Trump’s determined “STOP THE COUNT!” tweet, briefly defined

President Donald Trump started his Thursday by demanding that states cease tallying votes.

“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump tweeted at 9:12 am ET, after spending a lot of Wednesday posting a flood of misinformation on Twitter meant to make it appear as if Democrats are stealing the 2020 election from him.

There’s one massive drawback, although — if vote tallying had been instantly stopped in all of the states, former Vice President Joe Biden would prevail in Arizona and Nevada, giving him 270 electoral votes and making him the presumptive president-elect.

Not solely is Trump’s speaking level self-defeating, however it’s fully inconsistent with what his advisers had been saying on Wednesday and Thursday.

About an hour earlier than Trump posted his tweet, as an illustration, Trump’s former marketing campaign adviser Kellyanne Conway was on Fox & Mates preaching the advantage of persistence, saying, “We are able to’t wait three hours, three days, three weeks, to get a consequence? … What’s the rush?”

And on Wednesday night, Trump marketing campaign senior authorized adviser Jenna Ellis appeared on Tucker Carlson’s present and blasted the media for “reporting inaccurately and falsely that the Trump marketing campaign is wanting the poll counting to be stopped.”

Ellis’s feedback, in flip, contradicted what Trump stated throughout his weird early Wednesday morning press occasion/marketing campaign rally on the White Home, throughout which he described the election as a “main fraud on our nation” and stated “we’ll going to the US Supreme Courtroom. We would like all voting [i.e., vote counting] to cease.”

Trump’s actual place, after all, is that solely votes solid for him needs to be counted. His followers are on the identical web page, and that’s why teams of them chanted “Cease the vote!” exterior authorities buildings in Michigan — a state the place Trump led through the early a part of the rely on Tuesday night, solely to be surpassed by Biden as extra ballots had been tallied on Wednesday — whereas others chanted “Depend the vote!” in Arizona, the place Trump is trailing.

That incoherency is captured on this video mash-up:

Trump marketing campaign officers like Ellis and Pam Bondi have tried to string the needle by arguing that Trump needs all of the legit ballots to be counted, however not ones that had been solid fraudulently. However when Bondi was pressed to offer proof of fraud throughout a Wednesday morning look on Fox & Mates, she couldn’t.

Trump’s Thursday morning tweet was doubtless meant to allude to Pennsylvania, the place his slim lead over Biden is in jeopardy as extra votes are counted from the Democratic-leaning Philadelphia area. However what Trump doesn’t appear to grasp is that Biden doesn’t want Pennsylvania to get to 270 electoral votes.

Extra broadly, Trump’s technique, to the extent there’s one, seems to be to attempt to create the notion that he was cheated by tossing out accusations of fraud. The issue for him is that there’s no proof to again up his claims.

Later Thursday morning, Trump posted one other tweet proclaiming that “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!”

However that tweet contradicts state legislation in locations like Pennsylvania and North Carolina that enable mail ballots to be tallied after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked earlier than November 3. As I’ve defined beforehand, Trump’s place that mail ballots are weak to fraud isn’t supported by proof, however it could give the Supreme Courtroom a pretext to get entangled in an election he now seems very more likely to have misplaced.