Lt. Governor Dan Patrick of Texas, a Rush Limbaugh wannabe, offered a reward of $1 million to anyone who could find voter fraud.
The Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania John Fetterman tweeted to claim the reward. He said he found a case where a man was trying to get a ballot for his deceased mother. Voter fraud! He wanted to cast her ballot for Trump.
No word from Lt. Governor Patrick.
The Washington Post reports that Trump continues to proclaim that he will win, although he is 5 million votes behind Biden, and Biden has won the electoral college. The people around Trump are babying him, as they watch the lawsuits get tossed out of court. No one wants to tell him it’s over. In occasionally lucid moments, he talks about running in 2024, his aides say.
President Trump declared Wednesday on Twitter, “WE WILL WIN!” But, in fact, the president has no clear endgame to actually win the election — and, in an indication he may be starting to come to terms with his loss, he is talking privately about running again in 2024.
Trump aides, advisers and allies said there is no grand strategy to reverse the election results, which show President-elect Joe Biden with a majority of electoral college votes, as well as a 5 million-vote lead in the national popular vote.
Asked about Trump’s ultimate plan, one senior administration official chuckled and said, “You’re giving everybody way too much credit right now.”
Republican officials have scrambled nationwide to produce evidence of widespread voter fraud that could bolster the Trump campaign’s legal challenges, but no such evidence has surfaced.
And Biden’s lead in several states targeted by the Trump campaign has expanded as late-counted votes are reported. In all-important Pennsylvania, the Democrat now leads by more than 50,000 votes.
GOP officials filed a lawsuit in Arizona and sought to keep their “evidence” secret, but the judge hearing the case rejected their request.
Only 180 votes are at issue. Biden leads by more than 12,000 votes.
An attorney representing President Donald Trump’s reelection team, in a lawsuit alleging poll workers “incorrectly rejected” Election Day votes, asked a Maricopa County Superior Court judge on Tuesday to seal the evidence he says will support that claim.
But attorneys representing the election officials being sued convinced the judge to reject the request after arguing the public “has a right to know how flimsy Plaintiffs’ evidence actually is.”
The Trump campaign filed the lawsuit on Saturday alongside the Republican National Committee and the Arizona Republican Party, claiming Maricopa County poll workers had disregarded procedures designed to give voters a chance to correct ballot mistakes on Election Day.
Though the plaintiffs claim the problem could have left thousands of legitimate votes uncounted, county officials on Monday estimated 180 ballots were at issue.
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?
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.
Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect explains the dilemma of divided government:
| Can Biden Govern With a Republican Senate? |
| It now looks like Biden will squeak through by taking Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But in the Senate, Republicans will likely have 51 seats. If Mitch McConnell is leader of a Republican majority again, what then? For starters, Biden will have to govern as a more centrist president. It will take some doing for him to get a Cabinet confirmed. The most important players will be the three Republican Senate moderates: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, and Susan Collins of Maine. Biden will need to reach out to them and see if they will occasionally break Republican caucus discipline and vote to pass crucial legislation and confirm nominees. Something similar occurred in 2009 when President Obama found three Republican senators to help him pass the Recovery Act—Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania), Olympia Snowe (Maine), and, yes, Susan Collins. Their price was a much weaker act that redirected hundreds of billions from public investment to tax cuts. Thus the danger. To get nominees confirmed, Biden would need to shop them first to McConnell and then to the three moderates. That means his Cabinet will be even more centrist than it already was going to be. And forget Rooseveltian legislation in the first two years. One ray of hope: There is a very vulnerable class of GOP senators up in 2022. But in the meantime, Biden has to deliver something to an anxious electorate. |
We won’t know the final results of our national election for days. The volume of mail-in ballots will slow the counting in several states. What we do know is that Trump was not repudiated, despite his lies, despite his crude behavior, despite his poor handling of the pandemic.
