Eliana Willis

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    Trump was unique. The Republicans will struggle to find another like him | Jan-Werner Mueller

    None of this is to say that Trumpism will disappear, but he was a master at selling illusions – and few have his skillsetLiberal and conservative commentators are fast converging on a prediction: Donald Trump might be gone, but Trumpism is here to stay. Of course, the former are anxious that a smooth, smart authoritarian will pick up where Trump left off and make the US join the rightwing populist international of autocrats like Modi, Erdogan and Orbán; the latter are hoping for a Republican party somehow dedicated to an “American worker” who we ought to imagine as a conservative nationalist. Both sides overestimate Trumpism and – still, after all these years – underestimate Trump himself.Conventional wisdom has it that figures like Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, Missouri senator Josh Hawley, or even a TV personality like Tucker Carlson are auditioning to claim the Trumpist movement. There is little doubt that the movement is potent: after five years, plenty of citizens deeply identify as Trumpists; and a whole folklore has been built around Maga. The Republican party has every reason to deploy this movement against the Biden administration and combine Mitch McConnell’s Machiavellianism from above with more or less manipulated grass-roots pressure from below, strung along by Fox and talk radio which will never forget that polarization is big business. After all, such a dual strategy – Republican establishment plus Tea party – already served to sabotage crucial parts of the Obama presidency. Continue reading… More

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    Make no mistake: Biden's success is an important win for the world | Cas Mudde

    Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the popular vote with a record number of votes. That is worth celebratingSo, it wasn’t a landslide, but it will be a decisive victory after all. With an estimated 306 electoral college votes, Biden will even be two votes above Trump’s “biggest electoral college victory since Reagan” in 2016.But seriously, it will be weird to have a president again who will live in our reality rather than his own. I wonder how long we will enjoy it. People forget fast, and media and pundits even faster. How long before we will all complain about how “boring” and “predictable” Biden is, two of the characteristics that helped him win the election. Continue reading… More

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    How can Joe Biden deal with Donald Trump's obstruction in transition?

    The president-elect can learn from Franklin D Roosevelt’s response to Herbert HooverPresidential transitions are never easy, especially when they involve an incumbent president defeated at the polls. But this time the transition occurs in the midst of an unprecedented crisis. The incumbent refuses to acknowledge the vote as a rejection of his policies and has a visceral dislike for the president-elect, who he accuses of dishonesty and dismisses as too frail to assume the duties of office. He tars his successor as a socialist, an advocate of policies that will put the country on the road to ruin.The year was 1932, and the transition from Herbert Hoover to Franklin D Roosevelt occurred in the midst of an unparalleled economic depression and banking crisis. The outgoing president, Hoover, had an intense aversion to his successor, whose incapacity of concern was not any lack of mental acuity, but rather Roosevelt’s partial paralysis. He called FDR a “chameleon on plaid” and accused him of dealing “from the bottom of the deck”. In his campaign and subsequently, Hoover insinuated that FDR’s socialistic tendencies would put the country on a “march to Moscow”. Continue reading… More

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    How Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the fight for America’s soul – video

    In the final episode of Anywhere but Washington, Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone return to Florida, the crucial swing state that Donald Trump won last week. His victory there paved the way for his baseless attacks on the election process. From Palm Beach county, home to the president’s private club Mar-a-Lago, election night turns into election week, in a story of hope and joy but also division and lies
    Watch more from the Anywhere but Washington video series  More

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    Will Trump accept defeat and leave the White House? Yes, experts say

