In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law. His legal challenges to the election of Joseph Biden have toggled between appalling and farcical.
President Trump's frantic post-election challenges are having the opposite effect of what he intended: He's documenting his demise through a series of court fights and recounts showing Joe Biden's victory to be all the more obvious and unassailable.
Why it matters: The president’s push to overturn the election results is dispelling the cloud of corruption he alleged by forcing states to create a verified — and legally binding — accounting of his election loss.
- "Each loss further cements Biden's win," says election law expert Richard Hasen.
- "History shows that any leader who constructs a major myth, that is later shown to be false, will eventually fall," says Harvard science historian and "Merchants of Doubt" author Naomi Oreskes. "The risk is that he takes his country down with him."
That point is true for people who follow the details. The general public is a different story.
President Trump’s repeated — and baseless — insistence that widespread fraud undermined this month’s presidential election has left a mark on Americans’ faith in the voting process, a postelection USC Dornsife survey has found.
Using a 0-100 scale to measure their confidence that all ballots were tallied correctly, the average ranking from voters was a middling 58. Democrats gave higher marks — 79 — that the vote count was accurate, while Republicans on the whole rated their confidence in the election results’ accuracy at just 34.
“What’s really very clear is that the large group of voters who voted for Donald Trump in this election have absorbed the message that the vote may not have been completely, fairly counted,” said Jill Darling, the director of the USC Dornsife survey. Democrats, she said, may have lost confidence because of concerns about voter suppression or problems with the U.S. Postal Service.
Rudy Giuliani's Hair Dye Running Down Face at Sweaty News Conference https://t.co/4PMV8k1Rdb
— TMZ (@TMZ) November 20, 2020
