DeSantis, Bondi disappear as Trump’s election challenges turn desperate and chaotic

President Donald Trump, his progressively desperate legal challenges floundering with a lack of evidence, welcomed two high-ranking Michigan Republicans to the White House on Friday as he focused on a new strategy to subvert the election.

The latest move would result in Republican legislatures in critical states overriding the will of their voters and certifying a voters list different from that chosen by the popular vote.

If the move sounds familiar to viewers of Floridians and Fox News, it’s because Governor Ron DeSantis was one of the first and most prominent elected officials to suggest it. Talk on The Ingraham angle two days after the election, DeSantis urged Trump to “fight” and urged legislatures to take matters into their own hands.

“Under Article II of the Constitution, presidential voters are elected by the legislatures and the projects they create and the cadre,” DeSantis said. “If there is a deviation from that, if they don’t follow the law, if they ignore the law, they can also offer remedies.”

The commentary landed like a grenade in an oil field. And DeSantis, the president’s close political ally, disappeared almost immediately after launching it.

The Republican leader has kept a low profile since this interview with Laura Ingraham. As Trump brought forward a series of frenzied, last-minute lawsuits to overturn the results in multiple states, DeSantis avoided reporters, only emerging for a brief interview on The Weather Channel before Tropical Storm Eta approached.

While Trump’s legal efforts have been thrown out in court, on several occasions DeSantis has remained silent. Instead, its Twitter feed includes announcements about the coronavirus vaccine and an extension of the state’s red snapper season.

DeSantis was even a mom on Friday when Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield landed in Washington, DC, to examine the idea he had first put forward. two weeks ago.

DeSantis isn’t the only Florida Republican to publicly step down after playing an early role in questioning the election result. Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi has become the public face of Trump’s fight to stop the counting of the ballots in Pennsylvania. But she, too, has since disappeared.

The day after the election, Bondi stood alongside Trump’s lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani outside a Philadelphia counting center to expose what they called fraud. But Bondi was nowhere to be found on Capitol Hill on Thursday when Giuliani once again appeared in front of cameras to expose a bewildering array of vast plots related to the 2020 election. Bondi did not respond to messages seeking comment.

In a lively 90-minute performance, Giuliani – gesturing wildly as an unidentifiable dark liquid trickled down his cheeks – accused Democrats of orchestrating a multi-state hijacking of the election to help Joe Biden to win the presidency. It involved, Giuliani concluded without evidence, “Venezuela, Cuba and possibly China,” as well as tech giants and daily pollsters.

Giuliani often referred to alleged problems with Dominion Voting Systems, a company that supplies voting machines to counties in states across the country. The company has become a frequent target of conspiracy theorists who allege the Dominion vote tabulators deleted millions of ballots or had coding that shifted some votes from Trump to Biden. These criticisms have been largely denied.

Not mentioned by Giuliani is that the Dominion machines have also been used by some states where Trump has won, including 18 counties in Florida. Dominion is one of only two approved voting system providers in Florida.

The DeSantis administration did not respond to a request for comment on Giuliani’s allegations about Dominion. However, electoral officials from Republican and Democratic counties statewide defended the Dominion machines in talks with the Tampa Bay Times Friday and categorically rejected Giuliani’s remarks.

“I listened to part of the press conference and couldn’t find any facts inside. No fact or evidence, ”said Shirley Anderson, Hernando County election supervisor and Republican.

Anderson stands behind his Dominion gear, she said. The manual check her office performed last week exactly matched the totals from her national tabulators, she said.

Although they lack prestige, Giuliani and Trump’s legal team managed to raise doubts about the election. A Michigan Republican election official is considering delaying certification of the vote in that country, citing unfounded criticism of the Trump campaign against Dominion.

Recent polls suggest that up to seven in 10 Republicans do not trust the results, although Trump’s own Director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has said it was “the safest election in the world. American history ”. Trump fired this individual, Chris Krebs, after the remarks.

Tammy Jones, Election Supervisor in Levy County, said people are calling her office, asking how they can be sure their vote counts, even in cases where they place their own ballots in the vote tabulators . Levy County uses Dominion machines.

“It makes me sad to think people don’t trust the system,” Jones, a Republican, said.

U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz, a panhandle Republican close to Trump, said this week the president’s strategy was to overthrow a state that was called out for Biden. Speaking on a podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, a former top Trump adviser who now faces fraud charges, Gaetz pointed to Georgia as the place where “the dam could open.”

“Then I think the American people will say, ‘Wait a sec. If you’ve lied to us about Georgia, we need to ask you a few more questions about Wisconsin, ”Gaetz said. “If you lied to us about Wayne County, Michigan, how are we supposed to believe you about what happened in Fulton County?” “

Mark Earley, the Election Supervisor in Leon County, called the reports of millions of doctored or lost votes “garbage”.

“This is patently false,” said Earley, a Democrat. “Yet these people are still there in the news, gushing about all of these things on the contrary and making people no longer believe their votes are being counted accurately.

It’s unclear how much support Trump has among Republican state legislatures to help him in his efforts to certify different voters. There is also no obvious legal way to achieve this.

After their meeting with Trump, Shirkey and Chatfield said in a joint statement that “they had not yet been informed of any information that could change the outcome of the Michigan election” and they pledged to “go through the normal process. concerning Michigan voters ”.

But Trump’s patronage of the two Michigan lawmakers was quickly seen by many as an escalation beyond political theater or the publicity stunt. In a tweet Thursday night, Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah, said of Trump’s pressure on state and local authorities: “It’s hard to imagine worse, more undemocratic action on the part of of a sitting US president. Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, another Republican, said the “savage Trump campaign press conferences are eroding public trust.”

However, the two Republican senators from Florida, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, did not raise concerns. But Scott in the Washington post Last week rejected the proposal to have GOP-controlled legislatures approve pro-Trump voters in states Biden won.

“I just think the voters decide,” Scott told the newspaper.

Rubio this week called Biden “president-elect” before calling the Democrat’s victory a “preliminary result.”

Rubio’s office did not respond to a request for comment on Trump’s invitation to Michigan lawmakers. However, in an interview before the election, Rubio warned that a foreign country could attempt the very tactics deployed by the Trump campaign.

“If this is a close election, then you use your influence operation to promote the narrative that in parts of the county in certain counties, partisan election officials were blocking Democrats, Republicans, or people of a certain racial or ethnic makeup to vote, all of which designed to create chaos and questions about the legitimacy of the election, ”Rubio told the Washington post in September. “And that would be their dream. It would be the greatest achievement an opponent has ever achieved against us in an electoral cycle is to get us to the point where people honestly believe, half the country believes, that the person who is going to take the oath was not valid and legitimately. elected. “