Month: November 2020

James Fallows wrote a great piece earlier this year called “If Trump Were an Airline Pilot” which laid out the ways in which any other person would have been held accountable for the grotesque loss of life that happened under their watch. In this new Atlantic piece he muses on the difference in concept between the legal terms negligent homicide and manslaughter and applies the non-legal, common sense everyday definition of the terms, and picks up the analogy where that earlier one left off:

At the time of that comparison, the main case against Trump involved his temperamental, intellectual, and moral unfitness for the job. But since then we’ve moved into the realm of manslaughter. Yesterday nearly 2,000 Americans died of COVID-19. By Thanksgiving Day, another 10,000 to 15,000 will have perished. By year’s end, who knows? And meanwhile the person in charge of guiding the national response does nothing.

Or worse than nothing. He tweets in rage. He fires anyone suspected of disloyalty. He encourages endless lawsuits that are tossed out of court one after another but that, one after another, do cumulative damage to confidence in elections and democracy. His cat’s-paw in charge of the General Services Administration does what none of her predecessors ever dared, pretending that the outcome of the election is still in doubt. Thus she blocks Joe Biden’s transition team from receiving the funding or cooperation it needs during the rapidly dwindling days until inauguration. (Rapidly dwindling from an incoming administration’s perspective, with so many plans to prepare and staffers to select. Moving like molasses from other perspectives.)

We’re beyond the range of my earlier comparisons to a leader of a museum “who routinely insulted large parts of its constituency” or a CEO “making costly strategic decisions on personal impulse.” The problem with finding analogies to illuminate the Trump administration’s reckless disregard for national welfare now is that all of them seem so extreme.

Is this like Nero fiddling while Rome burns? That’s too mild and clichéd, and it implies a more cultured form of distraction than Trump’s tweeting about Fox and OAN.

Is it like the Allied generals during the grimmest trench-warfare stage of World War I, sending wave after wave of young troops “over the top” and to certain death from German machine guns? At least the generals and the troops thought they were fighting for something larger than themselves.

Is it like an armed school security guard who hears gunfire inside the school building but doesn’t go in to protect the children, not wanting to get shot himself? Something like this has happened, but at least such a guard would be acting on the natural if nonheroic instinct for self-preservation. (Today’s government figures, by contrast, would face no physical risk by making the pandemic the center of their efforts. Their only risk is criticism for defying the will of Trump.)

Is it like an airline captain who stops looking at the instruments because he is wrapped up in a Twitter war, while the plane heads straight into a mountain? No, because under long-developed airline protocols, the other pilot in the cockpit would already have grabbed the controls.

It is like a nurse or doctor strolling past an emergency room just as a patient goes into cardiac arrest—and nonchalantly continuing to stroll to the break room? Or like a Marine Corps medic letting a wounded comrade bleed out on the battlefield while the medic paused for a smoke? Yes, it would be like that—except that such things are impossible to imagine. It’s similar when you try to imagine a firefighting crew, outside an apartment-building inferno, deciding to go home even as residents scream desperately from upstairs windows amid the flames. You can’t imagine it. It wouldn’t occur.

But it is happening with the pandemic. These examples are the equivalent of an administration looking the other way, leaving states and cities and hospitals and families to their own resources—even as first those hospitals, and then the mortuaries, fill up, and medical workers serve endless shifts, knowing that they may be next to succumb. And all of this with the pandemic taking a cruel and disproportionate toll on racial minorities, and on families that are already under pressure from an unequal economy.

In these circumstances a “normal” national leader would be doing several things urgently, and all at once. One is restoring cooperation outside the country—on early detection of new outbreaks; on lessons of failed and successful containment strategies, or travel controls; on the other necessary global responses to a global threat. The next is restoring cooperation within the country—so that equipment availability, quarantine and distancing plans, vaccine rollouts, and countless other measures don’t remain a battle of each against all. The next would be giving a clear, steady, and believable account of where the country stands in this grim journey: how much longer things will get worse, when and where they might get better, what sensible steps should be taken in the meantime. (Imagine, for instance, the president assigning Anthony Fauci or another credible figure to have daily briefings, with no politicians at the microphone whatsoever.) And the next would be using every bit of political leverage to get new financial aid to businesses, families, schools, and city and state governments that are about to be plunged into new economic desperation. (Instead, the U.S. Senate has convened to ram through judicial appointments, and do nothing else.)

Of course, none of those things has happened, nor can, until January 20 at the earliest. The deaths go on, and our national leader looks the other way—at Fox, and in the mirror.

One more parallel to our current predicament comes to mind. It is very different in its legal implications, but evocatively similar in its emotional tenor.

This past summer, viewers around the world saw eight minutes and 46 seconds on video that few of them can ever forget. That’s how long a Minneapolis police officer kept his knee on the neck of the prone George Floyd. The officer’s face was impassive, barely showing interest, as his victim pleaded, and struggled, and choked, and died. The officer’s affect was like that of a fisherman, watching his catch flop helplessly toward death as it ran out of breath on the pier. Legally, the courts have yet to determine what those eight minutes and 46 seconds meant; the officer has pleaded not guilty to second-degree manslaughter and second-degree murder. But the video had such power because people around the world understood what they were seeing. One man was in control of another. One man calmly watched as another died. In the layman’s sense of the term, these were images of manslaughter, of homicide.

