Trump signed the omnibus/relief bill and then released a statement calling for changes to the bill. Please, somebody send him that Schoolhouse Rock video.

According to Mike Allen at Axios, SecTres Mnuchin and House Republican Leader McCarthy got Trump to cave with a combination of flattery and empty promises. I take it that when Trump signed the bill, he believed Senate Republicans would go ahead and pass the $2,000 benefit and eliminate the tech liability protection I wrote about a couple of days ago.  I will be very surprised if Senate Republicans even bother to go through the motions. At this point, they’re probably about as ready to get rid of Trump as are the rest of us.

Today House Democrats are planning to vote to override Trump’s veto of the annual defense bill and pass a stand-alone $2,000 benefit bill. The latter probably will be blocked again. I expect the override to pass and the Senate to support it also, but we’ll see.

Paul Waldman offers a recap of Trump’s latest episode:

Cementing his status as quite possibly the worst deal-maker ever to sit in the Oval Office, President Trump once again created a crisis, made some impulsive demands, then backed down at the last minute without actually obtaining anything other than some increased suffering for millions of Americans.

If there is a silver lining to any of this, Waldman continues, it’s that it shows us how weak Trump has become and how easy it will be for Congress, and the rest of us, to ignore him. I don’t believe there’s any critical legislation left for him to sign, which means not even Senate Republicans need him for anything any more. They might even prefer that he stay away from Georgia, although today Rupert Murcoch’s New York Post is telling Trump to give up on overturning the election to focus on Georgia.

Back to Waldman:

At The Week, Joel Mathis writes that Trump has learned nothing. “It is remarkable that he spent four years in the White House without showing any real growth in his ability to get stuff done,” Mathis says. A big part of Trump’s problem is that he has no patience or appreciation of process. All along he has treated the details of policy making as irrelevant. He wants to rule by edict, like a king — declare what he wants done and let the little people figure out how to do it — but Washington doesn’t work that way.

Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer at Politico:

THAT’S IT? President DONALD TRUMP made all this noise about the Covid relief and government funding bill only to sign it and get nothing in return?

TRUMP got taken to the cleaners.

WHAT A BIZARRE, embarrassing episode for the president. He opposed a bill his administration negotiated. He had no discernible strategy and no hand to play — and it showed. He folded, and got nothing besides a few days of attention and chaos. People waiting for aid got a few days of frightening uncertainty.

ZIP. ZERO. ZILCH. If he was going to give up this easy, he should’ve just kept quiet and signed the bill. It would’ve been less embarrassing.

Trump’s last hurrah will be on January 6, when we will hopefully see his last attempt to overturn the election fizzle out.

David Horsey, Seattle Times

At WaPo: Mass confusion over Trump’s endgame as Washington barrels toward shutdown, economic crisis.

A large spending bill that Congress passed last week must be signed into law by midnight on Monday in order to prevent many federal agencies from dramatically scaling back their operations. After Congress passed the bill, Trump posted a video on Twitter announcing his objections to it, claiming stimulus benefits were too small and that foreign aid was too excessive.

Since he posted the video on Dec. 22, White House aides have not offered any public briefings on Trump’s strategy or plans. Instead, Trump has issued a series of tweets reiterating his demand for changes but not saying much more. Vice president Mike Pence is in Vail, Colo. and has also been out of sight in recent days.

The consequences of inaction are immense.

Well, yeah. Immense and ruinous for everybody. See Countdown to shutdown: Here’s what happens if Trump doesn’t enact the stimulus law by midnight Monday. It’s bad. Back to the earlier WaPo article:

The White House has provided virtually no information about what its plans are to head off the potential economic calamity of a shutdown and the failure of the relief effort. A White House spokesman declined to comment when asked about the president’s intentions. Negotiations between congressional leaders and the White House appear to be at a complete standstill, and a back-up plan had not yet materialized as of Sunday afternoon.

All kinds of people, especially Republicans, in Washington are baffled over Trump’s inaction. Nobody does this.

“Everybody in the White House is trying to figure out what’s in Trump’s head, if this is a bluff or if he’s going to carry this out. He’s been confronted with all the facts and evidence,” said one person briefed by several White House officials over the weekend, speaking on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions. “Nobody knows what Trump is going to do. It’s a bizarre situation.”

