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    Trump fails to answer questions or formally concede in bizarre 90-second briefing – video

    Donald Trump and Mike Pence appeared in the White House briefing room for less than two minutes for Trump to tout the stock market’s good day – despite Trump having not taken a question from reporters in about three weeks.
    There was almost no notice of the briefing. CNN’s Jim Acosta said White House staff were suddenly shouting at journalists to get into their seats because the president wanted to walk into the briefing room. After Trump’s departure, a reporter was heard to say: ‘Well, that was weird as shit’.
    The General Services Administration on Monday declared Joe Biden the apparent winner of the US election, clearing the way for the formal transition to begin, after weeks of Trump refusing to concede, violating the traditions of the transition of power at the White House
    Trump agrees to begin transition as key agency calls Biden winner
    Fox News hosts distance themselves from Trump
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    Biden will have the presidency. But Republicans still have the power | Adam Tooze

    President Trump’s efforts to overturn the outcome of the 3 November election, which appear to be over, provided his opponents with a source of sadistic amusement. Trump’s self-humiliation in the eyes of the liberal world is complete. To his followers, of course, the fight goes on. And his Republican colleagues have reason to be cheerful. We should not allow the schadenfreude to distract us from this basic fact. Yes, Biden defeated Trump. But in that same election the Democrats failed to gain the majority of seats that the new president needs to actually put an end to the era of Republican dominance. Things might still go right in Georgia, but that would leave the Senate hanging by a thread.Four times, at moments of historic crisis, the US electorate has handed the White House to a Democrat – 1916, 1932, 2008 and 2020. But this year is the first time it has done so without also handing the Democrats a clear majority in Congress. The basic difference between Biden and his predecessors is that he lacks a solid political basis from which to wield power.The details of state-level politics across the US may seem pettifogging. What is a Senate runoff in Georgia compared to a global pandemic, or the challenge of the rise of China? This incommensurability is jarring, but it is what defines the US as a democratic superpower. The scale of the US economy, its fiscal capacity and military might make it the most powerful state on the planet. But who controls that power depends on fickle and often trivial whims of local political circumstance and on the infighting between the divided branches of US government.America’s rise to global power occurred in a crucial 20-year period between 1932 and 1952 in which, except for a brief two-year hiatus, the Democratic party controlled both the White House and Congress. That dominance defined a new image of the US as a driver of global progress, but that external face was founded at home on an incongruous coalition in which the “solid South” provided the necessary votes in Congress. Jim Crow segregation was the price. The Democrats remained the dominant power in Congress through the early 1990s, but there was never to be another period quite like the mid-century decades. More

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    Fox News' Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson distance themselves from Trump

    Donald Trump continued to gravitate towards his new rightwing media allies at TV channels One America News Network and Newsmax on Tuesday, even as heavyweight supporters Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh distanced themselves from the president’s attempts to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden.On Fox News on Monday, Ingraham said: “Unless the legal situation changes in a dramatic and unlikely manner, Joe Biden will be inaugurated on 20 January.”Carlson claimed “the 2020 election was not fair”, but admitted Trump had lost it.On his radio show, Limbaugh attacked Trump’s lawyers in Pennsylvania, led by Rudy Giuliani, for failing to provide any evidence to back claims of voter fraud in the state.“You announce massive bombshells,” he said, “then you better have some bombshells.”On Tuesday morning, Trump pinned Carlson’s monologue to his Twitter page. But he also retweeted a string of messages by Randy Quaid. In one, the actor echoed Carlson’s claims about trust in election infrastructure, demanding “an in-person-only-paper ballot re-vote”.“Are you listening, Republicans?” Trump tweeted.But in another message, shot in extreme close-up and flashing light and spoken in bizarrely hammy tones, Quaid quoted an old Trump tweet: “Fox News daytime ratings have completely collapsed. Weekend daytime, even worse. Very sad to watch this happen.“But they forgot … they forgot what made them successful. What got them there. They forgot the golden goose. The only difference between the 2016 election and 2020 is Fox News.”Trump has made many such claims about Fox News’ failings. Fox News has disputed his claims about ratings. On Tuesday, a spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.One America News and Newsmax are devoted to supporting Trump. With a move into television among Trump’s possible post-White House plans, both are increasingly under the spotlight.Newsmax has enjoyed ratings growth and mainstream attention, including a Wall Street Journal report which said Trump allies had considered a buyout.OAN remains a fringe operator but on Monday, the Daily Beast reported that one host, Christina Bobb, had been working on the Trump team’s legal challenges.“Christina is an attorney and has helped with some legal work in her personal capacity and not on behalf of OAN,” Jenna Ellis, a Trump adviser, told the Beast.Ellis made her own headlines on Monday. Speaking to MSNBC, she said: “President Trump won by a landslide.”“Take a pause,” host Ari Melber interjected. “If you make false statements, you don’t run roughshod. You made a false accusation.”Trump lost Georgia by around 12,000 votes, Pennsylvania by around 80,000 and Michigan by more than 150,000. Biden won the national popular vote by 6m and the electoral college by 306-232. On Monday, Trump allowed the transition to proceed but continued to make baseless claims of fraud and insist he would be proved the winner.Trump is certainly suffering one landslide defeat: in election-related lawsuits. According to the Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias, the president has won one such case – and lost 35. More

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    The 10 swing state counties that tell the story of the 2020 election | Ben Davis

    Looking at the results of the 2020 election at the more granular level of counties and precincts, it can mostly be defined by one thing: stasis. But beneath that stasis the results of this election and the changes from previous elections say an enormous amount about where the country is and is going. The counties that swung the most mostly fall into two categories: Latino areas swinging strongly towards Trump, and white-majority suburban areas swinging towards Biden. These 10 swing state counties were crucial to the final results, and help tell the story of what happened in 2020.Maricopa county, ArizonaHome of Phoenix and environs, Maricopa county is perhaps the most important individual county to the 2020 presidential election. The county makes up an absolute majority of the population of the swing state Arizona, and the winner of the state almost always wins the county. This year, Biden was able to flip Arizona by just over 10,000 votes, his margin coming entirely from winning Maricopa county by around 45,000. It was the first time the county had voted for the Democratic nominee for president since 1948. In many ways, Maricopa was a microcosm of the election: narrowly won by Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, containing urban and suburban areas, and having large communities of both college-educated white moderate voters and Latino voters. Maricopa was one of the linchpins of the Biden strategy of flipping white suburban voters – which he did just enough to win. Precinct results show Biden doing clearly better than Clinton in the white-majority suburban areas. They also show the result of Democrats’ failure to keep their margins among working-class Latino voters, especially in the seventh congressional district, which was carried by Bernie Sanders in the primary. Within Maricopa we can see the results of the trade-off Democrats made to win this election.Hidalgo county, TexasOn the border with Mexico, Hidalgo county, centered on McAllen, is over 90% Hispanic. Working-class and with very high rates of poverty, historically solidly Democratic Hidalgo represents the center of Biden’s failures with Latino voters and working-class voters more broadly. Hidalgo swung 23 points towards Trump, destroying any hopes Democrats had of winning Texas. Hidalgo saw a 27% increase in turnout, as Trump was able to break expectations by activating low-turnout voters to his side. Young, rapidly growing and working-class, Hidalgo is exactly the type of place Democrats need to win to enact any sort of progressive agenda in the future. For many years the conventional wisdom was that turnout in places like Hidalgo would benefit Democrats, but the consequence of Democrats’ focus on flipping white suburban voters was that these new voters were ignored by the party and Trump was able to capitalize. Like most working-class Latino areas, Hidalgo voted for socialist Bernie Sanders in the primary. Going forward, Democrats need a message of class-focused populism to build a base in communities like Hidalgo and build a progressive governing majority.Collin county, TexasThe flip side of Hidalgo county, Collin county in suburban Dallas is an example of the places that powered Biden to competitiveness in Texas and other suburb-heavy sun belt states. Collin county, like other suburbs in Texas, has long been a Republican bastion, giving enormous margins to GOP candidates up and down the ballot. George W Bush twice won Collin by over 40 points, and Mitt Romney won by over 30 in 2012. This year, however, Collin went for Trump by just four points, a 13-point swing to the Democrats from 2016. Collin and Hidalgo counties represent the twin patterns of this election: affluent white suburban areas swinging towards Democrats and working-class Latino areas swinging to Republicans.Miami-Dade county, FloridaMiami-Dade county is fairly unique politically, but you can’t tell the story of the 2020 election without talking about it. Miami and the surrounding area are heavily influenced by the politics of the Cuban diaspora, but the county is also home to many other communities. Miami-Dade saw one of the strongest swings in the country towards Trump, from going to Clinton by 30 points to Biden by just seven. While much of this was powered by Cuban-majority areas, Biden lost ground all over the county, including Black-majority areas. The immense losses in Miami-Dade are one of the biggest swings, and biggest shocks, of the election, costing two Democratic seats in the House of Representatives and putting Florida nearly out of play. The story in Miami-Dade is that the Republicans can mobilize massive numbers of working-class people who usually don’t vote. This has scrambled the entire American political landscape, and put Democrats in a precarious position going forward.Gwinnett county, GeorgiaGwinnett county, in suburban Atlanta, was key to Biden flipping Georgia. The suburbs were the first area of Georgia to support Republicans as the state moved from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican, and are now in the vanguard again as the state