Outgoing President Donald Trump is continuing to push utter lies about the recently concluded presidential election, which he is desperately trying to convince observers that he won, despite reality telling an entirely different story. On Tuesday, amidst a pretty much daily barrage of nonsensical conspiracy theories, Trump claimed — in all-caps, for some reason — that “DEMOCRATS DUMPED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF BALLOTS IN THE SWING STATES LATE IN THE EVENING,” adding: “IT WAS A RIGGED ELECTION!!!” This alleged fraud unequivocally did not take place — outgoing U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, an agency at the Department of Homeland Security, and local election officials of both major parties from around the country have all confirmed that there’s no evidence of election outcome-altering fraud. Election results changed as workers counted ballots.
THE DEMOCRATS DUMPED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF BALLOTS IN THE SWING STATES LATE IN THE EVENING. IT WAS A RIGGED ELECTION!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2020
Not only have officials across the country and across levels of government confirmed that there’s no evidence of systematic fraud affecting the outcome of the election, but conservative and liberal judges, including a slew of Trump’s own appointees, have also rejected the claims from the president’s team in a steady stream of post-election court losses for the GOP. Recently, every single justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, including Trump’s three nominees for that bench, rejected arguments that were at the center of a Texas-led lawsuit in which top Republicans, including the president’s own team, sought the invalidation of the election outcome in four states where Biden won. Two conservative justices said that they’d have heard the case, but they added that they wouldn’t have granted the Republican demands.
When does it end? When is the Republican fight against democracy going to draw to a close? Michael Flynn, who recently received a pardon from the president, has publicly presented the idea of declaring martial law and tasking the military with holding a new election. Obviously, this tactic is entirely authoritarian and would represent a fundamental attack on the democratic process in the United States — but at one point, Flynn served in the Trump administration as the president’s national security adviser.
Prominent conservative attorney Lin Wood, who has worked with the Trump-allied attorney Sidney Powell, has also pushed the idea of declaring martial law. Meanwhile, top Trump defender Rudy Giuliani has reportedly privately pushed the idea of tasking the Department of Homeland Security with seizing election management machines from around the country, although Giuliani was reportedly informed that the department does not have this authority.
Check out Twitter’s response below:
