An Open Letter to the Journalists of the USA

 

Dear Members of the Press,

        As this eventful year grinds to a close, I write to you as a citizen, a reader, a listener, and a viewer to plead that you prepare carefully for the post-presidency of Donald J. Trump. 

         Perhaps it would be most useful to you if I began with a self-administered survey. What, as a consumer of news media, would I like to hear about Donald Trump after 12:00 PM on January 20, 2021? Preferably, absolutely nothing. Barring that, AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE. 

        My preferences of course arise in part from my politics. I have been an ardent critic and opponent of President Trump's since he first launched his campaign in 2015. But my bias does not, I would argue, make my input invalid. 

       Even the President's supporters would have to admit that Donald Trump has manipulated the news media like no president before him. Moreover, as long as he wielded the power of his office, there were severe limits on what you as professionals could do to evade that manipulation.  Whatever the president says or does is virtually by definition "newsworthy," you were thus bound by the ethics of your trade to report his words, even when they were gratuitously offensive, deliberately misleading, or disingenuously provocative.  

       All of that changes on January 20, however. Once Trump is a private citizen, his pronouncements become no more newsworthy than that of any other celebrity. This principle is very important to think through and work with, if you hope to maintain your professional integrity, because experience teaches us that Donald Trump will try to get you to forget it. He will broadcast progressively more offensive slurs, progressively more outrageous lies, and stage progressively more lurid scenes of turmoil and mayhem to keep your cameras, microphones, and headlines focused on him. 

       His instincts for this kind of spectacle are uncanny. Just this morning he has broken through the tragic news of the pandemic that has killed 300,000 Americans by releasing a video. It satirizes the 1993 "Beef: It's What's For Dinner" ad by setting scenes of the Trump presidency over Aaron Copland's familiar "Rodeo" suite, and trolls the president's critics by, for example, implying that he has (or should have) been awarded several Nobel Peace Prizes. 

       This is just a taste of what is to come. Conspiracy theories. Racist innuendo. Twitter brawls with Rosie O'Donnell and Alec Baldwin. A smorgasbord of madcap fun awaits.

        Let's be honest. Some of this is about money, and Trump knows it. Even as Trump has excoriated you all as "enemies of the people," he has aided your bottom line by generating so much news. I do not mean this observation as a criticism. Constructing a system driven by sales and profit and then denigrating those who do what they must to survive according to those rules is one of the most clever and hypocritical tactics by which the powerful perpetuate their control in America- I won't play that game with you. 

        But continuing to cash in on the public appetite for "Trump outrage" will only be profitable in the short term. Ultimately, allowing the entire media to degenerate to the level of tabloid exploitation hurts everyone and everything, including your bottom line. News can only remain a profitable commodity in the long run if it remains news, and for that to be true it must retain relevancy. "News" sold purely for its entertainment value (which is the only value that anything coming from Trump will retain, once he is out of office) will eventually be driven off the market by other, more artful and rewarding diversions.

      So this is what I beg of you, as someone who has a great deal at stake in your success. After January 20, 2021, I ask that before you publish or air ANY story about Donald Trump, you think carefully about a single question: "Is this news?" If you are performing this operation conscientiously, given Trump's proven track record, 9 times out of 10 the answer will be "no". 

     I and others will be watching carefully. If you appear too mercenary or opportunistic in your coverage of Trump, your audience is likely to apply pressure by way of boycotts and "news fasts" to get you to correct course. But I am optimistic it will not come to that. Most of the press has shown courage, dedication, and integrity during these challenging years, for which I thank you. I look forward to profiting from your work as we cross the approaching threshold, and wish you all a Happy New Year!

 

             Sincerely,

 

              Andrew Meyer 

The Powell Gambit

 

News that Donald Trump might seek the appointment of Sydney Powell as special counsel to "investigate election fraud" provides a new window onto Trump's sheer animal cunning and utter nihilism. Last week I imagined that the theatrics being planned by Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) and Representative "Mo" Brooks (R-Alabama) at the joint session of Congress on January 6th, at which they plan to object to the certification of the Electoral College vote, might be the "final insult" to our collective intelligence by the Trumpist movement. This is not to say that Trump himself and his followers will not continue to spew vitriol and nonsense. But January 6th looked like the last opportunity for Trump's clown posse to use the actual organs and procedures of government to score political points. 

