Part III: "He's Gonna Declare Himself the Winner."

Let's delay the next presidential election,
said no other president in U.S. history.

Part III: “He’s gonna Declare Himself the Winner.” 

__________  

U.S. officials and candidates “should use the absolute greatest amount of restraint and caution if they are considering publicly calling the validity of an upcoming election into question.”  

U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee (unanimous)

__________  

 

HAVING dabbled in lying about U.S. elections for years, as the 2020 contest approaches, Trump gears up. 

February 2020: U.S. intelligence experts, including Joseph Maguire, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), warn Congress that the Russians are already meddling in the coming election. Trump fires Maguire, a man he appointed. 

 

“Delay the Election.” 

July 30, 2020: President Trump floats this wildly unconstitutional idea on Twitter!

 

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

 

(Imagine the right-wing fury if Biden ever suggested the same.)

 

August 29: Trump warns that foreign nations (but not Russia!!) plan to manipulate the mail-in vote. “It will be the scandal of our times.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed up by a new Trump-appointee, responds: “We have no information or intelligence that any nation-state threat actor is engaging in any activity to undermine the mail-in vote or ballots.” 

 

September 17: Trump is already hedging his bets. With polls showing he’s going down to defeat, he claims we will never know who won the 2020 election. He warns that the “result may never be accurately determined, which is what some want.” 

Sen. Marco Rubio explains that the Senate Intelligence Committee has unanimously endorsed the conclusion that U.S. officials and candidates “should use the absolute greatest amount of restraint and caution if they are considering publicly calling the validity of an upcoming election into question.” 

(Okay, that didn’t happen!!!!) 

 

September 22: Gen. H. R. McMaster, Trump’s second National Security Advisor – by this time replaced – warns that his old boss is “making it easy” for Russia to interfere in the 2020 election.

 

October 1: Mr. Trump claims that absentee votes cast for him in Wisconsin have been “dumped in the river.” In reality, three trays of mail were found by a Wisconsin roadside, including “several” absentee ballots, but none from Wisconsin voters. No flowing water is involved.

 

October 12: It is widely reported that Pennsylvania has received 2.6 million mail-in ballot requests. That figure includes 1,794,448 Democrats, but only 693,670 Republicans. Everyone knows that when the mail-in ballots are counted, Democrats are going to get a huge bump. By law, Pennsylvania will be required to count in-person ballots first, and mail-in ballots after polls close. 

 

“He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.” 

October 31: We won’t know this until later, but in a secret meeting, three days before the election, Steve Bannon outlines the Trump plan for Election Night. Ironically, most of his listeners are Chinese immigrants – one of whom records the discussion. Bannon sounds amused as he explains. “What Trump’s gonna do,” he laughs, “is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.” 

Bannon expects Trump to build an early lead, as in-person votes are tallied. Biden’s strength will come later when mail-in ballots – as in Pennsylvania – are counted. “And Trump’s going to take advantage of it. That’s our strategy [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted]. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.” So, “at 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that.’” 

“If Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock,” Bannon adds, “it’s going to be even crazier. No, because he’s gonna sit right there and say, ‘They stole it. I’m directing the attorney general to shut down all ballot places in all 50 states.’ He’s not going out easy. If Biden is winning, Trump is going to do some crazy shit.” 

Bannon eventually be indicted in a scheme to bilk the MAGA dopes. He and three associates will collect millions of dollars in donations on the promise to help build a border wall! No wall will ever be built, and those associates will go to jail; but Bannon dodges prison when he receives a Golden Pardon. 

(Even Bannon knows Trump is going to lie.)

Bannon gives away the game before any votes are counted.

 

NOTE ON METHODOLOGY: In all these posts, we place names in bold, if an individual knows Trump cannot be trusted. We do NOT use Democrats to prove our point – that Donald can never be trusted. 

 

November 2: With one day left until the election, final polling averages show Biden with a +6.7 point lead. Trump claims the polls are phony. 

(We should note that at this editing, in March 2024, Trump loves the same kind of polls because they show him ahead. Donald says Biden has no chance to win unless the coming election is rigged.) 

