122/ He says Democrats "cheated like hell" in the GA runoff. No evidence offered, needless to say.

He then—knowing he's speaking to a mob with many white supremacists—attacks four people (see if you can spot a trend): Stacy Abrams; Oprah; Michelle Obama; "Barack Hussein Obama."

123/ He notes how "unhappy" he is with SCOTUS, and how he "fought like hell" for three of them to get on the court—see, I said the phrase would pop up—including Brett Kavanaugh, who Trump's allies told him was "killing" the GOP (violent imagery). Calls Kavanaugh's accusers liars.

124/ Of the Supreme Court he says—effortlessly spinning a conspiracy theory—"It almost seems they're all going out of their way to hurt all of us. And to hurt our country. To hurt our country." He says they can't rule for him because they'll lose friends on "the social circuit."

125/ He lauds media for accusing their enemies of doing what they're doing, and then says that "if I were media, I'd do the same, hate to say it."

But... he *is* doing the same. This *whole speech* is him doing the same. He's meta-meta-attacking the media. An extraordinary move.

126/ "For the sake of our Constitution, for the sake of our children, we [hereby] lay out our case [for election fraud]..."

I'm not going to repeat the "case" he thereafter supplies. It's all gibberish and lies.

127/ Keep in mind how *historically extraordinary* this rant is. The election ended 60 days ago. Trump thereafter lost 65 state and federal lawsuits. Every state certified the election results and told him—often via calls with election officials—that all his fraud claims were BS.

128/ Trump's rant—and it's long—is delivered despite *every word he says* having been rejected in conversations *he was present for* with elections experts and election law attorneys. Trump has been told over and over and over that everything he's saying is a lie and he persists.

129/ But the rant is *necessary* because remember the theme of the speech: January 6 is the *real* election day, as the November election was "fake."

"The only way [Pennsylvania can recertify their electors] is if Mike Pence agrees to send it [the electoral slate] back [to PA]."

130/ Understand what Trump is telling the mob: that state elections officials *believe he won* and are simply asking for the right to *get their electoral slates back* so they can recertify the election with Trump winning. He's saying his loss was a paperwork error a mob can fix.

131/ "Mike Pence has to agree to send it back. {He's interrupted by a new chant—one I can't make out.} And many people in Congress want to send it back. Think of what you're doing. Let's say you *don't* do it....let's say they're stiffs, and they're stupid people, and they say...

132/ "...Pennsylvania and other states want to redo their votes, they want to see the numbers—they already have the numbers—very quickly, and they want to redo. Their legislature! Because many of these votes were taken, because it wasn't approved by their legislature."

Got that?

133/ I wrote that out to underscore that it's gibberish.

Whenever Trump gets into the weeds of election law or elections process he—how do I put this—simply *makes no sense whatsoever*. He babbles.

Because the goal here is just to leave a cloud of doubt about a "fake" election.

134/ "If you don't do that [send the slates back to the state legislatures], you will have a President of the United States for four years—with his wonderful son—you will have a president who lost all of these states....a president who was voted on by a bunch of stupid people."

135/ I know this rhetoric is confusing. To simplify:

1) "Stupid people" means Congress.
2) Trump is saying the real "vote" for president happens on January 6—not in November of the year prior.
3) He is saying Congress' "vote" must reflect what GOP legislatures (not voters) want.

136/ This is insurrection. Trump is preaching the overthrow of a democratically elected government, arguing for a new system of government in which voters don't decide who the POTUS is, but rather GOP state legislatures—whose political judgment is then rubber-stamped by Congress.

137/ One of you already intuited where this is headed. The reason Democratic members of Congress say that the insurrectionists were trying to "burn the ballots"...

...is because they were. That's why they wanted to get to the House chamber. Because that's where the ballots were.

138/ Sure, the insurrectionists would have settled for simply breaking up the joint session of Congress—but one of the *key targets* of their armed invasion was to get the ballots that were *in* that joint session, because Trump had convinced them the slates were fraudulent ones.

139/ Fortunately, aides took the ballots as Congress was fleeing Trump's mob. But if you watch video of the insurrection you hear a lot of "we're gonna burn this place down."

The mob needed to interrupt the "vote"—the election day Trump told them of—and hopefully get the slates.

140/ "You will have an illegitimate president. That's what you'll have. And we can't let that happen."

