The Washington Monthy writes that Trump had an elaborate plan, dreamed up by one of his inner circle (Stephen Miller?) Jared Kushner?), to demand a halt to the counting on Election Day, knowing that the mail-in ballots would favor Biden. But then FOX News called Arizona for Biden, and his plan was foiled. He was furious and demanded that FOX retract its call, but it did not back down. He even attacked the person who heads FOX’s Decision Desk, but to no avail.
Donald Trump telegraphed his plan to steal the election in the days leading up to Nov. 3. He wanted to declare victory on election night, stop the counting mail-in votes he considered illegal, and, if necessary, send the election to the judiciary and eventually the Supreme Court.
Implementing that strategy would require a public relations effort in which Trump made at least a plausible case that he had won re-election. Michigan and Wisconsin looked out of reach. So the president would need to maintain the illusion that he was winning the rest of his 2016 states to have any pathway to 270 electoral votes. The most vulnerable were Pennsylvania and Arizona.
Republicans had ensured, via the courts, that Pennsylvania couldn’t begin counting mail-in ballots prior to November 3rd. So Trump was relying on an early lead in that state coming from those who had voted in person on Election Day. That made Arizona pivotal to the public relations campaign for Trump to claim victory.
But at 11:20 pm on Tuesday, Fox News foiled the plan by calling Arizona for Biden. The Associated Press followed at 2:50 AM. Eventually, they were joined by NPR, “PBS NewsHour,” Univision, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. With Arizona gone, Trump would have no clear path to 270 electoral votes.
The Trump administration seems to have gone into hibernation since the election. The coronavirus is raging out of control, but the federal coronavirus task force is silent, with neither Trump nor its titular chair Mike Pence attending its meetings. Given the administration’s penchant for toxic actions, its inactivity may be a blessing, but in the case of student loan repayments, this is not the case.
– “Trump’s student loan cliff threatens chaos for Biden,”by Michael Stratford: “At midnight on New Year’s Eve, President Donald Trump’s pause on student loan payments for 33 million Americans is set to expire, just three weeks before President-elect Joe Biden is slated to take over.
“The Education Department started warning borrowers through text messages and emails this week that their monthly payments will resume in January. Even though Trump said this summer that he planned to later “extend” the freeze beyond Dec. 31, a White House spokesperson declined to comment on whether the president is still considering another executive action to move the expiration date.
“If Trump doesn’t act unilaterally and Congress doesn’t act to avert the cliff either, Biden could waive his own executive wand once inaugurated, though the president-elect’s campaign will not divulge his plans. The intervening weeks of limbo could cause mass confusion and uncertainty for borrowers. For the incoming president, the economic and administrative mess could take months to untangle, consuming the early days of his Education Department.”
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!”
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.
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.
A Trump administration appointee is refusing to sign a letter allowing President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team to formally begin its work this week, in another sign the incumbent president has not acknowledged Biden’s victory and could disrupt the transfer of power.Follow the latest on Election 2020
The administrator of the General Services Administration, the low-profile agency in charge of federal buildings, has a little-known role when a new president is elected: to sign paperwork officially turning over millions of dollars, as well as give access to government officials, office space in agencies and equipment authorized for the taxpayer-funded transition teams of the winner.
It amounts to a formal declaration by the federal government, outside of the media, of the winner of the presidential race.
But by Sunday evening, almost 36 hours after media outlets projected Biden as the winner, GSA Administrator Emily Murphy had written no such letter. And the Trump administration, in keeping with the president’s failure to concede the election, has no immediate plans to sign one. This could lead to the first transition delay in modern history, except in 2000, when the Supreme Court decided a recount dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush in December.
“An ascertainment has not yet been made,” Pamela Pennington, a spokeswoman for GSA, said in an email, “and its Administrator will continue to abide by, and fulfill, all requirements under the law.”
