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Trump Delivers 46-Minute Rant Against Election, Insists He Won All States

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2020 //
73

Our democracy is under attack by the man who took an oath to protect the Constitution. Donald Trump gave a 46-minute speech denouncing the outcome of the election, which he insists was fraudulent despite the fact that his own Attorney General concluded that the Department of Justice did not find evidence of widespread fraud that would change the outcome of the election. Trump’s legal team has filed dozens of lawsuits, almost all of which were rejected in court by judges of both parties, including judges appointed by Trump. The few cases that went in Trump’s favor were over minor issues that did not affect the outcome of the election in any state.

The Washington Post reported on Trump’s speech:

Escalating his attack on democracy from within the White House, President Trump on Wednesday distributed an astonishing 46-minute video rant filled with baseless allegations of voter fraud and outright falsehoods in which he declared the nation’s election system “under coordinated assault and siege” and argued that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost to President-elect Joe Biden.


Standing behind the presidential lectern in the Diplomatic Reception Room and flanked by the flags of his office and of the country whose Constitution he swore an oath to uphold, Trump tried to leverage the power of the presidency to subvert the vote and overturn the election results.


The rambling and bellicose monologue — which Trump said “may be the most important speech I’ve ever made” and was delivered direct-to-camera with no audience — underscored his desperation to reverse the outcome of his election loss after a month of failed legal challenges and as some key states already have certified Biden’s victory.


The president’s latest salvo came a day after his attorney general, William P. Barr, said the Justice Department had found no evidence of voting fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election.


Trump delivered in person many of the claims he previously has advanced on social media or that his lawyers have brought on his behalf in courts, which have been debunked or summarily dismissed because there is no evidence to support them.
Trump claimed in Wednesday’s video, again without evidence, that “corrupt forces” had stuffed ballot boxes with fraudulent votes. He claimed the fraud was “massive” and “on a scale never seen before.” He called on the Supreme Court to “do what’s right for our country,” which he suggested entailed terminating hundreds of thousands of votes so that “I very easily win in all states.”




Although Trump last week authorized his administration to cooperate with Biden’s transition, he still has refused to concede. With Wednesday’s remarks, the president intensified his protest of the results and threatened to disrupt the nation’s long history of a peaceful transfer of power.
“

This election was rigged. Everybody knows it,” Trump said. He added, “Our country needs somebody to say, ‘You’re right.’ . . . If we don’t root out the fraud, the tremendous and horrible fraud that’s taken place in our 2020 election, we don’t have a country anymore.”




Trump also claimed that Dominion Voting Systems, which manufactures voting machines used in many states, was “very suspect” and that many voters who pressed the button for “Trump” had their votes counted for Biden. There is no evidence that votes were in any way compromised, and Dominion has said there is no merit to Trump’s claims.


Biden decisively won the election with 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232. In the national popular vote, Biden leads with 80.9 million to Trump’s 74 million, a difference of 4.4 percentage points and nearly 7 million votes.


A majority of states already have certified their results ahead of the Dec. 14 meeting of the electoral college to finalize the national result. Those states include Georgia, which delivered Biden one of his narrowest victories and where officials conducted a hand recount that still had Biden winning by about 13,000 votes.
Trump’s video Wednesday represented his most comprehensive remarks yet about the election and came after he has spent the month since the election largely hidden from public view, save for a handful of official appearances and a call-in appearance on Fox News Channel.




Any hope that the president might be slowly coming to grips with his loss and accepting the fact that Biden will be sworn in as president on Jan. 20 was dashed by his combative and emphatic tone, which amounted to a call to arms to his supporters. The fight is paying dividends so far, with Trump’s political operation using a blizzard of misleading appeals to supporters to raise more than $170 million since Election Day on Nov. 3.


As he invariably has throughout his presidency, Trump spun an alternate reality. Although his words actually worked to undermine democracy, he cast himself as the protector of democracy, saying his single greatest achievement as president would be to restore “voter integrity for our nation.”


Trump released a two-minute edited version of the video on Twitter, which the social media company labeled as “disputed,” and included a link to the full 46-minute video on Facebook, where the company applied a label explaining that voting by mail has long been trustworthy and that voter fraud is “extremely rare.”





