Former Trump attorney Sidney Powell recently admitted in a court filing that “no reasonable person” would believe her conspiracy theories about how the 2020 election was stolen from Trump after massive voter fraud.
Of course, most people understood this already, long before she just admitted to it. Clearly, however, some believed her, and those who, like her, spread similar conspiracy theories and outright lies, all in an attempt to overturn the election, or nullify it, in an effort to keep Donald Trump in the White House.
Basically, she is revealing here that she did not even believe what she herself was professing in regards to massive voter fraud. That is why now, once facing the gravitas of saying things under oath in court, she is backing down. This is similar to how Rudy Giuliani was claiming massive voter fraud before the cameras in public, but went out of his way to make clear that he was not alleging massive voter fraud when in front of the court. It is an obvious ploy, and begs the question, quite frankly, of just how stupid and willfully blind and brainwashed you have to be to still believe the allegations, even when Trump's own most loyal lawyers back down from these claims, and even ridicule their own claims in the case of Powell. For all intents and purposes, she is outright admitting that anyone who believed her nonsense is stupid and unreasonable.
She now has basically discredited herself. Will it change anything?
Will Trump fans finally start to get outraged that their being lied to by their own side? Will they finally get angry that maybe, just maybe, they have been duped? After all, a hell of a lot of them seem to rely upon anger in their support of him. Here, quite nakedly, they are being spoken of as if they are morons to believe what Trump and his team, as well as the extremist far right-wing media, so clearly worked very hard to get them to believe. Will they respond with indignant outrage, as they have responded time and time again over the past five years to almost any effort by pretty much anyone to portray Donald Trump as anything less than perfect and infallible?
It seems unlikely. Many people believed it. They continued to believe whatever the hell they wanted to believe despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They want to believe that this man, Donald Trump, is the hero that he pretends to be, and so they dismiss the overwhelming abundance of evidence that reveals him to be something quite different. They hear the warnings that this man is nothing but a first rate con artist, that he is a snake oil salesman, selling them a bill of goods. If Trump hesitating to criticize Nazis did not do it, if his constant, incessant lying and transparent narcissism wouldn’t do it, and if four years where it was proven that he lied about everything from making Mexico pay for the wall to working to establish a truly solid and affordable healthcare program that would cover everyone to the obviously corrupt nature of his telephone call to the Ukraine to his constant flipping back and forth on the coronavirus crisis (to say nothing of withholding serious information from the American public to lying about massive voter fraud to passively aggressively supporting what amounted to an attempted coup d’état , then nothing will change their minds.
As for Sidney Powell, she probably will be back in some form or another. Sure, this discredits her towards many. But either she will get back in good graces with Trump, and thus the Trump crowd by extension, or she will turn to trashing Trump publicly in a tell all book, and getting a bunch of interviews and public appearances and such. Maybe she will be one of the next celebrity guests competing on Dancing With the Stars. Who knows?
I'd be willing to bet that loyal Trump supporters will condemn her for betraying Trump, and will now think of her as part of the conspiracy against him, to try and discredit him. How else can they rationalize? Will they even bother to try? Are they even paying attention to this story at all? Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that it will be enough to give many of them a pause for thought for even a second.
Sidney Powell argues in new court filing that no reasonable people would believe her election fraud claims by Katelyn Polantz, Tue March 23, 2021:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/22/politics/sidney-powell-dominion-lawsuit-election-fraud/index.html
It's not going to change anything. Trump supporters will simply ignore this, or scoff and continue to engage in mental gymnastics the way they've always done in the past. As long as we're speaking metaphorically here, medical science simply hasn't evolved to the point of making it possible to extract these people's heads from their asses. And they like it that way. I'm not sure if you remember the dialog from Cool Hand Luke starring Paul Newman, which was featured in the intro to GNR's "Civil War". But there's a line in it which goes "Some men, you just can't reach." Replace "men" with the gender-neutral "people", and you've captured the essence of Trump's base.
ReplyDeleteYes, I remember that, mostly from the GNR song, although I finally did see the movie some years back. Also, I agree that nothing is likely to change, or shake the faith of fanatical Trump supporters, despite the overwhelming mountain of evidence that they are presented, time and time again, to refute their staunch faith in quite possibly the greatest scam artist in world history.
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