Such was the magic number Trump hoped to shake out of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State, on January 2, 2021, during what has become an infamous, hour-long plus phone call. Although the conversation wandered very far and very, very wide, the President always came back to either that particular, peculiar figure or one quite like it. Relentlessly so. One could imagine the wished-for numerals writ especially large, in blocks, upon a legal pad placed in front of him and circled, several times, in red. This was the objective. This was the hill to die on. This was also, of course, the minimum number, according to Trumpian mathematics, he needed outdo Joe Biden and to claim legitimate victory in the purple turning state. Inexplicably Trump kept saying, the figure was just “one more than we need, one more than we had”. One more than what, precisely? If the count is accurate in the first place, which you insist it is not, what will one more vote do for you? What does any number from in Georgia mean? What does it take to win in Peach Tree territory?
If one listens to the entirety of the taped and disclosed, tedious and fascinating conversation, Trump clearly believes that was he is talking about is a good deal for Raffensperger, raw numbers wise. The offer is, in fact, quite generous, Trump suggests. It will make Raffensperger look shrewd, an honest broker, a level head among so many chaotic voices. All vexatious problems between D.C and Atlanta have been solved. The mysterious loss has been deciphered. Trump is certain–so he says–that he defeated Biden by “hundreds of thousands of votes.” Just look at the giant numbers of people who flocked to his rallies, he bellows. So obvious! For Raffensperger to “find” a mere 11,780 should be light work for the secretary. All Raffensberger needs to do, metaphorically, is to open that special desk drawer of his, the one he forgot to open before, and there inside he will find the innards of a Dominion Voting System machine which happens to contain, within its removal brain, the exact, necessary, digital tabulation. What were the odds of that? That the innards were lying right there, so close, all along, while so many lawsuits had been thrown out for lack of evidence? Kind of spooky, really. But you can’t argue with numbers. Number are what numbers are.
One can find all sorts of representative figures in the Rorschach splatters made by Trump in the course of his diarrhoetic, long winded shake down. The rigidity of the personality disordered. The mafia mentality. Knowing no difference between a conversation and a court proceeding. Even Trump’s knee jerk misogyny is here, waved freely around when he chides Cleta Mitchell, one of his attorneys, sitting in on the call, because poor Cleta has once again chimed in and has missed the the-oh-so-much-more-crucial point he is trying to make.
But the single and most fundamentally stupefying aspect of all?
In the call, along with his usual incapacities, Trump seems unable to understand the most rudimentary principles of mathematics.
On the blackboard, the teacher draws three chickens. How many chickens do you see? Raffensperger, at his desk, says “three.” Trump, at his desk, says “ten.” Trump then suggests that the teacher declare that there are at least “five” chickens. Trump points out that, in the negotiated scenario he proposes, he will then have moved off his count by five, while Raffensperger only has to move off his count by two. Two is less than five. Two. That’s all Raffensperger needs to give up. “Give me a break,” Trump says. He is giving up more than Raffensperger. That way, everybody wins. What’s so wrong with that?
Failing to discern any difference between dream and reality has become a rite of passage for far-right conservative Americans lapsed into the thrall of Trump. To earn one’s bone fides, one can choose from any number of wishful hallucinations. And if one can’t go all in at the high-bullshit-content buffet, there are some more moderate selections. Ones that may not be outright hallucinations, per se, but for which there is, and likely never can be, any proof. Cutting taxes for the rich is of benefit to everyone. Human activity has affected the temperature of the globe not at all. Donald Trump is a latter day King Cyrus. COVID 19 is a hoax. Muslim Americans in Jersey City, New Jersey, poured out onto the streets and cheered as the jets slammed into the World Trade Center. Five black teenagers raped and nearly killed a jogger in Central Park. A caravan of immigrants is heading toward our southwestern border. And these, of course, on the broad spectrum, are some of the less edgy, more ho-hum, run of the mill article of faith. These are the vanilla flavored fantasies. Others are infinitely more byzantine. Such as the one about how Trump instigated a counter-coup by pretending to conspire with Russia so that he could then arrange for the appointment of Robert Mueller, so that special counsel Mueller could in turn secretly investigate prominent Democrats. That’s some really deep, deep state shit. Trump’s public protestations about, and excoriation of Mueller, were cover for this meticulous, circuitous sting. You know.
To a degree, as many have observed, this marks a wholesale, communal abandonment of an essential projects of Ancient Greece, and as later elaborated upon during the Enlightenment. That is: a physical realm exists beyond all human ideologies and desires. The man of Athens does not howl about the pain in his upper right abdomen because there is a demon with a nasty, miniature pitchfork poking around inside him. No, Hippocrates concluded, the Athenian’s liver had grown too big. That Hippocrates was wrong about what exactly caused the case of hepatitis in question does not make his method of inquiry any less valuable. Nor does the Enlightenment’s dogmatic insistence upon achieving some kind of utopian quantification and categorization of everything under the sun mean that nothing was gained by learning that lightning was a form of electricity or that certain fossils demonstrated that the world is much older than anyone had previously imagined. One dose of Zithromax is enough to prove the project’s worth.
What is more curious is the degree to which the American right tirelessly insists upon using terms lifted from this fact-based project while not caring for the project itself in the least. Trump and his supporters do not threaten the principles of the Republic itself–here represented by elected officials in Georgia–because they, in spite of their high wattage avowals to the contrary, want an accurate count. They do so because, instead, and in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they want what they want. 11,790 is an article of desire, of faith, of belief. Trump and those gathered in the room with him go on to insist that this number can be demonstrated through the examination of a non-existent avalanche of videotapes, documents, data, eye witness statements, sworn affidavits, expert testimony, and court proceedings. Perhaps even a fourth recount. Every fact produced as a result of reason has an arguable opposite, they argue. A kind of factual counterfactual. And there is always, somewhere, and some-when, some as-yet-released trove of transcripts, hard drives, email threads, and on camera confessions that prove how everything is exactly as they insist.
But why bother with that sort of thing at all? Why insist upon any burden of proof? You lose as soon as you step into the boxing ring where two plus two equals four. Why put an exploratory toe into that forbidding water? Look how the dynamic duo of Powell-Giuliani flamed out every time evidence was required of them. Why demand, as Trump, et alia, do during the twisted conversation, that the facts presented by Raffensperger must pass the strange, extrajudicial thing Trump calls “the smell test”?
It is hard to let go of Enlightenment lingo, apparently, even when it makes you look like a fool. Those on the other end of the buzzing line down in Georgia–those gripping their phones who had to listen to the mad number salad–understood that one person equals one vote. And they stuck with this method of counting because it is the lifeblood of the Republic. They affirmed how a neat, little mathematical equation can secure the place of every citizen. This simple sign of accounting–the American ritual of election–can no longer be assumed in the Trumpian era, though, when one man’s clutch on power so dominated a country and that gloomily promises to last well past the time when one man leaves the scene. Reckoning with the numerical metastasis of Trumpianism, the multiplication of those falling into autocratic thrall, even at this very late date, though, must be a calculation for another day.