Trump is very unlikely to win the election in court, legal scholars explain

Rudy Giuliani — (Image credit: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

President Trump's campaign filed a flurry of lawsuits Wednesday, asking federal and state courts to disqualify ballots in one way or another in key states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia. "Most experts think their prospects are dim, even with the Supreme Court dominated by conservatives," the Los Angeles Times reports.

Courts have traditionally been wary of undoing an election once the votes have been counted, and the Trump campaign has not provided persuasive reasons for judges to stop ongoing counts of legally cast ballots. "You need a legal violation to go to court," former White House counsel Donald McGahn told the Times. "It depends on state law and on the facts."

"A lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee," Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, told ProPublica. So far, judges have "actually demanded facts and haven't been ruling on all-caps claims of fraud or suppression," he added. "They haven't confused public relations with the predicate for litigation, and I would expect that to continue."

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Fox News anchors Bret Baier and MacCallum also seemed skeptical when White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany tried to make the Trump campaign's case on Wednesday:

There are likely to be recounts in very close states, like Georgia, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania. But "recounts rarely change the vote totals very much," University of Kentucky law professor Joshua Douglas told ProPublica, nor do challenges to the validity of ballots.

And if Trump wants a bailout from the Supreme Court, he isn't helping his cause by publicly suggesting the conservative justices will ride to his rescue, University of Chicago law professor David Strauss tells the Times. "He has the same attitude toward the Supreme Court that he has toward the rest of the government — that it works for him, not for the American people. It is hard to see how anyone who cares about the court, on any side of the political spectrum, would not cringe and find those comments of Trump's to be very disturbing."

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.