Trump Pressures Pence to Overturn Biden Win as Congress Counts Electoral College

President Donald Trump will make his last stand to overturn his election loss on Wednesday when Vice President Mike Pence presides over a congressional session to ratify November’s results, an event that threatens to strain the relationship between the two men.

Trump’s refusal to concede and his obsession with overturning the will of voters means the ceremony poses a test for his most loyal subordinate. Pence also faces a party divided over Trump’s conduct, a rift that is growing after the president on Saturday pressured Georgia election officials to overturn his loss in the state.

The vice president’s top aides are developing options for him to acknowledge the reality of the November election result while also nodding, in a possible statement, to the president’s unfounded accusations of vote fraud.

Development of the plan has fallen to Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, and General Counsel Greg Jacob, both of whom realize the potential tension in the situation, according to two people familiar with the matter.

“Pence just has to play it straight. He has a specific job as defined in the Constitution,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a longtime Trump ally. “He doesn’t have the burden of having to force something to happen. All he has to do is preside over it.”

In a statement over the weekend, Short said that Pence “shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud and irregularities in the last election.”

Yet the president himself is unlikely to let the day pass without comment -- and that, along with following the law, is what most concerns Pence’s friends and advisers.

Trump’s call on Saturday to Georgia’s top election officials underscored that risk, showing that the president is still grasping for any leverage to reverse his defeat.

He urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes for him to overtake President-elect Joe Biden, and told him he was taking a “big risk” by not doing so.

“So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break,” Trump said in a recording of the call obtained by Bloomberg News.

Congress ratifies the results of the election in a joint session every four years, as mandated by the Constitution. Typically, the session is routine and brief.

Some of Trump’s allies now argue that Pence has the power to single-handedly change the outcome of the election. Last week, several House Republicans, led by Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, filed a federal lawsuit seeking to force Pence to reject Electoral College votes from several states where Trump has, baselessly, claimed that Biden won only thanks to vote fraud.

On Thursday, the Justice Department, on behalf of Pence, asked a judge in Texas to deny Gohmert’s request. A federal appeals court threw out the Gohmert suit on Saturday, after a Trump-appointed judge dismissed it on Friday.

These recent machinations place enormous pressure on the vice president. Through four years in the White House, he’s remained unfailingly loyal to Trump, neither publicly disagreeing with any policy nor offering the slightest criticism of his boss.

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