Elections

In the three weeks since Election Day, President Trump’s most visible presence has been on Twitter. Since Nov. 3, he has posted some 550 tweets — about three-quarters of which attempted to undermine the integrity of the 2020 election results. Trump Tweets Per Day Tweets about election fraud Other tweets Trump Tweets Per Day Tweets […] More

In February of last year, while interviewing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for this magazine, I asked him about what happened the previous summer during the NATO summit in Brussels. It was widely reported that President Trump threw a fit at the July 12 session, berating German chancellor Angela Merkel about the United States paying more than its fair share. Two sources told me that senior members of the delegation, Pompeo included, feared Trump might pull America out of the alliance entirely. But when I asked Pompeo about the incident, citing the July 12 date in particular, he gave me absolutely nothing. It wasn’t that he demurred, or tried to spin the events of that day. Instead, he made a show of rejecting the question’s premise.“If I’m remembering the meeting correctly,” he said, “what happened was no different than what happened on July 9, 10, 11, 13 or 14.” As he ticked off each date in a steady, even tone, the message seemed clear: He didn’t just want to be nonresponsive; he wanted me to see just how willful his nonresponse would be.I thought about that interview again this month, after Pompeo held an instantly infamous news conference. It had been three days since The Associated Press announced that Joe Biden had won the election. Pompeo should have expected that he would get asked about the standoff then roiling the nation: The president was refusing to concede the race and spinning out baseless conspiracy theories about the result. But when the issue was raised by the first reporter to be called on, Rich Edson of Fox News, Pompeo seemed annoyed. Edson asked whether the State Department was “currently preparing to engage with the Biden transition team.” If not, he continued, could that “pose a risk to national security?”With a frown and a shake of his head, Pompeo brushed aside the question of cooperating with Joe Biden. Instead, he made a declaration: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”
When the sentence was done, he nodded, flashed a quick smile and audibly exhaled through his nose. This gesture was recounted by many as a “chuckle,” but it didn’t quite sound like one; it was more like an amiable snort, which he used as his own transition to some less inflammatory rhetoric: The votes would all be counted. The Constitution would be obeyed. The State Department would do everything possible to assure the success of whoever has been sworn into the office “on Jan. 20, a minute after noon.” He spoke as though he hadn’t just made a flat pronouncement about who that person would be — the person whose chances were shrinking by the hour from slim to none, and who also happened to be his boss.Almost immediately, the internet erupted with debate over whether Pompeo had been serious. Secretaries of state frequently issue statements to encourage fair and peaceful elections in other countries; Pompeo now seemed to be undermining the legitimacy of America’s own election from the department’s lectern. His echo of Trump’s denialism prompted further speculation about whether the administration’s actions could amount to a “coup.” Some political journalists tried to tone the moment down, claiming that the “chuckle” carried with it some degree of self-awareness, and that Pompeo had been kidding. On the other side were partisans on both wings, as well as foreign news services, who were inclined to take the American secretary of state seriously.Trump’s win in 2016 adrenalized the career of Pompeo, who was plucked from his Kansas congressional seat to lead the C.I.A. Elected in 2010 with the G.O.P.’s Tea Party class, Pompeo was best known for his aggressive questioning of Hillary Clinton during the Benghazi hearings. Now 56, he is seen as a viable presidential contender, one of a small group of Republicans who could excite the Trumpist base without alienating the traditional G.O.P. establishment. Along with Pompeo, this group includes Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz and Mike Pence. The problem for this group is that Trump could himself run for a second term in 2024. As long as he remains in the picture, as a candidate or a self-styled shadow president, those who would claim to be Trump’s heirs will have to reside, at least in part, within the realm of his delusions. It is a place where there is no such thing as defeat, only broken scoreboards.[embedded content]Rather than coming to terms with Trump’s loss, then, the whole party may, like Pompeo at that lectern, be forced to spend the next four years stuck in the denial phase. No ambitious conservative can afford to oppose Trump’s positions, even when they tip over into magical thinking. Most have avoided recognizing Biden as the president-elect, an omission that would have been unthinkable under previous Republican presidents.In such a climate, attempting to unify the party, let alone the country, will be a heavy lift. The most a conventional politician can hope to do is communicate multiple messages, in a half-chuckled way that allows disparate constituencies to hear whatever they want to. In an interview on Fox, hours after the news conference, Pompeo repeated his points about vote-counting and the Constitution. When