The face in the White House is snarling rather than impassive, gaudily made up rather than unadorned, craving the limelight rather than operating outside it. But as it turns to the public, it reveals the same careless indifference toward lives it should have spared.

We know what we are seeing. It is a mass death event at the hands of Donald Trump. He may not be held legally accountable for the tens of thousands of preventable deaths in this pandemic but that doesn’t mean he isn’t guilty.

I don’t think I’ve ever approvingly quoted Jonah Goldberg before, not even during the years of Never Trumpism of which he has been an adherent from the beginning. He’s not my favorite person. But when he’s right, he’s right and this righteous rant is on the money:

The president of the United States is trying to steal an election he clearly and unequivocally lost.

Even liberals frame this fact wrong. They keep saying that Trump is undermining the legitimacy of the election. He is certainly doing that. But the undermining isn’t the end he most desires—it’s the means to that end. The man is literally trying to steal an election.

He may not think—anymore—that this is the most likely outcome. But he certainly thinks it’s one of the possible outcomes, and one of the few things we know about Trump is that he likes to keep his options open. From the reporting, he’s pursuing a bunch of goals, many of which reinforce each other.

Claiming the election was stolen lets him pretend—to himself or the country—that he’s not a loser. Claiming the election was stolen and pretending that he’s not a loser keeps his hardcore fan base with him, which will be good for him no matter what happens. It’s good prep work for some kind of “Trump TV” and/or for a potential bid to run again in 2024—at least in his mind. But he surely also thinks there’s a chance, however slim, that he will actually get to steal the presidency. If this was all just a show, he wouldn’t need to invite Michigan pols to the White House, presumably to strong arm them.

Think about it this way: Let’s say there’s a 99 percent chance he won’t be able to do any of the things that could result in him staying in power. He won’t be able to flip various state electors, get the courts to invalidate millions of votes, or get this sent to the House. But odds are good that in his head he thinks he’s got a maybe a 5 percent or 10 percent chance. Maybe even better than that.

As outrageous as his effort to delegitimize the election is—and it is very outrageous—that outrage pales like a lit candle next to the noonday summer sun when you compare it to an effort to literally overturn the popular and Electoral College vote and steal the election. But because that outcome is so unlikely, and Trump’s effort to pull it off is so comically inept, people are focusing on the more likely outrage rather than the more outrageous outrage.

This was the plan.

It’s pretty clear now—as I think Nicholas Grossman pretty accurately predicted—that his goal was always to steal the election if he didn’t win fairly.* He was pretty transparent about this long before the election. He spent months saying that mail-in or early ballots were rife with fraud. He told all of his voters to vote on Election Day. He expected this would give him a “mirage” lead that night, and then, because he had already established the illegitimacy of mail-in ballots, he could pretend to be justified in proclaiming victory on Election Night.

Sure, there would be lawsuits and the like later, but Trump would have momentum on his side. He even telegraphed over and over that he expected the Supreme Court to come to his rescue amid the chaos. That was his primary explanation for why he thought it was important to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed. 

But as Grossman points out, there was just one problem: Trump wasn’t actually leading on Election Night. It’s one thing to declare victory prematurely when the tally on the scoreboard on your side is tied—it’s another to claim that you won when even the scoreboard clearly says you didn’t.

This, by the way, explains why Trump World was so very, very, very, angry about Fox’s decision to call Arizona. I’ll admit, I thought the anger at Fox was simply stupid, not evil. I wrote of the people screaming at Fox:

[They] … are the political equivalent of Kathy Bates in Misery. They think the Fox News Decision Desk is James Caan, and their collective sin is not writing the story the way the MAGA Kathys wanted. And they’re ignoring the fact that even if Fox banged out precisely the story the Kathys wanted on their metaphorical manual typewriters, it wouldn’t change the fact that the story they want is fiction.  Trump lost because more Americans—in total and in the necessary states—voted against him. Grow up and deal with it.  

But it turns out that the Arizona call ruined the pretext. If Pennsylvania had been the tipping point, they thought they could get the election thrown to the court. But the Arizona call combined with the undeclared result in Georgia preempted that.

So now the Trump team is falling back on sheer gall, breathtaking dishonesty, and gobsmacking insanity. Noah Rothman laid out the naked idiocy of what they’re trying to do. Sadly, he wrote his piece before Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell said, “Hold our beers.” The theory—theories? —they laid out yesterday made Billy Madison’s speech seem like the Gettysburg Address and Demosthenes’ Third Philippic rolled into one.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining why any theory that hinges on the cutting-edge computer know-how of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela is going to have problems (see our fact checks here). I’ll just note that even if you sat there watching that thing and said, “This sounds plausible,” it doesn’t change the fact they offered no proof of what they were alleging. Nor have any of their lawyers when they have stood before a judge. On Twitter and in press conferences, Trump (and Trump World) are alleging world-historic crimes. In front of judges, their lawyers are muttering about Sharpies.

Tucker’s indictment.

