Dave Wasserman@Redistrict
22h
New @CookPolitical: over 153.5M now counted, Trump's popular vote lead down to 1.68%: https://cookpolitical.com/vote-tracker/2024/electoral-college
Trump 76,666,332 (49.93%)
Harris 74,086,596 (48.25%)
This is the closest popular vote gap since Bush v Gore.
Absolutely perfect laboratory to cultivate a population of people ready to carry out a genocide of Palestinians.
Israel appeared to be the testing ground for the mRNA injections.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was told — in a phone call during a live press briefing — not to comment on reports of a ballistic missile strike on Ukraine on Thursday.
The AFP news agency reported that an unknown male voice told Zakharova, "On the 'Yuzhmash' ballistic missile strike that the Westerners have started talking about, we are not commenting at all."
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the possible ICBM attack, saying questions about it should be instead directed to the Russian Defense Ministry.
THE HAGUE (AP) — The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants on Thursday for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister and Hamas officials, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity over the war in Gaza and the October 2023 attacks that triggered Israel’s offensive in the Palestinian territory.
The decision turns Netanyahu and the others into internationally wanted suspects and is likely to further isolate them and complicate efforts to negotiate a cease-fire to end the 13-month conflict. But its practical implications could be limited since Israel and its major ally, the United States, are not members of the court and several of the Hamas officials have been subsequently killed in the conflict.
Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have condemned ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan’s request for warrants as disgraceful and antisemitic. U.S. President Joe Biden also blasted the prosecutor and expressed support for Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas. Hamas also slammed the request.
“The Chamber considered that there are reasonable grounds to believe that both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity,” the three-judge panel wrote in its unanimous decision to issue warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
Quote:Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was told — in a phone call during a live press briefing — not to comment on reports of a ballistic missile strike on Ukraine on Thursday.
The missile spoke pretty clearly.
Today, former Florida representative Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration for the office of attorney general. He did so shortly after CNN told him that they were going to report that the House Ethics Committee had been told there were witnesses to yet another sexual encounter between Gaetz and a minor in 2017. There was already evidence that he had sent more than $10,000 to two women who later testified in sexual misconduct investigations. The notes explaining the payments said things like: “Love you,” “Being my friend,” “Being awesome,’ and “flight + extra 4 u.”
Trump transition spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer told Will Steakin of ABC News that discussions of Gaetz’s payments “are meant to undermine the mandate from the people to reform the Justice Department.”
Gaetz’s withdrawal turns attention to Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. As host of the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, Hegseth has no relevant experience to run a crucial United States government department, let alone one that oversees close to 3 million personnel and a budget of more than $800 billion.
According to Heath Druzin of the Idaho Capital Sun, Hegseth has close ties to an Idaho Christian nationalist church that wants to turn the United States into a theocracy.
Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,” including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. He calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.”
Like Gaetz, Hegseth is facing stories about sexual assault. Yesterday, officials in Monterey, California, released a police report detailing a 2017 sexual assault complaint against Hegseth. The report recounts chilling details of a drunk Hegseth blocking a California woman from leaving a hotel room and then sexually assaulting her. A nurse reported the alleged assault after the woman underwent a rape exam. Hegseth says the encounter was consensual, but he paid the woman a settlement in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement. He was never charged.
Trump’s pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, is also short on experience in the field of the department she has been tapped to oversee. She once incorrectly claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in education when she was trying to get a seat on the Connecticut Board of Education and is known primarily for her work building World Wrestling Entertainment. And she, too, has been entangled in a sex abuse scandal. In October, five men filed a lawsuit claiming that she and her husband, Vince McMahon, were aware that former ringside announcer Melvin Phillips was assaulting “ring boys” who were as young as 13.
A spokesperson for the Trump transition said of McMahon’s misrepresented credentials: “These types of politically motivated attacks are the new normal for nominees ready to enact President Trump’s mandate for common sense that an overwhelming majority of Americans supported two weeks ago.”
But Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence makes McMahon look like a prize. As military scholar Tom Nichols points out in The Atlantic, former representative TulsI Gabbard is “stunningly unqualified” to oversee all of America’s intelligence services, including the Central Intelligence Agency. Nichols notes that her constant parroting of Russian talking points and her cozying up to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad make her “a walking Christmas tree of warning lights” for our national security.
Former Republican governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley suggested that Gabbard is “a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer” who has no place at the head of American intelligence. A Russian state media presenter refers to Gabbard as “our girlfriend” and as a Russian agent.
And then there is Trump’s tapping of Robert Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has no training in medicine or public health and, in addition to being a prominent critic of the vaccines that have dramatically curtailed disease and death in the U.S., is an outspoken critic of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
There are a number of ways to think about Trump’s appointments. The people he has picked have so little experience in the fields their departments handle that Erin Burnett of CNN suggested that he is simply choosing them from “central casting”—a favorite phrase of his—to look as he imagines such officials should. Indeed, as Zachary B. Wolf of CNN pointed out, while President Joe Biden vowed to make his Cabinet look like America, Trump’s picks look “exactly like Fox News.” Trump has actually tapped a number of television hosts for different positions.
