Republicans Are Destroying Democracy

Every Day Trump Repeatedly Emails His Supporters a Dangerous Message: Democracy Doesn’t Work

Overall, the GOP has refused to stand up against the anti-democratic lunacy of Trump’s efforts to nullify the results of a fair election.

21 Cowardly GOP Senators Show ‘Extreme Contempt’ For Trump But Only In Private

The senators, Bernstein tweeted, include the five who have congratulated Joe Biden on his election victory despite Trump’s refusal to concede: Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.).

Also included in Bernstein’s list are several Senate GOP leaders – though notably not Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – including Senate GOP Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) and his predecessor John Cornyn (R-Tex.), Senate GOP No. 4 Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and newly elected NRSC Chair Rick Scott (R-Fla.).

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who Trump mocked as “little Marco” when they faced off in the 2016 campaign but who has since become a firm Trump backerin public, is on the list, though Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who sustained some of Trump’s harshest attacksin 2016, is not.

Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) Pat Roberts (R-Kans.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who have broken with Trump in either calling forthe transition to start or for Biden to receive classified intelligence briefings, are on the list.

The list also includes Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the Senate GOP’s only black member, outgoing Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), and Sens. Jerry Moran (R-Kans.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.).

Post Election Madness and Assholery

Board in key Michigan county fails, then agrees, to certify vote totals by deadline

Trump fires top DHS official who refuted his claims that the election was rigged

Ga. secretary of state says fellow Republicans are pressuring him to find ways to exclude ballots

Trump team looks to box in Biden on foreign policy by lighting too many fires to put out 

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin cuts off several Federal Reserve emergency aid programs, sparking unusual rebuke from Fed

Trump accuses Pfizer and Moderna of working to stop his re-election and again claimed falsely that he had ‘won’ the election

Fact-checking the craziest news conference of the Trump presidency (see pics below)

President Gutter Swill Still Won't Concede

Trump, the Absolute Worst Loser 

He has spent his life gaming the system, so it’s no surprise that he can’t accept defeat. 

By Charles M. Blow 

Nov. 15, 2020

 

Donald Trump lost the election. He knows it. But he won’t admit it. He still hopes and believes that there is a way for the courts to erase enough votes to tip the election in his favor. 

This will not happen. His legal challenges in swing states across the country are largely being met with defeat and setback. In court, you have to provide evidence. Lies, accusations and conspiracy theory don’t cut it. Trump has spent his life gaming the system. It is unfathomable to him that this system can’t be gamed. 

In the end, Trump hopes to push his case to the Supreme Court, where he has seated three conservative justices. That is also not likely to be a winning strategy. Trump believes he can use the judiciary as a weapon against the American people. The judiciary is not likely to allow itself to be used. 

Barring that, he is committed to destroying faith in the electoral process itself. If he didn’t win, he insists he must have been cheated because, in his mind, failure is not a possibility. Like he has done for the entirety of his presidency, he is lying, concocting a narrative detached from reality. 

His Twitter feed since the election — he has made precious few appearances or official statements during this time — has been an unprecedented attack on election integrity and the voting franchise as a whole. He keeps complaining that the election was rigged, that it was stolen from him, that computer software switched millions of votes from him to Joe Biden. 

On Sunday, in reference to Biden, he tweeted: “He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!” (snip)

After Republicans lost in 2012, they produced an autopsy report designed to grow the party. With Trump, they threw that out and doubled down on being the party of white grievance. 

This year’s election and Trump’s reaction to it is not likely to produce an autopsy but induce a séance. The Republican Party is dead. Trump killed it. MAGA is dancing on the grave. The way to remember that party is in spirit.

 

#25thAmendment Trending On Twitter As Trump Insists He Won The Election

Trump Is a Demonic Force

Damon Linker in The Week:

If I were still a believing Christian, I might be tempted to think that Donald Trump is Satan himself.

No, I don't mean that literally, but I do mean it seriously.

