1. Jonathan Chait: Trump Says Vote-Counting Should Only Continue in States Where He’s Behind

Trump’s argument is simple and farcical. In states where Trump trails, like Arizona, he urges that more votes should be counted and that he will probably win. In states where Trump leads, no more votes should be counted. Trump on Georgia, where his opponent is slightly favored to pull ahead by projections: “They’re never gonna catch us, they can’t catch us.” There is no principle here more sophisticated than “Heads I win, tails you lose.”

“We were getting ready for a big celebration … all of a sudden it was just called off,” the president complained, when “a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people [who supported him]. We won’t stand for it … We were winning everything and all of a sudden it was just called off.” This is a completely fantastical description bearing no relation to what happened. As analysts have predicted for weeks, late-arriving ballots favored Joe Biden and have eaten into Trump’s early lead. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/trump-steal-election-sue-vote-counting-states-losing.html

2. Dan Balz: Trump has attacked democracy’s institutions, but never so blatantly as he did overnight

For four years, President Trump has sought to undermine the institutions of a democratic society, but never so blatantly as in the early morning hours of Wednesday. His attempt to falsely claim victory and to subvert the election itself by calling for a halt to vote-counting represents the gravest of threats to the stability of the country.

A president who respected the Constitution would let things play out. But Trump has shown once again he cares not about the Constitution or the stability and well-being of the country or anything like that. He cares only about himself and retaining the powers he now holds. And so he cries “fraud” when there is no evidence whatsoever of any such thing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-has-attacked-democracys-institutions-but-never-so-blatantly-as-he-did-overnight/2020/11/04/ba0acc3a-1e7e-11eb-ba21-f2f001f0554b_story.html

3. Susan B. Glasser: Biden Wins, But Trump Remains the President of Red America

Trump spent the run-up to Election Day preëmptively undermining the results. He declared the contest both the most important in American history and the most crooked—unless he won outright. Before any votes were counted, he called it a “Rigged Election!” He has repeated this outrageous claim nearly two hundred times since August, according to Factba.se, which tracks all of Trump’s public statements. The closer we got to the election, the more he said it. But the night is now over, and Trump has not been declared the winner. Will he bring on the whirlwind that he had promised? It only took a few hours to find out the answer: the President’s dangerous rhetoric was, in fact, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Before 1 a.m., with an apparent break toward Biden in Arizona, and with the former Vice-President telling car-honking supporters at a drive-in rally in Delaware that “we’re on track to win this election,” Trump attacked the results even before they were formalized. “They are trying to STEAL the Election,” he tweeted. “We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Poles are closed!” Soon after 2:20 a.m., Trump spoke to supporters in the White House, where he was even more explicit that he will follow through on his threats. He declared that he won, and said that he will go to the Supreme Court to stop the millions of votes that are still being counted. “This is a fraud on the American public,” Trump claimed, with no evidence at all to back it up. The worst-case scenarios, tragically, seem to be coming true. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-worst-case-election-scenario-is-happening

4. Thor Halvorssen and Garry Kasparov: The Breathtaking Hypocrisy of Rudy Giuliani

Over the last two weeks, president Trump’s personal lawyer, former prosecutor and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, has retailed a sensational story about a crooked foreign oligarch involved in the energy business seeking to intervene in a potential prosecution of his activities by a democratic government. The Ukrainian oligarch in question reportedly grew rich as a result of his unsavory ties to a ruthless dictator and to the Ukrainian government’s oil and gas sector. Giuliani claims that the oligarch’s energy company engaged in an influence-peddling operation by providing monthly retainers to several individuals, including Hunter Biden, to run interference with “the big guy” and stymie any potential prosecution. The unnamed “big guy,” the scandalmongers imply, is former Vice President Joe Biden.

Ironically, since 2019, Rudy Giuliani has himself reportedly engaged in a far-reaching influence-peddling operation to prevent a crooked foreign oligarch involved in the energy business from being prosecuted by the government of the United States. The foreign oligarch, Alejandro Betancourt-López, grew rich as a result of his unsavory ties to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. Mr. Giuliani’s lobbying efforts involve multiple U.S. law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, the Southern District of New York, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Treasury.

