US Politics

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany appeared on Sunday to admit Donald Trump lost the presidential election, a concession the president refuses to make.In an interview on Fox News, McEnany discussed runoff elections in Georgia in January which will decide control of the Senate.“If we lose these two Senate seats,” she said, “guess who’s casting the deciding vote in this country for our government? It will be Kamala Harris.”Trump refuses to concede defeat by Joe Biden, despite losing the electoral college 306-232 and trailing in the popular vote by more than 7m.He is not alone: only 27 of 249 Republicans in Congress have acknowledged Biden’s victory, according to the Washington Post.But the Democrat will be inaugurated in Washington on 20 January and Harris, a senator from California, will become vice-president.Trump has filed lawsuits seeking to overturn results in a number of states, the vast majority of which he has lost.In Georgia, the president continues to demand that Governor Brian Kemp call a special session of the state legislature, to overturn Biden’s victory.Kemp and Republican officials including secretary of state Brad Raffensperger and lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan have refused to do so.On Fox News, McEnany discussed Trump campaign lawsuits in a number of states, including Georgia. But she focused on the Senate runoffs in the southern state.If Democrats defeat sitting Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue on 5 January, the Senate will be split 50-50. A casting vote from Vice-President Harris will therefore give Democrats a tenuous hold on the chamber to add to control of the House of Representatives and the White House.“What is paramount is Georgia,” McEnany said. “Right here, right now, making sure that we hold this branch of government.” More

US health secretary Alex Azar has insisted the Trump administration does have a plan to distribute coronavirus vaccines, after President-elect Joe Biden said he had not seen a detailed blueprint.“With all respect, that’s just nonsense,” Azar told Fox News Sunday.Azar and other officials were pressed on the Covid-19 response as the US experiences its worst outbreak since the spring while preparing to distribute a vaccine.There were 2,254 new Covid deaths in the US on Saturday, according to Johns Hopkins University, making the full death toll 280,979 from nearly 14.6m cases. For the first time since the early days of the pandemic, the seven-day rolling average of deaths has passed 2,000.Healthcare systems are under increasing strain. From Sunday night, large parts of the most populous state, California, will enter a lockdown that will last past Christmas.On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will consider whether to to provide emergency use authorization for a vaccine developed by Pfizer. If it does, the first round is expected to be distributed in the following 24 hours.In the first phase of distribution, vaccines will be allocated to 21 million healthcare workers and 3 million residents and staff of long-term care facilities, following guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week. Health officials estimate 40 million doses of vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna will be distributed by the end of December.On Friday, Biden said his team had been in touch with the Trump administration about the vaccine rollout.“There is no detailed plan, that we’ve seen anyway, as to how you get the vaccine out of a container, into an injection syringe, into somebody’s arm,” Biden said.Azar said the distribution plan was being run by the military and private sector and would use retail pharmacies, public health departments and community health centers.Dr Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific officer of the administration’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine program, told CBS’s Face the Nation he would meet Biden this week.“We really look forward to it, because actually things have been really very appropriately planned,” Slaoui said, adding that “confusion” may have arisen because the government’s plan relies on state health agencies.“I think the plans are there, and I feel confident that once we will explain it, everything in detail, I hope the new transition team will understand,” he said.Asked if Trump’s skepticism about masks and repeated downplaying of the pandemic had exacerbated its effects, Azar said the spike in cases was about behavior.“We need people to renew their commitment,” he said.On ABC’s This Week, Azar insisted the Trump administration supports masks – even after the president held a rally on Saturday night in Georgia where people mostly did not wear them. Host George Stephanopoulos also asked about the White House planning large holiday parties with up to 900 guests.“Our advice remains the same in any context, which is wash your hands, watch your distance, wear face coverings when you can’t watch your distance and be careful of those indoor settings,” Azar said.On NBC’s Meet the Press, another member of the White House coronavirus taskforce, Deborah Birx, was questioned about the contradictions between Trump’s actions and comments and public health guidance.“I hear community members parroting back those situations, parroting back that masks don’t work, parroting back that we should work towards herd immunity, parroting back that gatherings don’t result in super-spreading events,” Birx said. “And I think our job is to constantly say those are myths.”Asked about the holiday parties, Birx underlined that being indoors without a mask presents an opportunity to spread the virus.“You cannot gather without masks in any indoor or close outdoor situation,” she said.Birx warned that Americans must follow Covid-19 guidelines to prevent hospital overcrowding and to limit the spread of the virus, even with a vaccine on the way.“The vaccine is critical, but it’s not going to save us from this current surge,” Birx said. “Only we can save us from this current surge.”Slaoui said the most susceptible populations should see the effect of the vaccine in January or February. “But on a population basis, for our lives to start getting back to normal, we’re talking about April or May,” he told CBS.In an interview with CNN’s State of the Union, Slaoui endorsed Biden’s plan to require Americans to wear a mask for the first 100 days after he is inaugurated on 20 January.“I think it’s a good idea – it’s never too late,” Slaoui said. “This pandemic is ravaging the country.” More

Donald Trump’s attacks on Republican officials in Georgia and insistence his defeat by Joe Biden must be overturned are disgusting, the Republican lieutenant governor of the southern state said on Sunday.
“It’s not American,” Geoff Duncan told CNN’s State of the Union. “It’s not what democracy is all about. But it’s reality right now.”
The president staged a rally in Valdosta, Georgia on Saturday night. He began his speech, which lasted more than 90 minutes, by falsely claiming he won the state, which in fact he lost by around 12,000 votes in a result certified by Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger more than two weeks ago.
“They cheated and they rigged our presidential election, but we will still win it,” Trump falsely insisted. “And they’re going to try and rig this [Senate] election too.”
Two Georgia Republicans face 5 January runoffs which will decide control of the Senate. On Sunday evening, Kelly Loeffler will debate Rev Raphael Warnock, her Democratic challenger. Amid controversy over stock trades made by both Republicans during the Covid-19 pandemic, David Perdue has declined to debate his challenger, Jon Ossoff.
In Valdosta, the president invited Perdue and Loeffler on to the stage. Neither reiterated his baseless claims about election fraud, Perdue coming closest by saying: “We’re going to fight and win those seats and make sure you get a fair and square deal in Georgia.”
As Perdue spoke, the crowd chanted: “Fight for Trump!”
Some suggest Trump’s assault on the presidential election could depress Republican turnout.
“I think the rally last night was kind of a two-part message,” Duncan told CNN. “The first part was very encouraging to listen to the president champion the conservative strategies of Senators Loeffler and Perdue, and the importance of them being re-elected.
“The second message was concerning to me. I worry that … fanning the flames around misinformation puts us in a negative position with regards to the 5 January runoff. The mountains of misinformation are not helping the process. They’re only hurting it.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Duncan: “At a certain point, does this disgust you?”
“Oh, absolutely it disgusts me,” Duncan said.
In Valdosta, Trump read from a prepared list of nonsensical evidence he said highlighted his victory. This included arguing that by winning Ohio and Florida he had in fact won the entire election, and also that winning an uncontested Republican primary was proof he beat Biden in November.
Trump lost the electoral college 306-232 and trails in the popular vote by more than 7m. His campaign has launched legal challenges in various states. The majority have been rejected or dropped. The campaign filed a new lawsuit in Georgia on Friday.
Trump vented fury at Republican governor Brian Kemp, a one-time ally who he called from the White House on Saturday to demand the Georgia result be overturned.
“Your governor could stop it very easily if he knew what the hell he was doing,” Trump told supporters, adding: “For whatever reason your secretary of state and your governor are afraid of Stacey Abrams.”
Abrams, a staunch voting rights advocate who Kemp beat for governor in 2018, helped drive turnout and secure the state for Biden, the first Democrat to win it since 1992.
On Sunday, Duncan was asked if Kemp would do as Trump asks, and call a special session of the state general assembly to appoint its own electors for Trump, a demand one critic called “shockingly undemocratic”.
“I absolutely believe that to be the case that the governor is not going to call us into a special session,” Duncan said.
In an angry intervention earlier this week, Georgia elections official Gabriel Sterling said of Trump’s attacks on Kemp, Raffensperger and other Republicans: “Someone’s gonna get hurt, someone’s gonna get shot. Someone’s gonna get killed. And it’s not right. It has all gone too far.”
Duncan said “we’ve all all of us … got increased security around us and our families [but] we’re going to continue to do our jobs. Governor Kemp, Brad Raffensperger and myself, all three voted and campaigned for the president, but unfortunately he didn’t win the state of Georgia.”
