Month: November 2020

If you still think that maybe Trump is not a serious danger or that he’s just doing what anyone would do in his position and anyway he’s not as bad as George W. Bush, check this out:

Perhaps as consequential as President Trump firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper via tweet on Monday, which has been widely expected for months, was the hiring of Michael Ellis to be the National Security Agency’s general counsel.

As one of the most controversial staffers in the White House over the past four years, Ellis has shown himself to be as much a staunch Trump loyalist as anyone else in the administration. But his new job means that he will no longer be a political appointee. Instead, as a civilian member of the senior executive service, he gets protections that will make it quite difficult for President-elect Joe Biden to fire him.

Burrowing down into what Trump derides as “the deep state” will give Ellis, a former Republican campaign operative, a powerful platform from which he could seek to complicate or undermine the incoming Democratic administration’s agenda. This is a preview of the sort of behavior from Trump that many on Biden’s transition team expect, and fear, during the lame-duck president’s final 71 days in power, even as he refuses to concede defeat.

Ellis worked for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) before joining the National Security Council when Trump took office. In March 2017, Ellis was reportedly one of the people involved in giving Nunes access to classified files related to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Nunes reviewed the records at the White House in the middle of the night. The notorious episode came to be known as “the midnight run.” 

In July 2019, Ellis was allegedly the first person who proposed moving the transcript of Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president to a special server where fewer people would be able to see that the president had pushed his counterpart in Kyiv to announce an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter when the topic of Javelin antitank missiles came up.

Then-Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified under oath before Congress that Ellis was behind moving the transcript. But Ellis defied a subpoena to answer questions about his role in the donnybrook and what knowledge he might have had of the freeze on vital military assistance that Congress had approved for Ukraine. Ellis is named in the second article of impeachment that passed the House as a party to Trump’s obstruction of Congress.

After the GOP-controlled Senate voted not to convict the president, Trump ordered the removal of Vindman from the White House and promoted Ellis to be senior director for intelligence on the NSC.

Being general counsel for the NSA is one of the most immensely complicated and critical legal jobs in all of government, but it is somewhat insulated from politics. Ellis will report to the deputy general counsel for intelligence at the Defense Department, a civilian job. That person reports to the DOD general counsel, who is a political appointee. Once Biden’s eventual nominee for that job is confirmed by the Senate, he or she could choose to reassign Ellis to a different civil service position inside the military’s legal architecture. 

“The appointment was made under pressure from the White House,” Ellen Nakashima reports. “NSA Director Paul Nakasone was not in favor of Ellis’s selection, according to three people familiar with the matter. However, the selection was not up to him, they said. … Ellis was selected over two other finalists: acting NSA general counsel Teisha Anthony and Bradley Brooker, acting general counsel at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Both are career civil servants.” The Pentagon and White House did not respond to a request for a comment.

Ironically, this is happening as Trump moves aggressively to roll back civil service protections for members of the bureaucracy. But it’s not surprising. Trump trying to burrow people inside the government shows just how much this president sees personnel as policy.

This is dangerous. He is putting loyalists in place everywhere.

What do you think that means?

Republicans still have a chance to keep control of the U.S. Senate into 2021. The acting president, however, has little chance of retaining his sinecure. Revenge his byword, he will try to burn the place down before he goes. His followers in the provinces will try if he doesn’t. I am not the only one warning of that.

The North won the Civil War but lost Reconstruction. That ushered in a century of Jim Crow bolstered by the myth of the Lost Cause. The losers in this presidential election are running the same play.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent writes:

With Trump unlikely to formally concede, you can see a kind of Lost Cause of Trumpism mythology taking hold, in which many supporters continue believing the election was stolen from him and that squeamish Republicans betrayed him by not fighting hard enough against it.

That could do serious civic damage: As Rick Hasen suggests, it appears designed to place a cloud of illegitimacy over Biden’s presidency. What’s more, it will require Republicans running in 2024 to do a delicate dance maintaining fealty to that mythology for years, just as they tiptoed around “birtherism.”

