Trump Loses Pennsylvania Election Lawsuit (Again)

Donald Trump (via Axios – screen capture)
A federal judge has thrown out the Trump campaign’s lawsuit in Pennsylvania hoping to stop the certification of ballots there likening Team Trump’s arguments to Frankenstein’s monster, saying it appeared “haphazardly stitched together.” From the New York Times:

A federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed on Saturday night a lawsuit by the Trump campaign that had claimed there were widespread improprieties with mail-in ballots in the state, ending the last major effort to delay the certification of Pennsylvania’s vote results, which is scheduled to take place Monday.

In a scathing order, Judge Matthew W. Brann wrote that Mr. Trump’s campaign, which had asked him to effectively disenfranchise nearly seven million voters, should have come to court “armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption” in its efforts to essentially nullify the results of Pennsylvania’s election.

But instead, Judge Brann complained, the Trump campaign provided only “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” that were “unsupported by evidence.”

Trump Invites Michigan GOP Leaders To WH Over Election Results

From CNN:

President Donald Trump has invited Republican state lawmakers from Michigan to the White House on Friday, according to a person familiar with the matter, as the President and his legal team are mounting an effort to overturn the results of the election he lost to President-elect Joe Biden.

Trump also called two Republican canvass board members from Wayne County, to Tuesday to offer his support, the person said, after they went back and forth on voting to certify the election results from the state’s largest county, which includes Detroit. The board members filed affidavits Wednesday seeking to “rescind” their votes to certify the election result.

Michigan law requires the election results to be certified by Monday, November 23. With no credible reports of fraud, observers are concerned state lawmakers could use the legislature to substitute Trump-supporting Electoral College electors in an effort to swing the state back to Trump. President-elect Joe Biden won the state by 3 percentage points and over 157,000 votes.

Trump Fires Senior Official Responsible For Security Of Presidential Election

Donald Trump has asked a federal court to force Twitter to reinstate his account

Donald Trump (image public domain/White House)
Donald Trump has fired Christopher Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security cyber chief who declared the 2020 general election was the most secure in U.S. history. From the New York Times:

President Trump fired Christopher Krebs on Tuesday night, retaliating against his administration’s most senior official responsible for securing the presidential election.

Mr. Krebs, who has systematically disputed Mr. Trump’s baseless declarations in recent days that the presidency was stolen from him through fraudulent ballots and mysterious software glitches that changed millions of votes, had worked in the Department of Homeland Security.

The announcement came via Twitter, the same way Mr. Trump fired his defense secretary two weeks ago.

Mr. Trump seemed set off by a statement released by Homeland Security late last week, the product of a broad committee overseeing the elections, that declared the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history.”

Randy Rainbow: ‘Don’t Tell Donald He’s Not Re-Elected Today!’

While Team Trump continues a facade of ‘fake news’ regarding the Donald’s many filed (and then dismissed) lawsuits in trying to re-litigate the 2020 election, Randy Rainbow lampoons White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and her constant assertions her boss “won” via Stephen Sondheim’s “Not Getting Married Today” from Company. Rainbow’s rapid-fire satirical lyrics are seriously on point. Enjoy 🙂

Trump Tweets In Circles ‘I Concede NOTHING!’ Then Heads Out For Golf

Donald Trump reportedly took classified top secret documents from the White House when his administration came to an end.

Donald Trump (screen capture)
Donald Trump seemed to acknowledge that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. had indeed won the presidential election (as projected by nearly all major news outlets including Fox News), but then U-turned dispatching a new tweet that read, “I concede NOTHING!” This is just the latest in Trump’s woefully embarrassing behavior in light of his loss to Biden. From the New York Times:

His first tweet came Sunday morning at 7:47. Referring to Mr. Biden, the president said that “he won.” That represented the first time Mr. Trump had publicly said what his advisers have been telling him for days privately: His re-election bid failed and Mr. Biden will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.

After a flurry of tweets and news reports about his “concession,” Mr. Trump insisted that he had been misunderstood.

At 9:16, he insisted falsely: “RIGGED ELECTION. WE WILL WIN!” And three minutes later, he wrote that Mr. Biden “only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”

Even though Republican Attorneys General and Republican Governors in the final battleground states have assured the public there’s been no evidence of the ‘widespread voter fraud’ Trump continues to allege, he continues. #sad Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic rages on with no president attending to the issue as more than 1,000 Americans are dying on average each day. From the Washington Post:

Since Election Day and for weeks prior, Trump has all but ceased to actively manage the deadly pandemic, which so far has killed at least 244,000 Americans, infected at least 10.9 million and choked the country’s economy.

