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Hate to say it @Mindysan33, but y’all in GA don’t really get to relax yet. (And yep, intentional verbiage!) Senate in Jan!!
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Yep! We have our work cut out for us here.
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Remember this?
Well, you have a president-elect now.
And besides that re-run of Arrested Development at the Four Seasons, it seems that democratic due process will go on in the US.
I’m glad for that.
I’m also fucking tired.
@milliefink, if you are actually discussing things on HCR’s pages, give her my (our, if I may make the assumption) thanks for a great service she has done so far.
I hope she keeps it up.
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November 8, 2020 (Sunday)
Trump and Republican Party leaders are refusing to acknowledge that Democrat Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris have won the 2020 election. Despite Biden’s win in the Electoral College and his win of 4.4 million* and counting in the popular vote, Trump insists—without evidence-- that there has been fraud and will not concede the election. So far, most Republican leaders are following his lead. This morning, for example, Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) suggested, contrary to the facts, that there are irregularities in the ballot counting.
Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) and former President George W. Bush were two of the handful of Republican leaders to congratulate Biden and Harris. The rest are keeping mum, possibly recognizing what Senator Lindsey Graham said out loud on the Fox News Channel this morning: “If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again."
Graham is right that, in their modern incarnation, Republicans will definitely have a hard time surviving unless they change the system even more than they already have. They are in the minority in the country, and a Democratic administration will likely pass a new voting rights act to replace the one the Supreme Court gutted in 2013. More voters will indeed make it hard for the current Republican Party to regain control of the country.
The obvious answer to the Republicans’ problem would seem to be broadening their appeal, and there are glimmers that a branch of the Republican Party is heading that direction. After the election, former chair of the Republican National Committee and adviser to the never-Trump Lincoln Project Michael Steele appeared on comedian Larry Wilmore’s new show on NBC’s Peacock streaming service.
Steele emphasized that he was still a Republican, but he was an American first, and that the Republican Party needed to get rid of its allegiance to Trump and rebuild. He pointed out that he has been a Republican since 1976, and that most of the people currently in charge are newcomers. Steele expressed disappointment that so many voters supported Trump in the election, but was more scathing of Republican Party leaders who “sycophantically kowtow to a[n]… egomaniacal henchman who has one… view of the world and that’s himself.”
Right-wing media outlets also continue to insist, without evidence, that the election was fraudulent. The Fox News Channel is emphasizing the many lawsuits Trump has filed without mentioning that the lawsuits have all, so far, been thrown out for lack of evidence of any kind of fraud. Once again, Trump’s people are constructing a fictional narrative through “investigations,” a theme that, after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails and Hunter Biden’s Ukraine work, should sound familiar.
Memes on right-wing media are expanding on this rumor. They call for holding a new election, promise that the Supreme Court will step in to give Trump the win, or assure Trump followers that the election will get thrown in the House of Representatives, where Republican states will hand the White House back to Trump. These attacks are taking a toll. On CBS News’s 60 Minutes today, Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican, said the people counting ballots in the city have received death threats.
This is not normal. The outcome of this election is not in doubt. Trump’s lawyers have launched a number of lawsuits challenging the mail-in votes that favored Biden, but judges have thrown all of them out from lack of evidence of any kind of fraud. There is no reason to think that the Supreme Court will step in, or that the election will get thrown into the House, although either is technically possible and may be what the president is hoping for.
Sources close to the president told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and his campaign adviser Jason Miller are telling Trump to hold rallies to push for a vote recount. Even aside from its implications for our democracy, this horrifies public health officials. Today we passed more than 10 million cases of coronavirus, with averages of more than 100,000 infections a day. Trump has insisted, without evidence, that we are “rounding the corner” on the virus, even as more members of the White House staff, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, have come down with it.
Aside from the coronavirus, the attack on the outcome of the election, even in the face of a clear win, is designed to keep the Republican base seething about an election leaders are telling them was stolen. The Trump campaign is fundraising on this issue, urging followers to donate for the legal challenges ahead. But the Wall Street Journal today noted that the fine print of the “Official Election Defense Fund” explains that 60% of contributions to the fund will go toward paying off Trump’s election debt, and 40% to the operating account of the Republican National Committee. Only after a donation hits the legal limit will the remainder go toward legal expenses.
