After a cesspool presidency, the stink just won’t leave
He refuses to concede defeat.
He trip-wired an 11th hour purge of senior military and intelligence authorities, imperiling American domestic security and further jeopardizing incendiary combat zones abroad.
He is using his presidential powers to override the will of the electorate, on Friday bringing Michigan’s Republican legislative leaders to the White House for what is fundamentally a coup attempt — perverting the democratic process by arm-twisting the state board of
nvassers in Wayne County into not certifying the election results for Joe Biden.
The unprecedented and probably illegal manoeuvre could result in friendly Republican state lawmakers selecting electors for the electoral college, instead.
The ploy is reportedly being considered for other states won by Biden, president-elect.
He is 2-for-31 in legal gambits before the courts to throw out election results in jurisdictions across the country.
He has forbidden anyone from his administration cooperating in a smooth transition of power to the incoming president, vice-president and team officials meaning Biden has no access to intelligence data or anything else.
He months ago checked out of the global pandemic that has thus far taken a quarter-million American lives.
He has run roughshod over the Constitution.
He has been impeached by the House.
He has told a squillion lies. How far will Donald Trump go, be allowed to go before Jan. 20 — the date of Biden’s inauguration — by his quailing GOP
nablers, subservient generals, Congress, and, most pointedly, the president-elect himself?
“I think this borders on treason,” House Majority leader Steny Hoyer said this week. “He is undermining the very essence of democracy, which is: You go to the polls, you vote and the people decide.
“There’s no doubt that the people decided.”
Republic Sen. Mitt Romney tweeted: “Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud of conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people, and overturn the election. It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American president.”
From Gen. John Allen, former Afghanistan commander, after Trump a few days ago nnounced, without consulting military experts, a unilaterany al halving to 2,500 of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, while troops in Iraq would fall from 3,000 to 2,500: “I believe it’s political. There was no tactical, operational or strategic merit to doing things.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday called him a “psychopathic nut.”
Biden, typically measured, nevertheless sounds close to the breaking point. Addressing Trump’s hissy-fit unwillingness to concede defeat, dragging out the electoral process with legal challenges: “I just think it’s an embarrassment quite frankly. I think it will not help the president’s legacy.” That was last week. On Thursday: “It’s hard to fathom how this man thinks. I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won, and is not going to win, and we’re going to be sworn in on Jan. 20.”
Biden further warned that, as a result of Trump’s demented actions, “incredibly damaging messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions. It sends a horrible message about who we are as a country.”
What legacy, exactly?
It’s been four years of outlandish behaviour, rage-tweeting, crudeness, towering megalomania, demagogic tyranny, nepotism and rules-flouting, to say nothing of more recent COVID-19 denial and the entanglement of multiple criminal investigations across an array of allegations, from campaign finance violations to sexual harassment accusations and hush money checks cut for a be stripped of the presidential privilege that shielded him from prosecution while in office. And don’t forget the alleged tax evasion. Racketeering charges could be pursued by the Internal Revenue Service Investigation Division. (It was tax evasion that finally brought down Al Capone.)
A cesspool presidency, it’s been, unprecedented in the length and breadth of soiling. Although nothing comes close to Trump’s pitiful and maniacal scheming to nullify the Nov. 3 election.
Sabotage and destabilization and baseless claims of election fraud.
At what point will he be forced to stop?
Even Trump’s most idolatrous bumboys have assured the president-passé will vacate White House come inauguthe ration day without need of law enforcement frog-marching him out of the premises.
In truth, nothing’s off the table. And just imagine the chaos that would ensue if Trump’s stormtroopers, the phalanx of Proud Boys and militia radicals and nutbar fellow travelers, launch a resistance. All to salve his insatiable ego.
Forbes reported recently about a meeting of the Business Roundtable, a group of elite CEOs from major corporations that actually discussed the looming prospect of llies “seditt and more mass firings such as Trump’s ouster of Defence Secretary Mark Esper and other Pentagon officials as the president hunkers down, unleashing rack and ruin in a scorched-earth withdrawal.
The deadline for resolving ballot disputes is Dec. 14, if Trump even gives a toss about that.
Clearly he sees himself as more emperor than president, cloaked in the mantle of fiats.
There’s no precedent for a defeated president barricading himself in the Oval Office. He might have to be forcibly evicted. As Biden’s campaign spokesperson, Andrew Bates, has said ( jokingly, except not so much): “The United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”
Rice University political science professor Bob Stein told the Houston Chronicle of that eventuality: “If the president refuses to leave the office, the Secret Service and the FBI will be on the ground. The FBI and the Secret Service control the White House. At that point, I think you have a national crisis.”
But the U.S. has been in a state of national crisis since the election. Crisis and international ridicule. They must be laughing themselves silly in the Kremlin and the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
The president has prat-andtwat-tumbled from ungracious and eccentric to malevolent and mutinous.
In a word: Treasonous. One option is for Trump to resign, triggering a two-month faute de mieux Mike Pence presidency. And Pence would grant Trump, teetering toward bankruptcy, a full pre-emptive pardon.
Trump is congenitally incapable of admitting defeat, of standing before the world as a loser.
Recall what he said during at a campaign rally last month: “Running against the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics puts pressure on me. Could you imagine if I lose? My whole life, what am I going to do? I’m going to say, ‘I lost to the worst candidate in the history of politics.’ I’m not going to feel so good.
“Maybe I’ll have to leave the country, I don’t know.”
If only.
“It’s hard to fathom how this man thinks. I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won.” JOE BIDEN
U.S. PRESIDENT-ELECT