After Ronald Reagan left office, Grover Norquist sought to cement the Reagan myth by plastering his name on “as many buildings, highways, airports, schools, mountains and parks, libraries and museums around the country as possible.” Norquist started the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project in 1997. Apparently, he was still trying to turn the Gipper into a minor deity in in 2016. He’ll have to compete for space with Confederate names and monuments from Key West to Portland, Ore.

We know how much the proprietor of Trump Tower enjoys seeing his name plastered on things. Since his followers already consider him a minor deity, perhaps he would settle for a statue here and there as a consolation prize for getting out of town without razing it first.

Defeating Donald Trump at the ballot box has not stopped the rot in body politic. That rot proceeds apace.

Multiple attendees of the soon-to-be-former acting president’s election night watch party are infected with COVID-19. The boss’ chief of staff, Mark Meadows; four other campaign and White House aides (that we know of); and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson. And now David Bossie, the non-lawyer chosen to lead Donald Trump’s quixotic attempt to undo his reelection loss in the court of public opinion and in actual courtrooms.

For strict-father conservatives, top Republicans are insanely indulgent with the man-child still “leading” their party. Indulging his aversion to mask-wearing means the people above face weeks of isolation with coronavirus symptoms. Their indulgence means the rest of us face weeks of propaganda campaign aimed at convincing Americans that, no, Trump did not lose the election by 4.6 million votes (so far) because he is a walking disaster. Their indulgence means further decay of institutions that have upheld the republic since its inception.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will outlast Trump in Washington, D.C. He is nonetheless willing to indulge Trump’s wounded ego:

McConnell (R-Ky.) said from the floor of the Senate that the president is “100 percent within his right” to pursue recounts and litigation. McConnell did not repeat Trump’s baseless assertions that fraud had cost him the election, but he said he had met with Attorney General William P. Barr earlier in the day and supports the president’s right to investigate all claims of wrongdoing.

“We have the tools and institutions we need to address any concerns,” McConnell said. “The president has every right to look into allegations and request recounts under the law.”

Separately, Barr on Monday gave federal prosecutors a green light to pursue allegations of voting irregularities in certain cases before results are certified. The memo appeared to reverse previous Justice Department guidance that prosecutors generally should not take overt steps in cases involving alleged voter fraud until results are in and official.

John Dean once described Richard Nixon’s Watergate coverup and the payments of hush money as “a cancer on the presidency.” In Trump, that cancer has metastasized to much of the Republican Party.

Anand Giridharadas believes no amount of increased understanding, bipartisan appeals, or attempts at unity will treat this political sickness. Indulging it got us here:

Yesterday the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, refused to acknowledge the election results and actually boosted Trump’s conspiracy theorizing. These are not people you need to reach out to. These are people you need to constrain through law, as much as possible, and beat overwhelmingly.

The Union did not persuade the Confederacy to give up slavery. The Confederacy had to be defeated on the battlefield. It was not an intellectual exercise. But that’s how we treat political battles.

Giridharadas continues:

Perhaps the way to bring the country together is not to bring the country together but to fix it. Perhaps the way to heal divisions is not to heal divisions but to get the government working again. Perhaps the way to get people to believe in science isn’t to get people to believe in science but to roll out a vaccine successfully, fairly, and efficiently. Perhaps the antidote to the poison of this era isn’t the active pursuit of kumbaya but good, old-fashioned progress: steady and palpable life betterment, and the repair of institutions so they can’t be hijacked again.

Republicans indulging Donald Trump has broken government worse than his party had since the Reagan revolution. Trump indulging rather than defeating the coronavirus contributed to 240,000 Americans losing their lives. Rather than address the crisis at hand, Republicans will now indulge Trump’s obsession with settling scores over the next two months while tens of thousands more Americans die in the latest Covid surge. Hospitals again are headed toward reaching capacity in what looks now to be a death march to Jan. 20.

It is not liberal permissiveness that led us here.

I know it’s hard to believe that 70 million of out fellow Americans voted for that odious brute, but way more sane people voted for Biden and Harris. We need to get a grip. And the news media needs to stop talking about how close it was. It wasn’t as close as 2000, and that year they all shouted in our faces that we had to “get over it!”

