Eliana Willis

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In normal times it would go to the top of anyone’s curriculum vitae or résumé. Serving in the White House has typically been a passport to a lucrative job on a corporate board, in the lobbying industry or at a prestigious Washington thinktank.
But alumni of Donald Trump’s administration could be in for a rude awakening. The outgoing president proved so disruptive and divisive that those perceived to have been his enablers may find themselves given the cold shoulder as they seek alternative employment.
“Those people will carry this stain with them for the rest of their lives,” said Moe Vela, a former senior adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden. “The further we get away from his tenure, the more historians, political scientists, political operatives and just history itself will uncover, reveal and continue to demonstrate just how corrupt this was. And as that continues, the stain will only grow darker and larger.”
Presidential transitions can be brutal affairs. Officials who have become accustomed to working at America’s most famous address, weighing in on economic and national security issues that reverberate around the world, suddenly find themselves cast out into the cold of Washington after the inauguration of the new president-elect on a bleak January day.
But there is usually a support network in place, including nearby K Street, the home of political lobbying firms, and an array of thinktanks in the capital and beyond. Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state under President George W Bush, is now director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, which also gave safe harbour to Trump alumni Jim Mattis and HR McMaster.
White House press secretaries can prosper in the media or corporate world. Jay Carney, who was Barack Obama’s spokesman from 2011 to 2014, is a senior vice-president and head of public relations for Amazon. His successor, Josh Earnest, who had a spell as an NBC News and MSNBC analyst, is now senior vice-president and chief communications officer at United Airlines. More

Santa will not be pleased. Not to mention Jesus. That guy is gonna be pissed. When they find out what’s happened here, America is going to be in for a very dark Christmas indeed.I am not one of the unfortunates so poisoned by capitalism’s warped inhalation of the holiday season that they have grown cynical about the entire enterprise. My family takes Christmas very seriously. From a very young age I learned that this time of year was not about orgies of shopping or stewing in your contempt for your far-flung relatives, but rather about putting our dormant innate generosity into practice. The Christmas spirit is love. Our bitter cynicism should properly be oriented not at the Christmas spirit itself, but rather at those who corrupt it.Three hundred thousand Americans have died from Covid this year. Well over 200,000 of them died unnecessarily. Had our government managed this public health crisis in a mature and rational way, the deaths would be a fraction of what they are. Our government chose not to do so. Our leering and stupid leader chose to make the wearing of masks into a defining political issue – not out of necessity, or for any financial gain, or out of adherence to any philosophy, but out of aggressive stupidity, laziness and self-rationalization. Usually, the Republican party screws regular people because someone stands to get rich on it. In this case, it was only because they formed a coward’s puppet line behind an awful leader with a loud voice. In every community in America, there are people lying dead because their elected officials were scared of being tweeted at by a former reality show host.Merry Christmas, America.Tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs this year through no fault of their own. Tens of thousands of small businesses, each one representing the dreams and ambitions of a human being and the employment of many others, have failed this year through no fault of their own. The money that our government appropriated to carry all of these people and businesses through this natural disaster ran out months ago, and nothing more has been forthcoming, even as we watch our friends and neighbors sink into bankruptcy and food insecurity and desperation.Many other nations have paid workers to stay home, relieving financial pressures on employers and employees alike. Republicans in Congress have refused to do this, because the stock market has stayed high, and also because they don’t care. Our incompetent and callous Republican leaders have ordered shutdowns without providing an adequate safety net, thus causing predictable public backlash against the shutdowns, which Republicans have been happy to encourage, because it directs public ire away from them and onto public health professionals. Idiocy in the White House has combined with the wealth-worshiping Republican Senate to produce the worst of both worlds: a raging preventable public health disaster and an economic catastrophe from which the very rich have been insulated.Your loved ones can die, your business can collapse, your job can evaporate, your unemployment benefits can dry up, your stimulus checks can disappear, and in return your elected leaders will offer you sneering