The appointment of Powell would change all that. The idea is simple but viciously clever. A key plank in the Trump mythology is the claim that his opponents saddled him with the "Russia hoax" and the Mueller investigation out of purely political motives, to restrain what would have otherwise been an "even more" powerfully transformative presidency. The appointment of Powell would thus be a case of "turnabout is fair play," except that Trump would of course (wink wink) insist that it was not really turnabout, since the "election fraud" is "real," while the "Russia hoax" was not. 

The strategic brilliance of this idea is that it would effectively create a proxy by which Trump himself could stay in government past January 20. Powell would be given a suite of offices, a budget of tens of millions of dollars, and would be empowered to hire a staff of dozens (if not hundreds) of lawyers and clerks. She would have the full attention of the media because, however ridiculous the pretext on which she had been credentialed, her office would have real power to issue subpoenas and empanel Grand Juries.

 The rallying cry of Trump and his goons would be "it is just like Mueller!" But of course, Powell would be very different than Robert Mueller in many respects. She would not limit her investigations to any narrow brief, but would begin casting as wide a net as possible as soon as she got rolling. She would also be very free in sharing information about her ongoing investigation with the press. We would begin hearing very lurid details about Hunter Biden's love life within minutes of Powell turning on the office lights. 

A key aspect separating Powell from Robert Mueller is her place at the lunatic fringe of our politics. She has publicly allied herself with the "QAnon" movement, which claims that the Democratic Party is a cabal of Satan-worshiping, blood-drinking pedophiles. The object of installing her as a special counsel is thus not to launch any credible legal threat against the Biden White House, but to set them up for a political firestorm.

Why? Powell is such a toxic figure that she can be counted upon to become completely intolerable, given any modicum of real authority. She will use the platform of special counsel to broadcast progressively more egregious obscenities, until the sheer level of racism, antisemitism, homophobia, and xenophobia issuing from her office becomes so poisonous as to compel her dismissal by the Biden White House (it will be a choice between ejecting Powell and losing the support of tens of millions of mortally offended voters).

This will of course be met with theatrical howls of outrage from throughout the GOP. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Kevin McCarthy will call fire and brimstone down on Joe Biden for daring to do what even Donald Trump did not! Fire a special counsel! Heaven forfend! The Saturday Night Massacre replayed! Will the nation ever recover!

To be sure, this will only buy Donald Trump a few more months of relevance. If Powell is appointed in January I would expect her to be gone by April or May and forgotten soon thereafter. But anyone who believes that Trump would not do this out of simple spite has not been paying attention. And there would be other dividends. Money could be raised on the plume of outrage. The "embarrassment" of firing a special counsel would leave the Justice Department open to charges that any investigation of Trump himself was "politically motivated."

I must say, as disgusted as I am by the sheer hypocrisy and nihilistic malignancy of such a maneuver, the very idea displays more imagination and creativity than I gave Trump and his minions credit for. I do not doubt that Trump would do this in a heartbeat, but it will not be so simple to accomplish. He will need an Attorney General who is willing to be associated with such a grotesque stunt. William Barr, who has demonstrated that there is a limit to how much disgrace he is willing to bear, is exiting. But finding someone willing to go along with this plan as acting AG will not be easy. It must be an attorney who has not yet been disbarred, but has all of the ethics of a gangster consigliere and no future ambition of virtually any kind. Even Rudy Giuliani would most likely blanch at the prospect. 

We live in interesting times, and the next thirty days may be an especially intriguing interval. Arriving at a point where we only had to worry about the tens of thousands who are dying of a novel plague would, amazingly, make the world a more boring place. Here's hoping that we can reach that juncture soon.

Naked Dumb Part 33 1/3: The Final Insult

Yesterday's vote by the Electoral College confirming Joseph R. Biden, Jr. as President-elect and Kamala Harris as Vice-president-elect put yet another stake through the heart of the zombie coup being orchestrated by Donald J. Trump against the democratic process. One might imagine that this would mark an end to Trump's grotesque obscenities, but they will not. More amazing still, not only will Trump continue to fulminate about imaginary fraud and overturned elections, but so will a significant number of GOP elected officials. At the very least, the counting of the Electoral College vote before a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021 will see another futile and profane attempt to "protest" the lawful result of the election on the part of Republican members of the House and (perhaps) the Senate.