That so many of his appointees have histories of sexual misconduct is also striking, and underlines both that they share his determination to dominate others and that they do not think rules and laws apply to them.
But there is another pattern at work, as well. In a piece he published on November 15 in his “Thinking about…” newsletter, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained that destroying a country requires undermining five key zones: “health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.” The nominations of Kennedy, Gaetz, Hegseth, and Gabbard, as well as the tapping of billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to destroy the administration of the government, are, according to Snyder, a “decapitation strike.”
“Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States,” Snyder writes. “How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective,” he explains, “Trump's proposed appointments—Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard—are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done.”
But that destruction of the United States is so far still aspirational. The constant references to Trump’s supposed “mandate” are misleading. He did not win 50% of the vote, meaning that more voters chose someone other than Trump in the 2024 election than voted for him, and even many of his voters appear to have misunderstood his policies.
According to Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Trump’s loyalists have tried to shore up support for his nominees in the Senate by threatening the Republican senators: "If you are on the wrong side of the vote, you’re buying yourself a primary. That is all. And there’s a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance it.”
That threat is a direct assault on the Constitution, which gives to the Senate the power to advise the president on senior appointments and requires their consent to a president’s choices, and one that also hands the U.S. government over to an international billionaire. Forcing a leader’s political party to get into line behind that leader is the first task of an authoritarian, who needs that unified support in order to attack political opponents.
But, so far, the threat hasn’t worked: it could not save Gaetz in the face of public outcry.
Almost as soon as Gaetz withdrew his name, Trump presented former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi as his replacement for the attorney general post. In March 2016, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) found that the Trump Foundation illegally donated $25,000 to support Bondi at a time when she was considering joining a lawsuit against Trump University. Her office ultimately decided not to join the lawsuit.
Bondi defended Trump in his first impeachment trial, during which she was a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel. She supported Trump’s campaign to insist—falsely—that he won the 2020 presidential election. She is also a registered lobbyist for Qatar.
Meanwhile, Republican perceptions of the economy have changed abruptly. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post notes, since Trump’s election, there’s been a 16-point drop in the percentage of Republicans who say they were doing worse a year ago than they are now.
While that change is due to Trump’s election, in fact Biden’s policies continue to deliver. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters today that for the second year in a row, the average price of a Thanksgiving dinner has fallen. According to the American Farm Bureau, that price fell 5% this year, with the cost of turkey down 6%. Gasoline to travel for the holiday is also down to its lowest point in more than three years, by about 25 cents per gallon since this time last year, falling to below $3.00 a gallon in almost 30 states.
Tonight, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggested that Americans should keep scorecards of the country’s economic numbers, “charting where inflation, unemployment and GDP were at the end of Biden’s term and regularly updating it with Trump’s latest numbers.” He noted that “the country is now covered with embryonic factories, businesses, economic redevelopment projects and more courtesy of Joe Biden’s CHIPS act and the Inflation Reduction Act,” and predicted that Trump will claim credit for all Biden accomplished.
Keeping track would help preserve those projects in the face of threatened Republican cuts and at the same time prevent Trump from being able to claim more credit for his administration than it has earned.
I have some reasons for thinking that, as bad as the next four years will be, the "massive political realignment" may be illusory.
...
1. There were obviously structural problems in having to start so late in the year with a candidate who served as VP (unlike Al Gore or G.H.W. Bush) with an unpopular president.
2. Given any president's 4 or 8 year term in office there will be a sizeable number of voters who look around and determine that they don't like the way things are going and choose to "throw the bums out". There will always be wars, or hurricanes, or downturns in the business cycle that make people believe that there must be a change. And there will always be disappointment, either when things don't change, don't change enough, or when some other problem emerges that can (with some creativity) be laid at the feet of the incumbent.
3. Members of the young male demographic, both white and non-white, who don't regularly vote, or who voted for the first time may not be as ideologically influenced as pollsters suggest. (Example: Obama voters who switched to Trump in '16.) It's also very possible that Trump's persona is the real attraction. And, 0f course, there is likely a degree of misogyny involved as well.
4. Trump has promised a lot. Every promise – and some of them are pretty far out – which is not kept risks disappointing a particular set of voters. Every failed policy becomes fodder for the opposition. For instance, suppose childhood diseases begin to reappear and spread because of vaccine skeptics in the administration.
5. While there are major differences, remember that Nixon won re-election in a landslide. Popular opinion can change. It requires dogged investigation and effective communication, especially with a heavily polarized electorate, but it's not impossible.
