Reporters Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker have a new book out, "I Alone Can Fix It - Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year," and the Washington Post has a riveting excerpt that covers election night at the Trump White (Supremacist) House. One of the vignettes that caught our eye involved disgraced man- in- search- of- a- balcony Rudy "Toot Toot" Giuliani. It presages Toot Toot's need to deny reality and go directly to the autocrat's playbook:
One Trump confidant who mostly stayed out of the Map Room was Rudolph W. Giuliani. That’s because the president’s personal attorney had set up his own command center upstairs on the party floor. Giuliani sat at a table in the Red Room with his son, Andrew, who worked at the White House in the Office of Public Liaison, staring intensely at a laptop watching vote tallies. The Giulianis made for an odd scene, as partygoers swirled around them. After a while, Rudy Giuliani started to cause a commotion. He was telling other guests that he had come up with a strategy for Trump and was trying to get into the president’s private quarters to tell him about it. Some people thought Giuliani may have been drinking too much and suggested to Stepien that he go talk to the former New York mayor. Stepien, Meadows and Jason Miller took Giuliani down to a room just off the Map Room to hear him out.
Giuliani went state by state asking Stepien, Meadows and Miller what they were seeing and what their plan was.
“What’s happening in Michigan?” he asked.
They said it was too early to tell, votes were still being counted and they couldn’t say.
“Just say we won,” Giuliani told them.
They said it was too early to tell, votes were still being counted and they couldn’t say.
“Just say we won,” Giuliani told them.
Same thing in Pennsylvania. “Just say we won Pennsylvania,” Giuliani said.
Giuliani’s grand plan was to just say Trump won, state after state, based on nothing. Stepien, Miller and Meadows thought his argument was both incoherent and irresponsible.
“We can’t do that,” Meadows said, raising his voice. “We can’t.”
That former chief of staff and former House Freedumb Caucus member Mark Meadows had to be the voice of reason tells you a lot about how far off the deep end Toot Toot was willing to plunge in order to overturn election results. Of course, the malignant former guy was contemporaneously telling everyone he could buttonhole to "stop the counting" while he was still ahead in states like Arizona and Pennsylvania, or to "find votes" for him in Georgia. Toot Toot was simply going to the playbook the malignant former guy previewed before and after the election.
But, as we now know, that was only the beginning of Toot Toot's manic efforts to challenge election results around the country, which has subsequently made him the focus of a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit, two Justice Department investigations, and the suspension of his law license in New York and the District of Columbia.
And as predictable as the sun rising in the east, the "thing" Toot Toot has been so determined to please was trashing him behind his back and has since refused to pay Toot Toot's substantial ($20K/ day) legal expenses. Sad!
