He called Raffensperger “wacky” and Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor, “incompetent.” They don’t know, apparently, that their job is to deliver the state to him, even though he lost it. (Rudy Giuliani pushed the State Farm scenario with the help of deceptively edited security footage the full video shows that the story is nonsense.) Trump repeated those claims at the rally in Dalton.

Raffensperger is a Republican, as are other state officials who have explained, again and again, that the President’s claims-about votes cast by people who were either underage or dead, or mystery ballots being brought in under the cover of a staged water-main break at the State Farm Arena, in Atlanta-are demonstrably false. On the face of it, Trump’s demand was illegal. Georgia’s votes have been counted three times.

The prelude to the rally was a telephone call, on Saturday, in which Trump threatened Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, with criminal liability-“a big risk to you”-if he did not “find” eleven thousand seven hundred and eighty votes for him-just enough to overcome Biden’s margin of victory in the state-somewhere, anywhere. But, given that Trump is not on any ballot, how, and with what weapons?

“FIGHT FOR TRUMP! FIGHT FOR TRUMP!” the crowd chanted, at various points. “President Trump has fought for us and we’re fighting for him, and a fair and accurate election,” Perdue said-a reference to the election, in November, that Trump lost, and to the President’s efforts to throw out its results. “This President fought for us we’re fighting for him,” Loeffler said. What exactly was Donald Trump asking the crowd to do when he spoke, on Monday night, at a rally in Dalton, Georgia? The occasion for the event was Tuesday’s dual Senate runoff elections in the state but no one, not even the Republican candidates-Senators Kelly Loeffler, who joined Trump onstage, and David Perdue, who is quarantining after a coronavirus exposure and appeared by video-pretended that was the main issue.

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