Tucker Carlson’s getting a lot of praise for calling B.S. on Powell’s allegations. I’m glad he’s doing it, even if I have problems with his late conversion to Trump-skepticism. I also have issues with acting like Powell is just freelancing here. She and Giuliani are doing Trump’s bidding, so this isn’t just Powell’s deranged theory—it’s the sitting president’s theory, too. We can all laugh or shake our head as Rudy Giuliani spews nonsense to the point where someone would be forgiven for thinking his leaking hair dye was literally bullshit seeping out of his head. That doesn’t change what he’s trying to do.

So Tucker is right when he says, “What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history.” And he’s right that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

But he doesn’t close the circle. If our political system were sufficiently sclerotic and decadent that Powell’s con yielded the results she desires, it would be the greatest crime in American history, too. I don’t see the moral difference between stealing the election using cutting-edge Venezuelan algorithms and stealing the election by peddling deranged nonsense about Venezuelan algorithms.

I understand that everyone is tired of being angry. But this whole spectacle is infuriating. At least some of the people pushing Trump’s effort have to know it’s a colossal fraud, but they’re just doing it anyway. They are trying to pull off monumental election fraud by claiming that Democrats—and the Venezuelans, Cubans, and perhaps the Lizard People (but not the Lizard People you’re thinking of)—are guilty of monumental election fraud.

And spare me the anti-anti-Trump bloviating about how Trump’s scheme, however “overstated” or “problematic,” is still valuable because it’s shining a light on the very real issue of election fraud. This is like forgiving an attempted bank robbery because it exposed the flaws in bank security.

I don’t like “lying for justice” arguments from the left or the right. I don’t give a rat’s ass that Trump’s failing effort to steal an election or his already successful effort to delegitimize an election and a duly elected president is “raising awareness” or “shining a light on important issues.” And, as I strongly suspect, neither do the people hiding behind this irrelevant rhetoric.

The GOP’s cowardice.

I know I’m a broken record about how the weakness of our political parties is poisoning our politics. But look, political parties are supposed to be patriotic institutions. Unlike the Boy Scouts or Major League Baseball, however, they have a deep interest in protecting the sanctity of our electoral system. Their interest in preserving the legitimacy of our political system is total, in the same way the New York Yankees’ interest in the health of baseball is total. And yet, the RNC hosted that hate crime against democratic legitimacy yesterday. The GOP’s social media account spewed soundbites from Powell and Giuliani out into the country like a firehose attached to a sewage tank.

A serious party that cared about its long-term credibility, never mind the long-term credibility of our political system, would walk away from this burning septic tank en masse. Instead it spends its days lobbing Molotov cocktails of flaming B.S. from its windows.

And I don’t care if “the Republican base” believes this bilge or wants to believe it. The party has a higher obligation to the country, to future Republicans, and—as quaint as it sounds—to its principles than to a lame duck president.

None of these hacks are getting Wales out of this, and it wouldn’t be worth it if they were.

While we’re at it, spare me the hosannas for the newfound courage of people like Joni Ernst. When the Trump campaign was merely claiming that the presidency was stolen, she stayed quiet. It was only when Powell claimed that other Republican politicians stole their races, too, that she suddenly took offense.

As for the conservative “leaders” who think it’s their job to tell their readers, viewers, and listeners what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear for the good of the country, my contempt is total. In a system with weak parties, it is incumbent on the ideological allies of the party to explain to the rank-and-file what is true and right. Pandering to them is not only wrong, it’s dangerous. The whole point of the conservative movement is to protect and preserve the legitimacy of the constitutional order and the blessings of liberty such an order was intended to secure. Indulging feelings—no matter how sincerely felt—when they don’t align with the actual facts undermines that project.

What if they won?

Which brings me to my final complaint and what really stews my bowels. What’s the end game? Again, I doubt Trump or his criminal accomplices actually believe they’ll succeed. But that’s very different from saying they don’t hold out hope that they still might pull off this caper. What if they did? What if instead of being the incompetent bungling demagogue we know Trump to be, he actually managed to bribe, blackmail, or otherwise cajole enough of the legislators, judges, justices, electors, and various officials required to hand him the presidency despite losing both the electoral college and the popular vote?

What would the country look like in Trump’s purloined second term?

Look, I think “What if this were Obama?” is one of the lowest forms of punditry. But if Barack Obama tried something like this, after losing fair and square to Mitt Romney, we’d be hearing lots of conservatives talking about “Second Amendment remedies.” And as loath as I am to hint, even for rhetorical purposes, that violence is justified, they’d have a point.

If Obama actually succeeded in stealing the election in 2012, there would be riots. There would very likely be open rebellion in the military. And when the dust settled, Congress would likely vote to impeach and remove him (or at least I hope it would). What is your principled argument for why it should be any different with Trump?

The likely scenario for how this all plays out is bad enough. But if Trump actually succeeded, it would wreck the country. But, yes, it’s true: He would own the libs. And apparently doing that is even better than getting to be Attorney General of Wales.

That’s harsh but true. Even so, I don’t think he’s hard enough on the GOP establishment. They collaborated with Trump throughout his presidency and refused to take the impeachment case seriously which was, by the way, predicated on Trump using the power of the presidency to try to sabotage Joe Biden’s campaign! They knew what he did. They approved of it.

It is clear to me that they have decided to let Trump play this out as long as he can. If he can pull off this coup, more power to him. If not, they’ll pat each other on the back for his success in delegitimizing Biden’s win among 45% of the people and sabotage his administration. Trump is useful to them whether he steals another term or not.