Polls were clear. Trump was going to get clobbered by women.

November 3-4, 2020 – Election Day/Night: As millions of votes pour in it looks as if Trump may win a second term. Experts at Fox News, however, watch Biden’s lead in Arizona grow to more than 88,000 votes. They call the state for Biden. Only about 3,500 votes separate Trump and Biden in Georgia. Pennsylvania, by law, has only started counting millions of mail-in votes. 

No matter. Just after 2 a.m., Mr. Trump declares victory, nationwide. He insists counting of ballots must end immediately. 

Millions of votes are still being recorded, mostly from Democratic-leaning areas. This always happens, not because voting is rigged, but because most Democratic areas are heavily populated, and getting accurate counts takes time. Fulton County in Georgia, for example, will have half-a-million ballots. 

Greeley County, in red-state Kansas, will poll 627 votes. Officials there can tally up early and go out for beer. 

(For fun, look up voting for Loving County, Texas.)

There are wide swaths of Kansas where population is scarce.
Author's photo, from cross-country bicycle ride - 2007.

  

November 5: Votes are still being counted. Team Trump insists counting in Pennsylvania (where the president has a lead) must stop. 

In Nevada, and also in Arizona (where Biden leads), Team Trump demands that counting must continue. 

Behind the scenes, Roger Stone is already helping flesh out a plan to claim the election was stolen. 

He had the same idea four years earlier (see Part I), but didn’t need to implement it.

 

November 6: Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) chastises Trump for claiming the Pennsylvania vote has been rigged. “There is simply no evidence that anybody has shown me – or anyone else I’m aware of – of any kind of widespread corruption or fraud.” 

(Unless otherwise noted, we are only quoting Republicans.) 

 

Nationally, vote totals are running in Biden’s favor. His lead in Georgia, where Republicans control the levers of government, rises to 10,352.

 

November 7: Election experts at the major news outlets agree. Joe Biden is declared winner of the 2020 election.

 

November 8: We won’t learn for years – until Fox News gets hammered in a  defamation lawsuit – but Tucker Carlson texts his producer and admits that allegations of massive vote stealing, which he and other Fox hosts have been touting, are “absurd.” 

(Fox News: “We keep the ill-informed ill-informed.”) 

 

November 12: Members of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council Executive Committee, including Trump appointees, Director Chris Krebs of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Bob Kolasky, and Benjamin Hovland, issue this unanimous statement: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.” 

 

November 13: North Carolina sorts out its last votes and Mr. Trump is declared winner. Donald is fine if votes take time to count, as long as he wins. 

Team Trump is busy pushing claims of massive voter fraud in Georgia. This gets embarrassing quickly. The Trump campaign cites the shocking case of James Blalock, Jr., a World War II veteran, who voted in Georgia, despite having died fourteen years earlier. Mr. Blalock had not in fact voted. His wife, Agnes, had, under her properly registered name: “Mrs. James E. Blalock, Jr.” 

Team Trump throws out all kinds of outrageous claims about the “Stolen Election.” A tale is told of a U.S. Army raid on the office of a Spanish election software company, Scytl, with an office in Frankfurt, Germany. 

When asked about the “raid” and the “seizure” of mythical, rigged computer servers, an Army spokesperson replies tersely, “Those allegations are false.” 

(And thank you for your service!) 

 

Recounts show that Republicans keep losing. 

November 16: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, unloads in an interview. With a hand recount of all votes in the state nearing completion, he says he is being pressured to find ways to exclude legal ballots. After a statewide recount, Trump is still losing by 12,284 votes. 

Mr. Krebs continues to stand by this statement: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” during the recent election. 

Trump fires Krebs.

 

Election officials in Clark County, Nevada (one of several battleground states the president insists he won) announce that they are unable to call one race with confidence. Ross Miller, the Democrat, appears to have defeated Stavros Anthony by 10 votes – out of 153,000; but 139 ballots have “discrepancies.” 

