Tag: Donald Trump

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GOP Leaders In Key States Decline To Intervene In Selection Of Electoral College

Donald Trump (image via Flickr/WhiteHouse – public domain)
One of the Trump campaign’s big ‘hail Mary’ moves is to try and flip the results of the presidential election by encouraging Republican-controlled state legislatures to disenfranchise voters in their states by picking members of the Electoral College that would vote for Trump instead of the Joe Biden for their state. But GOP leaders in key states flipped by Joe Biden in this election cycle have told the Associated Press they have no plans to subvert state laws.

State GOP lawmakers in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have all said they would not intervene in the selection of electors, who ultimately cast the votes that secure a candidate’s victory. Such a move would violate state law and a vote of the people, several noted.

“I do not see, short of finding some type of fraud — which I haven’t heard of anything — I don’t see us in any serious way addressing a change in electors,” said Rusty Bowers, Arizona’s Republican House speaker, who says he’s been inundated with emails pleading for the legislature to intervene. “They are mandated by statute to choose according to the vote of the people.”

The idea loosely involves GOP-controlled legislatures dismissing Biden’s popular vote wins in their states and opting to select Trump electors.

Team Trump was probably hoping that such ploys would become entangled in legal rabble-rousing that would end up at the Supreme Court where the Donald’s handpicked conservative justices might hand him a win. In related news, the Washington Post reports “two prominent law firms have sought to withdraw from representing the Trump legal effort in Arizona and Pennsylvania.”

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Joe Biden Projected To Win Georgia, Electoral College Vote Total Now 306

(graphic via MSNBC)
And the final two states have been projected in the 2020 presidential election. Multiple news outlets have projected President-elect Joe Biden will win Georgia, and as expected, Donald Trump will win North Carolina. Biden is the first Democrat to win Georgia in 28 years and the first non-southern Democrat to win the state in 60 years. Biden wins 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. In 2016, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway called Trump’s win with 306 electoral votes a “massive landslide” and “historic.” Trump would repeat that claim many, many times.

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Election Officials In Every State: No Evidence Of Voter Fraud Found

Donald Trump (screen capture)

Donald Trump during ABC News Town Hall (screen capture)
The New York Times reached out to the top election officials in every state of the nation inquiring about any confirmed illegal voting or fraud in the 2020 presidential election as alleged by Donald Trump and the Republicans. The answer – from Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State – was a unanimous ‘no.’

Top election officials across the country said in interviews and statements that the process had been a remarkable success despite record turnout and the complications of a dangerous pandemic.

“There’s a great human capacity for inventing things that aren’t true about elections,” said Frank LaRose, a Republican who serves as Ohio’s secretary of state. “The conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology.” 

Steve Simon, a Democrat who is Minnesota’s secretary of state, said: “I don’t know of a single case where someone argued that a vote counted when it shouldn’t have or didn’t count when it should. There was no fraud.”

“Kansas did not experience any widespread, systematic issues with voter fraud, intimidation, irregularities or voting problems,” a spokeswoman for Scott Schwab, the Republican secretary of state in Kansas, said in an email Tuesday. “We are very pleased with how the election has gone up to this point.”

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Trump ‘Terminates’ Defense Secretary Via Tweet

L-R Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Mark Esper (images: Flickr/WhiteHouse – public domain)
Donald Trump took to Twitter this morning to announce the news that he had “terminated” Mark Esper as his Secretary of Defense. From the New York Times:

Mr. Esper’s downfall had been expected for months, after he took the rare step in June of disagreeing publicly with Mr. Trump and saying that active-duty military troops should not be sent to control the wave of protests in American cities. The president, who had threatened to use the Insurrection Act to do exactly that, was furious, officials said.

Mr. Esper, 56, a former secretary of the Army and a former Raytheon executive, became defense secretary last July after Mr. Trump withdrew the nomination of Patrick M. Shanahan, the acting defense secretary, amid an F.B.I. inquiry into allegations from Mr. Shanahan’s former wife that he punched her in the stomach. Mr. Shanahan denied the accusations.

Mr. Shanahan had been standing in for Jim Mattis, who resigned as defense secretary in 2018, citing his own differences with the president.

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Newsmax Host: Media Timed Biden Win For When Trump Was On Golf Course

Reporting from the corner of Cynicism and Bitter… A talking head at the far-right leaning streaming website Newsmax tried to insinuate all of the mainstream media (including Fox News Channel) colluded with the state of Pennsylvania to wait for Donald Trump to take his 284th trip to play golf before projecting former Vice President Joe Biden as the next president of the U.S.

“The timing on of all this, Emerald, certainly fascinates me. We talk a lot about media collusion with the Democratic Party and here we have the president just leaving the White House to go to his golf course to play a round of golf and he deserves to be able to do that.”

“We have the press conference that Rudy Giuliani is going to hold in Philadelphia happening. And at the very same time, all of all sudden, all of the networks, with the exception of Newsmax, decide that this is the time that they’re going to call the election. We are, here at Newsmax, not calling the election.”

Check out the creepy laugh when he says “He deserves to be able to do that…” Practically everyone with an interest in the election returns figured out the result would probably be announced today. Why would Trump even play golf today? And then, of course, there’s the fact that Trump lied to the American people four years ago and said there “wouldn’t be time for golf” if he was elected in 2016. It’s almost Shakespearean that Trump learned he lost the race on a golf course.