Duncan sidestepped a question about the wisdom of holding a rally where many attendees did not wear masks, as coronavirus cases surge. But he did call Biden’s request that Americans to wear masks for 100 days “absolutely a great step in the right direction”.
On Saturday, the Washington Post found only 27 of 249 congressional Republicans were willing to acknowledge Biden’s victory. Duncan did so.
“On 20 January Joe Biden’s going to be sworn in as the 46th president and the constitution is still in place,” Duncan said. “This is still America … as the lieutenant governor and as a Georgian I’m proud that we’re able to look up after three recounts and be able to see that this election was fair.”
Raffensperger told ABC’s This Week: “We don’t see anything that would overturn the will of the people here in Georgia.”
It was “sad, but true”, he added, that Trump had lost.
“I wish he would have won. I’m a conservative Republican and I’m disappointed but those are the results.”
In Valdosta, Trump did seem at points to recognise the end is near. With reference to policy on Iran and China, he described “what we would have done in the next four years”. He also said that if he thought he had lost the election, he would be “a very gracious loser”.
“I’d go to Florida,” he said. “I’d take it easy.” More

On 3 November, a majority of the US electorate voted to eject the president from the White House. Yet Donald Trump still refuses to accept the verdict. Populism’s pretense of devotion to “the will of the people” lies in shambles. Conservatives have demonstrated their readiness to jettison democracy for the sake of clinging to power or appeasing an unhinged man-child.Ominously, Gen Michael Flynn has demanded martial law and suspending the constitution. Elsewhere, one Michigan Republican called for voiding the vote in Wayne county, thereby disenfranchising Detroit. At the same time, the president and his allies remain committed to burnishing the legacy of long-dead Confederate generals, even if means killing a pay increase for US troops.As Thomas Ricks reminds us in First Principles, the paradox of equality melded to racism dates back to the founding. The most famous pronouncement in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal”, was written by a slave-owner, Thomas Jefferson.A Pulitzer-winning author and military historian, Ricks also observes that one of our two parties has felt perpetually compelled to offer a “home to white supremacists, up to the present day”. First the Democrats, now the Republicans.Case in point: the fight over DC statehood. Back in June, the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton argued that the majority-minority District of Columbia (population 684,000) did not deserve to be a state because it lacked the “well-rounded working class” of Wyoming (population: 577,000).Elsewhere, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, recently tweeted that it was “essential” to “keep Ethiopia on the path to democracy”. The US has seen this movie before, back when the cold war turned hot and the rice paddies of south-east Asia became killing fields.While freedom was supposedly on the march overseas, the home front was markedly different. Black churches were bombed. Martin Luther King was jailed, stabbed, assassinated. John Lewis was beaten in Selma. Others were sent to an early grave.Jon Meacham is a native of Tennessee, a biographer of George HW Bush and now a speechwriter for Joe Biden. In His Truth is Marching On, his new book about the young Lewis, Meacham says “the hypocrisy of an America fighting for liberty abroad while tolerating white supremacy at home” characterised the Vietnam era.And yet as Edmund Fawcett, a self-described “leftwing liberal” and former writer at the Economist, notes in his new book, Conservatism, “although liberal democracy is a child of the left, its growth and health have relied on support from the right.” Half a century ago, Senate Republicans defeated a southern Democratic-led filibuster and enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Those days are gone.He also posits that “when, as now, the right is divided, the haves sleep less easily that government is in safe hands.” Said differently, monied America is not simply about tax cuts. It can even come with a conscience, a reality that troubles both the president and the woke left. Philadelphia’s upscale suburbs made the difference for Biden in Pennsylvania, and possibly the US.Fawcett is keenly aware of the rise of the hard right, of Trumpism in America, of Marine Le Pen in France, UKIP in Great Britain and the AfD in Germany. “The arrival of a new century,” he writes, “scrambled assumptions and shook the conservative center.” These tremors continue. Brexit tethered to a pandemic is expensive – and lethal.Amid America’s winter of political discontent, Ricks, Meacham and Fawcett are well worth reading. Each conveys a message that deserves our attention as we strive to exit, or at least better understand, the morass.The way of CincinnatusSpurred by the seismic shock of the 2016 election, First Principles focuses on America’s first four presidents, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, their education and outlooks. In Ricks’ view, ancient Greece and Rome influenced these men more than contemporary religion.