More key Republicans tell Trump to end delays. ‘Past time to start a transition’

More top Republicans are urging President Donald Trump to begin the transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden as the president continues to fight the Nov. 3 election in court.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Trump adviser, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that it’s time for Trump to end his legal battles, calling the president’s legal team a “national embarrassment” for failing to present evidence of voter fraud in court.

“We can’t continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen,” Christie said, ABC News reported. “The country is what has to matter the most.”

Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pennsylvania, also called on Trump to concede in a statement Saturday, NPR reported. A federal judge there has dismissed a Trump lawsuit challenging the results, one of dozens of such suits thrown out by judges across the nation.

“President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania,” Toomey said. “To help unify the country, President Trump should accept the outcome of the election and facilitate the presidential transition process.”

Trump responded on Twitter, calling Toomey “no friend of mine” and citing baseless claims of voter fraud, which the social network flagged as misinformation.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-North Dakota, called on Trump to begin the presidential transition process while continuing his court battles.

“It’s past time to start a transition, to at least cooperate with a transition,” Cramer said, NBC News reported. “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.”

In Michigan, another state where Trump has contested the election results to no avail in court, GOP Rep. Fred Upton said it’s time for the president to admit he lost the election, The Daily Boulder reported.

“It’s over,” Upton said in an interview on CNN’s “Inside Politics” on Sunday. “The voters have spoken. No one has come up with any evidence of fraud or abuse.”

They join other Republicans, including Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland and Senators Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse and Susan Collins, who earlier urged Trump to begin the transition.

Some have gone further, criticizing Trump’s efforts to challenge election results.

“Stop golfing and concede,” Hogan advised Trump in a Twitter post Sunday as the two argued about South Korean coronavirus test kits.

“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 posted Thursday to Twitter.

“It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President,” Romney wrote.

“Based on what I’ve read in their filings, when Trump campaign lawyers have stood before courts under oath, they have repeatedly refused to actually allege grand fraud — because there are legal consequences for lying to judges,” Sasse said, CNN reported.

Biden has been projected as the winner of the Nov. 3 election with a popular vote lead of 6 million over Trump and 306 electoral college votes, Fox News reported.

This story was originally published November 22, 2020 at 10:11 AM with the headline "More key Republicans tell Trump to end delays. ‘Past time to start a transition’."