David Perdue and Jon Ossoff

Dear Commons Community,

Senator David Perdue (R-Ga.) has declined an invitation to debate Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff ahead of January runoff elections for both of the state’s Senate seats. 

The Atlanta Press Club said Perdue, who is seeking a second term, will be “represented by an empty podium” at the Dec. 6 debate. Perdue’s decision to skip the debate was first reported by The New Yorker on Sunday.

“The Atlanta Press Club’s Loudermilk-Young Debate Series is disappointed that Sen. David Perdue has decided to not participate in his debate,” the press club said in a statement.

The statement continued: “Jon Ossoff has confirmed his participation, so according to our rules, we will proceed with the debate and Sen. Perdue will be represented by an empty podium. That is not our preference.”

Perdue’s campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Runoff elections for Perdue and Ossoff, as well as for Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and Democrat Raphael Warnock, were scheduled for Jan. 5 after none of the candidates received at least 50% of the votes in their respective races this month.

The closely watched runoffs will determine whether Republicans maintain control of the Senate. If Democrats succeed in flipping both seats, the Senate would likely be split 50-50. Democratic Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would have the power to cast a tiebreaker vote.

Perdue declined an invitation to debate Ossoff just ahead of Election Day on Nov. 3, after a clip of Ossoff accusing Perdue during a previous debate of leveraging inside information to profit off the coronavirus pandemic went viral. (Perdue’s campaign has said a federal investigation into the matter cleared the senator of any wrongdoing.)

“Looks like Sen. David Perdue is too much of a coward to debate me again,” Ossoff tweeted Sunday. “Perdue can’t defend his lies about COVID-19, self-dealing stock trades, his bigotry, or his votes to take away Georgians’ health care. Senator, come on out and try to defend your record. I’m ready to go.”

A coward indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said yesterday that U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham asked him whether he had the power to reject certain absentee ballots, a question he interpreted as a suggestion to toss out legally cast votes.

Raffensperger made the comments to The Washington Post, saying he’s faced rising pressure from fellow Republicans who want to see Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow lead in the state reversed. Nearly 5 million votes were cast in the presidential election in Georgia, and Biden was leading President Donald Trump by about 14,000 votes.

Raffensperger’s comments came as election officials across the state were working to complete a hand recount of votes in the presidential race. As reported by the Associated Press.

“When Georgia voters return an absentee ballot, they have to sign an oath on an outer envelope. County election office workers are required to ensure the signature matches the one on the absentee ballot application and the one in the voter registration system, Raffensperger said in a statement over the weekend.

Graham asked him whether political bias might have caused elections workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures and whether Raffensperger could throw out all absentee ballots in counties with higher rates of nonmatching signatures, the secretary of state told the newspaper.

When asked about the conversation with Raffensperger, Graham said that he was “trying to find out how the signature stuff worked.” He said Raffensperger “did a good job of explaining to me how they verify signatures.”

Asked about Raffensperger’s interpretation that he was suggesting that legally cast ballots should be thrown out, Graham said, “That’s ridiculous.”

County election officials around the state worked through the weekend on a hand tally of the votes in the presidential race as part of a legally mandated audit to ensure the new election machines counted the votes accurately.

Once the tally is complete and the results are certified, the losing campaign can request a recount, which would be done using scanners that read and tally the votes.

Election officials said Monday that the hand tally had turned up more than 2,500 votes in one county that weren’t previously counted but that that won’t alter the overall outcome of the race.

The unofficial breakdown of the votes those votes was 1,643 for Trump, 865 for Biden and 16 for Libertarian Jo Jorgensen, according to Gabriel Sterling, a top elections official.

“The reason you do an audit is to find this kind of thing,” Sterling said.

He said the issue appeared to be an isolated problem and that there were “no fundamental changes” in other counties.

County election board Chairman Tom Rees said it appears the ballots were cast during in-person early voting but election officials weren’t sure how they were missed.

