Trump’s Secret Plan Was No Secret

Today’s January 6th Committee’s hearings are about the pressure campaign on Mike Pence to hand the election of 2020 to Trump. Official Washington and the media are shocked — “Shocked, I tell you!” — that John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump had come up with the “bizarre” idea that Vice President Pence could toss the election to the House, thus keeping Trump in office.

They’re amazed when they reference five states having submitted two slates of electors each, the “real” Biden ones and the “phony” Trump ones that Giuliani and Eastman conspired with Republicans to create.

But this was neither bizarre nor new.

I was hearing rumblings about this in the spring of 2020 — a full eight months before the election that Trump lost — and wrote an article for Alternet.org on March 13, 2020 laying out Trump’s coming strategy.

It turns out that Trump was merely planning a repeat of something Republicans had already done — when the Republican President Pro Tempore of the Senate (typically the Vice President, that that year the VP was dead) overturned the election of 1876 that Democrat Sam Tilden had won — and gave the White House to the loser, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.

My article even pointed out how rightwingers on the Supreme Court had prepared the ground for this strategy (think Clarence and Ginny Thomas).

I think you’ll find it fascinating, and it will help you understand both what Eastman/Trump/Giuliani were thinking (and…