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      After the fact: the five ways Trump has tried to attack democracy post-election

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      The decisive rejection by the US supreme court of an attempt by one state, Texas, to throw out election results in four other states might prevent the recurrence of such an effort in future presidential elections.But the Texas lawsuit was not the only unprecedented attack to be leveled on US democracy during the November presidential election, and other such efforts could escalate in, or echo through, future elections for an unknown time to come.Historians could mark 2020 as the moment when Republicans applied the same zeal they have used to attack democracy in advance of elections, through voter suppression and gerrymandering, to attacking democracy on the back end, by trying to deny and overturn the results.Here is a list of five post-election attacks on democracy by Donald Trump and Republicans that were new in 2020 but might haunt elections for years to come.Especially reckless and sustained election fraud chargesFalse accusations of election fraud are a fixture of US elections, but Trump has professionalized the enterprise, making more audacious and systemic claims of election fraud than ever before and coaxing more elected officials to go along with the lies than seemed possible before the Trump era.Republicans normalized Trump’s false charges by treating them as “legal challenges”. But by declining to acknowledge the election result, Republicans lent weight to the notion that something unusual was afoot apart from Trump’s effort to subvert the popular will, and they held open a months-long window for Trump’s lies to circulate, during which faith in US democracy was damaged.Political pressure on local elections officialsWill the certification of election results in key counties ever again be taken for granted? And will the partisan poison that reached down to the local level in 2020 corrupt the conduct of future elections at that level?This was the year for local officials from both parties to receive death threats as they worked to finish the vote counting and then certify the result. Many Republican officials, as in Philadelphia, Michigan and Georgia, reacted to the pressure with expressions of outrage and brave statements of principle. But other local Republican officials, as in Detroit, responded to the merest charm offensive from Trump by trying to retract their certification of the county results.In healthier times for the US democracy, no one paid much attention to the certification process because it was taken as an article of unexamined faith that the vote was the vote and the only role officials had was to stamp it. Now there is a plain chance that officials might take direction from the White House, the Republican National Committee or someone else instead of voters.External legal challenges to the certification of state election resultsLawsuits have developed around elections before, but never in US history has an election been followed by a legal battle of the scope mounted by the Trump campaign. Trump, the loser, sued in every state, with multiple lawsuits, where flipping the result could help him win.The fact that Trump lost basically all the lawsuits might not discourage future presidential campaigns from building a national post-election legal strategy into their victory plan: if you can’t win at the ballot box, try the courts.Internal political challenges to the certification of state election resultsGoaded by Trump, legislators in Pennsylvania asked the supreme court to prevent certification by the state of its result. Republican Senate candidates in Georgia demanded that the Republican secretary of state withdraw from the certification there. The Republican party in Arizona demonstrated extremely shrill behavior, demanding that the election not be certified and even challenging Twitter followers to express their willingness to die to prevent certification.On the whole, efforts by these state elected officials to respond to Trump’s sudden demand that they overthrow what everyone had previously recognized as a democratic process were half-hearted and ineffectual. But if state elected officials get serious about disrupting the certification process, they might come more prepared in future elections.The president’s roleShould a president of the United States, after an election, be calling up county election officials in charge of certifying the results? Should a president invite lawmakers weighing an intervention in their state’s certification process for lunch? Should a president call out the mob on Twitter against a local election official or a state secretary of state who has resisted his schemes?Whatever damage US democracy has sustained in 2020, much of it traces back to the source, to a president who did not see anything wrong in 2019 with coercing a foreign leader to try to take out a political opponent, who made the fealty of state governors a condition of pandemic aid, and who now has twisted the arms of elected officials across the United States in an effort to subvert the will of American voters.The role that Trump has played in attacking the integrity of the American system is the most outrageous and unprecedented of all the unholy perversions of democracy that 2020 has seen. Whether that role will be replicated or reprised in future White Houses, and in future elections, could make all the difference. More

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      Trump's coup is failing but American democracy is still on the critical list

