Month: December 2020

McConnell made the great sacrifice of acknowledging the election results today as if it was perfectly normal for a president who clearly lost to refuse to concede and that it’s equally normal for the opposing party to fail to acknowledge the victory until the electoral college votes. They are all such unctuous phonies.

This isn’t going to be the end of it for House Republicans who are pledging to fight the certification of the electoral college results on January 6th.

“We have a superior role under the Constitution than the Supreme Court does, than any federal court judge does, than any state court judge does,” Brooks told the New York Times. “What we say, goes. That’s the final verdict.”

Brooks told the Times he plans on challenging the electors in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin.

In order for an objection to get a debate, he will need at least one senator to join him. It’s not clear so far that any senators will object.

If an objection is filed, each Chamber would have to debate for two hours. For electors to be tossed, the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree.

According to Axios, McConnell is trying to ensure that no Senators will participate in this sham. But lest you think he is doing it because he cares about our democracy or the country — think again. He reportedly asked the GOP Senators not to cooperate with the scheme:

This is about politics as much as about doing the right thing. McConnell expressed concern about such a vote, because the GOP would have to vote it down — something that could damage incumbents up for re-election in 2022.

He says it will damage Republicans to vote against destroying our democracy.

In 2022.

I don’t know if he really believes that or he just thinks his caucus is so far gone they can’t be counted on to recognize reality. I’m not sure it matters. It’s lunacy either way.

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Now that Biden’s election has been secured and we have a vaccine on the way, I know people are feeling a little bit more optimistic that we might be able to get back to normal in 2021. I know I’m yearning for it. These past four years have been exhausting and 2020 was an absolute horror. I still can’t believe the death toll and it’s going to get worse before it gets better unfortunately.

My first post on the virus was in January of this year. (I unfortunately called it the Wuhan virus, which was what it was referred to in the literature at the time, but I should have realized it was wrong to label it that way.) I was alarmed but under the impression it wasn’t going to be a problem for us, largely based upon the reassurance from the government. That was a mistake. If anyone should have known that Donald Trump’s administration was not to be trusted, it should have been me.

I still can hardly believe how bad America’s response to this crisis has been. If we ever had any faith that the bureaucracy could carry on despite poor leadership from our elected officials, I think we’ve been disabused of that notion. The alleged Deep State that operates on its own apparently isn’t very efficient.

I think this has shown us as nothing else has, that government matters. And our crisis of democracy is just as acute as our health crisis. The damage Trump and his collaborators in the party and the right wing media have caused is immense and all the political and profit incentives lead toward more normalization, not less. It’s the path of least resistance.

I have been posting to this blog seven days a week since 2002. And just as my contributors and I have closely observed and analyzed what was happening in the run-up to the Iraq war, the kidnap torture regime of the Bush administration, the financial crisis, the Grand Bargain, the rise of the progressive movement, the Trump disaster and everything that happened in between, we’ll continue to keep an eye on what’s happening now.

I’ve always said, if nothing else, we document the atrocities. And sadly, if you look over the past 18 years there is plenty to document, no matter who is president or which party has the majority in congress. This is one of the most tumultuous times in our history and as citizens we have an obligation to pay attention. We’re here to help with that if we can.

If you would like to help out with that you can do that by hitting one of the buttons below or sending something to the snail mail address on the left sidebar. I cannot say how much it means to me.

cheers,

digby

If this didn’t brainwash 50 million people or so, you might be tempted to just shrug it off and let them live in their little bubble. Unfortunately, it does affect many millions and it’s going to have a negative influence on our politics for quite some time, Trump or no Trump. They are no longer tethered to reality and it’s very hard to see how a democracy can function this way:

President Trump’s media criticism is usually binary — there are “good stories,” favorable to him, and then the other category.

Most news coverage on Monday fell into that other category. One by one, presidential electors in all 50 states and the District of Columbia formally recognized Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect, the latest and most significant rejection so far of Mr. Trump’s desperate attempts to undo the will of the voters.

