Donald Trump undercuts American democracy as he clings to power - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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President Donald Trump is trying to steal a free and fair election that he lost by a wide margin to President-elect Joe Biden by tearing at the most basic principle of American democracy: He's trying to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes.
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He asked state Republican leaders in Michigan to visit him Friday, hinting at a possible attempt to convince them to ignore Biden's big win in the state and send a slate of electors to the Electoral College that backs him and not the President-elect.
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Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who rampaged through an unhinged news conference Thursday, is in effect baselessly arguing that troves of Democratic mail-in ballots, many of them cast by Black voters, are illegal and that Trump has therefore won the election with room to spare.
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Giuliani's team is also making absurd claims of a massive, centralized, Democratic conspiracy involving long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, Cuba, China, the Clinton Foundation and George Soros to throw the election.
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"The problem is, he's speaking for the President of the United States," veteran Republican elections lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg told CNN's Wolf Blitzer."It is a sweeping, totally unsubstantiated attack on one of the basic foundations of the country -- our free elections."
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"I am worried that any lawmakers who attend this ridiculous meet and greet are really attending a conspiratorial meeting to steal the election," Tribe told CNN's Erin Burnett. "There's no question that the meeting that is being held is illegal. There is no question that it really is designed quite corruptly to take away people's right to vote."
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"It's quite clear that Republican, as well as Democratic judges, are going to follow the law when there is no ambiguity," Tribe said. "The only guy who seems to be uninterested in the law is Rudy Giuliani, and God knows what he is auditioning for."
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Trump would need to cancel out Biden's victories in multiple states to come anywhere near the 270 electoral votes to clinch the presidency.
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CNN election law expert Rick Hasen wrote on his website that the President's meddling with the Wayne County election officials "is very dangerous for our democracy, as it is an attempt to thwart the will of the voters through political pressure from the President."
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Republicans, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who have given the President latitude to challenge the result without mounting a credible case, now begin to look as though they are facilitating his most extreme assault yet on US democracy.
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"That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're lucky," Krebs wrote.
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President-elect Biden, watching from Wilmington, Delaware, as he builds out his Cabinet, said that Trump was sending "incredibly damaging messages" to the rest of the world about how democracy works.
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"It's going to be another incident where he will go down in history as being one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history. ... It's just outrageous what he's doing."
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The US on Thursday hit another one-day record for new cases -- more than 182,000, according to tallies from Johns Hopkins University.
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while the optimism of officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx over a coming vaccine were genuine, their warnings that Americans should not gather this Thanksgiving as the virus rages comprehensively debunked Trump's claims the pandemic is already over.
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After hundreds of voters called into the canvass board Zoom meeting to express outrage about the potential effort to disenfranchise Detroit-area voters, the two GOP board members relented and voted to certify the results Tuesday night, but they then filed affidavits Wednesday asking to "rescind" their action -- which is not expected to have any practical effect on the certification.
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CNN's Dana Bash and Gloria Borger, for instance, quoted sources as saying that the President, who believes that the Russia investigation dented his own legitimacy, is now trying to ruin Biden's presidency. And in the end, the courts -- and the institutional system that Trump has relentlessly pummeled over the last four years -- still seem likely to hold firm against his power-hungry schemes.
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He made a racist argument that election results should be overturned by tossing out hundreds of thousands of votes in large cities dominated by Black voters, including Detroit and Philadelphia, where he claimed the number of voter fraud cases "could fill a library."
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"The only surprise I would have found in this is that Philadelphia hadn't cheated in this election, because for the last 60 years, they've cheated in just about every single election. You could say the same thing about Detroit," Giuliani said at one point. "Each one of these cities are cities that are controlled by Democrats, which means they can get away with anything they want to do."
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One affidavit Giuliani highlighted has already been rejected by a judge, and many have been vague, contradictory and devoid of evidence, showing isolated incidents or suspicions of illegal behavior not rooted in facts.
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Highlighting the Trump campaign's naked effort to disenfranchise voters, the judge explicitly noted that there was no evidence of fraud related to the ballots the Trump campaign was seeking to throw out: "There exists no evidence of any fraud, misconduct, or any impropriety with respect to the challenged ballots," Baldi wrote in his opinion. "There is nothing in the record and nothing alleged that would lead to the conclusion that any of the challenged ballots were submitted by someone not qualified or entitled to vote in this election."
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"Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election," Romney said in a statement posted to Twitter.