Meanwhile, the refusal to acknowledge Biden’s win is hamstringing his ability to get his team in place. Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee at the General Services Administration, the agency in charge of signing the paperwork that gives a new administration access to office space and equipment as well as $9.9 million authorized for a presidential transition, has refused to sign paperwork enabling Biden and his team to begin the transition process. Once the transition begins, the new administration can begin to process disclosure and conflict-of-interest forms and get up to speed with ongoing government projects. But the GSA is refusing to allow a transition before Trump agrees that one is in order. Normally the transition begins the day after the election is called.
Trump’s people are standing almost alone in refusing to acknowledge the results of a democratic election. The rest of the world is greeting the new presidential team with joy. “London looks forward to working with you—it’s time to get back to building bridges, not walls,” tweeted London Mayor Sadiq Kahn. “Welcome back America,” tweeted Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. In what must have been a bit of a blow for Trump, even his former personal ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated Biden and Harris today with a personal tweet: “Joe, we’ve had a long & warm personal relationship for nearly 40 years, and I know you as a great friend of Israel. I look forward to working with both of you to further strengthen the special alliance between the U.S. and Israel.”
Vice President Elect Harris is a pathbreaker, the first woman elected to the vice presidency. This fact has not been lost on American women, many of whom think her election falls into the category of “high time.” Harris acknowledged this achievement in her victory speech last night, wearing a white pantsuit in honor of the suffragists, who fought for the vote, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who ran for the presidency in 2016. Harris is a pathbreaker in other ways, too: she is the first Indian-American and the first Black woman to be elected to the second-highest office in the land.
Tonight, the Biden team released its schedule for tomorrow. Biden will receive a briefing from his transition coronavirus team and launch a 12-person coronavirus task force co-chaired by Dr. Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General under President Obama and President Trump, and former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. David Kessler.
Vice President Pence’s coronavirus task force has not met in weeks, but will do so tomorrow. The president has not been seen in public since the election, except going to and from his golf course twice over the weekend. He has nothing on his public schedule for Monday.
*I had this wrong last night when I put it at 5 million.
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Guess we’ll have to have the campaign cover some costs in the meantime. That should take a whole hour of fundraising.
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We can’t vote in those elections but we’re sendng money to the campaigns of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
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November 9, 2020 (Monday)
I had hoped that the days when the news came like a firehose were over, but so far, no luck.
This morning, the stock market jumped 1200 points in its first day of trading after the announcement of Biden’s election. Over the course of the day it was up as much as 1600 points, then ended for the day with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 834.57 points, or 2.95%.
The strong market is at least in part because pharmaceutical company Pfizer and the German drug company BioNTech announced today they have a coronavirus vaccine which appears to be about 90% effective. The Trump administration immediately tried to take credit for the vaccine, only to have Pfizer note that it has not taken federal money under Trump’s Operation Warp Speed for rushing a coronavirus vaccine. Don Jr. promptly suggested that the delay in announcing the potential vaccine until this week was designed to hurt Trump’s reelection, but it seems Pfizer is likely distancing itself from Trump to avoid any suggestion that the vaccine is about politics, rather than science. In the past, the administration has touted a number of treatments for Covid-19 that have turned out to be ineffective, and the pressure for a vaccine before the election threatened to weaken public faith in one.
The pandemic continues to worsen across the country. Today we learned that Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has tested positive for the virus; so has David Bossie, the Trump adviser in charge of the campaign’s legal challenges to the election loss. Both men were at the election night watch party at the White House, along with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was sick with Covid-19 at the time and did not wear a mask. Aides told PBS NewsHour reporter Yamiche Alcindor that they were worried the event would be a superspreader, but felt pressured to attend.
