Month: December 2020

Thanks to all who have taken the time to participate in this year’s Happy Hollandaise fundraiser. I’m so grateful for your support. Writing this blog seven days a week is a slog but knowing that people value it and want us to continue makes it worthwhile. So thanks again. I really appreciate it.

This next year is going to be a big challenge for the media and for the Democrats. There will be an attempt by Republicans to distance themselves from Donald Trump and rehabilitate their tattered “conservative”brand in order to sabotage Joe Biden’s presidency. The temptation to allow them to do it will be great, since the media wants to prove itself to be “fair and balanced” and will likely jump at the opportunity to let the GOP off the hook since they’ve been so hard on Trump. And the Democrats will be twisted into pretzels, as usual, by the traps they have laid for themselves over the past few years.

You see, Republicans have a very clever way of inoculating themselves from accountability by turning the Democrats’ own ethics against them. For instance, Trump spent the last four years incessantly threatening to jail his political opponents, even strutting around the stage like an orange Mussolini as his ecstatic followers gleefully chanted “lock her up!” at political rallie. Liberal pundits wrote essays decrying this practice as something worthy of a tinpot dictator in a banana republic and Democratic politicians took to the floor of congress and the TV cameras decrying these threats as assaults on our democratic system. “We don’t do that in America!” they cried.

Unfortunately, that gave the Republicans a weapon to wield against them if they wanted to pursue justice in the case of the most corrupt, perfidious president in American history, Donald Trump himself. Imagine the Republican high dudgeon if a Biden department of Justice were to pursue criminal charges against Trump for any of the myriad of corrupt acts he committed while in office?. You can believe they will throw that “we don’t do that in America” in Democrats’ faces, barely able to contain their smirks, and Democrats will trip over themselves trying to explain why they aren’t hypocrites.

You can already see this happening in small ways. One hopes that Democrats and the press do not fall into old traps and allow the Republicans to pretend that they are ethical after all they’ve done or allow them to turn minor Democratic infractions into Trump-level scandals. I’ll just remind you of one famous example of how that works:

This is the Gallup research @mattyglesias referenced.
""Email" Dominates What Americans Have Heard About Clinton"https://t.co/fR5GDzqZzQ pic.twitter.com/UNSM2GDQk4

— Steve Darden (@stevedarden) December 26, 2016

Here’s a small example of what I’m talking about from this week:

Biden talks about unity and healing, but you want to know what they really think?

Read how the person he wants as the next WH deputy chief of staff called Republicans in Congress a bunch of f***ers

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) December 17, 2020

And, here’s the media and unnamed Democrats taking the bait. Soon, her (accurate) comment will be considered a major gaffe that caused the Republicans to refuse to work with the Biden administration because they are so personally offended. The same Republicans who have collaborated with Donald Trump and covered for his worst crimes.

New w @HansNichols – Advisers close to President-elect Joe Biden are frustrated over a Glamour magazine interview in which incoming White House deputy chief of staff Jen O'Malley Dillon referred to Republicans on Capitol Hill as "f*ckers."https://t.co/X1c7AensFQ

— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) December 16, 2020

This dynamic is a problem when it comes to GOP accountability. Being utterly shameless as Marco Rubio shows in that tweet makes the media’s job easy and the Democrats queasy. And it simply cannot be allowed to happen this time around.

Greg Sargent wrote about this today, from a different angle and he’s right about that too. He says;

Prepare for a set of rhetorical tricks. Republicans will portray President Trump’s degradations as a matter of tone and personal conduct. They will depict themselves as having been discomfited bystanders to his ugly comportment. And they will carefully sever their own governing ideology from any role in the legacies of destruction he unleashed on the nation.

The embryo of this effort can be found in this big New York Times piece about GOP maneuvering over Trump’s rage about his loss. Trump is MIA as president, mostly ignoring the vaccine rollout and refusing to condemn Russia’s massive cyberattack, instead focusing on overturning the election.

But, the Times reports, some Republicans profess to see an “upside” in Trump’s disinterest in specifics and in his coming absence:

They believe the president’s departure might allow Republicans to return to some of the themes that proved effective in down-ballot races last month, while also depriving Democrats of their most dependable boogeyman.

Going forward, Republicans believe Trump’s “focus will never linger on one matter for long,” the Times notes, and they can get back to elevating the “perceived excesses of the left”:

“When Trump is no longer in office there’s going to be less focus on personality and ‘What did he tweet today, what did he say today?’” predicted Senator John Cornyn of Texas, adding, hopefully, that Democrats would soon struggle with internal divisions in a “Tea Party moment” akin to what Republicans faced a decade ago.Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was even more succinct, arguing that the Democrats’ left wing would alienate moderate voters.“Our problem is tone, their problem is policy,” Mr. Graham said of the two parties. “We’ve both got to overcome problems, but I like our chances better because we can act better and it’s harder for them to legislate differently.”

