‘A Decrepit Democratic Machine’

As they frantically searched for ways to salvage President Donald Trump’s failed reelection bid, his campaign pursued a dizzying game of legal hopscotch across six states that centered on the biggest prize of all: Pennsylvania. The strategy may have played well in front of television cameras and on talk radio.  But it has proved a disaster in court, where judges uniformly rejected their claims of vote fraud and found the campaign’s legal work amateurish, reports the Associated Press. In a ruling this weekend, US district judge Matthew Brann—a Republican and Federalist Society member in central Pennsylvania—compared the campaign’s legal arguments to “Frankenstein’s Monster”, concluding that Trump’s team offered only “speculative accusations”, not proof of rampant corruption. However, Trump does seem to acknowledge the writing on the wall: his administration cleared the way for Joe Biden’s transition to the White House, giving him access to briefings and funding, even as vowing to fight the results.

Now, as the legal doors close on Trump’s attempts to have courts do what voters would not do on Election Day and deliver him a second term, his efforts in Pennsylvania show how far he is willing to push baseless theories of widespread voter fraud. It was led by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, who descended on the state after the November 3 election as the count dragged on and the president played golf. “Some of the ballots looked suspicious,” Giuliani, 76, said of the vote count in Philadelphia as he stood behind a chain link fence, next to a sex shop. He maligned the city as being run by a “decrepit Democratic machine”.  

Just heating up was Trump’s plan to subvert the election through litigation and howls of fraud—the same tactic he had used to stave off losses in the business world. And it would soon spread far beyond Pennsylvania. Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who specialises in election law, called the Trump lawsuits dangerous. “It is a sideshow, but it’s a harmful sideshow,” Levitt says. “It’s a toxic sideshow. The continuing baseless, evidence-free claims of alternative facts are actually having an effect on a substantial number of Americans. They are creating the conditions for elections not to work in the future.” Not a single court has agreed with the strength of the case, but that did not stop Trump’s team from firing off nearly two dozen legal challenges to Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania. No judge ever found any evidence of election fraud in any state where the campaign sued. Instead, Trump lawyers found themselves backpedalling when pressed in court for admissible evidence, or dropping out when they were accused of helping derail the democratic process.