Month: December 2020

This piece by Fintan O’Toole is so brilliant I’m just going to leave it here for you to read:

“In my beginning”, wrote TS Eliot in Four Quartets, “is my end.” This, at least, can be said of Donald Trump: he will leave the White House as he entered it, strangely unaltered by four years as president.

His hairstyle has been toned down. His demeanour – malign, self-obsessed, reckless of truth and decency, revelling in the harm he has done and can still do to the norms and institutions of democracy – has not.

This continuity is ominous. Trump was able to upend American politics before he was in office. There is every reason to think he will still be able to do so after he is replaced by Joe Biden on January 20th.

It is useful to go back to the period in 2016 when Trump was where his successor is now: the victor in the election but still not president. For it was in this interregnum that Trump took a single action that was scarcely noticed at the time but that, more than any other, defined his presidency.

That action had both the political destructiveness and the personal brutality that would become familiar as the primary weapons in Trump’s armoury. It consisted merely in ordering a load of ring-binders full of carefully compiled documents to be dumped.

It was the day after Trump’s victory party, held of course in the garish Trump Tower in Manhattan. Chris Christie, who was still governor of New Jersey, a successful Republican in a heavily Democratic state, was the man with the 30 bulging binders.

In them was the transition plan, the crucial details of how a Trump administration was going to work, including shortlists of pre-vetted candidates for all the top jobs in the administration, as well as timetables for action on key policies and the drafts of the necessary executive orders.

It had taken a team of 140 people assembled under Christie’s chairmanship nearly six months to create the plan.

When Christie arrived at Trump Tower, he was met by Trump’s then consigliere, Steve Bannon. Bannon told Christie that he was being fired with immediate effect “and we do not want you to be in the building anymore”. His painstaking work was literally trashed: “All thirty binders”, as Christie recalled in a self-pitying memoir, “were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again”.

With Trump, the personal and political could never be separated and both were equally at work here. The personal was silverback gorilla stuff, humiliating Christie was a sadistic pleasure and a declaration to established Republicans that Trump was the boss of them all now.

The political message was one that took longer to sink in. A transition plan implied some kind of basic institutional continuity, some respect for the norms of governance.

At the beginning, as at the end, the idea of an orderly transition of power was anathema to Trump.

Why? Because a timetable for action and a commitment to appoint, to the thousands of positions filled by the incoming president, people with expertise and experience, would constrain him. He was not going to be constrained.

Too many people did not get this. It is hard, after such a relentless barrage of outrage and weirdness over the last four years, to remember what the broad consensus about Trump was at the beginning of 2016.

It was that he wouldn’t be nearly as bad as he looked. To adapt the old saw about campaigning in poetry but governing in prose, he had campaigned in Gothic horror but he would surely govern in the realistic novel.

The sheer weight of the office would alter him. The “adults in the room” would keep him under control. He might be let out now and then to howl at the moon, but inside the White House he would be broken in as a house-trained conservative. The institutional superego would cage his rampant Id.

At worst, Trump would do nothing. He’d sit around eating cheeseburgers and making calls to Fox News, while the serious people got on with serious things.

All of this was to grossly underestimate Trump. He may have done plenty of the cheeseburgers and Fox News stuff. But he also kept his eye on the great strategic prize: the creation in the US of a vast and impassioned base for anti-democratic politics.

The big question to be answered about Trump is why he did not do two things that might have seemed obvious: infrastructure and war.

One of the things that was genuinely appealing about Trump in 2015 was that he said something that everyone knows but that American politicians avoid acknowledging because it is too downbeat.

This truth is that the infrastructure of the richest country in the world – the roads, railways, bridges, dams, tunnels – is woefully substandard. Trump said this and promised to fix it. Polls showed that two-thirds of voters approved.

But he didn’t fix it. He presented a plan in 2018 for a relatively tiny $200 billion investment (supposedly to be supplemented by $1.5 trillion of private money). It went essentially nowhere.

