Dozens of fresh and brazenly wrong claims by President Trump about stolen victory have not made it any closer to the truth. But they have accompanied a fresh rush of loyalty from his Republican allies.
GOP attorneys general in 17 other red states have joined the Texas effort to nullify the election results in big battlegrounds won by President-elect Joe Biden, a lawsuit that election law experts have uniformly derided with terms stretching from silly to outlandish, bonkers to dangerous. And as many as two dozen Republicans in the House were expected to sign on as well.
The Supreme Court could reject the claim outright as soon as the deadline for filing such briefs passes Thursday evening. If that happens, Trump will have nothing but his own false rhetoric to lean on until Congress meets to formalize the electoral vote count on Jan. 6, when more ultimately fruitless GOP shenanigans aiming to discredit democracy are guaranteed.
Trump invited the group of supportive GOP attorneys general to lunch in the Cabinet Room on Thursday, while the nation's Democratic attorneys general rushed to file by later afternoon their own brief urging the high court to throw out the Texas suit as soon as possible.
A late burst of litigation elsewhere, based on outside-the-box legal theories but unsupported by credible evidence, continues to prove fruitless.
On Thursday a Trump appointee to the federal bench in Wisconsin, Judge Brett Ludwig, said that ruling in favor of the president's bid to overturn the result in that state would be "the most remarkable ruling in the history of this court or the federal judiciary."
"All I ask for is people with wisdom and with courage, that's all," Trump told guests at a White House Hanukkah party Wednesday night. "Because if certain very important people, if they have wisdom and if they have courage, we're going to win this election in a landslide."
He backed that up with a simple "WISDOM & COURAGE!!!" tweet Thursday, one of about two dozen Twitter posts furthering his fabricated fraud claims in the past two days. Most have merited warning labels by the social media platform.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's lawsuit demands the Supreme Court use its power to settle disputes between the states to throw out the combined 62 electoral votes for Biden from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. (With them Biden has 306 and Trump 232.)
The rationale, supported by unproven or disproven allegations, is that all those states acted unconstitutionally to make voting easier during the coronavirus pandemic.
A quick response from the Supreme Court is expected by the end of the week, at the latest, because the Electoral College meets across the country Monday to cast its votes.
Already this week, the court has dismissed without a word of disagreement the first election suit it touched — a bid by Pennsylvania Republicans to toss that state's result with the claim that the its mail-in voting rules are out of bounds.
The chairman of the conservative House GOP Freedom Caucus, Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, reached out at Trump's behest to get members of the group to formally endorse the Texas suit. (Earlier this week, 25 of them called on Attorney General William Barr to appoint a special counsel to investigate "irregularities" in the election, even though Barr himself said last week the Justice Department and FBI had found no evidence to overturn the result.)
Trump used campaign funds to get an attorney to file a motion asking to intervene on behalf of Texas and reportedly asked one of state's senators, Ted Cruz, to represent him if the case is accepted. "This is the big one," the president explained on Twitter.
Even if the Electoral College votes as expected on Monday, congressional Republicans can stage a sure-to-fail effort to block Congress from finalizing the vote. It won't succeed because such a move would need approval by both the Senate and the Democratic House.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.