1. Ezra Klein: Trump is attempting a coup in plain sight

The Trump administration’s current strategy is to go to court to try and get votes for Biden ruled illegitimate, and that strategy explicitly rests on Trump’s appointees honoring a debt the administration, at least, believes they owe. One of his legal advisers said, “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court — of which the President has nominated three justices — to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through.”

If that fails, and it will, Mark Levin, one of the nation’s most popular conservative radio hosts, is explicitly calling on Republican legislatures to reject the election results and seat Donald Trump as president anyway. After Twitter tagged the tweet as contested, Trump’s press secretary weighed in furiously on Levin’s behalf.
That this coup probably will not work — that it is being carried out farcically, erratically, ineffectively — does not mean it is not happening, or that it will not have consequences. Millions will believe Trump, will see the election as stolen. The Trump family’s Twitter feeds, and those of associated outlets and allies, are filled with allegations of fraud and lies about the process (reporter Isaac Saul has been doing yeoman’s work tracking these arguments, and his thread is worth reading). It’s the construction of a confusing, but immersive, alternative reality in which the election has been stolen from Trump and weak-kneed Republicans are letting the thieves escape. https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election/2020/11/7/21554114/trump-election-2020-voter-fraud-challenge-recount-biden

2. Timothy L. O’Brien: Why Trump Fears Leaving the White House

Although Trump has over the years juggled, among other difficulties, ho-hum grades, the threat of personal bankruptcy, sexual assault accusations, an intensive federal investigation and an impeachment, he has plowed ahead relatively unwounded and unencumbered by regret. Wealth, celebrity and the presidency have kept him buoyant. All that insulation has also meant that he hasn’t learned from his mistakes. Every personal and public reckoning has been postponed or shunted aside.

Now, however, Trump is staring at two threats that loom after he leaves the White House in January. One is financial, the other legal. Neither is entirely under his control. And both may help explain, along with his perennial inability to accept losing, why Trump won’t acknowledge that President-elect Joe Biden is going to succeed him and why he has enlisted the Republican Party to help him gaslight Americans about the outcome of the presidential election.

Trump and the patchwork of businesses he houses inside the Trump Organization are saddled with more than $1 billion in debt, which Dan Alexander of Forbes has helpfully tallied. A portion of that total has been divulged over the past few years in the president’s personal financial disclosures, on file with the Office of Government Ethics. The New York Times recently revealed that Trump has personally guaranteed at least $421 million of the debt, with more than $300 million coming due within four years.

In other words, Trump is on the hook for a lot of money that he may have to scramble to repay in a Covid-19-battered economy in which his industries — hotels, leisure, urban real estate — have been particularly pummeled. Forbes estimates his assets are worth $3.7 billion; Bloomberg News pegs them at about $3.2 billion. He’s not going broke. But if the economy continues to struggle in coming months, those valuations will be tested. And much of what Trump holds isn’t liquid, meaning he may be hard-pressed to sell assets quickly if he needs to raise funds. Among Trump’s most valuable holdings, for example, are minority stakes in two properties controlled by Vornado Realty Trust. Rumors of fire sales might further depress the value of his portfolio. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-11-11/why-trump-fears-leaving-the-white-house

3. Richard Wolffe: Trump's refusal to concede follows his pattern of incompetence and delusions

The Trump administration has been living in a state of denial for the last four years. They claimed the pandemic would disappear like a miracle. That climate crisis was an exaggerated fiction. They said the world respected Donald Trump. And Rudy Giuliani really intended to stage a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

There’s a pattern in here somewhere. Oh yes. It’s a pattern of snort-inducing lies, incompetence and delusions.

As the sun sets on Trump, our unnaturally bronzed soon-to-be ex-president is clinging on to the summer of his power with every tweet he can muster. He absolutely, defiantly, categorically will not concede the election, or allow his officials to work on a transition.

This is a shame because it makes him look a pathetically sad loser with a paper-thin skin, which he has been forever. But it’s a shame for his many ardent defenders whose job would be so much easier if they were defending someone with a shred of decency, integrity or maturity. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/11/trump-refusal-concede-follows-pattern-incompetence-delusions

4. Christian Schneider: Republicans Continue to Cower Under Phony Strongman

Donald Trump is obviously not Stalin: he doesn’t conduct show trials, send his political opponents to gulags, or starve millions of his own people to death.