The other thing he didn’t do is war. For all his belligerence and violently nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric, Trump didn’t start a new war or escalate an existing one, which makes him unusual among modern presidents.

Arguably, these two things – building infrastructure and starting a military conflict – might just have got Trump re-elected. So why did he not do either of them?

His personal laziness is certainly one explanation: galvanising and directing such huge efforts is hard work.

But there is a deeper reason. Great building projects and military engagements validate the idea of government itself. Trump’s overwhelming instinct was to destroy that idea.

It is not just that Trump really was not interested in governing. It is that he was deeply interested in misgovernment.

He left important leadership positions in government departments unfilled on a permanent basis, or filled them with scandalously unqualified cronies. He appointed people to head agencies to which they had been publicly hostile.

Beneath the psychodrama of Trump’s hourly outbursts, there was a duller but often more meaningful agenda: taking a blowtorch to regulation, especially, but by no means exclusively, in relation to the environment.

This right-wing anarchism extended, of course, to global governance: the trashing of international agreements, withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, sucking up to the leaders of mafia states, and open contempt for female leaders like Angela Merkel and Theresa May.

With this discrediting of democratic governance, it is not just that we cannot disentangle the personal motives from the political ones. It is that the replacement of political institutions by personal rule was precisely the point.

Trump’s aim, in the presidency as in his previous life, was always simple: to be able to do whatever the hell he wanted. That required the transformation of elective office into the relationship of a capricious ruler to his sycophantic courtiers.

In this nexus, the madder the better. Power is proven, not when the sycophants have to obey reasonable commands, but when they have to follow and justify the craziest orders.

There is no fun in getting your minions to agree that black is black. The sadist’s pleasure lies in getting them to attest that black is white. The “alternative facts” that Trump’s enabler Kellyanne Conway laid down at the very beginning of his administration are not just about permission to lie. They’re about the erotic gratification of making other people lie absurdly, foolishly, repeatedly.

Trump’s wild swings of position were all about this delight in the command performance of utter obedience.

To take just the most outlandish example, Kim Jong-un could be transformed from the Little Rocket Man on whom Trump would unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” to “Chairman Kim” with whom, in his own words, he “fell in love”.

His followers, like old Stalinists desperately tacking to the shifting winds of the Moscow line, agreed that Trump’s opposites were equally brilliant.

The price of this form of power is the undermining of any form of democratic deliberation. Democracy is not just about voting – it is a system for the rational articulation of ideas about the public good. Trump set out to lay waste to that whole system, from the bottom up, poisoning the groundwaters of respect for evidence, argument and rationality that keeps it alive.

The power of his instinct was that he knew how to tap into a hatred of government that has been barely below the surface of American culture since before the foundation of the US.

That instinct proved sufficiently well attuned that he got nearly 75 million votes in November, even while his malign incompetence was killing his own people. He got those votes, moreover, having made it abundantly clear that he would never accept the result of the election unless he won. They were votes for open autocracy.

This is his legacy: he has successfully led a vast number of voters along the path from hatred of government to contempt for rational deliberation to the inevitable endpoint: disdain for the electoral process itself.

In this end is his new beginning. Stripped of direct power, he will face enormous legal and financial jeopardy. He will have every reason to keep drawing on his greatest asset: his ability to unleash the demons that have always haunted the American experiment – racism, nativism, fear of “the government”.

Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands. It is, for him, not goodbye but hasta la vista. Instead of waving him off, those who want to rebuild American democracy will have to put a stake through his heart.

Nothing is more important than that point about power. It’s one thing to get your cult followers to do your bidding. It’s something else indeed to be able to persuade them not only say that black is white and up is down, but to actually believe it. His power over his followers is profound.

The best that I can say about Trump is that he’s 75 years old and his kids are faded carbon copies who could never do what he did. But he’ll be around for a while yet and as O’Toole makes clear, he has every reason to keep his cult engaged, if only to protect himself from the last vestiges of what we used to call the rule of law. He won’t go quietly that’s for sure.