The county elections office suffered several setbacks, including a top official being infected by the coronavirus, and it seems proper procedures weren’t followed when the results were tabulated by machine, Sterling said. But the county had the paper ballots and caught the problem during the hand tally, he said.

Trump, who has made unfounded claims of voting irregularities and fraud, and his campaign have repeatedly taken to social media to criticize Raffensperger and the way the state’s hand tally was being conducted. The secretary of state has responded in social media posts of his own disputing their claims.

Raffensperger told the Post that he and his wife have received death threats in recent days.

“Other than getting you angry, it’s also very disillusioning,” he said.

County election officials were instructed to complete the count by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. The deadline for the state to certify election results is Friday.

The hand tally appeared to go smoothly in most places, and the vast majority of the state’s 159 counties had completed their work by Monday, Sterling said. What remained was mostly data entry and quality control measures before submitting results to the secretary of state, he said. State election officials have said they wouldn’t release any results from the tally until the whole process is complete.

Raffensperger’s office has consistently said it’s likely the results will differ slightly from those previously reported by the counties but that the difference is not expected to change the outcome. The tally resulting from the audit is what will be certified, election officials have said.”

As a side note, the Associated Press has not declared a winner in Georgia, where Biden leads Trump by 0.3 percentage points. There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law provides that option to a trailing candidate if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points. It is AP’s practice not to call a race that is – or is likely to become – subject to a recount.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert on the White House’s coronavirus task force, applauded early data from biotechnology company Moderna and pharmaceutical company Pfizer that show their respective coronavirus vaccines are highly effective.

“The data are striking,” Fauci told NBC’s “Today” about the Moderna data, released this morning. “They’re really quite impressive.  … Now we have two vaccines that are really quite effective. So I think this is a really strong step forward to where we want to be about getting control of this outbreak.”

Fauci said he expects the Food and Drug Administration to grant emergency use authorizations for the vaccines. “Doses could be available to high-risk individuals by the end of December,” he told NBC. 

For the second time this month, there’s promising news from a COVID-19 vaccine candidate: Moderna said its shots provide strong protection, a dash of hope against the grim backdrop of coronavirus surges in the U.S. and around the world.

Moderna said its vaccine appears to be 94.5% effective, according to preliminary data from the company’s still ongoing study.

A week ago, competitor Pfizer Inc. announced its own COVID-19 vaccine appeared similarly effective — news that puts both companies on track to seek permission within weeks for emergency use in the U.S.

The U.S. has passed 11 million coronavirus cases, with more than 1 million of them added in a week, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

In the week of Nov. 8 to Nov. 14, the U.S. added 1,041,075 coronavirus cases, a new record high. The country recorded 7,723 new deaths in the week.

“Record cases over the past week will be record hospitalizations soon,” U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams warned in a tweet. He urged Americans to wear masks when outside the home and limit social interactions to ease the burden on hospitals.

The vaccine announcements are surely good news.  The fact that Anthony Fauci is positive about them gives us all hope that we may be nearing an end to this pandemic sometime in 2021.

Tony

At 7:27 p.m. EST on Sunday, Nov. 15, 2020, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon “Resilience” spacecraft lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Aboard are astronauts Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker, and Victor Glover of NASA and Soichi Noguchi of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency). The four are on the way to the International Space Station for a six-month science mission.

Dear Commons Community,

SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station yesterday on the first full-fledged taxi flight for NASA by a private company.

The Falcon rocket thundered into the night from Kennedy Space Center with three Americans and one Japanese. The Dragon capsule on top — named Resilience by its crew in light of this year’s many challenges, most notably COVID-19 — reached orbit nine minutes later. It is due to reach the space station late tonight and remain there until spring. As reported by the Associated Press.

“By working together through these difficult times, you’ve inspired the nation, the world, and in no small part the name of this incredible vehicle, Resilience,” Commander Mike Hopkins said right before liftoff.

Once reaching orbit, he radioed: “That was one heck of a ride.”

Sidelined by the coronavirus himself, SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk was forced to monitor the action from afar. He tweeted that he “most likely” had a moderate case of COVID-19. NASA policy at Kennedy Space Center requires anyone testing positive for coronavirus to quarantine and remain isolated.

Sunday’s launch follows by just a few months SpaceX’s two-pilot test flight. It kicks off what NASA hopes will be a long series of crew rotations between the U.S. and the space station, after years of delay. More people means more science research at the orbiting lab, according to officials.

At Kennedy, he was replaced by SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell. She wouldn’t give Musk’s whereabouts, but said he was “tied in very closely to the launch.”

“I have a series of texts to prove it,” Shotwell told reporters.

The flight to the space station — 27 1/2 hours door to door — should be entirely automated, although the crew can take control if needed. SpaceX had to deal with pressure pump spikes once the capsule reached orbit, but quickly resolved the issue.

With COVID-19 still surging, NASA continued the safety precautions put in place for SpaceX’s crew launch in May. The astronauts went into quarantine with their families in October. All launch personnel wore masks, and the number of guests at Kennedy was limited. Even the two astronauts on the first SpaceX crew flight stayed behind at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Vice President Mike Pence, chairman of the National Space Council, joined NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine to watch the launch.

“I didn’t start breathing until about a minute after it took off,” Pence said during a stop at SpaceX Launch Control to congratulate the workers.

Outside the space center gates, spectators crowded into nearby beaches and towns. NASA worried a weekend liftoff — coupled with a dramatic nighttime launch — could lead to a superspreader event. They urged the crowds to wear masks and maintain safe distances. Similar pleas for SpaceX’s first crew launch on May 30 went unheeded.

“In such a crazy year, we have finally some great news,” said Sophia Giallanza, who came from Miami with her husband and son to see their first launch. “So it’s really wonderful.”

The three-men, one-woman crew led by Hopkins, an Air Force colonel, named their capsule Resilience in a nod not only to the pandemic, but also racial injustice and contentious politics. It’s about as diverse as space crews come, including physicist Shannon Walker, Navy Cmdr. Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut on a long-term space station mission, and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi, who became the first person in almost 40 years to launch on three types of spacecraft.

They rode out to the launch pad in Teslas — another Musk company — after exchanging high-fives and hand embraces with their children and spouses, who huddled at the open car windows.

Besides its sleek design and high-tech features, the Dragon capsule is quite spacious — it can carry up to seven people. Previous space capsules have launched with no more than three. The extra room in this newest capsule was used for science experiments and supplies.

The four astronauts will be joining two Russians and one American who flew to the space station last month from Kazakhstan. The orbiting outpost soared over the launch site a mere half-minute before liftoff.

The first-stage booster is expected to be recycled by SpaceX for the next crew launch. That’s currently targeted for the end of March, which would set up the newly launched astronauts for a return to Earth in April.

In the next 15 months, SpaceX should be flying roughly seven Dragon missions for NASA, both crew and cargo, Shotwell said.

While Bridenstine noted it was a beautiful launch, he stressed: “This is a six-month mission and it’s the first of many.”

“When you’re flying into space, there’s always risk and we will always be diligent,” he added.

SpaceX and NASA wanted the booster recovered so badly that they delayed the launch attempt by a day, to give the floating platform time to reach its position in the Atlantic over the weekend following rough seas.

Boeing, NASA’s other contracted crew transporter, is trailing by a year. A repeat of last December’s software-plagued test flight without a crew is off until sometime early next year, with the first astronaut flight of the Starliner capsule not expected before summer.

NASA turned to private companies to haul cargo and crew to the space station, after the shuttle fleet retired in 2011. SpaceX qualified for both. With Kennedy back in astronaut-launching action, NASA can stop buying seats on Russian Soyuz rockets. The last one cost $90 million.

