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      John Oliver on Trump's refusal to concede: 'Absolutely unforgivable'

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      John Oliver tore into Donald Trump’s “pathetic, dangerous” refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory on Last Week Tonight, after two weeks of the president’s attempts to delegitimize the results of the election with baseless claims of voter fraud, backed by most congressional Republicans. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, for example, said Trump is “100% within his rights” to challenge the election result, and chastised Democrats on the Senate floor for “any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election”.
      “First, no one expected Trump to immediately, cheerfully accept the results,” Oliver countered. “He’s incapable of cheerfully accepting anything apart from blowjobs, Nazi endorsements and the opportunity to scream inside a stranger’s truck,” to harken back to a photo-op from two years or what feels like two decades ago.

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      Furthermore, Democrats in Washington never refused to accept the election results in 2016: Hillary Clinton formally conceded the morning after election day, and Obama hosted Trump in the White House the day after that. “And yet Republicans are trying to defend their support for Trump’s indefensible behavior,” Oliver continued. One senior White House official asked the Washington Post: “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” which Oliver called “a question that never ends well, whether the ones asking it are overworked parents who need a break or the Weimar Republic”.
      The Trump campaign and its television surrogates on Fox News have lobbed numerous unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud before, during and after the election, and “if you’re a casual viewer of rightwing media, you might think, ‘Well, there must be something here, they wouldn’t be going to all this trouble over nothing’”, Oliver said. “But the thing is, they are. This really is nothing.”
      Oliver summarily disproved Trump voter fraud claims from Pennsylvania to Georgia to Michigan – “I could spend the rest of this show debunking stories,” he said. “The problem is, it’s endless” and often nonsensical. “And who knows why Republicans are entertaining this – maybe it’s the fact that Georgia has two Senate runoffs coming up and they want to keep Trump happy so he’ll help rally voters for him there,” Oliver added. “Maybe they’re currying favor with him because they’re worried he’ll be a power broker going forward, I don’t know. What I do know is that the answer to the question ‘what is the downside of humoring him?’ is a lot.”
      The Trump administration’s refusal to acknowledge the election’s outcome prevents Biden from receiving high-level intelligence reports or accessing funds for his transition team. More pressingly, it blocks Trump officials from sharing critical details of a distribution plan for a Covid vaccine with Biden’s team. As cases surge to new records across the country heading into the holiday season, “you really want the new team handling the pandemic to be able to talk to the old team,” said Oliver, “even if, as I suspect, the old team’s plan was just a single white board in Jared’s office with nothing on it other than ‘discover cure?’ circled five times and then a drawing of Donald Trump saying: ‘Good job, new son.’”
      Many of Trump’s election fraud claims are laughable or ridiculous, Oliver continued, but “the fact is, a lot of people believe stuff like that. And when you continually insist that the election was stolen in big cities and suggest that remedying this calls for the ‘biggest fight since the civil war’,” to quote a video retweeted by Trump of the actor Jon Voight comparing contesting Biden to battling Satan, “things start to get deadly serious.” Earlier this month, two armed men were arrested outside the Philadelphia convention center, where city officials were counting ballots. One of the city’s commissioners, a Republican, told CBS news that the vote-counting center had received threatening phone calls “reminding us that ‘this is what the second amendment is for’”.
      It’s clear, Oliver said in response to the situation in Philadelphia, that “Trump is playing a dangerous game here, because there’s a huge difference between ‘not my president’ and ‘not the president’. And to be clear, people who are that angry are not riling themselves up in a vacuum. They’ve been fed a steady diet of misinformation, bullshit fraud claims, and a victim narrative from outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, OANN and, most importantly, Trump himself.”
      Trump’s continued propagation of election conspiracy theories via Twitter since the election are an “appropriate coda to a presidency that has destroyed so many lives”, said Oliver. “So many of us have lost loved ones, either because you can no longer square your love for them with their love for him, or because they fell down a mind-melting rabbit hole of conspiracy theories that he happily perpetuated, or because he let a deadly virus run wild, and it fucking killed them.
      “And now, as a parting gift to the country,” he concluded, “Trump is somehow managing to divide us even further while also hobbling his successor at the worst possible time, which is absolutely unforgivable.” More

