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      Trump law firm withdraws from Pennsylvania case challenging election

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      A major law firm withdrew overnight from a Trump campaign case in Pennsylvania seeking to have mail-in ballots thrown out, in the latest blow to the president’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election result in court.
      The Ohio-based Porter Wright Morris & Arthur firm, which brought a suit on Monday alleging that the use of mail-in ballots had created “an illegal two-tiered voting system” in the state, abruptly withdrew from that case in a memo to the court.
      “Plaintiffs and Porter Wright have reached a mutual agreement that plaintiffs will be best served if Porter Wright withdraws,” the memo said. The lead lawyer in the case, the Pittsburgh-based Ronald L Hicks Jr, did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The news was first reported by the New York Times.
      Separately, lawyers for the Trump campaign withdrew a lawsuit in Arizona, conceding that the case would not move enough votes to change the election result in the state. “Since the close of yesterday’s hearing, the tabulation of votes statewide has rendered unnecessary a judicial ruling as to the presidential electors,” Trump lawyer Kory Langhofer told an Arizona state court, in news first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
      Unlike most lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign, which targeted small pools of votes whose exclusion would not change the election result, the Porter Wright suit in Pennsylvania challenged nearly 2.65m votes that were cast by mail, the majority by Democrats.
      It accused the secretary of the commonwealth, Kathy Boockvar, of “arbitrary and illegal actions” and sought an emergency order prohibiting the certification of the Pennsylvania election result.
      With that lawsuit stalled, certification in Pennsylvania – and the formal election of Joe Biden as president – drew a step closer. By law the state’s result must be certified by 23 November.
      The news came as a coalition of US federal and state officials said they had no evidence that votes were compromised or altered in last week’s presidential election, rejecting unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud advanced by Trump and many of his supporters.
      The statement from cybersecurity experts trumpeted the 3 November election as the most secure in American history.

      The Trump campaign has been using lawsuits trying to prevent or delay states in which Trump lost from certifying their election results, an essential step to translating state popular-vote results into a national electoral college result.
      Biden has opened up a lead of 5.3m popular votes and counting, and he is on track to win the electoral college 306-232.
      Dozens of lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign in six states to challenge the election result have gained little traction. The campaign has won minor court victories, such as requiring Pennsylvania to set aside ballots received after election day in case they are later ruled invalid.
      But that pool of ballots and others targeted in Trump lawsuits is not large enough to overcome Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania, where he is up almost 60,000 votes and counting, and in other states.
      Porter Wright is representing the Trump campaign and the Republican party in other Pennsylvania lawsuits, including one seeking to throw out mail-in ballots for which missing voter identification information was not provided by 9 November. The disposition of that lawsuit, which Hicks was also leading, is unclear.
      Porter Wright and a second large law firm, the Ohio-based Jones Day, representing Republicans in 2020 election lawsuits have come under pressure for acting as perceived accomplices in Trump’s effort to cancel the election result.
      The legal news site law.com called it a “public relations nightmare” for the firms. At least one lawyer at Porter Wright resigned over the firm’s decision to carry Trump’s lawsuits forward, the NYT reported.
      The Lincoln Project anti-Trump Republican group has attacked the firms on Twitter, asking, “do you believe your law firms should be attempting to overturn the will of the American people?” The group was suspended from Twitter for publishing the names and office contact information of the lawyers.
      While legal actions by the Trump campaign are proceeding in multiple states, more than a dozen cases have been thrown out of court, and there is not a single case in which substantial evidence of election fraud has emerged.
      Instead, Trump lawyers have had to admit to judges that they have no evidence of fraud – in sharp contrast with the message the president is spreading on Twitter.
      In a case in Maricopa county, Arizona, accusing poll workers of misconduct – the case that was withdrawn on Friday afternoon – Trump lawyer Langhofer told a judge that the plaintiffs were “not alleging fraud” or “that anyone is stealing the election” but raising concerns about “good faith errors”.
      In a case in Montgomery county, Pennsylvania, the lawyer Jonathan Goldstein, who has his own law firm, was attempting to have 592 mail-in ballots thrown out because of “irregularities” with the ballots’ outer envelopes.
      A judge pressed Goldstein on whether he was alleging voter fraud.
      “I am asking you a specific question, and I am looking for a specific answer,” the judge said. “Are you claiming that there is any fraud in connection with these 592 disputed ballots?”
      “To my knowledge at present, no,” Goldstein said.
      “Are you claiming that there is any undue or improper influence upon the elector with respect to these 592 ballots?” asked the judge.
      Goldstein replied: “To my knowledge at present, no.” More

