Tom wrote about the the ever slipping “mandate” this morning, quoting from that NY Times piece “The Landslide That Wasn’t.” Mar-a-lago is hopping mad: Trump transition team spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt on Friday took aim at Politico and The New York Times for reporting on the fact that President-elect Trump didn’t win the popular vote by some resounding majority. It was not massive and it was not historic. In fact, Harris has now received almost a quarter of a million more votes than Trump did in the higher turnout election of 2020 — you remember the ine he bragged about being the highest number by any incumbent in history? Basically, we’re back to crowd size arguments. And if you ask a Trump supporter what’s going on they’ll either say the votes counted since election day are all fraudulent or that it’s fake news. Deal Leader got the greatest victory in the history of the world. Everyone knows that.
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Also, our numbers matter Heading into Season 2 of “The Apprentice Goes To Washington,” we are already seeing Donald Trump’s flacks insisting he won a mandate bigger even than his first inauguration crowd. Even without Sean Spicer around to parrot it, you know know the line by heart: “Like nobody’s ever seen.” There will be big strong men with tears in their eyes agog at Dear Leader’s yuge mandate, etc. Not so. The New York Times subhead reads: “The latest vote count shows that Donald J. Trump won the popular vote by one of the smallest margins since the 19th century.” But if Trump is still breathing, he’s still selling the rubes crap like Trump steaks and Trump sneakers and Trump NFTs and Trump Bibles: 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. […] With some votes still being counted, the tally used by The New York Times showed Mr.
Trump is choosing people based on how they defend him on television and (surprise!) that’s not the best way to vet people for big jobs in the government. He’s already lost Gaetz. Who’s next? The Wall St. Journal sez: Members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team were blindsided by the latest details to emerge about a 2017 sexual-assault allegation against Pete Hegseth, increasing their frustration with the man nominated to lead the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter. The transition team, which hadn’t been told about the original allegation before announcing Hegseth, was surprised again late Wednesday night when the Monterey, Calif., city police released a report about the 2017 allegations. The heavily redacted report details a boozy night at a hotel in California, a poolside argument and two conflicting versions of what ultimately took place inside Hegseth’s hotel room. The Monterey police said a redacted version of the report had been released to Hegseth on March 30, 2021.
Steve Ratner tweeted this, commenting: The Omicron wave of covid was 10x more deadly for unvaccinated Americans — empowering anti-vaxxers like RFK is clearly a threat to American public health. If we have another pandemic RFK Jr will tell us that it’s a government conspiracy and recommend that we take some snake oil cures. If he has his way there will be no experts at the CDC or the NIH who can investigate the disease, track cases, communicate with scientists around the world, develop strategies and treatments. All of that is going to be compromised by this fruitcake conspiracy theorist who is completely unqualified for anything other than collecting roadkill which is he apparently very good at. I’m somewhat horrified by the Democrats likie Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Sen Cory Booker saying that RFK isn’t such a bad guy because he’s in favor of healthy eating and wants to improve the food supply. Those are good things. But this guy has spent a lifetime trafficking in conspiracy theories about diseases and demonizing science. And he’s fucking crazy.
Contrary to his customary bragging that he won the election in an unprecedented landslide, President Donald Trump’s percentage of the popular vote has fallen below 50% and every day it drops a little bit lower as the final votes are tallied up. According to the Cook Report, as of Tuesday, he was at 49.94 percent, and Harris was at 48.26, a difference of a mere 1.68%. He won fair and square but to call it an overwhelming mandate to dismantle the government is ridiculous. Obviously, Trump will always maintain that his victory was the greatest in history and that nobody’s ever seen anything like it. But in Washington it’s clear that Trump’s win was not the overwhelming validation of his agenda that we were told in the days after November 5th. Over 50% of the people voted against it, just as they did in 2020 and in 2016. Perhaps some Republicans waking up from their stupors and realizing this accounts for the fact that the fever broke yesterday for the first time since election day. Matt Gaetz withdrew his nomination for Attorney General proving, as my colleague Amanda Marcotte writes, resistance is not futile.
