President Donald Trump's demand for vote counting to stop in an election that is still undecided may have been his most extreme and dangerous assault on the institutions of democracy yet in a presidency replete with them.
Trump
appeared in the East Room of the White House early on Wednesday morning
to claim falsely that he had already beaten Democrat Joe Biden, and the
election was being stolen from him in a massive act of fraud. He vowed
to mount a challenge in the Supreme Court and declared that he had
already won states that were still counting votes, including Georgia,
North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
The election has not yet been won,
and the President and the former vice president are still locked in a
tight battle for the decisive states with millions of votes still being
counted.
Trump's
remarks essentially amounted to a demand for the legally cast votes of
American citizens not to be recorded in a historic act of
disenfranchisement. And they brought closer the potential constitutional
nightmare that many have feared since Trump started to tarnish an
election that he apparently worried he could lose months ago. His
rhetorical broadside was also notable because it came at a moment of
huge tension in a deeply divided nation -- a time when a president, even
one whose political fate is in the process of being written -- could be
expected to call for calm.
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