“Christianity simply did not loom as large in colonial America as it would a century later,” Ricks writes, “or indeed does now.” The Declaration of Independence summons the Creator and Nature’s God but Jesus does not appear. The constitution refers to religion but is silent as to a deity.Between Greece and Rome, Ricks contends the latter held sway over the early presidents, with the exception of Jefferson. In the run-up to and aftermath of the revolutionary war, Rome came to exemplify republicanism, civic virtue and stoicism, as well as a cautionary tale of decline and tyranny. It came as little surprise that Washington would lead the new nation. More remarkable was the fact that he did not seize power and instead stepped down voluntarily. Cincinnatus, the citizen-soldier, was the paragon, Caesar the anathema.Even so, it is Jefferson, Greece and the epicurean notion of happiness that mark our Fourth of July celebrations. America’s Declaration of Independence hinged on a country dedicated to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, instead of John Locke’s formulation of government existing explicitly to protect property. Importantly, for Jefferson happiness was about more than just the right to party. Rather, it spoke to a general tranquility and the possibility of a common purpose.His subtle shift in wording was seismic: the landless could no longer be so easily marginalized or subordinated. A single phrase would help incubate the seeds of Jacksonian democracy. “America works best when it gives people the freedom to tap their own energies and exploit their talents,” Ricks concludes.‘The way of Jesus’Under the subtitle John Lewis and the Power of Hope, Meacham covers the first 28 years of the civil rights leader’s life, from his birth in 1940 to the murders of Dr King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. It is practically a hagiography, portraying Lewis as saint and hero – and yet imperfect.As a boy, Lewis preached to the chickens on the family farm. Later he attended American Baptist College in Nashville, Tennessee. He was ordained as a minister but instead of settling into a pulpit, he took up the cross and threw his body and soul into the civil rights movement.In Meacham’s telling, Lewis “rejected the tragedy of life and history” and “embraced the possibilities of realizing a joyful ideal”. The late congressman “seemed to walk with Jesus himself”, making the cause of the poor, the downtrodden and the oppressed his own.Meacham’s religious tenor is organic. He is a believing Christian who discounts a wholly secular public square. Instead, he observes that “one way to a nation where equality before the law and before God is more universal, is the way of King and of Lewis. Which is also the way of Jesus.”Unlike Ricks, Meacham sees the constitution as a distinctly Calvinist document. It is “theological and assumes our sinfulness and that we will do the wrong thing far more often than the right thing”. He adds: “We have done everything since then to prove them right.”Fittingly, Meacham gives Lewis the final say in the book’s “afterword”, in which the congressman plays off the text of the Gospel of John, proclaiming that America’s “moral compass comes from God, is of God, and is seen through God”.More hauntingly, Lewis writes: “And God so loved the world that he gave us countless men and women who lost their homes and their jobs for the right to vote” and the “children of freedom who their lives in a bombing in Birmingham and three young men who were killed in Mississippi”.In other words, Christ’s Passion can be relived and reimagined; suffering can bring redemption in this world. Those who bled and died were more than just historic figures.The way of Weimar?If anyone needs further reminder of the American right’s apparent discomfort with universal suffrage, Fawcett offers a telling examination of extreme libertarianism and populism. He recalls the work of Jason Brennan, a Georgetown business school professor who complains of “ignorant majorities” and their capacity to “thwart” economic growth.Unmentioned is Palantir’s Peter Thiel and his infamous 2009 take: that women and minorities have mucked things up. Thiel has since partnered with the Trump administration, and holds a passel of government contracts.Back then, he wrote: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”Fawcett also calls our attention to the tension between populism and participatory democracy. His characterizations are borne out by the last gasps of Trump’s presidency. He asserts that “populists are ill at ease with multi-party competition” and “indifferent or hostile to countervailing powers within the state or society”.Here, Fawcett is dead on. Trump’s campaign cries of “lock her up”, branding the press as “the enemy of the people” and bashing the “deep state” are cut from the same cloth.The final paragraphs of Conservatism pose these questions regarding the center-right: “Do they side with the hard right and leave liberal democracy to the mercies of uncontrolled markets and national populism? Or do they look for allies with whom to rebuild a shaken center?”If the response of Republican congressional leadership to Trump is a case study, the answer is discouraging. The other day, Mitch McConnell stood sobbing in the Senate over a colleague’s pending departure but had nothing to say about the president’s destructive behavior. Weimar is not an abstract. In the end, guardrails don’t always withstand the stress. More

