Daily US Times: Some of the Republican leaders are not falling in line behind President Trump’s attempts to falsely claim victory and seek to halt some vote-counting in the election, with several top GOP leaders expressing rare public rebukes of the president.
Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the Senate Majority Leader and a Trump ally who usually avoids criticizing the president in public, told on Wednesday that “claiming you’ve won the election is different from finishing the counting.”
With millions of votes still uncounted, in a 2:35 a.m. speech on Wednesday at the White House, President Donald Trump baselessly claimed he had defeated Democrat Joe Biden and alleged “major fraud on our nation” as election officials work through a massive surge in mail-in ballots, which they had long warned would take extra time to count. The president called for a halt in “all voting.”
On his ABC News discussion, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said: “There’s just no basis to make that argument tonight. There just isn’t. All these votes have to be counted that are in now.”
Christie is the Republican president’s ally who spent seven days in the intensive care unit after catching the coronavirus, potentially from Mr Trump, while helping him prepare for the first debate with Biden.
Christie continued: “You have to let the process play itself out before you judge it to be flawed. And by prematurely doing this, if there is a flaw later, he has undercut his own credibility.”
The former governor described Trump’s stance as ”a bad strategic decision, it’s a bad political decision, and it’s not the kind of decision you would expect someone to make tonight who holds the position he holds.”
Other Republican leaders also made their stand clear. During an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said that while he is for Trump, ”…if it ends up being Biden, all of us will accept that.”
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