Philip Bump: “One second after noon on Jan. 20, 2021, President Trump will once again be a private citizen. The odds are good that he won’t be at the Capitol at that moment, given how the inauguration festivities will be affected by the coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s truculence about the election results. But, particularly given the broad collapse of his scattershot legal efforts, it’s even less likely now than it was a week ago that anything can prevent President-elect Joe Biden from becoming chief executive. And a week ago, there was essentially no likelihood.”
“The math is simple. Trump lost the electoral college 306 to 232. To win a second term, Trump would need to somehow pry 38 electoral votes away from Biden. That means that he would have to overturn the results of at least three states, barring some sort of miracle in which it is suddenly determined that he won California. Even wresting away the three states in which Trump lost by the narrowest vote totals — Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — wouldn’t do the trick: That would get him only 37 electoral votes. He would basically have to somehow finagle a win in Pennsylvania plus two of Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin to get a second consecutive term in office. And it’s increasingly obvious that that’s not going to happen.”