Trump told us exactly what he did

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Donald Trump visited a Mack Trucks facility in Macungie, Pennsylvania, this week. Though billed as an economic speech, Trump predictably wandered from topic to topic, leaving a trail of lies, distortions and incoherent rants.

We have come to accept Trump’s rambling as normal. We expect him to make up facts and defame his political opponents. Most importantly, we know that he will lie about elections and make false claims of election fraud.

But this normalization comes at a steep price for democracy. When we accept that the president lies, we cheapen the value of truth. When we accept his attacks on Democratic leaders and opposition figures, we destigmatize and thus enable the weaponization of government.

After ranting about California’s system of tallying ballots, Trump proceeded to falsely claim that the Los Angeles mayoral election was rigged against the Republican candidate. Never mind the fact that Los Angeles is overwhelmingly Democratic. In Trump’s telling, a Republican reality TV personality should have won.

Then he turned to the governor’s race, where Xavier Becerra came in first by a wide margin and Republican Steve Hilton made the runoff in a distant second place. Early in the ballot-counting process, it appeared as if the Trump-endorsed Hilton might fall out of the top two vote-getters and thus miss the runoff.

This is where Trump’s telling of the story picks up:

I called up the very powerful and very good U.S. attorney in California, and I said, ‘Do me a favor. Take a look, they are trying to steal that election, too.’ I guess they called up. They said, ‘This is the U.S. Attorney calling.’

So, over the next week, he was definitely going to lose, but the U.S. attorney called, ‘We want to check your votes.’ About an hour after the call, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Hilton has won.’ Had I not made that call, Steve Hilton would right now be watching the election from home.

If Trump is to be believed, the Republican candidate was set to lose an election, the president personally called the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, who in turn called the state, and the result was a change in election results in favor of the Republican.

The last part of this telling is clearly fabricated. I doubt any call from the U.S. attorney’s office affected the tabulation of a single vote — let alone flipped the results.

But what about the rest of his story?

First, we know that Bill Essayli — the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles — is a Trump loyalist who desperately wants to be the confirmed U.S. attorney for the Central District of California.

We know that the day after Trump accused Democrats of trying to “steal” the gubernatorial primary, Essayli sent an underling to observe the vote counting. He also announced on social media that his office had launched “multiple election fraud investigations.”

We also know that Essayli subsequently told right-wing commentator Glenn Beck that his office “will be charging some people. It will be election fraud charges in the next one or two months, I believe.”

Finally, we know that Donald Trump has a history of calling top election officials and demanding the fabrication of election results. After the 2020 election, he famously called Georgia’s secretary of state to demand that he find more than 11,000 votes that did not exist and add them to the official results.

It seems likely that the actual sequence of events was as follows: Trump was embarrassed by Republican performance in California. He first made false claims of voter fraud, then called Essayli and asked him to do something to substantiate them. To placate Trump, Essayli sent a prosecutor to observe the vote counting and made menacing, nonspecific claims of criminal investigations.

If this is correct, it represents an abuse of executive power to achieve a partisan political objective — a serious national scandal that implicates the president, federal prosecutors, and potentially others.

Yet that is not how the national media is treating it.

The same reporters who thought it was a scandal when former President Bill Clinton briefly boarded Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s plane on a Phoenix tarmac in 2016 – to make small talk about grandchildren and golf – are now entirely mute.

The same major media outlets that assigned teams to assess Joe Biden’s mental acuity are passing on investigating what communications Trump had with Essayli.

Here, we have a president who, by his own account, personally called a federal prosecutor to intervene in an ongoing election — and the story has barely registered.

Which brings us back to Trump’s speech at the Mack Trucks facility. TIn the middle of his story about California’s election, Trump digressed to compliment Pennsylvania’s U.S. attorney David Metcalf and one of his assistants, who were apparently seated in the rally audience. “We have your great U.S. attorney here, by the way. And your assistant U.S. attorney. They are doing great. Thank you, David.”

Pause on that for a moment.

Federal prosecutors were sitting in the audience at a rally, being publicly thanked by the president they serve. Yet, none of the reporters present seemed to find this worthy of a question.

Our democracy and the rule of law that underpins it is being murdered — not in darkness but in broad daylight for all the world to see.

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