Rudy Giuliani, self-declared enemy of corruption in Ukraine—meet Rudy Giuliani, monthly-retainer-seeking friend of corrupt Venezuelan oligarchs! https://thebulwark.com/the-breathtaking-hypocrisy-of-rudy-giuliani/

5. Jane Mayer: Why Trump Couldn’t Afford to Lose

It has become clear that the Manhattan D.A.’s investigation involves more than the Stormy Daniels case.

Secrecy surrounds Vance’s grand-jury probe, but a well-informed source told me that it now includes a hard-hitting exploration of potentially illegal self-dealing in Trump’s financial practices. In an August court filing, the D.A.’s office argued that it should be allowed to subpoena Trump’s personal and corporate tax records, explaining that it is now investigating “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.”

The prosecutors didn’t specify what the grand jury was looking into, but they cited news stories detailing possible tax fraud, insurance fraud, and “schemes to defraud,” which is how New York penal law addresses bank fraud. As the Times’ recent reports on Trump’s tax records show, he has long made aggressive, and potentially fraudulent, use of accounting gimmicks to all but eliminate his income-tax burden. One minor but revealing detail is that he deducted seventy thousand dollars for hair styling, which ordinarily is a personal expense.

At the same time, according to congressional testimony that Cohen gave last year, Trump has provided insurance companies with inflated income statements, in effect keeping two sets of books: one stating losses, for the purpose of taxes, the other exaggerating profits, for business purposes. Trump’s lawyers have consistently refused to disclose his tax records, fighting subpoenas in both the circuit courts and the Supreme Court.

Norman Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington, D.C., and an outspoken Trump critic, said, “The odds are 99.9999 per cent that New York State authorities have him on all kinds of tax fraud. We know these aren’t crimes that end up just with fines.” Martin Flaherty, a founding director of the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice, at Fordham University, and an expert in transitional justice, agreed: “I have to believe Trump has committed enough ordinary crimes that you could get him.”

The question of what would constitute appropriate accountability for Trump—and serve to discourage other politicians from engaging in similar, or worse, transgressions—has already sparked debate. Flaherty, an authority on other countries’ struggles with state crimes, believes that in America it would have “a salutary effect to have a completely corrupt guy getting thrown in jail.” He acknowledged that Trump “might get pardoned,” but said, “A big problem since Watergate is that élites don’t face accountability. It creates a culture of impunity that encourages the shamelessness of someone like Trump.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/why-trump-cant-afford-to-lose

 

6. Michelle Goldberg: Four Wasted Years Thinking About Donald Trump

It’s very hard to catalog all the things we’ve lost under the presidency of Donald Trump.

As I write this, over 225,000 Americans have lost their lives to Covid-19. Many of our children have lost months of school. Soon, a huge part of the country will lose Thanksgiving.

Because of the Trump administration’s barbaric family separation policy, 545 children may be lost to their parents forever. America has lost its status as a leading democracy. We lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so we’re probably going to lose Roe v. Wade. More people have lost their jobs under Trump than under any president since at least World War II.

Compared with all this, mourning the cultural casualties of the Trump years might be frivolous.

But when I think back, from my obviously privileged position, on the texture of daily life during the past four years, all the attention sucked up by this black hole of a president has been its own sort of loss. Every moment spent thinking about Trump is a moment that could have been spent contemplating, creating or appreciating something else. Trump is a narcissistic philistine, and he bent American culture toward him. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/opinion/trump-arts-culture.html

7. Roger Cohen: How Trump Lowered America’s Standing in the World

Tuesday’s election will be seen globally as a referendum on the durability of democracy. If American democracy, long a beacon, cannot self-correct, then all democracies are at risk. European nations have watched with alarm as President Trump has set about undermining American democracy while attacking the very foundations — the European Union and NATO — that allowed war-torn Europe to become whole, democratic and free.

The Oval Office was once the focal point of the respect the United States commanded around the world; no longer. It has become impossible for democracies today to believe it is in their national interest to take Trump’s America seriously. With this president, there are simply too many petulant reversals of course. The presidency and dishonesty have become synonymous. Alliances are founded on trust. When that goes, they begin to dissolve.

