November 21, 2020 at 10:57 AM JamesNewLeaf said... Historians will NOT record this election as having been stolen.
Simple fact. Live with it. _______
November 21, 2020 at 11:01 AM C.H. Truth said... Historians will NOT record this election as having been stolen.
Just as they did "NOT" record the 2016 as being stolen by the Russians. But just as Trump spent 4 years being dissed by Democrats claiming he was illegitimate, the same will be said about Joe Biden by conservatives.
When even 30% of your own Party believes Democratic poll workers and vote counters likely cheated to make sure Biden won... there is going to be a problem.
A problem that could be solved by a little bit of transparency and just a little bit of effort in avoiding suspicious behavior. If there was nothing to hide, then why did so many of these counties work sooooooo hard to prevent legal poll watchers from actually watching?
Moreover Reverend... why are the counties attempting to block or remove poll watchers from watching (as the law provides) always run by Democrats?
If you can give me ONE good reason why someone wants to do this sort of work without any supervision or anyone watching... then please provide it. Because so far, nobody has provided a reasonable explanation what-so-ever. __________
November 21, 2020 at 11:10 AM JamesNewLeaf said... Ch, would you please give us any evidence you have as to which court has agreed with the accusation that poll watchers were blocked. ___________
November 21, 2020 at 11:30 AM Delete JamesNewLeaf said... While readers are waiting, they might want to look at this:
November 21, 2020 at 11:36 AM C.H. Truth said... Sorry James...
There was actual video posted online of poll watchers being removed, poll watchers being placed 25' away, poll watchers not being allowed in.
There was a viral video where one precinct removed the last remaining Republican poll watcher for "not properly wearing his mask" and the poll workers broke out in applause.
There were court cases where Judges had to order precincts to allow the poll watchers in.
So with all due respect to "polifact" (which is none) - you're full of shit and once again simply refuse to EVER address anything. You just deny things in plain sight, like every liberal does..
So this is why I rarely bother to engage in these threads anymore. It's just so pathetic. __________
November 21, 2020 at 11:42 AM JamesNewLeaf said... Well, Ch, it looks like you are forced to admit that some of the claims that poll watchers were not allowed to watch are bogus. "Pants on Fire" bogus, as a matter of fact.
Seems to me, if true, and widely true, the results of the election could be overthrown.
Why is it that Trump's supporters are having so little success in the courts?
And why are local election officials, both Democratic and Republican, so indignantly angered by accusations that they did not run fair elections when they made every attempt to do so?
You can make all kinds of ridiculous charges (just look at Giuliani and Powell) but proof is needed, evidence that holds up in court.
The Justice for Black Farmers Act, 600 dollars per acre, it will back and that will soon them to failure.
Dystopian illogic "In 1920 there were nearly 1 million Black farmers in the United States. Today, due to this history of discrimination, it is estimated that there are less than 50,000 remaining Black farmers." Warren/Booker
In 1920 there were 6.5 million total farms. Today , there are 2 million.
So Actually the White Farmer has the greatest grievances.
The economy is crashing while jowls McConnell, Mnunchen diddle while trump plays golf.....and people wonder why Ttump lost.....BWAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!
At issue is Treasury funding for various credit-support programs the Fed launched under the Cares Act, adopted by overwhelming bipartisan consensus on March 27. Contrary to Mr. Powell’s publicly expressed wishes, Mr. Mnuchin says that the programs must cease new operations on Dec. 31, and unused funds, to the tune of roughly $450 billion, revert to the Treasury for reprogramming by Congress. The secretary offers two reasons: The Cares Act set a year-end sunset; and actual usage of the program has been minimal — only $25 billion in actual lending — so it is already overcapitalized. On the legal point, Mr. Mnuchin’s is a plausible interpretation, though hardly the only one possible. What is clear, though, is that his position suits Senate Republicans who have been lobbying the secretary to shut down the Fed programs lest they survive into a Democratic administration, where, Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) has said, they “could be very, very badly misused.” A more cautious, less partisan view would be that the Fed’s programs should remain as an insurance policy against problems that very well might occur this winter due to a surging coronavirus.
