2. Amber Phillips: Predictably, some Republican voters in Georgia are turning on the party

Part of what makes President Trump’s hold over the Republican Party so powerful is that the Republican establishment doesn’t fully understand it. And that means it is unsure about how to wield it without Trump helping.

That’s manifesting in an ugly way for the party in Georgia. As Trump tries to burn down democratic institutions on his way out of office, at least some hardcore Trump supporters in the state are turning on the GOP.

This couldn’t come at a worse time for the party. Republicans are trying to rally their loyalists to vote Jan. 5 in two Senate runoff races that will decide whether Democrats have full governing control in Washington next year or Republicans can block some of their policies.

But almost all the establishment Republican figures in Georgia or campaigning there have recently faced accusations from some voters that they’re not Trumpian enough for not wading completely into the president’s baseless claims that the election was stolen from him. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/30/georgia-republican-voters/

3. David Frum: Trump Pardoned Flynn to Save Himself

Here’s the first and most important thing to understand about the crime for which President Trump just pardoned former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn: Flynn did not lie to protect himself. He lied to protect Donald Trump.

At the end of December 2016, Flynn had a series of conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. A month later, on January 24, 2017, Flynn was asked about those conversations by the FBI agent Peter Strzok.

In the first set of conversations, Flynn urged Kislyak to oppose a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity. The second set occurred a week later, while Flynn was on holiday in the Dominican Republic. There, Flynn sought to convince Kislyak to persuade the Russian government not to retaliate against the United States, over a round of sanctions punishing Russia for intervening in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump.

From Flynn’s own narrow personal point of view, there was no reason to lie about any of these conversations. Yes, he was pushing the limits a little bit, doing diplomacy before the new administration took office. A more elegant diplomat would have found a way to honor the rule that there’s only one administration at a time, while also communicating what he wanted the Russians to know about the differing intentions of the incoming administration. But such limit-pushing has surely happened often before in the history of American foreign policy. All Flynn had to say to avoid legal jeopardy was, “Yes, I spoke to Ambassador Kislyak. Possibly I was premature. My bad.”

So why didn’t he say that? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/trump-pardoned-flynn-protect-himself/617220/

4. Dan Barry: ‘Loser’: How a Lifelong Fear Bookended Trump’s Presidency

President Trump went on the attack this month after failing to win a In the now-distant Republican presidential primaries of 2016, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas handily won the Iowa caucuses. This was determined by a method that has lately come under attack but at the time was considered standard: elementary math.

One of the losers in Iowa, the developer and television personality Donald J. Trump, soon accused Mr. Cruz of electoral theft. He fired off several inflammatory tweets, including this foreshadowing of our current democracy-testing moment: “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.”

The episode vanished in the tsunami of political vitriol to come during the Trump presidency. Still, it reflects what those who have worked with Mr. Trump say is his modus operandi when trying to slip the humiliating epithet he has so readily applied to others.

Loser.

“The first thing he calls someone who has wronged him is a loser,” said Jack O’Donnell, who ran an Atlantic City casino for Mr. Trump in the 1980s. “That’s his main attack word. The worst thing in his world would be to be a loser. To avoid being called a loser, he will do or say anything.”

Across his long career, he has spun, cajoled and attacked — in the press, in lawsuits and lately, of course, on Twitter — whenever faced with appearing as anything less than the superlative of the moment: the greatest, the smartest, the healthiest, the best. This has at times required audacious attempts to twist a negative into a positive, often by saying something over and over until it either displaces the truth or exhausts the audience into surrender. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/us/politics/trump-election-loss.html

5. Eric Lutz: Republicans Are Really Trying To Argue That Biden’s Cabinet Picks Are Corrupt

As Joe Biden introduced his first round of Cabinet picks Tuesday, one thing that stood out was the fact that none of the people on the stage were total nutcases. None had rivulets of dye-stained sweat streaking down their cheeks. No one suggested consuming bleach. And most importantly: Whatever criticisms they invite, they all at least seemed to know what their jobs entailed and evinced an ability to carry out the duties entrusted to them. Fulfilling these basic prerequisites should not be notable, but after four years of dopes in posts they don’t understand, truculent goons working to undermine the very departments they lead, and an unending parade of incompetence, grift, and empty swagger from Donald Trump and his administration, the fact that Biden, Kamala Harris, and the people they’ve surrounded themselves with all had their shoes on the right feet and spoke in complete sentences was a refreshing change of pace.

