You’re Fired!

A compendium of post-firing news articles and opinion pieces

 

You’re Fired!

by Bendib

Hello Joe, ByeDon. ‘He’s Gone’: Celebrations as Trump —Worst and Most

Dangerous President in American History— Departs White House.

Donald Trump is still technically president, but Americans on social media and in the streets breathed sighs of relief and celebrated Wednesday morning after the outgoing incumbent departed the White House for Florida ahead of the noon swearing-in of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

“Thank you to those who fought so hard and resisted. He’s gone,” said immigrant rights activist Erika Andiola, a message echoed by thousands of others after Trump left Washington, D.C. following a brief speech to a small crowd of his supporters.

In response to a video of Trump leaving the White House in Marine One, Sina Toossi of the National Iranian American Council tweeted, “This is the single greatest thing Trump has ever done for America.”

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump board Marine One as they depart the White House on January 20, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Eric Thayer/Getty Images)
JANUARY 20, 2021 8:30 a.m.- MST

—”Goodbye and good riddance Donald Trump. See you at your trial,” said Sen. Ed Markey. by Jake Johnson, staff writer Wednesday, January 20, 2021 Donald Trump is still technically president, but Americans on social media and…

Read full story here…

Jubilant Celebrations outside Trump White House, Nationwide after Biden/Harris victory

“The fight isn’t over. But man, this feels good right now.”

by Common Dreams staff

Saturday, November 7, 2020

People celebrate on Black Lives Matter plaza across from the White House in Washington, DC on November 7, 2020, after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election. – Democrat Joe Biden has won the White House, US media said November 7, defeating Donald Trump and ending a presidency that convulsed American politics, shocked the world and left the United States more divided than at any time in decades. (Photo: Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images) 

Massive streets celebrations erupted outside the White House in Washington, D.C. as well as across other cities and communities nationwide on Saturday afternoon as word spread that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election and is now considered the nation’s President-elect.

Thousands of people—mostly masked due to the Covid-19—swarmed the streets in the nation’s capitol and descended on Lafayette Park where they blared music and held signs outside the White House gates.

As the Washington Post reports:

Around noon, an impromptu parade broke out on the streets of the nation’s capital to celebrate Biden’s victory. A brass band perched on the back of a truck played upbeat jazz as people spilled out of homes, shops and restaurants in downtown D.C. to join the march.

The crowd swelled quickly as the truck moved from the heart of Adams Morgan in the direction of the White House—first a dozen, then three dozen and soon close to a hundred. A few policemen on motorcycles escorted the group as passing cars stopped to honk, their drivers cheering.

A woman on a bicycle pedaled through Columbia Heights shouting, “It’s over!”

A man in Shaw stood on the curb with a stemmed glass of red wine, raising it to passersby.

“We won!” he shouted in Spanish. “We won!”

Fireworks exploded in bursts as neighbors emerged on porches with pots and pans to bang. Some simply stood there, raising their phones as if it were proof what they were seeing was real.

“The nightmare is over,” a man called to his neighbor, ambling out of a rowhouse just before noon.

Similar scenes were seen in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere:

“Ah, finally, something to celebrate,” Justin Oakley, a resident of Brooklyn, told the New York Times, while celebrating in Prospect Park. “The fight isn’t over. But man, this feels good right now.”

This article published by Common Dreams on November 7, 2020, here…

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

Biden further solidifies victory with Arizona win as election officials counter Trump’s fraud lies in joint declaration

“In an extraordinary rebuke, a federal agency releases statement from federal, state, and local officials saying Trump is totally full of it when he claims large-scale election fraud.”

by Jon Queally, staff writer

Friday, November 13, 2020

CNN was among the major news outlets Thursday night that projected Joe Biden, already considered the president-elect based on the number of electoral college votes he has secured, had also won Arizona—the first time the state has gone to a Democrat since 1996. (Image: CNN)

President-elect Joe Biden received further good electoral news later Thursday night as major news outlets—based on a fresh batch of reported results—finally put the state of Arizona in his column, cementing his national lead in the electoral college just as a statement issued from state and national election officials stated that President Donald Trump’s continued claims of voter fraud are not based in reality.

