Month: January 2021

Following up on the post below about a 73% reduction in disinformation on social media since Trump was banned, here’s is CNN’s Daniel Dale’s 15 Biggest Trump Lie list:

Trying to pick the most notable lies from Donald Trump’s presidency is like trying to pick the most notable pieces of junk from the town dump.There’s just so much ugly garbage to sift through before you can make a decision.But I’m qualified for the dirty job. I fact checked every word uttered by this President from his inauguration day in January 2017 until September 2020 — when the daily number of lies got so unmanageably high that I had to start taking a pass on some of his remarks to preserve my health.Trump got even worse after November 3. Since then, he has spent the final months of what has been a wildly dishonest presidency on a relentless and dangerous lying spree about the election he lost.As the country grapples with the deadly consequences of this deception, I’ve selected the 15 Trump lies that stand out to me from his four years in power — for their importance, for their egregiousness, for their absurdity, or for what they say about the man.

The most telling lie: It didn’t rain on his inauguration

Trump began his presidency by lying about the weather.It rained during Trump’s inaugural address. Then, at a celebratory ball later that day, Trump told the crowd that the rain “just never came” until he finished talking and went inside, at which point “it poured.”This was the first lie of Trump’s presidency. Like his lies that same week about his inauguration crowd, it hinted at what would come next.The President would say things that we could see with our own eyes were not true. And he would often do this brazen lying for no apparent strategic reason.

The most dangerous lie: The coronavirus was under control

This was more like a family of lies than a single lie. But each one — the lie that the virus was equivalent to the flu; the lie that the situation was “totally under control“; the lie that the virus was “disappearing” — suggested to Americans that they didn’t have to change much about their usual behavior.A year into the crisis, more than 386,000 Americans have died from the virus.We can’t say with precision how the crisis would have unfolded differently if Trump had been more truthful. But it’s reasonable to venture that his dishonesty led to a significant number of deaths.

The most alarming lie saga: Sharpiegate

Trump tweeted in 2019 that Alabama was one of the states at greater risk from Hurricane Dorian than had been initially forecast. The federal weather office in Birmingham then tweeted that, actually, Alabama would be unaffected by the storm.Not great, but fixable fast with a simple White House correction. Trump, however, is so congenitally unwilling to admit error that he embarked on an increasingly farcical campaign to prove that his incorrect Alabama tweet was actually correct, eventually showcasing a hurricane map that was crudely altered with a Sharpie.The slapstick might have been funny had White House officials not leaped into action behind the scenes to try to pressure federal weather experts into saying he was right and they were wrong. The saga proved that Trump was not some lone liar: he was backed by an entire powerful apparatus willing to fight for his fabrications.

The most ridiculous subject of a lie: The Boy Scouts

When I emailed the Boy Scouts of America in 2017 about Trump’s claim that “the head of the Boy Scouts” had called him to say that his bizarrely political address to the Scouts’ National Jamboree was “the greatest speech that was ever made to them,” I didn’t expect a reply. One of the hardest things about fact checking Trump was that a lot of people he lied about did not think it was in their interest to be quoted publicly contradicting a vengeful president.The Boy Scouts did. A senior Scouts source — a phrase I never expected to have to type as a political reporter in Washington, DC — confirmed to me that no call ever happened.Yep, the President of the United States was lying about the Boy Scouts.

The ugliest smear lie: Rep. Ilhan Omar supports al Qaeda

At a White House event in 2019, Trump grossly distorted a 2013 quote from Rep. Ilhan Omar to try to get his supporters to believe that the Minnesota Democrat had expressed support for the terrorist group al Qaeda.Trump went on to deliver additional bigoted attacks against Omar in the following months. But it’s hard to imagine a more vile lie for the President to tell about a Muslim official — who had already been getting death threats — than a smear that makes her sound pro-terrorist.

The most boring serial lie: The trade deficit with China used to be $500 billion

Trump, an incorrigible exaggerator, rarely chose to use an accurate number when he could instead use an inaccurate bigger number. So he said well over 100 times that, before his presidency, the US for years had a $500 billion annual trade deficit with China — though the actual pre-Trump deficit never even reached $400 billion.Trump made versions of the “$500 billion” claim so many times that it became almost physically painful for me to fact check it any more.

The most entertaining lie shtick: The burly crying men who had never cried before

They were almost always male. They were almost always large. They were almost always blue-collar. And, according to the President, they kept walking up to him crying tears of gratitude — even though they had almost always not previously cried for years.Trump’s series of Tears Stories — which sometimes doubled as “Sir” Stories — helped me understand his lying as a kind of performance art.

The stories were oddly grandiose, like something you’d hear from a two-bit foreign strongman. They were also pure shtick. Trump was like a touring stand-up comic, refining and re-using his favored dishonesty bits until they stopped working for him.