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      Officials condemn Trump's false claims and say election 'most secure in US history'

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      The presidential election was the “most secure in American history” with no evidence that votes were compromised or altered, a coalition of federal and state officials has said, offering the clearest repudiation yet of Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud.The statement backed repeated assurances by experts and state officials that, despite the coronavirus pandemic and record numbers of voters, the election went smoothly without irregularities.Yet almost a week after Democrat Joe Biden was declared the winner, Trump continues to refuse to accept defeat and to hamper an orderly transition of power. In a newspaper interview on Friday, he insisted without evidence that the election was stolen from him and that his quixotic legal challenges will succeed.The latest blow to his case from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which led federal election protection efforts. “While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too,” it said.“When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.”The statement was tweeted by Chris Krebs, the agency’s director, who just hours earlier had been the subject of a media report that said he had told associates he expects to be fired by Trump.Krebs has been vocal on Twitter in repeatedly reassuring Americans that the election was secure and that their votes would be counted. “America, we have confidence in the security of your vote, you should, too,” he wrote.The officials who signed the statement said they had no evidence that any voting system had deleted or lost votes, had changed votes, or was in any way compromised.They said all the states with close results have paper records, which allows for the recounting of each ballot, if necessary, and for “the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors”.“The election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalising the result,” the statement added.The message delivers a fresh blow to the credibility of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud and widespread problems that he insists could yet tip the election in his favour.His campaign have seized on issues that are typical in every election: problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postmarks on mail-in ballots, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots miscast or lost. With Biden leading Trump by wide margins in battleground states, none of these would have any impact on the outcome.Trump’s campaign has also launched legal challenges complaining that their poll watchers were unable to scrutinise the voting process. Many of those challenges have been thrown out by judges, some within hours of being filed. Again, none of the complaints showed any evidence that the outcome of the election was affected.In a further sign that Trump’s “legal strategy” is unravelling, the law firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur withdrew from a case in Pennsylvania that challenged nearly 2.65m votes that were cast by mail, the majority by Democrats. It said in a memo: “Plaintiffs and Porter Wright have reached a mutual agreement that plaintiffs will be best served if Porter Wright withdraws,” but did not offer further explanation. More

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      This is no conventional coup. Trump is paving the way for a 'virtual Confederacy' | Jonathan Freedland

