Tag: 2020 Election
Stevenson’s army, November 23
WaPo had the news first, now everybody discusses Biden’s choices for SecState, NSA and UN Ambassador.
Trump exits Open Skies Treaty.
Netanyahu met not-so-secretly with MBS.
Brookings Fellow writes of the politics of Biden’s foreign policy.
Hollow Pentagon: 40% of top jobs lack confirmed officials.
Pollster acknowledges ultra low response rate.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Worst and best cases, neither all that great
Younger brother Jeremy Serwer writes:
We’re almost done.
That said, apparently our Constitution provides no prescription for next steps if a President refuses to step down and leave. In a nutshell, the Founders couldn’t imagine this happening, and/or felt that such a President would be impeached/tried/convicted out of office first.
Good piece in The Washington Post today on the issue:
So, a possible worst case scenario, IMHO:
- Enough states certify their Electors to keep Biden over 270
- Trump’s attempts to reverse Electors at the Electoral College fail: legal penalties prevent electors from turning
- A final appeal by the Trump Campaign to the Supreme Court
- Court rules in favor of Biden
- Trump still doesn’t concede
- Preparations proceed for the Inauguration on the Capitol steps (won’t be challenged as Trump would also need to be inaugurated if he thinks he won)
- On January 20, 2021 at noon Biden is either sworn in, or Trump manages to disrupt the Inauguration attempting to co-opt the swearing in ceremony
- EITHER WAY, as of a second after noon on January 20 Trump is no longer President, per the Constitution and the 20th Amendment
- In preparation, the Secret Service, the Capitol Police, and/or the US military is prepared to block Trump and maintain order. Their context for not supporting President Trump: none of these services will execute what their leadership identifies as an illegal order, and our statutes protect that position. Hard to believe there’s not a lot of discussion going on in those offices.
- Biden is inaugurated
- Trump could conceivably be taken from the White House/Oval Office by force
Hopefully, the more likely scenario:
Cooler heads in the Trump family (and/or close enough confidants that Trump will not fire due to what they may know – think VP Pence?), and/or pressure from Republicans in Congress not subject to near term re-election, convince him that he has lost, that he should concede (though he may not). While he may not attend the Inauguration nor assist/facilitate the transition, he steps back from disrupting it and prepares to leave the Oval Office and the White House residence. Best case, he finally concedes and does attend Biden’s Inauguration.
No matter what happens, our country will remain sharply divided over who should be President. There will be demonstrations, potentially violence, though this too will dissipate – PARTICULARLY if we begin to curb the pandemic, consequently restore the economy to a better normalcy, and further reduce the unemployment rate – and those not working and not included in that rate – begin to get jobs back. After all, how much demonstrating can you do if you have your job(s) back, need to be at work, and by so doing are not at risk of virus infection and potentially death?
Finally, some predictions that won’t go away for a bit:
- A poor transition (assuming the GSA head still refuses to support Biden’s transition efforts) results in varied chaos for the new administration, no matter how much they are attempting to fund and execute a transition without cooperation from the Trump Administration.
- Without preparatory knowledge of Operation Warp Speed details, therapeutic treatments, PPE supplies, and vaccine distribution could be delayed or disrupted.
- Other areas of the Biden Administration will be slow to gear up.
- We will not have heard the last from Donald Trump. The Donald and his Trump minions will remain loud via social media and our e-mail IN Boxes. If he stays healthy, and/or a charismatic replacement arises, the 4-year campaign to 2024 will remain a doozy.
- Hopefully, newspapers/cable/radio (e.g., “traditional” media) will stop covering him the way they do now.
- Biden maintains his recently stated position of not prosecuting former Presidents.
- Domestically, policing/race/equality issues return to the forefront, particularly if the pandemic remains extant through all or most of 2021.
- And, in January, a possible victory by Democrats in the Georgia Senate run-offs giving them a tie-breaking majority in the Senate. At this juncture, as likely as it is not; if it happens, my prior trifecta prediction of a Dem sweep comes to fruition – albeit, barely.