the host asked if he was serious about his transition remark, he avoided answering. Trump himself took notice of Pompeo’s stubborn commitment to living within the ever-changing borders of his boss’s fantasies, retweeting the “second Trump administration” clip with approval that night. The following week, Trump invited Michigan lawmakers to the White House in the clear hope of finding a way to deprive Biden, who won the state, of its 16 electoral votes. Trump was obviously not kidding about overturning the election result. Why should we think Pompeo was?Given his assurance about a second term, it might seem reasonable for American allies to wonder if Pompeo was representing the whole of the U.S. government or an embittered, departing faction. For the next few weeks, at least, he could still get in the room with heads of state, and he soon departed on a trip to France, Turkey, Georgia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Each of the countries he planned to visit had offered its official congratulations to President-elect Biden. Did Pompeo take issue with his counterparts engaging with Biden? “The business of State continues,” replied a senior Department official when asked in a briefing. “We have continuity of government.”There was no mention of a Biden administration — or another term for Trump. It appeared that Pompeo was willing to meet reality halfway, even if his words had suggested otherwise. More

The word Dolchstosslegende is hard to pronounce but important to understand. It translates as “stab-in-the-back myth” and was a key element in the revival of German militarism in the Weimar years. Even modestly educated Germans know exactly what it denotes and the evil it entails.Donald Trump and his legal team are now contriving their own Dolchstosslegende.That’s true even as Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the election seems to descend from fantasy to farce. The main point of the exercise is no longer (if it ever seriously was) to find a judge, governor or other pliable instrument to deny Joe Biden the presidency. It is to deny the legitimacy of the Biden presidency, of the electoral system that gave him the office and of the federal and judicial systems that turned Trump’s legal challenges aside.The point of the farce is farce. It is to make an obscene joke of the Biden administration and our constitutional system of government.This was also the point of the Dolchstosslegende, which claimed that the German Army, though in retreat in the fall of 1918, could have kept up the fight had it not been betrayed by defeatist and scheming politicians who agreed to an armistice that November.This was, of course, a self-serving lie: Germany’s armies were being routed, its strategic situation was hopeless, its sailors were mutinying, its people were approaching starvation and only the armistice (which the kaiser’s generals asked for) spared it from a much more painful defeat.But the nature of the myth wasn’t that it should be believable. It’s that it should be believed.There’s a difference. The success of the first rests on a plausible interpretation of facts. The success of the second requires a psychologically astute understanding of the people to whom the lie is peddled. The Dolchstosslegende may have been a transparent falsehood, but it had the double advantage of bucking up a humiliated nation’s pride and playing to its gut prejudices. Translated into the bigoted vernacular, “defeatist” and “scheming” almost always meant socialists, communists and Jews.In this sense, it doesn’t matter that Rudy Giuliani’s legal case is being laughed out of court. What matters is that the district judge who did so is an Obama appointee (despite being a conservative Republican), and therefore can be dismissed as part of the deep-state conspiracy seeking to bring Trump down.Nor does it matter that the lawyer Sidney Powell painted an anti-Trump conspiracy so vast that it seems to have embarrassed Giuliani and would have made the ghost of Joe McCarthy proud. What matters is that Powell’s list of enemies — from the director of the C.I.A. to the former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez — hit all the right notes for the president’s die-hards.And there are a lot of them: 52 percent of Republicans think the president “rightfully won” re-election, at least according to a Reuters Ipsos poll from last week. In other words, a majority of Republicans will believe literally anything Trump says.Here again the comparison to Germany rings loud. In a famous passage of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt noted how “Mass Propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”The Dolchstosslegende worked because so many Germans were happy to believe what, at some level, they also knew wasn’t true. But it also worked because it had a clear aim that a growing number of Germans shared, which was to overthrow the struggling Weimar Republic by claiming that it was founded on treason. In other words, it wasn’t just a conspiracy theory. It was a political weapon with the revolutionary aim of destroying democracy itself.What Trump and his minions are now attempting is of a piece. It is rich that many of the same people who spent years claiming that Robert Mueller’s lawful and constrained investigation was a deep-state coup are now happy to entertain a sitting president’s preposterous claims of electoral fraud.But the aim is clear: to treat the Biden presidency as a product of treachery by a political order that is so comprehensively corrupt that it will require far tougher means than the ones Trump employed to root out.In case certain readers think I’m making a comparison between Trump supporters and Nazis, let me emphasize that I am not. What I am saying is that this modern-day Dolchstosslegende, like surf pounding against a bluff, abets future demagogues by eroding public confidence in democratic institutions, until, unprotected, they collapse.No comparison with the Weimar years is complete without noting that the republic wasn’t just done in. It did a lot to do itself in, too, mostly through economic mismanagement. All the more reason to wish the Biden administration well as it navigates crises that now include some of the most disreputable opponents our own republic has ever known.