jokes about masks and lies about who won the election. The rest, they will mostly ignore.Merry Christmas, America.Donald Trump is a vapid and pathetic man controlled in every case by his own worst impulses, but he is not the biggest villain of 2020. Without the entire superstructure of the Republican party behind him – voting for him, campaigning for him, debasing themselves before him, praising his stupid ideas and supporting him politically – he would not be in a position to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths. There is a long, straight line that runs from the wink-and-nod racist Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon through the deregulation and union-busting of Reagan and up to the deadly narcissism of Trump. When a political party is willing to tell any lie and demonize anyone in order to protect the right of the rich to have everything, it will eventually find that it has become the home of cranks and fascists. The Republican party has spent decades stoking malignant ignorance in service of greed, and it has now been devoured by it. What afflicts us now is not just a virus, but a national philosophy lovingly tended by many generations of conquerors that prizes avarice and calls it individualism.We are all in this pandemic together. Sickness passes from person to person with no regard for identity. Economic decline seizes every city and state at once. Overwhelming crises like these can be catalysts for unity. Shared pain is also an opportunity for shared love. Suffering so widespread can open everyone’s eyes to the common fate of humanity, and our responsibility to support one another in good times and bad.But that is not what America is getting out of this crisis. We are getting the suffering without the sharing, and the pain without the promise of mutual support. Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus, a man who told people to love their neighbors and give their wealth to the poor; it is embodied by Santa, a man who rewards generosity with more generosity, and vows to carry gifts to the homes of everyone no matter who they are. And yet the people who are loudest about Christmas – those showing off the biggest tree, carrying the most ostentatious Bible – are the same people who have chosen to allow hundreds of thousands of us to die, rather than do what needs to be done for public health, and have chosen to allow millions of us to sink into poverty, rather than do what needs to be done for public welfare. They have chosen this because they believe that this is the path that will maximize their own power. That is their present to you, and they really don’t care if you like it.Yes, Virginia, there is a “War on Christmas”. But the Republicans are the ones waging it. And the Christmas spirit, I’m sorry to say, is losing. More

Donald Trump has reportedly acknowledged in private that his attempt to overturn the election result will fail, while a senior Republican in the Senate said on Monday a challenge coming in the House of Representatives will “go down like a shot dog”.But amid reports of a president unhinged – one report said: “We cannot stress enough how unnerved Trump officials are” – and while Trump continued to stoke a Republican civil war by attacking Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, a group of GOP representatives visited the White House to plan one final push to reverse the will of the American people.Congress meets to validate the electoral college result, a 306-232 win for Joe Biden, on 6 January. On Monday, Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama led a delegation of about 12 Republicans to the White House, where they discussed how their challenge to that result will proceed.“It was a back and forth concerning the planning and strategy for January the 6th,” Brooks told Politico, adding: “More and more congressmen and senators are being persuaded that the election was stolen.”There is no evidence that this is the case, and Brooks notably declined to identify any of the supposed doubters. By all the evidence, challenges to the result in the House and the Senate will not have the votes to be sustained.On Monday, No 2 Republican senator John Thune told CNN the move was “going down like a shot dog” and added: “I just don’t think it makes a lot of sense to put everybody through this when you know what the ultimate outcome is going to be.”Nonetheless, Trump continues to make baseless accusations of mass electoral fraud and reportedly to rage against aides he deems insufficiently zealous in his defence. According to the news site Axios, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and chief of staff Mark Meadows are prominent among such hapless targets.So is McConnell, whom Trump claims to have saved in his re-election fight this year, the president sending a slide to Republicans in Congress which purported to show the restorative effect of a presidential tweet and robocall.