Hello, and welcome to day 13 of Donald Trump refusing to accept reality and concede the presidential election to Joe Biden. Over the last almost two weeks, Trump has ranted and raved about completely unfounded claims of voter fraud, tweeted multiple variations on “I WON!” that have been flagged for spreading false information, and had his justice department make it easier for prosecutors to investigate claims of fraud which, again, do not appear to have happened outside the confines of the abandoned warehouse that is his head. At no time has Trump won any significant legal battles despite filing multiple lawsuits and on Friday, his attorneys dropped a suit in Arizona. Despite the fact that he has no chance of overturning the results of the election, his administration is carrying on as though he’s going to have a second term because, at this point, it appears that no one in his inner circle has the nerve to cup their hands around the sides of their mouths so as to create a kind of megaphone while shouting slowly but clearly “YOU LOST,” or to simply roll up a newspaper and rap him on the snout in the hopes he’ll respond to nonverbal commands.
But there is one person who’s willing to tell Trump to cut the shit: Barack Obama. Speaking with 60 Minutes for an interview that aired Sunday night, the 44th president was asked what advice he would give his successor, answering: “Well, a president is a public servant, they are temporary occupants of the office, by design. And when your time is up, then it is your job to put the country first and think beyond your own ego and your own interests and your own disappointments. My advice to President Trump is if you want, at this late stage in the game, to be remembered as somebody who put country first, it’s time for you to do the same thing.”
Pressed by CBS’s Scott Pelley on whether that meant conceding, Obama responded: “Absolutely. I think it was time for him to concede probably the day after the election or at the latest two days after the election. When you look at the numbers objectively, Joe Biden will have won handily. There is no scenario in which any of those states would turn the other way and certainly not enough to reverse the outcome of the election. More than the courtesy of a concession, the Trump White House is declining to free up the usual funds and facilities for the incoming administration. President-Elect Biden is not receiving secret national security briefings as Mr. Trump did when he was president-elect.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Obama called out the spineless Republicans going along with Trump’s absurd refusal to concede, who include Mitch McConnell and Georgia runoff candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who demanded last week that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger resign over evidence-free claims of “failures” in the election process. (He declined.) “The president doesn’t like to lose and—never admits loss,” Obama said. “I’m more troubled by the fact that other Republican officials who clearly know better are going along with this, are humoring him in this fashion. It is one more step in delegitimizing not just the incoming Biden administration, but democracy generally. And that’s a dangerous path. We would never accept that out of our own kids behaving that way if they lost, right? I mean, if my daughters, in any kinda competition, pouted and—and then accused the other side of cheating when they lost, when there was no evidence of it, we’d scold ’em. I think that there has been this sense over the last several years that literally anything goes and is justified in order to get power.”
Speaking to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg for an interview that was published on Monday, Obama similarly said he was discouraged by the fact that Republicans are for some reason still going along with the demands of a child. “For all the differences between myself and George W. Bush, he and his administration could not have been more gracious and intentional about ensuring a smooth handoff,” he said. “One of the really distressing things about the current situation is the amount of time that is being lost because of Donald Trump’s petulance and the unwillingness of other Republicans to call him on it.” And it doesn’t appear like that petulance will be ending any time soon, if someone’s tweets are any indication!
Incidentally, during their chat for The Atlantic, Goldberg remarked that Obama could be called “a realistic optimist” and that at the beginning of his new book, A Promised Land, the former president makes it clear that he hasn’t “swerved from the belief that America is imperfect but perfectible, that there’s more good than bad in the American story, and that tomorrow can be better than today.” Goldberg then asked Obama, “Even with Biden’s win, how does Trump as a phenomenon change your view of what America is?” To which Obama responded, in part:
So much of whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic depends on the time frame. If you were looking across millennia, then humans have advanced. Read a biography of Genghis Khan, who led a superpower for a long time—they were a superpower for longer than America’s been around. You know, when they raided a town, they gave you two choices: If you open the gates, we’ll just kill you quickly and take your women and enslave your children, but we won’t slaughter them. But if you hold out, we’ll slowly boil you in oil and peel off your skin. Compare the degree of brutality and venality and corruption and just sheer folly that you see across human history with how things are now. It’s not even close.