The idea of Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, a fallen angel, or demonic force who rises up in defiance of God, tempts human beings toward sin, inspiring evil, sowing chaos and disorder, tearing down good things, desecrating the beautiful, telling lies for the sheer thrill of spreading confusion and muddling minds — the pious believe such a being actually exists, wandering the world, intervening in lives, possessing bodies, polluting souls. But it's also possible to make use of the character as a metaphor, an idea, treating it as the fanciful creation of culture as it tries to make sense of something real in human experience. 

What is this something? It's more precisely a someone — the kind of person who delights in wreaking havoc, who acts entirely from his own interests, and whose interests are incompatible with received norms, standards, restraints, and laws. Someone who actively seeks to inspire anger and animus, who likes nothing more than provoking conflict all around him, both to create advantages for himself and because pulling everyone around him down to his own ignoble level soothes his nagging worry that someone, somewhere might be more widely admired. This is a person who lives for adulation without regard for whether the glory is earned. The louder the cheers, the better. That's all that counts. And so the only thing that's a threat is the prospect of the cheers going silent — of someone else rightfully winning the contest for public approval.

Donald Trump is the demon in American democracy.

A week ago, immediately following Election Day, I felt anxious. I'm a liberal-leaning centrist. I've written hundreds of columns lambasting Trump. I voted for Biden without a moment's hesitation. So I was disappointed to see that the outcome of the election was much closer in the Electoral College than I hoped it would be. The rest of the week was tense. But by midday Saturday, the outcome was clear. Biden had pulled into the lead in Pennsylvania (my home state) the day before, and by late morning his lead in the vote count had grown to more that 0.5 percent. With that milestone reached, major news organizations called the race.

Members of my family traveled from the suburbs into Philadelphia to celebrate on the streets. That evening we gathered in front of the TV to watch the speeches from Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. We all felt grateful. Relieved. In my own case, the feeling flowed less from partisanship than patriotism — love of my country and hope that the civic turbulence of the past four years might recede for a time. We had held a national election during the worst pandemic in a century and peacefully voted the president out of office. That realization, combined with Biden's calls to healing and unity and his gestures of reconciliation toward the other side, felt like a return to normal politics after years of crisis.

A Democrat holding the White House isn't how I define "normal." I define "normal" as the country managing an orderly transfer of power from one administration to the next. The fact that many Americans consider this normal, and that it is achieved (for the most part) democratically, is an enormous achievement — and a testament to the great good fortune of everyone lucky enough to call the U.S. home.

But that sensation of normalcy has already vanished — thanks to one man.

What makes Trump demonic? One thing above all: His willingness, even eagerness, to do serious, potentially fatal, damage to something beautiful, noble, fragile, and rare, purely to satisfy his own emotional needs. That something is American self-government. Trump can't accept losing, can't accept rejection, and savors provoking division. He wants to be a maestro conducting a cacophony of animosities at the center of our national stage because it feeds his insatiable craving for attention and power — and because, I suspect, he delights in pulling everybody else down to his own level.

That is a satanic impulse.

Think of all the ways that Trump could have responded to the election results.

He could have acted and spoken like a normal president. Whatever his personal feelings of disappointment, he might have said, "We fought a good fight, but Joe Biden prevailed. I will now do whatever I can to ensure an orderly and productive transition." 

Or he could have been more feisty and combative: "Yes, Joe Biden won. I'm not happy about it. I think it was a mistake. But a loss is a loss, and we'll be working with the incoming administration over the coming couple of months to help out where we can."

Or he could have pushed even further into nastiness: "You know, this was a big mistake. At least Republicans made gains in the House and prevented the Democrats from taking over the Senate. That's important because the Biden administration is going to be a disaster. You'll see, and then I'll be back to boot him out of the Oval Office. I'm declaring right now, I'm running for president again in four years. You'll be begging for me to return to the White House."

That would have been an unprecedented thing to say and do. But it wouldn't have crossed the line into an attack on the system itself. The president is allowed to express negative thoughts about his successor. Having served only one term, he's allowed to run for office again in four years. Indeed, all three of these imagined scenarios would have done the essential political work of reconciling his supporters to the reality of life in a functioning democracy, which involves ruling and being ruled in turn, winning some and losing some, and consoling oneself with the thought of getting another chance to try again down the road and in the meantime accepting the legitimacy of one's opponent taking power.