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      What led to Trump and what will follow Biden | Letters

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      George Monbiot (The US was lucky to get Trump – Biden may pave the way for a more competent autocrat, 11 November) is probably right about Barack Obama paving the way for Donald Trump, because the former failed to tackle big business. I would go even further and say that Tony Blair, another “breath of fresh air” at the time with his Tory-lite policies, more or less paved the way for our Trump – in the form of Brexit.Both politicians had a clear electoral mandate to bring about fundamental changes to their societies: in Blair’s case, to change our parliamentary institutions, as, when it came to corralling business, the UK was very much, and still is, a bit-part player. In the end, his successor handed over a poisoned chalice to the Tory/Lib Dem coalition to attempt to clean up the mess and, after its failure, to face the consequences. Joe Biden, besides confronting neoliberalism, needs to do to his country’s political system what Blair failed to do to his. John MarriottNorth Hykeham, Lincolnshire• George Monbiot paints a bleak prospect for the US and, by implication, the rest of the free world. He writes at length about the failure of Barack Obama to change the basic course of social and economic conditions during his eight years in office. He also comments on how important it is that Democrats win both Senate seats in Georgia to avoid a Republican-led upper house. Surely it was exactly this that stopped Obama at every turn – the fact that during his presidency he was cursed with a hostile and belligerent Senate.The 2008 global financial crisis was one of his darkest moments, and I believe it was Gordon Brown who took charge of the initial recovery worldwide. Most politicians realised that it was senior bank staff who were responsible for the disaster. But as the old adage says, “If you owe the bank £100 then you have a problem, but if you owe the bank £10,000,000 then the bank has a problem.” They were just too big and important to be allowed to fail. What didn’t happen, but should have, was that no bankers were exposed and prosecuted. Both Obama and Brown must bear some of the criticism. Richard YoellBromham, Bedfordshire• I am appalled by the advocation of “tub-thumping left populism” as a way forward for the US. We have seen enough of tub-thumping populism (whether of the left or right) in the world during the last 100 years to know where it leads – to mass civil unrest, police brutality, military intervention, civil war, governments shutting down parliaments and locking up (or kidnapping and murdering) political opponents. In short, to unbridled anarchy, tyranny and mayhem. So thanks, but no thanks! For all its faults and weaknesses, I’ll stick with democracy based on free and fair elections, even if it doesn’t always lead us to the ideal society that we may yearn to see realised.Philip StenningEccleshall, Staffordshire• George Monbiot overlooks the way in which the neoliberal doctrine of “making wealth before welfare” has been massively overturned by the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the primacy of health over economics has been forced on even the most ardent neoliberal regimes, not least in the UK. This will certainly leave an indelible mark on the post-pandemic era. Unlike the disastrous neoliberal response to the 2008 crash, this time we are seeing the start of a possible end of its dominance as the prevailing ideology of our times, for the first time since the Thatcher-Reagan years.Adam HartGorran Haven, Cornwall More

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      If it were happening in Turkey, we’d call Trump’s actions an attempted coup | Ece Temelkuran

