David Axelrod, Barack Hussein Obama’s chief strategist, was clearly worried about Donald Trump’s prime time speech about election integrity last night. Hyperventilating on X Tuesday, he warned that “If @POTUS really trots out Pulte, Patel and a crew of political apparatchiks posing as intel experts… to announce they’ve uncovered ‘evidence’ of foul play in 2020, it’ll only heighten fears that he’ll claim an ‘emergency’ down the line and claim extraordinary fed power over elections. If so – and there are plenty of other signs of manipulation brewing – the most important battles of the midterms may be in the courts.”
Let’s begin by considering Axelrod’s rhetoric. Are the directors of the CIA, the FBI and Homeland Security people who “pose as intelligence experts?” Or are they, you know, intel experts, no posing involved? We all know about the potential of semantic sabotage inherent in carefully deployed quotation marks. Just as “fresh” fish is something quite different from fresh fish, so “evidence” is not the same thing as evidence. Axelrod hoped to provide a little proleptic prophylaxis against whatever revelations the President might provide about election interference and election corruption in 2020. If all he had was “evidence” of an “emergency” then we could all rest easy, right?