Biden, as the New York Times reported late Thursday,

has narrowly won Arizona, capturing the state’s 11 electoral votes and strengthening his Electoral College margin as President Trump continues to make baseless attacks on the vote counts favoring Mr. Biden.

Mr. Biden, whose margin in Arizona is currently about 11,000 votes, or 0.3 percentage points, is the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state since President Bill Clinton in 1996. Four years ago, Mr. Trump won the state by 3.5 percentage points.

While others, including Fox News, had already done so, NBC News and CNN were among the outlets to finally call the state in Biden’s favor. With that, Biden has now secured 290 votes in the electoral college—20 over the 270 threshold needed—compared to Trump’s 217. Biden also leads the popular vote by over 5 million—a lead that continues to grow.

The news from Arizona dovetailed with a joint statement from national, state, and private election officials that declared—in a direct rebuke to lies and falsehoods spewed by Trump—that “the November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”

Distributed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the statement issued by the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees, federal bodies which oversee the election and include federal employees from within the Trump administration, declares unequivocally that “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

“While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections,” the statement continued, “we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too. When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.”

As the Times noted, the statement from the election officials was released just hours after Trump repeated a baseless report that a voting machine system “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide”—a baseless lie not substantiated by any evidence.

In addition to backing the substance of the statement, Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), was openly going on offense against Trump’s misinformation tactics—which he called “Rumor Control” on social media. Among his activity on Twitter, Krebs retweeted a post from David Becker, an election security expert and director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who warned people against being taken by such false claims.

“Please don’t retweet wild and baseless claims about voting machines, even if they’re made by the president,” Becker had tweeted. “These fantasies have been debunked many times, including by @DHSgov @CISAgov on this excellent site/resource, Rumor Control.”

This article published by Common Dreams on November 13, 2020, here…

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

 


‘Nightmare Coming to an End’: Vanquishing Donald Trump

“We, the voters, decided this!”

by Common Dreams staff

Saturday, November 7, 2020

After days of uncertainty amid concurrent global crises, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was declared the winner of the closely-watched contest that denied President Donald Trump a second term Saturday morning, after votes tallied in the battleground state of Pennsylvania pushed Biden over the 270 electoral vote threshold.

According to NBC News: “The former vice president amassed 273 Electoral College votes after winning Pennsylvania’s 20 electors, according to NBC News, surpassing the 270 needed to win the White House and defeat President Donald Trump.”

The Associated Press, which put both Arizona and Pennsylvania in Biden’s column, also called the race:

The determination in Pennsylvania put Biden at 273 electoral votes to Trump’s 214—a deficit the president has no way of overcoming even as five other states—Alaska, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina—continue to process their results. Adding Arizona’s eleven electortal to Biden’s column, put his electoral count to 284.

Shortly after the news broke, Biden said in a tweet addressed to the nation that he was “honored that you have chosen me to lead our great country.”

“The work ahead of us will be hard,” he added, “but I promise you this: I will be a President for all Americans—whether you voted for me or not. I will keep the faith that you have place in me.”

Progressives immediately celebrated Biden’s victory and expressed elation over Trump’s pending departure.

“This nightmare is coming to an end. Despite every attempt to silence our voices and block our vote, the will of the people won,” declared George Goehl, director of the grassroots advocacy group People’s Action.

“We, the voters, decided this!” said Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, North America director for 350 Action, in a statement when the news broke. “By working together, our unapologetic movement for people and planet has been steadfast and patient as our votes were counted. People power stood up to Donald Trump’s fascist vision for America and elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris into the White House. The government we chose must be sworn in because this is the people’s democracy.”

The subject line in an email from the Sunrise Movement was expressive: “We fucking did it.”

“Excuse my language,” said the group’s executive director Varshini Prakash, “but we fucking did it. It’s official. We WON.”

