One of the more haunting images from “The Final Days,” the sequel to Woodward and Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men,” is that of Richard Nixon wandering drunkenly through the White House giving speeches to the portraits of the previous presidents as Watergate was unraveling and he realized he was about to endure the worst humiliation of his life. In a meeting with some congressman, at one point, he said, “I can go in my office and pick up a telephone and in 25 minutes millions of people will be dead,” prompting California Senator Alan Cranston to warn Defense Secretary James Schlesinger about “the need for keeping a berserk president from plunging us into a holocaust.”
Schlesinger went on to issue an order that if the president gave any nuclear launch order, military commanders should check with either him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before executing them, which is a serious departure from the normal protocol requiring an order from the Commander in Chief to launch immediately. Luckily, Nixon just moped around the White House for a while until he was finally given the heave-ho by members of Congress.
Looking back on it, what we thought of as a frightening, dangerous episode now looks like a staid and dignified affair compared to what’s going on in Donald Trump’s final days. We can only wish that Trump was just crying into a glass of scotch and asking Henry Kissinger to get down on his knees and pray for him as Nixon did. Instead, he seems to be having a very public nervous breakdown. Since the election, he’s fired the civilian leadership at the Pentagon and replaced them with henchmen and sycophants, apparently setting of serious concern among the top brass.
Axios reported on Tuesday that he has become so frustrated that he’s even starting to turn on his most trusted accomplices, including Vice President Mike Pence, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House counsel Pat Cipollone, all of whom he believes are failing him. He is said to believe that everyone around him who isn’t actively egging on his futile efforts to overturn the election is either “weak, stupid or disloyal” and he is increasingly only listening to propagandists at OAN, Newsmax, a few select programs at Fox News and his inner circle of conspiracy mongers.
We know from various reports that Trump has been meeting with his former National Security Adviser, the recently pardoned, admitted felon Mike Flynn, and his lawyer Sidney Powell, who was formerly Trump’s lawyer as well. Powell wanted to be named a “special counsel” to investigate election fraud, but according to the Daily Beast, that has been nixed by the president for now. The president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani is hostile to Powell and has told the press that she is not affiliated with the president’s legal team, but he too is pushing ridiculous schemes such as having the Department of Homeland Security seize the voting machines in certain states, which the DHS has said they have no authority to do. Flynn has also publicly proposed Trump invoke Martial Law in the states that Biden won narrowly and order the military to run a new election. That Trump has been open to discussing such far-fetched plans is bad enough in itself. And for some bizarre reason, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who also happens to have had a long term affair with convicted and deported Russian Spy Maria Butina, has been present at at least one meeting with all of these people, as slightly less unhinged members of the White House attempted to push back on their wacky plots.
At the moment Trump seems fixated on the idea of having the Republicans in congress refuse to accept the certification of the electoral college vote on January 6th. This week QAnon believer Marjorie Taylor-Greene, a newly elected member of the House of Representatives from Georgia, organized a strategy meeting with Trump at the White House along with some of his most loyal supporters in the House like Matt Gaetz, R-Fl, Louis Gohmert, R-Tx, Mo Brooks, R-Al, among others. They seem hopeful that at least one Republican in the Senate will join them to object — which would turn the whole thing into a circus but change absolutely nothing.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell begged his senators not to go along with the whole charade because it would look bad to vote against Donald Trump since he clearly lost the election. His deputy, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, said “it’s going down like a shot dog and I just don’t think it makes a lot of sense to put everybody through this when you know what the ultimate outcome is going to be.”
That put McConnell and Thune on Trump’s ever-growing shit list. First Trump sent around a graph supposedly showing that he was responsible for McConnell’s re-election and than on Tuesday night threw this out there::
Republicans in the Senate so quickly forget. Right now they would be down 8 seats without my backing them in the last Election. RINO John Thune, “Mitch’s boy”, should just let it play out. South Dakota doesn’t like weakness. He will be primaried in 2022, political career over!!!
But perhaps he’s taking his greatest revenge by threatening to veto the COVID-9 relief bill unless they agree to give every American who qualifies a $2000 check instead of the measly $600 that they finally squeezed out of McConnell and his caucus. Democrats immediately endorsed Trump’s idea and the ball is in McConnell’s court as I write this. If Trump wants to wreak revenge on his “disloyal” Republicans by agreeing to send badly needed money to Americans who are suffering from his and the Republican’s malfeasance I couldn’t be happier. However, it’s very likely that this will do nothing but blow up the bill at the last moment, resulting in some very bad outcomes. Had he involved himself in the negotiations and pushed hard for relief he just might have won the election and helped people sooner. But he preferred to pretend the pandemic was over instead. The stable genius blew that one bigly.
Trump also pumped out some pardons on Tuesday night, showing that no matter how much he is trying to convince himself that the Greek chorus in this farce isn’t chanting “it’s over,” he knows he’s still got some business to take care of. He pardoned two people convicted in the Mueller probe, three corrupt Republican allies, more horrific war criminals and some border guards who shot an unarmed drug dealer. (He also pardoned a small handful of people who deserved it, proving there is a Santa Claus after all.)
Trump is all over the place and it’s hard to know what’s serious and what’s just the usual Trump sideshow. But he’s making one thing very clear. If someone is loyal to him he will make sure they never have to pay a price for committing an illegal act as long as he’s president. The incentives to do so on his behalf are right out there. We’ll just have to hope none of his ecstatic followers in or out of government decide to do something about it while he’s still got the power to pardon them.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time. If you’re of a mind to drop something in the old Hullabaloo Christmas stocking, you can do so below.
Pharmaceutical manufacturers may have delivered serviceable COVID-19 vaccines in record time, but for others in both the U.S. public and private sectors timeliness is not exactly a virtue.
Congress has approved a deal to provide a $900 billion coronavirus aid package. “If things continue on this path and nothing gets in the way, we’ll be able to vote tomorrow,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters late Saturday. A deadline for preventing a government shutdown looms tonight, and congressional leaders plan to pass the stimulus bill today alongside a $1.4 trillion government funding package.
The stimulus plan includes $300 per week in unemployment benefits and a single $600 payment to individuals. The agreement gelled after senators resolved an impasse involving Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania’s insistence that the Federal Reserve’s lending powers be restrained. Details of the agreement are not clear at present, but CNN reports it includes $330 billion for small business loans, plus over $80 billion for schools, and billions more for distributing COVID-19 vaccines. Stories I scanned provided no update on eviction protections in the stimulus bill.