The most traditional big lie: Trump didn’t know about the payment to Stormy Daniels

We’ve established that Trump was not your traditional political liar. One of his distinguishing features is that he lied pointlessly, dissembling about trivial subjects for trivial reasons.But he also lied when he needed to. When he told reporters on Air Force One in 2018 that he did not know about a $130,000 payment to porn performer Stormy Daniels and that he did not know where his then-attorney Michael Cohen got the money for the payment, it was both audacious — Trump knew, because he had personally reimbursed Cohen — and kind of conventional: the President was lying to try to get himself out of a tawdry scandal.

The biggest lie by omission: Trump ended family separation

Much of Trump’s lying was clumsy, half-baked. Some of it was almost art. Here’s what he told NBC’s Chuck Todd in 2019 about his widely controversial policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border: “You know, under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it.”Yes, Trump signed a 2018 order to end the family separation policy. What he did not mention to Todd is that what he had ended was his own policy — a plan announced by his own attorney general that had made family separation standard rather than occasional, as it had been under Obama.All of Trump’s words in those two sentences to Todd were accurate in themselves. But he was lying because of what he left out.

The most shameless campaign lie: Biden will destroy protections for pre-existing conditions

Trump’s re-election campaign was consistently and consciously dishonest, especially in its attempts to cast Joe Biden as a frightening radical. When Trump claimed in September that Biden would destroy protections for people with pre-existing health conditions — though the Obama-Biden administration created the protections, though the protections were overwhelmingly popular, though Biden was running on preserving them, and though Trump himself had tried repeatedly to weaken them — Trump was not merely lying but turning reality upside down.

The lie he fled: He got Veterans Choice

Trump could have told a perfectly good factual story about the Veterans Choice health care program Obama signed into law in 2014: it wasn’t good enough, so he replaced it with a more expansive program he signed into law in 2018. That’s not the story he did tell — whether out of policy ignorance, a desire to erase Obama’s legacy, or simply because he is a liar. Instead, he claimed over and over — more than 160 times before I lost count — that he is the one who got the Veterans Choice program passed after other presidents tried and failed for years.And why not stretch? He knew he probably wouldn’t be challenged by a press corps drowning in other Trump drama. It wasn’t until August 2020 that he was asked about the lie to his face. He promptly left the room.

The Crazy Uncle lie award: Windmill noise causes cancer

It was a problem for the country that the President was not only a conspiracy theorist himself but immersed in conspiracy culture, regularly stumbling upon ludicrous claims and then sharing them as fact.For such a fierce critic of the media’s use of anonymous sources, Trump sure liked to use a lot of unnamed sources himself. His stories were full of nonsense he attributed to “people” or that he claimed “they” say. One of the most bonkers “they say” items: his 2019 declaration that “they say” the noise from windmills “causes cancer.” After Trump amplified another conspiracy lie in 2020, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie admonished him by saying that “you’re not, like, someone’s crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever.” Except he was, until Twitter took down his account.

The most hucksterish lie: That plan was coming in two weeks

Trump’s big health care plan was eternally coming in “two weeks.” So were a bunch of other plans and announcements. Trump is, at his core, a huckster. Every moment of his presidency was a chance for him to sell someone on something, whether or not that something actually existed. And if they asked when they could actually see the magic elixir he said was being brewed just over there behind the curtain, he would just have to delay them until they forgot about it

.My personal favorite lie: Trump was once named Michigan’s Man of the Year

Trump has never lived in Michigan. Why would he have been named Michigan’s Man of the Year years before his presidency? He wouldn’t have been. He wasn’t. And yet this lie he appeared to have invented in the final week of his 2016 campaign became a staple of his 2020 campaign, repeated at Michigan rally after rally. It’s so illustrative because it makes so little sense.

The most depressing lie: Trump won the election

Trump’s long White House campaign against verifiable reality has culminated with his lie that he is the true winner of the 2020 presidential election he clearly, certifiably and fairly lost. To many of us, it’s ludicrous nonsense. But to millions of deluded Americans, it’s the truth. And it has now gotten people killed.

The nation’s truth problem, clearly, isn’t just a Trump problem. With this last blizzard of deception and the Capitol insurrection it fomented, Trump has shown us, once more, just how detached from reality much of his political base has become — or always was.

It always was. Trump just turbocharged it and sent them into outer space.

Imagine that:

Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent after several social media sites suspended President Trump and key allies last week, research firm Zignal Labs has found, underscoring the power of tech companies to limit the falsehoods poisoning public debate when they act aggressively.

The new research by the San Francisco-based analytics firm reported that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Trump was banned from Twitter.

Election disinformation had for months been a major subject of online misinformation, beginning even before the Nov. 3 election and pushed heavily by Trump and his allies.