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      [embedded content]
      Nearly four decades after the publication of A Very British Coup, a popular novel by member of parliament Chris Mullin, America is in the throes of a very Trumpian coup – desperate, mendacious, frenzied and sometimes farcical and, most importantly, doomed to failure.
      But even as Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election result face a knockout blow when the electoral college meets on Monday, the president is winning in other ways that could cause profound collateral damage.
      Trump has raised more than $170m since losing to Joe Biden by requesting donations for an “election defense fund”. He has reasserted his dominance of the Republican party, many of whose members have either advanced his lies about a rigged election or maintained a complicit silence.
      And his war on democracy, amplified by rightwing media to millions of Americans, threatens to burn long after Joe Biden takes the oath of office on 20 January. There are already signs of a new grievance movement rising from the ashes of Trump’s defeat to shape the future of Republican politics. It is driven by disinformation, rage and the core premise that Biden is an illegitimate president.
      “What was a fracture in our democratic process is now a break,” said Kurt Bardella, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project. “The Republican party has shown itself to be completely immune to facts, truth and common sense. There is not going to be a moment where it collectively decides, ‘Oh, my gosh, what have we been doing all this time?’
      “There is not going to be a great epiphany. They are going to continue down this path of dismantling the country as we knew it because their ideology isn’t about an issue or a specific public policy. Their identity is only the pursuit of power and the means to try to hold on to it and get more of it.” More

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      Nearly two-thirds of House Republicans join baseless effort to overturn election

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      More than 120 Republican members of the US House of Representatives formally asked the US supreme court this week to prevent four swing states from casting electoral votes for Joe Biden to seal his victory in the November election, a brazen move that signals how the Republican party has embraced Donald Trump’s baseless attacks on the American electoral system.The request from 126 GOP members – nearly two-thirds of the Republican caucus – came in support of a lawsuit Texas filed earlier this week that sought to block the electoral votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia, all states Biden won in November. The lawsuit also won support from top House Republicans.The suit was ultimately rejected by the supreme court on Friday. The US constitution gives states clear authority to set their own election and does not give other states the right to interfere. Texas’s argument in the suit was also based on unsupported claims of fraud that have been dismissed in lower courts.“The lawsuit has so many fundamental flaws that it’s hard to know where to start. It misstates basic principles of election law and demands a remedy that is both unconstitutional and unavailable,” Lisa Marshall Manheim, a law professor at the University of Washington, wrote in an email. “At core, it’s an incoherent amalgamation of claims that already failed in the lower courts.”Despite its ultimate failure the lawsuit represented a troubling case that was unprecedented in American history: a quest to overturn a presidential election on the basis of unsubstantiated claims by an incumbent who soundly lost his re-election bid.It also became a test of fealty for the president’s party that pitted Republican governors, lawmakers and elected officials against one another.One supreme court brief, filed by prominent Republicans in opposition to the Texas lawsuit, said the arguments “make a mockery of federalism and separation of powers”.Among the 126 lawmakers who signed on to the brief is a particularly puzzling group: 19 Republican members of Congress who represent districts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin.Those members all appeared on the same ballot as the presidential candidates and all but one were elected under the same rules to which they are now objecting.(Meanwhile, Doug Collins, a Georgia congressman, ran for a US Senate seat and lost. Collins conceded his race, thereby accepting his defeat in a statewide election, and was later chosen by the Trump campaign to lead its recount effort in the state.)By signing on to the brief, those lawmakers are essentially arguing that their own results could have been tainted by the same irregularities they say cost Trump the election in their state.The Guardian contacted the offices of all 18 of those Republicans who won re-election to ask if they believed there should be further investigation into their electoral victories in November. None of them responded to a request for comment.Most of the lawmakers who supported the effort are far-right conservatives from deep red districts that voted for Trump. But collectively, their support for the lawsuit meant that more than a quarter of the House, including the California congressman Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader, believe the supreme court should invalidate the votes of tens of millions of Americans.Seventeen Republican attorneys general have also signed on in support of the last-ditch legal bid to overturn the 2020 presidential contest before states’ electors meet on Monday to officially declare Biden the victor.Biden won the election with 306 electoral votes, the same number that Trump won in 2016, and he leads the popular vote by more than 7 million. The four states targeted by the Texas lawsuit represent 62 electoral votes.Biden soundly defeated Trump in Michigan and Pennsylvania, part of the “blue wall” that Trump shattered in 2016. Biden also clawed back a third “blue wall” state – Wisconsin – while eking out a surprise victory in Georgia, where multiple recounts have affirmed his win despite an audacious attempt by the president to pressure the Republican governor and secretary of state to reverse the result.Dozens of lawsuits brought by Trump’s campaign and allies in state and federal court were unsuccessful, with the cases so lacking in evidence of the widespread voter fraud they alleged that judges summarily dismissed, derided and even denounced them as meritless. Election law experts have also roundly criticized the Texas lawsuit, pointing to what they say are substantial legal flaws in the argument brought forth by the state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton.Paxton, a staunch ally of the president, is under indictment in a long-running securities fraud case and faces a separate federal investigation related to allegations that he abused the power of his office in connection with a political donor. He has denied the allegations. Yet Paxton’s attempts to override the election results have raised speculation that he may be angling for a presidential pardon, though he insists that is not his motivation. More

