Editors’ Blog
On Wednesday I noted how critical it is that Democrats go on offense to protect democracy in this country. This is not only a critical policy imperative. It is also good politics. The critical point, as I argued, is that Democrats need to go on offense now – pushing a broad array of reforms to secure civic democracy in this country – because Republicans will certainly use this election as another excuse to impose further restrictions. And here we have one of the first of what will certainly be many examples.
As the end of 2020 approaches, TPM is celebrating its 20th anniversary. And, in honor of that, we’re doing something a little different with the Golden Dukes this year: We’re going to crown the all-time Golden Duke, or at least the greatest of the last twenty years. Or rather, you’ll crown this winner.
President Trump has been laying the groundwork for years at this point.
Even if he had won the election, he’d probably continue floating it — letting a potential Michael Flynn pardon swing in the breeze while he waits for the right moment to let it drop. Now we’ve reached an hour so ripe with presidential turmoil that he might as well fling a distraction at his base.
President Trump’s decision to allow the full, formal transition process to move forward signals the end of any real attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. It’s been clear for a while that this effort would fail; now you can be sure of it. The real impact of the blizzard of lies and frivolous lawsuits about voter fraud, however, will be as the premise and predicate for a new round of voter suppression laws Republican legislatures and GOP-appointed judges will try to put into effect starting next year.
We’ve seen this pattern before, as predictable as day follows night.
We know that Joe Biden, President-Elect of the United States, has vast expectations for his presidency resting on his shoulders. That challenge grew only greater when it became clear Democrats would likely not control the Senate for the first two years of Biden’s presidency. But beyond specific legislation or executive actions there is something more basic we should focus on – something Democrats have often done poorly at, not least in the presidency of Barack Obama, in which Biden served as Vice President. It is never enough to govern well and trust that voters will reward good governance. It simply never works that way.
The news out of the GSA last night was obviously newsworthy — the strongest indication yet that President Trump is running out of options to keep his claims of a stolen election afloat.
Perhaps it’s easier to speak out against President Trump and the flailing, chaotic, dwindling days of his presidency when you’re no longer in an official position.
At TPM, we have certain terms we use over and over. Dignity wraiths. The brittle grip. A new one in recent months: Schrodinger’s DHS secretary. You can find a (very) partial list of these terms — Josh Marshallisms, largely — here.
For our 20th anniversary celebration next month, we’re putting together a master list. It’s quite an undertaking: Twenty years of proprietary terms. But we think it will serve as a useful guide to some of the key themes of the last two decades. Also, we think it will be funny.
However: 20 years is a long time, and we need the help of our dedicated readers to remember some of these terms.
So, if you remember one that we’re missing, shoot us an email.
There’s an important and clarifying subtext to Team Trump’s decision to jettison Sidney Powell from the zombie campaign’s legal team. Yes, her theories and accusations are terrifyingly demented. But, c’mon … do we think that’s really supposed to be a problem? The issue is the Georgia senate races.
I’m not sure quite what to make of this. Those two Michigan House and Senate leaders who went to visit President Trump at the White House appear to have given Trump an unqualified ‘no’. Indeed, not only do they appear to have given him an unqualified ‘no’ in the joint statement they released after the meeting. But they coupled this with an ask for more COVID relief.
At least three members of the Trump family inner orbit are looking to a future that might not necessarily involve the chief patriarch being president of the United States.
While the family publicly continues to hype Trump’s dangerous and ridiculous election delegitimization crusade, privately a few have their sights set on their own political futures.
Two weeks ago, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow announced that she had been exposed to COVID-19 and would be stepping away from the network’s post-election coverage to quarantine. Last night, Maddow revealed that her partner of more than two decades, Susan Mikula, has been battling a severe case of the coronavirus.
“At one point, we really thought there was a possibility that it might kill her,” Maddow said, adding that Mikula is thankfully now on the road to recovery.
It was a powerful and authentic moment, and a reminder of the human toll of the virus. Give it a watch after the jump.
To soften the blow of defeat Fox's Geraldo proposes naming the vaccine after Trump. "It would be a nice gesture to him and years from now it would become kind of a generic name. Have you got your trump yet, I got my trump, I'm fine. I wished we could honor him in that way." pic.twitter.com/fM8qwFhxF6
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 20, 2020
Through this corrupt era one of the common refrains has been, “that’s why or how we got Trump.” Usually it is whatever it is the person didn’t like before Trump rebranded as the bad thing that got us Trump. But on display today is one of the real reasons ‘we got Trump.’ It’s not the deepest reason but it is a critical, critical part of the equation. It’s also why Donald Trump was able to careen through the leading candidates of the Republican party so easily in 2016.
We’re watching the press conference of the President’s legal team. It’s an all star team of rejects and degenerates from the Fox Cinematic Universe: Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Joe DiGenova. It’s both comical in its slapdash level of nonsense but also deeply corrupt and an attack on the very foundations of the American republic. In the course of this event Giuliani has claimed that most of the votes in Wayne County (Detroit) are invalid and should be discarded. Needless to say, this disenfranchises most of the African-American population in Michigan. As Giuliani succinctly put it, “It changes the results of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County.”
