President Donald Trump's wild and unsupported claims of voter fraud have emerged as a high-stakes Republican loyalty test that illustrates the tug of war likely to define the future of the GOP whether he wins or loses the presidency.
There is a pervasive sense among current and former GOP officials that the president's behaviour is irresponsible if not dangerous, but a divide has emerged between those influential Republicans willing to call him out publicly and those who aren't.
Driving their calculus is an open acknowledgement that Trump's better-than-expected showing on Election Day ensures that he will remain the Republican Party's most powerful voice for years to come even if he loses.
That stark reality did little to silence the likes of Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a second-term Republican who has not ruled out a 2024 White House bid. He described the president's claims as “dangerous” and “embarrassing.” “If there are legitimate challenges, we have a process, that's the way it works,” Hogan told The Associated Press.
“But to just make accusations of the election being stolen and widespread fraud without providing any evidence, I thought was really bad for our democratic process and it was something I had never seen in my lifetime.” “Other Republicans did speak up," he noted, "but certainly not enough of them."
Indeed, the most aggressive Republican criticism was limited to the small and familiar group of frequent Trump critics such as Utah Senator Mitt Romney and Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, who will not face Republican voters again for at least four years. But a handful of more regular Trump defenders raised the embattled president's ire by failing to rush to his defense.
Some Trump allies viewed former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley's initial response as a political obituary of sorts for the president. She thanked Trump on Twitter for helping to deliver “conservative victories” up and down the ballot and predicted that “truth will prevail.”
It was a similarly muted defense from Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, another Trump ally in the 2024 conversation. He avoided embracing some of Trump's most outlandish claims but vowed to introduce legislation to address some of the president's concerns about transparency during an appearance on Fox News.
A spokesman declined to make Hawley available to answer follow-up questions. But Missouri's other Republican senator, Roy Blunt, was not afraid to call out Trump's inconsistent calls to stop counting ballots in states where he's ahead and keep counting in states where he's behind.
“You can't stop the count in one state and decide you want the count to continue in another state," Blunt told reporters. “That might be how you'd like to see the system work but that's not how the system works.”
As votes were tallied across the country Friday afternoon, Biden was on the cusp of winning the presidency as he opened up narrow leads in the critical battlegrounds of Georgia and Pennsylvania. The shifts put Biden in a stronger position to capture the 270 Electoral College votes needed to take the White House.
With things trending in the wrong direction for him, Trump continued to spread baseless rumours of voting fraud throughout the day, calling on the Supreme Court to intervene even as his campaign struggled to produce significant evidence of malfeasance.
Still, there was no shortage of Republican leaders willing to back him up — especially after Donald Trump Jr called out their silence on social media.
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters Friday that he was “not conceding” Biden's tightening grasp on the presidency and fully supported Trump's efforts to challenge ballot counts in several states.
On Fox News the night before, Graham said he was transferring USD 500,000 from his campaign account to Trump's legal fund, and called for others to make donations as well.
Ari Fleischer, a former aide to President George W Bush, said Trump was simply saying out loud about the voting system what most losing candidates say privately.
"I wish people talked with less bombast. But I'm not going to fault the president for it,” Fleischer said.
“Be gentle about Trump's behaviour,” he urged. “When I watched it last night and watched these heads explode I just rolled my eyes. ... We've always been a noisy democracy.”
Yet history suggests that Trump's rhetoric and actions go well beyond the normal trappings of democracy. Never before has a sitting president so aggressively undermined the integrity of a US election.
His strategy was entirely predictable. With polls showing him lagging, Trump raised questions about the integrity of the voting system for much of the year. Yet his words from the White House this week were no less shocking.
Even internally, some advisers did not want him to address the nation Thursday night when he made his most outrageous claims.