So the "terrible precedent" of having an accused sexual trafficker/statutory rapist take on the highest law enforcement post in the nation is just hand waved away?
Yes, yes, I know even he gets to be presumed innocent. Yet at the same time, credible accounts of crimes essentially create a rebuttable presumption, particularly as the alleged victims were minors.
And these are the kinds of crimes (if proven) that victims tend to not report because, surprise, surprise, they are often not taken seriously or their carefully collected evidence rots for 10 years, or the perp gets off with a disproportionately lower sentence (or completely) so as not to endanger his all-important swimming career or whatever.
But hey, tell us all again how the incoming administration is going to protect women, eh?
Whether we like it or not.
On the night he won a second term, President-elect Donald J. Trump rejoiced in the moment. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he boasted. In the two weeks since, his campaign has repeatedly heralded his “landslide,” even to market Trump merchandise like the “Official Trump Victory Glass.”
But by traditional numeric measures, Mr. Trump’s victory was neither unprecedented nor a landslide. In fact, he prevailed with one of the smallest margins of victory in the popular vote since the 19th century and generated little of the coattails of a true landslide.
The disconnect goes beyond predictable Trumpian braggadocio. The incoming president and his team are trying to cement the impression of a “resounding margin,” as one aide called it, to make Mr. Trump seem more popular than he is and strengthen his hand in forcing through his agenda in the months to come.
The collapse of Matt Gaetz’s prospective nomination for attorney general on Thursday demonstrated the challenges for Mr. Trump in forcing a Republican Congress to defer to his more provocative ideas. While Mr. Gaetz, a former Republican congressman from Florida, denied allegations of attending sex and drug parties and having sex with an underage girl, they proved too much even for Republicans eager to stay in Mr. Trump’s good graces.
With some votes still being counted, the tally used by The New York Times showed Mr. Trump winning the popular vote with 49.997 percent as of Thursday night, and he appears likely to fall below that once the final results are in, meaning he would not capture a majority. Another count used by CNN and other outlets shows him winning 49.9 percent. By either reckoning, his margin over Vice President Kamala Harris was about 1.6 percentage points, the third smallest since 1888, and could ultimately end up around 1.5 points.
“If the definition of landslide is you win both the popular vote and Electoral College vote, that’s a new definition,” said Lynn Vavreck, a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “Identity Crisis” about Mr. Trump’s first election, in 2016. “I would not classify this outcome as a landslide that turns into evidence of desire for a huge shift of direction or policy.”
But Mr. Trump has a clear interest in portraying it that way as he seeks to transform Washington. “It obviously gives you more momentum if you say, ‘The people have spoken, and they want my set of policies,’” Ms. Vavreck said. “Nobody gains any kind of influence by going out and saying, ‘I barely won, and now I want to do these big things.’”
As he assembles a cabinet and administration during the transition, Mr. Trump is certainly acting as if he has the kind of political capital that comes from a big victory. Rather than picking lieutenants with wide appeal, he is opting for highly unconventional figures with scandals to explain, almost as if trying to bend Senate Republicans to his will.
Asked about the president-elect’s characterization of his victory, Mr. Trump’s campaign sent a statement by Steven Cheung, his communications director, attacking The Times and repeating the sweeping claims. “President Trump won in dominating and historic fashion after the Democrats and the fake news media peddled outright lies and disinformation throughout the campaign,” he said.
Mr. Trump would not be the first newly elected or re-elected president to assume his victory gave him more political latitude than it really did. Bill Clinton tried to turn his 5.6-point win in 1992 into a mandate to completely overhaul the nation’s health care system, a project that blew up in his face and cost his party both houses of Congress in the next midterm elections.
George W. Bush likewise thought his 2.4-point win in 2004 would empower him to revise the Social Security system, only to fail and lose Congress two years later. And President Biden interpreted his 4.5-point win over Mr. Trump in 2020 as a mission to push through some of the most expansive social programs since the Great Society, then saw Republicans take control of the House in 2022 and the White House and Senate two years after that.
“Trump’s appointments have already demonstrated that he will continue a bipartisan tradition of presidents over-reading their electoral mandate,” said Doug Sosnik, who was a White House senior adviser to Mr. Clinton.
Real landslides have been unmistakable, including Lyndon B. Johnson’s in 1964 by 22.6 points, Richard M. Nixon’s in 1972 by 23.2 points and Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 by 18.2 points. In the 40 years since that Reagan victory, no president has won the popular vote by double digits.
Mr. Trump legitimately has plenty to brag about from this month’s election without need for exaggeration. In winning a second term, he demonstrated remarkable political grit and resilience, overcoming a lifetime of scandals and investigations, two impeachments, four indictments, multiple civil judgments and conviction on 34 felony counts. Only one other defeated president, Grover Cleveland, ever mounted a successful comeback before, and he did not have such heavy political baggage in 1892.