Republicans, though, are already trying to paint Biden’s nominees as dangerous, inept kooks. Indeed, in the bizarro world of the GOP, it’s not Trump and the stooges he’s had running the United States government the last four years you need to look out for—it’s Biden and his team of experienced establishment figures. Biden’s nominees, Marco Rubio tweeted Tuesday, seem impressive on paper, but will actually be the “polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline.” The private consulting work of Tony Blinken and Avril Haines, Biden’s picks for secretary of state and director of national intelligence, respectively, is of great interest to John Cornyn, who showed considerably less interest in the tangle of conflicts and foreign ties of Trump and others around him. “I want to see what foreign countries, if any, they have worked for,” he wrote Tuesday. And Mike Pompeo, the blustering secretary of state, took direct aim at his successors. “I know some of these folks. They took a different view,” he said in a Fox News interview. “They lived in a bit of a fantasy world.”

It’s rich for a guy in Trumpworld—home to QAnon conspiracy theorists and a president who still maintains he won re-election by a landslide—to suggest someone else is living in a fantasy. But it’s likely a preview of the confirmation fights that lie in store for Biden’s nominees, and probably for the next four years of his presidency. After helping Trump drive the nation down the road to ruin, Republicans will quickly pivot to vilifying the new administration as loony radicals and casting themselves—the lot that lined up behind a reality television star many of them actively despised—as the grown-ups in the room. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/republicans-joe-biden-cabinet-criticism-marco-rubio-mike-pompeo

6. Jonathan Chait: Republicans Remain Opposed to Any Policies That Would Reduce Fossil-Fuel Use

The relief of Donald Trump’s long good-bye will begin yielding to the stark reality that his party remains fundamentally pathological. No issue highlights this depressing reality more clearly than climate change.

For more than a decade, the GOP has stood alone among major right-of-center parties in industrialized democracies worldwide in its refusal to endorse climate science. But during the Trump era, the party’s rhetorical emphasis shifted. The major Republican point of agreement is now to insist on fossil-fuel use as an inherent good.

The conservative Washington Examiner reported not long ago on what kinds of climate policies, if any, Republicans may support under a Biden administration. Most of the Republicans queried for the story implicitly agree that climate change is a problem but insist that big government is not the solution. Their buzzword is innovation. A spokesperson for Senator John Barrasso, chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, explains, “He believes free-market innovation, not government taxation or regulation, is the best way to address climate change.” Representative Tom Reed says, “You lead with innovation.” And the Chamber of Commerce likewise asserts, “It’s OK to have ambitions, goals, and targets, but our focus is on innovation and technology.”

“Innovation” sounds like promising grounds for cooperation. The green-energy sector has seen an explosion of innovation over the past decade, with the price of solar energy, batteries, and other green technology plummeting rapidly.

But what kind of innovation do Republicans want? Halfway through the Examiner story, we arrive at the bottom line: “Republicans remain opposed to any policies that would reduce fossil-fuel use.”
Well, then, that would rule out any policy. Innovation in this case actually means keeping all the incumbent energy technologies in place permanently. In other words, their actual priority is the opposite of innovation. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/republicans-climate-change-biden-science-greenhouse-gas.html

7. Robert Barnes: Trump’s imprint on Supreme Court shows conservative effect in key coronavirus ruling

The Supreme Court’s new conservative majority showed its muscle on Thanksgiving Eve, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett playing a key role in reversing the court’s past deference to local officials when weighing pandemic-related restrictions on religious organizations.

All three of President Trump’s nominees to the court were in the 5-to-4 majority that blocked New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s restrictions on houses of worship in temporary hot spots where the coronavirus is raging.

The court’s most conservative justices distanced themselves from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Trump’s first nominee, went out of his way to say that lower courts should no longer follow Roberts’s guidance of deference, calling it “mistaken from the start.”

The Supreme Court on Nov. 25 backed Christian and Jewish houses of worship challenging New York state's pandemic restrictions on religious organizations. (Reuters)

“Even if the Constitution has taken a holiday during this pandemic, it cannot become a sabbatical,” Gorsuch wrote. Rather than applying “nonbinding and expired” guidance from Roberts in an earlier case from California, Gorsuch said, “courts must resume applying the Free Exercise Clause.”

“Today, a majority of the court makes this plain.”