But inside the sprawling and self-reinforcing network of websites, podcasts and video news that has fed some of the most reckless and unrealistic claims about the election, the myth of Mr. Trump’s political survival endures.

The lead story on the Gateway Pundit, which researchers have identified as one of the major sources pro-Trump misinformation online, floated the idea of a “BOMBSHELL” ruling in a case on Monday that the site teased as a possible game-changer: “Will a Small County in Northern Michigan Be the Key to Overturning the Nation’s Election Results?”

On a podcast hosted by Mr. Trump’s former White House chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, a conservative activist vowed to file a new lawsuit seeking to reverse the electors’ vote — adding to the dozens of suits so far, nearly all of which have been dismissed. “Intimidation and fear is not something that works in a democracy,” said Phill Kline, the director of the conservative Amistad Project, vowing to continue the fight.

The podcast was one of at least six on the list of Apple’s 100 most popular podcasts that are hosted by someone who has been vocally supportive of Mr. Trump’s attack on the nation’s electoral system.

The world seems to have recognized what the Electoral College affirmed on Monday: Mr. Trump will be leaving office whether he wants to accept his fate or not. The Supreme Court refused to second-guess this reality on Friday when it rejected a legally dubious, last-minute maneuver by the State of Texas. Numerous world leaders have accepted it by congratulating Mr. Biden. Even Mr. Trump’s own administration eventually bowed and agreed to formally begin the transition process.

Yet six weeks after his defeat, the aggressive campaign by Mr. Trump and his media boosters to insist with each new setback that the election is far from settled isn’t letting up.

Inside this bubble, the president’s allies present virtually impossible outcomes as completely plausible. They raise expectations of victory in unwinnable lawsuits and battles over electors that state legislators are unwilling to have. They bolster the credibility of questionable witnesses and advocates whose most important qualification is an unequivocal conviction that Mr. Trump won in November, despite all available evidence.

And then when they don’t meet the bar they set, they move it.

This is what the president’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller, demonstrated on Monday when he insisted in an interview on “Fox & Friends” that the Electoral College vote was largely irrelevant because all that truly mattered was Inauguration Day, Jan. 20.

“So we have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner,” Mr. Miller said, resetting the calendar to another scheme to invalidate the votes of millions of Americans, because the previous one had flopped.

Some allies of Mr. Trump had hoped the Electoral College vote would end with a different outcome: that Republican legislators in six battleground states would name slates of electors favorable to Mr. Trump. Late last week, a coalition of leaders affiliated with the Tea Party, conservative political organizations and social conservative groups wrote an open letter urging activists to “begin mobilizing immediately to contact their state legislators, as well as their representatives in the House and Senate, to demand that clean slates of electors be appointed.”

The upheaval failed to materialize and the electors cast their votes on Monday without incident. The few instances of resistance by Republicans were muted and entirely symbolic.

All along, Trump-friendly media personalities like Mark Levin, who hosts one of the most popular talk radio shows in the country, have led their audiences to believe that it was possible to pressure state lawmakers to reject Mr. Biden’s victory. They have often based their confidence on the wild accusations of people with political motives and diminished credibility.

Mr. Levin, along with Rush Limbaugh and Mr. Bannon, was one of the first to give a national platform to the conspiracy theories of the lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, whose various claims of fraud involve a multinational network of saboteurs and domestic enemies of the president both dead (Hugo Chávez of Venezuela) and alive (“Never Trump” Republican officials).

In an interview with Mr. Levin on Nov. 10, for instance, Mr. Wood called for the Biden electors to be replaced in a special session of Georgia’s legislature “so they can elect the electors to vote for Donald Trump.” He then falsely claimed that Mr. Trump not only won the state by “a landslide” but also won the national popular vote with 70 percent support.

On their own, comments as outlandish as these might not rise to become as widely accepted as they are now among Mr. Trump’s base. But the hosts validated them beyond just giving them a platform. They vouched for the professional credibility of the lawyers.

