Laughably twisted logic.....

Marjorie Taylor Greene's laughably twisted logic to explain away the January 6 riot

Analysis by Chris Cillizza

Marjorie Taylor Greene has this all figured out.

"If the #Jan6 organizers were Trump supporters, then why did they attack us while we were objecting to electoral college votes for Joe Biden?" the Georgia Republican House member tweeted on Tuesday morning, hours before former President Donald Trump's second impeachment trial was set to start. "The attack RUINED our objection that we spent weeks preparing for, which devastated our efforts on behalf of Trump and his voters."

Huh?

This is wrong -- on two main fronts. Let's go through them.

1) The January 6 rally in Washington, DC, which led to the insurrection at the US Capitol, was expressly organized by those who -- like Trump -- believed the 2020 election was somehow stolen. The reason that January 6 was chosen as the date for the rally because that was the day that Congress was set to affirm the Electoral College votes from all 50 states.

Don't believe me? Here's Trump at the January 6 rally:

"All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they're doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That's what they've done and what they're doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved."

The people who overran the Capitol were there to disrupt the Electoral College count in any way they could. Hence the chants of "Hang Mike Pence!" when the vice president refused to go beyond his ceremonial role in affirming the Electoral College vote. They had zero interest in disrupting the objections to the count offered by the likes of Rep. Mo Brooks (Alabama) in the House and Sen. Josh Hawley (Missouri). The rioters were emboldened by those people and saw them as allies fighting, figuratively, on the inside while some of them fought, literally, on the outside.

2) The riot at the Capitol did not, in fact, "ruin" the objections to the Electoral College results as Greene claims. Know how I know? Because AFTER the rioters were cleared from the Capitol building, the House held two votes on objections raised by Republicans to the electoral vote count in Arizona and Pennsylvania. And 121 House Republicans voted in favor of the Arizona objection while 138 voted in favor of the Pennsylvania objection. On the Senate side, they also held votes to decertify the electors in those two states after the riot. Six Republicans supported the effort in Arizona while 7 did the same on Pennsylvania.

Hawley, in a floor speech following the riots, insisted that "we do need an investigation into irregularities, fraud" -- despite the fact that there is simply no objective evidence of any sort of fraud like the Missouri Republican was talking about. The Trump forces got what they wanted -- a chance to go on the record (and against facts) that the election was somehow stolen.

Why spend time rebutting Greene, who despite having only been in Washington for a month has already shown a remarkable ability to, well, not tell the truth? Because falsehoods, if not corrected, get believed -- by a lot more people than you might think.

That's the lesson of the Trump years. And it's not one we should forget just because the 45th president is no longer in the White House.