What Did the Democrats Win? Michael Tomasky

What Did the Democrats Win? Michael Tomasky 

Q —November 18, 2020 

For now, democracy is hanging on. I’ve been writing presidential election postmortems every four years since 1992, and I never imagined I’d open one with that sentence. But despite Joe Biden’s impressive and necessary win, this is the lesson of the 2020 election: our democracy remains intact, at least for today. We learned emphatically this year that the political chasm that opened in this country in the 1990s is wide and deep and—for-the foreseeable future, and in spite of the president-elect’s rhetoric—likely to grow wider and deeper, threatening the idea that we can long continue as one nation. This was not a given going into the election. In the weeks before November 3, when we believed those sunny polls, Democrats anxiously whispered the word “landslide.” I was hearing projections from people—knowledgeable people with experience on presidential campaigns—that Biden might top 350 even 400 electoral votes, which surely would have meant, in turn, as many as fifty-three or fifty-four Democrats in the next Senate, and ten or fifteen new Democrats in the next House. Such a result—with Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, maybe even Texas turning blue—would have forced a reckoning upon the leaders of the Republican Party, giving rise to a restive faction within it (led perhaps by Mitt Romney) that would compromise and modernize, by agreeing to strike actual legislative deals with Democrats, say, or by reducing the blatant racial and ethnic bigotry the party so regularly peddles. Instead, the results of the congressional elections were very strong for Republicans, strong enough to affirm to them that their basic direction is fine. They just need to find a standard-bearer who is less obviously a gangster and an incompetent. The election demonstrated, more intensely than any other before, that Americans inhabit two different moral universes. In our personal lives, we may share broadly similar ideas about what constitutes right and wrong: how to raise children, how to be responsible friends and family members. But on political matters, we see two opposite realities. This is largely the work of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the rest of the right-wing media—now including admirers and imitators like Newsmax and the One America News Network—plus the ecosystem of rightwing Facebook chat rooms where lies begin, spread, multiply, and eventually get retweeted by the president. (One rumor, started by QAnon, the lunatic conspiracy theory, had it that John F. Kennedy Jr. did not die in a plane crash in 1999 and was slated, on October 17, to emerge from hiding, join Trump at a rally in Dallas, the city where his father was assassinated, and accept Trump’s offer to become his running mate.) Disinformation campaigns circulated: for instance, The New York Times reported that videos of Biden edited to show him “admitting to voter fraud” were viewed more than 17 million times before election day This creation of an alternate reality has been most chillingly evident in the Republican discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic. During the party convention in August, White House economic adviser Lawrence Kudlow spoke of the virus in the past tense. “It was awful,” he said: Health and economic impacts were tragic. Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere. But presidential leadership came swiftly and effectively with an extraordinary rescue for health and safety to successfully fight the Covid virus. The twisting of official reports to defend Trump’s response—claims, based on a willful misreading of a report by the Centers for Disease Control, that Covid has killed only about nine thousand people, or that Trump saved two million lives—has been particularly ghastly. Yet millions of Americans believe these claims. Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing provocateur who was convicted in federal court in 2014 of making illegal campaign contributions (Trump pardoned him), yet has remained a Christian leader commanding the attention of legions, tweeted on November 9: There is a great shift under way. We are, all 70 million of us, and our families, going to make our exit OUT of liberal institutions of indoctrination. This means schools, universities, media, entertainment. This won’t happen overnight but it’s happening already. We’re outta here. One certainly understandable response is: good riddance. But emotions aside, one can see that the process he is describing is already well underway. We may shop at the same big-box stores and eat at the same chain restaurants as the postindustrial, pro-monopolistic market renders the suburban highways of Buffalo indistinguishable from those of Biloxi. But step inside a church or a polling place and you’ll know instantly which part of the country you’re in. Good things, of course, did happen on election day. Donald Trump was defeated. Fraught and hair-raising though the road to January 20 may be, I’m confident that Joe Biden will take the oath of office and move into the White House. The details of his victory have been dissected thoroughly by now. The heart of it is that he seems to have answered the basic challenge that pundits spent the year laying before him: Could he win over swing voters while simultaneously appealing to the party’s base and to younger, more urban voters? He did. Among independents, according to exit polls, he beat Trump 54 to 41 percent. Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton among them 48 to 42 percent. Biden also did five points better among young voters than Clinton had, winning 60 percent to her 55 percent. He did slightly better among women than Clinton, with 57 percent to her 54 percent. Trump got a couple more points among Black and Latino voters in 2020 than he did in 2016. It’s hard to say, given the imprecision of exit polls, how meaningful these differences were, but the Trump campaign targeted Black males and certain Latino groups heavily on social media, and the Democrats were slow to respond. For all the media chatter about the Cuban-American vote in Florida, the margins have been essentially static for three elections: Romney got 52 percent; Trump got 54 percent in 2016 and 55 percent this year. Still, that Trump gained anything among these voters should cause Democrats to take serious stock of their failings. Biden won back the three states that Trump had shocked the country by winning in 2016 by the narrowest of margins: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He won Wisconsin by about as much as Clinton had lost it, Pennsylvania by about 25,000 more, and he turned Michigan around decisively, winning it by nearly 150,000 votes. It is especially heartening that Biden won Arizona and Georgia, which no Democrat had done since Bill Clinton in 1996 and 1992 respectively. (Before Clinton, the last Democrat to win Arizona was Harry Truman.) Arizona becomes the fourth state of the Southwest–Mountain West to switch over since Ronald Reagan’s time—in the 1980s, now reliably blue Colorado was as red as Wyoming. This doesn’t mean Arizona is now solidly blue, but it does mean that it will be competitive for the foreseeable future. These are important expansions of the Democratic map. At the same time, the map seemed to contract in other places. Trump’s victory margins in Ohio and Iowa held steady at around eight to ten points between the two elections, but in Florida, he beat Biden far worse than he beat Clinton, by 373,000 votes this year to 113,000 in 2016. Part of this is explained by the Latino vote. Though the margins among Cuban-Americans haven’t changed over the years, they apparently voted in greater numbers this year than in 2016, enough that their votes helped the GOP capture two Democratic leaning congressional districts. Trump also did very well among the growing Venezuelan-American population of Florida—helped, perhaps, by a completely false ad his campaign ran claiming that Venezuela’s socialist government was backing Biden. Finally, the effects of the pandemic could have aided Trump’s margin—Republicans did more door-knocking and Trump did more campaigning in Florida, while the Democrats curtailed their activity. The Democrats didn’t make much effort in Ohio or Iowa, either. But it’s sobering to recognize that none of these three states can really now be called a swing state. For years, Florida and Ohio, with twenty-nine and eighteen electoral votes, respectively, have been the archetypal purple states. Forty-seven electoral votes, votes that have been hotly contested for the last several elections, are a lot for Democrats to leave behind. It gives them little margin for error in future elections in the Great Lakes region and the Southwest. But at least Biden won. The Senate results were gravely disappointing. Looking over the numbers, I noticed in some states a rather severe drop-off from presidential vote totals to Senate vote totals. In North Carolina, for example, Biden received around 114,000 more votes than Senate candidate Cal Cunningham, who was supposed to be one of those who would lift Democrats to the majority. In Georgia, Biden won about 100,000 more votes than Senate candidate Jon Ossoff; he also received over 850,000 more than Raphael Warnock, but Warnock was running in a special election for Senate against many candidates. In Colorado, even the winning Senate candidate John Hickenlooper received around 70,000 fewer votes than Biden. The pattern was broken in Arizona, where Senate candidate Mark Kelly outpolled Biden by around 44,000 votes. Kelly aside, these numbers are troubling. There’s often some drop-off below the presidential level, but not usually like this. For example, in 2016, three first-time Democratic Senate candidates won election: Tammy Duckworth in Illinois, Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire, and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada. Duckworth and Cortez Masto trailed Clinton by a bit, but the margins were small (Hassan actually outpolled Clinton slightly). One would have to do a comprehensive study to explain this in detail. There are always some local reasons—in North Carolina, Cunningham, for example, was likely hurt by extramarital sexting that became public in early October. But it’s hard to avoid concluding that in several states, swing voters turned against Trump but were loath to endorse a fully Democratic government. The Democrats’ hopes for a Senate majority now depend on Georgia, where the two runoff races will take place on January 5. Most experts think the odds of a double victory are long. Democrats will need a huge African-American turnout, which Stacey Abrams just might be able to engineer. In the last two years, her organization Fair Fight Action registered some 800,000 new voters. That effort, along with a “motor-voter” law—which was enacted, notably, under Republican governor Nathan Deal, and which automatically registers new drivers to vote—helped make Biden’s win in the state possible. In Fulton and Gwinnett Counties, Black voter registration increased by 40 percent. Black turnout, in Georgia and throughout the country, was undoubtedly boosted by the presence of Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket. Warnock, who is African-American and the head pastor at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, is well positioned to benefit. He came in first on November 3, but that was because two Republicans split the conservative vote. Ossoff trailed GOP incumbent David Perdue by less than two points. Obama is expected to campaign in the state, as is Harris, and possibly Biden. The Democrats’ message here should be blunt: if we don’t get both these seats, the government will essentially be run by Mitch McConnell. If it’s true that special elections are about motivating the party base, I should think that McConnell is about the most powerful base motivator the Democrats can come up with. The Senate results were the election’s biggest disappointment, but, in a way, the House results were more shocking. As I write, Republicans have picked up a net eight seats. The Democratic majority is likely to be slim indeed. Predictably, this led to instant recriminations. Two days after the voting, House Democrats held a caucus meeting at which Representative Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA official first elected in 2018 to represent Virginia’s seventh congressional district—a historically Republican seat—unloaded on the party’s progressive faction. “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” she said. “We lost good members because of that.” She pointed to the slogan “defund the police” as a big culprit in Democratic losses, warning that the emphasis risked getting the party “fucking torn apart in 2022.” This brought a rejoinder two days later from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who told the Times that many House Democrats lost in large part because they were running antiquated campaigns and not responding directly to attacks. “They were vulnerable to these messages,” she said, “because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks.” There is anecdotal evidence supporting the idea that “defund the police” was used effectively in GOP advertising. In Virginia’s GOP-leaning fifth district, Republican Bob Good attacked his Democratic opponent, Cameron Webb, with the declaration, “He’d defund the police, end Medicare, force you into socialized medicine, double your gas prices with a Green New Deal.” The district is an uphill climb for Democrats under the best of circumstances, and indeed a number of the House seats Democrats lost this year were in Republican-leaning districts that Democrats managed to capture in 2018, their best year in House elections since 1974. But those from more winnable districts lost or trailed as well, including, as of this writing, Abby Finkenauer of Iowa’s first district (with a Cook Political Report number of D+1, meaning that it leans slightly Democratic), Rita Hart of Iowa’s second district (D+1), and T. J. Cox of California’s twenty-first district (D+5). 1 Democrats are reportedly undertaking a study to determine what worked and what didn’t. But there seem to me two main points of focus. The first is that the “Democratic brand,” to use the phrase some have been bandying about, is in trouble in vast stretches of the country. 2 The party must determine why. My hunch is that “defund the police” merely fed into a problem that already existed across exurban middle America, where the Democratic Party is seen as coastal and “too liberal.” (Biden may have laid it on pretty thick with his “Joe from Scranton” bit, but it seems to have effectively established him as a man of the people.) Second, it would be nice to see the Democrats put more energy into identifying what unites them than what divides them. Nancy Pelosi is clearly hostile to the AOC left, perhaps with good reason, perhaps not. Whatever the case, she is the leader. She should appoint an informal working group that would include leftists, mainstream liberals, and centrists to try to work through their differences. It’s on her to bring the caucus together. This next two-year term may be her last. If she allows the next session to degenerate into an ideological food fight, that will be an unfortunate way for her to go out. These divisions underline why the Democrats’ failure to capture the Senate—if indeed they fail—is tragic. If they had won the Senate, and if they’d been able to take a vote to reform or eliminate the filibuster—a bigger if, but one on which I was hopeful, provided they’d had fifty-three or fifty-four senators, giving them a few votes to spare—then they could have solved many of their problems by simply governing. They could have passed a coronavirus relief bill; a minimum wage bill; an infrastructure bill; a bill “fixing” Obamacare (protecting it against legal challenges like the one now pending before the Supreme Court) and creating a public option; a voting rights and democracy bill; a bill on climate; a bill for rural America (addressing economic development, rural broadband, the opioid crisis) to keep Biden’s pledge to be the president of those who voted against him as well as for him; an immigration reform bill; a bill on gun safety; and more. All of these measures are broadly popular among a populace that is, to use Bill Clinton’s old phrase, “operationally progressive and rhetorically conservative.” And all this could have been happening as the nation emerged from the darkness of the pandemic, with broad distribution of the vaccine that Biden promises must be “free to everyone.”3 Americans could have seen something they’ve rarely seen in this century— their government working, passing popular law after popular law, making people’s lives better. Assuming no recession, it all would have made for a 2022 in which Democrats might have expanded their majorities. Instead, we appear to be headed for two more years of gridlock. McConnell will pass nothing. As for the Supreme Court, not only will Biden not increase its size, which he’s hesitant to do anyway; we may be locked into a situation where Justice Stephen Breyer, now eighty-two, can’t retire and give Biden a chance to put a younger justice on the Court, because McConnell will likely not allow a vote. There will be two years of finger-pointing and nothing getting done, which as McConnell knows will hurt Biden and the Democrats more than the Republicans. Dispirited liberals will stay home in 2022; the Republicans will recapture the House and be well positioned to take back the White House in 2024. And speaking of 2024, you-know who vows to run again. Time will reveal to us the precise degree of Donald Trump’s power over the Republican Party once he’s no longer president. Assuming that he continues to make regular public interventions—on Twitter, at rallies, possibly as the star of a new TV network or streaming service—there’s good reason to think that his dominance will last. On Fox News, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, brimming with an enthusiasm not unlike that of a North Korean news broadcaster, observed that the seventy-four-year-old Trump “is the titular head of our party for many decades to come.” But even if Trump himself fades, it’s hard to see the changes he has effected being undone. No one else will be quite as brazen as Trump, but he and his 73 million votes have taught the party that created him a great deal. Openly being a white ethnonationalist carries surprisingly little penalty, and in fact brings considerable reward. Ditto flouting constitutional traditions and norms—oh, they will eviscerate you on Morning Joe and the Times editorial page, but Amy Coney Barrett sits on the Supreme Court and Merrick Garland does not. You can lie and lie and lie and invert and pervert the truth endlessly, and half of the media and country will be onto you, but the other half will pick up on your cues and rearrange their understanding of the world to suit yours, and together you will fight the other half to a rough draw, even on a matter as serious as the effective negligent homicide of tens of thousands of Americans, if not more. The Republican Party will not stop doing, or being, all of the above. Its authoritarian impulses, which predate and have enabled Trump, will continue. There is no one in the party—no one— urging it to pull back from the pursuit of total dominance by means of the courts, racial gerrymandering (which it will continue to control), the rules of the Senate, and the imbalance of the Electoral College. The minority repeatedly thwarting the will of the majority is intolerable and untenable. It will one day lead the Democrats, if and when they have unified power, to take countermeasures that will enrage the minority—watch, for example, Senator Tom Cotton’s angry floor speech from last June against statehood for Washington, D.C. The right will then counter those moves through tactics we haven’t even thought of. The prospect of future disunion is no longer theoretical. Joe Biden will reset our struggling democracy in some important regards. He will shift away from Vladimir Putin and toward our traditional allies. He will not interfere in Justice Department investigations. He won’t fire his FBI director because the bureau is investigating him. These are not small matters. But what was needed in this election to turn back this dark tide was a much broader repudiation of Trumpism than the voters delivered. It’s not quite mourning in America, but neither is it morning. Q —November 18, 2020 

