The President of the United States is trying to steal the 2020 election, which he lost decisively to Joe Biden. He is doing so in plain sight, while the leaders of the Republican party either egg him on, play along with the dishonest charade, or remain mute.
President Trump has invited the leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state legislature to meet him in Washington on Friday, according to a person familiar with those plans, as the president and his allies continue an extraordinary campaign to overturn the results of an election he lost.
Trump’s campaign has suffered defeats in courtrooms across the country in its efforts to allege irregularities with the ballot-counting process, and has failed to muster any evidence of the widespread fraud that the president continues to claim tainted the 2020 election.
Trump lost Michigan by a wide margin: At present, he trails President-Elect Joe Biden in the state by 157,000 votes. Earlier this week, the state’s Republican Senate majority leader said an effort to have legislators throw out election results was “not going to happen.”
But the president now appears to be using the full weight of his office to challenge the election results, as he and his allies reach out personally to state and local officials in an intensifying effort to halt the certification of the vote in key battleground states.
In an incendiary news conference in Washington, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor who is now serving as Trump’s lead attorney, made baseless claims that Biden had orchestrated a national conspiracy to rig the vote.
Trump’s team appear to be increasingly focused on Michigan as a place where Republican officials — on the state’s Board of Canvassers and in the legislature — might be persuaded to overturn the results. — Tom Hamburger, Kayla Ruble, David A. Fahrenthold, and Josh Dawsey (“Trump invites Michigan Republican leaders to meet him at White House as he escalates attempts to overturn election results”). [Emphasis added.]
Rick Hasen, among the foremost authorities on election law, said this: “It’s easy to joke about this, and Rudy has become the butt of…jokes. On the other hand, this is deadly serious stuff. They’re talking about trying to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people, and take the election away from the winner and hand it to the loser.”
There are sixty-two days until the inauguration of Joe Biden. Donald Trump — whose public schedule has been virtually empty for the past two weeks — is virtually bunkered down in the White House. His attention is not on a raging coronavirus, which is infecting, hospitalizing, and killing an unprecedented number of Americans, but on how to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters — mostly Black — so he can claim a victory that is not his.
And Republican leaders offer no objection. Professor Hasen has a message for them: “If you are in a position of power and you are wondering if now is the time to show some courage, the answer is unequivocally yes.”
While these efforts — of a flailing wannabe autocrat and his inept accomplices — appear to be playing out like a ridiculous farce, this is serious stuff. A presidential election and a peaceful transition of power in the United States of America are in the balance.
Even Trump’s critics, who have warned about the erosion of our democratic institutions, might have expected — after Biden’s substantial win seemed to put Trump beyond cheating distance — that by this time the leadership of the Republican Party would have pushed back against this reckless, lawless rampage.
But, these are the men and women who saw nothing in Trump’s shakedown of a foreign leader to warrant impeachment (or censure or even a slap on the wrist), the same folks who have watched as hundreds of thousands of Americans have died, as the White House shunned accountability, … and so on and so on and so on — for four years.
The leadership of the Republican Party is beneath contempt.
(Image: Rudy Giuliani’s theatre of the absurd press conference from The Guardian video.)