Trump enters the stage

It challenges conceptual trinity of many levels of thought: e.i. the self containment of Cantor’ s faith reasserting the Being in itself; the Marxian concept of diminishing returns , coupled with the Ayin Rand reproduction of In Praise of Capitalism backed by Common Sense.

How all of these strains coalesce inwardly,principally, sourcing values in the current contextual scheme- with the outward ratiplazition of the quantum of necessary power that is sufficient to evoke the will of the people–puts the whole question of 20th century anathema of political and military justification on a reset.

The industrial and military complex allegedly solved the growing European nihilism to existential angst, and for the next half century it contained it within its own perimeters, but it ran out of the dreams of ideal situations, that ended the Wisoniam isolative steam, within which such was still affordable on the level of ideals, where faith assumed it’s own fortuitous imperative

The Marxism contentious doubt was contained successcully, but the fuel to power the machine to will its own destiny was sidelined by the diminished power of pragmatic assertions based on such local, nationalistic markets. Which traded openly on current fields of value transfer.

The power to engage and trade diminished , in light of thearxian charge, whereby, thearkets began to require extended world wide dimensions

It became a throwback into a categorically certain belief into in itself, a Kantian synthesis between what is evident factually, and what it has become existentially absent.

The 20 th century events attest to this and that triad of denial has mot yet been supported sufficiently and conclusively .

Nationalism , socialism, capitalism, have not successfully coelesced as of yet, not to avoid another literal test that can surmount a meaning full challenge to a phenomenal reduction ad absurdum, by stopping arbitrarily by an eidectic imposition, the value of which OS overcome by an ever increasing price if self justification

The world government, its tools, its power to act, has no real pubolicalkt vested faith in itself, to avoid separation between the elements mentioned before, to convince any differing levels into a fully functioning entity, hence, here we are today.

As long and disjointed this narrative appears, I was compelled to write it.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

The New York Times
Opinion

The ‘Trump Won’ Farce Isn’t Funny Anymore
Republicans are now seriously arguing that elections are legitimate only when their side wins.

By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist

For our purposes, the “joke” is President Trump’s ongoing fight to overturn the election results and hold on to power against the wishes of most Americans, including those in enough states to equal far more than the 270 electoral votes required to win the White House.

“#OVERTURN,” he said on Twitter this week, adding in a separate post that “If somebody cheated in the Election, which the Democrats did, why wouldn’t the Election be immediately overturned? How can a Country be run like this?”

Unfortunately for Trump, and fortunately for the country, he has not been able to bend reality to his desires. Key election officials and federal judges have refused his call to throw out votes, create chaos and clear a path for the autogolpe he hopes to accomplish. The military has also made clear where it stands. “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,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a speech not long after the election.

But there are others who — out of partisanship, opportunism or a simple taste for mayhem — have chosen to support the president’s attack on American democracy. They refuse to acknowledge the president’s defeat, back lawsuits to throw out the results, and spread lies about voter fraud and election malfeasance to Republican voters. They are laughing at Trump’s joke, not realizing (or not caring) that their laughter is infectious.

What was a legal effort by the Trump campaign, for instance, is now one by the state of Texas, which has petitioned the Supreme Court to scrap election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, depriving Biden of his victory. Filed by Ken Paxton, Texas’s attorney general, the suit says it would be a violation of due process to accept the outcome in those states, on account of “election irregularities” and “interstate differences in the treatment of voters” that disadvantage Republican voters in areas with stricter voting rules.

This lawsuit rests on the novel argument that the Constitution gives exclusive and unquestioned authority to state legislatures to appoint presidential electors as they see fit and renders any action to expand voting without direct legislative consent unconstitutional. The Supreme Court already rejected that argument once this week when it turned away a similar lawsuit by the Trump campaign to overturn the results in Pennsylvania.

Regardless, on Wednesday, 17 Republican attorneys general filed a brief in support of Texas, urging the court, in essence, to cancel the election and hand power back to Trump. “Encroachments on the authority of state Legislatures by other state actors violate the separation of powers and threaten individual liberty,” reads the brief, which also claims that “States have a strong interest in ensuring that the votes of their own citizens are not diluted by the unconstitutional administration of elections in other States.” The next day, more than 100 Republican members of Congress filed a brief in support of this lawsuit, in effect declaring allegiance to Trump over the Constitution and urging the court to end self-government in the name of “the Framers.”

Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times
There’s a paradox here. This sloppy, harebrained lawsuit has no serious chance of success. Granting Texas (and, by extension Trump, who joined the lawsuit) its relief would plunge the country into abject chaos, with violence sure to follow. That this quest is quixotic is, in all likelihood, one reason it has so much support. It is only with the knowledge of certain defeat that Republican officeholders feel comfortable plowing forward with an effort that would tear the United States apart if it succeeded. They can play politics with constitutional government (Paxton, for instance, hopes to succeed Greg Abbott as governor of Texas) knowing that the Supreme Court isn’t going to risk it all for Donald Trump.

Then again, it was only two weeks before Election Day that four of the court’s conservatives announced their potential willingness to throw out votes on the basis of this theory of state legislative supremacy over electoral votes. It is very easy to imagine a world in which the election was a little closer, where the outcome came down to one state instead of three or four, and the court’s conservatives could use the conflict over a narrow margin to hand the president a second term.

With no evidence that Republicans have really thought about the implications of a victory in the courts, I think we can say that these briefs and lawsuits are part of a performance, where the game is not to break kayfabe (the conceit, in professional wrestling, that what is fake is real). Still, we’ve learned something from this game, in the same way we learn something about an audience when it laughs.

We have learned that the Republican Party, or much of it, has abandoned whatever commitment to electoral democracy it had to begin with. That it views defeat on its face as illegitimate, a product of fraud concocted by opponents who don’t deserve to hold power. That it is fully the party of minority rule, committed to the idea that a vote doesn’t count if it isn’t for its candidates, and that if democracy won’t serve its partisan and ideological interests, then so much for democracy.

None of this is new — there is a whole tradition of reactionary, counter-majoritarian thought in American politics to which the conservative movement is heir — but it is the first time since the 1850s that these ideas have nearly captured an entire political party. And while the future is unwritten, the events of the past month make me worry that we’re following a script the climax of which requires a disaster.

Why Is the G.O.P. Refusing to Recognize Its Own Success?Dec. 8, 2020

Opinion | Jamelle Bouie
It Started With ‘Birtherism’Nov. 24, 2020

Opinion | Jamelle Bouie
If Biden Wants to Be Like F.D.R., He Needs the LeftNov. 20, 2020

David Quammen
The Virus and Bats
Dec. 11, 2020
Michelle Goldberg
Covid Meds Are Scarce, but Not for Trump Cronies
Dec. 10, 2020

© 2020 The New York Times Company

To be edited.

Supreme Court denies effort to block election results in 4 key states that sealed Trump’s fate
RICHARD WOLF | USA TODAY | 3 hours ago

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court refused Friday to let Texas challenge the election results in four battleground states critical to President Donald Trump’s defeat at the polls last month, likely sealing his political fate.

“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections,” the court said in a brief order. It dismissed all other related claims as moot.

The justices’ action clears the way for electors to convene in 50 states and the District of Columbia Monday and all but confirm that President-elect Joe Biden will be the nation’s 46th president.

Texas had made, and Trump had endorsed, an 11th-hour effort to have the nation’s highest court block Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin from casting their electoral votes for Biden Monday. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed the four states used the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext to change election rules and greatly expand mail voting in violation of the Constitution.

Within days, the last-ditch challenge had erupted into a war involving nearly every state in the nation. The four battleground states fired back, with Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro labeling the effort to negate millions of citizens’ ballots a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.”

“Texas seeks to invalidate elections in four states for yielding results with which it disagrees,” Shapiro told the justices in legal papers. “Its request for this court to exercise its original jurisdiction and then anoint Texas’s preferred candidate for president is legally indefensible and is an affront to principles of constitutional democracy.”

Reacting to the decision, Shapiro said the high court’s “swift denial should make anyone contemplating further attacks on our election think twice.”

The effort was a long shot for several reasons. States run their own elections, making it a violation of sovereignty for Texas to interfere with other states’ procedures. Federal law defers to states in choosing the 538 electors, and Congress ultimately counts those votes.

More: Texas AG asks Supreme Court to overturn Trump’s losses in key states. Don’t hold your breath.

What’s more, voters in the challenged states followed the rules in voting, including by mail, and would have been disenfranchised under Texas’ challenge. Lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and allies across the country have not identified verifiable instances of fraud.

“Every American who cares about the rule of law should take comfort that the Supreme Court — including all three of President Trump’s picks — closed the book on the nonsense,” Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska tweeted.

More: For these Trump supporters primed to disbelieve defeat, challenging the election was a civic duty

President Donald Trump speaks during a ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, Dec. 3, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
EVAN VUCCI, AP
And while disputes between states can go directly to the Supreme Court without first being heard by lower courts, the justices retain discretion to deny such requests. For instance, the court refused in 2016 to hear a dispute between Colorado and two neighboring states over the cross-border impact of marijuana legalization.

Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said Friday they would have granted Texas’ request to make its case, but “would not grant other relief.”

Earlier: Will the Supreme Court ride to Donald Trump’s rescue? Don’t count on it.

Some opponents of the Texas lawsuit were nonetheless disappointed by the court’s brief, unsigned order. The ethics group Fix the Court lamented that it should have been a stronger denunciation.

“SCOTUS could have asserted in one voice the danger Texas’ petition poses to our democracy,” the group tweeted. “Instead, it took an easy off ramp and has left us to wonder whether some of the nine are sympathetic to Texas’ seditious request.”

The action was the second time in recent days that the court had turned away efforts to forestall Trump’s defeat. On Tuesday, the justices denied an effort by Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., and others to block the election results in Pennsylvania. Those challengers had claimed that the state legislature’s 2019 expansion of mail-in voting was illegal.

Texas had contended that changes in voting procedures made by state officials in the four battleground states abrogated laws passed earlier by their legislatures, which it said have the sole constitutional authority to run elections.

“Defendant states flooded their citizenry with tens of millions of ballot applications and ballots, ignoring statutory controls as to how they were received, evaluated, and counted,” Paxton wrote in igniting the firestorm Monday night. “Whether well-intentioned or not, these unconstitutional and unlawful changes had the same uniform effect – they made the 2020 election less secure.”

Trump’s request to intervene in the challenge endorsed widely disputed statistics intended to show that Biden’s victory in the election was almost an impossibility. Among other things, he incorrectly said no presidential candidate ever lost election after winning Florida and Ohio, as Trump did. Richard Nixon endured the same fate in 1960.

“These things just don’t normally happen, and a large percentage of the American people know that something is deeply amiss,” Trump’s lawyers said in court papers.

All four of the challenged states told the justices Thursday that Texas’ request should be slapped down.

Georgia said the justices should not “transfer Georgia’s electoral powers to the federal judiciary.” Michigan said Texas “does not have a cognizable interest in how Michigan runs its elections.” And Wisconsin said “the harm and public interest factors strongly weigh in favor of denying the extraordinary relief Texas seeks – stripping millions of voters of the choice they made.”

Originally Published 4 hours ago

© Copyright Gannett 2020

With Biden likely a foregone conclusion, will the following be reversed, as a logical predictable outcome of getting back to a peaceful coexistance of the Orban Hungarian president with the Democratic US president?

<<><><>><><><>>>>>>>>>>><><><><>{><><>

Dec 4, 2018,05:39pm EST
Why Hungary Forced George Soros-Backed Central European University To Leave The Country

I’m a senior editor in charge of Forbes’ education coverage.
George Soros, Founder and Chairman of the Open Society Foundations attends the European Council On Foreign Relations Annual Council. of
Central European University in Hungary, founded and funded by Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros after the collapse of the Soviet Union to spread principles of democracy and free society, announced yesterday that it was being forced from its campus in Budapest by the far-right government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

The move came after a two-year struggle with the Orban government, which has blocked political and intellectual dissent and increased control over much of Hungarian life.

The university, which has 1,435 students from 118 countries, teaches in English and has a reputation as one of the top schools in the region. It will move its U.S.-accredited degree programs to Vienna where it will start enrolling students in the fall.

In an incredulous-sounding statement, CEU president Michael Ignatieff said, “This is unprecedented. A U.S. institution has been driven out of a country that is a NATO ally. A European institution has been ousted from a member state of the EU.” The statement went on to say, “Arbitrary eviction of a reputable university is a flagrant violation of academic freedom. It is a dark day for Europe and a dark day for Hungary.” Indeed, it appears to be the first time a major university has been forced to leave an EU country.

Soros himself has been a target of the Orban government for some time. In June, Hungary passed a measure it called the “Stop Soros” law. Crafted by Orban himself, it created a new crime, called “promoting and supporting illegal migration,” banning organizations from helping undocumented immigrants. Under the new law, distributing information about the asylum process or giving migrants financial help, could result in a 12-month jail sentence.

Soros has indeed given aid to Hungarian rights organizations. The law passed on World Refugee Day, five days after Orban talked on the phone with President Trump, who has also criticized Soros, claiming erroneously in an October tweet that Soros had paid for signs carried by people protesting the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

Donald Trump Jr. recently retweeted the false contention by Roseanne Barr that “George Soros is a nazi (sic) who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps.” In fact, Soros, whose family changed its name from Schwartz to sound less Jewish, was a Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Hungary and to survive the war, lived for a time with a Hungarian officer who inventoried the possessions in homes where Jews had been forced to leave. Soros has written, “instead of submitting to our fate, we resisted an evil force that was much stronger than we were—yet we prevailed. Not only did we survive, but we managed to help others.”

