Dear Commons Community,  

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday handed a defeat to Republicans seeking to throw out up to 2.5 million mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania as they try to undo President Donald Trump’s election loss, with the justices refusing to block the state from formalizing President-elect Joe Biden’s victory there.  The court in a brief order rejected a request made by U.S. Congressman Mike Kelly, a Trump ally, and other Pennsylvania Republicans who filed a lawsuit after the Nov. 3 election arguing that the state’s 2019 expansion of mail-in voting was illegal under state law.  CNN reported that the justices deliberated only forty minutes to reach their decision.

As reported by Reuters.

Pennsylvania was one of the pivotal states in the election, with Biden, a Democrat, defeating Trump there after the Republican president won the state in 2016. State officials had already certified the election results.

There were no noted dissents from any of the justices on the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority including three Trump appointees. Trump had urged the Republican-led Senate to confirm his most recent nominee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, before the election so she would be able to participate in any election-related cases.

Trump has falsely claimed that he won re-election, making unfounded claims about widespread voting fraud in states including Pennsylvania. Democrats and other critics have accused Trump of aiming to reduce public confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections and undermine democracy by trying to subvert the will of the voters.

The Republican plaintiffs argued that the universal, “no-excuse” mail-in ballot program passed by the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania legislature in 2019, enabling voters to cast ballots by mail for any reason, violated the state’s constitution.

It appears that judicial challenges by Trump and company to the presidential election in various state, federal and now the U.S. Supreme Court have been dismissed.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump and his bullies are intimidating election officials.  These cowards are going to people’s homes and places of business to scare and harass  officials for being honest and doing their jobs. As reported by Reuters.

“Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s top election official, had just finished hanging Christmas decorations with her young son on Saturday night when a crowd demanding November’s presidential election result be reversed gathered outside her home to denounce her as a “traitor” and a “criminal.”

The demonstrators, some armed and holding up placards saying “Stop the Steal”, clustered on the sidewalk outside Benson’s Detroit home as security and police officers looked on, video broadcast live on Facebook by one of the participants showed.

“Through threats of violence, intimidation, and bullying, the armed people outside my home and their political allies seek to undermine and silence the will and voices of every voter in this state,” Benson, Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State, said in a statement on Sunday.

The demonstration was the latest of what election authorities across the United States describe as a tide of intimidation, harassment and outright threats in the charged aftermath of the Nov. 3 election, which Republican President Donald Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump has made unsubstantiated claims of widespread electoral fraud and is trying but failing to overturn Biden’s victory, challenging the outcome in court in multiple states while also pressing state officials, lawmakers and governors to throw the results out and simply declare Trump the winner.

Courts have so far rejected those requests.

Supporters of Trump in recent weeks have staked out election officials’ offices in Georgia, mounted armed protests in Arizona and left menacing telephone messages for election officials across the country, producing political turmoil unlike any other in modern U.S. history.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said that the baseless fraud claims and subsequent threats against election officials are “very damaging to our democracy. I hope it’s not the end of our democracy.”

“We cannot allow our elected officials to live in fear at all times whenever someone doesn’t like how they believe they’ve perform their job duties,” Nessel told Reuters.

Michigan, Arizona and Georgia were among a handful of hotly contested battleground states that Biden won, helping to secure his 306 to 232 advantage in the Electoral College that will officially select the next president on Dec. 14.

But the threats have not been confined to places where the election was close. In Vermont — a state no Republican presidential candidate has won since 1988 — election officials said they received a voice message threatening them with “execution by firing squad.”

“No public servant should ever have to feel threatened or concerned for their safety while they are doing their work,” Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, a Democrat, told Reuters.

“The conspiracy theories and unfounded rhetoric that are being pushed by the president and his campaign team really could inspire some dangerous behavior somewhere in this country. It starts at the top and it really needs to stop.”

Asked to comment, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, Tim Murtaugh, said: “No one should engage in threats or violence, and if that has happened, we condemn that fully.”

He added that the campaign’s lawyers had themselves been “inundated with threats from leftist Biden supporters” and their personal information posted online.

Trump and his political backers have blasted Republicans leaders and election officials in Georgia and Arizona for certifying Biden as the winner in their states.