    Donald Trump may never concede that he legitimately lost the 2020 election and the US presidency.That in itself will probably not matter too much, but he may use his final months in office before Joe Biden takes office in January, 2021 to push the divisive politics that have become his calling card. He may even boycott Biden’s inauguration ceremony.But even if Trump and his colleagues sow a sloppy, chaotic and vindictive transition of power, it’s still unfathomable that the one-term president would belligerently barricade himself inside the Oval Office and refuse to leave, says Lawrence Douglas, a professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College.“I do not see that happening,” says Douglas, whose book Will He Go? considers the aftermath of the 2020 election. “I think at some point, Donald Trump will submit to defeat.”After flirting with the idea of rejecting unfavorable election results for years, Trump has stoked fears of worst-case scenarios: civil war, a weaponized supreme court, and even the end to American democracy. With only 10% of Trump’s supporters initially believing Biden won the presidential contest, many Americans are also concerned about an outburst of violence, even as the rancorous commander-in-chief paints a baseless picture of rigged, fraudulent results.“I had such a big lead in all of these states late into election night, only to see the leads miraculously disappear as the days went by. Perhaps these leads will return as our legal proceedings move forward!” Trump tweeted on Friday.In a last-ditch effort for Republicans to hold onto the executive branch, Trump and his allies have already begun filing a firestorm of lawsuits around the election. But they’ve made little headway thus far.“If the number of contested ballots are not greater than the margin, courts are not eager to tear open an election,” although judicial scrutiny could actually address a “lingering cloud of illegitimacy” around the vote counts, said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School.If any of Trump’s legal challenges do find sympathy among Republican lawmakers and federal courts, that could cause a messy, fraught environment leading up to 20 January, when Biden is supposed to take office.But it’s more probable that Republicans will remain silent even if Trump continues to fuss and largely refuses to cooperate with Biden’s people in the interim, says Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University.“The difficulty with that is it just doesn’t give the new administration the best tools, the best information, and the best transition that we would hope for,” Zelizer says. But “my guess is Biden’s already expecting that”.Even as a lame duck, Trump could strategically force Democrats to oppose executive orders that underscore their party’s vulnerabilities ahead of runoff elections in Georgia that will determine who controls the US Senate, Turley says. If the outgoing administration does lean on executive orders, those can be dismantled by Biden.But after Democrats spent four years challenging whether Trump could rescind former president Barack Obama’s policies, Turley says, they’ve created a “precedent of their own making” against reversing such orders without long administrative slogs.Trump may use the power of the presidency to push for more conservative court appointments, another tax cut or environmental deregulations – measures to “remind Republicans of why a lot of Republicans voted for him”, says Zelizer, even as he exits the White House. Although he lost re-election, he still won more than 70m votes, and he could wield significant authority over his base for years to come.“He will continue to tell tens of millions of Americans that the Biden presidency is illegitimate, that essentially the Democrats have committed a coup,” Douglas says. “That could certainly pave the way for a resurgence of Trumpism, if not Trump himself in 2024.”Meanwhile, Biden may inherit a divided government that’s struggled to cooperate and compromise in recent years, shaken by a tumultuous transition.“He’s a decent person who genuinely will try to unite Americans,” Douglas says. “Now, whether he’ll be successful at doing that remains to be seen.” More

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    We were told Joe Biden was the 'safe choice'. But it was risky to offer so little | Naomi Klein