Spot the trick? Cornyn and Graham are professing relief that we won’t have to focus on Trump’s “tweets” and his “tone” anymore. This is supposed to look as if Republicans are criticizing Trump’s excesses while wistfully wanting to get back to substantive arguments over the nation’s direction with “the left.” You can almost see them admiring their halos in the mirror.

But no one should be fooled by this game, especially when you hear a lot more of it. Trump’s destruction went far beyond tone, and it continues right now. Many Republicans were active collaborators in much of that destruction. And the destructive influence of both that collaboration and the role of their ideology in facilitating it will continue for the foreseeable future.

Sargent is right. NO ONE SHOULD BE FOOLED. This is their game and it’s important to be strong and resist these bad faith attempts to rehab their brand and sabotage the Democrats. It’s not going to be easy. But if we let this one go, we will be sorry. They have activated a right wing faction in this country that is addicted to conspiracy theories and believes they are entitled to win by any means necessary. It won’t end well.

I’ve been writing about this phenomenon for a very long time. It’s one of the reasons I got into this blogging thing way back when. The right’s assault on democracy and its propagandistic manipulation of our politics has been a long term, systematic project going back decades and it’s finally succeeded in completely radicalizing its followers. Getting rid of Trump was job one, but the threat is far from over.

If you’d like to stay abreast of all this and like the way we synthesize and analyse the firehose of news and opinion we all have to deal with, please consider dropping a little something in the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking. You can do so below or at the snail mail address on the left sidebar. And again, thanks so much for your continued support. It really means the world to me.

Happy Hollandaise.

cheers,
digby

It may seem as if President Donald Trump has done nothing since losing to Joe Biden but watch TV and rage tweet about his stolen election fantasy, however, he’s actually been quite busy.

He’s reportedly considering a military coup or an executive order to seize the voting machines in swing states that Biden won. He spent a lot of energy pushing Attorney General Bill Barr to pursue some of his wild theories about the alleged election theft and pressed him to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Biden’s son Hunter. He’s also been engaged in purging the federal government of those he considers disloyal, particularly at the Pentagon, where he has spent the final few weeks of his presidency installing some of his closest collaborators for reasons that remain unclear.

So you can’t say he is doing nothing — he’s just not doing his job.

Last week, we were informed that there was a major cyber intrusion into both business and government by what the intelligence services and private security companies believe was the Russian government. By all accounts, it is an unprecedented case of cyber-espionage, however, Trump had nothing to say about this for days until this weekend when he downplayed the attack:

….discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!). There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA. @DNI_Ratcliffe @SecPompeo

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2020

Needless to say, he has also been silent about the worst public health crisis America has faced in over a century as COVID-19 once again surges across the country, filling up hospitals and morgues at a frightening pace. According to the Washington Post, one of his closest advisers, speaking anonymously, said, “I think he’s just done with covid I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with covid. . . . It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.” Trump is known for projecting his own dark thoughts onto others so I suppose it’s not even ironic that he spent most of the fall campaign insisting that after November 4th, nobody would talk about COVID anymore. For instance, he told the Republican Convention that it was all fake news, that “they want to make our numbers look as bad as possible for the election.” At one campaign rally on October 24th, he told his ecstatic crowd:

“That’s all I hear about now. That’s all I hear. Turn on television—’Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ A plane goes down. 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it. Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore,”

This Christmas week, our country is losing an American every 33 seconds to Covid, Covid, Covid. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump points out, “every time you listen to Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas,’ about five people have died of the virus between the beginning and the end of the song.” The death toll is over 318,000 and climbing.

Oddly enough, Trump can’t even tear himself away from his scheming about the election he indisputably lost six weeks ago to take a victory lap for the successful approvals of the vaccines. All he could bring himself to do was whine pitifully to the press that they’d better not give Biden credit because it was all his doing. He has barely mentioned the successful rollouts of the first two vaccines on his hysterical Twitter feed.

This is in keeping with his attitude about the crisis from the beginning.

You may recall that both the Washington Post and the New York Times have done deep reporting on the administration’s crisis response from the emergence of the virus in January to their desperate attempt to re-open the economy in the spring to this summer’s surprise surge. They are all excellent, long-form “tick-tock” pieces of how this emergency unfolded and unraveled. It was very bad in the beginning and hasn’t gotten any better since.