President-Elect Joe Biden started his presidential transition today, beginning by announcing the make up of his coronavirus task force. It’s an impressive group of doctors and scientists, including Dr. Rick Bright, a whistleblower fired by Trump officials. “Please, I implore you, wear a mask," Biden told Americans. "A mask is not a political statement…. The goal is to get back to normal as fast as possible.”
New leadership and the rising infection rates are shifting the conversation. Last night, Utah’s Republican Governor Gary Herbert announced a state of emergency. He has imposed a statewide mask mandate indefinitely and a ban on social gatherings outside of households for the next two weeks. He has limited extracurricular activities at schools. Businesses that don’t follow the mask mandate can be fined; organizers who ignore the social gathering rule can be prosecuted and fined up to $10,000.
Not everyone likes the idea of new leadership, though. In an unprecedented move, Trump is refusing to acknowledge that he has lost the election. He has launched lawsuits challenging the ballot counting in a number of states, and his surrogates—including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany—are accusing the Democrats of cheating. Tonight, Attorney General William Barr legitimized the idea of voter fraud by permitting federal prosecutors to investigate such allegations. Barr’s move prompted the head of the Election Crimes Branch of the Department of Justice, Richard Pilger, to resign.
But what’s so weird about this is that they are losing all these lawsuits. Indeed, some of them they’re not even trying to win: they’re not bothering to fill out the correct paperwork. It seems clear that they are simply stoking the narrative of an unfair election, but it is not at all clear to me to what end.
It is certainly possible that Trump and his people are launching a coup, as observers warn. And yet, this would not be an easy task. Biden’s win is not a few votes here or there; it is commanding, and Trump’s aides are telling reporters they think the game is played out. The military has already said it wants no part of getting involved in the election, and the courts so far are siding against the administration entirely. Even key Republican leaders, such as Georgia’s Republican lieutenant governor, are denying there has been any problem with the vote.
Maybe what’s at stake is that last Tuesday’s election left control of the Senate hanging on two runoff elections in Georgia. Today the Republican candidates in those races tagged on to the cries of voter fraud to call for Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to resign. Raffensberger is the top elections official in the state. He is a Republican. There is no evidence of any irregularity in the 2020 Georgia election, and the two senators did not offer any. But if they can get Democratic votes thrown out, Senator David Purdue and Kelly Loeffler might avoid the runoffs that look like they might well result in Democratic victories.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is determined to keep control of the Senate, and ginning up a conviction that the election was rigged could do that. McConnell defended Trump’s challenging of the election today, although he did not explicitly say he believed the election had been fraudulent. Trump’s attacks are working: new polling shows that 7 out of 10 Republican voters now think that the 2020 election was illegitimate. Barr met with McConnell before he signed onto the idea of voter fraud by announcing that federal prosecutors could go after it.
Still, while control of the Senate is likely driving McConnell, it seems highly unlikely that Trump cares about it. Perhaps the president is simply deep in a narcissistic rage, unable to face the idea of losing.
But there is something else niggling at me.
Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Biden’s win means that the current administration is denying him the right to see the President’s Daily Briefing (the PDB) which explains the biggest security threats facing the country and the latest intelligence information. Trump can keep Biden from seeing other classified information, too.
Today, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper (by announcing the firing on Twitter), and replaced him with a loyalist, Christopher C. Miller, who will be “acting” only. Trump also selected a loyalist and Republican political operative to become the general counsel at the National Security Agency, our top spy agency, over the wishes of intelligence officials. Michael Ellis was the chief council to Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA) a staunch Trump loyalist. Trump is also reportedly considering firing FBI director Christopher Wray and CIA director Gina Haspel. Last week, he quietly fired the leaders of the agencies who oversee or nuclear weapons, international aid, and electricity and natural gas regulation, although he was moved to a different spot in the administration.
In other words, he is cleaning out the few national security leaders who were not complete lackeys and replacing them with people who are. It’s funny timing for such a shake-up, especially one that will destabilize the country, making us more vulnerable.