“We won. And this is a big win,” said María Urbina, acting co-executive director and national political director of Indivisible. “A record number of voters turned out amidst a pandemic to express the will of the people, and to put a historic ticket in the White House by clear margins. Come January, we’ll move forward together to swear in a President and Vice President who are serious about governing and will be expected to deliver on an agenda of dignity and justice for all.”

“Together,” Urbina added, “we can make good on the promise of an America that works for all of us, that prioritizes the most vulnerable, and that ensures we can all live with dignity. For now, we celebrate. This victory belongs to all of us.”

Biden’s victory comes in the midst of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and related economic crisis, a monthslong national reckoning over systemic racism, seemingly endless U.S. war, and the global climate emergency. There have been more than 9.7 million Covid-19 cases and nearly 236,000 deaths in the United States out of over 49 million infections and 1.24 million deaths worldwide.

On top of that is the broader crisis of Trump’s presidency, which has featured rollbacks of environmental and public health protections at the behest of deep-pocketed polluters, a “pro-corporate, anti-worker agenda,” efforts to degrade the rights of historically marginalized groups, inhumane immigration policies—including forcibly separating migrant children from their parents at the border—and constant lies.

Since Election Day, Trump has escalated his attacks on American democracy by falsely declaring victory early Wednesday, tweeting disinformation about the election, and delivering on Thursday evening what one reporter called “the most dishonest speech he has ever given.” His campaign has also filed multiple lawsuits this week related to the race, validating pre-election warnings that he would try to steal the vote to retain power.

The president’s actions sparked nationwide demonstrations demanding election officials “count every vote.” Amid fears that Trump may refuse to concede, Biden campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement on Friday that “the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1942, Biden studied history and political science at the University of Delaware then earned a law degree at Syracuse University. After practicing law as a public defender and at a firm, and entering local politics in Delaware’s New Castle County, he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972.

Biden represented Delaware in the Senate for nearly four decades—with stints chairing the Foreign Relations and Judiciary committees—before serving as vice president for both terms of President Barack Obama’s administration. After declining to run in 2016, Biden beat 27 primary competitors to secure the 2020 Democratic nomination.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Biden’s running mate, was among his primary competitors. Born in 1964, Harris hails from Oakland, California. After graduating from Howard University, she earned a law degree from the University of California, Hastings. She was district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016. She will be the first woman, as well as the first Black and South Asian American, to serve as vice president.

Since Biden selected Harris in August, progressives have pledged to continue engaging with the pair and pushing them to embrace bold, popular policies including Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. As climate campaigners have pressured Biden and Harris to pursue more ambitious proposals, they have also emphasized that “Trump’s climate policies are a raging dumpster fire.” On Wednesday, the U.S. ditched the 2015 Paris climate agreement at Trump’s direction; Biden has vowed to reenter the accord.

While progressives—including former primary rivals Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—have rallied behind Biden’s bid to oust Trump, the future president has also faced extensive criticism for his political track record on numerous fronts, such as his support for the Iraq War, his primary role in the 1994 crime bill, and his refusal to back universal public healthcare or a ban on fracking for fossil fuels.

“The evident defeat of Donald Trump would not have been possible without the grassroots activism and hard work of countless progressives,” Norman Solomon wrote in a column for Common Dreams early Friday. “Now, on vital issues—climate, healthcare, income inequality, militarism, the prison-industrial complex, corporate power, and so much more—it’s time to engage with the battle that must happen inside the Democratic Party.”

Some news outlets, such as Vox and Business Insider, declared Biden victorious on Friday morning, based on a determination from their election-calling partner, Decision Desk HQ, at 8:50 am ET that the former vice president had won Pennsylvania—hours before other election-calling operations or major news network announced a winner.

“The race is over, as far as our call is concerned, because of the vote totals coming out of Philadelphia this morning,” Drew McCoy, the president of Decision Desk, told Vox senior politics correspondent Andrew Prokop. “It became pretty obvious that as the remaining votes across the state and in Philadelphia are counted, Biden’s lead will continue to grow.”