By all accounts, Trump is still primarily obsessed with overturning the election he’s lost several times already. And I would say there’s no point expecting Trump to be rational. He’s like an abusive man. Abusers have to be in control, and when control is taken away from them — when the victim tries to leave — they become more dangerous.

“The statistics are that women in abusive relationships are about 500 many times more at risk when they leave,” said Wendy Mahoney, executive director for the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence. “Domestic violence is all about power and control, and when a woman leaves, a man has lost his power and control.”

Trump hit the jackpot of all big, shiny toys — he got to be president! — and now it’s being taken away from him, and he can’t deal. He can’t deal with losing the election. He can’t face the loss of status and power. He doesn’t understand why other people with power — senators, governors, Supreme Court justices — aren’t helping him keep what he wants. And if he can’t have what he wants, he’s going to hurt as many people as he can hurt while he can, before power is taken away from him. Nobody burns bridges more effectively than an abusive man who loses control.

So I don’t expect him to sign anything. I hope I’m wrong.

Nancy Pelosi says she’s going to make another attempt to pass a stand-alone $2,000 direct benefit tomorrow. As with the last attempt, this isn’t expected to pass. It’s about forcing Republicans to go on record opposing it. IMO if Republicans had half a brain they’d pass it and send it to Trump asap. He still might not sign the bill, of course.

Bill Barr is now gone. This analysis by David Graham on Barr’s departure is from December 14, but it’s still worth reading. Barr has been such a perfect toady. Before election day, he was making noises about voter fraud, and after the election he authorized federal prosecutors to investigate fraud claims. But at some point, there was a line Barr wouldn’t cross. We may never know what that line was. He stopped supporting the fraud claims. He’s out. Whatever Barr expected to accomplish with his lies and deceit and degradation of his office, all that is gone.

See also On His Way Out the Door, Barr Drops a Bombshell About the Durham Investigation by Nancy LeTourneau. In his last interview as Attorney General, Barr more or less exonerated the CIA and other intelligence agencies that investigated potential connections between the Trump campaign and Russia before the 2016 elections. The investigation was initiated for justifiable reasons, Barr said; the CIA was not out of line. For some reason, Barr decided he was done lying for Trump.

Another big loser here is Steve Mnuchin. Jeff Stein, WaPo:

The president’s denunciation of the agreement represented a stunning public broadside against his own treasury secretary, who for four years loyally shielded the president’s tax returns, endured repeated presidential tirades in private, and defended even Trump’s most incendiary and contradictory remarks. Through it all, Mnuchin had emerged with the unique ability to walk a tightrope between Trump and congressional leaders, serving as an emissary in difficult negotiations. That all ended on Tuesday, when Trump posted a video on Twitter ridiculing the agreement. …

…Mnuchin had described the bipartisan deal as “fabulous” one day before Trump called it a “disgrace.”

Update: The Mahablog magic works again. I am seeing reports that Trump signed the bill, although he still says the bill is a disgrace.

I hope you had a pleasant Christmas. Donald Trump appears to have had a pleasant Christmas. News stories say he played golf with Lindsey Graham on Christmas day. Then Miz Lindsey tweeted this:

After spending some time with President @realDonaldTrump today, I am convinced he is more determined than ever to increase stimulus payments to $2000 per person and challenge Section 230 big tech liability protection.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) December 26, 2020

The tech liability protection thing is in the defense funding part of the omnibus bill, I take it. I confess I haven’t followed this issue closely. There’s a discussion of it here. Righties want to revise Section 230, “a 25-year-old law that lets websites moderate third-party content as they see fit without being liable for that content (with a few exceptions). Simply put, you can sue a Twitter user if they tweet something defamatory about you, but you can’t sue Twitter.” In rightie world, social media companies should somehow be forced to publish content righties like no matter how inflammatory, dangerous, false, or libelous it is.  How removing liability protection would accomplish that eludes me, however.

Anyway, I say that if Trump wants to make a deal, give folks the $2,000 and strip out the tech liability protection and insist that he sign the damn bill asap. And be clear there will be no more negotiations with him. A lot of people lost unemployment benefits today. Millions will be in a world of hurt if this bill doesn’t become law, like, now. Before the end of the year, at the latest.

Unfortunately Trump is probably just delaying the bill so he can stay in the news. I wish there were some way to declare a news media embargo on him if he doesn’t sign the damn bill. That would probably be the one thing that would motivate him.

Joe Biden released a statement today that begins:

It is the day after Christmas, and millions of families don’t know if they’ll be able to make ends meet because of President Donald Trump’s refusal to sign an economic relief bill approved by Congress with an overwhelming and bipartisan majority.

This abdication of responsibility has devastating consequences. Today, about 10 million Americans will lose unemployment insurance benefits. In just a few days, government funding will expire, putting vital services and paychecks for military personnel at risk. In less than a week, a moratorium on evictions expires, putting millions at risk of being forced from their homes over the holidays. Delay means more small businesses won’t survive this dark winter because they lack access to the lifeline they need, and Americans face further delays in getting the direct payments they deserve as quickly as possible to help deal with the economic devastation caused by COVID-19. And while there is hope with the vaccines, we need funding to be able to distribute and administer them to millions of Americans, including frontline health care workers.

But for Trump, not signing the bill is the equivalent of holding his breath or screaming his head off until he gets want he wants. The problem is, he wants everything. If you made him emperor of the world, that still wouldn’t be enough. He’s like a black hole of neediness.

A day before unemployment benefits for millions of Americans were set to expire, President Donald Trump had a different insult in mind: his former-model wife has yet to appear on the cover of a fashion magazine as first lady.

“Fake news!” he complained on Twitter from Palm Beach, concerned for Melania’s social station on Christmas as Americans hunkered at home, enduring a holiday diminished by pandemic, darkened by the prospect of an imminent government shutdown and shaken by an eerie explosion in Nashville that authorities said was intentional.

A day later, as those jobless benefits for gig workers and self-employed Americans were lapsing, Trump was issuing a string of angry messages about his own perceived injustices: the election he falsely claims was stolen from him and the growing roster of people he’s upset won’t help him reverse it.

I understand he’s blamed Bill Barr, the CIA, Mitch McConnell, pretty much the entire Republican establishment, for his election loss. This is truly a temper tantrum for the ages. I don’t think in all of world history there’s been an explosion of sheer arrested emotional development that was this big or consequential.

. 

The graphic is a bit faded, but so are we all about now, I suspect.

Millions of Americans are facing eviction and hunger now, for no fault of their own. They had a brief bit of hope — next week there’d be a little money, extended unemployment benefits, an extended eviction moratorium — and now that’s been snatched away again. A better package in a few weeks, assuming there is one, is going to be too late for a lot of people. The help needs to come now. It just breaks my heart.

And Donald Trump played golf today.

Trump is angry at the world now. It would be like him to let people starve and freeze in the streets because he lost the election. There is speculation he’s going to stay in Florida and not come back to Washington, ever. He may very well blow off whatever duties he is supposed to attend to until the end of his term. I’m betting he doesn’t sign the bill, and it will die.

I just hope most Americans are told the truth about why this disaster happened. I fear they’re being told it’s Nancy Pelosi’s fault, somehow.

Greg Sargent thinks Trump will sign the bill, because Trump doesn’t want to disrupt distribution of the covid vaccines, which he considers to be his great achievement. He probably threw the bomb about the $600 payment just to get attention. I hope he’s right.

It’s not clear to me if a government shutdown would immediately disrupt vaccine distribution, but it probably wouldn’t be long before states run out of funds for distribution and begin to scale back vaccinations.

Amber Phillips writes that Trump really is out of options to take back the election. Maybe now that he’s away from the White House — and maybe not going back — he’ll come to terms with that and sign the freaking bill. But not before ruining a lot of Christmases.

Alex Isenstadt reports at Politico that Trump is now checking out the 2022 midterms and is preparing to support primary challengers to Republican incumbents he considers insufficiently disloyal to him. See also Greg Sargent, Republicans raging at Trump are getting exactly what they deserve. The Republican establishment must secretly hope Trump falls into a water hazard on his golf course and is eaten by an alligator.

