1: The steal that never happened
Nobody in the crowd knew that among them was a man dressed from head to toe in a suit of pressurized armour. His metallic suit was hidden beneath layers upon layers of clothing, a heavy leather jacket topping a black hoodie, the hood of which was pulled up and over the back of his cylindrical helmet.
The helmet itself was wrapped in a dark grey scarf, its horizontal slit of a visor obscured behind dark sunshades. Wearing so many layers made the normally slim but muscular man appear distinctly wide.
Under normal circumstances, wearing all these clothes just to obscure his armour would have looked rather conspicuous in a crowd. But today, everybody in the crowd was conspicuous. In hindsight, it may not have been necessary to hide the armoured suit.
Through the horizontal visor, just wide enough for his eyes to peer through, Sid Tanner saw that some of the idiots who had gathered were dressed in army vests as though soldiering in war! Another was shirtless, wearing mainly war paint and Viking horns.
Tanner felt like he had wandered into a convention for the scientifically illiterate and morally bankrupt. Among the angry mobsters all around him many wore shirts bearing the words ‘Proud Boys’, the far-right neo-fascist group of White Supremacists.
Others wore clothes emblemized with ‘Q-anon’, the fringe movement of wackos responsible for spreading unsubstantiated conspiracy theories alleging the entire Democratic Party comprised of satanic and cannibalistic child molesters and sextraffickers. Many others waved Confederate flags in the air, widely regarded as a symbol of white supremacy, racism, and modern slavery.
The fact that members of such cults were allowed to walk the streets left Tanner with grave concern for humanity. He knew from personal and professional experience how bad governments could be, but the disinformation these fringe groups believed was as far from the truth as possible – at best. At worst, the delusions they spouted only served as a distraction from real reasons to take a stand against the government.
Tanner was glad his face was hidden, embarrassed to be seen in public with these brainwashed idiots. They all unquestioningly swallowed the Big Lies their leader fed them, lies he had unwittingly but indirectly admitted that he had no proof for. Just four days prior to the rally, a telephone call to the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had leaked to the press.
During that call, the protesters’ psychotic leader repeated the same Big Lies over the phone, in an attempt to pressure Raffensperger to change the outcome of the election. Raffensperger had heard the same Big Lies before in the media, and together with his aides was quick to shoot them down. During that same call, the angry mob’s psychotic leader told Raffensperger: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.”
That leaked phone call should have been the end of Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him. How could he honestly make that claim when by his own admission he had no evidence that 11,780 votes were missing?
Nobody should have taken him seriously after that. Instead, thousands of Trump supporters gathered outside the White House and unquestioningly swallowed the verbal excrement he spewed from the podium behind bulletproof glass.
Leaking such a phone call would have certainly destroyed any politician’s campaign thirty years ago, but in a digital era of disinformation, any unfavourable news coverage could quickly be labelled as ‘Fake News’ and dismissed.
“We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen,” Trump chanted. “You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.”
His lies were met by wide applause.
Behind the mask, Sid Tanner rolled his eyes.
For the most part he tuned out. Holding a BSc with a Double Major in Astrophysics and Geology and being a former elite RAAF pilot who had the privilege of ascending the Kármán line, Tanner was far too intelligent to be listening to the crap being fed to the crowd, staring up at the podium mesmerized like Coprophilous insects. The protestors waved banners high in the air with the dubious words: “TRUMP WON”.
“Idiots!”
It was the only word Tanner could muster.
How the hell had it all come down to this?
Election fraud was not completely unheard of in the United States. Back in the 1990s during his teenage years, Sid Tanner remembered his parents owned a copy of the book Votescam: The Stealing of America by James and Kenneth Collier. He never read it himself, but he remembered its provocative tagline: “Why can’t we vote the bastards out? Because we didn’t even vote the bastards in.”
As if to substantiate that claim, just a few years later came the infamous 2000 election, which saw the state of Florida stolen from Democratic candidate Al Gore and given to his Republican opponent George W Bush.
The conflict of interest was clear as day.
The first news network to call Florida in Bush’s favour – while all the other stations had accurately declared Gore the winner – was the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News. And the man working at Fox that night, who called Florida for Bush, was none other than his cousin John Prescott Ellis.
Those responsible for counting the votes in Florida – the Governor and Secretary of State of Florida – did nothing to contradict Fox’s falsehood because they were directly responsible for the steal. The Florida Secretary of State was Katherine Harris – the chairwoman of Bush’s presidential campaign; and the Governor of Florida was Bush’s little brother Jeb.
During the Electoral College counting, many congressmen had objected that millions of votes cast by African Americans in Florida had been dubiously excluded from the count. As the Vice President of the United States at the time, Gore presided over the Joint Session, but there was nothing he could do to uphold these objections. With not one signed endorsement by a Senator, as per the rules of the Joint Session, these objections could not be discussed nor investigated further by the House and Senate. One after another they were dismissed.
