1. Philip Bump: Trump has achieved one of his post-election goals: Sowing doubt about the outcome with his base

One can think of the last two weeks as President Trump setting both a goal and a stretch goal. A goal is something he hopes to achieve. A stretch goal, by contrast, is something that may not be achieved but which may be within reach, given the right amount of effort.

Since Election Day, Trump’s stretch goal has been a second term in office: unlikely, but, hey, who knows? The immediate and attainable goal, on the other hand, is simpler. Trump wants to be able to spend the rest of his days insisting that he didn’t lose the 2020 election. He wants to march around Mar-a-Lago and have people nod as he grumps that President-elect Joe Biden committed unidentified crimes that denied him a second term in office.

That second goal has already been obtained.

Monmouth University has been tracking confidence in the 2020 election for months. In a poll released Wednesday, the pollsters asked Americans whether they were confident that the presidential race was executed fairly and accurately. Most people said it was — but three-quarters of Republicans and Trump voters said that it wasn’t. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/18/trump-has-achieved-one-his-post-election-goals-sowing-doubt-about-outcome-with-his-base/

2. Bess Levin: Polar Bear Genocide, Drilling Bonanzas, Letting Everyone Get COVID-19: The Many Ways Trump Plans to F--k Over the U.S. in the Next Nine Weeks

Despite hourly Twitter outbursts about how he totally won the election, numerous ridiculous lawsuits, and a pathological refusal to concede to Joe Biden and let a normal and necessary transition occur, a small part of Donald Trump appears to know that come January 20, 2021, he’ll be out of power. One, because he basically admitted as much over the weekend before trying to take it back and two, because he’s planning to shove through numerous policies and executive actions in the next nine weeks, seemingly aware that his window of time to do so is closing rapidly.

One of the moves, announced this week, would fuck over the planet and many living things, neither of which Trump has any regard for. On Monday, his administration said it will be begin the formal process of selling leases to oil companies for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. While Trump’s industry pals would obviously love nothing more than to extract as much profit as possible from the 19 million acres of land are thought to overlie billions of barrels of oil, scientists, environmentalists, and other assorted parties warn the move could be devastating.

Other messes Trump plans to make include:

• Trying to push through the nomination of Judy Shelton to the Federal Reserve board of governors so that Biden can’t fill the vacancy and it can instead go to someone whose main qualification is that she thinks Trump is an economic genius, tipping the balance of the board to Trump appointees;

• Enraging foreign powers like China by preparing new sanctions that would, “infuriate the government of President Xi Jinping and bring ties between the two nations to their lowest point in decades,” a toxic situation that would make it difficult for Biden as he tries to get Beijing to cooperate on, among other things, climate change.

• Drawing down U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq to a level in line with what Biden has said is necessary but in a slipshod, premature way that could embolden insurgent forces.

• Meanwhile, Trump has apparently been musing about bombing Iran, according to the Times:

And of course, there’s the imminent danger with regard to what Trump seemingly plans to do nothing about, i.e. the coronavirus, which is worsening by the day as the Biden administration is blocked from getting a head start on its own response. With more than 69,000 people in the hospital with the virus as of Saturday and more than 1,100 COVID-19 deaths being reported each day on average, that’s kind of a lot—if one cares at all about thousands of Americans dying, which the current occupant of the White House clearly does not. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/donald-trump-last-minute-damag

3. Maureen Dowd: Trump should be happy to get back to what he knows best: promoting himself

Many see a wannabe despot barricaded in the bunker, stubby fingers clinging to the levers of power as words that mean nothing to him – democracy, electoral integrity, peaceful transition, constitutionality – swirl above. One presidential historian sees something different in Donald Trump’s swan song. Michael Beschloss has been tweeting pictures of Hollywood’s most famous divas, shut-ins and head cases. Norma Desmond watching movies of herself, hour after hour, shrouded in her mansion on Sunset Boulevard as “the dream she had clung to so desperately enfolded her." Howard Hughes, descending into germaphobia, madness and seclusion. Greta Garbo, sequestered behind her hat and sunglasses. Charles Foster Kane, missing the roar of the crowd as he spirals at Xanadu, his dilapidated pleasure palace.

