US elections 2020

Imagine raiding Versailles with a herd of bulls. You probably won’t make it past the gates, and you certainly won’t wind up King of France, but you would irreparably trample the gardens and might well erode the foundation. That’s more or less how I view Donald Trump’s current assault on the election.Let’s begin with the obvious: Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States on 20 January 2021. As Benjamin Wittes recently explained, “It is exceedingly difficult to steal an election in the United States.” I encourage interested readers to look through his analysis, which I believe is spot on. I’ll quickly sum up the legal arguments.Trump’s lawsuits will not award him the presidency. To win, Mr Trump must prove systemic fraud, with illegal votes in the tens of thousands. There is no evidence of that so far, and evidence of widespread fraud is unlikely to arise in an election that Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security just labeled “the most secure in American history”. His lawsuits are, as one commentator aptly put it, “too absurd to be even dignified as frivolous”. As of this writing, he is 0-12 in court, a batting average that would shame even a little league baseball player.His lawsuits are also mathematically useless. He has focused on 2,000 ballots in Michigan where, at the time of this writing, Biden leads by 148,645 votes. He’s challenging a whopping 180 ballots in Arizona, a state recently called for Biden with a lead of 11,434. Georgia’s short-lived lawsuit sought to shave 53 ballots off a 14,057-vote lead. Elsewhere, the math is much the same.Nor will any recounts move the needle. The largest recount swing in history – Florida’s 2000 recount – changed only 1,247 votes. Recounts currently under way in Wisconsin and Georgia should look more like Wisconsin’s 2016 recount, where the margin shifted by 571 votes. Neither number even approaches Biden’s margins.More far-fetched scenarios are, well, far-fetched. State and local election officials, who do not report to Trump, are on track to certify Biden’s electors in the next few weeks. State legislatures are understandably reluctant to bypass their own constituents by certifying Republican electors, which would in any case be ineffectual and might well be unconstitutional. And the possibility of Trump mobilizing military resources to barricade himself in the White House on 20 January is almost certainly fanciful.Many Americans are laughing at Trump, joking that he’ll take the fight from the Four Seasons Total Landscaping building next to a porn shop all the way up to the Supreme Courtyard by Marriott. The man is a clown and deserves every ounce of ridicule thrown his way.But Republican leaders aren’t laughing. Not even close. They’re backing the president step by frivolous step. What began with exhortations to let legal challenges run their course seems to be escalating, withMike Pompeo giggling about a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration” and the House minority leader saying he doesn’t know if Biden will be president on 20 January.Donald Trump is a clown and deserves every ounce of ridicule thrown his wayMost materially disturbing is a memo from the attorney general, Bill Barr, that opens the door for politically motivated federal investigations. The memo lowers the bar for new investigations, allowing the DoJ to investigate “irregularities” instead of only “potential crimes”. It also explicitly permits investigations before election results are certified, a departure from the department’s longstanding practice of avoiding electoral interference. Barr’s memo promises a steady drip of misinformation to gloss Trump’s legal claims with a veneer of plausibility.Consciously undermining democracy by elected officials should be shocking. Shockingly, it isn’t.Republicans have spent four years engaged in a kind of performance art to stroke the fragile ego of their “Dear Leader” and appease his base. This time around, Republican politicians dance on Trump’s command to secure control of the Senate in this January’s runoff elections and extend their majorities in 2022 and 2024. Maybe some Republicans feel stuck, unable to do anything but play along with Trump’s latest delusion and hope that the federal judiciary will be a bulwark against tyranny, saving them from themselves. It’s an uncomfortable position, but not unexpected in a party that, data shows, has taken a hard turn toward authoritarianism in recent years. (To Republicans bristling at the characterization: you know you’re tilting authoritarian when Turkey’s strongman recognizes the results of a US election before you do.)Or perhaps the Republicans just wanted a distraction. The Senate’s ramming through unqualified judicial nominations has been bumped below the fold. Trump’s recent purge of the military’s high-level civilian leadership, while concerning to some, has met only mealy-mouthed displeasure from Republicans committed to backing his electoral posture. Commentators predict that Trump hopes to shield himself from future federal prosecution or selectively declassify information that undermines the Russiagate investigation with his new Pentagon personnel. And stoking election