President Donald Trump continues to refuse to admit that he lost this year’s election — to say the least. He claims that widespread fraud plagued the process, and his top ally Rudy Giuliani has gone into further unhinged detail about the president’s team’s ideas, claiming that a centrally planned Democratic conspiracy to rig the election for Biden unfolded during the recent presidential race. There is no legitimate evidence for these claims. During time on television following this Monday’s electoral college vote, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) heavily criticized Trump’s post-election behavior, sounding an alarm about the potential negative impact on democracy.
On CNBC, Romney said as follows:
‘The biggest concern that I have is that people here genuinely believe that somehow this election was stolen, and there’s not evidence of that. The president was saying it was stolen even before Election Day happened. He said if he loses, it would be fraud. Well, no one knows that… I thought I was going to win too when I ran for president in 2012. I didn’t. I didn’t go out and say ‘fraud.’ We have a process. We count the votes. That’s the way it is… We’re the democratic leader of the world. What’s going on now, I’m afraid, is terribly dispiriting to people all over the globe.’
On CBS on Tuesday, Romney also pointedly observed that the “principles that have long been the hallmark of my party are very much in question.”
Mitt Romney on CBS This Morning:
"The principles that have long been the hallmark of my party are very much in question."
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) December 15, 2020
Trump has, essentially, rejected the basic democratic process in the United States. The Department of Homeland Security, the outgoing U.S. Attorney General, and local election officials of both major parties from around the country have confirmed that there is no legitimate evidence of election outcome-altering fraud. The result of the reasonably free and fair democratic process in the United States was the election of Joe Biden as president — and Trump has rejected this result in favor of his ramshackle conspiracy theories. No matter whatever haughty claims emerge from the president and his allies, the very obvious net result of Trump’s efforts is a severe attack on democracy in the United States. In Wisconsin, Trump sought retroactive changes to election procedure that would have invalidated hundreds of thousands of ballots, among other examples.
On Tuesday, Trump himself retweeted a post calling for the jailing of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both of whom are Republicans and who have faced criticism for refusing to capitulate to Trump’s efforts to steal the election. At one point, Trump directly called Kemp, raising the possibility of a special session of the state legislature, where Georgia legislators could appoint members of the electoral college for the state who back the president regardless of the popular vote outcome in the state. Kemp refused to go along with this plan.
Featured Image is edited and via Gage Skidmore on WikiMedia Commons, available under a Creative Commons License