The president and his cronies are likely to do real damage and major grifting in the next two months. But in other ways, the picture of the president as a pathetic, unravelling diva is apt. Trump has said in interviews and at rallies that two of his favorite movies are the black-and-white classics about stars collapsing in on themselves, Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard. In Sunset Boulevard, Max the butler and a camera crew conspire to make the demented silent film star believe she’s getting her close-up when she’s actually just being lured down the staircase to answer for her sins. The Republicans enabling Trump’s delusion are like the camera crew, filming a scene with the disintegrating diva that is never going to be seen. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” a senior Republican official told the Washington Post. “No one seriously thinks the results will change.” Trump, who once wanted to be a Hollywood producer and considered attending USC film school, never made the pivot to being a politician. He got elected because he played a competent boss and wily megabillionaire on a reality TV show – pretty good acting now that we know he is neither – and he has stayed a performance artist and a ratings-obsessed showman. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/trump-should-be-happy-to-get-back-to-what-he-knows-best-promoting-himself-1.4409907

4. Jonathan Chait: Trump’s New Vote Fraud Theory Is So Much Crazier Than You Realize

President Trump has been promoting wild conspiracy theories about election fraud since 2016. Like so many of his outrages, this has numbed the public and caused the absurdity to recede into the background of events. It is therefore easy to miss the fact that the conspiracy theory Trump has begun circulating over the last several days is vastly crazier than the ones he used to promote. It’s as if, Spaceship Trump, last seen leaving Earth for the moon, it has now reached distant galaxies.

Trump’s old election conspiracy theory centered on mail balloting, which he deemed rife with fraud, unless it was being done by Republicans. His new theory is that the election was stolen because a left-wing software firm connected to Hugo Chavez and George Soros maliciously stole hundreds of thousands of votes in the middle of the night. Trump has been spreading the claim on Twitter the last several days:

Why does the Fake News Media continuously assume that Joe Biden will ascend to the Presidency, not even allowing our side to show, which we are just getting ready to do, how badly shattered and violated our great Constitution has been in the 2020 Election. It was attacked......perhaps like never before! From large numbers of Poll Watchers that were thrown out of vote counting rooms in many of our States, to millions of ballots that have been altered by Democrats, only for Democrats, to voting after the Election was over, to using Radical Left....owned Dominion Voting Systems, turned down by Texas and many others because it was not good or secure, those responsible for the safeguarding of our Constitution cannot allow the Fake results of the 2020 Mail-In Election to stand. The World is watching! — Donald J. Trump

It’s worth recalling that, just a few weeks ago, Giuliani allegations of serious misconduct by Joe Biden that large segments of the commentariat deemed substantive enough to demand reporters cover respectfully. Now he is raving about a secret communist computer program to control the U.S. government. And he has been deputized to make this claim on behalf of the man who is, for the next two months, the president of the United States. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/trumps-dominion-vote-fraud-election-conspiracy-theory-crazy.html

5. Karen Tumulty: Lindsey Graham’s claim that he wasn’t interfering in the Georgia vote doesn’t add up

When Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, received a message on Friday that Graham had called him, he told “CBS This Morning” on Tuesday, he assumed that the South Carolina senator wanted to discuss the Jan. 5 runoff races for both of Georgia’s Senate seats. So he returned the call.

Raffensperger said he was surprised to discover that Graham wanted instead to talk about the ongoing audit of the presidential race and the state law that matches signatures to mail ballots to assure their legitimacy. According to what Raffensperger told my Post colleague Amy Gardner in an interview, Graham raised a conspiracy theory that suggested biased poll workers might have accepted ballots with nonmatching signatures.

The implication was stunning and impossible to miss.

Raffensperger told Gardner that Graham was urging him to find a way to toss legally cast ballots, something the secretary of state does not have the power to do, absent court intervention, even if he were so inclined. “It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger said.

He said he didn’t argue with Graham. “I really just got off the call, and I said I would circle back,” Raffensperger told CBS News. After speaking with his counsel, he decided “not to get back and re-engage.”

For doing his job according to the law in the 2020 election, Raffensperger has been subjected to abuse and even, he says, death threats. Georgia’s two Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, have called on him to resign. All of this is, no doubt, spurred by claims from the president himself that the election is being stolen from him.

“As a Republican, I wish the results would go another way, but I think that at the end of the day, what you’re going to see is this audit is going to verify what the machines counted and then we’ll certify,” he said Tuesday.