conflict is providing cover for the White House conman to fleece his loyal followers once again. A fundraising campaign promised to “stop the steal” but actually lined the pockets of Trump’s personal Super Pac.As one commentator put it Trump is orchestrating “not a coup, but a cover-up and a con game”.Republicans might succeed in holding Trump’s base. They might confirm a few more judges and retain control of the Senate and successfully grift Magaphiles. But they’re playing with fire and we are all in extreme danger of getting burned.History shows: “When politicians break democracy, they are wrong to think they control what comes next.”You’d think the modern Republican party would have learned this lesson. After Obama’s election, the neo-conservatives sold their souls for tax cuts. They welcomed birthers and bigots into their big white tent. They expected Paul Ryan would take the Republican mantle. Instead they got Trump. Even the most repugnant Republicans hated him. After Trump denigrated Ted Cruz’s wife, the brave senator shot back, calling Trump a “sniveling coward” and vowing that he would not “go like a servile puppy dog” and support then-candidate Trump.Fast forward to this week: Cruz rushed to the president’s defense after Don Jr publicly shamed “2024 GOP hopefuls” for failing to lick his father’s boots. Ask Ted whether he’s steering the party, or whether the party is steering him.If Republicans are telling themselves that “this time it will be different,” that they now know how to harness the explosive cocktail of economic displacement and racial anxiety, they’re flat-out wrong.Biden’s administration will probably be the first thing burned. In forcing the federal government to delay presidential transition, Trump and the Republicans have denied the president-elect access to transition funds, barred incoming personnel from processing security clearances, and prevented Biden from receiving intelligence briefings. While Biden and some of his senior staff know how to run a White House, they still need a smooth transition to hit the ground running full speed.Republicans don’t seem to appreciate how the country as a whole could suffer. Early stumbles in an administration can be catastrophic. The 9/11 commission found that delays with President Bush’s transition prevented him from hiring national security personnel, which in turn left us vulnerable to the attacks. President Biden needs every waking moment between now and 20 January to prepare for the known challenges: a raging pandemic, a tanking economy and a fractured country. The Republican party’s obstinance will amplify those threats and probably create new ones.This election denialism erodes national security in the immediate term, too. With America’s attention directed inward, our allies are worried and our adversaries are emboldened. This president has spilled classified information and permitted Russian bounties on the heads of American servicemen and women. The harm that he is doing to the nation’s defenses as he draws out the election, and the even greater harm he’s capable of doing as long as he has his fingers on the nuclear codes and his hands on the instruments of executive power, is incalculable.The damage he and the Republicans are doing to democracy may be even worse.Our system requires legitimate government, which requires legitimate elections. As Senator Chris Murphy put it, if Republicans convince half the country that “those people that got elected were illegitimately chosen, then so must be the actions they take when they get in office.”America has a long history of violently disobeying allegedly illegitimate governments, stretching from the Revolution through secession to the recent plot to kidnap and execute Michigan’s governor for “treasonous” Covid-19 restrictions.Even if violence doesn’t ensue this election cycle – and I fervently hope it won’t – the degradation of democracy will reverberate for years to come. Democratic self-government is not a condition, it’s a practice. The colonies practiced for over 150 years before forming a union, and even then they succeeded only on the second try. We practiced poorly for a century before unshackling our fellow citizens, and it took another 50 years of effort to enfranchise America’s women. We have not been perfect, but we have constantly endeavored to embody our ideals, to ensure that government of the people, by the people, and for the people will flourish in our great nation.When we begin to doubt that government does reflect and represent the people, we begin to doubt that it ever can.Republicans are sowing those seeds of doubt. And if we allow them to germinate and grow, we’ll soon find thorny disunion where our manicured garden of democracy once bloomed. No, the gates won’t be overrun and yes, the Biden administration will take office on 20 January.But we should all worry whether that will be enough. To Republican leaders: democracy needs your help to flourish. Please, put patriotism above party loyalty before it’s too late. More

Donald Trump has come closer than ever to admitting that he lost the US presidential election, suggesting “time will tell” but stopping short of a formal concession to president-elect Joe Biden.