The call to action—the incitement to insurrection—couldn't be clearer.

141/ He then says that it's *this* truth the media is trying to "suppress"—a verb he's attached, in his speech, to Communism—and "promises" the mob that as soon as he began revealing the electoral slates were fake many of the media cameras at the speech "were turned off." Insane.

142/ "These are the things you don't hear about. You don't hear about it from the people who want to deceive you and demoralize you and control you." He's falsely telling the mob that he's just *revealed* something incredible about the election, and the law, and the Constitution.

143/ More conspiracy theories. He says media (mainly Big Tech) is trying to suppress him getting this truth out, and his supporters from spreading the truth, by reconfiguring algorithms—sort of like he says they did with the election—to ensure the truth is suppressed (Communism).

144/ "Let the weak ones get out [of the Republican Party]. This is a time for strength." This calls to mind Donald Trump Jr.'s prior message to the crowd, which was that it's not the Republican Party anymore, it's *Donald Trump's* Republican Party. Straight-up fascist propaganda.

145/ Another specter-of-Communism meme: "They want to indoctrinate your children."

"It's all part of a comprehensive assault on our democracy. And the American people are finally standing up and saying no."

Lest you wonder who's "standing up" his next words are: "This crowd..."

146/ He now disavows any knowledge of how "this crowd" came to be. He lies and said he "did no advertising" to get the crowd to come (he repeatedly and frantically advertised the Save America March through the very Twitter feed he moments earlier had said he "didn't care about").

147/ "We didn't do anything. This [mob] just happened."

A bald-faced lie. Ali Alexander says he worked with Trump Congressional allies Reps. Gosar, Biggs and Brooks to make the rally happen. Trump was in touch with DoD about whether the Guard would come. He manufactured the mob.

148/ "We have nothing to do with it."

This is like the fourth straight—false—denial that he had anything to do with the mob.

It's almost like he knows the speech is wrapping up; the mob is headed to the Capitol; he's going to flee to the White House; and he's washing his hands.

149/ "They're forming all over the United States."

Remember when he said there should be "hell all over the country" on January 6 over the "fake" election? Well that was exactly his goal—and that's what he's pumping up here: the idea that there are Trump mobs forming everywhere.

150/ He's on a bizarre digression involving foreign wars, now. He's saying that "in a year" his mob must vote out all the "weak Republicans," for instance Liz Cheney, who apparently stands in for "the neo-cons." Hence his self-congratulation for "mostly" bringing the troops home.

151/ He returns to his script, now, and the script says he should be talking about "dropbox" fraud in Wisconsin—including "human drop boxes"(?)—and his "great" conversation (which people "love") with the "crooked" Georgia SoS.

Not going to summarize these bizarre, debunked lies.

152/ Trump now casually implies that Brad Raffensperger might actually be a *secret Democratic spy and colluder* who spent 2020 and 2021 trying to help the Democrats win in Georgia.

Raffensperger is a far-right conservative.

These lies are so bizarre and unhinged—he's deranged.

153/ He says Georgia must "find" the votes he "needs," as "tens of thousands" of fake votes were added to the Democrats' tally.

He has been repeatedly told that this is a lie. "Willful ignorance" is no defense under the law, yet he repeats lies Raffensperger and others debunked.

154/ "The radical left knows exactly what they're doing. They're ruthless—and it's time somebody did something about it. And Mike Pence, I hope you're going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if you're not, I'm gonna be...

155/ "...very disappointed in you, I will tell you right now. I'm not hearing good stories."

Pence had already told Trump in a face-to-face conversation that he wouldn't be "stand[ing] up," so the "it's time somebody did something" piece would have to—Trump knew—fall to the mob.

156/ Trump is speeding up significantly now. He realizes he's losing the mob. He's now engaged in a massive data dump regarding Georgia and Arizona. Little crowd reaction. He's mainly sticking to the teleprompter, which is what he does when he knows he needs to speed things up.

157/ Oh my god. So many numbers. No one could be following what Trump is saying here. He's rushing, and the lies he's delivering are very confusing and are delivered in a way that doesn't clarify them. He's nervous. He rushes through Nevada and then says, "In Michigan—quickly..."

158/ He keeps emphasizing that all the supposed widespread fraud (NB: there was no evidence of widespread fraud) was in large cities. Note that Trump never comes close to the "ten states" that Rudy Giuliani will shortly plead with Sen. Tommy Tuberville to contest. He's at 4, now.

