Edition · December 9, 2020
Trump’s legal machine hit another wall
December 9, 2020 was a rough day for the post-election pressure campaign: courts kept swatting down Trump-backed challenges, and the Supreme Court got dragged into the Texas stunt that even many Republicans knew was a long shot.
On December 9, 2020, Trump’s effort to reverse the election kept running into the same problem: judges were not buying the fantasy. Nevada’s high court rejected a Trump campaign appeal, an Arizona federal judge dismissed another pro-Trump election case for lack of standing, and the Supreme Court’s handling of Texas’s absurd bid to toss out votes in four battleground states made clear the whole scheme was going nowhere fast. The day also underscored how much Trump was relying on allies, surrogates, and state officials to keep the election denial machine spinning after the votes were counted.
Closing take
The broader story of the day was simple: Trump world was still performing outrage, but the legal system was not joining the bit. Every fresh dismissal chipped away at the campaign’s credibility, and the whole operation was starting to look less like a strategy than a public record of failure.
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Texas stunt
Confidence 5/5
★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5
Serious fuckup
The Texas case Trump wanted to embrace kept drawing public pushback and looking more ridiculous by the hour. Attorneys general from a broad coalition moved to urge the Supreme Court to reject it, arguing that Texas had no business trying to police how other states ran their elections. For Trump, the whole episode showcased how far his allies were willing to go to inflate a fraud narrative that even many Republicans treated as unserious.
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Legal pileup
Confidence 5/5
★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5
Serious fuckup
Nevada’s Supreme Court rejected a Trump campaign appeal over the state’s election results, while an Arizona federal judge threw out another pro-Trump challenge for lack of standing. The same day, the Texas case that Trump allies were trying to use as a last-ditch vehicle to overturn Biden’s win kept moving toward an eventual humiliation in front of the Supreme Court. The practical effect was brutal: Trump’s post-election litigation was not building momentum, it was stacking losses.
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Election denial
Confidence 5/5
★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5
Serious fuckup
Trump’s allies spent December 9 still trying to shove the Supreme Court into the middle of his election loss, even after lower court blows and obvious standing problems had made the Texas-led case look more like a press release than a legal strategy. The move underscored how little the campaign had left beyond procedural fantasy and public pressure.
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Nevada loss
Confidence 5/5
★★★☆☆Fuckup rating 3/5
Major mess
The Nevada Supreme Court rejected the Trump campaign’s appeal seeking to overturn the state’s election result. That was another clean legal loss in a week already crowded with them. It also reinforced a larger truth Trump refused to accept: courts were not going to rescue him from the math.
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Standing defeat
Confidence 4/5
★★★☆☆Fuckup rating 3/5
Major mess
A federal judge in Arizona dismissed a pro-Trump election case for lack of standing and found the allegations short on real evidence. That left Trump allies with yet another court order saying, in essence, you don’t get to sue your way out of a defeat just because you dislike the result. It was the sort of ruling that turns a political grievance into a legal dead end.
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Vaccine victory lap
Confidence 4/5
★★★☆☆Fuckup rating 3/5
Major mess
At a White House vaccine summit, Trump hailed the rollout as a triumph and talked as if the hard part was over, even as the country was setting grim COVID records and public health officials were warning the vaccine would not quickly blunt the surge. The message looked less like leadership than a last-minute attempt to claim credit before the messy logistics began.
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