Conservatives give the Trump campaign a dose of reality: Biden won -- so get over it

In the right-wing media, it isn't hard to find extremists who are more than happy to echo President Donald Trump's claims that the 2020 presidential election has been stolen from him because of widespread voter fraud — and they are urging Trump to fight to the bitter end. But not all conservative journalists go out of their way to promote nonsense conspiracy theories, and some of them are acknowledging that Joe Biden is now president-elect of the United States. The National Review's Andrew C. McCarthy and Commentary's Noah Rothman, in articles published this week, lay out some reasons why Trump's last-ditch efforts to change the election results aren't working.

Discussing the Trump campaign's lawsuits in Pennsylvania, McCarthy explains, "Realistically speaking, the legal battle over the 2020 election is over. As I explained over the weekend, from President Trump's perspective, that battle is beset by a fatal mismatch between: (a) what his campaign is in a position to allege and prove, and (b) the remedy — i.e., the potential number of votes that could swing from Biden to Trump. That problem was already apparent last week, when the campaign filed its original complaint in the Williamsport federal court. It became insurmountable Sunday, when the campaign amended its complaint, stripping out the main fraud claims. What is left of the lawsuit cannot conceivably change the result in Pennsylvania."

McCarthy goes on to say that even if the Trump campaign succeeds in getting some votes thrown out in Pennsylvania, Biden's lead in that state would still be insurmountable.

"The main problem for President Trump continues to be math," McCarthy observes. "There are not nearly enough ballots at issue in what remains of his lawsuit to alter the outcome of the voting in Pennsylvania. And without Pennsylvania, he cannot win the election by flipping other states — for which there is, in any event, no realistic prospect."

In Commentary, Rothman argues that if the Trump campaign's efforts to change the election results are an attempted "coup," it is a very bad attempt.

"According to (Washington) Post reporter Robert Costa, people close to Rudy Giuliani — who leads the legal campaign to save the president from defeat — acknowledge that the election is lost if the votes are all counted," Rothman writes. "Their only hope now is to force states to avoid certifying their respective results, prevent Biden from achieving a majority in the Electoral College, and throw the presidency to the House of Representatives where, presumably, the Republican-led majority of state delegations would reelect the president. The plan is as diabolical as it is nonsensical."

Rothman notes that for Trump's allies, the "biggest impediment" to overturning the election results is "the votes of hundreds of thousands of Americans." But the Trump campaign's would-be "coup," according to Rothman, is more "pitiful" than anything — and their "desperate efforts to cling to power" are not working.

"Far from being menaced by this subterfuge, Trump's Democratic opponents can summon only embarrassment for the president," Rothman stresses. "There is no modern analog for the display Republicans are engaging in — no parallel to which the right can point and claim their actions are justified by the standards of decency Democrats violated long ago. This is new. And though it may soon become more dangerous than it is today, the flailing tantrum in which the president's final phalanx is engaged isn't frightening as much as it is pathetic."

Rothman discussed his article during a November 19 appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." Watch the video below: