Tag: sore loser Trump

Donald Trump spent $3 million on Wisconsin recount — only for Joe Biden to gain 132 more votes

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The re-election campaign of soon-to-be-former President Donald Trump spent $3 million for a recount of votes in Wisconsin in the hopes of throwing out tens of thousands of absentee and early ballots cast in support of President-elect Joe Biden.

But Trump’s $3 million dollar gambit hasn’t paid off. In fact, it actually increased Biden’s lead over him by 132 votes. As Slate explains, Trump was specifically asking for recounts in Dane and Milwaukee Counties, two Democratic strongholds where Biden beat Trump by over 360,000 votes total.

“By the end of the recount in Milwaukee County, Biden’s total had increased by 257 votes, from 317,270 to 317,527. Trump also saw an increase in votes, boosting his total by 125 votes to 134,482,” Slate wrote, showing how Biden ended up even further ahead. The new votes were originally excluded from the county’s total due to “human error.” Continue reading.

20 days of fantasy and failure: Inside Trump’s quest to overturn the election

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The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.

But Trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ”

However cleareyed Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’ ” Continue reading.

‘I’m Sick Of It’: GOP Rep. Denver Riggleman Unloads On Republican Colleagues, Trump

TOPLINE — Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.) pulled no punches against President Trump and his fellow Republicans in Congress in an interview with Forbes, accusing them of a “massive grift” in refusing to acknowledge the results of the election and claiming Trump appeals to groups that are “anti-Semitic” and “anti-American.”

KEY FACTS

  • Riggleman, one of just 10 GOP House members acknowledging Joe Biden’s victory, said the Republican refusal to acknowledge the result is “just money-making for the 2024 election” and “completely unethical,” saying he’s spoken to 30 or 40 GOP members of Congress who privately acknowledge the result despite public silence.
  • “They’re worried about committee assignments, they’re worried about the team,” Riggleman said of Republicans who have stayed loyal to Trump, noting that breaking with Trump can “cost them their careers,” and that “the career is more important than the facts, it’s that simple.” Continue reading.

Georgia Secretary of State’s Message to Trump After State’s Election Recount: ‘You Should Leave Quietly’

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that President Donald Trump should “leave quietly,” after Georgia certified its election results for Joe Biden last week.

In an interview published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Saturday, Raffensperger, a Republican, said he’s received threats and angry messages from the president and fellow GOP politicians who disagree with his decision to certify the election.

“My job as secretary of state is to make sure we have fair and honest elections, follow the law, follow the process,” Raffensperger said in the interview. “When you lose an election, you should leave quietly. It’s the will of the people that has been expressed,” he added. Continue reading.

Federal appeals court panel rejects Trump request to block certification of Pennsylvania’s election results

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A federal appeals court on Friday rejected President Trump’s request for an emergency injunction to overturn the certification of Pennsylvania’s election results, delivering another defeat to the president’s attempts to reverse the outcome in a state that has already formalized President-elect Joe Biden’s victory there.

Trump’s campaign had filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit after a U.S. district court last weekend dismissed its federal lawsuit against Pennsylvania election authorities and rejected the campaign’s request to be allowed to revise the suit to include more allegations.

The lawsuit sought to halt certification of Pennsylvania’s results on the grounds that Republicans were illegally disadvantaged because some Democratic-leaning areas allowed voters to correct administrative errors on their mail ballots. Continue reading.

Biden won — but Trump gave authoritarians a disturbing lesson on ‘how to steal an election’: political analyst

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During the 2020 presidential election, many of President Donald Trump’s critics — from liberals and progressives to Never Trump conservatives — warned that democracy itself was on the line in the United States and that Trump would become even more dangerously authoritarian during a second term. Trump was defeated by President-elect Joe Biden, but journalist Jeff Greenfield — in an op-ed published in Politico this week — isn’t so sure that U.S. democracy came out of the election unscathed.

