Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat

November 3, 2020 (Tuesday)

Tonight, we wait, as returns from this year’s election are about what we expected. In-person ballots cast today are weighted toward Trump, while the uncounted mail-in and early ballots are expected to favor Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Tonight, few states except the rock-solid Democratic or Republican states have yet been called by the Associated Press.

This is the scenario we all foresaw. Tonight, the election returns look relatively good for Trump, which is why he talked about claiming a victory at the end of election night. This is the so-called “red mirage.” But as the mail-in ballots get counted, everyone expects the Democratic numbers to climb fast and far.

As they do, the Trump team will fight every single ballot. They will try to claim that counting the mail-in ballots is “fraud,” or that Democrats are “stealing” the election when, in fact, election officials are simply counting all the ballots.

Remember that no one is arguing that Trump will win the popular vote. He wants to win in the Electoral College.

What we are seeing in this election is the result of voter suppression across the southern states, along with an Electoral College that has been corrupted from its original intent and is now artificially skewed toward rural states.

In 2018, for example, people in Florida voted overwhelmingly to restore voting rights to felons. This would have added about 1.5 million people back to the rolls, many of them African Americans. But the Republican legislature passed a law saying the former felons could not vote unless they had paid all their court fines and fees. A federal judge said that law was essentially an unconstitutional poll tax, but an appeals court overturned that decision. Five of the six judges who upheld the law were appointed by Trump.

Today, as well, there are problems with ballots. This summer, the Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, a major fundraiser for the Republican Party and a key ally of Trump, changed the rules for mail delivery, slowing it significantly. It turns out that more than 300,000 ballots were checked into the USPS mail system but not checked out of it. U.S. District Judge Emmett G. Sullivan ordered the USPS to sweep 27 processing centers for the missing ballots, but USPS officials refused, saying they already had a system in place and that changing it would be disruptive. Sullivan has called the parties in tomorrow morning to discuss the issue.

The problem of voter suppression is compounded by the misuse of the Electoral College. The Framers originally designed delegates to the Electoral College to vote according to districts within states, so that states would split their electoral votes, making them roughly proportional to a candidate’s support. That system changed in 1800, after Thomas Jefferson recognized that he would have a better chance of winning the presidency if the delegates of his own home state, Virginia, voted as a bloc rather than by district. He convinced them to do it. Quickly, other state officials recognized that the “winner-take-all” system meant they must do the same or their own preferred candidate would never win. Thus, our non-proportional system was born, and it so horrified James Madison and Alexander Hamilton that both wanted constitutional amendments to switch the system back.  

Democracy took another hit from that system in 1929. The 1920 census showed that the weight of the nation’s demographics was moving to cities, which were controlled by Democrats, so the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives refused to reapportion representation after that census. Reapportioning the House would have cost many of them their seats. Rather than permitting the number of representatives to grow along with population, Congress then capped the size of the House at 435. Since then, the average size of a congressional district has tripled. This gives smaller states a huge advantage in the Electoral College, in which each state gets a number of votes equal to the number of its senators and representatives.

These injuries to our system have saddled us with an Electoral College that permits a minority to tyrannize over the majority. That systemic advantage is unsustainable in a democracy. One or the other will have to give.

We should know the results of this election by Thursday night, I would guess.

Biden is still projected to win.

brianlux

mickeyrat said:

November 3, 2020 (Tuesday)

Tonight, we wait, as returns from this year’s election are about what we expected. In-person ballots cast today are weighted toward Trump, while the uncounted mail-in and early ballots are expected to favor Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Tonight, few states except the rock-solid Democratic or Republican states have yet been called by the Associated Press.

This is the scenario we all foresaw. Tonight, the election returns look relatively good for Trump, which is why he talked about claiming a victory at the end of election night. This is the so-called “red mirage.” But as the mail-in ballots get counted, everyone expects the Democratic numbers to climb fast and far.

As they do, the Trump team will fight every single ballot. They will try to claim that counting the mail-in ballots is “fraud,” or that Democrats are “stealing” the election when, in fact, election officials are simply counting all the ballots.

Remember that no one is arguing that Trump will win the popular vote. He wants to win in the Electoral College.

What we are seeing in this election is the result of voter suppression across the southern states, along with an Electoral College that has been corrupted from its original intent and is now artificially skewed toward rural states.

In 2018, for example, people in Florida voted overwhelmingly to restore voting rights to felons. This would have added about 1.5 million people back to the rolls, many of them African Americans. But the Republican legislature passed a law saying the former felons could not vote unless they had paid all their court fines and fees. A federal judge said that law was essentially an unconstitutional poll tax, but an appeals court overturned that decision. Five of the six judges who upheld the law were appointed by Trump.

Today, as well, there are problems with ballots. This summer, the Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, a major fundraiser for the Republican Party and a key ally of Trump, changed the rules for mail delivery, slowing it significantly. It turns out that more than 300,000 ballots were checked into the USPS mail system but not checked out of it. U.S. District Judge Emmett G. Sullivan ordered the USPS to sweep 27 processing centers for the missing ballots, but USPS officials refused, saying they already had a system in place and that changing it would be disruptive. Sullivan has called the parties in tomorrow morning to discuss the issue.

The problem of voter suppression is compounded by the misuse of the Electoral College. The Framers originally designed delegates to the Electoral College to vote according to districts within states, so that states would split their electoral votes, making them roughly proportional to a candidate’s support. That system changed in 1800, after Thomas Jefferson recognized that he would have a better chance of winning the presidency if the delegates of his own home state, Virginia, voted as a bloc rather than by district. He convinced them to do it. Quickly, other state officials recognized that the “winner-take-all” system meant they must do the same or their own preferred candidate would never win. Thus, our non-proportional system was born, and it so horrified James Madison and Alexander Hamilton that both wanted constitutional amendments to switch the system back.  

Democracy took another hit from that system in 1929. The 1920 census showed that the weight of the nation’s demographics was moving to cities, which were controlled by Democrats, so the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives refused to reapportion representation after that census. Reapportioning the House would have cost many of them their seats. Rather than permitting the number of representatives to grow along with population, Congress then capped the size of the House at 435. Since then, the average size of a congressional district has tripled. This gives smaller states a huge advantage in the Electoral College, in which each state gets a number of votes equal to the number of its senators and representatives.

These injuries to our system have saddled us with an Electoral College that permits a minority to tyrannize over the majority. That systemic advantage is unsustainable in a democracy. One or the other will have to give.

We should know the results of this election by Thursday night, I would guess.

Biden is still projected to win.

I thought maybe she had written this hours ago, but reading it on Facebook, it looks like this was written at about 40 minutes ago.  She still see's Biden as projected to win.  Can it be? 

mickeyrat

November 4, 2020 (Wednesday)

Counting continues in the 2020 presidential race. There is a lot I’d like to say about what this election looks like, but I will wait until we have a final count. Remember: the fact that polling officials are taking time to count the ballots is a good thing, not a bad one. And there is no reason to think election officials are being anything but careful.

Apart from the vote tallies, there have been some important indicators in the past two days about our political system.

