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

Roger Cohen: Mr. President, Pack Your Bags and Be Gone

Trump wants to preserve, protect and defend only himself.

The ruler broods, alone with his rage and shame, undone by rejection, his mind, like Macbeth’s, “full of scorpions,” plotting to overturn facts and destroy American democracy. His lackeys, and only they remain, try to humor the master in his labyrinth.

Donald Trump, departing president, lost in an election that a division of the Department of Homeland Security has now called “the most secure in American history,” with no “evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.”

Mr. President, get the boxes, get the tape, pack your bags and be gone.

He can’t. He won’t. It’s not in the man. Truth is unbearable. Fraud! Rigged! Trump can no more accept defeat than recall the fact that he took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

His only vow is to preserve, protect and defend himself. He has never been able to see beyond that orange face in the mirror. No Bible offers consolation to this man, no creed, no truth, no sense of decency, not even Fox News now, nothing.

Robert Reich: Trump’s refusal to concede is just the latest gambit to please Republican donors

Millions who should be ranged against the American oligarchy are distracted and divided – just as their leaders want

Leave it to Trump and his Republican allies to spend more energy fighting non-existent voter fraud than containing a virus that has killed 244,000 Americans and counting.

The cost of this misplaced attention is incalculable. While Covid-19 surges to record levels, there’s still no national strategy for equipment, stay-at-home orders, mask mandates or disaster relief.

The other cost is found in the millions of Trump voters who are being led to believe the election was stolen and who will be a hostile force for years to come – making it harder to do much of anything the nation needs, including actions to contain the virus.

Trump is continuing this charade because it pulls money into his newly formed political action committee and allows him to assume the mantle of presumed presidential candidate for 2024, whether he intends to run or merely keep himself the center of attention.

Leading Republicans like the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, are going along with it because donors are refilling GOP coffers.

Charles M. Blow: Trump, the Absolute Worst Loser

He has spent his life gaming the system, so it’s no surprise that he can’t accept defeat.

Donald Trump lost the election. He knows it. But he won’t admit it.

He still hopes and believes that there is a way for the courts to erase enough votes to tip the election in his favor. This will not happen.

His legal challenges in swing states across the country are largely being met with defeat and setback. In court, you have to provide evidence. Lies, accusations and conspiracy theory don’t cut it. Trump has spent his life gaming the system. It is unfathomable to him that this system can’t be gamed.

In the end, Trump hopes to push his case to the Supreme Court, where he has seated three conservative justices. That is also not likely to be a winning strategy.

Trump believes he can use the judiciary as a weapon against the American people. The judiciary is not likely to allow itself to be used.

Barring that, he is committed to destroying faith in the electoral process itself. If he didn’t win, he insists he must have been cheated because, in his mind, failure is not a possibility.

Like he has done for the entirety of his presidency, he is lying, concocting a narrative detached from reality.

Michelle Goldberg: The Post-Presidency of a Con Man

Out of office, Trump might seem a lot less formidable.

It’s hard to tell whether Donald Trump is attempting a coup or throwing a tantrum. [..]

But there’s cause for comfort, of a sort, in signs that the president is preparing for life outside the White House in exactly the way one would expect — by initiating new grifts. Trump has been sending out frantic fund-raising requests to “defend the election,” but as The New York Times reports, most of the money is actually going to a PAC, Save America, that “will be used to underwrite Mr. Trump’s post-presidential activities.” Axios reports that Trump is considering starting a digital media company to undermine Fox News, which he now regards as disloyal.

These moves suggest that while Trump may be willing to torch American democracy to salve his wounded ego, at least part of him is getting ready to leave office.

Laurence H. Tribe: Republicans are playing with fire. And we all risk getting burned

The party is challenging the outcome of the election without any proof of fraud. Their degradation of democracy will reverberate for years to come

Our system requires legitimate government, which requires legitimate elections. As Senator Chris Murphy put it, if Republicans convince half the country that “those people that got elected were illegitimately chosen, then so must be the actions they take when they get in office.” [..]

Even if violence doesn’t ensue this election cycle – and I fervently hope it won’t – the degradation of democracy will reverberate for years to come. Democratic self-government is not a condition, it’s a practice. The colonies practiced for over 150 years before forming a union, and even then they succeeded only on the second try. We practiced poorly for a century before unshackling our fellow citizens, and it took another 50 years of effort to enfranchise America’s women. We have not been perfect, but we have constantly endeavored to embody our ideals, to ensure that government of the people, by the people, and for the people will flourish in our great nation.

When we begin to doubt that government does reflect and represent the people, we begin to doubt that it ever can.

Republicans are sowing those seeds of doubt. And if we allow them to germinate and grow, we’ll soon find thorny disunion where our manicured garden of democracy once bloomed. No, the gates won’t be overrun and yes, the Biden administration will take office on 20 January.

But we should all worry whether that will be enough. To Republican leaders: democracy needs your help to flourish. Please, put patriotism above party loyalty before it’s too late.

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: A Republican Senate Would Be Bad for Business

What’s bad for America would be bad for corporations, too.

So the blue wave fell short of expectations. Joe Biden will be the next president, but unless Democrats pull off an upset in the Georgia Senate runoffs — which, to be fair, they might, given the remarkable strength of their organizing efforts there — Mitch McConnell will still be the Senate majority leader.

Big business seems happy with this outcome. The stock market was rising even before we got good news about prospects for a coronavirus vaccine. Corporate interests appear to imagine that they will flourish under a Biden presidency checked by Republican control of the Senate.