As Trump released his video, his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was in Michigan making a similar case to state legislators and citizens there. The former New York mayor alleged at a video news conference in Lansing that there were extensive voting irregularities in the state, largely in Detroit, a majority-Black city that voted heavily for Biden. Giuliani claimed a similar pattern of fraud emerged in several other large urban centers with municipal governments controlled by Democrats.




“It was a plan to steal this election,” Giuliani said.
There is no evidence to support this claim. Giuliani cited affidavits that had been used in lawsuits that have so far been rejected in the state.


Giuliani gave a pugilistic exhortation to Trump supporters at the late afternoon press conference.
“We have to fight. The president does not intend to give up,” he said, urging Michigan Republicans to put “pressure on state legislators” to uphold their constitutional obligation to decide state results in a disputed presidential election.


“You have to get them to remember that their oath to the constitution sometimes requires being criticized,” Giuliani added. “It sometimes even requires being threatened. But you don’t back off of an oath because a vote is too hard.”


On Wednesday evening, Giuliani and Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis made similar arguments before a Michigan House panel. In her opening statement, Ellis referred to Trump’s video message and said the state legislature has a constitutional mandate “not to allow a corrupt” election. She said the nation’s founders provided “a tool — state legislators — to combat corruption” in elections.


That interpretation of a constitutional mandate is disputed by many election experts, who nonetheless worry that it could lead some state legislators to attempt to overturn certified election results.


Norm Eisen, a former Obama appointee who serves as counsel to the bipartisan Voter Protection Program, called that interpretation “constitutional disinformation that has no basis in law.”




This activity comes as Trump prepares to visit Georgia on Saturday to hold a campaign rally for Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both Republicans facing runoff elections on Jan. 5.


Trump’s baseless allegations of voter fraud in Georgia have roiled the race, with Republicans divided over whether to trust the election system or, as former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell argued, stay home in protest.


Powell led a rally in a northern Atlanta suburb Wednesday in which she exhorted hundreds of the president’s supporters not to participate in the Senate runoffs, in part because she said the state’s voting machines are not trustworthy.


“I would encourage all Georgians to make it known that you will not vote at all unless your vote is secure,” Powell said. “There should not be a runoff. Certainly not on Dominion machines.”




Powell claimed falsely that Dominion machines were rigged to weight Biden’s votes more heavily than Trump’s, that a hand recount was a sham, and that state and local election officials have been destroying ballots and other evidence of fraud. She has presented no proof of her claims.


L. Lin Wood, another Trump ally who helped lead Wednesday’s event, made similarly baseless claims.
“We’re not going to vote on your damn machines made in China,” Wood said. “We’re going to vote on machines made in the USA!”


Wood took aim at just about every state Republican leader in Georgia, including Perdue, Loeffler, Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and the state party chair, David Shafer, even though some of them have stood by Trump and echoed his false claims of fraud.


“If they don’t fight for Donald Trump, including Loeffler and Perdue, send them all home!” Wood exclaimed to the crowd. “You are criminals!”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Insane, Trump

Andrea Gabor: We Need Civics Education!

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2020 //
74

Andrea Gabor, the Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York, writes here about the importance of civics education, especially in a time when democracy is under attack by a defeated president and the leadership of the Republican Party.

Put Civics Back in the Classroom, Right Now

Has there ever been a better time to resume lapsed efforts to teach young Americans the structure and purpose of U.S. democracy?


By Andrea Gabor

The presidential election seemed to mark a revival in American civic engagement. A record two-thirds of the electorate voted. Candidates raised at least $3 billion in small-dollar donations, and historic get-out-the-vote efforts had an impact in Nevada, Georgia and elsewhere.


Yet large numbers of Americans appear to believe President Donald Trump’s baseless charges of election fraud. Civic life and discourse have been eroded by the normalization of lying by elected leaders, the dissemination of disinformation via social media and the attempted weaponization of the courts to undermine confidence in voting.
Has there ever been a better time for a revival of civics education? Not your father’s bland civics, with its how-a-bill-becomes-law tedium, but a vigorous set of lessons about American society and government that encourages fact-based exchanges of views and civil debate about controversial topics without taking sides in contemporary disputes about such issues as abortion or immigration policy.