In the latest installment, a report from the Washington Post called “The inside story of how Trump’s denial, mismanagement and magical thinking led to the pandemic’s dark winter,” reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker, and Philip Rucker lay out a narrative that would be farcical if it weren’t so very, very tragic: If Trump and his cohorts had made even the slightest effort to encourage mitigation strategies and public health guidelines instead of fighting them all the way, they could have saved tens of thousands of lives.

The vaccines are, as the Post puts it, a “triumph of scientific ingenuity and bureaucratic efficiency” but they don’t make up for the fact that the president, whom they describe as being “perpetually in denial,” has led a monumentally dysfunctional federal response that was the direct cause of proportionally more deaths in the U.S. than in other developed countries. It is an embarrassment that is laid directly at his feet:

The catastrophe began with Trump’s initial refusal to take seriously the threat of a once-in-a-century pandemic. But, as officials detailed, it has been compounded over time by a host of damaging presidential traits — his skepticism of science, impatience with health restrictions, prioritization of personal politics over public safety, undisciplined communications, chaotic management style, indulgence of conspiracies, proclivity toward magical thinking, allowance of turf wars and flagrant disregard for the well-being of those around him.

He would not listen to the scientists because they didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. That is the story of his presidency, isn’t it? It’s got to be happy talk or Trump doesn’t want to hear it.

But let’s not forget all the Republicans who enabled this catastrophe. From the governors who refused to take the measures that might have spared lives to their accomplices in Congress who refused to save businesses from going under so they wouldn’t feel compelled to open up prematurely. Instead, they all genuflected to the man who can’t hear bad news without falling apart.

For instance, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fl., actually had the temerity to post a picture of him getting the vaccine before everyone else:

Young, healthy Senator, who spoke at rallies packed w/thousands w/o masks, who supports Trump -who’s down-played COVID & mocked those who wear masks, is 1st to get vaccine while most medical workers, elderly & infirm Americans, wait.
Congratulations on ur privilege, @marcorubio. pic.twitter.com/gpm3PfNCd4

— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) December 20, 2020

The argument for doing that is that we need important and famous people, regardless of their politics, to get vaccinated so that others will know it’s safe. I have a sneaking suspicion that I could count the number of people who will be reassured by Marco Rubio getting the vaccine on one hand, however. But ok, perhaps this is what we must do. Still, how infuriating for him to have the gall to then post this:

People are tired of being told they have to stay home & can’t work or open their business by people who break their own rules and haven’t missed a paycheck

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) December 20, 2020

The obtuseness on display by a man who has excused the grotesquely incompetent response to this crisis having the nerve to lecture people who tried to save lives and businesses with almost no support from the federal government is almost too much to bear.

This is on Trump, to be sure. But all of his Republican accomplices were right there with him. They couldn’t bring themselves to do what was necessary to help the economy weather the crisis and instead decided that it was better to let businesses struggle and hundreds of thousands of Americans die over these past few months. Even though the Republicans finally agreed to a $900 billion relief package late Sunday evening, i’s very late and far from being enough. According to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Republicans only came to the table after months of stalling to help the two GOP Senators in the Georgia runoff election. The carnage they’ve helped create is unforgivable.

Happy Hollandaise everyone. If you’d like to contribute to our annual fundraiser you can do so here.

cheers,
digby

“I was wrong” is one of those phrases that can save relationships. Refusing to make the admission when it is true can, over time, poison the soul. One Office of Legal Counsel attorney from the Obama administration found that her strategy of staying on as “a last line of defense against the [Trump] administration’s worst instincts” was a mistake.

“Watching the Trump campaign’s attacks on the election results,” Erica Newland writes, “I now see what might have happened if, rather than nip and tuck the Trump agenda, responsible Justice Department attorneys had collectively — ethically, lawfully — refused to participate in President Trump’s systematic attacks on our democracy from the beginning. The attacks would have failed.”

Thankfully, Trump’s use of “second-rate lawyers” to challenge election results doomed that effort to failure, she writes. Even Trump-appointed judges were having nothing of it.

If Justice Department attorneys had left en masse earlier in Trump’s presidency, his efforts to hollow out the republic might have been left to similarly incompetent lawyers. Harms that will now take years to repair might have been stillborn. Newland is doing some soul-searching over her participation:

Before the 2020 election, I was haunted by what I didn’t do. By all the ways I failed to push back enough. Now, after the 2020 election, I’m haunted by what I did. The trade-off wasn’t worth it.

In giving voice to those trying to destroy the rule of law and dignifying their efforts with our talents and even our basic competence, we enabled that destruction. Were we doing enough good elsewhere to counterbalance the harm we facilitated, the way a public health official might accommodate the president on the margins to push forward on vaccine development? No.

