There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud and many states have already certified their results as the vast majority of Trump’s baseless legal challenges go down in defeat, meaning that he is merely trying to delay the inevitable as he fights Biden’s ascent to the White House.
During the Georgia speech, which included a video showcasing his fake claims about election fraud, he alternated between freewheeling lines and his teleprompter script — occasionally trying to thread the needle between asking Georgians to get out and vote, but then doing further harm to his party by inaccurately claiming that Georgia’s election system is fraudulent. The voter registration deadline is Monday and early voting begins December 14.
“This election was rigged and we can’t let it happen to two of the greatest, most respected people in Washington,” he said, pointing to Loeffler and Perdue. “We can’t let it happen again. Your governor could stop it very easily if he knew what the hell he was doing.”
The competing messages were on full display when Trump invited Loeffler and Perdue to the stage to make brief remarks. Loeffler warned the crowd that if they don’t vote, Republicans will lose control of the Senate. But the crowd seemed much more interested in the President’s claims, drowning out the two candidates by chanting “Stop the steal” and “Fight for Trump!”
Trump called their Democratic rivals, Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff “extreme,” and at one point said he understands the inclination among many of his supporters to sit out the election. But he urged them not to do so. “If you don’t vote, the socialists and the communists — they win,” he said.
“The answer to the Democrats’ fraud is not to stay at home; that’s what (House Speaker) Nancy Pelosi and (Senate Minority Leader Chuck) Schumer, that’s what they want you to do — stay at home,” Trump said. “If you want to do something to them — I don’t want to use the word revenge, but it is a sense of revenge — to the Democrats, you show up and vote in record numbers.”
There is no evidence of systematic fraud by Democrats.
Trump’s un-American effort to overturn Georgia’s result
The President also demanded that Kemp order an audit of absentee ballot signatures. Kemp refused to call a special session and said he does not have the authority to force the audit. The White House declined to comment on the call, but the dispute between the two men soon spilled in to public view on Twitter.
Kemp, a Republican, defended his response to the President in a tweet. “As I told the President this morning, I’ve publicly called for a signature audit three times (11/20, 11/24, 12/3) to restore confidence in our election process and to ensure that only legal votes are counted in Georgia,” the governor tweeted.
The President continued attacking Kemp at the rally — calling on him to “get a lot tougher” on Trump’s manufactured claims of voter fraud and stating that Kemp should “be ashamed of himself.” Kemp did not attend the event, his spokesman said, because of the sudden death of a close friend of the family on Friday.
On his way to Georgia Saturday afternoon, Trump attacked both Kemp and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who is also a Republican, for refusing to go along with his efforts to reverse the election results in those states.
“Between Governor @DougDucey of Arizona and Governor @BrianKempGA of Georgia, the Democrat Party could not be happier. They fight harder against us than do the Radical Left Dems,” Trump tweeted. “If they were with us, we would have already won both Arizona and Georgia.”
“Republicans will NEVER forget this,” he added in a second tweet.
President ignores dangerous coronavirus spread
The President made only a few passing references to the coronavirus pandemic Saturday night, claiming credit for the rapid development of multiple vaccines, for example, and stating, at one point, that Congress should send more emergency aid to struggling Americans, whose benefits are expiring at the end of this month.
But he once again gathered thousands of unmasked people to an event aimed at stroking his ego, flaunting guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and needlessly putting his supporters at risk while setting a terrible example for the country with his lack of precautions as he has done so often throughout the pandemic.
So far the emergency stimulus package includes $300 a week in enhanced federal unemployment benefits, a continued pause on student loan payments, an eviction moratorium, another round of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to help small businesses, $16 billion for vaccine development and distribution, as well as Covid-19 testing and tracing, among other relief measures.
On Saturday, the United States saw the second highest number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 since the pandemic began, according to the Covid Tracking Project, and medical experts are bracing for a surge in deaths.
Meanwhile many other states are worried about the fact that the initial doses of the available vaccine will not be enough to vaccinate their most critical populations.
Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency room physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said the difference between the state of the pandemic now and this past spring “is that this is all over the country. It is out of control.”
“The reason that we may not be seeing apocalyptic scenes in the hospitals just yet, is that in the spring, it was all kind of concentrated into a few hotspots,” Faust said. “Now, the whole country is a brewing hot spot. My concern is that a couple weeks from now, it won’t just be a couple of hospitals, or a couple of regions or states where they are running out of ICU beds — which is happening — but it will finally be the whole country.”
“We need to absolutely watch that. Because once we run out of hospital beds, we will face something the likes of which we’ve never seen before,” Faust said.