The Wall Street Journal is one of the most conservative editorial voices in the nation. Today its editorial says that the Electoral College has decided the election. Biden won. Trump lost. Trump should concede.
The Electoral College meets Monday to cast its votes for President, officially marking Joe Biden as the election winner. President Trump’s legal challenges have run their course, and he and the rest of the Republican Party can help the country and themselves by acknowledging the result and moving on.
Mr. Trump’s last legal gasp came Friday evening when the Supreme Court declined to hear the Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn the election results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. As we predicted, the Court cited Texas’s lack of legal standing to challenge how another state manages its elections.
Some on the right claim that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, but this is wrong. The Justices said they would have taken the Texas case as a “bill of complaint” when states sue other states.
This is a technical point that concerns the Court’s case management, and the two Justices have a long-time view that the Court should hear more of these direct state appeals. We happen to agree, but in this case the Texas claim was outside constitutional bounds. Justice Alito (joined by Justice Thomas) added that he would “not grant other relief.” This was not a dissent on the merits of the Texas claim.
Mr. Trump and his camp are attacking the Court, and the President is deriding the “standing” point as a dodge. It is much more than that. Limits on standing are fundamental to a conservative understanding of the proper judicial role under Article III of the Constitution. If anyone can sue without a cognizable injury and the possibility of remedy, the courts would be overwhelmed with frivolous claims.
There is more to the editorial but I don’t subscribe and this is the free content available to me. Note: Even if Alito and Thomas had dissented, which they did not, the vote would have been a decisive 7-2 against Trump’s frivolous claim. It was 9-0 against Trump’s frivolous claim. At what point do courts begin to fine and punish lawyers for repeatedly filing frivolous claims?
There has never been an election in the United States like this one.
Donald Trump continues to insist that the election was stolen and that he is the rightful winner, even though his opponent Joe Biden has 6-7 million votes more than Trump does and even though Biden will register 306 votes in the Electoral College today, the same as Trump called “a landslide” when he won in 2016. In every presidential election in recent memory, the loser conceded defeat before the Electoral College met. Not Trump. He vows to continue his fight. Some commentators think that he is “fighting” because he is collecting millions of dollars from small donors, which he may use to pay his legal fees after leaving the White House or to pay off bank loans.
About three-quarters of Trump voters believe what he says, despite the Trump campaign’s failure to win in any consequential court, despite 50 losses in state courts, and two rejections by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Michigan’s 16 electors will convene at 2 p.m. Eastern inside a heavily guarded state capitol in Lansing to cast their ballots for Joe Biden to become president and Kamala Harris to become vice president.
A spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R) said in a statement overnight that the entire capitol complex will be closed to the public based on “recommendations from law enforcement” amid “credible threats of violence.” Police will escort each of the electors from their cars amid what’s expected to be a large “Stop the Steal” protest outside.
This certainly sounds like the prudent call, but it is nevertheless lamentable that the closures – combined with coronavirus precautions – will strip some of the pomp and circumstance from a sacred American tradition that is typically pro forma.
Ugly events this weekend – from Washington, D.C., to Washington state and Minnesota to Kentucky – showed that violence is not hypothetical. This is an especially dangerous development in a democracy that depends upon losers accepting the results of free and fair elections.
Police in Olympia, Wash., arrested an armed right-wing protester and charged him with shooting a counterdemonstrator during protests on Saturday night.
In the nation’s capital, at least four people were stabbed, including someone who is now in critical condition, and 33 more were arrested, after rallies supporting President Trump descended into chaos fueled by white nationalists. D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham estimates that as many as 700 Proud Boys and their confederates roamed downtown streets looking to start fights, clashing with about 200 anti-Trump protesters.
Many photographs show the Proud Boys carrying Confederate flags. If they want to secede from the Union, let them go. It is never too late.
Are they Confederates or fascists or both?
Can Trump be impeached retroactively for betraying his oath of office? For attacking the Constitution? For sedition?
