Trump’s phone call about ‘finding’ votes in Georgia is even worse than you think

What the president says about ‘good Republicans’ should send a shiver down everyone’s spines

(AFP/Getty Images)

The opening days of 2021 seem awfully familiar. Donald Trump is again facing possible legal fallout, this time after a recorded phone call in which he can be heard attempting to bully a political leader into meddling in the election results. And like clockwork, Republicans are rushing to minimize the scope of the president’s flagrant corruption.

This time, the target of Trump’s boiler-room pressure pitch isn’t Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump’s request was simple and direct: any “good Republican” would be happy to help the White House fabricate the 11,780 votes needed to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s upset Georgia victory, even if that means breaking the law.

“You have to say that you’re going to re-examine it,” Trump flatly tells Raffensperger in the call. “But re-examine it with people that want to find answers, not people that don’t want to find answers.” 

As Georgians prepare to vote in a rare double special election that will determine partisan control of the Senate, they should think about what it means for David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler to call themselves “good Republicans”. 

For nearly an hour, Meadows and Trump used every trick in their corrupt playbook to cajole, flatter, and intimidate Raffensperger into agreeing to launch a baseless investigation inspired by the president’s internet-fueled diet of election conspiracy theories. To his credit, Raffensperger offered clear and repeated rejections of Trump’s manufactured reality.

“Well, Mr President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong,” Raffensperger tells Trump during the recording. At another point, Raffensperger attorney Ryan Germany repeatedly states to Trump that claims of voting machine irregularities are simply not true: “Let me tell you what we are seeing — what we’re seeing is not at all what you’re describing. These investigators from our office, these are investigators from GBI [the Georgia Bureau of Investigation]… and that’s not what they’re seeing.”

At multiple points throughout the conversation, Trump levels attacks against a wide range of Republicans principled enough to accept the outcome of the 2020 election. He reserves special venom for Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who he berated on a similar phone call in early December.

“If I didn’t run, Brian [Kemp] wouldn’t have had even a shot, either in the general or the primary,” Trump monologues. “He was dead, dead as a doornail. He never thought he had a shot at either one of them. What a schmuck I was. But that’s the way it is.” 

Trump has long defined being a “good Republican” not as holding a coherent set of conservative ideological principles but as submitting totally to his demands for personal loyalty. Questioning Trump’s methods, even if they cross clearly into criminal conduct, is the quickest way to find yourself cast out of the Trumpist inner circle that now controls the empty shell of the GOP. 

Trump and Meadows repeatedly make the mistake of believing Raffensperger shares their party-first, party-only, party-uber-alles view of governing. The idea that a Republican Secretary of State would willingly allow a Republican president to lose Georgia baffles and infuriates Trump.

“They hate the state, they hate the governor, and they hate the secretary of state,” Trump says of Raffensperger’s efforts to ensure a fair count of Georgia’s ballots. “The only people who like you are people that will never vote for you. You know that, Brad, right?”

This phone call reveals a president completely unconcerned with even the appearance of propriety, and a senior staff cowed into humoring every legally suspect idea the president discovers on social media — or “Trump media,” as the he describes it during the call.

Through it all, the most scathing attack Trump can think to lob at Raffensperger is that he is a bad example of a Republican. Nearly half a dozen times, Trump loudly decries the Republicans who refuse to advance his unfounded and dangerous election conspiracy theories. Being a Republican has nothing to do with policies or beliefs or values. Those now stand in the way of the one thing that matters: defending Donald Trump until the bitter end. 

Georgia now finds itself in the driver’s seat of American democracy. On January 5, a likely record number of voters will turn out to cast ballots that will determine whether the Senate remains a bulwark of Trumpism well into the Biden administration. Georgians must now ask themselves if they want to carry the shame of electing two Republican Senators who see nothing wrong with Trump’s repeated efforts to illegally silence their votes.

Any Republican who claims Trump’s stamp of approval is telling you quite a bit about their personal and political values. To be a “good Republican” in the age of Trump is to willingly undermine your own state’s fundamental right to vote in order to please an increasingly erratic authoritarian.

Georgia has an opportunity to reject the GOP’s descent into brazen criminality. Doing so would make a powerful and lasting statement about the strength of America’s democracy.