The commander of SpaceX’s first crew, Doug Hurley, noted it’s not just about saving money or easing the training burdens for crews.

“Bottom line: I think it’s just better for us to be flying from the United States if we can do that,” he told The Associated Press last week.

Congratulations to Space-X!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg in yesterday’s New York Times had a column speculating on how Donald Trump’s post-presidency might unfurl.  She reviews his appeal in the Republican Party and what it might mean for him politically.  She describes his various legal entanglements and although he might pardon himself before he leaves office, he will not be able to escape Cyrus Vance, New York City’s experienced and capable district attorney.  She also considers his sizeable financial liabilities which might be upward of $500 million.  She talks about his interest in establishing a new media outlet that would compete with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News.  She concludes that Trump is the con man:

“[who] is in for years of scandals and humiliations. We will doubtlessly find out more about official misdeeds he tried to keep secret as president. Republicans who hope to succeed him will have reason to start painting him as a loser instead of a savior. He’ll have to devote much of his energy to trying to stay out of prison.

Below is the entire column.

Insightful!

Tony

New York Times

The Post-Presidency of a Con Man

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Nov. 13, 2020

It’s hard to tell whether Donald Trump is attempting a coup or throwing a tantrum.

Crying voter fraud, his administration has refused to begin a presidential transition despite his decisive electoral defeat. Some Republicans have floated the idea of getting legislatures in states that Joe Biden won to disregard vote totals and instead appoint pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College. The president has decapitated the Pentagon, putting fanatical loyalists in some of its highest ranks. Anthony Tata, who called Barack Obama a “terrorist leader” and tweeted a lurid fantasy about the execution of the former C.I.A. director John Brennan, is now the Pentagon’s policy chief. This is all supremely alarming.

But there’s cause for comfort, of a sort, in signs that the president is preparing for life outside the White House in exactly the way one would expect — by initiating new grifts. Trump has been sending out frantic fund-raising requests to “defend the election,” but as The New York Times reports, most of the money is actually going to a PAC, Save America, that “will be used to underwrite Mr. Trump’s post-presidential activities.” Axios reports that Trump is considering starting a digital media company to undermine Fox News, which he now regards as disloyal.

These moves suggest that while Trump may be willing to torch American democracy to salve his wounded ego, at least part of him is getting ready to leave office.

When he finally does, some political observers and Republican professionals assume he’ll remain a political kingmaker, and will be a favorite for the party’s nomination in 2024. The Times reported, “Allies imagined other Republicans making a pilgrimage to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida seeking his blessing.” Senator Marco Rubio told The Daily Beast’s Sam Brodey, “If he runs in 2024, he’ll certainly be the front-runner, and then he’ll probably be the nominee.”

Maybe. There’s no doubt that Trump has a cultlike hold on his millions of worshipers, and a unique ability to command public attention. But there are reasons to think that when he is finally ejected from the White House, he will become a significantly diminished figure.

Once Trump is no longer president, he is likely to be consumed by lawsuits and criminal investigations. Hundreds of millions of dollars in debt will come due. Lobbyists and foreign dignitaries won’t have much of a reason to patronize Mar-a-Lago or his Washington hotel. Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch could complete the transition from Trump’s enabler to his enemy. And, after four years of cartoonish self-abasement, Republicans with presidential aspirations will have an incentive to help take him down.

“His whole life he’s been involved in a bunch of litigation,” said the superstar liberal attorney Roberta Kaplan. But post-presidency, “I have to assume that, given the amount of civil litigation and potential criminal exposure, it’s going to be at a completely new dimension.”

Kaplan is pursuing three high-profile lawsuits against Trump, including the writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case. Carroll, you might remember, accused Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room during the 1990s. Trump called her a liar, and she’s suing him for damaging her reputation.

