US elections 2020

Extreme Republican partisans have been installed in important roles in the Pentagon, following the summary dismissal of the defense secretary, Mark Esper, at a time Donald Trump is refusing to accept his election defeat.
Democrats immediately demanded explanations for the eleventh-hour personnel changes and warned that the US was entering dangerous “uncharted territory” with the reshuffling of key national security roles during a presidential transition.
However defence experts argued there was little the new Trump appointees could do to use their positions to the president’s advantage, given the firm refusal of the uniformed armed services to get involved in domestic politics.
Anthony Tata – a retired army brigadier general, novelist and Fox News commentator who called Barack Obama a “terrorist leader” – has taken control of the Pentagon’s policy department, following the resignation of the acting undersecretary of defence for policy, James Anderson.
Tata had been unable to win Senate confirmation after old tweets surfaced in which he expressed virulent Islamophobic views.
Meanwhile, Kash Patel – a former Republican congressional aide who played a lead role in a campaign to discredit the investigation into Russian election meddling – has been made chief of staff to the new defence secretary, Chris Miller.
According to Axios, another new Miller adviser is Douglas Macgregor, a retired army colonel who was nominated over the summer, but not confirmed, as ambassador to Germany. Macgregor has referred to immigrants to Europe as “Muslim invaders”, advocated shooting illegal immigrants on the US border, and promoted a range of white nationalists conspiracy theories. He advocated a fast withdrawal from Afghanistan and has said the US should not “rush hundreds of thousands of troops to the Polish border to deal with the Russians”.
The undersecretary of defence for intelligence, Vice Admiral Joseph Kernan, a retired navy Seal, was also reported to have resigned on Tuesday, and was replaced by Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a former aide to Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who pleaded guilty to perjury.
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nation’s stockpile of nuclear warheads, was forced to quit on Friday.
The fate of CIA director, Gina Haspel, was also in question. In a show of support, Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell invited Haspel to his office on Tuesday and Republican Senator John Cornyn tweeted: “Intelligence should not be partisan”. But he was attacked on Twitter by the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, who asked if he or other Republicans backing Haspel had “actually discussed this with anyone in the Admin[istration] who actually works with her … or are you just taking a trained liar’s word for it on everything?”
The reasons for the post-election personnel changes 10 weeks before the end of Donald Trump’s tenure were unclear, but they came at a time when the president is refusing to accept election defeat.
The former defence secretary, Mark Esper, fired by tweet on Monday, had refused to allow active duty troops to be deployed on US streets during the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer. More

Joe Biden won the presidential election, a fact that Donald Trump and other Republicans refuse to acknowledge.
There are worries the president and other Republicans will make every effort to stay in power. “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, said on Tuesday. William Barr, the attorney general, has also authorized federal prosecutors to begin to investigate election irregularities, a move that prompted the head of the justice department’s election crimes unit to step down from his position and move to another role.
Despite all of Trump’s machinations, it is extremely unlikely he can find a way to stay in power or stage a coup. Here’s an explanation of why:
Donald Trump refuses to accept that Joe Biden won the presidential election. Is there a constitutional path for him to stage a coup and stay in office for another term?
Not really. The electoral college meets on 14 December to cast its vote for president and nearly every state uses the statewide popular vote to allocate its electors. Biden is projected to win far more than the 270 electoral votes he needs to become president. His victory doesn’t hinge on one state and he has likely insurmountable leads in Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona.
There is a long-shot legal theory, floated by Republicans before the election, that Republican-friendly legislatures in places such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania could ignore the popular vote in their states and appoint their own electors. Federal law allows legislatures to do this if states have “failed to make a choice” by the day the electoral college meets. But there is no evidence of systemic fraud of wrongdoing in any state and Biden’s commanding margins in these places make it clear that the states have in fact made a choice.
“If the country continues to follow the rule of law, I see no plausible constitutional path forward for Trump to remain as president barring new evidence of some massive failure of the election system in multiple states,” Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in elections, wrote in an email. “It would be a naked, antidemocratic power grab to try to use state legislatures to get around the voters’ choice and I don’t expect it to happen.”
For lawmakers in a single state to choose to override the clear will of its voters this way would be extraordinary and probably cause extreme outcry. For Trump to win the electoral college, several states would have to take this extraordinary step, a move that would cause extreme backlash and a real crisis of democracy throughout the country.
“There’s a strange fascination with various imagined dark scenarios, perhaps involving renegade state legislatures, but this is more dystopian fiction than anything likely to happen,” said Richard Pildes, a law professor at New York University. “The irony, or tragedy, is that we managed to conduct an extremely smooth election, with record turnout, under exceptionally difficult circumstances – and yet, a significant portion of the president’s supporters are now convinced that the process was flawed.”
Is there any indication Republicans in these important states are going to go along with this?
Shortly after election day, Jake Corman, the top Republican in the Pennsylvania state senate, indicated his party would “follow the law” in Pennsylvania, which requires awarding electors to the winner of the popular vote. In an October op-ed, Corman said the state legislature “does not have and will not have a hand in choosing the state’s presidential electors or in deciding the outcome of the presidential election”.
But on Tuesday, Republicans in the Pennsylvania legislature said they wanted to investigate allegations of voter fraud. There’s no evidence of widespread malfeasance in the state, but the move is alarming because it could be the beginning of an effort to undermine the popular vote results in the state. The Republican-led legislature in Michigan is also investigating the election, as are Republicans in Wisconsin. There’s no evidence of widespread wrongdoing in either place.
Is this related in any way to the lawsuits Trump is filing?
Trump’s campaign has filed a slew of legally dubious suits since election day. The purpose of these suits appears not to be to actually overturn the election results, but to try and create uncertainty and draw out the counting process.
Each state has its own deadlines for certifying election results that are then used to allocate its electoral college votes. In at least two states, Pennsylvania and Michigan, Trump’s campaign is seeking to block officials from certifying results.
That certification timeline is important because federal law says that as long as election results are finalized by 8 December this year, the result is “conclusive”. That provides a safeguard against Congress, which is responsible for counting the electoral college votes, from second-guessing election results. By dragging out the process, the Trump campaign may be seeking to blow past that deadline and create more wiggle room to second-guess the results.
Even if that is the Trump campaign’s hope, courts are unlikely to step in, Pildes said.
“States are going to start certifying their vote totals beginning in less than 10 days, and there is no basis in the claims made thus far for the courts to stop that process,” he said.

Say the worst-case scenario comes to fruition and Republican-led legislatures override the will of the people in several states. Is there any safeguard to stop Trump?
Yes. Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Nevada all have Democratic governors who would refuse to approve a set of Trump electors with the popular vote clearly showing Biden winning their state. Instead, they would submit the electors Biden is entitled to as the winner of the popular vote.
It would then fall to Congress, which is charged with counting the votes from the electoral college, to decide what to do. The law that outlines the process for how Congress should handle a dispute in electors from a state is extremely confusing, but experts believe the slate backed by a state’s governor is the legally sound one. There is a rival theory that the president of the Senate, Mike Pence, could have control over the process. A dispute over electors between the US House and Senate is a worst-case scenario and the US supreme court would probably be asked to step in.
Regardless of however long a dispute is, the constitution does set one final deadline. Even if counting is ongoing, the president and vice-president’s terms both end at noon on 20 January. At that point if there isn’t a final result in the race, the speaker of the House – likely probably Nancy Pelosi – would become the acting president. More

We all know a bad loser when we see one and we all know what a tantrum looks like. So there has been something wearily familiar about Trump the grump’s carry-on in the White House. If you have watched a football match or dealt with kids, or indeed adults, you’ll have come across his type before.Except I am not sure we have. When you think about it, his kind of behaviour is actually rather rare. Then again, normalising the abnormal and hitherto unacceptable would appear to be the president’s special gift.I have seen many a tantrum in my time; I’m afraid I have had a few myself. But this is of a different order. It’s one thing to spit the dummy, throw the toys out and make a noise; it’s quite another to keep up the performance without calming down, sulking for a bit and then muttering a few apologies before moving on. I must admit I have upended a Monopoly board and, in the field of sporting endeavour, I once literally took my bat home. Not that it mattered; the others had bats of their own so they carried on without me. What a loser.Sportspeople, especially footballers, are generally thought to be poor role models. Setting aside how they spend their private lives, on the pitch they contest every refereeing decision, feign injuries, cause injuries and generally cheat. But they know how to accept defeat. A match can be as hotly contested and ill-tempered as you like, yet, once the final whistle is blown, you rarely see anything but handshakes, hugs and the odd smile. When I was a kid watching West Brom play fierce local derbies against Aston Villa and Wolves on boggy 70s pitches, I remember being gobsmacked in grudging admiration at the sight of all the bonhomie as they trudged off at the end. I assumed this is what it meant to be an adult. For my part, I fantasised about harming every member of the opposition. Usually these homicidal urges passed within hours or sometimes days. I’ve grown up now and get these feelings only occasionally.We have all seen football managers moaning about this decision or that, and it’s never a good look. But they accept defeat, albeit grudgingly and with bad grace. Boxers knock seven bells out of each other in the ring after insulting each other royally in the buildup to a fight. But when the contest’s over, awash in blood, snot, sweat and tears, they hug like they mean it. The result is accepted. To do otherwise, trumping up charges of foul play, demeans nobody more than it demeans the loser.“Show me a good loser,” said Vince Lombardi, “and I’ll show you a loser.” The renowned American football coach may have had a point but, in the wrong hands, read the wrong way, these kinds of words may be problematic. How many times have we heard it said in great admiration of anyone successful, especially athletes, that a key to their success is that they “never know when they’re beaten”? In a similar spirit, they will often be lauded for doing “whatever it takes” to win and even “refusing to accept defeat”. It’s not the biggest jump in a kid’s mind from hearing all that to getting echoes of it in the behaviour of that funny man in the White House.The other night, Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, tweeted: “I can’t really understand why a full-scale coup attempt in the world’s most powerful nation is being widely treated like an amusing temper tantrum.” Good point, that: why aren’t we taking it more seriously? Perhaps it is partly because we can’t bear to show our kids we’re concerned; if we take him seriously then perhaps they will, too. I would much rather our young were laughing at him than worrying about him or, worse still, emulating him in some way. To laugh at him feels more useful, in that it’s crueller; that stuff works in the playground. Whether it stops this comical tantrum turning into something darker is another matter.• Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist More