Trump phone call: what it taught us, what it didn't

It was a glorious phone call. Donald Trump spent an hour talking to – well, mostly at – Brad Raffensberger, Secretary of State in Georgia. It was one of the most revealing incidents in Trump’s rather unusual, not to say weird, career. It was him through and through. It was him in spades.

Donald Trump and Brad Raffensberger

So what exactly did it reveal about him?

In the first place, it was clear he had no intention of listening to anyone else, as he talked over them whenever he felt like it. Convinced as he is that his view is the correct view, he sees no point in letting anyone else talk, since they would take a position different from his and that, by definition, at least in his mind, means they are wrong. 

“We believe our numbers are right,” Raffensberger told him.

“But your numbers aren't right. They're really wrong and they're really wrong, Brad,” Trump replied after a long ramble, offering no evidence to back up his assertion (Raffensberger’s claims have been confirmed by audits and stood up in court).

In the second place, let’s just look at the rambling itself. Trump has little command of language, and he uses words not to elucidate but to browbeat and bully. Here he is giving Raffensberger some information I’m not sure he needed to know (bear in mind that he’s from the State of Georgia, which was about to hold two Senatorial run-off elections, and he’s the Secretary of State):

… I think we should come to a resolution of this before the election. Otherwise you're going to have people just not voting. They don't want to vote. They hate the state, they hate the governor and they hate the secretary of state. I will tell you that right now. The only people like you are people that will never vote for you. You know that Brad, right? They like you know, they like you. They can't believe what they found. They want people like you. 

Then there’s the constant resort to projection, as I’ve pointed out before. This is where Trump accuses others of faults he embodies himself. For instance, when he told Raffensberger “I just want to find 11,780 votes” he was trying to steal an election, an attempt he’s been running under the slogan “stop the steal”. There’s something wonderfully barefaced about accusing opponents of stealing an election you’re trying to steal yourself. 

Then there was this outburst:

There's only two answers, dishonesty or incompetence. There's just no way. Look. There's no way. 

Dishonesty or incompetence? Let’s look at Trump’s handling of the Covid pandemic. All those stories about its being little worse than the flu, or of disappearing soon. Either he knew that was nonsense, in which case he was dishonest, or he believed it despite its being obviously inane, in which case he was incompetent.

Or perhaps not simply incompetent but also deluded. Look at this sentiment, repeated by Trump several times, in different words:

I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There's no way I lost Georgia. There's no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes… But I won that state by hundreds of thousands of votes.

Does he really believe this to be true? Does he really believe that he has won the election not just in Georgia, but nationally too? Does he really believe that he is going to start a second term on 20 January?

That may seem unlikely, if there’s any truth in the rumours that Trump is planning to travel to Scotland to play golf on that day. Perhaps I should say “was planning”. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, has now locked down the country and banned travel except for essential purposes. As she pointed out, “coming to play golf is not what I would consider to be an essential purpose”. 

It’s hard to attend your own inauguration if you’re out of the country. So if he really was planning to travel outside the US, that’s as close an admission of his defeat as we’ve had from him. In turn, that makes all his talk about having won a straight lie, so he would be deeply dishonest.

On the other hand, listening to the recording of the telephone call, it does sound as though he genuinely believes in his victory, certainly in Georgia, and probably for the country as a whole. If that’s the case, then he’s deeply deluded.

Dishonest or deluded, then. As he might say himself “there’s only two answers”. Although nothing stops him being both dishonest and deluded. 

Whatever the answer, though, whether he’s dishonest, deluded or both, he’s certainly unfit to hold his office. As rather over 81 million voters in the US have decided. Well, 81 million applying any reputable way of counting them, though not Trump’s way.

That’s the main point about the phone call. It taught us what we already knew: 

• Trump is unfit for office – we knew that. 
• He can’t listen – we knew that.
• He’s incoherent and uses language to bully and browbeat – we knew that.
• He projects his own faults on others – we knew that.
• He’s trying to steal an election he lost – we knew that too.

In other words, the recording of the phone call taught us nothing we didn’t already know. But, boy, did it confirm a lot. Maybe, just maybe, that might at last shake the convictions of the diehard among Trump’s supporters.