President Trump began his third straight week of angry defiance of the election results, brooding behind the scenes about the state of his campaign’s legal challenges and of Georgia’s hand recount while refusing the pleas of some advisers to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
Despite mounting legal losses in courts and a retreat by his attorneys in a federal case filed against Pennsylvania election officials, Trump dug in on his false claim that he “won” the election.
The president also assailed Georgia for what he described on Twitter as a “Fake” and “MEANINGLESS” recount in that state, which President-elect Joe Biden leads by 14,205 votes and has been projected to win. Trump officials seized late Monday on the discovery of about 2,600 eligible votes in heavily Republican Floyd County that were not included in initial tallies, although they would not be enough to change the outcome statewide.
Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said in an interview Monday that he has come under increasing pressure from fellow Republicans to exclude ballots in an effort to reverse Trump’s narrow loss and that the president’s misinformation campaign has gotten so out of hand that he has received death threats.
Trump’s campaign has begun winding down its operations, with employment contracts for a number of aides expiring on Sunday. The president, frustrated that his campaign lawyers were not appearing more frequently on television to amplify his baseless claim that he was the real election winner, has elevated attorneys Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jenna Ellis to run his legal and public-relations efforts to overturn the results.