First of all, much of Trump’s power during his term has come from his ability to dominate the public narrative through threats or rumors. From his insistence that he had hired detectives to investigate President Obama’s birth certificate, through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails and Hunter Biden’s laptop, he has gathered power by warning that something untoward was looming just over the horizon. But yesterday, after all the hype about expected violence at the polls, there was remarkably little trouble.

Trump's attempt to control politics by controlling the narrative continued early this morning, as the Department of Justice sent an email to federal prosecutors telling them that, while the law prohibits sending armed federal officers to polling places, it did authorize them to monitor “voting fraud” by sending armed federal officers to the places where election officials were counting ballots. About a half hour later, Trump called a press conference in which he declared victory and claimed that the ongoing counting of legally cast ballots must be stopped. Counting the ballots, he said, was the Democrats’ attempt to “steal the election.”

But Trump’s power is wavering, and he can no longer control the narrative. As he spoke, NBC News and MSNBC cut in to note that he was lying. After he finished, other media outlets also pushed back. On ABC News, Terry Moran said: “This isn’t law, this isn’t politics, this is theater,” Moran said. “And let’s be blunt: it’s the theater of authoritarianism.” Throughout the day, Trump tweeted angrily about the on-going counting of ballots; Twitter hid many of the tweets behind warnings that they were spreading disinformation.

Republican leaders have been surprisingly quick to turn on the president. Last night, the Fox News Channel was the first to call the state of Arizona for Democratic candidate Joe Biden which, according to Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair, led Trump to call Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Fox News Channel, to demand a retraction. Murdoch, who has said for months that Trump would lose the election, refused.

Today, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters that “claiming you’ve won the election is different from finishing the counting.” Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who caught the coronavirus when he helped to prepare Trump for the first presidential debate, told ABC News, “There’s just no basis to make that argument…. There just isn’t. All these votes have to be counted that are in now.” Among others, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, Republicans all, echoed McConnell and Christie.

Still, last night Trump’s campaign sent out an estimated 9 million texts to his followers claiming the election had been stolen and asking for money for lawsuits to fight the apparent outcome. Today, Trump and his supporters flooded Twitter and Facebook attacking election results, prompting critics to urge the social media outlets either to take down the posts or to shut down the accounts spreading the disinformation.

The Trump team’s tactic appears to have worked, though. Today, Trump supporters gathered outside the TCF Center in Detroit, a city that is 79% Black, to complain that there aren’t enough Republican poll watchers to oversee the ballot counting, which they think is tilting artificially toward Biden. Tonight, supporters gathered outside Arizona's Maricopa County Elections Office, where election officials are counting ballots, yelling “count those votes!”

The officials are, indeed, counting the votes. And U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington, D.C., is following up on the failure of the United States Postal Service to comply with his order to make sure no ballot was left in a USPS plant on Tuesday. Sullivan made the order after civil rights groups learned that 300,000 ballots had been scanned into processing facilities but not out of them. After 5:00 on Tuesday, an attorney for the Justice Department told Sullivan that the USPS had its own system and thus would not comply with the order.

Today, Sullivan brought USPS officials into a hearing to explain their actions. The official in charge of handling ballot processing, Kevin Bray, told Sullivan that the lack of an outgoing scan on the ballots likely meant they had been removed by hand for faster delivery. He could not tell Sullivan how many ballots are still in the system. Sullivan ordered him to provide that data by 9:00 tomorrow morning. The hearing will resume at 11:00.

For his part, Biden, along with running mate Senator Kamala Harris, gave a brief statement today celebrating yesterday's demonstration of American democracy and praising the 150 million people who voted in the election despite the pandemic. "Here," he said, "the people rule." He explained that he was not claiming victory- yet- but that he and Harris expected that when the votes were counted, they would win. He called for Americans to lower the temperature and come together as a nation. "We are not enemies," he said, and "the presidency itself is not a partisan institution. It's the one office, in this nation, that represents everyone." He reminded listeners that counting ballots was at the heart of our democracy. "We the people will not be silenced. We the people will not be bullied."

Another news story dropped quietly yesterday while people were distracted with the election. The Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security issued a report challenging Acting Director Chad Wolf’s actions this summer when he sent law enforcement officers from the department to Portland, Oregon. The report challenged the deployments’ legality on a number of fronts, and concluded that the issue is open, unresolved, and urgent. The Department of Homeland Security’s top attorney, Chad Mizelle, an ally of senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, rejects the inspector general’s findings.

Trump insisted in his campaign rallies that stories about coronavirus were simply attacks on his candidacy, and on November 4 we would no longer hear about the pandemic. Sadly, today brought us not to silence, but to a new record: the U.S. had more than 100,000 new infections today. At slightly before 7 pm EST tonight, the number was 104,004 cases. Infections are spiking, and public health officials expect the rise will continue unless we address it.

mickeyrat

November 5, 2020 (Thursday)

And still, we wait.

Ballot counting in the 2020 presidential election continues, although it sure looks like Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris are going to win.

What has stood out today is the degree to which Trump and his team have governed by creating their own reality. Now that that image is being challenged, they are flailing.

Knowing he would lose the popular vote, Trump intended to win by arguing that Democrats had “stolen” his victory. Before the election, he talked about the dangers of mail-in ballots, setting up the idea that they would somehow be fraudulent, although there is no evidence of that. He expected—correctly, as it turned out—that mail-in ballots would be heavily Democratic while Republicans would vote in person on Election Day. That set up a scenario in which the election results on November 3 would give an advantage to him, but as the hours wore on and the mail-in ballots got counted, the Democrats would gain ground. So he talked repeatedly of ending the count on the night of November 3, although ballot counting has always taken days.

He planned to challenge the counting of the mail-in ballots in the courts, all the while telling his supporters that Democrats were stealing his victory. If he could gin up enough chaos, he could buy time to throw the results into doubt and, perhaps, get the Supreme Court to enter the fight. There, he hoped for victory with the help of the three justices who owed him their seats.

He planned to subvert the election, staying in power thanks to his extraordinary ability to control the narrative, making people believe things that are not true.

The only thing that could stymie that narrative was overwhelming turnout from Democrats. To make that impossible, Trump’s team arranged to keep voters from the polls in places like Florida, and Texas, and enlisted Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to delay the mails so ballots would not be delivered in time to be counted.

But, in the end, their plans could not completely suppress those Americans fed up with the Trump administration. As I write tonight, Biden and Harris are winning the popular vote by more than 4 million votes, and the numbers are rising. If it weren’t for our antiquated Electoral College system, this election would already be over, decisively.

Instead, we are still waiting on the outcomes in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Alaska.

The unraveling of Trump’s plan to claim victory has been mesmerizing.

Until Tuesday night, everything seemed to be going according to plan. In the evening, Trump won Florida by about 375,000 votes, a victory certainly helped by the disfranchisement of 1.5 million ex-felons, whose voting rights Floridians had voted overwhelmingly in 2018 to restore. Florida’s 29 electoral votes made it look like Trump was on track to win, opening up room for him to declare victory even though many of the states he would need to win for real were still counting. If he could claim victory early on, any later correction would look like the election was being “stolen.”

