The Proud Crowd is Coming

Sixty-Eight Days:  So much for my fantasy that Trump would leave Washington, turning over the war against COVID to  Biden’s team of competent scientists and public health professionals as soon as it was obvious that he’d lost the election. Well Trump’s loss is obvious, but he still hasn’t and probably never will concede and most in his party are so fearful of incurring his twitter wrath, fearing that doing so will damage their future reelection campaigns and presidential ambitions, that they remain on his train.  Ironically, those presidential ambitions shared by an increasing cast of Republican characters, will be stymied, at least for a while, as Trump is now hinting that when and if he leaves office, he’ll immediately announce that he’s running in 2024, that will allow him to raise money, even more than he’s currently raising for his faux legal battles, and maintain relevancy as he pursues his media ambitions.  For now, Trump’s still waging a largely symbolic legal war against the election results, sending scores of lawyers to courts, only in states he lost of course. His legal claims are baseless and his legal team knows it, several times when asked by presiding judges if they had actual evidence of election fraud, those attorneys admitted no fraud, just a sloppy signature or two.  In one case, a particularly inept attorney actually filed his brief in the wrong court system. Even in the isolated cases where the Trump legal team has managed to get a few votes tossed, Biden’s margin of victory remains too large for their minor successes to have any impact.  Since grifters have to grift it’s worth noting that a careful read of the teeny, tiny print at the end of Trump’s legal fundraising emails alerts donors that Trump can spend their contributions on personal items. 

The Turning Tide:  Despite Trump’s efforts to remain in office the tide is turning against him, it turns out that Fox and the AP were right about Biden winning Arizona, last night the decision desks at CNN and MSNBC joined in, calling Arizona for Biden.  The editorial board of MAGA Mega donor Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas paper has called for Trump to face reality adding “An electoral system that involves the participation of 150 million Americans will have its share of issues, but it’s an insult to reason and logic to argue that isolated irregularities constitute proof of a grand national conspiracy.”  Despite Trump’s best efforts at intimidation, his own Department of Homeland Security issued a statement yesterday confirming that “the November 3 election was the most secure in American history ….There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.”  Of course the people at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the division of Homeland Security responsible for keeping the voting systems safe and for signing on to those remarks, are now on the chopping block, both for making that statement and for effectively preventing Russian interference and rebutting Trump disinformation.  Yesterday CISA director Christopher Krebs told associates he expects to be fired because he’s angered the White House by doing his job so well and the White House has already asked Bryan Ware, the assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, to hand in his resignation. As to the transition, so far few Republican Senators are willing to formally acknowledge Biden’s victory but more of them now say that the time has come for the GSA to facilitate Biden’s transition and most of the same crowd are also onboard with Biden getting read into the top secret presidential daily briefing. Even China gets it, early this morning their foreign minister somewhat belatedly congratulated Biden and Harris on their apparent victory.

Viral Musings:  The virus continues to do its horrifying thing,  California has joined Texas as the second state to have crossed through the 1 million case barrier; by comparison New York State, the early epicenter, has so far reached “only” 550,000 cases although that number is moving to a steeper climb. A record number of 140,000 people tested COVID positive yesterday, a number of states have reached or are about to reach their hospital capacities and daily death counts are now regularly exceeding 1000, odd because Trump asserts that people don’t die from COVID anymore.  A few more individuals who attended Trump’s super spreader election night victory rally have now tested COVID positive, including advisor Corey Lewandowski, particularly distressing because he’s been traveling all over and now we know that he’s been spreading a whole lot more than election disinformation. It’s not just careless, creep Corey, billionaire donors Liz and Dick Uihlein, who also attended the COVID House election festivities, have tested positive despite Liz’s belief that the virus is so not a thing to worry about, at least that’s what she’s been telling her call center employees when they’ve complained about their too close work conditions.  RNC’s chief of staff, Richard Walters is also in the positive column.  Though he was nowhere near the election night party, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is now in quarantine because his wife tested COVID positive. Several members of Raffensperger’s staff are also quarantining but no worry, he wants us all to know that nothing about that will inhibit the hand counting of Georgia’s votes, that’s the hand count that he’s doing to placate Trump and his abettors.   

Et Cetera:  Bloomberg News reports that NY State Attorney General Letitia James’ office is investigation the tax returns of the family of Trump Organization CFO Alan Weisselberg.  Tish and crowd are focusing on their failure to declare the value of their rent free Trump Tower apartment as well as certain other benefits such as free albeit not so legit accounting services as taxable income.  It’s fair to assume that the point of those investigations is to pressure Weisselberg to cooperate in the investigation into Trump and his kids, just another reason that Trump is freaking out.  On the Trump front a number of his cronies believe that when he’s finally ready to leave, the crybaby and Melania will slink off to Mar a Lago, never to return to Washington.  That won’t happen right away because Trump wouldn’t want to miss the Million Maga March, the one with lots of white supremacists, Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis, scheduled for this weekend, but it could happen as soon as Thanksgiving or, if those who claim to know are correct, by Christmas.  It’s not clear whether Ivanka and Jared will join them.  Right before Election Day, the two pulled their kids from the Washington DC private day school they had been attending, transferring them to one in Maryland, after the parents at the DC school complained that Ivanka and Jared’s attendance at those large unmasked viral COVID House events heightened the risk of all their families contracting COVID.  Moving the kids again might be too off brand for model mom Ivanka who hopes to climb her way back into what passes for polite society.   

Have a safe weekend.