Mike Klonsky writes that his blood began to boil when he saw the pictures of thugs and fascists marauding in the streets of the nation’s Capitol, expressing the allegiance to their defeated leader, who happens to be the President of the United States. This is what fascism looks like. What’s worse than Trump, as Mike Klonsky notes, is the cowardice and complicity of the majority of Republicans, who cower before this would-be dictator, this man intent on destroying our democracy. Trump has lost 50 cases filed in state courts, and has lost twice in the Supreme Court. Yet he vows to continue his fight to overturn an election that he lost by overwhelming margins. He could not even persuade the federal judges he appointed to accept his claims of fraud. This man belongs either in a mental institution or in prison as an inciter of sedition.
Klonsky begins:
My blood is boiling after seeing news and videos of violent American fascists (“Proud Boys) being turned loose on mask wearers and counter-protesters in D.C. yesterday.
This follows by days 126 Republican congressmen and 17 red-state attorneys general signing on to the Texas lawsuit aimed at disenfranchising millions of voters, especially voters of color. As expected, the Supreme Court on Friday rejected the suit — with only wingnut justices Alito and Thomas mumbling their dissent — but not before more than 60% of House Republicans had signed onto the effort. This group of election deniers reached beyond Trump’s staunchest allies and included powerful figures such as the chamber’s top two officials and the leaders of influential committees, all of whom put their official stamp on this fascist measure.
What follows is an alarming story about a young man who hoaxed thousands of people on Twitter, including Trump. The real shocker is not this particular story—which is so absurd that it’s funny— but the fact that it is so easy to set up fake accounts, collect money for fake causes, and impersonate others. This is a cautionary story for our times.
Jack Nicas wrote:
Last month, between tweets disputing his election loss, President Trump posted an article from a conservative website that said his sister Elizabeth Trump Grau had just joined Twitter to publicly back her brother’s fight to overturn the vote.
“Thank you Elizabeth,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “LOVE!”
But the Twitter account that prompted the article was not his sister’s. It was a fake profile run by Josh Hall, a 21-year-old food-delivery driver in Mechanicsburg, Pa.
“I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness. He actually thinks it’s his sister,’” Mr. Hall, a fervent Trump supporter, said in an interview last week.
It was a surreal coda to nearly a year of deception for Mr. Hall. Since February, he had posed as political figures and their families on Twitter, including five of the president’s relatives. He had pretended to be Robert Trump, the president’s brother; Barron Trump, the president’s 14-year-old son; and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. The accounts collectively amassed more than 160,000 followers.
Using their identities, he gained attention by mixing off-color political commentary with wild conspiracy theories, including one that the government wanted to implant Americans with microchips, and another that John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, was alive and about to replace Mike Pence as vice president.
“There was no nefarious intention behind it,” Mr. Hall said. “I was just trying to rally up MAGA supporters and have fun.”
Many of those “Make America Great Again” followers appeared to believe the posts. Records also show that some accounts served another purpose: directing people to give Mr. Hall money. They promoted a fund-raiser for a political group Mr. Hall created called “Gay Voices for Trump.” In an interview, he admitted that the group didn’t exist. The fund-raiser brought in more than $7,300.
Mr. Hall’s Twitter spree seems to be a case of mischief spun out of control, illustrating how a person simply needs a phone and some knowledge of the internet to start trouble that gets the attention of hundreds of thousands of people.
Mr. Hall was hardly the first self-professed Trump fan to try to profit off fellow Trump backers. Federal prosecutors, for example, said in August that Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser, and three others had solicited donations to build a border wall and then pocketed more than $1 million.
Beware of salesmen in plaid jackets selling snake oil.
And he was hardly the first person to create a fake online persona. Fake accounts have been instrumental in the spread of conspiracy theories, and scammers have repeatedly posed as celebrities, soldiers and even Mark Zuckerberg to defraud people on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Those companies said they remove millions of fake profiles each year. Yet Mr. Hall showed that it was still fairly simple to impersonate key White House officials and the president’s family, including his teenage son, and amass tens of thousands of followers before Twitter took notice.