Civics should begin with a common narrative that Americans can agree on, beginning with what the Declaration of Independence and Constitution say about the role and structure of U.S. government. It should explore the definition of citizenship and how it has evolved over the course of 250 years via such documents as the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, the Seneca Falls Declaration on women’s rights, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It should address the role of the electoral college, how it works, and how votes are counted. And it should examine the prerogatives of state and local governments and their relationship to the federal government.
A foundational civics course must include uncomfortable truths. That would mean delving into the three-fifths compromise of the constitutional convention, which made slaves count toward the congressional representation of slave states without granting them any political rights, along with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Supreme Court’s sanction of Japanese internment during World War II and its 2018 decisionto overturn that precedent. But divisive and complex debatesabout the degree to which slavery shaped American society should be left to more advanced classes.


Civics should also make room for local variations in content and execution. For example, the terms on which Southern states were readmitted to the union following the Civil War might receive more emphasis in the South, and the role of the 1787 Northwest Ordinances in expanding statehood could be stressed in the West.


The refreshing of civics curricula in Illinois and Florida provide a roadmap for how states should approach the topic today. Illinois’s civics mandate, especially a requirement that classes discuss “current and controversial issues,” is especially important. The law passed overwhelmingly in 2015 with bipartisan support — Illinois was among 11 states that previously had no civics mandate — and was signed by former Governor Bruce Rauner, a Republican. (While Illinois had long required high schools to teach two years of social studies, including one year of American history, the law now requires that at least one semester be devoted to civics.)


Facilitating constructive discussions of controversial topics requires special teacher training. Illinois offered all civics teachers professional development courses over a three-year period, and created a mentoring program for civics teachers, especially in schools with no previous civics course — as many as 13 percent of the total. The problem is that the state didn’t set aside money for the training, relying instead on philanthropies; a subject as important as civics should have a dedicated funding stream for educators and schools.Nor should the introduction of civics concepts wait until high school. Last year, Illinois added middle school to the grades that must provide civics instruction. Similarly, Florida’s decade-old civics law makes passing a middle-school civics course a requirement for high 
school matriculation.


A well designed middle-school civics test could support fact-based debate and is arguably less onerous than a high-school graduation requirement; students who fail the class (in Florida the test accounts for just 30 percent of the middle-school civics grade) could retake the test and go on to high school. When the coronavirus pandemic recedes, states should consider eliminating all middle-school testing in lieu of a single meaty civics test that might include geography and some economics.


When it comes to civics, states have a lot of ground to make up. For decades, government policies, including state testing mandates and federal initiatives like President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program and President Barack Obama’s support for Common Core, have focused on college and workplace readiness. Civics instruction got short shrift and was often abandoned.

As attacks on democratic institutions picked up steam during the Trump presidency, civics remained an afterthought. As of 2018, only eight states required students to take a yearlong civics and government class. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is considered the nation’s report card, dropped its 4th- and 12th-grade civics and American history exam in 2014.

Few recent state civics efforts succeeded.
Now, as a few states begin to pursue a civics revival, one concern is political interference from the left and right. California Governor Gavin Newsom just vetoed an ethnic studies law that threatened to erode time and effort spent on other subjects, including civics. Last year, Florida’s legislature passed a bill requiring the state to review civics materials, a concern at a time when Republican lawmakers and Governor Ron DeSantis have promoted Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud.


But civics instruction needn’t take sides to promote democratic involvement. Last year, Massachusetts became the first state to require schools to coordinate nonpartisan student-led civics projects. The redesigned Advanced Placement U.S. government and politics course taken by many college-bound students also requires students to work on a civics project, either partisan or not.
States should borrow good ideas from each other, including Florida’s emphasis on middle-school civics and Illinois’s focus on constructive debate. A shared narrative will be stronger if buttressed by productive argument and brought to life by civic action.


Andrea Gabor
Bloomberg Chair of Business Journalism 
Baruch College/CUNY
After the Education Wars (The New Press, June 2018)
www.andreagabor.com

Categories Citizenship, Civics, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Reform

Michigan: The One Republican Who Stood Up to Trump

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2020 //
15

When the Trump team and the president himself pressured Michigan Republican officials to overturn the vote in their state, only one man said no. He said he had to follow the law. He was a hero of democracy.

His name is Aaron Van Langevelde.

“We must not attempt to exercise power we simply don’t have,” declared Van Langevelde, a member of Michigan’s board of state canvassers, the ministerial body with sole authority to make official Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. “As John Adams once said, ‘We are a government of laws, not men.’ This board needs to adhere to that principle here today. This board must do its part to uphold the rule of law and comply with our legal duty to certify this election.”