The GSA statement left experts on federal transitions to wonder when the White House expects the handoff from one administration to the next to begin — when the president has exhausted his legal avenues to fight the results, or the formal vote of the electoral college on Dec. 14? There are 74 days, as of Sunday, until the Biden inauguration on Jan. 20.
“No agency head is going to get out in front of the president on transition issues right now,” said one senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. The official predicted that agency heads will be told not to talk to the Biden team.
The decision has turned attention to Murphy, whose four-year tenure has been marked by several controversies involving the president, an unusually high profile for an agency little known outside of Washington.ADhttps://1172e0dead972cb9362ac3bba9372937.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
“Her action now has to be condemned,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who leads a House oversight panel on federal operations. “It’s behavior that is consistent with her subservience to wishes of the president himself, and it is clearly harmful to the orderly transition of power.”
The delay has implications both practical and symbolic.
By declaring the “apparent winner” of a presidential election, the GSA administrator releases computer systems and money for salaries and administrative support for the mammoth undertaking of setting up a new government — $9.9 million this year.
Transition officials get government email addresses. They get office space at every federal agency. They can begin to work with the Office of Government Ethics to process financial disclosure and conflict-of-interest forms for their nominees.
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.
Perhaps as consequential as President Trump firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper via tweet on Monday, which has been widely expected for months, was the hiring of Michael Ellis to be the National Security Agency’s general counsel.
As one of the most controversial staffers in the White House over the past four years, Ellis has shown himself to be as much a staunch Trump loyalist as anyone else in the administration. But his new job means that he will no longer be a political appointee. Instead, as a civilian member of the senior executive service, he gets protections that will make it quite difficult for President-elect Joe Biden to fire him.
Burrowing down into what Trump derides as “the deep state” will give Ellis, a former Republican campaign operative, a powerful platform from which he could seek to complicate or undermine the incoming Democratic administration’s agenda. This is a preview of the sort of behavior from Trump that many on Biden’s transition team expect, and fear, during the lame-duck president’s final 71 days in power, even as he refuses to concede defeat.
Christopher Miller arrives at the Pentagon on Monday to take control just moments after Trump tweeted that he had “terminated” Mark Esper and installed Miller as acting secretary of defense. (Adrees Ali/Reuters)
Ellis worked for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) before joining the National Security Council when Trump took office. In March 2017, Ellis was reportedly one of the people involved in giving Nunes access to classified files related to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Nunes reviewed the records at the White House in the middle of the night. The notorious episode came to be known as “the midnight run.”
In July 2019, Ellis was allegedly the first person who proposed moving the transcript of Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president to a special server where fewer people would be able to see that the president had pushed his counterpart in Kyiv to announce an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter when the topic of Javelin antitank missiles came up.
Then-Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified under oath before Congress that Ellis was behind moving the transcript. But Ellis defied a subpoena to answer questions about his role in the donnybrook and what knowledge he might have had of the freeze on vital military assistance that Congress had approved for Ukraine. Ellis is named in the second article of impeachment that passed the House as a party to Trump’s obstruction of Congress.
After the GOP-controlled Senate voted not to convict the president, Trump ordered the removal of Vindman from the White House and promoted Ellis to be senior director for intelligence on the NSC.
Being general counsel for the NSA is one of the most immensely complicated and critical legal jobs in all of government, but it is somewhat insulated from politics. Ellis will report to the deputy general counsel for intelligence at the Defense Department, a civilian job. That person reports to the DOD general counsel, who is a political appointee. Once Biden’s eventual nominee for that job is confirmed by the Senate, he or she could choose to reassign Ellis to a different civil service position inside the military’s legal architecture.
“The appointment was made under pressure from the White House,” Ellen Nakashima reports. “NSA Director Paul Nakasone was not in favor of Ellis’s selection, according to three people familiar with the matter. However, the selection was not up to him, they said. … Ellis was selected over two other finalists: acting NSA general counsel Teisha Anthony and Bradley Brooker, acting general counsel at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Both are career civil servants.” The Pentagon and White House did not respond to a request for a comment.