But before he could take a victory lap, the Fox News Channel called Arizona for Biden long before anyone else did. Arizona had been a Trump state in 2016, so this meant a flip and undercut Trump’s claim to a commanding lead. Trump was furious. He and his aides worked Twitter and the phones, trying unsuccessfully to get FNC to retract the call and, when that failed, to discredit it.

As Trump fumed, the Biden campaign was watching its candidate's numbers tick upward—again, as expected—and Biden gave a short statement Tuesday night saying the campaign felt good about where it was, and encouraging patience as election officials counted all ballots.

Trump then made a statement at 2:30 am Wednesday morning, claiming victory, demanding that officials stop counting mail-in ballots, and promising to take the election to the Supreme Court to decide. “This is a fraud on the American public,” he said. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win the election.”

But key Republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, noted that a number of Senate candidates ran more strongly than Trump did, meaning they no longer need him. They have clearly decided that Trump is no longer useful to them, and they went before television cameras in the morning to contradict him. They said that all ballots should be counted.

Since then, the president has been flailing. His legal team has been filing lawsuits to challenge ballot counting, but the suits are frivolous, and keep getting thrown out. They are designed not to win legal points, but rather to do what Trump has always done politically: create a narrative that makes his supporters believe something that is not true. So, for example, his team has sued to have Republican observers in ballot counting areas, only to have to admit to a judge that they already have observers there. They are not writing a wrong; they are trying to set Trump’s supporters up to believe a lie.

Remember when, during the impeachment hearings, the Republicans dramatically stormed a hearing to demand they have access… when, in fact, members of the committees already had access and had been attending? Then, as now, it is all about creating a narrative.

By Thursday, Trump’s surrogates were escalating their attacks on the election process. The usual suspects—the Trump children, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the White House press secretary Kelly McEnany, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, and so on—have tried to cast doubt on the election, insisting that election officials should not be counting ballots that were cast on or before November 11… except in Arizona.

Some were even more explicit about overturning our democratic process. Trump legal adviser Harmeet Dhillon told Lou Dobbs on the Fox News Channel: “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court- of which the president has nominated three justices- to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through.” Former White House chief strategist Steven Bannon went further, calling for Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray to be beheaded “as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you are gone.” Twitter banned Bannon permanently.

Tonight, Trump addressed his sliding fortunes with a statement that will go down in the annals of the American presidency alongside Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” speech trying to regain control of the runaway Watergate story. In front of a wall of flags, speaking a low voice and tripping over his words at times, he rambled through a wild attack on the election, claiming it was being stolen from him. MSNBC cut away from his remarks almost immediately, noting they were lies; ABC News made it about five minutes. Fact-checker Daniel Dale tweeted: “I’ve read or watched all of Trump’s speeches since 2016. This is the most dishonest speech he’s ever given.”

It felt Shakespearean, like the desperate attempt of a man who has lost control of the narrative to try to claw it back, even as we all know it’s gone beyond all recovery. As CNN’s Anderson Cooper said, it was “sad and truly pathetic…. That is the most powerful person in the world, and we see him like an obese turtle on his back, flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over. But he just hasn’t accepted it, and he wants to take everybody down with him, including this country.”

In the wake of Trump’s statement, more Republican officials condemned his attack on democracy. Then, tonight, 19 former U.S. Attorneys, all of whom served under Republican presidents, released a statement condemning Trump’s “premature, baseless and reckless” attacks on the election process. “We hereby call upon the president to patiently and respectfully allow the lawful vote-counting process to continue, in accordance with applicable federal and state laws, and to avoid any further comments or other actions which can serve only to undermine our democracy,” they wrote. Perhaps more significant is the fact that Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier told his audience that “We have not seen the hard evidence” of the fraud Trump’s campaign claims.

Tonight, the Secret Service sent reinforcements to Wilmington, Delaware, to surround Biden in a protective bubble, in anticipation of what many expect to be a victory speech some time tomorrow.

Halifax2TheMax

mickeyrat said:

November 5, 2020 (Thursday)

And still, we wait.

Ballot counting in the 2020 presidential election continues, although it sure looks like Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris are going to win.

What has stood out today is the degree to which Trump and his team have governed by creating their own reality. Now that that image is being challenged, they are flailing.

Knowing he would lose the popular vote, Trump intended to win by arguing that Democrats had “stolen” his victory. Before the election, he talked about the dangers of mail-in ballots, setting up the idea that they would somehow be fraudulent, although there is no evidence of that. He expected—correctly, as it turned out—that mail-in ballots would be heavily Democratic while Republicans would vote in person on Election Day. That set up a scenario in which the election results on November 3 would give an advantage to him, but as the hours wore on and the mail-in ballots got counted, the Democrats would gain ground. So he talked repeatedly of ending the count on the night of November 3, although ballot counting has always taken days.

He planned to challenge the counting of the mail-in ballots in the courts, all the while telling his supporters that Democrats were stealing his victory. If he could gin up enough chaos, he could buy time to throw the results into doubt and, perhaps, get the Supreme Court to enter the fight. There, he hoped for victory with the help of the three justices who owed him their seats.

He planned to subvert the election, staying in power thanks to his extraordinary ability to control the narrative, making people believe things that are not true.

The only thing that could stymie that narrative was overwhelming turnout from Democrats. To make that impossible, Trump’s team arranged to keep voters from the polls in places like Florida, and Texas, and enlisted Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to delay the mails so ballots would not be delivered in time to be counted.

But, in the end, their plans could not completely suppress those Americans fed up with the Trump administration. As I write tonight, Biden and Harris are winning the popular vote by more than 4 million votes, and the numbers are rising. If it weren’t for our antiquated Electoral College system, this election would already be over, decisively.

Instead, we are still waiting on the outcomes in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Alaska.

The unraveling of Trump’s plan to claim victory has been mesmerizing.

Until Tuesday night, everything seemed to be going according to plan. In the evening, Trump won Florida by about 375,000 votes, a victory certainly helped by the disfranchisement of 1.5 million ex-felons, whose voting rights Floridians had voted overwhelmingly in 2018 to restore. Florida’s 29 electoral votes made it look like Trump was on track to win, opening up room for him to declare victory even though many of the states he would need to win for real were still counting. If he could claim victory early on, any later correction would look like the election was being “stolen.”

But before he could take a victory lap, the Fox News Channel called Arizona for Biden long before anyone else did. Arizona had been a Trump state in 2016, so this meant a flip and undercut Trump’s claim to a commanding lead. Trump was furious. He and his aides worked Twitter and the phones, trying unsuccessfully to get FNC to retract the call and, when that failed, to discredit it.

As Trump fumed, the Biden campaign was watching its candidate's numbers tick upward—again, as expected—and Biden gave a short statement Tuesday night saying the campaign felt good about where it was, and encouraging patience as election officials counted all ballots.

Trump then made a statement at 2:30 am Wednesday morning, claiming victory, demanding that officials stop counting mail-in ballots, and promising to take the election to the Supreme Court to decide. “This is a fraud on the American public,” he said. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win the election.”

But key Republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, noted that a number of Senate candidates ran more strongly than Trump did, meaning they no longer need him. They have clearly decided that Trump is no longer useful to them, and they went before television cameras in the morning to contradict him. They said that all ballots should be counted.

