# Post ts_111058475545370458

- Post ID: `ts_111058475545370458`
- Platform: Truth Social
- Posted: 2023-09-13T15:10:51.999Z (UTC)
- Deleted: no
- Repost: no
- Canonical URL: https://trump.fm/post/ts_111058475545370458
- Analysis page: https://trump.fm/post/ts_111058475545370458/analysis

## Post text

> https://spectator.org/this-just-in-competing-slates-of-electors-have-happened-before/

## Engagement

- Likes: 13,989
- Reposts: 4,386
- Replies: 546
- Views: unknown
- Metrics collected: 2026-02-01T01:19:51.398Z (UTC)

# Analysis

_Machine-generated by trump.fm on 2026-03-20T08:34:48.008Z (UTC): a model's reading of this post, not his words. Its psychological terms describe the language, not a clinical assessment of him._

## Summary

A bare URL share, aide-authored during business hours (11:10 AM EDT), pointing to an American Spectator article arguing alternate elector slates have historical precedent — a direct counter-narrative to the Georgia RICO indictment's fake elector charges. The post functions as coordinated legal communications rather than authentic Trump expression. The dominant defense mechanism is rationalization: deploying historical scaffolding to normalize legally challenged conduct. The historical precedent claim is mostly false as a legal analogy — prior competing-slate episodes arose from genuine unresolved certification disputes, not post-certification submission of false documents. No authentic Trump stylistic fingerprints are present; the naked link format and business-hours timing are consistent with Scavino or comms staff. Clinically, the post is part of a sustained anxiety-management apparatus around legal jeopardy, operating in an intellectual rather than emotional register. No danger indicators, no dehumanizing language, no acute psychological distress visible in the post itself. Psychological significance lies not in the post's content but in what it reveals about the coordinated infrastructure managing Trump's legal exposure narrative.

# Analysis: Truth Social Post — 2023-09-13T15:10:51Z

## Overview

The post consists **solely of a hyperlink** to a *American Spectator* article titled *"This Just In: Competing Slates of Electors Have Happened Before."* No original text, commentary, punctuation, or emotional framing was added. The post's entire communicative payload is the article's title and its implied argument.

---

## Authorship Attribution

**Assessment: Aide-written (high confidence)**

- **Local time:** 15:10 UTC = **11:10 AM EDT**. In September 2023, Trump was typically at Trump Tower (NYC) or Bedminster, NJ — both Eastern time. Mid-morning is firmly within business hours.
- **Format:** A bare URL share with no appended text is a signature aide/comms-team format. Authentic Trump posts almost always layer personal commentary, superlatives, or emotional punctuation onto shared links.
- **Content type:** Directly coordinates with his legal defense strategy in the Georgia RICO case — the kind of message that would be curated by legal communications staff, not composed spontaneously.
- **No typos, no ALL CAPS, no rhetorical ejaculations.** Absence of all authentic Trump stylistic markers is itself diagnostic.

The most likely author is Dan Scavino or a comms staffer working in coordination with Trump's legal team.

---

## Contextual Significance

This post cannot be read in isolation from its legal context. On **August 14, 2023**, Trump was indicted in Fulton County, Georgia under the RICO statute, with the fake/alternate elector scheme as a central charge. The indictment specifically alleged that Trump and co-conspirators organized fraudulent slates of electors in seven states to obstruct certification of Biden's victory.

The article shared here advances the core counter-narrative: *that competing slates of electors are not unprecedented and therefore not inherently criminal.* This is a direct, legally-motivated propaganda operation — using a friendly conservative outlet to seed a historical-precedent argument in the public mind and, potentially, future jury pools.

The posting date — September 13 — is the same day **Mark Meadows was denied a federal court transfer** in the Georgia case (a significant legal setback for the co-defendant bloc). Whether or not this specific article was timed to that ruling, the post fits a pattern of accelerated narrative management coinciding with adverse legal developments.

