If we lived in an America where facts mattered, and shame was still a thing, the pratfall of the Cyber-Ninja “audit” in Arizona would dampen the momentum of the Trumpist “stop the steal” movement.
In an America where facts mattered, the GOP-backed “audit’s” finding that, yes, indeed, President Joe Biden won Arizona would be a colossal embarrassment.
In an America where facts mattered, the finding of the GOP-backed “audit” that, yes, indeed, President Joe Biden won Arizona — by an even larger margin than originally reported — would be a colossal embarrassment for the grifters and scammers of the Trump world. It would an egg-on-their-faces moment for the ages.
But we don’t live in that America, because if facts mattered, we wouldn’t be where we are now. For the boosters of the “big lie,” the Arizona audit flop was not even a speed bump. And that should tell us a great deal about this moment in U.S. politics.
In the wake of the report, some Republicans urged a return to sanity. “When it comes to the audit, like the three audits that preceded it, it’s now over,” Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said on Twitter. “The outcome stands and the 2020 election in Arizona is over.”
The chairman of Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Jack Sellers, urged lawmakers to “stop listening to the fringes and gather real facts from election experts before making more careless allegations and proposing legislation based on poor science.”
But there is zero chance of that in the Trumpified GOP.
As The New York Times reported over the weekend: “Significant parts of the right treated the completion of the Arizona review as a vindication — offering a fresh canard to justify an accelerated push for new voting limits and measures to give Republican state lawmakers greater control over elections. It also provided additional fuel for the older lie that is now central to Mr. Trump’s political identity: that the 2020 election was stolen from him.”
Undeterred by the facts, Arizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers railed that the state should “decertify the election, and tweeted out a bizarre letter to Arizona state senators that insisted that, “The fate of the United States and the Republic for which it stands along with Freedom and Justice for All is on trial before the world.”
“The enormity of the decision that you are being tasked with rendering will ripple through the ages,” the letter read, “and may very well be viewed as a last nail in the coffin of the Idea of Government of the People and for the People and by the People that President Lincoln spoke about in the Gettysburg Address.”
Former Missouri governor and U.S. Senate candidate Eric Greitens joined the chorus, demanding that Arizona overturn the results of the election — despite the finding that…
Read More: Trump’s Arizona election lies unchanged after ‘fraudit’ results.