Hahahhha:

A Josh Marshall tweet Friday reminded me political adversaries never disappoint us because we expect so little of them. We expect more and demand more of our friends. With friends, however, we are quicker to reach for sticks and stingier with the carrots.

This brought back an exercise I went through ten years ago at Scrutiny Hooligans when Rep. Heath Shuler ran for re-election in NC-11. In light of Marshall’s tweet, I thought it might be timely to repost it.

Progressive readers in the Cesspool of Sin by then had had enough of our Blue Dog and cited a catalog of sins for which they would never forgive him (and certainly would never again vote for him), bills they felt strongly about that Shuler had voted against. I got curious. I looked up what happened in the end to the bills they cited (and reminded them of bills he had supported):

After the lively discussion on the NC-11 House race a couple of weeks back, I compiled and researched some of the votes commenters cited to make their cases for or against voting for Shuler this November. (The list includes a few others I remembered.) Votes here are for final passage, unless noted. See http://thomas.loc.gov/

“Key votes” are in the eye of the beholder. Your mileage may vary.

Key House Votes Against Party

– HR3 / S5 Stem Cell Research Act of 2007, Passed anyway
– HR3685 Sexual Orientation Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA), 2007, Passed anyway
– H Res 1031 Establishment of the Office of Congressional Ethics, 2008, Passed anyway
– HR1 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (“Stimulus Bill”), Passed anyway
– HR1913 Hate Crimes Expansion, 2009, Passed anyway
– HR2749 Food Safety Regulation Amendments, 2009, Passed anyway
– H.AMDT.509 to HR 3962, 2010 (Stupak Amendment), 64 Democrats joined Republicans in adding Stupak amendment to Affordable Health Care bill, 240-194
– HR3962, 2010 Affordable Health Care for America Act, Passed anyway
– HR4213 Unemployment Benefits Extension, 2010, Passed anyway
– HR4872 Health Care Reconciliation Act, 2010, Passed anyway
– HR5618 Unemployment Benefits Extension, 2010, Passed anyway

Key House Votes With Party

– HR800 Employee Free Choice Act of 2007, Passed
– HR985 Whistleblower Protection Act of 2007, Passed
– HR2831 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007, Passed
– HR6124 Second Farm, Nutrition, and Bioenergy Act of 2007 (Farm Bill), Passed
– HR2642 G.I. Bill Expansion and Other Domestic Provisions, 2008, Passed
– HR 5749 Emergency Extended Unemployment Compensation Act of 2008, Passed
– HR 6867 Emergency Extended Unemployment Compensation Act of 2008, Passed
– HR2 Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 (SCHIP), Passed
– HR627 Credit CARD Act of 2009, Passed
– HR 1106 / S896 Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009, Passed
– HR1586 Education Jobs and Medicaid Assistance Act, 2009, Passed
– HR1728 Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act, 2009, Passed
– HR2454 Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (Cap and Trade), Passed
– HR 3548 Extending Federal Emergency Unemployment Benefits, 2009, Passed
– HR4173 The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009, Passed

OpenCongress.org finds that Rep. Heath Shuler votes with his party 85% of the time.

Having the majority counts even if your congresscritter is not your dream date.

I observed here later:

Almost to a one, the complainants got the bills they wanted passed passed. What they obsessed over were the times they felt betrayed when, for whatever reason, their Democrat didn’t vote their way on some key vote. (It’s a conservative district; Pelosi gave him a pass?) In spite of the fact that they got what they wanted legislatively, they wouldn’t let it go. Because what they really want in a representative is a soul mate. In spite of the fact that Shuler voted (to that point) 85% of the time with the caucus and his Republican predecessor, Charlie Taylor, would have voted +/- 0%, people wouldn’t take winning for an answer. Their soul mate had hurt them.

This is politics. If you want a soul mate, try Match dot com.

I cautioned after the Blue Wave of 2018 that some of those Democrats were noobies and would make mistakes:

Tolerance, please. Think Progress reports, “Of the 59 newly-elected Democrats who will be joining Congress for the first time next month, only 18 have previous experience holding some kind of elected office.” Count on it: Even progressive first-time electeds will make mistakes.

“I screwed up,” a freshman state senator told me after a vote during her first months ever in elected office. It was one of those switcheroo bills. They read as if they do one thing and actually do another. It was a rookie lawmaker’s mistake. She learned from it.

Some friends had little tolerance for her learning curve. On high alert for return of the ancien régime (perhaps with reason), they spoke of throwing this solidly progressive, generous to a fault, Moral Monday arrestee under the bus. Who could they get to primary her?

Neither they nor I could tell you today what that early bill was about.

Nor could many of the ScruHoo readers tell you what happened to the bills over which they remained so angry with Shuler. They remembered he’d “jilted” them on the vote. They’d forgotten they ultimately got what they wanted and Democrats put points on the board.

Unless Democrats win both Georgia Senate seats in January, Biden will need not only tolerance but support as he tries to advance the ball against McConnell’s goal-line defense. What counts are not the individual plays, but points on the board.

“Destroying our allies is the surest way for us to lose and we cannot afford to lose,” Darcy Burner said in her keynote to Netroots Nation in 2009 [timestamp 7:30]. Sometime during that conference, she mentioned using “Scooby snacks” in raising her son. Carrots. Positive reinforcement. And politically? Your state representative or senator does something you liked? Send them $5 or $10. Same with Congress. Every time. Don’t just make angry calls when they disappoint you. Reinforce the good behavior you want to see more of.

