US elections 2020

Subterms

    More stories

    • 188 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Official plane used by Trump will fly to Scotland just before Biden inauguration – report

      by

      The murk surrounding Donald Trump’s likely whereabouts on his last day as president has thickened considerably with news that an official plane he has used in the past is due to fly to Scotland the day before Joe Biden’s inauguration.Trump himself is sticking to his refusal to accept his decisive electoral defeat. He has been caught cajoling election officials to “find” thousands of extra votes and is encouraging his supporters to gather for a “wild” day of protest on Wednesday when Congress is due to ratify the result.The White House has refused to say what he will do when Biden is inaugurated on 20 January, raising the question of whether Trump will even leave the building voluntarily.Most Trump-watchers expect him to dodge any event that would involve acknowledging his election loss. They predict he will stage a spectacular diversion to detract from Biden’s first day on the job.Many versions of that scenario have the outgoing president flying to his private club in Florida, Mar-a-Lago. But Scotland’s Sunday Post has reported that Prestwick airport, near Trump’s Turnberry golf course resort, has been told to expect a US military Boeing 757 that has occasionally been used by Trump, on 19 January.The report said that speculation over a possible inauguration day drama has been fuelled by sightings of US military surveillance aircraft circling Turnberry for a week in November, doing possible advance work.“It is usually a sign Trump is going to be somewhere for an extended period,” the Post quoted an unnamed source as saying.The 757 is a smaller, narrower plane than the Boeing 747-200Bs that are normally designated Air Force One. It is more often used by the vice-president and first lady, Melania Trump, than the president.There was no immediate response to requests for comment from the White House or Prestwick airport. Leaving the country before formally leaving office would be unprecedented for a US president.Flying to Scotland before 20 January would be a way to get US taxpayers to pay for the first leg of a post-presidential holiday. It is also possible the flight was booked as a contingency by a candidate surprised by defeat and unsure what to do.Multiple reports suggest he will face severe difficulties in his heavily indebted business empire.New accounts published on Monday showed Trump’s array of golf properties in Scotland lost £3.4m in 2019, though Trump Turnberry showed a modest profit.Meanwhile his neighbours at Mar-a-Lago have launched a legal effort to stop him moving there full-time, saying he is precluded by an agreement he signed in the early 1990s converting the estate from a private residence to a club.Wherever Trump goes on 20 January, it is unlikely the exit will be quiet or particularly dignified. But it will be unlike any presidential departure the country has ever witnessed. More

    • 213 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump is a buffoon – but the next aspiring autocrat won't be so incompetent | Richard Wolffe