I’ve long enjoyed Christmas Eve because of the way the world suddenly gets quiet in the evening. It’s push, hustle, shop right up until the sun sets, and suddenly the stores close and everyone goes home. This year there’s just the relentless, grinding passage of time and a lot of people staring into an abyss.

I do hope that wherever you are you have some cheer and company this holiday. And as always I appreciate all of you for helping me stay sane.

I never liked reality television shows that didn’t involve cute animals, like “Dr. Chris: Pet Vet.” But now we’re all stuck in one. I am not happy.

Along with yesterday’s shameful and disgraceful pardons, Trump apparently threw a fit over the frustrating relief bill and threatened to not sign it. Jordan Weissmann writes at Slate that Trump’s threat revealed he has no clue what the bill is.

So Donald Trump took a breather from plotting history’s most ineffectual coup on Tuesday night in order to toss a grenade into Washington’s holiday plans, tweeting a surprise video in which he announced he did not support the crucial coronavirus relief bill Congress passed earlier this week. Calling the legislation a “disgrace,” he complained that the $600 checks it included for most households were “ridiculously low” and asked Congress to increase them to $2,000.

It would have been nice if he’d done that several days ago.

Echoing deceptive criticisms that have circulated online over the past couple of days, Trump also criticized the coronavirus package for including unrelated spending like foreign aid to Egypt and Belize as well as funding for Asian carp removal. “It’s called the COVID relief bill, but it has almost nothing to do with COVID,“ he said. This is blatantly misleading; what actually happened is that for procedural reasons Congress inserted the coronavirus deal into a larger end-of-the-year spending bill necessary to keep the government open, which contains money for basic government efforts like fishery management. Unfortunately, our president is fundamentally a low-information Twitter and Fox News junkie, and according to the Washington Post, some of his aides who disliked the bill used the foreign provisions “as a way to turn Trump against the measure, knowing that American money going to other countries raises the president’s ire.” History, as usual, is playing out as farce.

My sense of things is that Trump’s cognitive abilities have deteriorated since the election, and of course they weren’t that great before the election. I wouldn’t call this a psychotic break; it’s more like dementia mixed with paranoia.

Sorry you killed the impeachment now, Mitch? See also Jonathan Chait, Trump Has Reached the ‘Railing Against Mike Pence’ Bunker Phase.

So how much damage can Trump do? Back to Jordan Weissmann.

In theory, lawmakers passed the COVID relief and government funding bill with enough votes to override a veto from the president. The problem is that it appears Trump could kill the legislation through a so-called pocket veto, which cannot be overturned, simply by choosing not to sign it before Congress ends its term in January. The next House and Senate would have to start over with a new bill, which could be a lengthy process.

This would not have been a concern if Capitol Hill had actually gotten its act together and sealed a relief deal earlier. Under Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution, the president has 10 days, not including Sundays—so basically the 18^th century equivalent of 10 business days—from the time he receives a bill to either sign or veto it. After that period, the legislation automatically becomes law unless Congress has already adjourned, in which case the bill dies. The problem is that the current Congress is set to end by noon on Jan. 3, meaning that even if lawmakers sent him the bill tomorrow, they will have to adjourn before the 10-day window runs out. Trump can kill the bill permanently without lifting a finger while he sits in bed at Mar-a-Lago binging on Newsmax. (And no, Congress can’t delay the end of its term; that would require passing a law.)

Yes, this would be just the time to fail to pass a spending bill and shut down the government. Greg Sargent:

Trump’s threat not to sign the deal makes a government shutdown more likely, and it puts congressional Republicans who supported it in a terrible spot. As one GOP observer noted, Trump “just pulled down the pants of every Republican who voted for it.”

There might be a silver lining to this, eventually, which is that it could help Democrats in the Georgia runoff elections.

Republican Senate candidates Perdue and Loeffler have run on being loyal to Trump and have refused to acknowledge that he lost the election. Will they now support the $2,000? Or go against Trump and stick with $600?

