“notwithstanding a long series of disappointments for litigants trying to demonstrate that the presidential election was illegitimate, culminating in two unanimous rejections by the Supreme Court last week. According to a recent Fox News poll, 68 percent of Republicans and 77 percent of Trump voters believe “the presidential election was stolen.”
Some of those Trump fans may simply be signaling their loyalties or giving the response they think will irk the president’s enemies. But unless Trump supporters are perpetrating an elaborate gag nearly as sophisticated and complex as the baroque conspiracy he blames for denying him a second term, there are a lot of true believers out there.
Believing Trump requires accepting his claim that election officials across the country—possibly aided by a long list of co-conspirators that includes George Soros, the Clinton Foundation, and several foreign governments—used fraud-facilitating voting machines to give Joe Biden an edge, then switched to manufacturing “hundreds of thousands” of phony paper ballots when the original plan fell short. It also requires believing that pro-Trump news outlets, Republican election officials, Republican members of Congress, Trump-nominated judges and justices, the Department of Homeland Security, and Trump’s own attorney general helped conceal that conspiracy by casting doubt on the president’s charges or obstructing his efforts to overturn the election.
The alternative to buying all that is to conclude that Trump has refused to admit defeat, whether for personal or political reasons, and has therefore resorted to increasingly desperate explanations for Biden’s victory. That hypothesis is consistent with everything we know about Trump, including his disdain for the truth, his enormous yet fragile ego, and his allergy to accepting responsibility.
It is also consistent with the chasm between Trump’s assertions and the claims his campaign has made in court. In a 46-minute Facebook rant earlier this month, Trump complained that “even judges so far have refused to accept” that he won the election—hardly a niggling detail, since courts are the forum where Trump had to support his charges with credible evidence.
Trump thinks the Supreme Court “chickened out” when it declined to hear Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit seeking to overturn the election results in four battleground states. The justices simply “didn’t want to rule on the merits of the case,” the president avers.
Yet state and federal judges have ruled on the merits of Trump’s legal arguments and rejected them, often in blistering terms. Equally telling, the Trump campaign’s lawsuits have failed even to allege the sort of vast criminal conspiracy he describes in speeches and tweets—possibly “because there are legal consequences for lying to judges,””
“Officials from four presidential swing states forcefully criticized an effort by Texas and President Donald Trump to enlist the Supreme Court to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election, with Pennsylvania calling the last-ditch legal effort “seditious” and built on an “absurd” foundation.
“The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated,” Pennsylvania said in a 43-page brief signed by Attorney General Josh Shapiro and his deputies.
“In support of such a request, Texas brings to the Court only discredited allegations and conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact,” the attorneys wrote. “Accepting Texas’s view would do violence to the Constitution and the Framers’ vision.”
The briefs from Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin — states targeted in Texas’ lawsuit, brought by Attorney General Ken Paxton, which Trump is attempting to join — directed their fury largely at Paxton. And they pleaded with the justices to reject the suit out of hand, warning that anything else would give states unprecedented power to sue each other to enforce their will, leading to waves of partisan retribution that shake the foundations of federalism.”
…
“Texas’ lawsuit drew skepticism even among Republicans on Capitol Hill, who have broadly been supportive of the president’s efforts to undermine faith in the democratic system. Some Texas GOP lawmakers, including Sen. John Cornyn, raised questions about the merits. Rep. Chip Roy called it “a dangerous violation of federalism,” and House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy twice dodged questions about whether he backed the legal effort.
However, a group of 106 House Republicans signed a friend of the court briefing, arguing the defendant states acted illegally and that their electors should be prevented from voting.”
“To the extent that exit polls can be believed, Trump got a thumping 45 percent of Florida’s Latino vote, an 11-point improvement over his 2016 performance. This is squarely because 58 percent of the Sunshine State’s sizeable Cuban American community in the populous Miami-Dade County voted for him, an improvement of four points from last time. This cut Joe Biden’s overall county-wide lead to merely seven points, in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s 30-point one.
Why did Biden lose ground with these groups? One reason is that Trump successfully associated Biden with socialism, and raised the specter that the Democrat would turn America into the countries they’d escaped. In one masterstroke of microtargeting, Trump invited Fabiana Rosales, the wife of an imprisoned Venezuelan opposition leader, to the White House and then used the video with her to woo the community. Meanwhile, Biden took the Latino vote for granted and did little to refute this branding, even as political commentators like Linda Chavez, a conservative who opposed Trump, were sounding the alarm telling him to wake up. Biden could have also done more to point out that Trump had rejected half the asylum petitions of Cubans and Senate Republicans five times in 18 months spurned efforts to extend the Temporary Protected Status for undocumented Venezuelans. If these communities had been more aware of Trump’s record, they might have been less inclined to support him in such numbers. It was missed opportunity on Biden’s part.”