We need more like him.

Categories Courage, Democracy, Fraud, Michigan, Trump

The Most Outrageous Effort to Overturn an Election in U.S. History

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2020 //
94

Political reporter David Sanger wrote a fascinating analysis of Trump’s attempt to reverse the results of the election. Trump lost the electoral college; Biden won 306 votes, surpassing the necessary 270. Trump lost the popular vote by nearly six million votes. He obviously forgot that he swore an oath on the Bible to defend the Constitution. He is actively subverting it.

David Sanger wrote:

President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election are unprecedented in American history and an even more audacious use of brute political force to gain the White House than when Congress gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency during Reconstruction.

Mr. Trump’s chances of succeeding are somewhere between remote and impossible, and a sign of his desperation after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by nearly six million popular votes and counting, as well as a clear Electoral College margin. Yet the fact that Mr. Trump is even trying has set off widespread alarms, not least in Mr. Biden’s camp.

“I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday, before adding, “It’s just outrageous what he’s doing.” Although Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Trump’s behavior as embarrassing, he acknowledged that “incredibly damaging messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions.”

Mr. Trump has only weeks to make his last-ditch effort work: Most of the states he needs to strip Mr. Biden of votes are scheduled to certify their electors by the beginning of next week. The electors cast their ballots on Dec. 14, and Congress opens them in a joint session on Jan. 6.

Even if Mr. Trump somehow pulled off his electoral vote switch, there are other safeguards in place, assuming people in power do not simply bend to the president’s will.

The first test will be Michigan, where Mr. Trump is trying to get the State Legislature to overturn Mr. Biden’s 157,000-vote margin of victory. He has taken the extraordinary step of inviting a delegation of state Republican leaders to the White House, hoping to persuade them to ignore the popular vote outcome.

“That’s not going to happen,” Mike Shirkey, the Republican leader of the Michigan State Senate, said on Tuesday. “We are going to follow the law and follow the process.”

Beyond that, Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, could send Congress a competing electoral slate, based on the election vote, arguing that the proper procedures were ignored. That dispute would create just enough confusion, in Mr. Trump’s Hail Mary calculus, that the House and Senate together would have to resolve it in ways untested in modern times.

Federal law dating to 1887, passed in reaction to the Hayes election, provides the framework, but not specifics, of how it would be done. Edward B. Foley, a constitutional law and election law expert at Ohio State University, noted that the law only required Congress to consider all submissions “purporting to be the valid electoral votes.”

But Michigan alone would not be enough for Mr. Trump. He would also need at least two other states to fold to his pressure. The most likely candidates are Georgia and Arizona, which both went for Mr. Trump in 2016 and have Republican-controlled legislatures and Republican governors.

Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona has said he will accept the state election results, although only after all the campaign lawsuits are resolved. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, where a hand recount reaffirmed Mr. Biden’s victory on Thursday, has not publicly said one way or another who won his state.

Mr. Trump has said little in public apart from tweets endorsing wild conspiracy theories about how he was denied victory. Yet his strategy, if it can be called that, has become clear over two days of increasingly frenetic action by a president 62 days from losing power.

In just that time, Mr. Trump has fired the federal election official who has challenged his false claims of fraud, tried to halt the vote-certification process in Detroit to disenfranchise an overwhelmingly Black electorate that voted against him, and now is misusing the powers of his office in his effort to take Michigan’s 16 electoral votes away from Mr. Biden.

In many ways it is even more of an attempted power grab than the one in 1876. At the time, Hayes was governor of Ohio, not president of the United States. Ulysses S. Grant was, and when Hayes won — also by wrenching the vote around in three states — he became known as “His Fraudulency.”

“But this is far worse,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian and author of “Presidents of War.” “In the case of Hayes, both sides agreed that the outcome in at least three states was in dispute. In this case, no serious person thinks enough votes are in dispute that Donald Trump could have been elected on Election Day.”

“This is a manufactured crisis. It is a president abusing his huge powers in order to stay in office after the voters clearly rejected him for re-election.”

He added: “This is what many of the founders dreaded.”

Mr. Trump telegraphed this strategy during the campaign. He told voters at a rally in Middletown, Pa., in September that he would win at the polls, or in the Supreme Court, or in the House — where, under the 12th Amendment, every state delegation gets one vote in choosing the president. (There are 26 delegations of 50 dominated by Republicans, even though the House is in the hands of the Democrats.)

