Jill Stein’s cynical push for recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan has two obvious goals: to raise more political cash, and to “troll” President-elect Donald Trump. She’s succeeding on both fronts — the interests of the nation be damned.
It’s a pander to liberal hysteria over Trump’s win that will doubtless feed conspiracy theories for years to come. (At least she left Florida out of it this time.)
Yet no recount has any chance of even vaulting Stein past Gary Johnson into the third-place slot. The odds are huge that the effort won’t flip a single state to Hillary Clinton, who needs all three to reverse the Electoral College result.
And if Stein really wanted Hillary to win, she shouldn’t have run in the first place: Her vote in two of the states was more than Trump’s margin over Clinton.
Yet the Green presidential candidate has raised north of $7 million thanks to the effort, far more than her campaign will have to spend on it. She’s also building a fine database of suckers for future fund appeals.
Clinton’s camp, meanwhile, will help monitor the recounts — purely, it claims, to make sure everything’s clean. And never mind about her pre-election thunder on the need to “accept … the outcome.”
Trump, stung by the push to delegitimize his victory, couldn’t resist tweeting his outrage on Sunday — slamming Clinton for her about-face, then spouting fiction about “millions of people who voted illegally.”
Naturally, the punditry then overreacted, with claims that Trump himself was delegitimizing the results. No: His claims undermine nothing (except his “presidential” image) unless you figure he swept the illegal-alien vote.
Still, Trump should recognize a sideshow when he sees it — and assign some very junior member of his communications team to mocking such idiocy. Unlike Stein and Clinton, the president-elect has real work to do.