At age 17 he left Hungary for London where he put himself through the London School of Economics while working as a railway porter and waiter. In 1956 he emigrated to the U.S. and in 1970, he launched Soros Fund Management, a hedge fund where he amassed his $8.3 billion fortune. Through his Open Society Foundations, he has given away at least $14 billion in grants, well more than his personal net worth.

In Budapest, thousands of protesters have marched in favor of keeping Central European University in the city, and for the past week, hundreds occupied Kossuth Square next to the Parliament building. “Even Voldemort didn’t kick Hogwarts out,” read one sign, according to The New York Times.

Orban has also made it difficult for Soros’s Open Society Foundation to operate, and it pulled out of Hungary this year.

Orban’s decision to oust the university has met with criticism from European politicians who earned their diplomas there and numerous universities have voiced support, as well as more than two dozen Nobel laureates.

The American ambassador to Hungary, David B. Cornstein, had initially criticized Orban’s move, but subsequently, according to The New York Times, he compared the university’s experience to his own career when he owned a jewelry business housed in a Long Island JC Penney store. “I was a guest in another guy’s store,” he said. “The university is in another country. It would pay to work with the government.”

In an interview with The Washington Post, Cornstein confirmed that he tried to use neither incentives nor threats to sway Orban. He also commented that the school’s ouster “doesn’t have anything to do with academic freedom,” according to The Post.

By contrast, Judith Sargentini, a Dutch politician and member of the European Parliament, told The New York Times, “It’s a very sad day for academic freedom in Europe, particularly in Hungary, of course, but all of Europe. If a European government can actually bully a university out of its country, and the others stand by and watch and don’t act, and I am particularly pointing at the other member states that have not been acting on things happening in Hungary for years now, we are in deep trouble.”

Soros did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

© 2020 Forbes Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

"It happens every four years and officially names the next president and vice president — but thanks to President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, this year’s Electoral College vote Monday is getting extra scrutiny and taking on even more significance.

All 50 states have already certified their election results ensuring that Joe Biden will be the 46th president, but the Electoral College vote makes the result official.

Trump and some Republican had sought to have electors removed in four crucial battleground states, but the Supreme Court rejected that attempt on Friday night. After the court victory, Biden spokesman Mike Gwin said, “President-elect Biden’s clear and commanding victory will be ratified by the Electoral College on Monday, and he will be sworn in on January 20th.”

Here’s a look at what the vote means, how and where it takes place and what happens next.

What is the Electoral College?
The Electoral College is not a place — it’s a process.

The “college” part of the term is derived from the Latin word “collegium” — a “society of colleagues.” In this case, it’s a society of electors. Under the Constitution, the electors are the people who actually cast votes for president.

The electors are chosen by the political parties of each state ahead of the November general election. The party whose candidate gets the most votes for president in the state gets to have its electors vote for that candidate. (Most states have a winner-take-all system, with Maine and Nebraska being the exceptions.)

How many electors are there?
The “college” consists of 538 electors, and 270 votes are needed for a candidate to win the presidency. The number of electors in a state is equal to the number of members in the state’s congressional delegation. The District of Columbia has three electors.

What’s happening Monday?
After a state’s vote totals are certified, its governor prepares a Certificate of Ascertainment with the names of the winning electors and the number of votes.

Under federal law, the electors gather in their separate states to “give their votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December.” This year, that’s Dec. 14.

Most of the voting will take place in state Capitol buildings. In many states, electors meet in the office of the governor or the secretary of state.
What the Electoral College vote means for Trump and Biden
The first states set to vote Monday are Indiana, Tennessee and Vermont, which will take place at 10 a.m. ET. Battleground states that have been hotly contested with legal challenges by Trump vote a little later — Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania’s electors are slated to vote at noon, while Wisconsin’s are scheduled to vote at 1 p.m. and Michigan’s at 2 p.m.

Once the votes are cast and Biden passes the 270 mark, he will officially be president-elect and Sen. Kamala Harris the vice president-elect. They will be sworn into office Jan. 20.

Biden is expected to deliver remarks on the vote around 8 p.m. ET on Monday.

What role do Congress and Pence have?
After the Electoral Colleges votes, the states send the votes on to Washington, where they’ll be counted in a joint session of Congress at 1 p.m. ET Jan. 6. The president of the Senate — in this case Vice President Mike Pence — will then formally announce the winners.

(Biden got to announce his own re-election as vice president in 2013, and Trump and Pence’s election in 2017.)

What’s Trump said about the Electoral College?
While the president maintains the election was rigged and that he won a second term, he said in late November that he would clear out of the White House in January if he lost the Electoral College vote.

“Certainly I will,” he said.

But, Trump added, if the Electoral College does vote for Biden, “they made a mistake.”

Can electors change their votes?
Some can, but it rarely happens. Since 1948, there have only been 16 “faithless electors” — although there were seven in 2016. Five switched their votes from Hillary Clinton to other people and two changed their votes from Trump to others.

Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia have laws requiring the electors to vote for the candidate they’ve pledged to vote for and, of those, 15 have penalties for electors who don’t. The Supreme Court earlier this year upheld states’ rights to penalize faithless electors.

Can Congress block the Jan. 6 count?
Technically yes, but realistically no.

Under an 1887 law, a congressman and a senator together can submit written objections to a state’s vote count. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., has already announced his intention to do so Monday, though no senator has yet said they would join him.

If Brooks is successful in finding a partner, the count would stop and the Senate and the House would separately debate the objection on the disputed state’s vote for up to two hours. Then the House and the Senate would vote on whether to sustain the objections.

“Both houses must vote separately to agree to the objection. Otherwise, the objection fails,” the Congressional Research Service noted.

With the House under Democratic control and Republicans having only a slim majority in the Senate, the odds of that happening are zero.

Objections have only been made twice since 1887, once in 1969 over a faithless elector and once in 2005 over voting irregularities in Ohio. Neither attempt was successful."

From the Washington Post

The Guardian

US elections 2020

Electoral college vote may be knockout blow to Trump’s ploy to subvert election
Formality to cement outcome of election takes on real political significance as Trump continues efforts to undermine results

President’s lies spark political unrest in several cities

Donald Trump on Monday could suffer a withering blow to his increasingly hopeless effort to overturn the results of the US presidential election when 538 members of the electoral college will cast their ballots and formally send Joe Biden to the White House.

Under the arcane formula which America has followed since the first election in 1789, Monday’s electoral college vote will mark the official moment when Biden becomes the 46th president-in-waiting. Electors, including political celebrities such as both Bill and Hillary Clinton, will gather in state capitols across the country to cement the outcome of this momentous race.

Normally, the process is figurative and barely noted. This year, given Trump’s volatile display of tilting at windmills in an attempt to negate the will of the American people, it will carry real political significance.

Trump continued those quixotic efforts over the weekend, sparking political unrest in several cities including the nation’s capital. On Sunday morning he tweeted in all caps that this was the “most corrupt election in US history!”.

In an interview with Fox & Friends that aired on Sunday, he insisted that his anti-democratic mission was not over. “We keep going and we’re going to continue to go forward,” he said, before repeating a slew of lies about the election having been rigged.

Trump’s barefaced untruths about having won key states including Pennsylvania and Georgia went entirely unchallenged by the Fox News interviewer, Brian Kilmeade.

Any faltering hopes Trump might still harbor of hanging on to power were shattered on Friday when the US supreme court bluntly dismissed a lawsuit led by Texas to block Biden’s victory in four other states. In a different case, a Wisconsin supreme court judge decried Trump’s lawsuit aiming to nullify the votes of 200,000 Americans, saying it “smacked of racism”.

Despite the categoric rebuff that Trump has suffered in dozens of cases, including before the nation’s highest court, his unprecedented ploy to tear up democratic norms continues to inflict untold damage on the country with potential long-term consequences. The Texas-led push to overturn the election result was backed by 126 Republicans in the House of Representatives – almost two-thirds of the party’s conference – as well as Republican state attorneys general from 18 states.

Among the wider electorate, a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 77% of Republicans believe – mistakenly – that there was widespread voter fraud in the 3 November election.

Another manifestation of the harm that is being done was the violence that erupted on Saturday night across several cities. In Washington DC, four people were stabbed and required hospital treatment, and 23 were arrested, when far-right groups clashed with counter-protesters following a so-called “Stop the Steal” march enthusiastically endorsed by Trump.

Far-right militia groups mingled among the Trump supporters and engaged in the violence, including the white nationalist Proud Boys who call themselves “western chauvinists”. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who Trump pardoned for lying to the FBI, addressed a crowd, exclaiming: “We decide the election. We’re waging a battle across America.”

Violence also broke out in Olympia, the state capital of Washington state. One person was shot in clashes between heavily armed factions, with Trump supporters and Proud Boys facing off against counter-protesters, and three people were arrested.

Video footage appeared to show that the shot was fired by a member of the Proud Boy and that the victim was a counter-protester, although details remained sketchy.

In Georgia, a separate militia group, Georgia Security Force III%, were in attendance at a far-right rally at the statehouse on Saturday. The armed group has helped to organise recent caravans that have intimidated local election officials at their homes claiming falsely that Biden’s victory in Georgia was fraudulent.

Biden’s transition team has watched with growing alarm the spate of violent incidents that has cropped up around Trump’s spurious claims of a rigged election. Cedric Richmond, a Democratic representative from Louisiana who Biden has tapped as the incoming director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, said they were anxious about what lay ahead in the holiday season.

“We are concerned about violence,” he told Face the Nation on CBS News. “Where there’s violence it is not protest, that is breaking the law, so we are worried about it.”

Asked about the majority of House Republicans who backed Trump’s frivolous lawsuit to block election results being certified, Richmond implied their resistance was more theatrical than real. “They recognize Joe Biden’s victory. This is just a small proportion of the Republican conference that is appeasing the president on his way out because they are scared of his Twitter” feed.

The outlier nature of Trump’s stubborn refusal to concede was underlined on Sunday by Al Gore in an interview with CNN’s State of the Union. Exactly 20 years ago to the day, he conceded the bitterly-fought 2000 presidential race to George W Bush, saying: “This is America, we put country before party – we will stand together behind our new president.”

Gore told CNN that he hoped Monday’s electoral college vote would be the beginning of healing. He called the lawsuit dismissed by the supreme court “ridiculous and unintelligible”, and castigated those Republicans who continued to stick with Trump in his “lost cause”.

“With the electoral college votes tomorrow in all 50 states, I hope that will be the point at which some of those who have hung on will give up the ghost,” Gore said. “There are things more important than bowing to the fear of a demagogue.”

© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

The New York Times
Electoral College Results
Election Disinformation

Full Results

Biden Transition Updates

Trump Allies Eye Long-Shot Election Reversal in Congress, Testing Pence

Some House Republicans plan to try to use Congress’s tallying of electoral results on Jan. 6 to tip the election to President Trump. The attempt will put Republicans in a pinch.

The ensuing fight promises to shape how President Trump’s base views the election for years to come.
The ensuing fight promises to shape how President Trump’s base views the election for years to come.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

Published Dec. 13, 2020
Updated Dec. 14, 2020, 11:09 a.m. ET
President Trump lost key swing states by clear margins. His barrage of lawsuits claiming widespread voting fraud has been almost universally dismissed, most recently by the Supreme Court. And on Monday, the Electoral College will formally cast a majority of its votes for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But as the president continues to refuse to concede, a small group of his most loyal backers in Congress is plotting a final-stage challenge on the floor of the House of Representatives in early January to try to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory.

Constitutional scholars and even members of the president’s own party say the effort is all but certain to fail. But the looming battle on Jan. 6 is likely to culminate in a messy and deeply divisive spectacle that could thrust Vice President Mike Pence into the excruciating position of having to declare once and for all that Mr. Trump has indeed lost the election.

The fight promises to shape how Mr. Trump’s base views the election for years to come, and to pose yet another awkward test of allegiance for Republicans who have privately hoped that the Electoral College vote this week will be the final word on the election result.

For the vice president, whom the Constitution assigns the task of tallying the results and declaring a winner, the episode could be particularly torturous, forcing him to balance his loyalty to Mr. Trump with his constitutional duties and considerations about his own political future.

The effort is being led by Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, a backbench conservative. Along with a group of allies in the House, he is eyeing challenges to the election results in five different states — Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin — where they claim varying degrees of fraud or illegal voting took place, despite certification by the voting authorities and no evidence of widespread impropriety.

Image
Representative Mo Brooks is not the first lawmaker to try to use the tallying process to challenge the results of a bitter election loss.
Representative Mo Brooks is not the first lawmaker to try to use the tallying process to challenge the results of a bitter election loss.Credit…Erin Scott/Reuters
“We have a superior role under the Constitution than the Supreme Court does, than any federal court judge does, than any state court judge does,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview. “What we say, goes. That’s the final verdict.”

Under rules laid out in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act of 1887, their challenges must be submitted in writing with a senator’s signature also affixed. No Republican senator has yet stepped forward to say he or she will back such an effort, though a handful of reliable allies of Mr. Trump, including Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky, have signaled they would be open to doing so.

The president has praised Mr. Brooks on Twitter, but has thus far taken no evident interest in the strategy. Aides say he has been more focused on battling to overturn the results in court.

Even if a senator did agree, constitutional scholars say the process is intended to be an arduous one. Once an objection is heard from a member of each house of Congress, senators and representatives will retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state’s votes. Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century.

