I get the feeling he’ll concede as soon as he gets enough money to cover a few debts. He’s taking a page from Lindsey Graham’s playbook. The attention it generates and additional concern it generates among his detractors is just icing on the cake to him.
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November 11, 2020 (Wednesday)
Today President-Elect Joe Biden named his chief of staff. He has picked Ronald A. Klain, 59, a veteran Democratic operative with degrees from Georgetown and Harvard Law School, who has worked in and around Washington, D.C., since 1987, when he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White. Klain was Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president.
Like Biden, Klain is well-known and well-liked in both parties, and is seen as competent and politically astute. He is an expert institutionalist who worked with Biden during the recession he and President Obama inherited from the previous administration. President Obama also appointed Klain to oversee the U.S. response to Ebola, giving him much-needed expertise as we face both a recession and a pandemic.
That’s the big story of the day. The coronavirus pandemic is out of control. Today states reported 144,000 new cases and 1,562 Americans died, the highest number of deaths since May 14. Hospitalizations are rising quickly, with more than 1600 people admitted every day. Texas has had more than 1 million infections, and has set up mobile morgues.
In North Dakota, the hospitals are at full capacity. To alleviate staffing shortages, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum ® has taken the extreme step of allowing infected health care workers to continue to work, delivering care to those who are also sick. Burgum has declined to issue a mask requirement.
Today, three more members of the White House, including the political director Brian Jack, tested positive for coronavirus. Those infected attended the White House election night watch party, suggesting that the White House has now held two superspreader events. The first was the September 26 event celebrating Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court to take the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat.
Although Biden’s margin of victory in last week’s election continues to mount and Trump’s lawsuits over the results continue to fail, Trump still refuses to admit he lost the election. Such a refusal in the face of such a big loss is unprecedented, and White House sources are grousing to reporters that the administration is “a f*****g clown show.”
Veteran Republican operative Karl Rove wrote today in the Wall Street Journal that the margin of victory is too high to be overturned, and former Secretary of Defense and Republican Senator William Cohen of Maine warned that Trump’s conduct is “more akin to a dictatorship than a democracy.” Twitter and Facebook have begun to block Trump’s lies about the election, prompting angry followers to call for switching their allegiance to platforms where they can say whatever they wish, true or not.
Trump’s refusal to recognize Biden’s victory is likely about more than his wish not to be seen as a loser. First of all, it’s quite profitable. The Trump campaign is urging followers to donate to the legal challenges, but the fine print shows that donations will actually go to a new Trump Political Action Committee and to the Republican National Committee’s operating account. Donations won’t go toward the legal challenges until donations to the other two funds are at their legal maximum of several thousand dollars.
Trump has quietly floated the idea of running again in 2024, but that, too, is likely tied to money. He is the only president in history to file for reelection on the day of his inauguration, and we now know that much of his campaign money went to legal bills and lavish lifestyles.
Republican leaders are humoring Trump because they need his voters in Georgia to eke out control of the Senate. Both of Georgia’s Senate seats are headed to a runoff in early January, and Republicans need Trump supporters to turn up. “We need his voters,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota, told reporters today. “[W]e want him helping in Georgia.”
Trump’s refusal to recognize the outcome of the election also gives him room to deny Biden the access to resources and information usually shared with the president-elect. He has refused to permit Biden access to the State Department, so the world leaders calling to wish him well have to reach out to the president-elect directly. Virtually all major foreign leaders have now called, except two of Trump’s autocratic allies: President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. For all the calls, both sides are providing readouts, as was the norm before Trump became president.
Trump has also refused to let Biden see the Presidential Daily Briefing, a daily document outlining the most recent intelligence about threats to the nation, and he has refused to let his people cooperate with Biden’s in a transition, a highly unusual move. Biden says he can work around these issues. “We don’t see anything that’s slowing us down, quite frankly,” Biden said yesterday. “We’re going to do exactly what we’d be doing if he had conceded and said we’ve won, which we have. So there’s nothing really changing.” Nonetheless, the refusal to cooperate weakens the country.
