Trump's Hatred of America in Seven Words
A short sentence that revealed the evil intent of his Election Day plot
They were only seven words out of millions uttered in person and on video in the historic hearings of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 coup attempt. Seven words of enormous significance that reveal the evil and anti-Americanism of the 45th President of the United States. Seven words uttered by Trump that did not make it into the summary of the committee’s findings but were revealed in the final hearing where its members voted to make a criminal referral of him to the Justice Department.
“The only thing that matters is winning.”
Not the American people. Not abiding by the Constitution. Not salving the wounds of a deeply divided country. Not meeting the words and principles uttered by the Founders of the United States.
Winning. At all costs. A single sentence that explained virtually everything in the committees 154-page summary of its findings.
Trump, a man endlessly bathing in the ooze of his malignant narcissism, has never disguised his utter contempt for the institutions and values of America. All that ever mattered to the 45th President of the United States was what television news anchors said about him on television, whether foreign dictators were sufficiently fawning in their parasitic praise of him, whether the public crowds and Republican bootlickers in Congress bowed down before him as a savior sent by God.
And that was why winning was all that mattered. Winning no matter how many people suffered or died in his relentless effort to salve the wounds to his ego inflicted by the hollowness of his soul.
Trump uttered these words to Hope Hicks, his longtime confidante, White House advisor and sycophant, in the days leading up to the violence of January 6. Hicks only came forward after the committee’s last public hearing that took testimony from witnesses. (Previously she had refused to answer the committee’s questions in a closed hearing, probably because like many members of Trump world, she considered herself above the law.) But on the day of the criminal referral, the committee played a video that included a short section from Hick’s deposition in which she told of a conversation she had with Trump between the election he lost and the coup he inspired.
"We were not seeing evidence of fraud on a scale that would have impacted the outcome of the election," Hicks said in the videotaped testimony shown Monday. So Hicks told Trump that "I was becoming increasingly concerned that we were damaging his legacy."
Trump’s response? "He said something along the lines of, you know, 'Nobody will care about my legacy if I lose so that won't matter,'" Hicks said. "'The only thing that matters is winning.'"
And that explains everything that happened in the lead-up and aftermath of the 2020 election, and why Trump so firmly believed that the Big Lie would be successful. The former president knew he was duping his followers about having “won” - either that, or he is so deeply mentally ill that statements he doesn’t want to hear bounce off him like a basketball thrown to the floor.
For weeks before the election, Trump campaign advisors - including Bill Stepien, the campaign manager - told Trump that the results of the final determination of who had won would not be known on election night. The reason for that? Mail-in votes. So many Republican legislatures around the country had made it illegal to even begin counting the mailed-in ballots until election day that a delay was guaranteed.
He was told there would be a red illusion - the earliest results of the evening would likely show him leading as Republicans were far more likely to vote in-person than Democrats, but as the mail-in votes were counted, Democrats would catch up. The only question would be if there were enough mail-in ballots from Democrats to overcome the Republicans’ advantage on in-person voting.
Perhaps Trump accepted that - or is too divorced from reality to understand it - which would explain so much of what he did leading up to election day: Telling his supporters to vote on election day, not be mail-in ballot. Appointing a Postmaster General who did everything in his power in the weeks leading up to November 3, 2020 to slow down delivery. Bleating to his fans, beginning months before the election and in the years that followed, that mail-in votes were the key to fraud.
Everything suggests that he did understand. If Republicans want to argue he didn’t get it despite being told multiple times, then they are declaring the man is too stupid to hold office. And his understanding that point underscores the diabolical nature of his Big Lie.
Trump and his cronies planned for it, planned to convince his inattentive supporters that some huge fraud had occurred, planned to tear apart the country all for their own benefit. The January 6 Committee’s findings show that, long before the election was held, Trump planned to declare himself the winner based solely on the in-person voting from election day, then push to end the counting of mail-in ballots by bleating that they were useless, and they were frauds.
The evidence of that it was premeditated is strong. The committee obtained written communications to the White House dated October 31 and November 3, 2020, from Tom Fitton, head of the conservative activist group Judicial Watch. According to the committee’s Introductory Material to the Final Report, those communications proved that Fitton was in direct contact with Trump and knew that Trump planned to falsely declare victory on election night and call for vote counting to stop.