This article published by Common Dreams on November 7, 2020, here…

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

“The fight isn’t over. But man, this feels good right now.”

by Common Dreams staff

Saturday, November 7, 2020

People celebrate on Black Lives Matter plaza across from the White House in Washington, DC on November 7, 2020, after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election. – Democrat Joe Biden has won the White House, US media said November 7, defeating Donald Trump and ending a presidency that convulsed American politics, shocked the world and left the United States more divided than at any time in decades. (Photo: Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images) 

Massive streets celebrations erupted outside the White House in Washington, D.C. as well as across other cities and communities nationwide on Saturday afternoon as word spread that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election and is now considered the nation’s President-elect.

Thousands of people—mostly masked due to the Covid-19—swarmed the streets in the nation’s capitol and descended on Lafayette Park where they blared music and held signs outside the White House gates.

As the Washington Post reports:

Around noon, an impromptu parade broke out on the streets of the nation’s capital to celebrate Biden’s victory. A brass band perched on the back of a truck played upbeat jazz as people spilled out of homes, shops and restaurants in downtown D.C. to join the march.

The crowd swelled quickly as the truck moved from the heart of Adams Morgan in the direction of the White House—first a dozen, then three dozen and soon close to a hundred. A few policemen on motorcycles escorted the group as passing cars stopped to honk, their drivers cheering.

A woman on a bicycle pedaled through Columbia Heights shouting, “It’s over!”

A man in Shaw stood on the curb with a stemmed glass of red wine, raising it to passersby.

“We won!” he shouted in Spanish. “We won!”

Fireworks exploded in bursts as neighbors emerged on porches with pots and pans to bang. Some simply stood there, raising their phones as if it were proof what they were seeing was real.

“The nightmare is over,” a man called to his neighbor, ambling out of a rowhouse just before noon.

Similar scenes were seen in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere:

“Ah, finally, something to celebrate,” Justin Oakley, a resident of Brooklyn, told the New York Times, while celebrating in Prospect Park. “The fight isn’t over. But man, this feels good right now.”

This article published by Common Dreams on November 7, 2020, here…

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

As street parties erupt over Biden victory, Trump substitutes concession with ‘This election Is far from over’

The new lame-duck president showed no sense of irony, hypocrisy, or self-awareness at all as he accused Biden, who has repeatedly over the last four days urged for all the ballots to be counted and for the nation to be patient, of claiming his win prematurely.

by Jon Queally, staff writer

Saturday, November 7, 2020

People carry a Trump inflatable as they celebrate on Black Lives Matter plaza across from the White House in Washington, DC on November 7, 2020, after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election. (Photo: Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images) 

Amid Democratic elation and the eruption of street dancing, champagne corks, and exclamations of joy over Saturday’s announcement that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election to become the next President of the United States, his opponent—President Donald Trump—issued a statement shortly after the news broke making clear there is likely no concession speech in sight as he made further unfounded claims over the election results and vowed further legal challenges.

While Trump had earlier announced his intention to hold an 11:30 am ET news conference, that event was scuttled, or at least postponed, when major news networks—which have been diligently tracking the counting of ballots since voting concluded on Tuesday—called the race in Biden’s favor at roughly the same time.

Despite Trump’s repeated and outrageously false public statements—starting on Election Night and carrying through to Saturday morning—that he “in fact” was the actual winner of the 2020 race, the sitting president showed no sense of irony, hypocrisy, or self-awareness at all as he accused Biden, who has repeatedly over the last four days urged for all the ballots to be counted and for the nation to be patient, of claiming his win prematurely.

“We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed,” Trump declared in a bizarre written statement issued by his campaign after Biden’s win was projected.

“The simple fact is this election is far from over,” the statement continued. “Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor. In Pennsylvania, for example, our legal observers were not permitted meaningful access to watch the counting process. Legal votes decide who is president, not the news media.”