And others are watching and learning:

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, I would be most grateful.

cheers,
digby

The vaccines are coming. But not in time to prevent this mass death event we are going to have in January and February. It’s so frustrating.

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, I would be most grateful.

cheers,
digby

This piece by David Ignatius has raised some eyebrows because of the sourcing: “senior officials,” “government officials,” and “State Department and Pentagon officials.” It’s not White House gossip:

Not to be alarmist, but we should recognize that the United States will be in the danger zone until the formal certification of Joe Biden’s election victory on Jan. 6, because potential domestic and foreign turmoil could give President Trump an excuse to cling to power.

This threat, while unlikely to materialize, is concerning senior officials, including Republicans who have supported Trump in the past but believe he is now threatening to overstep the constitutional limits on his power. They described a multifaceted campaign by die-hard Trump supporters to use disruptions at home and perhaps threats abroad to advance his interests.

The big showdown is the Jan. 6 gathering of both houses of Congress to formally count the electoral college vote taken on Dec. 14, which Biden won 306 to 232. The certification should be a pro forma event, but a desperate Trump is demanding that House and Senate Republicans challenge the count and block this final, binding affirmation of Biden’s victory before Inauguration Day.

Trump’s last-ditch campaign will almost certainly fail in Congress. The greater danger is on the streets, where pro-Trump forces are already threatening chaos. A pro-Trump group called “Women for America First” has requested a permit for a Jan. 6 rally in Washington, and Trump is already beating the drum: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Government officials fear that if violence spreads, Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act to mobilize the military. Then Trump might use “military capabilities” to rerun the Nov. 3 election in swing states, as suggested by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. Trump “could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election,” Flynn told Newsmax in a Dec. 17 interview.

The Pentagon would be the locus of any such action, and some unusual recent moves suggest pro-Trump officials might be mobilizing to secure levers of power. Kash Patel, chief of staff to acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller, returned home “abruptly” from an Asia trip in early December, according to Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin. Patel didn’t explain, but in mid-December Trump discussed with colleagues the possibility that Patel might replace Christopher A. Wray as FBI director, one official said. Wray remains in his job.

Another strange Pentagon machination was the proposal Miller floated in mid-December to separate the code-breaking National Security Agency from U.S. Cyber Command, which are both currently headed by Gen. Paul Nakasone. That proposal collapsed because of bipartisan congressional opposition.

But why did Trump loyalists suggest the NSA-Cyber Command split in the first place? Some officials speculate that the White House may have planned to install a new NSA chief, perhaps Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the young conservative recently installed to oversee Pentagon intelligence activities.

With firm control of the NSA and the FBI, the Trump team might then disclose highly sensitive information about the origins of the 2016 Trump Russia investigation. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe tried to release this sensitive intelligence before the election, despite protests from intelligence chiefs that it would severely damage U.S. national security. Trump retreated under pressure from then-Attorney General William P. Barr, among others.

Trump’s final weeks in office will also be a tinder box because of the danger of turmoil abroad. Iranian-backed militias fired more than 20 rockets last Sunday at the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad, with around nine hitting the compound but inflicting no American casualties. The United States sent intense, high-level messages to Tehran, public and private, warning against any further provocation. The toughest was a Dec. 23 tweet from Trump warning: “If one American is killed, I will hold Iran responsible. Think it over.” State Department and Pentagon officials say Trump’s retaliatory threat is real.

Another potential flash point is just a week away. Jan. 3 marks the first anniversary of the U.S. targeted killing of Quds Force commander Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani and Iraq militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.Any new violence could ignite a quick cycle of escalation that could bring direct conflict between the United States and Iran during Trump’s final weeks in office.

Ignatius suggests that Republicans go up to the White House and tell Trump “this must stop.”

Lol. Or what?