Moreover, Mr. Trump won the popular vote for the first time in three tries and became the first Republican to win it in 20 years. The electorate moved in his direction across the country, even in deep blue states that he lost like New York and California. He won all seven battleground states and improved his Electoral College tally from 306 votes out of 538 eight years ago to 312 this time. And his party held onto the House and took control of the Senate, giving him more leeway to enact his policies over the next two years.
All told, he proved that he is not the historical aberration that many political strategists thought he was, doomed to be repudiated and not re-elected. He demonstrated that more Americans agreed with his view of a dystopian nation in crisis and were willing to accept a convicted felon as their leader than considered him the unacceptable fascist-leaning threat to democracy that his opponents described.
But good is never good enough for Mr. Trump, who typically offers a constant fountain of self-describing superlatives like “the best,” “the most,” “the biggest” and so on regardless of the topic. Rarely encumbered by contravening facts, Mr. Trump has long claimed to be more popular than he is.
At his first White House news conference as president after the 2016 election, he declared that he secured “the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan,” which was true only if one did not count George H.W. Bush, Mr. Clinton and Barack Obama, each of whom won larger totals in the Electoral College.
A year later, Mr. Trump claimed online to be “the most popular Republican in history of the Party,” which again was true only if one did not count five other Republican presidents who were more popular since World War II, according to polls. And he regularly boasted at rallies that he won the women’s vote in 2016, which was true only if one did not count women who were not white.
So it should come as no surprise that Mr. Trump would frame his latest victory in grandiose terms. “We had tremendous success, the most successful in over 100 years, they say,” Mr. Trump told Indonesia’s president in a call that was recorded and played on Fox News on Nov. 12. “It’s a great honor and so it gives me a very big mandate to do things properly.”
His campaign has been pushing the theme as well. A fund-raising email sent the day after the election quoted Mr. Trump thanking supporters “for electing me in a landslide victory.” Another on Nov. 12 likewise referred to “his landslide victory.” By Tuesday, in yet another fund-raising email, this one selling the gold Trump victory glasses for just $45 each, it had become officially capitalized, in both letters and money, as “President Trump’s LANDSLIDE VICTORY.”
Mr. Trump’s allies know the path to his heart lies in flattering him, and some have adopted the mantra. The day after the election, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, declared that “we the people made our voices heard by re-electing President Trump in a historic landslide.” She issued at least four more statements that same day referring to it as a landslide.
Five days later, Mr. Trump rewarded her by announcing that he would make her his ambassador to the United Nations. She thanked him in a statement. “President Trump’s historic landslide election has given hope to the American people and is a reminder that brighter days are ahead,” she said.
Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, called it a “huge landslide victory.” David McCormick, the newly elected Republican senator from Pennsylvania, called Mr. Trump’s victory an “incredible mandate.” Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky, opened a committee meeting this week by calling it “our first hearing since the election in which President Trump won in a landslide.”
Mr. Trump’s 1.6-point victory is smaller than that of every winning president since 1888 other than two: John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968. In addition, two presidents won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote: the second Mr. Bush in 2000 and Mr. Trump in 2016.
Moreover, Mr. Trump had limited coattails this month. With some races yet to be called, Republicans were on track to keep almost exactly the same narrow majority in the House that they already had. The party picked up four seats in the Senate, enough to take control, a major shift that will benefit Mr. Trump. But even then, in the places where Mr. Trump campaigned the most, he failed to bring Republicans along with him in four of five battleground states with Senate races.
“This election was more of a repudiation of Biden and the Democrats than it was a vote for Trump,” said Mr. Sosnik. “A normal Republican candidate should have picked up at least eight Senate and 30-plus House seats given that the incumbent Democratic president had a job approval in the thirties with 70 percent of voters believing that the country was headed in the wrong direction.”
Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the younger Mr. Bush’s successful re-election campaign in 2004, said the only mandate that Mr. Trump won was to make the economy better.
“A majority of folks on Election Day didn’t like or trust Trump and thought he was too extreme,” he said. “The non-MAGA folks who voted for him did it despite Trump, not because of Trump. They were voting against Biden more than they were voting for Trump.”
Whether other Republicans see it that way may determine how successful Mr. Trump is in confirming his other contentious nominations and pushing through his legislative agenda, including deep tax cuts, expansive spending reductions, new curbs on immigration, revisions to the Affordable Care Act and repeal of Mr. Biden’s climate change programs.
“Trump can legitimately claim a mandate from the American people for his effort to make America great again,” said Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale Law School.
“But given his razor-thin majorities in Congress,” he added, “he will fail to gain the support of Republicans from swing districts who will predictably fear defeat in the midterm elections if they enact legislation destroying Obamacare or increasing tariffs in ways that will impose shattering burdens on millions of voters.”