Although refusing to admit defeat, Trump is showing little sign of actually wanting to govern. He is tweeting statements that Twitter is flagging as disinformation and he is golfing. Otherwise, his public schedule is largely empty, while Biden is keeping a normal presidential schedule. Reporters are expressing relief at the calm confidence Biden is returning to Washington, D.C.
The president has, though, begun a major purge at the Pentagon, another unusual move in the last two months of his presidency. He has replaced top civilians, including Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Esper’s chief of staff Jen Stewart, acting Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James Anderson, and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Joseph Kernan, with his own loyalists.
No one is quite sure what this purge means, but people are worried. General Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star general, told MSNBC he was “alarmed” at the shake-up.
There are, though, some obvious reasons for the change in personnel. It might simply be a flexing of his muscles. It might be a way for him to permit loyalists to pad their resumes before they have to leave. It might be a way to try to release selective bits of intelligence about the Russia investigation to bolster his story about the contacts between his 2016 campaign and Russia—both Michael Ellis, who became general counsel of the National Security Agency, and Kashyap Patel, who replaced Stewart, are close associates of Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA) who has worked hard to discredit the Russia investigation.
Or it could be that Trump wants to draw U.S. troops out of Afghanistan before the Pentagon says it’s safe. Military experts think that a U.S. presence is important for keeping the Taliban from regaining power there, where it could quietly back international terrorists, leaving us vulnerable to a terrorist attack during Biden’s administration. A former Trump official told Politico reporters Lara Seligman and Natasha Bertrand, “There is a lot of concern among military and former civilian Pentagon people that this shift was because [Trump] intends to take some kind of controversial military action and wanted junior political people that would greenlight it.”
In October, Trump shocked leaders by tweeting that he would bring home the 5,000 U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan, where we have been for 19 years, by the end of 2020. Military officials told reporters that there were no plans to quit the country immediately as we waited for guarantees that the Taliban was following the agreement hammered out in February. A senior administration official disagreed, telling reporters that, as commander in chief, Trump would determine the best approach to Afghanistan. Throughout Trump’s term, military contractor Erik Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, has tried to convince Trump to privatize our operations there, for a cost of about $5 billion a year, a fact that may or may not be relevant.
One thing, though, is clear. Trump thrives in chaos and the centrality it brings him. He is upping the ante post-election, as he fears the nation is moving on without him.
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Belgium beat you there, US.
Hell yes.
Question for the fellow mutants who know such things: are these political positions as such, i.e. are they going to be replaced by a new administration, or are these “career” positions which would (usually) stay in office? (Esper, of course, has had a political position, so that’s that.)
If the latter, the damages would be more persistent, if the former, a not unlikely idea seems that he wants to get loyalists a nice early retirement package on his way out. (That is, of there’s not a minimum amount of time you’d have to serve, as in functioning democracies).
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If Trump can appoint them, then an incoming administration can replace them. So, yes, they are political appointees.
Regarding the why, it’s very likely a workaround for getting arms sales approved like the one to the UAE that indirectly lines 45’s pockets and curries favor with his autocrat buddies. Esper was likely either blocking the sales or slow-playing it.
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I am under the impression that this isn’t entirely true. I think the chief of the executive branch can fire nearly everybody (or let someone be fired in the US, but I think political positions are usually replaced after a new administration takes up its work. Trump and Barr anyways think they can fire everybody, Unitarian approach and all. Doesn’t make this legally sound, mind.
To clarify: they can fire whoever, but that doesn’t mean they can replace them with cronies. Non-appointees cannot be replaces with appointees. They have to be hired based on standard government procedures for the civil service.
So if you see them remove and replace someone, then that was an appointee.
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Thanks. So, in your opinion, could it be that it’s just about retirement packages?
It’s seems trumpish to me, and would be a certain relief compared to other options. Like starting a war with Iran.
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Not exactly, but it could be a byproduct. Like I wrote above, it’s probably just clearing the way for massive arms sales to crony countries with an easy pipeline to Russia, so they can do teardowns on US military tech.