Millions of people have been lured down dark internet rabbit holes like QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory that claims satanic Democrats abuse and eat children and is fueled by someone posing as a government official. By comparison, Mr. Hall was a small-timer. His escapades in the alternate reality universe might have gone unnoticed — until Mr. Trump’s mistaken tweet elevated him to the big time of MAGA misinformation.
The New York Times identified Mr. Hall as the person behind the fake Trump accounts, which have now all been taken down by Twitter, and constructed a recap of his deception via screenshots of some of his tweets and an archive of many others collected by Ian Kennedy and Melinda Haughey, University of Washington researchers who use software to save millions of tweets about the election and pandemic. The Times also interviewed Mr. Hall, people close to him and people he misled online.
Mr. Hall said he became interested in politics in 2016 when he was a teenager, energized by Mr. Trump. “I kind of thought he was like a clown at first,” he said. “But the more I heard him talk, I realized: Yeah, he says kind of off-the-wall things, but I do agree with what he’s saying.”
He dreamed of becoming a conservative talk-radio host, he said, so he opted against college and decided to instead build a persona online. He sparred with liberals on Twitter; created a “public figure” page on Facebook; and self-published a 49-page e-book on Amazon called “Hall Nation” that detailed his “38 essential rules to live life in order to be happy and successful.” (The first rule? “Insults are a good thing.”)
Offline, he was not so successful. He struggled to hold a job, he said, including stints as a hotel clerk and sandwich maker. Most recently, he delivered food for DoorDash.
But online, he started to develop a small following. In January, he asked followers to help him pay for a lawyer, saying “a Planned Parenthood loving radical leftist” whom he used to date had accused him of harassment. He also began selling T-shirts that said “Josh Hall did nothing wrong.” He raised $815 on GoFundMe. Court documents indicate he is using a public defender. A hearing in the case is scheduled for later this month.
Mr. Hall said that around that time Twitter suspended his account without explanation. “Once I got banned from Twitter, my attitude was kind of like, ‘What the hell, I’m just going to have fun now,’” he said. (A Twitter spokesman said the company suspended his original account because he had created multiple accounts under different identities.)
So he started a new account under a different name: Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois best known for trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat. Mr. Blagojevich’s prison sentence had just been commuted by President Trump, making him a sudden ally in the eyes of some conservatives.
Our cat Dandelion (Dandy) resting on Mitzi’s bed. Mitzi was unhappy about this.
“OBAMA STARTED THE CORONAVIRUS,” Mr. Hall wrote on Feb. 27 under Mr. Blagojevich’s photo and a profile named @GovBlago. It was typical fare for the account, which eventually drew more than 26,000 followers. For much of the time it was active, the profile included a disclaimer in its bio that it was a parody account, which Twitter allows under some conditions.
The rest of Mr. Hall’s impostor accounts did not include such disclaimers.
Twitter eventually removed the @GovBlago account, prompting Mr. Hall to impersonate someone else in the headlines: Dr. Birx, the White House official working on the pandemic. “The media is lying to you about this virus,” he wrote as @DoctorBirx on April 22. The pandemic was “plotted by the powers that be to crash our economy in hopes that Trump will pay for it in November.”
Mitzi, a wonderful 100-lb certified purebred mutt, at rest on her bed.
“Uncle Rob runs Gay Voices For Trump with @TheBiTrumpGuy, although I am very much a heterosexual male. It’s the Trump genes – we love women,” Mr. Hall wrote as Robert Trump in July. “But we are trying to reach out to LGBT and other minority voters. Josh is doing great work so please give him a follow and support him!” The tweets brought Mr. Hall’s real profile thousands of new followers.Tracking Disinformation ›
Not long after, Mr. Hall started messaging Trump supporters as Robert Trump, asking them to donate to a fund-raiser for his group, according to screenshots posted online by two people who received the messages.
“Hey patriot. Would really appreciate if you have a couple of bucks to spare to organization,” he wrote, according to one screenshot.