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      The roadmap to Democrats' longterm political power? A multiracial coalition | Ian Haney López and Kristian Ramos

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      The key to the Democrats’ 2020 win in the United States is hiding in plain sight: their success in forming a multiracial coalition. Whereas Republicans relied overwhelmingly on white voters alone, poll data indicates that Democrats convinced white voters along with Latino, Black, Asian American and Native American voters to form a powerful coalition. The Democrats’ success in 2020 provides a roadmap to winning future elections.The US is a multiracial nation, and the Democrats are a multiracial coalition. But this can be hard to recognize from the way most polling is reported. In almost every case, statistics break down voting patterns by race, for instance reporting that 87% of Blacks and 65% of Latinos voted for Joe Biden, while 58% of whites pulled the lever for Trump. Political reporting is saturated with information highlighting voting patterns by discrete racial groups, but almost nowhere can one find numbers about the assembled coalitions.The problem is not the statistics themselves. Pollsters provide numerical answers to the questions they’re asked. When it comes to race, conventional political wisdom urges splitting groups into contending racial camps. But that routine splitting of racial groups accepts the Republicans’ basic framing of American politics, blinding Democrats to their great strength as a multiracial coalition.Since the 1960s, Republicans have campaigned on a message of racial conflict. They urge whites to see themselves as threatened by demands for racial equality as well as by immigration from continents other than Europe. Republican rhetoric is usually coded, replacing racial epithets and frank endorsements of white supremacy with terms like “thugs”, “welfare queens” and “illegal aliens”. Even so, the underlying message remains pervasive: racial groups are locked into conflict – whites against all the rest – and everyone must choose a racial side.When Democrats and liberal pundits parse the vote by racial bloc rather than by multiracial coalition, they unintentionally reinforce this mental schema. The group-conflict mindset encourages the view that each racial group has competing interests and strongly implies the existence of inevitable trade-offs when recruiting from different racial groups. No Democratic candidate for president has won a majority of the white vote since 1964, so Democrats know they must assemble a multiracial coalition. Viewing voters through the lens of competing racial teams, however, often pushes Democratic strategists to see the need to build cross-racial solidarity as a liability.Yet look at the 2020 coalitions. Based on available exit poll data, Black voters were 22% of all of those who voted for Joe Biden, Latino voters comprised 16%, and Asian Americans were a further 5%. In other words, Biden won with 43% of his total vote coming from Black, Latino and Asian American voters, combined with 53% of his support coming from white voters.In contrast, Donald Trump’s “coalition” barely deserves that name. White voters provided 82% of his support. Just 3% of Trump’s team were African Americans, with Asian Americans at just under that number. Latinos were 9% of Trump voters – but this overstates the racial diversity of Trump’s coalition. Latinos differ among themselves about how they identify racially. In polling one of us conducted in July, 13% of those seeing Latinos as people of color indicated they would vote for Trump, compared with 32% of those seeing Latinos as ethnically white.Visualized this way, one sees immediately that the notion of contending racial armies – and especially the Republicans’ extreme version, which paints white people as besieged – is obviously false. When viewed in terms of discrete groups, the majority of whites voted for Trump. But when seen in terms of coalitions, white voters also formed the majority of Biden supporters. What sense does it make to describe whites as one racial bloc, let alone as an endangered group?But one also sees that, in American politics, race nevertheless remains supremely relevant. The question for most voters is not what racial group they belong to – white or Black, Latino or Asian. It’s what sort of racial future they expect – one where they must barricade to protect their family against threatening and unfamiliar strangers, or one where their family will best thrive in communities that promote respect, curiosity and collaboration.For the most part, Democrats have been slow to sharpen this basic choice between conflict or collaboration, leaving voters to work it out on their own. Even so, many seem to have figured it out. Themselves all too often the targets of racist barricades, African Americans overwhelmingly (but not uniformly) reject the political party pushing conflict. Most Latinos and Asian Americans do, too, though some seem to believe they will join the mainstream if they help close the gates behind them.With or without Trump, Republicans are very likely to continue campaigning on themes of racial threat and conflictAmong white voters, the greater tendency of those with college degrees and those in urban areas to vote Democratic may reflect more confidence in a collaborative multiracial future. This emerging sense of linked fate across racial lines is evident in the multiracial coalition that delivered the presidency to the Democrats.Republicans suspect that in 2024 they’re likely to face a mixed-race Black and Asian presidential candidate in the person of the current vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris. Even if that doesn’t come to pass, they certainly see a country with an increasing non-white population. With or without Trump, Republicans are very likely to continue campaigning on themes of racial threat and conflict. If so, they will cast the Democratic party as the party of racial minorities, and if Harris is the Democratic candidate, she will be the inevitable bogeyman.For Democrats, a successful retort is already on hand. They are not the party of a non-white cabal, as the right alleges. Nor need they be a party that prioritizes whites, as too often happens when Democrats believe they must choose between racial constituencies. Instead, they are the party of racial coalition, and within this new majority, every racial group has an equal and valued role. In other words, for Democrats, the multiracial coalition they need to win has already come together. Now Democrats must lean into it.One way to do so is to promote the data showing that a multiracial coalition is already taking shape. Rather than almost exclusively relying on statistics that split people into separate groups, Democrats (and the media) should also call for and publicize the coalition numbers. Indeed, Democrats should make their success in building cross-racial solidarity a core aspect of their brand, popularizing the idea that they represent a future in which all groups by pulling together can find security and the freedom to thrive. The numbers – when we make them visible – show that Democrats represent the hope of our multiracial society.Ian Haney López is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America
      Kristian Ramos is the founder of Autonomy Strategies and former communications director of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus More