…
“By contrast, the states where Latinos came through in decisive numbers for Biden—and against Trump—were Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona. Colorado was an early win for the vice president. Nevada was a squeaker. And Arizona has yet to even be called by The New York Times. In all three, preliminary reports suggest upwards of 70 percent of Hispanics voted for Biden. Why in such large numbers? Because unlike Florida, Hispanics in these states tend to come from Mexico or Central America. And unlike Texas, they tend to be immigrants or first-generation. Hence Trump’s rhetoric and policies directly threatened them, especially in Arizona, which has long been Ground Zero for the restrictionist movement and where Trump’s interior enforcement policies have hit the Hispanic community hard.”
…
“Trump had plenty of restrictionist plans ready to go for his second term, he simply chose to de-emphasize them on the stump. Top aide Stephen Miller had already cued up a series of executive orders to further limit grants of asylum, punish and outlaw “sanctuary cities,” expand the travel ban to include more countries, require even more extreme vetting for visa applicants, and impose new limits on work visas. As if that wasn’t ambitious enough, he was also planning to act on a perennial item on the ultra restrictionist wish list by using an executive order to end birthright citizenship, forcing the matter to the Supreme Court.
But he didn’t campaign on those plans. In fact, he barely mentioned them. This was in sharp contrast to his first campaign”
“The share of third-party/independent presidential voters plummeted by nearly four percentage points since 2016, from 5.7 to 1.8, while Joe Biden exceeded Hillary Clinton’s haul nationally by 2.6 percentage points and climbing steadily, as the populous blue states continue to pad his lead.
So while Michigan, for example, was delivering essentially the same results for Trump as four years ago, the Great Lakes State was subtracting 3.6 percentage points from third-party candidates, and adding 3.2 to Biden”
…
“Arizona has a similar story: down a combined 4.6 for the marginal names, up 4.3 for the Democrat; 92 percent E.V. All over the country, the president was able to bring out more of his voters, but with only a handful of exceptions was unable to expand on his core share of support by persuading fence-sitters to choose the Republican side.”
…
“There were 7.8 million third-party voters last time, and just 2.7 million this time, so any strong lean by the remaining 5 million-plus was always going to dwarf whatever impact partisans may attribute to “spoilers.””
“The women—all white, all from the greater Phoenix area—had been repelled by Trump in 2016. None of them voted for Hillary Clinton. But over the past four years, as they watched their party fall to Trumpism, their disgust sent them all in the same direction: the Democratic Party.”
…
“This suburban shift has been especially clear here in Maricopa County, the 9,000-square-mile of beige housing developments and lush golf courses around Phoenix, which accounts for more than 60 percent of Arizona’s votes. The candidate who wins Maricopa—one of the most populous counties in the nation—nearly always wins Arizona, and no Republican nominee has ever won the White House without Arizona since it became a state in 1912. But the state has become much more hospitable to Democrats since Trump’s election. In the 2018 midterms, which were seen as a repudiation of Trump, especially in the suburbs, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won Maricopa and became the first Democrat to win a Senate race in Arizona in 30 years. Sixteen percent of Republican women in Maricopa broke with their party to vote for Sinema that year, exit polls showed.”
…
“Overall, most white Republican women supported Trump. But nationally, “we’ve not seen this amount of defection from the Republican Party in 20 or 30 years,” Christopher Weber, a professor at the University of Arizona School of Government and Public Policy, told me.
The suburban shift went well beyond Maricopa. Through organizing by activists of color and the leftward tilt of white, college-educated women, Biden was able to capture many of America’s other big suburbs, including Cobb County, Georgia, outside of Atlanta, and the counties surrounding Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Detroit; and Houston.
For many of the GOP defectors, it came down to the president’s personality—his flagrant racism and misogyny, his bullying, his insult comedy.”
…
“the women were careful to note that it’s not just Trump’s personality that turns them off. It’s his antipathy toward the issues that feel most urgent to them. That attitude helps make them prime targets for the Democratic Party. These women are conservative, yes: They believe in low taxes, limited government, free trade, and “the responsibility of individuals,” as Andersen put it. But they also crave action on climate change. They want affordable health care for all Americans. They want a humane immigration system. They want policies to promote equality and address police brutality. For many Republican women in America, the starkest example of Trump’s failure has been his administration’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, his refusal to encourage mask wearing, and his blasé attitude toward the crisis, experts told me.”