It is not enough, of course. The compromise represents perhaps as much as Democrats can get and the most Republicans will concede to the incoming Biden-Harris administration while trying not to appear Scrooges the week of Christmas. Should the bills pass the House and Senate today, someone will have to get the outgoing president’s phone out of his hand long enough to sign them both before funding expires.
The dealmaker-in-chief is nowhere to be found. He is too busy trying to cover Russia’s backside over the massive network hacks being discovered by government agencies. That is, when he is not in the Oval Office with his merry band of lunatics plotting and screaming about how he might still overturn the results of the November election. Declaring martial law was even under consideration, per reports.
Donald J. Trump was too preoccupied with himself to celebrate the emergency use authorization of a second COVID-19 vaccine last week, or to model responsible behavior by getting the shot on camera as his vice president did. On “Saturday Night Live,” Vice President Mike Pence (played by Beck Bennett) assured Americans the vaccine is safe, “That’s why President Trump refuses to take it about it or talk about it.” And because while Trump may have deserted his post, “he still cares deeply about not going to prison.”
After allowing said president to firehose disinformation via its platform for years — much of it deadly in 2020 — Twitter finally began adding disclaimers to Trump tweets this spring. Over six weeks after the Nov. 3 election, Twitter finally has added a new advisory label to Trump’s tweets:
“Following certification of the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, we’ve updated our label to reflect the latest information,” a Twitter spokesperson told Variety.
If cleanliness is next to godliness, timeliness saves lives. How many might have been saved this year had more people in leadership positions acted sooner rather than dragging their feet?
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:
McConnell made the great sacrifice of acknowledging the election results today as if it was perfectly normal for a president who clearly lost to refuse to concede and that it’s equally normal for the opposing party to fail to acknowledge the victory until the electoral college votes. They are all such unctuous phonies.
This isn’t going to be the end of it for House Republicans who are pledging to fight the certification of the electoral college results on January 6th.
“We have a superior role under the Constitution than the Supreme Court does, than any federal court judge does, than any state court judge does,” Brooks told the New York Times. “What we say, goes. That’s the final verdict.”
Brooks told the Times he plans on challenging the electors in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin.
In order for an objection to get a debate, he will need at least one senator to join him. It’s not clear so far that any senators will object.
If an objection is filed, each Chamber would have to debate for two hours. For electors to be tossed, the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree.
According to Axios, McConnell is trying to ensure that no Senators will participate in this sham. But lest you think he is doing it because he cares about our democracy or the country — think again. He reportedly asked the GOP Senators not to cooperate with the scheme:
This is about politics as much as about doing the right thing. McConnell expressed concern about such a vote, because the GOP would have to vote it down — something that could damage incumbents up for re-election in 2022.
He says it will damage Republicans to vote against destroying our democracy.
In 2022.
I don’t know if he really believes that or he just thinks his caucus is so far gone they can’t be counted on to recognize reality. I’m not sure it matters. It’s lunacy either way.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so here:
President Trump lost key swing states by clear margins. His barrage of lawsuits claiming widespread voting fraud has been almost universally dismissed, most recently by the Supreme Court. And on Monday, the Electoral College will formally cast a majority of its votes for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
But as the president continues to refuse to concede, a small group of his most loyal backers in Congress are plotting a final-stage challenge on the floor of the House of Representatives in early January to try to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory.
Constitutional scholars and even members of the president’s own party say the effort is all but certain to fail. But the looming battle on Jan. 6 is likely to culminate in a messy and deeply divisive spectacle that could thrust Vice President Mike Pence into the excruciating position of having to declare once and for all that Mr. Trump has indeed lost the election.
The fight promises to shape how Mr. Trump’s base views the election for years to come, and to pose yet another awkward test of allegiance for Republicans who have privately hoped that the Electoral College vote this week will be the final word on the election result.
For the vice president, whom the Constitution assigns the task of tallying the results and declaring a winner, the episode could be particularly torturous, forcing him to balance his loyalty to Mr. Trump with his constitutional duties and considerations about his own political future.
The effort is being led by Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, a backbench conservative. Along with a group of allies in the House, he is eyeing challenges to the election results in five different states — Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin — where they claim varying degrees of fraud or illegal voting took place, despite certification by the voting authorities and no evidence of widespread impropriety.
“We have a superior role under the Constitution than the Supreme Court does, than any federal court judge does, than any state court judge does,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview. “What we say, goes. That’s the final verdict.”
Isn’t that special? You’ve just got to love their stubborn adherence to the spirit of democracy don’t you? Or at tleast the concept of “one Trump cultists, one vote.”
This won’t work, of course. But I have to say I will love watching MIke pence dance on the head of a pin when it happens:
Under rules laid out in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act of 1887, their challenges must be submitted in writing with a senator’s signature also affixed. No Republican senator has yet stepped forward to say he or she will back such an effort, though a handful of reliable allies of Mr. Trump, including Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky, have signaled they would be open to doing so.
The president has praised Mr. Brooks on Twitter, but has thus far taken no evident interest in the strategy. Aides say he has been more focused on battling to overturn the results in court.
Even if a senator did agree, constitutional scholars say the process is intended to be an arduous one. Once an objection is heard from a member of each house of Congress, senators and representatives will retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state’s votes. Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century.
[…]
“My No. 1 goal is to fix a badly flawed American election system that too easily permits voter fraud and election theft,” Mr. Brooks said. “A possible bonus from achieving that goal is that Donald Trump would win the Electoral College officially, as I believe he in fact did if you only count lawful votes by eligible American citizens and exclude all illegal votes.”
It remains unclear how broad a coalition he could build. More than 60 percent of House Republicans, including the top two party leaders, joined a legal brief supporting the unsuccessful Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election results. But it is one thing to sign a legal brief and another to officially contest the outcome on the House floor.
Some Republicans including Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Matt Gaetz have also signaled they could support an objection. Mr. Brooks said he had been speaking with others who were interested. But prominent allies of the president who have thrown themselves headfirst into earlier fights, like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio or even the House minority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, have so far been publicly noncommittal.
“All eyes are on Jan. 6,” Mr. Gaetz said on Fox News Friday night after the Supreme Court rejected Texas’ suit. “I suspect there will be a little bit of debate and discourse in the Congress as we go through the process of certifying the electors. We still think there is evidence that needs to be considered.”
Mr. Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said he would “wait and see how all the legal cases turn out” before deciding what to do.