The communications with Fitton were not the only evidence of Trump’s plot. An auction recording of one of Trump’s closest confidantes, Steve Bannon, showed that on October 31 - the same day as the first of Fitton’s communications - friendly associates from China were hearing about the corrupt scheme. Bannon told them:
“What Trump’s going to do is just declare victory, right? He’s going to declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just going to say he’s a winner… The Democrats – more of our people vote early that count. Theirs vote in mail. And so they’re gonna have a natural disadvantage, and Trump’s going to take advantage of it – that’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner. So when you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a firestorm…. Also, if Trump, if Trump is losing, by 10 or 11 o’clock at night, it’s going to be even crazier. No, because he’s gonna sit right there and say ‘They stole it. I’m directing the Attorney General to shut down all ballot places in all 50 states.’ It’s going to be, no, he’s not going out easy. If Trump – if Biden’s winning, Trump is going to do some crazy shit.
Winning was all that mattered. The fact that Trump knew and planned to set off a “firestorm” raging across the country was of no significance. Not so long as Trump’s knowing fraud might help him win in a way that would make Vladimir Putin jealous.
Trump moved forward with the con on election night, just as planned, with the approval of his lawyer Rudy Giuliani. “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this,” Trump said that night. “We want all voting to stop.”
Just in case listeners may have misunderstood whether Trump meant he wanted the polling places to shut down or for the mail-in ballots to be trashed, the next morning he tweeted, ““STOP THE COUNT!” So arrogant was this man in his plan to overthrow America that he did not bother to explain why counties around the country should violate both federal and state law by refusing to tabulate mail-in ballots.
Everything else that happened must be seen through Trump’s words on election night and in his tweet the next day. He knew what he was doing, he plotted it out in the months, weeks and days leading up to the election. But in his narcissistic arrogance, he seemed not to have counted on the fact that election officials would not break the law just because America’s tyrant demanded that they should. The rage and irrationality of Trump can be best understood through that failure. It both punctured the thin skin covering his damaged ego and revealed that he might not be able to use his cult to override America’s vote.
The reality that, without the plot going through, Trump lost. He knew he lost. His own people told him he lost. On the night of November 7, Stepien, Campaign’s Senior Advisor Jason Miller met with Trump in Oval Office, and he heard that the numbers were brutal, and that they did not lie.
“I was in the Oval Office,” Miller told the committee in this private testimony. “And at some point in the conversation Matt Oczkowski, who was the lead data person, was brought on, and I remember he delivered to the President in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose.”
No matter. As the whole world knows, Trump hid the fact that he had been told in no uncertain terms that he had lost. Instead, he pushed forward with the scheme of screaming at every moment that the election was rife with fraud, despite hearing from his own team, over and over, that his claims were utter nonsense.
“I repeatedly told the President in no uncertain terms that I did not see evidence of fraud, you know, that would have affected the outcome of the election,” former Attorney General Bill Barr told the committee in private testimony. “And, frankly, a year and a half later, I haven’t seen anything to change my mind on that.”
Trump publicly fought based on every conspiracy theory, despite being told again and again that they were untrue. Stepien told the committee that he and his team was forced to combat every bit of nonsense about the election that came Trump’s way from the assortment of loons he had had brought on as warriors for his victory. Stepien said:
“President Trump, you know – if someone’s saying, hey, you know, all these votes aren’t counted or were miscounted, you know, if you’re down in a State like Arizona, you liked hearing that. It would be our job to track it down and come up dry because the allegation didn’t prove to be true. And we’d have to, you know, relay the news that, yeah, that tip that someone told you about those votes or that fraud or, you know, nothing came of it. That would be our job as, you know, the truth telling squad and, you know, not – not a fun job to be, you know, much – it’s an easier job to be telling the President about, you know, wild allegations. It’s a harder job to be telling him on the back end that, yeah, that wasn’t true.”
But Trump didn’t react to this news like a maniac. He didn’t rant and rave that the conspiracy theories must be true, despite his continuing twitter-rage. No, in one of the most stunning sections of the committee’s report, he accepted everything Stepien, and his team told him. That was revealed in this exchange between Sepien and the committee staff:
Committee Staff: How did he react to those types of conversations where you [told] him that an allegation or another wasn’t true?
Stepien: He was—he had—usually he had pretty clear eyes. Like, he understood, you know – you know, we told him where we thought the race was, and I think he was pretty realistic with our viewpoint, in agreement with our viewpoint of kind of the forecast and the uphill climb we thought he had.
Trump knew. Trump understood he had lost all along. Perhaps he is so narcissistic, suffers from such a severe personality disorder or mental illness, that he no longer remembers that he had accepted that the conspiracy theories that he spews to this day - theories that have spread election denial across the Republican Party like a virus, with scores of GOP candidates like Kari Laker in Arizona adopting them to explain their own losses. He knew but was willing to demolish the faith in our democracy that, until Trump, had been widely held among our citizens. He knew yet pushed for the fatal coup attempt on January 6 that could have resulted in the death of member of Congress and even the Vice President.
He knew. But he didn’t care. Because, to Donald Trump, all that matters is winning.
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