This figures. Trump lies about everything and is a conspiracy theorist from way back. He was king of the birthers, after all. Because he always cheats, he projects his own worldview on to everything:
President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him through widespread fraud, but it’s far from the first time he’s cried foul about an election.
Timeline:
Nov. 2012 Trump, who had endorsed Republican nominee Mitt Romney, tweeted about apocryphal reports of “voting machines switching Romney votes to Obama” after previously warning supporters in October to “be careful of voter fraud!”
Feb. 2016 Trump repeatedly chalked up his narrow loss to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in the Iowa caucus to voter fraud, pushing vague, unsubstantiated claims Cruz “cheated” and “stole” the election and demanding, “either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.”
Nov. 2016 Despite defeating Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, Trump tweeted baseless allegations of “millions of FRAUD votes” and claiming, “Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.”
Dec. 2017 Trump subtly pushed doubts about the legitimacy of Alabama’s special Senate election, which Democrat Doug Jones won in an upset, conceding “a win is a win,” but adding, “The write-in votes played a very big factor.”
Nov. 2018 Trump took aim at Senate elections in Arizona and Florida and a gubernatorial race in Georgia – the latter two of which Republicans won – falsely claiming Florida counties “miraculously started finding Democrat votes” and proposing a new election in Arizona because of unexplained “electoral corruption.”
Aug. 2020 A rare example where Trump lacked a direct personal stake, he called to re-run the late-decided Democratic primary in New York’s 12th District, pointing to it as a prime example of the failings of mail-in voting – though analysts argue such examples serve better as a display of New York’s subpar election administration.
Nov. 2020 Trump has made some of his most outlandish voter fraud claims yet in an effort to hang onto power despite Democrat Joe Biden’s clear win, repeatedly pushing claims about voting machines changing votes that even his own officials rebuked.
Amid Trump’s continued refusal to concede the election – despite allowing his General Services Administration to recognize Biden as the “apparent winner” and authorize cooperation toward a transition of power – his legal team has filed lawsuits in key states won by Biden to try to overturn the results. Those efforts have largely been met with failure, as have Trump’s attempts to pressure state lawmakers to block certification of their states’ results. […]
Aaaand:
73%. That’s the share of Republicans who agree with Trump’s false claims that he won the election, according to a CNBC/Change Research poll released Monday. Just 3% of GOP voters, by contrast, acknowledge the reality of Biden’s victory.
He’s always been this way. And now they are too. Everything is always rigged against them. They just can’t get a break. Unless they win.
As the 2020 campaign wound down, President Donald Trump held rallies across the country to fire up his supporters and get them out to vote. Many saw the rallies as a sign of big enthusiasm for Trump, but the data suggest the visits did not produce the desired impact for the president.
Comparing Trump campaign stops over the last two weeks of the race to election results shows that in the overwhelming majority of cases, Trump underperformed his 2016 margins in the counties he visited, in some cases by large amounts.
There were 30 Trump campaign stops in that period, according to an NBC News tally, in states from Arizona to Nebraska to Pennsylvania. In five counties that Trump visited he saw better results than he did in 2016, but in the remaining 25 his margins of victory got smaller, his margin of defeat grew or the county flipped Democratic.
The numbers are important to note because they raise questions about how journalists and analysts perceive campaigns.
Crowd sizes are often held out as a way to gauge support for a politician, and sometimes they are. But during a pandemic, with a polarizing candidate on the stump, it’s possible the meaning of the rallies were misread. While the crowds were visible sign of enthusiasm for Trump, there were much bigger, and less visible, groups of people who were not at the rallies and who may have seen them in a negative light.
A look at some crucial states that were the sites of several rallies offers some evidence for an invisible, negative impact for the president.
In Michigan, Trump held five events in the last two weeks of the campaign and in every one of those counties, his 2020 margins were worse than they were in 2016. Some notable examples are below.
On Oct. 27, Trump held a rally in Ingham County, the home of Lansing, and in the election results he did 5.5 percentage points worse than he did in 2016 as Joe Biden beat him there by more than 32 points. On Oct. 30, Trump held an event in Oakland County north of Detroit. He lost Oakland by 14 points this year — 6 points worse than he did in 2016. And on Nov. 2, Trump held a rally in Grand Traverse County in the northern reaches of the state. Trump still won the county, but by only 3 points, which was 9 points less than his margin in 2016.
The pattern was similar in Pennsylvania. Trump held seven events in the state in the last two weeks of the campaign and in every county Trump visited he did slightly worse than he did in 2016.
Trump visited Erie, the ultimate swing county in the state, on Oct. 20 and in the end the county narrowly flipped to Joe Biden by a single point after narrowly backing Trump in 2016. The president visited Lancaster County on Oct. 26 and he still won it by about 16 points, but that was 3 points less than he won it by in 2016. And on Nov. 2, Trump visited Scranton, in Lackawanna County, but when the votes were tallied he lost the county by more than 8 points, roughly 5 points worse than his loss there in 2016.
There were a few bright spots on the Trump campaign tour, particularly in Florida, one of the battlegrounds he carried in 2020. Trump visited the state four times in the last two weeks of the campaign, and while he didn’t improve in most of the places he visited, his numbers got a lot better in Miami-Dade.
It’s possible that the reason his rallies actually lost him votes is because half the people who attended them either died or were too sick to vote.
By the way, Trump is talking about doing rallies in Georgia for Loeffler and Perdue. He may not really care if they are elected but he loves his superspreader rallies. It can only help the Democrats.