Mr. Johnson plans to hold a hearing this week “examining the irregularities in the 2020 election,” featuring Ken Starr, the former independent counsel who is a favorite of the right, and at least two lawyers who have argued election challenges for Mr. Trump. Whether he proceeds to challenge results on Jan. 6, he told reporters last week, “depends on what we find out.”
So yes, they are planning to turn it into a circus.Some probably believe this horsehit and some are likely just setting the table to take on “voter fraud” so they can cheat the way they are falsely accusing the Democrats of doing. (It’s yet another example of “I know you are but what am I” politics.)
“President Trump has expressed interest in pursuing the appointment of a special counsel to investigate allegations of fraud in the November elections and issues related to Hunter Biden, according to people familiar with the matter. In recent days, the president has directed advisers to look for people who could serve in such a position, one of the people said, as lawsuits and other efforts by Mr. Trump and his campaign to reverse the election results founder,” the newspaper reported Friday evening.
There might be two special counsels appointed.
“White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has told people that the president is interested in pursuing a special counsel to investigate election fraud and wants to act quickly, one of the people said. Senior White House officials have also discussed the possibility of pursuing a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, expressing frustration over Attorney General William Barr’s handling of investigations into Mr. Biden’s business and financial dealings and concern that the incoming administration of Joe Biden could seek to shut down any probes into Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, an administration official said,” The Journal reported.
“Mr. Trump has expressed rising frustration with his attorney general in recent months, privately and publicly, according to aides, as efforts by the president and his supporters to overturn the election have repeatedly failed,” the newspaper reported. “Mr. Barr’s announcement that the Justice Department hadn’t found evidence of widespread election fraud that would reverse Mr. Biden’s victory infuriated the president, the aides said, and Mr. Trump has openly accused the Justice Department of being involved in the election fraud he has alleged.”
If Barr won’t do this I guess he’ll have to appoint a new AG — I’m sure there’s some toady he can put in there — to appoint these two special counsels on the last day and insulate them from being fired. (A new AG has the authority to fire a special counsel for cause but the idea is that these, like the Durham probe, would be too politically hot for a Biden AG to do it.) That is the Whitewater template, only in that case they pressured Clinton’s own AG into naming an Independent Counsel for every stupid scandal they dreamed up.
Gird yourselves. The entire GOP is on board a campaign to sabotage the new administration. It’s really the only thing they know how to do.
This is from Ted Lieu, who happens to not only be a great national congressman but a wonderful constituent representative as well:
Coronavirus Updates and Resources from Rep. Lieu
Dear neighbor,
We are now in our third and most severe wave of this pandemic. As of December 3, Los Angeles County has its highest daily number of COVID-19 hospitalizations at 2,572 individuals. Since early November, the average number of daily cases has increased by 225% and the case positivity rate has risen dramatically from 3.9% on November 1 to 13.0% on December 2. These numbers are alarming and can only be turned around if each and every one of us does our part to stop the spread. This means washing our hands frequently; engaging in physical distancing; wearing a face covering in public; and following public health guidelines.
Below you will find information on the latest state and local safety measures. I understand these restrictions are taking a great toll on all of us, especially on our local CA-33 businesses.
Despite the obstacles we face, I am confident in our ability to meet this challenge together. I know it isn’t easy, but your continued efforts to protect the health of our community are deeply appreciated.
Your Weekly Reminder:
This is a difficult and uncertain period for all of us, when many are feeling stressed, anxious or depressed. If you are feeling this way, please know that you are not alone. If you need someone to talk to, please call the LA County Department of Mental Health hotline at (800) 854-7771 or text “LA” to 741741. Please also view the CDC’s guidance for coping with stress and anxiety during a pandemic.
In the middle of a pandemic, ensuring Californians have access to quality, affordable health care options is more important than ever. Californians can sign up for health care coverage now through Covered California’s open enrollment period. Consumers who shop health care plans during this time will benefit from California’s lowest rate change of 0.5% for 2021. To learn more and shop and compare plans, please visit coveredca.com.
Please remember to get your flu shot to stay healthy this season. It is likely that both COVID-19 and the flu will be present at the same time in LA County this year. You can get a flu shot at any local pharmacy. For quick flu facts and frequently asked questions about COVID-19 and the flu, click here.
Los Angeles County and its partner, Healthvana, have created a new contact tracing system to empower those who’ve tested positive for COVID-19 to anonymously notify their close contacts. Since April, Healthvana has delivered test results to those tested at county-operated sites via text or email. With this new system, messages alerting patients of a positive test result will include a link that allows individuals to enter the contact information of any recent close contacts so they can be notified of their potential exposure. Another way to support contact tracing in LA County is by downloading SafePass, a mobile app to help contain the spread of COVID-19. For more on contact tracing in LA County, please click here.
Have you witnessed fraud, waste, or abuse of coronavirus pandemic relief funds? Congress has approved over $3 trillion in federal spending to combat the pandemic and I am committed to ensuring your tax dollars are being spent properly. I encourage you to visit coronavirus.house.gov/contact/tip-line or call 202-225-4400 today to report waste, fraud, or abuse of COVID-19 funds.
COVID-19 Updates
As cases surge across our state and county, many of the COVID-19 restrictions currently in place are subject to change within the next few days. I want to provide you with the relevant resources so you can stay up to date on the latest developments. For recent coronavirus updates from the state of California, including details about the new Regional Stay at Home Order, please visit covid19.ca.gov. For updates from Los Angeles County, please visit covid19.lacounty.gov.
The LA County Department of Public Health is encouraging all residents to stay home as much as possible in the coming weeks to flatten the curve and save lives. Please remember to stay home; reduce mingling with those outside of your household; and wear a face covering outside of your home.
Additional Information
All LA County residents who would like to get tested should first contact their Primary Care Provider to see if they offer COVID-19 tests. If you cannot access a test through your provider, LA County is offering free testing. Please get tested if you:
Have symptoms related to COVID-19.
Were asked to get tested by LA Public Health because of a contact tracing investigation.
Were in close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19 in the past two weeks.
Work or live in a skilled nursing facility; group home; residential care facility; homeless shelter; or correctional facility.
Are experiencing homelessness.
Are an essential worker with frequent contact with the public.
Don’t have symptoms but believe you may have been exposed to COVID-19.
Today, LA County launched free and FDA-approved at-home COVID testing. For more information, please click here.
If you live in the City of LA and are unable to drive to a testing site, you can receive a free COVID-19 test at a mobile pop-up location (no appointment necessary). Please click here to view current and upcoming pop-up testing sites.