“It’s time we address the structural inequalities in our economy that the pandemic has laid bare,” President-elect Joe Biden said this week, as he introduced his economic team.It’s a good team. They’re competent and they care, in sharp contrast to Trump’s goon squad. Many of them were in the trenches with Biden and Barack Obama in 2009, when the economy last needed rescuing.But reversing “structural inequalities” is a fundamentally different challenge from reversing economic downturns. They may overlap – last week the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record high at the same time Americans experienced the highest rate of hunger in 22 years. Yet the problem of widening inequality is distinct from the problem of recession.Recessions are caused by sudden drops in demand for goods and services, as occurred in February and March when the pandemic began. Pulling out of a recession usually requires low interest rates and enough government spending to jump-start private spending. This one will also necessitate the successful inoculation of millions against Covid-19.By contrast, structural inequalities are caused by a lopsided allocation of power. Wealth and power are inseparable – wealth flows from power and power from wealth. That means reversing structural inequalities requires altering the distribution of power.Franklin D Roosevelt did this in the 1930s, when he enacted legislation requiring employers to bargain with unionized employees. Lyndon Johnson did it in the 1960s with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, which increased the political power of Black people.Since then, though, not even Democratic presidents have tried to alter the distribution of power in America. They and their economic teams have focused instead on jobs and growth. In consequence, inequality has continued to widen – during both recessions and expansions.For the last 40 years, hourly wages have stagnated and almost all economic gains have gone to the top. The stock market’s meteoric rise has benefited the wealthy at the expense of wage earners. The richest 1% of US households now own 50% of the value of stocks held by Americans. The richest 10%, 92%.Why have recent Democratic presidents been reluctant to take on structural inequality?First, because they have taken office during deep recessions, which posed a more immediate challenge. The initial task facing Biden will be to restore jobs, requiring that his administration contain Covid-19 and get a major stimulus bill through Congress. Biden has said any stimulus bill passed in the lame-duck session will be “just the start”.Second, it’s because politicians’ time horizons rarely extend beyond the next election. Reallocating power can take years. Union membership didn’t expand significantly until more than a decade after FDR’s Wagner Act. Black voters didn’t emerge as a major force in American politics until a half-century after LBJ’s landmark legislation.Third, reallocating power is hugely difficult. Economic expansions can be a positive-sum game because growth enables those at the bottom to do somewhat better even if those at the top do far better. But power is a zero-sum game. The more of it held by those at the top, the less held by others. And those at the top won’t relinquish it without a fight. Both FDR and LBJ won at significant political cost.Today’s corporate leaders are happy to support stimulus bills, not because they give a fig about unemployment but because more jobs mean higher profits.“Is it $2.2tn, $1.5tn?” JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon said recently in support of congressional action. “Just split the baby and move on.”But Dimon and his ilk will doubtless continue to fight any encroachments on their power and wealth. They will battle antitrust enforcement against their giant corporations, including Dimon’s “too big to fail” bank. They’re dead set against stronger unions and will resist attempts to put workers on their boards.They will oppose substantial tax hikes to finance trillions of dollars of spending on education, infrastructure and a Green New Deal. And they don’t want campaign finance reforms or any other measures that would dampen the influence of big money in politics.Even if the Senate flips to the Democrats on 5 January, therefore, these three impediments may discourage Biden from tackling structural inequality.This doesn’t make the objective any less important or even less feasible. It means only that, as a practical matter, the responsibility for summoning the political will to reverse inequality will fall to lower-income Americans of whatever race, progressives and their political allies. They will need to organize, mobilize and put sufficient pressure on Biden and other elected leaders to act. As it was in the time of FDR and LBJ, power is redistributed only when those without it demand it. More

Barack Obama has underlined his belief that Democrats should moderate campaign messaging in order to reach voters turned off by slogans including “Defund the Police”, telling a literary group: “If I spoke the language of James Baldwin as he speaks it on the campaign stump, I’m probably not gonna get a lot of votes in Iowa.”
Baldwin, a leading 20th-century African American intellectual and the subject of the Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, “didn’t have to go out and get votes”, Obama said in interview extracts released by PEN America, which will give the former president its 2020 Voice of Influence award next week.
Obama also said he thinks there is an opportunity for more expansive racial dialogue in the US. But his remarks may add to controversy which welled up this week when he said candidates using “snappy” slogans such as Defund the Police risked alienating voters otherwise broadly sympathetic to liberal aims.