Speaking to his audience the next day, Mr. Limbaugh cited Mr. Wood’s remarks and said, “I’m telling you that if you listen to Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, they continue to make it sound like it’s a slam dunk.” Mr. Limbaugh offered his assurances that the lawyers would not put their careers on the line if they weren’t serious.

Limbaugh knows this is bullshit. So do all the others. They are just giving their people what they want.

Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell and Vladimir Putin both acknowledged Biden’s victory today. Big of them. They, along with every last Republican in the congress knew very well that Biden had won it over a month ago. They were just waiting to see if Trump could steal it. If it had been any closer, he might very well have gotten it done.

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CNN advises readers on what constitutes social distancing bubbles that “can help you stay safe and sane” and still see other human beings during the holidays:

A Covid-19 bubble is the (select few) friends or family members you can socialize with and enjoy a meal with, mask-free. But the most important rule is no one can socialize in-person with anyone outside the bubble, especially without face masks.

It’s critical to keep this bubble as small as possible, said Dr. Sadiya Khan, an epidemiologist and assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“The fewer, the better,” she said. “Your bubble consists of everybody that your entire bubble is in contact with. So even if you’re only including one other person in your bubble, but that person has 10 people in their bubble, you’ve now got 11 people in your bubble.”

My bubble is mighty small. Luckily, it includes a divorced friend who used to cater for Los Angeles celebrities. She sees virtually no one else and likes to invite us over for dinner so she can cook for company. We call her place “the best restaurant in town you can’t eat at.” Since March, that’s “eating out.” Even then, we keep six feet apart.

One wonders what months of isolation will mean for divorce rates in the next year or two.

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Among the damages the outgoing president has wrought is the infantilization of the Republican Party. Donald Trump never led by accepting the responsibilities that come with the job of president but, petulant man-child that he is, he set an example that much of his party and his most fervent followers were eager to emulate.

Trump modeled name-calling and schoolyard bullying and taunts on Twitter, in his public statements, and at his rallies. And tantrums. (I almost forgot the tantrums.) He made adult adolescent behavior as socially acceptable for his followers as open racism. Cultist see; cultist do. The country is worse off for Trump’s tenure both domestically and internationally. The man who for decades complained the world was laughing at us (him) made it his mission to prove it by giving the world a president to laugh at.

This happens at every NATO summit with Trump. Every G7. Every G20. The US President is mocked by US allies behind his back. pic.twitter.com/FWncEM7jVs

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) December 4, 2019

The families of 300,000 Americans dead under his mismanagement of the CPOVD-19 crisis are not laughing.

Paul Krugman suspects that Republicans do not actually “believe” what they claim to, but that “what Republicans say they believe flows from what they want to do.” That is, “the point isn’t that the G.O.P. believes untrue things. It is, rather, that the party has become hostile to the very idea that there’s an objective reality that might conflict with its political goals.”

But there is belief and there is behavior.

Under Trump’s tenure, adolescent acting out and threats of violence have become behavior his party not only finds acceptable in its base, but in its leadership. If political stunts were policy, they would count as Republican accomplishments in the Trump era.

Trump electors on Monday demanded they be allowed into the Michigan State Capitol building to cast votes for Trump despite Trump having lost the state. Republican state legislator, Gary Eisen, suggested on the radio that violence could erupt during the Lansing protest he had agreed to assist. The party subsequently stripped Eisen of his committee assignments.

You’re supposed to stack yourselves one on top of the other under that trench coat. https://t.co/y1Yc5H3YCe

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

A single protester Tuesday afternoon clarified just how juvenile Trumpism is at its core. During a stand-up report outside Michigan’s State Capitol, a man wearing a Three Percenter sweatshirt and carrying an American flag stood behind MSNBC’s Vaughn Hilliard for minutes chanting, “NBC sucks!” Just to change it up now and again, he switched to chanting, “Liar! Liar!” in a sing-song tone usually heard only on a grade school playground.

