TIME Magazine‘s explanation of how the 2020
election was rigged against President Trump:
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,
one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs.
Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing
activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse,
little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO
published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit
bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice
protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital
to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy TIME Magazine‘s
explanation of how the 2020 election was rigged against President Trump: There
was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the
protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the
result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.
The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day.
Both sides would come
to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive,
sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came
together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault
on democracy. The handshake between business and labor was just one component of
a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow
effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and
fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized
coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they
came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically
inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was
separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial
contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors.
The scenario the shadow
campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election
so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central
act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its
founding. Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to
change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public
and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited
armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first
time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line
against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.
They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans
understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing
Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more
traction.
After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that
Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the
thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American
democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and
former Obama Administration official
who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter
Protection Program.
Source: Time Magazine