Trump himself has described Georgia’s Republican secretary of state as an “enemy of the people”, and one of his lawyers, Joe diGenova, said last week the administration’s former election cybersecurity chief should be “taken out at dawn and shot” for publicly defending the integrity of the election.

Several election workers contacted by Reuters said they did not want to speak about the threats they had received for fear it would make things worse.

Georgia officials were similarly reticent until last week, when threats online targeted a young contract worker for Dominion Voting Systems, whose voting machines were used in the state. One post on Twitter included a swinging noose.

That day, Gabriel Sterling, the Republican in charge of the voting machines, walked to a podium visibly angry and demanded that Trump “stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.”

In an interview with Reuters, Sterling said that he personally had received a message calling him a him “traitor” that included his home address. Someone else wished him a happy birthday in a tweet saying it would be his last.

After his local police chief suggested he notify his neighbors, he posted on a local Facebook page urging them to call authorities if they saw anything suspicious.

“I shouldn’t have to do that,” he said.

On Monday, Georgia again certified that Biden had won after counting ballots for a third time.

Let’s be clear here.  Trump is a pathetic clown-like figure who is a cowardly bully.  Slap him in the nose and he would run home crying to Melania.  He is acting out so badly because he cannot stand the fact that he LOST the presidential election to Joe Biden.

Tony

Paul Krugman

Dear Commons Community,

Borrowing a line from the movie, A Few Good Men, Paul Krugman in his column this morning focuses on Republicans who back Donald Trump “dangerous delusions” about who won the presidential election. Entitled, Republicans Can’t Handle the Truth, Krugman describes how Trump and most Republicans have engaged “in malicious, democracy-endangering lies.”  He references a survey by The Washington Post, where “only 27 Republican members of Congress are willing to say that Joe Biden won.”  And despite the complete lack of evidence of significant fraud, a majority of self-identified Republicans said in a Reuters/Ipsos poll that the election was rigged.

Krugman concludes:

“The point is that once a party gets into the habit of rejecting facts it doesn’t want to hear, one fact it’s bound to reject sooner or later is the fact that it lost an election. In that sense there’s a straight line from, say, the Republican embrace of climate denial to the party’s willingness to go along with Trump’s attempts to retain power.

And the G.O.P.’s previous history of dealing with inconvenient reality gives us a pretty good idea about when the party will accept Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election — namely, never.”

Below is the entire column. Krugman “can handle the truth!”

Tony

————————————————

New York Times

Republicans Can’t Handle the Truth!

Paul Krugman

December 8, 2021

President Trump’s continuing attempts to overturn an election he lost decisively more than a month ago is, like so much of what he’s done in office, shocking but not surprising. Who imagined that he would go quietly?

What some people may not have been fully prepared for is the way Trump’s party as a whole has backed his dangerous delusions. According to a survey by The Washington Post, only 27 Republican members of Congress are willing to say that Joe Biden won. Despite the complete lack of evidence of significant fraud, two-thirds of self-identified Republicans said in a Reuters/Ipsos poll that the election was rigged.

But you really shouldn’t be surprised by this willingness to indulge malicious, democracy-endangering lies. After all, when was the last time Republicans accepted a politically inconvenient fact? It has been clear for years that the modern G.O.P. is a party that can’t handle the truth.

Most obviously, Republican refusal to accept the election results follows months of refusal to acknowledge the dangers of the coronavirus, even as Covid-19 has become the nation’s leading cause of death, and even as a startling number of people in Trump’s orbit have been infected.

Sure enough, virus denial and vote denial converged almost perfectly on Saturday, when Trump addressed a large, mostly unmasked crowd in Georgia — creating a potential superspreader event — and demanded that the governor overturn the state’s election results. The next day Rudy Giuliani, who has been directing Trump’s efforts to cling to office, was hospitalized with the virus.

The thing is, Republican rejection of reality didn’t start in 2020, or even with the Trump era. Climate change denial — including claims that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by an international cabal of scientists — has been a badge of partisan identity for many years. Crazy conspiracy theories about the Clintons were mainstream on the right through much of the 1990s.

And one half-forgotten episode in particular seems to me to have foreshadowed much of what we’re seeing right now: Republican reactions to the mostly successful introduction of Obamacare.

The Affordable Care Act went into full effect in 2014, amid dire predictions by Republicans. The act, they claimed, would drive insurance premiums sky-high, fail to reduce the number of uninsured, and have a devastating effect on employment.

None of that happened. Instead, millions of Americans gained health insurance coverage. Job creation continued, with three million jobs added in the year following the A.C.A.’s implementation. Obamacare may have fallen somewhat short of its sponsors’ hopes (although nobody expected it to yield universal coverage), but from the beginning it helped many Americans, and was nothing like the disaster opponents predicted.

As far as I can tell, however, no prominent Republican was willing to admit that the party’s apocalyptic warnings had been proved false, let alone talk about why they were wrong. Nor, of course, did Republicans make any effort to come up with a better health plan. (It has been almost 11 years since Obamacare was signed into law, and we’re still waiting.) Instead, party leaders simply pretended that the promised catastrophe had, in fact, materialized.

For example, John Boehner, the speaker of the House at the time, insisted that there had been a “net loss” of people with health insurance. After that three million-job gain, Jeb Bush (remember him?) insisted that Obamacare was “the greatest job suppressor in the so-called recovery.”

Paul Krugman’s Newsletter: Get a better understanding of the economy — and an even deeper look at what’s on Paul’s mind.

And in a move that prefigured the Trump team’s desperate attempts to find evidence for election fraud, right-wing groups went in search of health care horror stories, tales of ordinary Americans devastated by Obamacare.

To be fair, while there is no evidence of significant electoral fraud, some people really were hurt by health reform — mainly young, healthy individuals who previously had cheap policies and made too much money to be eligible for subsidies. But these weren’t the victims Republicans were looking for. Instead, they peddled tales of older, working-class Americans who supposedly had lost access to affordable insurance.

None of these tales stood up to scrutiny. But that didn’t matter to the G.O.P. As I wrote at the time, Republicans had already — pre-Trump — entered the era of post-truth politics.

Now, there’s obviously a big difference in immediate impact between refusing to accept evidence that contradicts your policy preconceptions and refusing to accept the results of an election. But the mind-set is the same.

The point is that once a party gets into the habit of rejecting facts it doesn’t want to hear, one fact it’s bound to reject sooner or later is the fact that it lost an election. In that sense there’s a straight line from, say, the Republican embrace of climate denial to the party’s willingness to go along with Trump’s attempts to retain power.

And the G.O.P.’s previous history of dealing with inconvenient reality gives us a pretty good idea about when the party will accept Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election — namely, never.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla

Dear Commons Community,

Pfizer and Moderna, two pharmaceutical companies that have developed promising COVID-19 vaccines, will not participate in a “vaccine summit” today at the White House that touted the participation of private sector executives.

Pfizer said in a statement that it had informed the White House that it would not attend, but offered no other details, Bloomberg reported.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has previously vowed to keep Pfizer’s vaccine “out of politics.” 

Pfizer has pointedly noted that it accepted no funding from President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed to hurry the development of a coronavirus vaccine. But Warp Speed did promise Pfizer $1.95 billion for the eventual delivery of 100 million doses to the federal government if the vaccine is approved for use.

Bourla defended the decision to decline federal research and development funding in order to “liberate our scientists from any bureaucracy” and “keep Pfizer out of politics.”

After watching the presidential debate in September, Bourla told his staff in an internal memo obtained by Politico that he was “disappointed that the prevention for a deadly disease was discussed in political terms rather than scientific facts.” He vowed to “never succumb to political pressure.”

A spokesperson for Moderna, which is also awaiting Food and Drug Administration approval for the use of its COVID-19 vaccine, said in a statement that Operation Warp Speed contacted the company “to be part of a meeting at the White House concerning COVID-19 vaccine plans” and that Moderna “indicated its willingness to participate,” Stat reported. The company learned later that “based on the meeting’s agenda, its participation would not be required,” the statement noted.

An FDA representative insisted on Monday that the drugmakers had actually been excluded from the meeting because agency officials were concerned about the impropriety of executives mingling at the White House with FDA members who are charged with approving their vaccines, Bloomberg reported.

But it was unclear if the White House decision to exclude Pfizer and Moderna was made before or after Pfizer turned down the invitation. Company executives’ names were included in an invitation to the summit obtained a week ago by Stat.

White House spokesperson Brian Morgenstern said last Tuesday that the president “looks forward to convening leaders from the federal government, state governments, private sector, military, and scientific community.” 

The summit is scheduled two days before an FDA advisory committee is set to publicly examine data from Pfizer regarding its vaccine. A similar hearing for Moderna’s vaccine is set for Dec. 17.

The event is regarded by some industry officials as a public relations ploy by Trump to again claim credit for the rapid development of the crucial vaccines — and to pressure the FDA to approve them, Stat noted.

Trump boasted late last month that he was the one who “came up with” the vaccines.

“I came up with vaccines that people didn’t think we’d have for five years,” Trump said in a Fox News interview. He also boasted on Twitter, using a racist term for the coronavirus, that the private drug companies developed the vaccines “on my watch!”

The White House summit is expected to focus on vaccine distribution. Trump plans to sign an order directing the Department of Health and Human Services to get the vaccines to Americans before helping other countries, Bloomberg reported.

But there will still likely be a scramble for vaccines in this country. Trump reportedly declined an offer from Pfizer to buy more doses of its COVID-19 vaccine at the end of the summer, according to several press reports.

Congratulations to the leadership at Pfizer and Moderna for putting science and people ahead of politics and photo-ops.

Tony

Giuliani in Arizona Last Week

Dear Commons Community,

Rudy Giuliani was hospitalized yesterday after President Trump announced the former New York City mayor, the president’s personal attorney and the point man for his efforts to overturn the results of the election, had tested positive for COVID-19.

Giuliani was admitted to Georgetown University Medical Center, where he is “recovering quickly and keeping up with everything,” he tweeted late last night.

The 76-year-old has spent the past several weeks crisscrossing the country to promote the president’s claims that the election was stolen by the Democrats.

In public appearances, Giuliani and other members of the Trump legal team have ignored social distancing guidelines and other public health recommendations to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

In the past week alone, Giuliani appeared at election-related hearings in Arizona, Michigan and Georgia, speaking in close proximity to others without wearing a mask.

After Giuliani’s COVID-19 diagnosis was made public, Arizona announced its state House and Senate would close for a week “out of an abundance of caution.” Giuliani spent more than 10 hours at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix last Monday discussing election concerns and posing for a group photo with Arizona Republicans, including two members of Congress and at least 10 current and future state lawmakers.

In Georgia, members of a state Senate subcommittee who attended Thursday’s hearing with Giuliani were advised to quarantine.

“Little did I know that the most credible death threat that I encountered last week was Trump’s own lawyer,” Jen Jordan, a Georgia Democratic state senator who met with Giuliani, tweeted Sunday afternoon. “To say I am livid would be too kind. Sham senate hearing was travesty of justice. Now impact might go far beyond that.”

The Trump campaign released a statement saying Giuliani tested negative for the virus before his recent trips and “did not experience any symptoms or test positive for COVID-19 until more than 48 hours after his return.”

Dozens of White House and campaign officials have been infected with COVID-19 in the past two months, including the president himself. Last month, Giuliani’s son, Andrew, who works for the administration, tested positive for COVID-19 a day after appearing with his father at a news conference in Washington.

Trump and Giuliani’s behavior regarding protecting others from the coronavirus has been nothing short of reckless.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last night the Georgia senatorial debates (see excerpt above courtesy of Reuters) were held and failed to deliver knockout moments.  Republican Sen. David Perdue did not show which left Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff to criticize him at will.

Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler and her Democratic opponent, Rev. Raphael Warnock, traded attacks, many of which revolved around  the the presidential election and fiscal improprieties. 

The outcome of their race, along with the result of a second Georgia runoff in January between incumbent  Perdue and the Democrat, Jon Ossoff, will determine control of the Senate in the new Congress.

If either Republican incumbent holds onto their seat, the GOP will be poised to maintain its Senate majority. But if both Democrats win, it would bring the balance of power to 50-50 in the upper chamber with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris able to step in and cast tie breaking votes.