The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.
But Trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ”
However cleareyed that Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’ ”
Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin, for instance, discussed with Trump a poll he had conducted after the election that showed Trump with a positive approval rating, a plurality of the country who thought the media had been “unfair and biased against him” and a majority of voters who believed their lives were better than four years earlier, according to two people familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. As expected, Trump lapped it up.
The result was an election aftermath without precedent in U.S. history. With his denial of the outcome, despite a string of courtroom defeats, Trump endangered America’s democracy, threatened to undermine national security and public health, and duped millions of his supporters into believing, perhaps permanently, that Biden was elected illegitimately.
Trump’s allegations and the hostility of his rhetoric — and his singular power to persuade and galvanize his followers — generated extraordinary pressure on state and local election officials to embrace his fraud allegations and take steps to block certification of the results. When some of them refused, they accepted security details for protection from the threats they were receiving.
“It was like a rumor Whac-A-Mole,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Despite being a Republican who voted for Trump, Raffensperger said he refused repeated attempts by Trump allies to get him to cross ethical lines. “I don’t think I had a choice. My job is to follow the law. We’re not going to get pushed off the needle on doing that. Integrity still matters.”
All the while, Trump largely abdicated the responsibilities of the job he was fighting so hard to keep, chief among them managing the coronavirus pandemic as the numbers of infections and deaths soared across the country. In an ironic twist, the Trump adviser tapped to coordinate the post-election legal and communications campaign, David Bossie, tested positive for the virus a few days into his assignment and was sidelined.
Only on Nov. 23 did Trump reluctantly agree to initiate a peaceful transfer of power by permitting the federal government to officially begin Biden’s transition — yet still he protested that he was the true victor.
The 20 days between the election on Nov. 3 and the greenlighting of Biden’s transition exemplified some of the hallmarks of life in Trump’s White House: a government paralyzed by the president’s fragile emotional state; advisers nourishing his fables; expletive-laden feuds between factions of aides and advisers; and a pernicious blurring of truth and fantasy.
Instead, Trump empowered loyalists who were willing to tell him what he wanted to hear — that he would have won in a landslide had the election not been rigged and stolen — and then to sacrifice their reputations by waging a campaign in courtrooms and in the media to convince the public of this delusion.
Though Trump ultimately failed in his quest to steal the election, his weeks-long jeremiad succeeded in undermining faith in elections and the legitimacy of Biden’s victory.
And, not incidentally,it set the table for his triumphant comeback, something he has done over and over again in his life, having been able to snow the public and his wealthy benefactors into repeatedly bailing him out. The only thing that will stop him is when he shuffles off his mortal coil, probably quietly in bed at the age of 95. He is that lucky.
The Post’s narration of these last three weeks is actually hair- raising. What if a foreign country had decided this was a good time to poke the bear? Or terrorists pulled of a major attack. Or, I don’t know, a pandemic hit our shores and killed a quarter of a million people?
How is it possible that someone this delusional is being propped up by a whole political party and 74 million of our fellow citizens. It is literally madness.
And yet … Mad King Donald had prepared for this for months:
In the run-up to the election, Trump was aware of the fact — or likelihood, according to polls — that he could lose. He commented a number of times to aides, “Oh, wouldn’t it be embarrassing to lose to this guy?”
But in the final stretch of the campaign, nearly everyone — including the president — believed he was going to win. And early on election night, Trump and his team thought they were witnessing a repeat of 2016, when he defied polls and expectations to build an insurmountable lead in the electoral college.
Then Fox News called Arizona for Biden.
“He was yelling at everyone,” a senior administration official recalled of Trump’s reaction. “He was like, ‘What the hell? We were supposed to be winning Arizona. What’s going on?’ He told Jared to call [News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert] Murdoch.”
Efforts by Kushner and others on the Trump team to convince Fox to take back its Arizona call failed.
Trump and his advisers were furious, in part because calling Arizona for Biden undermined Trump’s scattershot plan to declare victory on election night if it looked like he had sizable leads in enough states.
With Biden now just one state away from clinching a majority 270 votes in the electoral college and the media narrative turned sharply against him, Trump decided to claim fraud. And his team set out to try to prove it.
Throughout the summer and fall, Trump had laid the groundwork for claiming a “rigged” election, as he often termed it, warning of widespread fraud. Former chief of staff John F. Kelly told others that Trump was “getting his excuse ready for when he loses the election,” according to a person who heard his comments.
In June, during an Oval Office meeting with political advisers and outside consultants, Trump raised the prospect of suing state governments for how they administer elections and said he could not believe they were allowed to change the rules. All the states, he said, should follow the same rules. Advisers told him that he did not want the federal government in charge of elections.
Trump also was given several presentations by his campaign advisers about the likely surge in mail-in ballots — in part because many Americans felt safer during the pandemic voting by mail than in person — and was told they would overwhelmingly go against him, according to a former campaign official.
Advisers and allies, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), encouraged Trump to try to close the gap in mail-in voting, arguing that he would need some of his voters, primarily seniors, to vote early by mail. But Trump instead exhorted his supporters not to vote by mail, claiming they could not trust that their ballots would be counted.
“It was sort of insane,” the former campaign official said.
Ultimately, it was the late count of mail-in ballots that erased Trump’s early leads in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other battleground states and propelled Biden to victory. As Trump watched his margins shrink and then reverse, he became enraged, and he saw a conspiracy theory at play.
