Good morning from Atlanta, Gateway to the South and the pulsing center of Tuesday’s two U.S. Senate runoffs that will determine partisan control of the upper chamber and the success of Joe Biden’s first term as president. I’ve been covering the races from my home in neighboring Florida but will be here in Georgia as your Playbook guide through Wednesday.
On Sunday, politics here switched from a national fascination to an international spectacle, courtesy of — surprise! — President Donald Trump, who was secretly recorded trying to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to throw out votes for an opponent and “find” votes for himself. Trump was strangely quiet about the call on Twitter on Sunday as the news exploded online, but expect the president to trash his new GOP bête noire by name at his rally tonight in Dalton.
The story of the extraordinary call of a president pushing a top election official to rig the Georgia results was broken by the superb reporting of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein and the Washington Post’s Amy Gardner, but the backstory is almost as interesting.
It started on Saturday when Trump and his team reached out to talk to Raffensperger, who, according to an adviser, felt he would be unethically pressured by the president. Raffensperger had been here before: In November he accused Trump ally and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham of improperly exhorting him to meddle in the election to help Trump win Georgia. Graham later denied it.
So why not record the call with the president, Raffensperger’s advisers thought, if nothing else for fact-checking purposes. “This is a man who has a history of reinventing history as it occurs,” one of them told Playbook. “So if he’s going to try to dispute anything on the call, it’s nice to have something like this, hard evidence, to dispute whatever he’s claiming about the secretary. Lindsey Graham asked us to throw out legally cast ballots. So yeah, after that call, we decided maybe we should do this.”
The call took place Saturday afternoon. “Mr. President,” announced Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, at the top of the call, “everyone is on the line.” Little did he know. Trump made his ask and did most of the talking for the next hour, trafficking in the same conspiracy theories about election fraud that no court or criminal investigator has found credible. At the end of the call, Trump complains, “What a schmuck I was.”
Raffensperger’s team kept quiet about the call and the recording and waited. The president made the next move, claiming on Sunday morning via Twitter that Raffensperger was “unwilling, or unable, to answer” questions about his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. “Respectfully, President Trump: What you're saying is not true,” Raffensperger replied at 10:27 a.m. “The truth will come out.” It wasn’t an empty promise.
This isn’t the first time that a call or his recorded comments have threatened Trump (see: Access Hollywood, Ukraine president).
“This phone call is bad,” Georgia conservative commentator Erick Erickson said on Twitter. We asked him to expand on that, and here’s what he added: “I think the general worry is that the GOP early vote actually came on strong [late] and there’s a real worry that the president shows up tomorrow and messes it all up. The North Georgia GOP has to turn out on Election Day. They’ve lagged the whole state. The President goes to Dalton tomorrow to get them out and now people are worried he spends his time attacking the GA GOP … There is real nervousness.”
Erickson and other Republicans have been concerned since November that the president’s voter fraud rhetoric will dampen turnout, a fear intensified by far-right activists who’ve suggested that Trump voters not go to the polls unless Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue fight harder to somehow cancel Biden’s Georgia win. Trump’s handling of a coronavirus relief package and his vetoing of a defense bill is another concern: Congress overrode the vote, but Perdue and Loeffler skipped out so they weren’t crosswise with Trump. Loeffler on Sunday avoided answering how she would’ve voted on the defense bill.
“Look, voters aren’t paying attention to all this stuff, people like us are,” one Georgia Republican strategist who’s working to elect Loeffler and Perdue told Playbook. “But at a certain point, all these little things that don’t look like they matter could matter. I still feel OK. But this doesn’t help. The president needs to cut out the Leeroy Jenkins s---. Unfortunately, he won’t.” Full transcript of the call with audio
This article originally appeared on Politico.