No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it.

We owe the country our honesty about that and about what we saw. We owe apologies. I offer mine here.

Newland’s confessional reminded me of the title of a McCarthy-era film, I Was a Communist for the FBI. Wikipedia describes the film and radio show as “artifacts of the McCarthy era, as well as a time capsule of American society during the Second Red Scare. The purpose of both is partly to warn people about the threat of Communist subversion of American society. The tone of the show is ultra-patriotic, with Communists portrayed as racist, vindictive, and tools of a totalitarian foreign power, the Soviet Union.”

The analogy is unsettling while hardly perfect. The Soviet Union is gone, but…. The self-described patriots supporting the Trump administration are the subversives in this case. But “racist, vindictive, and tools of a totalitarian foreign power” is way to close to reality for comfort and creepy as hell, as are some among Trump’s inner circle. Newland admits her role was not the heroic one she might have imagined. She worries she helped more than she hindered.

But confession they say is good for the soul.

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:

Happy Hostage Days!

As if 10 months of on-and-off shutdowns, business failures, masks and social distancing were not enough 2020 misery, Republicans led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) insisted on using the American population as hostages in economic relief negotiations. A second stimulus bill has languished in the Senate since summer as businesses struggled and failed and as Americans died and died and died. A haunting photo on the New York Times’ landing page this morning shows downtown Minneapolis this month nearly deserted at rush hour. Aid has come too late for many small businesses.

On this winter solstice of 2020, a $900 billion economic relief package finally is expected to get a vote in Congress. It is under half the size of the $2.2 trillion stimulus law enacted in March. McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced late Sunday that the deal was ready for a vote. There will be declarations that help is on the way and posturing for the cameras.

The Times reports:

Still, even as it prepared to pass a consequential measure, Congress was at the peak of its dysfunction, having left so little time to complete it that lawmakers faced a series of contortions to get it across the finish line. With additional time needed to transform their agreement into legislative text, both chambers had to approve a one-day stopgap spending bill — their third such temporary extension the past 10 days — to avoid a government shutdown while they were finalizing the deal.

Both chambers approved the measure on Sunday night, and President Trump signed it shortly before midnight. Final votes on the spending package were expected as early as Monday to approve it and clear it for Mr. Trump’s signature, but had yet to be scheduled.

Although text was not immediately available, the agreement was expected to provide $600 stimulus payments to millions of American adults earning up to $75,000. It would revive lapsed supplemental federal unemployment benefits at $300 a week for 11 weeks — setting both at half the amount provided by the original stimulus law.

The Washington Post provides a summary here.

The agreement omits the business liability shield from virus-related lawsuits to which McConnell had held the bill and suffering Americans hostage for months. The bill extends until the end of January the moratorium on evictions set to expire this month. It also provides $25 billion emergency assistance to renters.

Stimulus checks could begin going out to Americans with direct-deposit accounts about two weeks after passage. Those receiving paper checks or debit cards by mail could take two months as happened last spring. And those of very low income who do not file tax returns (perhaps 12 million)? It is going to be a very long winter.

When you haven’t any coal in the stove
And you freeze in the winter
And you curse to the wind at your fate
When you haven’t any shoes on your feet
Your coat’s thin as paper
And you look 30 pounds underweight
When you go to get a word of advice
From the fat little pastor
He will tell you to love evermore
But when hunger comes to rap
Rat-a-tat rat-a-tat at the window
(At the window!)
Who’s there? (hunger) oh, hunger!
See how love flies out the door

“Money Money” from Cabaret

Hunger and cold are not the only things knocking at the window, Ed Kilgore suggests. Miscalculations about pre-election leverage and the pandemic subsiding stalled progress on the relief package. There are checks for now, but austerity is on its way:

What [the bill] may ultimately be known for, however, is a brief bipartisan oasis at a moment when bipartisanship has been all but forgotten and may soon become extinct altogether. Sometimes a national emergency cuts through such barricades as the Republican Party’s long-established hostility to public sector activism. But if Joe Biden’s ascent to the presidency does indeed represent a return to normalcy, part of that normalcy will likely include a return to GOP obstruction and partisan gridlock.

As surely as spring follows winter, once the Biden administration moves into the West Wing, fiscal conservatives will be born-again deficit hawks.

Meantime, as we head toward Christmas this week I worry about local restaurants going under, including those owned by friends. This town is heavily (over-) dependent on tourism and January and February are lean times in normal years. We try to order takeout from our favorites regularly to try to keep them going where we can. But some simply may not make it.

