That New Trump Phone-Call Recording Sounds Pretty Bad, Huh?

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“If you can go home tonight, do not sign it. … We will get you attorneys.” —Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, on a Nov. 17, 2020, phone call with two Republican officials about not certifying their county’s presidential election results

It seems there’s a sequel to Trump’s infamous “perfect phone call.” Last week, the Detroit News published a recording of a November 2020 phone call Trump made to local Michigan Republican officials, pressuring them not to certify their county’s election results.

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel was also on the line, pushing Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, two GOP canvassers for Michigan’s Wayne County—which includes Detroit—to reject the certification minutes after they attended a canvassers meeting. Both Palmer and Hartmann did not sign the official statement of votes for Wayne County and later tried to rescind their votes in favor of certification but failed. In the end, Wayne County overwhelmingly voted in Joe Biden, with 68 percent of the vote.

While we did already know about this call—the basic facts of it came to light when Palmer testified to the Jan. 6 committee in 2021—the details of what exactly Trump and McDaniel said weren’t known until now.

In Palmer’s testimony to the House Select Committee, she said she didn’t remember exactly what Trump told her or if he had mentioned anything about Michigan’s election. In the newly published recording, however, Trump claims there were more votes in those counties than people, and that “everybody knows Detroit is crooked as hell.” Michigan’s election director, Jonathan Brater, said that was categorically false in a December 2020 affidavit, that in fact there were “fewer ballots tabulated than names in the poll books.”

The new details raise questions about whether Jack Smith could use this to strengthen his federal election interference case, or whether Trump could face state charges in Michigan, where officials have been conducting their own election interference investigation, similar to what Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis did in Georgia.

Former Trump lawyer Ty Cobb told Politico the phone call shows “the depths to which Trump personally participated in fraudulently pimping the ‘Big Lie.’ ”

Michigan did ultimately send a fake certificate to the National Archives and Congress claiming that Trump won the state’s 2020 election—and 16 Republicans face felony charges for signing on to it.

This phone call echoes the infamous conversation in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find “11,779” votes to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory—the one he’s defended as “an absolutely PERFECT phone call.” (Trump now faces 13 state felony charges for allegedly trying to overturn Georgia’s election results.) Then there’s the phone call Trump had with Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, in which he also pressured the governor to claim there had been voter fraud so Arizona’s election results could be overturned in his favor.

Karl Rove, a former adviser for the George W. Bush administration, told Fox News that Trump’s actions on this Michigan phone call are “what we would call election interference” and that the former president could face a situation that is similar to what he’s currently dealing with in Georgia. Rove also speculated that McDaniel might face legal ramifications. “I think that was highly inappropriate.”