Trump Fires Sidney Powell for Election Conspiracies as Though He’s Not About to Claim China Paid Poll Workers to Change All the Ballots to Biden

According to the New York Times, Trump had been “agitated” about Powell (and Giuliani) “for a few days,” reportedly “complaining about how Ms. Powell had sounded at the Thursday news conference, how black rivulets of liquid had dripped down Mr. Giuliani’s face, and about how long the appearance had stretched on,” and over the weekend, several of his advisers urged him to cut Powell loose. “She was too conspiratorial even for [Trump],” one of the president’s advisers told Maggie Haberman shortly after the campaign issued its statement.

In the wake of the firing, the consensus has been that Powell, who in her spare time promotes QAnon conspiracy theories, was too crazy even for Trump. Which, in reality, is obviously giving the president entirely too much credit! For one thing, he’s promoted the exact same batshit theory about the voting machines, Venezuela, and communists. For another, he’s also claimed “dead people” voted in the election. And then there’s the minor matter of him still refusing to concede more than two weeks after it was called for Joe Biden! Despite the fact that his legal challenges have been laughed out of court more than two dozen times:

The cold shoulder extended to Ms. Powell was only the latest embarrassment for Mr. Trump’s legal team, for which more than 30 lawsuits challenging the integrity of the election have either been dismissed or voluntarily withdrawn in a half dozen battleground states.

A major loss came in Pennsylvania on Saturday night, when the federal judge, Matthew W. Brann, threw out a lawsuit seeking to stop the certification of the state’s election results and criticized it in blistering language, likening its argument to “Frankenstein’s monster” and saying it was “unsupported by the evidence.”

Unsurprisingly, the canning of Powell has not stopped Trump from continuing to make election-fraud claims that have no basis in reality:

So yeah, there’s a lot of crazy going on here, but it’s not going to be cleared up just by getting rid of Powell.

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