    These have been a harrowing few days. And these days have been more harrowing than they should have been. As we all know, Joe Biden won the Democratic primaries based on the claim that he was the safest bet to beat Donald Trump. But even if the Democratic party base was much more politically aligned with Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren, in their support for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, for racial justice, the party was sure that Bernie Sanders was too risky. And so, as we all remember, they banded together and gave us Biden.
    But I think that after days of gnawing our fingers down to the quick, it’s fair to say that Biden was not safe at all, as we always knew. Not safe for the planet, not safe for the people on the front lines of police violence, not safe for the millions upon millions of people who are seeking asylum, but also not even safe as a candidate.
    Defeating Trump is a really important popular victory. A great many people did not vote for Joe Biden, they voted against Trump, because they recognize the tremendous threat that he represents. And the fact that the movements that are behind so much of that political victory are not able to even just take a moment and feel that victory, because they are already under attack by the Democratic establishment, as it seeks once again to abdicate all responsibility for ending us in the mess that we are in, is really its own kind of a crime. People should not have to be fighting off these attacks. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should not have to be on Twitter all day, making the point that it is not the fault of democratic socialists that the Democratic party has underperformed in the way that it has.
    In fact, she and so many others should be taking a bow for the incredible organizing and leadership that they’ve shown in this period.
    Biden was a risky candidate for the same reasons Hillary Clinton was a risky candidate. He was risky because of his swampy record because he had so little to offer so many people in such deep crisis. It seems he has secured an electoral victory by the skin of his teeth but it was a high risk gamble from the start. And not only is the left not to blame. We are largely responsible for the success that has taken place, not the Lincoln Project, which has, as David Sirota said, set fire to $67m in this election by trying to reach suburban Republican voters.
    We are the levees holding back the tsunami of fascism. The wave is still gaining force, that’s why this is such a difficult moment to celebrate. We need to shore up those levees, and we also need to drain energy away from their storm. So how do we do that?
    We need to, I think, recognize first of all that, though we may be dealing with the same kind of corporate Democrats as we were in 2008, we are not the same. We have changed. Our movements have grown. They grew during the Obama years, and they grew during the Trump years, they have grown in size but they’ve also grown in vision. In the vision of defund the police, moving the resources from the infrastructure of incarceration, of policing, of militarism to the infrastructure of care. Vision work has happened. The vision work behind the Green New Deal has happened. And of course the movement supporting Medicare for All.
    Even as we approach this juncture with so much fatigue, we have to remind ourselves that we have changed. That the presence of “the Squad” is a difference from the Obama and Biden years. Obama and Biden did not have to contend with Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and now Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. So I think where we go from here is, we need more coordination in all of this rising power.

    I think about that moment in 2018, when the Democrats took back the House of Representatives. They were expecting their victory parade and instead had their offices occupied by the Sunrise movement and [Ocasio-Cortez] greeting them and pledging to introduce Green New Deal legislation. That sort of inside-outside pincer is what we need to be replicating again and again and again. That is a glimpse of the kind of dynamic that we will need if we are going to win the policies that are actually enough to begin to keep us safe.
    What we have seen with the failure of the Democratic party to do the one thing that we look to from a political party, which is be good at winning elections. I don’t need to outline all the things we had going in our favor but this election should have been a repeat of Herbert Hoover’s loss in 1933. We are in the grips of a pandemic, a desperate economic depression and and Trump has done absolutely everything wrong.
    This should have been a sweep. It should have been the sweep that we were promised. And the fact is, the Democratic leadership bungled it up on every single front. It wasn’t just a mistake. They did not want to offer people what they needed, They are much more interested in appeasing the donor class than they are in meeting the needs of their constituents, who need them now more than ever.
    Naomi Klein is a senior correspondent at the Intercept and the inaugural Gloria Steinem endowed chair of media, culture and feminist studies at Rutgers University. She is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author, most recently of On Fire: The Burning Case for A Green New Deal.
    This is an abridged transcript of remarks Klein delivered at Where Do We Go From Here? a Haymarket Books event on 6 November 2020 More

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    Mitt Romney calls Donald Trump '900lb gorilla in the Republican party'