No matter what your political leanings, this should be a cause for celebration that our democracy is sound and fair. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for some of those who are elected under that system. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/17/lindsey-graham-claim-wasnt-interfering-georgia-vote-doesnt-add-up/

6. Steve Coll: What Does Trump Get Out of Contesting Biden’s Win?

Typically, the best way to understand Trump’s actions is to ask what’s in it for him. Four more years in the White House would extend his immunity from New York prosecutors conducting active investigations into possible criminal activity, ease pressure from bank creditors, and further enrich his family businesses: a win-win-win. Assuming that the President fails to rig a second term, he is fashioning a story about how corrupt Democrats foiled his reëlection, which might galvanize followers and donors after he leaves office. According to the Post, the President told advisers last week, “I’m just going to run in 2024. I’m just going to run again.” His campaign has formed a political-action committee, called Save America, which appears designed as a means for him to raise money to influence the Republican Party after his Presidency ends. The PAC is eligible to receive funds now for Trump’s “election defense,” but much of that money would likely be spent on other causes and candidates. Leave it to Trump to manufacture a constitutional crisis that also incorporates a fund-raising con. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/23/what-does-trump-get-out-of-contesting-bidens-win

7. Jeff Wise: The People v. Donald J. Trump

The defendant looked uncomfortable as he stood to testify in the shabby courtroom. Dressed in a dark suit and somber tie, he seemed aged, dimmed, his posture noticeably stooped. The past year had been a massive comedown for the 76-year-old former world leader. For decades, the bombastic onetime showman had danced his way past scores of lawsuits and blustered through a sprawl of scandals. Then he left office and was indicted for tax fraud. As a packed courtroom looked on, he read from a curled sheaf of papers. It seemed as though the once inconceivable was on the verge of coming to pass: The country’s former leader would be convicted and sent to a concrete cell.

The date was October 19, 2012. The man was Silvio Berlusconi, the longtime prime minister of Italy.

Here in the United States, we have never yet witnessed such an event. No commander-in-chief has been charged with a criminal offense, let alone faced prison time. But if Donald Trump loses the election in November, he will forfeit not only a sitting president’s presumptive immunity from prosecution but also the levers of power he has aggressively co-opted for his own protection. Considering the number of crimes he has committed, the time span over which he has committed them, and the range of jurisdictions in which his crimes have taken place, his potential legal exposure is breathtaking. More than a dozen investigations are already under way against him and his associates. Even if only one or two of them result in criminal charges, the proceedings that follow will make the O. J. Simpson trial look like an afternoon in traffic court. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-criminal-case.html

8. Susan Glasser: Is This a Coup, or Just Another Trump Con?

At times, during this unnerving week in America’s capital, it has felt as though we were watching events unfold in Minsk or some other dictator stronghold where elections are not stolen the day votes are cast but in the weeks afterward, as the defeated President holes up in his palace, defying reality and increasingly urgent crowds in the streets.

Here in Minsk-on-the-Potomac, Trump has been perpetrating the Big Lie, claiming the election was stolen from him and apparently persuading millions of Americans to go along with this evidence-free fantasy.

Biden, so far, has urged calm. It’s an ’embarrassment,’ he told reporters Tuesday in Wilmington, Delaware, where he continued to plan his transition, took congratulatory phone calls from world leaders, and appointed a White House chief of staff. The official line from Biden has been clear and simple: concession or no concession, Trump will have to leave office at noon on January 20th, and that is that. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/is-this-a-coup-or-just-another-trump-con

9. Philip Bump: Trump’s legacy will be defined largely by his attempt to look away from the coronavirus pandemic

By the time the ball drops over an empty Times Square on Dec. 31, 2020, will have been the deadliest year in the history of the United States. Part of that is a function of population growth; more people are going to die in a more populous country. But it’s primarily a function of the coronavirus pandemic, which has already taken at least 242,000 American lives. That’s one death for every 12 that occurred in the United States in 2018 overall, the most recent year for which data are available.

During the Civil War, 504 people were dying every day. On 224 of the past 257 days, the country’s seven-day average of coronavirus deaths has exceeded that mark. As of this writing, the current seven-day average of coronavirus deaths is more than twice that number. That’s because the country is in the midst of its third surge in new coronavirus cases.