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Until late last week, most Americans who aren’t regular consumers of right-wing talk radio and cable news probably had not heard of Sidney Powell, an appellate lawyer from Texas who joined President Trump’s legal team earlier this month as it undertook a fruitless pursuit to prove that fraud cost him the election.Ms. Powell burst into national attention on Thursday, when she appeared alongside Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is leading the president’s legal efforts, at a surreal news conference where she made claims that strained credulity, even for a presidential campaign that has repeatedly lowered the bar. In a matter of minutes, Ms. Powell blamed Cuba, Venezuela, the Clinton Foundation, the billionaire George Soros and Antifa, a loosely defined left-wing movement, for somehow making votes for Mr. Trump disappear.Mr. Giuliani seemed unfazed as his new colleague floated these fanciful theories. And when Ms. Powell finished speaking, the former mayor of New York added another possible conspirator she had left out: Black Lives Matter activists.Mr. Trump, however, was not so pleased. And he apparently had enough after Ms. Powell later accused Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and its Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, of being paid off for their involvement in the plot.“Georgia is probably going to be the first state I’m going to blow up,” Ms. Powell said over the weekend in an interview with Newsmax TV. “And Mr. Kemp and the secretary of state need to go with it.”The Trump campaign on Sunday issued a statement from Mr. Giuliani and another campaign lawyer, Jenna Ellis, disavowing Ms. Powell.Ms. Powell’s role on the Trump team was never clear. She did not appear in court at any of the dozen or so hearings so far in election-related cases, nor did she sign any of the hundreds of filings in nearly 40 election lawsuits submitted by the Trump campaign. How then did she become a public face of Mr. Trump’s legal team, which Ms. Ellis described at the news conference as an “elite strike force,” with Ms. Powell at her side?The Michael Flynn caseMs. Powell did not have much of a reputation in conservative legal circles until last year when she took on the case of Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. but later sought to withdraw his plea. The case became something of a cause célèbre among many Trump loyalists, who have long insisted that the president and his allies were the target of nefarious “deep state” law enforcement and intelligence officials.Ms. Powell, a native North Carolinian who began her legal career as an assistant federal prosecutor in Texas, certainly believed that. And through her aggressive defense of Mr. Flynn — she often used incendiary rhetoric, accusing the F.B.I. of committing “atrocities” against her client — she became an admired figure on the right and a frequent guest on conservative radio and television programs.Her visibility in the media caught the eye of the president, who spoke with her numerous times by phone.While representing Mr. Flynn, Ms. Powell also used her media appearances to amplify social media posts promoting QAnon, the baseless conspiracy theory whose proponents believe Mr. Trump is battling a cabal of satanic pedophiles. But this approach did not hurt her in the eyes of the president’s defenders, including Attorney General William P. Barr. After her attempts to get the Flynn case dismissed failed, Mr. Barr agreed to appoint a U.S. attorney to review the case, a step that ultimately led him to direct the Justice Department to drop the charges against her client. The case is still in limbo.In a statement to The New York Times earlier this year, Ms. Powell said she had long considered “prosecutorial misconduct and overreach” a problem. Conspiracies within the American government have been a preoccupation of hers for some time: In 2014 she self-published a book that purports to be a seminal work in “exposing ‘the Deep State.’”The book arose from her work in private practice, where she spent years representing defendants in the Enron financial scandal, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen and James A. Brown, a former executive at Merrill Lynch. During that time she began to impugn the motives of one of the federal prosecutors on the case, Andrew Weissmann, who went on to be a member of the special counsel team under Robert S. Mueller III, who led the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.False claims of voter fraudThough the false narrative that Ms. Powell laid out last week at the news conference was new to many Americans, she had been making those and other claims for more than a week as a frequent guest on right-wing