If your small business has been affected by the pandemic, you may be eligible for federal tax credits. To learn more, please click here.
Last week, Mayor Garcetti announced that all travelers entering the City of Los Angeles from another state or city will be required to fill out an online form to ensure acknowledgement of California’s 14-day quarantine period and the state’s new travel advisory. All passengers arriving at LAX or Van Nuys Airport must fill out the form at travel.lacity.org before or upon arrival. LAX is also now offering contactless food ordering and pick-up via LAXOrderNow.com.
This week was United Against Hate Week, when we recommit to standing up against hate together. If you or someone you know has experienced a hate incident, please call 2-1-1 to report it.
If you are in need of childcare services due to the pandemic, please visit mychildcare.ca.gov to find information on licensed childcare providers near you.
If you are looking for a new job or want to build job skills, the LA County Library has established a Work Ready program for you. To sign up, please click here.
Governor Newsom announced additional financial assistance for California businesses struggling as a result of the pandemic. The state will provide temporary tax relief for eligible businesses and, in partnership with the Legislature, $500 million in COVID-19 Relief Grant funding for small businesses. It will also increase funding for the California Rebuilding Fund by $12.5 million. These measures will be crucial to supporting vulnerable California small businesses, which are the foundation of the state’s economy. To learn more about the new assistance, please click here.
Johnson & Johnson has launched its Phase 3 ENSEMBLE trial to evaluate the efficacy (whether it works) and safety of Janssen’s investigational vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19. The ENSEMBLE trial aims to recruit up to 60,000 participants and is being conducted with the highest scientific and ethical standards. It is essential to include all types of people in clinical trials when researching and developing new vaccines in order to help ensure they are safe and effective for those disproportionately impacted. To learn more about Johnson & Johnson’s ENSEMBLE trial and determine if you are eligible to participate in the study, visit www.ensemblestudy.com. A clinical trial site near CA-33 is located at Anthony Mills, MD, Inc. at 9201 W Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles.
On December 3rd, Los Angeles County launched the Keep LA County Dining Grant Program to help restaurants impacted by COVID-19 restrictions. The program will provide $30,000 for eligible businesses to use for employee payroll, outstanding expenses, adaptive business practices to be able to stay open, and more. Preference will be given to restaurants that offered outdoor dining as of November 24th, 2020. Businesses that have already received assistance through LA County CARES Act programs are not eligible for this program. For additional information, please visit keeplacountydining.lacda.org.* The application period opened on Thursday, December 3rd and will extend through Sunday, December 6th at 11:59 p.m.
*Please note: Due to technical issues, the Keep LA County Dining website is temporarily down. The LA County Development Authority is working to resolve the issue. Please check here for updates.
If you are unable to pay your rent due to financial strain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, please visit housingiskey.com for tenant rights, a rent relief guide and more.
Through the COVID-19 Safety Compliance Certification Program, businesses owners can become trained on required safety protocols at no cost. Once they finish the program, they will receive a certificate and window seal to display at their establishment to reassure customers and employees that safety is their top priority. To learn more and become certified, please click here.
This week, Los Angeles County launched the Community Equity Fund to help prevent COVID-19 transmission in communities disproportionately impacted by the virus. Through this initiative, LA County seeks to address the inequities in COVID-19 prevention measures in some of the hardest-hit areas by partnering with 51 community-based organizations (CBOs) on the ground and providing them with funding, training, and technical assistance. To learn more about the Community Equity Fund, please click here.
LA City Mayor Garcetti recently announced emergency relief for food-service workers who have suffered a financial blow due to COVID-19 restrictions. The Secure Emergency Relief for Vulnerable Employees (SERVE) initiative will provide 4,000 local food-service workers with a one-time $800 stipend. Please click here to determine if you are eligible.
Mayor Garcetti also announced a new program to help deliver internet access to young students who need it the most. The Angeleno Connectivity Trust (ACT) will offer 100 GB of free internet connectivity to vulnerable students, including those in foster care, experiencing homelessness, and youth with disabilities. To find more information on ACT, please go to lamayor.org/Connectivity.
The World Health Organization (WHO) issued new mask guidelines, urging people who live in areas where coronavirus is spreading to wear a face covering at all times in public spaces. To download and read through the new guidelines, please click here.
Although we continue to face challenges brought on by this pandemic, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yesterday, Governor Newsom unveiled the first details of the state’s vaccine distribution plan. The first batch of vaccines will be distributed to health care workers in both clinical and non-clinical settings. To learn more about vaccine distribution, please click here.
With coronavirus cases rising in our area, we are all counting on each other to take the necessary precautions this holiday season. By washing our hands frequently, engaging in physical distancing, and wearing a mask in public, we are each playing our part in protecting our community. For more information on the coronavirus, please visit my coronavirus webpage, covid19.ca.gov and/or covid19.lacounty.gov. For frequent updates, please follow me on my Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts. Remember – by staying home, you are saving lives. I look forward to updating you again soon.
Stay safe.
Sincerely,
Ted W. Lieu Member of Congress
His staff is as good as he is. I recently had a constituent issue with which they all immediately helped me, with compassion and concern. People in my personal orbit were surprised because they are conservatives who believe that government is unresponsive.
I’m lucky, I know. But this is how it can be for everyone if they elect the right people.
Since Nov. 25, not a single fundraising email from the Trump campaign or its Republican National Committee fundraising account has featured Pence’s name in the “from” field. And this week, that Republican National Committee joint fundraising committee, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, made another subtle change: a handful of its emails swapped out the official Trump-Pence campaign logo for one featuring just the president’s name.
At first blush, those may seem like minor tweaks to gimmicky portions of Team Trump’s fundraising strategy. A source familiar with the process said the fundraising emails do not go to Vice President Pence’s team for clearance and an RNC official said the digital team was merely testing a new logo around the end of the month deadline. Indeed, some of the joint fundraising committee’s emails this week have included the original campaign logo with Pence’s name below Trump’s.
“It is an open secret [in Trumpworld] that Vice President Pence absolutely does not feel the same way about the legal effort as President Trump does,” said a senior administration official. “The vice president doesn’t want to go down with this ship…and believes much of the legal work has been unhelpful.”[…]
The political marriage between Trump and Pence was always based on simple tradeoff: Pence gave Trump credibility among establishment and religious types and, in exchange, shared the spoils of Trump’s far larger and more unorthodox coalition of voters. But in the aftermath of the 2020 elections, that deal has come under intense strain.