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for cabinet appointments that’s true – but if biden follows the law, he’s constrained in simply firing people at random.
trump’s new “schedule f” changes would change this, but – and i can’t find it now – i remember reading there were some restrictions about a person fired and replaced under schedule f. basically, allowing trump to stuff in people at random and make them hard to fire under a future administration.
and… again, if biden follows the law… you can’t always just issue an executive order to change things like that. there are rules making procedures that can take several years to replace previous orders.
[eta]
[eeta]
talks a bit about schedule-f, why it’s difficult to get rid of, and has some other civil service changes trump’s cronies authored for him.
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Apparently Trump (or one of his cronies, more likely) has figured out that he can put his people into what are usually “career” positions that are protected by public employee regulations, which make them very hard to fire. He may be creating an honest to god real Deep State.
Or just what @gatto said. (ninja’d)
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always projection with the repbulicans. ( makes me wonder what kind of voter fraud they tried. )
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Oh glob. Thanks for the background. Fuck this shit. That’s actually worse than I was expecting.
Sidenote:
There is a German colloquial term, "Schema F’.
Colloquially, the term “scheme F” is used when something is bureaucratic and routine, stereotyped, mechanical or thoughtless. The term goes back to the forms for the so-called “Frontrapporte” prescribed in the Prussian army after 1861, reports to be filled in on the evidence of full war strength.
That’s a translation from here
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“Fruit of the poison tree,“ I think is the legal term.
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November 12, 2020 (Thursday)
Tonight, the major networks called Arizona for Joe Biden. This means Arizona has voted for a Democrat for president for the first time since 1996, when Ross Perot’s bid for the presidency siphoned off votes from Republican candidate Bob Dole and let Democratic candidate Bill Clinton clinch the state. Before that, the last time Arizona backed a Democrat was in 1948, when it went for Harry Truman.
Since the numbers in Biden’s column now make up an insurmountable margin for Trump to overcome, the Trump campaign is now saying that the computers in certain states switched votes from him to Biden. This has been thoroughly debunked. This afternoon, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security circulated a statement by the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, a group of federal, state, and local officials, declaring that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence” of tampering with any voting systems.
Perhaps more to the point, Trump has been telling people that he will announce a run for the 2024 presidency as soon as the vote is certified for Biden. This would keep money flowing into his pockets, as well as keeping him in the news. Sources have told Maggie Haberman at the New York Times that the president has no grand strategy other than to keep his supporters energized to follow him into whatever he does next, including, perhaps, launching a competitor to the Fox News Channel.
Meanwhile, the president is holed up in the White House, his public schedule empty, tweeting about how he has won an election that everyone knows he lost.
One of the things he is ignoring is the devastating spread of coronavirus through this country. Today more than 153,000 new cases were reported, with 66,000 people hospitalized. More than 10.4 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, and more than 242,000 have died.
While the White House election night watch party has turned into a superspreader event, today ensnaring former 2016 Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, most infections are now caused not by large public events but by small gatherings at home: dinner parties, carpools, playdates. These indoor events create “perfect conditions for a virus that can spread among people who are crowded into a poorly ventilated space,” write the doctors and public health officials at the PolicyLab of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Cases are not only on the rise, but also more severe. Experts remind us that we should avoid spending more than 15 minutes within six feet of anyone outside our own household in any 24-hour period, and they beg people to stay home for the holidays this year.
President-Elect Joe Biden has been out of the news, working. His new chief of staff, Ronald Klain, told reporters that he has been speaking privately to Republicans, although he has not talked to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. While Republicans appear to want to keep up the public narrative that the results of the election are unclear, they are beginning to demand that Biden get access to the intelligence reports Trump is keeping from him. Shutting the president-elect out of intelligence reports hampers our national security not only with regard to foreign affairs, but also with regard to the coronavirus, leaving Biden out of the planning to roll out a vaccine, for example.