“You really have to understand Trump’s psychology,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a longtime Trump associate and former White House communications director who is now estranged from the president. “The classic symptoms of an outsider is, there has to be a conspiracy. It’s not my shortcomings, but there’s a cabal against me. That’s why he’s prone to these conspiracy theories.”
Those are the classic markings of a paranoid, malignant, narcissist. And that level of instability should not be allowed anywhere near a powerful office like the presidency. I think we’ve all become a little bit crazy over the past four years that something like this can be written and we read it with astonishment and then move on to watch a football game or read a book or otherwise carry on with our cloistered pandemic lives as if it’s perfectly normal. Which is has been for the past four years.
And here is more about Georgia, which I still think Trump is subconsciously trying to sabotage:
In the days following the election, few states drew Trump’s attention like Georgia, a once-reliable bastion of Republican votes that he carried in 2016 but appeared likely to lose narrowly to Biden as late-remaining votes were tallied.
And few people attracted Trump’s anger like Gov. Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor who rode the president’s coattails to his own narrow victory in 2018.
A number of Trump allies tried to pressure Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, into putting his thumb on the scale. Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler — both forced into runoff elections on Jan. 5 — demanded Raffensperger’s resignation. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump friend who chairs the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, called Raffensperger to seemingly encourage him to find a way to toss legal ballots.
But Kemp, who preceded Raffensperger as secretary of state, would not do Trump’s bidding. “He wouldn’t be governor if it wasn’t for me,” Trump fumed to advisers earlier this month as he plotted out a call to scream at Kemp.
In the call, Trump urged Kemp to do more to fight for him in Georgia, publicly echo his claims of fraud and appear more regularly on television. Kemp was noncommittal, a person familiar with the call said.
Raffensperger said he knew Georgia was going to be thrust into the national spotlight on Election Day, when dramatically fewer people turned out to vote in person than the Trump campaign needed for a clear win following a surge of mail voting dominated by Democratic voters.
But he said it had never occurred to him to go along with Trump’s unproven allegations because of his duty to administer elections. Raffensperger said his strategy was to keep his head down and follow the law.
“People made wild accusations about the voting systems that we have in Georgia,” Raffensperger said. “They were asking, ‘How do we get to 270? How do you get it to Congress so they can make a determination?’ ” But, he added, “I’m not supposed to put my thumb on the Republican side.”
Trump fixated on a false conspiracy theory that the machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems and used in Georgia and other states had been programmed to count Trump votes as Biden votes. In myriad private conversations, the president would find a way to come back to Dominion. He was obsessed.
“Do you think there’s really something here? I’m hearing . . . ” Trump would say, according to one senior official who discussed it with him.
Raffensperger said Republicans were only harming themselves by questioning the integrity of the Dominion machines. He warned that these kinds of baseless allegations could discourage Republicans from voting in the Senate runoffs. “People need to get a grip on reality,” he said.
More troubling to Raffensperger were the many threats he and his wife, Tricia, have received over the past few weeks — and a break-in at another family member’s home. All of it has prompted him to accept a state security detail.
“If Republicans don’t start condemning this stuff, then I think they’re really complicit in it,” he said. “It’s time to stand up and be counted. Are you going to stand for righteousness? Are you going to stand for integrity? Or are you going to stand for the wild mob? You wanted to condemn the wild mob when it’s on the left side. What are you going to do when it’s on our side?”
On Nov. 20, after Raffensperger certified the state’s results, Kemp announced that he would make a televised statement, stoking fears that the president might have finally gotten to the governor.
“This can’t be good,” Jordan Fuchs, a Raffensperger deputy, wrote in a text message.
But Kemp held firm and formalized the certification.
“As governor, I have a solemn responsibility to follow the law, and that is what I will continue to do,” Kemp said. “We must all work together to ensure citizens have confidence in future elections in our state.”
Think about that. The guy who, as secretary of state while running for Governor, went out of his way to disenfranchise 50,000 Georgians in order to win that election against Stacey Abrams, actually bucked Trump. I can see why Trump was surprised.
On Nov. 7, four days after the election, every major news organization projected that Biden would win the presidency. At the same time, Giuliani stood before news cameras in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, near an adult-video shop and a crematorium, to detail alleged examples of voter fraud.
[…]
Also that day, Stepien, Clark, Miller and Bossie briefed Trump on a potential legal strategy for the president’s approval. They explained that prevailing would be difficult and involve complicated plays in every state that could stretch into December. They estimated a “5 to 10 percent chance of winning,” one person involved in the meeting said.
Trump signaled that he understood and agreed to the strategy.
Around this time, some lawyers around Trump began to suddenly disappear from the effort in what some aides characterized as an attempt to protect their reputations. Former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who had appeared at a news conference with Giuliani right after the election, ceased her involvement after the first week.
“Literally only the fringy of the fringe are willing to do pressers, and that’s when it became clear there was no ‘there’ there,” a senior administration official said.
Giuliani and his protegee, Ellis, both striving to please the president, insisted that Trump’s fight was not over. Someone familiar with their strategy said they were “performing for an audience of one,” and that Trump held Giuliani in high regard as “a fighter” and as “his peer.”
He considers Rudy Giuliani his peer. Which is true. He is. And that’s not a compliment. What a pair.