From Terre Haute to Tehran to your grandma, Trumpism is revealed as a death cult in the end | Will Bunch

From Terre Haute to Tehran to your grandma, Trumpism is revealed as a death cult in the end | Will Bunch

Posted: November 29, 2020 - 1:18 PM

From Terre Haute to Tehran to your grandma, Trumpism is revealed as a death cult in the end | Will Bunch

For a man who too often talked and occasionally governed more like a mob boss than like the 45th president of a democratic republic, it’s sadly fitting that the final days of Donald Trump’s White House are playing out like a closing montage from one of The Godfather movies.

Cue the operatic aria, or maybe the piano riff from “Layla,” as the camera pans over the bloody pavement in a faraway village in Iran and the windshield of a sedan riddled with bullet holes, as a top nuclear scientist is brutally whacked just days after a not-so-secret sit-down between the crime bosses of Saudi Arabia and Israel with Trump’s traveling consigliere.

The brutal killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is arguably the most cinematic moment in our Trumpian death montage, but it’s not the most lethal. At a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department is racing to commit state-sanctioned murder against five more inmates before Trump leaves office — the first time since 1889 that a lame-duck presidency has carried out any executions at all.

These actions come at the end of a year in which death has covered the United States like a shroud, as a result of our utter failure to contain the coronavirus. In El Paso, Texas — one of the worst epicenters of COVID-19 — officials recently brought in 10 refrigerated morgue trucks to deal with an overload of deaths, a scene that a skillful director like a Coppola or a Scorsese would surely edit with interspersed cuts of an uncaring president lining up putts on a golf course.

In the end — and it is the end, no matter what a deranged team of White House lawyers is still babbling about on Newsmax or Facebook or wherever — Trumpism and America’s hopefully brief experience with neo-fascism has been exposed as a death cult.

The latest bizarre plot twist — an 11th-hour push by Trump and Barr’s Justice Department to allow executions by poison gas, firing squads, or the electric chair if that’s what’s needed to clear any obstacles to the current mode of lethal injection — probably would have been rejected in most Hollywood writers’ rooms for looking too much like 20th-century totalitarianism.

Medical workers use the mobile morgues near the El Paso Medical Examiner on Nov. 9 as coronavirus cases spike in El Paso, Texas. County Judge Ricardo Samaniego said the county has requested four more trailers in addition to the six mobile morgues.

BRIANA SANCHEZ/EL PASO TIMES / A

Medical workers use the mobile morgues near the El Paso Medical Examiner on Nov. 9 as coronavirus cases spike in El Paso, Texas. County Judge Ricardo Samaniego said the county has requested four more trailers in addition to the six mobile morgues.

Why is this happening, and why now? Why is a president who practically had to be dragged into starting a transition to the clear election winner Joe Biden’s presidency, and who seems to be spending most of his waking hours playing golf or tweeting bitterly about the unfairness of it all, so determined to mark his lame duck days with a rising body count. No one will acknowledge this grim reality publicly, but the two most likely explanations are equally troubling.

First, remember during the Trump impeachment hearings (15 years ago, right?) when Kyiv diplomat David Holmes testified that then-ambassador Gordon Sondland explained to him that the president only cared about “big stuff” — stuff that would help him get reelected? Apparently in Trumpworld, realpolitik is bigger stuff than the sanctity of human life.

Consider, in this context, the mounting U.S. death toll from the coronavirus, currently on pace to top 300,000 by the much-anticipated end of 2020. It increasingly seems that Trump had a political strategy as the third wave of COVID-19 began to swamp America in the fall, which was push any unpopular public safety response — shutdowns, restrictions on crowds including our beloved sporting events, mask mandates, etc. — onto key swing-state Democratic governors like Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf. That cold calculation — which ironically didn’t save the widely despised Trump but stirred up enough rage to help Republicans down-ballot — wasn’t a public health strategy, which would have involved Trump negotiating economic aid from Congress to make new lockdowns more survivable. If it meant thousands of excess deaths — including your grandma, perhaps — well, don’t sweat the politically small stuff.

