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.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a“ Steel Across America” event ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks on the Ellipse near the White House on Sept. 8, 2026 in Washington, D.C. President Trump welcomed 9/ 11 first responders to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’ s“ Steel Across America” event featuring a 16,900- pound, 21- foot steel beam recovered.
For Trump, even 9/11 is an opportunity
There was a reason organizers of the 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan told President Trump he could not speak at this year’s memorial service.
A good one, it turns out.
Because in a speech he gave on Tuesday in Washington, he did exactly what they were presumably worried about — he made it about himself.
According to The New York Times, Trump had wanted a speaking role at the service, but the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, said no, as they’ve maintained for the past decade-plus that the venue and event should be nonpartisan.
Trump has long used awful tragedies to either puff himself up, trash political opponents, or sell lies to the American people.
He blamed a deadly plane crash at Washington National Airport last year on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. He blamed Puerto Ricans for the devastation they endured after Hurricane Maria in 2017. He reportedly considered withholding disaster relief after the California wildfires based on the way affected regions voted. In an interview on Fox News meant to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, he used the occasion to slam former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…with graves of the dead behind him.
And now, as we approach the 25th anniversary of what many New Yorkers consider the darkest day in modern history, Trump has done it again.
He told a rambling, nonsensical story — one he’s told before — about going to Ground Zero just after terrorists flew two commercial jets into the twin towers. In the story, which no one has been able to verify, despite multiple attempts, he says firefighters had to carry him out of One Liberty Plaza, also known as the U.S. Steel Building, because they thought it was about to collapse.
As CNN fact checker Daniel Dale notes, there’s no evidence Trump went into this building, especially at a time when NYPD and NYFD had locked down the area. There’s no evidence that building was collapsing — in fact, it was deemed structurally sound and reopened within two months of the attacks. There’s no evidence he was carried out of it by firefighters.
But the lie isn’t even the worst part. Pretend it was all true — why would the leader of our country, and a New Yorker, decide to make that tragic day about himself?
Because that’s who Donald Trump is. He’s a malignant narcissist.
He’s also, incidentally, a terrible and ineffectual president, who’s made ill-fated decisions that he has to keep defending, and there’s nothing he won’t do to make himself look and feel better.
Within the first two minutes of his speech, he was cravenly using 9/11 to justify and promote his dumb war in Iran — two events separated by 25 years and 6,000 miles.
“And I will tell you, we’re right now fighting because we have a certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon, they were very close to getting it, and now they have no chance at getting it. They will never have a nuclear weapon. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been punished greatly. As you know, we’ve really taken it to them.”
As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, still one of the worst days of my life, I’m utterly sickened by Trump’s crass, political, and self-promotional framing of that awful day.
And I’m relieved he won’t be given a platform to do it again on Friday’s anniversary in lower Manhattan.
Because for Trump, everything is his for the taking, and absolutely nothing is sacred.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.