BTW.......masks are as useless as tits on a bull.....social distancing is just a hoax.......covid is nothing more than a nasty flu and most people have no problems........trump won!!!!!!!!
Why the GOP is doomed as they close ranks around another liar and toss one of the biggest trump junkies under the bus....Why are they soooooo stupid??????
For more than a week, a plain-spoken former federal prosecutor named Sidney Powell made the rounds on right-wing talk radio and cable news, facing little pushback as she laid out a conspiracy theory that Venezuela, Cuba and other “communist” interests had used a secret algorithm to hack into voting machines and steal millions of votes from President Trump.
She spoke mostly uninterrupted for nearly 20 minutes on Monday on the “Rush Limbaugh Show,” the No. 1 program on talk radio. Hosts like Mark Levin, who has the fourth-largest talk radio audience,and Lou Dobbs of Fox Business praised her patriotism and courage.
So it came as most unwelcome news to the president’s defenders when Tucker Carlson, host of an 8 p.m. Fox News show and a confidant of Mr. Trump, dissected Ms. Powell’s claims as unreliable and unproven.
“What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history,” Mr. Carlson said on Thursday night, his voice ringing with incredulity in a 10-minute monologue at the top of his show. “Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of government.” But, he said, when he invited Ms. Powell on his show to share her evidence, she became “angry and told us to stop contacting her.”
I heard a guy on rush's show yesterday crying that he would gladly die for trump!!!!! Wonder if he feels the same about defending our country or was that just for show......very sad...
(I've been out mulching leaves and discussing politics with a good neighbor while social distancing.)
YOU ignorantly said, "I might have read that last comment if it wasn't in all caps! Yawn..." ____________
It was not "in all caps," it was in all italics, to emphasize how important it is that you answer it, which obviously you cannot.
So I will now repeat "that last comment" again, neither in caps nor in italics.
But before I do, I will state that the reason you do not argue online, as you said, and the reason you do not answer the following, is because you simply cannot do either convincingly.
So prove me wrong, if you can, by answering this simply and convincingly, not by dancing all around it as you always do. _______
November 21, 2020 at 11:42 AM JamesNewLeaf said... Well, Ch, it looks like you are forced to admit that some of the claims that poll watchers were not allowed to watch are bogus. "Pants on Fire" bogus, as a matter of fact.
Seems to me, if true, and widely true, the results of the election could be overthrown.
Why is it, then, that Trump's supporters are having so little success in the courts?
And why are local election officials, both Democratic and Republican, so indignantly angered by baseless, evidence-lacking accusations that they did not run fair elections, when they made every effort to do so?
Now, you can make up all kinds of ridiculous charges (just look at Giuliani and Powell!) but proof is needed. Evidence is needed. Evidence that holds up in court.
Yours doesn't.
It doesn't hold up because it doesn't even exist, as the courts keep pointing out.
While we wait for Ch's lame answer (if he does answer), we can entertain ourselves with this.
Another answer to the question I asked Ch, actually:
Trump Loses Biggest Remaining Election Case 6:38 pm “A lawsuit brought by President Trump’s campaign that sought to block the certification of Pennsylvania’s election results was dismissed by a federal judge on Saturday evening,” the Washington Post reports.
Rick Hasen: “In a total loss the to Trump campaign, a federal district court in Pennsylvania has dismissed the most serious case brought by the campaign and denied the campaign a motion to file an amended complaint.
“The judge just excoriates this suit, which those of us in the field have called ridiculous from the start.”
Trump’s Clown Coup Crisis by SUSAN B. GLASSER NOVEMBER 20, 2020
In a way, we are ending the week where we began it: Donald Trump still did not win the 2020 Presidential election, and he is still, on Friday as he was on Monday, holed up in the White House, challenging Joe Biden’s victory. The coronavirus pandemic is still spreading at an alarming rate across all fifty states, and Congress and the White House are still doing nothing new about it. This is, in a horrible, stressful way, what passes for our current normal.
