The 2020 Presidential Election has been called. America has a president elect that will be inaugurated in January. The problem is, a whole 20% of Americans disagree, and their preferred candidate, the incumbent, Donald Trump, has directly supported their conspiracy theories and encouraged them. Long before the election started, Donald Trump has accused Democrats of planning on “stealing the election.” A huge part of that was mail in voting. He railed against it, saying it would cause mass voter fraud, despite there being no evidence for this, and mail in voting being used all across the country already. 

Along with the fact of Democrats being more likely to vote by mail due to fears of Covid-19 spread at the polls, (the suspected reason President Trump accused mail in voting of being dangerous in the first place) the President’s rhetoric influenced the vast majority of Republican voters to wait until election day and vote in person. There were other variables that impacted the election results as well such as the USPS being defunded by the Postmaster general who Donald Trump recently put in place. There is also the fact that in many swing states, ones with republican legislations who opposed mail in voting to fall in line with the party, mail in laws were not changed the way they needed to be. In states with updated laws, mail in votes could be counted before the election day count officially started, so that results could be more accurate, however in states which didn’t do this, mail in votes came in mostly the next day.

This has created is called the “red mirage.” Essentially, the votes coming in on election day skewed towards republicans heavily, whereas votes counted later on, ones done mostly by mail and in big cities where mail in vote counting took the longest, skewed heavily democrat. This gave Donald Trump the perfect opportunity to do what he has been signaling he’d do for years. He is denying the results, saying that “illegal votes” were counted, promoting every easily disprovable conspiracy on twitter, and losing credibility in the information his administration puts out.

Even Fox News has refused to go along with this narrative, a News Organization that has argued against its own credibility as a news station and has said in court that “any reasonable viewer” wouldn’t take some of their pundits claims seriously, and according to MediaBiasFactCheck.com is “strongly right wing biased” and has “mixed factual reporting.” The level of incredibility in these claims is astounding.

These claims have been backed up by a multitude of lawsuits in swing states Donald Trump lost, none of which have gone anywhere, most of which being dismissed outright. The display by Donald Trump’s lawyers in the courtroom has been described as “embarrassing” by the Washington Post, and claims of voter fraud, “baseless.” So Donald Trump’s threats of a judicial coup seem much less serious than anything that happened in 2000, as it seems the intentions were to have a repeat of, especially with two of Donald Trump’s supreme court nominations being lawyers in that case. None of these cases seem to be strong enough to get passed a local judge, let alone all the way up to the highest court of the land.

So will there be a judicial coup? The answer seems to be most likely no, what seems most likely to many is that this is political theater, every respectable and even some of the less respectable media outlets have called the race for Biden and don’t seem like they will be conceding on that. In all likelihood, most of the political strife on this issue will be for show unless very damning evidence suddenly comes out, which seems increasingly unlikely.