Shark Swims Near Shore in Western Australia

The Telegraph

January 6 was one of the saddest days in American history. A sitting President incited a mob of his supporters to attack the United States Capitol building, where the Senate and House of Representatives were meeting in the Constitutionally required joint session to count the votes of the Electoral College. Donald Trump’s clear intention in urging this act of violence against the final concluding act of the 2020 presidential election was to disrupt the counting procedure, thereby buying more time to escape the otherwise inevitable outcome of the election. This is as shameful as it gets, but it is nonetheless only one of a long series of shameful acts by Trump before, during, and after the November election. He has lied repeatedly about what happened in that election, convincing millions of decent, honest people that his opponents committed systematic fraud, in effect conning his own supporters. If there is evidence of this fraud, Trump has yet to provide it to any judicial or administrative tribunal, Federal or state. In his view, the anti-Trump conspiracy is so vast and so successful that it left behind no evidence. Either that, or his campaign had the worst team of lawyers in Anglo-American legal history. Trump’s charade promulgated the idea that Congress could overturn the duly certified results of the election from the key battleground states, enough to shift the Electoral College majority to his favour. And there was more: that somehow his Vice President, Mike Pence, would ignore the plain words of the Constitution, and impose his own outcome on the election, by deciding which state certificates of the results to count and which to ignore.