Trump and His Georgia Racketeers Goose-Stepped Into the Lives of Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman

By DICK POLMAN

When Trump’s Georgia racketeering trial finally happens, jurors will hear how the conspirators goose-stepped into the lives of two election workers who had dared to do the grunt work of making our democracy function. There’s no better way for prosecutors to give their case a tragic human dimension.

For many Americans, and for some jurors, “democracy” and “rule of law” might sound like abstractions – vitally important concepts, of course, but not particularly visceral. By contrast, however, the true-life travails of Shaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, were all too real. We need to put them front and center, because what happened to them is visceral evidence of how fascist lies hurt real people.

And if the MAGA players currently in court are ultimately exonerated, if lies and lawlessness win the day, a lot more real people will get a taste of what Moss and Freeman suffered.

It’s all there in the Georgia indictment document, scattered across 11 pages. Trump couldn’t abide his 2020 Georgia defeat, so, among his many post-election Peach State perfidies, he and Rudy Giuliani (now a fellow criminal defendant) ginned up some fake scapegoats: election workers Moss and Freeman, who were tasked with helping to count ballots in greater Atlanta. Naturally, they were Black women – because, as we all know from Trump, “bad things” supposedly happen in places with lots of Black voters.

Trump and Giuliani told various Georgia authorities – without a shred of evidence – that Freeman was “a professional vote scammer” who “stuffed the ballot boxes” for Joe Biden; that she and her daughter were “responsible for awarding at least 18,000 ballots” to Joe; and that mother and daughter, in cahoots with an unidentified man, were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine,” with the intention of using USB ports “infiltrate the crooked Dominion voting machines.” During Trump’s “perfect” phone call to the Georgia secretary of state, he invoked Freeman’s name 18 times.

(Last year, at a House hearing, Moss said under oath that the supposed USB port was actually a ginger mint. She was passing a ginger mint to her mother.)

David French, the attorney and sane conservative pundit, has a smart read on Georgia’s laws: “When you lie to state officials about important or meaningful facts in matters they directly oversee, you’re going to risk prosecution. That’s exactly what the indictment claims Trump and his confederates did … And when you read the list of Trump’s purported lies, they are absolutely incredible. His claims aren’t just false; they’re transparently, incandescently stupid.”

What happened to Freeman and Moss in late ’20 and early ’21, as detailed in the indictment document, was nauseating. At least three now-indicted Trump conspirators contacted Freeman by phone, text, and in person, warning that she might be in danger … but offering her “protection” if she’d agree to testify at an official state proceeding that she indeed had stuffed ballot boxes – to falsely confess to crimes she had not committed. In other words, she’d be physically safe if she confirmed Giuliani’s lies about her.

Freeman refused, and the coup conspirators ran out of time. But for Freeman and Moss, that wasn’t the end of the story. Some MAGA thugs were so inspired by Trump and Giuliani, they stormed the home of Ross’ grandmother in the hopes of making a so-called citizen’s arrest. Freeman was compelled to flee her own home for two months. Moss had to go into hiding; an anonymous phone caller said, “You should be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920,” an apparent reference to the segregation and lyching era.

When Moss and Freeman testified last year at the Jan. 6 Committee hearings, they filled in the rest of the story. Here’s Moss:

“It has turned my life upside down. I no longer give out my business cards … I don’t want anyone knowing my name. I don’t want to go anywhere with my mom because she might yell my name out over the grocery aisle or something. I don’t go to the grocery store at all. I haven’t been anywhere at all. I have gained about 60 pounds. I just don’t do nothing anymore. I don’t want to go anywhere. I second-guess everything that I do … All because of lies, of me doing my job, same thing I have been doing forever.

Here’s Freeman:

“I’m always concerned about who’s around me … There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not to target one. But he targeted me, ‘Lady Ruby,’ a small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen.”

Real people with real lives. And if the courts fail to nip fascism in the bud, many more of us will have tragic tails to tell.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net and is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2023

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