Edward Lee of the restaurant 610 Magnolia in Louisville tells Bon Appetit, “This is the end of the independent restaurant era, and I don’t know any chef in their right mind who feels hopeful right now. We have meal kits; we’re getting heaters. But at the end of the day, I’m on the Titanic, trying to throw out buckets of water to stay afloat. It’s the fluctuations that really hurt us.”

Stuck at home, shunning the usual family gatherings, we are hoping to order Christmas dinner (French comfort food) from friends’ restaurant. It is not much, but it is what we can do.

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:

He’s starting out low and he’s got nowhere to go but down:

Poll of the week: A new Fox News poll finds that 42% of voters say history will remember President Donald Trump as one of the worst presidents ever.An additional 8% say he will be remembered as below average, while 22% say one of the greatest, 16% say above average and 10% say below average.

What’s the point: With the Trump presidency coming to a close, historians and Americans alike are starting to put Trump in historical perspective. How they think of him now versus in a few years may change.

Still, it’s very clear that historians and a lot of voters believe history will remember Trump as one of the worst ever, while a not insignificant amount will see him as one of the best ever.

Pollsters have been asking Americans about how history will take stock of different presidents at the end of their presidencies since Gerald Ford.

No president has garnered as many strongly negative feelings as Trump. The only president who came even close to getting as many low ratings (in a five-category question) was George W. Bush in a Gallup poll at the end of his presidency; 36% said he would go down as a “poor” president.(Gallup’s five-tier system is outstanding, above average, average, below average and poor.)

Americans are usually fairly resistant to giving such a low rating as they have assigned to Trump. No other president hit even 20% for the lowest rating. The average percentage for the lowest rating (either poor or one of the worst) had been 14% before Trump.Some of what’s happening here is polarization. Americans are increasingly likely to feel either strongly positive or negative about politicians with little in-between room.

The 22% who rank Trump as one of the best ever is the highest percentage in the top category for any president at the end of their time in office. Even so, the negative beliefs about Trump’s presidency are greater than you’d expect based on polarization alone.The percentage who rank Trump in the top category is only 13 points above the historical norm, while the percentage who rank him in the lowest is 28 points higher than the historical norm.

There was far less vitriol toward the previous presidents who were defeated for a second term in office (Ford, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992). Just 7% said history would remember Ford as a poor president. It was 15% for Carter and 4% for Bush.

The high percentage of Americans who say Trump will go down as one of the worst presidents lines up with what historians have been saying for years.

Historian ratings are, of course, subjective to some degree. They aren’t perfect, and I have a number of qualms with them. The graders are more liberal than the country as a whole and who is deemed a good president today may change in a couple of decades. We’ve seen this before.Even with those qualifications, these rankings do tend to line up with how history remembers presidents.

Trump has generally been rated with James Buchanan as the worst president ever. This has been consistent across different surveys of experts.As I pointed out earlier this year, the way Trump could have moved up in the rankings was by winning a second term. That didn’t happen and may never happen (unless Trump wins in 2024).

Trump’s low ratings get at something that I’m not sure has ever been fully appreciated. Yes, Trump certainly has his loyal base (as indicated by the 22% of voters who say history will remember Trump as one of the best presidents ever).Yet, those who think of him as a failure have pretty much always been a larger chunk of the pie.

I guess it’s possible that his rating will go up as time goes on. But I doubt it.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! 2021 is bound to better than 2020 — it’s hard to imagine it can be any worse.

cheers,
digby

Check out this passage in the latest Trump legal filing to the Supreme Court:

Can you believe the chutzpah? They are brainwashing their followers to baselessly believe that the election was stolen and then wringing their hands that that “nation as a whole may suffer injury from the resulting confusion.”

And then they basically threaten to have their crazies burn the country down if they don’t get their way.

Nobody expects the court to accept this case but this is still stunning. They will literally say anything at this point and god only knows who will hear this stuff. You can bet lunatics like Flynn will be broadcasting it to every right wing media outfit he can.

The Washington Post takes a look at how Trump has managed to convince his cult that he actually won despite the fact that judges from across the political spectrum have thrown all 60 of their lawsuits except one out of court and his unhinged, half-wit legal team has made complete fools of themselves.

To preserve his hold on power, Trump has spent the weeks since Election Day promoting falsehoods about voting problems in Georgia and five other states, successfully persuading tens of millions of his supporters to believe a lie — that the election was stolen from him, and from them.

He has done so by harnessing the power of his position, using his pulpit at the White House and his Twitter feed to let loose a fusillade of conspiracy theories. His assault on the integrity of the election has gotten a hefty assist from pro-Trump media outfits and an assortment of state lawmakers and lawyers who gave oxygen to the debunked allegations — and a majority of congressional Republicans, who called on the Supreme Court to overturn the results in four states.