Update: Left “not” out “What counts are not the individual plays…”

When Democrats lose major elections, the media invites them to reach out to and better understand Real Americans™. Print reporters and TV crews visit small-town cafes to ask working people having coffee and eggs about the mood out there beyond the Beltway, beyond the hustle of New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

Strange thing is, the same happens when Democrats win big elections. “Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “the Los Angeles Times has given their editorial page over to letters from Trump voters, who had exactly the sort of predictable things to say we have been hearing for far more than four years, thanks to the New York Times and what came to seem like about 11,000 other news outlets hanging on the every word of every white supremacist they could convince to go on the record.”

Over the top, of course. Election maps indicate there are still plenty of outnumbered liberals in such places too. But the underlying assumption in these stories is more-liberal, more-diverse, urban America always has the obligation to understand and accommodate the thoughts and feelings of their more-conservative country cousins. Country cousins have no obligation to return the favor.

Solnit writes:

There’s also often a devil’s bargain buried in all this, that you flatter and, yeah, respect these white people who think this country is theirs by throwing other people under the bus—by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views. And you reinforce that constituency’s sense that they matter more than other people when you pander like this, and pretty much all the problems we’ve faced over the past four years, to say nothing of the last five hundred, come from this sense of white people being more important than nonwhites, Christians than non-Christians, native-born than immigrant, male than female, straight than queer, cis-gender than trans.

This country is their birthright, by god. All others are interlopers. Those who fail to recognize and respect that do so at their political peril. Paul Waldman noted that there is an entire media industry “devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them,” and that if liberals simply showed them more respect (read: deference), hearts and minds would change, kumbaya, etc. “Fuck your feelings” and “Pinochet did nothing wrong” would turn into “Set a spell. Take your shoes off. Y’all come back now, y’hear?”

The devil’s bargain in that is, Solnit writes, as the Trump era has shown, it requires America to throw anyone not from those happier, whiter, more idyllic climes under the bus. The way we assuage the “Fuck your feelings” crowd’s insecurities about their standing in God’s natural order is “by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views.” Indeed, “the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress.”

Like Jesus dispensing healings to all comers, Trump (and Rush Limbaugh) promised flocks they were indeed Real Americans™. That their sins were forgiven. Indeed, they were not sins at all. The unspoken message appended to “Black Lives Matter” is “too” or “as much as yours.” That, you see, is true intolerance: lessers not knowing their places, not recognizing who God put in charge because their god is God. Because some of us need Others below us on the social ladder to feel better about ourselves, as LBJ knew and as Sean McElwee found. They want and need them the way Col. Jessep insisted we need him on that wall. Shorn of that “freedom,” what self-respect do Real Americans™ have left?

There is a “hopelessly naïve version of centrism,” Solnit explains, born perhaps of the therapist’s notion that everyone’s feeling are valid, applied to facts and principles:

But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

I think our side, if you’ll forgive my ongoing shorthand and binary logic, has something to offer everyone and we can and must win in the long run by offering it, and offering it via better stories and better means to make those stories reach everyone. We actually want to see everyone have a living wage, access to healthcare, and lives unburdened by medical, student, and housing debt. We want this to be a thriving planet when the babies born this year turn 80 in 2100. But the recommended compromise means abandoning and diluting our stories, not fortifying and improving them (and finding ways for them to actually reach the rest of America, rather than having them warped or shut out altogether). I’ve spent much of my adult life watching politicians like Bill Clinton and, at times, Barack Obama sell out their own side to placate the other, with dismal results, and I pray that times have changed enough that Joe Biden will not do it all over again.

But why the assumption always that the onus is on the Left to do the work of “understanding” the Right when the Right feels no need to reciprocate? Compromising, as Master Trump taught them, is a sign of weakness, the Right’s cardinal sin, one only lessers commit. And lessers by their nature need not be respected or accommodated. Their voices need not be heard. Their votes need not be counted, as Master Trump taught this week. Indeed, why allow them to vote at all?

In two consecutive national elections and in three of the last six, the party most selected by neighbors that, win or lose, liberals are asked to appease has lost the popular vote. This time by 6 million votes (4%).

Solnit continues:

Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to. If Nazis wanted to reach out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing “Jews will not replace us” and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect. It is a minority position but by granting it deference we give it, over and over, the power of a majority position.

“Why is the onus on the rest of us to explain why we’re trying to do normal? … Why we are trying to uphold the Constitution?” former RNC chair Michael Steele asked Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” [timestamp 1:10:00]. “Why are we having to explain that, and the folks who are, as the president told us he would do, deconstructing the administrative state — they don’t have to explain themselves?”

Republicans are the first to throw down the Chamberlain card, accusing Democrats of being soft on tyranny and unfit to lead. The believe instinctively that anyone willing to appease those among us treading that road, even if it is their own base, are not worthy of their support or votes. By their own code, appeasers are weak and unworthy of respect. Lessers by definition.

“If half of us believe the earth is flat,” Solnit writes, “we do not make peace by settling on it being halfway between round and flat. Those of us who know it’s round will not recruit them through compromise.”

