QOTD -- Amusing Ourselves To Death

 

"Donald Trump got elected president, twice so far, because people have become so easily bored, and so desperate for constant stimulation, that the election of this subliterate carnival barker with the morals of a pimp and the intellect of a dull normal junior high school bully was sufficiently entertaining to them to entice them into making this fundamentally insane choice. Trump was entertaining to the voting public in the same way he was entertaining as the host of The Apprentice, which, crucially, allowed him to present himself to millions of television viewers as a 'successful businessman.' He was entertaining as the host of Wrestlemania, and as a constant gossip column item in New York in the 1980s, and in the pages of People magazine. He wasn’t, as so many of his voters emphasized when asked about why they were voting for him, 'a politician' – meaning, above all that he was amusing, rather than boring.

"We can only hope that, in the words of Neil Postman’s prophetic polemic on the degradation of knowledge in the information age, we are not now in the process of amusing ourselves to death." -- law professor Paul Campos, LGM, on the Malignant Fascist in general and his shambolic Operation Epic Epstein Fury address last night in particular.

(Image:  our new favorite, on-point Venn poster, via @kuperart) 

 

QOTD -- A Gigantic Crime From Beginning To End

 

"The Iraq war was illegal, and a massive collection of war crimes, but at least the Bush administration went to great lengths over many months to construct what lawyers call a “colorable” argument that it wasn’t. The most salient feature of the Iran war is that nobody involved in launching the war has made the slightest attempt to provide a fig leaf for its flagrant criminality.

"This is why I have a certain impatience with arguments over whether this or that act within the war is a war crime on wholly independent grounds — that is, would be a war crime even if the war itself had some shred of legality or justification. I understand that this is an important legal distinction from the perspective of the individual commanders and soldiers who are carrying out their orders, but the whole thing is just a gigantic crime from beginning to end, and it’s startling — this is a rhetorical phrase, it actually isn’t — that these massive crimes are being carried out in public with almost no discussion of the fact that they are what they are (Again, the most striking feature here is the absence of any semblance of attempt to justify what is both morally and legally mass murder on a vast scale)." -- law professor Paul Campos, LGM, in his post today, "Kinetic Illegality."  The vast scale and scope of the Malignant Fascist's criminality is breathtaking.  The narcissistic sociopath wants to have an historical legacy second to none, and he may very well achieve that -- as one of the most malign figures ever to strut the world stage.

QOTD -- Cold Civil War

 

"Trump, his administration, and all his supporters in the government, the courts, and the public at large, are the enemy. We are now in a cold civil war, and the sooner people recognize that, from the administration of the nation’s most prestigious university, to the line cook in a restaurant who wonders why his co-workers keep disappearing, the better." --  LGM's Paul Campos, citing yesterday's action by the Malignant Fascist's regime to halt Harvard University's right to enroll international students (roughly 27% of the student body) in its quest to bully the University to comply with the regime's racist efforts to erase diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in American organizations and companies (i.e.,  "policies that promote a fair and inclusive environment, particularly for those who have historically been marginalized or discriminated against. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing and valuing the unique contributions of all individuals while also addressing systemic barriers that prevent equal opportunities."  Imagine being against those core American values!).  He also notes the disappearing of people without due process to other countries, often to prisons.

The bill of particulars against this fascist regime goes much further, of course:

-- laying waste to the federal government, particularly health and welfare, watchdog, and regulatory agencies; 

-- rampant, overt bribery and corruption;

-- threatening protected free speech with prosecution;

-- threatening private companies with tariffs if they don't comply with his demands;

-- taking a broad range of illegal actions via Executive Order;

-- abandoning alliances with democratic nations and aligning with fascistic, autocratic regimes;

-- pursing efforts to limit voting in future elections, and undercutting free election monitoring, and much more.

Lawfare has some of the ways the MF's regime is undermining the Constitution via abusive invocations of non- germane statutes;  the Human Rights Watch supplements that with "100 Human Rights Harms in 100 Days" if you need further persuasion.

We hate to start the day and the Memorial Day weekend with this dire wake up call, but we think the people who defended the freedoms that are now under assault by today's fascists in America would expect it of us.  That's why we need fighters, not huggers.

