Republican Donald Trump’s defeat in the US presidential election has set off a flurry of activities within the party with his inner circle beginning to split over his ongoing refusal to accept the outcome.
After the election results came out, Trump’s would-be successors have started to position themselves for 2024 and a battle to lead a Trump-less Republican Party has begun to take shape.
According to Politico, American political media outlet, likely Republican candidates are about to descend on Georgia to campaign in a pair of Senate runoffs that will determine control of the chamber.
The Republican National Committee is bracing for a possible fight over its chairmanship while Donald Trump Jr is aggressively staking out a role as a future Republican powerbroker.
According to US media outlets, Democrat Joe Biden already bagged 290 electoral college votes, 20 more than a candidate needs, to secure victory as the 46th president of the United States.
Meanwhile, Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner and first lady Melania Trump advised him to come to terms with President-elect Joe Biden's victory but his adult sons pressed him to keep fighting against the outcome.
Quoting two sources, CNN reports that Kushner has approached Trump to concede. The first lady, according to a separate source familiar with the conversations, has privately said the time has come for him to accept the election loss.
Trump's sons Donald Jr and Eric, however, have reportedly urged allies to continue pressing on and they have pushed Republicans and supporters to publicly reject the results.
Trump's campaign is planning a messaging blitz to fuel its argument -- unsupported by any evidence to date -- that the President's second term is being stolen from him through corrupt vote counts in battleground states, CNN says quoting three sources familiar with the matter.
One of the ways it plans to do that is presenting obituaries of people the campaign will claim voted in the election and considering having campaign style rallies to amplify the message, two of the sources told CNN on Sunday evening.
The goal of the effort is to raise enough doubt about the results that secretaries of state in battlegrounds feel pressure to open investigations or call on their own for recounts -- something that would prolong the process and potentially give the campaign more time to advance its litigation through the courts.
A previous fact check by CNN of claims by a handful of prominent Republicans, such as members of Trump's family and supporters like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, of dead people voting in Michigan fell apart under scrutiny.
A CNN analysis of the claim and the purported backing for it did not find a single instance of that happening.
According to US media outlets, Republican Party officials, meanwhile, are grappling with how to keep intact the massive political infrastructure that Trump helped assemble with him on his way out of the White House.
While Trump has been defeated, he has not been vanquished. After receiving the second-highest popular vote total in history, and enjoying a core of supporters numbering tens of millions strong, he is positioned to wield outsized power over where the Republican Party goes from here.
Anyone who wants to run in 2024 will have a hard time winning the nomination against his opposition.
