The attention Trump has drawn to our flawed election system, which needs reform, has merit. But only up to a certain point, and that point has been reached and passed. The president’s legal team increasingly looks as though it is flinging mud to see what sticks, rather than pursuing a coherent course of litigation. Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell asserted, “What we are really dealing with here, and uncovering more by the day, is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference in our elections here in the United States.” She claimed that voting systems used in the U.S. “were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election,” and that Trump actually won more than 80 million votes, meaning 7 million Trump votes were switched to Biden. If voting machines were switching that many votes, they would have been uncovered in the Georgia hand-count.

At this point, Trump’s efforts are more likely to damage the Republican Party, and more specifically, undermine its chances of winning the Jan. 5 runoff elections in Georgia for the two Senate seats that remain undecided. GOP control of the Senate rests on those races; the party must win at least one of them to retain its majority. And that majority is all that stands in the way of a Congress dramatically more capable of passing damaging and extreme left-wing legislation after Jan. 20.

The president’s efforts to reverse the election result and stay in office for a second term are not going to succeed. Without a chance of succeeding, they have become distractions from the really important task of keeping the Senate in Republican hands. In Georgia, Trump is setting Republican against Republican.