Among the phone calls Biden has had with world leaders was one today with Pope Francis. According to the call readout, the pope offered Biden blessings and congratulations; Biden thanked the pope for promoting the common bonds of humanity and said he hoped to work together on issues that touched on their shared belief “in the dignity and equality of all humankind.” He singled out “caring for the marginalized and the poor, addressing the crisis of climate change, and welcoming and integrating immigrants and refugees into our communities"—all areas in which the pope has called on global leaders to take action, and on which the Biden administration’s policies are expected to differ from its predecessor’s. Biden will be America’s second Catholic president. (John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, was the first.)
Biden has announced policy teams to help with the transition. They are made up largely of volunteers who will review the different government agencies and make policy recommendations. The Biden-Harris team notes that the transition will prioritize “diversity of ideology and background; talent to address society’s most complex challenges; integrity and the highest ethical standards to serve the American people and not special interests; and transparency to garner trust at every stage.” The names on the transition teams are impressive ones. Stanford Law School Professor Pamela Karlan, who testified before the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment hearings will be part of the team that reviews the Department of Justice for the transition.
Lara Seligman at Politico reported today that Biden has been reaching out to former Pentagon officials who retired or were fired in the past four years to talk about the transition and whether or not they might want to go back into the Defense Department. The Biden team is talking to former officials because the current ones are Trump loyalists and team members don’t think they will be particularly cooperative or, for that matter, very knowledgeable. Seligman says that Biden wants to create a bipartisan leadership team at the Defense Department. In a notable change from the past four years, Biden’s agency review team for the Pentagon is led by female defense policy experts.
Biden tweeted just once today, after six American National Guardsmen, along with a Czech and a French team member, died in a helicopter crash in Egypt during a peacekeeping mission. One American was wounded. While the current president apparently ignored the loss, using Twitter to spread false rumors about the election and to attack the Fox News Channel, Biden tweeted: “I extend my deep condolences to the loved ones of the peacekeepers, including 6 American service members, who died on Tiran Island, and wish a speedy recovery to the surviving American. I join all Americans in honoring their sacrifice, as I keep their loved ones in my prayers.”
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Showing more “presidentiality” before even assuming the office than Il Douche has in 4 years. I look forward to a more professional approach to the office with quiet desperation.
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While this is a hell of a relief that he’s not trying to be “viral” à la Trump, I’m not sure this is a good sign.
Someone and the Guardian phrased it a little bit more eloquent then I could.
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November 13, 2020 (Friday)
Today, we set a record for new coronavirus cases: more than 181,000 people, with 1,389 deaths. Governors in Oregon and New Mexico have issued stay at home orders and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum ® late today gave in and ordered a statewide mask mandate. Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak (D) has tested positive. Recently, more than 130 of the Secret Service officers around the president have either tested positive or been told to quarantine because they have had close contact with other infected people. This is impacting White House security.
In a statement after he met with his transition Covid-19 Advisory Board today, President-Elect Joe Biden issued a statement warning that the facts are “alarming.” After pointing to the rising infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, and to the exhaustion on the part of our healthcare workers, he praised the progress toward a safe and effective vaccine but warned we are still months away from widespread vaccination.
While Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner denied federal responsibility to address the pandemic, instead leaving it up to the states and private companies, Biden called for a return to the concept of a government responsible to ordinary Americans.
“This crisis demands a robust and immediately federal response,” he said, “which has been woefully lacking. I am the president-elect, but I will not be president until next year. The crisis does not respect dates on the calendar, it is accelerating right now. Urgent action is needed today, now, by the current administration….” He called for more PPEs for front-line health care workers, science-based guidelines for managing the pandemic, and more testing. He also asked Americans “to step up and do their part on social distancing, hand washing, and mask wearing to protect themselves and to protect others.”
This afternoon, Trump spoke in public for the first time since the election, speaking to the press in the White House Rose Garden about the promising new coronavirus vaccine. He said it would be available to the entire nation as soon as April, “with the exception for places like New York state,” he said, where Governor Andrew Cuomo said he would want a panel of experts to examine any vaccine Trump tried to rush out before the election. Trump left the Rose Garden without taking questions.