It’s hard to think of anything more cruel and cynical, other than perhaps the Trump administration policy in Iran, which seems to be driven by a lethal desire to trigger a wider war in the Middle East, a doubling down for our outgoing president’s death cult. Indeed, 2020 has been bracketed by unwise, dangerously escalating, and amoral assassinations in Iran. The killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was done by a Trump-ordered U.S. missile strike; the Thanksgiving murder of scientist Fakhrizadeh is only a mild mystery — Israel’s fingerprints are all over it — and clearly delighted Trump, who tweeted approvingly about the planned hit, in between his election-fraud lies.

It stretches the imagination that the assassination wasn’t discussed during the recent unannounced confab between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (a.k.a. MBS, a.k.a. “Mr. Bone Saw”) and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. I’ll never understand why Trump and his criminal accomplices think that the best way to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons is to rip up the deal that prevented Iran from getting nuclear weapons — and then to poke murderous sticks in the eyes of the regime in Tehran.

But whacking an Iranian scientist fits with the broader Trump transition strategy, which is to make life as difficult for President-elect Biden, who promised during the campaign to restore the peace deal negotiated by his then-boss, Barack Obama, in 2015. If these 11th-hour machinations bring Iran to a state of near-war or, heaven forbid, actual war with Israel and the United States, it would surely complicate Biden’s peace agenda, to say the least. If the political gamesmanship leads to fighting and death, the president who golfed while your uncle was on a ventilator doesn’t really care, do u?

The same cruel dynamic is in play with Trump’s embrace of the death penalty, with the federal government on track to kill more of its prisoners in the last year of his presidency — 13, including the five currently scheduled before Jan. 20 — than in the entire half-century before it. The executions create the same contrast between the self-described “law and order” man in Trump and Biden who — despite supporting the federal death penalty in the infamous 1994 crime bill — now backs ending the barbaric practice, as do a growing number of voters.

Protesters gather across from the the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Ind. in August, where Keith Dwayne Nelson, who was convicted of kidnapping, raping and murdering at 10-year-old Kansas girl, was imprisoned on a death sentence.

Michael Conroy / AP

Protesters gather across from the the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Ind. in August, where Keith Dwayne Nelson, who was convicted of kidnapping, raping and murdering at 10-year-old Kansas girl, was imprisoned on a death sentence.

Which brings us to the second factor, which is that in Trump’s brand of American authoritarian rage, as the writer Adam Serwer brilliantly put it, the cruelty is the point. Behind everything from the brutal separations of toddlers from their mothers at the Southern border to tossing paper towels at Puerto Rico’s suffering victims of Hurricane Maria, Serwer saw “the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.” What better way to channel the “lock her up” rage toward political elites, journalists and scientists than to kill some people found guilty of actual crimes on your way out the back door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Thus, no one within Trump’s inner circle seems to care that it looks bad that the folks who weren’t bothered by tiki-torch Nazis in Charlottesville are now giving themselves legal authority to run actual gas chambers, even if it’s unlikely they’ll ever use this, or Soviet-style firing squads. Their grisly executions are simply a form of lack-of-virtue-signaling to the angry base. It’s the attitude that sprouts in crude yard signs that read “(Bleep) Your Feelings” — or in 5-4 Supreme Court rulings where a vague “religious freedom” trumps the communal idea of keeping loved ones alive in a pandemic.

Last week’s SCOTUS ruling to overturn public health restrictions on religious services in New York State — which happened only with the vote of supposed “pro-life” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the jurist that Trump and his accomplices rammed onto the high court at the same time he was scheduling a full dance card of executions — was a reminder that Americans will be dealing with the hangover of cruelty-is-the-point politics long after the Current Occupant retreats to Mar-a-Lago.

But our lost court’s sharp right turn also inspired an epic smackdown from none other than Pope Francis — supposedly the spiritual leader to four of the five justices behind last week’s superspreader ruling — who penned a New York Times op-ed to remind America what actual moral leadership looks like. Extolling the seemingly forgotten virtue of a public good, Francis wrote, “It is all too easy for some to take an idea — in this case, for example, personal freedom — and turn it into an ideology, creating a prism through which they judge everything.”

Easy ... easy to be hard, one might even say. Political movements born of rage-filled rhetoric almost always end in needless death — and America has proved no exception. One can only hope — and, in the spirit of Pope Francis, pray — that the hideous death cult that seems to be peaking in the last two months of Trump’s failed presidency will be remembered as a low point, the last throes of collective mad rage that paved the way for a new national sense of empathy, a matter of life and death.

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Want to understand Biden voters? Here’s your reading list.

Want to understand Biden voters? Here’s your reading list.

Opinion by 

Eugene Robinson

Columnist

November 24, 2020 at 6:06 a.m. GMT+9

Who are they and what drove them to vote in such huge numbers, even during a pandemic? What makes them tick? Is it culture? Tribalism? Race? How did they come to their worldview, and why do they cling to it so passionately? What do they mean for the future of American democracy?

I’m talking about the opaque and inscrutable Joe Biden voter, of course.

After Donald Trump won in 2016, the media and academia embarked on a numbingly comprehensive sociological and anthropological examination of “the Trump voter.” Reporters and researchers swarmed what seemed like every bereft factory town in the industrial Midwest, every hill and hollow of Appalachia, every windswept farming community throughout the Great Plains. I’m pretty sure television crews did, in fact, bring us reports from every single diner in the contiguous United States — at least, those where at least one regular patron wears overalls.

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Never mind that nearly 3 million more of us voted against Trump four years ago; no one seemed terribly interested in our inner lives, our hopes and dreams. This time, however, the gap is too big to ignore — Biden, the president-elect, beat Trump by more than 6 million votes and counting. He won back the heartland of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. He won Georgia, for heaven’s sake.

Logically, then, we should put aside those dog-eared copies of J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” and subject “the Biden voter” to the same kind of microscopic scrutiny. Venture out of your bubble, Trump supporters, and try to understand how most of America thinks.

African Americans were Biden’s most avid and loyal supporters, giving him 87 percent of their votes, according to exit polls. To understand the backstories of those Black voters in cities such as Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia — whom Trump is now trying his best to disenfranchise — you might start by reading “The Warmth of Other Suns.” Isabel Wilkerson’s magisterial opus charts the Great Migration in the first half of the 20th century, which brought millions of African Americans from the South to the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest.

If you’re more of an audiovisual learner, scroll through your streaming service until you find one of the film adaptations of the seminal plays by August Wilson, who lived and wrote in Pittsburgh — “The Piano Lesson,” say, or “Fences.” (The most recent Wilson production, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” starring Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman, won’t be available for streaming for another few weeks.) Alternatively, you could just listen to the transcendental music of the incomparable saxophonist John Coltrane, who was born in North Carolina and moved to Philadelphia as a teenager.

Biden lost overall among White voters, but his big gains among college-educated Whites who live in the prosperous suburbs of major cities nationwide may have been decisive. These voters, many of whom had benefited from Trump’s tax cuts, seem to have simply been appalled at Trump’s behavior in office.

To understand White suburbanites who were disgusted by Trump’s naked racism — his reaction to Charlottesville, his refusal after the George Floyd killing to say the words “Black lives matter” — you might dive into scholar Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist,” which has become a must-read in many of those circles. To experience the pain and anger many suburban voters felt about Trump’s policy of ripping children from the arms of their asylum-seeking parents along the southern border, I’d recommend “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy” by Jacob Soboroff, a correspondent for NBC News (where I am a frequent contributor).

Craving a mind-meld with those White voters whose driving impulse for choosing Biden may have been a more generalized horror at Trump’s unfitness to serve as president, there are, of course, the mega-selling fly-on-the-wall accounts “Rage” and “Fear” by my longtime Post colleague Bob Woodward. For a slightly different perspective, the psychological portrait by the president’s niece Mary L. Trump, “Too Much and Never Enough,” is incisive and harrowing.

To supplement your reading, you could rewatch pretty much any episode of “Saturday Night Live” from the Trump era. And if you want to know what peak anti-Trump outrage sounds and feels like, John Oliver’s HBO show “Last Week Tonight” takes you there and beyond.

If Trump supporters want to understand why Trump’s margin of support declined, albeit just modestly, among voters 65 and older nationwide, they can visit any of the media websites that track the covid-19 pandemic. Imagine how many of these older voters will have to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas without seeing their grandchildren except via FaceTime or Zoom.

It turns out “the Biden voter” isn’t so mysterious and unknowable after all. “I, too, am America,” wrote the poet Langston Hughes. And if you haven’t read him yet, add him to the pile, too.

Read more:

20 days of fantasy and failure: Inside Trump’s quest to overturn the election

20 days of fantasy and failure: Inside Trump’s quest to overturn the election

By 

Philip Rucker, 

Ashley Parker, 

Josh Dawsey and 

Amy Gardner

November 29, 2020 at 9:08 a.m. GMT+9

The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.

But Trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ”

However cleareyed Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’ ”

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Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin, for instance, discussed with Trump a poll he had conducted after the election that showed Trump with a positive approval rating, a plurality of the country who thought the media had been “unfair and biased against him” and a majority of voters who believed their lives were better than four years earlier, according to two people familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. As expected, Trump lapped it up.

The result was an election aftermath without precedent in U.S. history. With his denial of the outcome, despite a string of courtroom defeats, Trump endangered America’s democracy, threatened to undermine national security and public health, and duped millions of his supporters into believing, perhaps permanently, that Biden was elected illegitimately.

Trump’s allegations and the hostility of his rhetoric — and his singular power to persuade and galvanize his followers — generated extraordinary pressure on state and local election officials to embrace his fraud allegations and take steps to block certification of the results. When some of them refused, they accepted security details for protection from the threats they were receiving.

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“It was like a rumor Whac-A-Mole,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Despite being a Republican who voted for Trump, Raffensperger said he refused repeated attempts by Trump allies to get him to cross ethical lines. “I don’t think I had a choice. My job is to follow the law. We’re not going to get pushed off the needle on doing that. Integrity still matters.”

All the while, Trump largely abdicated the responsibilities of the job he was fighting so hard to keep, chief among them managing the coronavirus pandemic as the numbers of infections and deaths soared across the country. In an ironic twist, the Trump adviser tapped to coordinate the post-election legal and communications campaign, David Bossie, tested positive for the virus a few days into his assignment and was sidelined.

