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Listen to Donald Trump long enough and one of his favorite rhetorical strategies becomes unavoidable. It’s called the I’m-rubber-you’re-glue tactic. As regular readers know, it’s juvenile and ineffective, but the former president has nevertheless relied on this throughout his relatively brief political career.
He’s especially quick to rely on the tactic when pushing back against those who’ve implicated him in wrongdoing.
Earlier this year, for example, as special counsel Jack Smith investigated some of the former president’s alleged crimes, Trump declared that it’s Smith who might “very well turn out to be a criminal.” A couple of months later, the Republican tried the same tack against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, insisting the New York prosecutor is the actual criminal.
On Saturday, the former president spoke at a rally in South Carolina, where he seemed to add Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to the list. Describing the Jan. 2, 2021, phone call in which he told the Georgian he wanted someone to “find” enough votes to flip the state’s election results, Trump told supporters:
“The call was supposedly taped in the state of Florida. And in Florida, you’re not allowed to do, you know, that’s a two-party state. In other words, you’re not allowed to tape phone calls. They taped the phone calls. To show you how nice they are, they taped the phone calls, and you’re not allowed. So that is the real crime here.”
Remember, as we discussed earlier, after Trump lost in Georgia, the then-president called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, telling the Georgia Republican he wanted someone to “find” enough votes to flip the state’s election results, even if that meant overturning the will of the voters.
The then-president added, while pressuring Raffensperger, “[T]here’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
As regular readers know, Raffensperger recorded the call, offering the public the opportunity to hear Trump explore ways to cheat, begging others to participate in his scheme, and even make some subtle threats toward the state’s top elections official. There’s a very real chance that Trump crossed a legal line with this and related efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results, and he might soon be indicted.
But as of Saturday, the frontrunner for the GOP’s 2024 nomination said the “real” problem wasn’t his apparent misconduct, but rather, the fact that Raffensperger recorded him engaging in the apparent misconduct.
This is hardly better than Trump’s usual argument that since Raffensperger was polite during their phone meeting, the alleged election interference didn’t really count.
For his part, Georgia’s secretary of state met last week with federal prosecutors examining Trump’s post-election schemes.
We don’t yet have many details about the behind-closed-doors discussion, but Raffensperger’s office released a statement on Wednesday. “Georgia is a national leader in election security, integrity, and access,” it read. “Failed candidates and their enablers have peddled false narratives about our elections for personal gain for a long time and the voters of Georgia aren’t buying it.”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.