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      Not for the first time, Donald Trump’s unhinged behaviour prompts an uncomfortable question: should we be laughing in derision or trembling with fear? Is he playing out his last days as nothing more than a sore loser pathetically kidding himself that he might yet score the winning run, even after the crowd’s gone home and the stadium is empty – or is his insistence that last week’s election was stolen an attempt to cling on to power, to stage a coup against his democratically elected successor?The case for laughter is strong, as Trump’s allegations crumble to dust. On Thursday, a wing of the department of homeland security – part of the government that Trump still heads – declared that last week’s election “was the most secure in American history”, and that there was “no evidence” of any malpractice, still less of the mass-scale fraud that Trump has groundlessly alleged.The result is that Trump’s lawyers have been all but laughed out of court, forced by impatient judges to admit that they don’t have any evidence, let alone proof. His courtiers continue to pretend that the emperor is fully clothed, of course, but even they are winking at the crowd. Surely Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was joking when he promised with a smile: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”The inner circle are happy to let Trump, who has appeared only once in public since election day, remain hunkered down in his White House bunker, “feverishly tweeting, watching television and telephoning allies”, as the Los Angeles Times reports. They carry on telling him what he wants to hear, but they know his cause is doomed. Tellingly, even Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made his excuses for Saturday’s supposed council of war, sending “aides” in his place.All that should prompt derision rather than fear. We can take the lead set by the president-elect himself, relax and let the process play out until Joe Biden is sworn in on 20 January. That’s certainly appealing, and most of the time I manage it. But every now and then, fear intrudes.Why, for example, has Trump fired the civilian leadership of the defence department, including the defence secretary, Mark Esper, filling their posts and others in intelligence with ultra-loyalists? Esper stood up to Trump over the summer, when the president wanted to deploy the military to crush peaceful protests. Does Trump have something similar in mind, a move that would require a yes man to nod it through? Is it possible that Pompeo was not, after all, joking?For now, I can accept that a full, tanks-in-the-streets coup is not on the cards. One Capitol Hill Republican tells me he suspects Trump sacked Esper mainly to “make him feel better”, and “to get even with the people who thwarted him”, rather than because he wants a Pentagon boss who will agree to send in the troops. Equally possible, says my source, is that Trump plans to go out with a bang, and wants pliant people in post. What kind of bang? Some talk of a total withdrawal from Afghanistan. Conversely, there’s chatter about a possible attack on Iran.That would be huge – and Trump likes huge – but it’s not a coup. On this reading, Trump is rejecting the election result less in order to keep power than to instil in his base the sense of grievance that will bind them to him for his next act – whether that be a new media company, Trump TV, to challenge Fox News or another run for the White House in 2024.But if that’s true, it’s hardly grounds for relief. That Trump’s attempt to defy a democratic election is comically inept or cynically motivated doesn’t alter the fact that he’s making it. No less alarming, all but a handful of Republicans have backed him. Fearing both his wrath and the hold he continues to exercise over the Republican electorate – highly relevant, given that two Senate seats are up for grabs in Georgiain January – the party’s most senior figures have acquiesced in Trump’s evidence-free claim that the Democrats rigged the election.That matters. Most directly, it will impair the incoming president as he tries to get to grips with a pandemic that on Thursday saw a record number of new cases in the US – 159,000 in a single day – about which Trump is doing and saying precisely nothing. How can Biden lead if half the country has been primed to believe he is not the rightful president? The Republican rebuttal – that Democrats hardly welcomed Trump in 2016 – trips on one simple fact: Hillary Clinton conceded defeat right away. That is the only way a democratic system can work, with the consent of the loser.The fear is that Trump and his followers will never give way, that he will remain the head of a “Trumpian government in exile”, as the historian Sean Wilentz puts it, antagonistic to the legitimate, elected government, armed with allies in Congress, sustained via social media and nourished by grievance and the romance of a lost cause: a new, virtual Confederacy.The word is not wholly hyperbolic because, inevitably in America, so much of this turns on race. When Trump’s cheerleaders locate the supposed voter fraud in Philadelphia or Detroit, their listeners get the message: it’s that black cities are corrupt and, at root, that black people shouldn’t be allowed to decide who gets to be president of the United States. As Barack Obama writes in his upcoming memoir, these are “dark spirits” that have “long been lurking on the edge of the Republican party – xenophobia … paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks”.So no, this won’t be a coup like we’ve seen in the movies. But nor can we just laugh it off. Trump is often ridiculous, but he’s no joke. More

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      Making America grrr-eat again: Major and Champ, the Bidens' 'first dogs'

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      With Joe Biden’s election, dignity has been restored to the US presidency: after four years marked by perverse priorities and conspicuous inhumanity, a dog will finally be back in the White House.When Biden takes office in January, he and his wife Jill will be accompanied by their two German shepherds: Champ, 12, and Major, 2. They are the first dogs to occupy the Oval Office since the departure of Bo and Sunny, the Obamas’ Portuguese water dogs, in 2016.For Champ, adopted as a puppy after Biden was elected vice-president in 2008 (and named for a story he used to tell on the campaign trail), it will be a homecoming of sorts.For the rest of America, it concludes a period in presidential history that was actively hostile to man’s best friend – “like a dog” is one of Trump’s favourite putdowns – and reflects a return to founding values. More

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      in Elections

      The messy battle within the Democratic party's big, ever-expanding tent | Moira Donegan