has moved back into the Democratic column. Gwinnett voted Republican every year between 1980 and 2012, voting for George W Bush by over 30 points twice. After going narrowly to Clinton in 2016, the county followed the pattern of suburban realignment more strongly than almost anywhere else in the country, voting for Biden by 18 points, a 75,000-vote margin. Winning big in places like Gwinnett was the key to Biden’s strategy for victory, and he was just able to do it.Lackawanna county, PennsylvaniaLackawanna county is the home of Scranton, Joe Biden’s home town, and is a longtime working-class Democratic stronghold. Lackawanna tells two stories in 2020: one of Biden doing just enough for victory and another of a permanent realignment of historic Democratic working-class areas away from the party. Lackawanna voted for Biden by eight points, a five-point swing towards native son Biden that helped push him just over the top in Pennsylvania. Biden was able to recapture enough support in north-east Pennsylvania and places like it in the midwest and north-east, combined with his increased support in the suburbs, meant that he was able to recapture the states Trump so surprisingly captured in 2016. But under the surface, the result in Lackawanna shows a long-term realignment brought about by decades of neoliberalism and declining union density and accelerated by Donald Trump. Obama was able to win Lackawanna twice by over 25 points. The 2020 result is a swing of nearly 20 points since the Obama era, despite Biden’s local connections. It is clear that many working-class regions have permanently moved away from solid Democratic status.Chester county, PennsylvaniaChester county, in suburban Philadelphia, is one of the GOP’s historical bastions, voting Republican every year but the landslide of 1964 until 2008. This year, Biden won Chester by 17 points and nearly 54,000 votes. Biden’s strength in the Collar counties around Philadelphia was crucial to his win in the state, and is the main thing keeping Democrats competitive since their collapse among voters in rural and post-industrial areas. Places like Chester form the heart of the new Democratic coalition, and Democrats will have to keep and improve Biden’s margins – and match his margins in down-ballot races – to put together governing coalitions in the future.Mahoning county, OhioMahoning county, home of Youngstown, is maybe the most powerful symbol of Democratic loss in the working-class midwest. After voting Democratic by enormous margins for decades, Mahoning went to Trump this year, the first time a Republican has won it since Nixon in 1972. Mahoning went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Obama by over 25 points twice, and even Michael Dukakis by over 25 points. Biden’s shocking loss this year shows a combination of further erosion among white working-class voters and among black voters. Mahoning represents perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the class-based New Deal coalition that has shaped American politics since 1932.Waukesha county, WisconsinCrucial Waukesha county, in suburban Milwaukee, has long been a bastion of Republicanism. This year, however, Biden’s strength with suburban voters closed the gap just enough for Biden to win the state. While Trump won by 21 points, the swing in Waukesha and the rest of the Milwaukee suburbs was just enough for Biden to win the state by around 20,000 votes. While the movement in suburban Milwaukee and the suburbs more broadly was enough to win the election for Biden, it was not as much as many Democrats expected.Northampton county, North CarolinaNorthampton county is a strong example of a serious problem for Democrats: erosion among black voters. These losses may indeed have cost Biden the state of North Carolina. Northampton county is 60% black, and this year went for Biden by 20 points. This was a five-point swing against the Democrats, and the smallest margin for Democrats in the county since the Republican landslide of 1972. Losses among black voters this cycle should be very worrying to Democrats.While the results of the election mostly show stasis, within these results, there was some confounding of expectations. First, the sheer scale of Latino defections to Trump was shocking to many. On the other hand, the swing toward Biden was enough to win the election, but below the expectations of many Democrats, and these voters often split their ticket for down-ballot Republicans, costing the Democrats a chance at a governing majority. Furthermore, the stasis in rural, white areas was a surprise itself. Many of these areas swung dramatically towards Trump in 2016, and it was expected that Biden would rebound at least a bit as there was no more room to fall for Democrats. Instead, these areas mostly stayed the same or even swung to Trump a bit. The results of 2020 confirm the huge swings and coalitional realignment of 2016 are here to stay. We head into the future with a Democratic party weaker than ever among working-class voters of all races and more reliant than ever on a wealthier, whiter and more affluent coalition. More

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    John Kerry named as Joe Biden's special climate envoy