As Trump has tended to his own future, Pence has preferred to place his energies on the critical Senate run-offs in Georgia. Pence, sources say, privately views the Rudy Giuliani-led legal operation to overturn the 2020 election through the mass disenfranchisement of votes as counterproductive and doomed. And, as a former governor himself, he has been particularly uncomfortable with Trump’s attacks on Republican governors in some of the key battleground states that he lost. The president has accused several GOP leaders of incompetence or negligence in their inability or unwillingness to stop the certification of their state’s election results.
No,no,no,no no. Pence does not get to separate himself from Trump now that he’s a big loser. He’s been Trump’s adoring sidekick for four long years. He will be inextricably linked to Donald Trump for the rest of his life.
On Wednesday, Pence went to Capitol Hill where he participated in the swearing in of Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ)—an act that implicitly conceded the validity of the elections in Arizona. Hours later, Trump put out a 46 minute long speech in which he called for the results in six battleground states, including Arizona, to be overturned and for him to remain president. Pence was not by his side.
Oh yes he was. He will always be next to him whether he is physically present or not. Always.
This figures. Trump lies about everything and is a conspiracy theorist from way back. He was king of the birthers, after all. Because he always cheats, he projects his own worldview on to everything:
President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him through widespread fraud, but it’s far from the first time he’s cried foul about an election.
Timeline:
Nov. 2012 Trump, who had endorsed Republican nominee Mitt Romney, tweeted about apocryphal reports of “voting machines switching Romney votes to Obama” after previously warning supporters in October to “be careful of voter fraud!”
Feb. 2016 Trump repeatedly chalked up his narrow loss to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in the Iowa caucus to voter fraud, pushing vague, unsubstantiated claims Cruz “cheated” and “stole” the election and demanding, “either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.”
Nov. 2016 Despite defeating Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, Trump tweeted baseless allegations of “millions of FRAUD votes” and claiming, “Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.”
Dec. 2017 Trump subtly pushed doubts about the legitimacy of Alabama’s special Senate election, which Democrat Doug Jones won in an upset, conceding “a win is a win,” but adding, “The write-in votes played a very big factor.”
Nov. 2018 Trump took aim at Senate elections in Arizona and Florida and a gubernatorial race in Georgia – the latter two of which Republicans won – falsely claiming Florida counties “miraculously started finding Democrat votes” and proposing a new election in Arizona because of unexplained “electoral corruption.”
Aug. 2020 A rare example where Trump lacked a direct personal stake, he called to re-run the late-decided Democratic primary in New York’s 12th District, pointing to it as a prime example of the failings of mail-in voting – though analysts argue such examples serve better as a display of New York’s subpar election administration.
Nov. 2020 Trump has made some of his most outlandish voter fraud claims yet in an effort to hang onto power despite Democrat Joe Biden’s clear win, repeatedly pushing claims about voting machines changing votes that even his own officials rebuked.
Amid Trump’s continued refusal to concede the election – despite allowing his General Services Administration to recognize Biden as the “apparent winner” and authorize cooperation toward a transition of power – his legal team has filed lawsuits in key states won by Biden to try to overturn the results. Those efforts have largely been met with failure, as have Trump’s attempts to pressure state lawmakers to block certification of their states’ results. […]
Aaaand:
73%. That’s the share of Republicans who agree with Trump’s false claims that he won the election, according to a CNBC/Change Research poll released Monday. Just 3% of GOP voters, by contrast, acknowledge the reality of Biden’s victory.
He’s always been this way. And now they are too. Everything is always rigged against them. They just can’t get a break. Unless they win.
The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.
But Trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ”
However cleareyed that Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’ ”
Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin, for instance, discussed with Trump a poll he had conducted after the election that showed Trump with a positive approval rating, a plurality of the country who thought the media had been “unfair and biased against him” and a majority of voters who believed their lives were better than four years earlier, according to two people familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. As expected, Trump lapped it up.
The result was an election aftermath without precedent in U.S. history. With his denial of the outcome, despite a string of courtroom defeats, Trump endangered America’s democracy, threatened to undermine national security and public health, and duped millions of his supporters into believing, perhaps permanently, that Biden was elected illegitimately.
Trump’s allegations and the hostility of his rhetoric — and his singular power to persuade and galvanize his followers — generated extraordinary pressure on state and local election officials to embrace his fraud allegations and take steps to block certification of the results. When some of them refused, they accepted security details for protection from the threats they were receiving.
“It was like a rumor Whac-A-Mole,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Despite being a Republican who voted for Trump, Raffensperger said he refused repeated attempts by Trump allies to get him to cross ethical lines. “I don’t think I had a choice. My job is to follow the law. We’re not going to get pushed off the needle on doing that. Integrity still matters.”
All the while, Trump largely abdicated the responsibilities of the job he was fighting so hard to keep, chief among them managing the coronavirus pandemic as the numbers of infections and deaths soared across the country. In an ironic twist, the Trump adviser tapped to coordinate the post-election legal and communications campaign, David Bossie, tested positive for the virus a few days into his assignment and was sidelined.
Only on Nov. 23 did Trump reluctantly agree to initiate a peaceful transfer of power by permitting the federal government to officially begin Biden’s transition — yet still he protested that he was the true victor.
The 20 days between the election on Nov. 3 and the greenlighting of Biden’s transition exemplified some of the hallmarks of life in Trump’s White House: a government paralyzed by the president’s fragile emotional state; advisers nourishing his fables; expletive-laden feuds between factions of aides and advisers; and a pernicious blurring of truth and fantasy.
Instead, Trump empowered loyalists who were willing to tell him what he wanted to hear — that he would have won in a landslide had the election not been rigged and stolen — and then to sacrifice their reputations by waging a campaign in courtrooms and in the media to convince the public of this delusion.
Though Trump ultimately failed in his quest to steal the election, his weeks-long jeremiad succeeded in undermining faith in elections and the legitimacy of Biden’s victory.
And, not incidentally,it set the table for his triumphant comeback, something he has done over and over again in his life, having been able to snow the public and his wealthy benefactors into repeatedly bailing him out. The only thing that will stop him is when he shuffles off his mortal coil, probably quietly in bed at the age of 95. He is that lucky.
The Post’s narration of these last three weeks is actually hair- raising. What if a foreign country had decided this was a good time to poke the bear? Or terrorists pulled of a major attack. Or, I don’t know, a pandemic hit our shores and killed a quarter of a million people?
How is it possible that someone this delusional is being propped up by a whole political party and 74 million of our fellow citizens. It is literally madness.
