Wow! Why is the Associated Press Washington Bureau Julie Pace so consumed with anger, bordering on rage, over the fact that President Donald Trump and his team are seeking verification of election results? Does anybody remember the press reacting with anything even approaching outrage when Al Gore challenged the Florida election results for over a month after the 2000 election?
One would think that a wire-service bureau chief who's supposed to oversee all the Washington news wouldn't be throwing editorial thunderbolts. But Pace wants to get on cable news segments, so forget the appearance of detachment.
In the case of this year's election, Pace throws a complete conniption fit over the legal challenges by the Trump team on Thursday in "Analysis: For Trump, sowing post-election chaos is the goal."
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is trying to turn America’s free and fair election into a muddled mess of misinformation, specious legal claims and baseless attacks on the underpinnings of the nation’s democracy.
The resulting chaos and confusion that has created isn’t the byproduct of Trump’s strategy following his defeat to Democrat Joe Biden. The chaos and confusion is the strategy.
Trump’s blizzard of attacks on the election are allowing him to sow discontent and doubt among his most loyal supporters, leaving many with the false impression that he is the victim of fraudulent voting. That won’t keep Trump in office — Biden will be sworn in on Jan. 20 — but it could both undermine the new president’s efforts to unify a fractured nation and fuel Trump in his next endeavor, whether that’s another White House run in 2024 or a high-profile media venture.
Pace shifts into even higher anti-Trump gear when she continues with her claims the real goal of Trump isn't really to change the official election results but to prepare for post-election pursuits.
Rather than overturn the election results, Trump allies say the goal is to help keep the president’s most loyal supporters engaged and energized for whatever he might pursue after he leaves office — even if that means leaving them ill-informed about the reality of what has unfolded in the election.
Trump has long relished blurring the lines between truth and fiction and taking advantage of the confusion that creates. If anything, his presidency has only emboldened those tendencies, given the ways in which the Republican Party and friendly media outlets have helped propel his versions of events, even when they are indisputably false.
Which "Trump allies say the goal" is to pursue certain activities after he leaves office? Of course, those "Trump allies" in her story remain as anonymous as the anonymous sources quoted by Atlantic magazine claiming that Trump demeaned dead soldiers as losers. Do "Trump allies" help AP editors trash Trump?
To get an idea of the utter hypocrisy of Julie Pace, let me quote Julie Pace just before the 2016 election when she counseled patience in awaiting the election results in this November 3, 2016 Associated Press report.
“One of the biggest things that I would encourage people to do today is to have patience,” says Pace, a longtime political and White House correspondent. "There’s no expectation that we would definitely call the race for the presidency on election night. We call it when the votes are there and the math tells us we can.”
...Multiple American presidential elections — not just the most famous one, George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000 — have not produced immediate results, as unsatisfying as that can be for a society that now expects immediate delivery of everything from consumer goods to TV shows to news updates.
So patience is counseled by Pace when a Democrat is challenging the election results but if Trump does the same, then he is somehow sowing "chaos."
