Richard Grenell, the former ambassador to Germany and the head of President’s Trump’s LGBTQ outreach, has a well-earned reputation as a Twitter troll. Now he’s trying to troll the voters of Nevada. In a press conference today, Grenell announced a federal lawsuit to stop the vote count in that state because his former boss is upset he’s losing.
What Grenell actually claimed is that thousands of illegal votes were cast in Nevada and that the vote count must stop.
Related: Why did so many Americans vote for Trump? Sociologists know the answer.
“They continue to count illegal votes,” Grenell said at a press conference. “It is giving legal people the sense that the system is corrupt.”
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Legal people, in Grenell’s vocabulary, apparently means Trump supporters.
In keeping with his reputation for being a complete jerk, Grenell refused to take questions and even refused to tell reporters who didn’t recognize him what his name was.
“You’re here to take in information,” Grenell scolded.
Except, of course, Grenell didn’t supply any. As he stormed off from the press conference, Grenell was followed by MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff, who repeatedly pressed Grenell for evidence of fraud. Grenell just marched along, unresponsive until he got in a van and left.
The irony is that Grenell is demanding the count be stopped in the name of transparency. Yet Grenell believes transparency applies only to the other side, not his.
Grenell’s latest move is fully in keeping with his activities during the campaign. Grenell was one of the chief sources of disinformation from the Trump campaign.
He portrayed Joe Biden as a “phony” by tweeting a photo of Biden on a plane talking to someone without a mask, and another of Biden with a mask at a campaign event. The photo from the plane was from 2019, pre-pandemic. He also retweeted a false claimed that lobbyists for Iran were working with Biden’s campaign.
This time Grenell is fighting a losing battle. The lawsuits that Trump keeps threatening, including the one in Nevada, seem designed more to placate the president’s ego than actually convince the courts. In the meantime, Grenell will keep churning out his baseless allegations. Within an hour of the press conference, election officials debunked the story of the one voter who claimed that her ballot was stolen.
It turns out that officials spoke to the woman, verified her signature, and offered her the chance to challenge her ballot and signature, which she refused. On Twitter, Grenell had his usual trollish response to the facts: “Don’t mansplain to elderly women.”
Bonus moment of zen: Everyone screaming "what's your name?" at Ric Grenell pic.twitter.com/xjnjbcmfO2
— Lis Power (@LisPower1) November 5, 2020
