Thursday Reads: Trump is Delusional and Republicans Are Enabling His Madness.
Posted: December 10, 2020 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: 2020 Elections, Congress, Donald Trump, Electoral Collecge, Joe Biden, Ken Paxton, SCOTUS, Texas 17 Comments
Vincent van Gogh, Winter scene with Arles in the background
Good Morning!!
I don’t even know how to think or write about what Trump is doing right now. He has somehow convince 17 state attorney generals to join a stupid lawsuit that asks the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election. The man behind the suit is Texas AG Ken Paxton, who is currently under investigation by the FBI.
Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: Texas AG Ken Paxton, Under FBI Investigation, Asks SCOTUS to Overturn the Election.
On Tuesday morning, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the Supreme Court to effectively declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 election. Paxton’s lawsuit falsely accuses Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin of counting invalid votes in violation of the Constitution. It asks the justices to remedy this alleged misconduct by forcing all four states’ legislatures to throw out every vote and appoint electors who support Trump. Many Republican lawmakers have already endorsed such a scheme, but Paxton is the first to ask SCOTUS to facilitate it. If the Supreme Court took up his invitation, it would commit the single biggest act of vote nullification in American history, voiding millions of ballots to hand Trump an unearned second term.
The Supreme Court, however, is not going to take up Paxton’s invitation. It has asked for a response from the four defendant states by 3 p.m. on Thursday; in light of the court’s hasty disposition of similarly laughable complaints, we can safely assume that the justices intend to dispatch this case promptly. Paxton’s suit is shot through with conspiracy theories and constitutional claims with no basis in law. Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins, who typically authors the office’s lawsuits, did not sign on to this one, nor did his deputies; instead, Paxton brought in a “special counsel” from outside the agency. His suit is so ridiculous that it led some commentators to wonder whether the attorney general might have another motive for filing it. Paxton, after all, is reportedly under investigation by the FBI for alleged bribery and abuse of office. Trump, meanwhile, has been distributing pardons to his allies like candy. Paxton’s suit makes more sense as pardon-bait than it does as a legal document. And he may need presidential clemency to escape the federal criminal charges that could be imminent.
So this may just be an attempt by Paxton to get a pardon from Trump, but 17 other Republican-controlled states are going along with this assault on the democracy. In the article, Stern enumerates Paxton’s long history of criminal conduct and corruption. Read about it at the link.

Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape
Trump has also joined the lawsuit. CNN: Trump asks Supreme Court to invalidate millions of votes in battleground states.
President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to block millions of votes from four battleground states that voted for President-elect Joe Biden.
Trump’s request came in a filing with the court asking to intervene in a lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking to invalidate millions of votes cast in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The President is being represented by a new attorney, John Eastman, who is known for recently pushing a racist conspiracy theory questioning whether Vice President-elect Kamala Harris was eligible for the role because her parents were immigrants….
“Our Country is deeply divided in ways that it arguably has not been seen since the election of 1860,” the petition states. “There is a high level of distrust between the opposing sides, compounded by the fact that, in the election just held, election officials in key swing states, for apparently partisan advantage, failed to conduct their state elections in compliance with state election law.”
Echoing arguments made by Texas, Trump says the battleground states used the pandemic “as an excuse” and “ignored or suspended the operation of numerous state laws designed to protect the integrity of the ballot.”
He asks the court to block the states from using “constitutionally infirm 2020 election results” unless the legislatures of the states “review the 2020 election results.”
Instead of actually doing the job of POTUS in the midst of an out-of-control pandemic and economic disaster, Trump is spending all of his time claiming he actually won the election that he lost and trying to convince judges and lawmakers to help him with execute a coup and turn the U.S. into an authoritarian state.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir – Skaters in the Bois de Boulogne
The Washington Post: On record day for covid-19 deaths, Trump falsely proclaims at packed Hanukkah party, ‘We’re going to win this election.’
“And he won’t steal your pen.” LOL!
WAPO’s editorial board is right. Those Republican officials are actively undermining our democracy and playing Trump’s base is like handing out cans of kerosene and matches. They need to stand up and tell the public what the real deal is but they’re so afraid of the crazies that support Trump and they need their votes that they just cower and compromise. It’s insane too.
Here you go JJ!!! How’s kitty doing?
There’ve been a few other articles pointing out that the coronavirus can travel farther than what’s been thought earlier. This is especially so even in a space as large as the average living room. Masks can stop a fair amount, but some will still get through. It’s the cumulative amount of time that matters, so intermittent exposures even of a minute or so can add up to enough to infect a person.
Hell. Bad news. Better to know the truth than not, but still: S.C.A.R.Y. Tells us that it should have been treated as measles-level contagious 😦
Imagine any CEO of any company acting in this way. Refusing to accept that he has been fired and remaining in place with no intention of leaving. Company security would be summoned and the CEO would be walked out the door to the parking lot and offered a brisk “good bye!”.
But this idiot has dug in his high heels and is doing everything possible to avoid the outcome. His insanity has touched many of the congressional GOP who seem to be in step with the nonsense. This passes over to the “fans” who seem hell bent on harassing and threatening any who oppose them.
And all in service to this nut job. This lying, corrupt, criminal conman who could not care less for anybody but himself. I remember in studying the Holocaust asking how so many could have supported Hitler who was seriously crazy. This was Germany, a highly cultured, highly educated, highly informed nation of people who stood by and allowed the wickedness to take hold.
Look no further than right here in the USA for the same mindset at work. A deranged moron as “leader” and a willing and agreeable number of enablers propping up the would be dictator cheering for “four more years!”.
Demoralizing to say the least. Disturbing at best. Dangerous as hell.
And I’m not even certain he really wants to stay in the job. He’s just unable to admit defeat sure, and he’s preying on his base for $$$ absolutely. He’s a wrecking ball – throwing a temper tantrum on a planetary scale.
I hope he gets covid again at one of his parties.
It’s batshit crazy that Trump’s been allowed to get away with any of this and that the GOP joins him to tear down the process of government.
The east side of WA state has a high percentage of MAGAts. Fortunately total population over there is far less than on the west side, so overall the state votes blue.
All it takes is 1 batshit crazy man.
“cacophony of bogus claims”