75 days

Let’s assume that Trump’s lawsuits fail and he actually does leave the White House more or less peacefully.

That still leaves him 75 days as the president of the United States.

What might he be capable of doing in order to vent the rage that he must be feeling right now?

That’s what this thread is for. To keep track of what no one really knows is going to happen!

I’ve often imagined a scenario where someone like him becomes the lame duck with all the powers of the presidency at his command. What might he be capable of to “get even”? Who might he decide to take down with him in his final days?

And who might he pardon?

Here’s one take on it: qz.com/1928887/the-damage-trump … president/

A basic fear pertains to a kind of self fulfilling prophecy, which drives thusly obsessed people to the very brink, the bottom line of which is truly terrifying.

one of the real questions of the last 75 days is this question
of pardons… I assume he pardons his family, friends, associates,
but what of IQ45 himself? he could try to go the “self-pardon” route.
but that runs into legal issues…can the president really self-pardon?

a more likely scenario is to resign and have Pence pardon him,
but that requires Pence to commit political suicide because a
pardon of IQ45 will destroy any hopes of a future political career for pence…

it is possible that Pence agrees to pardon IQ45 and then after he is president,
change course in some attempt to save his career… but that will destroy
any chance of getting IQ45 base to follow him…

in other words, Pence is screwed either way he acts… and I certainly
welcome with open arms any attempt to destroy Pence by any means
necessary including self immolation…

so that is one thing to be on the lookout for… pardons…

Kropotkin

He could potentially, via proxies, negotiate for a pre-emptive pardon. Like Hey team Biden, you promise to pardon me in the name of national unity and all that and i’ll make a nicey nicey transtion of power. And the rich hate to see rich get in trouble. They think they should be above it. So, it might work. Obama pulled some pardon the rich shit and reps and dems in general don’t like to see the powerful and rich go to prison. And judges are following their lead and it is getting worse. Some have even argued that since they are rich prison will be a real shock for them, leaving plumbers and secretaries wondering why they won’t be shocked by time in prison.

How far will this sort of thing go? And what can be done to put a stop to it if Trump doesn’t put an end to it it soon?

washingtonpost.com/politics … story.html

[b]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.

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.[/b]

Does this signal the possibility that Trump will refuse to allow the transition to unfold as it always has in the past?

[b]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

And they get access to senior officials, both political appointees of the outgoing administration and career civil servants, who relay an agency’s ongoing priorities and projects, upcoming deadlines, problem areas and risks. The federal government is a $4.5 trillion operation, and while the Biden team is not new to government, the access is critical, experts said.

This is all on hold for now.[/b]

The very worst case scenario is , that if he exhausts all legal challenges, recounting, he can do more awful things like-being Commander in Chief, he will call in the military to stop eviction from the White House, declare martial law in case of civil unrest, declare the illegality of the Biden win, and even instigate a war, thereby provoking. wider conflict.

Has anyone thought of this, or is such too bad to even begin to think about?

I hated to say this, but listening to Mary Trump , was compelled to.

Now here is a twist. Perhaps it is not Trump’s fault that we have arrived at a stage in American civilisation, that is so unhappy in the midst if plenty, that perhaps a man like Trump coming to lead the nation was inevidable. At least a combination of political and social psychological conflation.
Very troublesome to say the least, and appeasement of such a man has very sorry precedents.

Political correctness has trumpeted with the cry: None dare call it a conspiracy, or, even, perhaps the coming of Orwellian nightmares.

Is this just the beginning?

washingtonpost.com/politics … lame-duck/

[b]President Trump on Monday moved forward his rumored post-election purge. He announced via a tweet that he had “terminated” Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper. Pre-election reports indicated Esper had joined CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray on thin ice as Trump confronts lame-duck status.

And within an hour of his firing, we found out Esper had set himself up as a truth teller whose firing presages a grim two months ahead. Esper suggested in a preemptively conducted Military Times exit interview that he was fired because he declined to bend the knee to Trump. And in so doing, he warned of what’s to come.

