Tweets, tantrums, and lawsuits fail to change reality for sore loser Trump

Donald Trump’s month-long quest to overturn his landslide loss officially ended on Monday, when the six states whose results he was seeking to overturn all cast their Electoral College votes for Joe Biden, cementing his status as president-elect.

Biden won’t officially cross the 270-vote threshold needed to win the Electoral College until California casts its votes later Monday afternoon. However, with Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all casting their votes for Biden, he will certainly be the winner by day’s end.

Of course, it’s been apparent since just a few days after Nov. 3 that Biden won. But Trump and his allies embarked on a multi-tiered effort to baselessly allege voter fraud in the hopes that it would either convince enough judges in courts across the country to throw out legally cast ballots to hand Trump a second term, or coerce enough Republican-controlled state legislatures to simply ignore the results of the election in their states and install electors for Trump.

In the end, that effort failed spectacularly.

Trump and his allies lost an astounding 59 legal challenges, according to Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who runs an organization that both tracked and fought against the legal challenges from Trump and his sycophants.

That included a case in Wisconsin on Monday, in which the state Supreme Court threw out a Trump campaign lawsuit that sought to invalidate 221,000 ballots in two heavily Democratic counties. One of the liberal justices on the court, Jill Karofsky, said the lawsuit “smacks of racism” and was “un-American,” according to the Associated Press.

Elias said the Wisconsin case was the last remaining “significant post-election case” — meaning Trump’s effort to use the judicial system to steal the election had effectively failed.

Those legal challenges were based on lies of nonexistent election fraud.

Trump himself tweeted hundreds of lies about the election, including dozens of baseless voter fraud accusations, and dozens more about the election being rigged.

“I WON THE ELECTION IN A LANDSLIDE, but remember, I only think in terms of legal votes, not all of the fake voters and fraud that miraculously floated in from everywhere! What a disgrace!” Trump said in a Dec. 12 tweet. Biden in fact beat Trump by more than 7 million votes.

In the two weeks after the election, Trump tweeted or retweeted more than 300 times seeking to undermine confidence in the process with fake conspiracy theories and outright lies about the vote tally, according to the New York Times.

Trump also had some very public meltdowns about his loss, including posting a 46-minute-long video of conspiracy theories to explain why he didn’t lose the election when he, indeed, did.

However, Trump and his allies presented no evidence of that fraud in court — leading to condemnations from judges who ruled against the lawsuits.

“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so,” Stephanos Bibas — a Trump-appointed federal appeals judge — wrote in a decision that tossed out the Trump campaign’s attempt to invalidate millions of ballots in Pennsylvania.

“Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” Bibas added.

Ultimately, the disinformation campaign failed spectacularly.

On Monday, the Electoral College electors met to cast their votes, with notable Trump foes — including Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams — serving as electors in New York and Georgia, respectively.

“I believe we should abolish the Electoral College and select our president by the winner of the popular vote, same as every other office. But while it still exists, I was proud to cast my vote in New York for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” Clinton tweeted after her vote.

Biden will end the day with 306 votes to Trump’s 232 — assuming all of the electors cast their votes as pledged, and do not become what’s known as “faithless electors.” Coincidentally, that’s the same margin Trump won in 2016 — which Trump himself called a landslide at the time.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.