QOTD -- Delusions And Randomness

 

"... Donald Trump was elected by swing voters, who either didn’t vote in 2020 or voted for Joe Biden. These swing voters seem on the whole to have voted to make Trump president again because they believe doing so will lower the price of eggs, or they want to pare back the 45% of the federal budget that’s spent on foreign aid, and so forth.

"What I’m saying is that, especially under current information and media technology conditions, American 'democracy' consists of total idiots deciding elections for reasons that are some combination of flat-out delusional and utterly random.

"That such people put a flagrant con man who tried to overthrow the government back in the White House isn’t surprising, really, because nothing such people do can be surprising, given the delusions and the randomness..."--  Paul Campos, LGM, on the state of American democracy (his view is somewhat more pessimistic than ours), and the misinformation forces leading our decline.  Btw, Campos is being sarcastic when he says that foreign aid is 45% the federal budget -- it's about 1% or less most years -- but then again, Trump will bring peace to Ukraine in 24 hours and cut inflation and fund the entire government through his tariffs!  All true!  We saw it on Zuck-up's Facebook!

 

"This Is America"

 

An extended quote from Paul Campos at LGM:

Here’s the lede of the ABC News story reporting on the fact that Donald Trump’s campaign posted Nazi rhetoric on his campaign web site yesterday:

"Former President Donald Trump on Monday posted a video on his social media platform that uses a language that appears to mirror that of Nazi Germany, suggesting there will be a “Unified Reich” if he wins the 2024 election."

No, it doesn’t APPEAR to mirror Nazi rhetoric, it SIMPLY DOES mirror Nazi rhetoric. Nobody else in American political history has gotten this consistently sanitizing treatment, where the candidate or elected official says something explicitly, right out in the open, and the media report it in the most equivocal way possible.

And they’ve been doing it now for nine years, including an entire presidency, and an attempted coup, and the shambolic nightmare of the Biden administration’s attempts to sort of maybe prosecute Trump for trying to overthrow the government, again right out in the open, as if that had to be “investigated” for a couple of years before we could figure out who exactly was behind the events of January 6, 2021.

Indeed, Merrick Garland’s slow-walking of the legal proceedings against Trump himself following the autogolpe is part and parcel of the same cultural phenomena that produce things like that ABC News headline.

The message in both cases is, “We’re not that kind of country.” Thus Donald Trump only appears to be a fascist, because he’s not really a fascist, because if he were really a fascist that would mean that one of the nation’s two major parties has gone fascist, which means America is on the verge of going fascist, which is impossible, because this is America, and we’re not that kind of country. And Trump only appeared to try to overthrow the government by staying in power after losing an election, because come on there’s not even a word in American for that, you have to use a Spanish word, because that’s what happens in banana republics, not in America.

“American exceptionalism” is simply denial...

Yes, we are that kind of country, it turns out.  Forty to 50 percent of the country (if you believe the polls at this moment) are ready to return the now openly fascistic Malignant Loser to office.  It doesn't much matter if those voters are in full support of that fascism (we believe a solid percentage are), or whether they're simply low- information amnesiacs (i.e., morons) who don't perform a basic task of citizenship in a democracy (i.e., being informed).  They'll march right into the voting booth and cast their ballot for the single most corrupt, incompetent, deranged, dangerous person ever to be elected President.

And, while this is happening, many of the "institutionalists" (i.e., the "non-alarmists") among us will continue to whistle past the graveyard of American freedom and democracy, because to do otherwise would be to admit that we are that kind of country.  Sic transit gloria, America.

(Photo:  Trump in Mobile, Alabama, Dec. 17, 2016 / Jim Watson, Getty Images)

QOTD -- Trump Tries To Thread Abortion Needle, Gets Pricked

 

"Support for federalism as a general principle is usually phony, and no issue illustrates this better than abortion rights. Almost nobody supports the idea of abortion rights being decided on a state by state basis, because that’s an idea that makes absolutely no sense from either any utilitarian or deontological perspective on the issue.

"Trump, it should be unnecessary to point out, has no moral principles of any kind, unless “what’s good for me is more important than any other consideration in the universe at all times and places” counts as a moral principle. So what’s he’s doing here is trying to pick the position that will help him the most, or hurt him the least, electorally speaking. How this is supposed to do so is unclear to me. The position beloved of reactionary centrists — a 15ish week national ban, with exceptions — would I imagine win some of the Ariana Grande vote, but this? Who is in favor of this besides Associate Justice I Like Beer?