We have a new, exclusive story up right now.
TPM’s Tierney Sneed has learned that the Census Bureau identified routine issues in data from the 2020 decennial census, and will need time to fix them. This seemingly small wrinkle could have significant implications for how political power is distributed through apportionment.
In a narrow sense, this is a very New York City-centric issue. But if it comes to fruition, life as we know it in this city will not only collapse further into the unlivable realm than it already has in the wake of COVID-19, but we might see another outbreak spike in the city.
Now’s your chance to sit back and absorb Josh Kovensky’s deeply reported piece on the Falwells and Giancarlo Granda. Caught with only a short break between Zoom calls? Here’s a condensed version of the main takeaways.
We should take a moment this morning to give a big thanks to the Biden campaign team and all the tens of millions of Biden voters. Because under extremely difficult circumstances they made sure it wasn’t close. Biden will win by at least 4 percentage points and likely more like 5. He will win by a 74 vote margin in the electoral college. Under normal, legitimate circumstances a win is a win is a win. Margins are just about bragging and feeling good. But this year it was critical and you can see that from the events of the last 24 hours.
I seldom or maybe never just reprint a tweet in a post. But this one is worth your reading all the way through.
Forget Russia’s interference in '16. Or Trump’s impeachment for asking Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden.
Arguably the biggest political scandal we’ve ever seen in this country is unfolding right before our eyes — even if it's failed to gain traction https://t.co/dRP80pnb0o pic.twitter.com/YdriQN6hJd
— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) November 18, 2020
Stunning turn of events tonight in Michigan. The Wayne County Board of Canvassers deadlocked and was unable to certify the county’s vote. Wayne County includes Detroit. The Board has two Republicans and two Democrats. The Republicans refused to certify. But tellingly the GOP Chair said they’d agree as long as Detroit was left out. Basically, they were trying to pull a power play in which they used their power to toss out the votes of the city of Detroit.
The state GOP jumped in and lauded the decision. Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis excitedly predicted it was the first step toward the GOP state legislature tossing out the results of the election and appointing Trump electors to the electoral college. Finally President Trump himself tweeted excitedly that it was a turning point.
But then it all changed.
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Just to keep you up to date, this Lindsey Graham story continues to grow. As we noted last night, Graham approached the Republican Secretary of State in Georgia with a plan to throw out what appears to have been a huge number of legally cast mail-in ballots. Since mail-in ballots overwhelmingly favored Joe Biden, there’s every reason to think that would have made Trump the winner and quite possibly avoided a run-off for David Purdue.
The full story of the Falwells’ romantic entanglement with a one-time pool attendant-turned business associate appears to be far messier and more surprising than we knew.
NBC is out this morning with an article which seem to signal President-Elect Biden’s “wary” of having the Justice Department scrutinize and possibly indict his predecessor, Donald Trump. It’s a bit of a hard article to decipher. On its face, it simply says that Biden is going to leave prosecutorial decisions to the Justice Department, which is exactly what should happen. A President who makes the DOJ and its prosecutorial power a tool of his personal will is the problem we’re trying to solve not the solution it. But you can also read it as Biden doesn’t want his presidency consumed by the drama and pyrotechnics of investigations and prosecutions of Trump and his family, which sounds a lot like ‘turning the page’ and ‘looking forward not back.’
According to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Sen. Lindsey Graham approached him about throwing out all mail-in ballots in counties that had higher than average ballot signature mismatches. This is a request (almost certainly at President Trump’s behest) to violate the law by throwing out huge numbers of legally cast votes on an absurd premise. He might as well have asked Raffensperger to falsify the numbers. And in fact, I think that is what it amounts to. This comes out in a new interview with Raffensperger from The Washington Post.
That’s a headline that could encompass the societal feeling of just about any stage of 2020. But it feels particularly pointed right now.
You may have heard that the Trump campaign has now dropped most of its case against the results of the presidential election in Pennsylvania. But they’re expanding their case in other directions. Specifically, counsel for the President’s campaign is asking the court to sanction counsel for the State of Pennsylvania (technically, the Secretary of State) because an unnamed associate at Kirkland Ellis left a mean voicemail in her voicemail box.
Last night I was heartened to hear that The Washington Post had called for the abolition of the electoral college in an editorial. This is hardly a controversial view, certainly among Democrats. But I was glad to see it because I’ve been thinking in recent months of the critical importance of building in this country what for lack of a better phrase I’ll call a democracy agenda. This is critical first because what we’ve long considered the most basic assumptions of civic democracy are so clearly under threat but also because longstanding features of the apparatus of the American state, which had the potential to thwart the democratic will, have now begun actively to do so.
I don’t know if you watched the President’s comments yesterday at his vaccine event. But one of our number, TPM Reader EB, said after it ended that that was the concession. He was right. I didn’t quite get it as it was happening. But after EB said it I realized he was right.
Of course he didn’t literally concede anything. Trump was petulant, lashing out at perceived enemies. But he was low energy and notably did not take questions. There was one moment even when he had to catch himself because he almost inadvertently admitted that he lost and that his presidency is ending.
It’s been rumored for years that President Trump doesn’t actually enjoy being president. And that’s never been more clear than the last week.