As of this writing, Trump has given no additional indication that he was preparing a concession that he might deliver to Biden or the nation, but that didn’t keep some detractors of the president from wondering what such a process—given his behavior thus far—might look like:

While it’s very much true as Trump states that media outlets do not get to decide who wins or loses an election, it has been Trump all week long making preposterous and lie-filled claims about the process. As Common Dreams reported earlier Saturday, the repeated false claims and assertion by the president have made clear that he is more interested in trying to either steal the election or sow chaos on his way out the door than actually engage in a fact-based assessment of where the vote count has been at any given point.

This article published by Common Dreams on November 7, 2020, here…

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

No you didn’t, Mr. President. No you didn’t.

 

Trump effort to steal election, sow national chaos is taking place in broad daylight

On Saturday morning, the U.S. president falsely claimed he “won this election, by a lot.” The only legitimate, fact-based response to that must be: No, you didn’t.

by Jon Queally, staff writer

Saturday, November 7, 2020

President Donald Trump walks to the motorcade on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, on November 7, 2020, as he departs for an undisclosed location. (Photo B&W illustration: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images) 

Update: Vanquishing President Donald Trump, Democratic nominee Joe Biden has won the 2020 presidential election and will become the 46th President of the United States. Major news outlets, including NBC News and the Associated Press, made their official projections late Saturday morning.

Earlier:

President Donald Trump’s brazen effort to spew misinformation as a way to steal the presidential election away from the American people continued Saturday, even as the results so far—based on a steady counting of ballots nationwide and in key states yet to be called—all show that Joe Biden is almost certainly on the verge of being the next president of the United States.

In a series of unhinged tweets Saturday morning—most of which were marked by the social media company as containing information that is “disputed” or “might be misleading about an election or other civic process”—Trump lied to the world, without providing a shred of evidence, that massive fraud has taken place since Election Day as state election offices counted an unprecedented amount of mail-in, absentee, and provisional ballots cast this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

At 10:36 am ET, Trump falsely asserted: “I won this election, by a lot!” There is, however, only one possible fact-based response to such a clear lie and that would be: No, you didn’t.

According to the New York Times, as of this writing, Biden leads Trump in the electoral college race by a margin of 253 to 214, and leads the national popular vote by 4,150,184 (74,449,091 for Biden compared to Trump’s 70,298,907).

As was predicted almost word-for-word by people like Sen. Bernie Sanders—who warned exactly of this kind of “nightmare scenario”—instead of getting ready to concede as he inches towards inevitable defeat to his Democratic rival, Trump has wrapped himself in a thick blanket of falsehoods to claim that a huge number of ballots cast against him are fraudulent as a way to delegitimize the election and sow massive distrust and unrest among his supporters.

According to the Associated Press on Saturday morning, Biden “edges closer to win” with a final call in Pennsylvania—where he currently leads Trump by a margin of 49.6% to 49.2% with 99% of the vote counted—all he needs to secure overall victory in the electoral college race to 270. As AP reports:

The delay in producing a verdict could be attributed to high turnout, a massive number of mail-in ballots and slim margins between the candidates. Biden held leads in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Georgia, putting him in a stronger position to capture the 270 Electoral College votes needed to take the White House.

There was intense focus on Pennsylvania, where Biden led Trump by more than 28,000 votes, and Nevada, where Biden was up by about 22,000. The prolonged wait added to the anxiety of a nation facing historic challenges, including the surging coronavirus pandemic and deep political polarization.

Meanwhile, Trump renewed his offense by making baseless claims of fraud.

“Bad things took place during those hours where LEGAL TRANSPARENCY was viciously & crudely not allowed,” falsely stated at 8:20 am ET via his Twitter account. “Tractors blocked doors & windows were covered with thick cardboard so that observers could not see into the count rooms. BAD THINGS HAPPENED INSIDE. BIG CHANGES TOOK PLACE!” Not a word of this is substantiated, but that didn’t stop the president from saying it to his millions of supporters.

