[Also, I’ll make another point: If they were spread too thin, it wasn’t for lack of available manpower. I am a fairly experienced trial and appellate lawyer, and I responded to a call for volunteer lawyers from the Trump campaign, through a conservative former Senator and his organization, and offered to put my life and my practice on hold, fly out to wherever they needed me on my own dime, and help the campaign any way they wanted pro bono. Drafting briefs, reviewing documents, taking depositions, observing counts, making coffee, whatever. There was also a prominent local businessman here in Houston willing to finance other lawyers to come with me.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Reyes#Unsuccessful_attempt_to_overturn_Trump‘s_2020_election_defeat
It’s not clear to me what Trump was trying to accomplish legally. My guess is that his intent was more political than legal - to emblazon on the minds of GOP voters that this election was fraudulent, to taint Biden’s victory in the same way that the Dems worked him over after 2016.
Which means there’s a good chance he goes for another bite at the apple again in 2024, with the vote by mail shenanigans from 2020 as his bloody shirt. Everyone’s running the odds today, and the Dems are probably working any legal angle they can to prevent him from doing so, including by tying him up in sham prosecutions. What do you think the odds are of Trump winning the nomination in 2024, if he does run?
I think highlighting the vote-by-mail shenanegans is not only a worthy goal, but an imperative one. I wish he and his team would have focused on that rather than chasing their tails on the Dominion and “Kraken” nonsense, pushing Flat Earth legal theories like claiming Pence can unilaterally reject electors, and making outlandish claims like he won by a “landslide” or by “hundreds of thousands of votes” in Georgia.
He has taken a very important message on mail-in voting and tossed its credibility into the woodchipper with this crap. We can’t afford that when the entire Democrat propaganda apparatus is mobilized to protect mail-in voting at all costs.
I also wish he wouldn’t beat up his own supporters like Kemp and Raffensperger, both of whom are on our side with regard to absentee voting: Kemp wants to add an ID requirement, and Raffensperger wants to get rid of “no excuse” absentee voting entirely. I’ve said more than once that ending “no excuse” absentee voting and greatly narrowing its availability should be the top priority for Republican state legislatures in 2021, other than redistricting, and we need a nationwide mobilization of the entire party to push that through.
I came up with odds on what was going to happen with Trump in 2024 last week, but I’ve changed them since the Jan. 6 fiasco. Here are my odds, which is, of course, a total guess at this early stage:
70%: Trump does not run at all in 2024 or is out before Iowa. This also includes the small-but-non-zero chance that the current articles of impeachment have 67 votes in the Senate and he will be precluded from holding office again.
20%: Trump runs third party. If he does, my prediction is his running mate will be Tulsi Gabbard.
10%: Trump runs for the Republican nomination. If he does, 20% chance he wins it, but that’s obviously highly dependent on who else runs.
0%: Trump is actually elected President in 2024. This is less of a total guess than the rest. I’m pretty confident his political career as anything other than a gadfly or spoiler is over.