Two additional top Senate Republicans — Georgia’s Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue — have announced their support of a plan to object to the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s win when Congress meets to certify the electoral college numbers on Wednesday. Loeffler will be in office and able to vote in support of the effort, but Perdue will not be in the Senate, meaning that he’s simply cheering from the sidelines on behalf of the Trump team’s attempt to overturn the election outcome. On Tuesday, Trump himself touted Loeffler and Perdue’s support of the effort to overturn the election.
Falsely alleging that certified election results from certain areas of the country are fraudulent, Trump petulantly tweeted as follows:
‘Pleased to announce that @KLoeffler & @sendavidperdue have just joined our great #StopTheSteal group of Senators. They will fight the ridiculous Electoral College Certification of Biden. How do you certify numbers that have now proven to be wrong and, in many cases, fraudulent!’
Pleased to announce that @KLoeffler & @sendavidperdue have just joined our great #StopTheSteal group of Senators. They will fight the ridiculous Electoral College Certification of Biden. How do you certify numbers that have now proven to be wrong and, in many cases, fraudulent!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2021
Georgia, get out and VOTE for two great Senators, @KLoeffler and @sendavidperdue. So important to do so!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2021
Notably, Trump didn’t even mention the fact that Perdue won’t even be in the Senate on Wednesday, because technically, his seat his currently vacant. His term ended earlier this month, and whoever wins his race against Democrat Jon Ossoff won’t be in the Senate until after the results are certified — and if the race is close, then this certification could possibly take awhile. Meanwhile, in Georgia, Democrat Raphael Warnock is fighting to unseat Loeffler, and if both Ossoff and Warnock win, then the Senate will be under Democratic control.
The scope of Republican opposition to Biden’s win suggests that there’s a nonzero chance of a majority of the party uniting in opposition to the legitimacy of a Democratic presidential election victory, which is troubling, to say the least. At this point, much of the GOP has embraced Trump’s brand of anti-democratic, wannabe authoritarianism. Just last weekend, the news emerged that Trump had spent about an hour on the phone with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), pressuring the top Republican to find a way to overturn the state’s certified election outcome. Trump based his demands on claims that fraud swung the outcome away from him in the first place, but in the real world, carrying out the president’s demands would require fraudulently doctoring Georgia’s results because of the total lack of meaningful evidence for his position.
Check out Twitter’s response below: