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      Trump supporters gather in Washington as president refuses to concede to Biden

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      Donald Trump continues to rage against the dying light of his US presidency, falsely claiming to be the victim of mass voter fraud and praising rightwingers and conspiracy theorists who gathered in Washington on Saturday to echo his fabrication.
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      Trump has still not conceded that he lost the 3 November election to Joe Biden, despite a protracted count showing the Democrat has comfortably secured the electoral college votes needed for victory, seizing formerly safe Republican states in Arizona and possibly Georgia, where a hand recount is under way.
      Across the US, Biden has more than 5m more votes.
      The president has refused to cooperate with a transition of power to Biden, who will enter the White House on 20 January, or even provide his successor with national security briefings. Trump continued on Saturday to claim, without evidence, that the election was “rigged” and that he is the rightful winner.
      On Friday, federal and state officials said the election was the “most secure in American history”, with no evidence votes were compromised or altered.
      Plenty of Trump supporters accept the president’s assertions, however, with several hundred rallying in Washington in demonstrations organised under titles including “Million MAGA March” and “Stop the Steal”. Fringe extremist figures such as Infowars founder and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Enrique Tarrio, chairman of the far-right Proud Boys group and Jack Posobiec, who promoted the infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy that led to a 2016 shooting at a Washington restaurant, spearheaded rallies that Trump called “heartwarming”.
      Trump emerged from the White House on Saturday morning to applause, cheers, waving and whistles from hundreds of supporters lining both sides of the street. They punched the air, took pictures with phones and held signs that included “Best prez ever” and “Stop the steal”.
      The crowd also waved flags including “Trump 2020: Keep America great”, “Trump 2020: No more bullshit”, “All aboard the Trump train!” and “Trump 2020: Pro life, pro God, pro gun”. A stand had been set up to sell merchandise, as if at a Trump rally. Some ran excitedly after the motorcade. There were chants of “USA! USA!”, “We want Trump! We want Trump!” and “Four more years! Four more years!”
      One attendee, Mike Sembert, from Fort Meyers in Florida, told the Guardian he had traveled to the rally because “we need our president back and we need four more years”. He said the election was fraudulent and votes were cast by “illegals and dead people”.
      Anti-Trump protesters have also continued to congregate in Washington since street celebrations erupted when Biden’s win was confirmed a week ago. Signs, some reading “Loser” and “Failure”, have plastered a non-scalable fence erected around the entire White House perimeter.
      There has been an “outrageous and illegitimate attempt to overturn the election which must be stopped in its tracks by people in the streets making clear: the election is over,” said Sunsara Taylor, a counter-protester. “Biden won. Trump lost.”
      The courts, as well as the major news organisations that typically project election winners, appear in no mood to indulge Trump. The president’s campaign has suffered a slew of legal losses in Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania after arguing that ballots were illegally counted.
      “The Trump campaign keeps hoping it will find a judge that treats lawsuits like tweets,” Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and elections law expert, told CNN. “Repeatedly, every person with a robe they’ve encountered has said, ‘I’m sorry, we do law here.’”

      The bulk of senior Republicans have either sided with Trump or refused to condemn his refusal to acknowledge his loss, a stance that will lead America down a “dangerous path”, former president Barack Obama has warned. There are some notable Republican exceptions. George W Bush, another former president, has congratulated Biden on his win.
      The tumultuous transition comes as the US is ravaged by a surge in coronavirus cases. On Friday, a new daily record of 184,514 infections was recorded by Johns Hopkins University, with Americans now dying at a rate of around 1,000 a day. Nearly 250,000 people in the US have died due to the pandemic, by far the worst death toll in the world.
      Biden has urged people to take basic precautions, such as wearing masks, while attacking the “woefully lacking” Trump administration response to the crisis.
      “I will not be president until next year,” the president-elect said. “This crisis does not respect dates on the calendar, it is accelerating right now. Urgent action is needed today, now, by the current administration – starting with an acknowledgement of how serious the current situation is.” More