Under Attorney General Bill Barr, the Department of Justice has tried to shut down the suit, arguing that Trump was acting in his official capacity when he said Carroll had made up the story to sell books. In October a judge rejected the department’s theory, but had Trump been re-elected, Kaplan expected an appeal.

Once Biden is president, Kaplan told me, “it’s hard for me to imagine that the D.O.J. won’t change its position.” So the case is likely to proceed. Kaplan expects it to go into discovery shortly after Biden’s inauguration. She anticipates deposing Trump and collecting his D.N.A. to compare with male D.N.A. found on the dress Carroll was wearing at the time of the alleged attack.

If Kaplan and Carroll prevail at trial, it would be a high-profile legal validation of Carroll’s claims. Her suit has not, so far, been a major news story — there’s too much else going on. But a verdict in her favor could be the #MeToo version of the civil judgment against O.J. Simpson — not justice, exactly, but a powerful rejection of impunity.

Carroll’s suit is not the only one that could force Trump to answer for his predatory history with women. The former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos, who says Trump groped and kissed her against her will, is, like Carroll, suing for defamation because Trump called her a liar. (Her lawyer is Beth Wilkinson, who defended Brett Kavanaugh when he was accused of sexual assault during his Supreme Court confirmation fight.)

In addition to Carroll, Kaplan is representing Mary Trump, the president’s niece, who is suing Trump, his sister and his late brother Robert’s estate for fraud and civil conspiracy, saying they cheated her out of an inheritance. And she’s representing a group of people who are suing Trump and his three oldest children for enticing them to invest in an alleged pyramid scheme, run by a telecommunications company called ACN, which sold clunky videophones.

The plaintiffs are poor and working class, including a hospice caregiver who paid thousands of dollars to ACN because she trusted Trump’s fulsome endorsements, having no idea that ACN was paying Trump millions. As with the other suits, there is obviously no guarantee of success. But Trump’s alleged involvement in a multilevel marketing scheme that traded on a false image of his business acumen will be a minor subplot over the next few years.

The writer E. Jean Carroll, left foreground, who has accused President Trump of raping her during the 1990s and is suing him for defamation, in October. Credit…John Minchillo/Associated Press

It’s too much to expect any sudden exposure of Trump. There will be no cathartic moment when everyone realizes that the emperor was always naked. But the question isn’t whether Trump’s support will evaporate. It’s whether it will erode, especially once he loses the ability to make Republican dreams come true.

Besides, the threats to Trump are not only to his reputation, such as it is. In Bob Woodward’s book “Fear,” he wrote that Trump’s former lawyer John Dowd implored the president not to testify in Robert Mueller’s probe because he believed him to be an inveterate liar. (Dowd has denied this.) Should Trump face depositions in these civil cases, however, he’ll have no choice about submitting to interviews.

Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s former deputy, told me he expects Trump to pardon himself for any federal crimes he might have committed. That would mean that even if a Biden Department of Justice wanted to take the extraordinary step of prosecuting a former president, it would also have to litigate the constitutionality of self-pardons, a complicated, time-consuming process.

But he might face state charges that he can’t pardon his way out of. The New York State attorney general, Letitia James, has a civil investigation into possible financial chicanery by the Trump Organization. Trump is under criminal investigation by Manhattan’s district attorney, Cyrus Vance. While the scope of the inquiry is unknown, his office’s filings suggest Vance could be looking at tax fraud, insurance fraud and falsification of business records.

The “Manhattan D.A.’s office is a really good office, and they’ve done a lot of white-collar cases,” said Weissmann. “If they were to prove — this is now hypothetical — but if they were to prove tens of millions of dollars in tax fraud or bank fraud, people go to jail for that.”

Let’s say Trump, ever the escape artist, avoids prison, setting himself up as the warlord of MAGA-world at Mar-a-Lago. His post-presidency still won’t be easy. As The Times has reported, he’s personally on the hook for $421 million in debt, most of it coming due in the next four years. If a long fight with the I.R.S. goes against him, he could owe at least $100 million more.