I don’t know if any of this is based upon specific information that Ignatius’s sources wanted out in the public or what. But it’s disturbing, particularly since this reporting on Trump blowing up the COVID relief bill suggests that Trump is now on a “burn it down” revenge trip:

[S]ome people close to the White House say Trump’s decision to hold up the deal reflects his embittered mood in the final days of his presidency.

“He’s just angry at everybody and wants to inflict as much pain on Congress as possible,” one person briefed by White House officials on the matter said.

He’s not just mad at Congress. He’s mad at America and he wants to get even. That could take any number of forms, none of them good.

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, I would be most grateful.

cheers,
digby

That tweet is from a couple of days ago, but I thought I should memorialize it as the quintessential post-election Trump tweet. It’s still stunning that the president of the United States thinks this way, much less publicly acts out in such a fashion. I don’t think I’ll ever fully get past the fact that the US elected this pathetic moron.

But that’s just me. Here’s a story in the Washington post about the people who’ve abandoned Fox News for Newsmax in the wake of Trump’s loss. They simply live in another world:

On the morning after Election Day, Greg and Jenny Brethen, loyal viewers of Fox News who watched the channel religiously for almost 20 years, turned on their go-to morning show, “Fox & Friends,” and thought they saw something fishy.

The Tennessee couple sensed that their favorite Fox personalities, weekday co-host Brian Kilmeade and weekend co-host Pete Hegseth, who appeared in a segment, were holding back. “Like they were both instructed to keep their mouth shut, that’s how I felt,” Jenny said.

The previous evening, the nonpartisan Fox News Decision Desk was the first network prognosticator to call the state of Arizona for Joe Biden, a call that to some was early — but ultimately held up. On Nov. 7, the network called the election for the former vice president, although Hegseth won’t call him the president-elect and Kilmeade has qualified his presidency with an uncertain “if.”

Whatever it was, Greg said the couple “felt duped.” At that moment, they decided to stop watching Fox News forever and look for an alternative. After hearing about the conservative upstart Newsmax during a pro-Trump rally, they chose to give the channel a shot.

“We’re permanently switched,” Jenny, 46, said in a recent phone interview. “We’re not going back. Once you do something like that, you’re done in our book.”

Jenny, who said she now watches Newsmax from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, was among the 15 longtime Fox News loyalists who spoke with The Post in depth about why they have flipped the channel to Newsmax in recent weeks and months…

“I jumped on it and haven’t looked back,” said 40-year-old technical engineer Jeremy Arant, who was introduced to Newsmax by his friends after the election…

“The night of the election completely did it. I haven’t turned on Fox News since,” said Jami Salamida, 43, a paralegal who lives in West Virginia. She watched Fox for two decades and now said she watches between eight and 10 hours of Newsmax each day…

“The cherry on the cake was when they called the results of Arizona,” said 60-year-old Donna Cumella, who works in IT in New York…

“I don’t hate Fox News, but when I switched to Newsmax, I felt more appreciated for my viewership,” said Nicholas Stanek, 31, who lives in Arizona and works as a roofing estimator. “Part of me just doesn’t want to give Fox News the ratings.” …

Sharon Allan, a retired dental hygienist who lives in Florida, said she sensed a leftward tilt in Fox’s content starting in late September and early October. “It was like all of a sudden. A lot of my friends, we all started noticing it at the same time,” she said. “It was a shift, like they had been bought out. They like were being told to only report certain things in a certain way. It was like, ‘Wow, am I looking at Fox?’ …

They aren’t informed about politics, world events or … Fox News:

Several of the Fox skeptics guessed that a change in the network’s corporate management could have contributed to the shift they perceived, but many seemed confused about who is running the company and what, if anything, has changed. Six viewers who spoke with The Post mentioned a transfer of power to “the sons,” whom they said were “liberal.” One person said she heard that “the dad who owns it passed away,” a reference to Rupert Murdoch, 89, who is alive and remains chairman of parent company Fox Corporation.