Today Washington Post diplomacy and national security reporter John Hudson noted that a source told him that the “Trump administration just gave Congress formal notification for a massive arms transfer to the United Arab Emirates: 50 F-35s, 18 MQ-9 Reapers with munitions; a $10 billion munitions package including thousands of Mk 82 dumb bombs, guided bombs, missiles & more….” This deal comes two months after the administration’s Abraham Accord normalizing relations between Israel and the UAE opened the way for arms sales.
The UAE has wanted the F-35 for years; it is the world’s most advanced fighter jet. They cost about $100 million apiece. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has secretly been pushing for the sale of the arms to the UAE in the face of fierce opposition by government agencies and lawmakers.
The administration had announced a much smaller version of this deal at the end of October, in a sale that would amount to about $10 billion, but Congress worried about the weaponry falling into the hands of China or Russia and seemed unlikely to let the sale happen. In 2019, it stopped such a deal. Trump declared a national emergency in order to go around Congress and sell more than $8 billion of weapons to the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. He later fired Steven Linick, the State Department’s inspector general looking into those sales, but when the IG’s report came out nonetheless it was scathing, suggesting that they put the U.S. at risk of being prosecuted for war crimes.
When you remember that Trump’s strong suit has always been distraction, and that he has always used the presidency as a money-making venture, I wonder if we need to factor those characteristics in when we think about his unprecedented and dangerous refusal to admit he has lost this election.
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I can vote in these elections…
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By “we” I meant my husband and I, not happy mutants in general. I’m damned glad you can vote in the Georgia senate runoffs and wanted you to know there are people who are doing what they can from afar. You, and other Georgians who want these two senators, aren’t fighting alone.
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Ah! Got it…
Thanks! We need it down here.
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I’m really impressed by the left-leaning people in Georgia. Y’all did something amazing swinging Georgia blue. I think Texas is probably the King of Voter Supression, but I know it’s really bad in Georgia too.
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An underreported part of this election is the continued trend toward blue in a lot of deep red states, like TX, AZ, GA and others. We did not get them all this time around, but a long-standing trend continued. This was not a one-off, and there is no reason to expect it to reverse. Demographic trends and the increased engagement of the youth vote show no signs of slowing. The voter suppression is only a delaying action by a dying party. Next order of business is to bring the democratic party back to the left.
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The thing is, it did not just happen. Even with the changing demographics, this depended more on voter turn out than on just changes to the electorate. People made this happen, primarily Stacey Abrams and the ground game she’s been building for the past decade. The democrats will be fools to ignore her strategy and go with continuing trying to win back the older, white working class.
I think that will happen more naturally with Abram’s approach, as it will bring in younger, more progressive minded people.
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That’s been soooooo inspiring!
Do you have a sense yet of the ground game and the energy in GA for these two all-important runoffs?
With potential for both deflation and renewed energy on both sides, I find it all hard to read at this point (except of course for the understanding that Dems will have to keep fighting like hell on those runoffs).
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Not really, but I assume she plans to keep up what she’s been doing. I want to say she raised several million since it became clear both senate races are headed to a run-off.
I’d think that the Dems have more enthusiasm in GA right now, and the GOP is more demoralized. I suspect that the election of someone like Greene up in the 14th irritated the more moderate republicans (I guess the Deal wing?) and that Perdue and Loeffler turning on Raffensperger will not help bring their party together.
Absolutely.
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November 10, 2020 (Tuesday)
A week after the election, it-- along with its insane aftermath-- has caught up with me. I’ve been asleep for hours, and am going to write this and go back to sleep for many, many more hours.
There is crazy news out there, which I’ll cover in the future, but it feels like it can wait. The gig is up. Trump is going to smash and grab all he can on the way out… but he IS on the way out.
See you all tomorrow, rested and ready for the future.
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Shall we collect?
Esper out. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty out. Neil Chatterjee out. Elliott Abrams touring the Middle East. Deal with UEA on F35. Deal on MQ9 drones with Taiwan.
And that’s just what made big news.
I wonder what HCR adds to that.
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I wonder too.
I dont agree that it’s entirely certain that “he IS on the way out.”
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