Defund the Police became a rallying cry on the left this summer, amid national protests for racial justice following the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, an African American man, and similar incidents in Atlanta, Kenosha and elsewhere.
Some senior Democratic party figures, including South Carolina congressman James Clyburn, have claimed the call to Defund the Police contributed to disappointing results in Senate, House and state races.
Obama is promoting A Promised Land, his memoir of his rise to the White House and first few years in office. Speaking to Snapchat this week, he added his voice to the chorus.
“I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘Defund the Police’ but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it – which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,” he said.
“The key is deciding: do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?”
In his remarks to PEN America, which will be streamed on Tuesday, Obama contrasted discussions of race in the context of “politics and getting votes” with “truth-telling and the prophetic voice”. Politicians, he said, often need to speak a “universal language” as a way to reach voters resistant to more pointed discourse about racial injustice.
But he also allowed that the racial upheavals of 2020, coupled with generational change, may herald an era in which race can be discussed in the political realm in less nuanced terms.
“What I think has changed – and we saw this this summer – is, because of people’s witness of George Floyd, because of what seems like a constant stream of irrefutable evidence of excessive force against unarmed Black folks, that I think white America has awakened to certain realities that even 20 years ago they were still resistant to.
“That creates a new opening for a different kind of political conversation.”
PEN America will also give an award, for courage, to Darnella Frazier, a young woman who filmed the killing of Floyd.

A recent poll by political strategist Douglas Schoen, previously an adviser to Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, found that Democrats should drop references to Defund the Police if they want to be competitive in the next midterm elections, in 2022.
“The data says to me that if the Democrats go the progressive route they can lose the House and the Senate overwhelmingly in 2022,” Schoen told the New York Post. “The incoming Biden administration has to understand that unless they take a moderate path, that is a likely potential outcome for the Democrats.”
Asked if Biden’s victory was a “mandate” for centrist or progressive policies, 62% of respondents to Schoen’s poll said centrist. The survey also found that Defund the Police hurt the party in down-ballot races, as 35% of voters said the issue made them “less likely to vote for Democrats” while 23% said it made them more likely.
Obama’s comments have not found support among leading progressives. Legislators including Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were quick to reject his comments to Snapchat.
“It’s not a slogan,” tweeted Bush. “It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive.” More

Only 26 of 249 Republicans in Congress are willing to admit Joe Biden won the presidential election, a survey found on Saturday.The election was called for Biden on 7 November, four days after election day. The Democrat won the electoral college by 306-232 and leads in the popular vote by more than 7m ballots.But Trump has refused to concede, baselessly claiming large-scale voter fraud in battleground states. The survey of Republicans in the House and Senate was carried out by the Washington Post, a paper Trump promptly claimed to read “as little as possible”.The president also said he was “surprised so many” in his party thought he had been beaten, promised “we have just begun to fight” and asked for a list of the politicians he called “Rinos”, an acronym for “Republicans in name only”.Two congressmen, Mo Brooks of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona, told the Post Trump won. Gosar said he would never accept Biden as president, telling the paper there was “too much evidence of fraud”.In fact, there is no evidence of voter fraud anywhere near the scale Trump alleges in any of the key states in which he is pursuing legal redress, so far winning one lawsuit but losing 46.Attorney general William Barr, a staunch Trump ally, said this week there was no evidence of fraud on the scale the president claims. Trump was reported to be close to firing Barr from his post. The president has also lashed out at an official he did fire, elections security chief Chris Krebs, who said the vote was the most secure in US history.Trump was due to travel to Georgia on Saturday, to support senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. The two Republicans face runoffs on 5 January that will decide control of the Senate. Polling is tight and many observers suggest Trump’s intransigence could damage Republican turnout.Biden was the first Democrat to win Georgia since 1992, beating Trump by more than 10,000 votes. Loeffler and Perdue have joined the president in attacking the Republican officials who ran the election in the state and certified its results.The Post said it had obtained video of Perdue telling donors Biden won.“We can at least be a buffer on some of the things that the Biden camp has been talking about,” he reportedly said, a weighty remark in light of widely reported obstruction of Biden’s transition planning.The Post said it “contacted aides for every Republican by email and phone asking three basic questions: who won the presidential contest, do you support or oppose Trump’s continuing efforts to claim victory and if Biden wins a majority in the electoral college, will you accept him as the legitimately elected president.