Zignal found it dropped swiftly and steeply on Twitter and other platforms in the days after the Twitter ban took hold on Jan. 8.Default Mono Sans Mono Serif Sans Serif Comic Fancy Small CapsDefault X-Small Small Medium Large X-Large XX-LargeDefault Outline Dark Outline Light Outline Dark Bold Outline Light Bold Shadow Dark Shadow Light Shadow Dark Bold Shadow Light BoldDefault Black Silver Gray White Maroon Red Purple Fuchsia Green Lime Olive Yellow Navy Blue Teal Aqua OrangeDefault 100% 75% 50% 25% 0%Default Black Silver Gray White Maroon Red Purple Fuchsia Green Lime Olive Yellow Navy Blue Teal Aqua OrangeDefault 100% 75% 50% 25% 0%YouTube locks Trump’s official accountThe Google-owned site’s decision to cut President Trump off from the site follows decisions by other social media giants to restrict Trump on their platforms. (The Washington Post)

The president and his supporters also have lost accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, Spotify, Shopify and others. Facebook called Trump’s suspension “indefinite” but left open the possibility that the account could later be restored.AD

The findings, from Jan. 9 through Friday, highlight how falsehoods flow across social media sites — reinforcing and amplifying each other — and offer an early indication of how concerted actions against misinformation can make a difference.

Twitter’s ban of Trump on Jan. 8, after years in which @realDonaldTrump was a potent online megaphone, has been particularly significant in curbing his ability to push misleading claims about what state and federal officials have called a free and fair election on Nov. 3.

Trump’s banishment was followed by other actions by social media sites, including Twitter’s ban of more than 70,000 accounts affiliated with the baseless QAnon ideology, which played a key role in fomenting the Capitol siege on Jan. 6.

“Together, those actions will likely significantly reduce the amount of online misinformation in the near term,” said Kate Starbird, disinformation researcher at the University of Washington. “What happens in the long term is still up in the air.”

The sheer volume of Trump lies and the number of retweets they garnered spread his lunacy very efficiently. I’m not sure where this de-platforming is going and I’m nervous about the possible ramifications. But de-platforming Trump in the wake of his insurrection to stop the counting of votes in a joint session of congress was absolutely necessary. I don’t know if it has tamped down any planned violence but tamping down the misinformation may help prevent more in the future.

GOP in anarchy? Republicans in shambles? Something like that …

As President Trump prepares to leave office with his party in disarray, Republican leaders including Senator Mitch McConnell are maneuvering to thwart his grip on the G.O.P. in future elections, while forces aligned with Mr. Trump are looking to punish Republican lawmakers and governors who have broken with him.

The bitter infighting underscores the deep divisions Mr. Trump has created in the G.O.P. and all but ensures that the next campaign will represent a pivotal test of the party’s direction, with a series of clashes looming in the months ahead.

The friction is already escalating in several key swing states in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s incitement of the mob that attacked the Capitol last week. They include Arizona, where Trump-aligned activists are seeking to censure the Republican governor they deem insufficiently loyal to the president, and Georgia, where a hard-right faction wants to defeat the current governor in a primary election.

In Washington, Republicans are particularly concerned about a handful of extreme-right House members who could run for Senate in swing states, potentially tarnishing the party in some of the most politically important areas of the country. Mr. McConnell’s political lieutenants envision a large-scale campaign to block such candidates from winning primaries in crucial states.

But Mr. Trump’s political cohort appears no less determined, and his allies in the states have been laying the groundwork to take on Republican officials who voted to impeach Mr. Trump — or who merely acknowledged the plain reality that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the presidential race.

Republicans on both sides of the conflict are acknowledging openly that they are headed for a showdown.

“Hell yes we are,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump.

Mr. Kinzinger was equally blunt when asked how he and other anti-Trump Republicans could dilute the president’s clout in primaries: “We beat him,” he said.

The highest-profile tests of Mr. Trump’s clout may come in two sparsely populated Western states, South Dakota and Wyoming, where the president has targeted a pair of G.O.P. leaders: John Thune, the second-ranking Senate Republican, and Liz Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican.

“I suspect we will see a lot of that activity in the next couple of years out there for some of our members, myself included,” said Mr. Thune, adding that he and others would have to “play the hand you’re dealt.”

He may face less political peril than Ms. Cheney, who in voting to impeach Mr. Trump said that “there has never been a greater betrayal by a president.” The Wyoming Republican Party said it had been inundated with calls and messages from voters fuming about her decision.

Mr. Trump has talked to advisers about his contempt for Ms. Cheney in the days since the vote and expressed his glee about the backlash she is enduring in her home state.

Privately, Republican officials are concerned about possible campaigns for higher office by some of the high-profile backbenchers in the House who have railed against the election results and propagated fringe conspiracy theories. Among those figures are Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Andy Biggs of Arizona. All three states have Senate seats and governorships up for election in 2022.