Which is definitely true but also an incredibly hilarious way to put Trump in perspective. He’s a malignant tumor that needs to be excised from society, but he’s not boiling us alive and peeling our skin off. Progress!
The Trump appointee blocking Biden’s transition is reportedly lining up a new gig for 2021
While Donald Trump is obviously solely responsible for the psychotic and mortifying postelection tantrum he’s been throwing for the past two weeks, a shit fit akin to watching a fellow supermarket shopper ram his cart into a display of Diet Coke and smash a dozen glass jars of pickles on the ground because he was told the store is closing in five minutes and he can’t stay any longer, his enablers aren’t far behind him when it comes to doling about blame for this global embarrassment. Obviously that includes senators like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and other spine-lacking Republicans but also an appointee whose name few people outside government knew as of last week: Emily Murphy.
The administrator of the General Services Administration must sign paperwork officially releasing millions of dollars to the winner of the election, in addition to giving its transition team access to government officials, office space in federal agencies, and taxpayer-funded equipment. In essence, as the Washington Post put it, the letter “amounts to a formal declaration by the federal government, outside of the media, of the winner of the presidential race.” But 13 days after the 2020 election and more than a week after all major media outlets called the race for Joe Biden, with Trump having absolutely no chance of getting a second term, Murphy has refused to acknowledge that Biden won, making it that much more difficult for the president-elect and his team to get a head start on crucial matters like a pandemic that has killed more than 245,000 people in the U.S. so far and stands to kill a lot more if no one does anything about it until January 2021. (“More people may die if we don’t coordinate,” Biden told reporters on Monday, stressing the need for his transition team to get access to the government’s plan for distributing a future COVID-19 vaccine. “A vaccine is important. It’s of little use until you are vaccinated. So how do we get the vaccine, how do we get over 300 million Americans vaccinated? What is the game plan? It is a huge, huge, huge undertaking to get it done,” Biden said. “If we have to wait until January 20 to start that planning, it puts us behind over a month, month and a half. And so, it’s important that it be done, that there be coordination now. Now or as rapidly as we can get that done.”)
And yet, despite the fact that Murphy is fine with effectively f--king over millions of people in deference to Trump, by acting as though he’s legitimately going to have a second term, she’s apparently making sure to line up options for herself when that second term never happens, according to ABC News:
The top General Services Administration official who’s blocking President-Elect Joe Biden’s transition team from accessing government resources ahead of his inauguration appears to be looking for a new job, according to a message obtained by ABC News. Emily Murphy, head of the GSA, recently sent that message to an associate inquiring about employment opportunities in 2021, a move that some in Washington interpreted as at least tacitly acknowledging that the current administration soon will be gone.
Congressional Democrats have accused Murphy of undermining the peaceful transition of power and could subpoena her for testimony on Capitol Hill to explain why she’s doing so. And while it’s true that there's often a reshuffling of officials after a presidential election, regardless of whether the incumbent returns, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., a senior member of the House Oversight Committee, insisted that Murphy reaching out privately about future employment opportunities “exposes the hypocrisy” of the Trump administration's position.
“Here’s somebody who refuses to sign the letter of transition but is self-dealing at the same time,” he told ABC News. “That’s a de facto recognition that there's an incoming administration, and it’s not called Trump—it’s called Biden.”
A GSA spokesperson denied to ABC the account that Murphy was actively looking for a new gig but said that if she was it would be totally acceptable, adding “The administrator remains focused on doing her job.” As for Murphy’s current job, while at present it‘s focused on kneecapping Biden, this isn’t the first time she’s done Trump’s dirty work, per the Washington Post:
…two issues of personal importance to the president became almost constant sources of controversy for her: the lease Trump’s company holds with the agency for its D.C. hotel, located in the federally owned Old Post Office Pavilion, and the planned consolidation of the FBI headquarters. Both projects have pressed Murphy into duty defending the president, and her actions elicited criticism from the agency’s watchdog as well as from congressional Democrats. Trump’s hotel lease was signed with the agency before Trump took office, and he resigned his position with the company when he entered office. But he retained ownership of his business, allowing him to profit from the property while in office.