The article goes on to report on the “hostile takeover” of the campaign by Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. It’s as farcical as you can imagine. They were given a free hand and it wasn’t until Giuliani appeared on TV sweating black liquid down his face and talking about “My Cousin Vinnie” that Trump felt it made him look like a fool. But, of course, he didn’t fire Rudy. He fired Sidney Powell who is hardly any more Looney Tunes that the Rudester.
They gathered the people who were willing to go on TV to shout that the election was stolen and sent them out. Everyone else stayed mum. Meanwhile, all of his court challenges were failing one after the other. So he moved to Plan B:
As Trump’s legal challenges failed in court, he employed another tactic to try to reverse the result: a public pressure campaign on state and local Republican officials to manipulate the electoral system on his behalf.
“As was the case throughout his business career, he viewed the rules as instruments to be manipulated to achieve his chosen ends,” said Galston of the Brookings Institution.
Trump’s highest-profile play came in Michigan, where Biden was the projected winner and led by more than 150,000 votes. On Nov. 17, Trump called a Republican member of the board of canvassers in Wayne County, which is where Detroit is located and is the state’s most populous county. After speaking with the president, the board member, Monica Palmer, attempted to rescind her vote to certify Biden’s win in Wayne.
Then Trump invited the leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state Senate and House to meet him at the White House, apparently hoping to coax them to block certification of the results or perhaps even to ignore Biden’s popular-vote win and seat Trump electors if the state’s canvassing board deadlocked. Such a move was on shaky legal ground, but that didn’t stop the president from trying.
The Post reports that there was a “full-court press” by Democratic and Republican leaders to urge them to resist. I had not heard that before and I have to wonder if it’s true. Republicans sure kept a low profile if that’s what they were doing.
They also report that the Michigan GOP leaders only acquiesced to visit Trump as a courtesy and to try to get COVID relief which sure sounds to me like an after-the-fact rationale. These are the same people who’ve been pushing Governor Whitmer to open up, virus be damned. I think there is a little ass-covering going on.
His slightly less insane enablers had been trying to get him to authorize the transition but he felt it was tantamount to conceding but, as we know, he finally agreed when they assured him that it wasn’t and he could keep challenging the results, which he did. And he and Rudy decided he should attend the half-baked “meeting” at the Wyndham hotel in Gettysburg thes next day to address the GOP officials who were discussing possibly sending alternate electors to the congress.
A few hours before he was scheduled to depart, the trip was scuttled. “Bullet dodged,” said one campaign adviser. “It would have been a total humiliation.”
That afternoon, Trump called in to the meeting of GOP state senators at the Wyndham, where Giuliani and Ellis were addressing attendees. He spoke via a scratchy connection to Ellis’s cellphone, which she played on speaker. At one point, the line beeped to signal another caller.
“If you were a Republican poll watcher, you were treated like a dog,” Trump complained, using one of his favorite put-downs, even though many people treat dogs well, like members of their own families.
“This election was lost by the Democrats,” he said, falsely. “They cheated.”
Trump demanded that state officials overturn the results — but the count had already been certified. Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes will be awarded to Biden.
This is utter madness. But from what I gather, we are all supposed to indulge him for the next two months and then he’ll be gone and we’ll all live happily ever after. Indeed I think we’re all supposed to immediately behave as if none of this ever happened. If the rhetoric coming from congressional Republicans is to be believed, we are already going right back to the good old days of harangues about deficits and spending and foreign policy weakness, basically erasing the last four years of insanity.
And I’m seeing a lot of people on the other side doing that as well, reverting back to all the old arguments and complaints as if nothing has changed. But everything changed. We now know that our supposed “guardrails” are only as good as a few people in random places doing the right thing in a situation in which denying reality requires a total suspension of reason.
If this election had been closer I have no doubt they all would have done it. Just go back and look at the lengths to which they were willing to go in 2000. You see, they already succeeded once.
Josh Marshall makes an important point about Democratic priorities. If they don’t move to protect democracy, everything else will be lost:
On Wednesday I noted how critical it is that Democrats go on offense to protect democracy in this country. This is not only a critical policy imperative. It is also good politics. The critical point, as I argued, is that Democrats need to go on offense now – pushing a broad array of reforms to secure civic democracy in this country – because Republicans will certainly use this election as another excuse to impose further restrictions. And here we have one of the first of what will certainly be many examples:
This election has shown we need major reforms to our election systems, including Voter ID laws across the nation, to protect against fraud and rebuild the American people’s trust in fair outcomes.
I filed my VOTER Act to establish uniform standards for vote-by-mail systems across the country, ensure the timely counting of ballots, protect against fraud, and much more.
Conservatives and neo-confederates have been suppressing the vote for decades. Centuries, actually. And they are more desperate to do it than ever now — they’ve lost 7 out of the last 8 popular votes in this country. That’s once in 32 years. In a normal democracy they would have been in the wilderness for more than a quarter century. But because our our undemocratic system that allows minority rule, they have managed to capture the presidency anyway, half of that time and control the congress even more. (They have also lost the popular vote in the House and Senate during that period, including this last election.)
Their only option at this point is to continue to find ways to keep people from voting and gaming the system with things like controlling the census and gerrymandering and holding on tight to the courts in the hopes that they will protect them and allow them to retain power undemocratically. Since they are now almost entirely a non-college educated working class party, dominated by white men, we have to look at what those people are after and it isn'[t good for women, racial minorities, immigrants, science, the arts, cities, LGBT people etc.
