Month: November 2020

Dave Neiwert (“Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump“) of Daily Kos knows his right-wing reactionaries, and there were there plenty of them in Washington, D.C. over the weekend:

The anti-democratic strategy concocted and nurtured by the radical right over the past four years—organize busfuls of out-of-town far-right thugs to invade liberal urban centers in order to engage in faux “protests” primarily designed to spark violence—came to the nation’s capital this weekend. The results were as ugly as they were predictable.

Following Saturday’s “Million MAGA March” featuring thousands of far-right extremists commingling with ordinary Donald Trump supporters as they marched to proclaim (with only conspiracy theories for evidence) that Trump and not Joe Biden had won the presidential election, the large contingent of hate-group street-brawlers—Proud Boys, American Guard, Oath Keepers, and Groypers—took to the streets of Washington, D.C., provoking fights and aggressively assaulting counter-protesters.

This is a well-established pattern, one we have seen evolving and being perfected by the radical right since early 2017—primarily in liberal urban centers such as Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and the Bay Area. The politics of violent confrontation this strategy manifests may have reached a kind of dark fruition on Saturday, with a large helping hand from Trump himself, who tweeted out encouragement to the same thugs he had told on national television to “stand down and stand by.”

Most of the violence came after dark. Multiple accounts suggest the D.C. Metro Police did their own version of “stand down and stand by” as the new brown shirts destroyed property and assaulted counter-protesters. They stepped in mainly to control anti-Trump protesters.

Neiwert writes that Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio posted an overt threat on Parler: “DC antifa ends tonight.” And on a Proud Boys Twitter account:

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Neiwert explains:

The “day of the rope” is a reference to white supremacists’ long-hoped-for racial war, the blueprint for which remains The Turner Diaries, a neo-Nazi “novel” that depicts, among other things, a day in which an angry society rises up and lynches all American “race traitors” from lampposts in a single day. Similar sentiments could be heard from the mouths of MAGA fans throughout the day Saturday.

Trump brown-nosers fresh off the campaign trail came out to speak to the crowd. Republican congresswoman-elect Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Republican congresswoman-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and QAnon both spoke to the crowd.

“It was not a Million MAGA on the streets of DC today, but it would be catastrophic to not take what happened today seriously,” commented researcher Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, who was present for the events. “This is a beginning, not the end. We’re witnessing the initial coalescing of a wide range of far-right forces into mass opposition.”

Neiwert summarized what this even portends in a Sunday tweet:

I know that a lot of folks are emotionally invested in believing we are just having a little bump and that everything will get back to normal soon.

I hate being the bearer of bad tidings, but the old normal is gone, stomped to the curb by the American right. We are in a fight.

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) November 15, 2020

The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt summarizes the various theories about what Trump is actually doing with his inane refusal to concede the election despite the fact that he clearly lost. In anyone else you would be talking about doing some kind of intervention and getting him some professional help, but this is Trump and he acts irrationally every day and his supporters love it so he remains in power, doing what he does:

Scenario 1: Start with the Big Lie: that President-elect Joe Biden stole the election. Proclaim it from the moment polls close, repeat it often and loudly.

Pressure right-wing media to amplify the lie, and crack the whip so your party echoes it.

Send out the lawyers to collect tales of fraud. There is none, but no matter; generate nonsense, and then pressure county and state Republicans to overturn honest counts and replace duly chosen electors.

Make sure that when the impostor slates reach Congress, your party will endorse the charade. On that front, he can still hope: after all, Republicans such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) so far are cheering or acquiescing in his fiction.

Make sure, too, as Robert Kagan outlined in this section before the election, that the “power ministries” are with you. A pliant Attorney General William P. Barr instructed prosecutors to be on the lookout for fraud; the Defense Department seemed less reliable, so Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper.

Other firings will follow as needed, and then every base will be covered: State officials buy into the Big Lie, the Senate plays along, the Supreme Court slaps down any challenge, and military, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are ready to deal with any popular objections.

I am confident that they really were prepared to go with this scenario. The had real lawyers lined up in the swing states since June, ready to contest, particularly in Pennsylvania where they had that case about the late arriving ballots tee’d up. He expresses every thought that passes through his head so he told us this during the last weeks of the campaign. But it depended on the election being close and coming down to one state. It did not — and the win in Pennsylvania was too big for them to disenfranchise all those voters who followed the rules in place at the time to overturn the election.

Sooo:

Scenario 2: Trump knows he has lost and must leave office Jan. 20, but he is salting the soil to make governing impossible for Biden while preparing his own political and financial comeback.