“I could have a fight over anything, and I could make it a big fight, and I could live with that,” Esper said Wednesday, at a time when reports of his imminent firing were swirling. He added: “Why? Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real ‘yes man.’ And then God help us.”[/b]

“Trump is dangerous”

One [point] is that Esper’s warning about what would come after him is now a very real and grim one — delivered in no uncertain terms. That one of Trump’s Cabinet officials would literally say “God help us” about a situation in which we now find ourselves should send shock waves through our body politic. Esper had a good idea what his fate would be at the time, yes, but this is still Trump’s defense secretary saying something pretty similar to what his first one, Jim Mattis, said: that Trump is dangerous.

Trump isn’t dangerous. Nobody is dangerous unless people aren’t educated. The thing that makes trump ‘dangerous’ is the Reagan era policy of crappy education for all US citizens. (If someone has an actual fact, who knows what they’ll do with it?!). People can’t be given facts! That will destroy the US!

He isn’t yet perceived as dangerous. But anyone can become dangerous triggered by some event that is formed through denial. Very objective oriented people are triggered bu the very objectless contest, which can bring it on, and appeasement in such a context becomes useless , for the most part…

However, a self admitted genius like him is nontrollable and in this case, Jared Kushner and even Melania tried to press him toward conceding. So far the bait was not swallowed.

Hoping here that restraint rules here, if not? Don’t forget, if what is assessed of his personality leaves little doubt .
What does surprises me is the other grand conspiratorial narrative, that has the ‘mob’ put JFK Doug , when he didn’t do their bidding. I am not suggesting anything other, then all things considered, the guy has balls.

He doesn’t have balls. The mob needs him. He needs them. When Joe Kennedy made a deal with the mob to give his son swing states, Kennedy won. Then, Kennedy and his brother attacked the mob visciously when they got into office. A promise was made, and the kennedys broke that promise. Bad form for mob code. That was the end of those two brothers.

Now here’s the deal, trump NEVER went against the mob. Trump is not a Kennedy. To say trump has balls is laughable.

If the orange man refuses to concede we will take the White House by farce.

Until then we’re just biden our time.

(‘biden’ our time)

How far will this go?

nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/p … e=Homepage

[b]President Trump’s refusal to concede the election to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has already affected Mr. Biden’s transition, particularly on national security issues.

Mr. Biden has yet to receive a presidential daily briefing, and it was unclear whether his team would have access to classified information, the most important pipeline for them to learn about the threats facing the United States.

Like previous presidents-elect, Mr. Biden is receiving Secret Service protection, and a no-fly zone has been established over his home in Delaware. But if Mr. Trump’s administration continues its refusal to recognize Mr. Biden as the winner, it could complicate his security until his inauguration.[/b]

How many days must pass before whoever can do something about it does something about it? Days? Weeks? All the way up to the swearing in ceremony in January?

Uh, if there is one?

Actually, it appears that Trump is not required to pass along the PDB to Biden:

Mr. Trump can prevent Mr. Biden and his aides from receiving the presidential daily briefing, the compendium of the government’s latest secrets and best intelligence insights, for the entire transition. No law states that Mr. Biden must receive it, though under previous administrations dating to at least 1968, presidents have authorized their elected successors to be given the briefing after clinching victory.

Will some “behind the curtain” begin to worry that this really could be detrimental to “national security” if Biden is left out of the loop?

Again, with Trump it’s all new territory.

Note this:

In the aftermath of the contested 2000 election, while votes in Florida were being recounted, President Bill Clinton authorized George W. Bush to receive the President’s Daily Brief. As vice president, Al Gore already had access to the intelligence.

You know iambiguous…

I’ve now stated this 5 times on this board:

Donald Trump is the very first post-modern president, he is the very first post-structuralist president, he is the very first moral nihilist president and he is the very first psychopathic president. He is also the very first president in debt. Lots of firsts for Donald Trump.

ILP (from what I can gather) is split down the middle (just like the country at large).

So far like a dozen of his lawsuits have failed because unlike on the internet or fox or brietbart or the daily caller in a courtroom you have to bring evidence and your assertions have to be based on facts. His people don’t look past the headlines.

Consider this headline:

“How to cover a coup — or whatever it is Trump is attempting”

And, yes, in the MSM.