And yet … Mad King Donald had prepared for this for months:
In the run-up to the election, Trump was aware of the fact — or likelihood, according to polls — that he could lose. He commented a number of times to aides, “Oh, wouldn’t it be embarrassing to lose to this guy?”
But in the final stretch of the campaign, nearly everyone — including the president — believed he was going to win. And early on election night, Trump and his team thought they were witnessing a repeat of 2016, when he defied polls and expectations to build an insurmountable lead in the electoral college.
Then Fox News called Arizona for Biden.
“He was yelling at everyone,” a senior administration official recalled of Trump’s reaction. “He was like, ‘What the hell? We were supposed to be winning Arizona. What’s going on?’ He told Jared to call [News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert] Murdoch.”
Efforts by Kushner and others on the Trump team to convince Fox to take back its Arizona call failed.
Trump and his advisers were furious, in part because calling Arizona for Biden undermined Trump’s scattershot plan to declare victory on election night if it looked like he had sizable leads in enough states.
With Biden now just one state away from clinching a majority 270 votes in the electoral college and the media narrative turned sharply against him, Trump decided to claim fraud. And his team set out to try to prove it.
Throughout the summer and fall, Trump had laid the groundwork for claiming a “rigged” election, as he often termed it, warning of widespread fraud. Former chief of staff John F. Kelly told others that Trump was “getting his excuse ready for when he loses the election,” according to a person who heard his comments.
In June, during an Oval Office meeting with political advisers and outside consultants, Trump raised the prospect of suing state governments for how they administer elections and said he could not believe they were allowed to change the rules. All the states, he said, should follow the same rules. Advisers told him that he did not want the federal government in charge of elections.
Trump also was given several presentations by his campaign advisers about the likely surge in mail-in ballots — in part because many Americans felt safer during the pandemic voting by mail than in person — and was told they would overwhelmingly go against him, according to a former campaign official.
Advisers and allies, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), encouraged Trump to try to close the gap in mail-in voting, arguing that he would need some of his voters, primarily seniors, to vote early by mail. But Trump instead exhorted his supporters not to vote by mail, claiming they could not trust that their ballots would be counted.
“It was sort of insane,” the former campaign official said.
Ultimately, it was the late count of mail-in ballots that erased Trump’s early leads in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other battleground states and propelled Biden to victory. As Trump watched his margins shrink and then reverse, he became enraged, and he saw a conspiracy theory at play.
“You really have to understand Trump’s psychology,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a longtime Trump associate and former White House communications director who is now estranged from the president. “The classic symptoms of an outsider is, there has to be a conspiracy. It’s not my shortcomings, but there’s a cabal against me. That’s why he’s prone to these conspiracy theories.”
Those are the classic markings of a paranoid, malignant, narcissist. And that level of instability should not be allowed anywhere near a powerful office like the presidency. I think we’ve all become a little bit crazy over the past four years that something like this can be written and we read it with astonishment and then move on to watch a football game or read a book or otherwise carry on with our cloistered pandemic lives as if it’s perfectly normal. Which is has been for the past four years.
And here is more about Georgia, which I still think Trump is subconsciously trying to sabotage:
In the days following the election, few states drew Trump’s attention like Georgia, a once-reliable bastion of Republican votes that he carried in 2016 but appeared likely to lose narrowly to Biden as late-remaining votes were tallied.
And few people attracted Trump’s anger like Gov. Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor who rode the president’s coattails to his own narrow victory in 2018.
A number of Trump allies tried to pressure Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, into putting his thumb on the scale. Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler — both forced into runoff elections on Jan. 5 — demanded Raffensperger’s resignation. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump friend who chairs the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, called Raffensperger to seemingly encourage him to find a way to toss legal ballots.
But Kemp, who preceded Raffensperger as secretary of state, would not do Trump’s bidding. “He wouldn’t be governor if it wasn’t for me,” Trump fumed to advisers earlier this month as he plotted out a call to scream at Kemp.
In the call, Trump urged Kemp to do more to fight for him in Georgia, publicly echo his claims of fraud and appear more regularly on television. Kemp was noncommittal, a person familiar with the call said.
Raffensperger said he knew Georgia was going to be thrust into the national spotlight on Election Day, when dramatically fewer people turned out to vote in person than the Trump campaign needed for a clear win following a surge of mail voting dominated by Democratic voters.
But he said it had never occurred to him to go along with Trump’s unproven allegations because of his duty to administer elections. Raffensperger said his strategy was to keep his head down and follow the law.
“People made wild accusations about the voting systems that we have in Georgia,” Raffensperger said. “They were asking, ‘How do we get to 270? How do you get it to Congress so they can make a determination?’ ” But, he added, “I’m not supposed to put my thumb on the Republican side.”
Trump fixated on a false conspiracy theory that the machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems and used in Georgia and other states had been programmed to count Trump votes as Biden votes. In myriad private conversations, the president would find a way to come back to Dominion. He was obsessed.
“Do you think there’s really something here? I’m hearing . . . ” Trump would say, according to one senior official who discussed it with him.
Raffensperger said Republicans were only harming themselves by questioning the integrity of the Dominion machines. He warned that these kinds of baseless allegations could discourage Republicans from voting in the Senate runoffs. “People need to get a grip on reality,” he said.
More troubling to Raffensperger were the many threats he and his wife, Tricia, have received over the past few weeks — and a break-in at another family member’s home. All of it has prompted him to accept a state security detail.
“If Republicans don’t start condemning this stuff, then I think they’re really complicit in it,” he said. “It’s time to stand up and be counted. Are you going to stand for righteousness? Are you going to stand for integrity? Or are you going to stand for the wild mob? You wanted to condemn the wild mob when it’s on the left side. What are you going to do when it’s on our side?”
On Nov. 20, after Raffensperger certified the state’s results, Kemp announced that he would make a televised statement, stoking fears that the president might have finally gotten to the governor.
“This can’t be good,” Jordan Fuchs, a Raffensperger deputy, wrote in a text message.
But Kemp held firm and formalized the certification.
“As governor, I have a solemn responsibility to follow the law, and that is what I will continue to do,” Kemp said. “We must all work together to ensure citizens have confidence in future elections in our state.”
Think about that. The guy who, as secretary of state while running for Governor, went out of his way to disenfranchise 50,000 Georgians in order to win that election against Stacey Abrams, actually bucked Trump. I can see why Trump was surprised.