“That breeze you felt recently was a national sigh of relief that the 2020 election might finally, at long last, be over,” Greenfield writes. “Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and the other close states have, or soon will have, certified the results. Judges have unceremoniously thrown out the dubious legal claims that thousands, or hundreds of thousands or millions of votes should be disallowed….. The guardrails held, right?”

But Greenfield isn’t so sure. Continue reading.

MAGA Lawyer Insults Trump Judge Who Tossed Their ‘Fraud’ Case

Jenna Ellis, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney and the Senior Legal Adviser to the Trump campaign is once again being mocked, this time for her near-immediate response to a unanimous 3-0 ruling against the campaign in a Pennsylvania election case.

Ellis says she and Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, have decided that the three judges, who were all appointed by Republican presidents – including the one who wrote the opinion who was appointed by Trump himself – are all part of the “activist judicial machinery” in Pennsylvania.

She is also vowing to take the case – which the judges say has “no merit,” to the Supreme Court. Continue reading.

Trump campaign loses appeal over Pennsylvania race

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President Trump’s campaign on Friday lost its appeal in the legal battle to contest Pennsylvania’s already-certified election results. 

A federal appeals court in Philadelphia upheld a previous ruling that dismissed the campaign’s case to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying its election results showing former Vice President Joe Biden winning the state. 

The three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that “the Campaign’s claims [of widespread voter fraud in the state] have no merit,” according to the court’s opinion. Continue reading.

Corporate Media Begin to Acknowledge GOP Coup Attempt

Even though President Donald Trump had telegraphed his intent months in advance to steal the 2020 election, by planning to get judges, state legislators and/or the Electoral College to illegitimately declare him the winner—laying out a pretext by lying about widespread voter fraud—corporate media were slow to accurately convey the reality and significance of Trump’s election theft efforts. I’ve noted twice before (FAIR.org, 9/15/20, 11/5/20) that corporate media betrayed their journalistic responsibilities by refusing to report, outside the context of opinion columns, that Trump has been attempting a coup, despite all the plain evidence.

Yet in the past few days, it seems corporate media have decided to report on Trump’s attempts to subvert the election and overturn its results as a fact, not as a matter of opinion. Here are some recent headlines:

  • Wall Street Journal (11/19/20): “Trump Broadens His Efforts to Overturn Election Outcome”
  • New York Times (11/19/20): “Trump’s Attempts to Overturn the Election Are Unparalleled in US History”
  • NPR (11/20/20): “The Growing Backlash Against Trump’s Efforts to Subvert the Election”
  • Associated Press (11/20/20): “Trump Tries to Leverage Power of Office to Subvert Biden Win”
  • Politico (11/21/20): “Trump Calls on GOP Legislatures to Overturn Election Results”
  • CNN (11/22/20): “Trump’s Attempt to Steal the Election Unravels as Coronavirus Cases Surge” Continue reading.

Trump tweets string of falsehoods about Wisconsin absentee voters

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“ ‘In Wisconsin, somebody has to be indefinitely confined in order to vote absentee. In the past there were 20,000 people. This past election there were 120,000…and Republicans were locked out of the vote counting process.’ @VicToensing @newsmax”

— President Trump, in a tweet, Nov. 24, 2020

Every part of this is false, proving once again why none of Trump’s claims about election fraud should be given any credence.

As we’ve documented in recent fact checks, the statements from Trump and his lawyers are all absurd and easily debunked. Last week, it was Sidney Powell alleging with no evidencethat an algorithm from Venezuela had changed millions of Trump votes to votes for President-elect Joe Biden. This week, Rudolph W. Giuliani is mixing up Michigan and Minnesota to peddle a false claim about “phantom voters.”

Here, we have Victoria Toensing mangling pretty much everything about Wisconsin in a Newsmax interview and Trump repeating the disinformation to more than 88 million Twitter followers. (Twitter quickly flagged the tweet as misleading.) Continue reading.