Trump may admit defeat — but he doesn't plan to go quietly

Donald Trump is considering a dramatic exit from the White House on the day President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated, Axios reports, including taking Air Force One to a political rally in Florida to counterprogram the new president’s swearing-in.

White House spokesperson said, “Anonymous sources who claim to know what the President is or is not considering have no idea. When President Trump has an announcement about his plans for Jan. 20 he will let you know.”

It’s the latest sign that Trump will leave office, despite his attempts to steal the election he lost in a landslide to Biden last month. NBC News reported last week that Trump is planning to announce a 2024 bid for president on Inauguration Day in yet another tacit admission that he lost.

And as Helen Halpin, director of the Center for Health and Public Policy Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, noted in a tweet, “Trump can’t take off on Air Force One the morning of the Inauguration to fly to a 2024 Campaign event in FL! Air Force One must be at Andrews Air Force Base, fueled & ready to go anywhere President Biden needs to go, as of noon Jan 20th.”

The news of his possibly holding a rally comes as his avenues to overturn his loss have been blocked.

Nearly every single one of lawsuits filed by the Trump team has been thrown out by state or federal judges who reject the baseless conspiracy theories about voter fraud that the team has been pushing.

The most recent court loss came on Monday, when a federal judge in Michigan threw out a lawsuit filed by Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell. The suit demanded that the judge decertify Michigan’s election results, which show Biden defeated Trump by 154,188 votes, a margin of 3%.

In her opinion, U.S. District Judge Linda Parker wrote, “Plaintiffs ask this court to ignore the orderly statutory scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of millions of voters. This, the Court cannot, and will not, do.”

“The people have spoken,” she wrote.

Meanwhile, GOP-controlled legislatures in states Biden won are also refusing to bend to Trump’s demands that they simply ignore the will of the voters and appoint Electoral College electors who will vote for Trump.

Trump called Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp over the weekend to demand he appoint Trump electors in the Peach State, even though Biden won it by 11,928 votes.

But in a statement on Sunday, Kemp said he rejected the request.

“Any attempt by the legislature to retroactively change that process for the Nov. 3rd election would be unconstitutional and immediately enjoined by the courts, resulting in a long legal dispute and no short-term resolution,” Kemp and Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan said in a statement.

“I voted for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him. But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election,” Arizona state House Speaker Rusty Bowers, also a Republican, said on Dec. 4.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.