Trump is really going bonkers

In the latest move during the current purge of people in Trump’s administration, he has fired the person who said that the recent election was the most secure in US history. (I wrote about the official expecting to be fired two days days ago.)

Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), in a tweet on Tuesday, saying Krebs “has been terminated” and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate”.

The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee, comes as Trump is refusing to recognize the victory of the president-elect, Joe Biden, and removing high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal. He fired Mark Esper, the defense secretary, on 9 November part of a broader shake-up that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon positions.

Krebs had indicated he expected to be fired. Last week, his agency released a statement refuting claims of widespread voter fraud. “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the statement read. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Krebs, a former Microsoft executive, ran the agency, known as Cisa, from its creation in the wake of Russian interference with the 2016 election through the November election. He won bipartisan praise as Cisa coordinated federal state and local efforts to defend electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference.

[Read more…]

How false claims of election fraud spread

Trump campaign has had a bad 72 hours in courts in their efforts to challenge the results by arguing that there was widespread fraud.

Since Friday, state and federal judges in Pennsylvania have rejected Trump’s challenges to small batches of ballots ranging from the hundreds to the low thousands; Biden leads Pennsylvania by more than 68,000 votes, according to Decision Desk HQ. Judges have also undermined some of the legal theories that underpin the campaign’s effort to stop Pennsylvania from officially declaring that President-elect Joe Biden won the state.

The morning after Election Day, Trump declared that he would take the election to the Supreme Court, invoking the image of another Bush v. Gore, when the justices halted a ballot recount in Florida that handed the 2000 election to former president George W. Bush. Two weeks later, the legal landscape does not look at all like 2000. Trump would have to find legal paths to flip multiple states that Biden won, and the only case pending before the Supreme Court involves the fate of the 10,000 absentee ballots that arrived in Pennsylvania after Election Day.

[Read more…]

What is Trump’s endgame?

On Thursday, November 10, 2016, Trump was invited to the White House by Barack Obama. That election was called for Trump at 2:30 am on Wednesday, November 9th so his meeting with Obama occurred just a day later. This latest election was called on Saturday, November 7th and yet ten days later Trump still has not met with Joe Biden and there is no indication that he will ever do so. So what is he hoping to achieve by this refusal?

I hesitated to use the term ‘endgame’ in this post’s title because it comes from chess and reflects the strategies that are brought into play in the third phase of the game when most of the pieces have gone and the board is uncluttered. I hesitated because I simply cannot see Trump having the ability to think carefully and strategically the way that chess requires. If he played chess, one can see him knocking over the board when he is losing and claiming that he won. Which, in a way, is what he is doing in this post-election period where he is gumming up the works as much as possible while claiming that he has not lost. He is so desperate to give the impression that he is going to continue in office that he has ordered that anyone in the administration who is caught looking for jobs will be immediately fired.
[Read more…]

Official who oversaw election security fears Trump may fire him

Why? Not because of a breakdown in security but the opposite. Chris Krebs, who heads the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) which helps protect the vote from hackers attempting to breach election infrastructure, has been debunking all the baseless conspiracy theories about how the election results were rigged and has declared that the election was “the most secure in US history”
[Read more…]

The ultimate Hail Mary by Trump supporters

Trump and his fans are trying their best to convince themselves that he has not lost the election. But time is running out for them. The claims of fraud that have been filed in state and federal courts across the country are being tossed out one after another and prestigious law firms are withdrawing from some cases because bringing frivolous lawsuits damages your reputation and can result in judges slapping you down, and the easy money these cases bring in may not be enough to compensate for the ignominy. Clown lawyers like Rudy Giuliani have no reputation to protect and thus can make the most outlandish claims inside and outside the courtroom, which is probably why Trump likes him so much. Lawyers like him are the only only ones really benefiting from these lawsuits and are enriching themselves off the deluded dreams of the members of the Trump cult who are donating to the ‘legal defense fund’, although the fine print says that up to 60% of that money will actually go towards retiring the campaign debt.
[Read more…]

The whole sordid Falwell saga laid bare

The website Politico has done a deep dive into all the nefarious things that Jerry Falwell engaged in while president of Liberty University. It is quite astonishing. He managed to avoid oversight by his supposed bosses on the Board of Trustees by forcing out of the board and his administration those who were not loyalists who raised concerns that his behavior was not consistent with the highly puritanical code demanded by the university of its students, faculty, and staff.
[Read more…]

Delusional Donald’s dubious logic

Here is a tweet from Delusional Donald on November 11, 2020.


[Read more…]