Tag: Trump fake voter fraud crisis
Of course Republicans are doing this. It’s who they are.
No. Not this time. Not again.
We knew that President Trump had no respect for democracy or the Constitution. So we’re not surprised that he’s lying, and lying, and lying again to claim he prevailed in the election that President-elect Joe Biden won decisively, fair and square.
What we did not know for certain was whether the Republican Party would once again bow before Trump’s corruption and his indifference to the fate of our republican institutions. Continue reading.
Pressure mounts on state Republicans as lawsuits challenging election results founder
Pressure mounted on state and local officials in battleground states to accept claims of ballot-counting irregularities and voter fraud in the election despite a lack of evidence, as Republicans sought new ways to block certification of Joe Biden’s clear victory in the presidential race.
In Michigan, Republican lawyers lobbied the Wayne County canvassing board to consider evidence of alleged improprieties before certifying the vote. In Pennsylvania, GOP lawmakers were the target of social media campaigns demanding the appointment of electors who favor President Trump. And in Georgia, the Republican secretary of state defended the election and announced a hand audit of the results, despite calls by the state’s Republican senators for him to resign over alleged problems.
The efforts in these states — where Biden has won or is leading in the count — come as the Trump campaign struggles to amass genuine evidence of fraud that will pass muster in court. Republican lawsuits seeking to challenge the Nov. 3 election results so far have foundered, and affidavits cited as proof of election fraud in cities such as Detroit have failed to substantiate serious claims that votes were counted illegally. Continue reading.
Trump insists he’ll win, but aides say he has no real plan to overturn results and talks of 2024 run
President Trump declared Wednesday on Twitter, “WE WILL WIN!”
But, in fact, the president has no clear endgame to actually win the election — and, in an indication he may be starting to come to terms with his loss, he is talking privately about running again in 2024.
Trump aides, advisers and allies said there is no grand strategy to reverse the election results, which show President-elect Joe Biden with a majority of electoral college votes, as well as a 5 million-vote lead in the national popular vote. Continue reading.
We’re witnessing the birth of a dangerous new strain in the right-wing movement
Donald Trump has a lottery ticket’s chance of overturning Joe Biden’s decisive victory in the 2020 election. There’s no evidence of fraud that would hold up in a court of law. Biden’s margins are beyond what might be reversed in recounts. And while the Constitution gives states the power to determine how their electors are selected, all states have laws on their books awarding them to the popular vote winner (aside from a few congressional districts in Nebraska and Maine).
Given that Trump is using these bogus claims of a stolen election to shake down his followers in order to pay off campaign debt and fund his new PAC, some have questioned how dangerous his refusal to accept the results really is. Perhaps he’s working toward acceptance, or keeping his base engaged for two upcoming Senate runoffs in Georgia that will determine control of the chamber next year. According to reports, many elected Republicans who back his silly claims are only doing so to humor him, and to avoid the wrath of his cult-like supporters, and privately acknowledged that the election is over. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” one senior Republican official told The Washington Post. “No one seriously thinks the results will change.”
But this is ultimately a distinction without a difference. The GOP is delegitimizing the Biden presidency so they can launch a new, meaner and more conspiratorial Tea Party movement. Republican operatives, including some veterans of the first Tea Party groups, are behind the “stop the steal” protests now underway across the country. A new poll conducted by YouGov for The Economist found that 86 percent of Trump voters believe that Biden did not win the election fairly, and a plurality of all voters said they thought there was enough voter fraud to swing the results of the race. Continue reading.
Trump’s postelection power plays risk troubles at home and abroad
Republicans have remained largely silent as Trump launched two-pronged attack on legal, security institutions
Since President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection last week, his lies and lawsuits and his fuming and firings have left the country and the world wondering: Is he just a sore loser or a national security threat?
The Trump campaign’s allegations of widespread election fraud so far have run smack-dab into reality as judges demand evidence in the lawsuits filed in several key states — and they show no indication they could change the election result anyway.
Yet the fire that Trump’s legal strategy is starting, one that Republicans largely have not poured water on, could dangerously erode the nation’s confidence in the election outcome, some political observers say. Continue reading.
Trump lawyers suffer embarrassing rebukes from judges over voter fraud claims
By now, it’s well-established that most of the arguments put forward by President Trump’s reelection campaign in its challenge of the results of the 2020 election are baseless and highly speculative. Even Trump allies, as The Washington Post reported late Tuesday, acknowledge the apparent futility of the effort. Others have reasoned that there’s no harm in going through the motions, with one anonymous GOP official asking, “What’s the downside for humoring him” for a little while?
But as scenes in courtrooms nationwide in recent days have shown, there is indeed a downside for those tasked with pursuing these claims. Repeatedly now, they have been rebuked by judges for how thin their arguments have been.
The most famous scene came in Pennsylvania, where a Trump lawyer strained to avoid acknowledging that their people were, in fact, allowed to observe the vote-counting process in Philadelphia: Continue reading.
Biden plays it cool as Trump refuses to concede
President-elect Joe Biden is countering President Trump’s efforts to question the legitimacy of the election by quietly and deliberately going about the business of transitioning into power.
Since media outlets declared him the winner over the weekend, Biden has installed transition teams for dozens of government agencies and outlined how he intends to tackle key policy priorities, beginning with COVID-19. The president-elect is taking calls from world leaders and expects to make announcements about his Cabinet in the next two weeks.
Trump is making the transition as difficult as possible. Continue reading.
Can Trump really stage a coup? Experts break it down.
For the first time in history, an incumbent president is refusing to concede after clearly and indisputably losing a presidential election. That’s making observers, citizens, and experts nervous that Trump may be preparing to stage a coup of some sort, or perhaps call again on his supporters to commit violence to sustain his rule.
Though it sounds alarmist, such happenings are certainly not unprecedented in the global arena; the United States frequently interferes with the Democratic process in other countries, and often undermines it in order to provoke a coupor make a citizenry lose faith in a governing party, as US interests did in Bolivia last year. What is more unprecedented is for such a thing to happen in the United States. We’ve certainly had bitter and controversial presidential elections, including, infamously, in 2000. Moreover, the Founding Fathers prophesied this happening: as my colleague Matthew Rozsa noted, in early American history George Washington warned against Americans electing a president who’d refuse to step down.
But in a historical first, Trump is the first president to flat out refuse to concede, leading some to believe he’s setting the gears in motion for a coup d’etat. Since the election was called on Saturday, Trump has tweeted baseless claims that there’s a pathway to invalidating counted ballots. In addition to his refusal to concede, he’s pushed to fight the election results with evidence-free lawsuits. Continue reading.
Fear of losing Senate majority in Georgia runoffs drives GOP embrace of Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud
Fear over losing the Senate majority by falling short in the upcoming runoff elections for two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia has become a driving and democracy-testing force inside the GOP, with party leaders on Tuesday seeking to delegitimize President-elect Joe Biden’s victory as they labored to rally voters in the state.
Those intertwined efforts threaten to disrupt Biden’s hopes of establishing a smooth transition as Republicans in Washington and Georgia, worried about dispiriting the president’s core supporters, increasingly echo his unfounded claims of election fraud and back his refusal to concede.
With their power on the line and Trump still the party’s lodestar, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his allies have made clear that they are now fixated on Jan. 5 — the date of the runoff elections — rather than on Jan. 20, when Biden will be sworn in as the nation’s 46th president. Continue reading.