“I don’t want to end up in the Supreme Court, and I don’t want to go back to Congress, even though we have an advantage if we go back to Congress,” he said then. “Does everyone understand that?”

Now that is clearly the Plan B, after the failure of Plan A, an improvisational legal strategy to overturn election results by invalidating ballots in key states. In state after state, the president’s lawyers have been laughed out of court, unable to provide evidence to back up his claims that mail-in ballots were falsified, or that glitches on voting machines with software from Dominion Voting Systems might, just might, have changed or deleted 2.7 million votes.

Those theories figured in a rambling news conference that Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, held with other members of his legal team on Thursday. The group threw out a series of disconnected arguments to try to make the case that Mr. Trump really won. The arguments included blaming mail-in ballots that they said were prone to fraud as well as Dominion, which they suggested was tied to former President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (who died seven years ago), and had vague connections to the Clinton Foundation and George Soros, the philanthropist and billionaire Democratic fund-raiser.

“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history,” Christopher Krebs, who was fired Tuesday night by Mr. Trump as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted Thursday afternoon.

“And possibly the craziest,” he went on. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lucky.”

Mr. Krebs has often noted that the purpose of a reliable election system is to convince those who lost elections that they have, indeed, lost.

Even some of Mr. Trump’s onetime enthusiasts and former top aides have abandoned him on his claims, often with sarcastic derision. “Their basic argument is this was a conspiracy so vast and so successful that there’s no evidence of it,” said John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser, who was ousted last year.

“Now if that’s true, I really want to know who the people are who pulled this off,” he said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “We need to hire them at the C.I.A.”

On this subject, here is another excellent article:

WHY TRUMP IS LIKELY TO FAIL IN HIS EFFORTS TO UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY.


Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, History, Hoax, Trump

Mercedes Schneider Reviews Douglas Harris’s Book About New Orleans

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2020 //
27

Mercedes Schneider reviewed Douglas Harris’s book Charter City in Commonweal. As a teacher in Louisiana and a close observer of the politics of education, Schneider is well positioned to assess the claims on behalf of the all-charter NewOrleans district. Harris is a respected economist who heads the Education Research Alliance at TulaneUniversity, which received a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to study school choice.

Schneider writes about the determination of whites in Louisiana to block integration of the public schools after the Brown decision. When the courts struck down vouchers, “anti-Black sentiment never waned, and decades of white flight from New Orleans followed. Meanwhile, the state diligently set about eliminating economic advancement opportunities for the remaining Black population, limiting employment and housing options while cutting back drastically on education. Soon enough, the city was bereft of a Black middle class and the tax base needed to fund basic services, including public schools. And so, as one might logically expect, the public education situation in New Orleans became dire.“ She wondered whether Harris would acknowledge this history but he did not.

Harris, the director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans and a professor of economics at Tulane University, focuses instead on data—specifically, on test scores and graduation rates in the years prior to the devastating 2005 storm and in the years that followed, from 2006 to 2015. By his accounting, the numbers went up post-Katrina, which he credits to intervention by the state in the form of charter-school initiatives. Now, data can be compelling, and reformers will often point to metrics like improved test scores to make the case for charter schools. But when I look at the data Harris cites, I think of the audit that’s being conducted at the request of the New Orleans superintendent of schools because of missing test scores and irregularities in high-school transcripts and class credits. I think of the numerous lawsuits calling for the Louisiana Department of Education—which was then run by a champion of the charter reform efforts in New Orleans—to release suspect testing data for independent review. So I can’t say I have confidence in the integrity of the data that Harris has analyzed. 

But that is not my principal concern. What’s more troubling is the narrative Harris spins out about the state takeover itself. That effort was led by Leslie Jacobs, former state school-board member turned businesswoman, who with a handful of other affluent whites form the core of what Harris calls the “reform community.” It was Jacobs who instigated things by drafting legislation that classified most New Orleans schools as “failing.” From there, the reform community—working out of office space provided by Tulane University—moved to sideline the predominantly Black community of New Orleans in its planning. Even as the city’s economy was still reeling from Katrina, the group engineered the mass firing of Orleans Parish School Board teachers. Harris describes the firing as an unfortunate necessity in achieving “reform”—that is, replacing traditional board-led public schools with a portfolio of independently operated charters. But the decision was also motivated by the inconvenient fact that the teachers were unionized, and thus a potential force of resistance. 