This piece called “Don’t define Biden’s victory down” by E. J. Dionne speaks to what I see as a big developing problem. As Trump and his henchmen scream over and over again that the election was rigged, the media is giving them hope that they can overturn the election. (They cannot.)

Myths often grow out of mistaken first impressions. So it needs to be asserted unequivocally that President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is far more substantial than the conventional take would have it and more revelatory about the future than Donald Trump’s election was four years ago.

The electorate decisively rejected the extremism that Trump kept on display this weekend as he continued to issue one diabolically false claim after another to discredit an election that he lost. Biden rebuilt the Democrats’ blue wall even as he extended the party’s reach in the South and Southwest.

It was, as Biden has said more colorfully in other contexts, a big deal.

But because Democrats did not win all they hoped for in the House, Senate and state legislative races, the magnitude of what happened last Tuesday is being defined down. And so many who oppose Trump simply can’t believe that more than 70 million of their fellow citizens would vote to reelect such a profoundly flawed man.AD

This is understandable, but it also feeds a double standard that distorts our view of the decision the country made.

Consider that in 2016, Trump won only 46 percent of the popular vote, losing it to Hillary Clinton by nearly 2.9 million ballots. He carried the three key states by minuscule margins — Michigan by 10,704, Wisconsin by 22,748 and Pennsylvania by 44,292.

Yet conservative commentators used this flimsy victory to insist that the media, liberals, academics and “coastal people” bow before the altar of “the Trump voter.” (As it happens, most Democrats, and particularly Biden, needed no lessons in empathy for working-class voters — of all races.) A thuggish Republican whose share of the vote was barely larger than John McCain’s in 2008 and smaller than Mitt Romney’s in 2012 was suddenly the prophet of a new age.AD

Now, look at what Biden achieved. He won the vote with 75 million ballots — more than any presidential candidate in history — and enjoys a lead of more than 4 million that is likely to grow substantially.

Biden’s margins in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are comparable to Trump’s in 2016 while his margin in Michigan is more than 10 times larger. The former vice president could win as many as 306 electoral votes, exactly Trump’s 2016 haul.

Yet there is no clamor for Republicans to get to know “the Biden voter,” no call on conservatives to be more in touch with the country they live in.

Some of this may have to do with race and racism, given who voted for Biden, and with the well-honed skill of conservative elites in mobilizing anti-elitism against liberals. But there were also pandemic-induced differences between the two elections in how results were reported and absorbed.

In 2016, the outcome was clear before midnight on Election Day, and the race was effectively called at 1:35 a.m. on Wednesday.

This time, Republican legislatures in Pennsylvania and Michigan made it impossible for those states to process the record number of mail votes as efficiently as did Texas and Florida, which went to Trump. Democrats went to bed in the early hours of Wednesday morning in a somber mood.

It has taken days for the magnitude of Biden’s victory to sink in — the exceptional mobilization of Black voters and the young, a continuation of the Democrats’ advance in the suburbs, plus Biden’s success in winning back a sufficient share of White blue-collar voters.

Yes, Democrats fell short of their hopes for the Senate, although they have one more shot at the majority in Georgia’s two January runoffs. Their problem: Senate results matched the outcome of the presidential election in every state except Maine, where Republican Sen. Susan Collins rekindled local affection and distanced herself from Trump.ADhttps://cf7d88f968fe06fc08d657dd4f342a48.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

There can be no denying that Trump’s ability to energize his supporters hurt Democratic House candidates who made inroads into hostile territory in 2018, as well as the party’s state legislative candidates. It turned out that it was too much to expect a miraculous resolution of the deep divisions in our politics. They go back to the 1990s, have hardened since 2000 — and Trump exploited them relentlessly.

So there’s still a lot of work to do, and Biden started doing it in an evocative and moving victory speech Saturday night that stressed healing and asked of Trump’s supporters: “Let’s give each other a chance.” Graciousness is good politics and good for the country, but so is understanding the brute facts of our political life: Democrats have won a popular vote majority in three of the last four presidential elections; Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the last 28 years. The country is changing in ways profoundly challenging to the GOP and the right. They’re the ones who should start worrying about being out of touch.

