Perks and prestige
President signals he’ll persist even after votes are cast
President rewards supporters with federal board seats./
President Donald Trump signaled that he will continue to challenge the results of the 2020 election even after the electoral college meets Monday in most state capitols to cast votes solidifying Joe Biden’s victory.
In a Fox News interview that aired Sunday morning, Trump repeated his false claims of election fraud and said his legal team will continue to pursue challenges, despite the Supreme Court’s recent dismissal of a longshot bid to overturn the results in four states Biden won.
“No, it’s not over,” Trump told host Brian Kilmeade in the interview, which was taped Saturday at the Army-navy game at the U.S. Military Academy. “We keep going, and we’re going to continue to go forward. We have numerous local cases. We’re, you know, in some of the states that got rigged and robbed from us. We won every one of them. We won Pennsylvania. We won Michigan. We won Georgia by a lot.”
Trump lost those swing states and others to Biden, who won 306 electoral votes; Trump won 232.
Trump’s comments came a day before electors meet in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots for president and vice president.
The electors are expected to follow the vote of their state. After voting, they must sign six certificates, one of which is submitted to the president of the Senate, currently Vice President Mike Pence. Both chambers of Congress —the House and the Senate —will meet in joint session on Jan. 6 to officially count the votes.
In the Fox News interview, Kilmeade outlined the process and asked Trump how it affects his chances for successfully challenging the results. Trump demurred.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’re going to speed it up as much as we can, but you can only go so fast. They give us very little time.”
Trump also declined to say whether he plans to attend Biden’s inauguration next month.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” he said.
Once the voting is complete, Biden is expected to deliver remarks Monday night in Wilmington, Del., on “the electoral college vote certification and the strength and resilience of our democracy,” according to his transition team.
Even if Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s victory come up short, some of the president’s allies have suggested in recent days that they will try to change how states conduct future elections.
“I think the campaign is taking our arguments that we tried to get in front of the U.S. Supreme Court — they are now going to take those, I think, state by state,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who spearheaded the lawsuit that was dismissed by the Supreme Court, said in an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox.
Paxton added that “they are legitimately good constitutional arguments that don’t depend on actually proving every little instance of fraud.”
Public polling shows that many Republican voters doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 election, prompting some observers to worry that Trump’s refusal to concede will further divide the country.
A CBS News poll released Sunday shows that 62 percent of registered voters believe that the election is over and that it is time to move on. But 75 percent of Republicans said that the election is not over and that it should still be contested. About 18 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2020 said they consider Biden the legitimate winner.
Attorney General William Barr said this month that he has “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” undercutting Trump’s claims of widespread and significant voting irregularities.
The president has continued to make baseless accusations of fraud, calling the election “a sham and a shame” and dismissing concerns that his actions are driving Americans further apart.