The halt of Cuomo’s orders, which had been allowed to remain in place by lower courts, was the first evidence that Roberts may no longer play the pivotal role he occupied over the past couple of years. He had been at the center of the court, with four consistently more conservative justices and four more liberal ones. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-coronavirus-restrictions/2020/11/26/5cf84020-2ffb-11eb-bae0-50bb17126614_story.html

8. Colbert I. King: I am thankful that Trump will be out of office. But dark days still lie ahead.

On Thanksgiving Day, I expressed gratitude that Donald Trump will no longer be president of the United States as of noon on Jan. 20. I also gave thanks that Air Force One, the presidential limousine, the White House mansion and all other appurtenances of the executive branch of the U.S. government will fall within the purview of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala D. Harris.

The thought that Trump aides Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro and Kayleigh McEnany and her crew of spin doctors will have to surrender their White House passes, and thereafter resort to taxis, ride-hailing companies, Metro or their own two feet to get around town is, well, delicious.

Today, I am looking forward to a William P. Barr-free Justice Department, a State Department no longer under the thumb of Mike Pompeo and a Defense Department led by experienced and competent professionals, all of which ensures that the causes of justice, diplomacy and our national defense will soon be in good hands.

Post Senior Producer Kate Woodsome talks to Americans who voted for Trump, or simply don't feel like denouncing him, about why they feel wrongly scorned. (Kate Woodsome, Joy Sharon Yi/The Washington Post)

Yet, I stop short of breathing a sigh of relief because Trump will be out of office. He will, after all, only be out of the building.

What that narcissistic demagogue has already done, and what his vindictive nature is causing him to now do, foreshadows that dark days may lie ahead.

The unscrupulous and defeated president, who continues to press unfounded charges of being cheated out of the election, is more than an American abnormality. Trump is doing damage to our democratic system by undermining confidence in our elections. There is also an added aspect to his recklessness. Trump’s unconscionable actions might be laying the groundwork for politically motivated violence. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-am-thankful-that-trump-will-be-out-of-office-but-dark-days-still-lie-ahead/2020/11/27/8c83f75e-30cc-11eb-860d-f7999599cbc2_story.html

9. Zak Cheney-Rice: Losing Hasn’t Changed Trump’s Stance on White Supremacy

In July, President Trump tweeted that he would veto any defense spending bill that renamed military bases that honor Confederate leaders, like Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Lee in Virginia. Legislation matching that description, the annual National Defense Authorization Act, currently has bipartisan support in the House and the Senate, but Trump has said privately that he hasn’t changed his mind about blocking it, according to NBC News. As recently as the September debates, reporters were still asking the president if he was willing to condemn white supremacist and militia violence in cities like Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, which he seemed hellbent on exacerbating amid nationwide protests. His apparent commitment to thwarting a perfunctory spending bill because it might diminish the veneration of prominent white supremacists is more evidence that this was an absurd question. Even as a lame duck, Trump’s stance remains clear. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-renaming-bases-honoring-confederates.html

10. David Brooks: The Rotting of the Republican Mind

In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. Moreover, this is not just an American problem. All around the world, rising right-wing populist parties are float

Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.

What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.

Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/opinion/republican-disinformation.html

11. National Review Editorial: Trump’s Disgraceful Endgame

Almost nothing that the Trump team has alleged has withstood the slightest scrutiny. In particular, it’s hard to find much that is remotely true in the president’s Twitter feed these days. It is full of already-debunked claims and crackpot conspiracy theories about Dominion voting systems. Over the weekend, he repeated the charge that 1.8 million mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania were mailed out, yet 2.6 million were ultimately tallied. In a rather elementary error, this compares the number of mail-ballots requested in the primary to the number of ballots counted in the general. A straight apples-to-apples comparison finds that 1.8 million mail-in ballots were requested in the primary and 1.5 million returned, while 3.1 million ballots were requested in the general and 2.6 million returned.

Flawed and dishonest assertions like this pollute the public discourse and mislead good people who make the mistake of believing things said by the president of the United States.

Trump’s most reprehensible tactic has been to attempt, somewhat shamefacedly, to get local Republican officials to Trump’s most reprehensible tactic has been to attempt, somewhat shamefacedly, to get local Republican officials to block the certification of votes and state legislatures to appoint Trump electors in clear violation of the public will. This has gone nowhere, thanks to the honesty and sense of duty of most of the Republicans involved, but it’s a profoundly undemocratic move that we hope no losing presidential candidate ever even thinks of again.