Since then, the president has been flailing. His legal team has been filing lawsuits to challenge ballot counting, but the suits are frivolous, and keep getting thrown out. They are designed not to win legal points, but rather to do what Trump has always done politically: create a narrative that makes his supporters believe something that is not true. So, for example, his team has sued to have Republican observers in ballot counting areas, only to have to admit to a judge that they already have observers there. They are not writing a wrong; they are trying to set Trump’s supporters up to believe a lie.

Remember when, during the impeachment hearings, the Republicans dramatically stormed a hearing to demand they have access… when, in fact, members of the committees already had access and had been attending? Then, as now, it is all about creating a narrative.

By Thursday, Trump’s surrogates were escalating their attacks on the election process. The usual suspects—the Trump children, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the White House press secretary Kelly McEnany, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, and so on—have tried to cast doubt on the election, insisting that election officials should not be counting ballots that were cast on or before November 11… except in Arizona.

Some were even more explicit about overturning our democratic process. Trump legal adviser Harmeet Dhillon told Lou Dobbs on the Fox News Channel: “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court- of which the president has nominated three justices- to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through.” Former White House chief strategist Steven Bannon went further, calling for Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray to be beheaded “as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you are gone.” Twitter banned Bannon permanently.

Tonight, Trump addressed his sliding fortunes with a statement that will go down in the annals of the American presidency alongside Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” speech trying to regain control of the runaway Watergate story. In front of a wall of flags, speaking a low voice and tripping over his words at times, he rambled through a wild attack on the election, claiming it was being stolen from him. MSNBC cut away from his remarks almost immediately, noting they were lies; ABC News made it about five minutes. Fact-checker Daniel Dale tweeted: “I’ve read or watched all of Trump’s speeches since 2016. This is the most dishonest speech he’s ever given.”

It felt Shakespearean, like the desperate attempt of a man who has lost control of the narrative to try to claw it back, even as we all know it’s gone beyond all recovery. As CNN’s Anderson Cooper said, it was “sad and truly pathetic…. That is the most powerful person in the world, and we see him like an obese turtle on his back, flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over. But he just hasn’t accepted it, and he wants to take everybody down with him, including this country.”

In the wake of Trump’s statement, more Republican officials condemned his attack on democracy. Then, tonight, 19 former U.S. Attorneys, all of whom served under Republican presidents, released a statement condemning Trump’s “premature, baseless and reckless” attacks on the election process. “We hereby call upon the president to patiently and respectfully allow the lawful vote-counting process to continue, in accordance with applicable federal and state laws, and to avoid any further comments or other actions which can serve only to undermine our democracy,” they wrote. Perhaps more significant is the fact that Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier told his audience that “We have not seen the hard evidence” of the fraud Trump’s campaign claims.

Tonight, the Secret Service sent reinforcements to Wilmington, Delaware, to surround Biden in a protective bubble, in anticipation of what many expect to be a victory speech some time tomorrow.

Damn girl, I feel like Nate Silver and Lerxts, yo! She be way high,like toast, yo!

mickeyrat

November 6, 2020 (Friday)

And still, we wait.

But not really, because the outcome of the 2020 election for the American presidency is clear. The Democratic ticket, headed by former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris, is ahead in the key states of Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. Biden does not need the electoral votes of all of them to put him over the 270 electoral votes he needs to win. It appears mathematically impossible for Trump suddenly to retake control of those states.

Tonight, with Harris beside him, Biden spoke to the nation. He acknowledged it is frustrating not to have a declared winner in the election, but urged people to be patient as election workers count every ballot: a process at the center of our democracy. He promised that he and Harris are already at work, receiving briefings on the coronavirus pandemic and the faltering economy, and that the country had its work cut out for it with those issues, along with climate change and systemic racism, but that we could solve them if we work together. Once again, he called for unity and promised to govern for everyone, not simply for those who had voted for him.

Biden had intended to make a victory speech, but the media seems oddly reluctant to call the election. That reluctance is odd enough that people are speculating as to why, suggesting that media administrators are afraid of the president’s fury or eager to milk the cliff-hanger situation for viewers. My own guess is that, with the president lashing out at what he insists without evidence is a fraudulent election, they are determined to have all the votes counted before making a final call.

For Trump is, indeed, lashing out: at his lawyers, his aides, election officials, and his opponents. He is allegedly having a hard time believing he lost.

He clearly intends to continue reshaping the government while he retains the office of the presidency: in the three days since the election he has gotten rid of the leaders of the three agencies in charge of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons, the regulation of natural gas and electricity, and aid to foreign countries. Administration officials did not give a reason for the ousters, but it seems clear he is purging the administration of officials he considers insufficiently loyal.

Trump’s supporters are also having a hard time believing he lost. A top campaign official used his own texting company to send out thousands of text messages telling supporters that the Democrats were stealing the election and urging them to rally in Philadelphia to protest. Two heavily armed men drove from Virginia and showed up Wednesday to attack the counting center in the city.

Supporters have also forced an election worker in Atlanta, Georgia, into hiding after a right-wing YouTuber posted a video of him throwing away a piece of paper and claiming it was a ballot. The video, along with the worker’s personal information, went viral. According to Richard Barron, the elections director for Fulton County, the worker was, in fact, properly discarding an instruction sheet.  

This election was not particularly close, but pundits warn that the fact that 70 million Americans voted for Trump and 74 million and counting voted for Biden shows that we live in two very different Americas, and that, for all his talk of unity, Biden will have a hard time finding common ground with Trump supporters.

Pundits suggest that the two different political ideologies in America are about values and principles, but it actually seems that the primary difference between the two camps is between those who are living in a fictional world, created by generations of right-wing media, and those who are living in the real world, the so-called “reality-based community.” According to political historian Rick Perlstein, a scholar of the right, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has been telling listeners that Democrats have stolen the election, and urging his listeners to abandon the Republican establishment, which did not sufficiently back Trump.

Entertainment personality Alex Jones is more extreme. He showed up to the Maricopa County, Arizona, counting center, where he told the crowd that “The Bidens are Communist Chinese agents” and urged listeners to fight “those scumbag Nazi bastards.” Jones owns a far-right conspiracy theory website aptly named InfoWars. According to an article by Veit Medick in Der Spiegel, about two-thirds of his income comes from the merchandise he sells to combat the conspiracies he talks about.

The Republicans’ alternative reality is quite literally deadly. Although 82% of Trump voters believe the pandemic is at least somewhat under control, today America had more than 122,000 new infections, and more than 1100 people died. An analysis by the Associated Press shows that 93% of the 376 counties with the highest numbers of coronavirus cases per capita voted for Trump. That deadliness might, in the end, create common ground with the Democrats who urge mask wearing and social distancing. “I think there’s the potential for things to get less charged and divisive,” Dr. Marcus Plescia of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials told the AP.

On October 25, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the White House was no longer going to try to control the pandemic, but was instead going to focus on finding drugs and a vaccine to treat it. Tonight, it came out that Meadows and four other White House aides have contracted the coronavirus. The people who knew were told to keep it a secret. Meadows has been participating in White House events this week—including a gathering on election night—without a mask.

