John Eastman’s grasp of conspiracy theories drove him to try to 'abolish the existing government': columnist
John Eastman’s path to extremism began with his promotion of election lies, columnist Philip Bump wrote for The Washington Post Monday in an in-depth look at the election denier identified as "co-conspirator 2" in Donald Trump's Jan. 6 indictment.
The former Donald Trump attorney, during a series of interviews with Republican donor Tom Klingenstein that were published over the past few weeks, “reinforces how (Eastman’s) ongoing embrace of explicitly false claims led him to embrace what he himself described as the potential need to ‘alter or abolish the existing government,”' Bump wrote.
Bump notes that Eastman during the interviews repeats debunked claims about the 2020 election.
“We are talking about whether we are going to, as a nation, completely repudiate every one of our founding principles, which is what the modern left wing, which is in control of the Democrat Party, believes — that we are the root of all evil in the world and we have to be eradicated,” Eastman said. “This is an existential threat to the very survivability not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation properly understood provides to the world. That’s the stakes.”
Bump writes that “Eastman’s entire argument for his actions after the 2020 election depends on the idea that he had evidence that the election might have been affected by fraud. He points to things like the lower rate of rejected mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania as suspicious, although that, too, has been explained: more attention paid to the process meant better-informed voters. What’s more, the rates dropped in a number of states, not just Pennsylvania. But Eastman assumes that this shift indicates fraud in the Keystone State and, applying some back-of-the-envelope math, that it made the difference for Joe Biden.”
The argument has led Eastman to promote fringe views.
“There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that says, you know, a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable. Or: tolerable. While they remain tolerable,” Eastman said.
“But at some point, the abuses would become so intolerable that it is not only their right, but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government. So that’s the question. Have the abuses and the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back?”
Eastman described “an exponential increase” in the radicalization of the left in recent years, noting that “You’re going to let 50-year-old men, naked, into teenage girls’ showers at public pools?” he said, echoing overheated but increasingly common right-wing rhetoric. “Or — or drag queens doing story hours to 6-year-olds?”
Bump contends that Eastman’s extremist views left him one through which to view the 2020 election.
“What choice did he have but to try to overthrow Biden’s election?” Bump writes.
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