This is unsustainable. Having this minority retain power (with the help of wealthy interests that don’t have their best interests at heart any more than the rest of us) our country remains under serious threat. As Marshall writes:
What we have is a spectacle in which virtually the entirety of the Republican party showed its willingness to impede voting to stay in power. Faced with defeat, when everything was on the table, they were happy to say, throw out of the votes of African-American voters in major cities in swing states. We have all just been witnesses to a grave crime against the republic, spearheaded by the President but supported by virtually every Republican officeholder in the country. It is no less grievous for appearing to have failed in its primary goal. It failed mainly because Joe Biden’s victory was simply too decisive. It required too much tinkering in too many different parts of the country to undo.
This latest degradation of democracy may end up being Trump’s most important legacy. The Democrats had better take it seriously. We’ve had two elections in the last 20 years give us presidents who didn’t win the popular vote but slipped into the White House due to the archaic vagaries of the electoral college. If they are successful in their plans to make voting even harder, this may end up being a permanent situation.
He’s sabotaging the Georgia election. Personally, I think he could not care less about Mitch retaining the senate. In fact, knowing him, I’d think he probably wants the Republicans to lose it because he doesn’t believe they’ve come out to defend him strongly enough.
Anyway, it was totally delusional. And Bartiromo has turned herself into a North Korean News Anchor for Donald Trump.
“Hospitals anticipate surge of coronavirus patients after Thanksgiving weekend,” CBS News reports.
And the Thanksgiving surge could produce a Christmas surge of coronavirus infections atop the Thanksgiving surge, warns CNN. Especially since new guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests most infections are spread by people with no symptoms:
“CDC and others estimate that more than 50% of all infections are transmitted from people who are not exhibiting symptoms,” it added in the guidance posted Friday.
“This means at least half of new infections come from people likely unaware they are infectious to others.”
So the fewer people together in one place the better. Please take this seriously. Many victims have no idea where they picked up the virus.
My 28 yo niece got it in April. She used to row crew. Now she can't walk up a flight of stairs without having to lie down for an hour. Her lungs are probably permanently compromised. Wear the goddamn mask, people.
“My 24 year old niece is on blood thinners for life. She feels the effects when she misses a dose. Covid lungs for life. Life expectancy for all who get it is shortened,” tweets another respondent.
“This is why it devastates me when the kids say they’ll just get covid and be done with it. Just because you move on from covid doesn’t mean it moves on from you,” tweets yet another.
Just as creepy are the people whose first reflex is to ask if victims young or old have underlying health issues. It smacks of a kind of unconscious belief by the curious in their own genetic superiority. As if, sure, this woman may look like me, but there must have been a reason she’s in such bad shape. Because that could never happen to me.
The death count is reaching for April highs once again even though medical teams know more now about how to fight it:
Yet the sheer breadth of the current outbreak means that the cost in lives lost every day is still climbing. More than 170,000 Americans are now testing positive for the virus on an average day, straining hospitals across much of the country, including in many states that had seemed to avoid the worst of the pandemic. More than 1.1 million people tested positive in the past week alone.
At the peak of the spring wave in April, about 31,000 new cases were announced each day, though that was a vast undercount because testing capacity was extremely limited. Still, the toll of the virus was an abstraction for many Americans because deaths were concentrated in a handful of states like New York, New Jersey and Louisiana.
It is still an abstraction for many. It is strange to think how paranoid we were in April. How cautious we were about masks and disinfectants, wiping down doorknobs and groceries and so forth. That was when so much was unknown about COVID-19 and New York City was burying bodies in mass graves. Over six months later, we have let down our guards and the virus is back to spring levels and hospitals are straining to keep up. Like normalizing mass shootings and Trump’s lies, we have come to shrug off the deaths and injuries as long as they are some other family’s.
Christmas around here is going to resemble Thanksgiving. Quiet. Small. Private. Baking will have to substitute for the annual family gathering.
Please consider it. A friend lost her grandfather this morning to COVID.
Bogus allegations of election fraud have me thinking lately about the Dunning-Kruger effect and other cognitive errors. Put colloquially, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Or perhaps not knowing enough to know better. Knowing the limits of what you know keeps you from getting into trouble. Having a medical degree does not make you a brain surgeon, etc.
Like the tale of Daniel and the priests of Bel. Each morning, a feast left in the temple the night before for a Babylonian idol is gone — proof, the priests tell the king, that Bel is a living god. But Daniel secretly scatters ashes on the floor one night before the king seals the chamber. In the morning, the feast is gone again. “Great thou art, Bel,” shouts the king. Except whose footprints are all those on the floor? asks Daniel.
Like 19th century flat Earthers who sighted down a six-mile stretch of England’s Bedford Canal to prove the Earth is flat. Markers set at the far end should have been below the line of sight if the Earth was round. But they were still visible! The experiment, however, had not compensated for atmospheric refraction of light. The experiment’s design was faulty. As was the flat-Earthers’ proof.
Like 9/11 truthers believing the World Trade Towers collapse was an inside job because the burning temperature of jet fuel is not hot enough to melt steel. Accurate facts led to a faulty conclusion through ignorance of metallurgy and column buckling.
Like scientists testing psychics. Detecting frauds is not their milieu. In everyday science their data is not actively trying to deceive them. Believing themselves “too smart to be fooled,” they got taken in by magicians’ tricks.