      by

      Eleven Christmases ago, a student boarded a Northwest Airlines plane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit with a singular mission.As the plane crossed the US border, he spent 20 minutes in the bathroom and then returned to his seat. There he tried to detonate his underwear, but only succeeded in burning his leg. The likely reason Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to kill almost 300 people was because he was sweating too much.The US has often been lucky that its enemies are too incompetent to detonate their own devices. But rather than relying on good fortune, successive presidents have spent trillions of dollars building a post-9/11 military order that is supposed to protect our freedoms.After listening to the outgoing president’s call with Georgia officials, it’s painfully clear that Donald Trump is the underwear bomber of our democracy. We are blessed to have such incompetent enemies, but the next assailant will not sweat quite so much, or so obviously. We cannot wait until someone comes along who knows how to light the fuse.How incompetent is the soon-to-be-ex-president? Trump wields the awesome power of the presidency with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer trying to crack a safe.“So what are we going to do here, folks,” he asked Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. “I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already. Or we can keep it going, but that’s not fair to the voters of Georgia because they’re going to see what happened, and they’re going to see what happened.”By “keeping it going” Trump meant he would wield his delusional sledgehammer on stage at his Georgia rally on Monday night, the day before the state’s crucial run-off elections that will determine which party controls the US Senate for the next two years.It’s not that Trump doesn’t try. Yoda says there is no try, but Trump really does try. He tries to sound precise with all the numbers of votes he dreams up. He tries to threaten the state election officials with unspecified crimes and political punishment.“Well, under law, you’re not allowed to give faulty election results, okay? You’re not allowed to do that. And that’s what you done. This is a faulty election result,” Trump warns his fellow Republican.“You should meet tomorrow because you have a big election coming up, and because of what you’ve done to the president – you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam – and because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote. And a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative because they hate what you did to the president. Okay? They hate it. And they’re going to vote. And you would be respected. Really respected, if this thing could be straightened out before the election.”One of the many challenges of this era is the distortion field that surrounds Donald Trump. Because he only cares for himself, and because he represents such a grotesque distortion of leadership, we focus on the individual. We try to understand his sociopathy and we talk about Trumpism, assuming it will all dissipate after inaugural day.But at this point, our concern should not focus on whether Trump and his allies can still derail Joe Biden’s inauguration: they can’t. Instead we should be deeply concerned about whether this cult can derail our democracy.Long after Trump shuffles down the ramp to his post-presidency, there will be another: a Josh Hawley or a Ted Cruz or a Tom Cotton. We won’t call their autocratic politics Trumpism, but they will be Trump-like.The roots of this ideology are deep and the network is extensive. At the end of this post-9/11 era, we are waking up to an insidious and far-reaching series of threats to our democracy and way of life. Some of its agents are directed by leaders like Trump; others are self-starting, independent actors. Some are inspired and organized internationally, but many are now home-grown.The racist, undemocratic wing of American politics moved briefly to the kooky fringes after the civil rights movement. But it burst back onto the main stage in the Obama years with the Tea party and its congressional outgrowth, the ironically-named Freedom Caucus. At the heart of the caucus were Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows – past and present chiefs of staff to one Donald Trump.It was Meadows who was polishing the turd as he teed up Trump’s call to Georgia’s state officials on Saturday.“What I’m hopeful for is there some way that we can, we can find some kind of agreement to look at this a little bit more fully,” Meadows ventured. “Mr Secretary, I was hopeful that, you know, in the spirit of cooperation and compromise, is there something that we can at least have a discussion to look at some of these allegations to find a path forward that’s less litigious?”By less litigious, Meadows meant less engaged with those pesky judges who tossed out all those Trump campaign lawsuits. When Georgia’s secretary of state said the courts decide these issues, Trump himself sounded befuddled.“Why do you say that, though? I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, sure, we can play this game with the courts, but why do you say that?The funny thing about this Freedom Caucus ideology is that it doesn’t respect the freedom of the judicial branch.Trump was planning to award the presidential medal of freedom – the highest civilian honor – to another Freedom Caucus chair, Jim Jordan. And he was traveling to Georgia on Monday with yet another member, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who just happens to support the QAnon conspiracy.A dozen senators are now openly defying their leader, Mitch McConnell, by promising to challenge the votes of the electoral college this week. They will fail to stop Biden’s presidency, but they are succeeding in splitting their own party between Trumpist autocrats and conservative Republicans.McConnell should have seen the splinter-group threat of the Tea party from the outset but chose instead to keep them inside his tent. Now he faces the impossible task of pleasing people who are neither conservative nor supporters of the republic.It is easy to brush this kind of nonsense aside as some temporary fever that will surely break some day. Biden often sounds like he believes he can help administer some centrist medicine with a spoonful of personal charm.But autocratic politicians nowadays don’t dress in black or brown, and have learned how to sound occasionally normal. Hungary and Poland are still members of the EU. Turkey still has newspapers, just not nearly so many independent ones. Russia still has elections, but its opposition leaders tend to be either jailed or poisoned.The only reason American democracy survived 2020 is because of historic voter turnout, a handful of principled Republican election officials, and an independent judiciary. None of those factors are guaranteed to survive, and without one of them, the whole system would collapse.We don’t know precisely why so many former defense secretaries warned Trump and his supporters against involving the military in their last-gasp effort to destroy democracy and the 2020 election results. But we do know the general fear, and the name of the organizer: one Dick Cheney.It may seem weird that the man who led so many abuses of power in the post-9/11 era should seek to warn us about the abuses of power in the post-Trump era.But the underwear bomber was no less real for all of Cheney’s promotion of war and torture. And the threat to our democracy is no less real for all of Trump’s buffoonish attempts at autocracy. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Top US business leaders call on Congress to certify election results

      by

      [embedded content]
      Some of America’s top business leaders called on Congress to certify the electoral results for the president-elect, Joe Biden, in a letter Monday, arguing that “attempts to thwart or delay this process run counter to the essential tenets of our democracy”.
      The letter, signed by executives at American Express, Goldman Sachs, JetBlue, Microsoft, Pfizer and others, marks the US business community’s most public effort to date to push back against Donald Trump’s continuing attempts to overturn the election result.
      Organized by the business advocacy group Partnership for New York City, the letter states: “The incoming Biden administration faces the urgent tasks of defeating Covid-19 and restoring the livelihoods of millions of Americans who have lost jobs and businesses during the pandemic.
      “Our duly elected leaders deserve the respect and bipartisan support of all Americans at a moment when we are dealing with the worst health and economic crises in modern history. There should be no further delay in the orderly transfer of power.”
      Many leaders in the business community initially embraced the Trump administration and Trump established a high powered jobs panel to revitalize the US economy. But many of those leaders quit after his apparent support for white supremacists after a fatal rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
      Among the signatories of Monday’s letter is Jonathan Gray, the chief operating officer of Blackstone, the private equity group run by Stephen Schwarzman, one of Trump’s biggest backers. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      What Trump's call means for Georgia Senate races: Politics Weekly Extra

