WASHINGTON: Republican lawmakers from Michigan were summoned to the White House on Friday as defeated US President Donald Trump continued efforts to subvert results of the Presidential elections amid continued deadlock over transfer of power to incoming President-elect Joe Biden.
State lawmakers are being told to defy the popular mandate that the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket won and award Michigan’s 16 electoral votes to Trump on the grounds the election was tainted, a contention Trump’s team has been unable to prove in court.
Similar efforts are underway in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to steal their 20+10 electoral votes already won by Biden, to deprive him of the Presidency.
The Presidential election has been called for Biden by a 306-232 margin, and denying him 46 electoral votes through political and legal subterfuge could keep Trump in the White House for a second term even though he lost both the popular vote (by six million votes) and the electoral college.
Many political analysts and commentators are sounding alarm over what they see as a coup. “The legal ‘challenges to the election are toast. Realizing the courts are a lost cause, Trump is now trying to convince elected officials to overturn the will of the voters. This is a political coup that is the definition of anti-democracy,” Daniel Goldman, a former Congressional counsel warned.
The Trump team’s tactics of subverting the election results is being played out in disturbing detail in Michigan, where his lawyers are attempting to invalidate votes in Wayne County, which includes black-majority Detroit, and which went to Biden by more than 90 per cent. After casting doubts on the validity of votes, Trump is putting direct pressure on local Republican officials not to certify the results that show Biden as the winner, while asking the state’s GOP lawmakers to award all electoral votes to him.
On Thursday, Trump telephoned two local Republican officials in Michigan who had initially declined to certify the results, resulting in a stalemate with their two Democratic counterparts ready to certify the results in favor of Biden as per the electoral mandate.
The Republicans reversed course and agreed to certify the results following pressure from agitated voters who felt their votes were being invalidated, but then changed their mind again after Trump called them, alleging they had buckled in the face of threats to their lives. Moderate Republicans who are standing up to the defeated President are also reporting threats from Trump-supporting extremists.
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