Truly, we have descended into a most dangerous form of farce. Donald Trump, dead-bang loser of the 2020 presidential election, is squatting in the White House like a petulant grease clog that just won’t clear the drainpipe, trying to figure out where he can go to war — literally — to “save” his unsalvageable presidency.
The ragged remnants of his military advisers dogpiled him when he drooled over a map of Iran recently, and now he’s eyeballing the abrupt withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan… not due to a thought-out plan for dismantling U.S. militarism, mind you. He appears bent on sowing chaos for the sake of chaos and undermining the incoming Biden administration, period.
That endeavor — Screw Biden — is the only policy this shabby bag-of-ass administration is bothering to pursue anymore. Well, except for the lawsuits, that is. The Trump campaign’s attempts to overturn the election in various courtrooms have fared about as well as Kong did when he tried to lay claim to the Empire State Building. All that’s left is the long, long fall.
Never fear, however, because it’s Rudy to the rescue! Trump, in yet another tactical move on the order of opening a second front in Europe, tapped “America’s Mayor” to run his collapsing legal challenges. Giuliani doffed his best grifter cap and reportedly landed a fee of $20,000 a day for the gig. It really would be hilarious if it weren’t so unutterably pathetic; the president of the United States is covered in leeches that are draining him dry, and all he seems capable of are block-letter tweets that deserve their own wing in the Gibberish Hall of Fame.
Two immediate problems presented themselves with this new arrangement: (1) When Giuliani delivered Trump’s legal “arguments” before U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann, the judge, according to reports, appeared “mystified” by the rhetorical junkwagon Rudy had parked in his courtroom; (2) Giuliani’s sudden arrival as the savior of the campaign has broken the angst dam within the ranks, and it is now full-blown civil war within Camp Trump.
For the briefest moment on Tuesday night, the Trump camp had a glimmer of hope that their barrage of legal nonsense might have opened a seam. Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, the two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, “cast an unprecedented vote against certifying the county’s November election results for the county’s 43 jurisdictions, including Detroit, Michigan’s largest voting jurisdiction,” according to The Detroit Free Press.
This “victory” lasted just long enough for the majority-Black denizens of Wayne County to draw a deeply outraged breath and bellow righteously about the barefaced racism involved in disenfranchising the voters of Detroit. Hours after voting against certification of the vote, the two GOP Board of Canvassers members reversed course and voted to certify. Trump, initially jubilant at the wheezed white power grab by Palmer and Hartmann, returned to his cone of sullen silence after they switched their votes.
Team Trump has filed a flurry of lawsuits in Nevada in search of the elusive silver bullet that will take down the election results and keep Trump safe for another four years. Meanwhile, South Carolina’s newly reelected Sen. Lindsey Graham is waist deep in his own pot of hot water after allegedly pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to throw away legally cast ballots. Graham has hotly denied the accusation, but alas for him, there appears to be a witness. A Republican witness, no less. Stay tuned on that one.
Lacking anything effective to do in pursuit of his election goal and sporting a spleen fit to burst, Trump vented late yesterday on Christopher Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security official who successfully held off foreign interference in this election with a whip and a chair.
For the crime of saying the election was clean, free and fair, Krebs was Twitter-fired in the best traditions of this gutter-bug administration. Criticism of this firing was stridently bipartisan, and Krebs left his position with head held high. “Honored to serve. We did it right.” he tweeted on his way out the door.
… and, yeah, it’s only Wednesday, with 63 long days of this left to endure.
The remarkable, horrifying, astonishing silence of the Republican Party in the face of this massive broad-daylight mega-scandal leaves me almost breathless with rage. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, with his pushback against Graham and the vandals within his own party, appears to be one of the few people of integrity left in this spiraling national humiliation… and when master vote-vandal Gov. Brian Kemp’s secretary of state is the hero of any affair involving ballots, we have entered some truly strange and bewildering space.
I wonder, and dread, what tomorrow will bring.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
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