Several Senate Republicans — including Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah — have forcefully rejected the idea of overturning the results, and their votes would be enough for Mr. Biden to prevail with the support of Democrats.

“The Jan. 6 meeting is going to confirm that regardless of how many objections get filed and who signs on, they are not going to affect the outcome of the process,” said Edward B. Foley, a constitutional law professor at Ohio State University who has written extensively on the electoral process. “We can say that with clear confidence.”

But he noted that the session could still carry consequences for the next few years. If even one Republican senator backed the effort, it could ensure that the partisan cloud hanging over the election would darken Mr. Biden’s presidency for years to come. If none did, it could send a definitive message to the country that despite Mr. Trump’s bluster, the party trusted the results of the electoral process and was finally ready to recognize Mr. Biden as the rightful winner.

Mr. Brooks is far from the first lawmaker to try to use the tallying process to challenge the results of a bitter election loss. House Democrats made attempts in 2001, 2005 and even 2017, but they were essentially acts of protest after their party’s nominee had already accepted defeat.

What is different now is Mr. Trump’s historic defiance of democratic norms and his party’s willing acquiescence. If Mr. Trump were to bless the effort to challenge the congressional tally, he could force Republicans into a difficult decision about whether to support an assault on the election results that is essentially doomed or risk his ire. Many Republicans are already fearful of being punished by voters for failing to keep up his fight.

The dilemma is particularly acute for Mr. Pence, who is eyeing his own presidential run in 2024. As president of the Senate, he has the constitutionally designated task of opening and tallying envelopes sent from all 50 states and announcing their electoral results.

But given Mr. Trump’s penchant for testing every law and norm in Washington, he could insist that Mr. Pence refuse to play that role. And either way, it will call for a final performance of the delicate dance Mr. Pence has performed for four years, trying to maintain Mr. Trump’s confidence while adhering to the law.

“The role the V.P. plays in the transition is something that people have never focused on and never think about, but with Donald Trump, you now have to consider all the possibilities,” said Gregory B. Craig, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama.

In 1961, Richard M. Nixon, who had just lost the election, oversaw the vote tabulation and had to decide whether to recognize competing electors from the new state of Hawaii. Mr. Nixon ultimately made a decision that hurt his vote total but had no effect on the final result that John F. Kennedy had won. Forty years later, after the 2000 election, Al Gore had to reject objections from his fellow Democrats and certify the victory of George W. Bush, who had won the state of Florida after the Supreme Court ordered a recount ended in that state.

Image
Members of the conservative Freedom Caucus in early December. Mr. Brooks, trying to drum up support for the effort, has met with the group.
Members of the conservative Freedom Caucus in early December. Mr. Brooks, trying to drum up support for the effort, has met with the group.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
Since the election, Mr. Pence has sent mixed messages about how far he would be willing to go to help Mr. Trump. In the early days of the transition, Mr. Pence fended off requests from the president’s loyalists to back specious claims about election fraud. But more recently, he publicly praised the failed lawsuit brought by the attorney general of Texas to have votes from battleground states thrown out.

Democrats said they were confident that Mr. Biden would emerge unscathed, but his transition team has begun coordinating with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, to prepare for the possibility that one or more senators would sign onto the challenges.

Mr. Brooks has been trying to drum up support. He met last week with about a half-dozen senators, including Mike Lee of Utah, and separately with the conservative House Freedom Caucus.

“My No. 1 goal is to fix a badly flawed American election system that too easily permits voter fraud and election theft,” Mr. Brooks said. “A possible bonus from achieving that goal is that Donald Trump would win the Electoral College officially, as I believe he in fact did if you only count lawful votes by eligible American citizens and exclude all illegal votes.”

It remains unclear how broad a coalition he could build. More than 60 percent of House Republicans, including the top two party leaders, joined a legal brief supporting the unsuccessful Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election results. But it is one thing to sign a legal brief and another to officially contest the outcome on the House floor.

Some Republicans, including Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, have also signaled that they could support an objection. Mr. Brooks said he had been speaking with others who were interested. But prominent allies of the president who have thrown themselves headfirst into earlier fights, like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio or even the House minority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, have so far been publicly noncommittal.

“All eyes are on Jan. 6,” Mr. Gaetz said on Fox News on Friday night after the Supreme Court rejected Texas’ suit. “I suspect there will be a little bit of debate and discourse in the Congress as we go through the process of certifying the electors. We still think there is evidence that needs to be considered.”

Mr. Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said he would “wait and see how all the legal cases turn out” before deciding what to do.

Mr. Johnson plans to hold a hearing this week “examining the irregularities in the 2020 election,” featuring Ken Starr, the former independent counsel who is a favorite of the right, and at least two lawyers who have argued election challenges for Mr. Trump. Whether he proceeds to challenge results on Jan. 6, he told reporters last week, “depends on what we find out.”

Coronavirus Vaccinations Begin in the U.S.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

Arizona held its Electoral College meeting at an undisclosed location for the safety of its electors, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs told CNN.

“We’ve seen increasingly escalating sort of rhetoric and threats throughout the last week, and decided to move this for the safety of everyone involved,” she said, calling it “unfortunate.”
This comes as election officials across the country have reported that they’re receiving death threats as President Trump continues to contest the election results and refuses to concede.
Hobbs said she and her team worked with law enforcement to keep the electors and the Electoral College meeting safe.

}>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>}}>>>}>>>>>

POLITICS

President-elect Joe Biden wins Electoral College vote, cementing his victory over Trump

The Electoral College voted Monday to cement Joe Biden’s victory over incumbent President Donald Trump.
The ballots were cast by individual electors in all 50 states and the District of Columbia mirror their state’s popular vote, and Biden won 306 votes to Trump’s 232 votes.
Trump’s legal and legislative efforts to overturn this year’s election brought heightened importance to the procedural votes.

WASHINGTON — The Electoral College voted Monday to cement President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump in this year’s presidential election.

The ballots were cast throughout the day by individual electors in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and they mirror their state’s popular vote.

Shortly before 5:30 p.m. ET, California electors cast their 55 votes for Biden, pushing him over the crucial threshold of 270 electoral votes. At approximately 7:15 p.m., Hawaii cast the final 4 electoral votes of the day for Biden, who won 306 total electoral votes. Trump won 232 votes.

Biden plans to address the nation on Monday night, where he will emphasize that “the integrity of our elections remains intact.”

“And so, now it is time to turn the page. To unite. To heal,” Biden will say, according to speech excerpts released by the transition.

RT: Electoral College Vote: Stacey Abrams: Democratic Delegates Certify Georgia’s 16 Electoral College Votes
Democratic elector Stacey Abrams leads her fellow electors through the process of casting their votes for President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris in the Georgia State Senate chambers in the Georgia State Capitol building in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., December 14, 2020.

The Electoral College vote is typically a formality, occurring more than a month after Election Day votes are cast. But Trump’s unprecedented legal and legislative efforts to overturn the election results this year have imparted a greater significance upon the proceedings.

The president, his campaign and his political allies have filed dozens of lawsuits since Election Day, asking federal and state courts to nullify the election results based on myriad unsubstantiated claims of irregularities.

These efforts repeatedly failed, prompting the president to shift tactics in early December and begin personally pressuring Republican state legislators to intervene in the selection of individual electors. So far, this too has failed.

Yet Trump continues to falsely claim that he, not Biden, is the legitimate winner of the November election and that he was the victim of a massive, coordinated nationwide conspiracy to alter votes in Biden’s favor.

In Pennsylvania (below) and Arizona, two key swing states that Biden won, Trump supporters convened Monday outside their state capitols to protest the electoral college vote.

A small band of Trump supporters march with flags as electors gathered to cast their votes for the U.S. presidential election at the State Capitol complex in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, U.S. December 14, 2020.
Joanathan Ernst | Reuters
In Michigan, electors received police escorts amid threats of violence at the state capitol. A Republican state representative was stripped of his committee assignments by GOP leaders Monday after refusing to rule out that violence would occur in the capital of Lansing during the electoral vote.

Meanwhile, congressional Republicans fearful of angering their Trump-loving constituents have largely fallen in step behind the president and refused to acknowledge Biden’s victory.

Once electors have formally recorded their votes for president and vice president, the next major event in the Electoral College process is a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, during which both chambers will officially count the electoral votes.

Vice President Mike Pence is expected to preside over the Jan. 6 proceedings in his formal role as president of the Senate, a job which also includes announcing the results.

Any objections in Congress to the electoral votes must be submitted in writing and signed by at least one member of the House and one senator. If an objection arises, the two chambers consider the objection separately.

Alabama Republican Rep. Mo Brooks has already said he will challenge the results of the Electoral College count in the House. In the Senate, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has not ruled out filing a similar objection.

But not all Republicans approve of Brooks’ plan to jam up the electoral count in a bid to challenge results that is sure to fail. And several Republican senators who have yet to publicly acknowledge Biden’s win have indicated that they will accept the results of Monday’s vote in the Electoral College as the final judgment on the 2020 presidential election.

Still, the denial of Biden’s victory by some Republicans in Congress is likely to stretch into January and beyond.

In a Washington Post survey of all 249 congressional Republicans, published Dec. 6, only 27 said they accepted Biden as the legitimately elected president. Another 220 GOP lawmakers gave an unclear answer or did not respond, and two, Brooks and Rep. Paul A. Gosar of Arizona, said they believed Trump was the rightful winner of the election.

Ever since Election Day, Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have largely tried to stay above the fray of Trump’s increasingly desperate campaign to overturn the results.

While a small team of Biden campaign lawyers monitors Trump’s lawsuits, the former vice president is charging ahead with a formal transition process, announcing his nominees for his incoming Cabinet and laying out a plan to aggressively combat the coronavirus pandemic during his first 100 days in office.

Biden and Harris are set to be sworn into office as president and vice president of the United States on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day.

Attorney General William Barr resigns, effective Dec.

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POLITICO

WHITE HOUSE

MAGA leaders call for the troops to keep Trump in office
A growing call to invoke the Insurrection Act shows how hard-edged MAGA ideology has become in the wake of Trump’s election loss.

President Trump

The Insurrection Act has gained popularity among the far-right fringes, mainly as a way for President Donald Trump to solve all their problems. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images

12/18/2020 04:30 AM EST

An 1807 law invoked only in the most violent circumstances is now a rallying cry for the MAGA-ites most committed to the fantasy that Donald Trump will never leave office.

The law, the Insurrection Act, allows the president to deploy troops to suppress domestic uprisings — not to overturn elections.

But that hasn’t stopped the act from becoming a buzzword and cure-all for prominent MAGA figures like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, two prominent pro-Trump attorneys leading efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and even one North Carolina state lawmaker. Others like Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who was recently pardoned for lying to the FBI, have made adjacent calls for Trump to impose martial law. The ideas have circulated in pro-Trump outlets and were being discussed over the weekend among the thousands of MAGA protesters who descended on state capitols and the Supreme Court to falsely claim Trump had won the election.

At its core, the Insurrection Act gives the president authority to send military and National Guard troops to quell local rebellions and violence, offering an exemption to prohibitions against using military personnel to enforce domestic laws. Historically, it has been used in moments of extreme national strife — the Civil War, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, violent labor disputes, desegregation battles, rioting following Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.

Only once, however, has it been used in the wake of an election — and that was to stop a literal militia from seizing the Louisiana government on behalf of John McEnery, a former Confederate officer who had lost the 1872 governor’s race.

Nonetheless, in the minds of some authoritarian-leaning and conspiracy-minded Trump supporters, the Insurrection Act has become a needed step to prevent President-elect Joe Biden from assuming the presidency. Their evidence-deficient reasoning: Democrats illegally rigged the election and are attempting a coup, and Trump must send in the troops to undo this conspiracy.

The conviction shows how hard-edged MAGA ideology has become in the wake of Trump’s election loss. While scattered theories about a “deep state” arrayed against Trump have long circulated in MAGA circles, calls for troops to stop a democratically elected president from taking office have taken those ideas to a more conspiratorial and militaristic level. It also displays the exalted level to which Trump has been elevated among his most zealous fans as his departure looms.

MAGA
POLITICS

MAGA-world may resist the vaccine, but it still wants Trump to get credit.

“The central theme here is that there supposedly exists a network of nefarious actors trying to undermine Trump and destroy the United States, and that this is a tool that Trump could use to save the day,” said Jared Holt, a research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, who focuses on far-right extremism.

The Insurrection Act has been rarely invoked since the civil unrest of the 1960s — the last time was to quell violence during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. And when it has been used over that period, it was always at the request of a state governor.

But over the past several years, it has gained popularity among the far-right fringes, mainly as a way for Trump to solve all their problems, from expelling undocumented migrants, to arresting generals and other “deep state” actors for allegedly plotting coups against Trump.

The idea has also become intertwined with the QAnon movement, the far-reaching and baseless conspiracy that Trump is secretly working to disrupt a cabal of pedophiliac, sex trafficking Democrats and global elite.

In May, a Q-drop — the name for the mysterious missives allegedly from a person at the center of the QAnon movement — floated the Insurrection Act for the first time as a way to solve “growing unrest” after George Floyd was killed by Minnesota police. “Call the ball,” Q said mysteriously.

Then, in June, GOP Sen. Tom Cotton brought the idea of the Insurrection Act into the national dialogue with a New York Times op-ed that called on Trump to invoke the law in response to rioting that was occurring amid largely peaceful protests over racial justice. Trump himself leaned into the idea, suggesting to a rally audience that he would use the act to put down “leftist thugs” protesting that summer.