"No longer are we as journalists able to have conversations about taxation, about healthcare, about foreign policy, with folks on the ground… because of the division over the basic belief of whether there is integrity in our election system"- @VaughnHillyard w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/HiEI7lxfjH

— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) December 14, 2020

What are you, 12? Developmentally, that would be older than the outgoing president he considers a leader.

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GOP Sen. Kevin Cramer, a top Trump ally, when asked by Hill pool if Biden is president-elect: pic.twitter.com/d7eH8BWfoG

— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) December 14, 2020

Cramer: “Well it seems to me that being elected by the Electoral College isa threshold where a title like that is probably most appropriate and it’s, I suppose you can say official, if there is such a thing as official President-Elect, or anything else-elect. And there’s an inauguration that will swear somebody in and that person will be the president of the United States, but whether you call it that or not, you know, there are legal challenges that are ongoing — not very many — probably not a remedy that would change the outcome bit so I don’t …

Again, I don’t know how a politician refers to another politician but it does look to me like the big race is really between the inaugural committee and the Justice Department at this point so we’ll see how the emails turn out.

WTF is he talking about??? Emails??? Shoot me now …

If I had to guess I’d guess that deluded Newsmax and OAN viewers think that the Justice Department is going to indict Hunter Biden over some emails which have been around for a while. And the Inaugural Committee? What is that about? They are just some party planners!

I guess he really, really loves his Dear Leader and he just can’t wrap his mind around the fact that he won’t be there after January 20th.

How many of these people are there?

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Barr out, not fired, but Trump announces it. https://t.co/6GzNfl97ZW

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) December 14, 2020

Check out the bizarroworld “resignation” letter. Good lord this man loves to be a toady:

…Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, an outstanding person, will become Acting Attorney General. Highly respected Richard Donoghue will be taking over the duties of Deputy Attorney General. Thank you to all! pic.twitter.com/V5sqOJT9PM

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 14, 2020

There are a lot of reasons Barr is deserting the sinking ship “to spend time with his family.” Apparently, his obsequious letter was done in order to avoid Trump firing him by twitter. But it’s very possible that he just didn’t want to be involved with this. (Or maybe he did but wanted to be out of government when the shit hit the fan.) Anyway:

President Trump has expressed interest in pursuing the appointment of a special counsel to investigate allegations of fraud in the November elections and issues related to Hunter Biden, according to people familiar with the matter.

In recent days, the president has directed advisers to look for people who could serve in such a position, one of the people said, as lawsuits and other efforts by Mr. Trump and his campaign to reverse the election results flounder. White House officials and allies of the president on Capitol Hill and elsewhere have also pushed for the appointment of a special counsel, another person familiar with the discussions said.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has told people that the president is interested in pursuing a special counsel to investigate election fraud and wants to act quickly, one of the people said.

This is an act of sabotage. They want a Whitewaterbenghazi scandal all baked in before Biden even takes office. And you can be sure that Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and the other reptilian collaborators are behind this. Recall this power play over the Durham appointment explains why:

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will hold hearings for Biden’s attorney general pick, want a pledge that the nominee will not interfere with Durham’s work.

“I think John Durham’s investigation is very important, and any attorney general who would impede that investigation or who would obstruct justice shouldn’t be confirmed,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a member of the Judiciary panel.

A special counsel can only be fired by the attorney general for a stated reason such as misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest or violating department policies.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who also serves on Judiciary, defended the need for Durham’s work to continue after Biden takes office.

“The public deserves to know what is going on here and they deserve to get all of the facts and information,” he said. “The investigation needs to conclude but it needs to be allowed to conclude in a timely fashion.”

Barr revealed in a letter to Congress Tuesday that he appointed Durham as special counsel on Oct 19, giving him the same authority and independence as former special counsel Robert Mueller, who headed an investigation of Trump’s inner circle that lasted nearly two years and cost more than $30 million.

Trump says Jeffrey Rosen will be Barr’s acting replacement. He’s in there for a reason., And I’m guess this is it. (Pardons too, but they’ll be handled by the WH Counsel’s office.) Barr is the most political, corrupt AG in history and that’s saying something considering the precedents of John Mitchell and Ed Meese. He’s special.