Mr. Hall denied he sent such messages and suggested that the screenshots had been fabricated. “I would tell you if I did,” he said. “I should have used better judgment and stuff. But I didn’t deliberately try and dupe people out of money.”
His fund-raiser on the website GoFundMe called his group “a grass-roots coalition of LGBT Americans” and said all donations would go to “field organizing, events and merchandise.” He brought in $7,384.
Mr. Hall admitted last week that the group didn’t exist. He didn’t do more than register about 100 people to vote. “I didn’t end up ever really doing anything with the Gay Voices for Trump,” he said. “So I never got the funds from it.” He said the money was still with GoFundMe.
A GoFundMe spokeswoman said that the organizer behind the fund-raiser — an account named Josh H. — had withdrawn the money. She said GoFundMe was now investigating how the funds were used and that the company would give refunds to any donors who requested one.
Mr. Hall didn’t respond to follow-up questions about the fund-raiser.
Moonrise over harbor in Greenport, New Tork
Josiah Bruns, an engineer from Goffstown, N.H., donated $100. With his donation, he left a comment: “Uncle Rob Trump asked me too.”
Mr. Bruns said in an interview that a QAnon message board had led him to the Robert Trump account, which also promoted the conspiracy theory. “We’re trained on the Q research board to always question everything,” he said, adding that he used those lessons to scrutinize the Robert Trump account. “I’m probably 65 percent sure that it was real.”
After The Times told Mr. Bruns that he had been deceived, he said he didn’t mind. In the future, he said, he would apply more research techniques he had learned from the QAnon movement to decipher what was real on the internet. The web is a minefield of lies, he said, “especially if it’s something you want to believe, because those are the easiest lies to fall for.”
In August, Robert Trump died. The news drew scrutiny to the fake Robert Trump account, and some of its followers began to suspect that Mr. Hall was behind it, given the pattern of tweets between the profiles. In response, Mr. Hall said on Twitter that the fake account was run by “a close political friend of mine” who “did not know about Mr. Trump’s serious condition.”
He began impersonating different Trump relatives, including Fred Trump III, the president’s nephew; Maryanne Trump Barry, the president’s sister and a federal judge; and Barron Trump, the president’s teenage son.
“COVID is a scam,” he wrote on Aug. 23 as Barron Trump, a fake account that attracted more than 34,000 followers in eight days. On Aug. 25, the account posted: “Q is real. The more the media delegitimizes it, the more it shows that they’re scared.”
The Trump Organization, which has spoken on behalf of the Trump family members in the past, did not respond to requests for comment. The White House declined to comment.
The Twitter spokesman said the company eventually took down all of Mr. Hall’s accounts for violating its rules on impersonation and evading a previous ban from the site. In response to questions about why someone could create accounts impersonating the president’s teenage son and a White House official, the spokesman said in an email, “We’re committed to protecting the integrity of the conversation on Twitter, and we’re working hard to ensure that violations of our rules against impersonation, particularly when people are attempting to spread misinformation, are addressed quickly and consistently.”
A review on Saturday showed nearly 100 fake Barron Trump accounts were still active on Twitter, not counting those that identified as parodies.
Without a Twitter account, Mr. Hall felt left out after the election, as many fellow Trump supporters convened on Twitter to claim that the vote was rigged. “Why not make a comeback?” he recalled thinking. “I’m going to do something to spice things up.”
On the afternoon of Wednesday, Nov. 18, he created a new impostor, this time posing as the father of Kamala Harris, the vice president-elect. “My daughter is not who she portrays herself to be. She is dangerous for our democracy,” he posted.
The tweet got little attention, so he abandoned that fake for another Trump sibling. The final living sibling he hadn’t tried was Ms. Trump Grau, the president’s older sister, who is in her late 70s, lives in Florida and has hardly said anything public since her brother was elected.
Mr. Hall changed the name, photos and bio of the Mr. Harris account and erased the old posts. Then he started with a new message: “This election inspired me to break my silence,” he wrote under a photo of Ms. Trump Grau and the username @TheBettyTrump. “My brother Don won this election.”