talk radio and cable news programs, and as a source for pro-Trump websites like Breitbart News.Her accusations were specific to the election, but they resembled the claims that Mr. Trump and his supporters have made for years about a vast web of enemies working to undermine him.The basic case she has presented on conservative media was as convoluted as it was far-fetched: Venezuela, Cuba and other communist nations were behind a plot to hack into voting machines and steal millions of votes from Mr. Trump, with the help of a secret algorithm.In an interview last week on the top-rated “Rush Limbaugh Show” — in which she spoke for nearly 20 minutes and faced no skepticism from the guest host, Mark Steyn — Ms. Powell claimed that the voting machines in question had been designed to rig elections for the former ruler of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013. They were “so hackable a 15-year-old could do it,” she said. And she cited unnamed “math experts” she had supposedly consulted who told her how an algorithm added votes for President Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s totals.In an interview the day before on Fox Business, Ms. Powell also said the conspiracy involved “dead people” who voted “in massive numbers” — again offering no proof — and described how fraudulent paper ballots were also part of the scheme.Speaking early last week to the right-wing radio host Mark Levin, who has the fourth-largest audience in talk radio, Ms. Powell said she had obtained an affidavit from someone purportedly present when the scheme was hatched by pro-Chávez forces in Venezuela to rig his elections.Because of her involvement in the Flynn case, the pro-Trump media often presented her as an expert with unimpeachable credentials.“Sidney Powell is no joke,” declared one Breitbart article published last week, which mentioned her early career as a federal prosecutor and her work for Mr. Flynn. Mr. Limbaugh, too, told his audience last week that he seriously doubts she would be putting her credibility on the line if she hadn’t uncovered serious wrongdoing.Other Trump allies were less convinced that her claims should be taken seriously. Tucker Carlson of Fox News said last week that when he pressed Ms. Powell, she failed to produce any evidence to support the elaborate conspiracy she purported to have uncovered. His dissent was not appreciated by the president’s defenders, or by Ms. Powell, who said Mr. Carlson had been “very insulting, demanding and rude” to her.Despite initial praise from the president, who announced less than two weeks ago that she had been added to his team of “wonderful lawyers,” it was never clear during her brief time with the campaign what her job was supposed to be. Her efforts on behalf of the Trump campaign appeared to be largely limited to public relations She has defended the president and attacked the integrity of the vote solely on Twitter, on television and at news conferences, acting more as a publicity agent than a lawyer.She has said she plans to file a suit in Georgia but hasn’t yet. It is unclear whether that work will continue now that the Trump campaign has cut her loose. More

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John Kerry, the former US secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee, has been named as a special envoy on the climate crisis under Joe Biden’s incoming administration.
Biden’s transition team said Kerry would “fight climate change full time” in the role, which for the first time will include a seat on the national security council.
This elevation shows the president-elect sees the climate crisis as an “urgent national security issue”, the Biden transition team said.
Kerry tweeted that “America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent national security threat it is.” The former Massachusetts senator, who ran for president in 2004, added that he will work with Biden, US allies and the climate movement to address the “crisis” of global heating.
As secretary of state, Kerry played a prominent role in the international effort to craft the Paris climate agreement, which commits countries to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid disastrous storms, heatwaves, flooding and other looming climate threats.
Since leaving government in 2017, Kerry has been sharply critical of Donald Trump’s dismantling of climate policies and the decision to remove the US from the Paris agreement. Biden has vowed to re-enter the Paris deal.
Over the summer, Kerry was part of a climate taskforce the Biden campaign used to develop its carbon-cutting policies.
The appointment of such a heavyweight political figure to a newly elevated climate position was warmly welcomed by environmentalists.
“John Kerry’s appointment is an encouraging signal that the US will make the climate emergency a matter of national security, but it’s only a step in what must be a bold new strategy,” said Brett Hartl, director of government affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity.
“Because Trump spent four years boosting fossil fuels and blocking solutions, the new administration must prove its commitment to drawing down fossil fuels and treating this crisis with the life-and-death urgency that it deserves.”
Seen as a moderate among climate campaigners, Kerry will probably be tasked with gaining support among Republicans for Biden’s sweeping $2tn plan to drastically cut emissions by generating millions of new jobs in renewable energy and other climate-friendly activities.
