Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt’s double-talk on election fraud is downright dangerous

The current president grew up in the church of Norman Vincent Peale, who famously preached that “attitudes are more important than facts.” Donald Trump has said that his late pastor, who wrote the 1952 best seller, “The Power of Positive Thinking,” “thought I was his greatest student of all time.” And according to Peale’s “never think of yourself as failing,” philosophy, just saying so would have made it true, eventually.

Most top followers — we can’t say “leaders” because they aren’t leading — in the party that Peale’s protégé has remade in his own image now speak aspirationally, too. As if the results of last month’s presidential election depended, even now, on their steadfastness in banishing all negative, losing thoughts. And on their refusal to be caught acknowledging the reality that Trump’s reelection campaign did fail.

“Anything’s possible,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said last week, when asked whether Trump could still overturn the election. That’s the spirit! And if faith in our democracy gets pummeled in the process, well, there are more important matters at stake, like Hawley’s ability to attract Trump voters to his hoped-for 2024 presidential campaign.

And like Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt’s 2022 reelection campaign, which he apparently can’t put at risk by treating the public as if they, too, have sense enough to see that the same 2020 election in which most Republicans not named Donald Trump did pretty well was not, in fact, stolen from the president.

On Sunday, Blunt went on CNN via satellite from some planet where acknowledging any unhappy truth is apparently fatal. Dana Bash asked him a straightforward question: Does he accept that Joe Biden won the election?

“Well, we are certainly moving forward as if that is what is going to happen on January the 20th,” he said. Then, after not answering, he started talking about “transition money” and “landing teams in the various agencies,” and other arcana on which he was in no danger of ever being quoted.

“The president wants to see this process play out,” Blunt said, as if it hadn’t already played out.

He also suggested that it would be wildly premature to refer to Biden as the president-elect, though he did call Trump that immediately after the election in 2016.

“The president-elect technically has to be elected president by the electors,” our senator said. “That happens in the middle of December. And then, January the 6th, I’m one of the four members of the Congress that participates in the joint session that decides that those electoral votes are fully accepted. And, of course, that is when this process is over, when those votes are accepted and counted. But we are working with the Biden administration — likely administration — on both the transition and the inauguration as if we are moving forward.”

But you aren’t really moving forward? The senator is suggesting a bunch of contradictory things here: that the race will be over when the electors vote, that the race will be over when Congress “decides that those electoral votes are fully accepted,” and later in the interview, that it will be over when the states certify their results. Basically, it will be over when Trump says it’s over.

“So,” Bash asked him, “is it safe to say that you do consider Joe Biden the president-elect?”

Blunt sighed, because owning the obvious is safe but not safe enough: “Well, the president-elect will be the president-elect when the electors vote for him. There is no official job president-elect.”

Media sets up ‘straw men’ with Republicans?

Stop picking on me, he complained: “Part of the problem we have had between the media and the Congress, particularly Republicans in the Congress, the last four years is there’s always this straw man that is set up.” To set up a straw man is to set up an intentionally misrepresented argument that’s easier to knock down than an opponent’s actual position.

Only, holding Republicans accountable for undermining democracy by pretending for their own reasons that legitimate election results can’t be trusted is not that.

“And I think I’m on a list of — that you’re keeping at your network of Republican senators who haven’t yet acknowledged that there’s a president-elect,” Blunt went on, “as if that’s a significant thing. It’s just a constant fight about things.”

It is a significant thing when the president falsely claims that he was robbed, and those presidential allies who could and should and, if they thought ethics mattered, would set the public straight are afraid to do so. It’s a constant fight because our democracy is worth constantly fighting for.

So, was Trump robbed? Again, Blunt couldn’t begin to say: “Well, it’s up to the president’s lawyers to present that evidence. And, at this point, they haven’t done it in a way that was acceptable to any court. I think there were things that could have been done differently and better to ensure there weren’t voter fraud. I don’t — I think the system, frankly, was more secure than it’s ever been before. And the president deserves some credit for that.”

To review, for those with whiplash, we have seen no proof of fraud, the system did work and the president somehow deserves credit for that, even as he’s counter-factually bellyaching that the system did not work.

Then, Blunt added that in Pennsylvania, when mail-in ballots “come back and you don’t check the signatures, that is a huge problem,” though not one “that would have changed the outcome.” Huge but impacting nothing, maybe because that didn’t happen, either.

Bash correctly pointed out that the state Supreme Court and a federal court “have both thrown out the notion” that those ballot signatures weren’t checked.

Trying to have things both ways has always been a Blunt hallmark. But now, with election officials getting death threats and a Trump campaign lawyer saying Trump’s former cybersecurity chief should be “taken out at dawn and shot” for saying that the election was secure, what our senator is doing is so disrespectful and even dangerous that history is going to ask not just what that Roy Blunt could have been thinking but why Missourians didn’t demand better.