Animal Thanksgiving! That’s from a couple of years ago, but I have to assume that zoos around the country will be doing something similar this year. Those are lemurs enjoying their T-Day dinner. The Oregon zoo: Denver Zoo: We aren’t the only ones feasting today! Our leucistic raccoon sisters, Pecan and Cashew, enjoyed a delicious Thanksgiving feast made up of hard-boiled eggs, clams, crawfish, pineapple, edamame, sweet potato, green beans, peas and carrots. Raccoons are omnivores, so these items are all staples of their daily diet. Our Nutrition Team presented these foods in a fun new way for our girls! These goats at Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, Washington, had a lot to be thankful for this season, given a huge Thanksgiving feast of vegetarian fare and even “mocktails” made from beet juice, according to the zoo.
That last part is important and it’s a key to GOP success. They constantly denigrate the government and then go to great lengths to make sure it fulfills all of their negative descriptions. Trump has taken this to a new level by using the con artist’s tactic of convincing people that they can believe him or they can believe their lying eyes about his own performance, which resulted in tens of millions of people believing that his adminstration was the greatest in world history and that the election was stolen from him. It means that they are now in a position of saying government sucks only under Democrats which is a big advance. Whether that will work for anyone but Donald Trump is unknown but I have my doubts. He is a very skilled pathological liar and I’m not sure others will be able to pull it off. But I have no doubt they will try. Right wing politics is no longer about ideology, that’s been proven. If they ever really cared about small government or individual freedom or traditional values, we now know they no longer do.
One step forward two steps back: Women have made significant gains in Congress in recent elections, but that progress has stalled for the first time since 2016, falling short of the current record levels. The latest woman to lose her race is Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, with NBC News projecting her defeat to Republican Nick Begich in Alaska. One other female lawmaker, GOP Rep. Michelle Steel, is locked in a tight and uncalled race in Southern California, where she is currently trailing Democrat Derek Tran by a narrow margin. If Steel also loses, the number of women in the next Congress, including both the House and the Senate, will reach 150 (including the eventual winner of Iowa’s 1st District recount between GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Democrat Christina Bohannon). That means the next Congress could begin one fewer woman than the 151 who were in Congress on Election Day, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics — the first decline since 2010 and only the second since 1978. 151 out of 535. And shrinking.
The richest man in the world is getting a lesson in Trump. Doubts abound as to whether he will graduate in 2028 with a four-year degree in Trumpism: It is now a parlor game in Washington and Silicon Valley to speculate just how long the Musk-Trump relationship will last. The answer, as discarded aides from Mr. Trump’s first term will tell you, may depend on Mr. Musk’s ability to placate the boss and keep a relatively low profile — but also to shiv a rival when the time comes. In short, how to play the politics of Trumpworld. Most of the people who now surround Mr. Trump in the transition are battle-tested aides from his past fights, or decades-long personal friends. Mr. Musk is neither. What he brings instead are his 200 million followers on X and the roughly $200 million he spent to help elect Mr. Trump. Both of those have greatly impressed the president-elect. Mr. Trump, gobsmacked by Mr. Musk’s willingness to lay off 80 percent of the staff at X, has said the tech billionaire will help lead a Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy.
Former US Attorney Joyce Vance wrote in her newsletter last night: There are lots of attempts to explain the 2024 election. Many voters said something along the lines of, they were unhappy with the government and wanted to try something new. These voters were concerned about the economy (although even The Wall Street Journal conceded it was the strongest in the world), the price of gasoline, and other similar issues that amounted to little more than a permission structure for voting for Trump. It was all summed up for me a few days after the election, in a conversation with an acquaintance who said they’d voted for Harris, but at least “my portfolio is doing great this week.” Voters who ignored the facts about the economy and used them as an excuse to vote for Trump weren’t people who wanted a change. They were people who, actually, didn’t want any change at all. They didn’t like new policies advanced by the Biden-Harris administration, a more inclusive vision of America where traditionally marginalized people had equal opportunity. They didn’t want a new generation of leadership.