In this scenario, the Big Lie is not a means to overturn the election but a stratagem to persuade as many of Trump’s nearly 73 million voters as possible that Biden is not a legitimately elected president. They, in turn, will press Republicans in Congress to obstruct Biden’s efforts to heal division and get things done.

After he leaves office, Trump will stoke the resentments to raise funds to support new businesses and pay old debts. The stolen election will be the lost cause that he redeems by running for president again in 2024.

This is what I think he is doing. Of course he’s humiliated that he decisively lost but he’s often had failures in his life that he was able to spin his way out of and get others to bail him out, sometimes more than once. I think he’s working that out right now. His verbal slip on Friday about “the next administration…” and his concede/not-concede tweets indicates that he knows the jig is up he’s just using this destruction of faith in democracy as a weapon for his own personal purposes (and the GOP is going along with it because they have been chipping away at our democracy for 20 years or more themselves.)

Then there is this:

Scenario 3: Trump has no plan but is lashing out in anger and disbelief that he could have lost an election.

In this scenario, the Pentagon purge is a settling of scores against people he resents and a frantic effort to declassify intelligence he thinks will burnish his image. McConnell and others are just playing along until his rage burns out. Barr’s memo is intended to appease the president, worded carefully to preclude any action. The court filings in battleground states are pathetic efforts to assuage a wounded ego, pursued by second-rate lawyers, with no hope of success.

Yes, that’s almost certainly part of it. And as Hiatt says, elements of all three are probably involved in this ridiculous spectacle. He doesn’t care about abstract concepts like dignity or legacy — he only cares about today’s news cycle and his own personal well-being — so he could have hoped for a closer election and had his future out-of-power in the back of his mind the whole time. And he is an infantile fool who is having a temper tantrum. That goes without saying.

Hiatt concludes:

One thing is sure: Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat is harming American democracy… We assumed that, unlike in so many countries in the world, losing incumbents would gracefully give way, knowing that they — or their party — would have a chance another day.

Trump has changed that. In the world he is shaping, election results are something you press partisan officials to overturn. Reality is what you say it is. Peaceful transfers of power are for chumps.

McConnell and McCarthy and the rest of their craven bunch are enabling this degradation. The lessons won’t disappear when Trump does.

Nope. From the moment Mitch McConnell stole the Supreme Court seat from Barack Obama in 2016, it was clear that the Republicans had finally completely gone rogue. They made it clear before Trump was even nominated that they no longer cared about hypocrisy and were going to retain power by any means necessary. Trump made that easier by taking all the slings and arrows from the rest of the country and allowing them to pretend that they were secretly embarrassed by him but couldn’t really do anything because their voters are a bunch of rubes and you can’t tell them anything.

They know now that they can get away with anything if they find the right points of leverage. It’s wide open now. The beltway establishment embodied by Hiatt is finally starting to come to grips with that. Let’s see if it sticks.

It figures that Trump’s political appointees would ignore any norms about involving themselves in rank partisan skulduggery while they collect taxpayers money. Of course it does:

The federal government’s chief information security officer is participating in an effort backed by supporters of President Trump to hunt for evidence of voter fraud in the battleground states where President-elect Joe Biden secured his election victory.

Camilo Sandoval said in an interview that he has taken a break from his government duties to work for the Voter Integrity Fund, a newly formed Virginia-based group that is analyzing ballot data and cold-calling voters in an attempt to substantiate the president’s outlandish claims about illicit voting.

Sandoval is one of several Trump appointees in the federal government — some in senior roles — who are harnessing their expertise for the project, according to the group’s leader.

The participation of administration officials in the project shows the extent of the efforts by the president’s allies to justify his unfounded allegations of widespread ballot fraud.

They claim this is done all the time and maybe it is. But look at what they’re doing:

Sandoval is part of a hastily convened team led by Matthew Braynard, a data specialist who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign. Another participant is Thomas Baptiste, an adviser to the deputy secretary of the Interior Department, who also took a leave to work on the project.AD

Braynard said in an interview that several other government officials on leave are also assisting the effort, but he declined to identify them.

The group is analyzing voter rolls and other databases in search of signs that ballots may have been cast illegally, information that Braynard said is being shared with Trump’s campaign. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The group appears to be attempting a makeshift version of an effort already conducted by a nonprofit consortium of states, which uses sophisticated data analysis to root out duplicate voter registrations and registrations of people who have moved or died. A Washington Post analysis of vote-by-mail data from three of the states in the 2016 and 2018 elections found that officials identified 372 possible fraud cases among 14.6 million votes — 0.0025 percent of ballots.