In a way, though, that makes the embarrassing post-2020 election obeisance of Republican politicians even more confounding. If they rightly acknowledge Trump’s election loss was not due to vote “fraud” and concede Joe Biden will, in fact, be president on January 20 next year, the worst they will suffer is an angry tweet from the president.

And yet they trot right out, single file, humiliating themselves in order to soothe the “very touchy and proud” adolescent in the Oval Office. Newt Gingrich, a man who knows how elections work, said Trump fell to a “corrupt and stolen election.” On the Senate floor, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Trump is “100 percent within his right” to pursue recounts and litigation.

According to one particularly odious pro-Trump commentator, Biden is “not the president-elect” because Real Clear Politics had yet to officially call a handful of states. (This is a heretofore unknown requirement spelled out in the version of the Constitution read exclusively by people with undetected natural gas leaks in their homes.) https://thebulwark.com/republicans-continue-to-cower-under-phony-strongman/

5. Jonathan Chait: The GOP’s Future Leaders Are Endorsing Trump’s Election Fraud Lie

Trump’s claims that he actually won the 2020 election and will somehow prevail upon the courts to overturn the results stand zero chance of proving true. Not unlikely. Not remote. Zero.

Yet watching the Republican Party absorb Trump’s ludicrous accusations has been depressingly instructive. It replicates the process by which Republicans accepted Trump in the first place. It also reflects, in miniature, the process by which the party has surrendered to kookery over several generations.

Even to refute the accusations of fraud is to grant them more dignity than they deserve; heroic efforts have been made by journalists at papers like the The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. The Trump campaign seized on “suspicious” changes in zip codes for a few thousand Nevada voters, who turned out to be members of the military. It asserted that its observers had been denied access to vote-counting in Pennsylvania, then admitted in court that the observers had been permitted to observe after all. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/trump-election-vote-fraud-lie-giuliani-four-seasons-myth-biden-won-2020.html

6. Zak Cheney-Rice: The Fate of the Country Rests on

It’s no exaggeration to say that the fate of the United States — and, in a lot of ways, the world — rests on what happens in voter precincts across the state of Georgia less than a week after we say good riddance to 2020. On that day, Georgians will decide the partisan makeup of the U.S. Senate. If Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock both defeat Republican incumbents in their runoff elections, the legislative body will have 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans by the end of the month, with Vice-President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote. This would be good. But if even one of them loses, things will get really ugly, really fast. Republicans will keep control of Congress’ upper chamber, with current majority leader and practiced obstructionist Mitch McConnell in the driver’s seat. The implications could not be more dire. A Biden White House has little hope of appointing progressive judges, expanding health-care access, or reforming law enforcement — let alone packing the Supreme Court or pursuing a climate agenda commensurate to the scale of the crisis — with a Republican majority blocking the way. What’s more, the structural advantage that the GOP enjoys in the distribution of Senate seats probably means a decade-long drought for Democrats, if not more. That means the cost of defeat in either one of these races is likely the difference between a productive Biden presidency and one so ineffectual that the 2022 midterms — and likely the 2024 election after that — are poised to be Republican bloodbaths. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/fate-of-the-country-rests-on-senate-runoffs-in-georgia.html

7. Eric Lutz: Trump’s Republican Allies Are Going To Help Him Burn It All Down

The entire premise of Donald Trump’s life is that he has never once been defeated. His project, and that of those around him, then, has been to maintain that illusion. This hasn’t always succeeded. He’s lost plenty of things—money, court cases. But never before has he faced the kind of public humiliation he seems poised to with Joe Biden’s victory. How does someone who delights in calling others “losers” react to becoming a loser himself, in the most concrete sense of the word? How does the most vainglorious man in America bring himself to accept defeat and ?

The answer, of course, is that he doesn’t. Unable to face the reality of his circumstances, he is doubling down on his delusions—that the world is conspiring against him; that he’s the big, strong winner he’s always claimed to be. He wants to convince his supporters, the courts, and himself that he is both victim and victor and has made clear that he’ll burn everything to the ground to do so. This is unsurprising. If his decades of public life have taught us anything, it’s that he simply can’t help himself. But the aides and allies who have enabled him these past four years are not bound by his paranoias and neuroses. They’re making a choice. And while some who have stood by him now seem to be taking tentative steps backward, others are sticking, enabling him still as he tries to take a blowtorch to the foundation of democracy. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/trump-republican-allies-ted-cruz-lindsey-graham-burn-it-all-down-election-2020

8. Amanda Carpenter: Trump, the Pathetic Loser

On Thursday night, staring down the abyss of defeat, President Trump marched into the White House briefing room and did what he has always done when backed into a corner. He unfurled lies. He claimed everything is “rigged” against him. He inflated his accomplishments to vertiginous heights.

