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By The Washington Post 
18h ago
Philip Rucker
Washington – Escalating his attack on democracy from within the White House, President Donald Trump on Wednesday distributed an astonishing 46-minute video filled with unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud and outright falsehoods declaring that the nation’s electoral system was “under coordinated assault and siege.” and argued that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost to President-elect Joe Biden.
Standing behind the presidential lectern in the Diplomatic Reception Room and flanked by the flags of his office and the country whose Constitution he was sworn to uphold, Trump attempted to harness the power of the presidency to subvert the vote and overturn the election results.
The rambling and bellicose monologue, which Trump said “may be the most important speech I have ever made” and was delivered directly to the camera without a hearing, underscored his desperation to reverse the outcome of his electoral defeat after a month of failed legal challenges. and how some key states have already certified Biden’s victory.
The president’s latest shot came a day after his attorney general, William Barr, said the Justice Department had found no evidence of voter fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election.
Trump personally delivered many of the claims that he has previously made on social media or that his lawyers have made on his behalf in court, which have been summarily discredited or dismissed because there is no evidence to support them.
Statement by Donald J. Trump, President of the United States
Full video: https://t.co/EHqzsLbbJG pic.twitter.com/Eu4IsLNsKD
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2020
Trump claimed in Wednesday’s video, again without evidence, that “corrupt forces” had filled the polls with fraudulent votes. He claimed that the fraud was “massive” and “on a scale never seen before.” He called on the Supreme Court to “do the right thing for our country,” suggesting that it involved ending hundreds of thousands of votes so that “I win very easily in every state.”
Although Trump authorized his administration last week to cooperate with Biden’s transition, he has still refused to budge. With Wednesday’s remarks, the president intensified his protest at the results and threatened to interrupt the long history of the peaceful transfer of power to the nation.
“This election was rigged. Everybody knows it,” Trump said. He added: “Our country needs someone to say ‘You’re right.’ … If we don’t eradicate fraud, the tremendous and horrible fraud that has taken place in our 2020 elections, we will no longer have a country. “
Trump also claimed that Dominion Voting Systems, which makes voting machines used in many states, was “highly suspicious” and that many voters who pressed the “Trump” button had their votes counted for Biden. There is no evidence that the votes were compromised in any way, and Dominion has said that Trump’s claims are without merit.
Biden decisively won the election with 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232. In the national popular vote, Biden leads with 80.9 million to Trump’s 74 million, a difference of 4.4 percentage points and almost 7 million votes.
Most states have already certified their results before the election college meeting on December 14 to finalize the national result. Those states include Georgia, which gave Biden one of its narrowest victories and where officials conducted a manual recount that still had Biden winning by around 13,000 votes.
Trump’s video on Wednesday represented his most comprehensive remarks to date on the election and came after the month since the election had passed largely hidden from public view save for a handful of official appearances and a call on Fox News Channel.
Any hope that the president could be slowly coming to terms with his loss and coming to terms with the fact that Biden will be sworn in as president on January 20 was dashed by his combative and emphatic tone, which amounted to a call to arms for his supporters. The fight is paying dividends so far, with Trump’s political operation using a storm of deceptive appeals to his supporters to raise more than $ 170 million since Election Day on Nov. 3.
As he has invariably done throughout his presidency, Trump spun an alternate reality. Although his words really worked to undermine democracy, he presented himself as the protector of democracy and said that his greatest achievement as president would be to restore “the integrity of the voters to our nation.”
Trump released an edited two-minute version of the video on Twitter, which the social media company labeled “contested,” and included a link to the full 46-minute video on Facebook, where the company applied a tag explaining what to vote by mail. it has been trusted for a long time and that voter fraud is “extremely rare.”
When Trump released his video, his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was in Michigan presenting a similar case to state lawmakers and citizens there. The former New York mayor alleged in a press video conference in Lansing that there were extensive voting irregularities in the state, primarily in Detroit, a majority black city that voted heavily for Biden. Giuliani claimed that a similar pattern of fraud emerged in several other large urban centers with Democratic-controlled city governments.
“It was a plan to steal this election,” Giuliani said.
There is no evidence to support this claim. Giuliani cited affidavits that had been used in lawsuits that have so far been rejected in the state.
Giuliani gave a pugilistic exhortation to Trump supporters at the afternoon press conference.
“We have to fight. The president has no intention of giving up,” he said, urging Michigan Republicans to pressure state lawmakers to uphold their constitutional obligation to decide state outcomes in a contested presidential election.
“They have to be reminded that their constitutional oath sometimes requires criticism,” Giuliani added. “Sometimes it even requires being threatened. But you don’t retract an oath because voting is too difficult.”
On Wednesday night, Giuliani and Trump’s campaign attorney Jenna Ellis made similar arguments before a Michigan House of Representatives panel. In his opening statement, Ellis referred to Trump’s video message and said that the state legislature has a constitutional mandate to “not allow corrupt elections.” He said the nation’s founders provided “a tool, state legislators, to fight corruption” in the elections.
That interpretation of a constitutional mandate is questioned by many election experts, who, however, are concerned that it could lead some state legislators to try to revoke certified election results.
Norm Eisen, a former Obama appointee who serves as an adviser to the bipartisan Voter Protection Program, called that interpretation “constitutional misinformation that has no legal basis.”
This activity comes as Trump prepares to visit Georgia on Saturday to hold a campaign rally for Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both Republicans facing a January 5 runoff election.
Trump’s unfounded allegations of voter fraud in Georgia have muddied the race, with Republicans divided on whether to trust the electoral system or, as former Trump attorney Sidney Powell argued, stay home in protest.
Powell led a rally in a northern Atlanta suburb on Wednesday in which he urged hundreds of the president’s supporters not to participate in the Senate elections, in part because he said the state’s voting machines are unreliable.
“I would encourage all Georgians to make it known that they will not vote at all unless their vote is secure,” Powell said. “There shouldn’t be a runoff. Certainly not on the Dominion machines.”
Powell falsely claimed that Dominion’s machines were rigged to weigh Biden’s votes more than Trump’s, that a manual recount was a sham, and that state and local election officials have been destroying ballots and other evidence of fraud. He has presented no evidence for his claims.
Lin Wood, another Trump ally who helped lead Wednesday’s event, made similarly unfounded claims.
“We are not going to vote for their damn machines made in China,” Wood said. “We are going to vote for machines made in America!”
Wood targeted nearly all of Georgia’s state Republican leaders, including Perdue, Loeffler, Governor Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and state party chair David Shafer, even though some of them have supported Trump and their false statements have been echoed. fraud claims.
“If they don’t fight for Donald Trump, including Loeffler and Perdue, send them all home!” Wood exclaimed to the crowd. “You are criminals!”
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