No serious conservative denied President Trump’s right to contest the results of the presidential election given the tight margins in several states. But his campaign has failed to provide substantive evidence to back its claims and now seems bent on embarrassing, rather than vindicating, itself.
In an outlandish press conference on Thursday, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and attorney Sidney Powell repeatedly claimed that the election is not over and that Trump’s team has enough evidence to overturn the results in several states. Except, such evidence has yet to appear, and nearly every single one of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits have been dismissed by the courts for that very reason.
Giuliani and Powell also pushed the debunked theory that Dominion Voting Systems played a part in boosting the vote totals for President-elect Joe Biden. If this were the case, why did Georgia’s by-hand recount confirm Biden’s margin of victory? To believe this conspiracy, one would need to believe that Georgia’s Republican officials were actively working against the leader of their party, which is essentially what Powell suggested.
Things only got worse. At one point, Powell said she has discovered that the “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China” affected the election’s results. She claimed the late Hugo Chavez directly contributed to the development of Dominion Voting Systems as a means of making sure he never lost an election — an allegation that is substantiated by only one witness, according to Powell.
These are deranged and unsubstantiated allegations that embarrass not just Trump but the entire Republican Party. And the worst part is that many Republicans are allowing it to happen. Two Republican canvassers in Wayne County, Michigan, originally refused to certify the county’s election results, a completely unprecedented move, after hearing directly from the Trump campaign. And several congressional Republicans have urged Trump not to concede to Biden, even though there is next to no chance that his campaign’s lawsuits change the outcome of the election.
By allowing Trump’s team to pursue this fever dream, Republicans are essentially making the argument that the only legitimate result they will accept is a Trump victory. The only problem with this is that Trump no longer has a path to victory, which even Giuliani knows, because his entire plan is to push Trump’s case into the House, where the GOP’s majority of state delegations would supposedly elect Trump.
This isn’t just ridiculous anymore; it’s dangerous. The president does not have the right or the authority to subvert the democratic process simply because he does not like its outcome. His allies should not stand by while Trump’s team wages a deliberate misinformation campaign aimed at convincing his base voters that they were robbed. The show is over. It’s time to pack it up and send Trump packing with it.