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It’s so nice that Rudy got such wonderful care from taxpayer funded doctors. He’s the president’s personal lawyer so he’s obviously an essential worker who deserved the kind of treatment only given to 1% of the patients who get sick from COVID:

“Dr. Trump, he was very confident in it,” Rudy Giuliani said in an appearance on his video podcast, Common Sense, released Friday, referring to the scarce and experimental treatment that he received.

Days after being released from Georgetown University hospital, Giuliani provided on the podcast more detail than he has before about his velvet-rope COVID treatment. Special attention from the White House and access to rare, newly developed treatments spirited Giuliani from precipitously declining oxygen levels to health in a matter of days.

Giuliani said that he had gotten the medicine, a monoclonal antibody treatment manufactured by Regeneron, out of an exception “if you’re willing to take whatever risk there is, which I was willing to take because Dr. [Sean] Conley had used it for President Trump.”

“I took that along with the flu shot and some other medicines,” Giuliani added. “And I must say I recovered.”

But even though Conley – and an assortment of rare medicines – get the practical credit for Giuliani’s treatment, he assigned the real cause for his cure to President Trump.

Giuliani’s comments provide some access to the strange world in which President Trump can dispense medical care as a benefit to those in his inner circle, and receive fealty as a response.

The former New York City mayor went further than he previously has in claiming that White House doctors were responsible for his care.

“Dr. Sean Conley, the White House physician, oversaw it,” Giuliani said.
“[He] kept in touch, made sure everything went right, gave me a lot of good advice.”

The former New York City mayor said that he fell ill on Dec. 3.

Giuliani said that while he was a “big believer” in “early detection” of the “CCP virus,” among other ailments, but that this time he declined to get tested after first experiencing symptoms.

“I probably did have symptoms for a few days – I was traveling very fast and going to one state after another testifying in hearings concerning the election, I had gone in five days to four states,” Giuliani said. “Really stressful hearings – some people were threatened, this whole anti-Trump thing has become a horrible sickness eating away at the souls of many people.”

But it wasn’t until he got home and spoke with his girlfriend Maria Ryan, a nurse practitioner and New Hampshire hospital CEO, that he found out he had the virus.

“She noticed that I looked a little pale,” Giuliani said, before telling him that he had symptoms of COVID after noticing that his blood oxygen levels were dangerously low.

“She got my son on the phone, and he said the same. Finally she got Dr. Conley on the phone from the White House who I’ve gotten to know working with President Trump,” Giuliani said. “And the combination of three doctors, Dr. Ryan, Dr. Conley, and now Dr. Giuliani, who took over my care, got me to go to the hospital.”

Giuliani later added, without elaborating, that his time at the hospital began with a “substantial” emergency operation. Doctors found that he had “COVID pneumonia,” and administered oxygen to him, along with remdesivir (“the new medicine that’s been developed within the last, less than a year, for dealing with the viral load of CCP virus”), four days of the steroid Dexmethasone (“I probably have more energy now than when I went in”), and Regeneron, the much sought-after monoclonal antibody treatment.

“Doctors thought it was almost miraculous how fast I recovered,” Giuliani said. “From the first day even to the second day, there was remarkable recovery.”

This is infuriating. How dare this man get this very special treatment on the basis of “Dr Trump’s” intervention when the asshole traveled all over the country refusing to wear masks infecting people all over the place!

This is grotesque. But then how could it be otherwise? It’s Rudy Giuliani.

Every day, the number of families mourning the death of a loved one to Covid-19 keeps growing at a devastating rate.

More than 300,000 people in the US have died from coronavirus since the first known death on February 6. That’s an average of more than 961 deaths a day.

But this holiday season has been especially brutal, with more than 50,000 deaths in just the past month, according to Johns Hopkins University.

In the past week, an average of 2,403 people in the US have died from Covid-19 every day

Rudy was very lucky and very, very privileged. Those 2400 people who are dying every day aren’t so lucky. And he and his famous client don’t give a damn about any of them.

