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Conservative groups protesting against US president-elect Joe Biden’s election victory gathered for protests across the country on Saturday, including in Washington where far-right groups clashed with counter-protesters despite a heavy police presence.Organizers of Stop The Steal, who allege without evidence that the 3 November election win was tainted by fraud, and church groups urged supporters to participate in “Jericho Marches” and prayer rallies.But in downtown Washington, tensions rose after dark as scores of pro-Trump “Proud Boys” protesters and “Antifa” counterprotesters faced off, separated by police in riot gear and on bicycles.Around 200 members of the Proud Boys, a violent far-right group, had joined the marches earlier on Saturday near the Trump hotel in the capital. Many wore combat fatigues and ballistic vests, carried helmets and flashed hand signals used by white nationalists.The two groups shouted insults at each other across a street near McPherson Square and some set off fireworks, but police kept them apart.Police pepper-sprayed at least two counter-protesters before the Proud Boys left the area and regrouped several blocks away.Protests were also planned in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, where Trump’s campaign has sought to overturn vote counts.More than 50 federal and state court rulings have upheld Biden’s victory. The US supreme court on Friday rejected a long-shot lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Trump seeking to throw out voting results in four states.“Whatever the ruling was yesterday … everybody take a deep, deep breath,” retired army general Mike Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, told protesters in front of the supreme court, referring to the court’s refusal to hear the Texas case.Flynn who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with the former Russian ambassador, spoke in his first public address since Trump pardoned him in November.“My charge to you is to go back to where you are from” and make demands, Flynn told the crowd, without being more specific. The US constitution is “not about collective liberty it is about individual liberties, and they designed it that way”, he said.Trump has refused to concede defeat, alleging without evidence that he was denied victory by massive fraud. On his way to Andrews air force base and then to the annual Army-Navy football game in New York, Trump made three passes in the Marine One helicopter over the cheering protesters.Trump’s supporters carrying flags and signs made their way in small knots toward Congress and the supreme court through downtown Washington, which was closed to traffic by police vehicles and dump trucks.Few of the marchers wore masks, despite soaring Covid-19 deaths and cases, defying a mayoral directive for them to be worn outside. Several thousand people rallied in Washington, fewer than during a similar protest last month.As some in the crowd echoed far right conspiracy theories about the election, a truck-pulled trailer flew Trump 2020 flags and a sign reading “Trump Unity” while blaring the country song “God Bless the USA”.“It’s clear the election has been stolen,” said Mark Paul Jones of Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania, who sported a tricorner revolutionary war-era hat as he walked toward the supreme court with his wife.Some protesters referenced the Biblical miracle of the battle of Jericho, in which the walls of the city crumbled after soldiers and priests blowing horns marched around it.In his speech, Flynn told the protesters they were all standing inside Jericho after breaching its walls.Ron Hazard of Morristown, New Jersey, was one of five people who stopped at the justice department to blow shofars – a ram’s horn used in Jewish religious ceremonies – to bring down “the spiritual walls of corruption”.“We believe what is going on in this county is an important thing. It’s a balance between biblical values and anti-biblical values,” Hazard said. More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Texas Lawsuit and the Age of DreampolitikThe separation of political reality from political fantasy stills exists — for now.Opinion ColumnistDec. 12, 2020Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesWhen it comes to Donald Trump’s efforts to claim victory in the 2020 presidential election, there are two Republican Parties. One G.O.P. has behaved entirely normally, certifying elections, rejecting frivolous claims and conspiratorial lawsuits, declining to indulge the conceit that state legislatures might substitute their votes for the electoral outcome.The other G.O.P. is acting like a bunch of saboteurs: insisting that the election was stolen, implying that the normal party’s officials are potentially complicit and championing all manner of outlandish claims and strategies — culminating in the lawsuit led by the attorney general of Texas that sought to have the Supreme Court essentially nullify the election results in the major swing states.What separates these two parties is not necessarily ideology or partisanship or even loyalty to Donald Trump. (Nobody had Brian Kemp and Bill Barr, both prominent members of the first group, pegged as NeverTrumpers.) It’s all about power and responsibility: The Republicans behaving normally are the ones who have actual political and legal roles in the electoral process and its judicial aftermath, from secretaries of state and governors in states like Georgia and Arizona to Trump’s judicial appointees. The Republicans behaving radically are doing so in the knowledge — or at least the strong assumption — that their behavior is performative, an act