monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): The election integrity is extremely important. In fact it's necessary. And there are so many Republicans that feel like it was rigged, they're hearing the president say that, they believe it was rigged. You hear people saying that they got dead people's ballots. They got -- I heard one lady say she got four ballots in the mail, two of them were for the people who lived in her house before, and both of them are dead. She could have easily -- if she had done the wrong thing, it's illegal -- she could have voted illegally. She didn't do that, but so many people have questions. Integrity is so important. And there are these battleground states where they changed the laws, they changed the rules at the last minute, and people have a problem with that. And they're worried that if they don't do something about it now, this will continue and mail-in ballots will continue in the next election.

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Virtually every power center on Earth joined the cause. That included big business, Wall Street, the defense establishment, pharma, the permanent bureaucracy in Washington and above all, Silicon Valley. All of these power centers worked tirelessly from the day Biden got the nomination until the first Tuesday in November to bypass voters and get Joe Biden to the White House.

Google changed its famed algorithm to obliterate traffic to websites that criticized Joe Biden. Facebook and Twitter did essentially the same thing. If that's not rigging an election, there's no meaning to that phrase.

Just discovered that the first episode of Columbo was written by Steve Bochco and was directed by Steven Spielberg. Surprised as hell yet not surprised at all.

Trump declared Monday that he wants to rename Fort Benning to Fort Trump. But I thought were removing the names of white supremacist traitors from government owned facilities?!

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris had a short yet emphatic response when asked if she believes Republicans are attempting a “coup” by plotting to reject President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory over President Donald Trump when those results are certified on Jan. 6th.

On Monday night, the incoming VP and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff went for takeout to Washington, DC’s Floriana Restaurant, after which VPE Harris spoke briefly with reporters.

Harris was first asked how she plans to work with “Republicans who refuse to still acknowledge the fact that you and President-elect Joe Biden have won the election,” and responded by emphasizing that victory.

“When Joe Biden and I are inaugurated on January 20 — which we will be, and Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States and I will be the next Vice President of the United States— we are committed to working with all leaders, regardless of who they voted for to address issues like what we need to do to support our small businesses, and to get them back open,” Harris said, adding that in order to do that, the country must “get control of the virus.”

The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere then said “There are a lot of people who see what’s going on Wednesday as an attempted active coup of the US government,” and asked “Is that what you see? Is this a coup attempt?”

According to Dovere’s pool report, the VP-elect responded “Let me just tell you something: We’re going to be inaugurated, period,” but a review of the pool video reveals the actual quote was “Let me just tell you something: We’re going to be inaugurated. Period.”

House and Senate Republicans have promised to object when Vice President Mike Pence certifies the results on Jan. 6, but none have the power to change the outcome.

It also comes on Sundance now. In fact they just had a whole 48 hr. marathon. It beats most of what passes for shows nowadays. Cleaner somehow.

Matthews asked political data analyst David Shor why this was, and Shor posited an issue of social trust:

It used to be that once you control for age and race and gender and education, that people who trusted their neighbors basically voted the same as people who didn’t trust their neighbors. But then, starting in 2016, suddenly that shifted. If you look at white people without college education, high-trust non-college whites tended toward [Democrats], and low-trust non-college whites heavily turned against us. In 2016, we were polling this high-trust electorate, so we overestimated Clinton. These low-trust people still vote, even if they’re not answering these phone surveys.

Those more willing to trust strangers are more willing to participate in polls, Shor said his research has found, meaning polls oversample Democrats and undersample Republicans in a way that’s difficult to control for. Furthermore, he told Matthews, Democrats have become more politically engaged in recent months due to factors ranging from the pandemic to the civil rights movement; this has led to an increased willingness — particularly among liberal Democrats — to answer pollsters’ questions.

So Democrats may be generally overrepresented in polls. And liberal Democrats may have an outsized weight on the results, inflating the support of Democratic candidates that, in reality, may not even have the firm support of the Democratic base.

Let’s say you’re looking for a new apartment. You’re trying to decide between two in two different neighborhoods, each being rented by a different company. While sitting down with a representative from Company A, you’re offered a warning about the competing unit: It’s in Neighborhood B, an area rife with burglaries and car thefts.

Alarmed, you do some research on your city’s website. Thankfully, the guy from Company A is completely wrong. There’s no particular concern about crime in Neighborhood B. You call the guy you were speaking with and let him know; he thanks you. You email him the city data just for his edification.

The next day, you walk into Company A to sign a lease. You overhear the same employee talking to another prospective client. Stay away from Neighborhood B, he says. It's riddled with burglaries and car thefts.