Addressing the right-wing media's construction of a false narrative for its supporters seems crucial to restoring sanity to the country’s politics. How that might play out is unclear, in part because Trump’s extremism seems to be driving a wedge into the right-wing ecosystem. Limbaugh and Jones are following Trump, but QAnon, which promised that Trump and the military were in control and that Trump would ride to victory, is suddenly adrift. Believers thought he would bring “The Storm,” which would destroy the pedophile-cannibals in the Democratic Party. But now, Trump is losing and “Q” went silent after the election until tonight, when it simply told followers to stay strong.

In contrast to Trump’s true believers, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is turning on the president. The New York Post is dismissing the Trump family’s claims of a fake election, and the Fox News Channel was the first to call Arizona for Biden on Tuesday, undercutting Trump’s ability to claim a premature victory.

Tonight, looking directly at the camera, Laura Ingraham gave a monologue on her show about how Trump should leave the White House with grace and become a party kingmaker for the future. Ingraham appeared to be talking to Trump supporters, but it was clear she was talking directly to Trump himself.

brianlux

"Trump’s supporters are also having a hard time believing he lost. A top campaign official used his own texting company to send out thousands of text messages telling supporters that the Democrats were stealing the election and urging them to rally in Philadelphia to protest."

I witnessed two Trump supporters talking about talking about this very thing.  I had to stifle a smirk and move on.

" An analysis by the Associated Press shows that 93% of the 376 counties with the highest numbers of coronavirus cases per capita voted for Trump."

Talk about self-defeating.  Dumb. 

Ditto for Meadows.

mickeyrat

the last paragraph......

brianlux

mickeyrat said:

the last paragraph......

"party kingmaker"?  What did she mean by that?  Another 2024 thing?

mickeyrat

brianlux said:

mickeyrat said:

the last paragraph......

"party kingmaker"?  What did she mean by that?  Another 2024 thing?

dynasty...

mickeyrat

 November 7, 2020 (Saturday)

Today at about 11:30 am, the media called the 2020 US presidential election. The winners are the Democratic candidate, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and his running mate-- the first woman elected to the vice presidency-- California Senator Kamala Harris.

It is a new day in America.

The last four years have been a struggle for the survival of American democracy. That struggle has been no less fundamental than the Civil War or World War II, for all that our people died not from foreign artillery but in hospitals and under the knees of police officers.

A majority of Americans spoke up this week to reclaim our fundamental values: equality before the law and equality of opportunity. This was a huge win. The Republicans did all they could to disfranchise Democratic voters, yet as of tonight, Biden and Harris are ahead by more than 5 million votes, with more votes still to be counted.

This victory, the defense of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” belongs to everyone who refused to let right-wing talking points go unchallenged any longer, who called their congressional representatives, who wrote letters to their local newspapers, who filled out a ballot, who ran for office. It belongs to everyone who stood up for America as a land of freedom and possibility, rather than a land of carnage.

It belongs to you.

If there is anything the last four years have taught us, it’s that we are our own saviors.

The struggle to protect our democracy is not over, not by a long shot. Already Trump’s supporters are insisting that the vote was rigged and the election stolen, and they are vowing to fight. Popular right-wing media hosts are egging them on. Meanwhile, Trump’s term does not end until January 20, 2021, and he will almost certainly use that time to take revenge on those he blames for his loss, that is: us. The next two months are going to be rocky.

While this election saved democracy for now, the forces that gave rise to Donald Trump’s presidency have not been vanquished. America is still under siege by oligarchs who are trying to take control of the country. They win supporters by spinning a false narrative that feeds fear and fury to drive ordinary Americans apart. And, as we now know, 70 million voters are open to their narrative, even if it means children torn from their parents, half of the country demonized as anti-American, a lawless administration, a deep recession, and more than 230,000 Americans dead.

For my part, I believe that the way to defang this cabal is by rejecting its lies and returning fact-based argument to the center of our national conversations. Going forward, I will continue to do my part to make that happen.  

But whatever the future brings, there is no doubt that today is ours. After four years in which we have indulged the worst of our nation, we have voted to reclaim the best.

Thank you all for this day.

[photo by Buddy Poland]

josevolution

Thanks for posting these it really helped me everyday to know there’s people like her speaking truth to power! 

mickeyrat

josevolution said:

Thanks for posting these it really helped me everyday to know there’s people like her speaking truth to power! 

you can sign up for a daily email through her website https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/people/4875576 or just follow her on facebook

the previous days letter gets posted between 2 and 4 am.

josevolution

mickeyrat said:

josevolution said:

Thanks for posting these it really helped me everyday to know there’s people like her speaking truth to power! 

you can sign up for a daily email through her website https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/people/4875576 or just follow her on facebook

the previous days letter gets posted between 2 and 4 am.

Thanks will def sign up for email I don’t do FB

mickeyrat

 November 8, 2020 (Sunday)

Trump and Republican Party leaders are refusing to acknowledge that Democrat Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris have won the 2020 election. Despite Biden’s win in the Electoral College and his win of 4.4 million* and counting in the popular vote, Trump insists—without evidence-- that there has been fraud and will not concede the election. So far, most Republican leaders are following his lead. This morning, for example, Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) suggested, contrary to the facts, that there are irregularities in the ballot counting.

Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) and former President George W. Bush were two of the handful of Republican leaders to congratulate Biden and Harris. The rest are keeping mum, possibly recognizing what Senator Lindsey Graham said out loud on the Fox News Channel this morning: “If Republicans don't challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again."

Graham is right that, in their modern incarnation, Republicans will definitely have a hard time surviving unless they change the system even more than they already have. They are in the minority in the country, and a Democratic administration will likely pass a new voting rights act to replace the one the Supreme Court gutted in 2013. More voters will indeed make it hard for the current Republican Party to regain control of the country.

The obvious answer to the Republicans’ problem would seem to be broadening their appeal, and there are glimmers that a branch of the Republican Party is heading that direction. After the election, former chair of the Republican National Committee and adviser to the never-Trump Lincoln Project Michael Steele appeared on comedian Larry Wilmore’s new show on NBC’s Peacock streaming service.

Steele emphasized that he was still a Republican, but he was an American first, and that the Republican Party needed to get rid of its allegiance to Trump and rebuild. He pointed out that he has been a Republican since 1976, and that most of the people currently in charge are newcomers. Steele expressed disappointment that so many voters supported Trump in the election, but was more scathing of Republican Party leaders who “sycophantically kowtow to a[n]… egomaniacal henchman who has one… view of the world and that’s himself.”

Right-wing media outlets also continue to insist, without evidence, that the election was fraudulent. The Fox News Channel is emphasizing the many lawsuits Trump has filed without mentioning that the lawsuits have all, so far, been thrown out for lack of evidence of any kind of fraud. Once again, Trump’s people are constructing a fictional narrative through “investigations,” a theme that, after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails and Hunter Biden’s Ukraine work, should sound familiar.

Memes on right-wing media are expanding on this rumor. They call for holding a new election, promise that the Supreme Court will step in to give Trump the win, or assure Trump followers that the election will get thrown in the House of Representatives, where Republican states will hand the White House back to Trump. These attacks are taking a toll. On CBS News’s 60 Minutes today, Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican, said the people counting ballots in the city have received death threats.

