Donald Trump lost the November presidential election to Joe Biden, and in a few weeks Biden will become the next president of the United States. But Donald Trump is still struggling with that reality, and he’s going to some extreme lengths to try defying the votes of millions of people who decided he needed to leave office.
According to the Washington Post, Trump begged and pleaded with the Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to turn the election in his favor. Biden won the state of Georgia by 12,779 votes, a margin that has already been recounted and certified, but Trump has falsely claimed for months now that he was somehow robbed of the victory in Georgia and several other states that would be necessary to actually turn the election results in his favor.
None of that will happen, but Trump has not stopped in exploring every avenue to overturn legal election results, now including putting pressure on elected officials to “find 11,780 votes” in Georgia to illegally change the result.
The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”
Word of that call first leaked, of course, from Trump on Twitter, who spewed more election misinformation and was actually corrected by Raffensperger later in the day.
Respectfully, President Trump: What you're saying is not true. The truth will come out https://t.co/ViYjTSeRcC
— GA Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (@GaSecofState) January 3, 2021
Shortly after that tweet, the Post story gave more embarrassing details for Trump, who apparently rambled in an hour-long call and called Raffensperger a “child” and “either dishonest or incompetent” for not believing his lies about widespread election fraud. He also called him a “schmuck” twice for endorsing Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who has not followed Trump’s baseless claims of fraud.
At another point, Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
The rambling, at times incoherent conversation, offered a remarkable glimpse of how consumed and desperate the president remains about his loss, unwilling or unable to let the matter go and still believing he can reverse the results in enough battleground states to remain in office.
“There’s no way I lost Georgia,” Trump said, a phrase he repeated again and again on the call. “There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
There are lots of wild, possibly impeachable moments from the Washington Post story, and the paper released audio of the rambling call that was full of random claims and misinformation. The story truly speaks to how, in the dying days of Trump’s presidency he seems completely consumed by his inability to understand he lost an election that happened months ago.
Trump sounded at turns confused and meandering. At one point, he referred to Kemp as “George.” He tossed out several different figures for Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia and referred to the Senate runoff, which is Tuesday, as happening “tomorrow” and “Monday.”
Meanwhile, Ted Cruz’s attempt to aid Trump in his attempts to overturn the election continued on Fox News on Sunday. But even one of Trump’s most loyal Republican Senators, Lindsey Graham, cast doubt on the effort on Twitter.
“Proposing a commission at this late date – which has zero chance of becoming reality – is not effectively fighting for President Trump,” he wrote of Cruz and his effort to somehow delay the certification of the presidential election.
Proposing a commission at this late date – which has zero chance of becoming reality – is not effectively fighting for President Trump.
It appears to be more of a political dodge than an effective remedy. https://t.co/4bIT1J36cL
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) January 3, 2021
They will also need to provide clear and convincing evidence that the failure to act – in both the state and federal courts and the states legislatures which investigated these claims – was made in error.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) January 3, 2021
My colleagues will have the opportunity to make this case, and I will listen closely. But they have a high bar to clear.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) January 3, 2021
Trump’s remaining supporters at this point are living in a world all but removed from reality, but it’s wild to hear the president begging a politician to do something as clearly undemocratic as overturning an election and peddling baseless conspiracy theories that lived, until recently, only in the darkest corners of the weirdest message boards. As for the other elected officials in Trump’s party, it seems it’s getting harder for those that support Trump to follow along.