But Trump didn't do that. Instead, what he's done is deny that he lost at all — even though he did. He's asserted that the Democrats stole the election without providing a shred of proof in even a single state to back up the incendiary accusation. The result? Seventy percent of Republicans are already prepared to say that the election wasn't free and fair. Which means they are inclined to believe that the Biden administration is illegitimate even before it starts — because, as Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina put it on Monday night on Fox News, the Democrats are only able to win power by cheating.

It would be one thing if Trump said these civically poisonous things and elected members of his party broke with him over it to congratulate the president-elect on his win. But of course, with a fewkey exceptions, they haven't. On the contrary, they've rushed to denounce the imaginary scourge of voter fraud, with many committing themselves to, in the words of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, "a smooth transition to a second Trump administration." Pompeo's line may have been a joke, but it wasn't funny.

A few of these GOP office holders might actually believe the president's nonsense. But I suspect most stand with the "senior Republican official" quotedin TheWashington Post:

What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change…. He went golfing this weekend. It's not like he's plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He's tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he'll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he'll leave. [The Washington Post]

Sure, haha, no problem. We can let the just-defeated president assert without evidence that in fact he won the vote, that the incoming president and his party stole the election, and that the most elemental processes of American democracy are untrustworthy. No biggie. Just a little good-natured fun and games from the commander-in-chief about how the upcoming transition of power is actually a coup. No harm, no foul!

Except that the harm to come from allowing this dangerous game with American democracy to proceed could be enormous. The "downside" of continuing to play the game is the further cultivation of a segment of the electorate that lacks any trust in or attachment to democratic elections — or rather, that only accepts an election's legitimacy when its own side prevails. "If we win, it's fair; if they win, it's fraud" is not a motto that is compatible with liberal democratic government. It's a formula for democratic breakdown. And Trump is doing everything he can to encourage his supporters to embrace it, with the active complicity of his party. 

I still believe that the most likely outcome of this mess is that Trump eventually relents, allowing the process of presidential transition to move forward. But that doesn't mean it's anything close to guaranteed. And even if he does back down, it seems certain to be combined with the deliberate nurturing of a stabbed-in-the-back narrative that keeps alive the pernicious fiction that Trump didn't really lose, that the Democrats' win in 2020 is tainted, and that the Biden administration has been illegitimate from the start, founded in an act of treachery for which no one has yet paid a price.

That it is all a lie won't matter one bit. The demon infecting our democracy doesn't care, and neither will those whose enmity he has worked so tirelessly to inflame over the past four years.

We Need to Accept That At Least 70 Million Americans Just Suck

Rude Pundit:

"So many times in the last few days, since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were declared the winners of the presidential race, I've heard someone say that it's fine to be happy, but "we have to grapple with the fact that 70 million still voted for Donald Trump despite everything that we know about him. What are we going to do about that?" 

 My response is simple: Maybe we just need to accept that at least 70 million Americans are just shitty people. And, frankly, it's on them to change. They're not fucking children. They're adults who made adult decisions. 

 I'm so fucking sick of the infantilization of the Trump voter, the idea that they're these naifs who need to be nurtured into some kind of maturity, that they have fears of the progressive world (even as they benefit from it in many places with expanded Medicaid), that they are uneducated and inundated with bullshit from Fox "news" and its devolved progeny in the nutzoid right-wing media. 

Fuck that. They chose this ideology. They chose what to believe. They decided to be a bunch of scabby pricks. They gotta own that shit. 

Forgiveness is wasted on those who refuse to believe they need to be forgiven. The more charitable of you might be able to do it, but I'm not fuckin' charitable to these goons and freaks and worms. 

Donald Trump played 'em like a goddamn fiddle. Hell, he's still playin' them, squeezing them for more cash under the umbrella of his bullshit "voter fraud" lawsuits. Until they wake the fuck up or are woken the fuck up, they need to exist as a warning not to let them get more power than they have and to work like hell to take away their remaining power. 

 It's time to tell Trump voters to spend a little time trying to understand Biden voters so they can see why we fucking kicked Trump's ass."

More on Trump supporters here and here.