Trump's motives in this malignancy are murky but not entirely inscrutable. He is raising a great deal of money (more than $200 million at recent count) from supporters through repeated appeals for funds to support his efforts to "right" the election. Since we are no longer in the throes of an actual campaign, he is free to use this money however he likes, as long as he declares it as income. Beyond this pecuniary incentive, Trump obviously thinks that perpetuating the fantasy of a stolen election is strategically wise. His brand is built on grievance, and since he cannot credibly claim to be aggrieved at the state of a nation that he led for four years (at least not until Joe Biden has been in office for a few hours), he now can gnash his teeth and spit venom over election fraud. This charade, he thinks, will carry him to 2022 and beyond. 

The motivation of the many GOP office holders lining up to endorse Trump's attempted coup is less clear. In part, it may be a fear that the Biden presidency will enjoy an automatic "recovery" dividend. If Biden oversees the dissemination of a vaccine and is at the nation's helm as the pandemic ends and the economy recovers, voters are likely to reward him with rising approval rates just as the midterm election cycle begins. In order to blunt that effect, Republicans may feel they have to "pre-soften" Biden's political purchase, bringing him as low as possible lest he rise too high.

But this can only account for a part of the malicious foolishness being displayed by so many Republicans at all levels of government. At basis, they must be falling in line behind Trump because they believe that he will continue to be a kingmaker in GOP politics for the next 2-4 years. Republicans are so acclimated to Trump's ownership of their party that they assume it will persist indefinitely. In this they are mistaken. They have misunderstood the nature of Trump's appeal and the dynamics of his hold on the Republican Party. 

Trump never offered his followers a coherent vision or set of principles. He channeled the anger of different communities about waning economic opportunity, demographic change, or advancing secularism. Nothing he said or did was particularly creative or original, but it felt new and compelling because it was transgressive and came from a position of genuine power. That type of impact has a finite shelf life, however. The same memes and catch-phrases ("Lock her up!") recycled over and over again from the station of a private citizen will not garner as much attention, especially from the half of the nation that is surfeited with Trump's nonsense and is now freed from having to worry about what he will say next. This will most likely roll Trump into a vicious cycle. Losing some of the nation's attention will make him petulant and resentful, which will lose more of the nation's attention, and so on...Becoming boring will make him more boring, which in turn will make him more boring...

Trump's hold over the GOP has always derived from his power as kingmaker during the primary electoral cycle. His followers made up enough of a motivated core of activist voters so that Trump could effectively eject Republicans from electoral office with a sign of his displeasure (as he did with Mark Sanford, former governor of South Carolina, who lost his House seat in a primary in 2018). But the next GOP primary is two years away, and Trump will have to find a way of remaining relevant until then. As a candidate and president he was the perfect foil for vicarious rage. As a loser who is waiting in the wings for another chance, his anger can only be impotent and pathetic, unless he can find a forum in which it at least appears significant and influential. This last challenge will be an uphill climb for someone of little initiative, limited knowledge, and almost no imagination.

Trump's toadies in the GOP have bet on the wrong Kraken. Nonetheless, their assaults on democracy will no doubt go on through the winter and into next spring. The dividends they expect will never materialize, but will they ever pay a political price for their sins? It is difficult to say. Until they do, we will never know which of their stunts is the final insult to our collective intelligence.

America's Once and Future Fascist

 

At yesterday's press briefing on the Covid-19 vaccine, Donald Trump made comments that revealed core tenets of his political program rarely so transparently on display:

“Whether it’s a legislator or legislatures, or whether it’s a justice of the Supreme Court or a number of justices of the Supreme Court -- let’s see if they have the courage to do what everybody in this country knows is right.”

 Gone was any pretense that the vote tally itself must be corrected or that legalities must be observed. Trump is now openly inviting organs of government to exercise fiat powers in overturning the election and maintaining him in power. Nothing about this is extremely shocking or new in the context of Trump's record. 

But the assertion that "everybody in this country knows [it] is right" to set aside the election lets slip a core tenet of Trumpism. Trump's message is not that the will of the people should be ignored. It is that half of Americans are not people at all, and thus may be generally discounted in all respects. 

Any protest that this is an "unfair reading" of Trump's words is tiresome. The implicit dismissal of tens of millions of people who celebrated the news of Joe Biden's election as "nobody" aligns perfectly with the policy and messaging of the Trump White House since day one. Stranding refugees in airports. Ripping children from parents. Dismissing the sick and dying in "Democrat-run" cities and states. If Trumpism is about anything, it is dedicated to the proposition that certain individuals are entitled to the dignity and rights of "people," others are not. 

