It’s been nearly two long months since the 2020 presidential race was called for Joe Biden, and to no one’s surprise his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, has not allowed a peaceful transition of power. Instead he’s filled the courts with dozens of failed lawsuits and insisted, baselessly, on voter fraud. The majority of Republicans have gone along with it thus far but, on Sunday, some of that support belatedly started eroding away. As per The Washington Post, a forceful letter demanded Trump concede was made public, one signed by such GOP heavy-hitters as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Those who signed the joint missive happened to all be former U.S. defense secretaries; the others were James Mattis, Mark Esper, Leon Panetta, William Cohen, Chuck Hagel, Robert Gates, William Perry and Ashton Carter. It was released mere days before Congress is scheduled to formally confirm Electoral College votes — a process that is being challenged by a number of Republican lawmakers, many of them steadfast supporters of the outgoing president. But though that effort is almost certainly doomed to fail, the letter from former vice president Cheney et al. did not mince words:
“Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the electoral college has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the electoral college votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived.”
One alarming part of the letter concerns fears that Trump would coax the military to help him overturn the election results. The signees stressed that doing so — which is also unlikely — “would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”
Sunday was a big day for big-time Republican names to come down hard against Trump’s continued attempts to unlawfully serve a second administration. Lindsey Graham, a onetime Trump critic who become one of his minions, tweeted Sunday that while he looks forward to hearing any real objections to the Electoral College votes that will be submitted on Tuesday, he stated sharply that they “will need to provide proof of the charges they are making.
Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who ran as a vice presidential candidate opposite Mitt Romney in 2012, losing the position to incoming president Joe Biden, also denounced Republican attempts to spread unproven discord about November’s election.
Will this soften Trump’s increasingly desperate and convoluted attempts to overturn an election he lost by over seven million votes? Probably not. After all, the news comes the same day The Washington Post also dropped audio of him asking Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to falsify election results in his favor — a smoking gun, essentially, proving illegality. So his post-presidential life is not exactly looking rosy.
(Via The Washington Post)