This is not normal. The outcome of this election is not in doubt. Trump’s lawyers have launched a number of lawsuits challenging the mail-in votes that favored Biden, but judges have thrown all of them out from lack of evidence of any kind of fraud. There is no reason to think that the Supreme Court will step in, or that the election will get thrown into the House, although either is technically possible and may be what the president is hoping for.

Sources close to the president told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and his campaign adviser Jason Miller are telling Trump to hold rallies to push for a vote recount. Even aside from its implications for our democracy, this horrifies public health officials. Today we passed more than 10 million cases of coronavirus, with averages of more than 100,000 infections a day. Trump has insisted, without evidence, that we are “rounding the corner” on the virus, even as more members of the White House staff, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, have come down with it.

Aside from the coronavirus, the attack on the outcome of the election, even in the face of a clear win, is designed to keep the Republican base seething about an election leaders are telling them was stolen. The Trump campaign is fundraising on this issue, urging followers to donate for the legal challenges ahead. But the Wall Street Journal today noted that the fine print of the “Official Election Defense Fund” explains that 60% of contributions to the fund will go toward paying off Trump’s election debt, and 40% to the operating account of the Republican National Committee. Only after a donation hits the legal limit will the remainder go toward legal expenses.  

Meanwhile, the refusal to acknowledge Biden’s win is hamstringing his ability to get his team in place. Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee at the General Services Administration, the agency in charge of signing the paperwork that gives a new administration access to office space and equipment as well as $9.9 million authorized for a presidential transition, has refused to sign paperwork enabling Biden and his team to begin the transition process. Once the transition begins, the new administration can begin to process disclosure and conflict-of-interest forms and get up to speed with ongoing government projects. But the GSA is refusing to allow a transition before Trump agrees that one is in order. Normally the transition begins the day after the election is called.

Trump’s people are standing almost alone in refusing to acknowledge the results of a democratic election. The rest of the world is greeting the new presidential team with joy. “London looks forward to working with you—it’s time to get back to building bridges, not walls,” tweeted London Mayor Sadiq Kahn. “Welcome back America,” tweeted Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. In what must have been a bit of a blow for Trump, even his former personal ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated Biden and Harris today with a personal tweet: “Joe, we’ve had a long & warm personal relationship for nearly 40 years, and I know you as a great friend of Israel. I look forward to working with both of you to further strengthen the special alliance between the U.S. and Israel.”

Vice President Elect Harris is a pathbreaker, the first woman elected to the vice presidency. This fact has not been lost on American women, many of whom think her election falls into the category of “high time.” Harris acknowledged this achievement in her victory speech last night, wearing a white pantsuit in honor of the suffragists, who fought for the vote, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who ran for the presidency in 2016. Harris is a pathbreaker in other ways, too: she is the first Indian-American and the first Black woman to be elected to the second-highest office in the land.

Tonight, the Biden team released its schedule for tomorrow. Biden will receive a briefing from his transition coronavirus team and launch a 12-person coronavirus task force co-chaired by Dr. Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General under President Obama and President Trump, and former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. David Kessler.

Vice President Pence’s coronavirus task force has not met in weeks, but will do so tomorrow. The president has not been seen in public since the election, except going to and from his golf course twice over the weekend. He has nothing on his public schedule for Monday.

*I had this wrong last night when I put it at 5 million.

g under p

mickeyrat said:

josevolution said:

Thanks for posting these it really helped me everyday to know there’s people like her speaking truth to power! 

you can sign up for a daily email through her website https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/people/4875576 or just follow her on facebook

the previous days letter gets posted between 2 and 4 am.

Thank you I am certainly signing up, it's great to hear a voice of reason in this tremulous year of 2020.

Peace

mickeyrat

November 9, 2020 (Monday)

I had hoped that the days when the news came like a firehose were over, but so far, no luck.

This morning, the stock market jumped 1200 points in its first day of trading after the announcement of Biden’s election. Over the course of the day it was up as much as 1600 points, then ended for the day with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 834.57 points, or 2.95%.

The strong market is at least in part because pharmaceutical company Pfizer and the German drug company BioNTech announced today they have a coronavirus vaccine which appears to be about 90% effective. The Trump administration immediately tried to take credit for the vaccine, only to have Pfizer note that it has not taken federal money under Trump’s Operation Warp Speed for rushing a coronavirus vaccine. Don Jr. promptly suggested that the delay in announcing the potential vaccine until this week was designed to hurt Trump’s reelection, but it seems Pfizer is likely distancing itself from Trump to avoid any suggestion that the vaccine is about politics, rather than science. In the past, the administration has touted a number of treatments for Covid-19 that have turned out to be ineffective, and the pressure for a vaccine before the election threatened to weaken public faith in one.

The pandemic continues to worsen across the country. Today we learned that Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has tested positive for the virus; so has David Bossie, the Trump adviser in charge of the campaign’s legal challenges to the election loss. Both men were at the election night watch party at the White House, along with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was infected at the time and did not wear a mask. Aides told PBS NewsHour reporter Yamiche Alcindor that they were worried the event would be a superspreader, but felt pressured to attend.

President-Elect Joe Biden started his presidential transition today, beginning by announcing the makeup of his coronavirus task force. It’s an impressive group of doctors and scientists, including Dr. Rick Bright, a whistleblower fired by Trump officials. “Please, I implore you, wear a mask," Biden told Americans. "A mask is not a political statement…. The goal is to get back to normal as fast as possible.”

New leadership and the rising infection rates are shifting the conversation. Last night, Utah’s Republican Governor Gary Herbert announced a state of emergency. He has imposed a statewide mask mandate indefinitely and a ban on social gatherings outside of households for the next two weeks. He has limited extracurricular activities at schools. Businesses that don’t follow the mask mandate can be fined; organizers who ignore the social gathering rule can be prosecuted and fined up to $10,000.

Not everyone likes the idea of new leadership, though. In an unprecedented move, Trump is refusing to acknowledge that he has lost the election. He has launched lawsuits challenging the ballot counting in a number of states, and his surrogates—including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany—are accusing the Democrats of cheating. Tonight, Attorney General William Barr legitimized the idea of voter fraud by permitting federal prosecutors to investigate such allegations. Barr’s move prompted the head of the Election Crimes Branch of the Department of Justice, Richard Pilger, to resign.

But what’s so weird about this is that they are losing all these lawsuits. Indeed, some of them they’re not even trying to win: they’re not bothering to fill out the correct paperwork. It seems clear that they are simply stoking the narrative of an unfair election, but it is not at all clear to me to what end.

It is certainly possible that Trump and his people are launching a coup, as observers warn. And yet, this would not be an easy task. Biden’s win is not a few votes here or there; it is commanding, and Trump’s aides are telling reporters they think the game is played out. The military has already said it wants no part of getting involved in the election, and the courts so far are siding against the administration entirely. Even key Republican leaders, such as Georgia’s Republican lieutenant governor, are denying there has been any problem with the vote.