Only on Nov. 23 did Trump reluctantly agree to initiate a peaceful transfer of power by permitting the federal government to officially begin Biden’s transition — yet still he protested that he was the true victor.

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The 20 days between the election on Nov. 3 and the greenlighting of Biden’s transition exemplified some of the hallmarks of life in Trump’s White House: a government paralyzed by the president’s fragile emotional state; advisers nourishing his fables; expletive-laden feuds between factions of aides and advisers; and a pernicious blurring of truth and fantasy.

Though Trump ultimately failed in his quest to steal the election, his weeks-long jeremiad succeeded in undermining faith in elections and the legitimacy of Biden’s victory.

This account of one of the final chapters in Trump’s presidency is based on interviews with 32 senior administration officials, campaign aides and other advisers to the president, as well as other key figures in his legal fight, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details about private discussions and to candidly assess the situation.

In the days after the election, as Trump scrambled for an escape hatch from reality, the president largely ignored his campaign staff and the professional lawyers who had guided him through the Russia investigation and the impeachment trial, as well as the army of attorneys who stood ready to file legitimate court challenges.

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Instead, Trump empowered loyalists who were willing to tell him what he wanted to hear — that he would have won in a landslide had the election not been rigged and stolen — and then to sacrifice their reputations by waging a campaign in courtrooms and in the media to convince the public of that delusion.

The effort culminated Nov. 19, when lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell spoke on the president’s behalf at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee to allege a far-reaching and coordinated plot to steal the election for Biden. They argued that Democratic leaders rigged the vote in a number of majority-Black cities, and that voting machines were tampered with by communist forces in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader who died seven years ago.

There was no evidence to support any of these claims.

The Venezuelan tale was too fantastical even for Trump, a man predisposed to conspiracy theories who for years has feverishly spread fiction. Advisers described the president as unsure about the latest gambit — made worse by the fact that what looked like black hair dye mixed with sweat had formed a trail dripping down both sides of Giuliani’s face during the news conference. Trump thought the presentation made him “look like a joke,” according to one campaign official who discussed it with him.

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“I, like everyone else, have yet to see any evidence of it, but it’s a thriller — you’ve got Chávez, seven years after his death, orchestrating this international conspiracy that politicians in both parties are funding,” a Republican official said facetiously. “It’s an insane story.”

Aides said the president was especially disappointed in Powell when Tucker Carlson, host of Fox News’s most-watched program, assailed her credibility on the air after she declined to provide any evidence to support her fraud claims.

Trump pushed Powell out. And, after days of prodding by advisers, he agreed to permit the General Services Administration to formally initiate the Biden transition — a procedural step that amounted to a surrender. Aides said this was the closest Trump would probably come to conceding the election.

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Yet even that incomplete surrender was short-lived. Trump went on to falsely claim that he “won,” that the election was “a total scam” and that his legal challenges would continue “full speed ahead.” He spent part of Thanksgiving calling advisers to ask if they believed he really had lost the election, according to a person familiar with the calls. “Do you think it was stolen?” the person said Trump asked on the holiday.

But, his advisers acknowledged, that was largely noise from a president still coming to terms with losing. As November was coming to a close, Biden rolled out his Cabinet picks, states certified his wins, electors planned to make it official when the electoral college meets Dec. 14 and federal judges spoke out.

A simple and clear refutation of the president came Friday from a Trump appointee, when Judge Stephanos Bibas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit wrote a unanimous opinion rejecting the president’s request for an emergency injunction to overturn the certification of Pennsylvania’s election results.

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“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Bibas wrote. “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

For Trump, it was over.

“Not only did our institutions hold, but the most determined effort by a president to overturn the people’s verdict in American history really didn’t get anywhere,” said William A. Galston, chair of the governance studies program at the Brookings Institution. “It’s not that it fell short. It didn’t get anywhere. This, to me, is remarkable.”

'There has to be a conspiracy'

Trump’s devolution into disbelief of the results began on election night in the White House, where he joined campaign manager Bill Stepien, senior advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Miller, and other top aides in a makeshift war room to monitor returns.

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In the run-up to the election, Trump was aware of the fact — or likelihood, according to polls — that he could lose. He commented a number of times to aides, “Oh, wouldn’t it be embarrassing to lose to this guy?”

But in the final stretch of the campaign, nearly everyone — including the president — believed he was going to win. And early on election night, Trump and his team thought they were witnessing a repeat of 2016, when he defied polls and expectations to build an insurmountable lead in the electoral college.

Then Fox News called Arizona for Biden.

“He was yelling at everyone,” a senior administration official recalled of Trump’s reaction. “He was like, ‘What the hell? We were supposed to be winning Arizona. What’s going on?’ He told Jared to call [News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert] Murdoch.”

Efforts by Kushner and others on the Trump team to persuade Fox to take back its Arizona call failed.

Trump and his advisers were furious, in part because calling Arizona for Biden undermined Trump’s scattershot plan to declare victory on election night if it looked as though he had sizable leads in enough states.

With Biden now just one state away from clinching a majority 270 votes in the electoral college and the media narrative turned sharply against him, Trump decided to claim fraud. And his team set out to try to prove it.

Throughout the summer and fall, Trump had laid the groundwork for claiming a “rigged” election, as he often termed it, warning of widespread fraud. Former chief of staff John F. Kelly told others that Trump was “getting his excuse ready for when he loses the election,” according to a person who heard his comments.

In June, during an Oval Office meeting with political advisers and outside consultants, Trump raised the prospect of suing state governments for how they administer elections and said he could not believe they were allowed to change the rules. All the states, he said, should follow the same rules. Advisers told him that he did not want the federal government in charge of elections.

Trump also was given several presentations by his campaign advisers about the likely surge in mail-in ballots — in part because many Americans felt safer during the pandemic voting by mail than in person — and was told they would go overwhelmingly against him, according to a former campaign official.

Advisers and allies, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), encouraged Trump to try to close the gap in mail-in voting, arguing that he would need some of his voters, primarily seniors, to vote early by mail. But Trump instead exhorted his supporters not to vote by mail, claiming they could not trust that their ballots would be counted.

“It was sort of insane,” the former campaign official said.

Ultimately, it was the late count of mail-in ballots that erased Trump’s early leads in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other battleground states and propelled Biden to victory. As Trump watched his margins shrink and then reverse, he became enraged, and he saw a conspiracy at play.

“You really have to understand Trump’s psychology,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a longtime Trump associate and former White House communications director who is now estranged from the president. “The classic symptoms of an outsider is, there has to be a conspiracy. It’s not my shortcomings, but there’s a cabal against me. That’s why he’s prone to these conspiracy theories.”

This fall, deputy campaign manager Justin Clark, Republican National Committee counsel Justin Riemer and others laid plans for post-election litigation, lining up law firms across the country for possible recounts and ballot challenges, people familiar with the work said. This was the kind of preparatory work presidential campaigns typically do before elections. Giuliani, Ellis and Powell were not involved.

This team had some wins in court against Democrats in a flurry of lawsuits in the months leading up to the election, on issues ranging from absentee ballot deadlines to signature-matching rules.

But Trump’s success rate in court would change considerably after Nov. 3. The arguments that began pouring in from Giuliani and others on Trump’s post-election legal team left federal judges befuddled. In one Pennsylvania case, some lawyers left the Trump team before Giuliani argued the case to a judge. Giuliani had met with the lawyers and wanted to make arguments they were uncomfortable making, campaign advisers said.

For example, the Trump campaign argued in federal court in Philadelphia two days after the election to stop the count because Republican observers had been barred. Under sharp questioning from Judge Paul S. Diamond, however, campaign lawyers conceded that Trump in fact had “a nonzero number of people in the room,” leaving Diamond audibly exasperated.

“I’m sorry, then what’s your problem?” Diamond asked.

'How do we get to 270?'

In the days following the election, few states drew Trump’s attention like Georgia, a once-reliable bastion of Republican votes that he carried in 2016 but appeared likely to lose narrowly to Biden as late-remaining votes were tallied.

And few people attracted Trump’s anger like Gov. Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor, who rode the president’s coattails to his own narrow victory in 2018.

A number of Trump allies tried to pressure Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, into putting his thumb on the scale. Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler — both forced into runoff elections on Jan. 5 — demanded Raffensperger’s resignation. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump friend who chairs the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, called Raffensperger to seemingly encourage him to find a way to toss legal ballots.

But Kemp, who preceded Raffensperger as secretary of state, would not do Trump’s bidding. “He wouldn’t be governor if it wasn’t for me,” Trump fumed to advisers earlier this month as he plotted out a call to scream at Kemp.

In the call, Trump urged Kemp to do more to fight for him in Georgia, publicly echo his claims of fraud and appear more regularly on television. Kemp was noncommittal, a person familiar with the call said.

Raffensperger said he knew Georgia was going to be thrust into the national spotlight on Election Day, when dramatically fewer people turned out to vote in person than the Trump campaign needed for a clear win following a surge of mail voting dominated by Democratic voters.

But he said it had never occurred to him to go along with Trump’s unproven allegations because of his duty to administer elections. Raffensperger said his strategy was to keep his head down and follow the law.

“People made wild accusations about the voting systems that we have in Georgia,” Raffensperger said. “They were asking, ‘How do we get to 270? How do you get it to Congress so they can make a determination?’ ” But, he added, “I’m not supposed to put my thumb on the Republican side.”

Trump fixated on a false conspiracy theory that the machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems and used in Georgia and other states had been programmed to count Trump votes as Biden votes. In myriad private conversations, the president would find a way to come back to Dominion. He was obsessed.

“Do you think there’s really something here? I’m hearing . . . ” Trump would say, according to one senior official who discussed it with him.

Raffensperger said Republicans were only harming themselves by questioning the integrity of the Dominion machines. He warned that these kinds of baseless allegations could discourage Republicans from voting in the Senate runoffs. “People need to get a grip on reality,” he said.

More troubling to Raffensperger were the many threats he and his wife, Tricia, have received over the past few weeks — and a break-in at another family member’s home. All of it has prompted him to accept a state security detail.