      by

      In a bonus episode ahead of one of the most influential moments for Joe Biden’s presidency before he’s even taken office, Jonathan Freedland and David Smith discuss a call made by the outgoing president to a state legislator in Georgia that could spell more trouble for Donald Trump.

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Donald Trump has been recorded pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn US president-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state, and it makes very interesting if not troubling listening. Polls will close in two senate seat runoff elections in Georgia on Tuesday. Jonathan and David try and figure out the impact such an explosive tape like this will have on the Republicans’ chances of victory. As we know, controversial, taped discussions involving Donald Trump don’t always make a difference. Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Democrats ask FBI to investigate Trump's Georgia phone call

      by

      Two Democrats have asked the FBI to open a criminal investigation into Donald Trump over a phone call in which he pressured Georgia state officials to overturn the presidential election in his favour.
      The US president berated and begged Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s top election official, to “find” enough votes to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in the state, according to an audio recording made public on Sunday.
      The revelation prompted fierce debate over whether the call violated federal statutes that prohibit interference in elections. Ted Lieu of California and Kathleen Rice of New York, in the House of Representatives, demanded a case be opened.
      “As members of Congress and former prosecutors, we believe Donald Trump engaged in solicitation of, or conspiracy to commit, a number of election crimes,” they wrote to FBI director Christopher Wray. “We ask you to open an immediate criminal investigation into the president.”
      Under US law, it is a crime to “knowingly and willfully” deprive voters of a free or fair election. Eric Holder, a former attorney general, tweeted: “As you listen to the tape consider this federal criminal statute.”
      During the hour-long call on Saturday, Trump asserted disproven claims of fraud and raised the vague prospect of a “criminal offence” if the Georgia secretary of state and other officials did not change the certified vote count.
      “All I want to do is this,” the president said. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
      Raffensperger, a Republican, pointed out that Georgia counted its votes three times before certifying Biden’s win by 11,779 votes. “President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions,” he said. “We don’t agree that you have won.”
      Trump insisted: “I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There’s no way I lost Georgia.” He pushed conspiracy theories circulating in rightwing media, including that hundreds of thousands of ballots mysteriously appeared in Fulton county, which includes Atlanta. Officials have said there is no evidence of this.

      Interviewed on ABC, Raffensperger said: “It was pretty obvious pretty early on that we’d debunked every one of those theories early on but President Trump continues to believe them.”
      The White House had reportedly made 18 attempts to call Raffensperger during the past two months before he relented. Raffensperger said he did so against his better judgment.
      “He did most of the talking, we did most of the listening,” he said. “But I do want to make my points that the data that he has is just plain wrong. He had hundreds and hundreds of people he said that were dead that voted. We found two. That’s an example of just his bad data.”
      Asked if he considered Trump’s request to be lawful, the secretary of state replied: “I’m not a lawyer. All I know is that we’re gonna follow the law, follow the process. Truth matters, and we’ve been fighting these rumours for the last two months.”
      Trump may have violated Georgia state laws by soliciting election fraud. Raffensperger said: “I understand that the Fulton county district attorney wants to look at it. Maybe that’s the appropriate venue for it to go.”
      Fani Willis, the Fulton DA, said on Monday she found Trump’s call “disturbing” and if referred the case would “enforce the law without fear or favour”.
      State law is not subject to the presidential pardon power, which Trump has recently used for allies and which some observers think he may try to apply to himself.
      As with so many past outrages, Republicans did not condemn. Kevin McCarthy, the party’s leader in the House, told Fox News: “The president’s always been concerned about the integrity of the election, and the president believes that there are things that happened in Georgia that he wants to see accountability for.”
      The incident echoed a 2019 call in which Trump tried to strong-arm the president of Ukraine to investigate Biden by withholding military support. That led to impeachment by the House and acquittal by the Senate but a repeat seems unlikely just two weeks before Trump leaves office.
      Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No 2 Democrat in the Senate, said Trump’s conduct “merits nothing less than a criminal investigation”.
      Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, told MSNBC: “It is unprecedented. It is the most consequential attack on American democracy in the history of our country … This is what mafia does … This is beyond outrageous. This is not only impeachable, it is certainly a criminal offence.”
      The revelations fuelled anxiety that Trump will stop at nothing to cling to power. All 10 living former secretaries of defense published a joint article in the Washington Post warning that the military should not be used to change the outcome of the election.

