President Donald Trump lost the Nov. 3 election clearly, decisively and legally.
On Saturday, the president’s efforts to invalidate election results in Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden is ahead by 80,000 votes, were dismissed by U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann, who said the president’s team offered “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … unsupported by evidence.”
This is just the latest in a long line of dismissals across the country, with judges in states ranging from Arizona to Georgia to Michigan tossing the president’s legal challenges to the election.
Indisputable evidence of any result-changing fraud has yet to materialize. Unfortunately, the president and his surrogates have taken to increasingly wild claims involving widespread, systematic election fraud that, if true, would entail one of the biggest crimes in American history.
On Thursday, attorney Sidney Powell, alongside Rudy Giuliani, alleged that “President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it.” Powell’s remarks have been heavily promoted by the national Republican Party and strongly embraced by the staunchest supporters of the president.
Which gets us to the problem at hand.
Powell, who was cut loose from the president’s team just days later, didn’t need to actually prove anything for the national GOP to push this narrative or for the president’s staunchest supporters to take her words as gospel.
Powell has yet to prove anything, yet her claims are already taken as a given by the staunchest supporters of the president. When Fox News host Tucker Carlson dared to point out that Powell refused to offer any evidence, the president’s staunchest supporters denounced Carlson for his supposed “betrayal.”
When loyalty to a politician trumps commitment to reasoned analysis of the facts, something has gone wrong.
Supporters of the president might want to believe Donald Trump is being wrongly deprived of the presidency and that Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell have the proof. But wanting something to be true does not make it true.
The reality is the Trump team has faced defeat after defeat in the courts because most of their arguments are hollow. The reality is that retweeting affidavits isn’t the same as proving widespread election fraud deprived the president of re-election.
Meanwhile, the president’s campaign has continued to fundraise with messages like, “I won the Election! The Radical Left Democrats, working with their partner, the Fake News Media, are trying to STEAL this Election. We won’t let them.”
It will be a stain on the republic, the American right and the Republican Party if such messages are how the outcome of the Nov. 3 election is understood.
The reality is the president lost an election in which record turnout yielded impressive gains for Republicans across the country and millions more votes for the president compared to four years ago. Rather than build on those victories in a positive way, the president has opted to add to the toxicity of American politics.
The nation is grappling with a surge in coronavirus cases and deaths. Millions of lives have been upended and many more are ravaged by the economic, physical and psychological toll of the pandemic.
Yet the president is busy proclaiming to have won an election he lost by over 6 million popular votes and over 70 electoral votes.
America is better than this. The Republican Party is better than this. The conservative movement is better than this. Right?