“If Republicans don’t start condemning this stuff, then I think they’re really complicit in it,” he said. “It’s time to stand up and be counted. Are you going to stand for righteousness? Are you going to stand for integrity? Or are you going to stand for the wild mob? You wanted to condemn the wild mob when it’s on the left side. What are you going to do when it’s on our side?”

On Nov. 20, after Raffensperger certified the state’s results, Kemp announced that he would make a televised statement, stoking fears that the president might have finally gotten to the governor.

“This can’t be good,” Jordan Fuchs, a Raffensperger deputy, wrote in a text message.

But Kemp held firm and formalized the certification.

“As governor, I have a solemn responsibility to follow the law, and that is what I will continue to do,” Kemp said. “We must all work together to ensure citizens have confidence in future elections in our state.”

'A hostile takeover'

On Nov. 7, four days after the election, every major news organization projected that Biden would win the presidency. At the same time, Giuliani stood before news cameras in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, near an adult-video shop and a crematorium, to detail alleged examples of voter fraud.

The contrast that day between Giuliani’s humble, eccentric surroundings and Biden’s and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris’s victory speeches on a grand, blue-lit stage in Wilmington, Del., underscored the virtual impossibility of Trump’s quest to overturn the results.

Also that day, Stepien, Clark, Miller and Bossie briefed Trump on a potential legal strategy for the president’s approval. They explained that prevailing would be difficult and involve complicated plays in every state that could stretch into December. They estimated a “5 to 10 percent chance of winning,” one person involved in the meeting said.

Trump signaled that he understood and agreed to the strategy.

Around this time, some lawyers around Trump began to suddenly disappear from the effort in what some aides characterized as an attempt to protect their reputations. Former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who had appeared at a news conference with Giuliani right after the election, ceased her involvement after the first week.

“Literally only the fringy of the fringe are willing to do pressers, and that’s when it became clear there was no ‘there’ there,” a senior administration official said.

A turning point for the Trump campaign’s legal efforts came on Nov. 13, when its core team of professional lawyers saw the writing on the wall. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia delivered a stinging defeat to Trump allies in a lawsuit trying to invalidate all Pennsylvania ballots received after Election Day.

The decision didn’t just reject the claim; it denied the plaintiffs standing in any federal challenge under the Constitution’s electors clause — an outcome that Trump’s legal team recognized as a potentially fatal blow to many of the campaign’s challenges in the state.

That is when a gulf emerged between the outlooks of most lawyers on the team and of Giuliani, who many of the other lawyers thought seemed “deranged” and ill-prepared to litigate, according to a person familiar with the campaign’s legal team. Some of the Trump campaign and Republican Party lawyers sought to even avoid meetings with Giuliani and his team. When asked for evidence internally for their most explosive claims, Giuliani and Powell could not provide it, the other advisers said.

Giuliani and his protegee, Ellis, both striving to please the president, insisted Trump’s fight was not over. Someone familiar with their strategy said they were “performing for an audience of one,” and that Trump held Giuliani in high regard as “a fighter” and as “his peer.”

Tensions within Trump’s team came to a head that weekend, when Giuliani and Ellis staged what the senior administration official called “a hostile takeover” of what remained of the Trump campaign.

On the afternoon of Nov. 13, a Friday, Trump called Giuliani from the Oval Office while other advisers were present, including Vice President Pence; White House counsel Pat Cipollone; Johnny McEntee, the director of presidential personnel; and Clark.

Giuliani, who was on speakerphone, told the president that he could win and that his other advisers were lying to him about his chances. Clark called Giuliani an expletive and said he was feeding the president bad information. The meeting ended without a clear path, according to people familiar with the discussion.

The next day, a Saturday, Trump tweeted out that Giuliani, Ellis, Powell and others were now in charge of his legal strategy. Ellis startled aides by entering the campaign’s Arlington headquarters and instructing staffers that they must now listen to her and Giuliani.

“They came in one day and were like, ‘We have the president’s direct order. Don’t take an order if it doesn’t come from us,’ ” a senior administration official recalled.

Clark and Miller pushed back, the official said. Ellis threatened to call Trump, to which Miller replied, “Sure, let’s do this,” said a campaign adviser.

It was a fiery altercation, not unlike the many that had played out over the past four years in the corridors of the West Wing. The outcome was that Giuliani and Ellis, as well as Powell — the “elite strike force,” as they dubbed themselves — became the faces of the president’s increasingly unrealistic attempts to subvert democracy.

The strategy, according to a second senior administration official, was, “Anyone who is willing to go out and say, ‘They stole it,’ roll them out. Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell. Send [former acting director of national intelligence] Ric Grenell out West. Send [American Conservative Union Chairman] Matt Schlapp somewhere. Just roll everybody up who is willing to do it into a clown car, and when it’s time for a press conference, roll them out.”

Trump and his allies made a series of brazen legal challenges, including in Nevada, where conservative activist Sharron Angle asked a court to block certification of the results in Clark County, by far the state’s most populous county, and order a wholesale do-over of the election.

Clark County Judge Gloria Sturman was incredulous.

“How do you get to that’s sufficient to throw out an entire election?” she said. She noted the practical implications of failing to certify the election, including that every official elected on Nov. 3 would be unable to take office in the new year, including herself.

Sturman denied the request. Not only was there no evidence to support the claims of widespread voter fraud, she said, but “as a matter of public policy, this is just a bad idea.”

'A flavor of the truth'

As Trump’s legal challenges failed in court, he employed another tactic to try to reverse the result: a public pressure campaign on state and local Republican officials to manipulate the electoral system on his behalf.

“As was the case throughout his business career, he viewed the rules as instruments to be manipulated to achieve his chosen ends,” said Galston of the Brookings Institution.

Trump’s highest-profile play came in Michigan, where Biden was the projected winner and led by more than 150,000 votes. On Nov. 17, Trump called a Republican member of the board of canvassers in Wayne County, which is where Detroit is located and is the state’s most populous county. After speaking with the president, the board member, Monica Palmer, attempted to rescind her vote to certify Biden’s win in Wayne.

Then Trump invited the leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state Senate and House to meet him at the White House, apparently hoping to coax them to block certification of the results or perhaps even to ignore Biden’s popular-vote win and seat Trump electors if the state’s canvassing board deadlocked. Such a move was on shaky legal ground, but that didn’t stop the president from trying.

Republican and Democratic leaders, including current and former governors and members of Congress, immediately launched a full-court press to urge the legislative leaders to resist Trump’s entreaties. The nonpartisan Voter Protection Program was so worried that it commissioned a poll to find out how Michiganders felt about his intervention. The survey found that a bipartisan majority did not like Trump intervening and believed that Biden won the state.

House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey said they accepted the invitation as a courtesy and issued a joint statement immediately after the meeting: “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan.”

A person familiar with their thinking said they felt they could not decline the president’s invitation — plus they saw an opportunity to deliver to Trump “a flavor of the truth and what he wasn’t hearing in his own echo chamber,” as well as to make a pitch for coronavirus relief for their state.

There was never a moment when the lawmakers contemplated stepping in on Trump’s behalf, because Michigan law does not allow it, this person said. Before the trip, lawyers for the lawmakers told their colleagues in the legislature that there was nothing feasible in what Trump was trying to do, and that it was “absolute crazy talk” for the Michigan officials to contemplate defying the will of the voters, this person added.

Trump was scattered in the meeting, interrupting to talk about the coronavirus when the lawmakers were talking about the election, and then talking about the election when they were talking about the coronavirus, the person said. The lawmakers left with the impression that the president understood little about Michigan law, but also that his blinders had fallen off about his prospects for reversing the outcome, the person added.

No representatives from Trump’s campaign attended the meeting, and advisers talked Trump out of scheduling a similar one with Pennsylvania officials.

The weekend of Nov. 21 and on Monday, Nov. 23, Trump faced mounting pressure from Republican senators and former national security officials — as well as from some of his most trusted advisers — to end his stalemate with Biden and authorize the General Services Administration to initiate the transition. The bureaucratic step would allow Biden and his administration-in-waiting to tap public funds to run their transition, receive security briefings and gain access to federal agencies to prepare for the Jan. 20 takeover.

Trump was reluctant, believing that by authorizing the transition, he would in effect be conceding the election. Over multiple days, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Cipollone and Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s personal attorneys, explained to Trump that the transition had nothing to do with conceding and that legitimate challenges could continue, according to someone familiar with the conversations.

Late on Nov. 23, Trump announced that he had allowed the transition to move forward because it was “in the best interest of our Country,” but he kept up his fight over the election results.

The next day, after a conversation with Giuliani, Trump decided to visit Gettysburg, Pa., on Nov. 25, the day before Thanksgiving, for a news conference at a Wyndham Hotel to highlight alleged voter fraud. The plan caught many close to the president by surprise, including RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, three officials said. Some tried to talk Trump out of the trip, but he thought it was a good idea to appear with Giuliani.

A few hours before he was scheduled to depart, the trip was scuttled. “Bullet dodged,” said one campaign adviser. “It would have been a total humiliation.”

That afternoon, Trump called in to the meeting of GOP state senators at the Wyndham, where Giuliani and Ellis were addressing attendees. He spoke via a scratchy connection to Ellis’s cellphone, which she played on speaker. At one point, the line beeped to signal another caller.

“If you were a Republican poll watcher, you were treated like a dog,” Trump complained, using one of his favorite put-downs, even though many people treat dogs well, like members of their own families.

“This election was lost by the Democrats,” he said, falsely. “They cheated.”

Trump demanded that state officials overturn the results — but the count had already been certified. Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes will be awarded to Biden.

Emma Brown, Beth Reinhard and Michael Scherer in Washington and Tom Hamburger in Detroit contributed to this report.

Updated November 27, 2020

What a conservative majority on the court really means

What a conservative majority on the court really means

Opinion by Steven V. Mazie

November 27, 2020 at 7:05 a.m. GMT+9

Steven V. Mazie is the Supreme Court correspondent for the Economist and professor of political studies at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan. His most recent book is “American Justice 2015: The Dramatic Tenth Term of the Roberts Court.”