    Donald Trump, stewing at the White House, reportedly approached by Jared Kushner about conceding the election but as yet unmoved, is “the 900lb gorilla when it comes to the Republican party”, Utah senator and 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney said on Sunday.
    The presidential election was called for Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate, on Saturday, when Pennsylvania moved into his electoral college column four days after the vote.
    Trump, who responded with defiance – and by playing golf – “will have an enormous impact on our party going forward”, Romney told NBC’s Meet the Press.
    “I believe the great majority of people who voted for Donald Trump want to make sure that his principles and his policies are pursued. So yeah, he’s not disappearing by any means. He’s the 900lb gorilla when it comes to the Republican party.”
    Romney is a relative moderate in Trump’s party and a relatively independent voice – he was the only Republican senator to vote for impeachment but he also voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court with unprecedented and many say unseemly haste.
    “The presidential race,” he said on Sunday, considering Republican victories in congressional, state and local elections, “was more a matter of a referendum on a person. And that when it came to policy, we did pretty well.”
    In an interview with CNN’s State of the Union, Romney elaborated, claiming: “Republicans overall did better than Democrats overall in this election. So it comes down to a question about what does America want in terms of policy.
    “It’s pretty clear they don’t want the Green New Deal,” he said, starting to tick off progressive policy goals not necessarily shared by Biden or offered on his platform.
    “Pretty clear they don’t want Medicare for All, don’t want higher taxes, don’t want to get rid of oil and gas and coal. The American people are more conservative than they are progressive, so to speak, and any argument to the contrary I think is going to be met with a lot of resistance from the American people, and from members of Congress.”
    Regardless of such political fights to come, Trump is still claiming without evidence that widespread voter fraud meant his election defeat was rigged.
    Asked on NBC what he would like to see the president do differently, Romney said: “We’re not going to change President Trump or his nature in the waning days of the presidency. And so I don’t think I’m going to be giving him advice as to what to do.
    “Clearly, the people in the past, like myself, who lost elections, have gone on in a way that said, ‘Look, I know the eyes of the world are on us. The eyes of our own people are on the institutions that we have. The eyes of history are on us.’
    “In a setting like this, we want to preserve something which is far more important than our self or even our party. And that is preserve the cause of freedom and democracy here and around the world.
    “But the president’s going to do what he has traditionally done, what he’s doing now … and by the way, he has every right to call for recounts. Because we’re talking about a margin of 10,000 votes here, or less in some cases [in fact just Georgia]. And so a recount could change the outcome. He wants to look at irregularities, pursue that in the court.
    “But if, as expected, those things don’t change the outcome, why, he will accept the inevitable.”
    NBC host Chuck Todd did goad Romney into slightly harsher words about Trump’s behaviour.
    “I think it’s fine to pursue every legal avenue that one has,” Romney said. “But I think one has to be careful in the choice of words. I think when you say that the election was corrupt or stolen or rigged, that that’s unfortunately rhetoric that gets picked up by authoritarians around the world.
    “And I think it also discourages confidence in our democratic process here at home. And with a battle going on right now between authoritarianism and freedom, why, I think it’s very important that we not use language which can encourage a course in history which would be very, very unfortunate.” More

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    'Let us be the nation we know we can be': Biden speaks after defeating Trump – US election 2020 live updates

    Key events

    Show

    10.17am EST10:17
    Trump goes golfing, again

    9.30am EST09:30
    Romney – Trump is ‘900lb gorilla in the Republican party’

    8.49am EST08:49
    US sees fourth consecutive record daily total of new Covid cases

    Live feed

    Show

    10.17am EST10:17

    Trump goes golfing, again

    Hello. Oliver Holmes here, taking over the live blog for the next few hours.
    ‘Surely, this election is over’, I hear millions of fatigued voices cry out. Well, yes, it is. Joe Biden is president-elect after winning the election, but the full count has still not finished and Donald Trump has hunkered down, refusing to concede.
    The latest update is that the current president appears to have gone golfing for the second day in a row. His motorcade recently arrived at Trump National Golf Club, in Sterling, Virginia, according to a White House reporter.
    A handful of demonstrators lined the sidewalks near the entrance of the club. Two signs read: “ORANGE CRUSHED” and “TRUMPTY DUMPTY HAD A GREAT FALL.”

    Updated
    at 10.19am EST

    10.00am EST10:00

    Michael Goldfarb, former London bureau chief of NPR and fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, has written for us today. He says that Trump was no accident, and the America that made him is still with us.