Just saying:

I just met with @VP-elect Pence at the @WhiteHouse to offer our support for a smooth, seamless transition of power: https://t.co/yKj1JyiOD3 pic.twitter.com/3bFdQjuQ6K

— VP Biden (Archived) (@VP44) November 10, 2016

Biden has almost 50,000 more votes in Pennsylvania and they aren’t done counting yet. But Republicans are going ahead with this nonsense anyway.

Pa House GOP members tomorrow will "call for a legislative-led audit of the 2020 election and demand election results not be certified, nor electors be seated, until the audit is complete," per news release.

— Andrew Seidman (@AndrewSeidman) November 9, 2020

Cavuto ends segment:

"We are just asking for proof. If you had something to prove an outlandish charge, or something on the surface that seems outlandish, by all means share it with us and we'll share it with the world. We're waiting."

Showing he knows they've got nothing. https://t.co/eOJPjBrFml

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) November 9, 2020

This is all garbage. They know it. The Republican Party has simply devolved into a power-mad authoritarian faction that believes it must win by any means necessary. The only question at this point is whether they are right.

60 Minutes did a segment last night on the vote count in Pennsylvania:

It is patently obvious that there was no systematic cheating in the vote count. It’s insulting that these people are saying so without proof, sullying the reputations of the people who work so hard to get that job done and insulting the voters of Pennsylvania. And it’s all being done to soothe the raw feelings of the man-baby in the White House, delegitimize a perfectly valid election and keep the right wing loons excited so they’ll vote in Georgia and keep the Grim Reaper in control.

This Republican Party is unAmerican.

When Giuliani was a prosecutor and a mayor he was thought of as a hard-charging law n’ order New York Republican asshole. Liberals like me always hated him. He wanted to ban art and bring the hammer down on Black neighborhoods and everything we hate about big city, tough guy wingnuts. But he was pro-choice and pro-gay rights and culturally identifiable as a blue state Republican, a dying species.

We all know what happened after 9/11. Despite screwing the pooch big time by placing the disaster command center in the World Trade Center, America was so shaken it looked for leaders anywhere it could find it and Giuliani became “America’s Mayor” and the front-runner for the presidency in 2008. He didn’t do particularly well, but he managed to maintain a reputation as a reasonably serious person.

Then came Trump and you know the rest.

I don’t think there’s ever been someone who fell so far so fast into clownish disrepute as Rudy Giuliani. The Borat movie and his “press conference” next door to a sex shop and crematorium last week were beyond embarrassing. But he hasn’t reached the low point yet:

The first person Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani called up as a witness to baseless allegations of vote counting shenanigans in Philadelphia during a press conference last week is a sex offender who for years has been a perennial candidate in New Jerseyhttps://t.co/w5YVaaNWzo pic.twitter.com/Pjbe9kukya

— POLITICO (@politico) November 9, 2020

Brooks was incarcerated in the 1990s on charges of sexual assault, lewdness and endangering the welfare of a minor for exposing himself to two girls ages 7 and 11, according to news accounts.

Brooks has run for various offices, including U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.

“I started watching it and all of a sudden I was like, ‘there’s New Jersey’s perennial candidate claiming to live in Philadelphia and Giuliani claiming him to be a poll watcher and Philadelphia resident,” Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora said in a phone interview.

James Gee, chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), also said he immediately recognized Brooks.

“Yeah, I know Daryl. It’s so fitting that he would be there,” Gee said.

Sadly, I’m pretty sure that Rudy will be going lower still. It’s hard to imagine what it might be, but he has shown there is no bottom.

What an ignominious end to a big career. But he went with Trump and Trump destroys everything he touches.

So Mitch js going to enable the Trump fantasy that the election is in dispute so they can sabotage the transition, cripple the Biden administration and keep the crazies all riled up for Georgia. This undemocratic, unAmerican power politics is a Republican problem not a Donald Trump problem. The sickness runs through almost half of this country.