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    John Kerry, the former US secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee, has been named as a special envoy on the climate crisis under Joe Biden’s incoming administration.
    Biden’s transition team said Kerry would “fight climate change full time” in the role, which for the first time will include a seat on the national security council.
    This elevation shows the president-elect sees the climate crisis as an “urgent national security issue”, the Biden transition team said.
    Kerry tweeted that “America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent national security threat it is.” The former Massachusetts senator, who ran for president in 2004, added that he will work with Biden, US allies and the climate movement to address the “crisis” of global heating.
    As secretary of state, Kerry played a prominent role in the international effort to craft the Paris climate agreement, which commits countries to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid disastrous storms, heatwaves, flooding and other looming climate threats.
    Since leaving government in 2017, Kerry has been sharply critical of Donald Trump’s dismantling of climate policies and the decision to remove the US from the Paris agreement. Biden has vowed to re-enter the Paris deal.
    Over the summer, Kerry was part of a climate taskforce the Biden campaign used to develop its carbon-cutting policies.
    The appointment of such a heavyweight political figure to a newly elevated climate position was warmly welcomed by environmentalists.
    “John Kerry’s appointment is an encouraging signal that the US will make the climate emergency a matter of national security, but it’s only a step in what must be a bold new strategy,” said Brett Hartl, director of government affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity.
    “Because Trump spent four years boosting fossil fuels and blocking solutions, the new administration must prove its commitment to drawing down fossil fuels and treating this crisis with the life-and-death urgency that it deserves.”
    Seen as a moderate among climate campaigners, Kerry will probably be tasked with gaining support among Republicans for Biden’s sweeping $2tn plan to drastically cut emissions by generating millions of new jobs in renewable energy and other climate-friendly activities.
    It is unclear how much success he will have if, as anticipated, Republicans remain in control of the Senate. More

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    Trump campaign cuts ties with attorney Sidney Powell after bizarre election fraud claims

    Perhaps Sidney Powell has gone too far even for Rudy Giuliani this time.
    The Trump campaign’s legal team has moved to distance itself from the firebrand conservative attorney after a tumultuous few days in which Powell made multiple incorrect statements about the election voting process, unspooled complex conspiracy theories and vowed to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” lawsuit.
    “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity,” Giuliani and another lawyer for Trump, Jenna Ellis, said in a statement on Sunday.
    Trump himself has heralded Powell’s involvement, tweeting last week that she was part of a team of “wonderful lawyers and representatives” spearheaded by Giuliani.
    There was no immediate clarification from the campaign and Powell did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
    The statement hints at chaos in a legal team that has lost case after case in its efforts to overturn the results of the 3 November election. Law firms have withdrawn from cases, and in the latest setback, Matthew Brann, a Republican US district court judge in Pennsylvania, threw out the Trump campaign’s request to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters there.
    “This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent,” he wrote in a damning order, issued on Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, the Trump campaign filed an appeal against Brann’s ruling in Pennsylvania.
    It came after similar failed court bids in Georgia, Michigan and Arizona to prevent states from certifying their vote totals.
    The statement on Powell was the latest sign of wariness over her approach even within some conservative circles. Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show last week that his team had asked Powell for evidence to support her claims, but that Powell had provided none.
    Powell made headlines with her statements at a Thursday news conference where, joined by Giuliani and Ellis, she incorrectly suggested that a server hosting evidence of voting irregularities was located in Germany, that voting software used by Georgia and other states was created at the direction of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and that votes for Trump had probably been switched in favour of Biden.
    However, her contributions that day were largely overshadowed by Giuliani’s hair dye malfunction.
    In a subsequent interview with Newsmax on Saturday, she appeared to accuse Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and its Republican secretary of state of being part of a conspiracy involving a voting-system contract award that she contends harmed Trump’s re-election bid.
    “Georgia’s probably going to be the first state I’m going to blow up and Mr Kemp and the secretary of state need to go with it,” she said, later adding that a lawsuit she planned to file against the state would be “biblical”.
    The status of that lawsuit was unclear on Sunday night.
    Powell, a former federal prosecutor, took over last year as the lead lawyer for Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
    Since then, a federal judge has rejected her claims of prosecutorial misconduct and has responded quizzically to some of her arguments, including her suggestion at a hearing several weeks ago that her conversations with Trump about the Flynn case were privileged.
    She has supported a Justice Department motion to dismiss the prosecution, a request that remains pending before US district judge Emmet Sullivan. More

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    Trump faces pressure from Republicans to drop 'corrosive' fight to overturn election

