Trump's Sedition Must Be Severely Dealt With

The Sound Of Music Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

While Trump helped burrow at least a dozen right-wing saboteurs into sensitive civil service positions, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp-- once a knee-jerk Trump ally-- pretty much admitted that Trump had demanded he illegally help him steal the election in Georgia. Gallup reported that since the election, Trump's favorability ratings have continued ticking down-- primarily with Republicans and independents-- and now stands at 42%. The more he shoots his mouth off about unfounded conspiracy theories to steal the election-- which makes him look awfully weak and impotent-- the more people are repulsed by him.

This morning the editors-- all conservatives-- of the National Review published an OpEd, Trump's Disgraceful Endgame, that helps explain why even some Republicans have had it with the whiny asshole. They wrote that "The chief driver of the post-election contention of the past several weeks is the petulant refusal of one man to accept the verdict of the American people. The Trump team (and much of the GOP) is working backwards, desperately trying to find something, anything to support the president’s aggrieved feelings, rather than objectively considering the evidence and reacting as warranted. Almost nothing that the Trump team has alleged has withstood the slightest scrutiny. In particular, it’s hard to find much that is remotely true in the president’s Twitter feed these days. It is full of already-debunked claims and crackpot conspiracy theories about Dominion voting systems. Over the weekend, he repeated the charge that 1.8 million mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania were mailed out, yet 2.6 million were ultimately tallied. In a rather elementary error, this compares the number of mail-ballots requested in the primary to the number of ballots counted in the general. A straight apples-to-apples comparison finds that 1.8 million mail-in ballots were requested in the primary and 1.5 million returned, while 3.1 million ballots were requested in the general and 2.6 million returned. Flawed and dishonest assertions like this pollute the public discourse and mislead good people who make the mistake of believing things said by the president of the United States."

Trump’s most reprehensible tactic has been to attempt, somewhat shamefacedly, to get local Republican officials to block the certification of votes and state legislatures to appoint Trump electors in clear violation of the public will. This has gone nowhere, thanks to the honesty and sense of duty of most of the Republicans involved, but it’s a profoundly undemocratic move that we hope no losing presidential candidate ever even thinks of again.

Getting defeated in a national election is a blow to the ego of even the most thick-skinned politicians and inevitably engenders personal feelings of bitterness and anger. What America has long expected is that losing candidates swallow those feelings and at least pretend to be gracious. If Trump’s not capable of it, he should at least stop waging war on the outcome.

NBC News reported today that Trump's performance generally decreased in the counties where he held his super-spreader rallies during the last 2 weeks of the campaign. Of the 30 counties he visited, his margin, compared to 2016, improved but in 25 counties his margin decreased-- even flipping blue in some cases!

Dante Chinni wrote that "Crowd sizes are often held out as a way to gauge support for a politician, and sometimes they are. But during a pandemic, with a polarizing candidate on the stump, it’s possible the meaning of the rallies were misread. While the crowds were visible sign of enthusiasm for Trump, there were much bigger, and less visible, groups of people who were not at the rallies and who may have seen them in a negative light."

Let's look at Pennsylvania, where courts keep throwing out Trump's attempts to overturn the election. He held 7 rallies in the last two weeks of the campaign and in each county he went to, his share of the vote was reduced from 2016, Erie being the most noteworthy because Trump won it in 2016 and lost it this year:

2016

• Trump- 60,069 (48.57%)

• Hillary- 58,112 (46.99%)

2020

• Biden- 68,286 (49.81%)

• Trump- 66,869 (48.78%)

His win number is Lancaster County decreased and his loss in Lackawanna County grew. On Sunday, the Philadelphia Inquirer did a deep dive into how Pennsylvania flipped from Trump, who won it by 44,292 votes in 2016 to Biden, who won it by 80,555 votes this year. Jonathan Tamari and Jonathan Lai wrote it was all because if the big anti-Trump margins in the suburbs. Their top findings:

• Turnout was bigger than in 2016 in every county, with Trump scoring more votes in every county and with Biden scoring more votes than Hillary had in every county.

• Although Philly gave Biden more votes than Obama, let alone Hillary, Biden's increase of 3% over 2016 paled compared to Trump's increase of 22%, his largest gain in net votes in any county (with gains in many Latino wards)

• The four collar counties around Philadelphia all saw the Democratic margin increase by five digits. Same in the Pittsburgh suburbs

• Trump's vote in the rural counties increased but not by enough to offset the big suburban swings for Biden

• Only 10 out of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, including Philadelphia, voted for Trump at higher rates this year than in 2016. The rets all swung in a blue direction

Another Inquirer report, this one this morning, shows that Trump's, Giuliani's and Powell's nonsense about the Dominion voting machines was pure hogwash, Trump having won in 12 out iff the 14 counties that use Dominion equipment. Despite that two neo-Nazi state Reps from York, Seth Grove and Dawn Keefer have been running around lying about the Dominion machines as well.