Category: Trump Administration

The Trump campaign was not denied access to Philadelphia’s ballot count

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“They didn’t even allow Republican Observers into the building to watch. A terrible insult to our Constitution!”

— President Trump, in a tweet, Nov. 18, 2020

Trump is in overdrive, tweeting one absurd falsehood after another to delegitimize the election he lost.

One repeated theme is that Republican observers were not allowed inside the room as election workers counted mail ballots in Philadelphia. Fraud thrives under cover of darkness, Trump warns.

But, in fact, Trump’s own lawyers have attested in court that his campaign was granted access and observed the process, both in Philadelphia and in other cities, and has found no evidence of fraud. Continue reading.

Farm support holds for Trump, but Biden may find inroads

End to aid payments in 2021 could cut deeply into incomes

President Donald Trump tenaciously courted farmers and ranchers with an anti-regulatory agenda and a confrontational trade approach that opened some markets.

But he also relied on billions in federal aid to compensate them for retaliatory tariffs and a pandemic that took a deep gouge out of the economy.

Despite the mixed performance, Trump’s policies on trade, regulation and other areas maintained his popularity in rural and farm communities, winning their support in the Nov. 3 election. Continue reading.

Trump’s coup might not work. But he may pave the way for the next failed candidate.

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PRESIDENT TRUMP has dropped the pretense of respecting democracy. Having lost the election, and a string of attempts to challenge vote counts, he demanded on Wednesday that state officials simply refuse to certify the results. The end game, according to Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis, is to enable Republican state lawmakers in a swing state such as Michigan to award their state’s electoral college delegates to Mr. Trump despite President-elect Joe Biden’s unassailable vote margins.

The Post’s Robert Costa reports that Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, is also talking up what would amount to a coup. He knows that his desultory lawsuits will not succeed, but calculates that if enough states are prevented from certifying their votes by legal deadlines, the election could be thrown into Congress, which might hand the presidency to Mr. Trump — again, against the will of the voters.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump demonstrated Tuesday that he will retaliate against those who fail to read from his corrupt script by firing Christopher Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security election security boss who publicly refuted the president’s unfounded allegations that voting systems were manipulated. Continue reading.

America’s 250,000 covid deaths: People die, but little changes

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Most everybody in town knows that Gladys Maull has been battered this year: Her father, her sister, an aunt, a great-aunt, all dead from covid-19. Maull keeps a sign on her front door: “Please do not come in my house due to covid-19. Thank you.”

Some people just step on in, maskless.

They mean no harm, but masks never caught on in rural Lowndes County, which has Alabama’s highest rate of coronavirus infections. In a place that gave 73 percent of its vote to Joe Biden, the sheriff and the coroner agree that although cases are spiking and deaths are rising, most people share President Trump’s view that masks are a matter of personal choice and that the end of the pandemic is just around the corner. Continue reading.

John Bolton fears that Trump has an ‘enemies list’ that he is working through

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White House National Security Advisor Ambassador John Bolton talks to reporters Wednesday, May 1, 2019, outside the West Wing entrance of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour) Alex Henderson November 18, 2020

Critics of President Donald Trump predicted that after the presidential race, he would be firing some prominent officials he considered non-loyalists — even if he lost the election. Trump did lose the election, and just as those critics predicted, he has been firing non-loyalists — and former National Security Adviser John Bolton, during a C-SPAN appearance on Wednesday, told the Washington Post’s Robert Costa that he fears Trump has an “enemies list” of more people he plans to fire.

Trump’s post-election firings have included former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Christopher Krebs, who served as director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Krebs’ unforgivable sin, in Trump’s mind, was arguing that the election was free and fair and that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud or errors as the president has been claiming. Continue reading.

‘Traitors to the president’: Conservatives fear public preparation for Biden term

Because Trump won’t concede, many conservatives have found they can’t be open about their plans to counter Biden’s agenda. Some have already faced blowback.