My God. This just gets worse and worse. That tens of millions of people are fighting to keep the monster Donald Trump and his collaborators in power is simply astonishing. How many people would have to die before they wake up to what they’ve done?

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It looks like we’re going to be forced to spend the next couple of years hanging on to Trump’s every tweet because he’s threatening to run again and everyone assumes he is the frontrunner. I wish I thought that was absurd, but recall that Sarah Palin was once the frontrunner for the 2012 nomination until her cheap and obvious grifting got in the way… (Trump is different — his grifting is part of his appeal.)

The following article suggests that he may not really run, he just wants people to think he will.

The president has spent days calling a dozen or more allies to ask what they think he needs to do over the next two years to “stay part of the conversation,” according to two people, including one who spoke to the president. And while Trump has told allies he plans to run for president again, he has also indicated he could back out in two years if he determines he’ll have a tough time winning, said three people familiar with the discussions.

Essentially, at this point, Trump appears just as interested in people talking about a Trump 2024 campaign as he is in actually launching a real campaign, even if he may ultimately turn his flirtation into a serious bid, according to interviews with 11 Republicans who worked for Trump or helped in his two races.

Formally running for president would mean a lot of things aides say Trump doesn’t want to deal with: financial disclosure forms, building campaign infrastructure, the possibility of losing again. But simply teasing a presidential run — without actually filing the paperwork or erecting a campaign — gets Trump the attention he needs for the next two years.

Attention will help sustain his business, parts of which lost millions of dollars while he was in office. Attention will help pay off his debts, which will need to be paid off in the coming years. Attention will help discredit his investigators, who are examining whether Trump illegally inflated his assets.

It’s a strategy Trump has used before. Prior to his 2016 run, Trump expressed interest in at least four different presidential bids spanning all the way to the late 1980s, only to ultimately back out.

“Trump has probably no idea if he will actually run, but because he only cares about himself and his association with the party has only been about his ambitions rather than what it stands for, he will try to freeze the field and keep as many people on the sidelines,” said a former White House aide. “Just for the sake of keeping his options open and, yes, keeping the attention all for himself.”

Trump hasn’t announced his candidacy yet in part because he won’t acknowledge he lost, falsely asserting widespread voter fraud gave the race to President-elect Joe Biden. On Monday, electors will meet in states across the country to officially cast their votes, a move expected to cement Biden’s win and prompt more Republicans to accept the victory.

That vote will train more focus on Trump’s future plans. Many in the MAGA base and even some prospective 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls have already thrown their support behind another Trump White House bid.

“There’s nobody really better than him to carry the torch,” said John Fredericks, a conservative radio host who served on the Trump campaign’s 2020 advisory committee.

In his calls to allies, Trump has been asking them specifically how he can campaign for four years, and soliciting advice on how to navigate the first two years. He has talked about traveling to the Middle East, a region where he would be well-received, according to the two people familiar with the calls. The visit would allow him to promote his policies there, including agreements his administration helped negotiate to normalize relations between Israel and several Arab nations. [YIKES!!!]

Among those he’s called are Fox News host Sean Hannity, former White House communications director Bill Shine, longtime allies Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie and former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell, according to one of people familiar with the calls. None of these people are dissuading him about running, but, according to the person, Trump has already dismissed concerns from those who think it’s a bad idea.

Some allies have privately urged Trump to announce he is running on Inauguration Day – as he did in 2017 — to try to take attention away from Biden and satisfy Trump’s need for attention. But Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and top aide, and Bill Stepien, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, are advising him to take his time to announce, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

“He’s going to announce,” according to the person. “It’s not a question of whether he will announce. The question is when he is going to announce.”

[…]

If Trump is just technically exploring a potential candidacy, he doesn’t have to register as a candidate, even if he conducts polling, travels and calls potential supporters, according to the Federal Elections Commission and election lawyers. But if he makes declarative statements about running, purchases campaign ads or spends more than $5,000 on an actual campaign, he would have to register, they added.

