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(CNN) – President Donald Trump found himself embroiled in an election conundrum of his own creation on Friday: He continued to promote false claims that the election was a “total scam,” even after another humiliating reprimand from the Pennsylvania court, while insisting on fact that his supporters are expected to participate in the second-round elections of the Georgia Senate in January, despite concerns about the fraud he has sown.
With the eyes of the political universe focused on the generation of voters in Georgia, where the two second round elections will determine which party controls the United States Senate, the president’s relentless attacks on the state’s voting apparatus, his tabulation process and its Republican secretary of state, causes confusion among Republican strategists and state leaders who fear that those attacks will erode confidence in elections at a time when they need to rally as many voters as possible to re-elect Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue on January 5 and clinging to his firewall against a Democrat-controlled White House and House of Representatives.
President-elect Joe Biden became the first Democrat in 28 years to win Georgia, and Trump has questioned the state’s election results for weeks. He made wild claims in his public comments, retweeted lawyers and aides who demanded the state election results overturned, and described the state verification, which was a manual recount of each ballot, as “useless” due to the his objections. to the signature verification process. After Georgia certified its results, which confirmed Biden’s victory in the state, Trump’s campaign required another recount, which is unlikely to undo his defeat.
Trump escalated those attacks when he spoke to reporters on Thanksgiving Day, including when he promoted his next campaign visit to Georgia on December 5, claiming without evidence that he was “robbed” with “fraud everywhere” and called the Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “enemy of the people”.
When asked by a reporter why he expected Republican voters to trust after what he described as an illegitimate election and to favor Loeffler and Perdue, Trump said he warned the two senators: “Listen, they have a system. fraudulent … be very careful.
But he backtracked on Friday when he tweeted a Newsmax article saying his supporters were considering an election boycott in Georgia on fraud allegations. After falsely calling the November election a “scam” that he hopes to cancel, he encouraged people to “go out and help David and Kelly, two GREAT people.”
Trump’s rhetoric, and how it could undermine Georgia’s electoral system, has troubled Republican strategists such as CNN state collaborator Alice Stewart, who stressed that fundamental Republican issues, including maintaining a conservative majority in the court Supreme and the prevention of Democratic court packing and the implementation of liberal policies such as the Green New Deal will depend on Republicans defending both Senate seats.
“Certainly if this continues, it will be a problem,” Stewart said of Trump’s baseless allegations of the vote in Georgia. “I think all legal and legitimate votes should be counted, but at this stage of the game, to claim that there is widespread election fraud, this claim that there is an election hoax, we need to see some evidence. We need to see what he’s talking about.
“Otherwise, you have to leave him and move on, because it’s not useful for the process,” Stewart said, noting that she and many of her family members in Georgia voted for Trump because they support his policies.
Republican donor Dan Eberhart called on lower-level Republican leaders to “come forward or come out right away” and openly contest Trump’s claims before he causes irreparable damage to his party.
“The party and the Republicans need to focus on strengthening (Senate Majority Leader) Mitch McConnell right now, who is winning these two seats in Georgia, and then we need to focus on winning the next election, taking back the 2022 House and They can’t do it if Trump froze everything, “Eberhart noted on CNN’s” Erin Burnett OutFront “Friday night.
“These Republican Senators, Republican Congressmen, Republican Governors are afraid of Trump’s tweet and I think we have to get over it,” he said.
Still don’t accept the inevitable
Trump took another disconcerting turn on Friday. After declaring Thursday night that he would leave the White House in January if Biden’s victory was certified by the constituency, he made the absurd assertion on Twitter that “Biden can only enter the White House as president if he can prove it. “80,000,000 votes” were not obtained fraudulently or illegally, “although Trump’s authority expires on January 20 when his term ends and his team has been unable to offer any credible evidence of fraud.
Trump’s own designee, US Election Assistance Commission Chairman Ben Hovland, rejected the premise of Trump’s tweet on Friday night. (The Commission is responsible, in part, for the testing and certification of voting machines and works closely with election officials across the country.)
“Those 80 million votes that President-elect Biden was confirmed. They have been confirmed by the men and women who run our elections across the country, “Hovland said on” Erin Burnett OutFront. “” We have certified results in several states now, and once again the people who run our elections have said those are the totals “.
“I believe the president and his allies have a win and 38 defeats, and have not provided evidence of widespread fraud in the courts,” he added of Trump’s judicial battles. “Clearly Joe Biden won this race, the electoral officials who run our elections have said, and that’s how our democracy works.”
Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, and has now become the first presidential candidate to get more than 80 million votes, with a margin of over 6 million over Trump.
A reproach in Pennsylvania
The paucity of evidence supporting Trump’s fraud allegations was once again clarified in the opinion of a group of three U.S. Court of Appeals for the third circuit on Friday, who denied the campaign’s request for Trump to resubmit his lawsuit contesting the results in Pennsylvania, where Biden enjoys a margin of more than 80,000 votes.
“Calling an unfair election doesn’t mean it is,” Trump-nominated judge Stephanos Bibas wrote to the jury. “The allegations require specific indictments and therefore evidence. We don’t have any here.
Bibas highlighted the gap between the incendiary allegations Trump and his allies made outside the courtroom and the feeble allegations appearing in their court documents, noting that Trump’s campaign never claimed that “no ballot was fraudulent or issued. by an illegal voter.
“He never claimed that any defendant treated Trump’s campaign or his votes any worse than he treated Biden’s campaign or his votes,” Bibas wrote. “Calling something discrimination doesn’t mean it is.”
The three-judge panel also called Trump’s campaign efforts to deny Pennsylvania voting certification “unprecedented”, adding that the campaign’s claims “have no merit.”
“Removing millions of ballots by post would be drastic and unprecedented, deprive a large chunk of the electorate of the right to vote and also disrupt all negative voting competitions,” the opinion said.
Although the defeat added to Trump’s humiliating campaign tally of more than 30 casualties or withdrawals from the courts in their attempt to contest the election results, President’s attorney Jenna Ellis said on Twitter that her team was moving. in court. Supreme
Ben Ginsberg, a Republican election attorney who co-chaired the 2013 Bipartisan Presidential Commission for Election Administration, said the Supreme Court dealing with the case would be a positive step toward ending Trump’s counterproductive efforts to overturn the case. democracy. .
“We just have to hope he takes this Pennsylvania case to the Supreme Court, because that will put an end to the other myth that the judges will leave him for him and follow his orders, because they are Republican judges,” Ginsberg said in “Erin Burnett OutFront. . ” on Fridays.
“What his supporters will see, once he’s out of office, is that there has been a long streak of setbacks, setbacks, defeats and that, in fact, will be part of his legacy when we look back.”
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