Except, of course, there’s nothing routine about any of this. We’ve been getting used to painful truths for so long that the awful enormity of the situation doesn’t hit us in the way it should when the predicted bad things happen, which is the story of the entire Trump Presidency. But history will not remember this as a slow news week, not at all. In fact, it has been a week of crisis—grave if slow-motion crisis—in which Trump’s effort to subvert the election results has been made explicit and unmistakably clear. He is no longer merely pursuing spurious lawsuits in state courts; in recent days, he and his lawyers have confirmed publicly that Trump now is trying to directly overturn the election results and the will of the American people by pressuring Republican state legislators to appoint electors who will vote for Trump in the Electoral College instead of Biden. The fact that Trump is almost certain not to succeed in actually remaining in office past January 20th does not in any way make this less alarming. There is simply no precedent for a President doing anything like what Trump is doing right now.
Meanwhile in America, this is the week that the U.S. passed the grim milestone of two hundred and fifty thousand deaths in the pandemic, many of them due to the Trump Administration’s botched response to the disease. This spring, such an outcome was all but unthinkable: when Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted that the U.S. could see a hundred thousand to two hundred and forty thousand COVID-19 deaths by this fall, few believed that this would come to pass. And yet here we are, living another Trump scandal of unfathomable magnitude.
Perhaps the one genuinely surprising thing about this culminating controversy of the Trump era is how publicly quiet the voluble President has become. Sure, he has still been tweeting out inflammatory and untrue statements. “We won!” he said, more than once. And: “Mortality rate is 85% down!” And: “Republicans must get tough!” But his public schedule has been almost entirely empty since the election, and he has appeared before the press just once, at a brief news conference, last week, to announce progress toward a vaccine; he took no questions. He has cancelled his Thanksgiving trip to Mar-a-Lago.
This is a stark contrast to the two weeks before the election, which were among the loudest of his short career in politics. With three, four, even five rallies a day, Trump held forth on everything from the perfidy of the Democrats to the awfulness of the weather. One theme was consistent wherever he appeared: the forthcoming “rigged” election, in which only one result—his own victory—could possibly be legitimate.
Since the end of this campaign, which did not result in that victory, Trump has engaged in what I’m increasingly certain history will record as one of the worst offenses of his Presidency: a systemic attack on the integrity of the election itself. This escalated dramatically this week, as his first wave of lawsuits began collapsing under the scrutiny of skeptical judges and nonexistent evidence. Rather than retreat, however, Trump has redoubled his efforts in key states, such as Georgia, Michigan, and Arizona, publicly pressuring local Republican officials not to certify the election results.
In Georgia, this ploy appears to have failed, with the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, openly feuding with the President and denouncing Trump’s efforts to undermine the vote count. On Thursday night, after a hand recount, Georgia officials said that Biden had once again emerged as the winner in the state—the first Democrat to do so since 1996—and that Raffensperger will certify the results on Friday. In Michigan, however, Trump appears to have had more success. Two Republicans on the Wayne County board of canvassers initially refused to certify the Presidential election results for the county, which includes the heavily Democratic city of Detroit, before an outcry caused them to reverse their votes a few hours later. Trump himself then intervened, calling the two officials, who late on Wednesday said that they wanted to change their minds again.
It may have been too late to reverse the Wayne County action, but, on Monday, the Michigan State board of canvassers is set to meet to certify the election results in the state, which Biden has won by more than a hundred and fifty thousand votes. However, the board is made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, and one of the Republicans said, on Thursday night, that he is inclined to audit and delay his vote to certify, citing the baseless fraud claims raised by Trump’s lawyers. If the board deadlocks and the results are not certified, Trump seems to hope that the Republican-controlled state legislature will just go ahead and appoint pro-Trump electors, voters be damned. In another unprecedented step, Trump summoned the Republican leaders of the Michigan legislature to a private meeting with him in the White House, on Friday.
This dubious, and remarkably brazen, strategy was on display in a not-to-be-believed-except-it-actually-happened press conference on Thursday, by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Trump would have won Michigan, Giuliani insisted, if you just don’t count Wayne County and, in effect, Detroit. And that was only one of the bonkers things he said. With an unidentified brown liquid streaking down his face as he spoke, Giuliani quoted the legal wisdom of the movie “My Cousin Vinny”; insisted that he had “direct evidence” of vote fraud in cities like Detroit, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, while producing none; and claimed that there was a vast conspiracy with roots in Venezuela to somehow rig the entire U.S. election.
