Quotes Of The Day -- The Damage Done

"PRESIDENT TRUMP has dropped the pretense of respecting democracy. Having lost the election, and a string of attempts to challenge vote counts, he demanded on Wednesday that state officials simply refuse to certify the results. The end game, according to Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis, is to enable Republican state lawmakers in a swing state such as Michigan to award their state’s electoral college delegates to Mr. Trump despite President-elect Joe Biden’s unassailable vote margins.

"The Post’s Robert Costa reports that Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, is also talking up what would amount to a coup. He knows that his desultory lawsuits will not succeed, but calculates that if enough states are prevented from certifying their votes by legal deadlines, the election could be thrown into Congress, which might hand the presidency to Mr. Trump — again, against the will of the voters. [snip]

"This is beyond political norm-breaking. This is a direct assault on democracy itself. That an American president would even contemplate scheming to overturn a free and fair election is astonishing. That he is actively trying to do so should shock Americans to the core." --  Editorial in this morning's Washington Post, on the coup neo- fascist Donald "Mango  Mussolini" Trump is attempting in concert with some of his dead- enders.

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"After Trump has provided the world with this theatrical coup-that-is-not-a-coup, it is naive to imagine that the U.S. can promote democracy or the rule of law with the confidence that it did in the past. For four years, our president has openly defied many of the values we used to put at the center of our foreign-policy rhetoric. And yes, everybody has noticed. Americans may have found the spectacle of Trump trying to blackmail the Ukrainian president into launching a fake political investigation of his opponents exotic. Ukrainians found it … familiar. The next time a senior American official comes to town and tells the Ukrainian government that its International Monetary Fund loan depends on enforcing laws against corruption, why shouldn’t the Ukrainians laugh?" -- Anne Applebaum, in "The World is Never Going Back to Normal," discussing some of the damage done to American foreign policy and standing in the world by the soon- to- be ex-president.