Since Election Night, when Trump claimed he already “did win” the election, Trump has refused to acknowledge the legitimate vote-counting process and instead used the ensuing days—while Biden has called for patience and assured Americans that “every vote must be counted”—to deepen his conspiratorial proclamations. Trump’s effort, say progressive critics, is about much more than just lying and deceit, but should be seen as an outright effort to “steal the election.”

As Esquire‘s Jack Holmes wrote Friday, the whole situation is incredibly easy to understand and clear to see:

what is now happening has been coming—and it’s been incredibly obvious—for months. Well, years. In 2016, Trump said he would only consider the election legitimate if he won. Even when he won, he greeted the news he’d gotten shellacked in the popular vote by saying 3 million of those votes were fraudulent. 3 million(!), and yet, when he created an entire presidential commission to investigate, they found nothing and disbanded. Then he ransacked the institutions of democracy for four years, undermining the separation of powers and the independent system of justice and the free press, until this election was approaching and he once again said he’d only lose if it was rigged.

“The president said he would scream fraud if he lost, and now that he’s losing, he’s screaming fraud while providing zero court-admissible evidence,” continued Holmes. “This isn’t complicated!”

Trump announced on Twitter that he will hold a “big press conference” at 11:30 am ET.

This article published by Common Dreams on November 7, 2020, here…

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

‘Concede and Get the Hell Out’

Anger grows as Trump refuses to admit defeat

 

“You lost, you miserable self-entitled infantile f**ker,” said famed American novelist Stephen King.

by Jon Queally, staff writer

Sunday, November 8

Supporters of US President-elect Joe Biden gather near the Texas capitol building to celebrate his victory in the 2020 presidential election in Austin, Texas on November 7, 2020. – Democrat Joe Biden has won the White House, US media said November 7, defeating Donald Trump and ending a presidency that convulsed American politics, shocked the world and left the United States more divided than at any time in decades. (Photo: Sergio Flores/AFP via Getty Images) 

Mixing with the jubilation shared by tens of millions across the U.S. and the world generated by President-elect Joe Biden’s declared victory this weekend, increasing levels of anger and frustration were voiced Sunday as President Donald Trump continued his refusal to accept the election results that show he was soundly defeated.

“The President needs to stop putting his narcissistic selfishness over what is good for our nation and our democracy.”
Even as Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris delivered acceptance speeches Saturday night, Trump bucked the tradition of congratulating the winners and instead spent the evening tweeting out false claims that he “won the election” and making evidence-free allegations of fraud.

As CNN reports:

Trump so far has refused to accept the election results, waging a legal strategy to contest them in courts and issuing false allegations of fraud. There are currently no plans to invite Biden to the Oval Office for the traditional meeting between the incoming and outgoing presidents, a historic sign of the peaceful transfer of power. Aides instead are working to craft ways for the President to feel validated even in loss, including through more rallies.

But after claiming publicly and falsely that he won the election, sources say Trump is not denying the outcome privately. And two people said Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law and senior adviser who oversaw his campaign from the White House, has approached Trump about conceding the election.

On Sunday, as the lies and deceit by the president continued, many Trump critics began to lose their patience.

“It is obscene for a president of the United States to talk of a stolen election when he has not put up any meaningful evidence of anyone stealing the election,” said Steven Greenhouse, former labor reporter for the New York Times in a Sunday morning tweet. “The President needs to stop putting his narcissistic selfishness over what is good for our nation and our democracy.”

Stephen King, the famed novelist and an avowed Democrat, was even more blunt in his proclamation. “You lost, you miserable self-entitled infantile fucker,” King declared. “Concede and get the hell out.”

In a letter to editor at the Guardian on Sunday, reader Pete Dorey in the U.K. said he fears that Trump’s “disputing of the validity of the election result is much more insidious than him simply being a bad loser.” Dorey wrote:

By repeatedly denouncing the accuracy of the outcome, even before it has been confirmed, [Trump] is giving his supporters a green light to spend the next four years blatantly defying a Biden government, and generally causing public mayhem, on the grounds that the Democrats “stole” the election from Trump, and that the new government thus has no democratic authority of mandate.