Maybe what's at stake is that last Tuesday’s election left control of the Senate hanging on two runoff elections in Georgia. Today the Republican candidates in those races tagged on to the cries of voter fraud to call for Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to resign. Raffensberger is the top elections official in the state. He is a Republican. There is no evidence of any irregularity in the 2020 Georgia election, and the two senators did not offer any. But if they can get Democratic votes thrown out, Senator David Purdue and Kelly Loeffler might avoid the runoffs that look like they might well result in Democratic victories.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is determined to keep control of the Senate, and ginning up a conviction that the election was rigged could do that. McConnell defended Trump’s challenging of the election today, although he did not explicitly say he believed the election had been fraudulent. Trump’s attacks are working: new polling shows that 7 out of 10 Republican voters now think that the 2020 election was illegitimate. Barr met with McConnell before he signed onto the idea of voter fraud by announcing that federal prosecutors could go after it.
 
Still, while control of the Senate is likely driving McConnell, it seems highly unlikely that Trump cares about it. Perhaps the president is simply deep in a narcissistic rage, unable to face the idea of losing.

But there is something else niggling at me.

Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Biden’s win means that the current administration is denying him the right to see the President’s Daily Briefing (the PDB) which explains the biggest security threats facing the country and the latest intelligence information. Trump can keep Biden from seeing other classified information, too.  

Today, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper (by announcing the firing on Twitter), and replaced him with a loyalist, Christopher C. Miller, who will be “acting” only. Trump also selected a loyalist and Republican political operative to become the general counsel at the National Security Agency, our top spy agency, over the wishes of intelligence officials. Michael Ellis was the chief counsel to Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), a staunch Trump loyalist. Trump is also reportedly considering firing FBI director Christopher Wray and CIA director Gina Haspel. Last week, he quietly fired the leaders of the agencies who oversee or nuclear weapons, international aid, and electricity and natural gas regulation, although that last official was moved to a different spot in the administration.

In other words, Trump is cleaning out the few national security leaders who were not complete lackeys and replacing them with people who are. It's funny timing for such a shake-up, especially one that will destabilize the country, making us more vulnerable.

Today Washington Post diplomacy and national security reporter John Hudson noted that a source told him that the “Trump administration just gave Congress formal notification for a massive arms transfer to the United Arab Emirates: 50 F-35s, 18 MQ-9 Reapers with munitions; a $10 billion munitions package including thousands of Mk 82 dumb bombs, guided bombs, missiles & more….” This deal comes two months after the administration’s Abraham Accord normalizing relations between Israel and the UAE opened the way for arms sales.

The UAE has wanted the F-35 for years; it is the world’s most advanced fighter jet. They cost about $100 million apiece. The president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has secretly been pushing for the sale of the arms to the UAE in the face of fierce opposition by government agencies and lawmakers.

The administration had announced a much smaller version of this deal at the end of October, in a sale that would amount to about $10 billion, but Congress worried about the weaponry falling into the hands of China or Russia and seemed unlikely to let the sale happen. In 2019, it stopped such a deal. Trump declared a national emergency in order to go around Congress and sell more than $8 billion of weapons to the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. He later fired Steven Linick, the State Department’s inspector general looking into those sales, but when the IG’s report came out nonetheless it was scathing, suggesting that they put the U.S. at risk of being prosecuted for war crimes.

When you remember that Trump’s strong suit has always been distraction, and that he has always used the presidency as a money-making venture, I wonder if we need to factor those characteristics in when we think about his unprecedented and dangerous refusal to admit he has lost this election.

mickeyrat

November 10, 2020 (Tuesday)

A week after the election, it-- along with its insane aftermath-- has caught up with me. I've been asleep for hours, and am going to write this and go back to sleep for many, many more hours.

There is crazy news out there, which I'll cover in the future, but it feels like it can wait. The gig is up. Trump is going to smash and grab all he can on the way out... but he IS on the way out.

See you all tomorrow, rested and ready for the future.

[Photo by Peter Ralston]

mickeyrat

November 11, 2020 (Wednesday)

Today President-Elect Joe Biden named his chief of staff. He has picked Ronald A. Klain, 59, a veteran Democratic operative with degrees from Georgetown and Harvard Law School, who has worked in and around Washington, D.C., since 1987, when he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White. Klain was Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president.

Like Biden, Klain is well-known and well-liked in both parties, and is seen as competent and politically astute. He is an expert institutionalist who worked with Biden during the recession he and President Obama inherited from the previous administration. President Obama also appointed Klain to oversee the U.S. response to Ebola, giving him much-needed expertise as we face both a recession and a pandemic.  

That’s the big story of the day. The coronavirus pandemic is out of control. Today states reported 144,000 new cases and 1,562 Americans died, the highest number of deaths since May 14. Hospitalizations are rising quickly, with more than 1600 people admitted every day. Texas has had more than 1 million infections, and has set up mobile morgues.

In North Dakota, the hospitals are at full capacity. To alleviate staffing shortages, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum (R) has taken the extreme step of allowing infected health care workers to continue to work, delivering care to those who are also sick. Burgum has declined to issue a mask requirement.

Today, three more members of the White House, including the political director Brian Jack, tested positive for coronavirus. Those infected attended the White House election night watch party, suggesting that the White House has now held two superspreader events. The first was the September 26 event celebrating Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court to take the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat.

Although Biden’s margin of victory in last week's election continues to mount and Trump’s lawsuits over the results continue to fail, Trump still refuses to admit he lost the election. Such a refusal in the face of such a big loss is unprecedented, and White House sources are grousing to reporters that the administration is “a f*****g clown show.”

Veteran Republican operative Karl Rove wrote today in the Wall Street Journal that the margin of victory is too high to be overturned, and former Secretary of Defense and Republican Senator William Cohen of Maine warned that Trump’s conduct is “more akin to a dictatorship than a democracy.” Twitter and Facebook have begun to block Trump’s lies about the election, prompting angry followers to call for switching their allegiance to platforms where they can say whatever they wish, true or not.

Trump’s refusal to recognize Biden’s victory is likely about more than his wish not to be seen as a loser. First of all, it’s quite profitable. The Trump campaign is urging followers to donate to the legal challenges, but the fine print shows that donations will actually go to a new Trump Political Action Committee and to the Republican National Committee’s operating account. Donations won’t go toward the legal challenges until donations to the other two funds are at their legal maximum of several thousand dollars.

Trump has quietly floated the idea of running again in 2024, but that, too, is likely tied to money. He is the only president in history to file for reelection on the day of his inauguration, and we now know that much of his campaign money went to legal bills and lavish lifestyles.

Republican leaders are humoring Trump because they need his voters in Georgia to eke out control of the Senate. Both of Georgia’s Senate seats are headed to a runoff in early January, and Republicans need Trump supporters to turn up. “We need his voters,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota, told reporters today. “[W]e want him helping in Georgia.”
 
Trump’s refusal to recognize the outcome of the election also gives him room to deny Biden the access to resources and information usually shared with the president-elect. He has refused to permit Biden access to the State Department, so the world leaders calling to wish him well have to reach out to the president-elect directly. Virtually all major foreign leaders have now called, except two of Trump’s autocratic allies: President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. For all the calls, both sides are providing readouts, as was the norm before Trump became president.

