CNN anchor Jake Tapper on Wednesday went off on Republicans and President Donald Trump for their “clownish” coup attempt, branding their effort to subvert democracy and nullify the presidential election over baseless voter-fraud conspiracies as “absolutely disgraceful.”
Over the past few weeks, Team Trump’s increasingly hapless legal challenges to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victories in various key swing states have been tossed out of court, including the Supreme Court. All 50 states and the District of Columbia, meanwhile, have now certified their votes, paving the way for Biden’s official Electoral College win.
In what appears to be one last-ditch effort, however, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan, alleging that recent voting law changes in those states mean their 62 combined electoral votes should be blocked and Trump should be re-elected.
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The president announced on Wednesday morning that he was joining the lawsuit, calling it the “big one” and the “case that everyone has been waiting for.” Later that afternoon, the Republican Missouri attorney general filed an amicus brief in support of Texas, joined by 16 other attorneys general from states that Trump carried.
Reporting on these latest developments on Wednesday afternoon, Tapper noted that some in the president’s “ride-or-die brigade in Congress” are now urging their Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill to also join the amicus brief.
“We have to point out, we have discussed this lawsuit on the show before, and it’s not taken seriously by any credible legal experts on the left or the right,” the veteran anchor added.
After White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins noted that while the lawsuit is a “long-shot,” it shows that the president is continuing to fight the election results and “tightening his grip on the GOP” despite the dubiousness of the latest legal challenge.
“So while the president is undermining democracy, he is having people help him in this effort,” Collins stated.
“It’s just not a credible lawsuit,” Tapper reiterated, citing conservative attorney George Conway’s recent assessment of the suit. “It’s full of nonsense and conspiracy theories.”
“This is where the Republican Party is now. If you cross the president, you actually fear for your life,” the CNN moderator stated at one point, referencing the Pennslyvania GOP Senate leader saying she'd get her "house bombed" if she defied Trump.
Later in the segment, the CNN political reporter Gloria Borger brought up the president’s personal attempts to push state lawmakers and officials to intervene on his behalf in an effort to throw out votes and flip results.
“It’s election tampering. I don’t care if you’re doing it on a phone from the Oval Office, or you’re doing it on a phone from your basement,” she declared. “What the president is doing is wrong, and he should be held accountable for it.”
“Making challenges in court is one thing,” Borger continued. “Of course, he is completely allowed to do that if he wants to. He doesn’t have a case anywhere, obviously, but at a certain point, what he is doing is telling elected officials to say the election that got you elected was illegal because it didn’t elect me too.”
A clearly disgusted Tapper, meanwhile, made his feelings clear when it came to the Republican push to keep Trump in the White House.
“It is a clownish, and it will be a failed attempt, at a coup, a non-violent coup,” he exclaimed. “But it is absolutely disgraceful. There’s really no other word for it other than that.”