“No matter how smart you are, or how educated you are, you can be deceived,” is the lesson of the late illusionist, escape artist and debunker of psychics, James Randi. A documentary on his career explained:
People often find ways to ignore or explain away the facts. A generation ago, this approach propped up faith healing and energy crystals; today, it fuels climate-change denialism and the anti-vaccination movement.
And now belief in massive election fraud where evidence for it is as faulty as that for a flat Earth. But no amount of proof will satisfy those who want to believe.
The New York Times’ Nate Cohn tweeted Saturday about bad faith and bad data in the fraud allegations:
The evidence for a 'rigged' election is so preposterous as of late that it's difficult to argue that any series of reforms would have avoided this mess
Cohn continued, “You’ve got folks convinced that there were more votes than people in Detroit. All you have to do is do is google search ‘detroit population’ and ‘detroit election results 2020’ to learn that it’s wrong.
“You’ve got folks convinced that there were fewer mail ballot requests than mail votes in Pennsylvania. A google search can disabuse you here, as well–and worst of all this was clear before the election.
“You’ve got folks convinced there’s something strange about ‘vote dumps’–AKA, populous jurisdictions reporting their results. If you’ve got an issue with it… you just have an issue with them having results…I can keep going here.
“The point is that the case for ‘fraud’ is so bad that it’s quite clear it only exists for one reason: they don’t like the result. Nothing could have been done to avoid this, and that was obvious even before the ’16 election–before the mail surge. If we had an election where every state had photo ID, in-person voting, and reported all of its results at once we would be in… exactly the same place.”
That is because believers are not interested in accuracy or facts, even from conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg.
The entire world is rigged against Trump. Or didn’t you know? Because QAnon does.
QAnon is the umbrella term for a sprawling set of internet conspiracy theories that allege, falsely, that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while operating a global child sex-trafficking ring.
QAnon followers believe that this clique includes top Democrats including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros, as well as a number of entertainers and Hollywood celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres and religious figures including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama. Many of them also believe that, in addition to molesting children, members of this group kill and eat their victims in order to extract a life-extending chemical from their blood.
Berkowitz explains one of game design’s bugaboos: apophenia.
Apophenia is : “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)”
In game play, apophenia leads players down dead-end trails after non-clues and frustrates progress. In QAnon, he explains, “apophenia is the point of everything. There are no scripted plots. There are no puzzles to solve created by game designers. There are no solutions.”
QAnon grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding. Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase. Guided because the puppet masters are directly involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the propaganda message Q is delivering.
There is no reality here. No actual solution in the real world. Instead, this is a breadcrumb trail AWAY from reality. Away from actual solutions and towards a dangerous psychological rush. It works very well because when you “figure it out yourself” you own it. You experience the thrill of discovery, the excitement of the rabbit hole, the acceptance of a community that loves and respects you. Because you were convinced to “connect the dots yourself” you can see the absolute logic of it. This is the conclusion you arrived at.
“Do your research,” believers tell you, and it shall set you free. From reality.
Training players to see conspirators behind random events is the point. “QAnon uses the oldest trope of all mystery fiction. A mysterious stranger shows up and drops a strange clue leading to long-hidden secrets which his clues, and your detecting power, can reveal.”
The Smoking Man from The X-Files knows everything. But if he just blurts it out, the mystery is solved and the fun is over. Instead, he drops clues. This is exactly why Q is not a whistleblowing, high-ranking intelligence officer. “He” is a plot device, Berkowitz insists.
And the point if there is one? To create an alternate reality for believers to inhabit.
Qanon is an attempt to create a new reality that can be acted on, lived in “as-if”, and manipulated, but does not match actual reality. Because if they can do that, then they can do anything they want and blame the outcomes on any fictional plot point they choose. One tentacle of a many-pronged attack of boogaloo bros, Qanons, Anti-maskers, Fake News, Alex Jones, etc. Scattershot programs all with the same message and the same end-game. To doubt reality. To create the fog of war without the war. To create a collectively shared reality that they directly control.
The republic our founders envisioned depended on a set of agreed-to facts. Alternative facts shatter the foundations on which the nation was built and destabilize it.
Who would want to do that? Another game designer, Jim Stewartson, believes “Russian intelligence is, at a minimum, exploiting this gamecult, to coin a phrase, to undermine our democracy.” Who knows? That’s beyond the limits of my knowledge.
But a large fraction of Trump supporters believe he actually won the election. That it was stolen in plain sight even as his attorneys try to steal it in plain sight. Belief that a cabal of elite, Satan-worshiping, cannibal pedophiles runs the world plays a part. That is alternative beyond faith in idols or the flat Earth or a government conspiracy behind 9/11. Hunter S. Thompson/Terry Gilliam alternative. One can find the genesis of that nonsense in the first 90 seconds of this clip from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).
Since it’s time for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Tuesday Afternoon and Wednesday Morning 3am, I thought I’d toss out more of my picks for the best Blu-ray reissues of 2020, in case you’re stuck for gift ideas. This has been a particularly bountiful year for restorations and long-awaited HD reissues; I’ll have some more picks in the near future! And a friendly reminder: whenever you make an Amazon purchase via a click-through on this site you’ll help support your favorite starving bloggers here at Digby’s Hullabaloo. Happy holidays!
Day of the Dolphin (Kino Classics) – “Fa loves Pa!” This offbeat 1973 sci-fi film marked the third collaboration between Buck Henry and director Mike Nichols. Henry adapted the script from Robert Merle’s novel. George C. Scott is excellent in the lead role as a marine biologist who has developed a method for training dolphins to communicate in human language. Naturally, there is a shadowy cabal of government spooks who take keen interest in this breakthrough. I like to call this one a conspira‘sea’ thriller (sorry).