We might, however, defeat them by out-organizing them. Defeat takes time to sink in, but repeated defeat has persuasive power of its own. Americans hate losers. Ask Donald Trump.

I’m sure some of you who had a pesky little sibling can relate:

He is the greatest con man that ever lived in America.

And these people can’t admit it because it would expose them as the dupes they are.

Brett Fryar is a middle-class Republican. A 50-year-old chiropractor in this west Texas town, he owns a small business. He has two undergraduate degrees and a master’s degree, in organic chemistry. He attends Southcrest Baptist Church in nearby Lubbock.

Fryar didn’t much like Donald Trump at first, during the U.S. president’s 2016 campaign. He voted for Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries.

Now, Fryar says he would go to war for Trump. He has joined the newly formed South Plains Patriots, a group of a few hundred members that includes a “reactionary” force of about three dozen – including Fryar and his son, Caleb – who conduct firearms training.

Nothing will convince Fryar and many others here in Sundown – including the town’s mayor, another Patriots member – that Democrat Joe Biden won the Nov. 3 presidential election fairly. They believe Trump’s stream of election-fraud allegations and say they’re preparing for the possibility of a “civil war” with the American political left.

“If President Trump comes out and says: ‘Guys, I have irrefutable proof of fraud, the courts won’t listen, and I’m now calling on Americans to take up arms,’ we would go,” said Fryar, wearing a button-down shirt, pressed slacks and a paisley tie during a recent interview at his office.

The unshakable trust in Trump in this town of about 1,400 residents reflects a national phenomenon among many Republicans, despite the absence of evidence in a barrage of post-election lawsuits by the president and his allies. About half of Republicans polled by Reuters/Ipsos said Trump “rightfully won” the election but had it stolen from him in systemic fraud favoring Biden, according to a survey conducted between Nov. 13 and 17. Just 29% of Republicans said Biden rightfully won. Other polls since the election have reported that an even higher proportion – up to 80% – of Republicans trust Trump’s baseless fraud narrative.

In Reuters interviews with 50 Trump voters, all said they believed the election was rigged or in some way illegitimate. Of those, 20 said they would consider accepting Biden as their president, but only in light of proof that the election was conducted fairly. Most repeated debunked conspiracy theories espoused by Trump, Republican officials and conservative media claiming that millions of votes were dishonestly switched to Biden in key states by biased poll workers and hacked voting machines.

Many voters interviewed by Reuters said they formed their opinions by watching emergent right-wing media outlets such as Newsmax and One American News Network that have amplified Trump’s fraud claims. Some have boycotted Fox News out of anger that the network called Biden the election winner and that some of its news anchors – in contrast to its opinion show stars – have been skeptical of Trump’s fraud allegations.

“I just sent Fox News an email,” Fryar said, telling the network: “You’re the only news I’ve watched for the last six years, but I will not watch you anymore.”

I think we can see the problem, can’t we? These people are being informed by a toxic stream of disinformation and propaganda and it’s metastasizing on social media and traditional media. I don’t think we have any hope of a vaccine for that.

GOP politicians are excitedly taking notes:

It may not be the last time. Many Republicans see attacks on election integrity as a winning issue for future campaigns – including the next presidential race, according to one Republican operative close to the Trump campaign. The party, the person said, is setting up a push for “far more stringent oversight on voting procedures in 2024,” when the party’s nominee will likely be Trump or his anointed successor.

Translation: “stringent” vote suppression. I don’t think there will be any hope of that during a Democratic administration. But in the those swing states that are run by Republicans you can bet that Democrats will be forced to walk on hot coals to vote in 2024 — particularly African Americans and other racial minorities.

Meanwhile, Republicans in this country are increasingly deluded:

In Grant County, West Virginia – a mountainous region where more than 88% of voters backed the president – trust in Trump runs deep. Janet Hedrick, co-owner of the Smoke Hole Caverns log cabin resort in the small town of Cabins, said she would never accept Biden as a legitimate president.

“There’s millions and millions of Trump votes that were just thrown out,” said Hedrick, 70, a retired teacher and librarian. “That computer was throwing them out.”

At the Sunset Restaurant in Moorefield, West Virginia – a diner featuring omelettes, hotcakes and waitresses who remember your order – a mention of the election sparked a spirited discussion at one table. Gene See, a retired highway construction inspector, and Bob Hyson, a semi-retired insurance sales manager, said Trump had been cheated, that Biden had dementia and that Democrats planned all along to quickly replace Biden with his more liberal running mate for vice president, Kamala Harris.

“I think if they ever get to the bottom of it, they will find massive fraud,” said another of the diners, Larry Kessel, a 67-year-old farmer.

Kessel’s wife, Jane, patted him on the arm, trying to calm him, as he grew agitated while railing against anti-Trump media bias.

Trump’s rage against the media has lately included rants against Fox News. He has pushed his supporters towards more right-wing outlets such as Newsmax and One America News Network, which have championed the president’s fraud claims.

Rory Wells, 51, a New Jersey lawyer who attended a pro-Trump “stop the steal” election protest in Trenton last week, said he now watches Newsmax because Fox isn’t sufficiently conservative.

“I like that I get to hear from Rudy Giuliani and others who are not immediately discounted as being crazy,” he said of Trump’s lead election lawyer.