You’ve likely been involved in enough business dealings to recognize the hustle being operated by the Company A guy. Maybe you confront him and he says something like, well, I don’t trust the city numbers. Or maybe he says, look, regardless, there are a lot of questions about the safety of the area. None of that changes the reality: He’s more interested in closing the sale than in presenting an honest case.

I chose a real estate example here because it seems likely to have some universality. I also chose it because what we're really talking about is one particular real estate titan's response to the results of last year's presidential election in Georgia.

When The Washington Post on Sunday published the transcript of President Trump’s call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, readers were treated to a historically unique high-pressure sales pitch. Trump demanded that Raffensperger revisit the state’s election results, berating the state official with a litany of claims about purported fraud and irregularities that the president said occurred in the state.

Those claims were not only broadly wrong, they were known to be wrong by anyone paying relatively close attention to things. Trump was presenting to the state of Georgia assertions which the state, and Raffensperger’s team in particular, had already publicly dismissed, hoping, it seems, that simply by dumping all of this in the secretary’s lap, he might consider Trump’s demand that Georgia scrape together just enough votes to hand Trump a win.

But, look. There’s a lot going on in the world, and it is at least theoretically possible that a casual observer might not have completed due diligence on some of the theories floating out there. Trump should not be granted this particular benefit of the doubt, of course, but, just for the sake of argument, let’s give it to him.

Georgia did, it seems, with elections official Gabriel Sterling making an appearance Monday afternoon to walk through the claims Trump made and to address each one with actual state data. He was accompanied by a large placard delineating some of Trump’s claims and rebutting each one.

[... ... ... ... ...]

It is not new to say that Trump operates on dishonesty. It is not new to say that his claims about fraud have been repeatedly proved meritless. It is not even new to point out that he continues to make false claims that have been repeatedly debunked.

What is new is that Trump is asking Americans to believe that their system of choosing leaders is flawed and corrupted because losing the election damages his vanity. He’s doing something that a Senate report last year warned has “significant national security and electoral consequences” by degrading confidence in a process already targeted by foreign adversaries.

He's lying over and over with impunity because he wants to and he can. The crowd at his rally, largely Trump supporters, ate it up. But Trump isn't trying to rent them an apartment. He's trying to get them to question the foundations of the American democratic system because he's frustrated that the system made clear that his political legacy isn't represented by his rally crowds.

That legacy is this: He is a president who was consistently unpopular and who was rejected by a majority of American voters. A president who spent his last months in office combating not the deadly virus raging through the country but, instead, reality.

The number, with a 231 area code, was incorrectly identified as belonging to Rep. Lee Chatfield in a Facebook and Twitter post by "Team Trump," an account for Trump's campaign. The post also refers to Chatfield as Speaker of the House, a position he no longer holds. The official Donald Trump Facebook page shared the post, which called on Michigan to decertify its presidential election ballots, shortly thereafter.

In the roughly 24 hours since then, former Petoskey resident O Rose, 28, has received "hundreds" of calls and text messages from strangers who believed they were contacting Chatfield.

"I can't take any more voicemails, my voicemail (box) has 44 voicemails in it right now," Rose said. "Endless, endless texts. I deleted a bunch, and now that I'm thinking about it, I probably shouldn't have, because I was just overwhelmed … It's just ridiculous."

Several calls came through while Rose was being interviewed on the phone Monday morning.

The News-Review does not quote people anonymously or under false identities, but for privacy, Rose agreed to be identified by first initial and last name in this article. Rose uses non-gendered they/them pronouns, and often goes by "O" as a shortened first name in real life.

Rose began replying with lighthearted, humorous pictures from the internet when texts first began to arrive — for fun, and in the hopes it would clue people in to the fact that it was a wrong number without requiring a more lengthy response.

Sometimes, however, an even more direct response was unsuccessful.

"I told them I was not Lee Chatfield, but they would still not believe me," they said. "It was just a string of people progressively denying reality."

In one screenshot shared with the News-Review, Rose responded to a text by saying, "This is NOT representative Lee's number … I'm a random citizen. The wrong numbers and information were posted." The original sender then replied, "So you say."

Rose has posted some of those screenshots to their personal Facebook page and elsewhere, trying to get enough attention to have their number taken down. They have also sent a message to Chatfield's Facebook page to let him know of the situation.

"I'm going to have to change my number eventually, but that takes a minute to do," Rose said.

Just discovered that the first episode of Columbo was written by Steve Bochco and was directed by Steven Spielberg. Surprised as hell yet not surprised at all.

Quote:

Trump declared Monday that he wants to rename Fort Benning to Fort Trump. But I thought were removing the names of white supremacist traitors from government owned facilities?!

- @DeanObeidallah