As Trump continues to claim, against all evidence, that he won the election, he has refused to begin the process of transition to a Biden presidency. He will not share intelligence with Biden, or permit transition teams to begin getting Biden’s people up to speed on the current situations in their departments. The man in charge of the Trump administration’s effort to produce a coronavirus vaccine wants to brief Biden, but cannot get permission to. Yesterday, more than 150 former national security officials from both parties warned that Trump’s refusal to begin the transition is a “serious risk to national security.”
Today, Trump’s second chief of staff (the current one, Mark Meadows, is his fourth), retired General John Kelly, called Trump’s refusal “an increasing national security and health crisis.” The downside of not briefing the new team “could be catastrophic to our people regardless of who they voted for.” This “is not about the president or about Mr. Biden,” he said. “It is about America and what is best for our people. Mr. Trump should order the transition process begin immediately. It is the right and moral thing to do.”
Interestingly, in an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe suggested that Trump’s refusal to share information might be about more than stubbornness. He noted that, while Trump has made motions toward releasing more information about the Russia investigation, it was incomprehensible that Trump would actually want that information released, because it contained information that “would risk casting the president in a very negative light.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo caught the implications of McCabe’s statement, suggesting that behind Trump’s refusal to let Biden see intelligence reports was the fear that those reports might implicate members of the Trump administration in wrongdoing.
Trump’s effort to overturn the result of the election by getting the courts to throw out ballots so far has come to nothing. A lawyer on Trump’s legal team, Sidney Powell, told Fox News Channel personality Lou Dobbs of “fraud,” and “staggering” evidence that Venezuela, Cuba, and China used Dominion voting machines to switch hundreds of thousands of votes from Trump to Biden. But, of course, no one speaking to the media is speaking under oath.
In courtrooms, where they face professional sanctions for unfounded allegations, Trump’s lawyers are not alleging any such fraud. Indeed, they are admitting they have no proof that such a thing occurred: a lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania to stop certification of the vote says those bringing the lawsuit are in the process of compiling evidence of fraud and “intend to produce it” later.
So far, Trump has lost every challenge he has brought. Sixteen assistant U.S. attorneys assigned to monitor cheating in the election today told Attorney General William Barr that they had found no evidence of substantial fraud. Respectable law firms are declining to represent Trump’s campaign, at least in part because lawyers are not supposed to bring frivolous lawsuits. This afternoon, Trump put his lawyer Rudy Giuliani in charge of the campaign lawsuits as well as all communications about them to the public.
And yet, Trump followers are rallying around the belief that Trump won the election and Democrats are trying to steal it. This belief is being pushed across the internet by the “Stop the Steal” campaign. That disinformation project is the work of Republican political operative Roger Stone, a self-described “dirty trickster,” whose looming imprisonment for conviction of seven felonies Trump commuted this summer. Stone’s political action committee created a “Stop the Steal” website back in 2016, raising money with the warning that the Democrats planned to steal the election that year. Several right-wing groups launched a similar project around the 2018 midterms. Now, that meme is taking off. Trump supporters are planning a rally in Washington, D.C., tomorrow.
Polarization might be out of step with the times. In a sign of how the election marks a change in the mood of the country, the 85-year-old billionaire industrialist Charles Koch has congratulated Biden and his running mate Senator Kamala Harris on their “historic win” and told Washington Post reporters James Hohmann and Mariana Alfaro that he hopes to find “common ground and things that we can work together on for as many issues as possible.” Since the 1950s, the Koch family has poured money behind Republican and Libertarian politicians who promise to end business regulation, but now Koch says he worries about extremism and all the hate in the country. He wants everyone “to work together and help each other and move toward a society of equal rights and mutual benefit.”
Still, Koch-funded organizations, together known under the name “Stand Together,” are planning to invest heavily in the Georgia runoff elections for Senate, hoping to keep the Republicans in office to maintain control of the Senate.
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ah, yes. the “i left my wallet in my other pants” defense.
that’s very nice, but you still need to pay for your groceries to take them home so please put the beer you shoved under your coat back on the shelf.
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