At the top of her Monday show, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted a strange comment from right-wing personality Steve Bannon about outgoing Bazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. According to Bannon, Bolsonaro shouldn't accept the results of the election, just as Donald Trump refused in 2020. Bolsonaro said previously that he would stage a coup if he lost.
"Why do you care, Steve Bannon? This is the part that's about us, that's about us and our country and our election next week," said Maddow. "Why do you think it is that this top White House adviser to former president Donald trump, why do you think it is that he's telling this guy in Brazil, this Trump-like far-right, buffoonish, unpopular Brazilian president who has been voted out of office?"
She continued: "Why did Trump endorse Bolsonaro and endorse his voter fraud claims even in advance of the election?" Maddow wondered. "Why is it that we can be absolutely 100 percent sure that if Trump were still president instead of Joe Biden, the U.S. government itself would be refusing to acknowledge that Bolsonaro just lost this election? Why? Why do they do this? It is not about Brazil. It is about us."
Bannon and those aligned with his beliefs are building a case that elections shouldn't matter and the system is broken.
"It is about propagating and inculcating into us or at least inculcating into their supporters this assertion, this belief, this conviction that elections are bad. That elections are suspect, that elections are for suckers. And anybody who is not a sucker shouldn't believe any election results anywhere," Maddow characterized the GOP belief. "Elections suck. They're a hoax. They're a racket. We shouldn't use them, we know better. And this line of attack — it isn't about any one election. It's not about any particular allegation of something being wrong with some particular election. It's about elections as elections. It's about elections as a category, and you can see it at work in all these different instances, right? That's how you can see it, sort of."
She showed a Fox clip of Republican candidate Blake Masters on the phone with Donald Trump being told he has to deny the election in 2020. The only thing that matters in the 2022 election isn't the economy, American democracy, personal freedoms and liberty, it's the 2020 election.
"Why does trump want to do this?" Maddow asked. "Why does he want all Republican candidates at every level to insist that elections are for suckers? And that election results don't count? The reason he wants to do this is so this idea that elections shouldn't be the way we do things anymore becomes the rallying cry and the operating principle of the Republican Party. And it's working within the Republican Party. I mean, ever since Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016, thanks to a Republican primary system he said was rigged and fraudulent, and then he won the general election that year, and still said there was fraud in that election."
As Maddow explained it, the Republican Party's ploy is to say that the elections are messed up. She brought up the 67 counties in Pennsylvania and 50 of those 67 counties the elections officials have left due to the threats and attacks. In Nevada, there are 17 counties and 10 of those 17 have left already.
"You may have seen the news over the weekend about this Republican-controlled county in Nevada that is breaking its elections system so profoundly they are swearing in dozens of citizens to be citizen hand counters of their ballots, and that's the only way they want to count," Maddow reported. "This is a system they are newly inventing that last week took 60 people one full day to count 900 votes poorly. Sixty people counting, a full day's work, less than 1,000 votes counted."
The Associated Press observed the groups showing that about three hours each counted 50 ballots. Then they had issues and couldn't count right so they had to recount them. One volunteer even complained they couldn't believe it took them two hours to get through just 25 ballots.
"Yeah. This is how you're going to count them. This is a county with 33,000 registered votes," said Maddow. "It took 60 people a full day to get through less than 1,000 votes. They have got 33,000 registered voters in that county. They're getting rid of the election system there effectively. They're having randos just personally rifle through the ballots and see what they might come up with to get through 33,000 votes on actual Election Day, where there's a tight Senate race and other stuff that's really important on the ballot. Yeah, it might take them a few months, maybe a year to get some kind of tally. Nobody will have much faith in it when they do. It's a system, right?"
But this is the point, she explained. "Say the elections are messed up. On the basis of that, mess them up. Then when the elections are messed up, claim vindication. And show everyone, hey, look, this election thing we used to do, it's just too broken to try to use it anymore. What a mess. Why would anyone believe those results? Let's throw the results out."
This is what she said is actually the effort happening today.
Watch the opener below:
GOP is trying to say elections are messed up -- then they mess them up - then end them youtu.be