While Murdoch’s son, James, and daughter-in-law, Kathryn, have embraced liberal causes and politicians, including Biden, they have no control over Fox News. James ceased his role as chief executive of the network’s then-parent company, 21st Century Fox, in March 2019, and almost completely cut his ties to his family’s media dynasty by stepping down from the News Corp. board of directors this summer, citing in a letter “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” And Murdoch’s other son, Lachlan, who now runs Fox Corp, is not known to have liberal leanings.

There is one Fox star they just can’t quit:

“I still like a little bit of Tucker because I think he’s a smart guy,” said 37-year-old Ricky Moxley, who works in industrial manufacturing in South Carolina.

“I will find myself allowing myself to watch Tucker because I think Tucker calls out what’s going on,” Salamida said. “That’s my problem: with the people at Fox pretending that nothing is wrong” with the election process. (There is no evidence of widespread election fraud that would change the results of the election.) Allan, the retired dental hygienist, thinks Carlson should be president one day.

They are emotionally devastated:

“It’s sad, because it’s like losing a friend,” said Jennie Spohn, 55, Markham’s sister-in-law, who works in construction in Michigan. “We loved Fox News. We stood up for Fox News. We stood by their side.”

And although Spohn digs Newsmax and watches upstart digital networks like Right Side Broadcasting Network, particularly to catch the president’s political rallies, she said, almost mournfully, “I don’t think there will ever be a love affair like we had with Fox News for years.”

“It is disappointing and it is depressing,” said Walker, who used to watch Fox throughout the day. “It was almost like Fox was a part of my family.”

Some of them do complain that Newsmax is dull as dishwater, which it is. It’s like watching a high school AV class compared to the professional razzle dazzle of Fox News. I suspect that if they don’t raise their game quickly, these people will drift back to Fox. In fact, this whole thing makes you wonder whether it wasn’t the Fox Trump Show that thrilled his cult members even more than Trump himself.

Whatever it is, this cultish affinity for a right wing news network is downright weird. I’m a political junkie to the core, but I honestly feel zero attachment to any cable news networks. I certainly have a lot of respect for certain commentators like Chris Hayes, whom I’ve admired as a writer as well as a broadcaster. But feeling like a network is “family” is just bizarre to me. To feel “betrayed” when it doesn’t tell you what you want to hear says that the propaganda is operating on a very emotional level. And it’s potent. Trump’s tantrum seems perfectly normal when that’s what you’re used to.

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, I would be most grateful.

cheers,
digby

Just brilliant:

Ain’t it the truth? My God, what a year. And it’s ending at a real low point. Unemployment insurance ran out on Christmas and Donald Trump is having a pout and spending his days on the golf course instead of signing the badly needed extension. His refusal to sign it is supposedly because he wants to give people more relief money and cut the “pork” from the omnibus appropriations bill. Obviously, he could have raised these objections before the bill was agreed upon but he has been spending every minute plotting with lunatics over his election loss.

So, we are looking at a government shutdown and massive hardship among vast numbers of people because of the horrific pandemic which, by the way, has claimed over 330,000 lives and counting and is still raging all over the country.

I suspect that Trump thinks he is negotiating with Republicans to vote against the pro-forma certification of the election on January 6th and hand the presidency to him. He has long said that the way he does a deal is to walk into a room and look across the table, say “Fuck You” and walk back out. I doubt he actually did that. But he may think that he can hold the government and the American people hostage with these two vital bills and blackmail the congress into letting him win the presidency

Obviously, this is delusional. Nearly insane. But that’s where we are.

You didn’t think this year would end calmly, did you?

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, I would be most grateful.

cheers,
digby

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution predicts Georgia will not settle down after Jan. 6. Adjust your expectations to what could be the new normal:

Once again, there could be tedious recounts. No matter who wins, the losing party could follow the example of the Trump campaign and his allies, who demanded and received statewide recounts both by hand and by machine. All three counts showed Trump lost by roughly 12,000 votes.