“Sadly, Mitch forgot,” the slide said. “He was the first one off the ship!”The wisdom or otherwise of attacking the Republican Senate leader two weeks before run-off elections in Georgia that will decide control of the chamber, and with it much of Biden’s chances of legislative success, seems lost on the president for now.Meadows was once a member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus in the House, and his former allies were among those visiting the White House on Monday. Mike Pence, who will preside over the joint session of Congress on 6 January, also attended the meeting.Trump is even reported to have soured on the vice-president, his loyal lieutenant since joining the ticket in 2016. The president is reported to believe Pence is “backing away” from him – notably, a claim advanced in a recent ad by the Lincoln Project, a group of dissident Republicans.“When Mike Pence is running away from you,” the ad says, “you know it’s over.”Among representatives reported to have been at the conspiratorial huddle at the White House was Jim Jordan of Ohio, a renowned attack dog so loyal to Trump that he has claimed never to have heard the president lie. (The Washington Post’s count of Trump’s lies in office stands at 26,000.) Also there was Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, an open supporter of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory preparing to take a seat in Congress.Brooks said the Republicans were “trying to make sure that we understand what [Pence’s] view of the procedural requirements are, so we can comply with them. Pence will have a tremendous amount of discretion, though I think the rulings he will make will be pretty cut and dry.“It’s still somewhat fluid, since this does not happen very often.”Trump remains actively engaged in the fundamentally anti-democratic campaign. He is said to have spent an hour poring over the details of the 6 January session with the group from Congress.The closer the president gets to removal from office, the more volatile he becomes, and the more wild his invective grows. According to Olivia Nuzzi of New York magazine, since election day White House aides have been “outright avoiding the president out of concern he might end up using any nearby staffer as a human stress ball”.In a meeting at the White House last Friday, Trump is reported to have floated the idea of the arch-conspiracy theorist and lawyer Sidney Powell being appointed a special counsel to investigate voter fraud during the election.According to the New York Times, Trump asked advisers at that gathering about whether the military could be mobilised to “rerun” the election. The idea was the brainchild of Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser pardoned by Trump for lying to the FBI, who was present at the Friday meeting.As Trump digs himself ever further into his “stolen election” rabbit hole, other key figures in his administration are gently but firmly moving in the other direction. William Barr, the US attorney general who has been willing to accommodate many of Trump’s whims, has distanced himself.On Monday Barr bluntly squashed the idea of a special counsel.“If I thought a special counsel at this stage was the right tool, I would name one, but I haven’t and I’m not going to,” he said. More

Donald Trump’s flirtation with declaring martial law in battleground states and appointing a conspiracy theorist as special counsel to help his attempt to overturn defeat by Joe Biden are “really sad” and “nutty and loopy”, Mitt Romney said on Sunday.“He’s leaving Washington with a whole series of conspiracy theories and things that are so nutty and loopy that people are shaking their head wondering what in the world has gotten into this man,” the Utah Republican senator said.Joe Biden won the 3 November election by 306-232 in the electoral college and by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote. Nonetheless, Trump is entertaining outlandish schemes to remain in office, egged on by allies like former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who Trump pardoned for lying to the FBI, and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney.During a Friday meeting at the White House first reported by the New York Times, Trump discussed security clearance for Sidney Powell, a conspiracy-spouting attorney who was cut from Trump’s campaign legal team.It is unclear if Trump will actually attempt to install Powell as a special counsel, a position which the US attorney general, not the president, appoints. Numerous Republicans, from outgoing attorney general William Barr to governors and state officials, have said repeatedly there is no evidence of the mass voter fraud Trump baselessly alleges.“It’s not going to happen,” Romney told CNN. “That’s going nowhere. And I understand the president is casting about trying to find some way to have a different result than the one that was delivered by the American people, but it’s really sad in a lot of respects and embarrassing.“Because the president could right now be writing the last chapter of this administration, with a victory lap with regards to the [Covid-19] vaccine. After all he pushed aggressively to get the vaccine developed and distributed, that’s happening on a quick timeframe. He could be going out and championing this extraordinary success.“Instead … this last chapter suggests what he is going to be known for.”Trump’s campaign and allies have filed around 50 lawsuits alleging voting fraud – almost all have been dismissed. Trump has lost before judges of both parties, including some he appointed, and some of the strongest rebukes have come from conservative Republicans. The supreme court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority and three Trump appointees, has refused to take up cases.Trump has been fuming and peppering allies for options. During the Friday meeting, Giuliani pushed Trump to seize voting machines. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) made clear that it had no authority to do so. It is unclear what such a move could accomplish.Barr told the Associated Press this month the Department of Justice and DHS had looked into claims voting machines “were programmed essentially to skew the election results … and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that”. Paper ballots have been used to verify results, including in Georgia, which performed two audits of its vote tally, confirming Biden’s victory.Flynn went yet further, suggesting Trump could impose martial law and use the military to re-run the election. Chief of staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone voiced objections, people familiar with the meeting told news outlets. Trump, who spent much of Saturday tweeting and retweeting electoral fraud claims, responded on Twitter.“Martial law = Fake News,” he wrote. “Just more knowingly bad reporting!”Trump’s grip on the Republican party remains secure, suggesting members in Congress will dutifully raise objections to the electoral college results on 6 January. Such objections will be for political ends and will not in all likelihood succeed in overturning the election. Democrats hold the House and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he will knock down objections in the Senate.On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Romney, who did better at the polls in his 2012 defeat by Barack Obama than Trump did in 2016 and 2020, was asked if his party could ever escape Trump’s grip.“I believe the Republican party has changed pretty dramatically,” he said. “And by that, I mean that the people who consider themselves Republican and voted for President Trump I think is a different cohort than the cohort that voted for me.“…You look at those that are thinking about running in 2024, [they are] trying to see who can be the most like President Trump. And that suggests that the party doesn’t want to take a different direction.”Josh Hawley of Missouri, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Ted Cruz of Texas are among senators thought likely to run to succeed Trump in the White House, and therefore likely to object to the electoral college results.“I don’t think anyone who’s looking at running in 2024 has the kind of style and shtick that President Trump has,” Romney said. “He has a unique and capable politician … But I think the direction you’re seeing is one that he set out.“I’d like to see a different version of the Republican party. But my side is very small these days … I think we recognise that character actually does count.” More

Joe Biden has won so much that he is, apparently, tired of winning.That was the crux of his speech Monday night, after the electoral college vote that made official (or rather, yet again made official) his victory over Donald Trump. After a blizzard of false claims of fraud and frivolous lawsuits, the race is over. The attempt to overturn the people’s will failed.In particular, the president-elect singled out courageous election officials – both Democrats and Republicans – who refused to be cowed by Trump’s attacks on the election. “We owe these public servants a debt of gratitude,” he said, “and our democracy survived because of them.” He didn’t name names, but one can reasonably assume he was talking about conservatives such as Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who publicly debunked pro-Trump conspiracy theories, or its voting system implementation manager, Gabriel Sterling, who warned that the president’s actions were stoking violence and has been since barraged with death threats.As a rhetorical matter, the president-elect was right to praise the courage of Republicans who stood up to Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. He was also right to declare victory for democracy. It’s his job to put the country’s best foot forward.But when it comes to the republic’s longer-term survival, the outcome remains far from certain. Because even the Republican officials who most bravely and patriotically stood up to Trump still don’t get it. The greatest threat to the American experiment isn’t the would-be autocrat on his way out the door. It’s the political party he continues to both lead and personify.The problem begins with the Republican establishment’s relationship to reality itself. Since at least the 1980s, mainstream conservatives have embraced theories that are not well-supported by evidence. (It’s hard to make a compelling argument, for example, that tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves.) But in recent years, as Republicans went from being the party of Reagan to the party of Mitch McConnell, the Republican party has gone from spinning facts to rejecting them entirely.Today, to be an aspiring Republican politician in good standing, one must espouse a set of core beliefs that are either entirely baseless or provably untrue: the climate crisis isn’t real; gun safety laws don’t reduce gun violence; masks don’t reduce the spread of Covid-19. To many observers, embracing a conspiracy theory about corrupted voting machines or