The Trump administration has unrelentingly undermined proven international relationships. America-first nationalism (even on vaccine development) has replaced the stabilizing commitment of the United States to multilateral institutions, a rules-based order and painstakingly negotiated international accords, like the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Iran nuclear deal. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/opinion/trump-foreign-policy-us-allies.html

8. Farhad Manjoo: The Fury Against Trump Has Begun a Great Democratic Awakening

Trump got us to recognize a truth long ignored in American politics: that a competent government is important. American greatness and American goodness can never again be taken for granted. His inept reign has proved that the country cannot run on autopilot, and there is no longer any basis for the lazy idea that America will always, in some automatic and reflexive way, “work things out.”

Trump’s gutting of federal agencies, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the State Department to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, proved, through their resulting failures and missteps, the importance of governmental capacity and competence. It is now tragically clear what happens if the federal government is left to wither, if expertise and experience is undermined and overruled, and if honesty, decency, integrity and fairness are abandoned by public officials: People die, people lose their jobs, hate and mistrust fester, long-term problems become sudden emergencies, and the country steadily loses unity and moral standing. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/opinion/trump-democracy-apathy.html

9. Catherine Rampell: The Paper Wall

The president — the son and grandson of immigrants — says he has no problem with people who come to America “the right way” and “obey the laws.” “I want people to come in,” Trump said during the 2016 campaign. “I want tremendous numbers of people to come in, and we are going to have that big, beautiful door in the wall.”

This turned out to be a big, beautiful lie. Under the leadership of Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief adviser on immigration matters, administration officials have been ordered to “close every opening, shut every door, close every loophole and then some,” according to a senior Department of Homeland Security official quoted in Jean Guerrero’s chilling new biography of Miller, “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.” Every immigrant possible — whether here lawfully or not, professional-class or blue-collar, entrepreneur or scientist, adult or toddler — would be rejected, deported or repelled.

To the extent that Americans are aware of such policy changes, they’re probably only familiar with the more gothic, telegenic horrors — particularly those visited upon unauthorized immigrants.

That is: the nursing babies separated from their mothers when they crossed the border, amid the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” family-separations policy for asylum-seekers; the abrupt deportations of undocumented immigrants who were otherwise law-abiding pillars of their communities, some of whose U.S.-citizen spouses even voted for Trump; or the initial, chaotic implementation of the Muslim ban (later rebranded a nondenominational “travel ban”).

In Trump’s most distorted visions, such policies would be reinforced by an electrified border wall surrounded by a moat filled with alligators. These conditions were designed, by the admission of administration officials themselves, to be vividly, infamously cruel, so they might better deter would-be immigrants. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/29/trump-immigration-daca-family-separation/

10. Jay Kiedrowski: Trump Republicans: a throwback to the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s

In the presidential election of 1856, Millard Fillmore ran as the Know-Nothing candidate. He won 23 percent of the vote and carried one state, Maryland, with eight electoral votes. Abraham Lincoln expressed his own disgust with the Know-Nothing Party. By the 1860 election, the Know-Nothing Party was no longer a viable political movement, in part because of the conflict over slavery within the party.

Fast forward to 2016: Donald Trump is running on an anti-immigrant, anti-elite, and anti-expert platform. He expresses disdain for the media, suggests that the voting process is rigged, and incites violence. He wants to “Make America Great Again.” Many conservatives are supporting him.

Today, when there is significant dislocation from immigration, aggressive foreign competition, and the transition to the information age, people are asking to go back to a former perceived better era. Politicians like Donald Trump seize on these feelings and claim changes to the system will make everything like they were. But how do you roll back progress? https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2016/09/trump-throwback-know-nothing-party-1850s/

11.  Peter Baker: Dishonesty Has Defined the Trump Presidency

Born amid made-up crowd size claims and “alternative facts,” the Trump presidency has been a factory of falsehood from the start, churning out distortions, conspiracy theories and brazen lies at an assembly-line pace that has challenged fact-checkers and defied historical analogy.

