Tag: Trump trying to cheat his way to a second term

Dear Trump, Enough Is Enough

The idea that Trump, the leader of the free world, would simply declare himself the winner of a U.S. election jarred even some of the most loyal of Republican stalwarts.

FOR NEARLY FOUR YEARS of the Trump presidency, the question to Republican lawmakers and leaders has been: Where would you draw the line when it comes to supporting President Donald Trump? The nasty tweets, the thousands of misstatements, the promotion of his business interests while in office? Maybe separating children from their parents when they came over the border illegally or threatening to withhold aid from states and governors he doesn’t like?

Turns out, the line came as Trump faced the reality that he might lose the election, as mail-in ballot counting started to take must-win states out of Trump’s reach. Even as millions of votes remained to be counted, Trump boasted of a victory early Wednesday. All week, Trump and his campaign have been insisting on social media that the president had won states like Pennsylvania and Georgia that had yet to be called.

That did it for a wide array of Republicans, and not just those who had already separated themselves from Trump. The idea that the leader of the free world would simply declare himself the winner – something Americans criticize in other countries and even punish other nations for doing – jarred the most loyal of Republican stalwarts. Continue reading.

Secretaries of State in Spotlight as Trump Ratchets Up Attacks to Sow Doubt

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While state election centers are broadcast on cable news and have drawn partisan supporters to the sites as thirst for electoral updates intensifies, election administrators have continued to diligently tabulate the votes.

PHILADELPHIA — They typically operate behind the scenes and far from the spotlight. But as the final count in the 2020 presidential election drags on and President Trump assaults the integrity of the results, otherwise obscure secretaries of state, election commissioners and clerks have found their every utterance meriting breaking news interruptions and all-caps cable chyrons.

With the occupant of the White House hinging on the results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, the Trump campaign has sought to ratchet up pressure on election officials, threatening legislation and trying to shape public opinion with carnival-like events. Mr. Trump himself baselessly claimed widespread fraud and that people were “trying to steal the election,” at a news conference Thursday evening. And the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., even tried to make support of the effort a litmus test of the 2024 Republican presidential primary.

“Everyone should be watching who is actually fighting this flagrant nonsense and who is sitting on the sidelines,” he wrote Thursday afternoon on Twitter. An hour later, he fumed, “The total lack of action from virtually all of the ‘2024 GOP hopefuls’ is pretty amazing.” Continue reading.

In Torrent of Falsehoods, Trump Claims Election Is Being Stolen

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Most television networks cut away from the statement President Trump gave Thursday night from the White House briefing room on the grounds that what he was saying was not true.

WASHINGTON — Even for President Trump, it was an imagined version of reality, one in which he was not losing but the victim of a wide-ranging conspiracy stretching across the country in multiple cities, counties and states, involving untold numbers of people all somehow collaborating to steal the election in ways he could not actually explain.

Never mind that Mr. Trump presented not a shred of evidence during his first public appearance since late on election night or that few senior Republican officeholders endorsed his false claims of far-reaching fraud. A presidency born in a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace appeared on the edge of ending in a lie about his own faltering bid for re-election.

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Mr. Trump said Thursday night in an unusually subdued, 17-minute televised statement from the lectern in the White House briefing room, complaining that Democrats, the news media, pollsters, big technology companies and nonpartisan election workers had all corruptly sought to deny him a second term. Continue reading.

Here’s what happens if Trump tries to sue his way to victory

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A hearing on Wednesday in an election case captured in miniature the challenge for the Trump campaign as it gears up for what could become an all-out legal assault on presidential election results in key swing states: It’s easy enough to file a lawsuit claiming improprieties — in this case, that Pennsylvania had violated the law by allowing voters whose mail-in ballots were defective to correct them — but a lot harder to provide evidence of wrongdoing or a convincing legal argument. “I don’t understand how the integrity of the election was affected,” said U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage, something he repeated several times during the hearing. (However the judge rules, the case is unlikely to have a significant effect; only 93 ballots are at issue, a county election official said.)

“A lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Levitt said judges by and large have ignored the noise of the race and the bluster of President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. “They’ve actually demanded facts and haven’t been ruling on all-caps claims of fraud or suppression,” Levitt said. “They haven’t confused public relations with the predicate for litigation, and I would expect that to continue.” Continue reading.