Just as striking, a number of mainline conservatives in the House are speaking openly about how much Mr. Trump damaged himself in the aftermath of the election, culminating with his role in inspiring the riots.

“The day after the election, that question of leadership was unquestionably in one person’s hands, and each week that has gone past, he has limited himself, sadly, based off his own actions,” said Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, who predicted that rank-and-file voters would come to share his unease after they fully absorbed the Capitol riot.

I don’t make predictions so I have no idea how this is going to come out. A lot depends upon what happens to Trump legally and whether or not he decides that politics is the best way to save his tattered business and fortune. The lack of social media platforms and the loss of focus by the mainstream media that’s about to happen will have an effect as well. But there’s no doubt that the Republican death cult is still alive and well and isn’t going anywhere. Whether they will still have the numbers to dominate the GOP after Trump is still unknown.

They created this problem for themselves. They helped it happen and enjoyed watching their political rivals scream into the void, trying to warn the country about the threat. Now it’s come for them. Good luck.

This interview with Madison Cawthorn by Olivia Nuzzi shows that he’s both stunningly shallow and stupid but also has his finger on the pulse of the right wing. In other words he’s one of the true heirs to the Death Cult:

Cawthorn won his primary by 30 points. “Madison had decent name ID because he became a local hero after his accident, and people love a hero overcoming adversity,” the Meadows aide said with casual cynicism. By the time Cawthorn won the general election, he looked, to liberals, almost like a mini-Trump, adept at owning the libs and racking up liabilities that would have ended most political careers. He visited the U.S.-Mexico border and appealed to QAnon with a claim that children were being kidnapped and sold into sex slavery across the Rio Grande; he was accused of sexual misconduct (Cawthorn maintains he did nothing wrong) and of spreading a lie that, if not for his car crash, he would have attended the Naval Academy (he was rejected prior to the accident). His campaign launched a racist attack against a member of the press; he posted a photo at Hitler’s vacation home with a caption about how seeing where “the Führer” (umlaut and everything) went to decompress had been on his “bucket list.” And on and on.

Cawthorn’s ideology is an almost convincing patchwork of conservative slogans and concepts, expressed with a child actor’s poised delivery — designed to charm elders and scare off peers. But it is shallow and contradictory. In one breath, he proposes a retreat from identity politics. In the next, he cites Trump’s appointing an openly gay Cabinet official as proof that he is one of the greatest presidents ever. He describes his version of “America First” foreign policy as humanitarian dovishness: “We should be leading with wells, not warheads.” Then he says he wants to cut foreign aid, the less than one percent of the budget that theoretically goes toward well digging.We advised him, ‘Keep your head down for the first year,’ ” says one former aide. “ ‘Don’t try to be a celebrity. It rarely works out.’ 

During an interview with the columnist John Solomon (famous for spreading Ukrainian-themed conspiracy theories ahead of the first Trump impeachment), Cawthorn described his new station in magical terms. “You think of a Harry Potter or a Gandalf in one of these great works of fiction,” he said. “They’re handed a wand. And you as the viewer, you don’t exactly know what they can do with that wand, but you know it holds incredible power. That’s a lot what it’s like coming into Congress, because there’s really no limitations onto what you can and cannot do in Congress. Aside from what the Supreme Court will allow you to do.”

“You almost can’t help, with him, doing some armchair psychoanalysis,” said Tom Fiedler, the Miami Herald journalist who derailed Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign and three decades later retired to Asheville and found himself covering the rise of Cawthorn for a local nonprofit. After Fiedler reported critically on aspects of Cawthorn’s biography, the campaign created a racist website to highlight that the journalist, who is white, “quit his academia job in Boston to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker.” Fiedler said, “He has a very Trump-like quality: He sees himself as charismatic and able to persuade everyone to come to his side. He feels he is the anointed one.”

In Washington, Cawthorn’s ambition is to replicate on the right what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has achieved on the left. (When we spoke in his office, Cawthorn said he considers her a “genius.”) As he understood things, that meant being famous, even if it required disregarding the wisdom of his elders. “We advised him, ‘Keep your head down for the first year,’ ” the former Meadows aide said. “ ‘Don’t try to be a celebrity. It rarely works out.’ ”

Now, with Cawthorn’s fame tied up in accusations that he helped incite a violent insurrection and with opponents calling for him to be expelled from the House after just days on the job, basic survival instincts are kicking in. I asked him about a tweet sent just after his election — “Cry more, lib” — that had helped make him a right-wing star. “That’s the thing I regret most,” he said. Wait a minute — isn’t this the party of “Don’t retreat, reload?” Of never admitting any wrongdoing so that you never have to be accountable? Cawthorn said many Republicans have encouraged him to hold the line. “I get so many texts from a lot of people who feel like they’re great advisers, saying, ‘Never apologize! We never back down! We never do this!’ ” he said, raising his voice.