Ironically, this is happening as Trump moves aggressively to roll back civil service protections for members of the bureaucracy. But it’s not surprising. Trump trying to burrow people inside the government shows just how much this president sees personnel as policy.
In related news, the top political appointee at the U.S. Agency for International Development told staff during a Monday phone call that three Trump loyalists are being elevated to top positions inside the agency in the waning days of the administration. John Barsa, who holds the title of acting deputy administrator, was formerly USAID’s acting administrator. He was supposed to step down from his position at the helm of the agency last week under the Vacancies Act but got to remain in charge after the White House fired Bonnie Glick, who had been serving as the deputy administrator.
“Glick was not given any reason for her firing but had supported the steps already taken in the transition process required by law,” Yeganeh Torbati and John Hudson report. “USAID officials also learned Monday that Max Primorac, who held previous roles focusing on religious rights in the agency, would be Barsa’s deputy … His title will be ‘senior official performing the duties of the deputy administrator.’ Primorac’s behavior while at USAID over the past two years has raised eyebrows among his colleagues. In 2019, Primorac expressed confidence during a government forum that Trump would win reelection. … And in 2018, just before he joined USAID, Primorac promoted a client’s business interests to a U.N. agency funded by USAID, ProPublica reported. … USAID, which provides billions of dollars of humanitarian assistance to foreign countries ever year, declined to comment.
Trump has also removed the official in charge of the federal program that produces the U.S. government’s definitive reports on climate change. “Michael Kuperberg, a climate scientist who had been executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) since July 2015, was told Friday evening to return to his previous position as a scientist at the Energy Department. He had been expected to stay on through the production of the fifth edition of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment,” Jason Samenow, Andrew Freedman and Juliet Eilperin report. “The USGCRP is a program Congress created to help coordinate the climate science programs of 13 federal agencies. … Kuperberg directed that office through the release of the fourth edition of the climate assessment, which detailed the potentially dire consequences for Americans should the country take little action to cut emissions.” That report angered the White House because Trump has consistently downplayed the seriousness of the climate threat.
“Removing Kuperberg could allow the White House to insert someone whose climate science views more closely align with Trump’s,” per Samenow, Freedman and Eilperin. “That may be exactly what’s about to happen, according to Myron Ebell, a climate change contrarian at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who is close to the administration. Ebell said in an interview that the job will most likely go to David Legates, a meteorologist from the University of Delaware who was recently appointed to be the deputy assistant secretary of Commerce for environmental observation and prediction at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“While that is a senior position at NOAA reporting directly to the acting administrator, Legates does not have a role in the climate assessment process while serving in that capacity. … Even if he were to hold the climate research job for just the remaining few months of Trump’s term, Ebell said he could help select the authors of the next assessment and influence its final content that way. Once the assessment’s authors are selected, it can be difficult to change them as the process moves along, Ebell said, regardless of the administration in office at the time.”
Whereas once I expended anger upon you, now I am simply glad never to be forced to think of you again. Whereas many have contended over the years that you acted valiantly, if secretly, to mitigate and ameliorate the cruelty of your father, the evidence suggests that you instead acted corruptly, if secretly, to coat his viciousness in silky pink pearlescent influencer goo.…
Unfortunately, the Trump™ brand now includes family separations, environmental denialism, global degradation, needless pandemic deaths, LGBTQ affronts, and petulant, truth-free grievance, none of which can just be shipped out and sold like last year’s sagging merch. The shattered shiny detritus is littered everywhere, and the cleanup work will take years. And though it may be a designer fragrance, the smell of complicity lingers. Even at its glossiest, the Trump™ catalog was never all that interesting. Please, oh please, take me off your list.
Christopher Miller arrives at the Pentagon on Monday to take control just moments after Trump tweeted that he had “terminated” Mark Esper and installed Miller as acting secretary of defense. (Adrees Ali/Reuters)
