Republicans are starting to shy away from Donald Trump and his fraud claims

President Donald Trump’s strategy to block Democratic President-elect Joe Biden’s access to the White House It starts to fall apart from the inside More and more Republican lawmakers, party leaders and the Justice Department are starting to leave the mogul, who insists with his theories about fraud in the Nov. 3 election.

Georgia became the first state to certify Biden’s victory on Friday, a move that will likely seal as valid the 16 state electoral votes that go to the Democrats. Since then, several legislators have said enough. Hardest hit came from Republicans in Michigan, who refused to block voter certification, ignoring Trump’s demands when he called them to the White House to put pressure on them.

Georgia is the first in a series of certifications that could officially declare Biden the winner in the coming days, with Michigan and Pennsylvania ahead of a deadline on Monday and Nevada on Tuesday.

Although Biden won Michigan in a decisive fashion, the state’s electoral validation received intense attention on Friday, when top Republican lawmakers in the state they refused to support Trump.

After the conference, lawmakers said they would “go through the normal process” to certify the state’s vote count and to honor the election result, dealing a blow to one of the president’s most egregious attempts to reverse the electoral process.

Other Republican lawmakers have publicly acknowledged Trump’s defeat. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee called Biden and his vice president Kamala Harris “president-elect” and “vice-president-elect” in an interview with ABC News. Rep. Kay Granger, Republican of Texas, said in CNN who had “major concerns” about Trump’s efforts to roll back the election, adding: “It’s time to continue.”

In turn, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee has become the most prominent Republican lawmaker to pressure Trump to begin the transition process, saying on Friday that Biden had “a very good chance” of winning.

From the Justice Department, which has had to comply in recent days with a series of demands from the president to legally investigate the elections, they say in public that they are obeying the head of the White House. But in private, they claim that everything is “crazy”. A group of sixteen prosecutors specially assigned to the case asked the Minister of Justice, William Barr, who rejects Trump’s claims because they saw no evidence of fraud or anomaly.

Several Republican lawmakers consulted off the record, They are betting that President Trump, once his legal recourse against the election is exhausted, will finally accept his defeat to Joe Biden. So far, however, the opposite has happened. As courts dismiss one trial after another, Trump is stepping up efforts to disrupt the process. Rather than accept the reality of the result, the president wants to use the power of his office to overthrow it.

“The Republican Party has allowed Trump to pout for too long”said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley of Rice University in Texas.

Biden has so far garnered 80 million votes against Trump’s 74 million. But state after state, from Arizona to Georgia, Trump’s demands are failing. In none was evidence of widespread fraud presented on a scale that could affect the outcome. Given the looming deadlines, Republican lawmakers will be forced to face the moment of truth.

States have a deadline to certify results until December 6, and Republicans view December 14, when the electoral college must proclaim the winner, as a way out of the Trump presidency. Then, they think, they’ll be able to say publicly what many are already saying in private: that Biden won the election.

Source: AFP, AP and EFE agencies