"The real salient point here is that Trump will of course sign any legislation a Republican Congress puts in front of him, and such a Congress will certainly pass a draconian national ban at the first opportunity. But I can’t see how this statement does anything but hurt him on the margin in regard to the issue, and the margin is where the election will be decided."  (our emphasis) -- Paul Campos, LGM, on the Malignant Loser's cynical gamesmanship on abortion rights.  The dimbulb forced birthers are already expressing deep disappointment, but they'll fall in line once it's explained to them that he's admitted his position is all about winning the election (see Tweets, below) as he continues to brag about ending Roe v Wade.  So if anyone has even the slightest doubt about this grifter's position or what would happen should he ever get into the Oval Office again, shame on you.

QOTD -- Don't Be A "Doom Junkie"!

 

"The psychological attractions of fatalism, and its close cousin despair, is that they cater to our bottomless laziness and inertia. This is what makes doom junkies of so many people on the left, broadly defined: if the situation is so dire as to be practically hopeless, then why not check out that new Netflix series, instead of trying to do anything about it?

"It’s difficult to be both clear-eyed about what Trump represents, and what his initial rise and evident political resurrection tell us about America, and to maintain the sufficient will to fight for the future of a country that has already sunk to our current level of political and cultural degradation.

"But consider the alternative." -- Paul Campos, LGM, reminding us (with a big assist from the NYT's Michelle Goldberg) that in these times, "Fatalism and despair are objectively pro- fascist."  We've got enough fascists and pro- fascists in this country;  we don't need people on our side to add to their numbers.

 

Our Elite Media Are Failing Us -- Normalizing Fascism Edition

 

Paul Campos at LGM offers yet one more example, based on a "chatty cheerful conversation among four of [the New York Times'] op/ed columnists" on their digital page (no link), of how our elite media are normalizing fascism:

America is on the edge of installing a fascist dictatorship via a presidential election. This really shouldn’t be in any way controversial. I mean if you want to get all technical and pedantic you could say America is on the ee of installing an authoritarian dictatorship with a number of strikingly fascist-like features, so we don’t have to get into a stupid argument about whether Donald Trump actually meets the fascist minimum, whatever that might be defined to require.

And one reason this is about to happen is that our media elites simply refuse to acknowledge this extremely obvious fact. If they did, they couldn’t possibly hold chummy conversations among themselves about how Biden and Trump are both unsatisfactory options — a view I share if “unsatisfactory” in one case means “this pizza is slightly overcooked and therefore unsatisfactory,” while in the other case it means “this bubonic plague is an unsatisfactory disease.” 

Campos cites recent polling (which, a year out, should be taken with a fist full of salt) showing Biden trailing the Malignant Loser in 5 of 6 battleground states, demonstrating the extent to which many Americans either don't understand the fascist threat or approve of it.  The media's (in this case, the NYT, though you could easily substitute the Washington Post, network news, etc.) failure to acknowledge the fact that we're potentially on the verge of a fascist takeover of America (but, "Joe Biden is old!") confirms Masha Gessen's prescient warnings that institutions like the media/ press won't save us, and that we should not "be taken in by small signs of normality." 

BONUS:  Look at who the Washington Post is installing as its new publisher and CEO; Q.E.D.

QOTD -- The Malignant Loser's Behavior Explained

 

Paul Campos at LGM makes a seemingly obvious but nonetheless valid point in "Occam's Donald's razor": 

I believe Josh Marshall is responsible for the dictum that, when considering any question involving Donald Trump, the stupidest possible answer is invariably correct.

A lot of people are saying that Trump’s constant violation of court orders in regard to his current and pending indictments is some sort of grand strategy.

That’s foolish, as Anton Chigruh might put it. Trump is behaving this way because

(a) He has no impulse control

(b) He’s pathologically narcissistic, and these prosecutions constitute narcissistic injury

(c) He’s faced very few consequences in his life for breaking legal and social rules; and

(d) He’s really stupid...

We have nothing to add except "Lock him up!"