This is fascism in a nutshell. "Sovereignty" is not equally distributed throughout the human community, but resides only in those who meet some test of national "purity." Liberal institutions like universal suffrage, birthright citizenship, or equal justice under law may be jettisoned because they allow the nation to be polluted by "the wrong sort."

The most distressing aspect of our Trumpist moment is the degree to which the fascist dimensions of his message are self-consciously embraced by many millions of his followers. Trump has been very clear about his contempt for the principles of democracy and his malicious hostility toward the majority of Americans who oppose him. Many of his voters (one third? half?) understood full well that in voting for Trump, they were endorsing his promise to continue his assault on "them (people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ citizens, 'liberal elites,' etc.)" and in doing so to game the system to the point of breaking. A vote for Trump was a vote for fascist oligarchy, and many voters got on board that train with eyes wide open.

Why are so many Americans ready to trade democracy for fascism? Some part of Trump's base have become radically disenchanted with the prevailing system through  economic despair. Communities in Appalachia and the industrial Midwest that suffered disproportionately through the Great Recession and saw meager benefits during a slow recovery, where life expectancy rates dropped and opioid addiction was on the rise, have provided fertile ground for Trump's message. Many of these individuals had never voted before signing up with Trump, and since they felt poorly served by democracy they were ready for whatever Trump offered as an alternative.

But though that segment of Trump's base has garnered much attention (exemplified by the popularity of books like Hillbilly Elegy), it has always constituted a small minority within his larger coalition. About half of Trump's support comes from the religious far right, which would like to see the constitution abrogated in favor of a political order rooted in perceived biblical imperatives. This would begin with bans on abortion, contraception, and same sex marriage, but might extend into realms like prayer in school and legal sanctions against certain forms of religious practice (for example, that of Islam). 

Trump's secular support derives largely from voters motivated by race to one degree or another, ranging from those who respond to dog whistles about "anchor babies" and "welfare queens" up to militant white supremacists. Across the spectrum of these groups, panic over changing demography (exacerbated by the two-term presidency of Barack Obama) has galvanized support for the disenfranchisement of large segments of the population. The other important secular component of Trump's coalition could be described as "corporatist plutocrats": wealthy members of the donor class who would like to see minority rule institutionalized by way of solidifying the position of the .01%.

Though these groups are all very different in nature and motivation, Trump has enjoyed a powerful mystique in their eyes because he perfectly epitomizes their common orientation. The thread that binds these communities together is grievance: all of them are impelled by a passionate anger at the status quo. Trump's voters are thus enchanted by the sheer dynamism and profound authenticity of his own sense of grievance. For almost five decades his defining posture as a public figure has been to broadcast how poorly he is appreciated by the world at large, and how much better things would be if he were taken more seriously. 

Since Trump himself is not an ideologue and has shown no patience for the genuine work of political organization, the Trumpist movement has emerged from the interaction of his supporters' inchoate passions and aspirations with Trump's own idiosyncratic style of leadership. His followers supplied the targets (Muslims, "Mexican rapists," Hillary Clinton, AOC, etc.), he supplied a frenetic style of "theater only" reality-TV politics. It has been a kind of fascism through spontaneous generation.

However haphazardly it emerged, now that Trumpist fascism is here, it is likely to stay. Will the forces that produced Trump grind on inexorably toward the dissolution of the American experiment in democracy? This last question is impossible to answer with any blithe confidence. Tens of millions voted to end our democracy, one cannot assume that they will relinquish that aspiration easily. 

Will they continue to follow Donald Trump? That is not likely. The success that he enjoyed as a candidate is not going to be easily replicated. He is, at basis, a man of very limited talents and almost no imagination. His mystique is rooted in his ability to entertain, but his repetitive and predictably vulgar belligerence has only failed to grow insufferably dull because of his status as President (the Chief Executive really tweeted THAT!). Stripped of the office, he will quickly become boring and pathetic.