“The results demonstrate the fear that most Republicans have of the outgoing president and his grip on the party,” the paper said, “despite his new status as just the third incumbent to lose re-election in the last 80 years. More than 70% of Republican lawmakers did not acknowledge the Post’s questions.”Most Republicans seem committed to saying nothing: 12 of 52 senators and 14 of 197 representatives have recognised Biden’s win, the Post said, but only eight Republicans were prepared to voice support for Trump’s strategy of refusing to concede and seeking to overturn the result.Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and Kevin McCarthy, who leads the House minority, have dodged questions.“Let’s wait until [we see] who’s sworn in,” McCarthy said on Thursday, when asked about tactics under a Biden administration.Last week Roy Blunt of Missouri, the senator who chairs the committee responsible for the inauguration, seemed to acknowledge reality – but then retreated.“We are working with the Biden administration, likely administration, on both the transition and the inauguration,” Blunt told CNN, adding: “The president-elect will be the president-elect when the electors vote for him.”The Post said Blunt did not answer its questions.The electoral college will meet on 14 December. Its votes will then be sent to Congress, which will meet in joint session to declare a winner on 6 January – the day after the Georgia runoffs. More

Of all the 78 US Treasury secretaries since Alexander Hamilton first took up the office in 1789, few have faced an in-tray piled quite so high as the one that will greet the first woman in the job: Janet Yellen.The choice of the Brooklyn-born doctor’s daughter to succeed Steve Mnuchin was a statement of intent by president-elect Joe Biden. Where many of her predecessors have been scions of Wall Street, Yellen’s background is in economics and public policy, and she has made it clear that her priorities are with Americans struggling to get by rather than with investment bankers. “There is a huge amount of suffering out there,” she said in September as she urged Congress to agree a new stimulus package.Yellen’s expressed desire for tighter financial regulation did not, however, stop Wall Street from joining the applause for her nomination. In part, that was due to the fact that, having been the first woman to be in charge of America’s central bank, she is seen as a seasoned pro. Donald Trump declined to give her a second term as chair of the Federal Reserve in 2018 not because she was doing a bad job, but because she was a Democrat appointed by Barack Obama.More importantly, though, Wall Street sees Yellen as a Treasury secretary who will push hard for expansionary policies aimed at boosting growth, profits and share prices. Nothing in her record suggests that the financiers are wrong.American economists are often divided into two camps: “freshwater” economists who believe in the primacy of market forces and whose spiritual home is the University of Chicago in landlocked Illinois; and “saltwater” economists, who emanate from the universities on the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards and admire the teachings of John Maynard Keynes.Yellen is a Keynesian to her fingertips: she warned against an over-hasty removal of stimulus during the financial crisis of a decade ago; she insisted that the Fed pay as much attention to unemployment as to inflation when she was its chair; and she believes the state has a duty to tackle poverty and inequality.Mohamed El-Erian, once chief executive of the investment management firm Pimco but now president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, said: “The appointment was probably one of the most well-received in the history of the US Treasury, and for good reason. Economists, lawmakers and market participants rightly see her as highly qualified, having lots of relevant experience and coming to the job with a deep understanding of both domestic and international issues. The policy portfolio she inherits will require an agile mix of traditional and out-of-the-box thinking.”Top of the to-do list will be a new package of support for a US economy struggling with three interlinked problems: a pandemic, high levels of unemployment, and the imminent expiry of financial support for laid-off workers.The jobless total has come down since surging to levels not seen since the Great Depression in the first wave of infections in the spring, but remains troublingly high for a country with, by western standards, a limited welfare safety net. What’s more, the latest data on Friday showed the rate of job creation slowing.Biden wants Congress to pass a “robust” stimulus package, and the chances of that happening will be greatly improved if the Democrats seize control of the Senate by winning the two vacant seats in Georgia next month. If not, as Mark Sobel of the Omfif thinktank says, Biden will be dealing with a “stingy” Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.The appointment was probably one of the most well received in the history of the US Treasury“Yellen will help negotiate and provide intellectual backing, making the case that now is the time to spend and that with low debt service costs, America should not fret in the near-term about rising debt,” Sobel says.Getting an emergency package of stimulus through Congress will only be the start of the legislative battle, because Biden also wants to spend more on upgrading America’s crumbling infrastructure