He went viral again, collecting about 20,000 followers in 24 hours. Mr. Hall delighted many of his followers with dozens more juvenile and bizarre tweets, including claims that President-elect Biden is a pathological liar, Ms. Harris is a communist and Michelle Obama is a man.
Mr. Hall collected over $7,000 with his fake “Gay Voices for Trump” Twitter account. Photo by Ben Mack on Pexels.com
On Nov. 20, Mr. Hall said, he woke up and checked the president’s Twitter account, as he did most mornings. “I was like shellshocked,” he said.
He quickly began bragging on Snapchat that President Trump had tweeted about his fake account. “My friend was joking, ‘Maybe he’s not close with his sister, and you just brought him and his sister a lot closer,’” he said. “So I kind of felt good about that.”
Within hours, the account was outed as a fake.
Mr. Hall argued that his accounts were clear parodies, if anyone just looked at what they posted. As Ms. Trump Grau, for instance, he called the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper “Anderson Pooper” and said he would cover the legal fees of anyone who poured gravy down the pants of Chris Wallace, the Fox News anchor.
“I’m a big Trump supporter, but I’m thinking, ‘He’s got to know that that’s a parody,’” he said. “How does he not know?”
CNN reports that the Supreme Court will not hear the demand by the Texas Attorney General and 16 other Republican state attorneys general seeking to overturn the voting results in key battleground states.
On Monday, the Electoral College will meet and confirm that Joe Biden will be our new President, #46.
Wednesday was one of the deadliest days in American history, as the coronavirus killed 3,140 people. This is 673 more Americans than the Japanese massacred in their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. It is more than twice the number of souls as perished aboard the Titanic.
In another record, 106,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with covid-19. President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is no longer among them. He flashed reporters a thumbs-up as he was driven away from MedStar Georgetown University Hospital at around 5 p.m. on Wednesday.
“Back 100% and lost little time,” Giuliani tweeted this morning.
The former New York mayor said he received remdesivir, dexamethasone and “exactly the same” treatment that Trump got in October when he was hospitalized, which the president has often credited for his speedy recovery.
“The minute I took the cocktail yesterday, I felt 100 percent better,” Giuliani said in a Tuesday afternoon interview with WABC, a New York talk radio station. “It works very quickly. Wow! … By the next morning, I felt like I was 10 years younger.”
As beds fill up, patients who need hospital care — for the virus or for something else — cannot get it. Many intensive care units are overwhelmed. More and more places face looming, life-and-death decisions about rationing care.
Giuliani himself acknowledged that he got “celebrity” treatment. He said the president’s doctor, apparently referring to White House physician Sean Conley, talked him into being admitted. “I didn’t really want to go to the hospital, and he said, ‘Don’t be stupid,’” Giuliani recounted. “We can get it over with in three days if we send you to the hospital.”…
But the VIP treatment for Trump and his crew, including access to the best cocktails of experimental drugs, seems like an important part of the explanation for why the president and his inner-circle continue to speak so flippantly about the dangers of the virus that has now killed at least 288,000 Americans.
Just like Trump after he got out of Walter Reed in October, Giuliani emphasized during his talk-radio appearance that his four-day stay in the hospital has not changed his perspective about the virus or lessened his opposition to mask mandates. He expressed no contrition for his pattern of reckless behavior that forced the Arizona legislature to close for this week and public health officials in Michigan to encourage people who attended a state legislative hearing at which Giuliani spoke to self-quarantine. Giuliani even claimed that covid-19 is “a curable disease at this point.”
“I have exactly the same view,” he said. “I have also been through cancer. … Things happen in life. You have to go with them. You can’t overreact to them. Otherwise you let the fear of illness drive your entire life. … I’d rather face risk than live in a basement all my life.”
Trump slammed the door on immigrants, not just those without papers, but those who were vetted and approved. Sonali Kolhatkar is a journalist, talk show host, and activist in California. She expected to bring her parents from India, but Trump blocked their entry. Now she hopes that Biden will open the door to legal immigration.
