President Trump is still attempting to claim victory in an election that he has indisputably lost, this time by focusing on invalidating President-elect Joe Biden’s win in Georgia.
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Over the weekend, Trump reportedly called on Governor Brian Kemp to ask for a special legislative session in the state to overturn the will of voters and award him Georgia’s votes in the electoral college. Since his campaign has lost his legal attempts to challenge election results in Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, Minnesota, and Georgia, the president appears to have identified Republican lawmakers as his last option to eke out a win that he didn’t earn.
From the Washington Post:
Hours before he was scheduled to hold a rally in Georgia on behalf of the state’s two GOP senators, Trump pressed Kemp to call a special session of the state legislature for lawmakers to override the results and appoint electors who would back the president at the electoral college, according to two people familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private call.
Trump also asked the governor to demand an audit of signatures on mail ballots, something Kemp has previously noted he has no power to do. Kemp declined the president’s entreaty, according to the people.
After the phone call, in which sources told the Washington Post that Kemp got “chewed out” by Trump, the president got on his favorite platform—Twitter—to call for the verification of signatures on ballots that have already been counted.
“If we win Georgia, everything else falls in place!” Trump tweeted, seeming to blame Kemp for not uncovering mythical “large scale discrepancies” that will suddenly prove that he actually won the state.
Though Kemp responded that he has publicly called for a signature audit, his attempts to appease the president’s exhausting unwillingness to accept that more people voted for Joe Biden did not save him from being lambasted on stage on Saturday when Trump spoke at a rally in Georgia for the state’s upcoming runoff elections.
In a free-wheeling, characteristically hot-mess speech, Trump belittled Kemp, saying the Governor should be “ashamed of himself” for not helping manufacture a win for him.
After calling on lawmakers and the Supreme Court to grant him the presidential victory, Trump went on to encourage rally attendees to vote for the Republican candidates in Georgia’s senate runoff race in January, and flagged a potential run for the Oval Office in 2024 while adding that he’d rather “go back three weeks” than wait four more years to take back the White House (a thought that makes me shiver).
“We will never, ever surrender,” Trump declared at the end of his speech, signaling that we are not out of the woods in terms of this long, painful, bloviating period before he is booted out of the presidency once and for all.
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