Here are four key takeaways from the Warnock-Loeffler debate courtesy of CNN.

Loeffler dodges on Trump’s baseless election claims

Loeffler was asked repeatedly during the debate to weigh in on President Donald Trump’s false claims that the election was rigged and did not directly answer questions on several occasions.

The Georgia senator did not explicitly say that she believes the presidential election was rigged when asked, but did say “it’s very clear that there were issues in this election.”

Loeffler said Trump has “every right to every legal recourse,” when asked if she stands by the President’s baseless narrative about the election, and then attempted to turn attention to her own Senate race.

Later in the debate, Warnock asked Loeffler, “Yes or no, Sen. Loeffler: Did Donald Trump lose the presidential election?

Loeffler did not give a direct answer, instead echoing what she had said earlier by saying, “President Trump has every right to use every legal recourse available.”

Warnock criticized the Republican senator over her rhetoric, saying that she “continues to cast doubt on an American democratic election.”

Warnock sidesteps on Supreme Court answer and Covid relief cost

Warnock was questioned during the debate about what topline number for total cost he would support for a new Covid relief package in Congress, as lawmakers in Washington are searching for a deal to pass such a proposal before the end of the year.

When asked to specify a number, he sidestepped, saying, “Look, I think that we should at least make sure that whatever we do, workers are at the center of that relief.”

The Democratic challenger also sidestepped when asked whether he supports expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court to offset recent appointments to the bench from Trump and whether he thinks there should be term limits for justices.

“People aren’t asking me about the courts and whether we should expand the courts. I know that’s an interesting question for people inside the beltway to discuss,” he said in response. When pressed again, he said, “I’m really not focused on it.”

Both candidates portray opponent as out of touch with voters

The debate featured pointed lines of attack traded between the two candidates who both attempted to make the case that their opponent is out of touch with voters.

Loeffler repeatedly referred to her Democratic opponent as a “radical liberal” — seeking to portray Warnock as extremely far left.

“Listen, I believe in our free enterprise system,” Warnock said during the debate after Loeffler asked if he would renounce socialism and Marxism.

Warnock, for his part, targeted the GOP senator over stock transactions that have been the subject of intense scrutiny for their timing related to the coronavirus pandemic.

Addressing Loeffler, he said, “You dumped millions of dollars of stock in order to protect your own investments and then weeks later when there came an opportunity to give ordinary Georgians an extra $600 of relief, you said you saw no need and called it counterproductive.”

Loeffler fired back, “I’ve been completely exonerated. Those are lies perpetrated by the left-wing media and Democrats to distract from their radical agenda. Since I got to the Senate, I’ve worked hard to deliver relief to Georgians during this pandemic and I’m continuing to do that.”

Loeffler and Warnock both say they would take a coronavirus vaccine

One thing the candidates could agree on was whether they would take a coronavirus vaccine with both saying that they are willing to do so when public health experts say it is safe.

“Absolutely, when our health professionals tell us that we have a vaccine that works and is effective and safe, I will take it, I will encourage the folks who listen to me, people who are in my church and in my community to take it,” Warnock said.

Loeffler also responded to the question by saying, “absolutely,” going on to say, “I could not be more proud of what we’ve done this year to deliver relief, but also get cures – vaccines and therapies that are effective. So I’m going to encourage my fellow Georgians to stay safe, to get that vaccine.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) shredded Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) for being the featured speaker at an indoor event that could become a COVID-19 superspreader in Jersey City — and warned the health regulation-busting Republican to stay out of his state (see video above).

“Matt — You are not welcome in New Jersey, and frankly I don’t ever want you back in this state,” Murphy said in a tweet Friday.

Gaetz was the featured speaker at a secret “gala fundraiser” Thursday for the New York Young Republican Club which jumped the river to bring their superspreading behavior to another state. Gaetz filled in for Tea Party supporting former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who bailed on the event because of her fears about the pandemic, The New York Times reported.

The event, with dozens of participants packed together in photos, clearly ignored New Jersey’s social distancing and mask regulations designed to help stem the spread of deadly COVID-19 amid a record surge of cases in the nation.

Gaetz was also subject to state quarantine rules since he likely flew in from Washington, D.C., or his home state of Florida, the Times noted.