Once again, there could be drawn-out legal battles that seek to challenge the election results, restrict counting of certain ballots and allow others to be tallied.

Once again, there could be an unwavering stream of misinformation infecting the social discourse, requiring elections officials, voting rights groups and the news media to work overtime to play Whac-A-Mole with falsehoods that spread virally on social media.

And once again, officials are preparing for the threat of violence after the election — no idle concern after this chaotic campaign season. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger required a security detail after he and his wife received death threats; some low-level county elections workers targeted by conspiracy theorists had to go into hiding.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):

Democracy is as hard as it is unnatural. “A republic if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin once said, perhaps aware the results of the political experiment the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had begun were TBD (in less elegant parlance). That imperfect union 233 years later remains imperfect for all its striving on behalf of some and stonewalling by others to keep the privileges of citizenship to themselves.

Zara Anishanslin, an associate professor of history and art history at the University of Delaware, wrote last year that history leaves out who asked the question to which Franklin’s pithy quote was a reply.

Elizabeth Willing Powel was “a pivotal woman of the founding era who has been erased from this story.” Born to a wealthy and politically connected Philadelphia family, she rather than her husband was recognized as the political brains of the family. The anecdote’s omission, Anishanslin believes, contributes to a history largely devoid of woman and “also makes it harder to imagine contemporary women such as Pelosi — or Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — as political leaders.”

Not just women, but nonwhite citizens of of every color, religion, origin, and political opinion remain marginalized to this day. And the poor.

Adam Gopnik wonders how this democratic republic endures at all (at The New Yorker):

America itself has never had a particularly settled commitment to democratic, rational government. At a high point of national prosperity, long before manufacturing fell away or economic anxiety gripped the Middle West—in an era when “silos” referred only to grain or missiles and information came from three sober networks, and when fewer flew over flyover country—a similar set of paranoid beliefs filled American minds and came perilously close to taking power.

Authoritarianism is easy, Gopnik suggests, citing Franklin’s quip. Democracy is hard. It was a time of economic plenty and yet spawned Joseph McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and suspicions that Eisenhower and Kennedy were somehow pawns of international Communism. The Deep South and Arizona voted solidly for Barry Goldwater. His humiliating loss launched the conservative movement that a decade and a half later gave the world Ronald Reagan, then George W. Bush, and now Donald J. Trump.

Goldwater’s ghostwriter Brent Bozell found Franco’s post-Fascist Spain an improvement on American decadence, Gopnik continues. Trump and his movement tolerate or even admire the authoritarian regimes of Putin and Orbán.

The interesting question is not what causes autocracy (not to mention the conspiratorial thinking that feeds it) but what has ever suspended it. We constantly create post-hoc explanations for the ascent of the irrational. The Weimar inflation caused the rise of Hitler, we say; the impoverishment of Tsarism caused the Bolshevik Revolution. In fact, the inflation was over in Germany long before Hitler rose, and Lenin came to power not in anything that resembled a revolution—which had happened already under the leadership of far more pluralistic politicians—but in a coup d’état by a militant minority. Force of personality, opportunity, sheer accident: these were much more decisive than some neat formula of suffering in, autocracy out.

Donald Trump came to power not because of an overwhelming wave of popular sentiment—he lost his two elections by a cumulative ten million votes—but because of an orphaned electoral system left on our doorstep by an exhausted Constitutional Convention. It’s true that our diagnoses, however dubious as explanations, still point to real maladies. Certainly there are all sorts of reasons for reducing economic inequality. But Trump’s power was not rooted in economic interests, and his approval rating among his followers was the same when things were going well as it is now, when they’re going badly. Then, too, some of the blandest occupants of the Oval Office were lofted there during previous peaks of inequality.

Maintaining inequality for a privileged few was a byproduct of the country’s founding despite aspirations of the founders for something better, in theory if not in practice.