“Mr. Trump still has assets to sell,” The Times reported. “But doing so could take its own toll, both financial and to Mr. Trump’s desire to always be seen as a winner.”

Trump is already trying to profit off his avid base, and he will surely continue. But it’s an open question whether, without the intoxicating aura of presidential power, he can sustain their devotion. There are several examples of once-formidable right-wing leaders reduced to footnotes after leaving office.

As Republican House majority leader, Tom DeLay was frequently described as the most powerful man in Congress. Then, in 2005, he was indicted on a charge of campaign money laundering. Though his 2010 conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, the last time he had any significant public profile was when he appeared on “Dancing With the Stars” in 2009.

Sarah Palin, too, was once a Republican icon; in many ways she presaged Trump. “Win or Lose, Many See Palin as Future of Party,” said a New York Times headline just before the 2008 election. It quoted the right-wing activist Brent Bozell: “Conservatives have been looking for leadership, and she has proved that she can electrify the grass roots like few people have in the last 20 years.”

But since resigning as Alaska’s governor in 2009, Palin has lost her luster. Once a likely presidential prospect, she recently made headlines for wearing a pink and purple bear costume on the Fox reality show “The Masked Singer.”

Trump is in for years of scandals and humiliations. We will doubtlessly find out more about official misdeeds he tried to keep secret as president. Republicans who hope to succeed him will have reason to start painting him as a loser instead of a savior. He’ll have to devote much of his energy to trying to stay out of prison.

After all that, could he be back in 2024? Of course. Trump is, if nothing else, relentless. But this election was just the latest reminder that he is far from invincible. When he is no longer in office, there will be many more.

Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd has a piece today likening Donald Trump to film stars who can no longer accept the fact that their acting careers over.  She makes the point that Trump has been a golden goose for the news media business but it is time for him to move on.  She comments that:

“…the Golden Goose is also a Silly Goose. He should just recognize that Biden winning is actually the best outcome for him. He doesn’t have to do the job anymore and can simply get on with the branding and the whining and the pot-stirring — the parts that interest him.

…Like Norma Desmond, he should give in to the fantasy of his life that he is so devoted to and leave the rest of us to live in the cold, cruel, unforgiving, inconvenient reality.”

The entire column is below.

Tony

———————————————————–

New York Times

Goodbye, Golden Goose

Time for Donald Trump to head down Sunset Boulevard.

By  Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

Nov. 14, 2020

WASHINGTON — 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, unraveling 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 U.S.C. 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.

Even after Georgia and Arizona were called and Joe Biden clinched 306 electoral votes — the same number Trump declared “a massive landslide victory” when he reached it in 2016 — the president is putting on a play within the play, one in which he’s still the star.

Trump Boswell Maggie Haberman reported that there is no grand strategy and the president “is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next,” playing his familiar game of creating a controversy and watching it play out.

As a growing number of Trump advisers and Republican Party leaders privately admitted the end was nigh — and as the Secret Service was rocked by coronavirus infections and quarantine orders from the president’s mask-defying, super-spreader campaign travel — White House officials propped up Donald’s grand illusions. This, even as his lawyers deserted him and judges ruled against him.

“We are moving forward here at the White House under the assumption there will be a second Trump term,” Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser, said on Fox Business Friday.

Kayleigh McEnany chimed in that the president would “attend his own inauguration.”

In his remarks about Operation Warp Speed Friday afternoon in the Rose Garden, Trump showed how tortoise-slow he has been about accepting that he’s out.

“I will not go, this administration will not be going to a lockdown,” he said. “Hopefully, the — the, uh, whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration it will be — I guess time will tell.”

Time has told. Do we detect a sliver of reality creeping in?

The president, who has never shown much interest in governing, has finally dropped all pretense to focus on the core tenets of the Trump Doctrine: himself, cable news, Twitter, self-pity, and caterwauling about perceived slights.