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      Top US cybersecurity official reportedly says he expects to be fired

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      Top US cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs has told associates he expects to be fired by the White House, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
      Krebs is the government’s point person on securing voting technology and is widely respected among local election officials. His agency has also been aggressively pushing back on rumors that something went wrong with the 2020 election, as Donald Trump, who refuses to concede to the president-elect, Joe Biden, contests.
      Krebs, who heads the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), did not return messages from the Reuters news agency seeking comment. And the Cisa and the White House declined comment.
      Separately, Bryan Ware, assistant director for cybersecurity at Cisa, confirmed to Reuters that he had handed in his resignation on Thursday.
      Krebs has drawn praise from both Democrats and Republicans for his handling of the US election, which generally ran smoothly despite persistent fears in the run-up that foreign hackers might try to undermine the vote or that there might be chaos with mail-in voting during a pandemic or intimidation of voters going to the polls to cast their ballots in person.
      But he drew the ire of the Trump White House over a website run by Cisa dubbed Rumor Control which debunks misinformation about the election, according to the three people familiar with the matter.
      White House officials have asked for content to be edited or removed from the website, which has disputed numerous false claims about the election, including that Democrats are behind a mass election fraud scheme, for which no evidence has been presented. In response, Cisa officials have refused to delete accurate information.
      In particular, one person said, the White House was angry about a Cisa post rejecting a conspiracy theory that falsely claims an intelligence agency supercomputer and program, purportedly named Hammer and Scorecard, could have flipped votes nationally. No such system exists, according to Krebs, election security experts and former US officials.
      Meanwhile Ware is one of several officials who have left national security-related posts since Donald Trump lost the election to Joe Biden. Trump has yet to concede.
      Ware did not provide details, but a US official familiar with his matter said the White House asked for Ware’s resignation earlier this week.
      The churn is being closely watched amid concern for the integrity of the transition from Trump to Biden. More

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      TikTok asks US court to intervene after Trump administration leaves app in limbo

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      The popular video-sharing app TikTok says its future has been in limbo since Donald Trump tried to shut it down earlier this fall and is asking a federal court to intervene.
      Trump in August signed an executive order to ban TikTok if it did not sell its US operations in 45 days. The move forced TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to consider deals with several American companies before ultimately settling on a proposal to place TikTok under the oversight of the American companies Oracle and Walmart, each of which would also have a financial stake in the company.
      But TikTok said this week it’s received “no clarity” from the US government about whether that proposal has been accepted.
      The deal has been under a national-security review by the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which is led by the treasury department. The department didn’t return emailed requests for comment this week.
      “With the November 12 CFIUS deadline imminent and without an extension in hand, we have no choice but to file a petition in court to defend our rights and those of our more than 1,500 employees in the US,” TikTok said in a written statement Tuesday.
      Trump has cited concerns that the Chinese government could spy on TikTok users if the app remains under Chinese ownership. TikTok has denied it is a security threat but said it is still trying to work with the administration to resolve its concerns.
      The legal challenge is “a protection to ensure these discussions can take place”, the company said.
      The Trump administration had earlier sought to ban the app from smartphone app stores and deprive it of vital technical services. To do this, the US could have internet service providers block TikTok usage from US IP addresses, as India did when it banned TikTok, effectively making TikTok unusable.
      Such actions were set to take place on 20 September but federal judges have so far granted TikTok extensions.
      TikTok is now looking to the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit to review Trump’s divestment order and the government’s national-security review. The company filed a 49-page petition asking the court to review the decision, saying the forced divestment from TikTok violates the constitution.
      “The government has taken virtually all of the ‘sticks’ in the ‘bundle’ of property rights ByteDance possesses in its TikTok US platform, leaving it with no more than the twig of potentially being allowed to make a rushed, compelled sale, under shifting and unrealistic conditions, and subject to governmental approval,” the filing says.
      The US attorney general office did not immediately respond to request for comment. More