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      President Trump’s refusal to concede to his successful challenger is “giving great comfort” to “authoritarian regimes” around the world, said Joe Biden’s biographer on CNN. “This is a source of delight [for them] … ” Turkey, my country, falls into that category of authoritarian regimes. But I can tell you that what is happening in the US is a source of horror, not delight, for those on the ground. We know the signs of when a political crisis becomes a de facto coup – so here’s a word of warning.Never mind the bitter jokes on social media (“America is faster at choosing other countries’ presidents”), the celebrations of Trump’s defeat across the world are filled with the expectation of a domino effect. The cheer doesn’t come from some belief that the US is the guiding light of democracy. What people want to believe is that when Trump goes, the mafioso network of 21st-century strongmen will be hit hard, and the world will be able to reverse the course of recent history. But things don’t appear to be that simple.A word of caution – I am not predicting that Trump will be successful in his immediate aim. The few routes available for him to remain president will be difficult to travel. And his utterances over the weekend – he both said that Biden won and that he won – suggest he might be closer to accepting reality. But this is also about undermining consent: a large proportion of the country does not trust the media or Congress or the Democrats, and now the actual functioning of electoral democracy is discredited in their eyes too.Nonetheless, a spectre of hesitation is haunting Washington. While the Trump administration is doing its best to sow confusion and challenge the mail-in ballots that helped deliver Biden a victory, the president-elect is acting coolly “presidential”; he is receiving calls from world leaders, which, he suggests, are the first steps in restoring respect for the US across the world. This courtly behaviour, this “wait and see” approach towards the incumbent, depends on trusting the health of US institutions.But contemporary authoritarianism works not by explicitly oppressing the people, but by accelerating the moral rot of already weakened institutions. Everything is riding on how those arms of the state and society – from the Senate and the supreme court to the press and the most insignificant of local public office – behave in the coming few days and weeks. And Trump has been manipulating these institutions for four years: see the way he used his term to pack the courts with rightwing judges at dizzying speed. Even the openly Biden-supporting media is hesitating to call a spade a spade, because they believe the institutions will prevail. Make no mistake, this is an attempted coup. If it were happening in Turkey the world’s media would not think twice about calling it so.It is happening in several corners all at once: Mike Pompeo’s smirk – the signature facial expression of “illiberal democracies” – as he promises a “smooth transition to the second Trump administration”; the sudden changes of cadre in the Pentagon; the calculated silence of Republican senators; Trump’s invocation of the “people” and the “movement”, hinting at a popular power that might carry him further than his opponents believe. Those who are analysing his behaviour in terms of psychology, referring to his famous allergy to losing, must be reminded: coups don’t always begin with a dramatic Reichstag fire, but through obscure and elusive machinations. Since the Americans might not know about our countries as much as we do about theirs, we can tell them that it has happened just like this here too – we trusted the institutions and were certain the leader wouldn’t dare.Today’s authoritarian societies are not fully formed dictatorships, single-party states – they don’t need to be. They manufacture crises and prolong political instability, keeping the masses on their toes, but ensuring leaders can act with impunity. American democrats shouldn’t expect a clear-cut power-grab from Trump, but rather a maddeningly obscure process that keeps everything up in the air until the masses are exhausted and lose interest. Even if he accepts reality and his electoral loss, Trump’s “movement” will see its task as running a parallel political reality for the next four years that will constantly threaten Biden’s legitimacy. Most importantly, through his recent appointments in the state apparatus and consolidation of anti-democratic loyalists, Trump is already engineering his own shadow state.The silence of the Republicans and the state offices responsible for power transfer tell those of us who are experienced in the business of “illiberal democracy” that the machine that creates parallel political realities is ready to take off. If you live in those countries like Turkey, which American liberals think of as a horrible yet impossible example of what might transpire in their own land, you know that an impossible tomorrow can become today’s reality, very quickly indeed.• Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish journalist and political commentator, and author of How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship More

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      Joe Biden: Black Lives Matter activists helped you win Wisconsin. Don't forget us | Justin Blake

