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Donald Trump almost said it. That there would be a next, another American government. One without him. He just held back.
On Friday afternoon (local time) he is in the Rose Garden of the White House to sell the latest developments in the field of vaccine research as his own success. Looking somewhat drained, he has been reciting the familiar superlatives in these first public statements for a good week.
Thanks to the “Warp Speed” program it launched, vaccines against the coronavirus were developed in record time. Which are now practically ready and can be delivered immediately. No one else could have done it, he says. But it seems like he doesn’t know exactly who he’s trying to convince.
Trump brings up the threat of new blockades. And for a moment he leaves the same line that he has been drawing since Election Day: he won, and if he loses, it is only because the Democrats have cheated.
In any case, under his rule, “there will be no blockade,” he says. And then he explains, “Hopefully he – will …” – and now he should end the sentence with “… the next government will not impose a blockade.” Trump pauses. “Whatever happens in the future. Who knows what government it will be, I suppose time will tell, but I can tell you that this government is not going to order a shutdown.”
Trump hasn’t come this close to admitting publicly that he lost since election night.
Perhaps Trump just heard that CNN election investigators, New York Times, Fox News and the AP proclaimed Democratic challenger Joe Biden the narrow winner in Georgia. What Biden brings to 306 votes in the electoral body, that Electoral College, which will elect the president in mid-December based on the results of the elections in the states. A candidate must get at least 270 votes to become president.
Trump so far has not been successful with the lawsuits
Biden gets exactly as many votes as Trump in 2016. At the time, Trump spoke of a landslide victory. This time he sent his lawyers to uncover what is supposedly the biggest electoral fraud in American history.
Trump hasn’t been very successful so far. His attorneys have filed a dozen lawsuits in various states, and the courts have so far dismissed one after another. Three of them only on Friday. The legal dispute is conducted according to a report from New York Times now entirely by Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and unwitting “hands on pants” man in Borat’s new movie. Unlike many other Trump advisers, Giuliani apparently still believes in victory.
An example of the quality of the demands is that according to which Republican election observers were allegedly unable to attend the counting of votes in Philadelphia. The federal judge had to ask multiple times before a Trump attorney awkwardly admitted that Trump representatives had been in the room on a series of “no-zeros.” The lawsuit was dismissed.
In only one case have Trump’s lawyers been right. In Pennsylvania, the head of election control had extended the deadline for first-time voters by a few days so they could still prove their identity. That was a violation of powers, the court said. The decision has no consequences for the outcome of the elections. Only a few votes that haven’t even been counted are affected.
Trump’s legal strategy leads nowhere because the distances Biden is ahead of Trump in the disputed states are too great, according to consistent information from the US media. A recount, for example, typically results in a shift of several hundred votes. In Arizona, however, Biden leads with 10,000 votes and in Pennsylvania with more than 60,000 votes.
Federal prosecutors: “There is no evidence” of material irregularities
In Arizona on Thursday, one of Trump’s lawyers had to admit in court that his case “was not a fraud, not a ‘someone steals the election’ thing.” The lawsuit alleges that the ballot papers filled with markers allegedly led to errors in the counting machines. Trump had been talking about fraud in connection with this case for days. His attorney eventually dropped the lawsuit himself.
In other cases, witnesses have withdrawn their testimony. The supposedly dead voters were still alive or would not have voted at all. Several attempts to slow down certification processes in the states have failed.
This Friday it was announced that the prestigious law firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur has resigned from its mandate. Apparently he was concerned that his reputation would be damaged if he continued to help Trump delegitimize the 2020 election. The Jones Day law firm announced that it would not accept new requests from Trump.
State prosecutors don’t seem convinced either. On Friday, 16 federal prosecutors hired to look for suspicious activity in the elections made clear in a letter to Attorney General William Barr that there was “no evidence” of material wrongdoing.
Not even the Trump administration itself wants to help. On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security said the 2020 elections were the “safest in the history of the United States.” There is no “evidence” that any electoral system has not worked. If in fact Trump’s plan was to dismiss Biden’s election victory with the help of the courts, it has so far failed miserably.