Quotes Of The Day -- No Way Out

"...Believing that the Republican electorate is full of fine, upstanding citizens who love civic virtue is willful blindness. Republican voters want someone to break stuff and have fun doing it. The only reason Ron DeSantis is struggling is that when he breaks stuff -- including people -- he doesn't really seem to being having fun. So of course Trump has been leading in the polls, DeSantis is second but trailing badly, and all the candidates who still maintain a surface politeness (while largely sharing the same political beliefs as DeSantis and Trump) are in single digits..." -- Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog, on how Trump is the Republican electorate, and the Republican electorate is Trump.

____________________

"...[T]he more disturbing thing is that the country is not in fact going to come apart at all in any foreseeable future: Instead we are going to have a kind of low-level very informal civil war for many decades to come, as Red America and Blue America increasingly come to the conclusion that they don’t want to live with each other any more, but can find no way, either practically or emotionally, to break up.

We’re in an old-style Catholic marriage with the fascists, and that relationship is going to become as impossibly bitter as that kind of arrangement becomes, when neither party can stand the other any more, but there’s still no way out." --  Paul Campos at LGM on the "delusional fetishists" of the Timothy McVeigh variety that populate the Republican/ Christofascist/ Shooters Party, from top to bottom.

QOTD -- MAGA Judge Mizelle

 

"Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, the federal judge who just ruled that the Biden administration’s mask mandate on commercial air travel is illegal, is a 34 or 35 year old federal district judge. She has been in that position for a year and half, despite having acquired essentially zero meaningful trial experience in her extremely brief legal career, prior to starting to run federal court trials herself. She spent basically all of her time after graduating from law school either clerking for an all-star lineup of wingnut judges, including Clarence Thomas, or doing the kind of research scutwork at elite legal institutions that doesn’t require any actual courtroom experience. [snip]

"Mizelle is a Federalist Society alumna, and a radical reactionary: for example, she doesn’t think paper money is constitutional, which was a semi-respectable legal opinion in 1870, but would be considered stark raving mad by ordinary lawyers today. But of course what ordinary lawyers think today may soon be quite beside the point, as the American legal and political system is gradually taken over by radical theocrats who think all of the 20th century and much of the 19th was just one big mistake." -- University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos, at LGM, on Trump- appointed (for life) Federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, whose MAGA-rific decision yesterday that the CDC overstepped its authority in mandating masks on commercial air travel and other mass transit may well result in unnecessary illness and death -- just to score political points.  

Shame on the Senate for confirming a nominee the American Bar Association rated as "not qualified."

Lawrence Gostin has more on the crank here.

Quotes Of The Day -- Stop Normalizing, Start Fighting

 

"To Biden and like-minded Democrats, working with the GOP whenever possible is good policy and good politics, a way for the president to fulfill what pollsters agree was one of his most popular campaign promises. But Biden’s repeated emphasis on his ability to cooperate with Republicans has stirred concerns among some Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans, and nonpartisan democracy advocates, that he is obscuring the threat mounting against democratic institutions as Trump strengthens his hold over the GOP, and extremists such as Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar solidify their beachhead in it. The overriding fear is that more Republicans appear to be radicalizing by the week and Biden is making the GOP seem normal." -- Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic, on "When Bipartisanship Risks Undermining Democracy."   

 ____________________

"The irony of all the throbbing metastatic insanity among Republicans is that it looks quite likely that they will win the 2022 midterms fair and square. If they nominated someone other than Trump or one of his many clones climbing the Republican ranks, they would likely be odds-on favorites to win in 2024 as well.

"One major reason for this, I submit, is that Democrats have failed to convince their own voters — a substantial majority in the last election — about what Republicans are really up to. The leadership doesn't act like the republic is on the line, or can't bring themselves to believe it. That leaves their base either thinking things are basically fine, or despairing at the thought of fighting back without even their own president on their side." -- Ryan Cooper in The Week, on "Democrats Are in Denial About What They're Up Against."

____________________

"... [H]however much the people may have voted for Biden in the hope for a return to normalcy, there is no normalcy on the horizon and efforts to provide it aren’t going to be politically rewarded. The only hope is to start fighting as hard as the Republicans are fighting. That means using the law (since it still exists for a little while longer) very aggressively. It means the effort to right the ship through reestablishing norms will fail spectacularly.

