Trump's attempt to steal election faces numerous embarrassing setbacks

Donald Trump’s naked attempt to steal the election he lost by a landslide was hit by blow after blow this weekend, making the anti-democratic coup plot look like even more of a long shot than it already was.

On Saturday, a federal judge in Pennsylvania tore Trump’s legal team to shreds, ultimately dismissing the Trump campaign’s lawsuit that sought to invalidate hundreds of thousands of votes.

The decision came after Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani delivered an embarrassing performance in front of the judge by demonstrating a lack of understanding of basic legal concepts and spewing baseless conspiracy theories that lacked even a shred of evidence to support them.

“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens. That has not happened,” judge Matthew Brann wrote in his decision throwing out the campaign’s suit.

The Trump campaign filed a motion to appeal the decision.

However, the appeal doesn’t seek to delay Pennsylvania’s vote certification — which is slated to take place on Monday — nor challenge the judge’s decision to throw out the lawsuit on the grounds that it had no merit and was doomed to fail. Instead, the campaign appealed the judge’s decision to not allow the campaign to amend its initial complaint.

Election law expert Rick Hasen called the appeal “bizarre and weak.”

Then, on Sunday, the Trump campaign tried to claim one of the members of its legal team, Sidney Powell, was not actually a member of the legal team — after Powell spouted more wild and baseless conspiracy theories about the election.

“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity,” Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, another Trump campaign lawyer, said in a statement.

Of course, Powell was a member of the Trump campaign legal team. Trump included Powell on a list of lawyers taking over his attempt to steal the election via the court system.

And Powell was one of the people at the campaign’s shameful press conference on Thursday, in which Giuliani sweated brown goo down his face as he relentlessly lied about the election and the campaign’s effort to challenge the results.

During that press conference, Powell talked about an insane and false conspiracy theory that claimed electronic voting software flipped votes to President-elect Joe Biden based on a directive from former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Chavez has been dead since 2013, and there is no evidence that electronic voting systems switched any votes.

Powell took her conspiracy theorizing a step further, accusing Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of somehow being involved in a conspiracy that caused Trump’s loss in the Peach State.

“Georgia’s probably going to be the first state I’m going to blow up and Mr. Kemp and the secretary of state need to go with it,” Powell said in an interview on the right-wing propaganda outlet Newsmax.

Meanwhile, Ellis — another member of Trump’s legal team — spent the weekend tweeting baseless conspiracy theories and fighting with Republicans on Twitter who do not back the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn the election results.

Ellis accused GOP pollster Frank Luntz of having a “MicroPenis” after Luntz mocked Ellis of running a “parody” Twitter account.

All in all, Trump’s effort to overturn his loss to Biden is failing spectacularly, as courts throw out the lawsuits and GOP-controlled legislatures refuse to go along with Trump’s demand to ignore the voters in their states and simply seat pro-Trump electors.

Numerous states will officially certify their results this week, setting the stage for the Electoral College to vote on Dec. 14.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.