But big business is wrong. Divided government is all too likely to mean paralysis at a time when we desperately need strong action.

Why? Despite the vaccine news, we are still on track for a nightmarish pandemic winter — which will be made far worse, in human and economic terms, if a Republican Senate obstructs the Biden administration’s response. And while the economy will bounce back once a vaccine is widely distributed, we have huge long-term problems that will not be resolved if we have the kind of gridlock that characterized most of the Obama years.

Eugene Robinson: Republicans are wrong. Trump has no ‘right’ to cause this chaos.

While Trump pursues his ‘rights,’ he neglects his duty and abuses the country

Don’t listen to lying Republicans, like Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who say President Trump “has every right to look into allegations” in an attempt to overturn the election. This is nonsense.

Trump has no “right” to file frivolous lawsuits in bad faith and demand recounts that have no chance of changing the outcome. He has no “right” to make wild claims of fraud without presenting a shred of credible evidence. He has no “right” to delay and disrupt the most important performative act in our democracy — the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. But he does have a duty to his country, and, like with so many other obligations, Trump is neglecting it to the point of abuse.

Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris won an election that was not all that close, and GOP quislings McConnell, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) know it. They know this is nothing like the cliffhanger of 2000, which hinged on a few hundred votes in a single state. Trump is trying — or pretending to try — to somehow change or nullify hundreds of thousands of votes in at least six states. [..]

The symbolism of a graceful concession is more important than the nuts and bolts of the handoff, especially for a president-elect with Biden’s vast experience, though especially in this pandemic, the nuts and bolts do matter. The Biblical book of Hebrews defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Trump is petulantly weakening a divided nation’s faith in its hoped-for and unseen foundational ideals — and of all the terrible things this awful man has done to our country, this could be the worst.

Catherine Rampell: Trump has deliberately made our government more dysfunctional. Here’s how Biden can fix it.

Biden must focus on policy, people and public trust.

President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to “restore the soul of America.” It is a worthy, poetic goal. Another, more prosaic objective also lies before him: fixing America’s plumbing.

By which I mean repairing the machinery of government, which has been corroded by Trumpian incompetence and malevolence. In the months ahead, there are at least three areas that need the Biden transition team’s urgent attention: policy, people and public trust.

The federal government is a massive, slow-moving ship. Even in the best of times it is often dysfunctional. But for the past four years, the Trump administration has deliberately made parts of government more dysfunctional, throwing sand in the gears in order to sabotage programs the president doesn’t like that are nonetheless required by statute.

The processing of various immigration applications has slowed, for instance; the number of enforcement actions against polluters, white-collar criminals and even child-sex traffickers has plummeted.

Where agencies still remain at least superficially functional, they have been steered toward helping the president’s own political and financial interests — by awarding contracts to cronies, say, or weaponizing antitrust and other state powers against perceived enemies. Indeed, arguably the biggest contrast in governing philosophy between President Trump and Biden is not over government size, per se; it’s whether government should serve the interests of the governed.

Amanda Marcotte: The far right is cracking up, as their violent fantasies of Trump’s fascist takeover evaporate.

QAnon, the Proud Boys and white nationalist groups flail around helplessly as twilight falls on the Trump era

The far right had a dream: That one day, people who had been exiled to the unacceptable margins of American political life could play the role of Donald Trump’s brownshirts. [..]

Then came the election. Trump lost. This has been very difficult for those people to accept.

People with fanatical and delusional beliefs famously don’t give them up just because they’ve been hit over the head with reality, of course. The various subcultures of crackpots that have sprung up under Trump are no exception.

Still, the election results have sent these groups reeling. All of them have spent the past four years growing their ranks and orbiting around Trump, convinced that he was a savior figure who would crush their perceived enemies.

For believers in QAnon, that belief manifested in a fantasy that Trump was going to round up all the members of the “deep state,” their imaginary shadowy conspiracy of Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and progressive activists that they believe both secretly runs the world and is also a network of Satan-worshipping cannibal pedophiles. Trump, they told themselves, was secretly organizing “the storm” to round up and destroy this sinister global conspiracy.

But since Trump’s election, Q — a user account that started on 8chan and drifted over to 8kun after 8chan was disbanded — has fallen silent. QAnon faithful believe the account is run by a current or former U.S. intelligence agent and Trump loyalist. In fact, it’s probably run by the father-and-son duo Jim and Ron Watkins, who are conspiracy theorists and definitely not U.S. intelligence agents. Without Q’s guidance, the QAnon cult appears to be confused and angry.

Richard Wolff: Trump’s refusal to concede follows his pattern of incompetence and delusions

The Trump administration has been living in a state of denial for the last four years – this is just the latest incident

Like all good seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness, the end of the Trump era is a heady mix of sweet melancholy.

There will come a time, soon, when world leaders look back on the last four years with a wry smile and a shake of the head. Instead of the sheer blood-draining horror of sitting beside a sociopathic maniac with the power to destroy the world in a nuclear holocaust.

For now, we must savor the last oozings of this Fall of Donald.

He cuts a tired and bloated figure, to be sure. He tweets less, but he does so in ALL CAPS. All the time. He promises the most amazing revelations and achievements, coming very soon, just like he said they would. [..]

But next week is when some states begin certifying their votes. The electoral college meets in one month. Now isn’t the time for making progress, or for recycling the slogans of losing campaigns long gone. A week after losing the election, now is the time to deliver the goods, or be delivered for good.

As all good Arsenal fans know, it’s the hope that kills you. And Trump has likely killed more than 700 fans (or their friends) with his awesome campaign rallies.