Trump is continuing to press his case, even now that the electoral college has formally elected Biden. In a meeting with allies on Friday, the president discussed deploying the military to rerun the election and appointing attorney Sidney Powell, whose conspiracy theories about election fraud have been widely discredited, as a special counsel to investigate the outcome.

Along the way, Trump has willfully damaged two bedrocks of American democracy that he has been going after for years: confidence in the media as a source of trusted information and faith in systems of government. It might be one of his lasting legacies.

A Fox News poll released on Dec. 11shows that more than a third of registered voters believe the election was stolen from Trump — a number that rises to 77 percent among those who voted for Trump. Conversely, 56 percent of voters believe Trump weakened American democracy by contesting election results in various states, with the number rising to 85 percent among those who voted for Biden, according to the poll.

How did it take hold? Well…

Even as his accusationshavecollapsed under scrutiny, they have gained traction among his most ardent supporters.

They have been spurred on by Trump-supporting cable and online news outlets such as OAN and Newsmax, which touted unfounded theories about the Dominion machines, dead people voting and poll workers in Michigan allegedly covering up windows with cardboard to prevent observers from watching the process.

At a rally in Valdosta, Ga., earlier this month for two Republican senators facing a runoff election on Jan. 5, Trump paused his speech and turned to giant screens that played misleading news reports on fraud. Thousands in the crowd watched the videos, rapt.

Trump’s arguments made sense, his supporters said. They couldn’t believe that Biden fared better than Obama had in his races, and they were suspicious that Trump was ahead in some states on Election Day but fell behind as mail ballots were counted — either unaware or untrusting of news reports explaining why that was expected.

“Do you truly believe that Joe Biden got more votes than Barack Obama?” asked Wendy Mick, 53, who traveled from New Jersey to a “Stop the Steal” rally in the District on Dec. 12, and said that Newsmax and OAN are her new preferred sources for political news. “He never campaigned. There’s no way that Biden got so many votes.”

The relative silence of Republicans lawmakers in the initial days after the election, both in states and on Capitol Hill, quickly gave way to a flood of support for Trump’s posture.

A stock line emerged among Republican leaders who refused to acknowledge Biden’s win: The president has the right to pursue all legal avenues available to him.

But Trump has donemore than pursue all legal avenues. He has openly cajoled his supporters to join the fight. And they did.

It goes on…

Apparently, like Trump, his followers simply cannot accept that anyone might disagree with them. They don’t believe it’s possible. And they are being egged on by virtually everyone in the Republican Party to hold their breath until they turn blue.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! 2021 is bound to better than 2020 — it’s hard to imagine it can be any worse.

cheers,
digby

The Washington Post made nice handy little list for you:

These are names which should live in infamy. I don’t want to hear another word about patriotism from ANY of them.

And Happy Hollandaise everyone …

cheers,
digby

I don’t know how many of you follow Donald Trump on twitter, but it’s getting really weird. I know that’s entirely predictable. When hasn’t it been weird, right? But there’s something really manic and bizarre about it right now that makes me wonder if he really isn’t starting to melt down psychologically.

Take 1-minute.

Tony Schwartz predicted exactly what Trump would do when he lost the election.

But THIS was before the 2016 election.

Every last word applicable now…https://t.co/HJnEq2t7cm

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) December 19, 2020

I know there’s a financial incentive in all this. I doubt he realized that he could make so much money from that stop-the-steal grift until they realized they could convert 75% of it to his own use. It’s worth hundreds of millions now and I’d guess he’s milking it, which isn’t irrational it’s just crooked as hell. As usual.

But still, his ranting on twitter isn’t the only thing he’s doing. That report yesterday about meeting with Giuliani, Flynn and Sidney Powell about seizing election machines and declaring martial law seems extreme even for that grift. I mean, they’re talking about staging a real military coup.

It sure looks like he’s cracking up. He’s spent his whole life avoiding being seen as a “loser” even as he squandered his father’s fortune and failed at business time after time. And he succeeded through relentless self-promotion and lies, eventually ascending to the highest-profile, most powerful job on earth, even managing to dupe tens of millions of Americans into believing he is the greatest leader the world has ever known. (He did this with a lot of help from the amoral Republican establishment and the right wing propaganda mills, but still, it’s quite an achievement.)

But now he is facing a major defeat, one which many others have faced for a variety of reasons. Think of Lyndon Johnson winning a real landslide in 1964 and then having to bow out in 1968. Or Richard Nixon resigning and flying off into permanent ignominy. Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr., Al Gore! That’s just in the last half century. Presidential campaigns always have a winner and I’m sure it hurts to lose. Think of poor Hillary Clinton. And yet Trump is the only losing candidate in history to act like a spoiled three year old and stage an extended temper tantrum that is getting worse by the day. He’s not crying himself out. He’s working himself up.