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      Fight to vote: is the US election finally in its endgame?

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      Hello Fight to Vote readers,It feels like this election has lasted about 20 years, but we’re finally in the last few days. Tuesday was the “Safe Harbor” deadline, when most election disputes must be resolved. And on Monday, the electoral college will finally cast its votes, all but securing the president-elect’s position.In these final days, it’s clear that Republican officials who support Trump’s “the election was rigged against me” claims are taking their final gasps of air.Let’s take a trip back to TexasAfter a tumultuous year, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, has decided to sue the battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. His claim? That all of their pandemic election changes violate federal law. Paxton claims that the attempts to increase access to the polls left open a window for “voter fraud” and weakened “ballot integrity”.Reminder: even Trump’s own attorney general found no evidence of widespread tampering or voter fraud in the election.So what happens now?Probably nothing. As with most of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits, legal experts are saying Paxton’s will have no real impact. However, these challenges serve to create an impression that our elections aren’t secure or fair – and that only further degrades trust in US democracy among the American people.How about the other last-ditch attempts?The supreme court decisively rejected a lawsuit by Pennsylvania’s Republican congressman Mike Kelly arguing that no-excuse absentee voting was illegal. The case was the first 2020 election legislation to reach the highest court in the US.
      Representative Alex Mooney, from West Virginia, introduced a resolution on Tuesday to condemn any lawmakers who call on Trump to concede “prematurely”, though the president lost the election by a significant margin. Many Republicans have distanced themselves from this kind of rhetoric, however, and the resolution isn’t likely to move forward in any meaningful way.
      Representative Kelly Loeffler, the Republican senator running for re-election in Georgia’s heated January runoff, refused to accept Trump’s defeat in a debate on Sunday. The current polls have Loeffler losing by a small margin.
      Here’s what to watch in the coming weeks:14 December: Electors will meet in their respective states and cast votes for US president. Each state gets two votes for its senators and one vote for each member of the House of Representatives. Some Republicans have said they will challenge the count.23 December: Electoral votes must arrive in Washington by this date.6 January: Electoral votes are counted. If there are objections, the House and Senate consider how they should move forward and count the votes. It’s unlikely that the objections will have an impact on the election since both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to sign off.20 January: Inauguration day. The new president takes the oath of office at noon.Meanwhile, if you missed it, Saturday Night Live had a brilliant sketch on Trump’s failed lawsuits last weekend. More