When southern Democrats abandoned a hundred years of Jim Crow and sought to expand the franchise and equal treatment to Black citizens, Republicans took up the cause of revanchism. They have since the New Deal stood athwart democracy, yelling Stop. Their leadership periodically commits Kinsley gaffes, publicly admitting that limiting access to the ballot box is one goal of their politics. Election suppression is by now written into the party’s DNA.

Now with conspiracy theories and their variants spreading as readily as the coronavirus, authoritarian policies enjoy renewed currency. Donald Trump’s paranoia has given Republican election suppression a shot in the arm. He was “the best thing that could ever have happened to them.” Trump may have no proof of election tampering, but lack of proof has never hampered America’s paranoid style. Sixty failed lawsuits are simply fertilizer, growth medium.

The New York Times:

The false notions have lived on in Mr. Trump’s Twitter and Facebook feeds; on the television programming of Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network; and in statehouse hearings where Republican leaders have contemplated more restrictive voting laws based on the rejected allegations.

In Georgia, Republican legislators have already discussed toughening the state’s rules on voting by mail and on voter identification. In Pennsylvania, Republican lawmakers are considering reversing moves that had made it easier to vote absentee, and their counterparts in Wisconsin are similarly considering tighter restrictions for mail voting, as well as for early voting.

If anything, President Trump has given the movement to limit ballot access new momentum while becoming the singular, charismatic leader it never had.

After declaring outright that high levels of voting are bad for Republicans, he persuaded his base that the election system is rotten with fraud, and to view that fiction as a bedrock party principle. Several recent polls have shown that majorities of Republicans think the election was fraudulent, even as election officials across the country report that it went surprisingly smoothly even in a pandemic, with exceptionally high turnout and no evidence of fraud aside from the usual smattering of lone wolf bad actors or mistakes by well-intentioned voters.

What the Trump years have taught those naive enough to still believe in the aspirations of the founders is that democracy is hard. As Gopnik suggests, “The rule of law, the protection of rights, and the procedures of civil governance are not fixed foundations, shaken by events, but practices and habits, constantly threatened, frequently renewable.”

And at the end of four years of Trump … exhausting. Just not as exhausting as succumbing to the authoritarian alternative.

Update: Misspelled the gentleman’s name throughout! Fixed it. (h/t/ TL)

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Can you even believe the lack of self-awareness? This Christmas weekend, millions of people are losing their businesses, their unemployment insurance and are on the brink of eviction because of Trump and the Republicans’ inaction. And they’re kvetching about Melania not being properly feted for her ostentatious wardrobe.

The fashion press are snobs but they are also business people. Most women who buy fashion magazines hate Donald Trump with the fire of a thousand suns. Melania would not sell magazines no matter how fashionable she might be.

There is no doubt that she looks great in her expensive clothes. She’s a model, after all. And sometimes her clothes are amazing. But her taste is very … iffy. She tends to dress like she’s wearing a costume when she travels overseas, sometimes being downright insulting, and has a strange propensity for military-style outfits. But her little “I really don’t care, do u?” gambit pretty much sealed her fate as a fashion leader. It was cruel and stupid and has been verified by her former pal Stephanie Winston Wolkoff as a purposeful act — as she was on her way to meet with little refugee kids on the border. If that’s true, she is a monster.

In addition, first ladies usually have some kind of a cause that they push pretty energetically. Melania had this “be best” online bullying thing which made zero sense since her husband is the worst online bully in the world. How could you do a feature story that would make her look like anything but a total hypocrite? They did her a favor by keeping her out of the magazines.

People will not miss her because she’s barely been there. I think we’re all grateful for that.

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, I would be most grateful.

cheers,
digby

This is why I snap whenever anyone says the Republicans are cowards as a way of explaining why they refuse to oppose Donald Trump. That’s wrong. They are amoral, craven opportunists:

Changes to the way millions of Americans voted this year contributed to record turnout, but that’s no guarantee the measures making it easier to cast ballots will stick around for future elections.

