Rudy Giuliani claims Trump has a viable path to victory - but fails to provide any evidence of widespread election fraud

There are perhaps only a few people in the world who watched Rudy Giuliani’s infamous performance at Four Seasons Total Landscaping earlier this month and judged that it worthy of repeating. Fortunately for Mr Giuliani, Donald Trump was one of them.

The president quickly rewarded the former mayor of New York for his chaotic display by giving him full control of the legal efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a job for which he is receiving a reported $20,000 a day. Unfortunately for Mr Giuliani, his prospects of success haven’t much improved since that fateful day in the car park behind the adult book store.

On Thursday, the world’s press was convened once more to hear an update from the president’s legal counsellors, which one member modestly described as being “an elite, strike force team,” but which in reality has been shrinking in size and ability for weeks.  

That team, Mr Giuliani explained, had figured out a viable path to victory for Mr Trump, which would involve throwing out hundreds of thousands of votes in several swing states by proving widespread voter fraud. Incidentally, it’s a path that would have to overcome the same electoral college margin the outgoing president won by in 2016, a margin Mr Trump described as a “landslide”.

In yet another meandering press conference, Mr Giuliani — at times sweating so profusely that what appeared to be black hair dye ran down both sides of his face — came armed with a map highlighting the states where he believed the results could be overcome in the courts. Marked in red were Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

“What I’m describing to you is a massive fraud. It isn’t a little, teeny one,” Giuliani said, repeating claims he has made at his previous unsatisfying press conferences on the same topic.

Yet again, though, he was lacking proof. What Mr Giuliani did have was hearsay, conspiracy theories and binders of affidavits — sworn statements from people who claimed to have seen voter fraud take place in these key swing states.

He waved papers which he said contained testimony claiming to be from witnesses who saw voter fraud take place. One person said she was instructed to change dates on ballots, another who was told not to request photo ID from voters and yet another who claimed to have seen a truck full of ballots for Joe Biden arrive at a vote counting centre.

“I’d like to read them all to you but I don’t have the time,” Mr Giuliani said of his alleged proof.

But these statements were disjointed, small-scale,uncorroborated and nowhere near enough to prove the kind of widespread voter fraud being alleged by Mr Trump’s team. And the entire thrust of the case purposefully ignores a crucial fact.

This election year was always going to be different. It took place as the country was gripped by a deadly pandemic, which forced millions to vote by mail to protect themselves and their families. This produced variances in the order of counting and tabulation, all of which were predicted and explained.  

Mr Giuliani ignored these truths, and instead pushed conspiracy theories and half-truths. Among them claims that only Democrats were allowed to fix mistakes on their absentee ballots, that Republican poll watchers were barred from monitoring the vote count and that suspect software stole votes from Mr Trump in Georgia.

Mr Giuliani then invoked a scene from My Cousin Vinny, a movie in which Joe Pesci plays a Brooklyn lawyer who transforms from a hapless courtroom joke into a brilliant legal mind. The irony is that Giuliani has played that exact role in reverse.

He was followed by Sidney Powell, another lawyer on Mr Trump’s election legal team who once represented former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

"What we are really dealing with here is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China and the interference with our elections here in the United States," she said, repeating yet more conspiracy theories about voting software that have already been debunked.  

All of these claims have been refused by election officials from both parties, and yet they swirl around in conservative media outlets and online echo chambers and back to Rudy Giuliani’s notepad.

Mr Giuliani repeatedly made the case for these claims to be heard in a court. "Give us an opportunity to prove it in court, and we will,” he said, as if there was some malevolent force preventing him from doing so.

The trouble with that statement is that the Trump campaign has lost 30 out of the 31 lawsuits it has filed since election day. Every time Mr Trump’s legal team has tested its claims in a court, they have been thrown out.

Mr Giuliani, with his stubborn insistence that there is still a viable path for Mr Trump to remain in the White House, increasingly resembles the Black Knight from ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’. At each press conference he appears with another limb missing, shouting ‘tis but a scratch!” at the top of his voice.

It is precisely because the legal pathway for Mr Trump is so narrow that his team is now reportedly pursuing an altogether more sinister strategy. In recent days, people familiar with the president’s strategy say he is focused on persuading Republican legislators to intervene on his behalf in battleground states and somehow cast their state’s electoral votes in his favour.

According to a Reuters report, Mr Trump’s lawyers are “seeking to take the power of appointing electors away from the governors and secretaries of state and give it to friendly state lawmakers from his party, saying the US Constitution gives legislatures the ultimate authority.”

That effort will likely go the way of the 30 lawsuits that have already fallen flat. But the damage done to American democracy, to its institutions, will last much longer.