Donald Trump continues to tell GOP state legislatures that they must overturn the election to install him as President in a coup, and so far they are resisting him.
President Trump called the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives twice during the past week to make the extraordinary request for help reversing his loss in the state, reflecting a broadening pressure campaign by the president and his allies to try to subvert the 2020 election result.
The calls, confirmed by House Speaker Bryan Cutler’s office, mark the third state where Trump has directly attempted to overturn a result since he lost the election to President-elect Joe Biden. He previously reached out to Republicans in Michigan, and on Saturday he pressured GOP Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in a call to try to replace that state’s electors.
The president’s outreach to the Pennsylvania GOP House leader came after his campaign and its allies have decisively lost numerous legal challenges in the state in both state and federal court. Trump has continued to press his baseless claims of widespread voting irregularities both publicly and privately.
The president said, ‘I’m hearing about all these issues in Philadelphia, and these issues with your law,’” said Cutler spokesman Michael Straub, describing the House speaker’s two conversations with Trump. “What can we do to fix it?’”
A White House spokesman declined to comment on the calls to Cutler, and a Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Cutler told the president that the legislature had no power to overturn the state’s chosen slate of electors, Straub said.
But late last week, the House speaker was among roughly 60 Republican state lawmakers who sent a letter to Pennsylvania’s congressional representatives urging them object to the state’s electoral slate on Jan. 6, when Congress formally accepts the results.
Although such a move is highly unlikely to gain traction, at least one Pennsylvania Republican, Rep. Scott Perry, said in an interview Monday he will heed the request and dispute the state’s electors.
The embrace of Trump’s false claims by many Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers shows how the president’s baseless attacks on the integrity of the election have gained traction with his supporters. Protesters chanting “Stop the Steal,” some with firearms, demonstrated over the weekend at the homes of Cutler in Pennsylvania and the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan.
Just because the coup is comically ham-fisted and Trump is doing this badly, we've now had dozens of frivolous legal challenges to the election results that Joe Biden has clearly won, and the longer the silence from the GOP goes on, the more likely officials in these states are going to be hurt or quite possibly killed by Trump's cultists.
Of course, cowardly Republican silence may actually preferable to the alternative of aiding and abetting sedition.
President Donald Trump's staunchest defenders on Capitol Hill are urging him not to concede even after President-elect Joe Biden wins the Electoral College vote next week, calling on their party's leader to battle it out all the way to the House floor in January as he makes unsubstantiated claims of widespread election fraud.
The view of Trump's defenders is at odds with that of many top congressional Republicans, including leaders of the Senate, who believe the election will be over next Monday when electors cast their votes and make Biden's win official -- even though the Democrat's victory in the presidential race has been clear for weeks.
But conservative House Republicans argue that next week doesn't mark the end of Trump's desperate efforts to overturn the election results, which he has failed to do through scores of fruitless lawsuits and brazen efforts to pressure state and local leaders to subvert the will of voters and appoint new slates of electors to the Electoral College. They said that Congress should engage in a full-throated debate over the results in key states because of their allegations of fraud, which have yet to be borne out in court.
Asked if Trump should concede next Monday, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said bluntly: "No. No way, no way, no way."
"We should still try to figure out exactly what took place here. And as I said that includes, I think, debates on the House floor -- potentially on January 6," Jordan, a trusted Trump confidant, told CNN.
It is not unusual for a losing candidate's most fervent supporters to take their case to the House floor -- something that occurred after the 2016, 2004 and 2000 presidential races. But it is unusual for the losing candidate to mount a weeks-long public campaign aimed at sowing discord and distrust over a pillar of democracy, something that Trump has done relentlessly since losing the race.
So expect another month of this at the minimum, completely with an exponentially growing chance of deadly violence.
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