From there, the Insurrection Act became a quick fix to everything among the more extreme MAGA figures.

Trump ally and convicted political operative Roger Stone brought it up on Infowars as a way for Trump to combat anything from coups to protests to election fraud.

“The president’s authority is the Insurrection Act and his ability to declare martial law,” he told host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Stone added that Trump could also use the law to arrest anyone from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for election interference, to Democratic power couple Bill and Hillary Clinton — an interpretation that legal experts say strains credulity.

Jimmy Gurulé, a former Justice Department prosecutor now teaching at Notre Dame Law School, called the argument tenuous. While the Insurrection Act can be legally invoked as a response to a “conspiracy” that hinders people’s rights, there must actually be a conspiracy to justify sending in federal troops over the objection of local and state officials.

“I think that the key here is, 'Well, what the hell is that conspiracy?’” he said. “No one can articulate the participants in the conspiracy, the scope of the conspiracy, the object of the conspiracy. It’s all over the place.”

Still, Trump himself seemed keen to the idea, telling Fox News host Jeanine Pirro that he would “put down [anti-Trump protests] very quickly” if they broke out after the election: “Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send in and we do it very easy.”

Further out on the MAGA fringe, Trump supporters suggested the president jump the gun and simply arrest everyone — before the election.

And now, with the Electoral College confirming Biden’s win, recounts failing to change the results and courts at every level swatting down lawsuits challenging the outcome, some MAGA figures have latched on to the specific Insurrection Act clause granting the president authority to use the military to quash a “rebellion against the authority of the United States.” In their strained interpretation, the clause gives Trump the power to go after the Democrats and deep state actors conspiring to remove him from office. It’s a reading of the law experts immediately rejected.

“When you’re talking about a group of conspiracy theorists, and others who lack any kind of legal knowledge, they’ll just pull that arrow out of their quiver when the rest don’t work,” said Brian Levin, executive director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

It seems nearly impossible Trump would actually invoke the law in this manner. But that hasn’t stopped prominent Trump supporters like Wood, one of the lawyers pushing unsubstantiated lawsuits through the courts, from suggesting Trump send the military into Georgia to break up a meeting of electors.

And over the weekend, after the Supreme Court rejected a Trump-boosted lawsuit from Texas asking to overturn the election results in four other swing states, MAGA supporters took to the streets to demand, among other things, that Trump use the Insurrection Act to force an election do-over, or at the very least, stop Biden from taking office.

The Epoch Times itself ran an editorial on Monday arguing that it was time for Trump to invoke the act and send in the military to seize thousands of voting machines in order to find fraud: “Our system is in crisis. Trump would act to restore the rule of law.”

Gurulé, the former DOJ prosecutor, pointed out that even if Trump tried to invoke the Insurrection Act, there really is nothing for the military to suppress.

“I guess it’d be a voting fraud conspiracy, but how is the military going to suppress that?” he said. “By what, seizing all the ballots? By seizing all the voting machines? By then, what are they going to do, conduct the votes? It just doesn’t make sense.”

The point, however, might just be to have the Insurrection Act as a talking point to keep the MAGA movement motivated. And Levin, the extremism researcher, feared a darker path if Trump — a man who already speaks in militaristic terms on a regular basis — continued to goad his base into thinking a Biden presidency is an insurrection.

“What is the heart of the Second Amendment, pro-militia, anti-government patriot movement? It’s the insurrectionist theory of the Second Amendment,” he said. “It says people can rise up against a tyrannical government. To me, this looks like the last exit on the Jersey Turnpike before we get to that spot.”

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

youtu.be/O74CUJ1ajxQ

POLITICO

TRUMPOLOGY

Is Trump Cracking Under the Weight of Losing?
Getting the boot from the White House is an undeniable ego blow for a man who has never admitted defeat.

President Donald Trump listens during a ceremony to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former football coach Lou Holtz, in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, Dec. 3, 2020, in Washington.
President Donald Trump listens during a ceremony to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former football coach Lou Holtz, in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, Dec. 3, 2020, in Washington.

By MICHAEL KRUSE

12/20/2020 07:00 AM EST

Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer at POLITICO and POLITICO Magazine.

Donald Trump has never had a week like the week he just had. On the heels of the Supreme Court’s knock-back and the Electoral College’s knockout, some of his most reliable supporters—Mitch McConnell, Vladimir Putin, Newsmax—acknowledged and affirmed the actual fact of the matter. Trump is a loser.

Consequently, he is plainly out of sorts, say former close associates, longtime Trump watchers and mental health experts.

It’s not just his odd behavior—the testy, tiny desk session with the press, the stilted Medal of Freedom ceremony that ended with his awkward exit, the cut-short trip to the Army-Navy football game. It’s even more pointedly his conspicuous and ongoing absences. The narcissistic Trump has spent the last half a century—but especially the last half a decade—making himself and keeping himself the most paid-attention-to person on the planet. But in the month and a half since Election Day, Trump has been seen and heard relatively sparingly and sporadically. No-showing unexpectedly at a Christmas party, sticking to consistently sparse public schedules and speaking mainly through his increasingly manic Twitter feed, he’s been fixated more than anything else on his baseless insistence that he won the election when he did not.

US President Donald Trump participates in a Thanksgiving teleconference with members of the United States Military, at the White House in Washington, DC, on November 26, 2020.

Over the course of a lifetime of professional and personal transgressions and failures, channeling lasting, curdled lessons of Norman Vincent Peale and Roy Cohn, Trump has assembled a record of rather remarkable resilience. His typical level of activity and almost animal energy has at times lent him an air of insusceptibility, every one of his brushes with financial or reputational ruin ending with Trump emerging all but untouched. His current crisis, though, his eviction from the White House now just a month out, is something altogether different and new.

“He’s never been in a situation in which he has lost in a way he can’t escape from,” Mary Trump, his niece and the author of the fiercely critical and bestselling book about him and their family, told me. “We continue to wait for him to accept reality, for him to concede, and that is something he is not capable of doing,” added Bandy Lee, the forensic psychiatrist from Yale who’s spent the last four years trying to warn the world about Trump and the ways in which he’s disordered and dangerous. “Being a loser,” she said, for Trump is tantamount to “psychic death.”

The combination of an unprecedented rebuke meeting an uncommonly vulnerable ego has some people wondering if there is a chance that Trump’s unusual actions suggest something potentially more dire. Could he be on his way to a mental breakdown?

Sam Nunberg dismissed the notion. “No,” the former Trump political aide said in a text.

Same with Anthony Scaramucci, who very briefly and semi-famously was his top White House spokesperson. “No chance,” he said.

But that’s not consensus. Louise Sunshine, for instance, has known Trump longer than just about anybody. She started working with him in the early 1970s—so I sent her a text asking her the question. “Maybe,” she responded.

Everybody, after all, has a breaking point. “And he’s not indestructible,” said Barbara Res, a former Trump Organization executive vice president who was the construction manager for Trump Tower and just wrote a book called Tower of Lies. “I do think Trump is struggling,” Tony Schwartz, the actual author of The Art of the Deal, told me, “and that this is far and away the toughest time he’s ever had.”

President Donald Trump arrives to the White House after spending Thanksgiving playing golf at his Trump National golf club on Friday, November 26, 2020 in Washington, DC. Photo by Oliver Contreras/Pool/Sipa USA

“His fragile ego has never been tested to this extent,” Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney and enforcer before he turned on him, told me. “While he’s creating a false pretense of strength and fortitude, internally he is angry, depressed and manic. As each day ends, Trump knows he’s one day closer to legal and financial troubles. Accordingly, we will all see his behavior deteriorate until it progresses into a full mental breakdown.”

“Psychological disorders are like anything else,” said Mary Trump, who’s also a psychologist. “If they’re unacknowledged and untreated over time, they get worse.”

In Lee’s estimation, it’s not something that could happen. It’s something that is happening, that’s been happening for the past four years—and will keep happening.

“His pathology has continued to grow, continued to cause him to decompensate, and so we’re at a stage now where his detachment from reality is pretty much complete and his symptoms are as severe as can be.” She likened Trump to “a car without functioning brakes.” Such a car, she explained, can look for a long time like it’s fine, and keep going, faster and faster, even outracing other cars. “But at the bottom of the hill,” Lee said, “it always crashes.”

Trump is who and how he is first and foremost because of his parents. His unwell mother couldn’t and didn’t give him the attention he wanted and needed, while his domineering father gave him attention but a wrong and warping kind—instilling in him a grim, zero-sum worldview with the dictate that the only option was to be “a winner.” Ever since, he responded so relentlessly to these harsh particulars of his loveless upbringing—the insatiable appetite for publicity, the crass, constant self-aggrandizement—that he became the president of the United States and arguably the most famous person alive. But from the time he was a boy, the way Trump has coped with the void he’s felt ultimately has been less a solution than a spotlight—it’s what’s made his most fundamental problem most manifest.

“His problem is that he has grown up with vulnerability in terms of his self-worth, self-esteem and a clear sense of himself,” Mark Smaller, a past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, told me. “Somebody with these kinds of vulnerabilities, affirmation, being the center of things, is never enough. Because you can’t solve these old wounds, these old, narcissistic wounds—you cannot solve them with affirmation, with being at the center of things. You can’t because they persist, so that you need more attention, you need more affirmation, you need to be more at the center of things, all the time, more often. And when realities start to interfere with getting that kind of affirmation, you just want more.”

The only moment in Trump’s life that remotely compares to what’s happening right now is in early 1990.

He was mired in a tabloid-catnip marital breakup on account of an affair with the B-movie actress who eventually would become the second of his three wives and the mother of the fourth of his five children. He also was a staggering $3.4 billion in debt—personally liable for nearly a billion of that—his business affairs in New York and with his casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in absolute shambles. “I would have been looking for the nearest building to jump off of,” Steve Bollenbach, the financial fixer banks made Trump hire, once told biographer Tim O’Brien. That spring, according to Vanity Fair, Trump ordered in burgers and fries and stayed up late in bed, staring at the ceiling. At risk of becoming a has-been and a punchline, Trump nonetheless boasted about future prospects—of national magazine covers and a comeback to come. “All Donald knew,” Wayne Barrett wrote around the time, “was that he was still a story.”

He sat at his desk paging through periodicals looking for his name. “Even if it was the same AP article in every single newspaper, he wanted to see it,” former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell told me. “That’s how he survives.”

“Did he collapse? No. He did not collapse,” veteran New York Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf said. “He just continued.”

Trump was able to do that, of course, principally due to the sprawling, near-foolproof safety net his father’s wealth allowed. Lenders in New York and regulators in Atlantic City, too, let him skate, both groups as beholden to him as he was to them.

Still, en route to averting comeuppance, he proceeded to weave this self-inflicted calamity into a preferred tale of a certain toughness he possessed. “Most people would have been in the corner sucking their thumb,” he said to a reporter from the Sunday Times of London. “You learn that you’re either the toughest, meanest piece of shit in the world, or you just crawl into a corner, put your finger in your mouth, and say, ‘I want to go home,’” he told a writer from New York. “You never know until you’re under pressure how you’re gonna react.”

But the biggest difference between then and now: Even when Trump was all but broke, even as bankers clawed back some of his “toys,” the “props for the show,” as he once put it in Playboy, they gave him an obscene $450,000-a-month allowance. And the most important thing? He got to keep Trump Tower. He got to remain living in the penthouse of the building that he had built, that had made him famous, and that served above all as the preeminent stage for how he wanted to be seen.

“He was always there in his office,” Alan Marcus, Trump’s publicist later on in the ‘90s, told me. “He was always there in his castle.”

This time, on the other hand, he’s getting kicked out. No more Oval Office photo ops. No more two-scoop nights watching Fox News in his room in the residence. In a month’s time, for most likely the last time, the door of the White House will close behind him.

This looming reality colors his interactions in these waning days.

Earlier this month, the Medal of Freedom ceremony to honor Dan Gable, the fabled Iowa wrestler and coach, seemed precisely the sort of pomp Trump liked the most throughout his single term. “He couldn’t stand the feeling of losing,” he said of Gable, reading from prepared remarks, standing behind the lectern festooned with the presidential seal, surrounded by Gable, Gable’s family and members of Congress from Iowa, reporters and photographers.

“Before matches,” Trump continued, “Dan would repeat the words ‘cakes, carries, ducks, picks, shucks, sweeps’ over and over again. I’ll have to ask Dan why. Why, Dan?”

“Because they’re all moves that end the match,” Gable said.

“Oh,” Trump said.

Toward the end of the event, though, when one of the reporters asked if he was still “looking to change the outcome of the election,” Trump called the election “rigged” and the United States “third-world” before turning to thank Gable again—and then abruptly walked out.

Gable, seeming surprised and still standing in the Oval, looked at the gathered press and held his hands up. He said all that was left to say.

“He’s gone.”

“So,” Brian Kilmeade of Fox asked Trump last weekend in one of the vanishingly few interviews the president has consented to since he lost, “would you show up at the inauguration. Will you?”

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“I don’t want to talk about that,” Trump said. “I want to talk about this: We’ve done a great job. I got more votes than any president in the history of our country—in the history of our country, right? Not even close: 75 million”—actually a little more than 74—“far more than Obama, far more than anybody. And they say we lost an election. We didn’t lose.”

This is true, obviously, only if one ignores the more than 81 million people who voted for Joe Biden and the 306 Electoral College votes he was awarded as a result.

The people who’ve known Trump well, the people who’ve watched him for a long, long time, the mental health professionals—they’re worried, they told me, about what’s to come, in the next month, and in the months and years after that.

“There’s no reckoning with reality,” biographer Gwenda Blair said. “He’s going to continue to frame it that he won, he was cheated, he’s the victim, and he’s going to continue to bend reality as best he can.”

President Donald Trump pumps his fist as he departs after an Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Summit in the South Court Auditorium of the of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House on December 8, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Oliver Contreras/SIPA USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

“He’ll continue to rage against the results, and he’ll continue to solidify in the minds of millions more Americans that the democratic process was corrupted, and that’s going to have a long-lasting tail that we’ll have to deal with in American politics for many, many years,” said Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security who was “Anonymous” before he revealed his identity in October. “I don’t expect that the president is going to chain himself to the Resolute Desk and refuse to leave, but also, given what we’ve seen the past few weeks, I wouldn’t totally put it past him.”

“The probability of something very bad happening is very high, unacceptably high, and the fact that we don’t have guardrails in place, the fact that we are allowing a mentally incapacitated president to continue in the job, in such an important job, for a single day longer, is a truly unacceptable reality,” said Lee, the Yale psychiatrist. “We’re talking about his access to the most powerful military on the planet and his access to technology that’s capable of destroying human civilization many times over.”

“You have to remember,” said Cohen, his former attorney. “Trump doesn’t see things the way that you do. He sees things in his distorted reality that benefits him. He’s able to right now embrace that distorted reality because he still wakes up in the White House. But what happens each and every day as he gets closer to not only leaving, but also it comes with a sense of, in his mind, humiliation, right? And he knows that he is destined for legal troubles.”

“He’s looking down the barrel” of legal and financial difficulties, Mary Trump said. “But perhaps more troubling for him or more terrifying for him is the fact that he is in danger of losing his relevance.”

And that is not something Trump will ever be able to abide.

President Donald Trump arrives to speak during an Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Summit in the South Court Auditorium of the of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House on December 8, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Oliver Contreras/SIPA USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

“He’s going to go back to Mar-a-Lago, to MAGAstan, as I call it, and he’s going to return to standing ovations and applause beyond what you can comprehend,” Cohen said, “because these sycophants that are there will continue to bolster his ego and he can go from table to table, listening to people placate him about how the election was stolen from him. And that’s just going to further create that mishigas in his head.”

“Do I think that Trump is going to fall apart in a way where he would become completely dysfunctional and not leave his room? I don’t think so,” said Smaller, the past president of the psychoanalytic association. “But if you’re in this kind of unregulated state, and I think that’s what we’re observing, he’ll do kind of desperate things to maintain that being the center of attention.”

“He will not go away, because this is his psychological lifeline,” Lee said.

“For him,” she stressed, “it’s a matter of psychic survival.”

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

Trump’s ridiculous exit strategy
Opinion by Michael D’Antonio

Editor’s Note: (Michael D’Antonio is the author of the book “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success” and co-author, with Peter Eisner, of the book “High Crimes: The Corruption, Impunity, and Impeachment of Donald Trump.”

Donald Trump lost. The calmer people around him – including his daughter – are looking for new places to live, and work, and, let’s face it, recover. Others are stamping their feet – No! – right along with the boss. A lawyer advises challenging the election result in the courts – again. A retired general says call out the troops. There’s screaming and accusations. Trump wonders about appointing a special counsel to investigate his 7 million-vote defeat.

Michael D'Antonio

Behold the crackpot presidency nearing its end.

After years of conspiracy theories, lies, and rage, the President seems to be turning the Oval Office into a stage set for the final scenes of a Biblical quality drama – and more specifically, the tale of the super-strong Israelite warrior Samson, who declared “Let me die with the Philistines!” and in toppling the temple, died along with his enemies.

Though born to enormous wealth and cosseted in luxury, Trump has often talked as if he views his life as a battle for survival. Those who refuse to give him what he wants – governors, lawmakers, journalists etc. – become enemies. In the final days of his presidency, the enemies are united by the election outcome and the Constitution on their side. The President seems to be turning the White House into a temple of paranoia.

The People’s House has been home to some of the greatest leaders of modern times. The Oval Office is where presidents have worked to serve and save the union. If any Oval Office sessions have marked a deviation from the norm, Trump’s Friday conference with attorney Sydney Powell and retired Lt. General Mike Flynn must rank near the top, along with the time Richard Nixon and Elvis trashed-talked the Beatles and the President gave Presley an FBI badge.

At Trump’s Friday meeting, lawyer Sydney Powell, once part of the legal cadre that failed to overturn the election with dozens of court challenges, arrived with her client Mike Flynn. A retired lieutenant general who pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI, Flynn was pardoned by the President last month. Perhaps it is out of gratitude for this gift that Flynn has been talking about Trump using martial law to, “basically rerun an election,” in key states where subsequent Trump wins would give him a second term. Although Flynn has justified this action by claiming rampant election fraud in those states, no such fraud has been found.

Why Trump should resign today
Why Trump should resign today
Hardly a stickler for evidence and facts, Trump reportedly asked about Flynn’s martial law idea. The New York Times also reported that Trump entertained Powell’s talk of resuming a legal campaign to assert election fraud despite the fact that more than 50 court filings in this effort have been rejected. Even the President’s allies on Fox News have, under pressure, publicly debunked one of the most serious allegations of fraud which they themselves promoted.

Nevertheless, there was Powell in the Oval Office brandishing affidavits alleging fraud. President Trump asked whether Powell could get a security clearance to help her in her effort to overturn the election through the courts. He also asked about naming her to a special counsel position, in order to carry out this work.

Trump’s fixation on court challenges, even as the Electoral College affirmed President-elect Joe Biden’s victory last week, aligns with a litigious streak that he has shown for decades. As USA Today noted in 2016, businessman Trump used lawsuits as tools of his trade and to distance himself from failures. When the paper examined his record, they found more than 3,500 cases. Notably, he was the plaintiff – the one initiating legal combat – in the majority of them.

Although Powell’s legal pugnacity apparently appealed to the President, he heard some vigorous pushback from White House advisers who were also in the Oval Office. Counsel Pat A. Cipollone and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows were among those who raised serious objections. Powell and Flynn accused others of abandoning Trump, CNN reported, and the meeting intermittently devolved into screaming matches. “It was heated,” one source told CNN. “People were really fighting it out in the Oval, really forceful about it.”

Having seen Trump rant and rave on the campaign trail and knowing his tendency toward conspiracy theories and drama, it isn’t hard to imagine the man indulging or even orchestrating Friday’s Oval Office craziness. It’s reassuring to know some around him will intervene before he brings the temple down, but frightening to consider Trump may share Samson’s willingness to bring everything down on himself in order to destroy his enemies.

Among the many difference between Trump and Samson is that the Bible shows Samson’s enemies were real. While Trump does have many real enemies, in the case of election fraud, they are imagined. Also, Samson didn’t injure his countrymen in his act of destruction. Trump threatens damage to the majority of voters, who though they chose Biden, are among those he was elected to serve.

Trump isn’t Samson. America isn’t a Philistine temple. Thank God there are still people around the President who resist the ridiculous drama.

© 2020 Cable News Network. A Warner Media Company. All Rights Reserved.

<<>>>>>><<>>>>>><<>>>>>><<>>>>>><<>>

WHITE HOUSE

Biden called Trump ‘Putin’s puppy.’ The president-elect may put Moscow on a tighter leash.
The incoming president is expected to quickly draw a contrast with Trump’s coddling of Russia.

Dec. 22, 2020, 6:00 AM ES

WASHINGTON — When a Russian spy who defected was fatally poisoned nearly 15 years ago, blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin from his deathbed, Joe Biden warned that the United States had been giving Putin “a bye” for far too long.

“I’m not a big fan of Putin’s,” Biden, then the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in 2006. “I think we should have a direct confrontation with Putin politically about the need for him to change his course of action.”

Putin didn’t alter his course.

Since then, Russia’s confrontations with the West have grown only more overt. And now, what is believed to be the Kremlin’s sweeping cyber hack of U.S. government agencies puts Biden on a high-stakes collision course with Putin when he becomes president next month.

But unlike when President Donald Trump entered the White House, after Putin’s interference in the 2016 election, Biden takes office after more than two decades of failed U.S. attempts to forge a cooperative relationship with Moscow.

“Russia is way more powerful today than it was 20 years ago, and it’s way more powerful today than it was four years ago,” said Michael McFaul, who was U.S. ambassador to Russia during President Barack Obama’s first term. “It’s a much more immediate threat that we continue to underestimate.”

Biden has no plans to try to forge a close relationship with Putin, as Trump attempted. And his administration’s Russia policy won’t be complicated, as Trump’s was, by an investigation into whether he or his allies had nefarious links to Moscow.

Instead, Biden is expected to quickly work to draw a contrast with Trump’s handling of Russia, including renewed scrutiny of reports of bounties offered to extremists in Afghanistan to kill U.S. troops. The U.S. commander overseeing the region has said the allegations haven’t been fully corroborated by intelligence, but the utter lack of concern from Trump about even the possibility has incensed Democrats and some Republicans.

“Donald Trump’s entire presidency has been a gift to Putin, but this is beyond the pale,” Biden tweeted in June. Addressing the issue during the first presidential debate, Biden called Trump “Putin’s puppy.”

Biden is also likely to slap new sanctions on Russia for election meddling and human rights violations, although it’s unclear how much further he can turn the screw given that Moscow is already under intense U.S. sanctions that have isolated it from the American financial system.

After Biden won the election, it took Putin more than a month to congratulate him, in a Kremlin statement wishing him “every success.” Just months earlier, when Biden was the Democratic nominee, Putin had chastised him publicly for “quite sharp anti-Russian rhetoric.” Biden has said responding to the recent cyber breach will be a “top priority” when he takes office, although he didn’t call out Russia by name.

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Indeed, the Russian government sees Biden as an adversary. The mistrust is mutual, and it has been for decades. Asked in 2001 by Tim Russert, then the moderator of NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” whether he believed Putin was trustworthy, Biden didn’t demur.

“The answer is no, I don’t,” he said.

Over the years, including his decades in the Senate, Biden often promoted the cautious pursuit of better relations with Russia while warning against letting Moscow exploit the veneer of high-level diplomacy with the U.S. to elevate itself as a major power or legitimize the consolidation of power under Putin.

During President George W. Bush’s administration, Biden emerged as one of the more vocal critics of the U.S. approach to Russia, even joining in 2007 with the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar of Indiana, to warn that the Bush administration was getting caught flat-footed as relations with Moscow deteriorated — and pointing to limiting Iran’s nuclear cooperation as an opportunity for Russia to work more constructively with the West.

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Biden’s only known run-in with Putin came in March 2011, when Putin was prime minister, and Biden, then the vice president, visited Moscow for a meeting on redeploying missile defense launchers in Poland and Romania. Biden, unsure before the meeting what to expect, would later write in his autobiography that Putin was “ice-cold calm throughout, but argumentative from start to finish.”

For two hours, they sat together in Putin’s office in the Russian White House, including a 15-minute side chat during which aides left the room while they spoke privately.

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Biden expected to nominate Dr. Miguel Cardona as education secretary
When reporters were allowed in briefly for the start of their meeting, which took place between Russian and American flags under a pair of ostentatious crystal chandeliers, Putin pitched Biden on a visa-free system that would let Russians and Americans travel back and forth unimpeded. Biden responded with a word of caution that seemed to foreshadow the position he’s now poised to take.

“In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a real difference between being president and vice president,” Biden told Putin.

Biden later recalled having riffed off of Bush, who famously told Putin that when he looked into his eyes, he could see Putin’s soul.

“‘Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes,’ I told him, smiling. ‘I don’t think you have a soul,’” Biden told Putin, according to his book.

Biden wrote: “He looked at me for a second and smiled back. ‘We understand each other,’ he said. And we did.”

There is a long history of U.S. presidents taking office hoping, and perhaps even believing, that they were the ones who could finally chart a new course with Russia and turn the page on the lingering enmities from the Cold War.

Before Trump pursued that strategy, Obama tried it. And while Obama ultimately downplayed Russia as a “regional power” acting out from a place of weakness, his run-ins with Putin became so highly anticipated that they hung over every major summit the two leaders attended, often overshadowing the bigger agenda the U.S. administration had hoped to set.

McFaul said he sees continuity in the U.S.'s Russia policy from the Bush administration to the Obama administration to the Trump administration in three areas — strengthening NATO, sanctioning Russia and aiding Ukraine. That view is often challenged by Democrats who say Trump hasn’t been as tough on Russia as he should have been and that his agreeable rhetoric toward Putin has undermined his administration’s policies.

“Biden will not seek to befriend Putin,” said McFaul, who participated in Biden’s meeting with Putin in 2011 and recalled that “it was contentious.” Afterward, Biden met with democracy and human rights advocates, which McFaul said not everyone in the Obama administration supported.

If there’s one obvious possibility for guarded cooperation between Biden and Putin, it may be pursuing an extension to the expiring New START treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms agreement between Moscow and Washington.

Putin and Biden have signaled clear interest in renewing it, although there is disagreement in the U.S. about how long to extend it, and the countries have already been trading blame for why discussions to extend it haven’t succeeded.

As he addressed the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, two years after he left the White House, Biden gave voice to that cautious optimism about the prospect of less contentious relations despite the lack of trust. He predicted that Russia’s dire long-term economic situation might produce enough of an incentive for Putin to change course.

“I haven’t given up hope. I’m not naïve about it,” Biden said. “As you’ve noticed, I’ve been a very strident voice in my — the last administration about Putin and Russia, as I am now. But that doesn’t mean that this is a fait accompli, that this is the way things are going to be.”