New Jersey law enforcement officials are investigating.

“It is beyond the pale that anyone would willingly endanger people in another state,” Murphy complained on Twitter Friday. 

Murphy added that it is “also beyond the pale that ‘Matt Putz’ — I mean Rep. Matt Gaetz — would participate in this. What a fool.”

The governor posted a photo of Gaetz in a gas mask on the floor of the House earlier this year. Gaetz wore the mask to mock restrictions to protect people from COVID-19.

The COVID-19 death toll has reached 281,000 Americans and counting.

The New York Young Republican Club initially posted on Facebook that the event was supposed to be held in Manhattan until New York City officials challenged those plans.

Idiots!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last night,  I was curious enough to watch television coverage of  Donald Trump’s rally in Georgia to see if he would really focus on supporting Republican senatorial candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.   I should have known better.  

Before about 4,000 plus Trump fans, most not wearing masks,  the rally started with Melania Trump reading off a teleprompter about how “President Trump did this and President Trump did that…”  She then introduced her husband at which point, Trump commented on what a popular first lady Melania was.  Trump opened with how he won Florida, Ohio and the presidential election.  He then criticized Georgia Governor Brian Kemp for not calling a special session of the Georgia Legislature to investigate and order another audit of the presidential election. 

After fifteen minutes of this, I shut the television off and went for a walk in the cold winter air.  When I returned, I watched “The Maltese Falcon” on Turner Classic Movies, and then finished reading The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sindal. 

It was a most enjoyable evening without the disgraceful Trump. 

Below is a recap of his address, courtesy of the Associated Press.

Tony

—————————————————————————–

AP

Trump assails vote integrity while urging turnout in Ga.

By AAMER MADHANI, BEN NADLER and ZEKE MILLER

President Donald Trump pressed his grievances over losing the presidential election Saturday, using a rally to spread baseless allegations of misconduct in last month’s voting in Georgia and beyond even as he pushed supporters to turn out for a pair of Republican Senate candidates in a runoff election in January.

“Let them steal Georgia again, you’ll never be able to look yourself in the mirror,” Trump told rallygoers.

Trump’s 100-minute rally before thousands of largely maskless supporters came not long after he was rebuffed by Georgia’s Republican governor in his astounding call for a special legislative session to give him the state’s electoral votes, even though President-elect Joe Biden won the majority of the vote.

The Jan. 5 Senate runoffs in Georgia will determine the balance of power in Washington after Biden takes office. Republicans in the state are worried that Trump is stoking so much suspicion about Georgia elections that voters will think the system is rigged and decide to sit out the two races.

The latest futile attempt to subvert the presidential election results continued Trump’s unprecedented campaign to undermine confidence in the democratic process, but overshadowed his stated purpose in traveling to Georgia — boosting Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.

Republicans need one victory to maintain their Senate majority. Democrats need a Georgia sweep to force a 50-50 Senate and position Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking vote. Party officials had hoped the president would dedicate his energy to imploring supporters to vote in the runoff, when Perdue and Loeffler try to hold off Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively.

Trump did echo Republican rhetoric that the races amounted to “the most important congressional runoff, probably in American history.” That is only true because he lost.

But after Air Force One landed, it quickly became apparent that Trump was intent on airing his own complaints and stoking baseless doubts about the conduct of last month’s vote, rather than boosting his party.

“I want to stay on presidential,” Trumps said minutes into his speech. “But I got to get to these two.” He praised the GOP lawmakers, Perdue for his support for military spending and Loeffler for pushing for early coronavirus relief spending. But he quickly pivoted back to his own defeat.

Trump pulled out a piece of paper and read a list of his electoral achievements, including falsely asserting he won Georgia and the White House. Biden carried the state by 12,670 votes and won a record 81 million votes nationally. Trump continued to reiterate his unsubstantiated claims of fraud, despite his own administration assessing the election to have been conducted without any major issues.

Chants of “Fight for Trump” drowned out the two senators as they briefly spoke to the crowd.

Hours before the event, Trump asked Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in a phone call to order the legislative session; the governor refused, according to a senior government official in Georgia with knowledge of the call who was not authorized to discuss the private conversation and spoke on the condition of anonymity. A person close to the White House who was briefed on the matter verified that account of the call.