      The tape also threatened to upend runoff elections in Georgia that will determine control of the Senate. Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue have backed Trump. Party infighting could lead some voters to stay home in protest.
      Georgia would not be enough to tilt the election to Trump. Biden won the electoral college 306-232 and the popular vote by more than 7 million. A dozen senators and more than 100 Republicans in the House plan to object when Congress meets to certify the results on Wednesday.
      Trump continued to rail against members unwilling to join the effort, tweeting: “The ‘Surrender Caucus’ within the Republican party will go down in infamy as weak and ineffective ‘guardians’ of our nation, who were willing to accept the certification of fraudulent presidential numbers!”
      For two months Trump has been claiming his loss to Biden was the result of fraud. Numerous reviews have rejected those claims and dozens of lawsuits have failed.
      Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Trump, tweeted: “Georgia voters, along with a clear majority of Americans, chose Joe Biden to be their president. Trump can’t change that, no matter how many oaths he breaks.” More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Revealed: David Perdue bought bank stocks after meeting financial officials

      by

      David Perdue, the Georgia Republican facing a Senate runoff election on Tuesday, has twice bought a significant number of shares in a US bank shortly after meeting with financial policy makers, raising more questions about his prolific stock trading while in office.In one case, in May 2015, Perdue bought between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of shares in Regions Financial Corporation two days after a 10-minute phone call with then treasury secretary Jack Lew.Perdue bought additional shares in the bank two years later, on 18 May 2017, two days after a half-hour meeting with then Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen.It is not clear in either case if Perdue discussed relevant financial regulation or other market-sensitive issues with Lew or Yellen or whether the discussions influenced his decision to buy the stock.At the time of the call with Lew, members of the Senate banking committee, on which Perdue sits, were engaged in close talks over a potential trade deal.But the purchase of more Regions stock in the wake of Perdue’s meeting with Yellen – who will be nominated to serve as treasury secretary by Joe Biden once the president-elect takes office – is possibly significant, because it came about two months before Yellen publicly discussed her support for raising the $50bn asset threshold for systemically important institutions, a change that meant Regions bank could see an easing of important financial regulations.As Yellen’s views on the topic publicly evolved in her role as chair of the Fed, so did Perdue’s buildup of stock in Regions. Perdue separately sought to advance deregulatory legislation that would be favorable for banks like Regions, which Regions and more than a dozen other banks publicly endorsed.Public records show that Perdue sold his full stake in Regions on 11 October 2019 and on 23 October 2019, suggesting that Perdue may have made a 21% return on his earlier investment. He then bought more shares of the stock in November 2019 and January 2020.John Burke, Perdue’s communications director, has said that Perdue does not handle day-to-day decisions about his portfolio, which Perdue claimed is managed by outside financial advisers.It is not uncommon for policy makers like Yellen to have meetings with senators. On the day of her meeting with Perdue in 2017, Yellen also met with Lord Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, had lunch with Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, and then met with another senator, Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown.Former government insiders say policy makers try to be cautious in such meetings, and try to avoid sharing information that could move markets. At the same time, it can be difficult to avoid the sharing of potentially valuable information if senators and policy makers are discussing any issue in depth, and a senator might be able to gauge an evolving policy position that could be market-sensitive.The new revelations come as Perdue’s frequent stock trading while in office has come under increased scrutiny in the press ahead of his runoff Senate election on Tuesday. If Democrats win two runoff elections, it will transfer control of the Senate from Republicans to Democrats.Previous media reports have focused on how Perdue has faced federal scrutiny for his frequent stock trading while in office, and whether his position as a senator with access to market-sensitive information, especially during the pandemic, may have influenced some trades. The New York Times, citing multiple anonymous sources, said Perdue’s sale of $1m in stock in a financial company called Cardlytics, where he served on the board, drew the attention of investigators at the Department of Justice last spring, who were undertaking “a broad review of the senator’s prolific trading around the outset of the coronavirus pandemic for possible evidence of insider trading”.The investigators ultimately concluded that a personal message that had been sent to Perdue from the company’s chief executive, alluding to “upcoming changes”, was not “nonpublic information”, and declined to pursue charges. Perdue sold his stock two days after he received the personal message from the CEO. About six weeks later, the chief executive resigned and the company revealed that results were below expectations, causing the stock to tumble.The New York Times separately reported that, as a member of the Senate’s cybersecurity committee, Perdue and others sought out the protection of the National Guard against data breaches. The newspaper said that beginning in 2016, Perdue bought and sold shares in a cybersecurity firm called FireEye on 61 occasions. Nearly half of those trades, the New York Times reported, occurred while Perdue sat on the cybersecurity committee, which could have given him access to sensitive information.Perdue’s senate campaign did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. He has formerly denied having any conflict of interest.But Perdue’s challenger in this week’s senator runoff, Democrat Jon Ossoff, has repeatedly raised the issue, and accused Perdue of using his office to enrich himself.Perdue’s spokesman has called the criticism “baseless” and he has emphasized being “totally exonerated” by federal investigators. More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump's Republicans have dumped Lincoln – they're the Confederacy now | Lloyd Green