Kino’s 2020 Blu-ray reissue features a new 4k digital restoration, a new commentary track by film historians Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson, and interviews with screenwriter Buck Henry and cast members Leslie Charleson and Edward Herrmann.
Diva (Kino Classics) – Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 cult fave kicked off a sub-genre that hoity toity critics have labelled Cinéma du look…or as I like to call ‘em: “really cool French thrillers of the 80s and 90s” (e.g. Beineix’s Betty Blue, and Luc Besson’s Subway, La Femme Nikita, and Leon the Professional). Diva not only reigns as my favorite of the bunch but would easily place as one of my top 10 films of the 80s.
Our unlikely antihero is mild-mannered postman Jules (Frédéric Andréi), a 20-something opera fan obsessed with a Garbo-like diva (American soprano Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez). The diva has never recorded a studio album and strictly stipulates that her live performances are never to be taped and/or reproduced in any medium. A clearly enraptured Jules attends one of her concerts and makes a high-quality bootleg recording, purely for his own edification. By chance, a pair of nefarious underworld characters sitting nearby witness Jules making the surreptitious recording and see nothing but a potential goldmine in the tape, sparking a chain of events that turns his life upside down.
Slick, stylish and cheeky with a wonderful international cast, Diva is a marvelously entertaining pop-art mélange of neo-noir, action-thriller, and comic-book fantasy. Chockablock with quirky characters, from a pair of hipster hit men (Gérard Darmon and Dominique Pinon) who hound Jules to his savior, a Zen-like international man of mystery named Gorodish (scene-stealer Richard Bohringer) who is currently “going through his cool period” as his precocious teenage girlfriend (Thuy Ann Luu) patiently explains to Jules.
I have owned 2 DVD versions of the film over the years, the transfers were passable but less-than-ideal. Kino’s Blu-ray, while still not the diamond quality I’d been hoping for (it is obviously not restored) it is by far the best-looking print I’ve seen of the film. Extras include interviews with members of the cast and crew (which have already appeared on a previous DVD edition) and a brand new commentary track by film critic Simon Abrams. A real gem!
The Elephant Man (Criterion Collection) – This 1980 David Lynch film (nominated for 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture) dramatizes the bizarre life of Joseph Merrick (John Hurt), a 19th Century Englishman afflicted by a physical condition so hideously deforming that when he entered adulthood, his sole option for survival was to “work” as a sideshow freak. However, when a compassionate surgeon named Frederick Treaves (Anthony Hopkins) entered his life, a whole new world opened to him.
While there is an inherent grotesqueness to much of the imagery, Lynch treats his subject as respectfully and humanely as Dr. Treaves. Beautifully shot in black and white (by DP Freddie Francis), Lynch’s film has a “steampunk” vibe. Hurt deservedly earned an Oscar nod for his performance, more impressive when you consider how he conveys the intelligence and gentle soul of this man while encumbered by all that prosthetic. Great work by the entire cast, which includes Anne Bancroft, Freddie Jones and John Gielgud.
Criterion’s Blu-ray features a gorgeous 4K restoration, archival interviews with the director, Hurt, co-producers Mel Brooks and Jonathan Sangar (and others associated with the production), a 2005 program about the real “elephant man” John Merrick, and more.
Essential Fellini (Criterion Collection box set) – With such a rich oeuvre to cull from, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher that it’s taken this long for someone to curate a decent Federico Fellini collection. That said, Criterion’s 2020 box set proves worth the wait. Predicated on the 100th anniversary of Fellini’s birth, the collection cherry picks 14 of the “essentials” from his catalog, from obvious choices like La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, LaDolce Vita, 8½, Amarcord and Juliet of the Spirits to previously harder to find early works like Variety Lights and The White Sheik. All the films have been newly restored.
As the set was released only several days ago, I haven’t had a chance to make a huge dent but the two films I have watched are impeccably restored (I started with 1950’s VarietyLights because I’d never seen it, and decided to feast on my favorite Fellini Amarcord on Thanksgiving…wow. Now that is one film the 4K restoration process was made for!).
Extras. Where do I start? Two feature documentaries…Fellini: I’m a Born Liar (great doc) and I’m looking forward to Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember (3 hours!). Also included is a restored version of the curio Toby Dammit. Starring Terrance Stamp, the 40-minute film was Fellini’s contribution to the 1968 horror omnibus/Edgar Allan Poe triptych Spirits ofthe Dead (Roger Vadim and Louis Malle directed the other two segments). There are numerous commentary tracks, TV interview segments, and more.
There are two books, one is a guide to the films and the other contains essays. It’s all housed in a sturdy album-sized box, with the discs secured in “coin collector” style pockets (similar to Criterion’s lovely Bergman box set released back in 2018). Here’s a hot tip: If you want this (and you know you do) as a wonderful gift for your favorite cineaste (or yourself) now is the time to snag it from Amazon, who are currently selling it for half-price…as of this posting.
The Grey Fox (Kino Classics) – I was overjoyed to finally retire my dog-eared VHS copy of Philip Borso’s underappreciated 1982 gem. Filmed on location in Washington State and British Columbia, Borso’s biopic is a naturalistic “Northwestern” in the vein of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller; an elegiac portrait of a turn-of-the century “west” that is making an uneasy transition into modernity (which puts it in a sub-genre that includes Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country or Richard Brooks’ Bite the Bullet).