All while the votes against him in decisive battleground states ticked higher and higher, a silent metronome in the background relentlessly counting toward his political demise.

While Trump’s bluster might have been enthralling in the past—or at least hard to look away from, like a car accident—this time, the television lights made his typical bronze glow look like mortuary makeup. He was a political dead man walking. Everyone knew it. Even him. His tone was grave, which only made his lies all the more loathsome.

One would expect a man in his final hours to reveal his innermost, truthful thoughts while in such a terminal state. Trump, however, delivered the opposite of a deathbed confession. Feeble and stumbling, he kept pushing the Kool-Aid on anyone who would sip it.

Trump’s sycophants and enablers find all their dreams that his presidency would be the most consequential and important in American history crashing down around them. We should all remember Trump as he presented himself in this monumental moment. As a babbling, incoherent, conspiracist. Our greatest presidential embarrassment. https://thebulwark.com/trump-the-pathetic-loser/

9. Noah Bierman: Trump is not conceding, and is likely to fire foes, pardon friends

Pardons offer the president the most absolute power during his lame-duck phase.

The most prominent possibilities include former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI but later tried to withdraw his plea, and Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager who was convicted of financial crimes.

Trump also may try to protect himself and the Trump Organization, his family-run holding company, from potential prosecution once he leaves office.

Federal and state prosecutors in New York are investigating alleged banking and insurance fraud, while the Internal Revenue Service has spent years auditing a $70-million deduction.

“He’s going to use [the lame-duck period] strategically to basically try to protect himself and his family and his money,” said Andrew Weissmann, a former top prosecutor in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 campaign collaborated with Russia and obstructed justice.

That could include proactive pardons for Trump’s grown children, current and former employees, and other figures close to Trump, including his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Trump may also try to pardon himself, a power that has never been tested in court.

“Just how broad the pardons have to be depends on what the president’s worried about,” Weissmann said.

The pardons would not limit all of Trump’s potential exposure. They would cover only federal crimes, not the investigations now underway by New York State Atty. Gen. Letitia James and Manhattan Dist. Atty. Cyrus Vance. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-11-07/election-trump-lame-duck

10. Ruth Marcus: Biden will inherit a mission impossible

The closeness of the results underscores the alarming reality that a significant plurality of Americans supports the most disastrous, most dangerous president in our history. Biden has, wisely and appropriately, promised to govern as president for all Americans — that is, the opposite of Trump’s divisive approach. But even winning the popular vote does not erase the fact that Biden would inherit a country whose citizens are as angry and polarized as at any moment in a century and a half. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-biden-wins-hell-inherit-a-mission-impossible/2020/11/04/48b1796a-1eda-11eb-ba21-f2f001f0554b_story.html

11. Susan B. Glasser: Donald Trump’s Day of Reckoning

Soon after Biden took the lead in Pennsylvania, a statement from the Trump campaign arrived in my in-box: “This election is not over,” the campaign’s general counsel, Matt Morgan, said. But it effectively was, and the question was no longer about the election’s outcome; it was what Trump would do about that outcome—the same question that has loomed over the race since Trump first told the American public that he would not accept any result except his own

Power ebbs away quickly in Washington. When a downcast Trump went to the White House briefing room, on Thursday evening, to insist that the election was being stolen from him, he did so alone. His two sons and campaign adviser Brad Parscale complained on Twitter that Republican Party leaders were absent from the fight—and threatened retribution. “Where is the GOP?! Our voters will never forget,” Eric Trump tweeted. A few Republicans, eager to claim Trump’s huge following in the Party, responded to the Trumps’ call for public reinforcement.

There is still great risk in a President defeated but not yet gone. Trump will remain in the White House until January 20th, in command of a vast executive branch and a wounded ego in need of validation and searching for justification. He is reportedly still considering firing senior officials in his government whom he considers insufficiently loyal, including the head of the F.B.I., Christopher Wray, and the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper. Who knows what investigations he could order up, what last-minute executive orders he could issue? In the meantime, the pandemic rages on, and as the nation was consumed this week by the drama of the unresolved election, the number of covid-19 cases escalated to dangerous new levels. The two months between now and the Inauguration could prove to be a volatile, dangerous moment in Washington, and not just because Trump is likely to pursue spurious legal cases and refuse to concede. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/donald-trumps-day-of-reckoning

12. Michael J. Stern: Trump's huge vote total breaks my heart. I recognize this America and I wish I did not.

This is going to be a scorched-earth column, so buckle up.