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      Before the dust had settled on Joe Biden’s presidential victory, a news cycle had begun, yet again, about how the Democratic party was in disarray. Representative Jim Clyburn, the juggernaut of South Carolina Democratic politics and a frequent emissary for the centrist wing of the party, began telling news reporters that he feared that the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, and in particular the slogan “Defund the Police”, had dampened the Democrat’s chances of strengthening their majority in the House and retaking the US Senate.
      On a tense conference call for the party’s House of Representatives caucus on Thursday, Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia congresswoman who narrowly won re-election on Tuesday, expressed the same concern. Meanwhile, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the standard bearer of the party’s progressive wing, gave an interview to the New York Times urging her party to adopt more modern voter engagement tactics and to view the left as allies, not obstacles. “I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy,” she said. “And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy.”
      Democratic infighting is an old story, one that comes up perennially, sometimes ascribed to generational or regional differences: the younger, more city-dwelling Democrats want universal healthcare and demand racial justice; the older, suburbanite Democrats shush them, worrying they will scare off the white suburban swing voters whom centrists believe that Democrats need for a majority. The conflict is repeated ad nauseam, whether Democrats lose or whether they win.
      But the truth is that the Democratic party is indeed a deeply divided one. The coalition that swept Joe Biden to victory was massive, diverse and profoundly self-contradictory. It contained older Black voters with religious convictions that are not dissimilar to those of the white evangelicals who power the American right, and it contained younger Black voters who believe fiercely in transgender civil rights and the dismantling of the police state. It contained white college-educated women who took offense at Trump’s crass language and it contained young Latino voters who feared for his threats to their citizenship. It is a coalition composed of the vast majority of all the Americans who are not white and a sizable minority of the Americans who are, of people who identify as socialists and people who see socialism as a serious threat to their way of life, people who desperately fear for abortion rights and people who deeply oppose them. The Democratic coalition, in other words, is huge – composed of people with competing, mutually exclusive goals, people who, in the end, probably would not always like each other.
      How did the Democrats wind up here, with such a very big tent, with so many competing demands underneath it? In large part, the answer to how the Democratic party’s coalition became so huge and contradictory lies not with the Democrats, but with Republicans. Throughout the Trump era but also for decades before, stretching back to the Nixon administration, the Republican party has played an aggressive base politics, shaping its policy positions and public rhetoric around white racial grievance. As Americans of color have grown in numbers and the share of the white vote has decreased, Republicans have not adjusted their stance to be more welcoming to non-white voters, but instead have increasingly relied on gerrymandering, voter suppression and anti-democratic institutional advantages to secure their continued power even in the absence of majority support. The Republicans have abandoned the pretense of trying to convince a majority of voters to back their vision for the country, and instead have taken on an electoral strategy that is about power, not persuasion.
      Republicans gerrymander congressional and state legislature districts to ensure Republican majorities in these bodies even when Democrats receive more votes, and they suppress the vote with archaic, burdensome and racially targeted state laws to ensure Republican victories even in races that would be competitive with a complete, free electorate. The result is that Democrats can often achieve only divided government at best even when, like in the 2020 election, they produce a massive majority of the votes. Republicans, meanwhile, can often secure united government even with a minority of votes. Faced with defeat, the anti-democracy Republican party need not even accept the results of an election that does not go in their favor, as we have seen over the past few days as the Trump campaign and Republican-controlled justice department sue in an attempt to have votes for Biden in many swing states declared illegal. Republican power relies heavily on these anti-democracy tactics, so heavily that in many instances the party no longer intends to persuade a majority of voters. They intend, instead, to secure minority rule.
      The result is that the competition between the Republican and Democratic parties has become de facto not a competition between ideologies or policy positions, but a competition between pro-and anti-democracy forces. Though the Republicans sometimes make half-hearted, clumsy and comedically tone-deaf overtures towards men of color in an attempt to secure their votes – Donald Trump increased his share of the Latino male vote significantly in the 2020 election, and attempted to court Black male voters by staging a bizarre photo op with the New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne – their overall strategy has been to remain in power by making it as difficult as possible for people to vote, and by especially targeting the voting rights of Black Americans. The goal is to ensure that the votes which matter most belong to their white minority of supporters.
      With one party committed to suppressing the vote, and only one other party remaining that considers itself accountable to voters, its no wonder that the Democratic party has assembled a coalition of so many disparate and conflicting constituencies. As the only pro-democracy party left in America, the Democrats have had to take as their mandate all the different democratic ambitions of a vast and diverse nation. Voters of different ideological stripes, ages and agendas have begun voting Democratic because the Republican party is repugnant to their principles in some cases, outright hostile to their citizenship in others. In other words, many voters have come under the Democratic tent because there is nowhere else for them to go.
      What does such a large coalition mean for the Democrats? In one sense, it’s an advantage – it means overwhelming popular support. Democratic party surrogates never tire of reminding Americans that their party has won the popular vote in every election except one since 1992. Those popular vote majorities are sizable, too – Joe Biden’s popular vote lead over Donald Trump is set to surpass 5m, even bigger than Hillary Clinton’s 3m popular vote lead in 2016. Anti-democratic provisions in the American constitution mean that more votes do not always translate to more power – Republicans control the Senate, for instance, even though their Democratic colleagues in that body represent millions more constituents. But in the long term, it means that Democrats have popular opinion, and sheer numbers, on their side.
      But the heft of the Democratic coalition also means that the party is swollen and overburdened, attempting to be all things to all its voters, attempting to please everyone at once. There is no coherent Democratic agenda, to speak of. The Biden campaign made little effort to draw attention to its policy proposals during the election season, relying instead on vague, broadly appealing rhetoric about the nation’s soul. Though the party has leaned heavily on the issue of healthcare, perhaps the one policy area that affects every single voter, the party’s healthcare agenda has been inconsistent across congressional districts, with Democrats calling for a single-payer system in blue areas and for a strengthened or merely maintained Affordable Care Act in purple ones. The issue is perhaps emblematic of the party’s problem in representing too many different groups: they can’t have one message, because there’s nothing that so many different people can all agree on.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      'Corrosive to democracy': what do Trump's baseless claims really mean?