© 2020 NBC UNIVERSAL

"POLITICS DEC. 23, 2020

Pence Should Remove Trump From Office on Sunday

In what are supposed to be the final days of his presidency, Donald Trump has been discussing invoking martial law to overturn the results of the 2020 election and seizing supposedly fraudulent voting machines that — according to a wild conspiracy theory being pushed by people Trump invited to the Oval Office to discuss the matter — were used to rob him of a second term.

This is merely the most extreme example, so far, of Trump’s post-election behavior, which grows more erratic and dangerous to our democracy by the day. There is a way to stop him, though.

More than 50 years ago, the framers of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution foresaw the possibility of a president’s behavior becoming so unstable that it would prove necessary to have some constitutional mechanism to remove him immediately from office. Section Four of that amendment provides a process for doing so: If the vice-president and the majority of the Cabinet decide that, for whatever reason, the president has become unfit to carry out the powers and duties of the office and they transmit a letter to Congress to that effect, then the vice-president becomes the acting president and remains so unless and until Congress refuses to allow that transfer of power to stand.

Legal scholars who have studied the drafting and adoption of the 25th Amendment recognize that its framers intentionally drafted it to allow Section Four to be used to address a wide range of potential situations — very much including the sorts of circumstances in which the nation finds itself today. While it is true that the amendment was created to deal with non-controversial instances of presidential unfitness, such as a president falling into a coma or being kidnapped, Section Four was made part of the amendment to deal with controversial cases as well: specifically with instances where the president’s unfitness to hold office was contested by the president himself.

Those who drafted and ratified the amendment made clear at the time that they were quite consciously employing general and open-ended language in the amendment’s text, rather than trying to define what circumstances would warrant the use of Section Four, because they concluded wisely that it would be vain to try to anticipate in advance all the circumstances that would require removing a president.

Members of the administration reportedly discussed the possibility of invoking the amendment in the early days of Trump’s presidency, but that possibility has been dismissed as purely theoretical, especially given one obvious problem: To do so, two-thirds of each house of Congress would have to vote to allow the vice-president to continue in the position of acting president. But as we reach the final days of the Trump presidency, this obstacle is about to be removed. The mechanics of the amendment allow the vice-president to remain in the position of acting president for a minimum of 25 days, as long as a simple majority of at least one chamber of Congress is willing to cooperate.

It may seem extremely unlikely that Mike Pence, who up to this point has been one of Trump’s most craven enablers, would even consider taking advantage of this constitutional power. But it’s always possible that, between now and January 20 when Trump’s term expires, the situation may become so extreme that he and eight other Cabinet members may find the modicum of personal courage and moral decency necessary to do the right thing.

Trump would put up a fight, but it wouldn’t matter this late in his presidency. Once Pence has transmitted the letter to Congress that makes him acting president, Trump may contest the vice-president’s actions via a letter of his own. Section Four, however, would give Pence four days to respond to this letter. After Pence did so, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives could — by simple majority vote — decline to act on the substantive dispute for the remaining 21 days. (Meanwhile, Democrats could filibuster any action in the Senate.) Were it not the end of his term, Trump would return to office after 21 days if Congress failed to act.

This, in effect, means that Pence could become acting president on Sunday, December 27, and would remain in the position for the rest of the current administration’s term in office, as long as House Democrats acceded to the new status quo. For the good of the nation, he should do so this weekend.

INTELLIGENCER

© 2020 VOX MEDIA, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

TheGrio

Military on alert over Trump’s martial law threat: ‘The craziness is unprecedented’

December 24, 2020, 3:02 pm

According to a new report, ranking officers have discussed what they would do if the president declared martial law.

President Donald Trump has filed lawsuits after losing the 2020 presidential election and refuses to acknowledge the defeat. A new report claims military leaders have discussed their plan of action if POTUS were to declare martial law toward the last days of his term.

According to the Washington Post, national security and election law experts assert Trump cannot declare martial law, however are alarmed by the possibility.

“This is really dangerous stuff to start playing with,” Rachel Kleinfeld, a national security expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the Post. “You cannot normalize extrajudicial action outside the rule of law and believe democracy will hold. Democracies are fragile, even ours.”

“If you have martial law,” Kleinfeld continued. “You have total suspension of the Constitution. So that’s a coup, and a coup in this country is not going to happen.”

President Donald Trump departs on the South Lawn of the White House, on December 12, 2020 in Washington, DC. Trump is traveling to the Army versus Navy Football Game at the United States Military Academy in West Point, NY. (Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images)
Although experts do not believe the unprecedented move is possible, a report claims the military is still preparing for the unknown. According to a Newsweek exclusive story, the Pentagon is on red alert and ranking officers have discussed what they would do if the president decided to declare martial law. One officer anonymously detailed the nature of the planning.

“I’ve been associated with the military for over 40 years and I’ve never seen the discussions that are being had right now, the need for such discussions,” the unidentified source said.

Another officer echoed similar sentiments to Newsweek.

“At this point, there’s no telling what the president might do in the next month,” said a former Northern Command (NORTHCOM) commander, who, according to the outlet is actively advising senior officers. “Though I’m confident that the uniformed military leadership has their heads screwed on right, the craziness is unprecedented and the possibilities are endless.”

While still in office, Trump has issued several dozen pardons. As theGrio reported in the past week, POTUS has issued 49 pardons and clemencies to his allies. Among those pardoned include former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and campaign adviser George Papadopoulos."

Despite the Supreme Court dismissing Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the election in four states, he insisted “It’s not over,” according to theGrio.

“This wasn’t like a close election,” Trump said. “You look at Georgia. We won Georgia big. We won Pennsylvania big. We won Wisconsin big. We won it big.”

Read More: New York AG subpoenas pro-Trump provocateurs in voter suppression plot

Various defense leaders from the Pentagon informed Newsweek that the military has no role to play in the outcome of the election.

The post Military on alert over Trump’s martial law threat: ‘The craziness is unprecedented’ appeared first on

‘Devastating consequences’: Biden blasts Trump for not signing COVID relief bill before unemployment aid lapses
SARAH ELBESHBISHI | USA TODAY | 4 hours ago

On Christmas Eve, House Democrats urged US President Donald Trump to sign a long-overdue COVID-19 relief bill after House Republicans blocked Trump’s longshot demand of increasing direct payments to Americans from $600 to $2,000. (Dec. 24)
AP
Amid a flurry of tweets criticizing everything from the Supreme Court to the Department of Justice, President Donald Trump again aired his displeasure of the COVID relief package, pushing for a $1,400 increase over what Republican and Democratic leaders had negotiated and leaving the status of the bill uncertain as unemployment benefits for million are set to expire.

“I simply want to get our great people $2000, rather than the measly $600 that is now in the bill,” Trump tweeted Saturday morning. “Also, stop the billions of dollars in ‘pork’.”

President-elect Joe Biden sharply criticized Trump’s refusal to sign the bipartisan stimulus bill, calling it an “abdication of responsibility” with “devastating consequences,” in a statement on Saturday.

“It is the day after Christmas, and millions of families don’t know if they’ll be able to make ends meet because of President Donald Trump’s refusal to sign an economic relief bill approved by Congress with an overwhelming and bipartisan majority,” Biden said.

As Trump’s criticisms have thrown the future of the relief bill in doubt, temporary unemployment benefits approved in response to the pandemic expire on midnight Saturday, threatening a lapse in aid. If the president doesn’t sign the new relief bill by the end of the day Saturday, states won’t be able to make those benefits available again for a full week, effectively cutting the aid extension from 11 to 10 weeks.

Biden blasted Trump for allowing the benefits to expire.

“This abdication of responsibility has devastating consequences. Today, about 10 million Americans will lose unemployment insurance benefits” Biden said. “In just a few days, government funding will expire, putting vital services and paychecks for military personnel at risk. In less than a week, a moratorium on evictions expires, putting millions at risk of being forced from their homes over the holidays.”

Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, has calculated that 11 million people would lose aid from the programs immediately without additional relief; millions more would exhaust other unemployment benefits within weeks.

Andrew Stettner, an unemployment insurance expert and senior fellow at the Century Foundation think tank, said the number may be closer to 14 million because joblessness has spiked since Thanksgiving.

While payments could be received retroactively, any gap means more hardship and uncertainty for Americans who have already grappled with bureaucratic delays, often depleting much of their savings to stay afloat while waiting for payments to kick in.

They are people like Earl McCarthy, a father of four who lives in South Fulton, Georgia, and has been relying on unemployment since losing his job as a sales representative for a luxury senior living community. He said he will be left with no income by the second week of January if Trump fails to sign the bill.

McCarthy said he already burned through much of his savings as he waited five months to begin receiving his unemployment benefits. After leaving weekly messages with the unemployment agency, McCarthy reached out to the South Fulton mayor’s office, then to his state legislative representative to ask for help. He finally started getting payments in November.

“For me, I shudder to think if I had not saved anything or had an emergency fund through those five months, where would we have been?” he said. “It’s going to be difficult if the president doesn’t sign this bill.”

The bill awaiting Trump’s signature would also activate a weekly $300 federal supplement to unemployment payments.

Trump first denounced the $900 billion relief package on Tuesday, calling it a “disgrace” in a video posted on Twitter.

“It’s called the COVID relief bill, but it has almost nothing to do with COVID,” Trump said in the video. “I’m asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000 or $4,000 for a couple.”

More: Donald Trump demands bigger stimulus checks in $900 billion COVID-19 relief package passed by Congress

I simply want to get our great people $2000, rather than the measly $600 that is now in the bill. Also, stop the billions of dollars in “pork”.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
December 26, 2020

The $600 direct payments were one of the compromises Republicans and Democrats struck as they negotiated the contents of the relief package, with most Democrats wanting higher payments like the $1,200 payments Americans were given as a part of the last major stimulus bill.

GOP leaders were also assured by the White House that the president would support the bipartisan legislation, including the $600 direct payments Republicans agreed to.

Trump’s refusal to sign this bill further delays the first COVID relief in months of Congress repeatedly failed to come together on another stimulus package even as many of the measures and aid began to expire.

More: Trump pardons Papadopoulos and former Republican members of Congress in raft of clemency grants

Trump also tweeted about the direct payments on Christmas, asking why politicians wouldn’t want to give Americans $2000.

“Made many calls and had meetings at Trump International in Palm Beach, Florida,” Trump said after a round of golf on Friday. "Why would politicians not want to give people $2000, rather than only $600? It wasn’t their fault, it was China. Give our people the money!”

Made many calls and had meetings at Trump International in Palm Beach, Florida. Why would politicians not want to give people $2000, rather than only $600? It wasn’t their fault, it was China. Give our people the money!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 25, 2020
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a rare moment of agreement with the president, tweeted, “at last, the President has agreed to $2,000 – Democrats are ready to bring this to the Floor this week by unanimous consent. Let’s do it!”

House Republicans blocked Democrats’ attempt to raise the direct payment from $600 to $2000 by unanimous consent on Thursday… Now, the fate of the direct payments, along with the rest of the package, remains uncertain until at least next week when Congress is back in session.

More: $2,000 stimulus checks in limbo as Congress unable to agree on COVID relief payments

In addition to wanting to increase the direct payments, Trump called on Congress to “get rid of the wasteful and unnecessary items from this legislation, and to send me a suitable bill,” in his Tuesday video.

In that same video shared on Twitter, Trump not only suggested he wouldn’t sign the bipartisan stimulus package, but that he might veto the $1.4 trillion spending bill attached to the relief bill if the direct payments aren’t increased.

Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have been trying to salvage the year-end legislation to try to prevent a shutdown.

Democrats will call House lawmakers back to Washington for a vote Monday on Trump’s $2,000 proposal, though it would probably die in the Republican-controlled Senate. They are also considering a vote Monday on a stop-gap measure at least to avert a federal shutdown and keep the government running until Biden is inaugurated Jan. 20.

© Copyright Gannett 2020

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POLITICO

WHITE HOUSE

Trump rails at Justice Dept., Supreme Court as stimulus bill deadline nears
The president took aim at the FBI and DOJ for not pursuing baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.

On the day millions of Americans left unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic prepare to lose benefits, President Donald Trump publicly aired his grievances with federal law enforcement agencies and the Supreme Court.

In a tweetstorm beginning early Saturday morning, Trump railed against the the Department of Justice and U.S. attorney John Durham for failing to produce a report that exposed wrongdoing in the FBI’s Russia probe.

“Where the hell is the Durham Report? They spied on my campaign, colluded with Russia (and others), and got caught,” Trump tweeted without providing any evidence to back his claims.

The president then took aim at the FBI and DOJ for not pursuing baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, saying the agencies “should be ashamed” for the lack of action against what he deemed “the biggest SCAM” in U.S. history.

Attorney General Bill Barr, who appointed Durham as a special counsel to investigate the origins of the FBI’s Russia investigation, left the Justice Dept. on Wednesday after falling out of favor with Trump for not supporting the president’s claims of widespread voter fraud or releasing Durham’s report before the November election.

Trump also took aim at the Supreme Court, calling it “totally incompetent and weak” and again questioning why it wouldn’t hear a suit filed by Texas claiming election fraud, effectively ending legal challenges to the electoral process.

“See everyone in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump added, alluding to the date when some of his most ardent supporters in the House prepare to mount a long-shot challenge to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s win while Congress counts the Electoral College votes. In a previous tweet, he accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republicans of having “NO FIGHT!”