She writes:
In April 2020, just as I was putting together the final stages of an arduous sponsorship application for my parents to obtain legal residency, President Trump signed an executive order upending our lives. Under cover of the COVID-19 pandemic, he enacted a 60-day suspension of most immigrant visas including those that enable citizens to sponsor their non-citizen parents. Two months later, Trump added more visa categories to the ban and extended it until the end of the year.
Trump’s cruel anti-immigrant agenda separated untold numbers of families, including mine. Will the new administration fix the mess?
Although the authority to change immigration laws lies with Congress, Trump managed to push through many aspects of an anti-immigrant wish list he has been touting for years. Americans like me suddenly have no access to the same rule that first lady Melania Trump used to sponsor her parents from Slovenia.
While the horrifying cases of family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border have justifiably drawn public indignation, the spectrum of separation is broader than most Americans realize. According to the advocacy group Value Our Families, Trump’s green card ban affects people like my parents who are being sponsored by their adult U.S. citizen children, as well as the spouses and children of green card holders, and the children and siblings of U.S. citizens. An estimated 358,000 people attempting to immigrate through available legal processes are affected...
As we wait for Biden to take the reins of government and do the right thing, my family will remain separated. Meanwhile, each day I can see from my backyard the newly built home, financed through the savings of my foreign-born parents, that sits empty and waiting for them.
Frank G. Splitt is an esteemed engineer who recently celebrated his 90th birthday. He writes from the perspective of many years of experience and knowledge.
By Frank G. Splitt December 3, 2020
The Trump Presidency The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The experience is shattering. How much stupidity! What delusion among such cultured and actually clever people! Just unconditional belief in the Führer, delight that ‘finally our weapons speak’.1 —Erich Ebermayer, September 3, 1939
My September 21, 2020, essay “Trumpism and Its Factions: An Existential Threat to America’s Democracy,” began with the above epigraph and concluded with the following three questions:2
If the president has his way, who would be able to stop him from using all the levers of government to not only contest the results of the upcoming election if he loses, but also who would stop him from realizing his personal and political aims as well as his ambition if he wins either by votes cast or by a SCOTUS decision as in Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000)? Shades of Germany in the 1930s?”
President Trump’s loyal supporters counter such concerns as well as any and all criticism by citing his policies that resulted in ostensibly good if not great accomplishments. It has been claimed that these accomplishments have been negated by the president’s offsetting personality.3 However, these “good” accomplishments, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder—forming only a piece of an ugly story that goes far beyond the president’s personality.
Not mentioned by his supporters have been vast international reputational as well as social and human costs that are still being paid for these accomplishments. Consider first the likely long-lasting impact of President Trump’s assault on America’s democracy and democratic values, as well as his demeaning of the office of the president via cruelty, incompetence, and alleged corruption as well as obstruction of justice.
Also not mentioned are the president’s trade policies that have damaged the U.S. economy and alienated allies. According to Dartmouth economist Douglas Irwin: “the president sought to reduce the trade deficit, increase manufacturing employment, change China’s policies, and reach better deals, but fell short on all accounts”4 Furthermore, consider the cost of the president’s divide-and-conquer strategy that not only tore American’s asunder, but also bolstered America’s slide towards autocracy and the fact that bad behavior and policies have steep costs as well. The list includes: the minority-voter suppression highlighted in a recent Commonweal Magazine editorial,5 blatant lies and gross exaggerations, flagrant self-dealing, the tax evasion, the separation of children from their parents, the encouragement of white supremacists, conspiratorialists, and radical right-wing factions such as neo-Nazis, and, perhaps oneof the most egregious of all in terms of lives lost, the downplaying and politicization of COVID-19.
An ugly state of affairs has pervaded the fabric of our nation. Sadly, none of this ugliness has any apparent bearing on the actions of President Trump’s loyal cult-like supporters of their tyrannical leader. For example, it has been reported that half of Republicans say Biden won because of a ‘rigged’ election.6 This belief appears to be a psychological phenomenon akin to the Hitler mania of the German people in the 1930s and the Jim Jones cult’s suicides in 1978.