Though her name appears nowhere in the 33 pages of opinions issued on Thanksgiving eve, Amy Coney Barrett looms large in her first consequential vote as a Supreme Court justice. Barrett played the decisive role in the court’s decision Wednesday to grant requests from Catholics and Orthodox Jews in New York City to block church and synagogue attendance limits in covid-19 hot spots.

During the pandemic’s first wave in the spring, the Supreme Court voted twice not to interfere when states such as California and Nevada restricted indoor gatherings, including church services. Those votes were 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joining his four liberal colleagues.

But with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September — and Barrett’s ascension to the bench — the tide has turned. Roberts is now unable to stop a majority from overruling local officials as they try to combat the coronavirus’s spread. Limiting attendance to 10 or 25 worshipers in the most dangerous zones, the majority said in its unsigned opinion, is “far more severe than has been shown to be required to prevent the spread of the virus at the applicants’ services.”

As infections and deaths spike across the country, the decision is a sign that the newly configured Supreme Court will not look kindly on steps taken by state and local officials to protect health and safety if they interfere with the autonomy of religious entities. This switch may come at a painful cost. “I see no justification for the Court’s change of heart” from its earlier decisions, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, as New York’s rules actually favor houses of worship over movie theaters and sporting arenas that are closed entirely. She warns that allowing large groups to congregate in churches “will only exacerbate the Nation’s suffering.”

The impact of Barrett’s arrival goes well beyond tying states’ hands in the fight against covid-19. Her vote will accelerate a trend toward deference to religious institutions that her fellow conservatives — including the chief justice — have been pursuing for a decade. Once upon a time, the court sought to balance the twin religion clauses of the First Amendment — separation of church and state on one hand and free exercise of religion on the other. More recently, its right wing has been all but ignoring the Constitution’s proscription against an establishment of religion while deferring to increasingly far-fetched religious-liberty claims.

Barrett is likely to ramp up the court’s support for people and organizations that demand carve-outs from rules that the rest of society must follow. In recent years, the Supreme Court has let religious corporations off the hook from an Affordable Care Act requirement that employee health insurance include free contraception. It has bowed to religious nonprofits that refuse to even sign a form giving them an exemption from this mandate. It has expanded the “ministerial exemption” to federal anti-discrimination claims for religious-school teachers. And it told a Christian baker he did not need to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, despite the state’s protections for LGBT customers.

Now the court seems bound to favor religion even more heavily. The wedding-cake decision was a narrow ruling based on specific evidence of anti-religious hostility from a state civil rights commissioner; the justices did not grapple with the more fundamental tensions between anti-discrimination law and religious prerogatives. But earlier this month, the court considered whether Philadelphia can be forced to work with a Catholic social services agency that rejects same-sex couples as foster parents. This case tees up a reconsideration of Employment Division v. Smith, a 1990 case written by Antonin Scalia holding that neutral laws that apply equally to all do not violate the Constitution, even if they have an incidental impact on religious exercise.

This shift is bringing with it a notable testiness among the justices. In his concurring opinion in the New York case, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch took aim at Roberts and the liberal dissenters, accusing them of sending the Constitution on “a holiday during this pandemic.” Roberts swatted back with his customary restraint: The dissenters, he wrote, “simply view the matter differently after careful study and analysis reflecting their best efforts to fulfill their responsibility under the Constitution.”

This is not the first time we have seen tensions between Roberts, who strives to tamp down the court’s perceived politicization, and the justices to his right. But Gorsuch’s bombast — and the uncommonly partisan and recrimination-filled speech Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. delivered to the Federalist Society this month — carries a disturbing air of triumphalism. With Barrett’s arrival, the court’s staunchest conservatives have something to give thanks for: a five-vote majority that does not rely on the chief’s assent.

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ok so a few things here

ok so a few things here

one, this is a masterful fisking and you should spend 20 minutes on the whole thing. really. and if I can’t believe I made it through the whole thread imagine reading this entire suit to create the thread

Unroll available on Thread Reader

two, sidney powell should be told if she appears in court the judge will pull a lever opening a trap door that will dump her down a half mile shaft into a decommissioned sulphur mine

 

and three, this suit is as bad as it is in all aspects because it does not exist to serve a legal function. it exists to create ten years of content for the internet maniacs who exist in the sidney powell universe

this suit is the equivalent of disney dumping ten dozen new full-length marvel and star wars movies onto disney plus in a single day. it’s content overload for the sake of creating a nonstop discussion of content

that it is legally incoherent and legally indistinguishable from having diarrhea in zero gravity is entirely irrelevant to the legion of nuts who just love posting snippets of “legal documents” containing new characters and plotlines to fuel the conspiracy ecosystem

so don’t fall into the trap of asking why the trump campaign would embarrass themselves. they have no capacity for embarrassment. the only objective here is to keep the alt-realitists busy for as long as possible chasing down every bizarre character & plot point

 

the alt-realitists are fairly described as many different things but above all they share one overarching taxonomic family - they are fictional universe nerds. complete and total fuckin fictional universe nerds, and not the harmless & fun kind of fictional universe nerds

unlike harmless & fun fictional universe nerds (d&d, anime, star wars, comics, harry potter, whatever, you name it), the alt-realists live in the same timeline as the fiction. which means the fiction must constantly be replenished as real life events necessitate new storylines

trump losing is a huge problem for the fuel tank of this universe, because the very concept in and of itself is already in violation of the primary narrative thread that’s sustained the fictional universe. it’s a collapsing neutron star at the core of the whole ecosystem.

because the alt-realitists have demonstrated they can convey political power in the real world, having command of them is a valuable political asset. so they must be fed copious amounts of bullshit in the hopes of maintaining the ecosystem in the face of an out-of-power trump

 

they could feed themselves as long as trump stayed in office but with him gone, this valuable political asset is liable to decay into uselessness. so the new responsibility of the sidney powells of the world is to shovel bushels & bushels of chum into the hopper to keep them fed

conspiracists don’t struggle with plotlines getting blown up by reality because they can just recreate new, larger conspiracies out of the rubble to patch them back together. but where the alt-realitists are different is because they are nerds they actually love the exercise

the only way they stop having fun with it is if the content mine runs dry, at which point they start running on fumes & getting bored. so the new content is pivotal to keeping the nerd gang together spotting easter eggs & arguing over what kind of web shooters spider man has

for what it’s worth I don’t think this approach will actually work, for reasons I’ve gotten into before. primarily, the problem is not having power is ultimately lethal to cults of power. it just doesn’t work. but they’re gonna give it the ol college try

Young Republican Grifters Own Libs, Destroy Conservative Movement

Young Republican Grifters Own Libs, Destroy Conservative Movement

Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, and the conservative youth group worshiping at the altar of Trump

Kimberly Ross

Kimberly Ross

Aug 14, 2019 · 10 min read

Image for post

Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens | Source: MediaNews Group/Boulder Daily Camera (Getty)

American conservatism is in disarray.

Yes, the Republican Party has the presidency, the U.S. Senate, a favorable Supreme Court lineup, more governorships and state legislatures than the opposing party—basically, they’ve got everything but the U.S. House.

What they don’t have is a youth movement that understands what conservatism is really about.

A political ideology centered around small government, free markets, personal responsibility, and adherence to the Constitution has been hijacked by a populist phenomenon that looks nothing like the doctrine it claims to hold dear.

At the heart of the new regime are personalities whose characteristics make them perfect sycophants for Trump. They are incurious—zealously so—just like their leader. But it’s not enough, in the arena of politics, to be a lukewarm supporter—to be a public figure who says, “Well, Trump’s less bad than the alternative, so we’ll back him for now.” No, the ones who want prominence, status, and maybe, just maybe if they’re lucky, a presidential retweet, must show unrelenting enthusiasm; they must go all-in. They know that if they play their cards right, if they show unbridled energy in the service of defending the president publicly, it can propel them toward Trump’s orbit.

This, by the way, is exactly what Trump needed to ensure that his 2016 victory was a takeover rather than an aberration. He needed grifters; he needed the unflinching loyalty of those committed to “owning the libs” above all else; he needed a movement of young Republicans whose devotion to conservative principles was always paper thin. Without these grifters, Trump would have been a blip. With them, it’s unclear whether conservatism can detoxify itself.

This is why, despite all the levers of power Republicans currently wield, conservatism is actually in ruins. And it is Trump’s young grifters who are helping him ruin it.

Was there always this hidden undercurrent ready to spring up and spill over into the mainstream in response to Democrats moving further left? For those of us who cling to a pre-2016 conservatism and reject the current brand espoused by the president and his uncritical mass of supporters, the question is deeply uncomfortable. Still, it must be asked.

Trump’s Rise

Trump’s ascent to the White House is one of those things that appears impossible before it happens, yet after it does you wonder why you ever expected anything different. Look at the inputs. George W. Bush, the “compassionate conservative,” was judged too friendly to liberal interests. John McCain, the 2008 Republican candidate, was to many conservatives even worse on this front. McCain’s loss to Barack Obama ushered in a period of intense Republican anger. In response to Obama’s eight years in office, they were never going to go with a mild and moderate replacement—they wanted his antithesis.

The 2010 Tea Party wave wasn’t, after all, a gentle rebuke. There were other under-the-radar episodes that predicted Trump, such as when Marco Rubio attempted a compromise on immigration reform and his career was nearly ruined as a result. Input after input showed that Republicans wanted something wild and new, a political force they believed could counter what they perceived to be the Democrats’ lurch to the left.

In 2016, a weary GOP backed a scorched earth approach. Almost overnight, a bumbling, boorish, reality star billionaire took the reins and stormed his way to victory. Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio—these candidates were quickly left in the dust, mouths agape, wondering how the anti-politician became the darling of the right.

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He did so by being, in the words of his supporters, a “fighter.” Jeb Bush, who once politely requested his audience to clap for him, did not seem capable of pushing back against the leftist tide threatening to remake American society. As the Republican primaries gave way to the general election, as the tone of Trump’s campaign grew coarser by the hour, the more Trump’s base resonated with it. Savagery sells, especially when it’s used as a retroactive salve to lessen the wounds of the past. The GOP couldn’t make Obama’s legacy disappear, but with each Trump-endorsed insult Obama’s two-term presidency seemed less important, less significant. And to Republican voters, that felt good.

