One of the most important moments in Donald Trump’s political career was the moment he won the 2016 presidential election. I mean, that’s obviously true from the standpoint that it meant he became the 45th president of the United States. But it was true, too, because it was the payoff of a very specific bet he’d made as he was running for president: that he was right and the experts were wrong.
After all, the experts kept saying he’d lose, analyses based on polling that, we learned after the fact, was underrepresenting core Trump voters. Trump’s campaign was largely predicated on a rejection of Washington elites because it played well, but his disparagements of pollsters were largely a function of necessity. They said he was going to lose and he said he wasn’t — he believed he wasn’t. And, lo: he didn’t.
There was a lesson in that for Trump: trust his gut, if not his rhetoric. And it seems almost certain that this instinct helped build the avalanche that overwhelmed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
On Wednesday, the House committee investigating the riot that day filed a legal document articulating how it believed Trump was probably culpable in the commission of several crimes. A central part of that articulation was that Trump had every reason to know that his claims of election fraud — as false as they were incessant — were dishonest. Over and over, people close to him told him that he was elevating unproven nonsense, but he kept elevating it anyway. The Washington Post ...
Image: Facebook/SAPS The IDAC has rubbished rumours that it has a J50 warrant of arrest for KZN provincial police commissioner Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi as “false”. This comes after re...