Tag: Trump wants to be a dictator

Trump, who never admits defeat, mulls how to keep up fight

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump never admits defeat. But he faces a stark choice now that Democrat Joe Biden has won the White House: Concede graciously for the sake of the nation or don’t — and get evicted anyway.

After nearly four tortured days of counting yielded a victory for Biden, Trump was still insisting the race was not over. He threw out baseless allegations that the election wasn’t fair and “illegal” votes were counted, promised a flurry of legal action and fired off all-caps tweets falsely insisting he’d “WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT.”

While some in his circle were nudging Trump to concede graciously, many of his Republican allies, including on Capitol Hill, were egging him on or giving him space to process his loss — at least for the time being.  Continue reading.

Donald Trump Jr. is promoting an authoritarian plan to steal the presidency

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On Thursday, former Vice President Joe Biden had won 253 electoral votes in the U.S. presidential race compared to 214 for President Donald Trump — and as the vote-counting continued in Pennsylvania, Nevada and other battleground states, Biden’s chances of a victory looked better and better. 

In response to this dismal situation for the president, far-right radio host Mark R. Levin responded with a tweet suggesting a plna to overturn the results. Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy denounced the idea as an authoritarian idea for trying to steal the election if Biden is declared the winner, and Murphy noted that Donald Trump, Jr. has signed off on Levin’s idea.

Levin, typing in all caps, tweeted:

Continue reading.

Steve Bannon and his co-host discuss beheading Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray

Bannon: “I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats”

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci.

Now I actually want to go a step farther but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you’re gone — time to stop playing games. blow it all up, put Ric Grenell today as the interim head of the FBI, that’ll light them up, right.

JACK MAXEY (CO-HOST): You know what Steve, just yesterday there was the anniversary of the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia, these were Quaker businessmen who had cohabitated if you will with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia. These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors.

BANNON: That’s how you won the revolution. No one wants to talk about it. The revolution wasn’t some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war. It was a civil war. Continue reading.

USPS processed 150,000 ballots after Election Day, jeopardizing thousands of votes

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The number of mailed ballots not delivered by Nov. 3 is expected to grow as more postal data is released in the coming days.

This story was updated Friday, Nov. 5, and includes a correction.*

More than 150,000 ballots were caught in U.S. Postal Service processing facilities Wednesday and not delivered by Election Day, agency data shows, including more than 12,000 in five of the states that have yet to be called for either President Trump or Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.

Another 39,000 ballots were processed Thursday, agency data shows, including more than 4,000, in the remaining swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Despite assurances from Postal Service leaders that agency officials were conducting daily sweeps for misplaced ballots, the mail service acknowledged in court filings that thousands of ballots had not been processed in time, and that more ballots were processed Wednesday than on Election Day. Continue reading.

Judges in two states reject Trump campaign lawsuits as the president continues to press unsubstantiated claims of fraud

NOTE: This article is being provided free of charge by The Washington Post.

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President Trump and his allies pressed their claims Thursday that election officials have allowed ballot fraud to infect the counting process in the battleground states poised to decide the presidency, but they offered no evidence of irregularities and met with two immediate defeats in court.

In Georgia, a local judge in Chatham County, home of Savannah, denied the Trump campaign’s effort to disqualify about 50 ballots that a Republican poll watcher claimed may have arrived after the 7 p.m. deadline on Election Day. In court, the poll watcher offered no evidence that the ballots had arrived late, and county election officials testified that they had arrived on time.

And in Michigan, a Court of Claims judge said she would deny the campaign’s request for an emergency halt to the counting of votes in the state. She noted that the request made little sense, given that the counting has essentially been finished in the state, with former vice president Joe Biden ahead by about 150,000 votes. He has been declared the winner of the state by national news organizations. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office described Trump’s request as an “attempt to unring a bell.” Continue reading.

Civil unrest fears grow as protests hit vote-counting battleground states

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Unrest across the country appears to be on the rise as protesters hold more demonstrations over ongoing vote counts in several key battleground states that will decide the outcome of a heated presidential race.

The Biden and Trump campaigns have diverged on their approach to ballot counting, with President Trump filing lawsuits to stop counting ballots and former Vice President Joe Biden emphasizing the importance of having all votes counted.

The dueling rhetoric has spilled out into the streets of various cities, where Biden supporters can be heard chanting “count the votes,” while Trump supporters call to “stop the count.” Continue reading.

‘This is disturbing’: DOJ claims armed feds are allowed to inspect state vote-counting locations

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As ongoing vote tabulation in several key battleground states continues to slowly narrow President Donald Trump’s path to reelection, the New York Times reported late Wednesday that the Justice Department has told federal prosecutors that U.S. law permits armed federal agents to enter ballot-counting locations to investigate alleged “fraud,” heightening fears of possible intimidation efforts by the Trump administration.

News of the Justice Department’s early Wednesday email came after Trump spent much of that day lying about vote-counting procedures and peddling baseless claims of suspicious activity as he watched his slim leads in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania vanish.

The Times noted that the Justice Department’s email, authored by Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, “created the specter of the federal government intimidating local election officials or otherwise intervening in vote tallying amid calls by President Trump to end the tabulating in states where he was trailing in the presidential race.” Continue reading.

Trump signals chaotic stretch after election

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President Trump is signaling that Election Day could be followed by a stretch of uncertainty and chaos as a purge of top officials, legal challenges to election results and potential resistance to a normal transition cloud the prospects for an orderly post-election period no matter who wins.

Among the possible scenarios is a quick effort to fire or sideline Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, whose prominence and increasingly pointed criticism of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic have angered the president.

Other federal health officials whose approach to the pandemic has frustrated the president also may be targeted, people familiar with the discussions say. That means the team leading the fight against the biggest public health challenge in decades could be reshuffled as Trump or Joe Biden bring in new leadership after the election. Continue reading.

Trailing in the polls, Trump enlists his administration and co-opts the government to bolster his reelection

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In the final days of the 2020 election season, President Trump has featured his White House press secretary as a star at his campaign rallies, where she has triumphantly joined him onstage.

Trump’s daughter Ivanka, a senior White House adviser, has stumped for him and on Saturday posted a stylized photo with uniformed law enforcement officers in Wisconsin, a key battleground.

His top aides, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser Robert O’Brien, have found pressing official business in a number of swing states, traveling there on taxpayer money. Continue reading.

How Donald Trump’s insatiable hunger for more bilked the US government for $2.5 billion

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Remember this number: $3. 

That’s how much Trump charged the federal government for a glass of water in April of 2018 when he and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. According to the Washington Post, Trump’s company also charged the government “$13,700 for guest rooms, $16,500 for food and wine and $6,000 for the roses and other floral arrangements,” over the two days he held meetings with Abe at the resort. But one day, Trump was scheduled to meet with Abe without aides and advisers, with no meal service or cocktails or any other celebratory nonsense. Just the two leaders, alone in a room, talking. According to the Post, the bill for that day contained a line item reading, “Bilateral meeting. Water. $3.00 each.”

Donald Trump has been paid “at least $2.5 million by the U.S. government,” since taking office, according to official documents obtained by the Post. Trump has made more than 280 visits to his own hotels and golf clubs over the last four years, and the payments covered costs for “hotel rooms, ballrooms, cottages, rental houses, golf carts, votive candles, floating candles, candelabras, furniture moving, resort fees, decorative palm trees, strip steak, chocolate cake, breakfast buffets, $88 bottles of wine and $1,000 worth of liquor for White House aides.” according to the Post. Continue reading.