With Joe Biden closing in on the White House, President Trump wants counting of votes called off. But only in certain states. The President is happy enough to keep the count going in Nevada, for instance, where Joe Biden is maintaining a small but steady lead over Trump. In fact, a crowd of his supporters turned up, giving it loads, demanding access to the count centre, with chants of ‘Keep counting’.
On the other side of the country in the Rust Belt states, Trump is desperate. Having declared himself victorious in the election, without evidence, he is now on the offensive. Even Fox News seems to have despaired of his latest antics. Fox News’s Judith Miller writing, “Trump declined the opportunity to toot his own political horn. Rather, he falsely declared an election victory that he had not yet achieved and vowed to petition the Supreme Court to demand a halt to the counting of ballots — ostensibly to prevent “fraud” in late-counted mail-in ballots. This was the latest twist of an evidence-free narrative that the president has echoed in tweets for weeks.”
Trump and his legal team are demanding a recount in Wisconsin, which Joe Biden has won by a margin of more than 20,000 votes. He is also demanding that counting stop altogether in Pennsylvania. As of this morning, Trump is still in the lead in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by a whopping 200K votes. The problem is, according to Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State last night, that there are still approximately 1 million valid votes to be counted there. Those votes are mostly mail-in and absentee votes and Biden has been winning with those voters in almost every state.
Trump simply wants to stop those voters having their votes counted at all. It’s still all to play for in the election. Several states, including Pennsylvania, could very well go Trump’s way but with this behaviour, we can only surmise that President Trump doesn’t expect them to. His legal team have sent papers to the Supreme Court demanding a halt to counting in several states. A CNN reporter last night said, “The President is engaging in this kind of reality-challenged behaviour…”
When even Fox News is telling you to get a grip of yourself, you’d think you’d listen though. Judith Miller of Fox News said, “There have been many “sad” moments in the campaign, but none more pathetic and outrageous than the president’s effort to delegitimize some of the more than 150 million votes cast by 67% of eligible voters.”
Miller points out, “‘Winners’ don’t seek to suppress and disqualify ballots; they want every vote to be counted, confident that they will win.”
Prominent Republicans are trying to distance themselves from the President’s comments. even Vice-President Mike Pence wouldn’t back up the assertions, simply saying simply that Trump was “on a path” to victory.
