On Thursday night, November 5 — two nights after Election Night 2020 — a winner still hadn't been called in the United States' presidential race, and votes were still being counted in Pennsylvania, Georgia and other battleground states. Former Vice President Joe Biden was ahead in the electoral vote count, and President Donald Trump and his allies made the baseless claim that Democrats were stealing the election through voter fraud. Never Trump conservative Amanda Carpenter, in an article published in The Bulwark, slams Trump's behavior — denouncing him as a sore loser who has refused to respect the fundamentals of the democratic electoral process.
Carpenter, who formerly served as Sen. Ted Cruz' communications director and is now a CNN pundit, explains, "On Thursday night, staring down the abyss of defeat, President Trump marched into the White House briefing room and did what he has always done when backed into a corner. He unfurled lies. He claimed everything is 'rigged' against him. He inflated his accomplishments to vertiginous heights — all while the votes against him in decisive battleground states ticked higher and higher, a silent metronome in the background relentlessly counting toward his political demise."
Trump, Carpenter notes, claimed, "If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us…. We can't have an election stolen like this."
But, Carpenter stresses, there is zero evidence that Democrats "stole" anything from Trump — and absolutely no reason to believe that Biden hadn't won his electoral vote lead fair and square.
Carpenter also notes that Trump said, "As you know, I've claimed certain states" — which, the conservative activist says, is absurd because in a democratic republic, presidential candidates don't get to "claim" states.
"It was all loser talk from a cult leader who would rather force the ending of democracy than face the end that is coming," Carpenter argues. "Either way, President Trump is talking about taking everyone around him down with him. Because if he really means what he says, and he wants to use all the powers invested in him as president to hunt down supposed 'fraud' and ensure that he can stay in power, where does that road lead? Straight toward dictatorship."
Carpenter concludes her article by emphasizing that as Trump was headed for defeat in the vote count, he continued to be an "embarrassment" for the United States.
"Trump's sycophants and enablers find all their dreams that his presidency would be the most consequential and important in American history crashing down around them," Carpenter emphasizes. "We should all remember Trump as he presented himself in this monumental moment: as a babbling, incoherent, conspiracist. Our greatest presidential embarrassment."