No sleep until January 20
Joe Biden will take the oath of office on January 20, 2021. Almost certainly. Hopefully. Maybe.
If you’re a child of the Cold War like me, you might remember pulp novels and low-budget movies about the Soviet Union successfully installing one of its own assets in the White House.
It is 2020, and we are seriously wondering if the outgoing inhabitant of the White House is going to spill his country’s secrets on the way out:
As president, Donald Trump selectively revealed highly classified information to attack his adversaries, gain political advantage and to impress or intimidate foreign governments, in some cases jeopardizing U.S. intelligence capabilities. As an ex-president, there's every reason to worry he will do the same, thus posing a unique national security dilemma for the Biden administration, current and former officials and analysts said.
All presidents exit the office with valuable national secrets in their heads, including the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, intelligence-gathering capabilities - including assets deep inside foreign governments - and the development of new and advanced weapon systems.
But no new president has ever had to fear that his predecessor might expose the nation's secrets as President-elect Joe Biden must with Trump, current and former officials said. Not only does Trump have a history of disclosures, he checks the boxes of a classic counterintelligence risk: He is deeply in debt and angry at the U.S. government, particularly what he describes as the "deep state" conspiracy that he believes tried to stop him from winning the White House in 2016 and what he falsely claims is an illegal effort to rob him of reelection.
"Anyone who is disgruntled, dissatisfied or aggrieved is a risk of disclosing classified information, whether as a current or former officeholder. Trump certainly fits that profile," said David Priess, a former CIA officer and author of "The President's Book of Secrets," a history of the top-secret intelligence briefings that presidents and their staff receive while in office.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The silver lining here is that we might finally learn if there’s anything in Hangar 18. In any event, the Republic’s most closely guarded secrets may be saved by the simple fact that the outgoing President is kind of a fucking moron:
Many concerned experts were quick to note that Trump reportedly paid scant attention during his presidential intelligence briefings and has never evinced a clear understanding of how the national security apparatus works. His ignorance may be the best counterweight to the risk he poses.
"A knowledgeable and informed president with Trump's personality characteristics, including lack of self-discipline, would be a disaster. The only saving grace here is that he hasn't been paying attention," said Jack Goldsmith, who ran the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department in the George W. Bush administration and is the co-author of "After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency."
"He probably doesn't know much about collection details. But he will have bits and pieces," said retired Gen. Peter B. Zwack, who served as a military intelligence officer and was the senior U.S. defense attache to Russia from 2012 to 2014.
We are so very lucky Donald Trump and his most dedicated cronies aren’t more competent. If they did have any idea what they were doing, I’d be even more concerned about their obstinate refusal to admit defeat:
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday voiced confidence that once every “legal” vote was counted, it would lead to a “second Trump administration,” appearing to reject Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump.
But hours after withering criticism over his comments, Pompeo, a close ally and appointee of Trump’s, in a Fox News interview appeared to soften his tone.
“I am very confident that we will have a good transition, that we will make sure that whoever is in office on noon on January 20th has all the tools readily available so we don’t skip a beat with the capacity to keep Americans safe,” Pompeo said.
Major media and polling outlets called the presidential election for Biden on Saturday but Trump and his allies insist “illegal” ballots may have been cast despite no evidence of mass voter fraud, which is extremely rare in U.S. elections.
Pompeo did not make any comments in either set of remarks to suggest he recognized Biden as the president-elect.
The Republican candidates in Georgia’s Senate runoff elections are calling for the state Secretary of State - himself a Republican - to resign because the Dear Leader lost, while Georgia’s Republican Congressional delegation (including the QAnon lady) are demanding that all of Trump’s vote fraud fever dreams be taken seriously.
Lindsey Graham is Lindsey Grahaming, and the Chairwoman of the Republican Party has been ordered not to acknowledge reality in any way:
A Trump 2020 endorser, Daniel Pipes, warns that his preferred candidate’s refusal to concede defeat is the kind of thing that leads to devastating consequences in other countries, and that the United States is by no means immune just because it’s the United States:
No law requires a concession speech, no agreement demands it; but this informal ceremony has an essential role in confirming the paramount rule of democracy, that the losing candidates has heard and accepted the voters’ verdict. After a hard-fought, even vicious, campaign, the vanquished assures the victor he accepts the results, permitting the country to move forward. Sure, political wrangling will immediately resume, but once the key step of accepting the voters’ will has been established, the country is whole, the body politic healthy and the next round can begin.
The alternative has dire consequences, as Víctor Hernández-Huerta of the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City shows. His study of 178 presidential elections in democracies in the period 1974-2012 found that in 38 of them, or 21 percent, when the runner-up candidates or their parties disputed the results, this ‘set off violent unrest, constitutional crises and even civil wars’. Hernández pointedly notes that the United States is ‘not immune’ to this danger.
So far, of course, the country has been blissfully free of such contention. Disputed presidential elections there have been aplenty: think 1800, 1824, 1876, 1960 and 2000. But, until now, losing candidates accepted their loss with grace and went on to make that all-important concession speech. They implicitly realized that some things — notably legitimacy and stability — matter even more important than winning.
[…]
…President Trump is absolutely entitled to pursue every legal avenue — including recounts and lawsuits — to assure his full rights.
But claiming that the Biden campaign engaged in ‘fraud’ and that the election was ‘stolen’ is wildly inappropriate unless and until there is a factual basis for these conclusions. Indulging in this sort of rhetoric has ominous implications, turning the election results into a political, as opposed to a legal, contest.