So, is it just scare-mongering to sell more newspaper subscriptions or, among other things, do the moves he is making at the Pentagon, actually signal an attempt on his part to refuse to leave the White House?

What I always come back to is the “for all practical purposes” reality of what can be done by those in the government to get him out of there.

washingtonpost.com/lifestyl … story.html

[b]President Trump lost. The nation knows it. The world knows it. And, although he won’t admit it, he certainly knows it, too.

But because he is claiming otherwise — with his Republican enablers joining the chorus — this past week has presented the reality-based press with a strange and extremely important challenge.

How do you cover something that, at worst, lays the groundwork for a coup attempt and, at best, represents a brazen lie that could be deeply damaging to American democracy?

“You don’t want to fearmonger. You don’t want to underplay something this dangerous, either,” Noah Shachtman, editor of the Daily Beast, told me.

The trickiest part: “Figuring out whether these bogus accusations are actually dangerous to the republic or just the last, lame gasps of a doomed administration.”

I’d argue that they’re both. Not because they pose more than a sliver of a chance of overturning the reality that Joe Biden will take office in January. Rather, because the constant drumbeat that the election was somehow illegitimate does harm all by itself.

In general, the press has covered this madness reasonably well. Even Fox News, Trump’s longtime cheerleader, quickly started using the term “president-elect” to refer to Biden. (Whether the network may have been shamed into this, early on, by a CNN story about its decision-making is a possibility, though Fox vehemently denies it.) And the mainstream press has given Trump’s mewling a lot of attention without giving it much credence.

Still, some of the worst tendencies of the media are on display, even if in muted form.

The two I’ve seen most frequently are the endless infatuation with dramatic conflict and the tendency to give equal treatment to both sides of any equation. Thus we get chyrons and headlines such as this one in Axios: “As Trump fights the transition in D.C., the world moves on to Biden.”

Feels about equal, right? With Trump getting the top billing.

And then there’s the straight-ahead repetition of dangerous rhetoric, as in this NPR headline about a startling statement by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, one he may have meant as a joke: “Pompeo Promises a ‘Smooth Transition To A Second Trump Administration.’ ”[/b]

Could it all really be as simple and/or ominous as this:

nytimes.com/2020/11/14/opin … e=Homepage

[b]WASHINGTON — Many see a wannabe despot barricaded in the bunker, stubby fingers clinging to the levers of power as words that mean nothing to him — democracy, electoral integrity, peaceful transition, constitutionality — swirl above.

One presidential historian sees something different in Donald Trump’s swan song. Michael Beschloss has been tweeting pictures of Hollywood’s most famous divas, shut-ins and head cases.

Norma Desmond watching movies of herself, hour after hour, shrouded in her mansion on Sunset Boulevard as “the dream she had clung to so desperately enfolded her.” Howard Hughes, descending into germaphobia, madness and seclusion. Greta Garbo, sequestered behind her hat and sunglasses. Charles Foster Kane, missing the roar of the crowd as he spirals at Xanadu, his dilapidated pleasure palace.

The president and his cronies are likely to do real damage and major grifting in the next two months. But in other ways, the picture of the president as a pathetic, unraveling diva is apt.[/b]

How will it all play out with less than 70 days to go?

[b]Trump, who once wanted to be a Hollywood producer and considered attending U.S.C. film school, never made the pivot to being a politician. He got elected because he played a competent boss and wily megabillionaire on a reality TV show — pretty good acting now that we know he is neither — and he has stayed a performance artist and a ratings-obsessed showman.

As a growing number of Trump advisers and Republican Party leaders privately admitted the end was nigh…White House officials propped up Donald’s grand illusions. This, even as his lawyers deserted him and judges ruled against him.

“We are moving forward here at the White House under the assumption there will be a second Trump term,” Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser, said on Fox Business Friday.

Kayleigh McEnany chimed in that the president would “attend his own inauguration.”[/b]

Stay tuned.

Certainly no bias in that “news” report.

Huh? My whole point is that discussions and debates about things like this reflect the “political prejudices” of particular individuals who come to acquire their own biases in the manner in which I described mine here on this thread: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=194382

In other words, the part that an objectivist of your own ossified ilk does not have the intellectual honesty, integrity or depth to explore.