Prior to his victory, there was a lot of talk about voters holding their nose as they cast their vote for Trump. A lot of talk about Trump being “the lesser evil.” You don’t see this reasoning so much anymore. Trump has consolidated support and turned lukewarm supporters into enthusiasts.

A major way he did so wasn’t via Paul Ryan’s acquiescense to Trump—as if the voters who sent Trump to the Oval cared a whit about Ryan. He consolidated support mainly by drawing to himself a network of grifters whose collected energies could set up a pro-Trump machine that would overwhelm the airwaves, the TV networks, the social media spaces, the college campus halls, with a single, unifying message: above all else, we must own the libs.

Like any cult, the Trump cult requires passionate missionaries to disseminate its message. Older, established advocates—Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News guests, radio hosts and their ilk—are necessary to bring their considerable listeners into the fold, but you don’t go from cult to movement without the youth on your side, without a youth group.

Rush Limbaugh Has Betrayed Principles For Politics and His Audience Doesn’t Care

But you should

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The Young MAGA-Grifters

One of the most well-known MAGA soldiers is 25-year-old Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a student organization supposedly dedicated to free speech, free markets, and small government. These sound great on paper and in soundbites, but the reality of what they do doesn’t line up with their stated aspirations.

Kirk’s target demographic is impressionable high school and undergraduate students who are alienated within left-dominated academe and yearn for a place to belong. There is nothing wrong with such yearning. The problem is that this horde of conservakids is fronted by Kirk and Candace Owens, the former communications director for TPUSA, both of whom do a major disservice to the true conservative cause.

In his review of Kirk’s latest book, Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can WIN the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters, The Washington Examiner’s Grant Addison minces no words (emphasis mine).

Leveraging his youth, talent for public speaking, and access to the White House, he’s fooled conservative donors into thinking he’s helping the cause of freedom on campus. Likewise, he’s fooled restless high school students and undergraduates into thinking performative victimhood and petty partisanship are epistemologically satisfying. Neither is true. Whether due to ignorance or indifference, Kirk and, by extension, his organization are hypocrites, and childish ones at that. And this petulant hypocrisy undermines not just legitimate indictments of higher education, but the intellectual development of young conservatives. The great irony of Campus Battlefield is how thoroughly Kirk paints this picture in his own words.

It’s evident that Kirk envisions himself as some grand general, leading his troops into the culture war. In reality, Kirk is a band director: his thoughts unoriginal and motions rehearsed, he trains his ensemble to play along to the tune of the day — currently, that of “owning the libs.” After all, the band’s job is to help cheer the team on to victory — a role Kirk performs with relish. And so he goes from campus to campus, conservatism’s fresh-faced Harold Hill, peddling his siren’s song to the kids in town until something better comes along.

Lacking any substance to stand on, Kirk and his team are focused on winning at all costs. All the while, they are either ignorant of or dismiss the idea that winning and winning well are two entirely different things. Donald J. Trump was certainly victorious on November 8, 2016, but to what end?

Owens, meanwhile, has also followed the MAGA grifting train to prominence.

In her Quillette article “The Problem With Candace Owens,” Arc editor Cathy Young explains why we should question the influence of someone who once stood firmly on the other side of the political aisle and only experienced a “conservative awakening” once the conditions were firmly in place to lucratively profit from shifting ideological gears.

Owens’s self-reinvention has certainly left quite a few people unconvinced. “Mundane Matt,” the libertarian video blogger who was among the first to denounce the Social Autopsy project, has slammed the new Owens as a cynical “performer” who doesn’t believe a word of what she says and who “plays victim” just as much as the leftists she decries. Software engineer Marlene Jaeckel, a self-described moderate conservative who recently went public about being ostracized by the “women in tech” community for challenging feminist narratives of victimhood, also had an extremely negative impression of Owens when she met her at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February: “She’s as fake as a three-dollar bill,” Jaeckel told me in a Twitter direct message, recalling that Owens seemed far more interested in “taking selfies with more famous speakers” than in discussion of issues.

Whether Candace Owens has any ideas at all besides the advancement of Candace Owens is very much in question.

In April here at Arc, Young wrote of Owens’ ceaseless attitude of victimhood, her rank tribalism, and how toxic she is for black Americans and conservatism, alike.

Candace Owens Plays the Victim Card

She’s not a Hitler fan, but she’s a terrible messenger for black conservatism

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To Kirk and Owens, personal advancement and name recognition matter more than educating youth on the history and merits of conservatism. The TPUSA message is so flimsy and Trump-focused that it can be distilled into an imprint on a t-shirt without losing much force. Some might call that powerful. Other young people recognize just how pernicious it truly is.

Of course, Kirk and Owens are far from the only youthful MAGA grifters.

CJ Pearson is only 17 years old, but has already been on the political scene for a while. On the right (and the left!) youth is rewarded for little more than existing. As long as a teenager spouts what established adults believe, they are quickly propelled to a larger platform. Often, that premature promotion becomes a problem.

Pearson rose to fame in 2015 when, at the age of 12 (!), he began lambasting President Obama and the Democrats from his YouTube channel. A very young, black conservative denouncing a black, leftist president naturally drew major attention. Once the 2016 presidential campaign season began in earnest in June of 2015, Pearson was all-in for Senator Rand Paul…until he wasn’t. In September, he threw his full support behind Senator Ted Cruz and explained his desire to reach millennials: “We’re seeking to learn from the mistakes of Romney, learn from the mistakes of McCain and to seek to tap into a new generation of courageous conservatives… the millennial generation.” By December, Pearson had switched direction entirely and vocalized his support for none other than Senator Bernie Sanders. “People are struggling in America,” claimed Pearson. “We need the right man in the White House. And in my opinion, that man is Senator Bernie Sanders.”

A Paul to Cruz to Sanders evolution is quite a story. But it didn’t end there.

Not long after endorsing Sanders, Pearson wrote a brief article entitled, “I’m 13 and Donald Trump Becoming President Scares the Crap Out of Me.”

I’m scared not only for myself, but also for my generation and the future of our great nation. But honestly, his ascension begs the question: Do people not know how bad Donald Trump is or do they just not care? I hope it’s the former because you can help ignorance, but you can’t fix stupid.

In August 2016, Pearson made another shocking announcement when he officially endorsed Donald Trump for president.

In my young optimistic eyes, after the last eight years of the Obama presidency, there is little left to lose. There is only room to do better, and there is only one goal: to make America great for every American.

Currently, Pearson maintains his support for Trump and has regained some of the GOP support he lost from flip-flopping all over the national stage. It’s hardly surprising that both sides love him when he is their own. Adults are easily caught up by the appeal of a young person amplifying their beliefs.

The whole thing has been a strange, tilted, less consistent version of the Jonathan Krohn saga. Pearson is quite obviously focused on building his own brand, not on building a conservative intellectual foundation. The only constant in Pearson’s ideological universe is himself. You don’t switch from one political extreme to another and back again absent narcissism or the ravages of teenage fickleness. It’s exhausting, juvenile, and foolish.

Let me be clear: there is nothing wrong with the ideas behind conservatism, or with robust youth activism. There is everything wrong with a lack of intellectual groundwork, training young Republicans to believe that “owning the libs” is the chief political good, that principles take a back seat to popularity, and that Trumpism and all it entails is morally sound by virtue of its victories.

The youth vote is great, but it means little unless it is built upon a solid foundation that rejects clichés, continuously strives for improvement, and ensures a similar political trajectory in the future.

The Messy Convergence of Christianity and a 

With “role models” like Kirk, Owens, Pearson, and others at the helm, the hope that true conservatism will make a healthy, post-Trump comeback is anything but certain.

Kimberly Ross is a columnist at Arc Digital. Follow her on Twitter @SouthernKeeks.

How I Organise My Life With Notion



How I Organise My Life With Notion

by Theo Sheppard, medium.com

May 23, 2020 12:05 PM

A beginners guide to the only productivity tool you need.

Screenshot — Notion for Mac

It has been about thirteen months since I first stumbled across Notion, the all-in-one planning application that has now become my (almost) sole productivity tool.

I use Notion to take notes, manage my tasks and keep track of both short and long-term goals. The only other productivity tools I use are the basic reminders app on my phone, Google Keep for jotting down short notes, Google Calendar and Pages/Word on my laptop.

Unsurprisingly, Notion has become incredibly popular over the last couple of years, attracting the likes of Steve Huffman, co-founder and CEO of Reddit.

Notion is so good it makes a devilishly complex problem seem simple.

— Steve Huffman, Co-founder & CEO of Reddit

Notion has a huge array of different ‘page’ layouts, each of which can be used for a different purpose, such as managing a team, planning a blog post or taking notes in a lecture. In this piece, I share a few of my favourite beginner Notion page layouts, including a brief explanation of how I set each of them up.

Hopefully, the ideas I share will be helpful both for those who are new to the tool and for current Notion users who are searching for more potential uses of the tool.

1 — Planning My Week

My ‘Weekly Plan’ is both the epicentre of my Notion setup and the pivot around which much of my life revolves.

Screenshot — Notion: Weekly Plan

To create this page, I have made use of one of Notion’s standard page templates, which can be found under the ‘add a page’ option within the main sidebar. I have formatted my Weekly Plan so that the weekend is lumped together. I do this so that, when viewing Notion on my phone, all of my tasks can be viewed clearly (without certain words being cut-off to save space).

To create each task I hover over the plus (+) sign to the left of each text box. This brings up a selection of ‘block’ options. From this menu, I select the ‘To-do list’ option, which inserts a simple checkbox. After the first task has been created, new tasks can be created by copy and pasting previous tasks or simply pressing enter after each checkbox.

I categorise my tasks using a colour-coding system, such as using red for work and green for exercise. I prefer to change the background colour when highlighting these categories as I think it stands out a little more clearly than just changing the text colour.

