Trump Administration Already Slipping Away From Reality?

Trump Melts Down on Twitter While His Top Advisor Threatens He’ll Prosecute Clinton if She Backs Recount Efforts

Sunday became a day of threats and bluster as President-elect Donald Trump, apparently aggravated by the election vote recount efforts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, took again to using Twitter to air his displeasure.

Although early Sunday morning he initially tweeted claiming that the Green Party-launched recount would not change the results of the election, by mid-afternoon his tone had changed considerably. He let loose with a tweet that claimed, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Fact checking websites, Politifact said that Trump’s accusation is “highly suspect” and Internet fact-checker Snopes immediately debunked that claim as untrue or unsubstantiated by fact.

By early Sunday evening, Trump claimed that, “Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California – so why isn’t the media reporting on this? Serious bias – big problem!”

The results differ from the President-elect’s accusation. Hillary Clinton won all of those three states. In Virginia, Clinton beat Trump, winning by 185,689 votes, or 49.9 percent to 45 percent. Although the margin in New Hampshire was fairly close, only 2,700 votes separating them, in California, Clinton beat Trump by more than 3 million votes, taking 61.6 percent to his 32.8 percent.

According to sources inside the Trump campaign who spoke with NCRM late Sunday night, Trump is rattled by the reemergence of a possible threat to his being secure in the position of president-elect. When asked how the claim of illegal voters gained traction in the Trump camp, one source pointed out that the controversial Infowars radio host Alex Jones, had published an article earlier this month with the headline, “Report: 3 million votes in presidential election cast by illegal aliens,” which was “most reliably” the source referenced by Trump.

While the Trump Twitter melt down continued to escalate, his senior adviser and chief spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway, delivered a not so thinly veiled threat to prosecute Hillary Clinton if she pursues the recount during an interview on CNN’s Sunday Morning show, State Of The Union.

“ […] And so he said he wouldn’t rule it out. He said it’s just not his focus right now. I think he’s being quite magnanimous and at the same time he’s not undercutting at all the authority and the autonomy of the Department of Justice, of the FBI, of the House Committees, who knows where the evidence may lead if, in fact, it were — if the investigation were re-opened somewhere.”

“But this is the president-elect’s position right now and I would say he has been incredibly gracious and magnanimous to Secretary Clinton at a time when for whatever reason her folks are saying they will join in a recount to try to somehow undo the 70 plus electoral votes that he beat her by.”

“I mean this — you know, I was asked on CNN and elsewhere, goodness a thousand times, will Donald Trump accept the election results? And now you’ve got the Democrats and Jill Stein saying they do not accept the election results. She congratulated him and conceded to him on election night. I was right there. And the idea that we are going to drag this out now where the president-elect has been incredibly magnanimous to the Clintons and to the Obamas is incredible.”

Conway’s inference that should the former Secretary of State’s campaign team continue to assist with the recount, she may face prosecution is extraordinary, and according to one Washington insider, a sign “that the incoming administration has an expansive and authoritarian view of executive powers that could represent a grave danger to the civil liberties and freedoms of the American people.”

Progressive writer and political pundit Jason Easley noted, “If Trump is so confident in the election results, why is he so rattled by this recount? The overblown reaction coming from Trump and his staff towards the recount might lead one to suspect that they are not as confident in the election results as is being projected publicly. Incoming presidents do not use their staff to issue veiled threats against their political opponents on national television.”

 

Brody Levesque is the Chief Political Correspondent for The New Civil Rights Movement.
You may contact Brody at Brody.Levesque@thenewcivilrightsmovement.com

Image by Michael Vadon via Flickr and a CC license