On Nov. 7, four days after the election, every major news organization projected that Biden would win the presidency. At the same time, Giuliani stood before news cameras in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, near an adult-video shop and a crematorium, to detail alleged examples of voter fraud.
[…]
Also that day, Stepien, Clark, Miller and Bossie briefed Trump on a potential legal strategy for the president’s approval. They explained that prevailing would be difficult and involve complicated plays in every state that could stretch into December. They estimated a “5 to 10 percent chance of winning,” one person involved in the meeting said.
Trump signaled that he understood and agreed to the strategy.
Around this time, some lawyers around Trump began to suddenly disappear from the effort in what some aides characterized as an attempt to protect their reputations. Former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who had appeared at a news conference with Giuliani right after the election, ceased her involvement after the first week.
“Literally only the fringy of the fringe are willing to do pressers, and that’s when it became clear there was no ‘there’ there,” a senior administration official said.
Giuliani and his protegee, Ellis, both striving to please the president, insisted that Trump’s fight was not over. Someone familiar with their strategy said they were “performing for an audience of one,” and that Trump held Giuliani in high regard as “a fighter” and as “his peer.”
He considers Rudy Giuliani his peer. Which is true. He is. And that’s not a compliment. What a pair.
The article goes on to report on the “hostile takeover” of the campaign by Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. It’s as farcical as you can imagine. They were given a free hand and it wasn’t until Giuliani appeared on TV sweating black liquid down his face and talking about “My Cousin Vinnie” that Trump felt it made him look like a fool. But, of course, he didn’t fire Rudy. He fired Sidney Powell who is hardly any more Looney Tunes that the Rudester.
They gathered the people who were willing to go on TV to shout that the election was stolen and sent them out. Everyone else stayed mum. Meanwhile, all of his court challenges were failing one after the other. So he moved to Plan B:
As Trump’s legal challenges failed in court, he employed another tactic to try to reverse the result: a public pressure campaign on state and local Republican officials to manipulate the electoral system on his behalf.
“As was the case throughout his business career, he viewed the rules as instruments to be manipulated to achieve his chosen ends,” said Galston of the Brookings Institution.
Trump’s highest-profile play came in Michigan, where Biden was the projected winner and led by more than 150,000 votes. On Nov. 17, Trump called a Republican member of the board of canvassers in Wayne County, which is where Detroit is located and is the state’s most populous county. After speaking with the president, the board member, Monica Palmer, attempted to rescind her vote to certify Biden’s win in Wayne.
Then Trump invited the leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state Senate and House to meet him at the White House, apparently hoping to coax them to block certification of the results or perhaps even to ignore Biden’s popular-vote win and seat Trump electors if the state’s canvassing board deadlocked. Such a move was on shaky legal ground, but that didn’t stop the president from trying.
The Post reports that there was a “full-court press” by Democratic and Republican leaders to urge them to resist. I had not heard that before and I have to wonder if it’s true. Republicans sure kept a low profile if that’s what they were doing.
They also report that the Michigan GOP leaders only acquiesced to visit Trump as a courtesy and to try to get COVID relief which sure sounds to me like an after-the-fact rationale. These are the same people who’ve been pushing Governor Whitmer to open up, virus be damned. I think there is a little ass-covering going on.
His slightly less insane enablers had been trying to get him to authorize the transition but he felt it was tantamount to conceding but, as we know, he finally agreed when they assured him that it wasn’t and he could keep challenging the results, which he did. And he and Rudy decided he should attend the half-baked “meeting” at the Wyndham hotel in Gettysburg thes next day to address the GOP officials who were discussing possibly sending alternate electors to the congress.
A few hours before he was scheduled to depart, the trip was scuttled. “Bullet dodged,” said one campaign adviser. “It would have been a total humiliation.”
That afternoon, Trump called in to the meeting of GOP state senators at the Wyndham, where Giuliani and Ellis were addressing attendees. He spoke via a scratchy connection to Ellis’s cellphone, which she played on speaker. At one point, the line beeped to signal another caller.
“If you were a Republican poll watcher, you were treated like a dog,” Trump complained, using one of his favorite put-downs, even though many people treat dogs well, like members of their own families.
“This election was lost by the Democrats,” he said, falsely. “They cheated.”
Trump demanded that state officials overturn the results — but the count had already been certified. Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes will be awarded to Biden.
This is utter madness. But from what I gather, we are all supposed to indulge him for the next two months and then he’ll be gone and we’ll all live happily ever after. Indeed I think we’re all supposed to immediately behave as if none of this ever happened. If the rhetoric coming from congressional Republicans is to be believed, we are already going right back to the good old days of harangues about deficits and spending and foreign policy weakness, basically erasing the last four years of insanity.
And I’m seeing a lot of people on the other side doing that as well, reverting back to all the old arguments and complaints as if nothing has changed. But everything changed. We now know that our supposed “guardrails” are only as good as a few people in random places doing the right thing in a situation in which denying reality requires a total suspension of reason.
If this election had been closer I have no doubt they all would have done it. Just go back and look at the lengths to which they were willing to go in 2000. You see, they already succeeded once.
Yes, he is a clown. But he is a very, very dangerous one, even now. He has succeeded in discrediting our election system and invalidating Joe Biden’s win for more than 50 million Americans without any evidence. And all but a handful of elected Republicans are just fine with that.
Chris Hayes addressed this last night:
“The tolerance that the institutional Republican party has for authoritarian, flatly anti-democratic politics to just overturn the election—the tolerance is luckily lower than the worst case fears. But it is way higher than anyone should be comfortable with,” says @chrislhayes. pic.twitter.com/NL2TvIqOSZ
This remains a very frightening moment. They are all fine with this:
Trump's attempt to overturn the election failed. But things to remember: POTUS tried to overturn the election while most Republicans supported him. It's time to turn to the transition, but not to turn the page. This was unprecedented and dangerous. It was also a partisan thing.
[E]ven without precipitating a full-blown constitutional crisis, Mr. Trump has already shattered the longstanding norm that a defeated candidate should concede quickly and gracefully and avoid contesting the results for no good reason. He and his allies also rejected the longstanding convention that the news media should declare a winner, and instead exploited the fragmentation of the media and the rise of platforms like Twitter and Facebook to encourage an alternative-reality experience for his supporters.
The next Republican candidate to lose a close election may find some voters expecting him or her to mimic Mr. Trump’s conduct, and if a Democrat were to adopt the same tactics, the G.O.P. would have no standing to complain.
