Several Republican officials have called on President Donald Trump to allow Democrat nominee Joe Biden to begin the transition process, even though Trump’s legal team is still making its case against the election results in court.
This weekend Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., became the most recent Republican senator to urge Trump to begin cooperating with Biden’s transition team, while also defending Trump’s right to “exhaust his legal options.”
“It’s past time to start a transition, to at least cooperate with a transition,” Cramer told NBC News on Sunday. “I’d rather have a president that has more than one day to prepare should Joe Biden end up winning this, but in the meantime, he’s just exercising his legal options.”
Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., went even further and called on Trump to concede and “accept the outcome of the election” after a federal court dismissed the Trump campaign’s lawsuit in his state.
Read my statement on today’s Pennsylvania federal court decision, and congratulating President-Elect Biden: https://t.co/tCCXWxIUoR pic.twitter.com/MaxfHCtK1x
— Senator Pat Toomey (@SenToomey) November 22, 2020
In Michigan, GOP Rep. Fred Upton said Trump needs to admit he lost the election.
“It’s over,” Upton told CNN on Sunday. “The voters have spoken. No one has come up with any evidence of fraud or abuse.”
Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, Ben Sasse, R-Neb., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, have all made similar statements.
Romney even went so far as to call Trump’s legal campaign “undemocratic.”
“Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election,” Romney said in a statement last week. “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President.”
