In what Republicans and Democrats are calling “an unprecedented attempt and use of brute political force to overturn legal election results” continues this week as defeated president Donald Trump promotes discounted conspiracy theories and utters lie after lie to subvert democracy and America.
“Mr. Trump’s chances of succeeding are somewhere between remote and impossible, and a sign of his desperation after President-elect Joeseph R. Biden Jr. won by nearly six million votes and counting, as well as a clear Electoral College margin,” writes David Sanger in The New York Times.
“Yet the fact that Mr. Trump is even trying has set off widespread alarms” Sanger adds.
In one of his latest attempts to overturn the election results, Trump has called Republican state leaders from Michigan to the White House Friday in a blatant attempt to recruit their help in ignoring the wishes of the voters in that state which Biden won.
“That’s not ging to happen,” Mike Shirkey, GOP leader in the Michigan State Senate said this week. “We are going to follow the law and follow the process.”
Some presidential historians say Trump’s attempts to overturn an election brings a comparison to Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio, who helped move the vote counts in three states in 1876 to beat Ulysses S. Grant. Hayes was called “His Fraudulency” because of the stunt.
“This is far worse,” Michael Beschloss, presidential historian and author of “Presidents of War,” told Sanger. “In the case of Hayes, both sides agreed that the outcome in at least three states was in dispute. In this case, no serious person thinks enough votes are in dispute that Donald Trump could have been elected on Election Day.”
“This is a manufactured crisis. It is a president abusing his huge powers in order to stay in office after the voters clearly rejected him for re-election,” Beschloss adds. “This is what many of the founders dreaded.”
On Thursday, Trump lead attorney Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York, spun a ring of fantasy conspiracy theories that claimed voting machine fraud, involvement by former President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (who died seven years ago) and illusionary claims of involvement by the Clinton Foundation and billionaire Democratic fund-raiser George Soros.
“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history,” Christopher Krebs, fired Tuesday night by Mr. Trump as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted Thursday afternoon. “And possibly the craziest. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lucky.”
Sadly, we do know what he’s talking about and it scares the hell out of us.