“.@FoxNews daytime ratings have completely collapsed,” he tweeted. “Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!”

The goose was at Fox’s neck. What an unnatural and delicious sight.

The network helped Trump become president and allowed him to maintain his viselike grip on his base. Fox was the oxygen inside his alternate-reality bubble.

But because Trump is 100 percent transactional, he couldn’t accept pure math, training his laser beam on Fox when it dared to veer ever so slightly from total fealty by correctly calling the race early in Arizona.

Trump is right about this one thing: He has been a Golden Goose for the news business. Every time he opens his mouth, 50 headlines jump out.

But the Golden Goose is also a Silly Goose. He should just recognize that Biden winning is actually the best outcome for him. He doesn’t have to do the job anymore and can simply get on with the branding and the whining and the pot-stirring — the parts that interest him.

He certainly branded the Democrats very effectively with socialism, defunding the police, shutting down the country and ending fracking. Biden escaped but a lot of down-ballot Democrats didn’t.

Now Trump should move on and stick to what he knows best: promoting himself. Like Norma Desmond, he should give in to the fantasy of his life that he is so devoted to and leave the rest of us to live in the cold, cruel, unforgiving, inconvenient reality.

Mr. DeMille just called, Mr. President. He says he’s ready for your close-up. Keep your pancake makeup on and step on out of the house now. The cameras will be waiting.

Trump Supporters in Washington, D.C.

Dear Commons Community,

Ardent supporters of President Donald Trump rallied in Washington yesterday behind his spurious claims of a stolen election.

As reported by the Associated Press:

“After night fell in the nation’s capital, demonstrators favoring Trump clashed in the streets with counter-protesters, videos posted on social media showing fistfights, projectiles and clubs. Police arrested at least 20 people on a variety of charges, including assault and weapons possession, officials said. One stabbing was reported, two police officers were injured and several firearms were also recovered by police.

A week after Democrat Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election, demonstrations in support of Trump also took place in other cities. Fury at the prospect of a transfer of executive power showed no signs of abating, taking a cue the president’s unrelenting assertion of victory in a race he actually lost.

“I just want to keep up his spirits and let him know we support him,” one loyalist, Anthony Whittaker of Winchester, Virginia, said from outside the Supreme Court, where a few thousand assembled after a march along Pennsylvania Avenue from Freedom Plaza, near the White House.

A broad coalition of top government and industry officials has declared that the Nov. 3 voting and the following count unfolded smoothly with no more than the usual minor hiccups — “the most secure in American history,” they said, repudiating Trump’s efforts to undermine the integrity of the contest.

The crowd in Washington was beginning to gather Saturday morning when cheers rang out as Trump’s limousine neared Freedom Plaza. People lined both sides of the street, some standing just a few feet away from Trump’s vehicle. Others showed their enthusiasm by running along with the caravan.

They chanted “USA, USA” and “four more years,” and many carried American flags and signs to show their displeasure with the vote tally. After making the short detour for the slow drive around the site, the motorcade headed to the president’s Virginia golf club.

Among the speakers was a Georgia Republican newly elected to the U.S. House. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has expressed racist views and support for QAnon conspiracy theories, urged people to march peacefully toward the Supreme Court.

The marchers included members of the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group known for street brawling with ideological opponents at political rallies.

The march was largely peaceful during the day before turning tense at night, with multiple confrontations as small groups of Trump supporters attempted to enter the area around Black Lives Matter Plaza, about a block from the White House, where several hundred anti-Trump demonstrators had gathered.

In a pattern that kept repeating itself, those Trump supporters who approached the area were harassed, doused with water and saw their MAGA hats and pro-Trump flags snatched and burned, amid cheers. As night fell, multiple police lines kept the two sides apart.

Videos posted on social media showed some demonstrators and counterdemonstrators trading shoves, punches and slaps. A man with a bullhorn yelling “Get out of here!” was shoved and pushed to the street by a man who was then surrounded by several people and shoved and punched until he fell face first into the street. Bloody and dazed, he was picked up and walked to a police officer.