Getting defeated in a national election is a blow to the ego of even the most thick-skinned politicians and inevitably engenders personal feelings of bitterness and anger. What America has long expected is that losing candidates swallow those feelings and at least pretend to be gracious. If Trump’s not capable of it, he should at least stop waging war on the outcome. https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/trump-election-fraud-disgraceful-endgame/

12. Jonathan V. Last: The Flavors of Crazy

There is a sliding scale of crazy. For instance, if we were going to list a set of beliefs in ascending order of insanity—from a little strange to pathologically nuts—it might look something like this:

1. There are an awful lot of unexplained flying objects.
2. Atlantis was real.
3. Bigfoot is real.
4. The earth is actually flat.
5. I was abducted by aliens.

Your reaction to these views being espoused by a person you just met would be quite different.

If someone told you they were interested in UFOs, you might be curious to know more. If someone told you they believed that Atlantis was real, you’d probably find it charming.

If someone told you they had personally been captured by little green men, you’d back away slowly.

So there’s crazy. And then there’s crazy.

Furthermore, our indulgence for craziness varies on the context. If your barber thinks the earth is flat, you might still let him cut your hair. If your oncologist told you that the earth was flat, you would find another doctor that afternoon.

So let’s talk about Michael Flynn.

Over the weekend, Flynn gave an interview to an outlet called Worldview Weekend. In the course of his remarks, Flynn had this to say about Donald Trump and the 2020 election:

“There is no doubt in my mind that he won this election. Hands down. In a landslide,” Flynn said about Mr. Trump during a phone interview that was uploaded to the internet afterward.

“I believe that at the end of the day we’re going to find out that he won by a massive landslide and he’ll be inaugurated come this January,” Flynn stated later during the interview.

Where does this fall on the crazy scale?

Let’s start by noting that Flynn is not doing the coy “just-asking-questions” routine. He’s not saying, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, Who can really say what happened?

He’s going the full monty. He doesn’t just believe that Trump probably won. He has no doubt—literally none!—that Trump won.

And not just won, but won by a “landslide.”

And not just a normal landslide, but a “massive landslide.”

And Michael Flynn doesn’t just believe that this is true, but he believes that this truth is going to be demonstrated and that in 51 days, Donald Trump will be sworn in for a second term.

On our list of crazy, where does this fall? Probably between “the earth is flat” and “I was abducted by aliens.”

Except that Michael Flynn does not cut hair for a living.

He was the forking National Security Advisor to the president of the United States.

How in God’s name did America let something like this happen?

I have some theories. https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/the-flavors-of-crazy

13. Bess Levin: Stephen Miller: Races To F--K Over Immigrants On His Way Out The Door

When he wasn’t making the case, via Twitter, that he should be put under conservatorship, or speaking to Fox & Friends for hours on end, Donald Trump spent much of the last four years enacting despicable policies, many of which concerned immigration. The top hits obviously include the travel ban, family separation, and spending billions of dollars in taxpayer money on his ridiculous border wall, but also using ICE to terrorize undocumented immigrants, attempting to allow the deportation of 700,000 people who came to the U.S. as children, cutting the refugee cap to the lowest level in history, and generally demonizing anyone who wasn’t born here and making their lives as miserable as possible. Behind these policies was World’s Biggest Bastard nominee for four years running Stephen Miller, the 35-year-old adviser who cut his teeth working for Jeff Sessions and defied his upbringing in Santa Monica to become a white supremacist. And if you thought he was going to ease up the immigrant-bashing policies on his way out the door, you sadly underestimated the depths to which Miller clearly hates himself, a self-loathing that he takes out on anyone with less power than him or who doesn’t have to spray on their hair.

Instead, Miller is reportedly doing everything he can to limit immigration, legal and otherwise, on his way out the door. Per Politico.  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/stephen-miller-final-anti-immigration-push

14. Jochen Bittner: 1918 Germany Has a Warning for America

HAMBURG, Germany — It may well be that Germans have a special inclination to panic at specters from the past, and I admit that this alarmism annoys me at times. Yet watching President Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign since Election Day, I can’t help but see a parallel to one of the most dreadful episodes from Germany’s history.

