It was a bad week for the Big Lie — former President Donald Trump and his allies’ false claims that widespread fraud is to blame for his 2020 election loss.
In one battleground state, Republican senators issued a report that eviscerated Trump’s lies about voter fraud. In another, a judge undercut Trump’s supporters’ hopes to examine nearly 150,000 mail-in ballots. And one of Trump’s closest allies, Rudy Giuliani, was suspended from practicing law in New York.
Trump and his conspiracy-minded supporters have eagerly been anticipating the conclusion of the problem-plagued audit of Maricopa County’s results in Arizona, but regardless of its final report, it will have no impact on the 2020 election results, as the election was already certified. Trump repeated his election lies at a rally in Ohio Saturday night, but last week’s blows underscored the reality that their options to continue contesting the 2020 election are narrowing.
In Michigan, the Republican-led state Senate Oversight Committee said in a report released Wednesday that there was “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud” in the state’s 2020 election.