I just have to take this moment to point out that I called this scenario last August in this Salon column:

With all his braying about the election being “rigged,” it was pretty obvious back in 2016 that Trump believed he wasn’t going to win. There’s even some famous footage of him on election night giving a very tepid thumbs-up, looking stunned and even despondent.

The following was tweeted just as Trump took the lead in Electoral College votes:

Trump had said, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” and that didn’t really work out for him. So I’m quite sure he was looking forward to making up for it once he lost. He was no doubt planning to parlay all that attention into a rumored media empire and completing those big deals like the Trump Tower Moscow plan he’d had to drop. He’d had fun on the campaign trail but actually being president clearly wasn’t something he’d thought too much about.

This time I think Trump really does want to win, if only to prove that he has a legitimate claim to the White House. (Protecting himself from legal trouble for another four years would be nice too.) But even someone as thick as he is can read the polls, and I would guess that he’s plotting to turn defeat to his advantage if the worst happens.

It would seem that his plan is to sow chaos if possible, challenge the result where he can, and claim that Joe Biden’s victory is illegitimate, regardless of the margin of victory. He can then set himself up as the president in exile, free to make money from speaking fees and books while trying to rehabilitate his tattered “brand.” Perhaps that rumored media empire will finally come to fruition. Most importantly, he’d be able to keep his cult alive with the tantalizing promise of a rematch in 2024.

I have no idea if Trump would actually want to do that — he might want to pass the torch to Don Jr. or Ivanka, and there’s no guarantee Republican voters would play along all over again. But in many ways, losing will offer him the opportunity to do what he loves to do most, and make money while doing it: tweet, shoot the breeze with media sycophants, play golf and bask in the adulation of his adoring fans. Who knows, he might even hold rallies. He could have all that without all the unpleasantness of trying to do a job he has never been able to figure out how to do.

It’s depressing to think that Donald Trump won’t simply fade into obscurity if he’s defeated this fall, I know. But I think he’s going to be like that obnoxious party guest who’s always the last to leave, whether we like it or not. The silver lining is that if he does decide to stay in the game, he’ll be like a lead weight dragging down the Republican Party for another four years. You know he’s going to make their lives even more hellish than the Democrats — and after their cowardly enabling of his monumental failures and criminal misdeeds, it’s exactly what they deserve. 

He’s not that hard to predict so it’s not as if I’m some kind of oracle. But so far it’s happening. And now this:

President Trump has already told advisers he’s thinking about running for president again in 2024, two sources familiar with the conversations tell Axios.

This is the clearest indication yet that Trump understands he has lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden — even as the president continues to falsely insist that he is the true winner, that there has been election fraud and that his team will fight to the end in the courts..

 Aides advising Republicans who are likely to run in 2024 are dreading the prospect of a Trump run given the extraordinary sway he holds over millions of GOP voters.

Even four years after leaving office, he could remain formidable in a Republican primary.

That fact alone could freeze the ambitions, fundraising and staffing of individual candidates — and of the Republican National Committee as it seeks to regroup and move beyond Trump.

On the day he was inaugurated, in 2017, Trump filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to qualify as a 2020 candidate.

I think you know the answer to that, right? And why that tweet speaks to the current moment:

Biden: "The single most effective thing we can do to stop the spread of Covid is wear a mask. The head of the CDC warned this fall & for the foreseeable future, a mask remains the most potent weapon against the virus…do it for your neighbor. A mask is not a political statement" pic.twitter.com/X1P2NLvJdX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 9, 2020

There is potential very good news on the prospect of a vaccine. If it pans out we may be on the way back. But we are surging massively right now and it’s likely to get worse. If masks and social distancing are all we have, people really have to start doing that seriously. The bodies are piling up.

The electoral math is inexorable now and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have won the election. They won a large popular vote victory, with substantially more total votes in the swing states Trump won in 2016. As election expert Larry Sabato put it on Twitter, “this was NOT an especially close election … You want close? Look at 1960, 1968, 1976, 2000 among others.”

