GET OUT: US politics November 2020

White women are not a swing voting bloc.

If a population that's consistently close to 50-50 Dem/GOP isn't a swing voting bloc, what is?

those same CNN exit polls this essay is based on, whose numbers are almost definitely wrong, has white women as 32% of the electorate. I don't think it makes any sense to write off one third of all voters.

“Fast forward to Election Day 2020: Exit polling indicates that Trump’s support had increased among White women.” 1. Stop using this exit poll data 2. Trump did not do better by eight points with white women (her figure) AND nonwhite voters! That makes no sense! https://t.co/NnxFWR1upz

— Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) November 28, 2020

Writing off is a bad way to phrase it. You don’t actively thumb your nose at them, but you shouldn’t let fear of white women govern messaging about police or social justice or X. They’re welcome to come along if they’d like.

Yeah I'd agree with that. It's an important discussion but the essay just seems really poorly argued.

i feel like we know that standardized ethnic categories developed for the broadcast era are not just reductive but actively misleading. i can accept that columnists are this dumb, but surely campaign staff are not?

Thinking about groups a relatively coherent is a useful way to allocate resources (in the absence of better options).

But often articles like that miss the essential fact that a vote is a vote. An white woman’s vote for a democrat is not worth more or less depending on how the demographic group she belongs to votes.

Anyway

The PA Supreme Court dismisses the case brought by U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly that sought to overturn last year’s law creating no-excuse mail voting and to throw out those mail ballots cast in this election.

This is the case the Commonwealth Court had earlier blocked certification in. pic.twitter.com/nO7Glvu46Y

— Jonathan Lai 🙊 賴柏羽 (@Elaijuh) November 28, 2020

They successfully cleared a path to the US Supreme Court! Victory is closer than ever!

Hahah oh the gems here

“The strategy was, ‘Anyone who is willing to go out and say, ‘They stole it,’ roll them out. Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell. Send Ric Grenell out West. Send Matt Schlapp somewhere. Just roll everybody up who is willing to do it into a clown car.” https://t.co/gSt6GctCtm

— Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) November 29, 2020

just occurred to me that “trust the plan” is pretty much the same message as every doomsday cult ever

Anyone able to C&P choice bits of that?

The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.

But Trump refused to see it that way. 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.’ ”

One might even say he's... increasingly isolated. Anyway.

However cleareyed 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.’"...

The 20 days between the election on Nov. 3 and the greenlighting of Biden’s transition exemplified some of the hallmarks of life in Trump’s White House: a government paralyzed by the president’s fragile emotional state; advisers nourishing his fables; expletive-laden feuds between factions of aides and advisers; and a pernicious blurring of truth and fantasy...

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 that delusion.

...The Venezuelan tale was too fantastical even for Trump, a man predisposed to conspiracy theories who for years has feverishly spread fiction. Advisers described the president as unsure about the latest gambit — made worse by the fact that what looked like black hair dye mixed with sweat had formed a trail dripping down both sides of Giuliani’s face during the news conference. Trump thought the presentation made him “look like a joke,” according to one campaign official who discussed it with him...

Ultimately, it was the late count of mail-in ballots that erased Trump’s early leads in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other battleground states and propelled Biden to victory. As Trump watched his margins shrink and then reverse, he became enraged, and he saw a conspiracy at play.

“You really have to understand Trump’s psychology,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a longtime Trump associate and former White House communications director who is now estranged from the president. “The classic symptoms of an outsider is, there has to be a conspiracy. It’s not my shortcomings, but there’s a cabal against me. That’s why he’s prone to these conspiracy theories.”...

On the afternoon of Nov. 13, a Friday, Trump called Giuliani from the Oval Office while other advisers were present, including Vice President Pence; White House counsel Pat Cipollone; Johnny McEntee, the director of presidential personnel; and Clark.

Giuliani, who was on speakerphone, told the president that he could win and that his other advisers were lying to him about his chances. Clark called Giuliani an expletive and said he was feeding the president bad information. The meeting ended without a clear path, according to people familiar with the discussion.

The next day, a Saturday, Trump tweeted out that Giuliani, Ellis, Powell and others were now in charge of his legal strategy. Ellis startled aides by entering the campaign’s Arlington headquarters and instructing staffers that they must now listen to her and Giuliani.

“They came in one day and were like, ‘We have the president’s direct order. Don’t take an order if it doesn’t come from us,’ ” a senior administration official recalled.

Clark and Miller pushed back, the official said. Ellis threatened to call Trump, to which Miller replied, “Sure, let’s do this,” said a campaign adviser.