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      'It's surreal': the US officials facing violent threats as Trump claims voter fraud

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      On 1 December Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia, stood on the steps of the state capitol in Atlanta and let rip on Donald Trump.
      “Mr President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia,” he said, contradicting Trump’s increasingly unhinged claim that he had won the presidential race against all evidence.
      “Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence,” Sterling went on, referring to a storm of death threats and intimidation that had been unleashed by Trump supporters against public officials in the state.
      “Someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right.”
      Then Sterling uttered the phrase that instantly entered the annals of American political rhetoric: “It has to stop.”
      It did not stop.

      Two days after Sterling’s impassioned speech went viral, Elena Parent, a Democratic state senator in Georgia, turned up for a hearing organized by Republican leaders to try to cast doubt on the election result. Trump attorneys, led by Rudy Giuliani, presented the hearing with a raft of conspiracy theories and baseless claims that tens of thousands of dead people and other ineligible individuals had voted.
      The Republicans hadn’t warned Parent that the event would be attended by Giuliani, Trump’s henchman in his mission to undermine American democracy until this week when the former New York mayor came down with Covid-19. So she had no idea that a big crowd of far-right fanatics and the media outlets that feed them lies and falsehoods would also be in the chamber.
      If she had known, she would have been careful to protect her personal details online. And she might not have sent out an anodyne tweet decrying the event accurately as a “sad sham”.
      The bombardment began immediately. “The attacks came from all corners and on all platforms,” Parent told the Guardian. “They were in chat-boards, by email, in comments on my Facebook and Instagram pages, on the phone. They ran the gamut from basic insults to ‘We are watching you, you have kids, we are coming to your house.’”
      In eight years as an elected politician in Georgia, she had never experienced anything like it. “It was surreal. I’m not someone who will ever be bullied or intimidated into being silent, but never have I had an issue on this scale.”
      The bile spread far and wide. An elected official in Missouri accused her on Facebook of an act of treason “punishable by death”.
      The worst part wasn’t the threats of sexual violence against her, or even the death threats; it was that her home address was plastered all over the internet. As a result, state police have stepped up patrols outside her home.
      Parent has no doubt about the source of the overwhelming assault she has endured. “We have a president who does not care about American institutions or democracy. He has created a cult-like following and is exposing people like me across the country to danger because of his unfounded rhetoric on the election.”
      What she fears most is that “cult-like” quality of Trump supporters. “That makes the entire experience more disturbing because you know there is no logic or sense of reality that will dissuade or deter these folks.”
      The election may be more than five weeks in the past, but in Georgia, the heat that Trump has generated around his unprecedented refusal to accept defeat shows no sign of cooling.
      Parent suspects that for elected officials like her, as well as election workers, it will remain “very difficult” through the two US senate runoff elections in Georgia on 5 January, which will be crucial in determining which party controls the Senate, and probably until Joe Biden’s inauguration on 20 January and beyond.
      At the center of the maelstrom are the public servants in charge of Georgia’s election process. Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state who on Monday recertified the results after three separate counts all showed Biden the victor by about 12,000 votes, has faced caravans of armed “Stop the Steal” militants driving past his house.
      In an interview with the Guardian, Raffensperger said that his wife was the first to start getting death threats. “Then I started getting them. Then she started getting sexualized texts. Threatening stuff.” More

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      ‘Will he ever concede?’: Trump keeps GOP leaders in endless political limbo

