Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Ian Martin: The madness of King Trump, America’s sulky George III sequel

Like the deranged King George III, the QAnon lionheart has lost America

e went mad and lost America”. A conventional summary of King George III, the tragic figure who took on the colonies, sending in his troops to “dominate” the streets and crush resistance. Alas, the war of independence didn’t end well, for George anyway. Defeated, bipolar, suffering frequent manic episodes, he retreated to Windsor Castle having nevertheless amassed an impressive library and a reputation for cultured intelligence.

A couple of centuries and 45 presidents later, Old King Trump sits barricaded in the White House doing nothing much. His face puckered into that trademark rosebud of petulance. Barking at underlings. Pretending HE won because a lot of Democrat votes were from dead people and very illegal. His sulky-toddler folded arms, like that time he refused to say a single kind word when fellow Republican and war hero John McCain died. There’s something almost majestic about Trump’s utter contempt for the office of president.

Karl Marx – apparently the evil genius behind peaceful protest and Medicare – said that historical entities appear twice, “first as tragedy, then as farce”. That feels about right.

Amanda Marcotte: Hey, Republicans — your guy lost. Can you please take the coronavirus seriously now?

Coronavirus denialism was entirely about helping Trump win the election — so can his voters move on now it’s over?

In the weeks leading up to the election, Donald Trump made a promise: That “on Nov. 4, you won’t hear” anything more about what he sarcastically called “COVID COVID COVID.” He loved this line and repeated it over and over again at rallies, to raucous cheers from crowds of conservatives who, despite rising rates of coronavirus infection and death, wanted dearly to believe the pandemic was being overblown to hurt Trump’s re-election chances — or even that the whole thing has been a hoax from the start.

Like most things that Trump says and his followers believe, of course, this was not true. The election came and went — and Trump lost, whether or not he admits it — but the coronavirus pandemic remains in the news as pretty much the top story, is as jaw-dropping new records in transmissions are set nearly daily and hospitals are overflowing. In fact, the U.S. had over a million transmissions in one week, meaning that nearly one in 10 people who have tested positive for COVID-19 did so just in the last seven days or so. Public health experts believe things will get much worse, as many Americans ignore the warnings not to travel or socialize over the holidays.

The election is over. Trump’s promise that the coronavirus would miraculously evaporate after the election has been proved false. One major question remains: Will Republicans finally start taking this pandemic seriously, now that there are no political points to score with continued denial?

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern: Of Course We Should Scorn Trump’s Sleazy Election Lawyers

Donald Trump’s campaign to have the 2020 presidential election decided in the courts has run into a serious snag: the courts. Depending on how you count, the campaign is about 1–24, with one lawsuit after another jettisoned from courtrooms in Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, by judges of all ideological and political stripes, many of whom have made plain that these claims are lacking in even minimal indicia of specificity, accuracy, or detail. As one suit after the next is narrowed or withdrawn altogether, the victim industrial complex that forms the backbone of the Trump strategy will soon have to find something new on which to blame his defeat. The next target is likely to be big prestigious law firms, which they will say were bullied out of representing the president’s interests by vicious partisan attacks. In fact, some prominent attorneys have already begun criticizing the criticism of Trump’s legal team. They fret that going after Trump’s lawyers could lead to a broader campaign against law firms that take on unpopular clients, a practice that undergirds our legal system’s ability to function. Just as someone has to defend accused murderers, someone had to file these Trump suits, they say.

But nothing can be further from the truth. The firms that lined up to try to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in Michigan or Pennsylvania based on claims they failed to research, refuse to check, or never believed in the first place should be scorned and sanctioned—not because they stepped forward to defend an unpopular client who had a right to representation but because they willingly and cynically volunteered to help Trump try to reach victory at any cost.

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Why the 2020 Election Makes It Hard to Be Optimistic About the Future

If we can’t face up to a pandemic, how can we avoid apocalypse?

The 2020 election is over. And the big winners were the coronavirus and, quite possibly, catastrophic climate change.

OK, democracy also won, at least for now. By defeating Donald Trump, Joe Biden pulled us back from the brink of authoritarian rule.

But Trump paid less of a penalty than expected for his deadly failure to deal with Covid-19, and few down-ballot Republicans seem to have paid any penalty at all. As a headline in The Washington Post put it, “With pandemic raging, Republicans say election results validate their approach.”