But that’s not going to work for him anymore, not in the environment he feels forming in the void left by Trump. “I think that’s bad for the country,” he said. “I really think that us just saying whatever the fuck we want to say and then — please don’t quote the ‘fuck’ — just saying whatever we want to say and then never apologizing for it, never saying, ‘Oh, you know what? That was wrong. This is actually wrong because this is actually not factual; here, let me fix that.’ I think that hurts our party, and it hurts us as humans and Americans because it makes people just so angry and aggressive toward one another. I don’t think it makes you weaker to apologize.”

To be clear, Cawthorn is talking about contrition in theory; he is not saying he is sorry for his participation in Trump’s rally. In fact, he thinks his speech to the mob may have saved his colleagues’ lives. “Maybe my remarks that day led to a thousand less people, or ten less people, who didn’t storm the Capitol,” he told me. “Maybe that number would’ve been enough to breach the House floor, and congressmen could have died or more police officers could have died. I think my comments there led to less violence.”

Here, Cawthorn is almost certainly in uncharted waters, which is his analogy, not mine. “I feel a lot like Magellan,” he said. “You know — the great explorer during the Age of Exploration.”

I fear he will go far in the Republican Party. He’s got it all.

If you can, read the whole article. There’s a lot more…

Here is one about why Amazon took down Parler:

Click here for a thorough debunking of the election fraud lies — from a right wing election site. If you have any Trumpish relatives, this might be a good link to send them. I don’t know what it will take to deprogram all these people but it’s probably a good idea to at least have the facts at hand.

Let’s just say that none of the accusations of fraud stand up to scrutiny. They just don’t. And, by the way, Trump and his people knew it from the beginning. Axios’s Jonathan Swan reports:

Beginning on election night 2020 and continuing through his final days in office, Donald Trump unraveled and dragged America with him, to the point that his followers sacked the U.S. Capitol with two weeks left in his term. Axios takes you inside the collapse of a president with a special series.

Episode 1: Trump’s refusal to believe the election results was premeditated. He had heard about the “red mirage” — the likelihood that early vote counts would tip more Republican than the final tallies — and he decided to exploit it.

“Jared, you call the Murdochs! Jason, you call Sammon and Hemmer!”

President Trump was almost shouting. He directed his son-in-law and his senior strategist from his private quarters at the White House late on election night. He barked out the names of top Fox News executives and talent he expected to answer to him.

“And anyone else — anyone else who will take the call,” he said. “Tell these guys they got to change it, they got it wrong. It’s way too early. Not even CNN is calling it.”

As the clock ticked over into the first minutes of Nov. 4, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani ranted to top campaign aides: “There’s no way he lost; this thing must have been stolen. Just say we won Michigan! Just say we won Georgia! Just say we won the election! He needs to go out and claim victory.” Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien later told associates: “That was fucking crazy.”

For weeks, Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory on election night — even if he lost. But the real-time results, punctuated by Fox’s shocking call, upended his plans and began his unraveling.

Trump had planned for Americans to go to bed on Nov. 3 celebrating — or resigned to — his re-election. The maps they saw on TV should be bathed in red. But at 11:20 p.m. that vision fell apart, as the nation’s leading news channel among conservatives became the first outlet to call Arizona for Joe Biden. Inside the White House, Trump’s inner circle erupted in horror.

Over the next two months, Trump took the nation down with him as he descended into denial, despair and a reckless revenge streak that fueled a deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol by his backers seeking to overturn the election. This triggered a constitutional crisis and a bipartisan push to impeach Trump on his way out the door, to try to cast him out of American politics for good.

But in four years, Trump had remade the Republican Party in his own image, inspiring and activating tens of millions of Americans who weren’t abandoning him anytime soon. He’d once bragged he could shoot another person on Fifth Avenue and not lose his voters. In reality, many of them had eagerly lined up to commit violence on his behalf.

As Trump prepared for Election Day, he was focused on the so-called red mirage. This was the idea that early vote counts would look better for Republicans than the final tallies because Democrats feared COVID-19 more and would disproportionately cast absentee votes that would take longer to count. Trump intended to exploit this — to weaponize it for his vast base of followers.

His preparations were deliberate, strategic and deeply cynical. Trump wanted Americans to believe a falsehood that there were two elections — a legitimate election composed of in-person voting, and a separate, fraudulent election involving bogus mail-in ballots for Democrats.

In the initial hours after returns closed, it looked like his plan could work. Trump was on track for easy wins in Florida and Ohio, and held huge — though deceptive — early leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

But as Bill Hemmer narrated a live “what if” scenario on his election telestrator from Studio F of Fox’s gargantuan Manhattan headquarters, the anchor sounded confused. “What is this happening here? Why is Arizona blue?” he asked on camera, prodding the image of the state on the touch screen, unable to flip its color. “Did we just call it? Did we make a call in Arizona?” Because of a minor communication breakdown, Hemmer’s screen had turned Arizona blue before he or the other anchors, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, found out that Fox’s Decision Desk had called it.