Still more important, legal and political experts said, is the way Mr. Trump identified perilous pressure points within the system. Those vulnerabilities, they said, could be manipulated to destabilizing effect by someone else, in a closer election — perhaps one that featured real evidence of tampering, or foreign interference, or an outcome that delivers a winner who was beaten handily in the popular vote but scored a razor-thin win in the Electoral College.
In those scenarios, it might not be such a long-shot gambit for a losing candidate to attempt to halt certification of results through low-profile state and county boards, or to bestir state legislators to appoint a slate of electors or to pressure political appointees in the federal government to block a presidential transition.
Indeed, Mr. Trump managed to intrude on normal election procedures in several states. He summoned Michigan Republican leaders to the Oval Office as his allies floated the idea of appointing pro-Trump electors from the state, which Mr. Biden carried by more than 150,000 votes. And he inspired an onslaught from the right against Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who declined to affirm Mr. Trump’s false claims of ballot tampering. Though Mr. Raffensperger oversaw a fair election, both of Georgia’s Republican senators, channeling the president, called for his resignation.
Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the country had experienced a “‘Lord of the Flies’ moment” that revealed just how willing some powerful actors were to enable an undisguised effort to sabotage a free and fair election.
“It’s easy to laugh at the Trump challenges, just because they’ve been so out there,” Mr. Li said. “But what’s scary is, you step back from that a bit and see how many people were willing to go along with it until fairly deep in the process.”
“There will be closer elections, ultimately,” he added. “This one wasn’t very close. The fact that people are willing to go down dangerous paths should give us all pause.”
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump will wind up as a singularly sore loser or as the herald of a new Wild West era in American electioneering. There have been far closer elections this century — including the 2000 vote that plunged the country into a weekslong review of Florida’s rickety vote-counting procedures, and the 2016 election that made Mr. Trump president through a historically wide split between the popular vote and the Electoral College. But no one else has entertained the corrosive tactics Mr. Trump has sought to employ.
Like numerous other presidential schemes over the last four years, Mr. Trump’s plot against the election unraveled in part because of external circumstances — the large number of swing states Mr. Biden carried, for instance — and in part because of his own clumsiness. His lawyers and political advisers never devised an actual strategy for reversing the popular vote in multiple big states, relying on a combination of televised chest-thumping and wild claims of big-city election fraud for which there was no evidence.
Barbara J. Pariente, the former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court who was among the jurists overseeing the state-level battle over the 2000 vote, said it was essential for Congress to clarify the process by which elections are conducted and resolved or risk greater calamity in the coming years. Mr. Trump’s team, she said, had already breached fundamental standards of legal conduct by filing cases seeking to throw out huge numbers of votes “without any evidence of impropriety, and then asking a court to look further into it.”
“As I look at what is happening now, I think it’s a real attack on our American system of democracy, and it is causing tens of millions of Americans to doubt the outcome,” Ms. Pariente said. “It has grave implications, in my view, for the future of this country.”
This piece by election law expert Edward Foley makes some of the same points.
I would not be as concerned about this if Trump were out there flailing around with Rudy and the GOP establishment was pushing back with any kind of energy at all. They are not. The only people brave enough to stand up are the odd local official and some state-wide elected Republicans who balked at being asked to steal the election for Donald Trump. For the most part they are all just sitting back to see what he can get away with and watch him expose the weak spots they can exploit in the future.
This is very bad. Unless you think the Republican Party is just pretending and will somehow turn into nice, old-fashioned Main Street types who are acting in good faith, you can see that this is a very big problem going forward. After all, they have shown us that authoritarian white nationalism sits just fine with all of them and they have no problem destroying all democratic institutions. You know what that’s adds up to right? (The “F” word.)
Image via Alice Minium at Medium, memorializing the Second Civil War of July 4, 2018. #lettersfromthesecondcivilwar
Eric Boehlert’s newsletter today points out the dainty way the press describes the outgoing president’s attempt to reduce the United States of America to a tin-pot dictatorship, one nation under Trump:
Instead of referring to his treasonous post-election behavior surrounding the would-be coup by a power-hungry authoritarian out to steal an election, we get news updates about Trump’s “tactics,” his vague “moves” and “chicanery”; his legal “strategy” and “power play” while “sulking” and “brooding” inside the White House. None of that captures the historic events that have unfolded since Election Day. Events that if they occurred in a foreign country would be covered much differently by the American press.
The idea that Trump’s harmlessly wandering the West Wing in a funk, despondent over his loss doesn’t match reality. In truth, Trump has spent weeks, with laser-like focus, actively trying to engineer the open theft of a presidential contest. He’s dispatched an army of lawyers who are committed to throwing out as many legitimate U.S. votes as possible. When that has proven to be a failure, he’s shifted to getting state Republicans to block or delay the certification of the popular votes in their states. And much of the Republican Party supports him, either publicly or tacitly by standing by and watching.
Were these events to unfold in a foreign land an ocean away, the more militant of congressional Republicans would call for sanctions against such a country and for arms sales to its neighbors. (Have Canada or Mexico asked?) They would hold forth for C-SPAN cameras in their chambers or preach before reporters in Capitol hallways of their undying faith in the power of democracy to deliver the fruits of freedom to the oppressed in less-God-blessed nations. They would issue principle-laden statements on their websites and in fundraising letters. They would bask, not to put it daintily, in the warm glow of their own exceptionalist glory.
For now, they cower. Feckless cowards before an even bigger coward.
“Trump’s baseless argument that this is still an election up for grabs was prevalent in interviews with Republicans across the country on Friday,” the New York Times reported and Jay Rosen noted, tweeting, “A counter-majoritarian party has to be counter-factual too. The conflict with journalism is structural.”
Took a screen shot of this one because there's talk among Republicans about how crazy it is to leave it up See: https://t.co/gLR9wjJKGN But it's still up: The @GOP's verified account floating the claim that he won in a landslide, which makes it official. The party went there. https://t.co/b7mPpeEK3T
"Trump’s baseless argument that this is still an election up for grabs was prevalent in interviews with Republicans across the country on Friday." https://t.co/fhn4pA7j7N
A counter-majoritarian party has to be counter-factual too. The conflict with journalism is structural.
Authoritarianism has been on display for weeks now, as Trump throws all his energy into casting doubt over free and fair elections in the world’s oldest democracy. The daily news coverage needs to say so, and drop the idea that Trump’s simply passing his days feeling sorry for himself, in a state of “denial.” He’s been waging a multi-pronged war on America.
From the shadows. One hopes Trump’s beefy, blustery, gun-toting foot soldiers are equally inept and cowardly.
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