Seemingly, half of Republicans have unconditional belief in Trump who was prescient when he once boasted: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” These voters believe the election was rigged not only because that’s what they want to believe, but more likely because Trump keeps baselessly saying it was rigged—insisting in a December 2, 2020, White House speech that he won the election.7 All of this would not be possible if these otherwise intelligent voters did not willfully suspend moral judgement and succumb to their avarice, self-interest, and/or any one of a number of political single-issues. This situation is not without its parallels, for example President Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign recalls one of the most disastrous political lies of the 20th century.8
Trump will always have his apologists and his steadfast defenders. They believe he is one of them fighting for what is right against elitist plots and those of the Deep State, as well as any others who may have betrayed them. To abandon their leader now would be to admit they were wrong—deceived or conned by his lies and exaggerations that placated their heart-felt resentment of the socio-political state of affairs in America.8 And, worse yet, admit that it was wrong to have supported him in the first place. It seems that one of the most difficult things for a person to do is admit that they were wrong—sometimes even in the face of incontrovertible evidence.9
What can be said of the president’s sycophantic congressional enablers? This group lives in utter fear of Trump’s base of loyal supporters and seems to believe the president has the right to impede the transition to the Biden presidency to suit his self- centered present and future interests no matter the cost to national security and the health of American citizens. These interests include: raising money, solidifying his base, undermining the Biden administration, deepening and exploiting ethnic, demographic religious, and racial divisions, as well as positioning for a possible 2024 rerun. 10, 11, 12
Finally, in view of the above, what might a post-Trump presidency portend? Although no one can say with any degree of certainty, here is a potential worst-case scenario: President Biden’s efforts to unite the country will fail, undermined beyond bearing by Trump who will be aided and abetted by Senate Republicans unwilling to stand up to him for fear of alienating his base. This will be followed by a further transition from democracy to autocracy while still conforming to the Constitution as interpreted by an unbalanced Supreme Court packed with Trump nominations and backed by a formidable voting block of true believers. This scenario reflects “shades of Germany in the 1930s.”
We will see what we will see
NOTES
Ebermayer, a German liberal intellectual, made these remarks after a visit with aristocratic neighbors who, as Hitler-loyalists, expressed boundless uncritical faith in their leader. The encounter was on the day Britain and France went to war with Germany after it invaded Poland. See pages 368-69 of Frederick Taylor’s book 1939: A People’s History of the Coming of the Second World War (Norton, 2020).
Splitt, Frank G., “Trumpism and Its Factions: An Existential Threat to America’s Democracy, FutureVectors, Sept.21, 2020, Afterword Oct. 13, 2020, http://www.futurevectors.com/Odyssey/Splitt%20- %20Trumpism.pdf
Epstein, Joseph, “Donald Trump, the President His Detractors Loved to Hate,” The Wall Street Journal, Opinion, Nov.14, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-the-president- his-detractors-loved-to-hate-1160530742143
Romano, Andrew and Walker, Hunter, “Trump in exile: How he will remain a force in the GOP, and a threat to Biden’s politics of unity,” Yahoo News, Nov. 18, 2020, . 13. Mazewski, Matt, “Trump Can Run Again,” Commonweal, Nov. 15, 2020, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/trump-can-run-again/ Frank G. Splitt, is a former McCormick Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and Vice President Emeritus of Nortel Networks, the author of the book An Odyssey of Reform Initiatives: 1986-2015 and its sequel Reflections: 2016-2019. He is the recipient of The Drake Group’s 2006 Robert Maynard Hutchin’s Award and a 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Optics and Photonics. His books and other writings can be accessed at http://www.futurevectors.com
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.
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!”
Georgia has a Republican Governor and Republican state officials. The presidential election was conducted under the auspices of Republicans. Biden won the election by a small margin. Trump insisted on a hand recount, and it confirmed that Biden won. Trump has demanded another recount.
