America the beautiful is taking another ugly political turn as Donald Trump puts national security at risk by refusing to cooperate with Joe Biden’s transition to the presidency.
While Americans struggle with threats from Covid-19 to climate change, Trump makes no pretense of governing, spending much of his time playing golf, refusing to concede the fact that he lost.
But even some ranking White House officials admit the president’s outlook is off the mark.
Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien told The Hill on Monday that “it appears clear … that Biden and running mate Kamala Harris won the election and should be given the time they need to get their people and policies in place.”
With their cases crumbling, Trump’s lawyers are starting to back away from multiple lawsuits supposedly intended to overturn Biden’s election victory.
“Voters in four states who had brought longshot lawsuits to disrupt President-elect Joe Biden’s win and went nowhere in court … dropped their cases Monday morning,” reports CNN.
“The cases were short-lived in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania federal courts, and fed into a pro-Trump legal strategy that’s almost certain to fail to block Biden’s presidential win,” the news network says.
In fact, the Trump campaign’s intensive fund-raising of late appears to be more directed at funneling cash into Trump’s own political pockets than at supporting its barrage of lawsuits.
And big Republican donors are noticing.
As one unnamed donor recently told USA Today: “Republican donors are about to seek extreme social distance from Donald J. Trump. President Trump should…call off the legal dogs.”
“In the two weeks since Election Day, the Trump campaign and its proxies … filed nearly two dozen lawsuits in at least seven states, a blizzard of litigation that has — without much evidence — challenged the integrity of … the election,” the New York Times reported on Monday.
In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign “scrapped a major part of its federal lawsuit challenging the election results” in the state, the Washington Post says.
That “pared down” Pennsyvania lawsuit drops claims that Trump observers were prevented from watching the votes being counted — focusing instead the claim that “Republicans were illegally disadvantaged because some Democratic-leaning counties allowed voters to fix errors on their mail ballots,” the Post says.
But that means there are no longer enough votes in question to matter.
Instead of the nearly 700,000 votes challenged by the original version of the suit, it now involves no more than a few thousand — while Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania totals nearly 69,000.
“Now you’re only talking about a handful of ballots,” said Cliff Levine, a lawyer representing the Democrats. “They would have absolutely no impact on the total count or on Joe Biden’s win over Donald Trump.”
But as a fundraising ploy, they could have a big impact on Trump’s coffers, at a time when he faces repayment of hundreds of millions of dollars in loans due shortly after he leaves office.