Of course, none of the above could be accurate or happen, though I believe some semblance of it will. Our system – even when it’s NOT defined or prescribed – will settle this, as it’s ultimately human beings that make things work. I believe the large majority of Americans are that type of human being.
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Stevenson’s army, November 21
The House Majority Leader says earmarks will return next year. [Hooray!][CRS has more background info.]
OMB used same tactic to cut WHO payments it used to block Ukraine aid.
NYT has good explainer of the programs being ended by Treasury despite support from Fed.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Sore loser sets himself up for more losses
Donald Trump is resisting the inevitable: the end of his term as President and his return to private life, where he no doubt anticipates financial and legal troubles galore. The American legal system provides him with ample opportunities to protest and delay while he and his minions claim with no factual basis whatsoever that the result of the November 3 election was fraudulent. He has already lost more than two dozen law suits and withdrawn a few more.
So now he is doing something unprecedented. He is trying to prevent certification of the election results in order to make it possible for Republican-controlled state legislatures to decide who won in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia. In the first three of these, there are Democratic governors who can themselves endorse a winner; their choice prevails in Washington if two slates of electors arrive from the state capital when the Electoral College meets on December 14.
So the odds are long on this plot to negate the votes of millions of Americans, many of them Black and Latinx. Trump and the Republicans don’t care. They are essentially trying to turn the clock back to the original constitution, which counted each slave as 3/5* of a person for purposes of Electoral College votes but of course did not allow them (or women, or men who didn’t own property) to vote. Trump is a racist who doesn’t want Black and Latinx votes to count as much as a white person’s. Lindsey Graham was explicit about his concern in discussing mailed ballots:
If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we are going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.
I’m pretty sure what some people are calling a “coup” (note the Trumpian locution) won’t work, not least because of those Democratic governors. There may still be some uncertainty as to how this will all shake out, but it won’t likely be in Trump’s favor. Nor will he be remembered well for attempting it. While his “base” remains mostly loyal for now, the passage of time has a way of giving people with even a modicum of brains and conscience pause for reflection. I know there is a wildly optimistic premise in that remark.
From another angle, I am rather enjoying the repeated failures of Trump’s expensive and mendacious team of supposed lawyers, led by Rudy Giuliani. They have disgraced themselves both in court and in public. Disbarring might be too good for them. People who in public allege malfeasance and offer no substantial evidence for it merit universal shunning. May they never find another sucker client.
That’s what Trump is. A sucker and a loser, one who is compounding his losses with every passing day. He hopes to get lucky in one court or another, but so far at least it isn’t happening. His consolation prize will be continued control over the remnants of the Republican party and a base too small to win an election. Let him run again in 2024, if he isn’t in prison, so he can lose again.
*I originally wrote 2/3 here. Apologies.
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His grip is loosening, but his cult is strong
The signs are few and far between. Republican members of an election board in Michigan that had divided on certifying results in Biden’s favor reversed itself and did so last night. Senator McConnell has criticized the Administration’s plan for withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Other Republican senators are keeping quiet on the many court challenges and the validity of the election results. Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal lawyer, embarrassed himself in a Pennsylvania courtroom when he was unable to cite specific examples of election fraud.
Trump himself is pulling out all the stops. He claimed in a tweet that more people voted in Milwaukee than were registered to vote there. That lie was easily debunked. He fired his own appointee in charge of election security, because that official contradicted the President’s claim that there was widespread fraud. Trump is spreading rumors of his intention to run again in 2024, a prospect belied both by his poor physical condition and the likelihood he’ll spend the next four years and more in court trying to fend off lawsuits and Internal Revenue Service charges. He continues to ignore the elephant in the room: an epidemic that has now killed more than 250,000 Americans on his watch and is accelerating rapidly. Another 50,000 or so will likely die before Trump leaves office.
Still, the fan base remains strong. His voters overwhelmingly believe Biden did not legitimately win and that Trump should not concede. They like his effort to contest the election results in court, an effort that has so far produced no significant change in the vote totals and more than two dozen judicial losses. While quite a few Republican governors and mayors are issuing orders to compel people to wear masks, Trump’s loyalists–even some in intensive care units infected with Covid-19–claim the virus doesn’t exist or isn’t worse than the flu. They remain intent on their freedom not to wear a mask. It’s almost as if there is an epidemic of self-delusion, which is carried not by a virus but by a adherence to the cult of a failed president.