Fox News is all over this “big” story. Trump is glued to Fox, and tweets exultantly. “Big victory,” he shouts. “Large scale voter discrepancy” He claims this case will have a “major impact,” nationally, and prove the whole election system is rigged and there are poltergeists in the machines. An automatic recount follows. Mr. Miller’s lead grows to 30 votes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

(I added exclamation points for each vote Miller gained.) 

 

November 19: Rudy Giuliani, accompanied by two other lawyers, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis, holds a press conference. Ellis refers to efforts to prove massive voter fraud as work that must be performed by an “elite strike force.” That “elite strike force” includes Rudy, Sidney, and herself. 

During that press conference, Powell describes the plot against President Trump. There has been,

 

massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China [emphasis added] and the interference with our elections here in the United States. The Dominion voting systems…were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he didn’t want it to come out. 

 

Jumping ahead, just for the fun of baffling the MAGAs, Ellis will later be forced to admit, during a disciplinary hearing in Colorado, that she was doing some bigtime lying about the 2020 election being stolen. 

Then Ms. Ellis will cop to a felony, for her part in a conspiracy to steal Georgia’s electoral votes for Trump. 

Then Powell will cop to six misdemeanors, in the same case, and be fined and placed on probation for six years. 

As for Rudy, he will tell so many lies about two Georgia poll workers “stealing votes” that he will get his dumb ass sued for defamation. He will refuse to supply documents the court demands; and a jury will award the plaintiffs – the two workers, who end up facing a storm of death threats – $148.2 million. 

(He remains under indictment in the Georgia case.) 

Rudy melts live on television.

 

November 19, 2020: Team Trump gets one of many black eyes in court. A suit is filed in Georgia by a prominent private attorney, L. Lin Wood, calling on a federal court to block certification of the state’s electoral votes. U.S. District Court Judge Steven Grimberg, a Trump appointee, chops the Wood case into kindling. Grimberg rules that “evidence of improprieties,” as presented by Mr. Wood, falls far short of what would be needed to justify stepping in to alter the state’s election results. 

 

“It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action.” 

November 20: Trump summons Republican lawmakers from Michigan to the White House. Privately, he suggests that they declare him winner of that state’s electoral votes, despite Biden’s 154,000-popular vote lead. 

After exiting, the lawmakers announce: “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan, and as legislative leaders we will follow the law [emphasis added] and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors just as we have said throughout this election.” 

 

Referencing the president’s ploy to convince those legislators to do his bidding, Sen. Mitt Romney is brutally honest. “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President,” he says. 

Stephen Saltzburg, who served in the Justice Department under Reagan and Bush 41, tells ABC, “If any other president were to have ever attempted what this president has been doing, people would begin to look at conspiracy to violate election laws.” 

(Again, we only quote Republicans.) 

 

November 21: Reuters notes that a suit filed by The Election Integrity Project, an organization led by a pro-Trump activist, has been tossed by Clark County District Judge Gloria Sturman. The suit alleged that 1,400 people who had registered to vote in Nevada, moved to California, and still voted in Nevada. 

The judge explains. A person who moves out of a state within 30 days of an election may legally vote in either the state where they lived, or in the state where they reside. Also: Military personnel, at bases like Camp Pendleton in California, but whose permanent homes are in Nevada, might send in a vote from a California address. Same for their spouses and adult children.  

 

November 21: Team Trump takes another slap upside the head. The president’s lawyers ask for election returns for the entire state of Pennsylvania to be voided. U.S. Middle District Judge Matthew Brann rules that the campaign has presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations.” 

Sidney Powell now “realizes” – after the statewide Georgia hand recount goes against Trump – that Brian Kemp, the Republican governor, is in on the fix. She tells reporters for Newsmax that an election lawsuit she has filed in Georgia will “be biblical.” She promises to “unleash the Kraken.” 

The mythical "Kraken."

 

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan says the president’s refusal to concede is harming the country. It’s time for Trump to “stop golfing and concede.” 

November 23: Next we have a statement signed by more than 100 leading Republican national security experts: “We believe that President Trump’s refusal to concede the election and allow for an orderly transition constitutes a serious threat to America’s democratic process and to our national security.”