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      First Republicans in Congress gave Donald Trump a week to admit he lost the presidential election. Then they called for the lame duck president to have his day in court, where the Trump campaign amassed a 1-51 win-loss record in challenging Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.Next Republicans pointed to the so-called “safe harbor” deadline of 8 December, when states would certify their respective results, as the date when Trump would surely be forced to admit his loss. But that deadline came and went on Tuesday, seemingly unnoticed by the White House.Now, it is beginning to dawn on some members of the Republican leadership that Trump is working on a calendar all his own, and that the political limbo they now inhabit – unable to take the basic step, as elected officials in the United States of America, of recognizing the rightful winner of a free and fair election – might never end, assuming they will not summon the courage to contradict Trump.“I don’t know that he’s ever gonna concede,” John Thune, the Senate majority whip, told Politico on Wednesday. More than 200 Republicans in Congress – about 90% of the total – will not say publicly who won the presidential election, the Washington Post found.The Republican silence has given Trump a window to expand his attacks on US democracy. The president’s tweeted lies about fake election fraud have escalated in the last month to include the simple message on Twitter “#OVERTURN”.The majority of Republican voters who think the election was fraudulent, despite findings to the contrary by Trump’s own administration and no supporting evidence, is still growing.The high stakes are plain. As Trump himself put it on Wednesday: “How can you have a presidency when a vast majority think the election was RIGGED?”Some Republicans cling to hopes that upcoming events in the transfer of power – future dates on the election calendar – will cause Trump to change course, and relax the pressure on them. Next Monday, 14 December, the electoral college meets to cast votes based on state certifications of the result.On 6 January, Vice-President Mike Pence, in his capacity as president of the US Senate, is to preside over a ceremonial meeting of a joint session of Congress at which the electoral votes are added up and Joe Biden is formally declared the next president.Representative Alex Mooney, a Republican from West Virginia who introduced a House resolution on Tuesday that encourages neither Trump nor Biden to concede until all the investigations are completed, expressed faith that the congressional count would convince Trump and end the silence of his colleagues.“The end is when the roll call is put up here,” Mooney told the Associated Press.But the five weeks since the election are littered with flawed speculation by Republicans about the supposedly imminent moment when Trump would admit reality and they could safely follow suit.“I think the goal here is to give the president and his campaign team some space to demonstrate there is real evidence to support any claims of voter fraud,” one senior Senate Republican aide told Reuters on 10 November. “If there is, then they will be litigated quickly. If not, we’ll all move on.”“At some point this has to give,” a second aide told Reuters at the time. “And I give it a week or two.”The result is a risky standoff like none other in US history. The refusal to agree upon the facts of the election – which was called for Biden by the leading media decision desks, including the Associated Press and, thereby, the Guardian, on 7 November, threatens to undermine voter confidence, chisel away at the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency and re-stack civic norms.Trump sent his party down this unprecedented path by claiming the election was “rigged”, but Republican leadership has enabled doubts to swell through their past four weeks of silence.The president has personally called on some local elected officials to reconsider the results. Now, the disputed election has taken on a political life of its own that the party’s leadership may not be able to squash, even as Trump’s legal challenges crumble and state and national level officials declared it the most secure election in US history.Republicans say it makes little political sense at this point for them to counter Trump’s views lest they risk a backlash from his supporters – their own constituents – back home.They are relying on Trump voters to power the Georgia runoff elections on 5 January that will determine control of the Senate. And while some GOP lawmakers have acknowledged Biden’s victory, most prefer to keep quiet, letting the process play out “organically”, as one aide put it, into January.But election experts warn of long-term damage to the long-cherished American system.“It clearly hurts confidence in the elections,” said Trey Grayson, the Republican former secretary of state for Kentucky and a past president of the National Association of Secretaries of State.“My hope,” he said, is by 14 December “there will be some more voices, but my gut is it won’t be until the 6th” (of January).Edward Foley, an elections expert and constitutional law professor at Ohio State University, said it was true that the election winner is not officially the president-elect until the Congress declares it so with its vote on 6 January to accept the electoral college results.“I’m less concerned about the timing, but that it happens,” he said.For Americans to “have faith” in the elections, the losing side has to accept defeat. “It’s very, very dangerous if the losing side can’t get to that,” he said.“It’s essential for the parties to play by that ethos – even if one individual, Mr Trump, can’t do it, the party has to do it,” he said.“What’s so disturbing about the dynamic that has developed since election day is that the party has been incapable of conveying that message because they’re taking their cues from Trump.” More

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      Republicans' devotion to Trump pits them against democracy, history – and reality

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      The supreme court tersely rejected a bid to overturn to the election result but much of the GOP is rallying to the lost causeOn Tuesday, the US supreme court delivered a devastating blow to Donald Trump’s dreams. A terse one-sentence order left the president even more desperate than he was at the start of the day: “The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.”The three justices whom the president appointed to the highest court failed to rescue him from the voters’ verdict. When he needed them the most, the persons that Trump called “my judges” were not his. Continue reading… More