Vae, did Trump win the election?

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/wisconsin-recount-over/2020/11/29/b4896ade-30c9-11eb-96c2-aac3f162215d_story.html)

The recount of presidential ballots in Wisconsin's two largest counties reconfirmed Sunday that President-elect Joe Biden beat President Trump in the key swing state by more than 20,000 votes, the latest example of the president's flailing efforts to undo the election results.

The completion of the recount — which the Trump campaign had requested — added to a pileup of defeats for the president as he continues to attack Biden's national victory, claiming without evidence that widespread fraud tainted the results. His campaign has vowed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, though it has yet to do so, while suffering losses nearly every day in state and federal courts.

After the completion of the recount in Wisconsin's Milwaukee County on Friday and Dane County on Sunday, there was little change in the final breakdown of the more than 800,000 ballots that had been cast in the two jurisdictions. In the end, Biden's lead over Trump in the state grew by 87 votes.

Under Wisconsin law, Trump was required to foot the bill — meaning his campaign paid $3 million, only to see Biden widen his margin.
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(https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/20-days-of-fantasy-and-failure-inside-trumps-quest-to-overturn-the-election/ar-BB1bs02h?ocid=st)

The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.

But Trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.' ”

However cleareyed Trump's aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it's like, ‘Shh . . . we won't tell him.' ”

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Trump's devolution into disbelief of the results began on election night in the White House, where he joined campaign manager Bill Stepien, senior advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Miller, and other top aides in a makeshift war room to monitor returns.

In the run-up to the election, Trump was aware of the fact — or likelihood, according to polls — that he could lose. He commented a number of times to aides, “Oh, wouldn't it be embarrassing to lose to this guy?”

But in the final stretch of the campaign, nearly everyone — including the president — believed he was going to win. And early on election night, Trump and his team thought they were witnessing a repeat of 2016, when he defied polls and expectations to build an insurmountable lead in the electoral college.

Then Fox News called Arizona for Biden.

“He was yelling at everyone,” a senior administration official recalled of Trump's reaction. “He was like, ‘What the hell? We were supposed to be winning Arizona. What's going on?' He told Jared to call [News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert] Murdoch.”

Efforts by Kushner and others on the Trump team to persuade Fox to take back its Arizona call failed.

Trump and his advisers were furious, in part because calling Arizona for Biden undermined Trump's scattershot plan to declare victory on election night if it looked as though he had sizable leads in enough states.

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In the days after the election, as Trump scrambled for an escape hatch from reality, the president largely ignored his campaign staff and the professional lawyers who had guided him through the Russia investigation and the impeachment trial, as well as the army of attorneys who stood ready to file legitimate court challenges.

Instead, Trump empowered loyalists who were willing to tell him what he wanted to hear — that he would have won in a landslide had the election not been rigged and stolen — and then to sacrifice their reputations by waging a campaign in courtrooms and in the media to convince the public of that delusion.

The effort culminated Nov. 19, when lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell spoke on the president's behalf at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee to allege a far-reaching and coordinated plot to steal the election for Biden. They argued that Democratic leaders rigged the vote in a number of majority-Black cities, and that voting machines were tampered with by communist forces in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader who died seven years ago.

There was no evidence to support any of these claims.

The Venezuelan tale was too fantastical even for Trump, a man predisposed to conspiracy theories who for years has feverishly spread fiction. Advisers described the president as unsure about the latest gambit — made worse by the fact that what looked like black hair dye mixed with sweat had formed a trail dripping down both sides of Giuliani's face during the news conference. Trump thought the presentation made him “look like a joke,” according to one campaign official who discussed it with him.

“I, like everyone else, have yet to see any evidence of it, but it's a thriller — you've got Chávez, seven years after his death, orchestrating this international conspiracy that politicians in both parties are funding,” a Republican official said facetiously. “It's an insane story.”
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