Tag: Trump sore loser

‘Math doesn’t care about his feelings’: Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. offers brutal assessment of Trump’s delusions

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Democratic Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman on Wednesday mocked President Donald Trump for still believing he has a shot at winning his state.

At the moment, President-elect Joe Biden has a lead of nearly 50,000 votes in Pennsylvania, which makes it almost impossible to imagine the result of the race being overturned after a recount.

Fetterman told CNN’s John King during an interview that the president seems to have a very hard time understanding how much basic arithmetic is stacked against him in the state. Continue reading.

Biden plays it cool as Trump refuses to concede

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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.

Fear of losing Senate majority in Georgia runoffs drives GOP embrace of Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud

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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.

Why GOP superlawyer Ben Ginsberg is bucking his party and blasting Trump’s baseless election claims

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In “Recount,” the made-for-television film version of the 2000 presidential election standoff that gripped the nation, Republican superlawyer Ben Ginsberg is portrayed as a bare-knuckled brawler with a jaded view of his adversaries.

“I’ve done over 25 recounts, and it never ceases to amaze me the extent that Democrats will lie, cheat and steal to win an election,” Ginsberg’s character says.

While Ginsberg says he doesn’t recall uttering those exact words in real life, he has made plenty of enemies among Democrats for his tactics over the years. In addition to his role in George W. Bush’s 2000 victory, he advised a group that Democrats say falsely accused their 2004 nominee, John F. Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, of lying about his military record and was widely seen as a decisive factor in Bush’s reelection victory.

Today, with tension rising over the results of a presidential election, Ginsberg is once again on the front lines but playing an unfamiliar role: Democratic ally. Continue reading.

As states press forward with vote counts, Trump advisers privately express pessimism about heading off Biden’s win

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Six states where President Trump has threatened to challenge his defeat continued their march toward declaring certified election results in the coming weeks, as his advisers privately acknowledged that President-elect Joe Biden’s official victory is less a question of “if” than “when.”

Trump began the day tweeting about “BALLOT COUNTING ABUSE” as he and his allies touted unproven claims that fraud had tainted the election in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Vice President Pence gave a presentation to Republican senators on Capitol Hill about new litigation expected in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia — imploring them to stick with the president, according to several Republicans in the room.

But even some of the president’s most publicly pugilistic aides, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and informal adviser Corey Lewandowski, have said privately that they are concerned about the lawsuits’ chances for success unless more evidence surfaces, according to people familiar with their views. Continue reading.

‘A grand scheme’: Trump’s election defiance consumes GOP

Many party officials are suggesting to the rank and file that the election was stolen or that the outcome stands to be reversed.

It was just noise when it started — Donald Trump spouting wild, unsubstantiated claims about election fraud, his lawyer seething at an almost comical press conference in the parking lot of a Philadelphia landscaping business.

But one week after an election in which Joe Biden received close to 5 million more popular votes than Trump and captured more than 270 electoral votes, the president and top Republican Party officials are nowhere near conceding.

And with his posturing — and statements of Cabinet officials like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — Trump is fueling a bonfire that’s consuming the GOP and disrupting the traditional transfer of power. Continue reading.

Fighting Election Results, Trump Employs a New Weapon: The Government

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As President Trump and his administration insist he didn’t lose, the rest of the world has increasingly moved to accept Joe Biden’s victory.

WASHINGTON — President Trump, facing the prospect of leaving the White House in defeat in just 70 days, is harnessing the power of the federal government to resist the results of an election that he lost, something that no sitting president has done in American history.

In the latest sign of defiance, the president’s senior cabinet secretary fueled concerns on Tuesday that Mr. Trump would resist handing over power to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. after legal challenges to the vote. “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said.

Mr. Trump’s attorney general has at the same time authorized investigations into supposed vote fraud, his general services administrator has refused to give Mr. Biden’s team access to transition offices and resources guaranteed under law and the White House is preparing a budget for next year as if Mr. Trump will be around to present it. Continue reading.

White House uncertainty grows over Trump post-election actions

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Officials around the Trump administration are sending mixed signals privately about support for President Trump‘s refusal to concede the election to Joe Biden.

Republicans and some of the president’s family members have publicly entertained the president’s unproven claims that widespread voter fraud is to blame for his deficit in key swing states such as Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania.

But inside the White House, there is more uncertainty about the benefits of Trump’s ongoing fight. Continue reading.

Trump’s final attempt to cling to power exposes a desperate and bitter man

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Joe Biden has won. He will be our next president.

Normally, the loser of the race would give a gracious concession speech, and accept the results. 

That won’t happen this time around, because Donald Trump is a pathological narcissist who will never admit defeat. But there’s no legal requirement for the losing candidate to formally concede – it’s just another tradition Trump will choose to ignore.  Continue reading.

‘What’s the downside for humoring him?’: A GOP official’s unintentionally revealing quote about the Trump era

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When the history of the Trump era is written, we’ll struggle to find quotes that are as revealing as one recorded Monday evening by The Washington Post’s Amy Gardner, Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Emma Brown.

Speaking about President Trump’s and his legal team’s myriad and baseless claims of massive voter fraud, an anonymous senior Republican official offered a rhetorical shrug.

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” the official said. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”

Indeed, what’s a little undermining of democracy between friends? Continue reading.