How bizarre was the performance? Christopher Krebs, the Trump-appointed director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—whom Trump fired, on Tuesday, after the agency issued a statement saying that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised”—offered a succinct verdict. Giuliani’s press conference, Krebs tweeted, was “the most dangerous 1 hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest.”
The fact that Trump and Giuliani’s campaign is utterly crazy, however, does not mean that it’s not working. In fact, a Monmouth poll this week found that seventy-seven per cent of Republicans now believe the election was tainted by fraud and are not certain that Biden won. Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, have refused to denounce Trump’s increasingly unhinged and undemocratic actions, and, while privately conveying acknowledgements of Biden’s victory, have publicly remained silent. The G.O.P. leadership, which has tolerated so many abuses by Trump, is now openly complicit in his worst one yet.
A few individual Republicans have spoken up. “It is outrageous,” Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, said on CNN, “It is an assault on democracy,” he added. “It’s bad for the Republican Party.” Late on Thursday evening, Mitt Romney, the Utah senator who was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump in his impeachment trial earlier this year, issued a statement that might well have been the toughest statement I have ever seen about a President from a member of his own Party. “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,” Romney said. “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President.” By speaking out, Hogan and Romney underscored just how shocking it is that their fellow-Republicans had thus far failed to join them.
Last week, I wondered in this column about just what Trump was up to in challenging the results: Was it an attempted coup, or just another Trump con? The past few days have seemed to offer an answer, and not a reassuring one. The truth is that even if Trump’s would-be coup looks like a con, even if it seems to be a clown show that’s surely doomed to fail, it still must be taken seriously as long as it is happening. Look at how far Republicans have gone along with Trump’s folly after an election that was decisively won by Biden, a contest in which he beat Trump by more than five million votes and garnered three hundred and six electoral votes—exactly the electoral-college “landslide” that Trump secured in 2016. Republican excuses have gotten increasingly pathetic: We’re just giving him time. We’re just letting the process play out. He’s entitled to pursue his claims in the courts. In explicitly demanding that Republican state officials disregard the will of the voters, Trump has, once again, made his Party’s leaders out as stooges and patsies.
The G.O.P. knows all too well that this is not the process by which American elections are decided, not now and not ever. What Trump is doing is not like the 2000 Florida recount. It is not like anything before in American history. Republican leaders can end this today, by finally saying publicly what so far they have only had the courage to admit in private. But will they, at long last, tell Trump what the voters said loudly and clearly: It’s over, you lost, and Joe Biden won?
We're still waiting for Ch to answer this: ________
JamesNewLeaf said... Well, Ch, it looks like you are forced to admit that some of the claims that poll watchers were not allowed to watch are bogus. "Pants on Fire" bogus, as a matter of fact.
Seems to me, if true, and widely true, the results of the election could be overthrown.
Why is it, then, that Trump's supporters are having so little success in the courts?
And why are local election officials, both Democratic and Republican, so indignantly angered by baseless, evidence-lacking accusations that they did not run fair elections, when they made every effort to do so?
Now, you can make up all kinds of ridiculous charges (just look at Giuliani and Powell!) but proof is needed. Evidence is needed. Evidence that holds up in court.
Yours doesn't.
It doesn't hold up because it doesn't even exist, as the courts keep pointing out.
The obese lame duck played golf while 1,000 people have died. Major leaders among the world’s 20 largest economies delivered video messages for the virtual session on the surging pandemic.Trump did not deliver a message for the event, and there did not appear to be any American presence in the session focused on pandemic preparedness.Trump participated briefly in the opening ceremonies of the virtual summit hosted by Saudi Arabia with the rest of the G-20 leaders.The president later went to his golf course, Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, where he’s spent the last several weekends since the election.
16 comments:
No, Ch. HERE'S why you don't argue online:
November 21, 2020 at 10:57 AM
JamesNewLeaf said...
Historians will NOT record this election as having been stolen.
Simple fact. Live with it.
_______
November 21, 2020 at 11:01 AM
C.H. Truth said...
Historians will NOT record this election as having been stolen.