And their approach, in case you missed it, has been denial and a refusal to take even the most basic, low-cost precautions — like requiring that people wear masks in public.

The epidemiological consequences of this cynical irresponsibility will be ghastly. I’m not sure how many people realize just how terrible this winter is going to be.

Amanda Marcotte: Lock him up! If Trump refuses to leave the scene after his defeat, there’s an obvious solution

To heal the country, Donald Trump needs to go away. He won’t do it on his own, so prosecution is the only answer

The national celebrations after Joe Biden decisively defeated Donald Trump in this month’s election focused heavily on the image of Trump being pushed out the door. People took to the streets and boogied down to Steam’s 1969 hit “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.” Signs carried by celebrants tended to focus more on Trump’s loss than Biden’s victory. During Saturday’s underwhelming MAGA march in Washington, counter-protesters chanted, “Trump, pack your shit! You’re illegitimate!”

Alas, like Freddy Krueger or the shark from “Jaws,” Trump will not be easy to get rid of. It’s not just that he refuses to concede and keeps telling his supporters he will find some legal miracle to invalidate the election, a ruse that stopped being serious several days ago and is now mostly the mercenary pitch of a con man. [..]

The only solution to this problem is for Trump to be too busy trying to stay out of jail — or too busy sitting in jail — to be the forever-candidate. To save America, Biden’s Department of Justice and state prosecutors in New York should focus on holding Trump accountable for all the various alleged or apparent crimes he’s committed. Trump’s executive privilege ends on Jan. 20 at noon Eastern time. That’s when the prosecutions should begin.

The list of such crimes is so long that the only real question should be where to start.

Katherine Stewart: Trump or No Trump, Religious Authoritarianism Is Here to Stay

Their unlikely ally may have lost the White House, but Christian nationalists still plan to win the war..

Will President-elect Joe Biden’s victory force America’s Christian nationalists to rethink the unholy alliance that powered Donald Trump’s four-year tour as one of the nation’s most dangerous presidents? Don’t count on it.

The 2020 election is proof that religious authoritarianism is here to stay, and the early signs now indicate that the movement seems determined to reinterpret defeat at the top of the ticket as evidence of persecution and of its own righteousness. With or without Mr. Trump, they will remain committed to the illiberal politics that the president has so ably embodied. [..]

Republicans have long known that the judiciary is one of the most effective instruments of minority rule. Mr. Trump’s success in packing the federal judiciary — as of this writing, 220 federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices — will be one of his most devastating legacies. The prospect of further entrenching minority rule in the coming years will keep the alliance between Republicans and the religious right alive.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Christian nationalist response to the 2020 election is that we’ve seen this movie before. The “stolen election” meme won’t bring Mr. Trump back into the Oval Office. But then, the birther narrative never took President Barack Obama out of office, either. The point of conspiratorial narratives and apocalyptic rhetoric is to lay the groundwork for a politics of total obstruction, in preparation for the return of a “legitimate” ruler. The best guess is that religious authoritarianism of the next four years will look a lot like it did in the last four years. We ignore the political implications for our democracy at our peril.

Cas Mudde: With Trump gone, can we talk about the fear of fascism we had about him?

It’s time to start a critical self-assessment of our analyses and commentary of the past years. What held up and what didn’t?

A March on Rome it was not. The “Million Maga March” attracted an estimated 5-10,000 people, far less than the roughly 30,000 fascists that marched from Naples to Rome in 1922, and it came nowhere near the “million” it had promised – despite the usual number-boosting from Trumpists. While Mussolini was able to use his march to grab power, this march will not help Trump cling on to power. In fact, Trump was so invested in the march, that his convoy sped past the protesters so that Trump could spend another day at his golf club in Virginia.

The Million Maga March is a good reminder of how problematic comparisons with historical fascism are. As soon as Trump became a serious contender for the US presidency, in early 2016, articles and books on the death of democracy/liberalism and the rise of fascism exploded. Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century became a #1 New York Times bestseller and the self-help book for anxious liberals. In 2016, users of the term “fascism” (for Trump) were criticized as fearmongers. Four years later, those not using the term were seen as cowards and enablers.