The big bamboo investigation ended months ago, folding itself into a slightly more plausible examination and, eventually, even an official explanation for what happened to Donald Trump last November in Arizona: He lost.
Thank you Cyber Ninjas, the so-called forensic auditors contracted by a box of Trump puppies known as the Arizona Senate. The Cyber Ninjas, just as Trump was praising them for being "highly respected" last Thursday evening, had already leaked the results of their dubious project that began last spring: He lost.
No one other than Trump, and only in the "highly respected" statement he withdrew almost the minute it went up, had considered the work of the Cyber Ninjas valid. Called by one veteran Republican strategist "the Cyber Nimrods" on a national news show, mocked for the theory that a significant number of Joe Biden ballots arrived in Arizona from China, and thus chortled at for examining ballots for traces of bamboo, the Cyber Ninjas somehow arrived at the same conclusion as every previous recount and audit done by real election officials with actual experience all over America: He lost.
Just four months behind schedule, they found, by their own formal statement issued Friday, "no substantial differences," between their own hand count of ballots and the official count from last November, and that the results "very accurately correlate with the actual canvas numbers." If anything, they said, Biden won by 360 votes more than the official count indicated.
Characterized by Trump as the first domino to fall in a process that would lead to the 2020 election being invalidated and returning him to the White House, the failed Arizona recount caper financed by right-wing wingnuts and Trump-backed political action committees still couldn't prevent America's oldest child from going on stage at a rally in Georgia the next night and flat-out lying about it.
"We won on the Arizona forensic audit yesterday," Trump told yet another audience of cultists who lapped it up in the kind of demented affair that not even Fox News will televise anymore, "at a level that you wouldn't believe."
That second part is actually true. I wouldn't believe it.
It reminds me of the other Trump quote I actually found credible. The one about his "investigation" into Barack Obama's birth certificate. Trump claimed he'd sent investigators to Hawaii to examine the document, investigators who "couldn't believe what they were finding." I know I certainly couldn't believe anything Trump investigators purported to unearth on Obama, so that part sounded true. Shame on me for believing there were investigators in the first place. As Trump attorney Michael Cohen later revealed, "he never sent anybody anywhere."
This is why the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 attack would be wasting its time should it even consider a subpoena to compel testimony from Trump. There is virtually nothing he won't lie about, virtually no plainly evident truth he won't try to club to death. He started his presidency telling people he drew a bigger inauguration crowd than Obama despite comparable photographic evidence to the contrary, and ended it triggering an insurrection that he characterized as a love-in.
In the face of fresh Arizona findings, he claims the Ninjas found "significant and undeniable evidence of fraud."
Quothe the Ninjas: "Uh, no."
The worst part is, as ever, even when Trump loses spectacularly, he wins. The Ninjas did what they were hired to do — sustain doubt, and not just in Arizona, but in the democratic system.
Does Pennsylvania have Republican senators stupid enough to try a "forensic" Ninja-style audit here? Oh absolutely. Does Wisconsin? Does Michigan? Does Texas — where Trump won? Oh sure, all of 'em.
What Trump taught Republicans in the last election cycle is a simple mantra they're trying to use in every future race: Votes for Republicans are legit, votes for Democrats are not, and thus Democrats can't be entrusted to run the government.
"The leadership of the Republican Party," wrote Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson this week, "composed now as it is of Trump loyalists, is undermining our democracy. It has fallen in line behind Trump's Big Lie that he and not Biden won the 2020 election, and that the Democratic Party engaged in voter fraud to install their candidate. This is a lie, but Republicans at the state level are using that lie to justify new election laws that suppress Democratic votes and put control of state elections into their own hands. If those laws are allowed to stand, we will be a democracy in name only. We will likely still have elections, but, just as in Russia or Hungary now, the mechanics of the system will mean that only the president's party can win."
That's a version of events almost too dark to ponder. Not everyone shares it. In Georgia, where Trump spent most of Saturday night eviscerating state officials who could not conjure a way to flip the election he lost there last November, the lieutenant governor sees another outcome for all of this.
Political pros know that Trump's constant slamming of the election process depresses the vote among Republicans as well.
"You pick a state, you pick an election, you pick a national election, and if we try the same approach, we will come in the same second place that we just did," said Geoff Duncan, Georgia's lieutenant governor. "And that's code language for 'lost.'"
Either outcome, of course, has one special inevitability: Trump will lie about it.