Naturally, Trump is still refusing to concede. After all, he told his followers that the only way he could lose was if the result was rigged, so he has left himself no room to concede gracefully even if he wanted to. He does not want to.

So we see Trump and his team flailing about ineffectually with thin legal threats that would require corrupt, partisan judges to overturn thousands of votes in multiple states to award him a victory. Anything’s possible, but as much as they might like to do that, even Trump’s handpicked judges will have a hard time coming up with a rationale that would bring that result.

Former President George W. Bush, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah and a few other establishment Republicans have acknowledged the election results, but there’s radio silence from most GOP officials. It appears they are still in collaborationist mode, hoping that Trump still has some magic dust up his sleeve and remaining fearful of their constituents, who are deep in denial. And then there are those who are out there openly supporting Trump’s tantrum:

“This is a contested election,” Lindsey Graham says on Fox. “President Trump should not concede.”

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) November 8, 2020

This is really about trying to find a way for Trump to “win,” even as he’s clearly lost. I believe he will find his way out of this by calling the election stolen, pretending to leave under duress and afterward fashioning himself as the “president in exile” who was deposed in a “coup.” He might even boycott the inauguration. I think he’ll do this with an explicit or implicit promise that he’s running again in 2024, even if he doesn’t end up doing it.

This has the positive effect for Democrats of keeping the Republican Party in turmoil for some time to come as Trump works feverishly to organize his following into a profit center and wreak revenge on his enemies one way or the other. (Remember, his credo is “always get even.”) For Republicans, there is a different calculation. Trump confidant Roger Stone, who gets the dark side of conservatism better than anyone, spoke the truth when he said the lack of a clear concession means that Biden will have “a cloud over his presidency with half the people in the country believing that he was illegitimately elected.”

That would be Trump’s idea of sweet revenge, for sure. After all, at least one of his reasons for fighting the Russia investigation was because it cast doubt on the legitimacy of his own election. You can bet that Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, who are among the GOP jackals urging Trump not to concede, will be happy to take full advantage of that “cloud” as well.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, the election has been decided and all eyes are turning to Georgia, where two runoff elections will determine control of the U.S. Senate. Mitch McConnell’s willingness to obstruct anything that might actually help the people in this moment of crisis has already been well demonstrated, even under Donald Trump. It will be much, much worse with a Democratic administration.

I’m sure the Biden staff is already looking at ways to reverse the Trump administration’s destruction of the administrative state, and with a new attorney general we may see some positive action at the Department of Justice as well. But let’s not kid ourselves: Much of the Democratic domestic agenda depends on Georgia. If McConnell is in charge of the Senate and guys like Graham and Cruz are running major committees, it’s going to be a legislative standoff. And America really doesn’t need that right now.

Having said that, there is one big plus already, regardless of what Trump, McConnell or Graham have up their sleeves: The U.S. foreign policy agenda will soon be in the hands of the Biden administration. Their team has already released a statement of Biden’s intention to immediately reverse Trump’s worst executive orders, most notably the withdrawals from both the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization.

The reaction from around the world to news of Trump’s defeat was pretty clearly one of immense relief. The rogue superpower has pulled back from the brink.

Fireworks for #bidenharis2020 here in SW London. We’re celebrating with you, America. It’s a much longer for win for us, too. pic.twitter.com/2UiPW5Ftyq

— Nikki Baughan (@NikkiBaughan) November 7, 2020

celebratory fireworks going off over here in Berlin! 🎇

— Andy Lutz (@ALutz7) November 7, 2020

Trump may have refused to concede, but from across the globe leaders have issued congratulations to President-elect Biden, which says something. The New York Times reported on Saturday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson immediately issued hearty congratulations as soon as the race was called. Former French ambassador Gérard Araud probably spoke for all of them when he told the Times, “You will be able to have a coherent conversation with a normal guy.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waited a bit longer, but he finally realized that Trump wasn’t going to pull off a miracle and issued a polite statement. The Trump-loving strongmen have not been as pragmatic. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán are reportedly not pleased. No word has come in from Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, China’s Xi Jinping or Trump’s most treasured BFF, Kim Jong-un of North Korea. And let’s not forget Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, who has maintained radio silence. It’s a sad day for authoritarians everywhere. Trump was so very easy to manipulate.

