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WASHINGTON (AP) – Donald Trump faced growing pushback from fellow Republicans on Friday (Nov. 20) for resisting Joe Biden’s election victory, as the increasingly isolated president continued his crusade against defeat in an angry rage. stream of tweets.
Insisting against all odds that the path to victory remains viable, Trump met with Michigan lawmakers on Friday in a bid to pressure districts in key states to revoke the will of voters.
But logic dictates that his days in the White House are numbered, with the states on the battlefield that sealed President-elect Biden’s victory on Nov. 3 rapidly approaching the deadlines for certifying their election results.
“The numbers don’t lie,” said Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, who was ready Friday to certify Biden’s victory.
“I think the figures we have presented today are correct,” he added, saying, “The figures reflect the verdict of the people.”
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Senator Lamar Alexander became the latest Republican to push Trump, saying that Biden “has a very good chance” of becoming the next president and that he must be provided “with all necessary transitional materials, resources and meetings to ensure a smooth transition “.
However, the outgoing president has taken refuge in the mansion and for almost two weeks has done something unimaginable a month ago: he avoided the media.
However, he has kept his busy tweet scheduled.
“A rigged election!” Trump raged on Twitter on Friday morning, calling the vote a “joke” and retweeting conservative personalities who argued that Biden’s victory was fraudulent and that Republican senators who accept the Democrat’s victory should be challenged in their next election. .
In particular, he retweeted a post on how to stop election “fraud and abuse” posted by Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who supports the QAnon conspiracy theory.
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“IRRESPONSIBLE”
As Biden’s team moves forward preparing to take office on January 20, his team announced a new senior staff at the White House on Friday, Trump appears to deny it.
On Friday, he takes the unprecedented step of welcoming two legislative leaders from Michigan to the White House, where Trump’s team seeks to prevent the state from certifying the vote.
Biden won Michigan by 155,000 votes, a margin more than 10 times greater than Trump’s state victory in 2016.
Biden, who turned 78 on Friday, criticized Trump as “irresponsible” for the move, which also alarmed some Republicans.
Senator Mitt Romney accused Trump of trying to “subvert the will of the people and reverse the elections” by putting pressure on local officials.
“It’s hard to imagine a worse and more undemocratic action by a sitting US president,” Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, said in a statement Thursday night.
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Yet Trump’s legal team continues to fight.
Rudy Giuliani and other attorneys held a conspiracy-laden press conference Thursday selling unsubstantiated allegations that Democratic “criminals” committed widespread fraud to deny Trump’s reelection.
The event fueled Trump’s latest effort to discard ballots in counties that voted heavily Democratic, force recounts, and delay the process long enough that an insufficient number of states have finalized their results before Electoral College votes. December 14.
“OUTRAGEOUS”
Republican Senator Ben Sasse criticized the tactics as undemocratic.
“Wild press conferences erode public trust. So no, obviously Rudy and his friends shouldn’t pressure voters to ignore their certification obligations under the statute,” Sasse said.
Another Senate Republican, Joni Ernst of Iowa, said it was “absolutely outrageous” that Trump’s lawyers declared that Democrats and Republicans could have rigged the election.
In a further blow to Trump’s risky hopes of overturning the results, Georgia officials formally certified Biden’s victory there on Friday, the first time a Democratic presidential candidate has won the southern state since 1992.
Georgia conducted a manual recount of about five million votes, reaffirming that Biden won by more than 12,000 votes.
The Trump campaign is likely to demand another recount.
While a growing number of Republicans are calling for the Trump administration to recognize Biden as president-elect, party leaders on Capitol Hill have tried to please the president, while some conservatives are doubling down on their support.
Republican Jim Jordan wrote to the House Judiciary Committee calling for an investigation into the integrity of the election “amid troubling reports of irregularities and irregularities.”
But more than two weeks after the election, a Pew Research poll shows that Americans approve of Biden’s conduct far more than Trump’s.
Sixty-two percent said Biden’s conduct since Nov. 3 has been excellent or good, compared to just 31 percent who said the same about Trump.
