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Donald Trump faced mounting pressure from Republicans on Sunday to abandon his chaotic and desperate fight to overturn the U.S. presidential election, as victor Joe Biden prepared to begin appointing his cabinet and a Pennsylvania judge compared the legal case. of Trump there with the “Frankenstein monster”.
Despite the Republican leadership in Washington backing the president’s claims that the Nov. 3 election was stolen from him by nationwide electoral fraud, other prominent figures, including two of his former national security advisers, were outspoken.
Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton said Biden would be sworn in in January, adding: “The real question is how much damage Trump can do before that happens.”
The president’s efforts were designed primarily to wreak havoc and confusion, he told CNN’s State of the Union program, more a display of “pure political power” than a genuine legal exercise.
Bolton noted that the Trump campaign so far has lost all but two of more than 30 legal challenges in various states.
“Right now, Trump is throwing rocks out of windows, he’s the political equivalent of a street riot,” Bolton said.
And another former Trump administration national security adviser, HR McMaster, told CBS’s Face the Nation that Trump’s efforts were “very corrosive” and warned that his actions were casting doubt among the electorate.
“You are playing into the hands of our adversaries,” he said, warning that Russia, for example, “does not care who wins” as many Americans doubt the outcome, undermining American democracy.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, another Republican, said he was also confident that Biden would be sworn in as scheduled on January 20 and said “I am ashamed” of the party’s lack of leadership to acknowledge the election result.
Hogan added that he thought Trump’s pressure last week on state lawmakers “to somehow try to change the outcome” was “completely outrageous.”
The United States used to oversee elections around the world, but now “it’s starting to look like we’re in a banana republic,” Hogan told CNN’s State of the Union policy program.
He added of Trump’s efforts to exert legal and political pressure: “It is time for them to stop.”
On Friday, the president met with Michigan Republican leaders in the White House in a savage attempt to sway them and leaders in other states on the battlefield at the electoral college to sideline the will of the people and declare Trump the winner, despite the fact that local and federal officials declared it the safest choice in American history.
In the latest setback to Trump’s efforts, Matthew Brann, a Republican judge for the United States district court in Pennsylvania, rejected the Trump campaign’s request to disenfranchise nearly 7 million voters there.
“This claim, like Frankenstein’s monster, has been randomly linked from two different theories in an attempt to avoid checking precedent,” he wrote in a conviction, issued Saturday.
It came after similar failed court offers in Georgia, Michigan and Arizona to prevent states from certifying their vote totals.
In ruling that Pennsylvania officials can certify election results in the state, where Biden has an advantage of more than 80,000 votes, Brann said the Trump campaign presented “tense legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … without supporting evidence “in his attempt to challenge a batch of thousands of votes.
Brann also suggested that the Trump campaign case demonstrated a lack of understanding of the United States constitution, writing: “The plaintiffs seek to remedy the denial of their votes by invalidating the votes of millions of other people. Rather than request that their votes be counted, they seek to discredit dozens of other votes, but only for one race. This is just not how the constitution works. “
For Trump to have any hope of remaining in the White House, he would have to eliminate Biden’s 81,000-vote lead in Pennsylvania. The state should begin certifying its results Monday, as does Michigan.
Kristen Clarke, chair of the attorneys committee for civil rights under the law, said of Pennsylvania’s outcome and the forthcoming certification of results: “This should put the nail in the coffin of any further attempts by President Trump to use the federal courts. to rewrite the outcome of the 2020 elections. “
Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey acknowledged that the ruling closed off any chance of a legal victory in the state, asked Trump to accept the result, and praised Brann as “a fair and impartial jurist.”
Liz Cheney, a member of the Republican leadership team in the House of Representatives, urged Trump to respect “the sanctity of our electoral process” if he cannot prove his claims of voter fraud.
Biden has garnered the most votes from a presidential winner in history, recording 6 million more votes than Trump, and will begin appointing people to his cabinet positions Tuesday, Chief of Staff Ron Klain said Sunday.
