Anyone watching the Donald Trump administration try and sabotage its recently lost election knows the team is falling apart. But even in a world where head lawyer Rudy Giuliani is willing to show God and everybody that he hasn't haunted a courtroom in decades, nobody expected the coming apart to be so literal.
Giuliani gave a news conference to talk about the status of Trump's bid to have the election thrown out by the courts, but all people could focus on was the fact that his profuse sweating was causing his hair dye to run down his face. As the former mayor of New York City spewed baseless allegations of voter fraud in key states (and acted out a scene from My Cousin Vinny), Twitter fixated on the brown goo rolling down the sides of his head.
Users on the platform pounced, presumably because you don't tend to see Nazis melting outside of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
It might be a bit of a "laughing to keep from crying" moment, as the Trump administration is actually attempting to have the election results invalidated with the help of a conservative judiciary. Though they haven't been successful in their judicial coup, they're far from out of options.
As pointed out by CNN, Giuliani's bizarre press conference was full of misinformation and outright lies. The former NYC mayor reiterated baseless claims about widespread voter fraud and irregularities, specifically pointing to the recent incident in Michigan's Wayne County. Giuliani told reporters the Trump campaign successfully got the county's board of elections to decertify the election results due to "overvotes"; however, the board members ultimately voted to certify the results after an initial deadlock.
According to the network, the so-called "overvotes" are more commonly referred to as "imbalances," which occur when the number of recorded ballots in the poll books do not match the number of cast ballots. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said these types of discrepancies are not unprecedented: "They certified the vote in 2016 with 80% of Detroit precincts out of balance. And yet today, 42% were out of balance and yet it didn't get certified, so clearly there is no valid point here," Benson previously said.
Giuliani also said mail-in ballots were "prone to fraud," a claim that experts have consistently refuted. He then turned his direction toward Pennsylvania, one of the several battleground states that went to president-elect Joe Biden. Giuliani said 682,770 ballots in Pennsylvania "weren't inspected, which renders them ballots that are null and void."
"Why? For several reasons, not the least of which is, that was basically only one of two places in the state where it was done. So, in the other parts of the state, there was a legitimate inspection of the ballots," he said. "So, if you have two different standards in different parts of the state, one favoring one part of the state, the other disfavoring the other part of the state, that’s a classic violation of the equal protection clause of the United States constitution ..."
A Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the argument earlier this week, when it threw out the Trump campaign's complaint regarding observers at ballot-counting sites. The court determined the observers in Philadelphia were given proper access to watch the vote tallies; however, the court ruled that it is up to county election officials to determine the minimal distance between the observers and ballot counters.
On Thursday news also arrived that Trump’s campaign will drop its last remaining Michigan lawsuit pertaining to the election because, as Bloomberg writes, “it succeeded in halting certification of election results in Detroit and surrounding Wayne County.”