…
“Since he won the Democratic primary, Biden has tried to forge a healthy partnership with Bernie Sanders–aligned members of his party. He’s accepted their counsel on issues such as climate change, and he’s adopted several progressive policy positions. But all along, leftists have questioned just how genuine his commitment is. That’s why women like Andersen and Skousen scare them: They worry that the addition of anti-Trump Republicans to the Democratic coalition will nudge the former vice president back toward the ideological center, a place where he’s traditionally been most comfortable. They fear that the moderates and former Republicans who helped him win in crucial swing states will be the voters he most wants to appease in office. They worry that he’ll stock his executive branch with Bill Clinton–era Democrats and corporate executives, and fill his Cabinet with Republicans such as former Ohio Governor John Kasich.”
“Many Vietnamese Americans — particularly first-generation, older immigrants with low English proficiency — had become more radically conservative, or were exposed to and sympathetic with these pro-Trump views.
From my reporting on immigrant Asian communities, I found that some Vietnamese immigrants who might not understand the nuances of racism in America felt threatened by the social unrest and looting in cities. A few even became counterprotesters at local Black Lives Matter rallies.”
…
“many first-generation Vietnamese were already conservative to begin with. Having left behind a communist-led country, they may be averse to liberal politics, deeply religious, and invested in the idea of the American dream. Guided by a tide of Vietnamese- and English-language misinformation, however, these radical right-wing views are now quietly held by a not-so-insignificant minority”
…
“Some Vietnamese Americans don’t align themselves entirely with other immigrants. Many are wartime refugees who fought against the communist North Vietnamese army alongside American soldiers, my mom explained. They had no choice but to leave their home country.
The way she sees it, Vietnamese people deserve to be here, but America shouldn’t just accept anyone. “A country is like a home,” she told me in Vietnamese. “You can’t just let anyone inside your home.”
But this line of thinking — that they are “good” or “special” immigrants — fails to recognize how Trump’s immigration policy actually hurts some Vietnamese families, especially newer arrivals who are navigating the green card process.
Those who fled Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon tend to remain strongly opposed to big government policies, are suspicious of any socialist-sympathizing politicians, and are blatantly anti-China, haunted by China’s imperialist agenda in Vietnam and the South China Sea. Many are religious, and hail from patriarchal households where the male breadwinner makes all the important family decisions.”
“It’s illegal to move to Georgia temporarily just to vote in an election and then leave. Georgia state officials are strongly urging prospective out-of-state voters to stay home, warning them they’ll face steep penalties if they vote fraudulently.”
“the sitting president’s refusal to acknowledge electoral defeat is worrisome, as it raises the prospect that he will not uphold a core tenet of democracy: Elections determine who is in power, and those who lose surrender power peacefully. The behavior of top Republican Party officials — subtly acknowledging that Trump must leave office on Jan. 20 but not openly rebuking his conduct — in some ways also violates that core value. And the combination of Trump’s and his party’s behavior raises a serious question: Is America’s democracy in trouble?
Maybe. People who study democratic norms and values both in the United States and abroad say that the behavior of Trump and the Republican Party over the past week deeply concerns them. Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan says it’s important not to think of democracy in binary terms — that either a nation is or is not a democracy. Instead, Nyhan argues, democracy falls more on a spectrum, and based on how Trump broke with democratic values as president and how he is handling the end of his presidency, America does remain a democracy, but it is somewhat less democratic than it was pre-Trump.”
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“Not only is Trump blocking his advisers from helping the incoming Biden administration get ready to deal with the pandemic, but the defeated president has largely disengaged from the COVID-19 crisis himself. In terms of managing the virus, America will be functionally without a president for two months.
We can’t totally rule out the most alarming possibility either — that Trump is going to try to stay in office past Jan. 20. After all, he has mobilized some key parts of the federal government and the Republican Party behind his efforts to question and undermine the election results.”
…
“It’s hard to know the answers to these questions. Democratic values are almost certain to be upheld this time — that is, the election determined who will be in charge, and the transfer of power will ultimately be peaceful. But it’s not totally clear that these values will be upheld the next time a Trump-like figure emerges. American democracy is likely to survive Trump, but his tenure has raised important questions about the state of America’s democracy and whether it will endure in perpetuity.”
“Biden..will not be allowed access to classified information or any members of the intelligence community until the General Services Administration officially “ascertains” him as the president-elect — a formality that has traditionally taken place within 24 hours of election day but is being held up by Trump as he continues to challenge the election results.
Biden was given classified briefings as a candidate but those stopped once he became president-elect, and his status as a former vice president and former senator does not afford him access now.”