“I think it’s important for Trump to boldly telegraph to the public that this election was a sham, that it can never happen again, and that he will lead the opposition for the next four years, including demanding election reforms,” a senior Trump campaign official said.

“The oxygen of his life is attention,” said Steve Schale, who ran Unite the Country, a super PAC that supported Biden’s candidacy. “I’m sure that not being on the news every day is a terrifying prospect to him. … I would not be surprised if he announced because he needs it.”

I just don’t buy it. Sure, he doesn’t want to lose again. This is, by far, the most traumatic thing that’s ever happened to him and his psyche is shattering because of it. I suspect he’s convinced himself that he didn’t really lose and may be able to convince himself that he can get over in 2024. And he’s desperate for attention as always.

But I think he will run because his core philosophy of life is one thing and one thing only: Get Even. He will not be able to resist his deep, instinctual need to get revenge on Joe Biden.

“I always say don’t let people take advantage — this goes for a country, too, by the way — don’t let people take advantage. Get even. And you know, if nothing else, others will see that and they’re going to say, ‘You know, I’m going to let Jim Smith or Sarah Malone, I’m going to let them alone because they’re tough customers.’ — Donald Trump at Liberty University

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Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyful Kwanza and an exultant end to 2020! I have some good news for you. The Trump presidency is almost over!

I also have some bad news: his cult isn’t going anywhere. Whether Donald Trump is on the scene or not, the political faction/cult/tribe/gang/whatever is always with us in one guise or another. Sometimes, they just make a lot of noise, other times they act as political saboteurs and there are moments in which they act out violently. And sometimes, it happens all at once. We may be in one of those times.

Donald Trump refuses to concede, which is not big surprise. He is a sick human being who should never have been allowed anywhere near the halls of power. The mere fact that he was is a testament to how far off the rails this powerful country of ours has gone. But he didn’t do it alone. His wealthy Republican benefactors, the right wing media, the GOP establishment and the angry, white Republican base were in it with him every step of the way.

I have been chronicling this phenomenon since the day I started this blog way back when the internet was young. It’s endlessly fascinating and increasingly terrifying. These people have gone farther in the last few years than even I thought they would go and I have never taken their movement lightly. Frankly, these post-election shenanigans have shaken me a bit. It’s possible the right is just in throes of a final Trump temper tantrum but doors have been opened that never should have been tried. I don’t know how it’s going to go.

Still, it could have been worse. I had thought that if Trump won, I might shut down this blog and go get a job at Starbucks or something. Being a Trump critic with a following has never felt particularly dangerous to me personally, but we did receive a couple of legal threats over the past four years and I assumed that could ramp up substantially if he had the validation of a second term. Trump may be a buffoon but he’s a dangerous buffoon and his GOP collaborators have shown that they are willing to back whatever undemocratic, unconstitutional abuse of power he wanted to deploy.

Luckily, we do not have to worry about that. The country is going to remain in crisis for some time, healthwise, economically and politically. But we don’t have to worry about a pathological, proto-fascist president and an authoritarian DOJ using their power to shut down dissent. At least not for the next four years. Huzzah.

So, we’re still in business here at Hullabaloo and I’m here asking for your support to keep us afloat for another year. We spruced up the place a little bit this year and I hope it’s to your liking. It’s still an un-cool, old-fashioned, clunky old blog but I hope the writing by my daily wingman Tom Sullivan, movie maven Dennis Hartley, contributors tristero, Spocko and Battocchio and myself manage to keep your interest without all the fun bells and whistles you might find elsewhere. We are nothing if not prolific.

So, once again, if you would like to help keep us going as we pass from the craziest political era ever to one that is no less important as we deal with fallout, I’d be grateful for your support.

You can donate or subscribe by clicking the buttons below or if you prefer snail mail, you can send it to the snail mail address over on the sidebar. And once again, thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who has contributed in the past and those of you who will do so this year. I will do everything I can to make it worth your while.

Cheers,

digby

*As always scroll down for new material. We’re still working here…