In his uncharacteristically optimistic Weekly Dish this past Friday, Andrew Sullivan wrote that 2021 has the potential to be a great year in no small part because “Donald Trump will not be president.”
You sure about that, Andrew?
This Twitter feed does not look like that of a man preparing to concede defeat any time soon:
Trump will believe Jim Freaking Hoft but not his own intelligence agencies:
“Russia, Russia, Russia,” said President Donald Trump mockingly, in a Saturday tweet about the massive cyberattack on the United States. His remarks come less than 18 hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo explicitly said Russia is “clearly” behind the attack.
“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality,” Trump wrote in his tweet, referring to the hack that Pompeo told conservative radio host Mark Levin was a “very significant effort” by Russia.
“Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of…discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!),” Trump’s two-tweet thread continued.
I’ll believe OJ is innocent before I accept that the pee tape is not real.
Oh, and Trump reportedly spoke to Mike Flynn about imposing “martial law”, because why the heck not?
During a White House meeting Friday, President Donald Trump floated the idea of naming conservative attorney Sidney Powell as a special counsel to investigate his election loss to President-elect Joe Biden, according to multiple media reports.
In the Oval Office meeting, which was first reported by The New York Times, Trump discussedwith his advisers the possibility of appointing Powell to investigate election fraud claims and to potentially seize voting machines that Trump claimed were rigged against him.
[…]
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn was in attendance at the White House on Friday, where Trump asked him about the idea of invoking martial law, according to the Times. The Wall Street Journal and CNN also reported that the idea of martial law was discussed but did not specify who raised it or how Trump viewed it. All the reports said the suggestion was rejected.
Trump denied the reports about the discussion of martial law in a tweet early Sunday, but he did not dispute any other aspects of the reports about the meeting.
In 1984 it was a major scandal when Ronald Reagan made an obvious joke about nuking Russia into a hot microphone. In 2020 Trump talks about martial law and it’s not even the main focus of the news story. (That also says something about how Sidney Powell, whom we were assured isn’t actually part of Trump’s legal team, has captured the public’s imagination.)
According to Axios, even Trump’s own staffers are freaking out:
Senior Trump administration officials are increasingly alarmed that President Trump might unleash — and abuse — the power of government in an effort to overturn the clear result of the election.
Why it matters: These officials tell me that Trump is spending too much time with people they consider crackpots or conspiracy theorists and flirting with blatant abuses of power.
There are 32 days until President-elect Biden's inauguration.
The big picture: Their fears include Trump's interest in former national security adviser Michael Flynn's wild talk of martial law; an idea floated of an executive order to commandeer voting machines; and the specter of Sidney Powell, the conspiracy-spewing election lawyer, obtaining governmental power and a top-level security clearance.
A senior administration official said that when Trump is "retweeting threats of putting politicians in jail, and spends his time talking to conspiracy nuts who openly say declaring martial law is no big deal, it’s impossible not to start getting anxious about how this ends."
"People who are concerned and nervous aren’t the weak-kneed bureaucrats that we loathe," the official added. "These are people who have endured arguably more insanity and mayhem than any administration officials in history."
“Trump sounds crazy behind closed doors right now even by Trump standards, according to people whose tolerance for craziness is exceedingly high,” writes Allahpundit.
Trump lost the election and has no legal way around it. The optimistic spin is that everything we’re seeing is theatre, designed to keep the base riled up and ready to pay for subscriptions to Trump’s Roku channel. Another in a long line of massive scams would be the good news.
The pessimistic spin is that he’ll never forgive the country for rejecting him, so he’s destroying everything and salting the earth on the way out. If the United States survives this, I expect to see some serious reforms put in place - including shortening the lame-duck period if possible, and changing the laws that give the President control over the country’s nuclear arsenal - in case another unhinged person is installed in the White House.
One silver lining: many Trump cultists lost so much money gambling that he’d win the election, they have less cash to spend on weapons.
This is what passes for a silver lining in 2020.
On Dec. 9, Donald Trump tweeted something incorrect but at least closer to the ballpark of the truth than most of what he’s posted since losing his reelection campaign.
“At 10 p.m. on Election Evening, we were at 97% [to] win with the so-called ‘bookies,’ ” Trump wrote. The “so-called ‘bookies’ ” never had Trump as a 97 percent favorite, but late on the night of Nov. 3, many online sportsbooks did indeed favor him to win the presidency. At points between 10 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. Eastern, many of these bookmakers—all of which are offshore, because election betting is not legal in the United States—posted odds that gave Trump around a 70 percent chance of victory. At 10:30 p.m., one of the most popular offshore books for U.S. bettors, Costa Rica–based Bovada, had Trump at -775, meaning a successful $775 bet would return $100 in profit. It implied an 89 percent chance that Trump would win.
If you were cursed enough to be following betting markets on election night, those numbers might have hit you like the New York Times’ 2016 needle on megasteroids. Political analysts had warned that delays in counting mail-in ballots could create a “red mirage,” where Republicans would look good based on the Election Day vote before Democrats made up ground. But the betting odds were not buying that theory of the race. They moved hard toward Trump when it became clear he would win Florida and looked good in North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas.
The betting markets were not good predictors, but they weren’t trying to be. The online bookmakers that fielded bets on the election saw their largest single-event windfall ever. To understand why, you need to understand election betting and Donald Trump supporters.
[…]
The odds-shifting bonanza on election night, with all that money on the line, was not a sign that the oddsmakers knew something the mainstream media did not. Instead, the Trump spike was the peak of a phenomenon that had been unfolding all year. Many Trump supporters were certain he could not lose, and they plowed so much money into betting on him that they distorted markets in his (and ultimately, the sportsbooks’) favor.
Ireland-based bookmaker PaddyPower (get it?) presumably avenged its 2016 disaster and then some:
An Irish bookmaker was left red faced on Wednesday morning after its decision to pay out early to customers who had bet on a Hillary Clinton victory in the U.S. election proved costly.
In October, Paddy Power paid out £800,000 ($992,528) on a Clinton victory after a series of negative news stories threatened to derail Donald Trump’s campaign.
“We’re in the business of making predictions and decided to put our neck on the line by paying out early on Hillary Clinton, but boy did we get it wrong,” Paddy Power spokesperson Lewis Davey said in a statement Wednesday.
The bookmaker added that it had been hit for more than £4 million ($4.96 million) by punters who’d backed Donald Trump to win.
“We’ve been well and truly thumped by Trump, with his victory leaving us with the biggest political pay-out in the company’s history and some very, very expensive egg on our faces,” Davey added.
A Christmas mystery:
At this point, the situation looks even more concerning than just before elections. Trump and his followers seem ready and willing to go significantly further and potentially with much more dangerous methods than one would have guessed mere weeks ago. Then again, Trump did tell the public that it would get dangerous...
Clearly we should be paying attention.
What always struck me about the outside view of the Home Alone mansion is the power bill. It must be of truly epic proportions. [cue diamond minecraft song ;)]