Politico’s Michael Kruse looked into this:

Over the course of a lifetime of professional and personal transgressions and failures, channeling lasting, curdled lessons of Norman Vincent Peale and Roy Cohn, Trump has assembled a record of rather remarkable resilience. His typical level of activity and almost animal energy has at times lent him an air of insusceptibility, every one of his brushes with financial or reputational ruin ending with Trump emerging all but untouched. His current crisis, though, his eviction from the White House now just a month out, is something altogether different and new.

“He’s never been in a situation in which he has lost in a way he can’t escape from,” Mary Trump, his niece and the author of the fiercely critical and bestselling book about him and their family, told me. “We continue to wait for him to accept reality, for him to concede, and that is something he is not capable of doing,” added Bandy Lee, the forensic psychiatrist from Yale who’s spent the last four years trying to warn the world about Trump and the ways in which he’s disordered and dangerous. “Being a loser,” she said, for Trump is tantamount to “psychic death.”

The combination of an unprecedented rebuke meeting an uncommonly vulnerable ego has some people wondering if there is a chance that Trump’s unusual actions suggest something potentially more dire. Could he be on his way to a mental breakdown?

A few people said no. But some seem to think it’s inevitable:

 Louise Sunshine, for instance, has known Trump longer than just about anybody. She started working with him in the early 1970s—so I sent her a text asking her the question. “Maybe,” she responded.

Everybody, after all, has a breaking point. “And he’s not indestructible,” said Barbara Res, a former Trump Organization executive vice president who was the construction manager for Trump Tower and just wrote a book called Tower of Lies. “I do think Trump is struggling,” Tony Schwartz, the actual author of The Art of the Deal, told me, “and that this is far and away the toughest time he’s ever had.”

“His fragile ego has never been tested to this extent,” Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney and enforcer before he turned on him, told me. “While he’s creating a false pretense of strength and fortitude, internally he is angry, depressed and manic. As each day ends, Trump knows he’s one day closer to legal and financial troubles. Accordingly, we will all see his behavior deteriorate until it progresses into a full mental breakdown.”

“Psychological disorders are like anything else,” said Mary Trump, who’s also a psychologist. “If they’re unacknowledged and untreated over time, they get worse.”

In Lee’s estimation, it’s not something that could happen. It’s something that is happening, that’s been happening for the past four years—and will keep happening.

“His pathology has continued to grow, continued to cause him to decompensate, and so we’re at a stage now where his detachment from reality is pretty much complete and his symptoms are as severe as can be.” She likened Trump to “a car without functioning brakes.” Such a car, she explained, can look for a long time like it’s fine, and keep going, faster and faster, even outracing other cars. “But at the bottom of the hill,” Lee said, “it always crashes.”

It certainly seems that he’s even more unhinged than usual but I don’t know how much of that is just a frantic attempt to keep hiscult on board or if he’s actually losing it. But he’s clearly not even pretending to function in the job he’s still charged with. He just doesn’t give a damn about anything other than pretending he isn’t the big loser he actually is. Whether he does anything drastic about it remains to be seen but by anyone’s standard this has to be acknowledged as a dangerous moment. The man who is in charge of the worlds biggest nuclear arsenal is unable to process his loss and is diving headlong into a vengeance soaked, fantasy world. Yikes.

If you’d like to contribute to the Happy Hollandaise fundraiser you can do so here.

cheers,
digby

Hey guys, thanks again for participating in this year’s holiday fundraiser. It’s made it a most wonderful time of the year for me and a most wonderful year to come.

As for that, I’m trying not to get my hopes up only to be dashed. Again. A lot depends on Georgia, of course. Keeping the Grim Reaper out of power will make the difference between a reasonable chance at turning the ship around and merely being able to bail it out enough to keep it afloat. Let’s just say that Captain Trump and his crew ran right up on that iceberg and then backed over it several times.

But even if the Democrats miraculously keep the Senate it’s important to remember that there will be a centrist coalition of red state Dems and a few so-called moderate Republicans who will be holding the Senate hostage. Remember, even Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump couldn’t keep the Republicans together to overturn the ACA. The same thing is going to happen, probably a lot more often, if the Democrats hold the Senate — even if they deep-six the filibuster. The Senate is an inherently undemocratic institution that favors the interests of rocks and cows over human beings.

