The counting of the electoral votes in a presidential election has generally been an uneventful affair. That is as it should be, considering all voting, counting and certifying is done by the states. The count in Congress is essentially a formality.
On Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris presided over a joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes from the November presidential election. There were 312 electoral votes for Donald Trump, 226 for Harris.
It was unlike what happened four years ago, when Joe Biden earned 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. Trump couldn’t handle losing and fanned the flames of conspiracy theory and intellectual nihilism among his supporters.
Trump schemed with a disgraced former Chapman University professor to unconstitutionally subvert the counting of the electoral votes.
Trump tried to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him more votes in that state, which narrowly went to Biden.
Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani leveraged all that was left of his reputation to spread election conspiracy theories and even stumbled his way into a $148 million defamation case for falsely accusing two election workers of wrongdoing.
Trump supporters promoted the fever dreams of attorney Sidney Powell, who invoked “Venezuela, Cuba and likely China,” as well as George Soros and the Clinton Foundation in a supposed election-stealing scheme.
Trump couldn’t understand why his Vice President Mike Pence and his Attorney General Bill Barr refused to back his efforts to undermine the election results.
Instead, he called for his supporters to come to Washington, D.C., riled them up and then watched for hours as they attacked the Capitol, attacked police officers and chanted “Hang Mike Pence” for the crime of defending the Constitution.
The American republic withstood this attack. The frivolous objections to the counting of the electoral votes were rejected and the count went on. Biden won.
Four years later, after a much too old Biden utterly mismanaged his presidency and managed to make Trump appealing after all, here we are.
What a world.