The risks
Benjamin Wittes on Trump’s Tantrum:
There exists no law or rule that compels a president to acknowledge the legitimacy of his defeat—or even the fact of it—except in the very limited sense that he has to vacate the office.
And he doesn’t have to do that until January 20. Until then he can tantrum his wee socks off.
So yes, the president is allowed to sulk. He is allowed to be the sorest of sore losers. He is allowed to once again display before the entire world the complete triumph of ego over patriotism, of self-interestedness over public-spiritedness, within his heart. There is, actually, nothing to do about it if he wants to play it this way; there is no way to stop him. And in and of itself, it’s not even a particularly grave problem. It is certainly sad that the United States has a president who so completely fails the basic tests of honor and decency. It would be lovely to see him just once rise to some occasion, any occasion. But it’s hardly a surprise that he can’t or he won’t or he doesn’t want to. He is, after all, Donald Trump.
I was thinking about that earlier today – how odd it is, in a way, that he didn’t grab such an easy chance to surprise us all. He has to go, so why not confound all our expectations by being generous and cheerful about it? He could take advantage of that maddening cognitive glitch which causes us to give more credit to people for being uncharacteristically decent than for being decent all the time. But noooooooooo, he has to act like a stupid petulant spoiled emperor up to the last second.
The bigger problem than the president’s refusal to concede the race is the toleration of that refusal by the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans. Yes, a few senators—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse—have congratulated Biden, and a few others have said that Biden should have access to transition resources and intelligence briefings.
But the Republican leadership in both houses of Congress have played along with the president’s obstinate refusal to face reality, pretending that there are still important questions about the integrity of the vote to litigate and resolve….And the president is capitalizing on the opportunity that McConnell and other congressional Republicans are providing.
Wittes then lists the ways Trump is capitalizing.
The administrator of the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy, has refused to “ascertain” (in the language of the law) that Biden is the “apparent” winner of the election, thus blocking transition funding and preventing certain other transition activity from beginning.
Pompeo said there would be a second Trump administration teehee. Biden is still not getting intelligence briefings.
More generally, the Washington Post reported on Nov. 9 that “[t]he Trump White House on Monday instructed senior government leaders to block cooperation with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team.”
And there’s the purge at the Pentagon.
Wittes goes on to explain how difficult it would be to steal the election in reality, and that all this sinister carrying on is dangerous anyway.
First, it is a harm to the orderly transition of power. Merely raising the specter of not honoring the results of an election, merely inducing democratic anxiety such that as serious-minded a person as Bill Kristol could write a piece like the one quoted above, is a democratic harm. Denying information to the Biden transition makes it harder to govern coming in. Conveying uncertainty to foreign actors is dangerous; it invites misunderstanding, and misunderstanding can be deadly.
Second there’s that pesky norms issue again – Trump has kicked them into smithereens with his lying sulks and sulky lies.
Finally, fourth, there’s the chance that I’m wrong that Biden’s prevailing in the election’s aftermath—that the automatic processes I have described are just a little bit less automatic than I think they are. There’s the chance that Republicans, having dug themselves into the Trump hole, don’t stop digging when the results are certified, that they don’t quite know how to back down. There’s the chance that state legislatures are little more aggressively partisan than I imagine, or that a few courts go off the deep end.
So that’s cheerful.
Trump could decide to concede and cooperate at any time. I think he’s addicted to the attention he’s getting for not doing so. Besides, it too late for him to do the right thing, that time has passed. His only option now is to continue being the ignorant, petulant fool he has always been. I’m not giving him credit for anything decent or honorable, because he’s shown us over and over that that’s not who he is. He’s an abuser.
The thing is, once Trump concedes, the spotlight shifts to Biden. Trump is yesterday’s news. He can’t handle that. See, even after he lost, we are all still talking about him, the news cycle is still about him, and that is his biggest hard on. (Sorry for the image, guys.) He must be the center of attention at all times. (Sort of like trans…)
At a time when we should be switching our focus to the incoming president, we are still forced to be focused on the outgoing toddler.
Trump is like a thousand year flood. A black swan event for which we were unprepared but not unaware of its dangers. Our government has wobbled back and forth from reactionary to progressive since the beginning. Our forefathers kicked the can down the road for more than 2 centuries because no one in the White House was ever such a piece of whale dung to ever ask the question, “what if I don’t want to?” The law is only as good as the general level of compliance to its precepts. Our political parties have always finagled for advantage but this is the first time one has said, “fuck you” to the rest of us. When invoking Nixon’s name is no longer just a pejorative, you know we are in deep shit. The Republican party has executed a strategy of demonization of progressives, disenfranchisement of opponents, undermining of public education, and fearmongering for at least 40 years. Trump just became the personification of that approach. A Golem fashioned from lies, memes, ill manners, and dirty tricks. As long as Moscow Mitch, et al, can use his petulance and lies to fortify the base and prepare for the midterms and 2024 general election they will. For apparently, there isn’t a true patriot among them and for 4 years lies and bad behavior have gone unchecked.
It really is difficult to steal an election in the USA, and certainly not by individually falsifying ballots the way Trump has been trying to claim. Like any other thing in this modern computerized age, the only serious way to change the counts is to do it at the counting end, not by “having dead people vote”. And it’s really hard to hide. The last time a major election was stolen with fake votes was the 1948 Senate election in Texas, as far as I know, and it was detected almost immediately (but still stolen, due to the vagaries of the legal decisions at that time). That one also only worked because it came down to fewer than 100 votes of difference between the candidates, with millions of votes cast.