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      in Elections

      End of Trump era deals heavy blow to rightwing populist leaders worldwide

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      As the Donald Trump era draws to a close, many world leaders are breathing a sigh of relief. But Trump’s ideological kindred spirits – rightwing populists in office in Brazil, Hungary, Slovenia and elsewhere – are instead taking a sharp breath.The end of the Trump presidency may not mean the beginning of their demise, but it certainly strips them of a powerful motivational factor, and also alters the global political atmosphere, which in recent years had seemed to be slowly tilting in their favour, at least until the onset of coronavirus. The momentous US election result is further evidence that the much-talked-about “populist wave” of recent years may be subsiding.For Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has yet to recognise Joe Biden’s victory, Trump’s dismissal struck close to home. “He was really banking on a Trump victory … Bolsonaro knows that part of his project depends on Trump,” said Guilherme Casarões, a political scientist from Getulio Vargas Foundation in Brazil.As the reality of a Trump-free future sunk in last Thursday, Bolsonaro reportedly sought to lighten the mood in the presidential palace, telling ministers he now had little choice but to hurl his pro-Trump foreign policy guru, Filipe Martins, from the building’s third-floor window.The election result represented a blow to Bolsonarismo, a far-right political project modelled closely on Trumpism that may now lose some of its shine. And on the world stage the result means Brazil has lost a key ally, even if critics say the relationship brought few tangible benefits. It brings an end to what Eliane Cantanhêde, a prominent political commentator, called Bolsonaro’s “megalomaniacal pipedream” of spearheading an international rightwing crusade. More

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      in US Politics

      Loser: Donald Trump derided defeat– now he must live with it

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      In the Manichean world of Donald Trump, there is one epithet more pathetic than any other: loser. He has used the term when describing fellow Republicans Mitt Romney and John McCain, critics such as Cher, his friend Roger Stone, and even American fallen heroes who died fighting for their country in France in 1918. Now he joins their ranks. He will forever carry around his neck the yoke of the one-term president, a burden shouldered in the last 40 years by just two other men – George HW Bush and Jimmy Carter.
      To make his humiliation complete, Trump lost to someone he denigrated as “the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics”. But in the end, after a nail-biting vote count, Joe Biden proved himself to be a more worthy opponent than that albeit by a thin margin than polls predicted.
      In 2016 Trump was a curiosity – the outsider who promised to take Washington by storm, the real estate magnate who said he would drain the swamp, the self-proclaimed billionaire who wouldn’t reveal his tax returns but would be the champion of “forgotten Americans”.
      Four years later, that unconventional mishmash of qualities had to some degree unraveled. He could no longer claim the mantle of the outsider – he was the incumbent of the most powerful office on Earth; the swamp looked more toxic than ever; and the forgotten Americans were hurting as never before while Trump himself was paying a paltry $750 a year in federal income taxes. More

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      in Elections

      The misinformation media machine amplifying Trump's election lies

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      The networks have made their calls, world leaders have begun paying their respects, and even Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s other media outlets appear to have given up on a second term for Donald Trump. But in a video posted on Facebook on 7 November and viewed more than 16.5m times since, NewsMax host and former Trump administration official Carl Higbie spends three minutes spewing a laundry list of false and debunked claims casting doubt on the outcome of the presidential election.
      “I believe it’s time to hold the line,” said Higbie, who resigned from his government post over an extensive track record of racist, homophobic and bigoted remarks, to the Trump faithful. “I’m highly skeptical and you should be too.”
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      The video, which has been shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook, is just one star in a constellation of pro-Trump misinformation that is leading millions of Americans to doubt or reject the results of the presidential election. Fully 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not “free and fair”, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted since election day. Among those doubters, large majorities believe two of Trump’s most brazen lies: that mail-in voting leads to fraud and that ballots were tampered with.
      Trump himself is the largest source of election misinformation; the president has barely addressed the public since Tuesday except to share lies and misinformation about the election. But his message attacking the electoral process is being amplified by a host of rightwing media outlets and pundits who appear to be jockeying to replace Fox News as the outlet of choice for Trumpists – and metastasizing on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
      Since election day, 16 of the top 20 public Facebook posts that include the word “election” feature false or misleading information casting doubt on the election in favor of Trump, according to a Guardian analysis of posts with the most interactions using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. Of those, 13 are posts by the president’s own page, one is a direct quote from Trump published by Fox News, one is by the rightwing evangelical Christian Franklin Graham, and the last is the Newsmax Higbie video.
      The four posts that do not include misinformation are congratulatory messages by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for Biden and Kamala Harris and two posts by Graham, including a request for prayers for Trump and a remembrance by Graham of his father, the televangelist Billy Graham.
      On YouTube, hosts such as Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber with more than 5 million followers, have also been pushing out content questioning the election results. A video from Crowder called Live Updates: Democrats Try to Steal the Election was viewed 5m times, and a nearly two-hour video headlined Fox News is NOT your friend has already racked up more than a million views. More