Braynard maintained that his project was pathbreaking, saying they had found that many states do not update their voter rolls “very aggressively or frequently.”

“Nobody’s ever done this before,” he said. “These things have to be done to find potential problems.”

David Becker, who led the creation of the interstate consortium, said it had taken more than three years to develop and relied on sophisticated software and proprietary state data that is unavailable to analysts like Braynard and Sandoval.

Becker said the Voter Integrity Fund appeared to be the latest in a series of “shoddy, fly-by-night” efforts to replicate the project and would inevitably flag numerous false positives based on inadequate data.

“I would put absolutely no stock in their analysis,” said Becker, who is now the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

They do not care if their analysis is flawed. The point is to make half the country believe the election was stolen so Trump can call himself the “rightful president” once he does whatever he’s going to do after January, most likely declare his intention to stage a presidential rematch.

The incredible richness of these people insisting for four years that the intelligence community, dozens of other countries and the Democrats were all wet in saying that there was Russian interference in the 2016 election, even though they never suggested that it changed the vote count. And here they are scouring the voting rolls in Republicans states frantically looking for non-existent evidence of systematic voter fraud and persuading their voters that they were robbed despite no evidence of it.

And, by the way, they are obviously total morons who just discovered that the voter rolls in most states are inaccurate — and are checked when people actually vote. This stuff is always the case in a country in which the elections are all local and where people move around and, you know, die. It’s been investigated and investigated and there is no evidence of any widespread, coordinated fraud that could have affected the result of an election.

There are ways someone could rig an election. This isn’t one of them and there is no evidence that anything else did either. It’s pathetic whining from a group of sycophants for the worst sore loser in history.

This is just unbearable. They die in disbelief:

I have a night off from the hospital. As I’m on my couch with my dog I can’t help but think of the Covid patients the last few days. The ones that stick out are those who still don’t believe the virus is real. The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is going to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that “stuff” because they don’t have COViD because it’s not real.

Yes. This really happens. And I can’t stop thinking about it. These people really think this isn’t going to happen to them. And then they stop yelling at you when they get intubated. It’s like a fucking horror movie that never ends. There’s no credits that roll. You just go back and do it all over again.

Which is what I will do for the next three nights. But tonight. It’s me and Cliff and Oreo ice cream. And how ironic I have on my “home” Hoodie. The South Dakota I love seems far away right now.

Originally tweeted by Jodi Doering (@JodiDoering) on November 15, 2020.

Donald Trump and the Republican party are responsible for this. Their “political party” has brainwashed their people into believing the virus is a hoax and they cannot die from it. They believe that the PPE is unnecessary and masking and social distancing is an act of government oppression.

We will hit the quarter of a million death mark soon, a vast number of which were preventable. And it’s getting worse.

From the “you can’t make this shit up” files:

Another pro-President Trump rally was held at the Michigan Capitol on Saturday as the “Million MAGA March” attracted thousands, including several far-right groups like the Proud Boys, in Washington, D.C.

It was part of a national “Stop the Steal” effort, a massive disinformation campaign about voter fraud in the 2020 election linked to longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, CNN reports. Stone, who was convicted of several felonies for trying to stop a U.S. House investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, had his sentence commuted this year by Trump.

[…]

The Lansing rally of a few hundred people Saturday came after a similar gathering last Saturday and small protests during the week.

One of the speakers is blogger and GOP activist Brandon Hall, who says he’s running for Michigan Republican Party chair. That position is currently held by former state Rep. Laura Cox (R-Livonia), who Trump announced at a pre-election rally in Grand Rapids would “be fired” if he lost the state, which he did. Cox has continued to defend the president and make unfounded claims of voter fraud after the election.

“We’re not going to give over our electoral votes to Joe Biden without a fight,” Hall said, as reported by the Lansing State Journal.

What Hall didn’t mention, and neither did the story, is that he has firsthand experience with election fraud. In 2013, Hall was charged with 10 counts of election law forgery, which is a felony. In December 2016, Hall was sentenced to 30 days in jail and 18 months probation for election fraud, the Grand Haven Tribune, FOX-17 and MLive reported.

Hall has been involved with various efforts this year blasting Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s orders to stop the spread of COVID-19. The GOP-majority Michigan Supreme Court in October overturned the 1945 law many orders were based upon.

