As expected, Donald Trump has lobbed lawsuits at a few states, challenging the bona fides of presidential voting.
My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Feldman accurately described lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania lawsuits as toothless. Judges in Michigan and Georgia dismissed the suits there on Thursday. And in Nevada, an NBC reporter, Jacob Soboroff, gamely tried to pin down a former Trump intelligence official, Ric Grinnell, for evidence of voter fraud supporting the lawsuit there. Grinnell stayed mum.
Trump’s lawsuits are plainly frivolous and manage to equate counting votes with fraud rather than democracy. But the point of the lawsuits isn’t to cure an actual problem. Trump has spent months claiming that elections and mail-in voting in the U.S. are riddled with malfeasance. They’re not, of course. The true goal is to find someone or something that he can blame for his own failures and shortcomings – in this current case, possibly losing a presidential election.
Days, weeks, months and years hence, Trump will point at these lawsuits as tangible proof that something was rotten in the 2020 presidential election. In fact, he will say, had the election not been rigged, he would have won. That’s a two-fer for Trump: It allows him to avoid taking responsibility and helps him dodge the “loser” label he enjoys slapping on everyone else but so fears himself. In that context, the lawsuits are well worth it to him, even if they help erode public trust in the electoral process.
This is all old hat for Trump; he’s been involved in at least 3,500 lawsuits over the last three decades or so. He learned long ago from the late Roy Cohn how to weaponize the legal system against business competitors, the government and critics, gaining the valuable insight that sometimes merely filing a suit got him just as far as actually going to court. If it made a financial or legal problem go away, cowed an opponent or provided him with a fall guy, that was enough.