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Trump's refusal to concede follows his pattern of incompetence and delusions | Richard Wolffe

Like all good seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness, the end of the Trump era is a heady mix of sweet melancholy.

There will come a time, soon, when world leaders look back on the last four years with a wry smile and a shake of the head. Instead of the sheer blood-draining horror of sitting beside a sociopathic maniac with the power to destroy the world in a nuclear holocaust.

For now, we must savor the last oozings of this Fall of Donald.

He cuts a tired and bloated figure, to be sure. He tweets less, but he does so in ALL CAPS. All the time. He promises the most amazing revelations and achievements, coming very soon, just like he said they would.

“WE ARE MAKING BIG PROGRESS,” he tweet-shouted on Tuesday. “RESULTS START TO COME NEXT WEEK. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

But next week is when some states begin certifying their votes. The electoral college meets in one month. Now isn’t the time for making progress, or for recycling the slogans of losing campaigns long gone. A week after losing the election, now is the time to deliver the goods, or be delivered for good.

As all good Arsenal fans know, it’s the hope that kills you. And Trump has likely killed more than 700 fans (or their friends) with his awesome campaign rallies.

It’s not easy to keep hope alive in what passes for Trump’s legal circles. As the Biden transition team points out, no less than 13 Trump lawsuits have been dismissed before and after the election. The arguments run the gamut from baseless to mindless, from Sharpie pens to vote count observers. They have mostly failed, just like the Trump presidency.

Take the case of the single postal worker in Pennsylvania who claimed to have witnessed something nefarious involving mail-in ballots. His allegations were swiftly seized upon by the former military lawyer and Trump super-booster Senator Lindsey Graham. Within hours, the attorney general of the United States ordered US attorneys across the country to get to work investigating such claims.

Sadly, the postal worker recanted the whole story on Tuesday, leaving the Trump campaign to wonder if he was suffering unduly from all the public exposure.

One of the few bright spots in an otherwise unremittingly overcast sky was the Pennsylvania and supreme court ruling to segregate ballots that arrived after election day. This epic legal triumph shrunk to bacterial size when Pennsylvania’s secretary of state revealed that the segregated ballots amounted to just 10,000 votes. Joe Biden is currently leading the state’s votes by more than 45,000.

Never mind the battleground states. The Trump administration has been living in a state of denial for the last four years. They claimed the pandemic would disappear like a miracle. That climate crisis was an exaggerated fiction. They said the world respected Donald Trump. And Rudy Giuliani really intended to stage a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

There’s a pattern in here somewhere. Oh yes. It’s a pattern of snort-inducing lies, incompetence and delusions.

As the sun sets on Trump, our unnaturally bronzed soon-to-be ex-president is clinging on to the summer of his power with every tweet he can muster. He absolutely, defiantly, categorically will not concede the election, or allow his officials to work on a transition.

This is a shame because it makes him look a pathetically sad loser with a paper-thin skin, which he has been forever. But it’s a shame for his many ardent defenders whose job would be so much easier if they were defending someone with a shred of decency, integrity or maturity.

Commentators at The Wall Street Journal and Fox News (proprietors: the Murdoch family) have strained mightily to condemn the Democrats for being mean, while standing up for every candidate’s right to file endlessly frivolous lawsuits. Republican senators refuse to congratulate the president-elect, Joe Biden, because this election isn’t over until Trump leaves the White House under the armed escort of the Secret Service.

And the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, half-jokes that he’s ready for a smooth transition to a second Trump term, thereby destroying three decades of American efforts to promote democracy around the world.

No wonder Pompeo is doing sweetheart interviews with small-time rightwing radio hosts such as Mike Belling (Standing Up For Milwaukee) who asked him if he agreed that America was more respected after four years of Trump.

Mike: the answer is no. How can you stand up for Milwaukee if you’ve forgotten how to stand up?

So we have the reality that nearly 80% of Americans believe that Biden won last week’s election while the fantasy politics game of the last four years plays itself out for one more month. There’s even supposed to be a “Million Maga March” in Washington DC this weekend. Let’s hope the crowd is bigger than a Tulsa rally in June.

There seems to be some debate going on, as political insiders try to figure out if this whole post-election period is some coup in the works or an elaborate joke to stop another Trump tantrum. “What’s the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time,” one anonymous Republican official told The Washington Post.

Setting aside the obvious damage Trump is inflicting on the Biden transition, there might just be some downside for his party in the two run-offs in Georgia that will decide control of the US Senate next year.

Georgia’s Republican candidates could spend the next two months talking about how they will act as a check and balance on a Biden presidency. Or they could just deny the outcome of the election and face endless questions about the last of Trump’s summer whine.

What’s the downside of a little bit humoring of a little old president? There is the small matter of American national security, including its vastly expensive and super-secret intelligence community.

There could be an innocent explanation for a lame-duck president firing the secretary of defense, and installing former aides to House Republican Devin Nunes and Michael Flynn at the National Security Agency and to run the huge Defense Intelligence Agency. Nunes was one of the key players undermining the Mueller and FBI investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Meanwhile Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, was convicted of lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts during the Trump transition.

What on earth could go wrong with our national exercise in humoring Donald Trump?

There is a season for everything and everyone. For Joe Biden, this is a time to heal, to reach out to Republicans and bring the country back together.

But for Donald Trump, winter is coming, and with it probably a long-overdue IRS bill, a very large bank debt for repayment, or a New York prosecution for tax fraud.

Never mind the mellow fruitfulness. It’s time to burn the village down.


Source: US Politics - theguardian.com


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