Trump has also refused to let Biden see the Presidential Daily Briefing, a daily document outlining the most recent intelligence about threats to the nation, and he has refused to let his people cooperate with Biden’s in a transition, a highly unusual move. Biden says he can work around these issues. “We don’t see anything that’s slowing us down, quite frankly,” Biden said yesterday. “We’re going to do exactly what we’d be doing if he had conceded and said we’ve won, which we have. So there’s nothing really changing.” Nonetheless, the refusal to cooperate weakens the country.

Although refusing to admit defeat, Trump is showing little sign of actually wanting to govern. He is tweeting statements that Twitter is flagging as disinformation and he is golfing. Otherwise, his public schedule is largely empty, while Biden is keeping a normal presidential schedule. Reporters are expressing relief at the calm confidence Biden is returning to Washington, D.C.

The president has, though, begun a major purge at the Pentagon, another unusual move in the last two months of his presidency. He has replaced top civilians, including Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Esper’s chief of staff Jen Stewart, acting Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James Anderson, and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Joseph Kernan, with his own loyalists.

No one is quite sure what this purge means, but people are worried. General Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star general, told MSNBC he was “alarmed” at the shake-up.

There are, though, some obvious reasons for the change in personnel. It might simply be a flexing of his muscles. It might be a way for him to permit loyalists to pad their resumes before they have to leave. It might be a way to try to release selective bits of intelligence about the Russia investigation to bolster his story about the contacts between his 2016 campaign and Russia—both Michael Ellis, who became general counsel of the National Security Agency, and Kashyap Patel, who replaced Stewart, are close associates of Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA) who has worked hard to discredit the Russia investigation.

Or it could be that Trump wants to draw U.S. troops out of Afghanistan before the Pentagon says it’s safe. Military experts think that a U.S. presence is important for keeping the Taliban from regaining power there, where it could quietly back international terrorists, leaving us vulnerable to a terrorist attack during Biden’s administration. A former Trump official told Politico reporters Lara Seligman and Natasha Bertrand, “There is a lot of concern among military and former civilian Pentagon people that this shift was because [Trump] intends to take some kind of controversial military action and wanted junior political people that would greenlight it.”

In October, Trump shocked leaders by tweeting that he would bring home the 5,000 U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan, where we have been for 19 years, by the end of 2020. Military officials told reporters that there were no plans to quit the country immediately as we waited for guarantees that the Taliban was following the agreement hammered out in February. A senior administration official disagreed, telling reporters that, as commander in chief, Trump would determine the best approach to Afghanistan. Throughout Trump’s term, military contractor Erik Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, has tried to convince Trump to privatize our operations there, for a cost of about $5 billion a year, a fact that may or may not be relevant.

One thing, though, is clear. Trump thrives in chaos and the centrality it brings him. He is upping the ante post-election, as he fears the nation is moving on without him.

mickeyrat

November 12, 2020 (Thursday)

Tonight, the major networks called Arizona for Joe Biden. This means Arizona has voted for a Democrat for president for the first time since 1996, when Ross Perot’s bid for the presidency siphoned off votes from Republican candidate Bob Dole and let Democratic candidate Bill Clinton clinch the state. Before that, the last time Arizona backed a Democrat was in 1948, when it went for Harry Truman.

Since the numbers in Biden’s column now make up an insurmountable margin for Trump to overcome, the Trump campaign is now saying that the computers in certain states switched votes from him to Biden. This has been thoroughly debunked. This afternoon, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security circulated a statement by the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, a group of federal, state, and local officials, declaring that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence” of tampering with any voting systems.

Perhaps more to the point, Trump has been telling people that he will announce a run for the 2024 presidency as soon as the vote is certified for Biden. This would keep money flowing into his pockets, as well as keeping him in the news. Sources have told Maggie Haberman at the New York Times that the president has no grand strategy other than to keep his supporters energized to follow him into whatever he does next, including, perhaps, launching a competitor to the Fox News Channel.  

Meanwhile, the president is holed up in the White House, his public schedule empty, tweeting about how he has won an election that everyone knows he lost.

One of the things he is ignoring is the devastating spread of coronavirus through this country. Today more than 153,000 new cases were reported, with 66,000 people hospitalized. More than 10.4 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, and more than 242,000 have died.

While the White House election night watch party has turned into a superspreader event, today ensnaring former 2016 Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, most infections are now caused not by large public events but by small gatherings at home: dinner parties, carpools, playdates. These indoor events create “perfect conditions for a virus that can spread among people who are crowded into a poorly ventilated space,” write the doctors and public health officials at the PolicyLab of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Cases are not only on the rise, but also more severe. Experts remind us that we should avoid spending more than 15 minutes within six feet of anyone outside our own household in any 24-hour period, and they beg people to stay home for the holidays this year.

President-Elect Joe Biden has been out of the news, working. His new chief of staff, Ronald Klain, told reporters that he has been speaking privately to Republicans, although he has not talked to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. While Republicans appear to want to keep up the public narrative that the results of the election are unclear, they are beginning to demand that Biden get access to the intelligence reports Trump is keeping from him. Shutting the president-elect out of intelligence reports hampers our national security not only with regard to foreign affairs, but also with regard to the coronavirus, leaving Biden out of the planning to roll out a vaccine, for example.

Among the phone calls Biden has had with world leaders was one today with Pope Francis. According to the call readout, the pope offered Biden blessings and congratulations; Biden thanked the pope for promoting the common bonds of humanity and said he hoped to work together on issues that touched on their shared belief “in the dignity and equality of all humankind.” He singled out “caring for the marginalized and the poor, addressing the crisis of climate change, and welcoming and integrating immigrants and refugees into our communities"—all areas in which the pope has called on global leaders to take action, and on which the Biden administration is expected to have different policies than that of its predecessor. Biden will be America’s second Catholic president. (John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, was the first.)

Biden has announced policy teams to help with the transition. They are made up largely of volunteers who will review the different government agencies and make policy recommendations. The Biden-Harris team notes that the transition will prioritize “diversity of ideology and background; talent to address society’s most complex challenges; integrity and the highest ethical standards to serve the American people and not special interests; and transparency to garner trust at every stage.” The names on the transition teams are impressive ones. Stanford Law School Professor Pamela Karlan, who testified before the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment hearings will be part of the team that reviews the Department of Justice for the transition.

Lara Seligman at Politico reported today that Biden has been reaching out to former Pentagon officials who retired or were fired in the past four years to talk about the transition and whether or not they might want to go back into the Defense Department. The Biden team is talking to former officials because the current ones are Trump loyalists, and team members don’t think they will be particularly cooperative or, for that matter, very knowledgeable. Seligman says that Biden wants to create a bipartisan leadership team at the Defense Department. In a notable change from the past four years, Biden’s agency review team for the Pentagon is led by female defense policy experts.

Biden tweeted just once today, after six American National Guardsmen, along with a Czech and a French team member, died in a helicopter crash in Egypt during a peacekeeping mission. One American was wounded. While the current president apparently ignored the loss, using his Twitter feed to spread false rumors about the election and to attack the Fox News Channel, Biden tweeted: “I extend my deep condolences to the loved ones of the peacekeepers, including 6 American service members, who died on Tiran Island, and wish a speedy recovery to the surviving American. I join all Americans in honoring their sacrifice, as I keep their loved ones in my prayers.”