Was there a conspiracy to defeat Trump? Report claims 'left-wing activists and business titans' formed alliance
Former President Donald Trump and his staunchest of allies have always been claiming that the 2020 presidential battle was not fought in the right spirit and eventually, it was compromised in favor of Joe Biden, who defeated the incumbent overwhelmingly to become the 46th president.
However, none of the Trump team’s measures to get the result turned in the favor of the former commander-in-chief succeeded. The courts did not back the claims and the open dissent by Trump’s supporters at the Capitol on January 6 resulted in the Republican getting impeached in the House and he now faces a trial in the Senate.
As Trump’s loyalists seethe in anger, the Time Magazine has come up with a report titled ‘The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election’ and, according to conservative observers, the “remarkable piece” precisely recorded things that happened in the November presidential election and one needed “to read between the lines of the rapid liberal bias”.
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The TIME article reads: "As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on November 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the US to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump’s ouster."
"A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. 'It was all very, very strange,' Trump said on December 2. 'Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted'."
The piece then said Trump was right in a way and it was enough to get Trump's supporters going. According to TIME’s National Political Correspondent Molly Ball who penned the piece, a “conspiracy” unfolded behind the scenes and it was about curbing the protests and coordinating resistance from the CEOs. It said both happened because of an “informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans”.
“The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the US 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 report said.
'An extraordinary shadow effort'
"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."
"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,” it added.
The report also said that “the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
The conservatives were quick to pounce upon the reporting and revelations of the TIME article. Right-wing site BizPac Review took a dig at the piece to say: “In detailing the actions brought about by the conspiracy, the piece speaks of every complaint made on the right about the election — only with a favorable spin.”
The conservative site also slammed Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group who TIME quoted as saying: “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated.” The BizPacReview article said: “The key term here being “proper outcome,” as Bassin noted that democracy needed a little nudge.”
It said while TIME called Bassin’s organization a “nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group”, the man is a former associate counsel for the Barack Obama White House and “his board members expose the partisan make up — beginning with Cecilia Muñoz, another former Obama official who worked for the National Council of La Raza and was appointed to the board of the US programs division of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations in 2018.
To back its claim, Review cited an article from Capital Research Center which was published in March 2019.