Other politicians will try to claim his mantle and stitch his coalition back together. This will not be easy. Few public figures can replicate Trump's assets: massive wealth, an aggrieved sense of exclusion from "elite society," and a made-for-TV persona. The figures bandied about as Trump's heirs (Tucker Carlson, for example) are pale imitations at best. Moreover, even someone with assets approaching Trump's will find his coalition difficult to reassemble. Trump's religious and secular supporters may have traveled as far down the same road as they are likely to go. Though they agree on how wise it was to appoint so many conservative judges, now that the task is accomplished they may fall out over questions such as whether condoms should be outlawed.

But none of these contingencies can be relied on to safeguard democracy. Now that the fascist genie has been let out of the bottle, this trend is likely to shape our politics for decades to come. Much will depend on external conditions. If the economy improves and an ecological crisis can be averted, the passions fueling an appetite for fascism may cool. If the future sees growing wealth inequality, deepening and expanding economic despair, and ecological degradation, a more competent demagogue may succeed where Trump failed.

All of this should serve as a call to action, not malaise. We do not have to sit by and fret as democracy crumbles. Ben Franklin famously warned us that we will have our Republic as long as we can keep it, and we know what we must do to achieve that. We must engage as citizens to make government work again, so that the endemic problems which are causing disenchantment and grievance are redressed. We must hold our leaders accountable to a more conscientious and less debased form of politics, not an insipid call to "civility," but to genuine civic virtue. We must demand that all our leaders, of all parties, respect the dignity and rights of all Americans. We do not have to agree with or fully cooperate with one-another, but we do have to respect one-another as fellow citizens and share power with one-another in accordance with the founding principles of our Constitution. If we can breath new life and vitality into these norms, fascism may not go away entirely, but it will stand no chance of prevailing.

 

Farewell: An Open Letter to President Donald J. Trump

Dear Mr. President,

         I write to bid you farewell, and to castigate you for the contemptible way in which you are leaving office. Your use of the Bully Pulpit to broadcast unfounded conspiracy theories, in combination with your complete abdication of leadership in the face of the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, is one of the most disgraceful chapters in the annals of our nation's history. Shame on you, sir.

          The chief duty of a President is communication. As a communicator you have been virtually nothing but toxic and divisive since the moment you were sworn into office, but the corrosive malignancy of your pronouncements has reached new heights in recent days and weeks. Take, for example, this tweet from December 1:

      There are at least two ways that the text of this tweet could be read. The first would be:

Do something Governor Brian Kemp. You allowed your state to be scammed. We have concrete evidence of thousands of illegal votes cast in your jurisdiction. If you check signatures and count signed envelopes against ballots, the truth of these allegations can be verified. Once that is done, there will be no need for a run off election, as we have reason to believe that Senators Perdue and Loeffler garnered more than 50% of the legal votes cast.

      The second, more plausible reading of your tweet would be:

Do something Governor Brian Kemp. You allowed Republicans to lose the election. There is a convenient mechanism to reverse that outcome. Just go back over the ballots, and on the pretext of a "mismatch" between signatures on mail-in envelopes and those on past voter registration forms, you can throw out thousands of mail-in ballots. Since we know that Democrats disproportionately voted by mail, once you have thrown away ten or twenty thousand mail-in ballots, we can be assured that all of the Republican candidates on the ballot will win handily.

       The fact that you allowed this ambiguity to exist demonstrates pernicious malice on your part, and is a violation of your oath of office. You swore to defend the Constitution of the United States, and nothing poses a greater threat to our constitutional order than a collapse of faith in the integrity of our elections. For you to use your office in the manner embodied by the above tweet is equivalent to throwing acid on the foundations of the Republic.

        Fake news! you might protest. I am insisting that the "worse" reading of your tweet must be true. I am purposefully misconstruing your intent! 

        Such protests would be an insult to everyone's intelligence. A President of the United States may not make flippant or unsubstantiated accusations of voter fraud, EVER. If you had made the accusation expressed in your tweet in a sober press conference, filled with eye witness testimony, expert analysis, and documentary evidence, then the more charitable reading of your tweet might be trenchant. For you to toss such a pronouncement onto the web without any corroborating evidence is malpractice that rises to the level of treason. It compels any thinking person to read your tweet in the harshest light, and it is only one of dozens of such pronouncements that you have made since November 3.