    It’s a measure of the bizarre, outsize impact of the man that pundits are already speaking of Trumpism. Liberal leftish types anticipate his return like Brian de Palma movie devotees anticipate Carrie’s hand coming out of the grave – Trump’s coming to drag them into the darkness. Rightwing radicals – conservative doesn’t seem the right term any more — speak of Trumpism because he was the person who energised their disparate coalition in a way no other person has. I almost typed politician rather than person but Trump is not a pol. He is a “leader”, someone on whom people project their own desires.
    Trump’s presidency was the end product of two strands of American life coming together after a quarter of a century of independent development. First, the Republican party’s evolution from a bloc of diverse interests into a radical faction built around a single idea: winning absolute power and making America a one-party state ruled by people dedicated to tax cuts for the wealthy and stacking the federal courts with judges who would roll back the New Deal/civil rights-era social contract.
    The former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, began this process more than a quarter of a century ago. He was the first prominent Republican to see in Donald Trump the man who could fulfil the modern party’s dreams. Gingrich later wrote, in 2018: “Trump’s America and the post-American society that the anti-Trump coalition represents are incapable of coexisting. One will simply defeat the other. There is no room for compromise. Trump has understood this perfectly since day one.”

    Read more here: Michael Goldfarb – Trump was no accident. And the America that made him is still with us
    And I’m done for the day – I’ll see you again tomorrow. Oliver Holmes will be with you shorty…

    9.58am EST09:58

    You are going to see this attack line from Republicans a lot in the coming days. Here’s conservative radio and TV host Mark Simone.

    MARK SIMONE
    (@MarkSimoneNY)
    Didn’t they keep saying Russia tampered with the election, that 17 intelligence agencies, 4 committees confirmed it and all news organizations were investigating it.Now we hear there’s never been any voter fraud and it’s impossible to tamper with an election. #election

    November 8, 2020

    Donald Trump Jr made a similar point earlier.

    Donald Trump Jr.
    (@DonaldJTrumpJr)
    We went from 4 years of Russia rigged the election, to elections can’t be rigged really fast didn’t we???

    November 8, 2020

    It bears repeating that despite team Trump repeatedly dismissing it as the ‘Russian hoax’ and similar, the CIA did find in December 2016 that Russia had interfered to try and help Trump win. Here’s the details:

    Officials briefed on the matter were told that intelligence agencies had found that individuals linked to the Russian government had provided WikiLeaks with thousands of confidential emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and others.
    The people involved were known to US intelligence and acted as part of a Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt the chances of the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favour one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” one said.
    The emails were steadily leaked via WikiLeaks in the months before the election, damaging Clinton’s White House run by revealing that DNC figures had colluded to harm the chances of her nomination rival Bernie Sanders.
    A separate report in the New York Times, also sourced to unnamed officials, claimed US intelligence agencies had discovered that Russian hackers had also penetrated the Republican National Committee’s networks, but conspicuously chose to release only the information stolen from the Democrats.
    A third report, by Reuters, said intelligence agencies assessed that as the campaign drew on, Russian government officials devoted increasing attention to assisting Trump’s effort to win the election. Virtually all the emails they released publicly were potentially damaging to Clinton and the Democrats.

    Important to note one key thing there – the Russian interference was all about the selective leaking of stolen and hacked information to assist Donald Trump, not changing the counting of votes. There was no evidence found that Russia hacked voting machines or faked ballot papers.

    9.49am EST09:49

    Trump’s campaign staff don’t seem in any mood to concede this morning.

    Tim Murtaugh
    (@TimMurtaugh)
    Greeting staff at @TeamTrump HQ this morning, a reminder that the media doesn’t select the President. pic.twitter.com/3ACjkBhxVn

    November 8, 2020

    A reminder that as it stands, Joe Biden has won over over 75m votes, some 4.3m more than the incumbent. He is projected to win at least 290 electoral college votes, and will be the 46th president of the United States.
    In 2000, while Bush did indeed prevail after those earlier calls for Gore, the election ended up hinging on just 537 votes in Florida. In order to prevent Biden reaching the White House, the Trump campaign are going to have to proved evidence that tens of thousands of votes in multiple states should be discounted as fraudulent.
    The 45th president, meanwhile, departed the White House at 9.15 this morning. The press pool were not informed where he was headed. Yesterday’s unscheduled trip was to play golf, during which Trump was informed that he had lost. More