Bush was subsequently ‘certified’ the winner.
Two years after the election, a study published in the journal of Statistical Science proved that many votes had been deceptively discounted as ‘invalid’ because they were either ‘undervotes’ (the hole puncher not going all the way through the voting card) or ‘overvotes’ (the hole puncher went all the way through, but the voter also wrote the candidate’s name on the card for further clarification since the punch-boxes were confusingly not exactly opposite the candidates’ names).
The confusion was by design.
In Florida, the ballots used a ‘butterfly’ design with the list of candidates spread out over two unsymmetrical columns on the left and right sides of the card, and the punch-boxes in a narrower central column. To vote for Bush, the first candidate on the left column, one simply punched a hole in the first box from the top. But to vote for Gore, the second candidate on the left column, one had to punch the third box from the top, not the second.
Indeed, the confusing ‘butterfly ballot’ led thousands of Floridians to think they voted for Gore when in fact they’d mistakenly voted for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, the first candidate on the right column. This led to many people ‘invalidating’ their own votes.
A substantial number of the ‘overvotes’ were double punched, with one hole accidentally punched for Buchanan and a second hole punched for Gore as correction. Hence, their handwritten clarification of which candidate they intended to vote for.
The issues with undervotes, overvotes, and mistaken votes were well known at the time, but it was ultimately the majority decision of the Republican Supreme Court judges that denied a manual recount. The study concluded that had those overvotes and undervotes been counted, Gore would have become the 43rd President of the United States.
The 2000 presidential election was stolen.
The deliberate irregularities had cost Gore the presidency.
But that was twenty-one years ago. Such irregularities did not reoccur in 2020. If the MAGA protestors wanted to ‘stop the steal’, they were twenty years too late. Still, the stolen 2000 election had not been forgotten. Even though it was ironically the Republicans who had stolen it, memories of the steal that actually happened probably helped fuel the rage brought on by the steal that never happened.
In actuality, in 2020 the United States simply had for a President a man-child who consistently dug his heels in and refused to take ‘no’ for an answer.
This had become the norm since Election Night.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Trump refused to admit that he lost. On Election Night, when all the networks including Fox News – the biggest promoter of pro-Republican far-right propaganda in America – started calling the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in favour of his opponent Joe Biden, the President had his senior political advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner phone Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch to challenge their coverage.
Murdoch said, “Sorry, Jared, there is nothing I can do. The Fox News Data authority says the numbers are ironclad. He says it won’t be close.” True to Murdoch’s words, the results showed Trump lost the election on both fronts, losing the popular vote by more than 7,050,000 and scoring only 232 Electoral College votes to Biden’s 306.
Any other Republican would know they were in trouble and accept that they lost if even their allies at Rupert Murdoch’s media empire said so.
But not Donald Trump!
The counting had not even finished when he first called the election a fraud in the wee hours of November 4th, 2020, nor had either candidate yet come anywhere close to securing their target of 270 Electoral College votes. Biden gaining the lead by a measly seven votes was enough to make the President feel threatened.
Shortly before 2:30am that morning, he went on national television to broadcast a message from the East Room of the White House. On stage in front of a wall of American flags, President Trump told his followers, “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”
His lie was met by thunderous applause from the audience. Clearly, none of them were going to let facts get in the way of what they wanted to hear.
Trump continued his disingenuous rant, “So, our goal now is to ensure the integrity, for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner, so we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”
The president’s remarks were nonsensical.
All voting had stopped.
What was still ongoing was the counting of votes.
Sure enough, whether corrected by somebody within his cabinet or realised on his own accord, no sooner had Trump stepped down from the podium, he immediately took to Twitter to reiterate his false claims in a barrage of tweets demanding that election workers “STOP THE COUNT!”
Almost comedically, such denouncements of the election led to mass nationwide protests by the President’s supporters, who gathered outside facilities in Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan where ballots were still being counted. If Trump was winning in a county, the protestors would demand the count be stopped; if he was losing, they demanded the count be continued or recounted.
Adding fuel to the fire, two days after his first speech, Trump addressed the nation a second time to denigrate the legitimacy of the mail-in ballots still being counted. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.”
All mainstream networks, except Fox News and CNN, promptly stopped airing Trump’s rambling and incoherent speech when it was clear what he was spouting was not based in reality.
After it was done, CNN’s anchor Jake Tapper said, “What a sad night for the United States of America to hear their President say that. To falsely accuse people of trying to steal the election. To try to attack democracy that way with this feast of falsehoods.”
Anderson Cooper, another CNN host, added, “That is the President of the United States, that is the most powerful person in the world, and we see him like an obese turtle on his back, flailing in the hot sun realising his time is over.”
Fox News on the other hand turned the other cheek.