As such, I fear that mass protests, the occupation of public buildings, and intimidation (especially of black communities) by gun-toting Trump supporters, will become a routine occurrence, justified on the grounds that ignoring the “undemocratic” Biden government is the duty of true “American patriots.”

If tough punitive action is taken against them, they will claim that democracy and liberty are being suppressed by “radical leftists” in Washington. But if their mayhem is ignored, they will claim that law and order is being undermined due a weak government in thrall to “political correctness” and “snowflake liberals.”

Or am I just paranoid?

Ahead of Biden being declared the projected winner by nearly every major news outlet in the country on Saturday, his campaign spokeperson Andrew Bates on Friday said their team was not ultimately worried if Trump—when defeated—refused to leave the White House voluntarily.

“The United States government,” said Bates, “is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

This article published by Common Dreams on November 8, 2020, here…

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

As Trump whines and gaslights, here’s a reality check: he got his ass kicked in the general election

“The fact that he is a major loser does not sit well with this egomaniacal president. But his feelings can’t change the facts.”

by Jon Queally

US President Donald Trump arrives for a wreath laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Veterans Day at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, on November 11, 2020. The visit was Trump’s first official post-election appearance Wednesday for what should be a moment of national unity to mark Veteran’s Day, now marred by his refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden’s win. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski /AFP via Getty Images) 

“The numbers are the numbers. There is no legal or legitimate way to rearrange the result they report.”

“Whatever Pompeo says to the contrary, whatever unreality Republican lawmakers are living in, Biden will take office on January 20, 2021. As for Donald Trump, he has finished the 2020 election as a loser.” — John Nichols, The Nation
So writes The Nation‘s political correspondent John Nichols in a piece published early Thursday morning—nearly five full days since the decision desks at major U.S. news outlets, based on the actual results reported by state election boards nationwide, determined that Joe Biden is the clear winner of the 2020 presidential election and President Donald Trump, though he still refuses to concede, is the very clear loser.

As ABC News reported Wednesday, “There is no truth to the claims that there was widespread voter fraud in the election, yet the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are pursuing lawsuits in several states claiming that there was. Despite their complaints, they have not provided any evidence of fraud or corroborated any of the president’s claims.”

Thursday reporting by the Associated Press says that while Trump’s legal team and GOP allies have been scouring the country for election shenanigans and filing lawsuits, so far there have been “few legal wins” and the hunt for “proof of fraud” have turned up nothing of substance.

“Experts doubt the suits can reverse the outcome in a single state, let alone the election,” reports the AP, adding that “Trump aides and allies have privately admitted as much, suggesting the challenges are designed more to stoke his base.”

As Sen. Bernie Sanders said during a CNN interview Wednesday night that Trump’s behavior—and that of the GOP going along with it—is an “outrage” against democratic integrity and the American people. Asked if he’d ever seen anything like what the president is now doing, Sanders said: “No. It’s not that I have not seen. Nobody has ever seen this.”

According to Nichols’ analysis, just because Trump “is a major loser does not sit well with this egomaniacal president,” the existence of these “feelings can’t change the facts.” And here, as Nichols notes, are some of the facts as they currently stand:

Biden has not merely received more votes than any candidate for the presidency in American history—77,400,000 and counting—he has finished the 2020 competition with a higher level of popular support than most of the winners of most of the presidential elections since the end of World War II.

What’s especially striking is the scope of Biden’s win as a challenger to a sitting president. Now that he has surpassed Reagan’s 1980 percentage in the race with Carter, Biden’s getting a higher percentage of the vote than any rival to a incumbent since Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt upended Republican Herbert Hoover in 1932.

While Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980 by winning 50.7% of the vote in 1980, Nichols notes, Biden has currently captured 50.8% of the popular vote—a number certain to rise as ballots in large states that Biden won like California continue to tabulate final results. Trump can falsely claim he won as much as we wants, writes Nichols, but that doesn’t change that he has “already lost. Bigly.”