    Donald Trump faced growing pressure from Republicans on Sunday to drop his chaotic, last-ditch fight to overturn the US presidential election, as victor Joe Biden prepared to start naming his cabinet and a Pennsylvania judge compared Trump’s legal case there to “Frankenstein’s monster”.Despite Republican leadership in Washington standing behind the president’s claims that the 3 November election was stolen from him by nationwide voter fraud, other prominent figures, including two of his former national security advisers, were blunt.Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton said that Biden would be sworn in in January and added: “The real question is how much damage Trump can do before that happens.”The president’s efforts were designed mainly to sow chaos and confusion, he told CNN’s State of the Union show, as a demonstration more of “raw political power” than a genuine legal exercise.Bolton noted that the Trump campaign has so far lost all but two of more than 30 legal challenges in various states.“Right now Trump is throwing rocks through windows, he is the political equivalent of a street rioter,” Bolton said.And another former Trump administration national security adviser, HR McMaster, told CBS’s Face the Nation that Trump’s efforts were “very corrosive” and warned that his actions were sowing doubt among the electorate.“It’s playing into the hands of our adversaries,” he said, warning that Russia, for example, “doesn’t care who wins” as long as many Americans doubt the result, undermining US democracy.On Sunday evening, hours after former New Jersey governor and adviser to the president Chris Christie said Trump’s legal team was a “national embarrassment” the campaign issued a statement distancing itself from lawyer Sidney Powell, who has been a prominent figure arguing the Trump case that the election was fraudulent, while positing wild theories but no evidence.Meanwhile, Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, another Republican, said he also was confident Biden would be sworn in on schedule on 20 January and said “I’m embarrassed” at the lack of party leadership speaking out to recognize the election result.Hogan added that he thought Trump’s pressuring last week of state legislators “to somehow try to change the outcome” was “completely outrageous”.The US used to supervise elections around the world but was now “beginning to look like we’re in a banana republic,” Hogan told CNN’s State of the Union politics show.Hogan later tweeted, in response to a critical tweet from Trump, who had gone to the golf course for the second time this weekend: “Stop golfing and concede.”If you had done your job, America’s governors wouldn’t have been forced to fend for themselves to find tests in the middle of a pandemic, as we successfully did in Maryland.Stop golfing and concede. https://t.co/tCXO8etxge— Governor Larry Hogan (@GovLarryHogan) November 22, 2020
    On Friday, the president met withRepublican leaders from Michigan at the White House in a wild attempt to sway them and leaders in other battleground states in the electoral college to set aside the will of the people and declare Trump the winner, despite officials at local and federal level declaring it the most secure election in American history.In the latest setback to Trump’s efforts, Matthew Brann, a Republican US district court judge in Pennsylvania, threw out the Trump campaign’s request to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters there.“This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent,” he wrote in a damning order, issued on Saturday.It came after similar failed court bids in Georgia, Michigan and Arizona to prevent states from certifying their vote totals.Ruling that Pennsylvania officials can certify election results in the state, where Biden has a lead of more than 80,000 votes, Brann said the Trump campaign presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations… unsupported by evidence” in its attempt to challenge a batch of thousands of votes.Brann also suggested that the Trump campaign’s case demonstrated a failure to understand the US constitution, writing: “Plaintiffs seek to remedy the denial of their votes by invalidating the votes of millions of others. Rather than requesting that their votes be counted, they seek to discredit scores of other votes, but only for one race. This is simply not how the constitution works.”For Trump to maintain any hope of staying in the White House, he would need to eliminate Biden’s 81,000-vote lead in Pennsylvania. The state is due to start certifying its results on Monday – as is Michigan.Kristen Clarke, president of the lawyers’ committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said of the Pennsylvania result and forthcoming result certification: “This should put the nail in the coffin on any further attempts by President Trump to use the federal courts to rewrite the outcome of the 2020 election.”On Sunday afternoon, the Trump campaign filed an appeal against Brann’s ruling in Pennsylvania.But Christie agreed that it was time for the president to concede and said the legal team fighting to overturn the election was “a national embarrassment”.Last week, lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell represented the Trump campaign in court and held a long press conference side by side at the Republican National Committee headquarters that was characterized by lies and wild claims about a fraudulent election, without presenting credible evidence.Then the Trump election campaign abruptly issued a statement on Powell.“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,” Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in the Sunday evening statement. “She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”Powell recently represented Michael Flynn, who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser before he was fired and prosecuted, in his tangled criminal case.Biden has garnered the most votes of a presidential winner in history, recording 6 million more votes than Trump. More