Yes, former Vice President Joe Biden squeaked out a victory. But we’ve still been slapped with the heartbreaking reality that nearly half our country voted to reelect President Donald Trump after spending four years watching him spew unbridled bigotry, engage in blatant corruption, and tell so many lies you’d need a magnifying glass to read The Washington Post's running list of false and misleading claims.

My best friend just called in disgust to say he did not recognize this country. Unfortunately, I do. It’s the same country that built itself largely on the backs of slaves who had their most basic human rights stolen and whose descendants, more than 150 years after emancipation, still carry the weight of the chains that held them down.

It’s the same country that closed its eyes to Matthew Shepard, beaten and broken and tied to a fence in rural Wyoming, where he was left to die … because he was gay.

And it’s the same country where you can see countless cellphone videos of people telling Latino Americans to speak English or "stay in Mexico" or “go back" to where they came from. 

When all is said and done, I fear Trumpism, and the ugliness it reflects, is here to stay. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2020/11/05/half-america-supports-donald-trump-heartbreaking-column/6165245002/

13. David Priess: An Embarrassing Presidential Display That Will Live in Infamy

Last night, from a podium in the White House—the People’s House, provided to the president, at public expense, as living and working quarters—Donald Trump claimed without evidence that valid votes coming in for his opponent were “illegal.” He declared that “we can’t have an election stolen like this.” He stated that “we can’t allow silence, anybody to silence our voters and manufacture results.”

With these remarks, the president humiliated those who have coddled or appeased him for four years. And, in asserting that votes presumably for his opponent are illegitimate before they’ve even been counted, he sunk to a new low for the American presidency.

That, I will admit, is a bold statement. Because we’ve had some low moments in the history of presidential behavior.

But when it comes to actual voting in elections, even previous presidents willing to use dirty tricks during their campaigns haven’t resorted to the kind of sordid display that the world witnessed on Thursday night. Instead, candidates running for the nation’s highest office in tumultuous times (including on the eve of an actual civil war) have by and large let the process unfold and then graciously accepted the result and moved on.

Trump, instead, is positioning himself to play the victim, to go down kicking and screaming like a toddler being pulled away from his favorite cartoon.

Shame on him. Shame on his enablers. And, yes, shame on us for allowing such an unfit man to occupy the People’s House. https://thebulwark.com/an-embarrassing-presidential-display-that-will-live-in-infamy/

14. Jonathan Chait: The End of an Error This country was always better than Donald Trump.

The simple truth is that was all a mistake — a ghastly, deadly mistake, the toll of which will linger for decades. The precise causes have all been exhumed: bad decisions by Hillary Clinton, an easily manipulated press corps, the FBI, the GRU, the Electoral College sorting out the votes just so.

America, by and large, never wanted Trump to be president. The public opposed his presidency from the moment he took office, and he trailed Joe Biden in polls continuously. The first chance the country got to correct the mistake, we d him unceremoniously. He suffered the rare ignominy of becoming an incumbent president denied a second term, a category that over the last century includes Hoover, Carter, Bush and now Trump. Of this sad group, only Trump had the benefit of a growing economy.

And while Trump kept his reelection close in the Electoral College, the nation as a whole registered clear opposition. Biden’s margin in the popular vote – the most precise measure of a “people’s president” – is likely to swell to an Obama-like margin. Progressives have chosen to torment themselves with the fact that Trump’s supporters continue to exist, rather than allow themselves to absorb the extent of his repudiation.

None of this is to say that the Trump experience was a mere aberration or without meaning. Even those who did not suffer directly from his presidency have come away shaken and disillusioned. Not only was one of the worst human beings in this country entrusted with massive power, but he put his twisted psyche on constant display. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/biden-defeats-trump-election-2020-president-repudiation.html

15. Matt Bai: Republicans: Unshackle yourselves from the Trump craziness

Here you are, anxiously waiting for Donald Trump and his royal family to accept reality, not wanting to say anything that might upset him or his followers, because somehow the thing you fear most in the world — more than any virus, or God, or even transgender bathrooms — is the prospect of losing primaries.

I ask you: Is your political life so dear, your committee seat so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of servitude to a rage-filled, nativist mob?

You think you can avoid this fight just by backing down and letting events take care of themselves?