Later Saturday, Trump continued to urge Republican senators to challenge the Electoral College vote counts, citing a litany of disproved claims about election fraud.

Meanwhile, the future of a roughly $900 billion coronavirus relief package, which would provide millions of households with direct payments and enhanced federal unemployment benefits, remains in question over the president’s objections.

Trump threatened to veto the relief on Tuesday if Congress didn’t increase the size of stimulus checks and gut provisions that he considered wasteful — a position he didn’t appear to back down from on Saturday.

“I simply want to get out great people $2000, rather than the measly $600 that is now in the bill. Also, stop the billions of dollars in ‘pork,’” Trump said.

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

top intelligence brass came out to say that there is credible worry that Trump’s last resort will be to wag some international dog in a big way.

Confirmation of this is patently obvious by the department of defense’s dragging their feet to accommodate transition, by sharing top secret national security issues with the Biden team.

"CORONAVIRUS

One year since coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, Americans there look home
“I would be very afraid if I were living in the States,” Benjamin Wilson, an American who has lived in Wuhan for almost two decades, said.

1 year after Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, new questions emerge

WUHAN, China — Benjamin Wilson, a Louisiana native who lives in the Chinese city where the Covid-19 virus was first identified a year ago, is watching the unfolding crisis back home with disappointment.

“I would be very afraid if I were living in the States,” said Wilson, who has lived in Wuhan, the sprawling capital of Hubei province, for almost two decades. “I didn’t really think that I would be where I’m at now, worried more about my family than myself.”

The contrast between his homeland and his adopted home is stark, the English teacher said. Although he endured more than 70 days of strict lockdown, that at times made him feel almost “imprisoned,” being shuttered indoors was a sacrifice that has paid off, he said.

Now, Wuhan is “one of the safest places in the world,” he added.

More than 338,000 people have died from the coronavirus in the United States so far, more than anywhere else in the world and more Americans than were killed in battle during World War II, according to data from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

While many health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have warned the outbreak in the U.S. is only set to get worse.

President Donald Trump’s government has been criticized for bungling the response to the public health crisis that has defined 2020. Trump held mask-free gatherings, appeared to promote unproven virus treatments, and later tested positive himself.

Trump has maintained that he took early steps to stem the spread of the virus, including barring entry to some foreigners, among them those travelling from China. Despite this, America remains out front with both the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths on the planet.

NEWS

Chinese woman jailed for four years for accounts from Wuhan as pandemic began
Wuhan, meanwhile, mass tested its entire population of 11 million in June and has recently begun vaccinating key groups in the city, according to state media.

In China overall, a country of some 1.4 billion people, the government says the virus has killed over 4,600 people, the majority in Wuhan — although experts say the statistics should be treated with caution.

Earlier this week, a national study of blood anti-bodies showed that more than 4 percent of Wuhan’s 11 million people may have been exposed to the coronavirus — 10 times the number recorded officially by mid-April.

It’s undeniable, however, that the virus has exacted a much more devastating toll on America.

Epidemic ‘well handled’
One year later, Wuhan’s streets are humming with activity. A new exhibition filled with photos and interactive displays that pay tribute to how Wuhan fought the virus has attracted thousands of visitors.

Meanwhile, residents say they have government authorities to thank for the return of quotidian life.

People wearing protective masks walk through a street market almost a year after the start of the coronavirus disease outbreak, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China.Aly Song / Reuters
“Now that the epidemic has been well-handled, our lives gradually are getting back on the normal track,” a retiree, Yang Xiuhua, 67, told NBC News.

China funneled national resources and expertise into the city, mobilizing nearly 43,000 medical staff from January to March, according to the state-owned Global Times, in the country’s largest medical support operation since 1949.

But the specter of the virus still looms in Wuhan. Li Chuanbi, 70, said that while he can now exercise in the park and meet with friends, he remains cautious.

“It’d be a lie if I tell you I’m not concerned,” he said. “People are worried that the pandemic will come back.”

Many in Wuhan still don masks and businesses check temperatures and offer sanitizer, in this city hugging the Yangtze River. But shops and restaurants are buzzing, schools are open and streets crowded once again.

Startling photos demonstrating the swift bounce back have gone viral on social media.

People enjoy a music party inside a swimming pool at the Wuhan Maya Beach Park, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China in August.Reuters file
One depicted swimmers packed inside a Wuhan water park, as a DJ took to the stage — an arresting image from the original virus epicenter, as Covid-19 continues to upend life for billions around the world.

Not without criticism
Still, China’s handling of the pandemic has not been without fierce criticism.

The timeline of early eventshas faced intense scrutiny, and raised questions about whether Beijing acted quickly enough to alert the World Health Organization to evidence of human transmission.

Map: Track coronavirus deaths around the world
The first clusters of an unexplained illness were reported to the WHO’s office in Beijing on Dec. 31. Detailed information about the “viral-pneumonia of unknown cause” was provided Jan. 3, according to the WHO, with 44 patients identified.

Reports also emerged that the ruling Chinese Communist Party suppressed information about the virus, with police disciplining a doctor, Li Wenliang, after he raised alarms in a chat group. Li later died of Covid-19, sparking a public outcry. The government posthumously hailed him a “martyr.”

On Jan. 23, local authorities sealed off Wuhan, while other parts of China were also locked down. The drastic response seemingly worked, as the city unlocked months later in April.

Another casualty of the coronavirus has been the already fractious U.S.-China relations, with the pandemic accelerating their decline.

Trump has accused the WHO of acting as a “puppet of China” and failing to adequately warn the world about the virus, claims the global health body denies. In July, the U.S. officially notified the United Nations of its withdrawal from the WHO.

Trump has further fueled resentment, often through racist rhetoric, by referring to the pathogen as the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus.”

Revisiting Wuhan nearly one year since the first Covid cases were reported
The White House has also cast aspersions, without providing proof, that the virus may have been manufactured or accidentally leaked from a Wuhan lab, claims China denies.

In January 2021, the WHO will lead a mission of 10 international Covid-19 investigators into China, with a visit to Wuhan scheduled, officials from the health body said. Among other issues, the fact-finding mission will probe into the origins of the virus.

However, with divisions over trade to technology, relations between the world’s two biggest economies have plummeted since the outbreak. In September, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned Washington and Beijing to “do everything to avoid a new Cold War.”

‘Horror story’
Amid the worsening relations between the two superpowers, Christopher Suzanne, an American, said he “unequivocally” made the right choice to return to Wuhan during the pandemic, as several of his family members in the U.S. have since contracted the virus.

The 34-year-old teacher who has lived in Wuhan since 2009, returned to the city with his family in March after baptizing his infant son in upstate New York.

“Just the feeling of being in Wuhan, it’s like it’s such a success story in the middle of a horror story,” he told NBC News.

“For the family, it was extremely difficult saying goodbye, not knowing when or how I’d be able to go home and see them again. But the decision in my heart was very easy,” he said, eager to return to his wife’s family in Wuhan.

Although the lockdown was tough on his mental health, Suzanne said he is now back at work and feels life is returning to normal.

But he acknowledged the virus had soured relations between Washington and Beijing.

Looking at the U.S. from a distance, Suzanne said his American compatriots seemed “so divided,” that whoever was in the White House was irrelevant, if people couldn’t agree on the basics of whether to wear a mask.

“I worry about my family,” he said. “That takes a toll on me.”

NBC News Digital.

"
POLITICO

2020 ELECTIONS

Pence declined to back Gohmert-led effort to upend election, lawyers indicate
Rep. Louie Gohmert is pressing to throw out long-established procedures so that the president will win another term.

Mike Pence speaks during the eighth meeting of the National Space Council.
Vice President Mike Pence is expected to preside over the certification of the Electoral College results Jan. 6. | John Raoux/AP

12/29/2020 05:41 PM EST

Lawyers for Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and Arizona’s 11 Republican electors revealed Tuesday that Vice President Mike Pence declined to sign onto their plan to upend Congress’ certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

It’s the first indication that Pence is resisting some of the most extreme calls to reverse the presidential election results, thus relying on his role as the presiding officer on Jan. 6, when Congress meets to finalize Biden’s win.

Gohmert and the Arizona electors sued Pence this week to throw out the procedures that Congress has relied upon since 1889 to count electoral votes. Instead, he said, Pence has the unilateral authority to determine which electors should be voted upon by Congress — raising the prospect that Pence would simply override the choices made by voters in states like Arizona and Pennsylvania that Biden won, to introduce President Donald Trump’s electors instead.

But in a motion to expedite proceedings, Gohmert and the electors revealed that their lawyers had reached out to Pence’s counsel in the Office of the Vice President to attempt to reach agreement before going to court.

“In the teleconference, Plaintiffs’ counsel made a meaningful attempt to resolve the underlying legal issues by agreement, including advising the Vice President’s counsel that Plaintiffs intended to seek immediate injunctive relief in the event the parties did not agree,” according to Gohmert’s filing. “Those discussions were not successful in reaching an agreement and this lawsuit was filed.”

On Tuesday evening, U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Kernodle of the Eastern District of Texas agreed to partially grant the request for an expedited schedule, calling for Pence to issue a response to the lawsuit by Dec. 31 at 5 p.m. and for Gohmert to issue a reply to Pence by Jan. 1 at 9 a.m. Kernodle did not agree to hold a hearing though and said none would be scheduled “absent further notice from the Court.” Kernodle also ordered Gohmert and his fellow plaintiffs to immediately send a copy of the order to an attorney for Pence, the Department of Justice, and the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas.

Gohmert and the electors told Kernodle they needed an expedited schedule that would result in a ruling no later than Jan. 4, so they have an opportunity to appeal ahead of the Jan. 6 session of Congress.

Pence still has not publicly weighed in on his plans for presiding over the Jan. 6 session, when Congress will count electoral votes expected to certify Biden’s victory. He also has not publicly commented on Trump’s repeated calls to reverse the results of the democratic process and install himself for a second term.

Gohmert’s attorneys in the case, some of whom have handled some of Trump’s lawsuits intended to overturn Biden’s victory in key swing states, indicated they’ve since been in touch with lawyers in the civil division of the Department of Justice about the administration’s formal response to the suit. Further calls were scheduled for later Tuesday.

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

In an extraordinary conference call this morning with fellow Senate Republicans, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said his Jan. 6 vote certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election will be “the most consequential I have ever cast,” according to a source on a call and two other sources briefed on the private remarks.

The big picture: The conference call came in the wake of Sen. Josh Hawley defying McConnell’s wishes and publicly declaring that he’ll object to certifying the electoral votes in Pennsylvania and perhaps in other states as well.

McConnell had previously urged senators not to force this vote, which he believed would put Republicans up for re-election in 2022 in a horrible position — forcing them to choose between defying the most popular politician in the party, Donald Trump, and undermining democracy.
His remarks to his conference are likely to escalate President Trump’s anger with him for daring acknowledge Trump’s defeat.
Behind the scenes: McConnell said on the call that the Jan. 6 vote is “a vote of conscience,” these sources said.

A source paraphrased McConnell as saying, “I’m finishing 36 years in the Senate and I’ve cast a lot of big votes.” including over war and impeachment.
“And in my view, just my view,” McConnell said, “this is will be the most consequential I have ever cast.”
“The context was McConnell saying we’re being asked to overturn the results after a guy didn’t get as many electoral votes and lost by 7 million popular votes,” the source said.
Between the lines: Many Republican senators are furious at Hawley for forcing them to take what Trump is setting up as the ultimate loyalty test on January 6th.

On the call, McConnell asked Hawley to explain what he planned to do on Jan. 6, said a source on the call.
Then, Indiana Sen. Todd Young pressed Hawley on which states he planned to contest, and Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey defended the integrity of his state’s elections.
There was just one problem: They were met with silence. Hawley hadn’t dialed into the conference call — a fact first reported by Politico’s Alex Isenstadt.

What’s next: Hawley has no plans to back down from his decision to object to the certification of the electoral votes — a ploy destined to fail on Jan. 6.

Hawley has been fundraising off of his planned objection to the election results, and this afternoon he emailed his Senate colleagues explaining his reasoning and copy-pasting a public press release he issued the day before to announce his decision.
In his email to his colleagues, Hawley made clear he was responding to pressures from his constituents.
“If you’ve been speaking to folks at home, I’m sure you know how deeply angry and disillusioned many, many people are — and how frustrated that Congress has taken little or no action,” he wrote.

Dec 30, 2020 - Politics & Policy

GOP Sen. Josh Hawley says he will object to Electoral College certification

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said in a statement Wednesday that he will object to the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory during the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, alleging that some states failed to follow their election laws and that Big Tech interfered on behalf of Biden.

Why it matters: Hawley is the first senator to say he will object to the certification, joining a group of House Republicans. Biden will still be certified the winner, but the move will force Senate Republicans to go on the record on whether they agree with Trump’s baseless allegations — many of which have been thrown out in court — that there was widespread election fraud.

Politics & Policy

Sasse: “Ambitious” Republicans objecting to Electoral College “are playing with fire”
Photo: Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said he “will not be participating” in an effort in Congress to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, writing on Facebook that he has been urging “colleagues also to reject this dangerous ploy.”

Driving the news: Sasse’s post comes a day after Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) became the first senator to say he will object to the Electoral College certification, joining a group of House Republicans.

Trump attacks No. 2 Senate Republican as the President turns on allies in his final days in office

(CNN)President Donald Trump is spending his final days in office attacking leadership within his own party, this time the second-highest ranking Republican in the Senate, offering a possible preview of his broader post-presidential strategy to use his influence in the 2022 midterm elections and beyond.