One hundred years ago, amid the implosions of Imperial Germany, powerful conservatives who led the country into war refused to accept that they had lost. Their denial gave birth to arguably the most potent and disastrous political lie of the 20th century — the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth.

Its core claim was that Imperial Germany never lost World War I. Defeat, its proponents said, was declared but not warranted. It was a conspiracy, a con, a capitulation — a grave betrayal that forever stained the nation. That the claim was palpably false didn’t matter. Among a sizable number of Germans, it stirred resentment, humiliation and anger. And the one figure who knew best how to exploit their frustration was Adolf Hitler.

Don’t get me wrong: This is not about comparing Mr. Trump to Hitler, which would be absurd. But the Dolchstosslegende provides a warning. It’s tempting to dismiss Mr. Trump’s irrational claim that the election was “rigged” as a laughable last convulsion of his reign or a cynical bid to heighten the market value for the TV personality he might once again intend to become, especially as he appears to be giving up on his effort to overturn the election result.

But that would be a grave error. Instead, the campaign should be seen as what it is: an attempt to elevate “They stole it” to the level of legend, perhaps seeding for the future social polarization and division on a scale America has never seen. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/opinion/trump-conspiracy-germany-1918.html.

15. Brian Klaas: How to protect our democracy from a future Donald Trump

American democracy has survived Trump, for now. We were saved partly by Trump’s bumbling incompetence and partly by the verdict of voters. But it was close.

We can’t afford more close calls. To prevent them, we need three crucial reforms.

First, Trump demonstrated how easy it is for a president to politicize the rule of law, turning it into a weapon against opponents and a shield for his friends. In many countries, such warping of the legal system is the first step on the road to authoritarianism.

Second, Trump exploited flaws in our election system to undermine confidence in the democratic process. We need to overhaul federal election laws. The patchwork of maddeningly complex state variations creates public confusion, and that confusion provides an opening for authoritarian-style demagogues such as Trump to falsely claim victory despite defeat.

Third, Trump demonstrated that presidents can be openly corrupt and suffer no consequences. Ethics norms must become ethics laws. Presidents should be required to divest from potentially compromising financial interests. Major-party nominees should be compelled to release 10 years of tax returns. And, given what potentially looms ahead in Trump’s post-presidency, there need to be more specific laws ensuring that former presidents don’t abuse their security clearances for future profits. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/30/how-protect-our-democracy-future-donald-trump/

16. Greg Sargent: Tom Cotton’s dumb attack on a Biden nominee hints at the future of Trumpism

The 2024 Republican presidential primary is already underway, and the battle to inherit the mantle of Trumpism is at the center of it all. There is no clearer sign of this than the colossally stupid attacks that the would-be Trumpist 2024 hopefuls are already lobbing at President-elect Joe Biden’s nominees.

Case in point: Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas has now debuted a new attack line on Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget.

Cotton told Fox News that Tanden would rather send relief checks to undocumented immigrants than to American families. This comes after another 2024 Republican hopeful — Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri — attracted widespread scorn for suggesting that Janet Yellen, Biden’s nominee to head the Treasury Department, is simultaneously “corporatist” and driven by “Marxist” impulses. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/02/tom-cottons-dumb-attack-biden-nominee-hints-future-trumpism/

17. David Corn: While Kelly Loeffler Opposed New COVID Aid, Her Husband’s Firm Sought to Profit Off the Pandemic

Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), like her fellow Senate Republicans, has not said much (or anything) about the looming eviction and foreclosure crises. But the new “wave of foreclosures" will likely lead to a real estate buying spree. That could be good news for Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the Fortune 500 company run by her husband—in which she holds between $5 million and $25 million in stock given the company’s acquisition of Ellie Mae.

Loeffler, thanks to her stock deals, had become “a poster child for Washington swampiness.” Yet her ongoing relationship to ICE perhaps illustrates a deeper issue. With her husband at the helm and with a large chuck of ICE shares within her personal portfolio, Loeffler stands to gain if the company succeeds in exploiting pandemic conditions to expand its hold on the digital mortgage business. The coronavirus crisis afforded ICE and her husband a huge opportunity, and they took an $11 billion leap with the Ellie Mae deal. So far, Loeffler has been far stingier when it comes to Georgians and other Americans for whom the pandemic means nothing but loss and misfortune. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/12/while-kelly-loeffler-opposed-new-covid-aid-her-husbands-firm-sought-to-profit-off-the-pandemic/