The state’s COVID-19 cases have soared since October, topping 251,000 cases on Saturday and reaching almost 8,000 deaths.

Whitmer lives in the governor’s mansion in Lansing, which has been a frequent site of heavily armed protests, prompting her to ask for her security to be upped even before an extremist right-wing plot was uncovered last month to kidnap and kill her in a show trial over her COVID-19 orders.

Hall helped organize an April rally in front of Whitmer’s home slamming her coronavirus orders. And he’s tried to organize an impeachment effort against Whitmer that has failed to gain traction, although some Republican lawmakers have signed on.

On Saturday, Hall led the crowd in a “Lock her up” chant about Whitmer, something that broke out repeatedly at Trump rallies in Michigan after the terrorist plot was foiled.

People like to say that Trump is all projection — whatever he accuses the other side of doing is what he does himself. But it’s really a reflexive right wing tactic across the board. Since they have elevated lying, dirty tricks, propaganda and cheating into unapologetically acceptable political tactics they are forced to suggest that this is normal behavior that the other side does as well.

I don’t know if this is a psychological need that stems from their own awareness that they have become grotesquely dishonest people in pursuit of power or whether or not they are just cynically trying to tar their enemies with their own tactics to muddy the waters and possibly make their voters give up on politics altogether.

Either way, American democracy is on a perilous path.

Good Sunday morning —

President Trump is refusing to acknowledge two realities:

-The election: Trump lost to Joe Biden by more than five million votes.

-Covid-19: The pandemic is at its highest peak yet as 31 states set records for new cases. pic.twitter.com/XNa5dD2sWK

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) November 15, 2020

Meet the Press could not get even one Republican senator to come on this morning to talk about all this.

And no, they were not embarrassed. Shamelessness is their superpower. It’s just that if they had to answer questions about why they are still propping up this loser and allowing thousands of Americans to die each day as their Nero fiddles, they might say something that would endanger their hold on power in the US Senate. Georgia MAGAs might not come out to vote for those two criminals Loeffler and Perdue and nothing is more important to them than that.

Trump conceded this morning (sort of — he’s really just dumb) and then took it back. Rudy Giuliani is running his legal team now and he’s hired a bunch of wingnut hacks and weirdos, including Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova. I hope they all got their money up front.

And never forget, all of this is being enabled every step of the way by virtually every Republican elected official in the country including 14 GOP Attorneys General who are filing amicus briefs in Trump cases. They are endorsing the firings, the lawsuits, the sheer lunacy. Silence is acquiescence.

You’re witnessing history right now, an unprecedented political moment.

Look what they have waiting for them:

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump will be walking into a financial morass when he leaves office and resumes control of the Trump Organization that is deeply in debt and will likely see revenues decrease with the president no longer able to count on tax dollars flowing into his properties to pay for his entourage when he visits.

With the New York Times previously reporting that the president is facing over $400 million in debt coming due soon — some of it personally guaranteed by Trump — the Journal is reporting a cash crunch may force the family to sell off some properties to retire debt at a time when lenders will likely keep their distance with the Trump Organization facing investigations in New York.

Reporting that “Republican spending at Trump properties has topped $23 million since 2015 compared with less than $200,000 in the five years prior, ” the Journal notes the president will be losing an income stream at a time when he will also lose $37,000 a month of rent payments as the Trump campaign shuts down their office in Trump Tower in New York. 

“The office tower, where the Trump Organization is based, has suffered from falling occupancy rates since Mr. Trump took office,” the report added.

Then there are Trump’s legal problems that are expected to explode once he is no longer protected by the office of the presidency and will put a massive strain on his finances.

“Financial challenges facing the Trump Organization are compounded by long-running legal issues, with New York probes of Mr. Trump’s businesses set to continue after he leaves office. Mr. Trump has also been contending with an Internal Revenue Service audit of his finances,” the Journal reported. 

According to Jeffrey Engel, a presidential historian at Southern Methodist University, “The fact that Trump thought he could run for president and be president with potential clear irregularities in his financial background and not be discovered, that’s the most surprising part to me. It reinforces that he did not fully appreciate what it meant to be president.”

Also dogging the family are the challenges of expanding internationally with the report stating, “The Trump Organization recently lost a series of legal battles over the exclusive use of the Trump name in the European Union’s 27 countries. The continuing trademark challenges could complicate the Trump Organization’s ability to use the Trump brand across a variety of business areas, including real-estate development, gambling, golf equipment and alcohol.”