She laments the fact that schools have been severed from their communities. Despite the celebration of “choice,” the one choice unavailable to parents is a neighborhood school. When local groups of Black parents have asked if they can apply for a charter, they find that they cannot. Community engagement is important, she says, but it is of no consequence in New Orleans.

Schneider says that the Black citizens of New Orleans have been disenfranchised for decades. The charter takeover of their city’s schools is yet another expression of disrespect for their communities.


Categories Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, New Orleans, Racism

Trump Continues to Rant about “Rigged” Election

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2020 //
80

Many parents look to the president of the United States as someone who is worthy of emulation. He (and someday she) is a role model. What Donald Trump is modeling right now is how to be a sore loser, how to throw a childish temper tantrum, how to undermine the democratic system of government founded on the consent of the governed.

We already have a convoluted democratic system, in which the will of the majority is overridden by the antique “electoral college.” The electoral college made Trump the president in 2016, even though Hillary Clinton won three million votes more than he did. In 2020, Trump lost the popular vote by five million, and Biden has unofficially won 306 electoral college votes, 36 more than is required to be called the winner. World leaders are congratulating Biden; Biden is moving forward, but Trump continues to whine that the election was “rigged” and that he is the actual winner.

The results of voting in the states have not yet been certified, and Trump is well within his rights to ask for recounts where the votes were very close. He has filed lawsuits in many states, and thus far none has been successful. All have been dismissed for lack of evidence of voter fraud or misdeeds of any kind. Based on past history, election experts say that the recounts are unlikely to change the results.

No one should object to recounts or serious lawsuits. Trump commits a grave error, however, in insisting that the election was “stolen” because he didn’t win. That’s the behavior of a toddler or a tyrant or both. It does a terrible disservice to the legitimacy of our democracy. Out of sheer spite, he hopes to undermine the Biden presidency in the eyes of his followers.

We have never seen anything like this in our lifetimes. We have never seen a president intent on destroying the Constitution and smearing the reputations of state election officials in every state that he did not win.

Politico reported this morning that Trump tweeted that Biden won, then withdrew the tweet and replaced it with another spurious claim of victory:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP offered JOE BIDEN a backhanded concession this morning, tweeting “He won” amid a series of complaints about the 2020 election. LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER, he took it all back. TRUMP tweeted: “RIGGED ELECTION. WE WILL WIN. … He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”

Toddler or tyrant?

Categories Democracy, Elections, Trump

A Statement by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: No Coup

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2020 //
62

As reported by CNN:

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs promises to uphold Constitution, not follow a man. Gen. Mark Milley, the top American service member, made this encouraging statement during the opening of an Army museum Thursday.

“We are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe or religion. We take an oath to the Constitution. And every soldier that is represented in this museum, every sailor, airman, Marine, Coast Guardsman, each of us will protect and defend that document, regardless of personal price,” Milley said during remarks at the opening of the US Army’s museum.

I take this bold statement to mean that the military will not enable Trump to seize power with a military coup.


God bless our troops!

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Trump

Is Trump Planning a Military Coup?

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2020 //
149

Trump fired Mark Esper, Secretary of Defense, because he refused to allow Trump to use the military to suppress domestic protests.

Now the top layer of Pentagon officials is stepping down and will be replaced by Trump loyalists.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/politics/pentagon-policy-official-resigns/index.html

Our allies are worried. We should be too.

Is Trump planning a military coup?

Categories Democracy, Elections, Insane, Trump

John Young: What the Stars in Our Flag Mean Today

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2020 //
6

John Young is a journalist transplanted from Texas to Colorado. He wrote this brilliant column which lucidly explains why so many people were dancing in the streets on Saturday after Biden’s victory was announced.

It begins like this. Open the link to read the dazzling ending.

This is not fake news.

            Donald Trump does not run the country.

            You say he never did. You say the Constitution does. Ah, but he was prepared to show you differently.

            When he was impeached, Republicans in the U.S. Senate told him he could. All but one of them barely flexed an eyebrow over his illegal act of extorting a struggling nation to help him torpedo a campaign rival — that rival who just became president-elect.

            After those proceedings, Trump knew he could get away with anything.

            Oh, yes, Barack Obama was right: The fate of democracy itself was at stake in this election. Democracy won.