It is unclear how much success he will have if, as anticipated, Republicans remain in control of the Senate. More

On the morning of Nov. 5, Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, asked his Facebook followers to report cases of voter fraud with the hashtag, Stop the Steal. His post was shared over 5,000 times.By late afternoon, the conservative media personalities Diamond and Silk had shared the hashtag along with a video claiming voter fraud in Pennsylvania. Their post was shared over 3,800 times.That night, the conservative activist Brandon Straka asked people to protest in Michigan under the banner #StoptheSteal. His post was shared more than 3,700 times.Over the next week, the phrase “Stop the Steal” was used to promote dozens of rallies that spread false voter fraud claims about the U.S. presidential elections.New research from Avaaz, a global human rights group, the Elections Integrity Partnership and The New York Times shows how a small group of people — mostly right-wing personalities with outsized influence on social media — helped spread the false voter-fraud narrative that led to those rallies.That group, like the guests of a large wedding held during the pandemic, were “superspreaders” of misinformation around voter fraud, seeding falsehoods that include the claims that dead people voted, voting machines had technical glitches, and mail-in ballots were not correctly counted.“Because of how Facebook’s algorithm functions, these superspreaders are capable of priming a discourse,” said Fadi Quran, a director at Avaaz. “There is often this assumption that misinformation or rumors just catch on. These superspreaders show that there is an intentional effort to redefine the public narrative.”Across Facebook, there were roughly 3.5 million interactions — including likes, comments and shares — on public posts referencing “Stop the Steal” during the week of Nov. 3, according to the research. Of those, the profiles of Eric Trump, Diamond and Silk and Mr. Straka accounted for a disproportionate share — roughly 6 percent, or 200,000, of those interactions.While the group’s impact was notable, it did not come close to the spread of misinformation promoted by President Trump since then. Of the 20 most-engaged Facebook posts over the last week containing the word “election,” all were from Mr. Trump, according to Crowdtangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. All of those claims were found to be false or misleading by independent fact checkers.The baseless election fraud claims have been used by the president and his supporters to challenge the vote in a number of states. Reports that malfunctioning voting machines, intentionally miscounted mail-in votes and other irregularities affected the vote were investigated by election officials and journalists who found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.The voter fraud claims have continued to gather steam in recent weeks, thanks in large part to prominent accounts. A look at a four-week period starting in mid-October shows that President Trump and the top 25 superspreaders of voter fraud misinformation accounted for 28.6 percent of the interactions people had with that content, according to an analysis by Avaaz.“What we see these people doing is kind of like setting a fire down with fuel, it is designed to quickly create a blaze,” Mr. Quran said. “These actors have built enough power they ensure this misinformation reaches millions of Americans.”In order to find the superspreaders, Avaaz compiled a list of 95,546 Facebook posts that included narratives about voter fraud. Those posts were liked, shared or commented on nearly 60 million times by people on Facebook.Avaaz found that just 33 of the 95,546 posts were responsible for over 13 million of those interactions. Those 33 posts had created a narrative that would go on to shape what millions of people thought about the legitimacy of the U.S. elections.A spokesman for Facebook said the company had added labels to posts that misrepresented the election process and was directing people to a voting information center.“We’re taking every opportunity to connect people to reliable information about the election and how votes are being counted,” said Kevin McAlister, a Facebook spokesman. The company has not commented on why accounts that repeatedly share misinformation, such as Mr. Straka’s and Diamond and Silk’s, have not been penalized. Facebook has previously said that President Trump, along with other elected officials, is granted a special status and is not fact-checked.Many of the superspreader accounts had millions of interactions on their Facebook posts over the last month, and have enjoyed continued growth. The accounts were active on Twitter as well as Facebook, and increasingly spread the same misinformation on new social media sites like Parler, MeWe and Gab.Dan Bongino, a right-wing commentator with a following of nearly four million people on Facebook, had over 7.7 million interactions on Facebook the week of Nov. 3. Mark Levin, a right-wing radio host, had nearly four million interactions, and Diamond and Silk had 2.5 million. A review of their pages by The Times shows that a majority of their posts have focused on the recent elections, and voter fraud narratives around them.None of the superspreaders identified in this article responded to requests for comment.One of the most prominent false claims promoted by the superspreaders was that Dominion voting software deleted votes for Mr. Trump, or somehow changed vote tallies in several swing states. Election officials have found no evidence that the machines malfunctioned, but posts about the machines have been widely shared by Mr. Trump and his supporters.Over the last week, just seven posts from the top 25 superspreaders of the