Kemp, in a tweet, said Trump also asked him to order an audit of signatures on absentee ballot envelopes in his state, a step Kemp is not empowered to take because he has no authority to interfere in the electoral process on Trump’s behalf.

Trump, though, vented his frustrations with Kemp on Twitter and at the rally.

“Your people are refusing to do what you ask,” he complained in a tweet, as if speaking with Kemp. “What are they hiding? At least immediately ask for a Special Session of the Legislature. That you can easily, and immediately, do.”

At the rally, he took aim once again at Kemp, saying he could assure him victory “if he knew what the hell he was doing.”

Trump’s personal contact with the governor demonstrated he is intent on amplifying his conspiratorial and debunked theories of electoral fraud even as Georgia Republicans want him to turn his focus to the runoff and encourage their supporters to get out and vote.

In his tweet, Kemp said: “As I told the President this morning, I’ve publicly called for a signature audit three times (11/20, 11/24, 12/3) to restore confidence in our election process and to ensure that only legal votes are counted in Georgia.”

While the governor does not have the authority to order a signature audit, an audit was initiated by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and it triggered a full hand recount that confirmed Biden’s victory in Georgia. The race has been certified for Biden and affirmed by the state’s Republican election officials as a fairly conducted and counted vote, with none of the systemic errors Trump alleges.

But after two pro-Trump lawyers this past week questioned whether voting again is even worth it — in echoes of the president’s baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud — even Vice President Mike Pence betrayed concerns that the Republican coalition could crack under the force of Trump’s grievances.

“I know we’ve all got our doubts about the last election, and I hear some of you saying, ‘Just don’t vote,’” Pence said Friday while campaigning with Perdue in Savannah. “If you don’t vote, they win.”

Few Republicans in Washington or Georgia believe wide swaths of the electorate in this newfound battleground would opt out of voting because of Trump’s false claims or his denigration of the Georgia governor and secretary of state for certifying Biden’s victory in the state.

The risk for the GOP is that it wouldn’t take much of a drop-off to matter if the runoffs are as close as the presidential contest: Biden won Georgia by about 12,500 votes out of 5 million cast. There’s enough noise to explain why Pence felt the need to confront the matter head on after two Trump loyalists floated the idea of the president’s supporters bailing on Perdue and Loeffler.

Trump’s false claims have resonated with voters such as Barry Mann, a 61-year-old business owner who came to hear Pence in Savannah. Mann hasn’t decided whether he’ll vote for his senators a second time.

“I think there’s some issues with our election and more investigation needs to be done,” Mann said, adding that he doesn’t think Perdue and Loeffler have done enough to support Trump’s efforts to overturn the results. “I want to see what happens between now and January,” Mann said.

Credit…Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump will be campaigning in Georgia today in support of Republican Senate candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.  Whether or not this will be helpful to them is debatable.

Michelle Goldberg, in a New York Times column this morning entitled,  The MAGA Revolution Devours Its Own, comments on this question.  Her column reviews how Trump throughout his life has and continues to use people and when they do not pay sufficient homage to him, he destroys and “devours” them.  She provides a number of examples when Trump or his henchmen attempted to skewer former allies such as U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions,  Governors Brian Kemp of Georgia and Doug Ducey of Arizona. There is also great concern that Trump will use his time on the stage tonight to focus on his unsubstantiated  claims of voter fraud in last month’s presidential election that might further alienate Republican voters in Georgia.

Ms. Goldberg’s column is below.  It is an interesting review of Trumpworld especially in this post-November election period.

Tony

——————————————————————-

The MAGA Revolution Devours Its Own

Republicans encouraged Trumpist havoc. Now it’s coming for them.

By Michelle Goldberg

Dec. 4, 2020

Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia election official and longtime Republican, held a news conference this week in which, with barely contained rage, he excoriated Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud and the threats of violence those lies inspired.

He railed against Trump’s campaign lawyer, Joseph diGenova, who called for the shooting of Christopher Krebs, a federal cybersecurity official fired by Trump for saying that the election wasn’t rigged. (DiGenova later claimed he was joking.) Sterling described a “20-something tech” involved in the vote tabulation who was getting death threats.

