“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lucky,” tweeted Chris Krebs of Rudy Giuliani’s press conference on Thursday. Trump recently fired the former DHS election security expert. By tweet, of course.
The presentation filled with conspiracy theories, Giuliani’s dripping hair dye, and promised evidence yet to see the light of day, made one wonder if Giuliani’s “crack team” had been smoking some before taking the podium. It was too bizarre to recount in detail. Watch Aaron Rupar’s highlight reel here, if you dare.
Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, a lawyer for former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, falsely claimed Donald J. Trump won the election “by a landslide.” She spun a conspiracy theory about Dominion Voting Systems, Smartmatic technology software, and the late Hugo Chavez of Venezuela creating software for flipping Trump votes to Biden. But Trump’s support was so “overwhelming in many states that it broke the algorithm,” she said. Later, Powell told Lou Dobbs, “The entire election, frankly, in all the swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump.”
Trump, as always, is trying to bend reality to his will. His people are attempting a coup in plain sight.
Multiple legal experts swear on their diplomas that Trump’s legal efforts are so looney, ham-fisted, and contrary to accepted law that they can never overturn the election. Those who make their living practicing law have more confidence in it than I for containing people who treat the law as a matter of convenience for themselves but primarily as a weapon to wield against enemies. Trump has made a career out of defying the law.
But Trump is nothing if not relentless (Washington Post):
DETROIT — President Trump has invited the leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state legislature to meet him in Washington on Friday, according to a person familiar with those plans, as the president and his allies continue an extraordinary campaign to overturn the results of an election he lost.
Trump’s campaign has suffered defeats in courtrooms across the country in its efforts to allege irregularities with the ballot-counting process, and has failed to muster any evidence of the widespread fraud that the president continues to claim tainted the 2020 election.
Trump lost Michigan by a wide margin: At present, he trails President-Elect Joe Biden in the state by 157,000 votes. Earlier this week, the state’s Republican Senate majority leader said an effort to have legislators throw out election results was “not going to happen.”
But the president now appears to be using the full weight of his office to challenge the election results, as he and his allies reach out personally to state and local officials in an intensifying effort to halt the certification of the vote in key battleground states.
After the Wayne County’s Board of Canvassers certified the election after a contentious meeting this week, Trump himself called one Republican member, after which she tried to rescind her certification. Not possible, said Michigan’s secretary of state’s office. So now Trump is going over her head. *
Too many made the mistake of counting Trump out in 2016.
JPMorgan is covering its assets:
Much of Wall Street views the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the election results as a desperate sideshow destined to fail. But JPMorgan is telling clients there’s still a chance that this process descends into chaos. It is 2020, after all.
Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy at JPMorgan Asset Management, warned in a report Wednesday of the “remote risk of an American horror story” and “constitutional mayhem.”
Cembalest, who helps oversee $2.2 trillion in assets, pointed to President Donald Trump’s Tuesday night firing of the top US election security official, Attorney General William Barr’s decision to authorize prosecutors to probe alleged voter fraud and the fleeting drama over certifying election results in Michigan’s largest county.
“Bottom line: a LOT of very unorthodox things have to happen for Trump to be reelected,” the JPMorgan strategist wrote. “Even so, I’m not ruling anything out.”
Chess legend, Vladimir Putin opponent and democracy advocate, Gary Kasparov, issued this short thread explaining his view of what the outgoing president is doing with his attempted coup.
In Trump’s twisted mind, reality is what he says it is.
* I had a client like that once. You’d hear the lead team member paged. Then another and another, working down the chain. He’d call everyone in the office, in turn, asking the same question. He didn’t want the right answer. He wanted someone to give him the answer he wanted, someone to blame when he did what what he wanted to and it went to shit.