Just as they did "NOT" record the 2016 as being stolen by the Russians. But just as Trump spent 4 years being dissed by Democrats claiming he was illegitimate, the same will be said about Joe Biden by conservatives.
When even 30% of your own Party believes Democratic poll workers and vote counters likely cheated to make sure Biden won... there is going to be a problem.
A problem that could be solved by a little bit of transparency and just a little bit of effort in avoiding suspicious behavior. If there was nothing to hide, then why did so many of these counties work sooooooo hard to prevent legal poll watchers from actually watching?
Moreover Reverend... why are the counties attempting to block or remove poll watchers from watching (as the law provides) always run by Democrats?
If you can give me ONE good reason why someone wants to do this sort of work without any supervision or anyone watching... then please provide it. Because so far, nobody has provided a reasonable explanation what-so-ever.
__________
November 21, 2020 at 11:10 AM
JamesNewLeaf said...
Ch, would you please give us any evidence you have as to which court has agreed with the accusation that poll watchers were blocked.
___________
November 21, 2020 at 11:30 AM Delete
JamesNewLeaf said...
While readers are waiting, they might want to look at this:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/nov/12/donald-trump/trumps-wrong-claim-election-observers-were-barred-/
___________
November 21, 2020 at 11:36 AM
C.H. Truth said...
Sorry James...
There was actual video posted online of poll watchers being removed, poll watchers being placed 25' away, poll watchers not being allowed in.
There was a viral video where one precinct removed the last remaining Republican poll watcher for "not properly wearing his mask" and the poll workers broke out in applause.
There were court cases where Judges had to order precincts to allow the poll watchers in.
So with all due respect to "polifact" (which is none) - you're full of shit and once again simply refuse to EVER address anything. You just deny things in plain sight, like every liberal does..
So this is why I rarely bother to engage in these threads anymore. It's just so pathetic.
__________
November 21, 2020 at 11:42 AM
JamesNewLeaf said...
Well, Ch, it looks like you are forced to admit that some of the claims that poll watchers were not allowed to watch are bogus.
"Pants on Fire" bogus, as a matter of fact.
Seems to me, if true, and widely true, the results of the election could be overthrown.
Why is it that Trump's supporters are having so little success in the courts?
And why are local election officials, both Democratic and Republican, so indignantly angered by accusations that they did not run fair elections when they made every attempt to do so?
You can make all kinds of ridiculous charges (just look at Giuliani and Powell) but proof is needed, evidence that holds up in court.
Yours doesn't.
November 21, 2020 at 11:52 AM
Hey Reverend...
I might have read that last comment if it wasn't in all caps!
Yawn....
The coming Avalanche of Positive Reporting is about to begin.
I can't wait.
Alky and Jane , expose thier closed minded Socialist.
Myopic Dystopia.
The Justice for Black Farmers Act, 600 dollars per acre, it will back and that will soon them to failure.
Dystopian illogic
"In 1920 there were nearly 1 million Black farmers in the United States. Today, due to this history of discrimination, it is estimated that there are less than 50,000 remaining Black farmers." Warren/Booker
In 1920 there were 6.5 million total farms.
Today , there are 2 million.
So Actually the White Farmer has the greatest grievances.
The economy is crashing while jowls McConnell, Mnunchen diddle while trump plays golf.....and people wonder why Ttump lost.....BWAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!
At issue is Treasury funding for various credit-support programs the Fed launched under the Cares Act, adopted by overwhelming bipartisan consensus on March 27. Contrary to Mr. Powell’s publicly expressed wishes, Mr. Mnuchin says that the programs must cease new operations on Dec. 31, and unused funds, to the tune of roughly $450 billion, revert to the Treasury for reprogramming by Congress. The secretary offers two reasons: The Cares Act set a year-end sunset; and actual usage of the program has been minimal — only $25 billion in actual lending — so it is already overcapitalized.
On the legal point, Mr. Mnuchin’s is a plausible interpretation, though hardly the only one possible. What is clear, though, is that his position suits Senate Republicans who have been lobbying the secretary to shut down the Fed programs lest they survive into a Democratic administration, where, Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) has said, they “could be very, very badly misused.” A more cautious, less partisan view would be that the Fed’s programs should remain as an insurance policy against problems that very well might occur this winter due to a surging coronavirus.