159/ Trump says the fraud was "only in a few states"—underscoring that when Giuliani calls Tuberville *less than an hour later* asking him to contest "10 states" as a "strategy" to "draw this out," it's because the rioters need time to sack the Capitol and maybe find the ballots.

160/ Great—we've reached the "Dominion" part of the speech. I'm not going to summarize this idiocy.

161/ Note that Trump scheduled this speech for two hours before the "vote" he wanted interrupted because he knew his speech was long. The speech ends up being ~75 minutes. Trump is leaving just enough time for the mob to get to the Capitol by 1PM—when he needs them to be there.

162/ He says he's going to wrap up his "evidence" because he knows that it's cold (he's just reading his speech; he doesn't skip ahead). This earns him a chant of "WE LOVE YOU! WE LOVE YOU! WE LOVE YOU!" from the crowd. He says that what he's described is a "criminal enterprise."

163/ "I could go on for another hour reading this stuff to you." (No—he couldn't.)

"The Republicans have to get tougher. You're not going to have a Republican Party if you don't get tougher." (Trump has a long history of associating "toughness" with physical strength and force.)

164/ "They [the Republicans up at the Capitol] want to play it *so straight*."

He implies that the mob needs to play it... less "straight."

Then: "When you catch someone in a fraud, you're allowed to go by {he pauses} very different rules."

God, that's another chilling line.

165/ "So I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do. And I hope he doesn't listen to the RINOs ['Republicans in Name Only'] and the *stupid* people."

No wonder the mob shows up at the Capitol obsessed with *finding*—and possibly detaining—Mike Pence. They were induced.

166/ Trump falsely claiming that voters around the country were sent "4, 5, 6, in one case I heard 7" absentee ballots is so ridiculous that it'd be funny if it weren't leveraged here in service of deliberate incitement to insurrection against the government of the United States.

167/ "This is the most corrupt election in the history of, maybe, the world." Note the verb tense—he remains in the present, as he has to convince the mob that the election is still an open question, not a past-tense event. Remember: his theme is that election day is *January 6*.

168/ "It's so crazy [the election's corruption] that people don't believe it. 'It can't be true!'" This is a propaganda technique—putting the preposterousness of what you're saying in service of its alleged veracity. He invites the mob to be awed by the novelty of the corruption.

169/ Surprise reveal! "This is not just a matter of domestic politics, it's a matter of *national security*." He's deputizing the mob to consider itself advocates for not just their own highly emotionalized partisan wishes, but also the defense of the country's national security.

170/ He demands "sweeping election reforms," telling Congress "you better do it" before "we have no country left."

"Today is not the end—it's just the beginning." Then: "With your help..."

He often does this: applies a phrase to its current sentence *and* the sentence prior.

171/ What the mob hears is, "With your help [today], today [will be] not the end—but just the beginning." And I say "hear" in the literal sense, i.e. the words are arranged so that the mental impression the listener receives is that the words have been said as I wrote them above.

172/ He uses the word "challenge" three times in quick succession, and then says "Our fight...is just getting started." Then: "We must 'Stop the Steal,' and then we must ensure that such outrageous election fraud never happens again."

Another call to mob action. Imminent action.

173/ "We're going forward [with election reform]. We'll take care of 'going forward.' We [you and I] need to take care of going back [to the November election]."

Trump is asking the mob to, alongside him—remember, he's promised to march to the Capitol—"take care of" the "steal."

174/ He follows this immediately with, "Don't let them talk..."—soon clarifying that what he means is that people talk about polls and approval ratings but all he is really "interested" in is {he attempts to gesture to the Capitol but points in the wrong direction} "right there."

175/ What comes next is really bizarre. He... how do I explain this?... outlines an entire political agenda involving election reform... as though he isn't 14 days from the end of his term.

He really wants the mob to *feel* like there's going to be a second Trump administration.

176/ He keeps saying, "We will do this..." and "We will do that..."—I swear this sounds like a State of the Union address. Honestly, listen for yourself. It does. There's absolutely no recognition in his tone or his words that his term as president is literally just about to end.

177/ In propaganda terms, what Trump is doing is outlining the "promise" of his quid pro quo of incitement to insurrection. He's asked the mob—directly and indirectly—to interrupt what's happening at the Capitol, but now he must underline *what they'll get from him* if they *do*.

