US election 2020: Trump’s fight over election he lost reveal most shameful weeks of his presidency
Donald Trump’s final weeks in office are turning into the most shameful of his presidency.
He has shown that he intends to use his remaining time in the White House to destroy the furniture on the way out regardless of the long term impact on the country.
The president’s quixotic and doomed legal campaign to overturn the results of the election he lost to Joe Biden is leading tens of millions of his supporters to believe that democracy in America is rotten to the core.
A new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll found about half of Republicans believe Trump ‘rightfully won’ the election. This means that at least 36 million of the 73 million who voted for Trump believe a massive fraud has been perpetrated on the country’s democratic process.
That is a toxic legacy that will linger long after Trump leaves the office as he deliberately continues to undermine public faith in the very institutions that have steered and safeguarded American democracy.
Like a wounded bull
Knowing that his time is coming to an end as a one-term president, Trump is behaving like a wounded bull. He is settling personal vendettas by sacking people who challenge him and ignoring a raging pandemic that he greatly contributed to. He has all but given up leading the nation, with 12 days of no scheduled events in the two weeks since Biden won the election. Trump is preventing his rightful successor from transitioning into the presidency as all new presidents should, with appropriate briefings, preparation and intelligence needed to carry out the world’s most important job.
Trump is also leading the senior Republican leadership into a place they will one day regret as they compromise their principles and common sense by supporting their increasingly mad king in his destructive folly to prove the election was fraudulent.
Giuliani’s wild press conference
On Friday (AEDT) the true madness of this moment in American politics was on stark display when Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani held a wild press conference where he directly accused Joe Biden of knowing about a nationwide plan to steal the election.
Giuliani made a raft of unsubstantiated claims about the discovery of numerous fraudulent mail-in votes, the appearance of mysterious ballot boxes in the middle of the night and the placement of hundreds of Republican election inspectors so they couldn’t see the counting.
He said it was ‘a common scheme’ by Democrat ‘crooks’ to commit massive voter fraud across numerous states.
Trump lawyer Sidney Powell went further claiming the fraud was a communist plot that was associated with Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, George Soros and the Clinton Foundation.
“Give us an opportunity to prove it in court and we will,’ Giuliani said. The only problem for Giuliani is that the courts are paying attention to the facts rather than the spin of Giuliani and Trump.
In at least 26 lawsuits filed across at least six states by the Trump team, no court has found a single case of election fraud or has overturned one vote.
Despite this, Trump continues to make the argument, day after day that it is an ‘open and shut’ case of voter fraud and that he has won the election.
Personal vendettas
When Christopher Krebs, the administration’s cybersecurity official responsible for securing the election, stated this week that the poll had been ‘the most secure in American history,’ Trump’s response was to sack him.
Trump’s personal vendettas also saw him sack his Defence Secretary Mark Esper, a pointless move given the looming change in administrations and one which only serves to destabilise the country’s military leadership.
Esper made the mistake of falling out with the president when he correctly refused Trump’s suggestion in June that active duty US troops be deployed on the streets to counter protesters.
Esper — along with Trump’s senior military leadership — also opposed Trump’s desire to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, fearing it would encourage the Taliban to resume widespread attacks in that country.
Trump this week ignored that advice and chose to halve the number of US troops in Afghanistan, rather than leave such a decision to the incoming president.
Trump’s supporters — and his detractors — suffer from the same myopia when it comes to assessing this president.
His critics believe everything he does is wrong and fail to recognise that Trump has achieved some important wins as president.
More Judas than Messiah
Yet Trump’s supporters are equally blinded by an almost Messiah-like worship of everything he does.
But there is much more Judas than Messiah in the way Trump has behaved since he lost this election.
America is suffering enough with a deadly pandemic, a stricken economy and a divided people. They don’t need their embittered president using his final, angry days in power to try to burn Rome.
Cameron Stewart is also US Contributor for Sky News Australia
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