The U.S. managed to avoid a national security disaster during Trump’s tenure (so far), but that has been sheer luck. Giving him any credit for not getting us into a war means you haven’t been paying attention to how close we came and how much forbearance it took from the rest of the world to avoid it. One very scary example was when Trump made the impulsive and dangerous decision to kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, just so he could bag one more “bad guy” than Obama. Iranian leaders showed surprising restraint and we got lucky. Who knows what four more years would have brought?

Trump’s main foreign policy was to undo anything Obama did, as he even admitted just the other day. Everything else was either something he picked up from watching CNN back in 1985 or a desire to impress an authoritarian strongman.

I’m sure many of us will find ourselves opposed to some of Biden’s policies, in some cases fairly soon. But they will not be totally incoherent, and world peace won’t be contingent on whether the president woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. As Joe Biden would say, that alone is “a big f**king deal.” 

My Salon column

Oh look, the Sore Loser Team finally got their plan together. I think when it was reported that they went on a search for their James Baker elder statesman to run the team and came up with ratfucking operative David Bossie we knew that something had gone wrong. This is even worse than I thought it was going to be:

President Trump plans to brandish obituaries of people who supposedly voted but are dead — plus hold campaign-style rallies — in an effort to prolong his fight against apparent insurmountable election results, four Trump advisers told me during a conference call this afternoon.

Obits for those who cast ballots are part of the “specific pieces of evidence” aimed at bolstering the Trump team’s so-far unsupported claims of widespread voter fraud and corruption that they say led to Joe Biden’s victory.

Fueling the effort is the expected completion of vote counting this week, allowing Republicans to file for more recounts.

Team Trump is ready to announce specific recount teams in key states, and it plans to hold a series of Trump rallies focused on the litigation.

Let’s unpack that. Trump is going to hold a bunch more superspreader rallies and brandish obituaries? In the middle of the pandemic? Is this some kind of joke?

I would ask what they think this will accomplish but the answer is obviously nothing. It’s to placate the man-baby who is having hismelf a good old-fashioned pout and needs to be bucked up because he didn’t get what he wanted.

Meanwhile, here’s the rest of the ridiculous plan. Do they really believe they can overturn the results in all these states? Because that’s what they have to do to win.

In Georgia: Doug Collins, the outgoing congressman who lost to Sen. Kelly Loeffler in a special election to fill former Sen. Johnny Isakson’s seat, will be leading the campaign’s recount efforts. The team has also redeployed 92 staffers from Florida to Georgia, doubling its group on the ground.

In Arizona: Kory Langhofer, former counsel for Trump’s 2016 transition, will serve as lead attorney.

In Pennsylvania: Porter Wright’s Ron Hicks is heading up the legal effort.

Nationwide: They’re assembling additional surrogates and lawyers.

“We want to make sure we have an adequate supply of manpower on the ground for man-to-man combat,” one adviser said.

The group is also staffing a campaign-style media operation.The team led by Trump communications director Tim Murtaugh is now a surrogate messaging center. It will pump out “regular press briefings, releases on legal action and obviously things like talking points and booking people strategically on television,” one adviser said.

They’ll also make a big play to raise money for their legal defense fund.

Trump’s formal legal team includes 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien, lawyer Justin Clark, and senior advisers Jason Miller and David Bossie.

Reps. Jim Jordan and Scott Perry, as well as former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, are also advising.

Trump’s team claims there is “no daylight” between them and the White House — chiefly senior adviser Jared Kushner and current Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

“We all have the same goal in mind, which is using the legal process over the next many days and weeks ahead to make sure that the president is re-elected,” one adviser said.

It’s hard to believe they’re going to actually attempt this but I guess they are. It’s just pathetic. Donald Trump can’t accept that he lost so they’re going to put the country through a bunch of bullshit, spend a ton of money that doesn’t have to be spent all because he’s such a narcissistic imbecile that he can’t accept that he lost.

It’s a miracle we survived the last four years.