The film is based on the real-life exploits of “gentleman robber” Bill Miner (who may or may not have been the progenitor of the venerable felonious command: “Hands up!”). The Kentucky native was a career criminal who spent about half his life as a guest of the State of California. First incarcerated in his early 20s, he was released in 1880 and resumed his former activities (robbing stagecoaches). The law caught up with him and he did a long stretch in San Quentin. When he got out of stir in 1901, he was in his mid-50s.
The Grey Fox picks up Miner’s story at this point, just as he is being “released into the 20th-Century” from San Quentin. Miner is wonderfully portrayed by then 60-year-old Richard Farnsworth. Jackie Burroughs is excellent as well, playing a feminist photographer who has a relationship with Miner. John Hunter’s screenplay weaves an episodic narrative as spare and understated as its laconic and soft-spoken protagonist.
Kino’s Blu-ray features a new 4K restoration, highlighting DP Frank Tidy’s fabulous cinematography (he also shot Ridley Scott’s debut 1977 feature film The Duellists, one of the most beautiful-looking films this side of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon). This is a film well-worth your time, whether this is your first time viewing or you are up for a revisit. (Full review)
Leave Her to Heaven (Criterion Collection) –There have been a lot of movies about possessive lovers, but the character of “Ellen Berent” (played by achingly beautiful Gene Tierny) takes the cake. Shot in eye-popping Technicolor, John M. Stahl’s 1945 drama (adapted by Jo Swerling from a novel by Ben Ames Williams) is equal parts film noir and twisted soaper.
Cornel Wilde co-stars as Richard Harland, a novelist who has a chance meeting with Ellen on a train. Before he knows what hit him, the slightly off-kilter but undeniably alluring socialite has introduced Richard to her well-to-do family, and in the blink of an eye, Ellen is dragging him down the aisle. Not that he resists (I mean, my god…look at Gene Tierny…look at her!) but as tends to occur in quickie betrothals, any poisons that may lurk in the mud don’t hatch out until after the honeymoon’s over.
As pointed out by film critic Imogen Sara Smith in an enlightening video essay produced exclusively for Criterion’s Blu-ray release, Tierny was perennially underrated as an actor due to her striking looks. I heartily agree-Tierney delivers a subtly chilling performance in this film. While you could call Leave Her to Heaven the original Fatal Attraction, by comparison Glenn Close’s clingy psycho is more like a cartoon villain and far less compelling. Excellent support from Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price, Mary Phillips and Ray Collins.
Leon Shamroy’s cinematography has never looked this luminous on home video. Criterion’s edition features a new 2K restoration by Twentieth Century Fox, the Academy Film Archive, and The Film Foundation. A must-have for the noir fan on your gift list.
CNN does its “heroes” thing every year and this year’s nominees for “most inspiring moment” reminds me that the early days of the COVID crisis featured solidarity that has dropped away. Back in the spring people were staying at home and singing out of their windows aevery night — all over the world.
I’m pretty sure that sort of collective outpouring would have worn off over time anyway. But honestly, Trump made it all so much worse with his insistence that we could just open businesses without containing the virus. His refusal to wear a mask alone (in order not to mess up his hair and make-up) has caused half the country to become spreaders and kill a bunch of people who didn’t have to die.
But there was a moment when everyone seemed to come together. We could have built on that to combat the virus. And he wrecked it.
Trump conceded that he would leave the White House on January 20th in his crazed press conference the other day. And, of course, he then tweeted this:
Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous “80,000,000 votes” were not fraudulently or illegally obtained. When you see what happened in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia & Milwaukee, massive voter fraud, he’s got a big unsolvable problem!
Harvard professor Timothy Snyder, and expert on tyrannical regimes of the 20th century, appeared on CNN this weekend. And he had an insight into Trump’s probably post-election strategy that I haven’t see described quite this way:
Let’s imagine that we go into 2021 with this alternative reality alive Let’s imagine what that means. Mr Trump and probably number of the Republican Party are telling a Big Lie. They are saying something about the system about the outcome of the election which they know not to be true. They are encouraging this view which is not just a Big Lie but a conspiracy because if you want to believe it, you have to believe that not only the Democrats but the judges and the vote counters and all those Black people in all those cities were somehow in on this conspiracy.
And the other thing that’s wrong with this is that you’re telling people, basically Trump voters, whose votes were counted, that they are the victims and in doing so you are reversing the basic truth of the American history which is that the people who are a real risk of being disenfranchised are African Americans. You are reversing that story and that in itself is not only tragic, and unfair, but it is also dangerous.
When you teach people who have power that they are victims, you are risking people who have power to go outside the system the next time. That they will expect that their own party will and should cheat the next time.
Or, even worse outcomes.
When asked about Trump attending the inauguration, Snyder pointed out that others have been “bad sports” in the distant past but that it wouldn’t be unlikely that Trump would refuse to attend because he is setting up a story about him being the victim as a way to dominate the GOP for the next few years though his own martyrdom.
That’s an interesting way of looking at what I have called “the president-in-exile” myth— or what others have dubbed the “Avignon strategy.” I think Snyder is on to something important about this that could have some real potency: the extension of the idea of conservative victimhood — even Lost Cause mythology. The chip on the shoulders of conservatives is already the size of Mt. Everest. All he has to do it stand at the summit and shout.