Republicans in key states that voted for President-elect Joe Biden already are pushing for new restrictions, especially to absentee voting. It’s an option many states expanded amid the coronavirus outbreak that proved hugely popular and helped ensure one of the smoothest election days in recent years.

President Donald Trump has been unrelenting in his attacks on mail voting as he continues to challenge the legitimacy of an election he lost. Despite a lack of evidence and dozens of losses in the courts, his claims of widespread voter fraud have gained traction with some Republican elected officials.

They are vowing to crack down on mail ballots and threatening to roll back other steps that have made it easier for people to vote.

“This myth could not justify throwing out the results of the election, nor can it justify imposing additional burdens on voters that will disenfranchise many Americans,” said Wendy Weiser, head of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law.

An estimated 108 million people voted before Election Day, either through early in-person voting or by mailing or dropping off absentee ballots. That represented nearly 70% of all votes cast, after states took steps to make it easier to avoid crowded polling places during the pandemic.

A few states sent ballots to every registered voter while others dropped requirements that voters needed a specific excuse to cast an absentee ballot. Many states added drop boxes and expanded early voting options.

The changes were popular with voters and did not lead to widespread fraud. A group of election officials including representatives of the federal cybersecurity agency called the 2020 presidential election the “most secure” election in U.S. history, and U.S. Attorney General William Barr told The Associated Press there had been no evidence of fraud that would change the outcome of the election.

Nevertheless, Republicans in Georgia have proposed adding a photo ID requirement when voting absentee, a ban on drop boxes and possibly a return to requiring an excuse for mail voting, such as illness or traveling for work on Election Day.

Early supporters of the ID requirement include Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Republicans who were criticized relentlessly by Trump for failing to back his fraud claims after losing in Georgia. A top deputy for Raffensperger has said the ID requirement would boost public confidence and refute any future claims of fraud.

The state’s two U.S. Senate runoffs next month will take place under current law, which requires local election officials to verify signatures on absentee ballots.

In Pennsylvania, Republican lawmakers have been writing legislation to address what they claim are problems with the 2020 election and mail voting in particular, even though courts and elections officials have found no evidence of widespread problems.

“We’d like to tighten it up as soon as we can,” said Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward.

Republicans hold majorities in both legislative chambers, and their support was instrumental in a year-old state law that expanded mail voting to all registered voters. One bill being discussed would go so far as to repeal that law and force voters to state an excuse to receive a ballot in the mail.

Previous elections have shown that voters appreciate mail voting, no matter their party affiliation. Republican candidates down the ballot did very well this year, even as a record 81.2 million voters cast their ballot for the Democrat in the presidential race.

In Michigan, Republicans held every congressional seat and kept control of the legislature despite Trump losing the state. Yet Republicans still held a legislative hearing in which Trump’s lawyers argued there were widespread irregularities without explaining how these somehow affected only the presidential race but not other contests.

“Just like we have seen a lot of legislators making ill-advised decisions to hold hearings that ended up being more political theater than policy debates, we can similarly expect legislators to further this hyper-partisan agenda to restrict the vote,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat.

Trump is making a total ass of himself and undermining American democracy more thoroughly than the Russian government could ever have hoped to do. But then, that’s the Republican playbook too. They’ve been shouting “voter fraud” for decades, despite no evidence of any kind of widespread or systematic attempts to do it and set the table for Trump’s inane temper tantrum. Now that he’s got 80% of Republicans believing that the vote is rigged, they can use that to suppress the vote even more. Win-win for them, even if it’s lose-lose for Trump.

This is the best thing that could ever have happened to them. They will be able to further restrict voting in swing states with GOP legislatures and tell their voters from now on that even when they lose they actually won. In the end, this may end up being Donald Trump’s greatest gift to the Republican Party. No wonder they aren’t saying a word about his betrayal of American democracy. It’s their dream come true.

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, I would be most grateful.

cheers,
digby