Day by day, President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of a free and fair election grow more brazen. Day by day, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and other so-called leaders of the Republican Party grow more complicit in this banana-republic style assault on democracy.
As one Trump court challenge after another fails, it is easy to dismiss his claims that the election was "stolen" as nothing but a public-relations stunt. Not a harmless stunt, to be sure; he is guaranteeing that millions of Americans will see President-elect Joe Biden as less than legitimate and their own democratic system as corrupt. But a stunt, nonetheless. Watching the latest ravings of campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who on Thursday posited with no evidence whatsoever a series of increasingly wild conspiracy theories, it was possible to feel any number of emotions: pity, fury, astonishment. But nothing in his unhinged performance would lead a serious person to fear that the election results were in danger of being voided in court.
But it is a different matter entirely when the president intervenes directly in an effort to persuade state officials to overturn the voting results. This is what Trump is now doing. Having lost an election by a decisive margin, and then having lost one legal challenge to that result after another, he is now strong-arming local Republicans to simply ignore and override the results.
In Michigan, he trails by a thumping 157,000 votes. First, as The Post has reported, he personally called a Republican member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers; after his phone call, that board member tried to rescind her vote certifying the results in the county, which includes Detroit and which Trump lost overwhelmingly. Another Republican member of the board also is trying to rescind his vote.
Now, as Post reporters learned, Trump has invited the state Senate majority leader and state House speaker to the White House. This follows reporting that the White House had settled on a strategy of inducing as much political interference as possible to delay or block Biden's ascent to the White House. Trump supporters are still holding out hope that Republican legislators in Michigan, Pennsylvania and other states might ignore the will of their voters and send pro-Trump slates of electors to Washington.
This remains a highly unlikely outcome. The two legislative leaders in Michigan, Mike Shirkey and Lee Chatfield, had said previously that they could not envision participating in any such maneuvers. But it is a pathetic spectacle when the burden of defending democracy is falling on such state leaders, as well as principled secretaries of state such as Georgia Republican Brad Raffensperger, while the likes of McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. -- who, having both just won reelection, have no conceivable excuse for such spinelessness -- hide behind platitudes about allowing Trump to play out his legal options.
Trump is not playing out legitimate legal options. He is maneuvering to undo his defeat through lies and chicanery. Let us all remember who abetted this disgrace and who stood up to it.