 

November 27: Another challenge to Pennsylvania election results is tossed. Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, with the concurrence of two other Republican-appointed judges, makes mincemeat of the case. “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Bibas writes. “Charges of unfairness are serious, but calling an election unfair [emphasis added] does not make it so.” 

(President Trump never gets the memo.) 

 

November 28: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court throws out Team Trump’s lawsuit asking for 2.5 million mail-in ballots to be disqualified. 

The ruling in is unanimous. 

(When Pennsylvania changed its law to allow mail-in balloting, in 2019, Republican House Majority Leader Bryan Cutler was clear. “This bill was not written to benefit one party or the other, or any one candidate or single election,” he said. “It serves to preserve the integrity of every election and lift the voice of every voter in the commonwealth.” The majority leader in the Pennsylvania Senate, also a Republican, praised the new voting system.) 

 

Same day: A two-county recount demanded by the Trump campaign in Wisconsin ends. At a cost of $3 million, paid by Team Trump, the recount in heavily Democratic Milwaukee and Dane counties proves that if there was massive voter fraud, and machines magically cheated Trump out of millions of votes, it didn’t happen in Milwaukee and Dane. Joe Biden gains a pocketful of votes. 

Trump phones in to Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox Business. He offers up a litany of “stolen votes” claims, insisting that a story he read proves tens of thousands of dead people voted in Michigan. CNN does what Maria won’t. They follow up on the same story. They check the list of “Dead Men Walking” to the polls. They check the first 25 names. Then they check 25 at random. Thirty-seven of the alleged dead voters were in fact dead. Sadly, none had arisen, Christ-like from the grave. 

Five of the fifty had voted – those dead rats – except that CNN found those five very much alive. 

That left eight, all still walking the earth. Sadly, none had bothered to vote. 

 

Mr. Trump switched to yipping about voting in Georgia. Bartiromo only listened. Donald warned that Democrats were about to steal two U.S. Senate seats, which would be decided in special elections. “You’re using the same garbage machinery, Dominion,” he complained. “And she’s going around, [Stacey] Abrams [a leading Georgia Democrat], she’s going around screaming that she’s got 800,000 or 850,000 ballots.” 

In reality, Abrams is actually “screaming” that voters have already sent in 750,000 requests for mail-in ballots for the election on January 5. In every tweet she links to Georgia’s online “Absentee Ballot Request Form.” 

This no-nonsense blogger checks the website for the National Council of State Legislatures. It turns out that even red states like Ohio, Texas, and Florida, allow early voting by mail.  

Mr. Blogger does some deep diving while editing this blog. He discovers that in the 2020 election, Democrats piled up 77,529,619 votes for 435 candidates for all seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Republicans polled 72,760,036. As was true, regarding Trump vs. Biden, Democrats piled up millions more votes. 

 

November 30, 2020: Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey makes it clear. Trump lost his state. 

(This fact ricochets off MAGA skulls.) 

 

In Georgia, Team Trump enjoys a brief glimpse of sunshine. A federal judge agrees to freeze Dominion voting machines used in three of the most populous blue counties. This comes in response to a lawsuit brought by Ms. Powell. Alas, the skies darken again when U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten notes that there is “precious little proof” to back Powell’s claims of haunted voting machines. 

 

“No evidence of widespread voter fraud.” 

December 1, 2020: Attorney General Bill Barr announces that the Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election. 

It doesn’t matter. Unproven allegations that Dominion Voting Systems machines were rigged lead to crazy right-wing types offering a $1,000,000 bounty to be paid for the “comeuppance” of Dr. Eric Coomer, head of security for the company. 

This leads to a wave of death threats. 

Dr. Coomer will later win a damage settlement, after One America News is shown to have had no evidence for such claims. 

He will also win a defamation case against Newsmax. 

(Coomer still has a massive defamation suit working its way through the Colorado courts. Defendants include former President Donald J. Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Gateway Pundit, and others.) 

 

December 2: Trump offers up a multitude of false claims in a speech, insisting that he won the election. “As President,” he says, “I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the Constitution of the United States.”