Trump was steaming and he wanted to see his top aides immediately. His son-in-law Jared Kushner, chief of staff Mark Meadows, campaign manager Stepien, senior strategist Jason Miller, and data cruncher Matt Oczkowski took the elevator up to the third floor of the residence at the White House. They met Trump and the first lady halfway between his bedroom and the living room at the end of the hall. Trump peppered them with questions. What happened? What the hell is going on at Fox?

Oczkowski told Trump that based on the campaign’s modeling he thought Fox was wrong and “we’re going to narrowly win” by maybe 10,000 votes or less, “razor close.” But the reality was, hundreds of thousands of votes were outstanding in Maricopa County and the picture was too cloudy to be sure. Then Trump told Kushner to call the Murdochs.

The team had been cautiously optimistic that they were watching a repeat of Trump’s poll-defying 2016 victory. In the West Wing, mid-level staffers congregated in the hallways buzzing with nervous excitement and anticipation. At the residence about 200 guests — donors, Cabinet secretaries, White House physician Sean Conley, TV boosters Diamond and Silk, and other VIPs — gathered for the official election night party. They munched on beef sliders. Most did not wear masks. “You knew in real time that you were in a superspreader event,” said one attendee.

Giuliani was stationed at a table amid the party, laptop open, watching the results come in, as if he were Command Central. His son, White House official Andrew Giuliani, sat at his right. Trump’s tight inner circle — children Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, plus his long-time adviser Hope Hicks, White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and a few others — gathered separately in the Old Family Dining Room to watch the returns on TV. Trump’s core campaign team monitored precinct-level results from down in the Map Room on the ground floor, the same room where FDR had once tracked fighting during World War II.

Trump had spent a bellicose summer and early autumn railing against mail-in ballots. After a toxic Sept. 29 election debate with Biden, Trump’s internal poll numbers nose-dived. He started choreographing election night in earnest during the second week of October, as he recovered from COVID-19.

His former chief of staff Reince Priebus told a friend he was stunned when Trump called him around that time and acted out his script, including walking up to a podium and prematurely declaring victory on election night if it looked like he was ahead.

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller’s speechwriting team had prepared three skeleton speeches for election night for all the possible scenarios: a clear victory, a clear loss, and an indeterminate result. But the speechwriters knew that if Trump was facing anything other than a resounding victory, the words would be his alone. This president would never admit defeat or urge patience.

The top officials tried to force Fox to retract its call. Kushner called Rupert Murdoch, who said he would see what was going on. Hicks, a former Fox executive, texted current Fox executive and ex-White House staffer Raj Shah. Hicks also gave Fox News president Jay Wallace’s phone number to top Trump campaign officials. The Trump campaign’s senior-most officials aggressively texted anchors MacCallum and Baier. Throughout the night, a number of Fox commentators friendly to Trump — including Tucker Carlson — questioned the Arizona call on the air. But the call stood.

Making the situation even more awkward, several high-profile Fox News personalities, including “Judge” Jeanine Pirro, were at the White House while their own network spoiled what was supposed to be a victory party.

It was shortly after 1 a.m. on Nov. 4 when Trump finally came down from his living quarters to the main corridor on the second floor of his private residence. His inner circle met him halfway. This was the first time most of them had seen the president that night. About a dozen aides and relatives huddled around Trump as he dictated an improvised speech. Stephen Miller sat on a couch furiously typing the president’s stream-of-consciousness thoughts. Aides rushed to print out screenshots of cable news graphics showing Trump’s illusory early leads in the key Midwest states. By 2 a.m., Trump wanted to know why he couldn’t he just say he had won and be done with it.

The speechwriters sent a draft to Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator, stationed at his laptop in a small room adjoining the East Room. The draft did not include the words that became the most infamous line of his speech: “Frankly, we did win this election.”

At 2:20 a.m., maskless aides and supporters in the East Room held up cellphones to record Trump, the first lady, Vice President Mike Pence and his wife walking out to waiting cameras as “Hail to the Chief” played. Dozens of American flags lined the backdrop behind them.

Trump declared victory — and announced that Democrats were perpetrating a giant fraud on the American people.

Both claims were lies.

Trump has lied as easily as he breathes his whole life. But the election fraud was The Big Lie that drove tens of thousands of people to the Capitol and turned them into marauding animals.

NBC News:

QAnon adherents, who believe Trump is secretly saving the world from a cabal of child-eating Satanists, have identified Inauguration Day as a last stand, and falsely think he will force a 10-day, countrywide blackout that ends in the mass execution of his political enemies and a second Trump term.

Several QAnon supporters were arrested after storming the Capitol last week, including Jacob Chansley, whose lawyer said his client believed he was “answering the call of our president.”