Trump has taken to Twitter to excoriate Governor Kemp for refusing to change the results. He and his proxies have attacked the state’s election officials. The Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger condemned the conspiracy theories and groundless attacks on the election. Another state election official spoke out and said, “This has to stop.” He warned that someone could be killed because of the violence unleashed by Trump.
ATLANTA — In one of the most striking rebukes to President Trump since he launched his baseless attacks on the American electoral process, a top-ranking Georgia election official lashed out at the president on Tuesday for failing to condemn threats of violence against people overseeing the voting system in his state.
“It has to stop,” Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, said at an afternoon news conference at the state Capitol, his voice shaking with emotion. “Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language.”
He added: “This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy, and all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. It’s too much.”
Mr. Sterling’s outburst of anger and frustration came amid a sustained assault on Georgia’s election process by Mr. Trump as he seeks to reverse his loss to his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Sterling, who previously said he had received threats himself, said that threats had also been made against the wife of his superior, Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state.
“Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia,” Mr. Sterling said. He added that the president needed to “step up” and say, “Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right.”
Mr. Sterling also called on the state’s two Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, to condemn the rhetoric that he said was getting dangerously out of hand. The two senators, both Trump loyalists, have called for Mr. Raffensperger to resign.
As Mr. Trump hurls false claims of fraud in Georgia, a number of lawsuits filed by conservatives in state and federal courts are seeking to decertify the results. The second of two recounts requested by the Trump campaign is in progress and is expected to wind up Wednesday. And the Georgia Republican Party has descended into a state of virtual civil war as some of its most powerful players maneuver and malign their rivals, seeking advantage, or at least survival.
In the meantime, Mr. Trump continues to lash out at Gov. Brian Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger, both staunch Republicans and Trump supporters, over the fact that he lost Georgia, saying they have not sufficiently rooted out fraud.
As late as Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump made the latest in a series of unsubstantiated claims about the Georgia election, writing on Twitter that the state had been “scammed” and urging Mr. Kemp to “call off” the election.
Some of Mr. Trump’s supporters have taken to the streets and the Capitol building in downtown Atlanta, where the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars recently joined them. In other cases, Trump supporters have harassed or threatened Mr. Sterling, Mr. Raffensperger and others.
In a statement Tuesday evening, Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said: “The campaign is focused on ensuring that all legal votes are counted and all illegal votes are not. No one should engage in threats or violence, and if that has happened, we condemn that fully.”
Amid all of this, Mr. Sterling, a detail-oriented former city councilman from the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs, has taken on a prominent role in the state as it conducted its recounts. Along with Mr. Raffensperger, he has often been the main speaker in numerous news conferences in which he has explained the complexities of Georgia’s election and recount systems and has argued that the results, which currently show Mr. Biden winning by about 12,700 votes, are trustworthy.
Ari Schaffer, press secretary for the secretary of state’s office, did not answer directly when asked Tuesday whether Mr. Raffensperger had given Mr. Sterling his blessing to speak out so forcefully against the president. But he noted that the deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, had been standing near Mr. Sterling when he made his statements.
“Gabriel has my support,” Ms. Fuchs said independently in a text message.
Late Tuesday, representatives for Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue said they condemned violence of any kind but also said they would not apologize for seeking accountability and accuracy in the state’s elections.
In the second of two news conferences called by the secretary of state’s office on Tuesday, Mr. Sterling, speaking loudly, emotionally and deliberately, said that people had intruded on Mr. Raffensperger’s personal property. He said that Mr. Raffensperger’s wife “is getting sexualized threats through her cellphone.” He mentioned that he had police protection outside his own house, a topic he had also broached in a Nov. 21 tweet.
“So this is fun … multiple attempted hacks of my emails, police protection around my home, the threats,” Mr. Sterling wrote then. “But all is well … following the law, following the process … doing our jobs.”
This is not fun. This is no joke. Trump is sowing distrust in democracy and endangering the lives of election officials who refuse to rig the results for him.
