President Trump on Wednesday night made yet another appearance from the White House to claim widespread fraud to steal the election from him. But his remarks did not provide evidence to back up his claims, nor did he lay out a legal strategy to stop the supposed theft from happening.
The reason is that he is not pursuing a strategy to win a contested election. His goal is to avoid admitting defeat should current trends continue.
“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Trump said. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.”
But in his remarks, Trump didn’t articulate a fair explanation of what was a “legal” and what was an “illegal” vote beyond the fact that if votes are for him, they should count, and if they are for Joe Biden, they are fraudulent.
Trump is trying to blur the lines between late counted votes and late votes. Just because mail-in votes take longer to count, which we all knew going in, it does not mean that they were cast after Election Day.
Trump is perpetuating the idea that somehow, Democrats wait and see how much Biden is down in a given state, and then just keep manufacturing votes until he’s up.
He did not explain why counting should stop in states in which his election night lead has been erased, but not in Arizona, where he has narrowed the gap since election night.
“It’s amazing how those mail-in ballots are so one-sided,” Trump declared with a straight face.
In reality, Democrats pursued a get-out-the-vote strategy that was focused on encouraging people to vote by mail. Trump, meanwhile, spent the closing months of the campaign warning his supporters that if they voted by mail, their ballots would be thrown in the trash and encouraging them to vote in person.
The logical consequence of that strategy was that Trump would perform better with in-person votes but that Democrats would do much better with mail-in voting.
Now that this is happening, Trump is trying to claim this as evidence of fraud.
The fraud claim has a natural appeal. Any scenario in which Trump was ahead first and Biden made gains when votes flowed in from liberal cities was going to be enough to rouse suspicions of Trump’s supporters.
Yet what they’re talking about is a fraud of enormous proportions. It would require coordinating hundreds of thousands of additional votes across multiple states, including Georgia, which has among one of the most pro-Trump governors in the United States.
If anything such as this operation were to be pulled off, there would be a lot more evidence. It wouldn’t boil down to people claiming, “Hmm, this looks suspicious.” Or, “LOL, like Detroit and Philadelphia wouldn’t steal an election!”
Given that the evidence that fraud cost him the election in multiple states is nonexistent, if current trends continue, Trump will have no plausible way to convince courts to throw away enough votes to erase Biden’s margins.
Democrats for years have spun all sorts of scenarios about Trump somehow refusing to leave office. But what we are witnessing is not a successful coup attempt in the making.
What we are witnessing is somebody who is too insecure and weak to be able to stand up and admit that he’s been defeated.