Democrats held repeated hearings to get a better explanation of how the agency decided to allow Trump to keep the lease given that the Constitution bar presidents from accepting gifts or payments from foreign governments, which often patronize the hotel. Under Murphy, the GSA repeatedly declined to provide documents to House Democrats, including the monthly income statements it receives from Trump’s company. Last year, the agency’s inspector general determined that GSA “improperly” ignored those concerns in allowing Trump’s company to keep the lease.
Trump has personally intervened in the most prominent real estate project in the agency’s entire portfolio: the plan to build a new FBI headquarters that would allow the bureau out of the crumbling and insecure J. Edgar Hoover Building. During his first year in office, Trump and the GSA abruptly canceled a bipartisan plan to build a new suburban headquarters for the agency, infuriating Democrats who had worked more than a decade on the project and who alleged that Trump canceled the project so a competing hotel could never be built in place of the Hoover building, a site down the street from his hotel.
If none of these feelers Murphy has reportedly put out materialize into something, perhaps she can find employment at the Trump Organization in 2021.
And speaking of presidential enablers
Lindsey Graham is apparently determined to go down as Trump’s number one henchman, even if it means kissing his last remaining particle of dignity goodbye:
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that he has come under increasing pressure in recent days from fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), to question the validity of legally cast absentee ballots in an effort to reverse President Trump’s narrow loss in the state. In a wide-ranging interview about the election, Raffensperger expressed exasperation over a string of baseless allegations coming from Trump and his allies about the integrity of the Georgia results, including claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado-based manufacturer of Georgia’s voting machines, is a “leftist” company with ties to Venezuela that engineered thousands of Trump votes to be left out of the count.
The atmosphere has grown so contentious, Raffensperger said, that both he and his wife, Tricia, have received death threats in recent days, including a text to him that read: “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.”
Raffensperger told the Post he was shocked that the senator from South Carolina seemed to suggest he figure out a way to throw out legally cast ballots. Typically mild-mannered, he also called Rep. Doug Collins, who is leading Trump’s effort to prove voter fraud in the state, “a liar” and a “charlatan.” On Friday Trump claimed on Twitter, in one of many posts flagged for spreading false information, that Raffensperger “won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud,” adding “we won the state” and calling the guy a “Republican in name only.” Which is a slightly different tone from the one the president took in 2018, before he needed people to help him steal an election:
We might finally see a certain someone’s tax returns
Not because he’s suddenly decided to release them, though:
President Donald Trump’s defeat will make it a lot easier for Democrats to finally get his tax returns, and some prominent lawmakers plan to keep the heat on the incoming Biden administration and House leaders to deliver. Once Biden controls the Treasury Department, his administration could simply hand over the long-sought records to its allies in Congress, who have been fighting in court to force Trump to turn them over, so far unsuccessfully.
As Politico notes, Biden has obviously cast himself as a unifier of the country, and he won’t necessarily be inclined to inflame things by doing something that looks like he’s going after his predecessor. On the other hand, it might not be up to him:
…if Democrats were to suddenly say “never mind,” it would not only be an embarrassing about-face, it would also infuriate people such as Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), the head of the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee. “In a perfect world, we could have mercy—but this is not a perfect world,” said Pascrell, who has helped lead the push to spring Trump’s returns. “Even if he is no longer the president, there needs to be some accountability…. We have got to follow through on this.” With Trump making noises about running again in 2024, moreover, Democrats may be loath to abandon the option.
Biden has not made any statements about how he‘d deal with the issue, and a spokesperson did not respond to Politico’s request for comment.