It was just the beginning of the manic insanity to ensue, and it only worsened after November 8th, 2020, when Joe Biden was declared the victor.
Trump inundated all his social media accounts and appearances on national television with unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud. Some of his claims were completely bonkers, and none could he prove in court. The President also pressured and harassed government officials in swing states to change the election results. Even the federal judges that Trump himself had installed rejected his allegations in court due to lack of evidence.
When his federal cases didn’t work, President Trump tried to take it up with the Supreme Court.
Most egregiously, he went so far as to conspire with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to file a frivolous lawsuit with the Supreme Court against the swing states that Biden won. The suit became known by the shorthand of Texas v. Pennsylvania, but its full title was significantly lengthier: State of Texas v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, State of Georgia, State of Michigan, and State of Wisconsin. It falsely alleged that all four of these swing states had violated the US constitution and breeched the independent state legislature doctrine. To try and push the suit, Louisianian congressman Mike Johnson had succeeded in soliciting signatures from all but one of the GOP members in Congress.
The President was banking on his appointed Supreme Court judges to steal the election for him. But again, much to his further embarrassment, the case was wisely dismissed. The Supreme Court ruled: ‘The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.’
Instead of trying to turn his negative image around and make the remainder of his one-term presidency worthwhile and memorable like any other outgoing US President would have, Donald Trump instead preferred to play golf and chase his delusions, while hundreds of thousands more of his citizens continued to die from the COVID-19 pandemic that he downplayed.
Even though on Election Night, Fox News had accurately reported that their man had lost, almost immediately after Donald Trump denounced the election as “a fraud on the American public” virtually the entire Murdoch media empire across America and abroad toxically entertained his fantasies of an election victory stolen from him.
Over the weeks that followed, the outgoing President appeared on Fox News to spout the Big Lie. The channel’s irresponsible anchors echoed and amplified his Big Lie in their commentaries and propaganda ads, giving the Big Lie unwarranted attention and credence, while everybody else in the mainstream and social media were quick to rightly shoot it down.
Practically everyone who was not a brain-dead Trump supporter had seen this coming. Even before the 2020 election started, Trump spent the majority of his reelection campaign casting aspersions on the legitimacy of mail-in ballots and claiming it would be “rigged” against him. It was the same script he had pushed since the 2016 election that brought him to power. Trump had openly stated he would only accept the outcome of the election if he won. And now it ultimately had come to this: an angry mob who bought the lies being riled up by a seventy-four-year-old child who couldn’t accept he lost.
What was now happening had all been foreseen years ago.
On October 20th, 2016, during the third presidential debate, the moderator asked Trump directly, “There is a tradition in this country, in fact, one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power and no matter how hard fought a campaign is that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?”
Trump refused to give a yes or no answer, simply stating, “I’ll keep you in suspense.”
His opponent at the time, former first lady Hilary Clinton, saw this as an opportunity to bolster her own campaign by calling Trump out on his long, sad, and pathetic history of falsely and belligerently claiming the world was conspiring against him.
She said, “Let me respond to that because that’s horrifying. You know, every time Donald thinks things are not going in his direction, he claims whatever it is, is rigged against him. The FBI conducted a year-long investigation into my emails. They concluded there was no case. He said the FBI was rigged. He lost the Iowa caucus; he lost the Wisconsin primary. He said the Republican primary was rigged against him. Then, Trump University gets sued for fraud and racketeering. He claims the court system and the federal judge is rigged against him. There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged against him.”
As if to illustrate his rival’s point, Trump smiled stupidly and promptly interjected with, “I should have gotten it!” much to the audience’s laughter.
Clinton gestured at him as if tell the crowd, ‘I told you so’ and continued, “This is a mindset. This is how Donald thinks, and it’s funny, but it’s also really troubling. No, that is not the way our democracy works. We’ve been around for two hundred and forty years. We’ve had free and fair elections. We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.”
Hilary Clinton’s words ultimately came back to haunt her on Election Night 2016. But four years later, they became all the more relevant and haunted Trump with a vengeance. Video clips of her enumerating his history of crying foul were used prominently and mercilessly in televised news specials and documentaries, and on social media posts debunking Trump’s claims of a stolen election. Everything Hilary Clinton said that day now seemed eerily like a premonition of what was unfolding on January 6th, 2021.
Tanner frankly couldn’t care less about the election. As far as he was concerned, no matter who got in the White House, it just meant more corruption, more wars, and ultimately more money funneled into deep pockets.
He had far more important fish to fry that day. Tanner’s concern was the two men standing a few meters in front of him. They had backpacks on and were wearing dark jackets that ran all the way down to their feet. It was these two men that Tanner had come to see.
For the past three weeks, he had the two of them under surveillance. Their hotel room had been bugged and he had listened in on their phone conversations. They had been talking with some of the highest level members of Trump’s administration. He was sure they were going to make their strike today.
