Andrew Sullivan

The PowerPoint plot against Joe Biden

If the revolution won’t be televised, the counter-revolution will at least be on PowerPoint. A series of 36 corporate-style PowerPoint slides have now been handed over to the Congressional Committee investigating the 6 January insurrection. Written and conceived by a retired colonel (who else?), the PowerPoint lays out a clear, if bonkers, strategy for keeping Donald Trump in power earlier this year. It involves the assertion that China had directly intervened in the election, skewing the electronic results to favour Joe Biden. Quite where the evidence would be procured to prove this is not so clear. But the plan barrels past that small problem to the main event: ‘1. Brief Senators and congressmen on foreign interference. 2. Declare National Security Emergency. 3. Declare electronic voting in all states invalid.’ Just tear up the election results on the basis of an unproven foreign plot. Alrighty then. That’ll go down swimmingly.

The whole PowerPoint is so preposterous it reminds you of South Park’s Underpants Gnomes’s business plan, which came in three slides: ‘1. Collect underpants. 2. ? 3. Profit.’ None of it makes much constitutional or political sense. But neither is it completely divorced from reality. The key moment arrives on 6 January, when: ‘VP Pence rejects the electors from states where fraud occurred causing the election to be decided by remaining electoral votes.’ And amazingly, the states ‘where fraud occurred’ were exclusively Democratic, and so the only possibly fair result would have been to have kept Trump president.

A fringe plot? Not exactly. You’d feel a bit better about it if the colonel, Phil Waldron, hadn’t been in frequent contact with the White House chief-of-staff, Mark Meadows, during this period; and if he hadn’t also been connected to Rudy Giuliani’s circus of legal weirdos holed up at the Willard Hotel, trying to find ways to stop the transition.

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