 

For months, leading up to the Presidential election, we were warned that we should not declare a premature victory. We were told repeatedly that it would take weeks, if not months, to determine the winner, to count the absentee ballots and to verify the results. … Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner even while many key states were still being counted.

 

Surely, even the dullest Trump fan will remember that he declared victory in the early morning hours of November 4. 

(Nope. They don’t.) 

 

Donald, who never checked a fact in his life, if a lie would better serve, continued:

 

In one Michigan County [Antrim], as an example, that used Dominion systems, they found that nearly 6,000 votes had been wrongly switched from Trump to Biden, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is what we caught. How many didn’t we catch? Are there 100s of other examples throughout the country? Are there 1000s? We just got lucky and they called it a glitch, but we found numerous glitches that evening.

 

This turns out, once again, not to be the tip of any iceberg. The mistake Trump refers to occurred in a county where the Board of Elections was and probably still is in GOP hands. The mistake had nothing to do with Dominion systems being rigged. 

In Detroit, Donald fumes, “there were more votes than there were voters. Think of that. You had more votes than you had voters.” The blogger does “think of that.” He thinks Donald is bullshitting and decides to check. 

Detroit is in Wayne County. The population of the county is two million. A total of 867,409 votes were cast in 2020. As for Detroit, turnout in the city was grim. “According to unofficial election results on the City of Detroit’s website,” the Associated Press explains, “on Nov. 3, there were 250,138 votes cast and 504,714 registered voters [emphasis added]. Detroit has an estimated population of 670,000.” 

A federal judge orders Team Trump lawyers to pay the State of Michigan and the City of Detroit $175,000 for filling a “frivolous” lawsuit in an attempt to challenge voting results there.

 

December 3: Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers is taking regular phone calls from Rudy Giuliani and President Trump. They want him to help overturn state election results. He says he won’t – because he took an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. “It would violate that oath,” he later explains, “the basic principles of republican government and the rule of law if we attempted to nullify the people’s vote based on unsupported theories of fraud.”

Bowers is an honest man.

 

 

Testifying before a panel of Michigan lawmakers, a star witness in the fight to overturn Biden’s victory in that state turns out to be quite the disreputable character. Mellissa Carone, who swore she had been witness to massive voter fraud, is on probation in an earlier case, involving a sex tape in which Carone played a starring role, her boyfriend (co-starring), a computer, and her boyfriend’s ex-wife. Carone sent the video to the ex-wife and then tried to frame her and make it seem as if she had stolen the tape. 

Her testimony proves so bizarre, Saturday Night Live offers a parody. And, yes, Rudy did punctuate her claims with a barrage of gaseous omissions, caught on microphones in the hearing room. 

 

 

December 4: Team Trump suffers five brutal court defeats in a matter of hours. At 4:30 p.m. the Minnesota Supreme Court tosses a suit, after Team Trump lawyers ask that the state’s electoral vote not be certified. 

The Michigan Court of Appeals tosses a challenge to certification of the vote in Wayne County. 

A Nevada judge shitcans a claim by several “alternate Republican electors” that there had been widespread fraud in the vote. Judge James T. Russell rejects their argument, writing that he can find “no credible or reliable evidence that the 2020 general election in Nevada was affected by fraud.” 

At 6 p.m. a Wisconsin judge blows up another lawsuit. Asked to overturn the state’s entire popular vote and let a Republican-led legislature decide who gets the electoral votes, Judge Brian Hagedorn expresses shock. “Judicial acquiescence to such entreaties built on so flimsy a foundation [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] would do indelible damage to every future election. This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread.” 

(This is exactly the path Team Trump wanted to take us down.) 

(And they will ask again in November.) 

 

At 7 p.m. a judge in Phoenix denies a request by Arizona Republican Party chairwoman Kelli Ward to invalidate the results of that state’s election. Judge Randall H. Warner rules definitively: “The court finds no misconduct, no fraud, and no effect on the outcome of the election.” 

 

“Which inevitably will subvert constitutional democracy.” 