Reader GregB said this about the election:
Conventional wisdom has informed us that when high voter turnout occurs Democrats win. Conventional wisdom can now stick it up its ass. This country is a majority bigot, racist, xenophobe, and ignorant nation. Let’s come to term with this fact. As Kurt Tucholsky wrote in one of his final diary entries before he committed suicide, Sprechen (Speak), Schreiben (Write), Schweigen (Silence). It’s time for silence. The nation is no more. It’s a rigged game. And we lose. Even if, by some miracle, Biden gets 271 electoral votes, his administration will get nothing done, get all the blame, and is doomed because the American people are too stupid to comprehend reality. The Senate will continue to obstruct (or bend over and take it if the Idiot remains). The Supreme Court is a rubber stamp (and Louisiana and its “Democratic” governor will lead the way for its first coup). The House will be a shrill, useless entity. Gleichschaltung is here, get used to it. We will have no international allies except for Brazi, Israel, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, North Korea, and our new masters, Russia. The so-called confederacy won the long game.
Once again, the polls misled us. We were expecting an overwhelming defeat for the incompetent racist-misogynist-xenophobic liar Trump, but it didn’t happen. As of 2:35 am, when I wrote this, the election was undecided. Trump held on to most of the states he won in 2016. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are not decided, although the polls showed comfortable leads for Biden in all three. The blowout that the polls told us to expect did not happen.
Republicans Joni Ernst, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsay Graham were re-elected, perhaps even the pusillanimous Susan Collins. It’s not yet clear which party will control the Senate.
As awful as Trump is, as badly as he has damaged the Western alliance, as surely as he has mishandled the pandemic, there’s a chance that we will have four more years of this mendacious buffoon. What does that say about the American people? What does it say about the Republican Party?
Four more years of DeVos or someone just like her? Heaven help us. Trump would wind the clock back to 1925, before the New Deal. No restraints.
If Biden ekes out a victory and has a Republican Senate, he won’t be able to fulfill any of his promises. A sad day.
Celebrated singer Marc Anthony was born in New York City. His parents were from Puerto Rico. This is a powerful message that shows why Puerto Ricans must vote.
I urge you to watch.
Jane Mayer, crack investigative journalist for The New Yorker, writes that Trump is afraid of losing because so many state investigations and lawsuits and debts await him, and perhaps, prison.
No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses—an outcome that nobody should count on—the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish. Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. The Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, “If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut.” Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden. Even if Trump wins, grave legal and financial threats will loom over his second term.
Two of the investigations into Trump are being led by powerful state and city law-enforcement officials in New York. Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney, and Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, are independently pursuing potential criminal charges related to Trump’s business practices before he became President. Because their jurisdictions lie outside the federal realm, any indictments or convictions resulting from their actions would be beyond the reach of a Presidential pardon. Trump’s legal expenses alone are likely to be daunting. (By the time Bill Clinton left the White House, he’d racked up more than ten million dollars in legal fees.) And Trump’s finances are already under growing strain. During the next four years, according to a stunning recent Times report, Trump—whether reëlected or not—must meet payment deadlines for more than three hundred million dollars in loans that he has personally guaranteed; much of this debt is owed to such foreign creditors as Deutsche Bank. Unless he can refinance with the lenders, he will be on the hook. The Financial Times, meanwhile, estimates that, in all, about nine hundred million dollars’ worth of Trump’s real-estate debt will come due within the next four years. At the same time, he is locked in a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over a deduction that he has claimed on his income-tax forms; an adverse ruling could cost him an additional hundred million dollars. To pay off such debts, the President, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be two and a half billion dollars, could sell some of his most valuable real-estate assets—or, as he has in the past, find ways to stiff his creditors. But, according to an analysis by the Washington Post, Trump’s properties—especially his hotels and resorts—have been hit hard by the pandemic and the fallout from his divisive political career. “It’s the office of the Presidency that’s keeping him from prison and the poorhouse,” Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale who studies authoritarianism, told me.
Will crowds be chanting, “Lock him up?” as they did for Hillary at so many Trump rallies? Karma.
Diane Ravitch's blog 