On Thursday, top Trump ally Rudy Giuliani led a press conference at which the president’s team attempted to make the case for their allegation that widespread fraud plagued the recent presidential election. Giuliani totally failed in this effort, although Trump and his allies don’t exactly seem as though they’re deterred in their mission to prove the existence of this imaginary election fraud. Giuliani zeroed in on what he characterized as statistical near-impossibilities in post-Election Day changes in the vote tallies, but he and the rest of the president’s allies who’ve raised this point have consistently failed to acknowledge the fact that mail-in ballots, which were counted after Election Day ballots in some areas, often leaned Democratic partly because of the president’s own open hostility towards mail-in voting.
In the time after Election Day, vote tallies changed against the president’s favor because valid votes were getting counted. The suggestion that at least some post-Election Day changes to vote tallies are unexplained or dubious is totally false. Before Election Day arrived, the delay in counting mail-in ballots in some areas had been openly broadcast far and wide, because of legal requirements to hold off on counting these mail-in ballots. There’s no mysterious conspiracy here.
Giuliani, however, was not done. At his Thursday press conference, he pushed the idea that there was some kind of centrally-coordinated, national conspiracy on the part of Democrats to commit electoral fraud and swing the election to Joe Biden. The utter disconnection of this claim from reality feels difficult to overstate. No — there was no secret cabal of Democratic leaders meeting in back rooms plotting ways to commit fraud and get away with it, and there’s nothing at all that meaningfully points to this scenario as a possibility.
The so-called evidence “would suggest that there was a plan from a centralized place to execute these various acts of voter fraud, specifically focused on big cities, and specifically focused on, as you would imagine, big cities controlled by Democrats,” Giuliani claimed. Giuliani added that because of the Democratic leadership in these cities, “they can get away with anything they wanna do.”
Watch these unhinged Giuliani comments below:
Giuliani, shorter: Black votes in big cities were fraudulent pic.twitter.com/Ht1zAviEbN
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 19, 2020
These statements are conspiratorial conjecture. He’s openly conflating his conspiratorial “hunches” with basic, duly documented reality. There’s no meaningful evidence — it’s just not there. Nevertheless, he added the following:
‘Isn’t the logical conclusion, that I think any jury would accept as they heard this evidence, that somebody had this plan? Maybe that was always the plan — to do this very, very questionable form of voting, which has been criticized by President Carter, by Secretary Baker, by most experts on election reform? I think the logical conclusion is this is a common plan, a common scheme, that comes right directly from the Democrat Party, and it comes from the candidate… That’s the reason why he probably didn’t have to go out and campaign.’
Biden — no matter how many times that the Trump team claims otherwise! — did not hide in his basement before Election Day. His campaign merely stayed away from holding large, in-person rallies because of the COVID-19 threat. Instead, the Biden campaign frequently held smaller events, some of which were geared towards getting broadcast live in order to extend their reach.
Watch some of Giuliani’s comments below:
Giuliani's reenacts a scene from "My Cousin Vinny" and then casually accuses Biden of crimes. Unhinged. pic.twitter.com/3RKJeX8cWs
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 19, 2020
"That's the reason why [Biden] probably didn't have to go out and campaign" — Giuliani's final argument (he has no evidence for this) is that the Democratic Party and Biden conspired to commit massive election fraud pic.twitter.com/5MJr2mZPRi
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 19, 2020
