Saturday was not a good day for the Trump campaign’s legal efforts in Wisconsin.

A Trump-appointed federal judge in the Eastern District of Wisconsin dismissed a lawsuit by lame duck president Donald Trump to overturn the state’s election, and a Trump-endorsed state Supreme Court judge blistered a lawyer representing Trump’s interests in a state case.

“This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits. In his reply brief, plaintiff ‘asks that the Rule of Law be followed.’ It has been,” judge Brett Ludwig, who was nominated and confirmed to the federal bench earlier this year, wrote to wrap up his opinion dismissing Trump’s lawsuit. 

Doing more than most federal courts have done with Trump election cases, Ludwig accepted the case, determining that Trump had standing and the case wasn’t moot.  Ludwig ruled, however, that Trump’s lawyers simply failed to make any compelling legal argument.

Saying Trump’s “claims fail as a matter of law and fact,” Ludwig determined that Trump’s lawyers did not establish that anything untoward or unusual happened in the state’s elections.  He upheld the state’s certification of the vote and dismissed Trump’s efforts to have the Republican-led legislature assign electors to the Electoral College.

In a state Supreme Court, Judge Jill Karofsky–who was first appoint to the state Supreme Court by now-ousted Republican Governor Scott Walker and endorsed for election by Trump–sharply questioned Trump campaign attorney Jim Troupis about the damages and events he claimed occurred, according to reporting on Twitter by Jan Wolfe of Reuters.  The Trump campaign is attempted to invalidate hundreds of thousands of votes in Dane and Milwaukee Counties.

“In your lawsuit what you have done here is target the vote of 250,000 people — not statewide, but in two of our 72 counties that have diverse populations, because they are urban, and because they vote Democratic,” Karofsky said, “This lawsuit, Mr. Troupis, smacks of racism.”

Troupis, who along with his wife, voted via an in-person absentee ballot before the Election Day, sought to have his vote and the votes of hundreds of thousands other Wisconsonites.  He made a number of claims to advance his argument including that “illegal forms” were used, though the form in question had been used across the state for years, not just in the two counties Troupis attempted to overturn.

“Mr. Troupis, I am very interested in knowing about one person in Dane County or one person in Milwaukee County who engaged in election fraud on Nov. 3, 2020,” Karofsky implored.  Troupis could not produce a suspect.

Troupis also presented as evidence ten Facebook posts by people who claimed they were “indefinitely confined” to obtain mail-in ballots.  In Wisconsin, voters themselves, not election officials, designate themselves as “confined,” and many did so because of the pandemic.

Trump’s attorney, however, called into question their status by  pointing to the people’s Facebook posts to demonstrate they were at public events during the election, attempted to call into doubt their “indefinitely confined” status.  Troupis did not call the posters to testify, nor did he offer verification of the posts’ authenticity.  “Facebook posts? That’s the evidence?” one judge was heard to say.