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      in US Politics

      Pompeo makes baseless claims about ‘smooth transition to second Trump administration’

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      The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo has predicted “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration” on a day when US allies offered their congratulations to the president-elect, Joe Biden.
      Pompeo made his remarks to reporters at the state department on Tuesday, and gave a slight smile after referring to a “second Trump administration” – leaving it unclear whether he was joking.
      He did not refer to the fact that Biden has been projected as the winner, and held a lead of 4.7m nationwide in the vote count so far, while being ahead in the four critical battleground states.
      Instead, Pompeo focused on the various legal challenges being pursued by the Trump administration, none of which so far have been found to have any merit.
      “We’re ready,” Pompeo went on. “The world is watching what’s taking place. We’re gonna count all the votes. When the process is complete, there’ll be electors selected. There’s a process – the constitution lays it out pretty clearly. The world should have every confidence that the transition necessary to make sure that the state department is functional today, successful today and successful with a president who’s in office on January 20 a minute after noon, will also be successful.”
      The state department is not currently communicating with the Biden team and all government agencies have been told to proceed with their budgets as if Trump had been re-elected, to the outrage of Democrats.
      “Secretary Pompeo shouldn’t play along with baseless and dangerous attacks on the legitimacy of last week’s election,” said Eliot Engel, the Democratic chairman of the House foreign affairs committee. “The state department should now begin preparing for President-elect Biden’s transition.”
      Pompeo said he was receiving “calls from all across the world”, but did not say who from. The leaders of America’s main allies, including Canada, the UK, France, Ireland and Germany have congratulated Biden in phone calls on Monday and Tuesday.
      “They understand that we have a legal process. They understand that this takes time,” the secretary of state said, comparing the situation now to the 2000 election. In 2000, George W Bush was leading by 537 votes in Florida, when the supreme court intervened to stop vote counting. Biden is ahead by tens of thousands of votes in four states.
      Echoing Trump’s line – which has become the party line for Republicans – Pompeo said: “We must count every legal vote, we want to make sure that any vote that wasn’t lawful ought not be counted – that dilutes your vote, if it’s done properly. Got to get that right. When we get it right, we’ll get it right. We’re in good shape.”
      When a journalist asked whether Trump’s refusal to concede discredits US promotion of democratic norms abroad, Pompeo replied irritably: “That’s ridiculous and you know it’s ridiculous, and you asked it because it’s ridiculous.”
      He added: “We want the law to be imposed in a way that reflects the reality of what took place, and that’s what I think we’re engaged in here in the United States and it’s what we work on every place all across the world.” More

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      US records seventh consecutive day of more than 100,000 new Covid cases