As many observers have noted, Trump’s ongoing refusal to concede the election—and with his campaign lawyers and the GOP continuing to file lawsuits that experts say have no chance of overturning results in any meaningful—looks a lot like a grift with two material aims: first, undermining the legitimacy of Biden’s victory to a degree that makes it difficult for him to govern the nation effectively in January; and second, lining his own pockets by raising more money to pay off existing campaign debt.

“Trump isn’t really trying to overturn the election,” wrote the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank on Wednesday. “He’s simply running one more scam before he leaves office that would enable him to enrich himself.”

“That’s the way it appears, at least, from the scores of fundraising emails his campaign has sent out since the election,” Milbank continued. “He seems to be asking for funds to challenge the election, but the fine print shows that the money could let him line his own coffers. The tin-pot-dictator routine looks more as if it’s about passing the tin cup.”

As Common Dreams reported last week, the fine print of ongoing fundraising messages promoting the idea of election fraud and legal challenges to donors indicates that up to half of each contribution could go toward retiring Trump’s pre-existing campaign debt.

And as Trump maintains his refusel to concede, warn experts, the danger of lasting negative impacts only grows.

“What we have witnessed since the election is the worst moment in presidential history,” Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University, told The Hill on Thursday. “No losing president—indeed no losing candidate—has so falsely and dangerously undermined the integrity of our democracy and our elections.”

Meanwhile, how to even do the reporting on whether Trump and his GOP allies should be indulged as he refuses to concede has itself become a story for journalists trying to navigate the up-is-down, 2+2=5 reality that the president has tried to create for the country.

In an analysis piece titled, “Republican election denialism isn’t scary or funny or pathetic. It’s all of the above” published Wednesday at the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop acknowledged the inherent challenge of covering an individual—who happens to be the president—who lies and misdirects nearly constantly. Allsop writes:

Time and again in the Trump era, we’ve had to cover stories—the Bible photo op,Sharpiegate, and so on—that are at once funny, and eye-rollingly pathetic, and extremely harmful; now such stories are coming thick and fast, as satirically amateurish lawsuits vie for our attention with abuses of federal power. On Saturday, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, spread conspiracies about fraud at a press conference outside the Four Seasons in Philadelphia—not the hotel, but a landscaping business adjacent to an adult bookstore and a crematorium. Hilarious? Yes. Really actually not funny? Also yes. The traditional press, which tends to privilege clarity of narrative and flatness of tone, has never really been equipped to handle such jarring contradictions.

The Trump-era debate over whether and how to amplify lies and other forms of bad-faith engagement has circled so endlessly because it’s impossible to settle. Allowing bad actors to use you to sow confusion and contradiction has unsustainable costs, but so, often, does failing to raise the alarm about the attempt, particularly when it comes to something as fundamental as election integrity. The joke/not-a-joke phenomenon drives at the same media weakness: if we rise to it, we’re “triggered”; if we don’t, bad actors use our silence to expand the boundaries of what they can get away with.

The voter-fraud myth has been one such story: the president pushed it in 2016, which seemed ridiculous to many in the press because he’d won, but it had the effect of buttressing his present lies, which are impeding a proper transition of power. Many of the present lies, too, seem ridiculous and futile—but they’ve now spread throughout the Republican Party, and could buttress any number of dark actions in future elections that are closer than this one. At some point, the reality-based press has to intervene as strongly as it can—no exceptions—and call this out for what it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t find Giuliani funny; joking about authoritarianism is its own form of power. But it requires recognizing authoritarianism first.

As Nichols writes in his latest assessment, President-elect Jo Biden “has every right to claim his mandate at this point”—and that is based on the facts before the American people, and the world.

“Whatever Pompeo says to the contrary, whatever unreality Republican lawmakers are living in, Biden will take office on January 20, 2021,” he notes. “As for Donald Trump, he has finished the 2020 election as a loser.”

This article published by Common Dreams on November 12, 2020, here…

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