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      Three months ago, a Kenosha police officer shot my nephew, Jacob Blake, seven times in the back in front of his children. Jacob was rushed to the hospital, where for days he was shackled to his bed, only to find he’d been paralyzed from the waist down. The officer who shot him, Rusten Sheskey, has yet to be charged with a crime and is currently on paid administrative leave.Days after the shooting, Donald Trump came and went, showing little empathy for our family, and calling for a violent crackdown on protests for racial justice. The press, too, came and went, as the drama of uprising transitioned into the long, slow work of healing and change. But even after the cameras left, after the president ignored our pain and took off in his motorcade, Kenoshans kept organizing.In close concert with the Blake family, grassroots organizations in Kenosha began turning protest power into electoral power in one of the most competitive swing states in the country. From the start, our goal was to counteract voter suppression and make sure everyone in our community had their voice heard at the ballot box.On 20 October, our family joined hundreds of activists and community members in a peaceful march from Kenosha to Milwaukee, receiving support along the way from luminaries like the former Ohio state senator Nina Turner and the Rev Jesse Jackson. The march took over 14 hours, ending in Milwaukee’s Red Arrow Park, where Dontre Hamilton was killed by a police officer in 2014. The message of the marchers was simple: south-eastern Wisconsin has seen too much violence at the hands of the police. It’s time for Wisconsinites to vote out the politicians who have allowed, and often encouraged, this violence in our communities.Make no mistake: now that Biden’s won the election, he owes this country real racial justice reformFor many of the activists in Kenosha, including Jacob’s family, this meant voting Trump out of office. In the last two weeks before the election, we took this message door to door in a canvassing sprint across Kenosha, a city where the Joe Biden campaign itself had very little presence on the ground. But for the thousands of low-propensity voters we spoke to one-on-one in the city of Kenosha, Biden’s 20,000 statewide vote margin might have looked a lot smaller.Mainstream Democrats often invoke “loyalty” as the quality they hope to inspire in their voters. But “loyalty” is a two-way street: party leaders shouldn’t expect it if they can’t deliver for the voters who put them in office. And on this front, particularly with Black voters, Biden is far from perfect. He spearheaded the 1994 crime bill, for instance, which expanded mass incarceration and hurt Black communities across the country.Kenosha’s community leaders are taking a chance on Biden, believing that this turning point will push him to learn from past mistakes and take a moral stance in this moment of national division. And we are tired of Trump’s hateful racism and the increasingly explicit imprimatur he’s given to violent white supremacists. But make no mistake: now that Biden’s won the election, he owes this country real racial justice reform.He must start with the most obvious steps: executive orders that address the immediate need for federal remedies to protect Black and Brown citizens from police brutality; appointing a special prosecutor to investigate both criminal and civil rights violations in the Floyd, Taylor, Blake, Cole and Anderson cases. More broadly, Biden must recognize that poverty and racism are pandemics in their own right, each of which has been exacerbated by Covid-19. Beginning to remedy them will require not just an emergency economic stabilization package, but a national moratorium on foreclosures and evictions for the next 12 months, and a prioritization of funding for the communities of color hit hardest by the virus.These demands are not coming from Kenosha alone, but from all across the country, where the Black Lives Matter movement – the largest social uprising in our nation’s history – has inspired a new generation of voters and activists. So while racial justice leaders may have helped Biden take back the White House, come January 2021, we’ll be reminding him exactly who got him there. More

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      America's flawed democracy: the five key areas where it is failing

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      On 7 November the United States pulled back from the brink of re-electing a president who has repeatedly shown disdain for democratic norms and institutions. Donald Trump has fused his own business interests with the White House, dubbed the media “enemies of the people”, embraced foreign strongmen, sidelined science and politicized the justice department, falsely cast doubt on the electoral process and is currently distinguishing himself as the first sitting president since 1800 to frustrate a peaceful transition of power.
      But as great escapes go, this one came bone-rattlingly close to collapsing. More people voted for Trump in the 2020 election – some 71 million Americans – than for any other presidential candidate in US history, other than Joe Biden himself. It took gargantuan determination to unseat him, with historically high turnout and black voters leading the way. And it happened in spite of, not because of, the unique features of US democracy.
      The election exposed deep flaws in how Americans choose their leaders. Some of those flaws are as old as the nation itself, while others are more modern creations that have been weaponized by Trump and the Republicans. Combined, they present an existential threat to America’s reputation – and survival – as the oldest constitutional democracy on the planet.
      As Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy, put it: “The United States just allowed an autocratic person to ascend to the presidency, to serve in it for four years and to very nearly extend that term. The big question is: how did that happen, what went wrong there?”
      Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, expressed a similar thought in Slate: “Our voting system is fundamentally broken,” she wrote. “The future of our country unequivocally depends on our ability to reform it.”
      Here the Guardian looks at five of the most glaring flaws exposed during this election cycle, and asks: what hope now for setting them right?
      1. The electoral college
      The US is recovering from a severe bout of stress, caused by nerve-shattering waiting for the swing states to be called. The 2020 presidential election will go down in people’s memories as unbearably close.
      It wasn’t close at all.
      Biden walloped Trump with a massive lead of more than 5 million Americans in the popular vote – the simple national tally of votes cast for either candidate. As CNN’s Harry Enten points out, the Democratic candidate will probably end up with 52% of the popular vote, the highest percentage of any challenger since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. More