In his first public remarks since his defeat was announced, Trump appeared to catch himself making a slip of the tongue as he discussed the possibility of a Biden administration imposing a national lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
“Ideally we won’t go to a lockdown,” the president told reporters in the White House Rose Garden. “I will not go – this administration will not be going to a lockdown. Hopefully the – whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration will be.”
Trump added: “I guess time will tell. But I can tell you this administration will not go to a lockdown.”
Biden was proclaimed the winner of the election last Saturday, a result Trump has refused to acknowledge while launching legal challenges based on unsubstantiated claims of fraud. The homeland security department on Thursday declared it the most secure election in US history with no evidence of votes being compromised or altered.
The president had issued dozens tweets and retweets but had not been seen in public except for a Veterans’ Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. It was the longest spell the American people had gone without hearing him speak since he took office.
Finally, on Friday, Trump held a press conference at the White House to provide an update on Operation Warp Speed, the effort to create a vaccine for Covid-19. The event, attended by Vice-President Mike Pence and coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx, took place one day after the US set a single-day record of more than 160,000 new cases.
Trump said he expects a vaccine to be available for the entire population as soon as April and an emergency use authorisation for Pfizer’s vaccine “extremely soon”. Pfizer has said it expects to report required safety data next week and can then apply for an emergency use authorisation.
Although he appeared deflated, his hair grey instead of its customary blond, Trump still dived into familiar territory, boasting about economic recovery and settling scores with one of his political foes, New York governor Andrew Cuomo.
The government would not deliver a coronavirus vaccine to New York state if and when it becomes available, Trump said, because the state has promised to do its own review to ensure their safety.
Cuomo “doesn’t trust where the vaccine is coming from”, Trump complained. “These are coming from the greatest companies anywhere in the world, greatest labs in the world, but he doesn’t trust the fact that it’s this White House, this administration, so we won’t be delivering it to New York until we have authorisation to do so and that pains me to say that.”
Cuomo dismissed the attack. In an interview on MSNBC, the governor said: “None of what he said is true, surprise surprise. We’re all excited about the possibilities about a vaccine. It’s not that people don’t trust the vaccine companies, the pharmaceutical companies. Pfizer’s a great New York company, Regeneron is a great New York company.
“But an overwhelming percentage of Americans are worried about political interference in the vaccination process, in the approval process, by the president. The American people trust the drug company more than they trust the president.”
Criticism of the administration’s response to the virus, which has killed more than 243,000 in the US, became a central argument for Biden ahead of the 3 November election. There have been more than 100,000 new confirmed cases reported daily for more than a week. The secret service is experiencing a significant number, many believed to be linked to Trump’s rallies in the closing days of the campaign.
Biden has devoted most of his public remarks to encouraging Americans to wear a mask and view the coronavirus as a threat with no regard for political allegiance. He has not endorsed a nationwide shutdown but appealed for Trump to take “urgent action”.
“The crisis does not respect dates on the calendar. It is accelerating right now,” he said in a statement on Friday.
Public health experts have warned that Trump’s refusal to take aggressive action or to coordinate with the Biden team will only worsen the effects of the virus and hinder the nation’s ability to swiftly distribute a vaccine next year.
Yet Trump continues to stall the presidential transition. When an interviewer on Fox Business suggested that it would look sad if Trump does not attend the inauguration on 20 January, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany replied: “I think the president will attend his own inauguration. He would have to be there, in fact.”
There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the election. Officials from both political parties have stated publicly that the election went well, and international observers confirmed there were no serious irregularities. Trump’s legal team continues to pursue election lawsuits that have gained little traction in the courts. More