To change the background colour, first select a task by highlighting it (i.e. dragging across with a mouse or double-tapping on a mobile device). Then, select the ‘text colour’ button (which generally appears as a capitalised A) and scroll down the drop-down list to find options for background colours.

Once I have completed a task, I press/click on the checkbox square, at which point the task will appear as having been crossed off my to-do list. At the end of each week, I place all of my completed tasks into the ‘Archive’ by selecting, dragging and dropping them onto the grey filing cabinet icon.

2 — Managing My Goals

Another way I use Notion is to record my progress with both short and long term goals.

Screenshot — Notion: Goals

As with my Weekly Plan, the ‘Goals’ page is another of Notion’s pre-prepared templates that can be chosen from the main sidebar. This means that columns for goals that I have completed (i.e. ‘Done’), in progress (i.e. ‘Doing’) and going to do (i.e. ‘To Do) already set up within the template.

I make sure to limit the number of goals that are in progress at one time as this helps me to focus my attention in the most productive way possible. I also try to keep a balance between work/life/health here, something I achieve by ‘tagging’ and colour-coding each goal, e.g. ‘Fitness’.

New goals can be added by pressing/clicking the + symbol and typing your intended goal. Double-clicking a task that has already been created will cause a new page to pop up. This page can be used to add a status (‘To Do’, ‘Doing’ or ‘Done’) to the goal and to tag a goal (e.g. ‘Work’ or ‘Life’).

3 — Tracking My Habits

Easily one of my favourite ways to use Notion is to track positive habits such as drinking 8 glasses of water, practising a language or going for a run.

Screenshot — Notion: Habit Tracking

The Habit Tracker template can be selected from the main sidebar, under ‘Personal’ templates. The name of the habit can be changed by replacing one of the default habits (e.g. ‘Meditate’) to a habit of your choice (e.g. ‘8 Hours Sleep’).

The days of the week should already appear on the template. However, a starting point may need to be selected manually by clicking on the box named ‘Date’ and selecting the appropriate start date from the calendar that appears.

Once habits and dates have been inserted into the template, you can easily mark a habit as completed each day by selecting the corresponding checkbox.

These are just a few simple uses for Notion that help me to organise my life effectively. I also use Notion to take notes and track the books, tv shows and films I watch, among other things. Please let me know if you found this piece helpful as I am considering sharing some more advanced Notion page layouts (as well as a few tips and tricks) in a later article.

Screenshot — Notion: Habit Tracking

Photo by: + sign

In the meantime, you can find a gallery of more Notion page setups here and a breakdown of how productivity guru Thomas Frank uses Notion here.

References

Rebecca Solnit: On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway

Rebecca Solnit: On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway

By Rebecca Solnit

November 19, 2020

Why Is It So Hard for Democrats to Act Like They Actually Won?

When Trump won the 2016 election—while losing the popular vote—the New York Times seemed obsessed with running features about what Trump voters were feeling and thinking. These pieces treated them as both an exotic species and people it was our job to understand, understand being that word that means both to comprehend and to grant some sort of indulgence to. Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election, the Los Angeles Times has given their editorial page over to letters from Trump voters, who had exactly the sort of predictable things to say we have been hearing for far more than four years, thanks to the New York Times and what came to seem like about 11,000 other news outlets hanging on the every word of every white supremacist they could convince to go on the record.

The letters editor headed this section with, “In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters.” The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.

Paul Waldman wrote a valuable column in the Washington Post a few years ago, in which he pointed out that this discord is valuable fuel to right-wing operatives: “The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive.” He notes that the sense of being disrespected “doesn’t come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn’t come from the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? An entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them. The right has a gigantic media apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the chorus at every opportunity.”

There’s also often a devil’s bargain buried in all this, that you flatter and, yeah, respect these white people who think this country is theirs by throwing other people under the bus—by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views. And you reinforce that constituency’s sense that they matter more than other people when you pander like this, and pretty much all the problems we’ve faced over the past four years, to say nothing of the last five hundred, come from this sense of white people being more important than nonwhites, Christians than non-Christians, native-born than immigrant, male than female, straight than queer, cis-gender than trans.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just complained that “you can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Now it’s considered bigotry.” This is a standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress. And of course Alito is disingenuous; you can say that stuff against marriage equality (and he did). Then other people can call you a bigot, because they get to have opinions too, but in his scheme such dissent is intolerable, which is fun coming from a member of the party whose devotees wore “fuck your feelings” shirts at its rallies and popularized the term “snowflake.”

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

I’ve spent much of my adult life watching politicians like Bill Clinton and, at times, Barack Obama sell out their own side to placate the other, with dismal results.

I think our side, if you’ll forgive my ongoing shorthand and binary logic, has something to offer everyone and we can and must win in the long run by offering it, and offering it via better stories and better means to make those stories reach everyone. We actually want to see everyone have a living wage, access to healthcare, and lives unburdened by medical, student, and housing debt. We want this to be a thriving planet when the babies born this year turn 80 in 2100. But the recommended compromise means abandoning and diluting our stories, not fortifying and improving them (and finding ways for them to actually reach the rest of America, rather than having them warped or shut out altogether). I’ve spent much of my adult life watching politicians like Bill Clinton and, at times, Barack Obama sell out their own side to placate the other, with dismal results, and I pray that times have changed enough that Joe Biden will not do it all over again.

Among the other problems with the LA Times’s editor’s statement is that one side has a lot of things that do not deserve to be called facts, and their values are too often advocacy for harming many of us on the other side. Not to pick on one news outlet: Sunday, the Washington Post ran a front-page sub-head about the #millionMAGAmarch that read “On stark display in the nation’s capital were two irreconcilable versions of America, each refusing to accept what the other considered to be undeniable fact.” Except that one side did have actual facts, notably that Donald J. Trump lost the election, and the other had hot and steamy delusions.

I can comprehend, and do, that lots of people don’t believe climate change is real, but is there some great benefit in me listening, again, to those who refuse to listen to the global community of scientists and see the evidence before our eyes? A lot of why the right doesn’t “understand” climate change is that climate change tells us everything is connected, everything we do has far-reaching repercussions, and we’re responsible for the whole, a message at odds with their idealization of a version of freedom that smells a lot like disconnection and irresponsibility. But also climate denial is the result of fossil fuel companies and the politicians they bought spreading propaganda and lies for profit, and I understand that better than the people who believe it. If half of us believe the earth is flat, we do not make peace by settling on it being halfway between round and flat. Those of us who know it’s round will not recruit them through compromise. We all know that you do better bringing people out of delusion by being kind and inviting than by mocking them, but that’s inviting them to come over, which is not the same thing as heading in their direction.

The editor spoke of facts, and he spoke of values. In the past four years too many members of the right have been emboldened to carry out those values as violence. One of the t-shirts at the #millionMAGAmarch this weekend: “Pinochet did nothing wrong.” Except stage a coup, torture and disappear tens of thousands of Chileans, and violate laws and rights. A right-wing conspiracy to overthrow the Michigan government and kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer was recently uncovered, racists shot some Black Lives Matter protestors and plowed their cars into a lot of protests this summer. The El Paso anti-immigrant massacre was only a year ago; the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre two years ago, the Charlottesville white-supremacist rally in which Heather Heyer was killed three years ago (and of course there have been innumerable smaller incidents all along). Do we need to bridge the divide between Nazis and non-Nazis? Because part of the problem is that we have an appeasement economy, a system that is supposed to be greased by being nice to the other side.

Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to. If Nazis wanted to reach out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing “Jews will not replace us” and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect. It is a minority position but by granting it deference we give it, over and over, the power of a majority position.

Is there some great benefit in me listening, again, to those who refuse to listen to the global community of scientists and see the evidence before our eyes?

In fact the whole Republican Party, since long before Trump, has committed itself to the antidemocratic project of trying to create a narrower electorate rather than win a wider vote. They have invested in voter suppression as a key tactic to win, and the votes they try to suppress are those of Black voters and other voters of color. That is a brutally corrupt refusal to allow those citizens the rights guaranteed to them by law. Having failed to prevent enough Black people from voting in the recent election, they are striving mightily to discard their votes after the fact. What do you do with people who think they matter more than other people? Catering to them reinforces that belief, that they are central to the nation’s life, they are more important, and their views must prevail. Deference to intolerance feeds intolerance.

Years ago the linguist George Lakoff wrote that Democrats operate as kindly nurturance-oriented mothers to the citizenry, Republicans as stern discipline-oriented fathers. But the relationship between the two parties is a marriage, between an overly deferential wife and an overbearing and often abusive husband (think of how we got our last two Supreme Court justices and failed to get Merrick Garland). The Hill just ran a headline that declared “GOP Senators say that a Warren nomination would divide Republicans.” I am pretty sure they didn’t run headlines that said, “Democratic Senators say a Pompeo (or Bolton or Perdue or Sessions) nomination would divide Democrats.” I grew up in an era where wives who were beaten were expected to do more to soothe their husbands and not challenge them, and this carries on as the degrading politics of our abusive national marriage.

Some of us don’t know how to win. Others can’t believe they ever lost or will lose or should, and their intransigence constitutes a kind of threat. That’s why the victors of the recent election are being told in countless ways to go grovel before the losers. This unilateral surrender is how misogyny and racism are baked into a lot of liberal and centrist as well as right-wing positions, this idea that some people need to be flattered and buffered even when they are harming the people who are supposed to do the flattering and buffering, even when they are the minority, even when they’re breaking the law or lost the election. Lakoff didn’t quite get to the point of saying that this nation lives in a household full of what domestic abuse advocates call coercive control, in which one partner’s threats, intimidations, devaluations, and general shouting down control the other.

This is what marriages were before feminism, with the abused wife urged to placate and soothe the furious husband. Feminism is good for everything, and it’s a good model for seeing that this is both outrageous and a recipe for failure. It didn’t work in marriages, and it never was the abused partner’s job to prevent the abuse by surrendering ground and rights and voice. It is not working as national policy either. Now is an excellent time to stand on principle and defend what we value, and I believe it’s a winning strategy too, or at least brings us closer to winning than surrender does. Also, it’s worth repeating, we won, and being gracious in victory is still being victorious.