In the final days of a disastrous presidency, millions of Americans throughout this country will be reading a memoir written by someone with a fundamental decency that Donald Trump could never achieve in his wildest Twitter-fueled fantasies. Not only would Trump have been intellectually incapable of producing such an introspective self-examination of his tenure, but it’s already obvious that he never, ever will have the kind of national and global respect that Obama commanded (and continues to receive) after his two terms in office had ended.

highdesert wrote: Thu Dec 17, 2020 8:52 am

On Jan. 6, Vice President Mike Pence will oversee final confirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Then he’ll likely skip town.

As vice president, Pence has the awkward but unavoidable duty of presiding over the session of Congress that will formalize Biden’s Electoral College victory — a development that is likely to expose him and other Republicans to the wrath of GOP voters who believe President Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him.

But Pence could dodge their ire by leaving Washington immediately for the Middle East and Europe. According to three U.S. officials familiar with the planning, the vice president is eyeing a foreign trip that would take him overseas for nearly a week, starting on Jan. 6.

Though Pence aides declined to confirm details of the trip, which remains tentative, a U.S. government document seen by POLITICO shows the vice president is due to travel to Bahrain, Israel and Poland, with the possibility of more stops being added. A pre-advance team of Pence aides and other U.S. officials left earlier this week to visit the planned stops in preparation for the multicountry tour, which would be Pence’s first trip abroad since last January, when he traveled to Rome and Jerusalem on a whirlwind two-day sojourn.

On the surface, the trip is part of a push to underscore the Trump administration’s role in brokering a series of diplomatic agreements to normalize relations between Israel and a handful of Arab countries, including Bahrain. But for Pence, visiting these countries is also a way to bolster already-strong credentials with the Christian right, which strongly supports Israel. And it allows Pence — once again — to put distance between himself and Trump’s complaints about the election outcome that are likely to intensify after Congress affirms Biden’s win.

It’s a tactic Pence has used to navigate the final days of Trump’s presidency: stay out of the spotlight and insulate himself from his boss’s baseless election-fraud crusade, all while still finding ways to burnish his own credentials and technically toe the party line.

Pence has promoted Trump in his work as head of the government’s coronavirus task force and while boosting two GOP Senate candidates facing runoff races in Georgia. But he’s declined to publicize his minimal involvement in the president’s election-fraud strategy. And while he has privately assisted the Trump campaign when asked — joining donor calls and lending his signature to fundraising pleas — his public comments since the election have almost all centered on other topics, including hosting an event focused on the Trump administration's anti-abortion policy at the White House on Wednesday.

“I suspect the timing is anything but coincidental,” one Pence ally said of his tentative travel plans.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/1 ... oss-447326

President Donald Trump sent a warning to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his GOP allies Friday morning: "Get tougher, or you won't have a Republican Party anymore. We won the Presidential Election, by a lot. FIGHT FOR IT. Don’t let them take it away!"

The Twitter missive comes as Trump is publicly encouraging senators to overturn the outcome of the presidential election—seen as a last-ditch effort after a string of court losses—because the president and his allies have not been able to produce any credible evidence of election irregularities that would change the outcome.

Trump claimed in the tweet directed at McConnell, who this week acknowledged from the Senate floor that President-elect Joe Biden has won the election a day after the Electoral College decisively confirmed Biden as the next president.

Trump has spent the weeks since the election tweeting and retweeting baseless claims that the contest was "rigged" against him and that he was the rightful winner, without providing evidence.

Congress will meet in a joint session on January 6 to confirm the election results, so Trump and his allies have launched a campaign to try to convince his GOP loyalists to override the Electoral College and voters. McConnell has privately urged senators not to engage in such a fight, but some have hinted that they may force a public vote. Such a move would take an objection from one House member and one senator among the incoming Congress that will be sworn in on January 3.

After incoming Alabama Senator Tommy Turberville appeared to suggest that he might be the one who would force a vote, Trump has lavished praise upon the former college football coach through a series of tweets and retweets Thursday and Friday.

"Tommy will be more popular than ever before—a hero!" the president tweeted Thursday night.

YankeeTarheel wrote: Sat Dec 19, 2020 8:49 am Biden's lead in:
Georgia (16 EV): Just under 12,000 votes
Arizona (11 EV): about 10,500 votes
Wisconsin (10 EV): about 20,600 votes.

So, despite Biden winning by over 7 MILLION votes, if just over 43,000 votes had gone for Trump the EV would have been 269 to 269, gone into the House, where each state gets one vote, and Trump would have been re-elected! So Biden's margin in 3 states that put him over was even LESS than the slim margin that put Trump over in 2016--between 70,000 and 80,000 votes.

Pundits, statisticians, and pollsters said Biden needed to win by at least 5 million votes to win. They were wrong. It took 7 million!

This is TERRIFYING and the reason the Electoral College needs to be abandoned, one way or another.