Dominion voter fraud claim accounted for 13 percent of the total interactions on Facebook about the claim.Many of those same accounts were also top superspreaders of the Dominion claim, and other voter fraud theories, on Twitter. The accounts of President Trump, his son Eric, Mr. Straka and Mr. Levin were all among the top 20 accounts that spread misinformation about voter fraud on Twitter, according to Ian Kennedy, a researcher at the University of Washington who works with the Elections Integrity Partnership.Mr. Trump had by far the largest influence on Twitter. A single tweet by the president accusing Dominion voting systems of deleting 2.7 million votes in his favor was shared over 185,000 times, and liked over 600,000 times.Like the other false claims about voter fraud, Mr. Trump’s tweet included a label by Twitter that he was sharing information that was not accurate.Twitter, like Facebook, has said that those labels help prevent false claims from being shared and direct people toward more authoritative sources of information.Earlier this week, BuzzFeed News reported that Facebook employees questioned whether the labels were effective. Within the company, employees have sought out their own data on how well national newspapers performed during the elections, according to one Facebook employee.On the #StoptheSteal hashtag, they found that both The New York Times and The Washington Post were among the top 25 pages with interactions on that hashtag — mainly from readers sharing articles and using the hashtag in those posts. (People sharing the articles could have been intending to debunk the campaign.)Combined, the two publications had approximately 44,000 interactions on Facebook under that hashtag. By comparison, Mr. Straka, the conservative activist who shared the call to action on voter fraud, got three times that number of interactions sharing material under the same hashtag on his own Facebook account.Jacob Silver contributed reporting. More

Even as the campaign lawsuits brought by President Trump over the 2020 election enter their death throes, many people continue to worry that Mr. Trump will find three Republican legislatures to magically snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. They are concerned that he will pull off an antidemocratic hat trick through maneuvers like delaying recounts in Wisconsin and blocking certification in Michigan to allow these legislatures to submit competing slates of electors to Congress. The goal is to prevent Joe Biden from securing the Electoral College votes he needs on Jan. 6 for Congress to declare him president.The good news is that there is no real prospect that Mr. Trump can avoid a reluctant handover of power on Jan. 20. The bad news is that Mr. Trump’s wildly unsubstantiated claims of a vast voter fraud conspiracy and the litigation he has brought against voting rights have done — and will increasingly do — serious damage to our democracy. Our problems will deepen, in particular, because Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy has led to the emergence of a voter-hostile jurisprudence in the federal courts. New judicial doctrines will put more power in the hands of Republican legislatures to suppress the vote and take voters, state courts and federal courts out of key backstop roles.Let’s start on the positive side. A federal district court opinion issued in Pennsylvania Saturday laid bare both the dangerousness and vacuousness of Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy. Rudy Giuliani, acting as one of the president’s lawyers, failed to persuade Judge Matthew Brann — an Obama-appointed Federalist Society member and former Republican official — to disenfranchise nearly seven million Pennsylvania voters and to let the state legislature name a slate of presidential electors. The court held that the Trump campaign offered a “Frankenstein’s monster” of a legal theory and that the complaint was full of nothing more than “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.”Although the campaign has appealed the case to the Third Circuit, it is so weak it will get no better reception there or at the Supreme Court. There are no remaining legal cases that could plausibly overturn the election results in even one state where Mr. Trump has lost (much less the three he would need for a different result in the Electoral College).Dilatory tactics like delaying certification or recounts will be rejected by courts or governors, and not even a single state legislature (much less three) seems eager to incur the wrath of the American people through a power grab that would violate the rule of law, trigger massive street protests and call the legislators’ own elections into question. Most state legislators appropriately defer to the will of their own voters despite pressure from the president.And even if three state legislatures engaged in broadly antidemocratic action by purporting to appoint their own slates of electors, federal law favors Electoral College slates sent in by governors, and we can expect Democratic governors in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to submit slates reflecting their voters’ choice of Mr. Biden. On top of that, Democrats will control the House, which will not accept rogue alternative electors. If Congress stalemates, Mr. Trump is out of office on Jan. 20 under the Constitution’s 20th Amendment.All of that is indeed good news, but I am quite concerned about what comes next. By the time President-elect Biden takes the oath of office, millions of people will wrongly believe he stole the election. At least 300 times since the election, Mr. Trump has gone straight to his followers on social media to declare the election rigged or stolen and to claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, himself as the real victor. Mr. Trump’s false claims will delegitimize a Biden presidency among his supporters. It should go without saying that a democracy requires the losers of an election to accept the results as legitimate and agree to fight another day; Republican leaders echoing Mr. Trump’s failure to support a peaceful transition of power undermine the foundation of our democracy. It’s not only the fact that we have had to say this, but that we keep having to repeat it, that shows the depths that we have reached.Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy also will make things worse when it comes to voting rights. The common thread in his campaign’s postelection litigation connecting Trump allegations of people of color illegally voting in Democratic cities in swing states and corrupted voting machines is a lack of any evidence to support the claims. Many of the lawsuits have been laughed out of court for lack of evidence, voluntarily dismissed, or involve so few votes that they could not plausibly change the outcome. These unsuccessful lawsuits will nonetheless provide a false narrative to explain how it is that Mr. Biden declared victory and serve as a predicate for new restrictive voting laws in Republican states. They already provided a basis for the now-aborted attempt of Republican canvassing board members in Wayne County, Mich., to reject votes from Democratic-leaning Detroit, and could be the basis for a similar move by Republicans when the Michigan state canvassing board meets Monday.And even as Mr. Trump has lost most of his postelection lawsuits, he and his allies had a good bit of success before the election in cases that will stymie voting rights going forward. Following the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court, federal appeals courts now routinely say that federal courts should be deferential when states engage in balancing voting rights — even during a pandemic — against a state’s interests in election administration and avoiding fraud, even when states come forward with no evidence of fraud. Under the so-called “Purcell principle,” courts increasingly allow states to make voting harder. They can do this whenever states are able to stall judicial proceedings long enough that they can claim a voting change comes too close to the election and will confuse voters and election administrators. Courts have issued other disturbing opinions, including allowing for age discrimination in the availability of mail-in ballots only for those older than 60 or 65, essentially short-circuiting litigation under the 26th Amendment, which bars discrimination in voting on the basis of age.The worst appears yet to come. In one of the lawsuits that remains technically alive at the Supreme Court out of Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump and his allies have advanced a muscular version of something that’s become known as the “independent state legislature” doctrine. Taken to its extreme, the doctrine says that state legislatures have complete authority to set election rules absent congressional override, and that their power to set election rules cannot be overcome even by state supreme courts applying right-to-vote provisions in state constitutions.That’s the basis for Mr. Trump’s claim in the U.S. Supreme Court that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court order, requiring the receipt of mail-in ballots arriving up to three days after Election Day, had to be counted. (This is now a question for future elections because there are not enough ballots at stake to affect the 2020 count.) The doctrine also could be potentially violated by state and local election agencies even when they act under the Legislature’s authority to administer elections.In the course of pre-election proceedings, Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas issued or signed onto separate opinions endorsing the strong reading of this doctrine. The newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, may well agree. And Chief Justice John Roberts, while not agreeing it was appropriate to apply this doctrine in these pre-election cases, was the lead dissenter in a 2015 case out of Arizona advancing a similar theory about broad legislative power to set the rules for federal elections.Either in the Pennsylvania case or in another, the court’s conservative majority could soon embrace a strong version of the independent state legislature doctrine. This could take state courts out of their essential role in protecting voting rights. It could potentially eliminate the ability of voters to use ballot measures to enact nonpartisan redistricting reform and other measures that apply to federal elections. It could give conservative courts looking for an excuse a reason to scuttle voter-protective rules enacted by state election boards.Together, the Trump-related precedents mean that neither state nor federal courts are likely to be able to play a backstop role when Republican state legislatures pass new restrictive voting laws, and that efforts to get around these state legislative efforts are likely to fail as well. Although in theory Congress has the power to override state legislatures with voter-protective legislation for federal elections, it is hard to see any of that getting through the next Congress even if Democrats barely grab control by winning the upcoming pair of Senate runoffs in Georgia.Mr. Trump has not admitted it, but he lost the 2020 election. His attack on voting rights and the legitimacy of our election system, however, will live far beyond his presidency. At stake is whether this country continues to adhere to the rule of law and to allow elections to be decided by a majority of voters.Richard L. Hasen (@rickhasen) is a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More