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      The coronavirus pandemic continues to surge in the US, after the country recorded a seventh consecutive day of more than 100,000 new cases.
      Monday also saw the US surpass 10m total cases – the highest number in the world, by far – and reach a death toll of 238,256. There were 111,433 new cases on Monday and 590 new deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
      Hospitalisations were also rising, with more than 59,000 nationwide, reported the Covid Tracking Project, which saw the biggest single-day increase since 10 July. It found South Dakota had the highest hospitalisation rates in the US and said Illinois had reported more than 10,000 cases for four days straight.
      Joe Biden, the president-elect, has warned the US is “facing a very dark winter” and that even with Pfizer’s announcement that it has a vaccine it believes is 90% effective, 200,000 more lives could be lost in the next few months.
      Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services, said on Tuesday the federal government will have enough of the vaccine by the end of December “to have vaccinated our most vulnerable citizens”. By the end of January, he told NBC, there will be enough for all healthcare workers and first responders, with March or early April targeted for a general vaccination programme.
      Experts say cases could rise exponentially in the coming weeks. Michael Osterholm, director of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, told CNN: “We are watching cases increase substantially in this country far beyond, I think, what most people ever thought could happen.
      “It will not surprise me if in the next weeks we see over 200,000 new cases a day.”
      On Tuesday, Donald Trump tweeted purported quotes from a Fox Business journalist and his former White House doctor turned congressman-elect, Ronny Jackson, crediting the president with the possible arrival of a vaccine. He also retweeted a post describing Biden as an “ambulance chaser”.
      Pfizer senior vice-president Kathrin Jansen told the New York Times the company did not participate in the government’s Operation Warp Speed or take any of its money.
      The Food and Drug Administration said it had issued an emergency use authorisation for Eli Lilly’s monoclonal antibody therapy, called bamlanivimab, to treat mild to moderate cases in adults and children over 12.
      On Tuesday, Osterholm told CBS a “perfect storm” was forming and that hospitals were “about to be overrun”.
      “We’re going to see by far the darkest days of this pandemic between now and next spring when the vaccine becomes available,” he told CBS.
      Top US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci told MSNBC he expects the FDA will probably put in for an emergency use authorisation of the Pfizer vaccine in the next week to week and a half. Providing it goes through, he said, doses should be available for highest-priority people in December.
      Asked if he would take the vaccine if it was approved by the FDA, he said he would.
      “I’m going to look at the data, but I trust Pfizer. I trust the FDA,” Fauci said. “These are colleagues of mine for decades, the career scientists. If they look at this data, and they say this data is solid, let’s go ahead and approve it, I promise you, I will take the vaccine, and I will recommend that my family take the vaccine.”
      He also reiterated the importance of wearing a mask, saying: “You protect others. Their mask protects you, and your mask also protects you.”
      Public health officials believe the federal government has not done enough to encourage Americans to take a vaccine or prepare them for what to expect.
      “This needed to happen yesterday,” Daniel Salmon, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told USA Today. “It’s like watching a train wreck happen.”
      Across the US, states are struggling. In El Paso, Texas, officials have six mobile morgues and have requested four more, CNN reported. The state was approaching 1m infections. In Ohio the chief medical officer, Dr Bruce Vanderhoff, warned of an “unprecedented spike” in hospital use and a growing demand on staff.
      “If we don’t control the spread of this virus, we won’t be able to care for those who are acutely ill without postponing important, but less urgent, care,” he said. “We anticipate that this kind of shift could happen in a matter of weeks if trends don’t change.”
      In Utah, the governor Gary Herbert, warned of a “dire situation” in hospitals, declared a state of emergency, issued a mask mandate and restricted social gatherings.
      “This is a sacrifice for all of us,” he said. “But as we slow the spread it will make all the difference for our overworked healthcare workers, who desperately need our help.”
      In California, cases are at their highest levels in months, a rise that the governor, Gavin Newsom, said could be linked to Halloween. The positivity rate in the state is 3.7% – a jump from 2.5% in just over three weeks – and hospitalisations have risen by more than 28% in two weeks.
      Newsom said people were starting to “take down their guard, take off their masks, begin to mix outside their households. We’re seeing some early indication related to Halloween. I’m very sober about that.” More