and on tackling global heating.Yellen’s scope for fiscal action (tax and spending measures) may be limited by gridlock in Congress, in which case the White House will require the Fed to provide more stimulus and a good working relationship between Yellen and the man who succeeded her as head of the central bank, Jerome Powell.While sorting out the labour market and boosting living standards will be the biggest challenge, Yellen will also devote time to other policy issues. She has the executive power to toughen up what she sees as too-weak financial regulation without Congress’s say so; she will adopt a less hostile – if still robust – approach towards China; and she will seek to reassert US leadership on the global stage, pursuing a multilateralist rather than a go-it-alone approach.In all, Yellen can be expected to act as if Trump’s four years in office never happened. The message will be that the grownups are back in charge.Six central bankers who shaped the future of their economiesBen Bernanke Chair of the US Federal Reserve between 2006 and 2014, Bernanke was credited with preventing a deep recession following the 2008 financial crisis. A student of the 1930s Great Depression, he vowed to rescue the banking system and maintain the flow of funds to prevent a wave of foreclosures and mass unemployment.His determination contrasted with the Bank of England, which hesitated before rescuing Northern Rock. However, Bernanke, a former Princeton professor, played down the threat from the US sub-prime mortgage scandal during the first two years of his tenure, which he has admitted made the crisis, when it came, much worse.Karl Otto Pöhl Often dubbed a father of the euro, Pöhl was appointed president of the German Bundesbank from 1980 to 1991 by his friend and mentor, chancellor Helmut Schmidt. A colourful, English-speaking former economics journalist, he came to prominence after the conservative Helmut Kohl surprised many and reappointed him. He famously warned Kohl against rushing ahead with German unification based on a one-to-one valuation of the east German mark with its West German equivalent, fearing the collapse of the east’s uncompetitive export industries. He said the same about the implementation of the euro. Kohl ignored him. East Germany’s industrial base collapsed. After the 2008 financial crisis, southern Europe erupted in riots, with protesters blaming the euro for their ills.Mario Draghi If Pöhl laid the foundation stones for the euro, Draghi prevented the currency from toppling over. In 2012, after campaigns in several member states to quit the euro – notably in Greece and Italy – triggered panic in financial markets, he said the single currency was “irreversible” and famously pledged to do “whatever it takes” to save it.As president of the European Central Bank from 2011 to 2019, which absorbed most of the powers from 19 member states’ central banks on its creation in 1999, he drew a line under the destabilising debate about the currency’s future. After he stepped down, the Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman described him as “[arguably] the greatest central banker of modern times”.Mark Carney Carney was governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to March this year. He was appointed by the chancellor at the time, George Osborne, who courted him for a year and called the former Goldman Sachs banker and head of Canada’s central bank “the outstanding central banker of his generation”. Yet within a year, he was likened to an “unreliable boyfriend” who failed to match his promises with action. This followed a series of overly optimistic forecasts that led many to prepare for an increase in interest rates that never came. Carney, more polished and dapper than his contemporaries, recovered much of his reputation in 2016 when he was dubbed “the only adult in the room” following the Brexit referendum. While parliament went into shock and No 10 was consumed by the resignation of David Cameron, Carney toured the TV and radio stations, calming fraying nerves.Raghuram Rajan The Chicago Booth economics professor is often described as one of the few economists to predict the financial crisis. In a speech in 2005 to the world’s top central bankers he explained that an explosion of borrowing made financial markets more dangerous. At the time he was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, so he might have expected his warning that “it’s possible these developments are creating a greater (albeit still small) probability of a catastrophic meltdown” would be taken seriously. It wasn’t.He took over as governor of India’s central bank in 2013 after warning that the country was suffering from hubris, adding that “growth can never be taken for granted” and that “self-delusion is the first step towards disaster”. The rupee, which tumbled 12% against the dollar in the three months before his arrival, stabilised. By the time he left in 2016, price inflation had fallen from almost 10% to below 4% and a series of banking reforms were in place.Christine Lagarde As president of the European Central Bank since last year, Lagarde has shown she is a would-be central bank hero. Shifting the dial at an institution covering 19 countries is never easy, but the former boss of the IMF has embarked on a campaign for greater transparency in a break from the traditionally closeted bank’s decision-making, and for unemployment and inequality to be as much of a yardstick for the ECB as inflation. She has also matched Carney in the drive to make central bank lending more climate-friendly, with green bonds that only allow loans to businesses that are environmentally friendly. PI More