Instead of conceding the 2020 presidential race after being defeated by Democrat Joe Biden , President Donald Trump embarked on an effort to overturn the results, launching dozens of legal challenges in key battleground states. According to a former federal prosecutor, this has made the commander-in-chief “look ridiculous.”
In a Friday op-ed penned for The Hill , Gregory J. Wallance — who was a federal prosecutor during the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations — argued that Trump’s attempt to challenge the results in the courts is pointless and embarrassing.
The president, Wallance posited, has always relied on “lying” to advance his agenda. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he routinely used platforms like Fox & Friends to spread baseless accusations about his political opponents, generate controversy and promote conspiracy theories.
Republicans by and large ignored his behavior, Wallance continued, while Democrats struggled to counter it. Now, Trump is trying to prove that he actually won the 2020 presidential race, despite the fact that all evidence suggests otherwise, he wrote.
“Whatever the motivation, the litigation strategy has been a predictable disaster because it meant submitting unsupported claims about the 2020 election to courts with zero tolerance for unsupported claims,” Wallance stressed, pointing out that Trump’s lawyers have lost nearly 40 lawsuits so far.
Some judges dismissed the cases brought up by the Trump campaign with prejudice. In Pennsylvania, for example, U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann rejected a lawsuit saying that Rudy Giuliani and his team of lawyers failed to show any evidence of voter fraud.
Even Attorney General William Barr recently admitted that the Department of Justice has found no evidence of electoral fraud, Wallance wrote, adding that judges are “one of the reasons we are a democracy,”
“But Trump seemed not to understand that when he asked federal judges to, in effect, endorse his baseless election claims,” he continued, arguing that the judicial system is why the United States is nothing like Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus.
Wallance concluded that “the election lawsuits must be Trump’s worst nightmare.”
“They have turned him into a two-time sore loser, once at the polls and then in the courts, and made him look ridiculous.”
Even some Trump allies seem to agree with Wallance’s assessment. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie , who has long been one of the president’s closest confidants, recently described his legal team as a “national embarrassment.” Christie pointed out that the campaign’s legal team has made shocking allegations at press conferences, but failed to present concrete proof in court.
