Oops, the MAGA Arizona recount actually took votes away from Trump
The saga of former President Donald Trump's much ballyhooed audit of the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County, Arizona, appears to be coming to a close this week. A draft report of the final results reportedly shows that not only did Joe Biden handily win both Maricopa County as well as the state of Arizona as a whole, but his margin of victory was in fact even larger than previously known.
Take it away DJ Khaled!
Audit spokesman Randy Pullen confirmed that the draft data released Thursday evening was legit, cautioning that "it's not the final report, but it's close" in a statement to KJZZ public radio in Phoenix. Crucially, the audit's findings fly in the face of Trump and his ilk's laughably bogus claims of massive voter fraud during the 2020 election, which — they insist — cost the president re-election.
"Was there massive fraud or anything? It doesn't look like it," Pullen said.
In fact, the data tabulated in the audit shows Biden received 99 more votes than initially counted, while Trump lost more than 260. Whoopsie!
The results, while unsurprising to anyone who does not have a red MAGA hat stuffed in the cranial cavity where their brain should be, come after months — and millions — were spent at the behest of Trump and his GOP sycophants to somehow prove that up is down, left is right, and Donald Trump won re-election but was thwarted by unseen nefarious forces. Equally mysterious was the "Cyber Ninja" company hired to oversee the audit, despite the fact that they're run by a Trump-aligned conspiracy theorist and were so wildly out of their depth during the whole effort that even Republican Maricopa County Board Chairman Jack Sellers had to come out against them, saying this spring that "the people hired by the Senate are in way over their heads."
"This is not funny," he added. "This is dangerous."
As befits someone with the attention span of a midsized insect, Trump has already moved onto bigger and better things, setting his sights on Texas and its proposed audit of the 2020 election.
"Bills to audit elections in your great state's House and Senate were considered during Texas's Second Special Session. Instead, the legislature passed a watered-down amendment that doesn't even apply to the 2020 presidential election," Trump said in a statement on Thursday. "This short amendment doesn't answer the questions Texans have about the last election. Texans demand a real audit to completely address their concerns."
Just hours later, the Texas Secretary of State's office announced plans to review election results in several counties.
While it's clear Trump's obsession with voter fraud and recounts stems from the toxic combination of his inability to mentally process defeat and his pathological need to undermine any system he feels has wronged him, it's hard to say what he hopes to get out of a Texas audit. In 2020, he won the state handily, by almost 8 percentage points.