BTW.......masks are as useless as tits on a bull.....social distancing is just a hoax.......covid is nothing more than a nasty flu and most people have no problems........trump won!!!!!!!!
Why the GOP is doomed as they close ranks around another liar and toss one of the biggest trump junkies under the bus....Why are they soooooo stupid??????
For more than a week, a plain-spoken former federal prosecutor named Sidney Powell made the rounds on right-wing talk radio and cable news, facing little pushback as she laid out a conspiracy theory that Venezuela, Cuba and other “communist” interests had used a secret algorithm to hack into voting machines and steal millions of votes from President Trump.
She spoke mostly uninterrupted for nearly 20 minutes on Monday on the “Rush Limbaugh Show,” the No. 1 program on talk radio. Hosts like Mark Levin, who has the fourth-largest talk radio audience,and Lou Dobbs of Fox Business praised her patriotism and courage.
So it came as most unwelcome news to the president’s defenders when Tucker Carlson, host of an 8 p.m. Fox News show and a confidant of Mr. Trump, dissected Ms. Powell’s claims as unreliable and unproven.
“What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history,” Mr. Carlson said on Thursday night, his voice ringing with incredulity in a 10-minute monologue at the top of his show. “Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of government.” But, he said, when he invited Ms. Powell on his show to share her evidence, she became “angry and told us to stop contacting her.”
I heard a guy on rush's show yesterday crying that he would gladly die for trump!!!!! Wonder if he feels the same about defending our country or was that just for show......very sad...
Ch, I just this minute read your 4:00pm.
(I've been out mulching leaves and discussing politics with a good neighbor while social distancing.)
YOU ignorantly said,
"I might have read that last comment if it wasn't in all caps!
Yawn..."
____________
It was not "in all caps," it was in all italics, to emphasize how important it is that you answer it, which obviously you cannot.
So I will now repeat "that last comment" again, neither in caps nor in italics.
But before I do, I will state that the reason you do not argue online, as you said, and the reason you do not answer the following, is because you simply cannot do either convincingly.
So prove me wrong, if you can, by answering this simply and convincingly, not by dancing all around it as you always do.
_______
November 21, 2020 at 11:42 AM
JamesNewLeaf said...
Well, Ch, it looks like you are forced to admit that some of the claims that poll watchers were not allowed to watch are bogus.
"Pants on Fire" bogus, as a matter of fact.
Seems to me, if true, and widely true, the results of the election could be overthrown.
Why is it, then, that Trump's supporters are having so little success in the courts?
And why are local election officials, both Democratic and Republican, so indignantly angered by baseless, evidence-lacking accusations that they did not run fair elections, when they made every effort to do so?
Now, you can make up all kinds of ridiculous charges (just look at Giuliani and Powell!) but proof is needed.
Evidence is needed.
Evidence that holds up in court.
Yours doesn't.
It doesn't hold up because it doesn't even exist, as the courts keep pointing out.
While we wait for Ch's lame answer (if he does answer), we can entertain ourselves with this.
Another answer to the question I asked Ch, actually:
Trump Loses Biggest Remaining Election Case
6:38 pm
“A lawsuit brought by President Trump’s campaign that sought to block the certification of Pennsylvania’s election results was dismissed by a federal judge on Saturday evening,” the Washington Post reports.
Rick Hasen:
“In a total loss the to Trump campaign, a federal district court in Pennsylvania has dismissed the most serious case brought by the campaign and denied the campaign a motion to file an amended complaint.
“The judge just excoriates this suit, which those of us in the field have called ridiculous from the start.”
You might want to look up the word "excoriate."
We can also enjoy this:
Trump’s Clown Coup Crisis
by SUSAN B. GLASSER NOVEMBER 20, 2020
In a way, we are ending the week where we began it: Donald Trump still did not win the 2020 Presidential election, and he is still, on Friday as he was on Monday, holed up in the White House, challenging Joe Biden’s victory. The coronavirus pandemic is still spreading at an alarming rate across all fifty states, and Congress and the White House are still doing nothing new about it. This is, in a horrible, stressful way, what passes for our current normal.