It was a fiery altercation, not unlike the many that had played out over the past four years in the corridors of the West Wing. The outcome was that Giuliani and Ellis, as well as Powell — the “elite strike force,” as they dubbed themselves — became the faces of the president’s increasingly unrealistic attempts to subvert democracy.

It goes on in this vein. Most of this is a recap of things that have been widely reported.

good morning!

White House counsel Pat Cipollone; Johnny McEntee, the director of presidential personnel; and Clark.

Pretty sure I've got relations called McEntee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiIGGDeN7D0

Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ”

I've been moderately fascinated for years (since we've been forced to care) by Trump's adherence to Norman Vincent Peale and "The Power of Positive Thinking." Peale was famously the pastor of the New York City church that Trump attended when he was a kid, which is to say, the last time he ever went to church. That must have left some sort of a mark on his addled mind, and definitely instilled an ethos in this most empty of vessels. An empty ethos, for sure, but an ethos all the same, and for sure a lifetime of failing upwards and thwarting criminal prosecution must really have ratified that ethos.

This was a good reminder/primer from NPR:

President Trump has long been a champion of what's been called positive thinking — the power to make things that you want to see happen actually happen.

"Affirm it, believe it, visualize it, and it will actualize itself." Such mantras have characterized much of the Trump story from his childhood when he first absorbed it from the man who first spoke it, Norman Vincent Peale.

Peale was a minister and author much admired by Trump's father. His most famous book, The Power of Positive Thinking, sold millions of copies in multiple languages and helped spawn a self-help movement and industry that has flourished ever since.

The Trumps attended Peale's Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and Peale officiated at the first of Donald Trump's three marriage ceremonies.

It has been argued that Trump stands as the single most successful practitioner to date of Peale's philosophy. Surely his careers as a builder and businessman, TV reality show star and media-dominating politician seemed to prove what Peale preached: "What the mind can conceive and believe, and the heart desire, you can achieve."

Emulating Peale's ferocious focus on attitude probably helped Trump plow ahead when his presidential prospects seemed hopeless just weeks before Election Day in 2016. The candidate appeared behind in polls and a now-infamous audio recording revealed his toxic comments about women.

But "there are no hopeless situations," Peale had counseled, "only people who take hopeless attitudes."

Obstacles, Peale taught, should never be a deterrent: "You will find they haven't half the strength you think they have."

Until this year, it is possible Trump took this literally. Arguably, he was getting away with it far more often than not.

He seemed to have been experimenting with this parallel universe approach all his life. It was not just the ups and downs of his business and personal life. It was his dogged insistence that there had only been ups and never any downs. He seemed to be demonstrating that an individual truly could ignore obstacles, defy norms and scoff at official rules and still succeed.

Impeachment? What impeachment?

Even impeachment was not a wall that stopped him but rather a hurdle he managed to clear — with the help of his party in the Senate.

Still, never is a long time, and the year 2020 has ultimately brought greater challenges than impeachment.

Our present moment compounds the coronavirus pandemic, ensuing quarantines and economic strains and the moral crisis prompted by the nationally witnessed killing of George Floyd by police. For months, Trump has tried to deny or minimize the gravity of all of these events. Yet they loom as large as ever — and perhaps larger.

In an insightful Politico essay in October 2017, political analyst Michael Kruse found Peale's imprint on every phase of Trump's career. But near the end, Kruse noted that Trump's success story remained unfinished, like a study in which some results have yet to be counted.

"From a scientific perspective," Kruse wrote, "Trump is an incomplete experiment."

Kruse then quoted the self-help author Mitch Horowitz, who called Trump's story an example of what, in at least the short run, "you can attain through self-help, through self-assertion and people's willingness to believe what they think that they see."

To which Kruse added: "Trump's version of his own reality, some insist, ultimately will crash against something more real."

And that something might well be the COVID-19 crisis and the sequence of events that has followed.

interesting, didn't know about that connection

Kinda explains Scott Adams’ fascination with him too. I remember he had a book in the 90s (back when he was relatively sane) where the final chapter was all about how if you wrote down your goals 15 times a day the universe would magically bend to your will.

i think that was talked about in "the dream," a podcast about pyramid schemes and MLMs, but i may be mixing up sources. i mean i know peale was, but may be forgetting where i learned of trump family's association with it. great podcast, though.

Sounds like the typical MLM/cult pitch - if it’s not working, you aren’t trying hard enough!

