As much of a dick and despicable human being I think Donald Trump is, I think this statement is similar to me saying “I just want to find a pair of tall boots in the perfect shade of brown.” This doesn’t mean that I expect someone to create these boots because I asked for them. It means that I hope they exist out there somewhere and I want to find them.
Am I being too generous?
Yes. He was talking to someone that he expected to go find those votes. This was not just him randomly thinking about his wishes and dreams, while he just happened to be on the phone with the one person that he thought could change the results.
He’s a wanna be mob boss, this is how they ask for things that are illegal.
Just “recalculate” That’s all I’m asking
And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated because the 2,236 and absentee ballots, I mean, they’re all exact numbers that were, were done by accounting firms, law firms, etc. And even if you cut ’em in half, cut ’em in half and cut ’em in half again, it’s more votes than we need.
Are you saying that at a restaurant or at a boot store? Because Trump was talking to the official in charge of counting the votes, not the dogcatcher.
That’s exactly what you expect if you are talking to a boot maker.
Did you, in that same conversation, threaten the person you were talking to with legal consequences if you didn’t get your boots?
Trump did.
Let’s try it this way. If Joe Biden decided he had legitimately won Florida, attempted to call their Sec of State 23 times over two weeks and, when he finally got the call….told the Sec of State he got it wrong, he really won the election and asked him to find a way to “fix” the results while invoking the fact that he was in charge of the DOJ….would you think that was OK?
If Joe Biden had spoken at a BLM rally in Minnesota and told the crowd to “go down to that police station and show those cops exactly what you think of them, remember that since they killed George Floyd the rules don’t apply anymore” and that crowd immediately stormed the police station and killed some cops, would you think Joe Biden bore any responsibility for their actions?
Donald Trump never “wishes out loud”.
If he expresses a desire, the universe is obligated to deliver or else.
Let me be clear, there were many, MANY things wrong with that call. Also wrong was that there were so many of them. It’s probably wrong that there was even one of them. Raffensberger knew that and had lawyers on the call and recorded it. However, the news keeps presenting that one statement as the most obvious thing wrong with that call. I’m just not sure that is enough.
There were so many things wrong with that call:
That it happened in the first place = WRONG
That there were so many of them = WRONG
Suggesting there is a criminal risk = WRONG
Suggesting they say that they just recalculated = WRONG
Not to mention my favorite part, when Trump repeatedly and effusively complimented Georgia attorney Ryan Germany on his last name. I just can’t bring that one up that enough.
If your point was that the media, in all its outrage, consistently fails to mention some of the more incriminating parts, I agree.
Yes - that’s it.
I think it’s a reflection of the thinking of Trump and much of the GOP these days: Namely, that reality conforms to one’s wishes - or, reality is how you make things look like.
Remember how, early on in the pandemic, Trump refused to let a cruise ship with Covid passengers dock at a US port “becuase it would make the numbers go up?”
Please clarify. Is the fact that the news media caught on to one memorable line in a transcript and used that as a headline over and over again enough to convince you that Trump didn’t really mean anything by it?
The news is not the DOJ. The news is interested in what the audience wants to hear (or read, on rare occasions) because the news is interested in one thing: eyeballs on them. I think it’s a mistake to judge the legality of anything by what the news says.
Perhaps the news media has caught on that the American people have an attention span disorder and that the one proven effective message is to keep repeating the same thing over and over again until it gets accepted as fact. If only the republicans and Fox news knew of this tactic!
I think it’s useful to focus on this line, because it’s so very specific. He cares about finding just enough votes to overturn Biden’s win, nothing more, and nothing less, which highlights to me that his concern isn’t about “counting all the votes” or “eliminating all the fraud”, what he really wants to do is win the election.
If he really cared so much about election integrity in and of itself, why would he be so focused on this one, particular, number? Had he said, “I just want you to make sure that the numbers are correct”, and then accepted the officials’ assurances that they were correct, there wouldn’t be (as much of) a scandal.
But ask yourself this: if they’d gone back, and somehow legitimately found 11,778 votes, how do you think Trump would have reacted to that?
I don’t think that’s quite it. Trump wasn’t hoping that there were that many votes to be found. He was absolutely sure that there were that many votes to be found, and was pressuring the guy to find them.
I see the complication as being elsewhere. The problem is that Trump genuinely believed (and believes) that he was ripped off by that many votes and much more. So to his warped mind, all anyone needed to do was make an honest and thorough review and they would find all the extra votes for him (or subtract the bogus votes for Biden - I don’t recall which it was). So all he was doing in his own mind was telling the guy to do an honest and thorough review, at least to the point that he found clearly that Trump had won Georgia.
The problem with that is that Trump was (and is) detached from reality. As a practical matter, there was nothing in the world which would ever convince him that he hadn’t won Georgia. If a recount failed to find that, then it would be obvious to Trump that the recount was itself flawed and/or corrupt, and a new recount, which would be honest and thorough, was needed to establish the true fact that he had won Georgia. So the bottom line is that the only thing which would satisfy Trump was to do some sort of bogus recount which would declare him the winner.
In sum, in Trump’s mind, he was only asking the guy to do an honest recount. In the real world, he was effectively pressuring him to be dishonest. How does that stack up? I don’t know.
Trump is broken as a human. He can’t believe he has ever lost anything. Facts and records of course prove other wise.
Trump cheats at Golf against a child for crying out loud. Which, in his mind makes him the winner at the game. He’s a pathetic loser, always has been, and always will be.
I’m going to disagree with this - in Trump’s mind, Winning is all that matters, whether honestly or by monetary/political/legal pressure. He doesn’t consider it cheating, true, he considers it playing to win. He wasn’t, by any means, asking for an honest recount though, he was telling someone he considered in a subordinate position to do whatever was needed so that he could win.
It’s a tactic that has worked for him throughout his life and he considers himself beyond anyone else’s judgement or control. This is still utterly corrupt, and doesn’t get any sort of pass, and hopefully 
will be prosecuted.
TL:DR; Trump isn’t honestly delusional, he’s convinced that everyone else’s job to to make his opinions truth.
Yes, I think the OP is being overly generous. He wasn’t talking buying merchandise, he was talking about stealing an election. He has no sense of right or wrong and has no idea of whether he’s asking something illegal. Those things are foreign to him. Asking him if his request was morally or legally right is like asking us to draw something in 5 dimensions. His brain has no concept of such matters. Nonetheless, what he asked was for someone to commit a crime and that’s attempted criminal conspiracy regardless of his mental incapacity.