Except, of course, there’s nothing routine about any of this. We’ve been getting used to painful truths for so long that the awful enormity of the situation doesn’t hit us in the way it should when the predicted bad things happen, which is the story of the entire Trump Presidency. But history will not remember this as a slow news week, not at all. In fact, it has been a week of crisis—grave if slow-motion crisis—in which Trump’s effort to subvert the election results has been made explicit and unmistakably clear. He is no longer merely pursuing spurious lawsuits in state courts; in recent days, he and his lawyers have confirmed publicly that Trump now is trying to directly overturn the election results and the will of the American people by pressuring Republican state legislators to appoint electors who will vote for Trump in the Electoral College instead of Biden. The fact that Trump is almost certain not to succeed in actually remaining in office past January 20th does not in any way make this less alarming. There is simply no precedent for a President doing anything like what Trump is doing right now.
Meanwhile in America, this is the week that the U.S. passed the grim milestone of two hundred and fifty thousand deaths in the pandemic, many of them due to the Trump Administration’s botched response to the disease. This spring, such an outcome was all but unthinkable: when Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted that the U.S. could see a hundred thousand to two hundred and forty thousand COVID-19 deaths by this fall, few believed that this would come to pass. And yet here we are, living another Trump scandal of unfathomable magnitude.
Perhaps the one genuinely surprising thing about this culminating controversy of the Trump era is how publicly quiet the voluble President has become. Sure, he has still been tweeting out inflammatory and untrue statements. “We won!” he said, more than once. And: “Mortality rate is 85% down!” And: “Republicans must get tough!” But his public schedule has been almost entirely empty since the election, and he has appeared before the press just once, at a brief news conference, last week, to announce progress toward a vaccine; he took no questions. He has cancelled his Thanksgiving trip to Mar-a-Lago.
This is a stark contrast to the two weeks before the election, which were among the loudest of his short career in politics. With three, four, even five rallies a day, Trump held forth on everything from the perfidy of the Democrats to the awfulness of the weather. One theme was consistent wherever he appeared: the forthcoming “rigged” election, in which only one result—his own victory—could possibly be legitimate.
Since the end of this campaign, which did not result in that victory, Trump has engaged in what I’m increasingly certain history will record as one of the worst offenses of his Presidency: a systemic attack on the integrity of the election itself. This escalated dramatically this week, as his first wave of lawsuits began collapsing under the scrutiny of skeptical judges and nonexistent evidence. Rather than retreat, however, Trump has redoubled his efforts in key states, such as Georgia, Michigan, and Arizona, publicly pressuring local Republican officials not to certify the election results.
In Georgia, this ploy appears to have failed, with the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, openly feuding with the President and denouncing Trump’s efforts to undermine the vote count. On Thursday night, after a hand recount, Georgia officials said that Biden had once again emerged as the winner in the state—the first Democrat to do so since 1996—and that Raffensperger will certify the results on Friday. In Michigan, however, Trump appears to have had more success. Two Republicans on the Wayne County board of canvassers initially refused to certify the Presidential election results for the county, which includes the heavily Democratic city of Detroit, before an outcry caused them to reverse their votes a few hours later. Trump himself then intervened, calling the two officials, who late on Wednesday said that they wanted to change their minds again.
It may have been too late to reverse the Wayne County action, but, on Monday, the Michigan State board of canvassers is set to meet to certify the election results in the state, which Biden has won by more than a hundred and fifty thousand votes. However, the board is made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, and one of the Republicans said, on Thursday night, that he is inclined to audit and delay his vote to certify, citing the baseless fraud claims raised by Trump’s lawyers. If the board deadlocks and the results are not certified, Trump seems to hope that the Republican-controlled state legislature will just go ahead and appoint pro-Trump electors, voters be damned. In another unprecedented step, Trump summoned the Republican leaders of the Michigan legislature to a private meeting with him in the White House, on Friday.
