Trump wants to punish a Wisconsin legislator for not stealing the election

Something he has no power to do. Something there is no reason for him to do.

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Let’s start with that second point. Trump has fixated on Wisconsin since shortly after polls closed in that state. Over the course of the past 21 months (!), Trump’s rationale for how and where the state’s results were putatively stolen from him have evolved. I mean that literally; Trump’s fraud claims are Darwinistic, with more potent ones supplanting feebler offerings. But all share a common characteristic: They are baseless.

• Trump has alleged that the sudden emergence of a batch of ballots in the middle of the night favoring Joe Biden was suspicious. It was actually just the reporting of ballots from Milwaukee County, the state’s most populous.
• Trump claimed, in a statement bashing Vos, that the state Supreme Court had declared “hundreds of thousands of Drop Box votes to be illegal.” It didn’t. In a sharply partisan ruling, it instead said that collection of ballots with drop boxes was illegal. Even hard-right groups like True the Vote, which has being trying to cast drop boxes as conduits for fraud (despite the utter lack of evidence to that end), admitted in a hearing that they weren’t claiming drop-box votes themselves were illegal.
• True the Vote’s claims are at the heart of the film “2000 Mules,” a favorite of Trump’s for its claims that tens of thousands of illegal ballots were cast in swing states. Not only does the film show no evidence of its central claim — that people dumped ballots in a number of drop boxes — the movie’s own analysis suggests that only 14,000 ballots were submitted in this manner in Wisconsin. Even if each had been for Biden (which, again, is utterly useless speculation!), he’d still have won.
• An investigation from a team led by a Republican who once served on the state’s Supreme Court, Michael Gableman, argued that there were irregularities around the vote in 2020. Among them was a claim that nursing homes had regularly seen 100 percent turnout, suggesting something suspicious. This claim was incorrect.
• The report otherwise centered on complaints about privately funded efforts to bolster elections systems in the state. A nonprofit’s grants to several cities were presented as potentially illegal, despite courts having already determined that they weren’t. Regardless, that does not in any way affect the validity of votes cast.

To any rational observer, the takeaway is obvious: Trump and his allies are grasping for straws and finding nothing in their hands but molecules of air. Among those allies, incidentally, is Gableman, the former supreme court justice. In the wake of the release of his report earlier this year, he’s enjoyed the benefits of Trump’s favor, including being feted at Mar-a-Lago. In part this was because Gableman went above and beyond. His team’s report stated clearly that it was not intended to “challenge certification of the Presidential election.” But, in presenting the report to the state legislature, Gableman claimed that elected officials “ought to take a very hard look at the option of decertification of the 2020 Wisconsin presidential election.”

Such a “hard look” would largely fall to Vos. His response has been consistent: He has no power to decertify the election. Setting aside the uselessness of it — Biden has been president for 20 months and even if he had lost Wisconsin, he still had more electoral votes — there’s simply no power granted the legislature to unwind the votes cast. For what would seem to be obvious reasons.

This doesn’t deter Trump in the abstract, of course. On Jan. 6, 2021, he asked Vice President Mike Pence to simply overturn the results of votes in several states, despite Pence having no power to do so. Trump has repeatedly (and recently) asked Vos to do the same thing, happily without the violent mob this time.

Vos can’t. So now Trump is endorsing his opponent in Tuesday’s primary.

“As Speaker of the Assembly, Robin Vos consistently blocked efforts at conducting a full cyber forensic audit of the 2020 Election,” Trump wrote in a statement endorsing Vos’s opponent — someone who Trump three weeks ago said he “didn’t know.” “In fact, his appointee to study Election Fraud in Wisconsin, highly-respected Justice Michael Gableman, found massive Election-changing fraud, abuse, and irregularities. Despite hearing this powerful evidence, Vos refused to do anything to right the wrongs that were done.”

(The “election-changing fraud,” etc. is assessed in the bulleted list above, of course.)

Elsewhere in the statement, Trump raises other putative reasons for opposing Vos, like his views on the gasoline tax. But as is often the case with the former president, his heart is on his sleeve: He’s mad that Vos, like Pence, won’t do a thing he can’t do.

In his statement, Trump notes that he’s joined in backing Vos’s opponent by none other than Michael Gableman. Over the weekend, Gableman lent his voice to a robocall on behalf of the challenger.

Those unfamiliar with the situation may be surprised to learn about the origins of Gableman’s probe. In June 2021, it was announced that he’d been tapped to probe potential election irregularities … by Robin Vos. Vos would later extend Gableman’s contract to continue his work.

The probe found nothing to suggest that the election results in Wisconsin shouldn’t stand. Even if it had, there was nothing that Vos could do about it anyway. And even if there were, it wouldn’t somehow unwind 20 months of Biden’s presidency or make Trump president again.

Trump’s effort to oust Vos is almost refreshingly direct. He wants Wisconsin legislators to invent a way that he can be retroactively declared the winner in 2020 and, since Vos won’t do that, he’s lashing out. It’s not even really stealing the election, since the election isn’t even in his grasp. But that doesn’t change the obvious and consistent motivation: using what power he has to try to convince the world that he didn’t lose two years ago.

Unfortunately for his efforts, he did.