On life support, with the pulse growing weaker by the day, and now barely detectable.
The media have described Trump’s legal assault on the election results as a “longshot,” but that’s being charitable: “The campaign and Trump supporters have filed lawsuits in multiple states challenging the Nov. 3 election result but have yet to overturn any votes,” Reuters reported on Tuesday, November 17, 2020. Read story here.
Now “any hope of reversing the outcome hangs on Pennsylvania,” Reuters says, but Biden leads there by 73,025 votes, and Trump’s lawsuit in that state “only affects a small number of ballots” and challenges procedures authorized by Pennsylvania law. In addition, most of his legal team quit the day before hearings began, which the judge refused to postpone.
(Related story: Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejects Trump campaign’s complaints about the state’s observer protocols; read that story here.)
On top of that, Trump’s legal efforts elsewhere also appear to be disintegrating: “As President Donald Trump’s legal efforts challenging the election results continue to hit dead ends, his campaign and legal teams have descended into chaos behind the scenes as many brace for the end of the post-election fight, multiple sources tell ABC News.” (Read that story here.)
Of course, legal challenges can succeed only if there are actual and remediable problems with the election results. Trump claims “fraud” occurred, but the real-life facts don’t back him up, and while baseless rhetoric has gotten him far in the political arena, it won’t get him anything in the courts, a fact of life he doesn’t appear to grasp. According to Reuters, “Legal experts say the lawsuits have little chance of changing the outcome.” That’s what I read in other sources, too. Reuters noted that, “A senior Biden legal adviser dismissed the litigation as ‘theatrics, not really lawsuits,'” and that appears to be what Trump is actually up to, the idea being to keep his supporters involved in a post-presidency movement.
Keep in mind, though, that election lawsuits fall into two discrete categories — the challenges we’re seeing now, and election contests — and the latter can’t be filed until after certification. However, the legal grounds, factual allegations, evidence and proofs, are largely the same; and if the Trump campaign fails in court at this stage, it’s very unlikely to prevail in post-certification election contests.
States will begin certifying later this month and into the first week of December; the electors meet in their respective states to cast electoral votes on Dec. 14, and the formal tallying of these votes in Congress occurs in the first week of January.