"I’d say that we should do away with the legislative filibuster and pass voter reforms, and that we should develop an intelligent and politically savvy legislative plan for 2022, and that we should do more and better messaging. But most of that won’t happen and the rest won’t be sufficient. The coup-plotters are in the driver’s seat and if we don’t have a radical and preemptive response, they’ll do next November what they failed to do on January 6.

"And we won’t come back from that." -- Martin Longman in Progress Pond, on "I Must Issue the Direst of Warnings."

____________________

"The Rittenhouse verdict matters because it is a symbolic representation of what the American right wing and its avatar the Republican party have become: A movement of heavily armed religious and quasi-religious fanatics, who wish to purify and thereby restore the traditional greatness of the Real America through the cleansing power of violence.

"There’s a word for that kind of thing, but no prominent Democratic politician can use it accurately, because to use it accurately would imply the need for radical resistance to the Republican party and what it has become. And almost no one in any position of power or influence is ready to advocate for that, because people in positions of power and influence aren’t the kind of people who can look this particular species of reality in the face, because doing so would call into question the very system that has made them so powerful and important and respected.

"But that doesn’t change that reality: it only exacerbates it, through continual and systemic denial." -- Paul Campos at LGM, on "Why the Rittenhouse Verdict Matters."

 

Particularly with the ramping up of violent speech by Republican officeholders and their frothing base and the on- going coup against American democracy, the response should be to a "radical and preemptive response" to the existential threat these nihilists pose, not downplaying the danger in a fog of "bipartisanship" or denial.  It would also help Democrats' sagging poll numbers within their own party if they stayed on offense and showed some self- confidence and passion for defending our democracy!

Quotes Of The Day -- Eroding Democracy

"Florida’s move to censor academics employed by its state university makes clear that, for many, the arguments about free speech that have dominated the political conversation over the past few years have never truly been about the right to speak. They have, instead, been about providing a predicate for conservatives to use the power of the state to settle political arguments. The campaigns of censorship and disenfranchisement must thus be understood as two halves of the same whole. The former erases the historical memory of the effect such restrictions have had in the past, and the latter prevents the public from acting on the knowledge of the discriminatory past that GOP leadership is attempting to erase."-- Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, on the University of Florida's censorship of professors wishing to testify in a lawsuit fighting Florida Republicans' voter disenfranchisement measures.

____________________

"There isn’t going to be anything resembling a normal election in 2024, because the right wing in this country is now completely committed to living their truth, which is that Democrats don’t win elections legitimately. This started out as a paranoid delusion, but now it’s an Article of Faith, that can’t be abandoned, because it’s become so intimately connected to their tribal identity.

"They won’t accept defeat, period, and we need to be ready for that." -- Paul Campos, LGM, re- stating what has become increasingly clear over the past several election cycles.  Maintaining power by any means necessary is existential for Republicans, whose disdain for democracy and pluralism has become a menace to us all.

QOTD -- Wrongheaded Framing

 

"It will be interesting to see how quickly, if at all, the American media outside of the Wingnut Scream Machine come to acknowledge that their initial framing of the evacuation is apparently going to end up being as wrongheaded as their coverage of Operation Enduring Freedom itself." -- Paul Campos, LGM. 

Don't look for any acknowledgement, but rather look for memory- holing the turnaround and rather impressive logistical feat underway.  Case in point, buried 11 paragraphs deep in this Reuters report, is this:

"Between 3 a.m. and 3 p.m. local time on Monday, some 10,900 people were evacuated from Kabul, meaning the United States had facilitated the removal of 48,000 people since Aug. 14."

We have a media addicted to pops and bangs, with easily ignored historical perspectives, with an attention span measured in hours if not minutes, and with egos unwilling to admit error (kind of reminds you of a certain malignant former guy).  Add to that a desire to prove that they're not treating Democrats with kid gloves.  

We're fond of repeating Masha Gessen's warning about onrushing autocracy: institutions will not save you.