Already you’ve got an avowed QAnon follower coming to a table near you at the caucus lunches. These people believe — I mean, actually believe — that Democratic politicians are harvesting blood from babies. A couple of followers were arrested last week, heading to a vote-counting center in Philadelphia with an armload of guns.

Somebody’s going to get killed here. Are you really going to spend the rest of your political careers shackled to this craziness?

Or keep cowering, and let your actual treason echo through the ages. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/09/republicans-unshackle-yourselves-trump-craziness/

16. Dana Milbank: Trump is now sabotaging national security to soothe his bruised ego

So this will be President Trump’s parting gift to the nation: He is deliberately sabotaging the national security of the United States.

His refusal to accept the results, even though it wasn’t a particularly close election, has taken an insidious new turn now that his political appointee in charge of authorizing the start of the Biden transition is refusing to give the okay.

The delay undercuts all aspects of government’s functioning and leaves the country needlessly vulnerable to security threats.

It’s understandable that current Republican officeholders don’t want to cross Trump by calling on him to concede.

But if they don’t insist that he at least authorize the start of a transition, they, too, are sabotaging our national security because of one man’s hurt feelings.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/09/trump-is-now-sabotaging-national-security-soothe-his-bruised-ego/

17. David Remnick: The Biden Era Begins

American democracy was on the ballot on Election Day, and although American democracy won, an occasion of immense relief, the margin of victory should not be exaggerated.

Joe Biden, the victor in the popular vote by a margin so far of more than four million, has won the Electoral College and will become the forty-sixth President of the United States. Senator Kamala Harris, the daughter of a Black father and an Indian-American mother, will make history as Biden’s Vice-President. Donald Trump, who will finish out his term as the most cynical character ever to occupy the Oval Office, was mendacious to the last, claiming victory before the ballots were counted and accusing an unknown “they” of trying to steal the election from him. He is sure to pursue his case, however misbegotten, in the courts and in the right-wing media. It would also come as no shock if he provoked civil unrest on his own behalf. If four years have proved anything about Trump, it’s that he is capable of nearly anything.

The unhinged, if predictable, spectacle of Trump’s press conference early Wednesday morning at the White House was outrageous even to some of his closest allies: here was an unstable authoritarian trying his best, on live television, to undermine one of the oldest democratic systems in existence. “This is a fraud on the American public,” he complained. “This is an embarrassment to our country.” As far as he was concerned, citing no evidence, “we have already won it.” Trump was willing, as always, to imperil the interests and the stability of the country to satisfy his ego and protect his power. On Thursday evening, Trump reprised this malign and pathetic performance, as he took to the White House pressroom to claim, again without proof, that he was being “cheated” by a “corrupt system.” Reading from a prepared text, he said that his vote was being “whittled down” as ballots were being counted. He spun a baseless conspiracy theory about dishonorable election officials, a burst pipe, and “large pieces of cardboard.” His words were at once embittered and deranged; his voice betrayed defeat. There has never been a more dangerous speech by an American President, and it remained to be seen if his party’s leadership would, at last, abandon him.

There can be no overstating the magnitude of the tasks facing Biden. If he survives whatever challenges, legal and rhetorical, that Trump throws his way in the coming days and weeks, he will begin his term facing a profoundly polarized country, one even more divided and tribal than the polls have suggested. It is a nation in which one half cannot quite comprehend the other half. He also confronts a country that is suffering from an ever-worsening pandemic, an ailing economy, racial injustice, and a climate crisis that millions refuse to acknowledge. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/16/the-biden-era-begins

18. Jonathan Chait: Why Trump and Republicans Are Plotting to Undermine Democracy

Republicans had little success in teaching their voters to despise and fear Biden like they despised and feared Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Trump’s election fraud lies are doing that work for them now, whipping the base into a frenzy of anger and priming them to regard Biden as the beneficiary of a stolen election.

This is not a plot to steal the 2020 election. It is a decades-long campaign to undermine American democracy, which treats Democratic governance as inherently illegitimate.

Republicans played Russian roulette with American democracy by supporting the presidency of an aspirational authoritarian. They’ll continue doing so by supporting his paranoid attacks on the electoral process. The reason they’re willing to weaken American democracy is very simple: They don’t care about democracy. Republicans had little success in teaching their voters to despise and fear Biden like they despised and feared Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Trump’s election fraud lies are doing that work for them now, whipping the base into a frenzy of anger and priming them to regard Biden as the beneficiary of a stolen election. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-election-fraud-biden-pennsylvania-lawsuit-voting-transition.html