            This just in: Vladimir Putin has no more sway over U.S. foreign policy.

            Today, like Trump, Vlad paces his quarters, steaming at what our voters have done. Vlad would never let this happen in his election.

            Russia invested so much in destabilizing this nation. The good works of the 1,000-plus-employee Internet Research Agency paid off in 2016. Now? Nyet.

            So much invested in making Americans disbelieve in their system.

            Freedom. Many a Trump supporter has sent that word ringing through hills and valleys. But what does that word represent to them? For too many, it represents the freedom to stomp around in camo, an AK slung over the shoulder.

            Freedom from fear? Don’t change the subject. The camo crowd couldn’t care less if you are a fearful person of color, or an immigrant, or if you are gay, or lesbian or transgender and fear for your rights.

            GOP support wasn’t necessarily about freedom anyway. Look at the Republican Party platform. Basically it says, “What Trump says.” 

            Now he’s bound for civilian life and the life of a criminal defendant. What does his party do now?

            Back to the Russians’ designs to mess with American voters’ minds, particularly people of color. Trump gloated over the lower-than-expected Black turnout in 2016, rightly pointing out that a no-vote by them was a vote for him.

            As his presidency seeped away it was mostly Black votes that provided the drip, drip, drip that took him down, in Detroit, in Milwaukee, in Philly, in Pittsburgh, in Atlanta, in Savannah.

            If ever an American election had a fitting coda, it was provided there in those communities.

            Trump had trashed voting by mail. We in Colorado who have been doing this for years knew he spewed bilge. Now voters in many more states fully appreciate the process.

            In the end it was mail-in votes — drip, drip, drip — that caused the waters to swell around and snuff a Trump dictatorship.  

Read on. The ending is the best!

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Reform, Racism, Trump

Boston Globe: How Trump Might Try to Sabotage the Election

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2020 //
31

The Boston Globe wrote about what Trump might do next. He could graciously concede his loss, but that doesn’t look likely. He could try to undermine the legitimacy of the election, by tweeting that it was rife with fraud, as he has done on Twitter and his public statements.

“The simple fact is this election is far from over,” Trump said in a statement that was issued while the president was reportedly out playing golf. “Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.”

He could try to overturn the election results by another method:

Ian Bassin, who worked in the White House counsel’s office during the Obama administration and now serves as executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit group Protect Democracy, worries more about Trump’s legacy.

“While I think the president poses an immediate danger to the functioning of the federal government … I’m actually more concerned about the threats Trump, and especially Trumpism, will pose to our country in coming years,” he said.

Democracy can survive smaller anti-democratic movements, he said, but when they grow to represent large swaths of the population, there are grave risks.

“He has unleashed a toxic political virus on the nation — a mix of white supremacy and authoritarianism — that is not going to be so easy to contain, even if he leaves office,” Bassin said. “So while Congress, courts, and responsible executive branch officials will have to protect our institutions from any Trump-led assaults during a potential lame-duck period, the rest of us have our work cut out for us.”

But there may be more pressing concerns, especially if Trump leans on Republican legislatures in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia to dismiss the results and submit a slate of electors to Congress who favor him, as some right-wing commentators have been suggesting.

Such a move may be unlikely, but it’s allowed by the Constitution, which designates that states appoint electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the 19th century, the popular vote in each state determined the slate of electors. But as recently as 2000, after the deadlocked election in Florida, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that states “can take back the power to appoint electors.

William John Antholis, director of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which specializes in presidential scholarship, said the size of Biden’s lead would make that approach more difficult, given that it would require multiple states to take the unprecedented step of overturning the will of voters.

“Every state that Biden wins will reduce the possibility of something crazy happening,” he said.

While Trump has lost the popular vote decisively — by more than 4 million votes, so far — some 70 million Americans voted for him, or nearly 48 percent of the electorate. His ultimate fate in the Electoral College, however, won’t be clear until the tight races in several swing states are certified.

Antholis hoped the margin would be great enough for other elected Republicans to recognize that the election was lost and persuade Trump to do so as well.

“Trump’s decision-making sometimes appears mercurial, but he does talk to a lot of people, and the messages those people provide to him, I think, will determine the fate of the country,” he said.

No matter what he hears, Trump is facing legal peril if he leaves office and loses his immunity from prosecution as a sitting president.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Trump
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