It’s certainly no well-kept secret that Donald Trump has the emotional maturity of a toddler, at best. But a humiliating and rather telling report from the Washington Post is now exposing just how deep the former US president’s petty, immature, self-important, and deeply corrupt streak really runs.
Trump has long been very publicly obsessed with his 2020 presidential election loss. Even to this day, over 2 years removed from the transition of power to the Biden administration, Trump continues to rage about 2020 almost daily. We’ve watched as the scandal-ridden former president stood front and center in the public’s eye and brutally lost every lawsuit, probe, and investigation he tried to launch into Joe Biden’s defeat against him. But according to the new report, there was even more going on behind closed doors, when it came to Trump’s efforts to discredit and ultimately overthrow Biden’s victory — it just never went public because it was too humiliating for the big guy to bear.
The Post’s Josh Dawsey reports that Trump actually commissioned a comprehensive research project, to the tune of over half a million dollars, to finally find him the smoking gun he needed to prove that the 2020 presidential election was rife with fraud that cost him his rightful win and return to the White House. However, Dawsey goes on to report on Trump’s visceral and distasteful reaction upon learning that there was no smoking gun to be found.
Dawsey reports that the Trump campaign paid the research company Berkeley Research Group through the East Bay Dispute and Advisory subsidiary company “more than $600,000 in the final weeks of 2020” in consulting fees to help him dig up the proof of widespread election fraud that he was, and remains, so convinced cost him his second White House term. According to sources who spoke with WaPo, that staggering $600k may have only scratched the surface of what Trump ultimately forked out, as sources confirmed to the publication that additional outside researchers were also hired for the same job.
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But in the end, Trump’s efforts and open pocketbooks were once again all for naught — the research companies he hired came out empty-handed, just like everything else. Sources who are familiar with the work done by Berkeley for the Trump campaign spoke with the Post and said that the project involved approximately “a dozen” researchers, including “econometricians,” who used “statistics to model and predict outcomes,” and ultimately dug their heels into at least a dozen hypotheses.”
Not a single one of them came out in the washed-up ex-president’s favor.
The work done by Berkley researchers encompassed the election in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada and combed through everything from possible voter machines malfunctions to any evidence indicating that the names of dead individuals had been used to cast votes, and everything in between, in an effort to prove that those 5 crucial swing states should have actually gone to Trump instead of his Democratic opponent. But in the end, they came up with nothing.
One source familiar with the project described the research done for the Trump campaign to the Washington Post:
‘They looked at everything: change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice, machines being tampered with, ballots that were sent to vacant addresses that were returned and voted,’ said a person familiar with the work who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private research and meetings. ‘Literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it.'”
Donald Trump notoriously and rather humiliatingly lost a staggering 60-plus state and federal court cases regarding the 2020 presidential election, and Berkley’s extensive research was no different. But what’s even more interesting, is the fact that Berkley’s vast research into the election never even made it into any of the endless court files.
Instead, Dawsey reports that Trump had the findings buried upon learning and growing very angry that they didn’t shake out as he’d hoped.
“None of the findings were presented to the public or in court,” Dawsey writes.
According to the report, Trump, his then Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and several other top advisors were briefed by Berkeley’s senior officials in a conference call that took place in December 2020. Trump and his allies’ reactions to the findings went over about as well as you’d expect:
Meadows showed skepticism of the findings and continued to maintain that Trump won. Trump also continued to say he won the election. The call grew contentious, people with knowledge of the meeting said.”
Read Dawsey’s full report with the Washington Post here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