Ha! Xp

See also: capitalism

Going great

Trump: I said I’d like to file, to the lawyers, I’d like to file one nice big beautiful lawsuit talking about this and many other things with tremendous proof pic.twitter.com/YA3Acedf28

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) November 29, 2020

Well, what does he even need the useless lawyers for? Sounds like he knows what he's talking about, he should probably just draw up that big beautiful lawsuit himself.

gargantuan, colossal proof

"Look at the election you have coming up [in Georgia] right now. You're using the same garbage machinery, Dominion" -- Trump demoralizes Republicans by suggesting their votes don't matter because the upcoming Senate runoffs in Georgia are rigged pic.twitter.com/aYM6KcGaos

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 29, 2020

no...don’t...stop

it's hilarious because one of the reasons the GOP leadership entertained his delusions was because they thought he would help campaign in GA.

Remind me again, what dimension of chess is it when you do an interview with the 'news' network you've told your followers over and over to stop watching?

great, keep it coming.
Hope he has some effect.
Any other senators who've had his greatest recent gift about to drop out of the senate, oh please do.

Is it disenfranchisement when you dissuade voters from showing up for your theoretical allies?

Remind me again, what dimension of chess is it when you do an interview with the 'news' network you've told your followers over and over to stop watching?

https://dobermann.wymark.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/imported-media/images/1563743436.jpg

My goodness, there's a real possibility that Donald Trump will be instrumental in handing the senate over to the dems. Can't wait to see the array of GOP reactions once they realize they've welded themselves inside the train they were so gleefully running off a cliff.

I mean, the whole reason there is a runoff election is because it was a really close race, right? So there was always a chance. Some hypothesized that the reason Biden did as well as he did in GA was strictly because (enough) people hated Trump, but it looks like those other races were squeakers, too. The question is then whether lingering support for Trump will do the opposite, and rather than drive out Dems to vote, counterproductively convince his base *not* to vote, which yeah, would be wonderful. Certainly Trump seemed to be successful enough convincing his flock to be wary of mail-in votes, let's hope he keeps that negative momentum going.

I wonder how much money they’ll have to pay him to come down to Georgia and the campaign for these two assholes and convince the rubes it’s not fixed against them

This description of Joe McCarthy in Fredrik Logevall’s JFK biography, when you take out the name McCarthy, is just...wow. pic.twitter.com/y9owEbgNfF

— Bianna Golodryga (@biannagolodryga) November 29, 2020

More... pic.twitter.com/S6Qh4kLDfH

— Bianna Golodryga (@biannagolodryga) November 29, 2020

Warnock vs Loeffler is bc the nov 3rd vote for that seat was a “jungle” primary

Ossoff vs Perdue is because neither hit 50%

JiC u know there is a direct line connecting McCarthy to both Trump and Stone, right?

My guess is warnock and Perdue will win

i've lost count now but do we need both to win, or only one to win to tie (and then Harris is tiebreaker vote)?

Both

to get to 50/50 + Harris

Wow can’t believe a generic description of a demagogue also describes another demagogue

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-moves-to-strip-job-protections-from-white-house-budget-analysts-as-he-races-to-transform-civil-service/2020/11/27/d04f6eba-2e69-11eb-96c2-aac3f162215d_story.html

ripping out the phone lines and putting glue in the keyboards as they prepare to depart, as expected.

Hammer party, surely he must ramp it up.
No self control like

JiC u know there is a direct line connecting McCarthy to both Trump and Stone, right?

Yep, but I suspect that's probably just a strange coincidence, as Cohn did not make McCarthy or Trump the lunatics they are, imo, he was his own enabling kind of sociopath, hovering around them (and others) like flies on shit.

it's a bit more direct than that
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/19/roy-cohn-donald-trump-documentary-228144
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTrHL7Vo_SQ

For a while every Biden news cycle is going to be like the Trump Tweet Curse: there will be a Trump news cycle from several years ago that matches the current cycle exactly, except every right-wing pundit is going to have precisely the opposite take as they had back then

— Quinta Jurecic (@qjurecic) November 29, 2020

Omigod like Joe just bust his foot playing with his dog.
God they'll have to rethink and give the election to t now that he's ill innit.
Yeah like.

I fear the next 4 years we're going to have a shadow Trump presidency. He'll be tweeting at his 'friendly' foreign powers (Poland, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Hungary, etc.) to ignore Biden because 'I'll be back in 2025', and they'll do their best to torpedo any worthwhile Biden foreign policy. Meanwhile most Republicans will treat Biden as illegitimate, spout Trump's rantings throughout the term, and probably refuse to even turn up at the inauguration, SOTU, etc. It's going to be bad.