The president has not attended a coronavirus task force meeting in “at least five months,” said one senior administration official with knowledge of the meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid details.

Trump Goes Full Twitter Meltdown As Georgia Recount Continues

Donald Trump

As the full recount of Georgia’s nearly five million votes continues (where Joe Biden holds a 14,000 vote lead), Donald Trump is having a full-on Twitter meltdown:

GOP Leaders In Key States Decline To Intervene In Selection Of Electoral College

Donald Trump (image via Flickr/WhiteHouse – public domain)
One of the Trump campaign’s big ‘hail Mary’ moves is to try and flip the results of the presidential election by encouraging Republican-controlled state legislatures to disenfranchise voters in their states by picking members of the Electoral College that would vote for Trump instead of the Joe Biden for their state. But GOP leaders in key states flipped by Joe Biden in this election cycle have told the Associated Press they have no plans to subvert state laws.

State GOP lawmakers in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have all said they would not intervene in the selection of electors, who ultimately cast the votes that secure a candidate’s victory. Such a move would violate state law and a vote of the people, several noted.

“I do not see, short of finding some type of fraud — which I haven’t heard of anything — I don’t see us in any serious way addressing a change in electors,” said Rusty Bowers, Arizona’s Republican House speaker, who says he’s been inundated with emails pleading for the legislature to intervene. “They are mandated by statute to choose according to the vote of the people.”

The idea loosely involves GOP-controlled legislatures dismissing Biden’s popular vote wins in their states and opting to select Trump electors.

Team Trump was probably hoping that such ploys would become entangled in legal rabble-rousing that would end up at the Supreme Court where the Donald’s handpicked conservative justices might hand him a win. In related news, the Washington Post reports “two prominent law firms have sought to withdraw from representing the Trump legal effort in Arizona and Pennsylvania.”

Joe Biden Projected To Win Georgia, Electoral College Vote Total Now 306

(graphic via MSNBC)
And the final two states have been projected in the 2020 presidential election. Multiple news outlets have projected President-elect Joe Biden will win Georgia, and as expected, Donald Trump will win North Carolina. Biden is the first Democrat to win Georgia in 28 years and the first non-southern Democrat to win the state in 60 years. Biden wins 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. In 2016, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway called Trump’s win with 306 electoral votes a “massive landslide” and “historic.” Trump would repeat that claim many, many times.

Election Officials In Every State: No Evidence Of Voter Fraud Found

Donald Trump (screen capture)

Donald Trump during ABC News Town Hall (screen capture)
The New York Times reached out to the top election officials in every state of the nation inquiring about any confirmed illegal voting or fraud in the 2020 presidential election as alleged by Donald Trump and the Republicans. The answer – from Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State – was a unanimous ‘no.’

Top election officials across the country said in interviews and statements that the process had been a remarkable success despite record turnout and the complications of a dangerous pandemic.

“There’s a great human capacity for inventing things that aren’t true about elections,” said Frank LaRose, a Republican who serves as Ohio’s secretary of state. “The conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology.” 

Steve Simon, a Democrat who is Minnesota’s secretary of state, said: “I don’t know of a single case where someone argued that a vote counted when it shouldn’t have or didn’t count when it should. There was no fraud.”

“Kansas did not experience any widespread, systematic issues with voter fraud, intimidation, irregularities or voting problems,” a spokeswoman for Scott Schwab, the Republican secretary of state in Kansas, said in an email Tuesday. “We are very pleased with how the election has gone up to this point.”

Trump ‘Terminates’ Defense Secretary Via Tweet

L-R Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Mark Esper (images: Flickr/WhiteHouse – public domain)
Donald Trump took to Twitter this morning to announce the news that he had “terminated” Mark Esper as his Secretary of Defense. From the New York Times:

Mr. Esper’s downfall had been expected for months, after he took the rare step in June of disagreeing publicly with Mr. Trump and saying that active-duty military troops should not be sent to control the wave of protests in American cities. The president, who had threatened to use the Insurrection Act to do exactly that, was furious, officials said.

Mr. Esper, 56, a former secretary of the Army and a former Raytheon executive, became defense secretary last July after Mr. Trump withdrew the nomination of Patrick M. Shanahan, the acting defense secretary, amid an F.B.I. inquiry into allegations from Mr. Shanahan’s former wife that he punched her in the stomach. Mr. Shanahan denied the accusations.

Mr. Shanahan had been standing in for Jim Mattis, who resigned as defense secretary in 2018, citing his own differences with the president.