Election 2020: See You At The Winter Palace/On Parler, Bitches
A fairly slow news day, but still quite a bit happening.
The biggest news was the Postal Service reporting to Congress that Trump's highest profile "whistle blower", a postal worker that Project Veritas -- a band of seriously shady liars and grifters previously known for being arrested breaking into a Senator's office to wiretap it, trying to seduce a CNN reporter on a sex boat, and appearing on CNN in a pimp's outfit. Really. This is where the Trump people are in terms of detective work. -- ANYWAY, this postal worker said he would testify under oath that his boss ordered him to backdate late-arriving mail-in ballots. When the postal inspectors general interrogated him, he promptly recanted. He then went to Youtube and recanted his recantation, probably because he was trying to make his $130k GoFundMe not disappear. (It did.)
Project Veritas also offered $25,000 for any more evidence of voter fraud. As much voter fraud as Trump's people are insisting happened, you'd think this would be an easy way to get 25k, but so far the only taker is Pennsylvania Lt. Governor and literal freaking half-ogre John Fetterman, who gleefully pointed out the one verified case of voter fraud in his state, a Republican who tried to vote for his dead mother.
The Trump camp's other legal actions have been going about as swimmingly as their strategy came into focus today. Essentially, the end game appears to be decertifying the votes of the swing states in which Biden won by a narrow margin - Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. If ALL of them are decertified, neither candidate will have 270 electoral votes, and thanks to wacky arcane rules that were last used in the late 19th century during the Hayes/Tilden election, a Republican majority of states will duly name Trump the winner. Also, I am absolutely winning the lottery tomorrow. I have a better chance of that then Trump's legal team of making the argument that all of these states had so much Democrat Crime that tens of millions of votes should be thrown out (while helpfully ignoring the equally close elections in Ohio, Texas, and North Carolina that Trump came out ahead in.) An NPR article I'll link downthread has the details on each one, but suffice to say, not even the most partisan Trump-appointed judge could rule in their favor with a straight face.
Yet apparently, the Trump administration seems to be proceeding on the assumption that actually, you stupid libs, they won the election and will just stay there in office. There has been no cooperation with Biden's transition team, Trump's personnel director has threatened to fire anyone who even considers looking for work, the national security team is having wholesale replacements (including Gen. Anthony Tata, whose claim to fame is insisting that Obama is a secret Muslim who wants to betray the country among many other similarly tactful quips) and in the most surreal instance, began planning the budget that the second Trump administration plans to submit in February.
The most visible instance of this was Mike Pompeo, during a news conference when asked if the State Department will cooperate with the coming transition, said that they absolutely will facilitate the second term of the Trump administration. He then smirked, as only someone thinking "you got OWNED, lib" can. Bear in mind, that for the next 70 days this is our nation's chief diplomat.
At this point it is quite reasonable to wonder how far this farce is going to go, and when a point of no return is crossed. Biden for his part, when asked today remarked that Trump's behavior was "sad" and "will not reflect well on his legacy". Considering that up to this point his legacy has been "the most incompetent President in our nation's history" I'm not so sure that has any real deterrent value, but Biden is nothing if not a slave to decorum.
There are some hard deadlines to all this coming up. The most obvious, of course, being January 20 when a new President is sworn in. Before that, the Electoral College must be seated, before that slates of electors must be certified by states, before that the state voting results must be officially certified. That last is set to happen, in most states in question, within the next week to ten days. Realistically, by this weekend, things will be MUCH, MUCH clearer.
The dangers as I see are twofold. One, and thankfully not very likely, is that Trump actually carries through what Nixon contemplated in 1974 - getting the 82nd Airborne to set up a perimeter around the White House and yelling "Come and take it, ya losers!" at passers-by from the balcony. If all legal remedies fail (as seems increasingly the case) then this is really the only available next step. However there are some powerful reasons for this not to happen.
First, the military won't cooperate. Gen. Mark Milley has already gone on the record as saying so, and it is highly likely that if given a direct order to do so anyway he would, at the minimum, slow-walk it long enough that legally his orders would come from Biden, not Trump. (We saw this slow-walk maneuver in action during the BLM protests, so this isn't merely an educated guess.)
Second, Trump really isn't that much of a revolutionary. Revolutions take work, and Trump really, really does not like work. This is a man who spent the past weekend, when his administration was in an existential crisis, at the golf course. Once things get to the "shit gets real" phase, he'll pull what Avril Korman calls the Vietnam ploy - hold up two fingers in victory, yell "I WON!" and get on the helicopter to Mar-A-Lago. Removing Trump from office would be much like when the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace - a cannonade of fire and fury, only to find the "defenders" are a few shell shocked apparatchiks - the ones not smart enough to leave the night before - that walk out saying "all this is your problem now, have fun!" (Note: this actually happened. The person who said "your problem now" was the Transportation Minister.)
That brings us to the second danger, which is far more likely and in fact already beginning to happen. You see, while you and I are looking at Trump's maneuvers and alternately cackling and shaking our heads, the 40% or so die-hard MAGA fans actually BELIEVE IT. They have spent the past week convinced that literally everyone - every news media network including Fox, the FBI, the Defense Department, every world government - everyone cooperated in a grand conspiracy to make Trump lose the election through massive vote fraud. And the more Trump's antics fail, the angrier they get - confirmation that in fact the world IS out to get them.
Today for example quite a few of their voices demanded that the MAGAverse relocate to Parler, since Twitter and Facebook both are in the hands of the enemy. Parler up until now has been known best as "the one place Laura Loomer and other unrepentant alt-righters can still post". Like most right-wing alternatives to actual social media, it's not very good. (As someone who's spent much of his life working on programming large-scale services, I can tell you (a) it's not trivial and (b) you could NOT pay me enough to do it so Laura Loomer has a safe space.) Parler, unlike Twitter or Facebook, has no problem with angry people talking about how, for one random example "every true conservative should kill two liberals, and then our country will be saved".
The longer Trump lets this fester, the longer the voices of the right-wing grifterverse will keep poking at the MAGA multitudes. The longer they are poked, the angrier they will get.