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      No one ever really expected Donald Trump to concede the election.
      After all, he told the world he wouldn’t. “The Democrats are trying to rig this election because that’s the only way they’re going to win,” he said back on 13 September. “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election if I win,” he said in 2016.
      But even after he won in 2016, he continued to spread lies about voter fraud, falsely saying that between 3 and 5 million people voted illegally. He also falsely claimed he only lost the state of New Hampshire because people were illegally bussed in from out of state. He created a panel to look into these kinds of issues, stacked with some of the country’s most prominent voter fraud conspiracy theorists. The commission, beset by infighting, dissolved without producing evidence of anything.
      Now, after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden, the president is returning to voter fraud to explain his loss. With flimsy evidence, his campaign has touted a slew of baseless lawsuits across the country. These efforts are unlikely to change the outcome of the election. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” a senior Republican official anonymously told the Washington Post.
      But Trump’s claims and the lawsuits are not, and have never really been about, changing vote totals. By fanning the spectre of voter fraud, Republicans are laying the foundation for questioning the legitimacy of a Biden presidency and any election in which an opposing candidate wins. They are sowing doubt not just about the 2020 election, but whether America’s voting system – the foundation of American democracy – is sound.
      Beyond this election, these efforts to sow doubt about election results will also augment a long-term Republican effort to justify making it harder to vote for swaths of the electorate. In a democracy, where governing power is rooted in the consent of the governed, this is deeply dangerous.
      Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, suggested this week that Democrats shouldn’t lecture Republicans about the need to concede because Democrats had challenged the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency since 2016. But the morning after the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton conceded the race, acknowledging she lost and saying she hoped Trump would be a successful president.
      “Part of democracy is accepting the legitimacy of the election. We know that because we put so much stock in concession speeches. Not that concessions have any legal impact, it’s because they signal the peaceful transfer of power,” said Franita Tolson, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “It signals to the rest of the world that you can lose an election here and no one loses their head.”
      “Seventy million people voted for him. He’s telling 70 million people he was cheated out of the presidency. That can’t help but be corrosive to democracy,” she added.
      There’s already some evidence Trump’s effort is working.Eighty per cent of Americans believe Biden won the election, but about six in 10 Republicans believe so, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. Seventy per cent of Republicans also said in a survey this week they didn’t believe the election was “free and fair”, a stark jump from the 35% who said the same before the election.
      On Saturday, even after every major media outlet called the election for Biden, Trump supporters said they didn’t know if they could trust the results, even from Fox News, a network often criticized for cozying up to the president and amplifying his misleading messages.
      “I trust our locality. But when I heard what’s going on in Detroit, and the bigger cities – I heard they were even burning ballots. I don’t know if it’s true or not,” said Eva Niemela, who traveled to the Michigan state capitol to attend one of several “Stop the Steal” rallies happening across the country by Trump supporters. (Ballots were not burned in Detroit.) More

