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      Republicans back Trump challenge to Biden election victory

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      Donald Trump’s resolve not to accept the result of the presidential election appeared unshaken on Sunday, as he continued to promote conspiracy theories about the vote, with little outward sign that anyone in his inner circle was prepared to talk him into conceding.
      CNN cited White House sources saying that the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had broached the subject of concession, and that his wife, Melania, was also advising that “the time had come for him to accept the loss”. But other outlets shot down CNN’s reports, even as the first lady tweeted in support of her husband.
      Trump continued to tweet false claims that the election had been stolen, and the only public statements from those close to him were adamantly in favour of staying.
      Top Republicans either amplified Trump’s baseless claims of widespread vote rigging or remained silent, with only a tiny number of moderates following tradition and congratulating Joe Biden.
      “Keep fighting for every legal and live vote,” South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of the president, advised him on Fox Business, pointing to a variety of legal challenges Trump’s lawyers were planning to launch on Monday.
      “If we don’t fight back in 2020, we’re never going to win again presidentially. There is a lot at stake here.”
      Legal challenges are routine in the aftermath of an election, as are recounts where margins are small. There will be a recount in Georgia. But there is no modern precedent for such processes leading to major changes in the results. International and US observers, and Republican state officials, have said there is no evidence of widespread irregularities despite the challenges of holding an election at the height of a pandemic.
      Even after congratulations to Biden flooded in from almost every foreign government, Republican loyalists lined up on Fox News – which has called the election for Biden – to portray the result as a media construct.
      “The media is desperately trying to get everyone to coronate Joe Biden as the next president, but that’s not how it works,” Texas senator Ted Cruz said. “The media does not get to select our president. The American people get to elect our president.
      “I believe President Trump still has a path to victory and that path is to count every single legal vote that was cast, but also not to count any votes that were fraudulently cast.”
      A statement from former Republican president George W Bush issued on Sunday said: “I extended my warm congratulations and thanked him for the patriotic message he delivered last night. I also called Kamala Harris to congratulate her on her historic election to the vice-presidency.
      “Though we have political differences, I know Joe Biden to be a good man, who has won his opportunity to lead and unify our country. The president-elect reiterated that while he ran as a Democrat, he will govern for all Americans.”
      Only two Republican senators have so far sent their congratulations to the president elect: former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. She said honouring Americans’ choice “in who leads us has always defined us and is the source of our exceptionalism. We must uphold that legacy.”
      Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, Romney referred to Biden as “president-elect”, something other Republicans have avoided. But he said he was not even going to try to talk Trump down from his insistence that he won the election.
      “You’re not going to change the nature of President Trump in these last days, apparently, of his presidency. He is who he is and he has a relatively relaxed relationship with the truth, and so he’s going to keep on fighting until the very end.”
      However, Romney acknowledged the harm the president’s obduracy was doing.
      “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,” the Utah senator said.
      Most Republican members of Congress remained silent on the question of the president’s concession, well aware that even after Trump leaves the White House, he and his supporters could unleash their wrath anyone seen as disloyal. More

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      Who will tell Trump to go? Not Melania or Jared, reports say

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      As Donald Trump spent Sunday morning visiting one of his golf clubs and doubling down on bogus election fraud claims, conflicting reports emerged about whether the president’s family and top advisers were advising him to admit defeat.
      The disparate reports likely reflected a White House in deep turmoil, some officials digesting the scale of their defeat in the presidential election but others, especially Trump himself, cling to a false narrative that the election was somehow stolen.
      Citing two sources, CNN reported that Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, had spoken to him about conceding. Another source told CNN Trump’s wife, Melania, told him that it was time to accept Joe Biden’s victory.
      Melania Trump was then yet to make a public statement on the election but had reportedly voiced her opinion in private.
      “She has offered it, as she often does,” CNN reported this source as saying.
      Later on Sunday she tweeted support for her husband, saying: “The American people deserve fair elections. Every legal – not illegal – vote should be counted.”
      Shortly after noon, the New York Times said a White House official disputed CNN’s reporting on Kushner. This official claimed that Kushner had advised Trump to seek “legal remedies”.
      Axios also reported on Kushner’s counsel. “A second source close to Kushner confirmed he had not advised Trump to concede,” the news site said.
      Any advice would appear to have had little impact on Trump himself, who continued to tweet false and baseless allegations of electoral fraud and had yet to call Biden to concede the race, a longstanding tradition in US politics. There was little sign that the president’s two oldest sons, Eric and Don Jr, were advising him to concede.
      Both the Times and Axios described behind-the-scenes conversations.
      According to the Times, White House advisers and staffers convened on Saturday at Trump campaign headquarters. After campaign officials explained that any legal strategy likely would not change election results, Kushner asked some to explain this to Trump. When they asked Kushner if he should also be part of this conversation, Kushner reportedly said he would participate in subsequent discussions.
      According to Axios, a source claimed there were some uncomfortable conversations in Trump’s circle, and that the majority accepted that Biden had won.
      A spokeswoman for Melania Trump did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
      Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has emphatically pushed for legal intervention. CNN also reported that White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who tested positive for Covid-19 this week, had discussed next moves with Trump’s legal team.
      Regardless of Trump’s view of the outcome, there has been no communication between the White House and Biden’s camp.
      Biden senior adviser Symone Sanders told CNN’s State of the Union that while “a number of Republicans from the Hill have reached out … I don’t believe anyone from the White House has.” More

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      Joe Biden gets to work as president-elect while Trump refuses to concede

