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Trump is allowed to avail himself every permissible legal option to contest the results, but must vacate the office, which he did without incident. So the transfer of power was upheld. It does set a precedent for repeats of this though. Suggesting that the process was unfair, fraudulent, or rigged is also protected speech provided the transfer of power is not obstructed. The Constitution makes no mention of the process having to be fair or that the votes are properly counted, only that the transfer of power is upheld. Even if the dems transparently cheated, Trump must still leave if no recourse is possible.
Depends how you do it. Filing a false police report is not protected speech. Nor is defaming identifiable individuals, if done with "actual malice". The Trump-Raffensperger phonecall is closer to filing a false police report than it is to normal political lying.
If you listen to that call Trump is very very clearly asking R. to 'find' invalid ballots that should not have been counted. (and that he believes to exist in large numbers)
If you call the police to report that somebody stole your bike, you think it was your neighbour, and they ought to investigate and 'find your bike', this is not a false report just because it turns out that you were mistaken as to the culprit.
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I would agree that this was a bad action, but, being very charitable here, Trump calling the Georgia Secretary of State to "find [number] of votes" doesn't seem different in substance from the Gore Campaign in 2000 calling the county authorities in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia Counties (all very blue districts!) and demanding they do a recount to ensure all their votes were counted. We don't have readouts from the sitting Vice President calling county election officials, but "find the votes" doesn't feel completely out of the question. Maybe the fact that Gore was trained as a lawyer would have prevented him from saying it explicitly, but implicit doesn't feel much cleaner here. Ultimately the election there was decided by SCOTUS (admittedly, on party lines) ruling that the disparate recount standards applied to different counties (read: only districts where finding ballots would be expected to tip the results a specific direction) violated equal protection under the Constitution. Rather uncharitably: Gore was found to, in violation of the Constitutional rights of the voters of Florida, conspire with partisan county election officials to change outcome of the statewide election, which would have tipped the electoral college.
Here you can even see The New York Times opining that absentee ballots which tipped the election should have been discarded for things like missing signatures and late postmarks. Strange they seem less interested in the legality of mail-in ballots cast in 2020.
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Doesn't this argument justify constitutional coups?
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