The conservative movement has become handicapped.

Organizations can’t sound the alarm about President-elect Joe Biden’s agenda. Conservative reporters won’t take pitches about Biden’s rumored Cabinet contenders, insistent on covering evidence-deficient claims of voter fraud instead. One conservative group involved in policy advocacy backed off from hiring two soon-to-depart Trump administration officials after growing concerned about the consequences.

And it’s all because of an unspoken rule set by President Donald Trump: Do not acknowledge Biden’s imminent White House takeover. Continue reading.

Trump and Tucker Carlson got caught falsely accusing a living woman of voting while dead

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As decisive a victory as President-elect Joe Biden has enjoyed — 306 electoral votes and a nationwide lead of at least 5.8 million in the popular vote — President Donald Trump and his allies are still hoping to overturn the election results in key battleground states. One of them is Georgia, where Trump’s campaign and Fox News’ Tucker Carlson wrongly accused a voter named Deborah Jean Christiansen of voting fraudulently. But CNN interviewed Christiansen, ascertaining that her vote was perfectly legitimate.

Trump’s campaign and Carlson both accused Christiansen of voting in the name of a dead woman. However, CNN reporters Konstantin Toropin, Daniel Dale and Amara Walker explain that in Georgia, there were two different women named Deborah Jean Christiansen. One of them died in 2019, but the other is alive and well and had every right to vote in the 2020 presidential election.

The two Georgia-based women, according to CNN, were “born in the same year and month but on a different day.” And CNN interviewed the Deborah Jean Christiansen who is still living and voted for Biden. Continue reading.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejects complaints about Philadelphia election observations

The Trump campaign argued that observers were stationed too far away to actually see the process of counting votes.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled 5-2 on Tuesday that observers’ rights to watch ballot counting was sufficient in Philadelphia, rejecting a claim from President Donald Trump’s campaign that poll observers didn’t get “meaningful access.”

The Trump campaign argued that observers were stationed too far away to actually see the process of counting votes, and a lower court initially agreed with them, ordering that they be allowed closer to the process. The state Supreme Court, which had previously rejected other Republican arguments, vacated that lower court order on Tuesday.

“We conclude the Board did not act contrary to law in fashioning its regulations governing the positioning of candidate representatives during the precanvassing and canvassing process, as the Election Code does not specify minimum distance parameters for the location of such representatives,” the court wrote in its majority order. “Critically, we find the Board’s regulations as applied herein were reasonable in that they allowed candidate representatives to observe the Board conducting its activities as prescribed under the Election Code.” Continue reading.

Trump seeks to settle scores in final days

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President Trump is settling scores and taking steps to cement his agenda in his final 60-plus days in the White House, even as he refuses to concede an electoral loss to Democrat Joe Biden and his legal team flails at the results in nearly a half-dozen states.

Trump fired the administration’s top cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs on Tuesday evening, the latest example of Trump settling a score. He expressed displeasure that Krebs issued a statement that the 2020 election had been the most secure in history, a message that undercut Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about voting machine vulnerabilities and a “rigged” election.

The removal of Krebs followed the firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and raises the prospect that Trump will remove more officials, such as CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Christopher Wray, while at the same time signaling that anything regarded as disloyalty to Trump will result in punishment. Continue reading.

The first big test of Trump’s attempt to steal the electoral college was a failure

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Local Republicans dipped their toe into it and, amid widespread backlash, pulled back

His legal challenges to overturn election results have gone nowhere, so President Trump has floated another way to get around his loss: persuade Republican legislatures in swing states to change state law on how to appoint electors and give them to him rather than President-elect Joe Biden.

It’s a legally dubious long shot. Pulling it off would depend on a chain reaction of events that start with local election officials all raising the specter of election chaos, which is exactly what happened in Detroit on Tuesday night before it fizzled

Two Republican election officials in Detroit initially refused to certify the largely Black county’s election results. After blowback, they reversed themselves. Continue reading.