The Trump campaign is frantically searching for ways to claim victory in Pennsylvania before all the votes are counted.
On a call with reporters on Wednesday, Trump Campaign Manager Bill Stepien said the campaign was “declaring a victory in Pennsylvania.”
Stepien went on to say that the campaign had sent the heavy artillery in the form of Rudy Giuliani to Philadelphia as part of a bid to stop Gov. Tom Wolf (D) from sending “magical ballots” to presumably corrupt the election.
Trump and his surrogates have been claiming, falsely, that Democrats are trying to somehow “steal” the election, when in fact officials are counting legitimately cast ballots. As they do so, the tally is drifting toward Biden. The campaign has sued for a temporary stop to ballot-counting in Pennsylvania, and filed a motion at the Supreme Court to invalidate ballots that arrived on Nov. 4 and after.
Biden is trailing Trump by 326,000 votes in the Keystone State with 85 percent of ballots counted, according to the AP. The outstanding ballots are mostly mail-in votes from Democratic areas, state officials have said.
Also on the call was Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller, who echoed the fear of “magical ballots” before adding that Trump’s re-election effort had a serious task before it: prevent a repeat of the 1960 Presidential election, where, in the annals of right-wing mythology, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley marshaled thousands of dead voters to swing Illinois for JFK against Richard Nixon, robbing him of the presidency the first time around.
There was no evidence to support any of this, and a planned press conference in Philadelphia with Giuliani, Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Corey Lewandowski, and Pam Bondi was delayed.
But Stepien’s statement did trigger a coordinated flood of announcements from Trumpworld that the campaign had won Pennsylvania which it, in fact, has not.
We have won Pennsylvania!
— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) November 4, 2020
VICTORY for President @realDonaldTrump in PENNSYLVANIA ‼️
— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) November 4, 2020