I think part of the reason Trump is resisting concession is that he believes he can say that any lawsuit or criminal prosecution is a political hit job if he is (hopefully metaphorically) dragged kicking and screaming from the White House. That probably won’t help him but I’m sure he will add it to whatever fusillade of lies and excuses he will deploy to defend himself.

ABC's This Week continues to spotlight and platform Trump voters yet again who say things like "For me to believe that Joe Biden got 78 million votes … I find that very hard to believe" and "it's never gonna be accepted." pic.twitter.com/p0yID5oLX9

— The Recount (@therecount) November 15, 2020

I’m sure they’ll be sitting down with the winners to hear what they are thinking as well. Right?

Right???

Trump supporters in Michigan (some armed) are protesting the presidential election results at the state capitol and alleging fraud with no evidence. This in spite of one of the leaders of the “Stop the Steal” effort there knowing what election fraud looks like up close.

Michigan Advance reports:

One of the speakers is blogger and GOP activist Brandon Hall, who says he’s running for Michigan Republican Party chair. That position is currently held by former state Rep. Laura Cox (R-Livonia), who Trump announced at a pre-election rally in Grand Rapids would “be fired” if he lost the state, which he did. Cox has continued to defend the president and make unfounded claims of voter fraud after the election.

“We’re not going to give over our electoral votes to Joe Biden without a fight,” Hall said, as reported by the Lansing State Journal.

What Hall didn’t mention, and neither did the story, is that he has firsthand experience with election fraud. In 2013, Hall was charged with 10 counts of election law forgery, which is a felony. In December 2016, Hall was sentenced to 30 days in jail and 18 months probation for election fraud, the Grand Haven Tribune, FOX-17 and MLive reported.

Credibility is not highly valued in this crowd. Deceit is how they build reputations.

Yesterday went by like a series of fast cuts. On Twitter. In the news. On television.

Sure, we drank champagne in the streets with neighbors on Saturday a week ago (socially distanced). But even then it felt like a stay of execution rather than a reprieve. The winter of Covid was coming.

KagroX announced it on Twitter:

About four hours for the US to go from 11.1 million reported cases of COVID-19 to 11.2 million.

— David Waldman – @KagroX.bsky.social (@KagroX) November 14, 2020

Proud Boy fascists and hooligan adversaries brawled in the streets of Washington, D.C. after dark Saturday night. The soon-to-be-former acting president urged District police to “do your job and don’t hold back!!!” on “ANTIFA SCUM.” The scenes began to resemble a disaster film.

CNN reported from a nearby hospital. But not about injuries sustained in street fighting:

Dr. James Phillips, chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University Hospital, told CNN’s Erica Hill he is “terrified” about what’s going to happen this holiday season.”

We’re going to see an unprecedented surge of cases following Thanksgiving this year, and if people don’t learn from Thanksgiving, we’re going to see it after Christmas as well,” Phillips said.

What’s that? About 28 Days Later?

The virus is overrunning hospitals across the northern tier. Minnesota chalked up a record 8,703 new cases and 35 new deaths on Saturday. The testing positivity rate there is 14.9%, reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The increases are not simply a function of more testing. “Last Saturday, the seven-day average positivity rate was 12.6%. The reading was just 6.5% three weeks ago,” the report adds.

Minnesota broke its record again today with 8700 new covid cases. This is the scene at the Governor’s mansion right now. pic.twitter.com/KlTBdqJAyz

— Evan Frost (@efrostee) November 14, 2020

In neighboring South Dakota, an emergency room nurse had Saturday night off:

https://twitter.com/JodiDoering/status/1327771330884808710?s=20

https://twitter.com/JodiDoering/status/1327771338698674176?s=20

The raging coronavirus virus attacks the body. The Trump rage virus infected minds long before. It did not arrive either from China or from Europe. It is American-made. Americans infected by the latter would not take this disaster seriously if it was flesh-eating zombies. And some infected by QAnon think Democrats are all but.

Digby mentioned yesterday how tough this winter will be on those who own restaurants, bars, theatres, etc. A friend who owns a couple of restaurants here sent a gift card in thanks for, well, this and other political work. It is still warm enough to eat outdoors, but I’d be ashamed to use it just now. They need paying customers.

Or federal help. January 20th cannot get here soon enough. Will it make a difference? We will know after the Georgia runoffs on January 5th.

Meanwhile, Germany is running a cute ad urging its people to stay at home.

This German Covid ad, now subtitled in English, is absolutely superb 👏 https://t.co/KSzSThaXTm

— Dr Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) November 15, 2020