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      in US Politics

      'People got involved': how Los Angeles progressives swept the election

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      Voters in Los Angeles have approved new limits to police power, elected a prosecutor who promised to reopen police shooting cases and mandated that 10% of the local budget be spent on prevention programs rather than incarceration.
      The slate of progressive victories in Los Angeles, which counts 10m residents and is home to the largest jail system in the United States, show the potential impact of local wins for criminal justice reform, as well as the growing electoral influence of Black Lives Matter.
      “So many people got involved and wanted to vote,” said Leah Garcia, an East Los Angeles resident whose 18-year-old son Paul Rea was shot to death by a Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy in 2019. “A lot of the families I talk to – we’re tired of living in fear.”
      Los Angeles elected a new district attorney, George Gascón, who has pledged not to keep people in prison when they are up for parole, not transfer teens to adult court, not pursue the death penalty and won’t use “gang enhancements”, which have long been used in racially discriminatory ways.
      Though Gascón faced protests in his former job as San Francisco district attorney for refusing to prosecute officers in several high-profile police killing cases, he vowed during the campaign in LA to reopen some police shooting cases, and has said that incarcerating people for low-level offenses during the coronavirus pandemic is “unconscionable”.
      Law enforcement unions had contributed millions of dollars in political spending to backing Gascón’s opponent, the incumbent prosecutor Jackie Lacey.
      For the past three years, Lacey had refused to meet with Black Lives Matter activists protesting against what they say are more than 600 police killings and in-custody deaths of prisoners since she took office in 2013 and Lacey’s refusal to prosecute the officers responsible. More

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      'It's not over yet, right?' Trump voters back president's refusal to concede

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      The red and blue political bunting and yard signs planted on suburban lawns are mostly gone and with them the outward signs of America’s fiercely oppositional election. But in other respects, the tensions of the 2020 contest remain as acute as they were on polling day for many Trump supporters.
      “Not many care about people as much as Trump,” said tow-truck driver Vinny Nolan as he took a rest at a highway truck stop near Hackensack, New Jersey. “The [Russia] collusion bullshit was a set-up. He gave everyone money while we iron this virus situation then they announce a vaccine two days after the election. Why didn’t they do that a week ago? He would have won.”
      To more than half the country’s voters the election is resolved with Democrat Joe Biden as the winner but to a marginally smaller share of Americans it remains an ongoing contest – no matter all the evidence against that. With Donald Trump as yet unwilling to recognize defeat, and papering swing-states with baseless legal petitions challenging vote counts, many of his supporters still say they remain behind the president.

      A pre-natal office administrator in suburban Rockland county, New York, who preferred to give only her first name – Emily – citing pervasive fears of being shunned for her support, conceded that Trump had failed to adequately address “the George Floyd thing”, as she called the killing of a Black American by a white Minneapolis police officer that triggered a summer of unrest and anti-racism protests.
      But Emily reasoned that Trump was not fundamentally a politician, a characteristic that lies at the heart of his enduring popularity for many of the 71 million Americans who voted for him on 3 November. And like many, protesters’ calls to defund the police had worried her. “They talk about the community policing. But what community? No one wants to get involved.”
      Ten days after voting closed, Republican voters are at a crossroads over whether to support Trump’s ongoing and unprecedented challenge to the vote counts or to accept defeat by Biden. Whichever path supporters choose to follow, for many Trump’s popularity is undiminished, perhaps even enhanced, by the manner of his defeat at the hands of what they regard as a political establishment.
      Leo Basa, a veteran from Aerial Lake, Pennsylvania, said he didn’t see evidence of a stolen election but politicians “had made a mockery of the system”.
      “The tables have turned. It is Republicans’ turn to say, ‘No, you didn’t win’, just like the Democrats did in 2016. It’s really a shame. They’re acting like children with the bickering. The media has a lot to do with it. State the facts and just the facts. I’ll make my own opinions.”
      On Wednesday, the widely publicized #StopTheSteal campaign was augmented with #stopthetires2020, a protest by truck drivers billing themselves as a “bonded group of brothers and sisters to show America who runs the country”.
      With stoppages on Wednesday and later this month, many showed their support on social media, and called on drivers to interrupt deliveries to coastal Democrat-controlled states from the industrial and food-producing central red states “to keep the movement going”.
      But on arterial highways leading into the disputed swing-state of Pennsylvania, many truckers said that they had either not heard of the protest, or had no wish to forfeit their daily haulage fees. More