Trump is fighting with Mitch McConnell and fighting with Fox, fighting with Republican governors, fighting with anyone who has a patriotic bone in their body. Trump's last act may be to veto a defense bill because he wants to keep the names of forts and bases named for Confederate traitors against the U.S. Ironically, many Republicans in Congress are not just willing to vote to override his veto; they are eager to be seen doing so.
Trump is still living out the tattered remains of the fantasy that he won the election. His twitter account is filled with lies and psychosis. This was what was on top of his still-not-deleted page this morning:
The Washington Post's Tim Bella noted that after McConnell acknowledged yesterday that Biden won the elected Trump, at 1 AM, "publicly pleaded with him to support his continued efforts to upend the election with baseless claims of mass electoral fraud... Trump’s tweet made it clear that McConnell’s decision to recognize Biden as president-elect has opened a rift at the top of the GOP, with the president continuing to falsely claim victory while McConnell works behind the scenes to convince Republican senators not to challenge the electoral college, which cast 306 votes for Biden on Monday, formalizing his victory." Right after Putin signaled the OK, Moscow Mitch followed:
Many of us hoped that the presidential election would yield a different result, but our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on January 20. The electoral college has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden. The president-elect is no stranger to the Senate. He’s devoted himself to public service for many years.
And the fight is on. Steve Schmidt may have re-registered as what he called on Lawrence O'Donnell's show last night "a conservative Democrat," but McConnell and most of the establishment Republicans are sticking around the fight it out with Trump-- to see who will control the GOP going forward. "Some of the president’s allies," wrote Bella, "also lashed out at the Senate’s top Republican on Tuesday, with Trump-aligned attorney L. Lin Wood calling him 'a traitor to American Patriots. His day of judgment is coming,' Wood tweeted. Fox News host Mark Levin, meanwhile, called for McConnell to retire. While not naming McConnell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia representative-elect and QAnon conspiracy theory supporter, said that Republicans who don’t continue contesting the election results are supporting 'the Chinese Communist Party takeover of America.' ... Trump appeared to note the smattering of support, retweeting early on Wednesday an article titled, 'Trump allies slam Mitch McConnell for congratulating Biden.'"
Yesterday, I noticed that a Virginia state Senator, Amanda Chase, a GOP candidate for governor next year, was still denying reality on her Facebook page. "Fair elections we can accept but cheating to win; never. It’s not over yet. So thankful President Trump has a backbone and refuses to concede. President Trump should declare martial law as recommended by General Flynn. I suspect she's not going to ever be governor of Virginia. Maybe she should move to Wyoming or one of the Dakotas.
Writing for The Hill yesterday, Jonathan Easley explained how "Chase’s remarks reveal how a segment of Trump’s most fervent supporters insist the election was stolen and are proposing increasingly radical solutions to avert the outcome. Chase says she’s working with pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell 'to expose what I and others believe is extensive fraud here in Virginia.'"
One state down, in North Carolina, state Sen. Bob Steinburg is basically asking-- also on Facebook-- for the same thing, a suspension of civil rights and tossing out the election results. How is that not sedition? "Asked by a local TV station on Tuesday," wrote Washington Post reporter Katie Shepherd, "whether he stands by those sentiments, Steinburg doubled down, insisting that nefarious forces had corrupted President-elect Joe Biden’s victory."
Steinburg's Facebook bullshit was quoting an interview with far right crackpot Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, on neo-fascist media outlet OAN. He was just reelected to the state Senate from the first district in the swingy northeast corner of the state (Hertford, Gates, Chowan, Camden, Perquimans, Pasquotank, Currituck, Washington, Terrell, Dare, and Hyde counties), beating Democrat Tess Judge 58,319 (55.2%) to 47,248 (44.8%). Unbidden, Steinburg offered to take a psychological evaluation to prove that he is sound of mind. 'I’m not nuts,' he told the outlet. 'I’m not a conspiracy theory person.'" He's both nuts and a conspiracy nut, but apparently not self-aware enough to recognize it.
Shepherd also noted that two members of Congress, anti-American neo-fascists Mo Brooks of Alabama and Paul Gosar of Arizona, say they refuse to accept the electoral college results. In his Post column yesterday, Greg Sargent wrote that McConnell said on the call that if the Senate is forced by even one nut-- think Ron Johnson, for example, to vote on whether or not to accept the Electoral College vote and then vote it down, it would be a "terrible vote," in McConnell's words, because it would make Republicans appear anti-Trump."McConnell," wrote Sargent, "fears this scenario because he doesn’t want Republican senators to have to vote against the idea that millions of votes should be overturned so Trump can be kept in power illegitimately. This is what anti-Trump really means. The scenario McConnell prefers, in which no Republican senator objects to any Biden electors, is not ideal, to be sure, since Trump and his loyalists will no doubt rage at them for failing to join his scheme. But it’s better than having to actively vote against it... [H]ere you have McConnell begging fellow Republicans not to feed the very beast that McConnell himself has been feeding for weeks, for incredibly cynical reasons. That’s bad enough, but it gets still worse."
What McConnell almost certainly fears in the dreaded scenario — in which Senate Republicans vote down an objection to Biden electors from a given state — is that Republicans will be cast as stab-in-the-back betrayers of Trump.
For as long as he can, Trump will try to keep alive the mythos that the election was stolen from him and that quisling Republicans didn’t fight hard enough to prevent this horrifying travesty of injustice. A vote like this will stand as the final betrayal of the Lost Cause of Trumpism, a day that will live in bloody infamy in the Trumpist mythology.
McConnell is trying to prevent any and all Senate Republicans from endorsing the idea that Trump actually won the election, but not because he thinks GOP voters deserve the basic respect of being told the truth. With some notable exceptions, most Republicans, McConnell included, treated it as simply unthinkable that they would tell their voters the truth about Trump’s loss until they absolutely had to.
After cynically feeding the lie that Biden wasn’t the clear winner for as long as he personally could, McConnell is only trying to get fellow Republicans to refrain from further feeding that beast because the alternative will give birth to a beast that’s even worse. Their contempt for their own voters is bottomless.
And Georgia. McConnell is petrified that if Georgia Trumpists feel stabbed in the back, enough really could stay away from the January 5 runoffs that Perdue and Loeffler both lose-- and that he becomes minority leader.