of storytelling rather than lawmaking, a posture rather than a political act.This postelection division of the Republican Party extends and deepens an important trend in American politics: The cultivation of a kind of “dreampolitik” (to steal a word from Joan Didion), a politics of partisan fantasy that so far manages to coexist with normal politics, feeding gridlock and stalemate and sometimes protest but not yet the kind of crisis anticipated by references to Weimar Germany and our Civil War.The cultivation is a bipartisan affair. When conservatives defend their fight to overturn the election as an answer to the way Democrats reacted to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, they are correct in the sense that most of their arguments and proposed tactics have antecedents on the liberal side. The attempts to scrutinize swing-state data for anomalies that prove the fix was in recapitulate similar attempts by early #Resistance pioneers. The state-legislature fantasy is an answer to the “Hamilton elector” fantasy, in which faithless electors were going to deny Trump the White House. The widespread Republican belief in voter fraud is akin to the widespread Democratic belief that Russian hacking changed vote totals.The difference, though, is that the right’s fantasy has been embraced from the start by a Republican president (Hillary Clinton was a follower rather than a leader in calling Trump “illegitimate”), and it has penetrated much faster and further into the apparatus of Republican politics. In January 2017, only a handful of Democratic backbenchers objected to Congress’s certification of Trump’s election. But you can find the name of the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, on a brief supporting the ridiculous Texas lawsuit.That brief did not persuade the Supreme Court, Biden will be president, and the Republicans who signed up for the fantasy have been protected from their folly, once again, by Republicans with actual responsibility — in this most recent case, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts.But it’s reasonable to wonder how long this can go on — whether dreampolitik and realpolitik can continue permanently on separate tracks, brushing up against each other from time to time without a serious collision, or whether eventually the dreamworld narratives will force a crisis in the real one.One possibility, which I explored in my recent book, is that political fantasy can actually be a substitute for radical action in the real world. There are ways in which the internet, especially, seems to contain and redirect the same extremism it nurtures — pushing it into memes and hashtags and social-media wars rather than actual revolutions, giving us Diamond and Silk tweeting about a military coup rather than the thing itself.In this theory, certain kinds of partisan fantasy might actually be stabilizing forces, letting people satisfy their ideological urges by participating in a story in which their side is always on the verge of some great victory, in which Trump is about to be exposed as a Manchurian candidate or removed by the 25th Amendment (I participated in that one), or alternatively in which Trump is about to order mass arrests of all the pedophile elites or get the Supreme Court to put him back in office for another four years. Or, for the apocalyptically inclined, a fantasy in which your political enemies are poised to do something unbelievably terrible — like all the right-wing militia violence that liberals expected on Election Day — that would vindicate all your fears and makes you happy in your hatred.Crucially, as in certain famous cults, the failure of these prophecies doesn’t undo the story. It just requires more elaboration and adaptation, more creative fantasizing — and meanwhile the gears of normal politics grind on, choked with sand but still turning steadily enough.I am certain this analysis fits the career of Trump himself, who has conjured wild fantasies among his friends and enemies alike, but who clearly doesn’t have the capacity to bring the real world into alignment with his own reality-television imagination, to suborn the custodians of institutional legitimacy — whether the military or the Supreme Court or his own attorney general and the governor of Georgia. And while Trump may get one more great performance in 2024, I’m not sure that any plausible successor will be able to achieve his mind-meld with the right’s dreampolitik — in which case this postelection fight might be a unique convergence between reality and fantasy, rather than a foretaste of the two collapsing disastrously into each other.On the other hand, we saw over the summer how amid the unique combination of pandemic, lockdown and Trump’s provoking presidency, the fantasy politics of the left could slip free of the dreamworlds of academia and online activism, contributing to violence and purges in the real world — from the streets of the Twin Cities to the board of the Poetry Foundation. Police abolition and apologias for rioting belonged to the realm of ideological fantasy politics until they didn’t, and if certain left-wing impulses have gone back to being fantastic in the months since, the memory of May and June remains.The Texas lawsuit didn’t torch any city blocks, but all those congressional signatures on the amicus brief did make it feel like something more than just another meme. The crucial question it raises is whether people can be fed on fantasies forever — or whether once enough politicians have endorsed dreampolitik, the pressure to make the dream into reality will inexorably build.The last month of 2020 won’t resolve that question. But we can look forward, in the next decade if not sooner, to discovering whether my confidence in the separation of political fantasy and political reality was the greatest fantasy of all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMeet the Electoral College’s Biggest Critics: Some of the Electors Themselves“Do we really want 538 Bob Nemanichs electing our president?” Bob Nemanich, a former elector, doesn’t. And he is hopeful that 2020 might put future electors out of a gig.Polly Baca serves as one of the Electoral College’s 538 electors, while all but calling for the group to be abolished.Credit…Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesDec. 