Biden meanwhile is building up his administration, staying calm but clear about the virus as his first priority. He will be lucky: the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines that have proven highly effective will be available in millions of doses about the time he takes office January 20. But it will still be six months or more before most of the population can be vaccinated. The Trumpians will resist and likely label the vaccines Biden hoaxes. The irony of course is that they are partly the result of Trump’s own early decision to pour government money into developing and producing them. He convinced people that the virus was a hoax but also spent billions to inoculate the country against it.
Contradiction and incoherence were never obstacles for Trump and his followers. They simply don’t care about consistency, logic, or science. Their main preoccupation is with their own identity as real Americans, by which they mean white Christians. Yes, there appear to have been some shifts in voting toward Trump among white women, Latinos and black males. But his cult remains overwhelmingly white and male. They are however in demographic decline and increasingly will, as Lindsay Graham has avowed openly, have trouble winning elections if everyone is allowed to vote. Still, there is no sign that the Republican Party is preparing to reconsider its white nationalist course. Trump’s cult remains strong, even if his grip on power is loosening.
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It’s getting serious, even if it isn’t
President Trump’s refusal to begin the transition to President-elect Biden was at first an annoyance with relatively little practical impact. Now, however, it is blocking serious planning for distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, making intelligence briefings for Biden and his team impossible, and casting doubt on US troop commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Trump is, as usual, prioritizing his personal interests in maintaining control of the Republican Party and raising money under the guise of contesting a stolen election. He knows he has lost but won’t give up until someone either chucks him out or he gets something in return. It is up to Republicans in Congress to chuck him out, at least until December 14 when the Electoral College meets and confirms Biden’s election. I can’t think of anything anyone respectable would want to give him in exchange for allowing the transition planning to start, but no doubt he would like some guarantees from Biden not to pursue judicial investigations.
The claims about a stolen election are demonstrating once again how far from reality so many of Trump’s supporters have wandered. There weren’t many at his “million” MAGA march last weekend in DC, perhaps 5,000 but certainly not 10,000. Describing downtown DC as flooded with demonstrators, as NPR did, was ludicrous. Downtown DC requires at least ten times that number to be even remotely described as flooded. Last weekend wasn’t much more than a sprinkle.
But out in the country there are still lots of people–70% of Republicans–who believe there were serious election irregularities, despite the fact that no one has found any. Aware of the likelihood such charges would arouse, state election officials appear to have run the cleanest, most correct elections ever, despite the onslaught of early voting and mailed-in ballots. I hope that the recounts and certifications to come will convince some people, but there is little sign of openness among the Republican base to the notion that Trump lost. Period.
He lost big in the popular vote–by more than 5 million–but that doesn’t really count. The Electoral College looks to be divided precisely as it was in 2016 (306/232), a margin Trump has always described as a landslide. I would say decisive, not a landslide. People are still trying to figure out just what happened, but it appears Trump lost support in the suburbs. I guess they weren’t so interested in his saving them from lower-income people, partly because lots of lower-income people already live there.
Biden now faces the prospect of trying to govern without a full transition period, with a narrowed majority in the House, and with a Republican majority in the Senate, unless the Democrats manage to pull of the unlikely feat of winning the two run-off contests in Georgia January 5. But he faces that prospect with an unusually wide and deep talent pool, many with fairly recent experience in governing and four years in the wilderness to think about how to do it better. So the President-elect may be handicapped, but when you are choosing your Secretary of State from among Susan Rice, Bill Burns, Tony Blinken, Chris Murphy, and some other political stars you are still well off.
Trump may of course still have some tricks up his sleeve, though so far his lawyers have lost two dozen election-related cases in court and won just one that will not affect the election outcome. The only virtue of the agony he is putting the nation through is the possibility it will convert a few of his cultists to reality-based politics. But there is no sign of that yet. The lack of transition is getting serious, even if the people who are causing it are not.
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