Assuming the Electoral College on December 14 validates Biden’s victory, the shame of it is that everyone knows Trump, for all his bluster, inevitably and quietly will stand by on January 20 as Joe Biden is sworn in. Judges, senators, representatives, cabinet secretaries, aides, generals and governors will make sure the Secret Service does not hold down the White House as a bunker. In the end, his incautious claims will do Trump no good but will only further sunder an already fractured country.
(Yeah, I know: what on earth did Pipes expect when he decided Trump should have four more years? But better to come to your senses late than never.)
As of this writing, if you asked me how I’m feeling about President Trump’s lame-duck weeks in office and the transition to a Biden Administration, I’d say I’m feeling about the same as I did around supper time on the day after the election. By then I was confident that Joe Biden had wrapped up Arizona and Nevada, that everything was trending in the right direction in the Rust Belt “firewall” states, and that he might even win Georgia. I was prepared to breathe again and let myself think he will be President as of January 20, 2020.
But every once in a while a piece of news would come - Trump is gaining on Biden in Maricopa County! Alleged reporting errors in Michigan are overstating Biden’s lead! There’s a sale at Penney’s! - that would send a chill down my spine and make me think the year 2020 was about to sucker-punch me once again. After a Tuesday night in which I slept fitfully and kept checking my phone every few minutes, my sleep still wasn't completely back to normal.
Some Trump allies are finally trying to let him - and themselves - down easy, and most likely will the outgoing President will slither back from whence he came. (Actually, not even that - he officially changed his residence from New York to Florida, which is probably why Florida Man has been complaining lately about his properly values going down.) Maybe this is all just promotion for the Trump streaming service. But it’s so embarrassing for the United States of America that we can’t know this with 100 percent certainty.
While at least one QAnon supporter is going to Congress, another QAnon adherent - subject of a viral video in which she destroyed a display of masks at Target - is pulling herself back from the abyss:
…The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based PR professional, a self-described “type A” personality, had spent the pandemic barely eating, barely sleeping, barely socializing with friends. Instead, “I was all consumed with doom-scrolling on the Internet. I was living in these conspiracy theories. All of this fear porn that I was consuming online was just feeding my depression and anxiety.” She had found comfort in QAnon, a loose collection of conspiracy theories that touch on everything from politics to covid-19.
En route to grab the water, she noticed a display of masks, the ones to help prevent the coronavirus. “The culmination of everything I had experienced, like all that energy, just zeroed in on the masks. And I just snapped,” she said.
She took videos of what happened next and streamed them on Instagram Live. They quickly spread to other platforms, reported on by publications such as USA Today. She was labeled a Karen — and far worse. She thought her career was over. She thought her marriage was over. She thought her life was over.
There’s an old bit of advice that the end of a story should be surprising yet inevitable. The Target incident almost perfectly encapsulates the adage, save for one important detail — Lively is adamant it wasn’t an ending. For 15 years, the 35-year-old worked to “put people in their best light, to put them on a pedestal.” Now she’s her own client. She has embarked on something of a media tour to tell her side of the story and is penning a memoir titled “You Can’t Cancel Me — The Story of My Life.”
[…]
Lively remembers the lead-up, but she doesn’t remember what she termed a “mental breakdown episode” at Target, saying it was akin to being “blacked out.” Watching the videos now is an “out-of-body experience.” She has no idea what she was trying to say, either at the store or to the police.
“I was living in a fantasy land in my mind,” she said. “But I take full accountability. I know I scared a lot of people. I know I angered a lot of people.”
That anger became evident when she came home from a week-long involuntary hospitalization to hundreds of furious emails and phone calls.
“My messages would fill up every single day with people saying, ‘I hope you die. Please kill yourself. I’m going to come and kill you. I know you have two little dogs, and I just put a spell on them to make them die tonight,’ ” she said. “The most horrible things you can possibly imagine. I received instructions with pictures: ‘Here’s how you should kill yourself.’ ”
Her husband, her husband’s business partners and even her hairstylist’s husband were getting threats. She was too ashamed to be seen in public.
“Her blessing is her curse,” said Prince, noting Lively’s social media following. “If she weren’t such a great PR person, no one would have known about her breakdown.”
We’ve all had good fun gawking at YouTube and Instagram video of crazy people freaking out in public. I just discovered the /r/AmIBeingDetained subreddit, and that’s led to me binge-watching the wacky adventures of “Sovereign Citizens” and “Freemen on the Land.” It feels so good to sit in judgment of people.
But we have no idea what they’re actually going through and what led them to that point.
Up next, James Dolan has some recommendations about how to run a winning basketball team.
Maybe my birthday present will be a peaceful, normal US Presidential inauguration.
But until it has safely occurred and we know Biden/Harris are the officially recognized new leaders of the USA, I’m staying braced for unplanned surprises. After all, that’s the new US: instability and unpredictability. Certainly not the wise superpower in which we believed growing up.
May it find its way back to sanity and become a better, wiser country in the process. I breathed a sigh of relief when the elections passed peacefully. Let’s hope that the transition is peaceful, as well; and even though Trump and his followers should be treated as unpredictable, the odds are that it will be peaceful. The Republicans now have a lot of control. Unrest would not be good for them either...it’s in their best interest to make Trump accept reality and at least cooperate reasonably, if not gracefully.