The man on the left was very tall and sported extraordinarily broad shoulders, probably the result of a mild case of gigantism. It was hard to gauge his figure. But the bulging beneath his sleeves and the way his jacket and shirt hung like curtains from his enormous pectorals suggested he worked out. He had black hair and a short beard, with a large nose and large forehead that always seemed to naturally cast shade on dark, very cruel eyes. A thin scar of unknown origin was cut from the bottom of his right eye and down his cheek to his lower jaw. Overall, his face looked something akin to an ogre’s.
The man on the right was shorter, his build suggesting he was equal proportions fat and muscle. There was no hair on the big round cue-ball of a head, and his mouth and nostrils were flared. The lack of hair made his ears seem more pronounced; they already looked enormous by his big, coiled sausages of ear lobes.
Both had set up shop in New York and Washington DC some five years ago. They had used American passports at hotels and anywhere else they needed to identify themselves, but facial recognition and other background checks had proven they were not who they claimed to be.
The CIA dossiers listed both men as agents of the Russian counterintelligence organization SMERSH. Supposedly shut down three quarters of a century ago, it was once an umbrella of three agencies within Stalin’s old Red Army, with the mission of snuffing out Soviet defectors and Nazi spies infiltrating the USSR during World War II. Now it was the clandestine death squad of the Russian Federation, tasked with assassinating foreign agents and conducting political terrorism abroad under the direct orders of Vladimir Putin. The agency’s name was a portmanteau of their motto: Smert Shpionam, which literally translates to ‘Death to Spies!’
Watching the SMERSH agents from afar, Tanner’s focus was fixed squarely on the backpacks both men were wearing. He had listened in on the phone conversations in the nights leading up to the January 6th, 2021, rally. He had followed them out of town to where the transaction was to take place. Tanner knew exactly the contents of those bags and what they planned to do with them.
2: Team Crazy
Some three weeks earlier, in the late-night hours of December 18th, 2020, President Trump called the craziest of his aides and legal team members to the White House for what would ultimately become their last resort.
The president sat back in the overstuffed, leather-padded swivel chair behind the Resolute desk. His elbows perched atop the armrests and his thick fingers intertwined to support his jutted chin, which was made more pronounced by a straight-bridged yet bulbous-tipped nose and small lips that always seemed to purse.
As usual, the juxtaposition of his hands relative to his face made President Trump’s complexion appear unnatural, if not inhuman. While his hands were a pale gray, his entire face was discoloured an unusual shade of orange that almost blended in with his excessively combed-over blond hair.
Whether the result of a catastrophic tanning malfunction or just his shortcoming of being a septuagenarian, Donald Trump always dubiously blamed his orange skin tone on the lighting. Only along the outskirts of his hair and on slightly bulged eyelids did his natural skin colour prevail.
The gray eyes themselves stared out piercingly beyond the desk, framed between a broad forehead with bushy eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones that indented into otherwise fat cheeks that sagged with old age.
Dressed in his well-tailored, black Brioni business suit with white linen shirt and a red necktie that inelegantly hung well below his trouser belt, the seated position that Trump had assumed made him look less like a world leader, or even an armchair general, and more a mafia boss coordinating his criminal associates.
In many ways since November, that had ceased to be a mere analogy.
Seated directly opposite from the President sat his former National Security Advisor, General Michael Flynn, a red-haired, squared-headed former US Army General still in uniform. Long had he been a staunch ally for the President. He had even taken the fall for him when the Russian interference scandal unraveled.
During the Meuller investigation, General Flynn eventually pleaded guilty to ‘willfully and knowingly making false statements and omissions to the FBI’ regarding his dealings with Russia during their election meddling in 2016. But in an egregious abuse of power, President Trump directed his Attorney General William Barr to drop all charges against General Flynn, and just a month prior to the meeting, the President had even gone so far as to pardon General Flynn.
Now General Michael Flynn was doing everything in his power to ensure his boss would remain in office.
Also present within the Oval Office were the White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and two of the President’s lawyers, Sidney Powell and Emily Newman. As if to emphasize the craziness of Trump’s desperation to stay in power, even Patrick Byrne attended the meeting. Byrne was until the previous year the CEO of Overstock.com. He had left his company after admitting to being in a sexual relationship with a woman nearly half his age who turned out to be a Russian spy. Now he was a die-hard conspiracy theorist infamous for pedaling COVID-19 denialism, Deep State disinformation, and false allegations that the 2020 election had been stolen. Byrne had never even met the President before, nor had he previously served in the campaign or administration. He had simply tagged along with Powell’s group.
It seemed anybody and their dog was allowed on the White House premises, so long as they denied Joe Biden’s election win and had some wacky conspiracy theory to bring to the table.