The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As the world turns on its axis and we observe human affairs through the lens of media and social media, it appears from here that we have turned another corner in the tenor of news coverage and public attention and opinion.

The good news is the kind of stories being covered by national and local news outlets is all over the map. It’s not all about Trump anymore.

The bad news is the news is all over the map. News outlets and the public seem to be paying less attention to the most significant news about the future of democracy and the planet.

Although you might admit that William Shatner’s attempt to describe the threats to the planet after his 25,000 mile joyride to the edge of space aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Horizon was “inchoate.”

Meanwhile, as Stephen Colbert likes to say on “The Late Show,” The Washington Post did carry a story this week in “The Fix” column, asking about how close we came on Jan. 6 to a stolen election — but not by Democrats.

How close were we to an actual stolen election — stolen by Trump?

The problem is this analysis itself is a bit inchoate, and leaves out one of the most important scenarios. Forgive this bit of inside Washington baseball. Allow me to quickly summarize the scenarios with bullet points and then correct the record.

Information has come to light of late about all the ways Trump tried to steal the election he was and still is calling stolen. He is raising millions of dollars for another presidential run in 2024 by continuing his anti-democratic claims about “Stop the Steal.”

It’s sheer propaganda, but it is still working with the vast majority of Republican voters.

* Conservative lawyer John Eastman had authored a memo outlining the steps by which Trump, Pence et al. could steal the election on Jan. 6.

* Then came a major report from the Senate Judiciary Committee detailing Trump’s pressure campaign to get the Justice Department to lay a predicate for that Jan. 6 plot.

“So just how close did we come to an actual stolen election — stolen by Trump?”

Pretty damn close it turns out, even closer than anyone else is reporting.

“This plot was foiled in large part because the Justice Department and Vice President Mike Pence opted not to go along with it. But what if they had?” The Post asks rhetorically. “Or what if Trump had followed through on firing acting attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen and replacing him with the Justice Department official who was willing to do his bidding, Jeffrey Clark?”

Courts had rejected Trump’s claims of fraud in state elections, so he and the White House turned to the Justice Department to try legitimizing the false claims so Congress might have a reason to overturn the election on Jan. 6.

They bombarded top Justice Department officials with wild claims they wanted investigated.

Meanwhile, Clark cooked up a draft letter stating that the Justice Department had “significant concerns” about the election results in Georgia and other states, calling on Republicans in state legislatures to convene special sessions to reconsider the Electoral College votes and putting forward alternative slates of electors.

While Clark’s effort was rejected out of hand, Justice Department officials continued to resist and threatened to resign en mass. As the story goes, Trump then backed down.

Trump could have fired Rosen and installed Clark, just as he fired FBI director James Comey. This would have generated stories comparing it to Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre,” but he had the power to do it.

* Vice President Mike Pence could have gone along with Trump’s plot to steal the election.

Pence’s refusal to go along with Trump’s plan and Eastman’s memo “made him, in the eyes of some Trump administration critics, somewhat of an unlikely hero of Jan. 6,” The Post says.

“But we’ve since learned that Pence agonized over this decision more than we previously knew.”

“You don’t know the position I’m in,” he told former vice president Dan Quayle in a conversation about it in late December, according to a new book by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Quayle told Pence that he had no choice, that he didn’t have the power to unilaterally set aside electors from certain states — a vital element of Eastman’s plan. Pence relented.

But The Post imagines a situation in which the Justice Department legitimized claims about fraud or voting irregularities in some states.

“Might that have given the agonizing Pence what he needed to take an extraordinary and unprecedented step? Maybe he could even have reasoned that he wasn’t unilaterally overturning the election.”

According to Eastman’s memo, the idea was not to get Pence to overturn the election himself — that’s the straw-man defense used by Eastman’s employer this week — but rather to declare the outcome in doubt and kick the decision to the House of Representatives.

Republicans controlled a majority of 26 state delegations.

* The alternate-elector plan

Eastman wanted Republicans in control of state legislatures to submit alternate slates of pro-Trump electors.

Eastman’s employer, the Claremont Institute, says in short: “John advised the Vice President to accede to requests from state legislators to pause the proceedings of the Joint Session of Congress for 7 to 10 days, to give time to the state legislatures to assess whether” to do something about the complaints.

“If the state legislatures had found sufficient illegal conduct to have altered the results, and as a result submitted a second slate of electors, John advised the Vice President that … the Vice President should regard Congress, not the Vice President, as having the authority to choose between the two slates.”

“We’ll never know how close we came to that being truly tested,” senior writer Aaron Blake says. “But as we continue to sort through what became of Jan. 6, it’s worth taking stock of what a few more pieces falling into place might have meant — and the pressure points in our democracy they reveal.”

Yes, all true and important. But there is one more frightening scenario not taken into account here.

If you look back on The Post‘s “trusty timeline,” or other vides on YouTube, you will see that some of the insurrectionists who got into the Capitol hell bent on finding and hanging Vice President Mike Pence and shooting House Speaker Nanci Pelosi in the head only missed by a matter of seconds or minutes.

One of the videos showed Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman diverting “Capitol rioters” — a.k.a. domestic terrorists — away from where Pence was hiding.

What if they had gotten to Pence, and or Pelosi, and had been successful in bringing about physical harm or even death to one of the Congressional leaders? This would have most certainly brought a halt to the vote to certify the Electoral College votes for Joe Biden as the winner in the presidential election of 2020, that night at least.

Congress Stands Up to Trump’s Angry Mob, Confirming Biden’s Electoral College Win

Other scenarios could have developed as a result.

Going Forward

What may be even more disconcerting now is what’s happening in red states where Republicans control a majority in all three branches of government. Many plans are being made and laws are even being passed to try to steal the next two elections, the midterms in 2022 and the next presidential election in 2024.

As many other commentators have already pointed out, this is where much energy should be focused by rank and file Democrats and party leaders — if they expect to protect our democratic elections going forward.

So laugh or cry with Captain Kirk for a day or two.

But try not to lose focus on the future. There is no guarantee that everything will turn out fine just because Joe Biden is president and Democrats hold a slim majority in the House and Senate at this time.

That could all change “in the blink of an eye,” as the good book says.

Perhaps Democrats might consider adopting their own “Stop the Steal” campaign going forward to counter the lies from Trump and the likes of Steve Bannon, who held a rally this week in Virginia for Republican Glenn Youngkin in the effort to defeat Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat running for governor.

Trump calls in to rally hosted by Bannon for Virginia GOP candidates

Steve Bannon of Breitbart News speaks on behalf of Judge Roy Moore at Oak Hollow Farm in Fairhope , Alabama, with one week to go in U.S Senate race, Dec. 5, 2017: Photo by Glynn Wilson