During his final weekend of campaign rallies, Mr. Trump continued to sow doubt about the validity of the election, making clear that he would deem any outcome other than victory for him to be corrupt. At a rally in Philadelphia, which has a sizable Black population, he asserted that the city would falsify the results. “Are they going to mysteriously find more ballots” after polls close, he asked. “Strange things have been known to happen, especially in Philadelphia.”

The nightmarish scenario of widespread doubt and denial of the legitimacy of the election would cap a period in American history when truth itself has seemed at stake under a president who has strayed so far from the normal bounds that he creates what allies call his own reality. Even if the election ends with a clear victory or defeat for Mr. Trump, scholars and players alike say the very concept of public trust in an established set of facts necessary for the operation of a democratic society has eroded during his tenure with potentially long-term ramifications. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/01/us/politics/trump-presidency-dishonesty.html

 

12. Brian Karem: Trump Co-Opts Mexican Holiday with Proclamation Demonizing Illegal Immigrants

Thirty-five minutes before midnight on Friday, Donald Trump dumped a Halloween surprise on the country. It was so stunningly tone-deaf, many initially thought it was parody. It wasn’t.

The president introduced a proclamation, headlined “National Day of Remembrance for Americans Killed by Illegal Aliens, 2020,” sets aside November 1 for this occasion—or Día de Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The move has been decried as insensitive by many in the Hispanic community on social media.

“I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities,” Trump, or more likely Stephen Miller, wrote.

This latest proclamation has led many to question the administration’s priorities. George Conway tweeted out, “When’s the National Day of Remembrance for Americans Killed by the Trump Administration’s Failed Pandemic Response?”

Actor Jon Cryer noted that “immigrants both documented and undocumented commit crime at a LOWER rate than citizens. Are we gonna have a national day of remembrance for the vastly larger group of Americans killed by Americans?”

Others wondered if we would have a national day of remembrance for those killed by police, white supremacists, and other assorted mayhem. https://thebulwark.com/trump-co-opts-mexican-holiday-with-proclamation-demonizing-illegal-immigrants/

13. Bess Levin: Donald Trump, Colossal Asshole, Says Doctors Get Extra Cash If People Die of COVID-19

Trump to a crowd in Waterford Township, Michigan, “if you have a bad heart and you’re ready to die or if you have cancer and you’re going to be dying soon, and you catch COVID, that happens we mark it down to COVID. You know our doctors get more money if somebody dies from COVID, you know that, right. I mean our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say is, I’m but you know sorry everybody dies of COVID. But in Germany and other places, if you have a heart attack or you have cancer, you’re terminally ill, you catch COVID, they say you died of cancer, you died of a heart attack. With us, when in doubt, choose COVID. It’s true, no it’s true. No, they’ll say, Oh it’s terrible what he said, but it’s true. It’s like $2,000 more. So you get more money. This could only happen to us.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/donald-trump-doctors-covid-19-cash

14. Linda Chavez: Cleaning Up Trump’s Immigration Mess

The Trump administration is directly responsible for orphaning 545 children. The children were among the 5,512 the Trump administration separated from their parents at the border from July 2017 to December 2019, sometimes ripping babies from their mothers’ arms. The intent was to terrorize families seeking refuge in the United States to stop them from coming.

“We need to take away the children,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a group of prosecutors who balked at enforcing the president’s “zero tolerance” order, which forced criminal (as opposed to civil) prosecution of unauthorized immigrants, including parents with children in tow. Lest anyone think the administration would make exceptions for separating parents from very young children or babies, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told federal prosecutors from Texas in a follow-up call that it didn’t matter how young they were, which is how 594 children under 10 years old ended up in the government’s “care.”

Faced with court orders demanding a halt, Trump signed an executive order modifying the policy in June 2018, which still subjects adults to criminal prosecution but detains families together “where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.” Most of the children separated from their parents were reunited with parents or other family, but the sheer number of those who were essentially lost in the system is a staggering rebuke to the callousness of this administration’s immigration policies. https://thebulwark.com/cleaning-up-trumps-immigration-mess/