Donald Trump to keep fighting but his campaign acknowledges game is over as Virginia HQ turns a 'ghost town'
President Donald Trump and his loyalists in the legal profession are not ready to accept the fact that he has lost the November 3 presidential election to Joe Biden. They have been knocking the doors of courts, hoping to overturn the election result, claiming the contest was compromised. But they have failed to get a single verdict declared in their favor and last week, the Supreme Court delivered a major blow to Trump by dismissing a lawsuit that Texas brought to challenge the election results in four key states.
But while Trump’s legal lieutenants continue to hope to scale Mount Impossible, his actual campaign has more or less acknowledged that the game is over. According to a report in the Daily Beast, the incumbent president's political machine is still raising funds, buying ads and even publicly vowing to carry on with the fight. But when one visits the campaign’s headquarters in Arlington, northern Virginia, the hopelessness becomes evident.
“But the futility of the effort is apparent in the campaign’s northern Virginia headquarters—the office that is supposed to be devoted to supporting and housing the legal crusade—which, knowledgeable sources tell The Daily Beast, has virtually emptied out,” the report said.
“It’s a ghost town now, with people waiting for the end,” one source familiar with the campaign’s operations told Beast.
TV sets from campaign headquarters were sold off for extra money
Sources confirmed to the Beast that a number of Trump-Pence signs have been pulled down from the walls of the headquarters. The desks and memorabilia have been packed or removed from the office. In fact, TV sets that were mounted to the walls around the office building’s 14th floor are being sold off for extra money. Belongings of the staff members are also being cleared out.
That the campaign had little hopes of the election results getting turned around became clear when the voter-fraud “hotline” created at the office after the Election Night was also scrapped last month after the staff members found the deluge of crank calls, violent threats and even farting noises into the telephones too torturous. Downsizing of the campaign team also started in November.
Trump has continued to claim that the election was rigged and that he will never give up. But on Monday, December 14, the Electoral College confirmed the win of Biden as the Democrat crossed the 270 vote-threshold to win the race for the White House.
While Trump loyalists like Rudy Giuliani still believe that all is not lost, the president’s campaign has focused on using its resources to just messaging. It has planned to air a couple of new ads in unconfirmed TV markets to promote its viewpoint that the election was marred by voter fraud, the Beast report said. But soon after the campaign’s announcement on the same, both the ads were removed from YouTube for breaching its policies on economic disinformation. The campaign still has enough money to spend on such advertisements and two joint fundraising committees raised more than $200 million in the weeks after Election Day but the current scenario gives indication that the Trump campaign “as a political apparatus is on its last legs”, the Beast added.
Why did the campaign not carry on with the crusade likening the fight at par with the 2000 post-election contest between George W Bush and Al Gore? Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser on the campaign, said it was “tough to compare” and that much of what remains of the campaign is now “virtual because of COVID, and much of it decentralized to the states”, the report added.