12, 2020Updated 7:06 p.m. ETFew critics of the Electoral College are quite like Polly Baca.Ms. Baca believes the Electoral College, which has chosen American presidents since George Washington, “has absolutely no reason to be.” This year, she brought, and lost, a Supreme Court case challenging her state’s rules over how electors vote. Before electors cast their ballots for president in 2016, she invited several members to her home to plot a way — also unsuccessful — to circumvent the outcome.But unlike Donald J. Trump, whose raft of legal filings and maneuvers has failed to change the result of this year’s election, Ms. Baca is a Democrat. And she even serves as one of the body’s 538 electors while all but calling for the group to be abolished.“There’s absolutely no reason why the world’s strongest democracy doesn’t elect its C.E.O. with the popular vote,” said Ms. Baca, who will cast one of Colorado’s nine electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the president-elect. “I’ve been on the outside, but I prefer to go on the inside to see what I can do.”It is the Electoral College, not the direct vote of the American people, that will decide the next president on Monday, when its 538 electors, chosen mostly during state party gatherings earlier this year, sign their ballots and send them to Washington.For generations, the body was viewed as a rubber stump to the will of the voters — but as with many things, scrutiny came only when things seemed to go wrong. The 2000 contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush showed that a mere 537 popular ballots could tip Florida’s Electoral College votes, and with it, the presidency. The 2016 election proved that a president could lose by millions of popular votes, yet be handed the White House anyway.“The head of the student council in your middle school was elected by a popular vote,” said Alexander Keyssar, a Harvard historian and the author of a book called “Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?” “I know it’s an old-fashioned notion, but the most fundamental democratic value is that all votes should count equally.”(He is not a fan.)Yet it’s hard to think of a time before this year that dragged the Electoral College, and American democracy with it, into such dangerous territory.The election, where it was clear by evening on Election Day that Mr. Biden had won the popular vote, turned into a nail-biter that stretched on for days — largely because of the high volume of mail ballots in a few states rich in Electoral College votes. President Trump used the delay to make false claims from the White House that fraud was underway and that he had actually won.Mr. Trump then turned to the courts to swing the Electoral College his way, backing lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. The president’s lawyers appeared to hope that a friendly judge would overturn the results in one or more states that would allow him the 270 electors he needed to remain in office.As judges dismissed his suits, the president urged Republican state lawmakers to send delegations to the Electoral College who would vote for him anyway. He then brought White House influence to bear on a county election body in Michigan — one more last-ditch effort to stall the state from sending electors for Mr. Biden.That has left electors like Ronda Vuillemont-Smith, a conservative Oklahoma activist who will cast her vote for Mr. Trump on Monday, believing the president will stay in office.“I’m going to be quite honest with you, I think Donald Trump will be president for a second term,” she said, citing continued attempts to overturn the results.Yet for other electors, the frantic moves by a sitting president — indeed, most of the election itself — has led to soul-searching, not just on who should be president, but also on how the president should be chosen.“These tactics are tantamount to those in authoritarian governments,” said Alan Kennedy, a presidential elector in Denver. He said the election reminded him of a stint when he lived in Uganda and its president jailed his main opponent ahead of an election, something Mr. Trump also has repeatedly called for during his campaigns.Mr. Kennedy plans to dutifully cast his vote on Monday for Mr. Biden. But for Mr. Kennedy, a captain in the Colorado Army National Guard who served in the Middle East, a question still looms large behind the task ahead of him: Is such a system really in keeping with the nation’s ideals?“What’s terrifying is how close we came to another election of a president who won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote,” he said.Robert Nemanich is quick to point out that he had no professional qualifications for being an elector other than being a high school math teacher.Credit…Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesRobert Nemanich, a former elector from Colorado Springs, puts it another way.“Do we really want 538 Bob Nemanichs electing our president?” he asked.Mr. Nemanich is quick to point out his only professional qualification for the job was being a high school math teacher. After volunteering as a Bernie Sanders primary delegate in 2016, Mr. Nemanich landed the job after giving out credentials at a state Democratic convention where selecting the electors was one of the agenda items.“I was one of the few asking to be an elector, and I would say 90 percent of people didn’t know what that was,” he said.And while this year’s electors include respected party officials and well-known activists — Hillary Clinton said she would be an elector for New York State — there have also been some unexpected names recruited for the task.They include Terri Hodge, a former state representative in Dallas who was sentenced to a prison term after pleading guilty to corruption charges in 2010, whom Texas Democrats selected as an elector this year. (As Mr. Trump won Texas, Ms. Hodge will not cast a ballot.)Tracking Disinformation More

