In case there was ever any doubt, nothing will make Trump accept the results of this election. His position, forever, will be that he was robbed
[NB: It doesn't matter what the election officials (from both parties) say, it doesn't matter what the courts say, it doesn't matter what the Electoral College says.]
Now Trump is blaming the FBI and DOJ (!) for his election loss
Trump Goes Off The Rails On Fox News
Trump's claims about fraud in Georgia could really jeopardize the two GOP Senate seats there
Don't call it a coup. Call it a scam
Trump has been complaining about rigged elections since 2012 -- any time he doesn't like the outcome, it's rigged
The courtiers
Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ” However cleareyed that Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’ ” . . . Trump empowered loyalists who were willing to tell him what he wanted to hear — that he would have won in a landslide had the election not been rigged and stolen — and then to sacrifice their reputations by waging a campaign in courtrooms and in the media to convince the public of this delusion.
Joe Biden's education agenda
More names for the Biden team
“Mr. Biden will nominate Neera Tanden, the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank, to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget. He will nominate Cecilia Rouse, a Princeton University labor economist, to be chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.” “The president-elect also plans to choose Adewale ‘Wally’ Adeyemo, a former senior international economic adviser during the Obama administration, to serve as Ms. Yellen’s top deputy at the Treasury Department. And he will turn to two campaign economic advisers, Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey, to serve as members of the CEA alongside Ms. Rouse.”
Biden Picks All-Female Communications Team
In election lawsuit news . . .
Trump blames Philadelphia, like other high-minority cities, for his loss in Pennsylvania -- and you know why. But the real source of his loss, there and elsewhere, was the suburbs
In other news . . .
We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the
Republican Party has become detached from reality. Moreover, this is not
just an American problem. All around the world, rising right-wing
populist parties are floating on oceans of misinformation and falsehood.
What is going on? . . . My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real. In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge. This ecosystem, Rauch wrote, operates as a funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survive collective scrutiny . . . Over the past decades the information age has created a lot more people who make their living working with ideas, who are professional members of this epistemic process. . . .
People need a secure order to feel safe. Deprived of that, people legitimately feel cynicism and distrust, alienation and anomie. This precarity has created, in nation after nation, intense populist backlashes against the highly educated folks who have migrated to the cities and accrued significant economic, cultural and political power. . . . It is a bitter cultural and political cold war. In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say, but also the so-called rules they use to say them. People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. . . .
For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want. Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source. . . .
They want to believe
Trump tells states they're on their own with vaccine distribution
Trump's rallies did nothing to help him with votes -- but they did a hell of a job as virus spreaders
Trump appointee violates freedom of the press -- no surprise
Trump continues his attacks on Fox World -- he thinks that if he can tank their ratings, they will be forced to be nicer to him
See? It works! https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-maria-bartiromo-interview_n_5fc3c515c5b61d04bfaa9471
Fox News Lets Trump Spew Lies Unchecked In First Interview Since Election Day
Bonus item: Sarah Cooper has more legal advice for Jenna Ellis
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