I don’t mean to sound like a reflexive pessimist. I hate that. It’s always better to have the Senate in Democratic hands no matter what. The confirmation battles and the agenda itself really depend on it. But it’s been a while since the Dems had a majority and it’s important to remind everyone that it’s pulling teeth to get anything done in this country. Remember, the Dems had a 59 seat majority and still had to pass the ACA under reconciliation because of the defectors.

So, let’s hope for a big victory in Georgia. It will make all the difference. But then get ready to push and pull and press the Democrats to do what needs to be done and bring their centrist members along. It does help. And keep in mind that it will also often require pushing the Democratic administration to use its power and influence in ways they may be reluctant to use it. It’s the way our system works. In the end the country will be better off but it’s never, ever easy.

If you’d like to help us keep our eyes peeled on all the details of the political developments for the next year, especially if you’d like to take a little break from the crazy and just get the highlights, you can throw a little something in the coffers by hitting one of the buttons below or send it to the snail mail address on the left column. I would be most appreciative.

I know it’s awful to be separated from our friends and relatives and unable to travel during this holiday season. But we made it through these last four years of hell and are coming out the other side and the good news is that Donald Trump will be screaming into the twitter void, regardless of what happens with the Senate and that’s definitely something worth celebrating.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers,
digby

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson brings the fuego. He’s not saying anything you haven’t thought and I haven’t written, but it’s meaningful that establishment Never-Trumpers say these things. The zealousness of converts can come in really handy when it comes to holding their former leaders feet to the fire.

In his op-ed, Gerson takes Trump to task for his shockingly undemocratic behavior, especially after his loss and gives kudos to the courts and local officials for holding the line. And then:

But this test has also revealed the soft and rotting parts of our democratic system. This begins with a significant portion of voters — mainly Republican voters — who seem determined to believe Trump’s disproven lies. While no sane politician would call these voters to account for their corrupting influence, I am perfectly willing. The determined self-delusions of Trump loyalists egg the president on. By siding with the president’s libels against our constitutional order, they help delegitimize it. Whatever these citizens’ intentions, they are making America a weaker country.

Yet the main responsibility belongs with elected Republicans, who should (and often do) know better. GOP leaders are now divided between the fearful and the deluded — between those who have lost their nerve and those who have lost their minds. After Trump’s decisive defeat, many played along with his fantasies of triumph in order to avoid negative attention from partisans. What could be the harm of a little presidential cosplay? Well, here is the harm: These Republicans have allowed conspiratorial lies to take root that will encourage extremists for decades and cement the GOP’s image as the party of seditious crackpots.

Third, this period of testing has revealed some structural weaknesses in the American system itself. Take, for example, the constitutional procedure allowing state legislatures to override the popular vote and appoint electors in certain exceptional cases. Legal expert Richard Pildes says this provision “lies around like a loaded weapon.” The same could be said of the provision that empowers the House of Representatives to resolve electoral disputes when the normal system is deadlocked. In more powerful and competent hands, these loopholes could turn a presidential election into a parody of democracy. Institutional reform to close these loopholes would be helpful but difficult to achieve.AD

In all these areas of testing, the greatest need is the restoration of norms. Some of these are political norms — the acts of grace and self-restraint that smooth transitions of power and cultivate a broad belief in democratic legitimacy. Others are professional norms — such as when a judge rules on the basis of law alone, or when a state official ensures a fair election.

Ultimately, the most powerful method to restore norms is the proper application of stigma.

So we should remember the 126 Republican representatives who endorsed a specious lawsuit to overturn the results of the 2020 election. They chose partisanship over patriotism and do not deserve the offices they hold.

We should recall Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson’s abuse of his committee chairmanship to spread conspiratorial lies about the election, two days after the electoral college confirmed Joe Biden as the next president. This was Johnson’s nasty little disservice to his country.

We should remember that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy refused to recognize Biden as president-elect, even after the electoral college, Vladimir Putin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had done so. This was political cowardice of the first order.

And we can never tire of confronting Trump’s mendacious, selfish, disloyal and destructive attacks on our democratic system. He is America’s most un-American president.

We Democrats are not allowed to blame Republican voters. That makes us intolerant and elitist, dontcha know? So, it has to be left to members of their own tribe to point this out.

David French goes there too. With the conservative, white evangelicals!

I don’t know that any of this will make a difference in the long run. Maybe all these people will drift back to their former positions over cancel culture or something. It wouldn’t surprise me. But at this moment their eyes have been opened and if there’s any chance that influential, Republican establishment types can stay “woke” to what their party has become, I’m hopeful. There’s no way this polarization will ever break unless there are converts. And God help us if the conversions go the other way…

Happy Hollandaise everyone. 2021 is bound to better than 2020 — it’s hard to imagine it can be any worse.

cheers,
digby