By now, it's hard to dispute that the primary cause for federal inaction is that Trump has decided to simply let the virus spread. We've seen hints of this for months, the most obvious of which was Trump's decision to pluck a neuroradiologist named Scott Atlas off Fox News and install him in the White House coronavirus task force. There, Atlas has pushed back against government epidemiologists to advance a strategy centered on slowing the spread of the virus by letting far more people contract it — and then, hopefully, become immune to it.

It’s a fierce competition, but this may define Trump’s legacy. He will be remembered as the president who faced a deadly crisis and decided to look away. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/13/trumps-legacy-will-defined-largely-by-his-attempt-look-away-coronavirus-pandemic/

10. Greg Sargent: A war among Trump’s kids shows this family won’t let us move on

CNN reports that Trump’s two adult sons — Donald Jr. and Eric — adamantly want Trump to refuse to concede and “drag it out until the bitter end,” while clinging to the lie that the election was stolen from him.

They believe the “outcome should change,” CNN reports. In other words, if possible, they want to overturn the results of a legitimate election.

By contrast, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner think the president should bow to the inevitable and concede after the Georgia recount is completed later this month. Here’s the reasoning:

Ivanka Trump has offered a more calibrated message to her father, asking him whether it was worth damaging his legacy and potentially his businesses to continue his refusal to concede. She is privately realistic about the President’s loss, a source told CNN, but she also knows that her entire future — now more than ever — is tied to her father’s, and must be handled delicately.

The careful reader will note that there’s no discernible deliberation over the impact that Trump’s refusal to concede is having on the whole country.

The only motivating factor in how this will be handled is what is good for Trump and the family. There’s disagreement on what is actually best for Trump, but Trump and Donald Jr. have already decided that not conceding is what’s best for them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/13/war-among-trumps-kids-shows-this-family-wont-let-us-move/

11. Colbert I. King: Republicans never gave Obama a chance. I fear it’ll be the same with Biden

Four days prior to President Barack Obama taking the oath of office in January 2009, radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh declared, “I hope he fails.”

In August 2009, eight months after Obama became president, pastor Steven L. Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Ariz., told his congregation that he prays for the death of Obama. Anderson said: “I’m not going to pray for his good, I’m going to pray he dies and goes to hell.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, the preacher said: “I’d like him to die of natural causes. I don’t want him to be a martyr; we don’t need another holiday. I’d like to see him die, like Ted Kennedy, of brain cancer.”

The following month, during Obama’s Sept. 9, 2009, speech to a joint session of Congress, South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson shouted, “You lie!,” while boorish behavior flourished in the GOP seats.

A year later, Sen. Mitch McConnell said in an Oct. 23, 2010, interview published in the National Journal: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

It was like that for the eight years that Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were in the White House. Make no mistake, Republican congressional leadership, and many right-wing commentators, didn’t honor the Obama-Biden victories in 2008 or 2012. They never wished them well during their eight years of service. Instead, they looked for every opportunity to obstruct their leadership.

And, I fear, it’s going to be like that again. Thanks to the Constitution, President Trump’s stranglehold on the U.S. government will end at noon on Jan. 20. But I don’t think the Trumpism horror show is going anywhere.

The sentiments underlying the behavior of Limbaugh, Wilson, Anderson and McConnell didn’t disappear with Obama’s departure from White House grounds. The nationalism, xenophobia, homophobia and distaste for folks of a darker hue that informed the opposition to Obama are manifested in today’s Trumpism, which comes with the added ingredient of a self-centered, arrogant, merciless autocrat.

Like many others, I hail Biden’s intention to unify a country so polarized under Trump’s divisive leadership.
Restoring the soul of America, making America respected around the world again, as Biden has pledged, is a goal that is likely shared widely across the nation.

Many of us — though perhaps not Trump or his disciples — are proud of Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s historic ascension to America’s second-highest office; she is the first woman, Black, Asian American and HBCU graduate to win the vice presidency.

And Harris’s description of Biden “as a president for all Americans” sets him apart from the outgoing president. If she and Biden can bridge the gap dividing this politically, socially and racially polarized country, that alone will be a gift to American democracy.

But there is reality.

Far too many of the people having fits over Trump’s defeat believe to their core that he was cheated out of winning the election. They don’t regard Biden, Harris and the incoming administration as political opponents, but as the enemy.