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      Donald Trump's refusal to concede is no joke – it's a dangerous precedent | Nesrine Malik

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      What started on a golden escalator five years ago ended in the parking lot of a garden design company next to a sex shop and across the street from a crematorium. The Four Seasons Total Landscaping incident – someone appeared to have booked a gardening services’ purveyor instead of the luxury Four Seasons hotel – was heavy with symbolism, and perfectly timed.
      The colossal joke triggered a sort of joyous breaking of a fever, as the power of the Trump administration ebbed away in front of the assembled cameras. The tension caused by the red mirage of Trump’s strong early showing during the election melted away, and all that remained was laughter. Social media rejoiced in the symbolic diminishment of Trump. Serious news channels tried and failed to cover it straight. The memes were bountiful.
      It was the same humour that has permeated the past four years. The familiar amusement at the fact that, sure, the toddler-president means what he says, but he doesn’t have the intellect or reach to execute his many whims. At the moment of his loss, surrounded by even more chaos than usual, the spectre of Trump was reduced one final time. He was no longer a sinister figure lurking in the shadows, but a harmless clown, one who had looked temporarily threatening only because of a trick of the light.
      Despite hopes that he might be on the point of conceding, with a speech that appeared to admit the possibility of a Biden administration, the president was back to his old tricks by Sunday afternoon, stating Biden may “have won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA” but that “I concede NOTHING!”. Even as Trump refuses to step down, even as every day a norm is shattered and a deep gash inflicted on the body of American democracy, his threat is minimised.
      Elder statesmen didn’t waste a minute indulging this circus. In an interview last week Tony Blair was asked about Mike Pompeo’s assertion that there would be “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration”. A smile played on Blair’s lips as he replied, “I assumed it was some ironic remark.” He went on to pull himself together to reassure us that America has strong democratic processes and systems, and that we shouldn’t dwell on Trump’s antics: “Things will move very quickly.”
      He should be more worried. Those strong institutions have a record that is too patchy to wager the country’s democratic future on. The Republican party is the first of those weak links. More foreign leaders so far have congratulated Joe Biden’s election than GOP senators, a pitiful four so far. Choosing loyalty to Trump and the voters they fear they might lose if they come out against him, members of the party have already made an autocratic choice, where their authority flows downwards from Trump, rather than upwards from a democratic decision of the majority. If a serious attempt is made to overturn the election result, this does not augur well.
      The judiciary is also looking wobbly. In addition to three supreme court judges, Trump has appointed almost a quarter of all active federal judges in the United States, skewing the courts not only ideologically but demographically, reversing trends under Obama, and resulting in overwhelmingly white, male judges. Over the past year, the majority of cases in which pro-voting rights rulings were overturned in federal courts involved a Trump-appointed judge.
      And there is a real path to Trump overturning the results. The details are arcane, but in a scenario where state legislatures conclude that the popular vote has been corrupted, they are enabled by the constitution to discard that vote. Republican-controlled state legislatures could then appoint sympathetic electors who would cast votes for Trump, even if Biden won those states’ popular vote. It is a far-fetched and unfathomable path, but several of the components needed to make it happen are already in play: a willing legislature, a pliable judiciary and a belief among millions of Americans that the election results are not valid.
      But the complacency that treats Trump as a joke that went too far endures. Mostly because Trump is, objectively, a mess. We expect autocrats to come in a different, more convincing form. We expect them at least to be able to finish a sentence. The sloppy incoherence and chaos of Trump and his administration makes it hard for some to believe that they are capable of pulling off anything as organised as a coup. But if enough Republican lawmakers and enough Republican voters can be activated to make it happen, Trump himself needs to do very little. And he doesn’t even need to pull it all the way off to set a dangerous precedent – for it to be a trial run.
      Instead of preparing for, and heading off, the worst-case scenario, and despite all the norm-shattering of the past few years, a stubborn American exceptionalism still remains, one that in sage tones calms any fears of a Trump takeover. The Biden camp has chosen to carry on with a transition process during which they have not even been allowed to access messages of congratulation, and still use no stronger language than calling Trump’s refusal to concede “an embarrassment”.
      The whole episode is “terrible for democracy, but ultimately a bad case of Trumpian bluster rather than an ominous portent of tanks in the streets” predicts the New Yorker. When a person is robbed of power, “they immediately become less scary”, Slate tells us. “Thank goodness Trump is too incompetent to properly organise a coup,” says the Washington Post. But, as the author Talia Lavin put it, “it is almost as if mainstream political journalists in the United States suffer a kind of Promethean ailment: each morning, an eagle draped in an American flag swoops down and removes their temporal lobe.” The lesson they are constantly unlearning is that with Trump, things seem unthinkable until they are inevitable. And by then, it’s too late.
      • Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump campaign abandons part of legal challenge to Pennsylvania election results