The “Million MAGA March” was heavily promoted on social media, raising concerns that it could spark conflict with anti-Trump demonstrators, who have gathered near the White House in Black Lives Matter Plaza for weeks.

In preparation, police closed off wide swaths of downtown, where many stores and offices have been boarded up since Election Day. Chris Rodriguez, director of the city’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, said the police were experienced at keeping the peace.

The issues that Trump’s campaign and its allies have pointed to are typical in every election: problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots miscast or lost. With Biden leading Trump by wide margins in key battleground states, none of those issues would have any impact on the outcome of the election.

Trump’s campaign has also filed legal challenges complaining that their poll watchers were unable to scrutinize the voting process. Many of those challenges have been tossed out by judges, some within hours of their filing.”

These protesters have a right to assemble but the election is over!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

CNN, CBS News and other media outlets made final election projections yesterday that would give Joe Biden 306 electoral votes to Donald Trump’s 232.   Two-hundred and seventy electoral votes are needed to win the presidency.  New projections were made for Georgia (Biden) and North Carolina (Trump).  These are the exact same totals that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election when he declared he won in a “landslide.”  While there are court challenges  and some recounting going on, it does not look like these numbers will change.

Congratulations to President-Elect Joe Biden!

Tony

Charles and David Koch

Dear Commons Community,

Charles Koch, who has supported radical right-wing causes for much of his life and supported Donald Trump’c presidential candidacy, admitted in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that “we screwed up.”  As reported:

“After spending decades bankrolling causes and politicians that fueled America’s increasingly ugly and hostile national divide, billionaire mogul Charles Koch said  in interview yesterday that he now wants to focus on bridging the gap he helped create.

“Boy, did we screw up. What a mess,” is how the Donald Trump supporter characterizes his partisan battles in his soon-to-be-published book, “Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World,” the Journal noted.

Now Koch claims he wants to work across party lines to forge solutions to poverty, addiction, gang violence and homelessness, he told the newspaper.

In an email to the Journal, Koch also congratulated President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory. He said he looked forward to “finding ways to work with them to break down the barriers holding people back, whether in the economy, criminal justice, immigration, the COVID-19 pandemic, or anywhere else.”

He added: “I hope we all use this post-election period to find a better way forward. Because of partisanship, we’ve come to expect too much of politics and too little of ourselves and one another.”

Koch, 85, still runs the conglomerate Koch Industries, with some 130,000 employees, that was begun by his father as a refinery business. He has adamantly opposed climate change mitigation measures that would impact fossil-fuel industries.

Koch and his billionaire brother David, who died last year, helped bankroll and shape 2010′s conservative Tea Party movement and founded the hugely influential conservative organization Americans for Prosperity in 2004. 

Koch is listed by Forbes as the 15th richest man in the U.S., and is worth some $45 billion. Koch Industries’ PAC and employees contributed $2.8 million to GOP candidates during the 2020 political cycle, noted the Journal.

The brothers were revealed as the powerful stealth engineers of a radical right movement in the U.S. in the ground-breaking 2016 book “Dark Money,” by New Yorker writer Jane Mayer. The Kochs funded ultra-conservative think tanks, peppered universities with hundreds of rightwing academics and used their wealth to boost an army of conservative politicians into office.

The family money also bankrolls the American Legislative Exchange Council which pens template bills for conservative politicians to introduce in state legislatures across the nation. And Koch plotted back in February to overturn a Trump loss at the polls.

Despite his stated intention to make peace, he railed to the Journal about the constant push to rob individuals of freedom with “top-down” control that stifles innovation. Koch complained about powerful interests lobbying the government, even though Koch Industries spent some $100 million on lobbying, the Journal pointed out.

We will have to see in the coming months and years if Koch is sincere and has found a new light.

Tony