         I personally cannot understand why anyone is disposed to attribute benign motives to you or to give you the benefit of the doubt. Your penchant for venality, corruption, and cruelty has been on such constant display, from your verbal coddling of dictators and white supremacists to your unconscionable torture of children kidnapped into and remaining in federal custody, to your criminal negligence as tens of thousands of Americans die of Covid-19, that you resemble no leader in modern memory so much as the late President of Uganda, Idi Amin. But what is "really in your heart" is of little matter in judging your actions now. Your persistent pursuit of a coup to overturn the free and fair results of our most recent election is both illegal and immoral. Cease and desist!

          I will not close with any pleas for you to change course or reflect on your actions, as I am certain that you are deaf to such entreaties. I wish you personally no injury or ill fortune. For the sake of our nation and its social cohesion, I hope that you and your family remain healthy and safe. But I cannot help but look forward eagerly to the day when you are no longer profaning the office you now hold, and can no longer use its powers and prestige to do such terrible damage to our system and way of life. Good bye, sir, and good riddance.

                         Sincerely,

                          Andrew Meyer

What Should President-Elect Biden Do?

A full four weeks after the election of Joseph R. Biden, Jr. to be the 46th President of the United States, we remain in the throes of an absurd coup attempt to overturn the will of the electorate. Donald Trump continues to send teams of lawyers into courts on impossibly quixotic errands. He is orchestrating a growing chorus of wingnut media "pundits" and internet "influencers" to broadcast increasingly outlandish conspiracy theories and disinformation, and persists in exerting pressure on Republican elected officials, most recently issuing a call for Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia to use his "emergency powers" to overturn the election results. 

Institutionally, this coup is a zombie. With each new defeat the possibility of changing the outcome of the Electoral College vote when that body meets on December 14 recedes further, and once that vote is cast Joe Biden's inauguration becomes a virtual certainty. But culturally, the Trump Coup continues to retain momentum. About half of Republicans believe that the election was "stolen" from Donald Trump, and the coup's supporting multimedia complex online, in print, and on air grows like a whirling gyre drawing more and more new forms of propaganda into its mass. 

This is a moment virtually without precedent in the history of American democracy.  For a sitting president to be orchestrating a baseless and wholly gratuitous campaign against the public's trust in the integrity of our elections would have been unimaginable not so long ago. The situation poses real peril to our system of government and our way of life. 

What, then, should the response of Joe Biden be to this assault on our Republic? That is a complicated question. Up until now Biden has been very restrained in his comments on Donald Trump's malicious activities, going only so far as to call them "irresponsible."  This is very much in keeping with the tone of his election campaign. Biden promised to be a leader who would bring people together and lower the temperature of our discourse, and his cool restraint in the face of Trump's wild provocations presents a welcome contrast to the chaotic leadership of the last four years.

There is, however, merit to the warning that leaving Trump's lies unanswered risks allowing the distrust they sow to fester. Zombie or not, what Trump is continuing to execute is an antidemocratic coup. Past authoritarians who have made such moves tend to gain in power and influence if their provocations are ignored or undeterred.

Though this caution is valid, the institutional climate in which we are operating creates special conditions. The arcane mechanisms of the Electoral College system provide Trump with his last, slim chance of undermining the election. Right now the machinery of the electoral process is grinding predictably toward Biden's inauguration. If Biden responds robustly to Trump's attacks before December 14, he risks creating the impression, if only in a few key figures, that there is something to fear in Trump's desperate maneuvers. If this tempts one or two unscrupulous functionaries to shirk their duty or abandon norms, it could start a cascade of betrayal. As long as Trump's efforts are having no impact, the wisest course is to let the process play out under its own steam.

The situation after December 14 is different, however. At that point, Trump's attack on the electoral process itself will be truly toothless, but his attack on the deeper, long-term foundations of democracy will remain toxic and corrosive. In that moment, there will be nothing at risk and everything to gain for Joe Biden to make plain declarations and issue straightforward demands: Trump is a liar. His accusations of fraud are baseless and unpatriotic (if not treasonous). He must concede the election to Joe Biden. 

Trump's concession has no legal force and his refusal to concede will change nothing, but it is traditional and fundamentally right that he should do so, and he should be told as much. Trump will brazenly carry his lies to the grave, his vicious contempt for our democracy and its norms is total. Nonetheless, it is proper for Joe Biden, the authentic president, to be as forthright in his articulation of what is just as Donald Trump, the pretend president, has been shameless in his dissemination of falsehoods.  

Trump lost the election. He must concede. That is the truth. I would like to hear our President-elect say it. If nothing else, hearing the truth from one of our leaders would be such a refreshing change.