This dubious, and remarkably brazen, strategy was on display in a not-to-be-believed-except-it-actually-happened press conference on Thursday, by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Trump would have won Michigan, Giuliani insisted, if you just don’t count Wayne County and, in effect, Detroit. And that was only one of the bonkers things he said. With an unidentified brown liquid streaking down his face as he spoke, Giuliani quoted the legal wisdom of the movie “My Cousin Vinny”; insisted that he had “direct evidence” of vote fraud in cities like Detroit, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, while producing none; and claimed that there was a vast conspiracy with roots in Venezuela to somehow rig the entire U.S. election.
How bizarre was the performance? Christopher Krebs, the Trump-appointed director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—whom Trump fired, on Tuesday, after the agency issued a statement saying that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised”—offered a succinct verdict. Giuliani’s press conference, Krebs tweeted, was “the most dangerous 1 hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest.”
The fact that Trump and Giuliani’s campaign is utterly crazy, however, does not mean that it’s not working. In fact, a Monmouth poll this week found that seventy-seven per cent of Republicans now believe the election was tainted by fraud and are not certain that Biden won. Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, have refused to denounce Trump’s increasingly unhinged and undemocratic actions, and, while privately conveying acknowledgements of Biden’s victory, have publicly remained silent. The G.O.P. leadership, which has tolerated so many abuses by Trump, is now openly complicit in his worst one yet.
A few individual Republicans have spoken up. “It is outrageous,” Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, said on CNN, “It is an assault on democracy,” he added. “It’s bad for the Republican Party.” Late on Thursday evening, Mitt Romney, the Utah senator who was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump in his impeachment trial earlier this year, issued a statement that might well have been the toughest statement I have ever seen about a President from a member of his own Party. “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,” Romney said. “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President.” By speaking out, Hogan and Romney underscored just how shocking it is that their fellow-Republicans had thus far failed to join them.
Last week, I wondered in this column about just what Trump was up to in challenging the results: Was it an attempted coup, or just another Trump con? The past few days have seemed to offer an answer, and not a reassuring one. The truth is that even if Trump’s would-be coup looks like a con, even if it seems to be a clown show that’s surely doomed to fail, it still must be taken seriously as long as it is happening. Look at how far Republicans have gone along with Trump’s folly after an election that was decisively won by Biden, a contest in which he beat Trump by more than five million votes and garnered three hundred and six electoral votes—exactly the electoral-college “landslide” that Trump secured in 2016. Republican excuses have gotten increasingly pathetic: We’re just giving him time. We’re just letting the process play out. He’s entitled to pursue his claims in the courts. In explicitly demanding that Republican state officials disregard the will of the voters, Trump has, once again, made his Party’s leaders out as stooges and patsies.
The G.O.P. knows all too well that this is not the process by which American elections are decided, not now and not ever. What Trump is doing is not like the 2000 Florida recount. It is not like anything before in American history. Republican leaders can end this today, by finally saying publicly what so far they have only had the courage to admit in private. But will they, at long last, tell Trump what the voters said loudly and clearly: It’s over, you lost, and Joe Biden won?
We're still waiting for Ch to answer this:
________
JamesNewLeaf said...
Well, Ch, it looks like you are forced to admit that some of the claims that poll watchers were not allowed to watch are bogus.
"Pants on Fire" bogus, as a matter of fact.
Seems to me, if true, and widely true, the results of the election could be overthrown.
Why is it, then, that Trump's supporters are having so little success in the courts?
And why are local election officials, both Democratic and Republican, so indignantly angered by baseless, evidence-lacking accusations that they did not run fair elections, when they made every effort to do so?
Now, you can make up all kinds of ridiculous charges (just look at Giuliani and Powell!) but proof is needed.
Evidence is needed.
Evidence that holds up in court.
Yours doesn't.
It doesn't hold up because it doesn't even exist, as the courts keep pointing out.
Ch can no more give us evidence for his accusations than Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell could give for theirs.
The obese lame duck played golf while 1,000 people have died.
Major leaders among the world’s 20 largest economies delivered video messages for the virtual session on the surging pandemic.Trump did not deliver a message for the event, and there did not appear to be any American presence in the session focused on pandemic preparedness.Trump participated briefly in the opening ceremonies of the virtual summit hosted by Saudi Arabia with the rest of the G-20 leaders.The president later went to his golf course, Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, where he’s spent the last several weekends since the election.
Post a Comment