As of Thursday, two-time popular vote losing impeached lame duck Donald Trump’s desperate bid to remain in office with lawsuits is failing so badly even he recognizes it. He’s down 1-28, and has apparently accepted the reality that he’s not going to get this election overturned by getting ballots disqualified. He’s not quitting, however, and tweeted out Thursday morning that his “very clear and viable path to victory” will be revealed in an “Important News Conference today by lawyers.” That presumably is what he’s trying to attempt now—egged on by deplorables Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and Boris Epshteyn: putting enough pressure on Republican officials in states to have them delay certification and muddy the waters. Creating delays and casting doubt on the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s clear and decisive win is all he’s got at this point.
They are still in court, however. Giuliani has changed tactics in Pennsylvania from overturning actual votes to asking a federal judge to order the state’s Republican-led legislature to choose the state’s electors on the basis of nothing, really. His fraud allegations have been thoroughly debunked in court, and his campaign even agreed to a joint stipulation Wednesday in one case in Bucks County that there was no fraud. The legal effort is a shambles. Even former Freedom Caucus maniac and White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney sees this. “It strikes me that this is the most important lawsuit in the history of the country, and they’re not using the most well-noted election lawyers,” he told the Washington Post. “There are folks who do this all of the time. This is a specialty. This is not a television program. This is the real thing.”
It’s a real thing that is threatening democracy, big time. While Republicans dropped a lawsuit seeking to stop the final certification of election results in Michigan, Trump was personally contacting the two Wayne County Republicans who have flipped twice on certifying the vote there. According to a source to the AP, “Trump reached out to the canvassers, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, on Tuesday evening after the revised vote to express gratitude for their support. Then, on Wednesday, Palmer and Hartmann signed affidavits saying they believe the county vote ‘should not be certified.’” That’s Trump trying to delay and undermine certification in states around the country. That’s unprecedented and the dangerous thread throughout what would be an otherwise hilarious legal effort.
University of Kentucky law professor Joshua Douglas says that it is unprecedented and it is exceedingly dangerous, should Trump have any success. “It would be the end of democracy as we know it,” Douglas said. “This is just not a thing that can happen.” It’s what Team Trump is aiming for. They are trying to delay certification in enough places—certain counties in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as in Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia—to set up the possibility of getting a favorable slate of electors installed where there are Republican legislatures to do it. If they can create enough chaos, they think they can upend the whole elector process and send the election to the House, where Trump would win because Republicans have a majority of state delegations, even though they’re in the minority. That’s a extreme long shot, but it’s among the harebrained plans the Giuliani-Bannon-Trump brain trust have cooked up.
Back in Michigan, Giuliani has dropped the legal effort to stop the state from certifying, but is engaging in some extremely dodgy arguments detailed in the Twitter thread from Buzzfeed’s Zoe Tillman. In its filing, the Trump campaign says the Wayne County board of canvassers "declined to certify the results" which is not true. They certified, then Trump called the two Republicans who tried to rescind their votes, which isn’t really a thing in the law. But it’s potentially enough to cast a cloud over the state’s certification, or at least that might be what Team Trump is thinking. Or Trump is working on the two Republicans on the state’s board of canvassers.
This seems to be pure Bannon. Even though there is really no chance that Trump can reverse the results of the election, the whole process can be upended in service of Bannon’s chaos strategy, a long-term plan to, in his words, “destroy the state. [...] I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
Giuliani and Trump might think it’s about him staying in office, but this is all pure Bannon. And it’s very dangerous. “Anything that aids and abets doubts about an election that has been conducted with integrity makes the future of democracy darker,” William Galston, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution told the Post. “To weaken a democratic people’s faith in its fundamental institutions of self-government is inexcusable.”
