Four days after Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the United States, Senator Rand Paul found himself unable to admit that the election that sent Biden to the White House was legitimate.
At a Sunday morning apparition on ABC This week, the Republican senator from Kentucky, who has repeatedly affirmed former President Donald Trump’s discredited charges of fraud in the November 3 election, declined to say that that election was not stolen.
“The debate about ‘whether or not there has been fraud’ should take place,” said Paul. “We never had a court appearance where we actually examined the evidence. Most cases were dismissed for lack of legitimacy, which is a procedural way of not really hearing the issue. “
In fact, while some of the dozens of Trump campaign lawsuits in battlefield states were dismissed or voluntarily withdrawn, many were heard and considered without merit, a fact that host George Stephanopoulos raised in response.
“After investigations, counts and recounts, the Justice Department, led by William Barr, said there was no widespread evidence of fraud,” said Stephanopoulos, referring to the former US Attorney General, who had been a faithful ally of Trump until he publicly declared that there was no evidence of widespread electoral fraud.
As Ian Millhiser of Vox explained, “Trump’s post-election processes failed for a variety of interconnected reasons”, but one was simply that “Trump and his allies just didn’t have very good legal arguments”:
In some cases, they brought penny-ante claims that could not have changed the outcome of the election even if they prevailed. In others, they made factual claims that were based entirely on speculation – or even conspiracy theories incubated on social media. In some cases, Trump or his allies presented legal arguments that were the exact opposite of the arguments they made in other cases. There are no good legal arguments that could justify the rejection of the election results, and the clown of Trump’s legal strategy just drew attention to the weakness of his claims.
Stephanopoulos continued to pressure Paulo: “Can’t you just say the words: ‘Wasn’t this election stolen?'”
The senator refused to do so, instead pointing to a poll that shows that the majority of Republicans do not trust the outcome of the election.
This distrust is due to a number of factors, including the baseless claims, repeated over and over again, by lawmakers and other prominent conservatives that there was fraud. Trump himself led this effort, repeating these statements so many times that, after a rally dedicated to this topic on January 6, his supporters tried to violently prevent the certification of electoral results by attacking the United States Capitol, in an insurrection attempt that ended with five deaths.
However, after dozens of lawsuits, tense “Stop the Steal” rallies and violence at the headquarters of the United States government, Paul promised to spend the remaining two years in office fighting the alleged electoral fraud.
He said so much about Twitter, following a TV appearance in which he refused to give legitimacy to the same electoral process that propelled him twice to power.