Married to the Mob — Thinking Comes Later

They came from all around the country, a horde of angry agitators determined to stop votes from being counted. They swarmed through the government’s offices, shoving and kicking the occupants, brawling with security, pounding on windows and chanting, “Stop the count! Stop the fraud!” It was November 22nd, 2000, and the unruly crowd had descended on the elections office for Miami-Dade County, where officials were performing a hand recount of some 10,000 contested ballots which had the real potential to hand the state’s electoral votes – and the presidency – to Al Gore.

Elections officials were working under a tight, court-imposed deadline to complete their recount, so to save time they moved their counting operation to a smaller room closer to the ballot counting machines. Republican election observers strenuously objected to this change – and shortly thereafter, the angry mob arrived, alleging that Democrats were trying to steal the election.

Individual members of the seething crowd told anybody who would listen that they were just ordinary, everyday Floridians who were concerned about election integrity. But the crowd was uncharacteristically well-dressed and monochromatic for South Florida: the Wall Street Journal described the mob as being comprised of “50-year-old white lawyers with cell phones and Hermes ties.” Another reporter overheard one of these concerned citizens brag to a friend, “I just told Rove.”

Within hours of the chaos at the elections office, local officials halted the recount. Thousands of potential votes for Gore were never tallied. A couple months later, George W. Bush became president. His margin of victory was 537 votes.

In the aftermath of what came to be known as “The Brooks Brothers Riot,” it grew clear that nearly all the participants were paid Republican Party operatives, and in the years to come many of them were handsomely rewarded for their efforts:

The riot’s leader on the ground was Matt Schlapp, who would go on to become the White House political director during Bush’s first term. Last year, Schlapp – now the president of the American Conservative Union – vociferously defended President Trump’s election fraud claims, alleging without evidence that 9000 fraudulent ballots had been cast in Nevada.
Another rioter, Garry Malphrus, was a former staffer to Senator Strom Thurmond who would later be named deputy director of Bush’s White House Domestic Policy Council.
Rioter Joel Kaplan became a senior policy advisor in the Bush Administration. Currently he is the vice president of global public policy for Facebook, where he was instrumental in spearheading changes to Facebook’s news feed algorithm that promoted articles by right-wing publications like Breitbart News and The Daily Caller to millions of users, and successfully prevented the company from shutting down Facebook groups that spread fake news stories.
The entire operation at the elections office was coordinated by Roger Stone, a political consultant hired by the Bush campaign. In the years since the Brooks Brothers Riot, Stone collaborated with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to release hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump, and has become something of a patron saint for the Proud Boys.

As the chaos unfolded, George W. Bush released an official statement. It read, in part:

“This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic – not our democratic republic. I am appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election and by the lack of respect shown today for our institutions, our traditions, and our law enforcement. … In the United States of America, it is the fundamental responsibility of every patriotic citizen to support the rule of law. To those who are disappointed in the results of the election: Our country is more important than the politics of the moment. Let the officials elected by the people fulfill their duties and represent our voices in peace and safety. May God continue to bless the United States of America.”

The Mitch McConnells and Liz Cheneys and other leaders of the Republican establishment aren’t breaking with Donald Trump because they’re outraged by the undemocratic act of summoning a violent mob to overturn an election. They’re doing it because they know it won’t work this time. Trump’s plan to throw out the electoral college votes that made Joe Biden president would require the cooperation of the House of Representatives, where Democrats hold a four-seat majority.

If the Democrats had lost those four House seats in the 2020 election, giving Republicans majorities in both houses of Congress on January 6th, every Republican (including the 10 who voted to impeach President Trump yesterday) would fully support throwing out Biden’s electoral votes from states like Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia. The resulting Constitutional crisis would be decided by the Supreme Court, whose six Republican-appointed judges would do exactly what the Federalist Society has trained them to do: adopt whatever tortured, obscure legal rationale is necessary to maintain white supremacy.

I’m sorry to be so divisive in what I am told is a time of unity and national healing. But when they run this play successfully in January 2025, don’t act surprised. This is who they are. It’s who they’ve always been.