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AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Castigates Barr for Not Publicly Disclosing Hunter Biden InvestigationThe critical tweets echoed the president’s attacks on Jeff Sessions, his first attorney general.President Trump on Saturday. He called the attorney general a “big disappointment” and denounced him for not revealing the existence of an investigation into Hunter Biden for possible tax evasion.Credit…Samuel Corum for The New York TimesMaggie Haberman and Dec. 12, 2020Updated 6:04 p.m. ETPresident Trump on Saturday excoriated Attorney General William P. Barr, castigating him on Twitter for not violating Justice Department policy to publicly reveal an investigation into President-Elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son.The critical tweets about Mr. Barr, who has largely been a close confidant to the president since he was appointed two years ago, came a day after the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit seeking to subvert the results of the election. With the Electoral College set to meet on Monday and Congress to formally tally the results in January, the prospects for Mr. Trump to change the outcome are all but gone.The president’s statements undermining faith in the electoral process — and his assaults on institutions — have escalated since the election on Nov. 3, as he enters the final weeks of his time in office. Privately, he has railed against Mr. Barr for not bolstering his false claims of widespread fraud in the election and instead affirming Mr. Biden’s victory.His messages on Saturday echoed his attacks on his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, whom he blamed for recusing himself from overseeing the investigation into whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russian officials in the 2016 election. For months, Mr. Trump publicly berated Mr. Sessions before firing him in November 2018, a day after the midterm races.In three tweets, Mr. Trump called the attorney general a “big disappointment” and denounced him for not disclosing the existence of an investigation into Hunter Biden for possible tax evasion, which he said would have given Republicans an edge in the election. Doing so would have violated department guidelines about publicly discussing ongoing cases. Mr. Trump benefited from that policy himself in 2016, when officials kept quiet the inquiry into possible conspiracy between his campaign and Russian officials.“Why didn’t Bill Barr reveal the truth to the public, before the Election, about Hunter Biden,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Joe was lying on the debate stage that nothing was wrong, or going on – Press confirmed. Big disadvantage for Republicans at the polls!”The president has told aides he would like to see Mr. Barr appoint a special counsel to investigate the younger Mr. Biden, according to people briefed on the discussions. He has not expressed that desire directly to Mr. Barr, according to a person familiar with the conversations, but has instead let the issue become public in the hope of creating a pressure campaign.Mr. Barr is so far unlikely to appoint such a special prosecutor, according to people familiar with the thinking. The question remains whether Mr. Trump will succeed in forcing him to resign or will fire him so he can appoint someone willing to do the president’s personal bidding.The president’s interest in appointing a special counsel was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal.A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment on the president’s tweets.Mr. Trump did not answer questions from reporters as he left the White House around noon to travel to West Point for the annual Army-Navy football game on Saturday. He has mostly stayed out of sight since Election Day, taking few questions from journalists and attending only a handful of public events.Last Sunday, The New York Times reported that Mr. Barr was considering resigning before the end of the term, a decision that he had been weighing for weeks. The attorney general was convinced Mr. Trump had lost the election, believed his work at the Justice Department was completed and wanted to avoid the controversy that often comes at the end of an administration.In response to the reporting, some Republicans lobbied Mr. Barr to reconsider his plans, and the attorney general let the White House know that he intended to stay through the end of the term.After Hunter Biden disclosed on Wednesday that the Justice Department was investigating his taxes, the president’s anger toward his attorney general grew.Mr. Barr has long been considered a close ally of the president. His public summary of the lengthy report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who was appointed to investigate Russian interference, cast the contents in a