An enemy that denied the nation a free and fair election. An enemy which should not be handed power.

An enemy never to be accepted, even if it does take over the government.

An administration to be undermined at every turn because its opponents believe the country is behind Trump, and not the enemy.

Which is to say achieving the goal of a reconciled and unified America where differences are respected and addressed civilly won’t be easy. Nonetheless, it needs to be a solemn Biden administration commitment.

But by all means, maintain focus, practice self-restraint, be alert and keep your guard up. Trumpism is not going anywhere. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-never-gave-obama-a-chance-i-fear-itll-be-the-same-with-biden/2020/11/13/aa5d2b1e-2529-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html

12. Michael Kruse: Trump’s Crazy and Confoundingly Successful Conspiracy Theory

In fundraising emails and text messages as well as social media strafes, in the mornings and in the evenings and throughout the wee hours, President Trump is peddling a vague, vast conspiracy of “ILLEGAL VOTES” and “ILLEGAL BALLOTS” and “blatant voter fraud” in states from the Northeast to the Southwest. The tweets just keep coming. “WE WILL WIN!”

And it’s … working. Seven in 10 Republicans, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll earlier this week, believe the election was stolen from their candidate.

“This isn’t about winning the presidency,” former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told me this week. “It’s his exit strategy.”

“It’s not about the vote-counting,” said Rory Cooper, a Republican strategist and a former adviser to Eric Cantor when he was the House Majority Leader. “His entire persona is built on the idea of winning despite his decades of not winning. He’s constantly creating a legend, frankly, about himself rather than a truthful narrative, so I’m not surprised that he’s going to use this to convince his supporters that the election was unfair and that he remains the leader of the Republican opposition.”

He added: “He’s going to have to take care of financial issues once he’s out of office, and he’s going to make a lot of money. He’s going to make a lot of money on books. He’s going to make a lot of money on speeches. He’s going to be able to hold rallies and charge for them. Putting everything from the Southern District of New York aside, and what could happen to him in Manhattan, just on the sheer financial side of it, the martyring of Trump—martyring himself—is good for business.” https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/11/13/trumps-crazy-and-confoundingly-successful-conspiracy-theory-436404

13. Bess Levin: Trump Has Repeatedly Asked If He Can “Preemptively” Pardon Himself

CNN reports that Trump has been asking aides since 2017 if he can self-pardon, which is just an amazing thing to behold given that he had just been inaugurated and apparently his first order of business as president was to be like, “Soooo....I was talking with some people and they were asking me, ‘Hey, Don, you’re president. You know these things, these pardons, are you allowed to do them on yourself?’ And I thought, That’s a great question. I had never thought of that but it’s a beautiful question.” According to one former White House official, Trump has also asked about pardons for his family, which makes sense given that they work together at the Trump Organization and possibly engaged in various forms of tax fraud together, among other things. Perhaps most incredibly, Trump reportedly “even asked if he could issue pardons preemptively for things people could be charged with in the future,” said the former official. Y’know, like a get-out-of-jail-free card for life just in case you decide to commit a crime at any point in the future.

Not surprisingly, because Trump has the mind of a child, the former official said that “Once he learned about it, he was obsessed with the power of pardons. I always thought he also liked it because it was a way to do a favor.” So taken was Trump by the idea of the ability to wave a wand and get rid of any legal consequences for a criminal conviction that senior officials would apparently bring it up out of nowhere if they needed to get him to shut up about something else.

Regarding whether or not Trump would actually pardon himself, former aides who say he wouldn’t do it believe so only because “doing so would imply he’s guilty of something.” (“As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?” he tweeted in June 2018.) But others think it’s basically a given. “Of course he will,” the former White House official told CNN. And while he presumably wants to, it’s not actually clear Trump can, although apparently there is an insane scenario in which he could fake sick and temporarily make Mike Pence president just so he could do the honors.

There are alternate possibilities of which Trump could avail himself: he could temporarily declare himself unable to perform his presidential duties, allowing the vice president to act as president, including by issuing him a pardon, and then the president could resume his duties as president, or resign.

Even if Trump can pardon himself or have Pence do it for him, a self-pardon would only protect him from federal crimes and not a number of ongoing investigations and civil suits currently underway, including two led by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who are pursuing possible criminal charges related to the Trump Organization. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/donald-trump-self-pardon