QOTD -- Final Solution

 

"The big problem for the radical right is that, in a diverse, pluralistic modern society, patriarchy, white supremacy, plutocracy, and theocracy are all radically inconsistent with anything even vaguely resembling liberal democracy. We can see clearly now that the solution to this otherwise insuperable dilemma is to get rid of liberal democracy.  [snip]

"What follows from this? Because, to the extent that this view is sincerely held, it practically requires those who hold it to launch a civil war against the evildoers, that if successful will result in either a final solution to the leftist question, or the formal breakup of the nation.

"There is, in short, no living with these people. A liberal democracy can’t survive when one of its two major parties is a radical reactionary authoritarian ethno-nationalist party, that rejects the very idea of a pluralistic liberal democratic society as a matter of first principles. Either that party or that liberal democracy must be destroyed, and will be." -- Paul Campos, on the dynamic playing out on the radical right following the decisive loss by Mango Mussolini.  When a collection of autocratic, anti- democratic sociopaths masquerading as a political party thinks it unlikely they'll ever win a national election again, it's easier to understand what's motivating their insane gambits, violent rhetoric and escalating intimidation tactics unfolding every day.

QOTD -- The Hunt Is On

"After four years of doing rails of primo conspiracy theory off Donald Trump’s feculent ass, the Republican party’s electoral base is rapidly hunting any non-lunatic GOP office holders into extinction. What will be left will reflect the mixture of right wing religious wack jobs, you’re not the boss of me libertarians, new gilded age aspiring plutocrats, proud boy white supremacists, raging misogynist incels, and general free range sociopaths that makes up the bulk of the approximately 74.5 million people who voted to retain Trump as president of the United States.

"Two thirds of the Americans who had the legal right to vote to eject Trump from the office he has befouled every day for the last 1,411 days chose not to do so. One third of this country is sane, one third is insane, and the other third is too indifferent or disaffected to help save the former from the latter." -- Paul Campos at LGM, in a post on a Republican effort in Ohio to impeach Republican Gov. Mike DeWine for trying to save lives in a raging pandemic, and the reality we face in dealing with an insane population that votes.

QOTD -- Rigged

"This is where we are now. The entire electoral system is in fact rigged — rigged structurally and perfectly legally in favor of Republicans, because of that sea of red on the maps surrounding the little dots of blue (where the actual people live).

"But it’s not enough for them. They need to rig it illegally, because John Calvin plus Ayn Rand is actually a very unpopular ideology in America if you’re not a white religious reactionary or a plutocrat, actual or aspiring. But there are still a lot of those people. Plus there are enough other people at the margins who are naive enough to be taken in by the nonsensical claims of American exceptionalism and capitalist bootstrap fantasies (start the next Facebook!). Or they’re just drunk on the depraved celebrity culture that makes Donald Trump look to them like somebody who maybe we should give a chance to 'drain the swamp.'

"When you add it all up it turns out that Donald Trump gets 74 million votes — five million more than Obama ever got! — even after four years of him making it perfectly clear that he was going to do exactly what he’s doing right now, which is to try to destroy America as a liberal democracy, and replace it with an authoritarian ethno-state." -- Paul Campos at LGM.  We're in a long, ebb and flow struggle for democracy in this country.  We can't sleep on victories that the anti-democratic party is so determined to overturn in the present and future.

Quotes Of The Day -- The Choice

"As we enter a prolonged period of disease, death and economic pain, we must think hard about presidential leadership — about what we need, what we want and what we must demand. [Franklin D.] Roosevelt met the moment because of his empathy, his life experience, his faith in America and his insistence on the centrality of fact. We are almost certainly facing a choice in November between Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden. So, it’s time to ask: Which of these men is more likely to approximate our greatest 20th-century crisis president?" -- Presidential biographer Jon Meachum, making the choice in November both a simple one and one of profound importance.

 _____________________

"This is the bill that’s coming due for the last several decades, during which the Republican party degenerated into an anti-government, anti-science, anti-expertise of every kind death cult. The election of Donald Trump, or someone like him, was the eminently predictable if not inevitable result of that degeneracy.

"Never forget; never forgive. Getting rid of Trump without also eventually destroying the Republican party in its present form is the equivalent of removing a primary tumor when the cancer itself has already become virulently metastatic. Any hope for survival requires a far more radical ongoing treatment of the disease itself" -- Paul Campos, at Lawyers, Guns & Money.

QOTD -- "Don't Panic"

After covering the flaws in the top tier Democratic presidential candidates, Paul Campos at LGM offers some sound advice:

But the problem [isn't] these particular candidates — not really. The problem is that when American political system combines with the contemporary American media environment and then the two of them meet the American voter, you get Donald Trump as president. That’s the problem. And that problem isn’t going away, unless we stop freaking out and do everything we can to make it go away, temporarily, no matter who gets the nomination. All of them could lose but all of them could also win, and if you think any of these people can’t win you’re just panicking. Don’t panic.

We hope we don't have to repeat this message periodically, but we know we will be.

"Our Democracy Is Still Very Much In Danger"

Would- be president for life Donald "Rump" Trump and his band of villains in Georgia and Florida have been trying to short- circuit the counting (and re- counting) of ballots since election day.  As more ballots (absentee, overseas, military, provisional) are counted, margins for the Republican vote suppressors in those states have been going down.  With Georgia Republican and voter purger extraordinaire Brian Kemp desperate to stay above the 50 percent threshold to avoid a runoff with Democrat Stacy Abrams, odious fraudster Gov. Rick "Batboy" Scott throwing around lies about fraud while a recount is underway, and future one- term Republican Senator from Colorado Cory Gardner echoing Scott's claims that Dems were "stealing" the election, there's a coordinated Republican effort to disenfranchise voters and to try to de- legitimatize election results when Republicans are in danger of losing.  Existential threat to democracy Rump is all in on this strategy, of course.

Paul Krugman discusses how Republicans are being prepared for distrusting any election results that result in Republican losses (not that it takes much preparation):

The attempt by Trump and his party to shut down the legally mandated Florida recount with claims, based on no evidence, of large-scale voting fraud fits right into this partisan epistemology. Do Republicans really believe that there were vast numbers of fraudulent or forged ballots? Even asking that question is a category error. They don’t “really believe” anything, except that they should get what they want. Any vote count that might favor a Democrat is bad for them; therefore it’s fraudulent, no evidence needed. 

The same worldview explains Republicans’ addiction to conspiracy theories. After all, if people keep insisting on the truth of something that hurts their party, it can’t be out of respect for the facts — because in their world, there are no neutral facts. 

So the people making inconvenient assertions must be in the pay of sinister forces. In Arizona, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won a Senate seat on the strength of late-counted ballots. Did you know that the state G.O.P. has filed a freedom of information request for information on interactions between election officials and, you guessed it, George Soros? [snip] 

What all of this means is that what’s going on in America right now isn’t politics as usual. It’s much more existential than that. You have to be truly delusional to see the Republicans’ response to their party’s midterm setback as anything but an attempted power grab by a would-be authoritarian movement, which rejects any opposition or even criticism as illegitimate. Our democracy is still very much in danger.

Paul Campos at LGM sees this as a dangerous prelude to the 2020 election (should Rump be around to run), and sketches how the attempts to de-legitimatize election results in close races this year may play out when 2020 rolls around:

(1) He loses a close election, like 2016 except the other way.  If that happens, I think there’s a good chance that he won’t acknowledge the legitimacy of the result, and he’ll do everything he can, legally and extra-legally, to stay in office. 

(2) He loses, or is obviously going to lose, by a big margin.  In this scenario, I can see things getting really crazy in the weeks running up to November 2020.  I can imagine him trying to call the whole thing off, on the grounds of some spurious national emergency, or announcing ahead of time that the election results were going to be illegitimate because of “massive voter fraud” (i.e., similar to his reaction to losing a close election, except anticipating the result and trying to delegitimize it ahead of time). 

(3) Something basically unimaginable right now (I don’t trust the show runners at all at this point). 

Ultimately I don’t think Trump is going to go gentle into that good night.  And it’s probably a good idea to start anticipating that possibility.  

Conservative Jennifer Rubin concurs:

President Trump is back in the United States — and back to attacking democracy. He tweets:

The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2018

We should note that this is the talk of authoritarians; it shows contempt for the office of the president, whom the Constitution designates to “to take care” that the nation’s laws are faithfully executed. It’s also a frightful peek at what he might do in 2020 should the vote not go his way.

We all need to be prepared and not assume Trump and Trumpism will accede to losing power.  These are times very few if any of us have ever experienced before, and the stakes couldn't be any higher.