Trump's various attempts to challenge election results

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My opinion - the Trump effort to subvert the election via judicial means is futile.

I am extremely convinced of one thing, however.

The so-called Trump lawsuits serve one purpose, and one purpose alone, to make Trump a viable 2024 candidate.

Trump had been denied a second term, and thus, his current objective is to ensure that in the future he would remain a viable candidate. The lawsuits generate the illusion of statistical uncertainty with the election results, and consequently, voters would be more inclined to feel that any future vote for trump in any future election won't go to total waste.

That is why, in a nutshell, the Trump campaign is suing like no tomorrow.

Desperate attempt to

A. Avoid prison

B. Avoid having to flee the country the ultimate act of a loser.

Speaking of losers, I read an article earlier about how a bunch of delusional trump supporters who made bets on trump to win at an online bookie called “Betfair” (.com, I guess) were losing their s**t over the website calling the election for Biden after the electoral college vote. They seem to still not realize trump lost the election and don’t think they should have to pay up because trump still has “legal challenges,” to the “fraudulent election.”

Shortly after midnight, however, as a flood of mail-in and absentee ballots began entering the count, the Trump red tide of victory began turning Joe Biden blue. As these mail-in and absentee ballots were tabulated, the President’s large leads in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin simply vanished into thin Biden leads.
(...)
In the wake of this astonishing reversal of Trump fortune, a national firestorm has erupted over the fairness and integrity of one of the most sacrosanct institutions in America – our presidential election system.

The weight of evidence and patterns of irregularities are such that it is irresponsible for anyone – especially the mainstream media – to claim there is “no evidence” of fraud or irregularities.

Voters unable to complete their ballot may bring one or two persons with them into the voting booth to assist them, or they may ask pollworkers to provide assistance.

Voters may not be assisted by their employer, union representative nor an agent of the employer or union representative. [emphasis in original]

I thought it was already well-established that the "flood of mail-in and absentee ballots" arrived and were counted after the in-person voting, and that this was the reason behind the "astonishing reversal of Trump fortune".

^ It’s all a con and everyone but trump supporters can see it. All they have to do is keep making headlines with their wild accusations and fools keep sending them money, soo.. why would they stop the BS train?

^I bet he’s funnelled a lot more than a mere few Million into his businesses.. I mean, just look at the cost of his golf trips - much of the money going to his own clubs.. ~$142,000,000.00 (But I think that includes security costs) https://trumpgolfcount.com/

It had long been obvious that if Trump lost the election, his exit would be graceless.

It was hard to see him conceding defeat in any circumstance, even if he got buried in a landslide. Having flouted norms throughout his presidency, there was no way that he would begin honoring them on his way out the door. Given to insulting his opponents and complaining of unfairness in the best of circumstances, he wasn’t going to find resources of classiness hitherto not in evidence.

Yet Trump hasn’t even managed to clear the low bar of realistic expectations for his post-election conduct.

All in all, it’s the worst thing he’s done in his presidency and the worst exit of a defeated president in U.S. history, an effort that is not less infamous for being incompetent and risible.

Vote fraud is a serious offense against democracy and the law, and should be combated as such. But the Trump team and its allies have not been able to provide evidence of widespread illegal activity despite an intense, indeed fevered, search for it. While the rhetoric of Trump’s lawyers has emphasized a fraudulent, stolen election, the arguments in court typically haven’t been about alleged fraud at all. They have focused on changes in procedures prior to the election, disparities in how counties handled absentee ballots, and the distance Republican observers were kept from the counting — none of which has come close to supporting the drastic remedies Trump has sought.

Trump was clearly preparing the ground for his fraud allegations prior to the election. His obsessive attacks on mail-in voting were out of proportion to the threat such voting represented. Yes, mail-in voting is less secure than in-person voting. Yes, some states were ill prepared to handle the tsunami of mail-in ballots. But the states that have long had robust mail-in voting programs, such as Colorado, Utah, and Oregon, haven’t experienced widespread fraud.

In eschewing vote by mail, Trump created an even heavier political lift for himself by urging his voters to vote only in-person, thus kicking away an opportunity to bank votes and requiring a massive same-day turnout to overcome what Democrats had been building over the course of weeks. If a quarter of the Georgia Republicans who cast absentee ballots in the primary but didn’t vote at all in the fall election had instead voted by mail, Trump would have won the state. By contrast, in Florida, where Trump won more comfortably than he did in 2016, the state GOP didn’t discourage voting by mail. In the Georgia runoffs for Senate, even Trump has urged people to vote by mail.

Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting were useful, however, in enabling him to discredit the election. The politicization of voting methods meant that same-day ballots would be heavily Trump while absentee ballots would skew Democratic. The fact that key states counted the same-day ballots first created the impression of a Trump lead that got overtaken in the dead of the night or in the days after the election.

That Trump would look for a way to undermine the legitimacy of a loss should have been obvious from the 2016 campaign, when he promised, with characteristic frankness, to accept the result “if I win.”

The failure of this post-election campaign has not made it costless. Trump has encouraged millions of voters to believe that their votes do not count toward election results. He has sent them on a hunt for participants in a nonexistent conspiracy against the public. He has directed scorn and rage at state officials, including Republi­cans who backed him loyally, whose sin has been to follow the law instead of indulging him. And he has set a terrible precedent for future elections, especially ones that turn out closer than this one did.

Republicans who have not been willing to parrot his claim of a landslide victory have generally not contradicted it, either. Instead they have resorted to offering one shabby excuse after another for the president’s conduct. They say, for example, that he has every right to make his case in court, a claim that runs against decades of more sensible statements from Republicans about the evils of frivolous litigation.

Or they say that Trump and his supporters have raised important questions. In many cases that is an ex­tremely charitable assessment. Take the widely broadcast claim that turnout in Milwaukee jumped suspiciously from 71 percent in 2012, when Obama was on the ticket, to 85 percent with Biden this year. The Republican National Committee spread that one — and didn’t correct the record when it was shown that turnout in 2012 was actually 87 percent, and therefore hadn’t risen at all. The lawsuits don’t merely ask questions, anyway: They request action, typically in the form of throwing out the ballots of thousands of law-abiding voters.

Another quasi-defense of Trump has been that many of his opponents refused to recognize the legitimacy of his election, too, and set out to undermine his new administration with investigations. That’s true. But this was not behavior to emulate, and Trump has exceeded it. Barack Obama did not delay the transition, let alone attack other Democrats for allowing it to proceed. Neither he nor Hillary Clinton urged state legislators to override their states’ voters.

Al Gore came closer to winning the 2000 election than Trump did this year, and put up a political and legal fight. But he didn’t spread conspiracy theories, urge that officials be put in jail for refusing to back his effort, or file dozens of lawsuits that got laughed out of court. Trump has plumbed new depths.

Through much of this, most elected Republicans followed their habit of keeping their heads down. This reflex started as an understandable, and probably prudent, decision. After he won in 2016, Trump was going to be president no matter what. But this posture hardened into an unwillingness by most congressional Republicans to criticize Trump on much of anything unless the provocation was intolerable.

Their fear of Trump — of his ability to mobilize a lot of their own voters against them with one tweet or statement — was well founded.

It’s not surprising that Trump would disgrace himself after an election loss; it is remarkable that he’s done it this grotesquely, and with so many who should know better effectively aiding and abetting him.