The Democrat now has 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 as a result of wins in two longtime Republican states, Arizona and Georgia, CNN projects — far above the 270 thresholds that Biden needed to clinch the presidency. But the indisputable math has not prevented the President from continuing to try to whip up outrage among his supporters on Twitter with unfounded accusations that the election has been stolen from him.
Friday’s speech in the Rose Garden was a portrait of a President clinging to power as his legal challenges to the election results crumble around him, mindful that he ought to show Americans what he’s been doing with the power of government as he spends his days tweeting conspiracy theories about lost or deleted votes in the midst of a pandemic that is coursing through the United States.
Both the President and his enablers still refuse to acknowledge that they are creating national security risks by blocking the transition to a Biden administration from going forward. But Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, did not hold back in a statement Friday night where he said the consequences of Trump’s intransigence could be catastrophic.
“The delay in transitioning is an increasing national security and health crisis,” Kelly said in a statement. “It costs the current administration nothing to start to brief Mr. Biden, (Vice President-elect Kamala) Harris, the new chief-of-staff, and ALL identified cabinet members and senior staff as they are identified over the days and weeks ahead. That said, the downside to not doing so could be catastrophic to our people regardless of who they voted for.”
The bipartisan 9/11 Commission also cited the abbreviated presidential transition after the contested election in 2000 as a reason why the nation was not prepared for the terrorist attacks, but national security arguments have not seemed to concern Trump.
Trafficking in falsehoods
Before and after the Rose Garden event, Trump seemed most engaged in trafficking false theories about how voting software glitches could have changed votes in his fact-free zone of Twitter, even as top election officials in his own administration shot those theories down.
One of Trump’s chief targets was Dominion Voting Systems, an election software company, that he claimed somehow altered the results in Arizona. “No wonder the result was a very close loss,” he tweeted.
But those exact theories were deemed baseless this week by the federal agency that oversees election security, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, in a statement along with state and private election officials: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” the agency said in its statement.
Dominion Voting Systems also released a lengthy memo Friday underscoring that the company is non-partisan, that there were no software glitches — and that “ballots were accurately tabulated and results are 100% auditable.” The company stated that “vote deletion/switching assertions are completely false.”