In Sundown, Texas, Mayor Jonathan Strickland said there’s “no way in hell” Biden won fairly. The only way he’ll believe it, he said, is if Trump himself says so.

“Trump is the only one we’ve been able to trust for the last four years,” said Strickland, an oilfield production engineer. “As far as the civil war goes, I don’t think it’s off the table.”

If it comes to a fight, Caleb Fryar is ready. But the 26-year-old son of Brett Fryar, the chiropractor, said he hoped Trump’s fraud allegations would instead spark a massive mobilization of Republican voters in future elections.

Asked whether Trump might be duping his followers, he said it’s hard to fathom.

“If I’m being manipulated by Trump … then he is the greatest con man that ever lived in America,” Caleb Fryar said. “I think he’s the greatest patriot that ever lived.”

Will these people ever come down to earth? I don’t know. I sure hope their parachute opens.

(And yes, I realize we don’t need to focus on the Trump voters, but this article discusses the sources of their delusion and I think that is something we have to face whether we like it or not.)

He was certainly given an orderly transition. Hillary Clinton conceded the election the morning after election day. The day after that Obama had Trump over to the White House:

President Obama met with Trump in the Oval Office for 90 minutes, just two days after Election Day. Obama told Trump he wanted him to succeed and would support him in a smooth transition. Trump, who for years falsely claimed Obama was not American and even accused the president of founding ISIS on the campaign trail, called Obama a “very good man” in their meeting and said he would heed Obama’s counsel.

Biden, then the vice president, spoke with Mike Pence in the VP’s West Wing office the same day Obama and Trump met. Biden and Pence later met on November 16, 2016, spending two hours at the vice president’s residence with their wives, Jill Biden and Karen Pence. Biden joked he’d be available to Pence as “senior staff,” on call 24/7.

Their November 16 meeting was seen as a peace offering between the two men from opposing political parties. “We are just very grateful for the hospitality today for the Vice President and the second lady,” Pence said then.Biden continued to offer Pence advice on foreign policy issues for the first several months of Pence’s tenure, and their last substantive conversation on related matters occurred in the summer of 2017, Biden aides told CNN’s Arlette Saenz in 2019.

The transitions can be vitally important:

As President Trump continues to contest the results of the election, President-elect Joe Biden continues to shape his administration, which will take office on Jan. 20. But there is still no formal transition underway, a far cry from the last several times new presidents have taken power.

In 2009, just before then-President-elect Barack Obama was to deliver his inaugural address, members of the outgoing Bush administration’s national security team sat down with the people who were about to take their place.

Stephen Hadley, who was George W. Bush’s national security adviser, remembers they were set to talk about the threat posed by Iran. He recounted the meeting at a webinar last month sponsored by the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition.

“And that weekend we had gotten intelligence that there was a potential threat to the inauguration itself,” he said. “So that Saturday morning, we had the FBI director come in and brief both the existing and incoming national security teams about that projected threat, what we knew about it and what we were doing about it, and then had kind of a roundtable discussion.”

Among those taking part in the discussion was then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, who was set to become Obama’s secretary of state. Hadley says Clinton posed an interesting question.

” ‘Well, what do we tell President Obama if he’s in the middle of his inauguration speech and he hears a loud bang, a potential bomb attack or something like that? What does he do? Does he hunker down? Do we rush him off the stage? How does he want to handle that moment?’ Well, that was a very productive discussion,” Hadley recalled.

Thankfully, there was no bang or attack, and Obama’s inauguration proceeded smoothly.

National security is one of the major reasons smooth transitions are so crucial, says Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Perry notes that the 9/11 Commission pointed to the shortened transition period between Bill Clinton’s administration and the Bush administration after the disputed 2000 results in Florida as playing a role in al-Qaida’s attack in 2001.

That, as well as the economic crisis at the end of Bush’s term, is why Perry believes the outgoing Bush administration worked so hard for a successful transition with the Obama White House.

“They were leaving office, and Obama was coming in in the midst of this horrible crisis that almost feels like it pales compared to what we’re facing now,” Perry says. “But remember, at the time it seemed pretty dire because the entire economic system was collapsing around the world and in the United States and was within inches of seizing up.”

The Obama administration tried to emulate the smooth transition between it and the Bush administration after President Trump was elected four years ago. But Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, says Trump made it difficult.

Trump replaced his transition team just after the election, and McDonough said at the recent webinar, “it appears that a lot of the material that was prepared for the transition team just wasn’t consumed.”

Ok, so the imbecile and his cronies didn’t pay any attention to the transition because they were stupid. That does not mean that getting access to the civil servants and other professionals isn’t important. Trump is just going to refuse all the way along I expect. There will be no real transition. I think that’s perfectly clear.

There are many takes around talking about how Trump’s antics may not succeed but they’ve laid the groundwork for a future fascist to exploit the weaknesses in our system. This one by Jamelle Bouie in his newsletter is nice and concise:

It is true that Donald Trump is attempting to overturn the results of the election and seize power over the will of the voters. It is also true that this attempt is as haphazard and amateurish as you can imagine, spearheaded by Rudy Giuliani and a handful of other third-string Trump loyalists. They hope to throw out as many ballots as needed to change the results in the five swing states that gave Joe Biden his victory. If that fails, which it pretty much already has, they hope to create confusion around certifying the votes in those states and then pressure state legislatures to ignore the voters and send Trump electors to Congress.

