‘No reason for alarm’: McConnell tries to paint Trump’s election fraud claims as normal

President’s post-election hysteria about election fraud is ‘not unusual,’ majority leader says of unprecedented claims of widespread fraud from his party

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is not backing away from his attempts to paint Donald Trump’s unprecedentedly litigious reaction to losing the US presidential election as normal.

The Trump campaign has gone 0 for 5 so far in its lawsuits attempting to discount vote totals in several key swing states that appear to have broken for President-elect Joe Biden.

Mr Trump’s legal team has provided no evidence so far to back any of its claims of widespread voter fraud or a lack of transparency in the ballot-counting process.

Millions upon millions of Americans — Republican voters, mostly — are losing faith in the integrity of the US elections as a result of the president’s posturing and the decision by other Republicans such as Mr McConnell not to repudiate his claims, new polling has found.

But Mr McConnell sees nothing wrong with Mr Trump’s actions and the impact they’re having on Americans’ trust in democratic institutions that have governed the country’s political outcomes for centuries.

There’s “no reason for alarm,” the majority leader told reporters on Tuesday at the Capitol.

“Until the electoral college votes, anyone who's running for office can exhaust concerns about counting in any court of appropriate jurisdiction,” Mr McConnell said. “That’s not unusual. That should not be alarming.”

The majority leader continued: “At some point here we'll find out, finally, who was certified in each of these states. And the electoral college will determine the winner. And that person will be sworn in on January 20. No reason for alarm.”

Mr McConnell has joined the chorus of Capitol Hill Republicans who have backed the president’s decision to fight the preliminary vote totals in states that do not appear to be in his electoral column.

Most — but not all — Senate Republicans have refused to acknowledge Mr Biden as president-elect despite the Associated Press and several other news outlets projecting on Saturday he had cleared the 270-vote threshold in the Electoral College to claim victory.

On Tuesday, Missouri GOP Senator Roy Blunt went as far as to suggest Mr Trump may actually have won, despite the president being down by thousands upon thousands of votes in the swing states of Mighigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, and no one presenting evidence of large scale voter fraud that would nullify those results.

“The president wasn’t defeated by huge numbers – in fact he may not have been defeated at all,” Mr Blunt said on his way into Senate Republicans’ weekly lunch meeting in Washington.

Nothing in the current vote counts suggests the second half of Mr Blunt’s statement could be true. And while the Trump campaign has levied accusations of voter fraud, judges have found those claims are unsupported by any evidence.