11/21/20: A weekend calm settles over the
White House. At 8 a.m., Trump manages to participate in a “Virtual 2020 G20 Summit,”
from the White House Situation Room. Let’s hope none of the other world leaders
made fun of the lame duck by fake “quacking” under their breathe.
We learn, however, that within thirteen minutes the
president lost interest in the Zoom-style meeting. He went back to tweeting
about how he was being cheated out of a second term.
When other G20 leaders broke for a special session on the global
pandemic, Trump decided not to participate at all.
Instead, he called on his Secret Service detail and off they went
to his private resort in Potomac Falls, Virginia for another round of golf:
Round # 311 since Trump took office –
and swore he would be too busy
working for the American people as president to ever play golf.
Like that bum, Obama (333 rounds in two full terms).
 |
Trump can't face facts. |
*
VARIOUS “fake news” organizations spend time compiling examples
of growing concern in Republican circles.
This is sometimes known as, “reporters going out to find
quotes.”
____________________
“It is difficult to image a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting
American President.”
Sen.
Mitt Romney
____________________
Sen. Lamar Alexander, chair of the
influential Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, tells
reporters,
If there is any chance whatsoever that Joe Biden will be
the next president, and it looks like he has a very good chance, the Trump
Administration should provide the Biden team with all transition materials,
resources, and meetings necessary to ensure a smooth transition so that both
sides are ready on day one. That especially should be true, for example, on
vaccine distribution.
Three Republican members of the U.S. House go on record. When asked about Trump’s efforts
to overturn election results, Rep. Kay Granger, a veteran Texas lawmaker, tells
CNN she has “great concerns about it,” adding, “I think that it’s time to move
on.” Granger insists Trump should be transparent about the situation. “I think
it’s time for him to really realize and be very clear about what’s going on,” she
said.
When asked if Trump should
concede, Fred Upton, a senior Michigan Republican who was targeted by Democrats
but won reelection by 16 points, said, “Yeah. I think it’s all said and done.”
What about voter fraud in his
home state? “No one has seen any real identification of any real fraud,”
Upton said.
Even more to the point – long term – Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois
Republican, said he worried that Trump’s claims were shaking the core of
democracy. “What I have a real issue with is making unfounded claims of
fraud and illegitimacy,” Kinzinger said. “And that has a real damaging effect.”
Referencing the president’s ploys
to convince Michigan election officials to do his bidding, and just give him
the state’s electoral votes, Sen. Mitt Romney is brutally honest:
Having failed to make even a plausible case
of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has
now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will
of the people and overturn the election. It is difficult to image a worse, more
undemocratic action by a sitting American President.
Stephen
Saltzburg, who served in the Justice Department during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush
administrations, and now serves as a professor at the George Washington
University School of Law, told ABC that what was happening was a scandal. “If
any other president were to have ever attempted what this president has been
doing, people would begin to look at conspiracy to violate election laws.”
It’s very
dangerous that we’re undermining the system.
Reporters
for The Hill applied a little shoe leather and tracked down a number of concerned Republicans.
“This is delusional,” Mark Braden, the former chief counsel at
the Republican National Committee admitted. “I’m a professional Republican so
it’s not easy for me to have to deal with my friends on this. Look – voter fraud occurs. I’ve seen it. It happens. But you have to be
realistic about the size and scope of it.”
Republican lawyers told reporters that Trump’s “early legal
challenges on voter fraud were defensible and reasonable, even if they had no
chance of changing the outcome of the election.” Now, they admit to being “disturbed
by the dark turn things have taken,” and worry that Trump’s claims were “undermining
democracy and misleading millions of his own supporters [emphasis added].”
Braden, for one, had no use for the bizarre argument put forward
earlier this week, by Rudy Giuliani and the rest of Trump’s current legal team.
“The Venezuelans didn’t screw around with the voting machines,” he grimaced.
That’s
100 percent total nonsense. I don’t know what’s going on here. It’s very
dangerous that we’re undermining the system. Democracy isn’t a God-given right.
It’s a fragile process. The two most important things are that the person with
the most lawful votes wins, and that the people who voted for the losing side
also believe their candidate lost. This is undermining that idea and it’s a
dangerous thing.
Sen. Ben Sasse mocked the president’s attorneys making an
allegation of “grand fraud” but so far refusing to make the claim in front of a
judge. “When Trump campaign lawyers have stood before courts under oath, they
have repeatedly refused to actually allege grand fraud because there are legal
consequences for lying to judges,” Sasse explained.
Support for the president’s scorched earth defense of his
“victory,” was beginning to wear thin. The editorial board at the Las Vegas
Review-Journal, which endorsed Trump twice and is owned by billionaire GOP megadonor
Sheldon Adelson, said the president was doing a “disservice to his more
rabid supporters by insisting that he would
have won the Nov. 3 election absent voter fraud.”
The editorial board at the Rupert Murdoch-owned New
York Post called on Mr. Trump to “stop the stolen election rhetoric” and to
“get Rudy Giuliani off TV.”