There have been contested elections and attempts to reverse the results, but there’s never been anything quite like this, where the loser of a fair election attempts to discard the outcome. Success would mean the end of constitutional government in the United States. Yes, the Electoral College theoretically allows state legislatures to assign a state’s electors as they please, but not in a post hoc fashion. More fundamentally, no matter what you might think of our political institutions, the foundation of American government is the consent of the governed. We have an absolute, fundamental right to choose our own leaders. To subvert this is to end the American republic.

Now, Trump won’t succeed. His margin of defeat is too great, and he lacks the institutional support in the courts and the military he would need to pull off a successful coup. But his effort, however ramshackle, is still an unacceptable attack on our democracy. It does not bode well for the future. Somewhere, quite possibly in Washington, an aspiring American autocrat is watching this, seeing the vulnerabilities in our system, feeling for those places where, with a little more effort, you could make a breakthrough.

Trump will fail in his attempt to overturn the election. But absent serious reforms to our political system, he’s cleared the ground for whatever wickedness follows in his footsteps.

And it didn’t start with this post-election carnival. He’s been showing the way for the cynical, authoritarian strain in American politics since he took office, starting with firing Comey.

But I will say again, as I’ve been saying on loop for years now, it isn’t Trump. None of this would be possible if he didn’t have the full support of his collaborators in the Republican Party. In fact, you can go all the way back to Bush Sr’s Christmas pardons and the machination of the 2000 recount and more recently MItch McConnell’s outright theft of a Supreme Court seat in 2016. In fact, the latter was a real escalation in that it could have been done without completely busting the norms that governed normal procedures. They had the majority. They could have slow-walked the hearings, created diversions done any number of things before finally simply voting him down closer to the election. The result would have been the same but it would have preserved the notion that presidents have a right to name Supreme Court justices.

McConnell wanted the people to see that he had the power to say “no, we’re not doing that, we’re changing the rules” simply because they had the power to do it. And then he demonstrated that he had the power to change them back. That lesson should have told Americans everything they need to know about what the Republican party stands for.

Trump has also demonstrated the power of the executive but more by blundering around like a bull in a China shop and constantly challenging Republicans to remain loyal so that they could achieve their own ends with the power of the presidency. They more than rose to the occasion. They have shown that a president can use his power without limit if he has the support of a ruthless party that will back him to the hilt. That lesson will not be lost on the next one.

Update: Masha Gessen at the New Yorker discusses the difference between a con and a coup in this piece:

“Con versus coup” might be a false dichotomy. A coup is a power claim made illegitimately, often but not always with the use of force, sometimes illegally but sometimes within the bounds of a constitution. A con is a mushy term: it can be a criminal act or simply an unethical one, perhaps just wily and manipulative. A con, in other words, is an illegitimate act of persuasion. A coup always begins as a con. If the con is successful—if the power claim is persuasive—then a coup has occurred.

You can see it better with failed coups. In August, 1991, the leadership of the Russian K.G.B. and some Politburo hardliners placed President Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest and declared themselves in charge of the country. On the second night of their coup, they held a press conference. Journalists who had for a few years enjoyed unprecedented freedom seemed to fall in line and accept the coup plotters’ power claim; they asked questions about, say, plans for rejuvenating the command economy. Then a twenty-four-year-old reporter named Tatyana Malkina rose and asked, “Do you realize that last night you committed a coup d’état?” Something shifted in the room. Journalists started bombarding the coup plotters with more combative questions, and the plotters themselves suddenly looked like lost, hungover men in ill-fitting suits. They ended the press conference, which state television had broadcast in its entirety, and in less than forty-eight hours the coup collapsed. We may never know what else was going on out of public view, but this is how many Russians remember it: the brave reporter in a frilly dress, the trembling hands of crooks and hustlers who didn’t believe in their own legitimacy, the end.

In July, 2016, a faction of the Turkish military attempted a coup. The government thwarted it within hours. The instant end of the coup was televised: people the world over saw tanks on bridges in Istanbul and immediately began speculating that the coup was merely a pretext for the larger crackdown that followed. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government arrested tens of thousands of people and fired many more, mostly on suspicion of belonging to the Hizmet movement, led by the émigré cleric Fethullah Gülen. Gülen denied that he had anything to do with the coup and suggested that it might have been staged by Erdoğan himself. Skeptics pointed to the holes in the coup plotters’ plans: they failed to secure total control of the media, they didn’t manage to arrest Erdoğan, they were poorly coördinated. Were they even serious? Similar conspiracy theories still circulate about the 1991 Russian coup: the plotters didn’t close the airports or turn off the Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s home phone. What kind of coup is that? A failed one.

Successful coup plotters don’t do everything right, either. No aspiring dictator can commandeer enough military power to be able to dominate an entire country that refuses to recognize him. No coup plotters can close every channel of communication and stop all movement. No one usurping power can force people to forget that different norms and expectations existed as recently as yesterday.

What successful coup plotters do is con enough people into thinking that they have already taken power. No one can fully predict when such a claim will succeed or fail.

Yeah. I’ll be thinking about that for a while. I think we know that they have already convinced an enormous number of people that they won the election despite the fact that it is a complete fantasy…