late-night “ballot dumps” would represent a break with reality. But for much of the Republican elite, that’s not a problem. They broke with reality long ago.The Republican establishment is also increasingly willing to disenfranchise eligible voters if it helps them win. Between 2008 and 2016, America lost 10% of its polling places, with cuts falling hardest on minority communities. Ever-broader voter purges have kicked millions of eligible, registered voters off red-state voting rolls. In Florida, the Republican state legislature rammed through a new law designed to disenfranchise former felons from voting – despite a 2018 ballot measure in which an overwhelming majority of Floridians voted to restore ex-felons’ rights.These examples barely scrape the surface of the war on voting that Republican politicians, not just Trump, have waged in recent years. The president’s wild attempt to steal an election is a first in American history. But it didn’t come from nowhere. Trump simply absorbed his party establishment’s prevailing view – that it is acceptable to win elections through whatever means possible, including by throwing out large numbers of votes on technicalities, hoping conservative judges put ideology over country, or stoking fears about nonexistent fraud – and took that approach to its logical conclusion.Perhaps that’s why so many Republican elected officials endorsed Trump’s baseless attacks on our democratic process well before the first 2020 ballot was cast. Explicit calls to replace democracy with a different form of government remain relatively rare. But the idea that power should be clung to using any means possible – and that the guardrails of our republic should be ignored or dismantled – is entirely within the Republican mainstream. That’s why Republicans in the Senate refused to call witnesses during Trump’s impeachment trial.It’s commendable that a handful of Republicans stood up to a president and met the low bar he presented. But it’s not enoughThe status quo – a Republican party that attacks democracy without rejecting it entirely – cannot hold. Over the long term, we’ll either have two parties that believe in the consent of the governed, or we’ll have a new and more autocratic form of government. We can’t have both. Yet many of the laudably brave Republicans who stood up to Trump don’t yet recognize that he is a symptom, not a cause. Brad Raffensperger says he supports Georgia’s Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in the state’s 5 January runoff, even though both of them called for him to be fired for defending the election results. Gabriel Sterling, the Georgia official who warned election misinformation could lead to violence, agrees. “Senator Perdue and Senator Loeffler, I feel bad for them,” he said. “I have one of their signs in my yard.”It’s commendable that a handful of Republicans stood up to a president and met the low bar he presented. But it’s not enough. Those who have admirably protected the American experiment from Trump must help America save it from the McConnell-era Republican party. That doesn’t mean Republicans need to change their minds about taxes, regulations, guns, or a host of other a host of other issues that divide the parties. But they do have to agree that democracy is the best way to settle our disagreements – and that those who don’t believe in democracy doesn’t deserve our votes, no matter how much we may support their other positions.Some politicians, such as the retiring congressman Paul Mitchell, have recognized that this is a time for choosing, and publicly left the Republican party over its assault on our nation’s most fundamental ideals. But too many genuinely patriotic Americans believe that they can have it both ways. They still view a politician’s support for authoritarianism as a mere character trait, rather than as the dealbreaker it must be for the country to survive.During his dangerous post-campaign campaign, Trump frequently used a two-part phrase to signal what he thought the country most needed. “WISDOM & COURAGE,” he declared, via tweet. Ironically, he was right. American democracy only made it through this tumultuous year thanks to profiles in courage. But over the haul, courage won’t be enough. We’ll need more profiles in wisdom, too. More

Kayleigh McEnany has described Monday’s electoral college vote confirming Joe Biden as the nation’s next president as just ‘one step in the constitutional process’. The White House press secretary’s assessment is the latest example of White House officials declining to accept Biden’s victory, even after Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday broke his silence on the winner of the presidency, saying: ‘The electoral college has spoken.’US news – live updates Continue reading… More

Republican Mitch McConnell on Tuesday congratulated the Democratic president-elect, Joe Biden, and vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, on their election victories, ending his long silence on the outcome of the presidential race. In remarks on the Senate floor on Tuesday morning, the Senate majority leader acknowledged the Democrats’ winning the White House following Monday’s formal result issued by the electoral collegeMitch McConnell congratulates Biden after weeks of declining to acknowledge election win – live Continue reading… More