Estrich: Winning is easy, losing with dignity is harder

This is one disappointment that simply cannot be fixed. There is no deal to be made. His lawyers are skirting around Rule 11, which provides sanctions for sham lawsuits, by making claims with absolutely no evidence to support them. None of these lawsuits would change the results of the election — even taken together. And to date, the only suit they’ve won is one about where poll watchers will stand in the next election in Pennsylvania.

In Pennsylvania, Republicans have been trying for months to convince courts that ballots postmarked on Election Day but received within three days after should not be counted. A number of states have similar rules, but Trump must have done better there. Pennsylvania has kept these ballots separate, and apparently, there were fewer than 10,000. It doesn’t matter: Joe Biden is leading in Pennsylvania by 45,000 votes.

In Arizona, the Trumpers have a poll worker who says he saw other poll workers helping voters press the button to submit their ballots, and another who claims that he saw 80 instances of poll workers giving confusing instructions, and two voters who claim they weren’t told they had a chance to fix their ballots. All told, the two lawsuits might affect somewhere between 82 and 122 votes, which hardly amounts to systemic fraud. Biden is leading Trump by 17,000 votes.

In Michigan, which Biden won by 147,000 votes, two Republican efforts to halt vote counting because Republicans were supposedly excluded from the process were rejected by two different judges.

In Nevada, the Trumpers tried and failed to block the state’s most Democratic-leaning county from using a machine to automatically verify signatures. The Trumpers also announced they would be sending a list of thousands of people who voted in Nevada but live out of state. There is nothing illegal about that: The Wall Street Journal pointed out that a number of the addresses are connected to the military. In Nevada, Biden leads by nearly 37,000.

In Georgia, the Trump campaign lost a lawsuit that sought to disqualify 53 mail-in ballots because they supposedly arrived after Election Day. After a hearing, the judge threw the case out, finding no evidence that the ballots arrived late.

Trump cannot sue his way back to the presidency. At some point, he will run out of lawyers willing to make fools of themselves with no prospect of payment.

What he can do is make his last two months in office count, not by bringing more lawsuits, not by purging his enemies, but by focusing every day on making the economy stronger. It’s the theme he wanted to run on, and it’s the only song that should be playing now.