Otherwise you would take my challenge.

From an official source:

A more, uh, amusing take on Trump’s refusal to concede:

When a Leader Just Won’t Go
Wisdom from Shakespeare to Dickens to ‘Seinfeld’ on President Trump’s long non-goodbye.

nytimes.com/2020/11/15/us/p … e=Homepage

[b]In Nancy Mitford’s comic 1960 novel “Don’t Tell Alfred,” the wife of the new British ambassador to Paris arrives at the embassy to find that she has a vexing problem: Her predecessor has refused to move out.

Indeed, Pauline Leone, the wife of the previous ambassador, is so unhinged by the prospect of a status-free future that she has set up her own rival court, grandly receiving a stream of visitors as if for all the world she were still Madame L’Ambassadrice, the social arbiter of Paris.

“At the beginning one thought it was a lark — that in a day or two she’d get tired of it,” a British official says crossly. But no. “She’s having the time of her life,” he adds, “and quite honestly I don’t see how we shall ever induce her to go.”

As the nation ponders the awkward case of Donald J. Trump, a president who will not admit that he has been fired, it is helpful to consider him through the experiences of other people, fictional and otherwise, who have been unable to accept the arrival of unwelcome developments in their personal and professional lives.

Is Trump like King Lear, raging naked on the heath and desperately hanging on to the increasingly diminished trappings of power even as they are stripped from him? Or is he more like Bartleby the Scrivener, the inscrutable model of passive resistance who one day declines to do any more work or indeed leave the building, declaring: “I would prefer not to?”

Is he like Nellie, the character in “The Office” who installs herself at the desk of the regional manager when he is out of town and unilaterally appoints herself boss? Or how about George from “Seinfeld,” who quits one of his many jobs in a huff, unsuccessfully tries to get it back, and reports to work anyway, as if nothing had happened?

Timothy Naftali, a history professor at New York University, said that one way to view Mr. Trump would be as a version of Miss Havisham, the jilted bride from “Great Expectations” who lives forever in the past, never taking off her tattered wedding gown even as her house decays around her.

“He’s wearing the cloak of the presidency and he’s stuck in his room, getting dusty, while everyone else has moved on,” Mr. Naftali said.

No president in American history has ever before refused for so long to concede an election he has obviously lost. But when it comes to hanging on to an alternative version of reality, Mr. Trump has plenty of nonpresidential company.

There was Eteocles, a son of Oedipus in Greek mythology, who remained on the throne of Thebes, reneging on his promise to share it with his twin brother, leading to a battle in which they killed each other.

There was Gov. Edmund J. Davis of Texas, a Republican, who refused to leave office after losing the election of 1873, claiming that he had several months left in his term and barricading himself on the ground floor of the State Capitol. (The newly elected governor and his supporters installed themselves on the first floor, using ladders to enter through the windows.)

There was the Hiroo Onoda, the Imperial Japanese Army officer who would not surrender after the end of World War II, remaining in combat-readiness in the jungle for 29 years until his by-then elderly former commanding officer arrived and rescinded his no-surrender order.

And there was the entire government of Moldova, which in 2019 decided not to make way for a new government, leading to a bizarre situation in which both groups claimed for a time to be in charge of the country. The impasse finally ended when the former prime minister grudgingly stepped down in the face of growing national outrage and international pressure.

While American presidential transfers of power have traditionally been smooth, well-run affairs, world history is replete with examples of dictators and strongmen employing nefarious means to remain in office. Sometimes such rulers refuse to accept the results of honestly conducted elections. Sometimes they throw out term limits, and just keep on governing. Sometimes they jail, torture, kill or disappear their political opponents. (Sometimes they do all of those things.)

Mr. Trump has spoken admiringly about at least some of these practices, saying, for instance, that he was “probably entitled” to a third term “based on the way we were treated.” (That was before he lost the election.)

But given the news wafting like the occasional smoke signal from the White House, where some of the president’s advisers and relatives are reportedly attempting various psychological techniques to get Mr. Trump to accept the fact that he is now a lame-duck president, his behavior seems less like a putsch and more like an extended whiny tantrum. As Dan Rather, an elder statesman of American journalism, said on Twitter: “Dude. You lost.”