So very much. I wish people would grasp that Trump isn’t the cause of our current crisis, he’s the result of a decades long plan to turn the government into the Republican party. The GOP has used celebrities, particularly Reagan, to bolster their votes, while telling liberal celebrities to “shut up and sing” if they so much as dare to express an opinion They convince people who are comfortable middle class that they are impoverished; people who hold the most power (i.e. white males and Christians) that they have no voice, are shut out; people who pay lower taxes than those making much less money that they are paying the highest taxes in the world (I hear this all the time); and people who have crappy health care that they have the best health care in the world and don’t need any damned single payer socialism.
We live in Bizarro, upside-down land. Truth is fake news; fake news is truth. Facts are alternative, and reality is whatever you identify it to be. Meanwhlie the left splits into ever small splinters of fragments because the woke accuse everyone of being “racist, imperialist, anti-trans, colonialist Nazi bigots” so they can feel superior to the rest of us without having to actually do anything to change it. In fact, if things did change, they would be unhappy because they would lose their righteousness.
Meanwhile, the MAGAts have invaded DC with claims of fraud and a stolen election (and without masks). I saw one of them parked around the corner last night (we live just west of National Airport, with easy access to downtown DC by car or Metro or bike, surrounded by hotels and restaurants), an oversized pickup with Oklahoma plates* and a huge Trump flag.
The plates said “Cherokee Nation”; I don’t know if that’s an indication of tribal membership, or just a geographical designation. iknklast?
Missing *.
(Speaking of which, don’t venture into downtown DC. You’d be an * it.)
When I lived in Oklahoma, it would have been an indication of tribal membership, but I don’t think you have to prove it to get one of the plates. And they may have gone to that being more common. I haven’t been there in a while.
Thanks, iknklast. What I find especially infuriating is that Trump’s favorite predecessor is Jackson; I’d think that that would be a red flag for Cherokees. On the other hand, I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that minority group X should necessarily fall into line behind the Democrats just because.
Yeah, Maroon, I get that way with women. Why, oh why, do women vote for him? But…some women have different ideas about what women are, or should be (my mother comes to mind). And some women have noticed that the Dems aren’t really doing all that much for us, either. We usually feel we’re coming out ahead just because they don’t make it worse…if they don’t make it worse.
I don’t know much about how the US (or any) government works but I can’t help but speculate about how much knowledge about how to run things might have been lost if Trump had won a second term. Perhaps there’d be nobody left who knew what all these norms were that he insists on ignoring, especially if someone inexperienced took over.
I’m sure a lot of stuff is written down, but if I’ve learned anything from analysing very large, complex systems, it’s that there are a lot of tacit rules and norms and ways of doing things that are never written down and are known only to the people who use them, not their bosses or even necessarily their closest colleagues. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been writing software for an organisation and found out that the way it really works is very different to the way anyone thinks it works.
I’ve found this most recently (although informally) with the NHS when trying to get a diagnosis for a medical condition. The NHS is currently fragmented, of course, because of COVID. But what I’ve found is that even the informal hacks that staff use to get around the terrible computer systems they’re forced to use are fragmented because people are missing, have been temporarily moved to other jobs etc.
So I wonder how easily that sort of knowledge could have been lost and perhaps already has been.
latsot, that’s sort of like when I was working at McDonald’s. I was the top grill person on my shift, so managers would often bring a new hire to me and say “Look, there are a lot of things I can’t tell you about how it’s actually done; I’m not allowed. So iknklast will give you the ins and outs of how to actually make a Big Mac”. None of the things I knew were written down, they got passed by word of mouth from one ace grill person to the next…and we handed down our knowledge to those coming after us. The Big Macs were not made using the exact process McDonald’s devised, but instead one that actually worked, turned out Big Macs that were picture perfect (only a few of us could do that – Big Macs are very slidy with that extra bun, and it’s difficult to make one that stands up in a proper stack).
@inkklast:
Yeah, it happens everywhere. It’s always fun to ask the boss how things work, ask the workers how things work, then ask the workers how things really work and draw up the differences on a diagram and show it to the boss.
The various policies and procedures our administrators develop seem to draw their view of education from old television, or something. Much of what they tell us is unworkable, or if we used it, would be ineffective. The computer programs they select for us are rarely structured around what we need, but around what they think looks like the right thing to appeal to the kids (software straight from central casting, if you will). And then they implement procedures, we ask questions like how the hell do you actually think we’re going to do that? Actually, we are much more diplomatic, parsing their dense, poorly constructed emails, and trying to figure out. Then we ask. Okay, what do you want us to do? Then they call us lazy, say we don’t want to do it because we’re just lazy. They never realize that some of what they ask is (1) not feasible; (2) ineffective; and/or (3) cannot be done by the deadline they set. Or that it might require skill sets that we don’t have, that they should hire someone to do because that someone has the proper skill set.
They have little to no idea what we do, but assume because they went to school they know how schools work.
Recently, our company moved to a new location. Those “in charge” of the remodeling, deciding what was done or installed were biologists. So for lab space, they were thinking in terms of cell biology labs. Us chemists repeatedly told them what we needed for the chemistry labs, but some we didn’t get because “cost’. And there was the repeated excuse of make do with what the previous tenant left. Well, we could, but we had to kludge a bunch of stuff together. And it adds more work. Luckily, we haven’t had to compromise on safety stuff. We may have gotten an upgrade on space, but we got a downgrade on appropriate-for-chemistry-lab-facilities.
And what’s with kitchen-type sinks in a lab? They should be utility-type. But that’s what was already there, so we’re to make do. Even if it does make it more difficult to clean glassware used for production (making compounds that go into salable product). /rant