Trump nears a dead end, but repeats victory claim
Biden is all set to take office on Jan 20 as the 46th US president Trump’s options narrow as Michigan backs president-elect’s victory Georgia becomes first of swing states to certify results, affirming Biden win
WASHINGTON — Joe Biden on Saturday reached the two-week mark since becoming presidentelect, with President Donald Trump stinging from back-toback setbacks in his desperate, unprecedented bid to undo his election defeat.
Trump has refused to concede and is seeking to invalidate or overturn the results through lawsuits and recounts in a number of states, claiming — without proof — widespread voter fraud.
That effort, which critics call an unparalleled push by a sitting president to subvert the will of voters, has met with little success. Trump’s bid to cling to power appeared ever more tenuous after Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced that a manual recount had confirmed Biden as the winner there.
A pair of Michigan Republican leaders delivered another blow when they declared on Friday night after a White House meeting with Trump: “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan.”
Trump, in his first public comments in days about the election outcome, again asserted “I won”
during a White House event on Friday. After a series of court defeats, the Trump team is resting its hopes on getting Republican-controlled legislatures in battleground states won by Biden to set aside the results and declare Trump the winner, according to three people familiar with the plan.
It is a long-shot effort focusing on Michigan and Pennsylvania for now, but even if both those states flipped to the president he would need to overturn the vote in another state to vault ahead of Biden in the Electoral College. —
Adefiant Donald Trump again falsely insisted he “won” re-election in his first public appearance for a week on Friday, as the US president appeared increasingly isolated over his long-shot bid to stay in power.
Claiming against all odds that a path to victory remains viable, and facing pushback from fellow Republicans alarmed by his effort to overturn results, Trump invited Michigan lawmakers to the White House on Friday as part of a bid to subvert the will of voters in key states.
But if he expected them to parrot the president’s line and publicly support efforts to overturn election results in Michigan — which Biden won by 155,000 votes — he was mistaken.
The Republican legislators stood firm, saying they would honour the election’s outcome.
“We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan,” the state’s Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield said in a joint statement after meeting Trump. “Michigan’s certification process should be a deliberate process free from threat and intimidation,” they added.
The statement came after Trump made brief comments about the election while announcing new pharmaceutical pricing plans at a rare post-election address to reporters. “Big pharma ran millions of dollars of negative advertisements against me during the campaign — which I
won, by the way, but you know, we’ll find that out,” Trump said. He exited the briefing room without taking questions.
Logic dictates that Trump’s days in the White House are numbered, with key states that sealed President-elect Biden’s win rapidly approaching deadlines to certify their election results.
In a second blow on Friday to Trump’s election interference efforts, Georgia became the first of those states to formally certify its results, affirming that Biden won in the southern state by 12,670 votes, or 0.26 per cent out of some five million ballots cast.
“Numbers don’t lie,” said Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia. “The numbers reflect the verdict of the people.”
Trump has been waging a last-ditch effort to throw out ballots in counties that voted heavily Democratic, force recounts and otherwise delay the process of finalising state results before the Electoral College votes to confirm the next president on December 14. In the latest in a series of presidential interventions not seen in modern US
politics, he had earlier insisted on Twitter that if Georgia let him “expose hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots”, it would give him “a BIG VICTORY” in the state.
The president spent most of the day hunkered down in the White House, fuming about the “Rigged Election” and retweeting conservative personalities — including a QAnon conspiracy supporter — arguing that his rival’s victory was fraudulent. Retiring Senator Lamar Alexander became the latest Republican lawmaker seeking to nudge Trump into triggering a formal transition process. Biden “has a very good chance” of becoming the next president, Alexander said, and should be afforded “all” resources necessary for a smooth transfer of power. Despite Trump’s election denial, Biden is fully preparing to take over on January 20.
On Friday — his 78th birthday — Biden huddled in Wilmington, Delaware, with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the top Democrats in Congress, telling them there is “a lot of work to do.” Trump’s Michigan gambit raised eyebrows among those in his party.
Nevertheless VicePresident Mike Pence took Trump’s message of defiance to Georgia as he campaigned with two Republicans whose runoff elections on January 5 will determine which party controls the Senate next year. “We’re going to keep fighting until every legal vote is counted. We’re going to keep fighting until every illegal vote is thrown out,” Pence told a crowd in Canton. —