---

## Psychological Analysis

### Trigger
**Legal jeopardy / ongoing narcissistic injury.** The Georgia indictment represents a sustained wound to both Trump's grandiose self-conception and his concrete liberty interests. The trigger here is not a single discrete event but the persistent low-grade activation that comes with criminal prosecution. The post-as-curation functions as an anxiety management behavior — externalized, rationalized.

### Defense Mechanisms

**Primary: Rationalization (neurotic level).** The article frames legally contested conduct as historically routine. Rather than confronting the substance of the charge, the share constructs a logical-sounding justification: *others have done this before, therefore it was not wrong.* This is rationalization in its cleanest form — post-hoc intellectual scaffolding for behavior that preceded any such reasoning.

**Secondary: Denial (pathological).** At a deeper structural level, the mere act of sharing an article premised on the normality of his conduct constitutes denial of the legal and factual seriousness of the charge. The article's framing requires accepting that the 2020 fake elector operation was merely a "competing slate" in a long historical tradition — a framing most legal scholars reject.

### Narcissistic State
Insufficient signal to assess grandiose vs. vulnerable from this post alone. However, viewed alongside the same day's other posts (poll numbers near 60%, Rumble video on his "strangle" on the race), the overall daily output pattern is **grandiose** — the legal-defense post functions as a defensive undercurrent to an otherwise dominance-broadcasting day.

### Narrative Identity
The implicit narrative is a **contamination sequence interrupted by redemption effort**: a legitimate political act (filing competing electors) was *contaminated* by politically motivated prosecutors. The historical-precedent argument is the redemption move — repositioning the contamination as injustice, not wrongdoing.

---

## Rhetorical Analysis

**Normalization via historical precedent.** This is among the most powerful forms of political rhetoric: if X happened before, X cannot be extraordinary or criminal. The argument smuggles in a false equivalence (disputed 19th-century post-Civil War electoral chaos ≠ a coordinated 2020 scheme to submit false certifications after state results were finalized and certified).

**Implicit whataboutism.** No explicit "what about" is needed; the entire article structure functions as one — redirecting the audience from the specific legal charges to a broad historical canvas where the conduct looks ordinary.

**Outsourced assertion.** By sharing rather than asserting, the poster achieves plausible epistemic distance — *I'm just sharing what a journalist wrote* — while fully adopting the article's argument. This is a low-accountability rhetorical posture.

**No dehumanizing language, no violent imagery.** The post is in an entirely legal/intellectual register.

---

## Fact Verification

| Claim | Verdict | Evidence |
|-------|---------|----------|
| "Competing slates of electors have happened before (implying 2020 conduct was historically normal and therefore not criminal)" | **Mostly False** | Technically true in trivial sense: Hayes-Tilden 1876 and Hawaii 1960 involved competing electoral certifications. However, those arose from genuine unresolved disputes before or during certification; the 2020 alternate slates were submitted after states officially certified Biden's results, and were premised on fraud claims rejected by 60+ courts. The legal analogy fails on the key distinguishing facts. Constitutional law scholars broadly reject this as a valid defense. |

Overall Veracity: 20%

## Cognitive Assessment

**Cannot assess.** A bare URL share provides no language production data. No vocabulary, syntax, coherence, or fluency markers are available. Baseline comparison is not applicable.

---

## Danger Assessment

**None.** No eliminationist language, no dehumanization, no mobilization call. The post operates in the legal-normalization register, not the threat register.

---

## Summary

*The post is a bare URL share, aide-written during business hours, functioning as legal narrative management in the wake of the Georgia RICO indictment. It outsources the "competing electors were normal" defense argument to a conservative outlet rather than making the claim directly, achieving rhetorical plausible distance while fully adopting the argument. The dominant defense mechanism is rationalization — constructing post-hoc historical scaffolding around legally challenged conduct. The historical precedent claim is technically grounded but mostly false as a legal analogy: prior competing-slate episodes arose from genuine certification disputes, not from organized submission of false certifications after official state results. The post is clinically unremarkable on its own; it requires longitudinal context (the indictment, the broader legal jeopardy pattern) to carry psychological weight. No authentic Trump linguistic fingerprints are present. No danger indicators.*

## Authorship Analysis

**Aide-Written** (score: 5%)

### Indicators

- Posted at 11:10 AM EDT — business hours, not late-night authentic Trump window
- Bare URL share with zero appended text — no superlatives, no ALL CAPS, no emotional punctuation
- Directly coordinates with legal defense strategy — comms/legal team content
- No typos, no misspellings, no stream-of-consciousness markers
- Professional link-share format consistent with Scavino/comms staff posting pattern

## Psychological Profile

### State

**Mixed State**

**Trigger:** Maintenance — Criticism (Georgia RICO indictment (August 14, 2023) / ongoing legal jeopardy)

Sentiment: +0.05

### Clinical

**Malignant Narcissism:**
- Narcissistic: 30%
- Antisocial: 20%
- Paranoid: 10%
- Sadism: 0%

**Defense Mechanisms:**
- rationalization (neurotic)
- denial (pathological)

**Cognitive Complexity:**
- Complexity: 0%

**Parasocial Techniques:**
- Outsourced assertion — sharing rather than stating to achieve plausible epistemic distance
- Normalization seeding — priming audience to view conduct as historically ordinary

## Danger Assessment

**NONE**

### Gaslighting

- False historical equivalence presented as factual context — normalizing legally distinct conduct by associating it with genuinely disputed historical precedents
- Reality distortion: article's premise requires accepting that post-certification false elector slates are equivalent to pre-certification genuine disputes

## Fact Checks (1)

_The model's verdicts from 2026-03-20._

> Competing slates of electors have happened before (implying 2020 conduct was historically normal and therefore not criminal)

**MOSTLY FALSE**

Technically true in trivial sense: Hayes-Tilden 1876 and Hawaii 1960 involved competing electoral certifications. However, those arose from genuine unresolved disputes before or during certification; the 2020 alternate slates were submitted after states officially certified Biden's results, and were premised on fraud claims rejected by 60+ courts. The legal analogy fails on the key distinguishing facts. Constitutional law scholars broadly reject this as a valid defense.

Sources: Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877 (historical); Hawaii 1960 dual-slate precedent (historical); 60+ post-election court rulings 2020-2021; Legal scholarship on Electoral Count Act reform 2022

Overall Veracity: 20%

## Tags

- legal-defense (95%)
- fake-electors (90%)
- Georgia-RICO (85%)
- normalization (85%)
- aide-written (90%)
- rationalization (80%)
- american-spectator (60%)
- historical-precedent-claim (80%)

## That day

_From trump.fm's machine-generated digest of the day, not his words._

**Grandiose Baseline Day: Late-Night Putin Validation, Romney Victory Lap, and a 14-Post Link Dump**

A moderately busy day of 27 posts was dominated by self-congratulation and rival-bashing, with Trump celebrating Romney's retirement, mocking DeSantis's declining polls, and attacking Biden over inflation numbers. The most notable moment came after midnight when he cited Putin's criticism of America as validation of his own persecution claims — a rare instance of openly leveraging hostile foreign propaganda. A massive midday burst of shared links, mostly posted by staff, padded the count, while a two-part morning response to a New York Times article revealed disproportionate sensitivity to any suggestion of cognitive error.

Full digest for 2023-09-13: https://trump.fm/date/2023-09-13/analysis

## Citation

- APA: Trump, D. J. (2023, September 13). https://spectator.org/this-just-in-competing-slate... [Social media post]. Truth Social. trump.fm. https://trump.fm/post/ts_111058475545370458
- MLA: Trump, Donald J. "https://spectator.org/this-just-in-competing-slates-of-elect..." Truth Social, 13 Sep. 2023. trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/ts_111058475545370458. Accessed 9 Oct. 2026.
- Chicago: Donald J. Trump, "https://spectator.org/this-just-in-competing-slates-of-elect...," Truth Social, September 13, 2023, archived at trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/ts_111058475545370458.

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