Trump’s Phone Call Is What Coup Fever Looks Like
The U.S. president goes back to Georgia, looking for some votes to steal. He knows that he’s been beat.
Trump claims victory at a Georgia rally in December. On Saturday, he phoned it in.
Photographer: Bloomberg
Like the little boy haunted by ghosts in the horror movie “The Sixth Sense,” President Donald Trump sees dead people everywhere. He thinks at least 5,000 of them voted in Georgia during the presidential election and were part of a broader conspiracy that deprived him of a victory in the state.
In an unhinged, extraordinary phone call Saturday with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, and Ryan Germany, Raffensperger’s general counsel, Trump tried to strong-arm them into conceding that President-elect Joe Biden hadn’t really secured 11,779 more votes than he did. And he encouraged them to find ways to invalidate those votes, according to a recording of the conversation obtained by the Washington Post (which broke the story) and Bloomberg News.