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      Joe Biden spent his first full day as US president-elect determined to hit the ground running, as he faces one of the most daunting challenges of any new occupant of the White House.
      The Democrat, who defeated Donald Trump to win election as the 46th president, immediately began work on what is likely to be a turbulent transition as he confronts the fast-spreading coronavirus, high unemployment, systemic racism, the climate crisis and a bitterly divided nation.
      Yet even as the silent machinery of a transfer of power kicked inexorably into gear, Trump still refused to concede defeat, insisting he would press ahead with legal challenges from Monday. There is no evidence of widespread election irregularities. On Sunday, former president George W Bush joined those recognising Biden as the winner.
      Biden, a 77-year-old former US senator from Delaware who was vice-president to Barack Obama, was declared the victor of a closely fought and divisive pandemic-era election on Saturday morning, triggering euphoria in major cities as people honked car horns, danced in the streets and turned Trump’s TV catchphrase against him: “You’re fired!”
      It was also hailed by observers around the world as a return to political orthodoxy after the disruptive experiment represented by aggressive “America first” nationalism and administrative chaos during Trump’s four-year presidency.
      In an outdoor victory speech to hundreds of supporters in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden struck a starkly different note, stating: “I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify.”
      He added: “This is the time to heal in America.”
      The vice-president-elect, the California senator Kamala Harris, wore a white suit and blouse, symbolising the women’s suffrage movement, and praised Biden’s “audacity” for choosing a woman as running mate.
      “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” she said.
      Biden listed goals including building prosperity, securing healthcare, achieving racial justice and saving the climate. But he said his first priority would be controlling Covid-19 with a plan “built on a bedrock of science … to turn this pandemic around”.
      Even as the nation was gripped by the election, the virus soared to record highs with an average of more than 100,000 cases per day. On Monday Biden will announce his own Covid-19 task force. His transition effort has a website, BuildBackBetter.com, and a Twitter account, @Transition46. But it is unclear what, if any, cooperation he can expect from the outgoing Trump administration. More

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

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      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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      in Elections

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

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      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

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      Was Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen a 'spoiler' for Trump?

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      When it became increasingly clear that a handful of battleground states would decide the winner in 2020’s US presidential election, many were struck by the razor-thin margins that emerged.
      The results also revealed a striking data point: Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen’s share of the vote in some of these states was higher than margins between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
      Before Biden became president-elect, this breakdown of ballots prompted questions whether Jorgensen – a third-party candidate who did not have a serious chance of winning in 2020 – drew votes away from Trump.
      In the Republican stronghold of Georgia, which will award 16 electoral college votes, Biden presently bests Trump by fewer than 8,000 ballots. The percentage-based breakdown puts this into sharp relief: Biden has won 49.5% of the votes compared to Trump’s 49.3%.
      Jorgensen has won the remaining 1.2% – which now totals 61,792 votes. That number is more than seven times the Trump-Biden split there. The Associated Press has not yet called Georgia’s results. On Friday, state officials announced a recount.
      Numbers from Arizona, which the AP has already called in favor of Biden, are also noteworthy. With 90% of the vote counted, Biden holds 1,626,943 votes to Trump’s 1,606,370 – a 49.6 to 48.9% divide. Jorgensen has landed 49,182 votes, or 1.5%. Arizona awards 11 electoral college votes.
      In Wisconsin, which Trump won by 22,748 votes in 2016, Biden has been called as the winner, with 1,630,570 votes compared to his opponent’s 1,610,030. Jorgensen got 38,415 votes, which is more than the difference between these candidates. Wisconsin has 10 electoral college votes.
      That said, a vote for Jorgensen is not by any means necessarily a vote that Trump would have otherwise won.
      Jorgensen herself doesn’t believe she is responsible for Republicans’ losses, and that the party’s candidates are to blame.
      “They should be mad at those candidates for not following through on their campaign promises,” Jorgensen told the Greenville News, which is in her home state of South Carolina, earlier this week. She reportedly said that many of her supporters were “recovering Democrats” who want US troops brought home from abroad, as well as Republicans tired with federal spending.
      “If I can get Republicans to start acting like Republicans and cutting the deficit. And if I can get the Democrats to go back to being the party of peace, bringing our troops home, and giving the average individual their rights? Then yes, I would be very pleased,” she told the newspaper.
      “In the personal conversations I had [on the campaign trail] a lot of people would say, ‘Yeah, in 2016 I voted for Trump. I was so excited and then he didn’t follow through on his promises.’”

      Several experts do not believe Jorgensen was a Trump “spoiler” in 2020.
      The Cato Institute’s David Boaz, who has penned books on Libertarianism, told Reuters earlier this week: “We just don’t know what would have happened if the Libertarians had not run a candidate.”
      He added: “Libertarians also get votes of people who just would not bother voting if they didn’t have another choice.”
      Moreover, it’s unclear which party is more heavily affected by Libertarian votes.
      Kenneth Mayer, American politics professor at the University of Wisconsin, told Reuters earlier this week: “It’s possible she played a role, but there is no way to know, and it doesn’t matter. The results of the election are the results of the election.”
      Third-party candidates rarely impact overall election results. The 2000 Presidential election – where Ralph Nader won 97,000 votes in Florida, and George W Bush won this state by 537 votes – is a rare exception, Mayer rsaid.
      Neither Jorgensen nor the Libertarian party immediately responded to requests for comment. More

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      'Spread the faith': Biden and Harris victory speeches offer message of unity – video highlights

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      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have offered a message of unity as the pair spoke following their election victory. Harris, who will be the first woman to be vice-president, paid tribute to her mother. For Biden, his speech was an opportunity to offer an olive branch to his political rivals after nearly four years of division under Donald Trump
      ‘We must restore the soul of America’: Joe Biden’s victory speech in full – video
      ‘You chose truth’: Kamala Harris’s historic victory speech in full – video More