According to fact-checkers at multiple credible sources, Donald Trump has set a world record for lies, deflections, mis-directions and related phantasmagorical utterances since he started his run for president and during his time in office. Mercifully, his time in office is about to end. Yet, in the midst of overt attempts to undermine the election, Trump has, at long last, told the truth about one thing.

During a roughly hour-long call by Trump, his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, some of his lawyers, including Cleta Mitchell (a recent appearance) with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State, and his attorneys, Trump in an endless stream of world-class whoppers, said on at least two occasions: “what a schmuck I was.”

Beyond that small victory for humanity, the rest of the call is almost beyond comprehension. I listened to the entire tape. What follows is my approximate “transcript” of the call, which, like the attack on Pearl Harbor, will live in infamy. It’s a bit herky-jerky but that reflects the nature of the “conversation.”

Throughout the call, Trump insists that “data” such as the size of his rallies in Georgia and the opinions of Republican governors from surrounding states prove beyond doubt that he won the election in Georgia by “hundreds of thousands” of votes, a “half million votes,” and 400,000 votes in his final plea for relief. Trump’s concept of truth is thus, essentially, that everyone knows if you have big rallies, you win the election. Also, if other politicians say, as Trump claims, ”there is no way” he lost Georgia, then, of course and obviously, he didn’t lose Georgia — he won it by huge margins.

On the rare occasions when they could get a word in, the representatives of Georgia contradicted every claim Trump made. The claims were the usual, most of which have been asserted in court cases that were thrown out but Trump claims the courts are against him so that doesn’t count. When Cleta Mitchell tried to chime into the conversation, Trump mostly just talked over her and said that whatever she was saying wasn’t important, because he only needed 11,780 votes to change the result and while he had “hundreds of thousands” more than he needed, he wasn’t really interested in going into all that as long as the GA officials “found” the 11, 780 he needed to be declared the winner (despite the fact that the vote count in Biden’s favor has been certified and confirmed in the Electoral College). Trump made clear he will never give up.

Trump has a very long list of “wrongs” perpetrated by the Georgia vote counters, including (1) video that the GA folks noted had been manipulated to show false results. The grievances also (2) include drop boxes that were mishandled, (3) dead people by the thousands who somehow voted, (4) “fake ballots” that were voted, (5) ballots that were shredded and are being shredded right now, (6) provisional ballots given to voters who were turned away because they allegedly had already voted but then their provisional votes weren’t counted, (7) people who moved out of state but still voted, (8) corrupt voting machines, (9) machines being removed, (10) parts of machines being removed ….

All of that either has been or will be “certified” in the near future by unnamed “experts” in Trump’s employ.

And it’s not just Georgia: “other states will be flipping to us shortly.” Some 200,000 more people voted in Pennsylvania than people voting. [That’s what I heard him say. I am not making this up]. In Michigan a “tremendous number of dead people voted.­­­­­” [These statements imply that Trump has reached out to Republican officials in other states he lost to urge them to somehow recount the votes and award him the victory]

The Georgia folks, trying very hard to maintain their composure and to be respectful to their Republican president asking them to violate the Constitution, federal law and Georgia law, noted that they simply did not agree with Trump’s claim that he won the vote in Georgia and that they had gone over his points one-by-one with the state legislature and Republican congressmen for hours.

Trump was having none of that, insisting that it was simply “not possible” he lost Georgia and that “they dropped a lot of votes in there at night.”

The Georgia people repeated that “the data you have is wrong.” “Only two dead people voted.” Cleta Mitchell, one of Trump’s lawyers, referred to a group of people with the same names as people who died but claimed they didn’t have the records they needed. Trump wasn’t interested in hearing from his lawyer; he interjected that “they stuffed the ballot boxes like nobody has ever seen before.”

The Georgia people noted, as politely as possible, that the video produced by Rudy Giuliani  to show that ballots were counted three times was “spliced and diced “by Giuliani to give a false impression of what actually occurred, that audits had been conducted and there was no evidence of ballots being input three times. When it was noted that during an absence of the vote counters, law enforcement people were present, Trump declared those people were either “incompetent or dishonest.”

Trump launched a personal attack on Stacey Abrams. Then he made the “give away” claim:  “we’ll find hundreds of thousands if you let us do it.”  More ranting followed: claims of many unsigned ballots and many forgeries in Fulton County. They’re “totally corrupt. They’re laughing at you. They cheated like nobody has ever cheated before. They are shredding ballots. The ballots are corrupt.”

Trump then asserted that there were crimes being committed and that the Georgia officials were not reporting it. “That’s a criminal offense. That’s a big risk to you and your lawyers. They’re moving machines and you’re letting them do it.” [It is a good measure of Trump’s desperation that, needing the complicity of the Georgia officials, he chose to accuse and threaten them].

Trump said they have “thousands of people who will testify they were denied right to vote because they were told they had already voted.” Trump’s ranting became louder and more forceful as it become clearer that he was going to get no joy from the Georgia authorities.

The first mention of “compromise and settlement” by a Trump attorney occurred at 53 minutes into the call. This was too late even if such an arrangement would have sufficed to cloak the discussion with privilege. [Even if these were in fact settlement talks regarding pending litigation, the solicitation of crimes of election fraud would almost certainly have defeated any claim of privilege. It’s reported Trump has sued someone over the release of the tape, but that is likely to meet the same fate as Trump’s other lawsuits (he’s 1 for 61 by my count).

As the call wound down, Trump pressed for immediate resolution, claiming the Senate run-off election was going to be affected because angry Republicans were being deterred from voting. The Georgia people reiterated that Trump’s data was wrong but indicated a willingness to sit down for talks. Trump became practically hysterical at this point, stating again that the governors in the surrounding states had said “there’s no way you lost GA.”

Meadows urged the lawyers to work out a plan to address some of the data issues, saying he can “promise you” there were more than two dead people who voted.

Trump brings up Abrams again: “I beat her.”  “What a schmuck I was.” “Let the truth come out.” “I won by at least 400,000 votes. That’s the truth.” Uh huh.