December 7: Georgia Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan complains, during an appearance on CNN, that Trump’s “mountains of misinformation” are hurting the Republican Party in his state. “If I had a chance to spend five minutes with every single person in Georgia that doubted the election results,” he explains, “I think I’d be able to win their hearts over, show them the facts and figures, separate fact from fiction”  

A federal judge and a Trump appointee, throws out a lawsuit, asking to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia. Plaintiffs, Judge Batten rules, were asking, “this court to substitute its judgment for two-and-a-half million voters who voted for Joe Biden. And this I am unwilling to do.” With that, Team Trump’s only “tie” in court, an earlier decision by Batten, becomes a loss.

Their record is reduced to 0 for 2020. 

 

U.S. District Court Judge Linda Parker tosses another lawsuit seeking to overturn the Michigan vote. Parker is scathing in her rebuke. “This lawsuit seems to be less about achieving the relief Plaintiffs seek – as much of that relief is beyond the power of this Court – and more about the impact of their allegations on People’s faith in the democratic process and their trust in our government.”

 

Fifteen hundred attorneys, from across the country, Republican, Democrat, and independent alike, sign a letter condemning the antics of the president’s legal team. “President Trump’s barrage of litigation is a pretext for a campaign to undermine public confidence in the outcome of the 2020 election,” they warn, “which inevitably will subvert constitutional democracy.” 

(This is the first time I have used any Democratic voices to prove my case. As before, names in bold are people who know, or have ample cause to believe, that Donald John Trump is a shameless liar.) 

 

“Less than one in a quadrillion.” 

December 8, 2020: The Trump campaign briefly advances a case to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to block certification of Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes. In a bizarre development Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed suit, on behalf of his state – against sister states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Paxton claims that those states’ electoral votes for Biden should not count. Texas electoral votes for Trump should. 

“At one point,” the Washington Post notes, “the [Paxton] complaint repeats discredited theories that Biden was rescued by a late dump of ballots, saying that as of 3 a.m. on the morning after the election, Biden’s chances at winning all four states were “less than one in a quadrillion.” 

(Since the world population is only eight billion, it’s unclear how that works.) 

 

Trump supporters may never figure this out, but Texas allows mail-in votes, just like the four states Paxton is suing. 

In Paxton’s state, however, only people over age 65 can be trusted to sign mail-in ballots, provide proof of who they are, fold them, put them in a special envelope, lick the flap, put the first envelope in a second, lick the flap, and affix correct postage. You can even vote from jail in Texas, under certain circumstances, which is fun. 

In the lawsuit filed by Paxton and crafted by a lawyer, Dr. John Eastman, it is cited as evidence that no person has ever been elected president if they met defeat in both Ohio and Florida. This is irrelevant. And wrong. 

John F. Kennedy lost both states, and still won in 1960. 

(Eastman is now under indictment in the Georgia election fraud case.)

John F. Kennedy won in 1960.

 

Next, we had several other irrelevant claims. This blogger’s favorite: Trump won 18 of 19 “bellwether counties.” According to Mr. Paxton and Dr. Eastman that meant there was no way Donald could have lost. 

We should point out, of course, that we don’t vote by “counties” in America, or count only “bellwether county” votes. We total up all the votes of all the people in all the counties in this great land. For comparison purposes, Hamilton County, Ohio has more people than the entire state of Wyoming. Franklin County, Ohio has more people than either North Dakota or South Dakota. 

One blue county has as many people as all those red.

 

Trump did win a majority of votes in 18 counties that had not missed picking the winner in a presidential election, dating back to 1980. 

So??? 

It was fun to find out that just four years earlier, Hillary Clinton beat Trump in 14 other “bellwether counties.” 

(Attorney General Paxton will later be found liable for retaliating against whistleblowers in his office, after they accused him of bribery and fraud. He agrees to pay $3.3 million in damages. But not before he tried to stick taxpayers for the tab.) 

At any rate, none of this mattered. Just forty minutes after the case was filed, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled: 

“DENIED.” 

“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections,” the Court explained. “All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.”