favorable light for Mr. Trump, drawing protests from Mr. Mueller himself.Mr. Barr also worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to publicly release the transcript of the call that Mr. Trump had with the president of Ukraine in July 2019. In that call, the president — who was withholding congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine — pushed for investigations into the Bidens.But their relationship has come under strain this year, with the president and Mr. Barr speaking infrequently. In February, as Mr. Trump widened his attacks on law enforcement, Mr. Barr publicly rebuked the president, saying that Mr. Trump’s tweets had made it “impossible” for him to do his job.In the weeks after the election, Mr. Barr refused to refute Mr. Trump’s specious claims of widespread voter fraud. But this month, after Mr. Trump raised the prospect that the Justice Department and F.B.I. may have been involved in tipping the election to Mr. Biden, Mr. Barr broke his silence. In an interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Barr said that he saw no examples of widespread voter fraud that could have meaningfully affected the election.Those comments angered Mr. Trump, who has been searching for anyone to help push the notion that the election was stolen from him.Days before the election, the Justice Department announced that Mr. Barr had appointed a top federal prosecutor as a special counsel to examine how the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies investigated the ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia.The announcement miffed Mr. Trump, who had wanted Mr. Barr to make public such a disclosure before the election, when Mr. Trump could have weaponized it on the campaign trail, as he did with the federal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server and the release of stolen emails from her campaign chairman aired publicly through WikiLeaks.Also in Washington on Saturday, a small group of the president’s supporters joined a “Stop the Steal” march. Among those present was Enrique Tarrio, a leader of the far-right group the Proud Boys who also led a “Latinos for Trump” effort during the presidential campaign.On the social media site Parler, Mr. Tarrio posted pictures of himself at the White House and said he had a “last-minute” invitation. Judd Deere, a spokesman for the White House, said Mr. Tarrio “was on a public White House Christmas tour” but did not meet with the president nor had the White House invited him.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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Donald Trump lost a federal court challenge on Saturday in Wisconsin while judges said yet another case being fought there “smacks of racism”.
The slap-downs came less than 24 hours after the abrupt dismissal by the US supreme court of the most audacious Republican attempt yet to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the election almost six weeks ago.
But despite the latest stinging legal defeats and rebukes, Trump took to the skies in the Marine One presidential helicopter on Saturday on his way to an engagement in New York and flew above a protest of several hundred diehard supporters in Washington DC, who persist in bolstering his false claims that the election was “stolen” from him by fraud and conspiracy.
This as the US electoral college will vote on Monday to confirm Biden’s resounding victory, alongside his Democratic vice president-elect, Kamala Harris.
And a trickle of Republicans joined leading Democrats in speaking up about the increasing futility but also the insidiousness of the lame duck president’s aggressive clinging to power.
After the supreme court decision, Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said of the Trump campaign challenges to the election result: “It is now truly over. Trump and his acolytes need to stop all efforts to deny millions of votes.”
More than 120 Republican members of the House of Representatives wrote an amicus brief to the supreme court last week in support of the lawsuit brought by Texas, which had been joined by Trump and aimed to overturn Biden’s victory in four key swing states, which the court on Friday night abruptly refused to consider.
Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, called the effort “an affront to the country”.
“It’s an offense to the constitution and it leaves an indelible stain that will be hard for these 126 members to wipe off their political skin,” he told the New York Times.
In Wisconsin on Saturday, the US district judge Brett Ludwig dismissed one of Trump’s latest lawsuits there that asked the court to order the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to name him as the winner, whereas in fact Biden won Wisconsin on his way to winning the White House.
Even as Ludwig said Trump’s arguments “fail as a matter of law and fact” an attorney for the president, Jim Troupis, was busy arguing in another case, before a skeptical Wisconsin state supreme court, a lawsuit that, if successful, would disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters in Wisconsin’s most diverse counties, Dane and Milwaukee, where Biden won.
Trump is not challenging any votes in Wisconsin counties that he won.
“This lawsuit, Mr Troupis, smacks of racism,“ the justice Jill Karofsky said to Trump’s attorney early in his arguments.
“I do not know how you can come before this court and possibly ask for a remedy that is unheard of in US history … It is not normal,” she added.
One of Karofsky’s fellow judges in that case, where a decision is now awaited, pointed out that Trump also did not make such challenges when he won Wisconsin on his way to the White House in 2016. More