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      President Donald Trump’s campaign has withdrawn a central part of its lawsuit seeking to stop the certification of the election results in Pennsylvania, where Democrat Joe Biden beat Trump to capture the state and help win the White House.
      Ahead of a Tuesday hearing in the case, Trump’s campaign on Sunday dropped the allegation that 682,479 mail-in and absentee ballots were illegally processed without its representatives watching.
      The campaign’s slimmed-down lawsuit, filed in federal court on Sunday, maintains the aim of blocking Pennsylvania from certifying a victory for Biden in the state, and it maintains its claim that Democratic voters were treated more favorably than Republican voters.
      The Associated Press on 7 November called the presidential contest for former vice president Joe Biden, after determining that the remaining ballots left to be counted in Pennsylvania would not allow Trump to catch up. Trump has refused to concede.
      The remaining claim in the lawsuit centres on disqualifying ballots cast by voters who were given an opportunity to fix mail-in ballots that were going to be disqualified on a technicality.
      The lawsuit charges that “Democratic-heavy counties” violated the law by identifying mail-in ballots before election day that had defects – such as lacking an inner “secrecy envelope” or lacking a voter’s signature on the outside envelope – so that the voter could fix it and ensure their vote would count, a moved called “curing”.
      Republican-heavy counties “followed the law and did not provide a notice and cure process, disenfranchising many”, the lawsuit said.
      Cliff Levine, a lawyer representing the Democratic National Committee, which is seeking to intervene, said it was not clear how many voters were given the chance to fix their ballot. But, he said, the number was minimal and certainly fewer than the margin – almost 70,000 – that separates Biden and Trump. “The numbers aren’t even close to the margin between the two candidates, not even close,” Levine said.
      In any case, there is no provision in state law preventing counties from helping voters to fix a ballot that contains a technical deficiency. Levine said the lawsuit did not contain any allegation that somebody voted illegally.
      “They really should be suing the counties that didn’t allow [voters] to make corrections,” Levine said. “The goal should be making sure every vote counts.”
      Pennsylvania’s top election official, secretary of state Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, responded in court on Sunday, asking the judge to dismiss the case. State courts are the proper jurisdiction for the subject, and the lawsuit contains no “plausible claim for relief on any legal theory”, the state’s lawyers wrote.
      More than 2.6m mail-in ballots were reported received by counties, and no report of fraud or accuracy problems has been made by state or county election officials or prosecutors.
      A key theme of Trump and his supporters has been their claim that Philadelphia – a Democratic bastion where Trump lost badly – had not allowed Trump’s campaign representatives to watch mail-in and absentee ballots processed and tabulated.
      However, Republican lawyers have acknowledged in a separate federal court proceeding that they had certified observers watching mail-in ballots being processed in Philadelphia. Governor Tom Wolf’s administration has said that ballot watchers from all parties had observers throughout the process and that “any insinuation otherwise is a lie”. More