QAnon believers have spent the last week forwarding chain letters on Facebook and via text message, often removing the conspiracy theory’s QAnon origins, in an effort to prepare friends and family for what they believe to be the upcoming judgment day.

According to researchers who study the real-life effects of the QAnon movement, the false belief in a secret plan for Jan. 20 is irking militant pro-Trump and anti-government groups, who believe the magical thinking is counterproductive to future insurrections.

Travis View, who hosts the QAnon-debunking podcast QAnon Anonymous, said Q supporters are waiting for a “miracle that prevents Biden from being inaugurated,” and it is beginning to grate on those anxious for more real-world conflict.

“I have seen some Trump supporters chastising people promoting QAnon-like conspiracy theories,” he said. “It seems some Trump supporters are reassessing their coalition and laying judgment on the QAnon wing.”

The split has become apparent on extremist forums like TheDonald, from which QAnon adherents have fled to an identical sister site due to constant pillorying for their fantastical thinking on the original site. The new website is named after The Great Awakening, the mythical judgment day of mass arrests and executions.

It is also apparent on viral TikToks and Facebook posts on the more mainstream parts of the web.

“I can’t believe the number of the gullible people who are still out there saying Q is going to run to the rescue in the next five days and you’re going to see military tribunals,” a user in one viral TikTok video said. “Look, I’m a full Trump supporter and I enjoyed reading all the stuff about the deep state and I believe most of it.”

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has frequently quibbled with QAnon supporters, also lashed out at believers of the conspiracy theory in a viral video earlier this week.

QAnon supporters have predicted blackouts for years, citing posts from “Q,” the false digital prophet at the center of the conspiracy theory. Q frequently posted about routine outages of major services, alluding to them as potential warning signs of the Great Awakening. In August 2018, Q posted three times about outages on the video game service Xbox Live, wondering “Anybody have problems with their X-Box Live accounts?” to the conspiracy theory’s followers.

While several specific doomsdays have passed without any prophecies coming true, experts who study QAnon believe another failed prophecy on Inauguration Day could further decimate the movement.

Fredrick Brennan, who created the website 8chan where “Q” posts and has spent the last two years attempting to have the site removed from the internet for its ties to white supremacist terror attacks, said he believes reality may devastate the movement on Inauguration Day.

“This week has been hugely demoralizing so far and that will be the final straw,” he said. “Even though Q is at the moment based on Donald Trump, it is certainly possible for a significant faction to rise up that believes he was in the deep state all along and foiled the plan.”

Oh my. This is just perfect,

Donald J. Trump’s “career average approval rating is the lowest for any president in modern polling, back to 1939, and he is the first president in that time never to achieve majority approval at any point,” finds a poll commissioned by ABC News:

Nine in 10 Americans oppose the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, seven in 10 say Donald Trump bears at least some responsibility for it and a majority in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll – 56% – favors efforts in Congress to bar him from holding elected office again.

Fifty-four percent in the national survey also say Trump should be charged criminally with inciting a riot for having encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol. More, 66%, say he has behaved irresponsibly, more broadly, in his statements and actions since the election.

Trump had help, of course, not that he needed help being utterly out of his depth. He appointed family members to White House posts who were way out of theirs. Trump’s chiefs of staff also were far less than stellar.

Rep. Mark Meadows takes the prize for the worst of them, Chris Whipple writes in the Washington Post:

In a secure tent on the Ellipse last week, as President Trump prepared to incite an angry mob ahead of its assault on the U.S. Capitol, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, smiling from ear to ear, mugged for a video with Donald Trump Jr., as Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit “Gloria” blared in the background.

For Trump’s glad-handing chief of staff, it was just another day of dutifully holding the president’s coat while the boss took a hammer to democracy. This will be the defining image of Meadows, for which he has earned the title of worst chief of staff in history.

Meadows “has raised sycophancy to an art form,” Whipple adds. Had Trump won reelection, Meadows might have found that title challenged by his NC-11 replacement, Republican Madison Cawthorn. And by Sen. Lindsey Graham, and by Rep. Matt Gaetz and others among the Republican House caucus. The competition is fierce.

Jenna Ryan deserves better. She knows it in her heart.

It is unlikely any Black Lives Matter supporters near The Mall on Jan. 6 screamed “GET A JOB!” at Ryan or at the crowd of nice, white insurrectionists on their way to storm the Capitol on a weekday afternoon. It might have happened. But not likely.

White conservatives are usually the ones screaming at browner, leftier demonstrators. Because if Black people are out in the streets on a weekday, white hecklers assume they are lazy, feckless, and unemployed. Not decent, hard-working Real Americans™.

What is more likely is had the angry crowd on Jan. 6 been overwhelmingly Black instead of overwhelmingly white, the security planning for the “situation” would have been dramatically more muscular. That much we know from law enforcement’s treatment of BLM protesters in Washington, D.C. and across the country last summer. Law enforcement would have given a Black crowd a much more hostile reception.