      by

      On Wednesday, the Republicans’ transition to the party of the Confederacy will be complete. A day after Georgia’s runoff elections, at least a dozen lawmakers in the Senate and more than half of the party’s House membership will seek to overturn the results of the 2020 election and disenfranchise the majority of US voters. A coup attempt in all but name, this is how democracy dies.Sadly, a statement issued on Saturday by seven sitting senators and four senators-elect dispelled any doubts about the nexus between the end of the US civil war, more than 150 years ago, and Donald Trump’s desperate attempt to cling to power. Predictably, America’s racial divide again stands front and center.After regurgitating for the umpteenth time unproven and unsubstantiated charges of electoral fraud, the senators invoked the election of 1876. Back then, the Democrats contested the outcome, conceding after the Republicans agreed to halt Reconstruction.As framed by Ted Cruz and his posse, “the most direct precedent” for their actions “arose in 1877, following serious allegations of fraud and illegal conduct in the Hayes-Tilden presidential race”. In their telling, “elections in three states” were “alleged to have been conducted illegally”. Left unsaid is that after the end of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the toxic legacy of “separate but equal” followed.To these Republicans the right to vote is only for some of the people, some of the timeTo quote Mississippi’s William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Senators from states that were part of the Confederacy, or territory where slaveholding was legal, provide the ballast for Cruz’s demands. At least one senator each from Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas is on board.Apparently, Trump’s defeat at the hands of Joe Biden, formerly vice-president to the first black man in the White House, and Kamala Harris, a black woman, is too much for too many to bear. Said differently, to these Republicans the right to vote is only for some of the people, some of the time – those people being this president’s supporters.Trump’s equivocation over Charlottesville, his debate shoutout to the Proud Boys and his worship of dead Confederate generals are of the same piece. The vestiges of an older and crueler social order are to be maintained, at all costs.Likewise, the reluctance of Trump appointees to the federal judiciary to affirm the validity of Brown v Board of Education, the supreme court ruling that said school segregation was unconstitutional, is a feature not a bug.As for the Declaration of Independence’s pronouncement that “All men are created equal”, and the constitution’s guaranty of equal protection under law, they are inconveniences to be discarded when confronted by dislocating demographics.“Stand back and stand by,” indeed.Since the civil war, there has always been a southern party, frequently echoing strains of the old, slave-owning south. Practically, that has meant hostility towards civil rights coupled with wariness towards modernity.To be sure, southern did not automatically equal neo-Confederate, but the distinction could easily get lost. And to be sure, the Democrats were initially the party of the south. During debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Republicans gave Lyndon Johnson the votes he needed. Not anymore.Cruz and Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who kicked off the attempt to deny the electoral college result, are the products of places like Harvard, Stanford and Yale. John C Calhoun, the seventh vice-president, argued in favor of slavery and the right of states to secede. He went to Yale too. Joseph Goebbels had a doctorate from Heidelberg. An elite degree does not confer wisdom automatically.For the record, Cruz also clerked for a supreme court chief justice, William Rehnquist. Hawley did so for John Roberts.On Sunday, as the new Congress was being sworn in, a recording emerged of Trump unsuccessfully browbeating Georgia’s secretary of state into finding “11,780 votes, which is one more than we have”. From the sound of things, Trump’s fear of prosecutors and creditors, waiting for him to leave the White House, takes precedence over electoral integrity.Back in May, after Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, predicted 240,000 deaths from Covid, and as armed protests to public health measures grew, an administration insider conveyed that Trump’s America was becoming a “bit” like the “late” Weimar Republic. Eight months later, the death toll is past 350,000 and climbing unabated.Come nightfall on 6 January, the party of Abraham Lincoln will be no more. Instead, the specters of Jim Crow and autocracy will flicker. Messrs Trump, Cruz and Hawley can take a collective bow. More