(h/t JoeMyGod)

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News Round-Up: November 6, 2020

Juan Melecio (image via Twitter)
Some news items you might have missed: • Edge Media: Juan Melecio (above), better known as gay porn star Antonio Biaggi, finished 5th in a field of 6 candidates for two city commissioner seats in gay-centric Wilton Manors, Florida. • The Advocate: The GOP failed in its attempt to derail the campaign of Democrat Roger Montoya by shaming him over a gay porn past nearly 40 years ago. Montoya triumphed in his New Mexico race for House District 40, besting Republican opponent Justin Salazar-Torrez 56.8 percent to 43.2 percent. • Victory Fund: Todd Gloria has won his race to become the next Mayor of San Diego, California. He is the first openly LGBTQ person and first person of color to be elected to the office. • New Music: Australian superstar Kylie Minogue drops some super-cute disco beats with her latest single, “Where Does The DJ Go?” The pop diva will also be streaming a live 50-minute performance – Kylie: Infinite Disco – around the globe on Saturday, November 7.

• NBC News: Defense Secretary Mark Esper has prepared a letter of resignation, according to three current defense officials. Defense officials say Esper prepared his letter because he is one of the Cabinet officials long expected to be pushed out after the election. • Vox: Georgia now has two Senate runoffs, both to be decided on January 5, 2021, as Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) and Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock failed to cross the majority threshold in Georgia’s special election Senate race.  Sen. David Perdue (R) and Jon Ossoff (D) are headed to a runoff as well as neither were able to clear the state’s 50 percent threshold. • Washington Examiner: Amid reports Donald Trump might not concede the election, a spokesman for Joe Biden’s campaign, Andrew Bates responded: “The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

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Election Update: November 6, 2020

L-R Donald Trump, Joe Biden (screen capture, campaign photo)
As of 10 am today, this is the state of play in the race for the presidency via the New York Times:

Mr. Biden, who was winning the popular vote by more than four million votes and has already won 253 electoral votes, pulled ahead of Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania by about 12,000 votes on Friday afternoon. If his lead holds — and it is expected to — the state’s 20 electoral votes would vault him past the threshold to win the election.

In Georgia, his lead was so narrow that state officials said a recount was inevitable.

In Arizona, Mr. Biden maintained his lead as election officials continued to plow through tens of thousands of ballots from Phoenix and its sprawling suburbs. His advantage shrank slightly, but not by as much as Republicans had hoped.

In Nevada, Mr. Biden nearly doubled his lead Friday to around 20,000 votes.

Mr. Biden had already begun to project the image of a man preparing to assume the mantle of office on Thursday, meeting with his economic and health advisers to be briefed on the coronavirus pandemic. He also urged the public on Thursday to show a “little patience” as the vote-counting in battleground states continued.

Note – one media outlet, Business Insider (working with Decision Desk HQ) has called the race for Joe Biden.

(graphic via NY Times)
(graphic via NY Times)

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Greetings From Nevada: Biden Expands His Lead Over Trump

New numbers were finally reported today from the presidential race in battleground state Nevada showing former Vice President Joe Biden expanding his lead over Donald Trump. From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

In the latest results released by the Secretary of State’s office at 9 a.m. Thursday, Biden built on the 7,600-vote lead he held when counting stopped on Election Night, a 0.6 percentage point advantage over Trump in a race with more than 1.2 million votes cast. Biden now leads Trump by 597,353 votes, 49.50 percent, to Trump’s 585,311 votes, 48.50 percent.

Nevada will continue to count ballots and update at least once daily.

Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, in a statement released late Wednesday, said that the remaining ballots were mail-in ballots received on or after Election Day and ballots from voters who registered at the polls on Election Day, as permitted by state law.

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A Tale Of Two Candidates (In Two Tweets)

L-R President Donald Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden
A tale of two candidates… As Joe Biden called for unity and declaring the office of the presidency “demands a duty of care for all Americans,” Donald Trump was retweeting his demands that states “STOP THE COUNT!”

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Low Energy Trump Calls In To ‘Fox & Friends’ As Biden Makes Final GOTV Push

It’s finally Election Day! And according to ABC News, early voting across the country hit record highs as over 97 million Americans cast their vote before today. Prior to this morning, voters had cast more than 70% of the total ballots counted in the 2016 general election, when 166 million Americans voted. In 2016, there were just under 43 million early votes. Former Vice President Joe Biden attended a church service before heading out to final ‘get out the vote’ appearances in Pennsylvania.

Donald Trump called in to his own place of worship – Fox & Friends. Sounding a bit low energy, Trump spoke about how “mean” people had been to him, bragged about the size of his campaign rallies, threw some predictable shade at Biden, and then turned on – of all outlets – Fox News Channel. “Fox has changed a lot,” whine Trump. “Somebody said ‘What’s the biggest difference between this and four years ago?’ I said Fox, it’s much different, you know. Fox is a much different place in terms of politics.” “In the old days, [Fox] wouldn’t put on sleepy Joe Biden every time he had opened his mouth. They had other networks for that, frankly. It’s a much different operation, I’m just telling you. It’s much different.” Trump also complained about the democratic process itself again moaning that all ballots won’t be counted by the end of tonight. As I’ve reported yesterday, every state has its own rules for cutting off accepting ballots and when to begin processing and counting them. Trump criticized American voters saying, “There’s no reason why they couldn’t put the ballot in 2 weeks earlier.” Some of those ballots include military service members overseas who have little control over when their ballots arrive.