The increasing isolation of the US in the world

Under Donald Trump, the US has become increasingly alone on the international stage.

One example is the new Asian trade agreement that excludes the US and includes China. After initially gushing over what a great leader China’s Xi Jinping was and praising their response to the covid-19 epidemic, when the pandemic got bad in the US he seemed to realize that he needed a scapegoat to escape blame and started attacking China. But his conflict with China predated that as part of his dislike of multilateral agreements that led to him declaring war on the trade agreements that his predecessors had agreed on with groups of other nations, and his strong criticisms of the NAFTA, WHO, NATO, and the Paris Climate Accord.

One of the thing he withdrew from was the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal that was being negotiated by the Obama administration that was designed to exclude China and increase trade links of Asian nations with the US. Trump pulled out of that deal and now those Asian nations have signed a huge trade pact that includes China and excludes the US.
[Read more…]

Season finale of Last Week Tonight

The show had its last episode on Sunday before going on hiatus until February. The show’s seasons usually end with a splashy finale but given the current situation, this one was weirdly interesting. The end of it reminded me of a scene from the film Michael Clayton with George Clooney but that was not popular enough to be worth alluding to and I am open to other suggestions.

I also find it interesting that the film 2001: A Space Odyssey has had such a major cultural impact that hearing the Strauss waltz The Blue Danube no longer brings to my mind people swirling around in elegant outfits in a huge ballroom but instead suggests some kind of event on a cosmic scale is about to occur.

State by state analysis of Trump’s legal challenges

The Trump Administration has been on a tear, filing lawsuits left and right in an effort to overturn what everyone except Trump cultists have accepted: that Trump lost and should concede prior to leaving office on January 20. The flurry of cases can be confusing and this article nicely summarizes where the challenges to six states are as of this morning.

ARIZONA

THE CASE: The Arizona Republican Party is trying to block the certification of the election results in the state’s most populous county, Maricopa, until the court rules on the party’s lawsuit asking for a new hand count of a sampling of ballots. An audit already completed by the county found no discrepancies, officials said.

WHAT HAPPENED: The judge was expected to issue a decision on Thursday.
In a separate case, Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee had sought to delay the certification of election results in Maricopa County. Republicans asked for the manual inspection of ballots in metro Phoenix, alleging that some votes were improperly rejected. A judge dismissed the case on Nov. 13 after the campaign’s lawyers acknowledged the small number of ballots at issue wouldn’t change the outcome of how Arizona voted for president.
[Read more…]

What happened to the women voters?

Before the election, there was widespread expectations that Trump had lost support among women, especially suburban women, and the elderly. As far as the women’s vote is concerned, that prediction does not seem to have been borne out

Before the election, Trump was widely mocked for the sort of desperate, tone-deaf comments he made in that Michigan speech, while polls predicted the president’s support among female voters would crater in a fatal blow to his and his party’s election hopes. But those predictions were mostly wrong. According to exit polls, Trump did one point better with women as a whole than in 2016, five points better with both black and Hispanic women, and three points better with white women. In a year with record voter turnout, those gains weren’t enough to match Joe Biden’s numbers, but the president can console himself with the fact that, come January, he will have helped put a record number of Republican women to work in the halls of Congress.
[Read more…]

John Oliver examines One American News

Donald Trump and his supporters have soured on Fox News because they think that apart from Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham, the rest of the hosts were not sufficiently supportive of Trump and not enthusiastic enough is peddling his lies that the election was stolen from him. As a result they are seeking even more extreme news sources and one that is becoming popular is a cable news outfit called One America News.

About seven months ago, John Oliver took an in-depth look at OAN.

Estimating crowd sizes is tricky

The National Parks Service used to issue estimates of the sizes of crowds at various public events but stopped doing so after getting hammered on all sides, both by those who wanted larger figures and those who wanted smaller ones. So now there are no ‘official’ crowd sizes, enabling anyone to make any claim that suits their purposes. Take for example, the Million Maga March in support of Trump held in Washington DC last Sunday. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany excitedly tweeted that a million people had actually turned up, while Trump initially claimed hundreds of thousands and later said tens of thousands.
[Read more…]

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…]