“It has to stop!” he said, visibly seething. “Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop.”

The next day, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, expressed his support for Sterling. “It’s about time that more people were out there speaking with truth,” he said. His office had asked Trump to “try and quell the violent rhetoric being born out of his continuing claims of winning the states where he obviously lost,” he said, to no avail. Trump’s language, said Raffensperger, was creating a “growing threat environment for election workers who are simply doing their jobs.”

Along with many other state-level Republican election officials, Sterling and Raffensperger have shown admirable commitment to the rule of law. Their refusal to participate in Trump’s attempted autogolpe helped avert a constitutional crisis. Yet it’s hard not to notice that their outrage is a bit selective.

There is nothing new about Trump inciting harassment against private citizens, or of his lackeys calling for violence against the president’s opponents. In 2015, after an 18-year-old college student asked Trump a question he didn’t like at a political forum, he targeted her on Twitter, and she was deluged with graphic, sexualized threats. Ahead of the 2018 midterms, a man named Cesar Sayoc sent homemade pipe bombs to Trump critics; he’s been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In September, Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign aide who was put in charge of communications at Health and Human Services, said in a Facebook video, “When Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin.”

Yet Raffensperger voted for Trump. On Thursday, he told CNN that he supports the president still. The fact that Trump has openly sought to undermine the 2020 election, or that he delights in siccing his followers on his perceived enemies, was not a deal-breaker for Raffensperger. If he is now incensed, it’s because he and his colleagues have become Trump’s targets.

Since Trump’s defeat, the MAGA revolution has begun devouring its own. As it does, some conservatives are discovering the downsides of having a president who spreads malicious conspiracy theories, subverts faith in democracy and turns the denial of reality into a loyalty test. As the internet meme goes, people voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, and now the leopards are turning on them.

Historically the American left, more than the right, was known for circular firing squads and excommunications. By turning the Republican Party into a cult of personality, Trump changed that. As the archconservative Jeff Sessions learned years ago, even a lifetime of ideological service is no defense when you’ve displeased Dear Leader.

People and institutions that get involved with Trump often end up diminished or disgraced. Since the election, this is happening faster than ever. The president is reportedly thinking of firing Attorney General Bill Barr because, for all Barr’s obsequious toadying, he has declined to repeat Trump’s fantasies about widespread electoral cheating. Much of the MAGA-verse has turned on Fox News, because its news programs aren’t pretending that Trump won.

Both Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona have been slavishly faithful to Trump, but stopped short of breaking the law by refusing to certify the vote in their states. For that, they’ve been at least temporarily cast out of Trump’s movement. “What is going on with @dougducey? Republicans will long remember!” Trump tweeted. At a berserk Georgia rally on Wednesday, the pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood led the crowd in a “lock him up” chant against Kemp.

In concert with the recently ousted Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, Wood called on Georgians to boycott the Jan. 5 Senate election runoff unless state officials do more to help Trump cling to power. Speaking of Georgia’s senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, Wood said: “They have not earned your vote. Don’t you give it to them. Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election, for God’s sake!”

Naturally, Republicans who understand that Trump lost and are worried about Senate control in a Joe Biden presidency aren’t happy about these antics. But what disconcerts these Republicans isn’t, by and large, that Trumpist lawyers are spewing demented misinformation. It’s that this misinformation might, for once, work against Republican power.

“At best, Wood-Powell are distracting from the G.O.P. message in the races, and at worst, they are convincing persuadable Georgians that it is the Republican Party that needs to be checked, not Joe Biden,” wrote Rich Lowry in Politico. At worst! Republicans would almost certainly be fine with Wood and Powell eroding confidence in American democracy if it didn’t threaten members of their party.

“The Republican establishment, and also the conservative establishment, has always made this bet that it could open Pandora’s box and close it on command,” Rick Perlstein, a historian of American conservatism, told me. They could activate tribalism to achieve power, while maintaining a modicum of respectability. They could create an alternative reality but keep people enclosed within it. But with Trump “having pried Pandora’s box open, that becomes impossible,” Perlstein said.

Republicans helped Trump unleash countless civic evils. They shouldn’t be surprised when those evils don’t spare them.