Rep. Anthony
Gonzalez (R-Ohio) described the recent Giuliani press conference as “embarrassing,”
and said comments from Sidney Powell undermined voters’ confidence in the
democratic process. He argued that the president’s lawyers needed to hold “real
investigations” focused on “real claims. Not whatever it was Sidney Powell was
talking about.”
Gonzalez was aghast. “I mean the
Sidney Powell claims were, I don’t even know how to describe it, I mean they
were beyond the pale,” he told The Hill. “If you’re going to allege
that communists’ money and Hugo Chavez rigged the Dominion voting system to
overturn millions of votes over decades, you better have sufficient proof, and
I didn’t see anything that was even close to that.”
“So, that was disappointing
because at the end of the day, what we really need to do is build confidence
in our electoral process,” he continued. “That’s what we have to do,
because this will now be the second election in a row where one side of the
aisle is going to be heavily disputing your outcome, and that’s not healthy.”
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, GOP strategist Karl
Rove, who has been close to the top brass at the Trump campaign, was frank. “This
election won’t be overturned,” he said.
Jonathan Turley, the constitutional scholar who
defended the president during impeachment hearings in the House may regret what
he said at the time. That is, he did not think Trump’s conduct involving his
pressure on Ukraine merited removal from office. “They’re claiming to have
evidence,” he said of the president’s legal team now, “but that evidence has
not been filed. They’ve filed a large number of affidavits stating voting
irregularities, but they haven’t filed anything to support these sweeping
claims about an international conspiracy. That’s what’s breathtaking.”
Reporters kept asking. Top Republicans started
to answer. Rep. Liz Cheney said it was time for
Trump’s legal team to start producing evidence.
She explained:
America is governed by the rule of law. The President and his
lawyers have made claims of criminality and widespread fraud, which they allege
could impact election results. If they have genuine evidence of this, they are
obligated to present it immediately in court and to the American people.
I understand that the President has filed more than thirty
separate lawsuits. If he is unsatisfied with the results in those lawsuits,
then the appropriate avenue is to appeal. If the President cannot prove these
claims or demonstrate that they would change the election result, he
should fulfill his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the
United States by respecting the sanctity of our electoral process.
He should. But of course, this is Donald Trump,
so he hasn’t. For eighteen straight days, and counting, he has devoted his main
efforts as president to claiming he was electorally screwed.
Meanwhile, the usual sycophants could be
trusted to slobber in defense of a president who had not provided any evidence
yet in court. Asked on Thursday if his state should delay certifying the
election, Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar told CNN: “I believe it should.” Gosar said
the “state has the ability” to name its own electors to the Electoral College
if results aren’t certified as part of the “system set up by our founders.”
When asked if he supported the idea of the legislature
naming its own electors, Gosar said: “I do.”
(When
last we checked, Arizona returns showed Joe Biden with
1,672,143 votes, to Trump’s 1,661,686.)
POSTSCRIPT: Since I’m not suffering from any mental illness, I’m having trouble getting past some of the dangerous claims that the Trump campaign and Trump sycophants and
Trump himself have already made. One favorite was a story that the U.S.
Army had raided the office of a Spanish election software company Scytl in
Frankfurt, Germany. There they supposedly seized several computer servers that
had evidence of voting irregularities in the recent U.S. election.
“Those
allegations are false.”
First, that story took a major hit when the U.S. Army denied
having raided any offices of any company in Frankfurt. When asked by the
Associated Press about the purported raid, and the Army’s “seizure” of mythical
servers, an Army spokesperson replied tersely, “Those allegations are false.”
Second, Scytl announced that it did not have any offices or
servers in the city, although it did do work there in 2019 for the European
Parliament.
Still, this was Team Trump, where no matter how absurd the
charge, that charge will be believed and spread through the ether. Social media
users Saturday began sharing reports that the servers, the ones U.S. military said
it didn’t confiscate, would reveal wrongdoing in the U.S. election. Right-wingers
hinted that the servers housed information from Dominion Voting Systems.
Who helped get this tall tale moving? None other than Rep.
Louie Gohmert of Texas. Louie is best known for insisting in the spring of
2015, that a plot was afoot in the Obama administration to use U.S. soldiers to
invade Texas. Somehow secret tunnels connected to abandoned Walmart stores were
involved. (The U.S. Army denied that far-fetched claim, too.)
In his remarks on the current story, Gohmert acknowledged
that the information about the alleged raid in Frankfurt came only from a
“German tweet in German,” and he admitted, “I don’t know the truth.”
He’d still be happy to spread the rumor!
The New York Times noted
that Gohmert talked to Charlie Kirk, a star in the right-wing
blogosphere. Kirk bought the story. Lin Wood, another right-wing name on
Twitter, amplified the tale, noting, “Biden & his criminal cronies are not
going to sleep well tonight. Well, Biden might, because he probably forgot the
name Scytl. His co-conspirators know name well. They also know the name
Paragon, company which purchased Scytl in 10/20.”
In other words, the story was flawed at its heart, but Trump
and his looniest allies were happy to spread it, regardless.