Trump, back at the White House after his Mar-a-Lago holiday with no public events on his schedule, attacked Sen. John Thune, a South Dakotan who is the No. 2 Senate Republican, in an afternoon tweet on New Year’s Day.

“I hope to see the great Governor of South Dakota @KristiNoem, run against RINO @SenJohnThune, in the upcoming 2022 Primary. She would do a fantastic job in the U.S. Senate, but if not Kristi, others are already lining up. South Dakota wants strong leadership, NOW!” he wrote in a tweet.

Trump has railed against Republican leadership broadly multiple times this week, but this time is naming names. Thune, the Senate majority whip, had been one of the top Republicans to speak in favor of accepting the Electoral College results and President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, drawing Trump’s ire.

“Once somebody gets 270, I understand they’re ruling right now, but I think that’s the process we have, yes. … In the end at some point you have to face the music. And I think once the Electoral College settles the issue today, it’s time for everybody to move on,” Thune said ahead of the formal electoral college voting process last month.

Trump’s tweet comes just 19 days before he leaves the White House and days before a joint session of Congress is set to formally certify the Electoral College results, with some Trump allies planning to join his baseless efforts to overturn the results of the election.

At least 140 House Republicans to vote against counting electoral votes, two GOP lawmakers say
At least 140 House Republicans to vote against counting electoral votes, two GOP lawmakers say
The President returned to Washington ahead of the January 6 event, when as many as 140 House Republicans, joined by at least one senator, Missouri Republican Josh Hawley, could vote to throw out electoral votes in key swing states Trump lost. Trump praised Hawley in a tweet Thursday evening.

On Friday, Hawley told reporters he has yet to decide how many states’ Electoral College results he plans to object to, saying, “I haven’t worked out the mechanism yet.”

Several of Hawley’s Republican colleagues expressed concern Friday over his plans, and the impact such a move could have on American democracy. Retiring Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said he thinks Hawley’s planned objection is a mistake, while Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, a vocal Trump critic, said that “spreading this kind of rumor about our election system not working is dangerous for Democracy here and abroad.”

McConnell, who called the congressional certification “the most consequential vote” of his career, would not answer Friday when asked by CNN if he was considering any sanctions or punishments against the freshman senator if he goes through with the challenge that GOP leaders have strongly opposed.

Thune told reporters on Friday that “this is an issue that’s incredibly consequential, incredibly rare historically, and very precedent setting. So, our members are – this is a big vote, they’re thinking about it.”

“I think now that we’re locked in to do it, we’ll give air to the objections and people can have their day in court and we’ll hear everybody out and we’ll vote,” he continued. “Like I said, I think in the end, I don’t think anything changes.”

McConnell called Hawley out over Electoral College objection during conference call Hawley wasn't on
McConnell called Hawley out over Electoral College objection during conference call Hawley wasn’t on
“We are letting people vote their conscience,” Thune said, with several Republican members saying there’s not much they can do to stop Hawley from objecting.

Trump is already beginning to preview how he’ll spend his post-presidency. In recent days, he has suggested Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who he had endorsed and had been a loyal Trump ally until the November vote, resign because he would not help overturn Biden’s win in that state. He has also repeatedly attacked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, another Republican who he had endorsed during the 2018 midterms.

The President has raised hundreds of millions of dollars since the November 3 election, a majority of which goes directly to a new fundraising leadership PAC, Save America, that is expected to aide him in donating to other candidates and political pursuits as he considers a potential presidential bid in 2024.

With this tweet, Trump is already planting the idea that he would support candidates offering primary challenges to current House and Senate Republicans he sees as disloyal.

For her part, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a top Trump ally, said last week that she would not pursue the Senate seat.

“@johnthune is a friend of mine, and I will not be challenging him. I’m honored to be Governor of South Dakota and will ask the people to give me an opportunity to continue serving them as Governor in 2022,” she wrote.

Analysis: It’s a new year but the politics of 2020 aren’t going away
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska blasted Trump for encouraging a 2022 primary challenge against Thune. She told CNN on Friday, “I think it’s quite interesting that he has demanded a loyalty test from so many Republicans and then when they are loyal to him – and there is one incident, one statement – and he is the first one to throw those loyal individuals under the bus. That’s not loyalty as I know loyalty.”

As a key member of the GOP leadership team, Thune has done much to advance Trump’s causes on Capitol Hill – from passage of tax cuts and other legislation, confirmations of Supreme Court nominees and numerous other judges, as well as critical acquittal votes during Trump’s Senate impeachment trial – even if he has spoken out occasionally about some of the President’s most controversial acts.

For his part, Thune shrugged off the presidential tweet with laughter.

“Yeah, well, finally an attack tweet. What took him so long?” a calm and soft-spoken Thune told reporters as he was leaving the Capitol after the vote to override Trump’s veto of the defense bill. “It’s fine, that’s the way he communicates.”

Thune said there has been no effort to patch things up with the President: “No, I’m not sure what I did to be deserving of all that but that’s, that’s fine. Like I said, I’m not sure that if anything changes his mind once he makes it up.”

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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"

DONALD TRUMP

Trump throws grenades into high-stakes Georgia Senate runoffs in final stretch
More uncertainty was added on Saturday after 11 Republican senators said they’d reject electors from certain states unless a commission is established to investigate the results.

Jan. 2, 2021, 6:52 PM EST

CUMMING, Ga. — Outgoing President Donald Trump is throwing one grenade after another into the high-stakes Georgia Senate runoffs in the final days before the Tuesday election.

And it’s not clear who the victims of his proverbial bombs will be.

First it was his refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election, which muddied his party’s message here about the need to keep the Senate in Republican hands. Then he blamed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in the chamber for refusing to pass $2,000 stimulus checks, compelling Sen. David Perdue and Sen. Kelly Loeffler to switch their positions on the issue to align with him.

He also described the “Republican Senate” as “pathetic” for rebuffing his demands to repeal an internet liability law known as Section 230 in a military bill vote that Perdue and Loeffler missed.

On Friday, Trump falsely claimed that the entire 2020 election in Georgia, including the two Senate races, were “illegal and invalid.” On Saturday, Trump again cast doubt on the legitimacy of the state’s election system.

His recent series of tweets came moments after Loeffler urged rally-goers in this suburb of Atlanta to vote and urge people they know across the state to vote.

“We’ve got to hold the line,” she said. “We’re the firewall to stopping socialism in America.”

The impact of Trump’s bomb-throwing is unpredictable in the highly polarized environment of a competitive state and an off-year election. His outlandish claims appear to have energized voters in both parties and, with polls showing both races neck-and-neck, it’s not clear which side will come out on top. Trump is scheduled to rally for Perdue and Loeffler on Monday night in the city of Dalton.

The runoffs on Tuesday will shape President-elect Joe Biden’s administration. If Democrats win both seats they’ll wrest control of the Senate and set the agenda. If at least one of the two Republican incumbents wins, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., will have a pocket veto over Biden’s legislative agenda, top administration personnel and judicial appointments.

“Tuesday is it. Tuesday is everything,” Jon Ossoff, the Democratic candidate facing Perdue, said at a campaign stop in Stone Mountain, just outside Atlanta. “And the work that you are doing today to mobilize the community to get out and vote will make the difference.”

As Ossoff boasts a packed schedule, Perdue has been forced off the campaign trail, saying Thursday he’ll quarantine after coming in “close contact” with a member of his team who has Covid-19. He expects to miss Trump’s rally on Monday, he told Fox News.

Rich McCormick, the 2020 Republican nominee for this city’s congressional district who narrowly lost to a Democrat, said “there is a danger” that Trump’s attacks on Republicans who run the Senate could hurt Perdue and Loeffler politically.

DONALD TRUMP

Trump throws grenades into high-stakes Georgia Senate runoffs in final stretch
“His ability to excite people is what got him elected,” McCormick told reporters after rallying here with Loeffler and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. “He’s trying to get people who would normally show up just for him to show up for them, and I think that’s a good thing.”

The Georgia races were thrown into more uncertainty on Saturday after 11 Republican senators announced they would reject electors from certain states unless a commission is established to investigate the election results — part of a last-ditch effort by Trump’s allies to overturn the election result.

The effort on Jan. 6 is virtually guaranteed to fail, as the senators conceded in a joint statement. Perdue’s term will have briefly lapsed by then, regardless of the election outcome, so he won’t participate. Loeffler declined to say how she’ll vote, telling reporters that “everything’s on the table right now” and vowed to “keep fighting for this president.”

Her Democratic rival, Raphael Warnock, tore into her.

“We keep reaching new lows. This is outrageous and it’s outrageous that the sitting un-elected senator of Georgia, Kelly Loeffler, is not standing up for the voices of people in Georgia,” Warnock said. “We have a democratic system. And the most powerful four words are, the people have spoken.”

The effort to block the counting of some electoral votes won by President-elect Joe Biden was blasted by numerous Republicans, including Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey and Utah Sen. Mitt Romney. McConnell has urged GOP senators not to participate in the effort.

Later on Saturday, Trump tagged McConnell in a tweet pressuring Congress to pass $2,000 payments, citing a Republican pollster who said they are popular. It again undercut the GOP message on Senate control.

McCormick described Trump as the political equivalent of a character played by Adam Sandler in a popular 1996 movie.

“He’s kind of like the Happy Gilmore of golf. He’s the guy who’s not supposed to be there, who has an amazing unorthodox following,” McCormick said. “Here’s this guy who can just drive the long ball, but all of a sudden he’s for real. And he wins.”

© 2020 NBC UNIVERSAL

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Related video: Ex-Pence aide turned Trump critic ‘very concerned’ about 6 January violence

Mike Pence welcomes Republican senators’ attempt to overturn US election
The 12 GOP figures join 140 members in House who say they will object to certification of results

Mike Pence has said he welcomes an attempt by Republican senators’ to overturn the US election.

Ted Cruz is among 12 GOP senators who say they are preparing to challenge the results of the election in a joint session of Congress next week.

The Texas representative leads a group of 11 politicians who say they will not certify the election results unless there is a 10-day “emergency audit” of the results, in support of Donald Trump. Separately, Josh Hawley of Missouri plans his own challenge.

The outgoing president has refused to concede the election and made a string of false and debunked claims about election fraud in battleground states.

These false claims have been rejected by judges across the country, and Mr Trump and his backers have not provided any evidence to back their many discredited lawsuits. The election results have been ratified by every state and the former head of the federal government’s cyber security unit described it as the “most secure” poll in US history.

Cruz leads 12 GOP senators to demand ‘emergency audit’ of election
George Clooney mocks Ted Cruz for supporting Trump despite wife slur
Walmart apologizes for tweet calling Sen. Hawley sore loser
Trump election lawyer calls for Pence to be ‘executed by firing squad’
“Vice president Pence shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud and irregularities in the last election," said Mr Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short in a statement hours after Mr Cruz announced his group’s intentions.

“The vice president welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on 6 January.”

Mr Cruz is being joined by Ron Johnson, James Lankford, Steve Daines, John Kennedy, Marsha Blackburn, Mike Braun, as well as Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis, Roger Marshall, Bill Hagerty, and Tommy Tuberville.

Together the 11 senators claimed, without providing new evidence, that the election “featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud and illegal conduct”. Mr Trump tweeted approvingly in response, writing: “Our country will love them for it! #StopTheSteal”.

Members of the House of Representatives and the US Senate will meet in joint session at 1pm ET on 6 January in the House Chamber.

Mr Pence will preside in his role as president of the Senate and leaders of both parties will appoint lawmakers from both chambers to act as “tellers.”

Mr Pence will open certificates of the electoral vote from each state and they are handed to the tellers.

Any objection to the vote must be made in writing and endorsed by at least one member of the House and Senate.

Debate on any objection is limited to two hours and a majority vote is required in each chamber to uphold the objection and throw out the state’s votes.

If that is not achieved the objection is disposed of and the electoral votes are counted as cast.

Mr Cruz has become an outspoken supporter of Mr Trump, despite their public clashes since 2016. Mr Trump infamously questioned the attractiveness of Mr Cruz’s wife, Heidi, on Twitter, and even once asked if the senator’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination.

As many as 140 House Republicans are expected to also object to the election results. It is unlikely to make any difference to the outcome, as Joe Biden’s win is almost guaranteed to be certified by majorities in the Democratic House and Republican Senate.

Observers say that the move is the first effort by potential 2024 Republican presidential candidates to position themselves and win approval from Mr Trump, if he decides against running for the White House again.

Pennsylvania’s Republican senator, Pat Toomey, has criticised his GOP colleagues. “The senators justify their intent by observing that there have been many allegations of fraud. But allegations of fraud by a losing campaign cannot justify overturning an election," said Mr Toomey.

Senator Mitt Romney was similarly displeased, saying in a statement: “The egregious ploy to reject electors may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our democratic republic.

"The congressional power to reject electors is reserved for the most extreme and unusual circumstances. These are far from it. More Americans participated in this election than ever before, and they made their choice.

"President Trump’s lawyers made their case before scores of courts; in every instance, they failed. The Justice Department found no evidence of irregularity sufficient to overturn the election.

“The Presidential Voter Fraud Commission disbanded without finding such evidence.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski, from Alaska, also said she would vote to back the results of the 2020 election, adding: “The courts and state legislatures have all honored their duty to hear legal allegations and have found nothing to warrant overturning the results.

“I urge my colleagues from both parties to recognize this and to join me in maintaining confidence in the electoral college and our elections.”