Voices: How ‘gangster’ Trump could be destroyed by one explosive phone call

For those of us who always thought Donald Trump to be a gangster, it is especially satisfying that the public servants of the great state of Georgia have faced down his threats and bullying – and charged him with racketeering.

“Racketeering”. It has such a low-down good-for-nothing Mafiosi feel to it, in contrast to the last set of allegations made against Trump: “conspiracy to defraud the United States”, which almost sounds dignified, if still unpleasant.

The derailed Georgia charges, all 41 of them, bring the combined Trump criminal charge sheet comfortably above the 100 mark. Justice is justice – and if Trump is found innocent of them all, then no one should complain, because the law and the criminal justice system should be independent and respected.

Having said that, on a sort of law of averages calculation, it is difficult to see how Trump will be cleared on everything.

Indeed, it’s the Georgia case that will likely prove most troublesome for Trump and his co-conspirators: well-known Trump associates such as Rudy Giuliani, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, ex-White House lawyer John Eastman, justice department official Jeffrey Clark and a couple of Trump’s personal lawyers – Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis.

Leaving the particulars of the Georgia case to one side, these legally-trained individuals should have known better than to get tangled up with The Donald.

These latest charges are especially potent and could kill Trump’s political career. They are among the most serious and rely on the strongest of the evidence, rather than, say, surmising what was going through Trump’s mind (albeit a crude simplification of the 6 January insurrection case, filed in Washington DC).

They will be the only ones televised. Trump, in a dock, will seem an inevitably diminished figure, with all his swagger stripped away – equal before the law. Swing voters (the ones that matter, not the fanatical “base”) will be forced to ask themselves if they want this man in the White House for the next four years.

The focus for the Georgian proceedings isn’t 6 January, but 2 January – and the conference telephone call the White House placed with the secretary of state for Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, with Trump and Meadows plus miscellaneous lawyers.

It’s quite famous, and probably the most portentous presidential phone call in history, given that Richard Nixon’s call to the Moon in 1969 was a fairly jolly affair.

Indeed, this fateful Trump call has a Nixonian, Watergate aspect to it, because it was taped. It establishes without any room for doubt what passed between the principals concerned. It is not “he said/she said”, where a smart defence lawyer can create the reasonable doubt needed to secure an acquittal.

No. Trump is banged to rights – condemned by his own big mouth. There is no wriggle room. He’s straightforwardly grubbing for bogus votes (the 11,779 he lost by, to be precise) and making up stuff about Georgia officials shredding ballot papers, dodgy election machines and mysterious scenes in the counting halls. All proved baseless.

It is the usual bluster, backed up by his heavies in the White House team. Raffensperger and his layers are polite and cooperative but firm, and refute all of Trump’s wild theories. At times, Trump seems indeed like a racketeer calling in a favour. The recording was leaked the day after the call and the transcript is freely available online. It is damning.

Here’s a clip or two. It has an almost cinematic quality as “The Trial of Donald Trump” gets underway:

TRUMP: “So what are we going to do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already. Or we can keep it going but that’s not fair to the voters of Georgia because they’re going to see what happened and they’re going to see what happened…”

RAFFENSPERGER (later): “Mr President, you have people that submit information and we have our people that submit information. And then it comes before the court and the court then has to make a determination. We have to stand by our numbers. We believe our numbers are right.”

TRUMP: “Why do you say that? I don’t know. I mean, sure, we can play this game with the courts, but why do you say that? First of all, they don’t even assign us a judge. They don’t even assign us a judge. But why wouldn’t you – Hey Brad, why wouldn’t you want to check out [name] ? And why wouldn’t you want to say, hey, if in fact, President Trump is right about that, then he wins the state of Georgia, just that one incident alone without going through hundreds of thousands of dropped ballots. You just say, you stick by, I mean I’ve been watching you, you know, you don’t care about anything. ‘Your numbers are right.’ But your numbers aren’t right. They’re really wrong and they’re really wrong, Brad. And I know this phone call is going nowhere other than, other than ultimately, you know – Look ultimately, I win, okay?

Ultimately? No. Trump did not win, and his refusal to accept that publicly (he most likely knew full well all along, as the 6 January trial should show), and he doesn’t deserve to win next time.

The transcript shows that all Trump and his team were doing was trying to grind down a public official into recounting over and again – and allow Trump lawyers and officials loose to oversee and influence their work and access to data until they capitulated to Trump’s domineering demands.

Yet even as they gang up on him, Raffensperger stands firm and sticks to the line that if Trump has a problem, he should take it to the courts to sort out. It’s a heroic performance – unlike Trump, seen at his very worst. He even tells “Brad” how unpopular he’s going to be with the voters (Raffensperger’s is an elected position and he’s a Republican) if the “truth” doesn’t come out.

Trump had no good reason to be making that call in the first place, and none of his claims about dead voters, dumped ballots or fraudulent postal votes ever came to anything. He did not win Georgia by 300,000 because his rallies were so well attended.

Of course, the Trump cultists won’t care about any of this, and see it only as further proof that Trump is a victim. Yet others will.

The endless trials of Trump and his conspiracy theory defence will remind Americans once again of just how unbearably awful, divisive and dangerous a Trump revival would prove, and one that – this time – has added retribution as a key goal.

Whether he wins the cases or not, Trump will surely lose in the court of public opinion – and by much more than 11,779 votes.