Mistreatment of peaceful BLM demonstrators by NYPD officers last summer prompted a lawsuit this week from New York state Attorney General Letitia James. “As the demonstrations continued, the very thing being protested — aggressive actions of law enforcement — was on public display,” James told a news conference.

Police shootings of unarmed Black men, BLM protest coverage, and cell phone video have begun revealing to nice, white people the very different, more-hostile world non-white Americans inhabit. A kind of parallel universe exists alongside the orderly one middle-class white Americans assume everyone nonwhite lives in too. A New Yorker cartoon decades ago satirized this in depicting two white women atop a ski slope. One says, “I wonder where the poor people ski?”

“White privilege” makes people like Jenna Ryan bristle. How dare you suggest they did not achieve their level of comfort through anything more than their Protestant work ethic? Or that they started on third base and think they hit a triple? Or that they do not deserve everything they have in life? Of course, they do. If you don’t believe Adam Smith, well, the Prosperity Gospel tells them so.

The occasion for this riff on white privilege (not my first) is a video posted Friday night of Texas realtor Jenna Ryan, the woman who with several friends hired a private plane to fly them to Donald Trump’s overthrow-the-government party. The FBI arrested Ryan on Friday — “They’re very professional” — without her being pepper-sprayed or thrown to the curb, one presumes.

No, I don’t mean the video Ryan filmed of herself (below) participating in insurrection against the United States government, the video in which she takes a break from the revolution to promote her real estate business.

This video. Caution: swallow your coffee first.

After her arrest, Ryan tells CBS 11 (Dallas-Fort Worth):

“I just want people to know I’m a normal person. That I listen to my president who told me to go to the Capitol. That I was displaying my patriotism while I was there and I was just protesting and I wasn’t trying to do anything violent and I didn’t realize there was actually violence,” Ryan said. “I’d just like to apologize for all of the families that are affected by any of the negative environment and I’d just like to say I really love people and I am not a villain that a lot of people would make me out to be, or people think I am, because I was a Trump supporter at the Capitol.”

[…]

“I don’t feel a sense of shame or guilty from my heart. I feel like I was basically following my president. I was following what we were called to do. He asked us to fly there. He asked us to be there. So I was doing what he asked us to do,” Ryan said. “I do feel a little wronged in this situation because I’m a real estate agent and this has taken my company. This has taken my business. I am being slandered all over the internet, all over the world and all over the news and I’m just like a normal person.”

Ryan is the victim here. She wants you to know she trusts Jesus and believes she does not deserve a prison sentence for her actions. In fact, “we all deserve a pardon” from Donald Trump. She will also need a job.

Ryan’s presumtion of blamelessness has nothing whatsoever to do with her being white.

UPDATE: It was “poor people” in the cartoon. Corrected.

This will bring a smile to your face. Lord knows we need that…

When politicians reach across the aisle, put aside their partisan differences and join together for the good of the country… Haha, just kidding:

A growing number of congressional Republicans are expressing opposition to President-elect Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic relief proposal, complicating the incoming administration’s push to quickly inject additional aid into the U.S. economy.

Congressional Republican lawmakers and aides on Friday predicted widespread GOP opposition to the plan Biden unveiled the day before, particularly over its provisions to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and provide $350 billion in state and local aid.
Democrats will have a narrow Senate majority and could pass a relief package without any Republican votes. But doing so would require a parliamentary Senate procedure that could take weeks and may require Biden to jettison key parts of his proposal, such as the increase in the minimum wage. Approving a relief package solely with Democratic votes would also fly against Biden’s repeated campaign pledges to unify lawmakers and cut bipartisan deals across party lines.

In other inspiring unity news merrickgarland, Mitch McConnell penned a new op-ed merrickgarland demanding that merrickgarland Democrats work together with Republicans:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) trotted out a brand new Fox News op-ed on Tuesday afternoon, headlined “Will Dems work with us, or simply put partisan politics ahead of the country?” Most of the article touted the Republican-controlled Senate’s accomplishments combating the opioid crisis, passing comprehensive tax reform, successfully confirming judicial nominees, reforming the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, and so on.

Along the way came the declaration that “reports of the death of bipartisanship in Washington have been wildly exaggerated. ” After running down a list of bipartisan work in the Senate, McConnell said that making the most of new opportunities heading forward “will depend on our Democratic colleagues.” He said the American people spoke in the midterms (at least as far as the Senate is concerned) and asked, “Will [Democrats] choose to go it alone and simply make political points? Or will they choose to work together and actually make a difference?”

This was not exactly received … well.

I don’t merrickgarland understand why so many observers merrickgarland are laughing and calling Mitch a merrickgarland hypocrite.

Come together, people.