Bush ally says Trump’s lawsuits are anti-democratic and go further than 2000 recount row

James Baker says in 2000 they were arguing about the election recount, not stopping the initial tally

James Baker, the Republican statesman who helped George W Bush win 2000’s election recount, says the Trump campaign’s effort to stop first-round counts is entirely different and somewhat un-democratic.

“We never said don’t count the votes,” Mr. Baker, who was both secretary of state and treasury under various GOP administrations, told The New York Times on Thursday. “That’s a very hard decision to defend in a democracy.”

Instead of stopping counts before they were finished, Mr Baker said his efforts in 2000 were about making sure a recount in Florida, where Mr Bush maintained a tiny lead, proceeded and ended fairly. (The legal dispute over the Florida recount eventually went to the Supreme Court, which controversially ended the process and effectively awarded the presidency to Mr Bush).

“There are huge differences,” the retired official, who voted for Mr Trump in 2016, told the paper. “For one thing, our whole argument was that the votes have been counted and they’ve been counted and they’ve been counted and it’s time to end the process. That’s not exactly the message that I heard on election night. And so I think it’s pretty hard to be against counting the votes.”

He added that he disapproved of a recent effort from Texas Republicans to throw out around 127,000 votes in Houston cast through a drive-by process, which state and federal courts have blocked so far.

As initial returns came in and showed former vice president Joe Biden in the lead, Mr Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner reportedly began making calls, looking for the “James Baker-like” figure who could lead the campaign’s wide-ranging, so far unsuccessful legal effort to challenge vote counting across the country in close races like Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.

While much of recent politics is viewed through the paradigms of Mr Trump and his predecessor Barack Obama, the 2000 election has re-emerged in the public consciousness. Many of the same players and issues are resurfacing in the middle of an election drama where the Democratic candidate will likely get more popular votes, but the election could be settled in the courts.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, the president falsely proclaimed himself the winner of the election and said the continued counting of ballots after election night was over, a normal and legal process that usually proceeds for days, was a “fraud on the American public” that should be arbitrated once again by the Supreme Court.

Three of the conservative justices on the court—chief justice John Roberts, as well as Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—were part of the legal team that helped win the 2000 election for Mr Bush in Florida over Democratic nominee Al Gore.

Before the election began Mr Gore predicted a clear victory for Mr Biden.

In a sign of just how much Mr Trump’s political career has diverged from previous Republicans’, part of that GOP effort in 2000 was to preserve disputed mail-in votes in the final tallies. The president has repeatedly claimed without evidence that mail-in voting produces fraudulent results, even though both he and his family voted by mail in this election.