178/ "If these people had courage and guts, they would finally get rid of Section 230."

By using "these people"—the word "these"—to refer to members of Congress a mile away, Trump underscores that he considers himself to be speaking to this mob in the very shadow of the Capitol.

179/ "It [Big Tech 'interfering in our elections'] has to be stopped, and Republicans have to get a lot tougher....they [Big Tech companies] should be regulated and investigated and brought to justice."

There's a *lot* more "Big Tech" focus in this speech than you'd ever expect.

180/ It's almost like Trump feared the events of January 6 would sever his relationship with several social media platforms? I'm not saying we know that—I don't even mean to speculate—but I just don't know how to account for Trump's obsessive focus on social media companies here.

181/ He points to three entities stealing elections and assaulting democracy: media (the press), the Democrats, and Big Tech. He is elevating Big Tech to one of the main "enemies of the people." I think he felt Twitter captioning some of his tweets was a sign of the end for him.

182/ In the last 24 hours, media has reported that Trump and his team *anticipated* Trump would eventually be banned from Twitter and other platforms—especially as he got close to the end of his term. That's the most likely explanation for his aggressive "Big Tech" rhetoric here.

183/ He says he wants Big Tech "brought to justice" to "the fullest extent of the law. They're totally breaking the law." He says that this and "draining the swamp" hasn't happened yet and will be a "dirty business."

What happens next is truly bizarre.

184/ Trump says, "Looking out at the crowds all over the country..." Uh... what? This suggests that Trump has been monitoring *coordinated* pro-Trump rallies all over the country, i.e. he knew and expected and planned that January 6 would see large-scale actions all over America.

185/ This matters because if you've been reading the news, there were pro-Trump actions on January 6 in state capitals all across America that involved threats, evacuations, and in one case the breaching of a government facility.

Trump saw his insurrection as a *national* event.

186/ "If we [the mob] allow this group of people [Congress] to illegally take over our country [today]—'cause it's illegal when the votes are illegal, when the way they got there [to the Capitol] is illegal, when the states that vote are given false and fraudulent information..."

187/ I'd finish the sentence I just ended with an ellipsis, but Trump didn't. He just said, "If we allow this group of people...", then left the consequences unsaid.

His next words are, "We're the greatest country in the history of Earth and we're headed in the right direction."

188/ I want to remind everyone *how far we've now come* from *any* idea that the mob is going to simply walk to within a couple blocks of the Capitol with Trump and just "cheer." How *far* we are from any sense of the "peaceful."

What Trump wants from the mob is *crystal clear*.

189/ He briefly rambles about his vanity "Wall" and, if you can believe it, migrant "caravans." It's clear that he's pulling out every single buzzword he's ever used to incite a crowd.

"As this enormous crowd shows, we have truth and justice on our side." He's reading this text.

190/ I note that he's reading this text to underscore that his team *knew* there would be an "enormous" crowd because—contra Trump's claims—they'd worked hard to *ensure* it would be enormous, large enough Trump could have on his teleprompter a claim about how vast the mob was.

191/ "Together we are determined to protect and preserve government of the people, by the people and for the people." He already said "people" means "real" people (his term)—Trumpists. Imagine how little the speech ("we") would work if the mob knew he was about to flee to the WH.

192/ "Our brightest days are before us. Our greatest achievements await."

This carries an echo of the fact that Trumpists consider their siege of the Capitol—at this point, minutes away—the greatest "achievement" of Trump's "movement." I'm not sure that resonance is an accident.

193/ He says one of the "achievements" that lies ahead for Trumpism is "election security"—which in this context of course refers *both* to his State-of-the-Union-like election reform agenda but *also* the "national security"- and "election"-related mob action he is now inciting.

194/ "We fight. We fight like hell [for election security]." There can be no mistaking that he's talking about *right now*. As in, "we"—him and the mob—are *about* to "fight like hell" for "election security" by ending the Save America March where it was *always* slated to end.

195/ "And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

Incitement to insurrection.

"Our most exciting endeavors, and our boldest adventures, have not yet begun."

But they're about to—and he knows it. Is counting on it.

Incitement to insurrection.

196/ "My fellow Americans, for our movement, for our children, and for our beloved country—and I say this despite all that's happened—the best is yet to come."

Watch what comes *right* after he says "the best is yet to come":

"So we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue..."