Are the walls finally closing in on Donald Trump? That’s the impression you’d get from MSNBC’s latest tirade about the former president, which centers on an executive order allegedly drafted after the 2020 election. Per the liberal news outlet, the January 6th committee is looking at the document as some kind of proof of an organized coup attempt.
The headline screamed that the revelation could be a “game changer,” but let’s dig in and see whether that’s true, shall we?
So what’s this all about? Apparently, an unsigned, unimplemented executive order to investigate 2020 election fraud was unearthed. It was not actually credited to the president but was apparently drafted by someone else. Whether Trump ever even saw it is up for debate, though, that’s not really relevant.
Here’s MSNBC’s description.
The draft EO is titled “PRESIDENTIAL FINDINGS TO PRESERVE COLLECT AND ANALYZE NATIONAL SECURITY INFORMATION REGARDING THE 2020 GENERAL ELECTION.” It rehashes the gobbledygook of Trump’s election fraud “big lie” as justification for directing the secretary of defense to seize, retain and analyze “all [voting] machines, equipment, electronically stored information.” It orders the secretary of defense to deliver an initial assessment of the election to the president seven days after the seizures.
You are probably asking yourself where the bombshell is here, and if you read past the headline, MSNBC essentially concedes there isn’t one. The subheading states the following.
The existence of the draft executive order doesn’t prove Trump entered into an illegal conspiracy. But it does raise questions the House’s Jan. 6 committee must investigate.
The most glaring problem for the left’s narrative is that the order was never signed. On what planet does a draft that was rejected represent anything other than irrelevance? After the election, Donald Trump, whether you agree with him or not, believed that election fraud had occurred. There were numerous suggestions from his advisers on how he could prove that legally. Almost all of them were left on the cutting room floor.
But according to the press, Trump not doing something somehow proves he attempted to do something. Think about how illogical that is. If the former president’s intention was to enact a “coup,” wouldn’t he have, you know, tried to enact a coup? Heck, that order in question doesn’t even constitute that, and even it was left unsigned. Yet, we are in this absurd place where evidence of Trump not having done something nefarious is somehow evidence he wanted to do something nefarious. That line of thinking makes no sense whatsoever, and it’s blatantly transparent why the argument is being made.
Democrats (and a few Republicans) are desperate to stop Trump from running again in 2024. The January 6th committee, as evidenced by its excuse-making for those who did actually foment violence on that day, exists solely to try to make a criminal referral on the former president. Everything they are doing is adding up to that. But if the best they can come up with is an unsigned executive order, they aren’t even going to succeed at that.
Ironically, their asinine pursuit is likely to make a second Trump run more possible. He’s never been one to back down from a fight, and the more they poke him, the more they are going to push him back into the arena.
Regardless, there’s something deeply disturbing about how this is all going down. It strikes me as an obvious abuse of power to use the government to claim thought crimes based on non-existent evidence in order to try to destroy a political opponent. One can think whatever they want about Trump’s election claims, but it is not incitement to violence to share them. It is also not a coup to not sign an order to investigate election fraud. Such assertions deserve nothing but mockery and dismissal.