He cannot bear being the loser and so now is doing everything within his power to assault the reality he hates,” said Joseph Burgo, a clinical psychologist who has studied Mr. Trump and written about his appeal to voters.

“Once he has exhausted all possible avenues to challenge the election, he will spend the rest of his life insisting the system conspired to deprive him of his victory,” said Dr. Burgo, the author of “The Narcissist You Know: Defending Yourself Against Extreme Narcissists in an All-About-Me Age.” “He will take refuge in blame, self-pity and righteous indignation to shore up his sense of self, thereby warding off the humiliation of true defeat.”

Meanwhile, many Republican legislators, loath to upset Mr. Trump, are helping to prop up the illusion that he is still somehow in power, in a way reminiscent of the courtiers who flattered, lied and enabled their way through the final days of Emperor Haile Selasse’s reign in Ethiopia in Ryszard Kapuscinski’s “The Emperor.”

Interestingly enough, there appears to be some precedent for this within the Trump family itself. When the president’s father, Fred, developed Alzheimer’s, the family reportedly conspired to help him believe that he still ran the Trump organization. According to Vanity Fair, the elder Mr. Trump would show up for work every day, signing blank papers and using an office phone connected only to his secretary’s line. “Fred pretended to work,” a family friend told the magazine.

With his vast coterie of enablers willing to believe his baseless assertions about the election, Mr. Naftali said, Trump might be better compared to the Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz.”

“Many of us assumed that Trump’s behind-the-curtain moment — when Dorothy arrived and, thanks to Toto, found out that the Wizard was a humbug — would come because of his handling of the Covid emergency,” he said. “But one of the reasons the president is able to continue this fantasy that he won a second term is that 73 million people don’t agree that he was a humbug. Even though the Wizard is on his way out, Oz still exists.”

Of course, angry people can be very dangerous when backed into corners, and Mr. Trump’s belief in his own falsehoods has already had damaging, real-life consequences. Some sympathetic right-wing media outlets and many Republican officials are refusing to acknowledge that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the president-elect. Millions of people appear to believe Mr. Trump’s assertions that the election was stolen and that the coronavirus, now raging out of control, is not a serious problem. His supporters are marching in the streets to protest the election result, and it remains to be seen under what circumstances he will finally leave the White House.

All these things raise the question (asking for a friend): How do you get someone to face reality and get out of the White House?

For clients who have lost their jobs during this unsettling time, said Megan Walls, an executive coach and career adviser in Chicago, she works to help them accept what has happened and move on. “The reality is that we can’t control Covid or jobs or business — we can only control ourselves,” she said.

However, she added, Mr. Trump would not be a good candidate for the kind of coaching she offers.

“I won’t work with people who are avoiding the situation or acting like a victim,” she said. “Anyone who is digging their heels in — I can’t help him until they help themselves. Maybe they don’t need a coach; they need a psychotherapist.”

How about flattery?

On Twitter, the Trump-admiring journalist Geraldo Rivera compared the president to a heavyweight champion who knows he has lost but grittily fights on in case he can eke out a victory. His lyrical description — “Still, he’s going to answer the final bell, looking for the knockout he knows is a long shot”— inadvertently brings to mind the delusional Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” who won’t surrender even after his arms and legs have been hacked off. (“Tis but a scratch,” the knight declares. “What are you going to do, bleed on me?” King Arthur responds.)

As for the former ambassador’s wife who overstays her welcome in “Don’t Tell Alfred,” embassy officials decide that the best way to evict her is to deprive her of the attention she craves. “We must bore her out,” an official says.

Finally, reluctantly, she leaves, taking on a diva-ish air of wounded glamour as she encounters a crowd of guests arriving for a party to which she has not been invited.

“She shook hands, like a royal person,” Mitford writes, “as she sailed out of the house forever.”[/b]

But then this part:

Of course, angry people can be very dangerous when backed into corners, and Mr. Trump’s belief in his own falsehoods has already had damaging, real-life consequences.

Trump still has “65 DAYS 18 HOURS and 34 minutes” to go down that route.