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi seized on Trump’s announcement to call for a stand-alone bill that would provide the $2,000 direct payment. The House plans to bring it up tomorrow, Christmas Eve.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, in a letter to Democrats, challenged Republicans to block the measures and said top Democrats were waiting to hear from Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, to see if there would be an objection from a House Republican. Any lawmaker willing to return to Washington in person can block the bill from moving forward by denying unanimous consent.

Make ’em be on the record, in other words.

Within minutes of Mr. Trump’s public opposition to the bill, Ms. Pelosi declared her agreement with the president’s call for $2,000 checks, as did Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and some of Congress’s most liberal members.

“We need to send a clean bill with just $2,000 survival checks and a separate spending/covid relief bill,” Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota and a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s ire, wrote Tuesday evening on Twitter, adding, “since Trump wants to sign a bill with survival checks, let’s send one to his desk right away.”

Of course, this measure will probably die in the Senate, because Mitch. But this is a great opportunity for Democrats to show America that Republicans killed it. And again, this has put Republicans in a real box.

The two Republican candidates in Georgia, Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, were already proclaiming passage of the coronavirus relief bill as a triumph, but they have also pledged fealty to the president, who called the bill a “disgrace.”

Still, a number of Republicans are likely to resist increasing the amount of direct payments after months of insisting that a relief package should be as small as possible. In the days before a bipartisan deal was struck, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, blocked attempts to raise the payments to $1,200.

Unemployment benefits are about to expire. Evictions are going to start. People are desperate. Mnuchin has been prancing around saying that people could start getting their $600 next week, but now that’s all in the crapper. Things could get really ugly really fast.

“Most working Americans don’t need a check right now,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, on “Fox and Friends” Wednesday morning. “It’s a really foolish, egg-headed left-wing socialist idea to pass out free money to people.”

If this is a reality TV show, and we have to vote somebody off the island, let’s make it Kentucky.

Whether you call it the flaccid stimulus bill or the frustrating relief bill, it appears there will be something passed no later than tomorrow. That’s assuming Trump doesn’t throw a wrench in the works.

[Update: The Mahablog magic strikes again — it was announced a deal has been struck just after I posted this.]

The poison pill provision introduced by Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R, PA) that would have tied the hands of the Federal Reserve has been watered down. Here’s the deal:

Mr. Toomey had sought to bar the Fed and Treasury Department from setting up any loan program similar to those established this year that have helped to keep credit flowing to corporate, municipal and medium-size business borrowers during the pandemic recession.

The agreed-upon alternative, offered by Mr. Schumer and still being drafted near midnight on Saturday, aides familiar with the process said, would bar only programs that were more or less exact copycats of the ones newly employed in 2020.

That sounds annoying but not catastrophic. Yet to be resolved:

Among the outstanding hurdles for lawmakers and aides racing to draft text was a push to expand a paid leave mandate set to lapse at the end of the year, how much money should be allocated to private and parochial schools and whether businesses should be allowed to deduct from their taxes loans given under a popular federal loan program, according to officials involved in the discussions.

However,

One of the potential remaining stumbling blocks is President Trump, who has largely been removed from the stimulus negotiations as he continues to attack the outcome of the Nov. 3 election and undermine President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. Shortly after midnight on Sunday, he tweeted his frustration with Congress for not yet acting on a stimulus and signaled that he would want larger direct payments than the $600 payments currently under discussion.

“GET IT DONE, and give them more money in direct payments,” the president wrote on Twitter.

I’d like to see a larger payment, too, but Mr. Stable Genius should be complaining to Mitch. And I am so happy I am not in Congress. I think at this point I’d be homicidal.

Elsewhere: There has been a lot of talk that Trump is losing it. We might wonder whether he ever had it. But there have been leaked accounts of oval office meetings that claimed Trump talked about martial law and appointing Sidney Powell special counsel to inspect Dominion voting machines. Dominion, meanwhile, has threatened Powell with a defamation suit.

See Peter Wehner, Trump Is Losing His Mind.

Given Trump’s psychological profile, it was inevitable that when he felt the walls of reality close in on him—in 2020, it was the pandemic, the cratering economy, and his election defeat—he would detach himself even further from reality. It was predictable that the president would assert even more bizarre conspiracy theories. That he would become more enraged and embittered, more desperate and despondent, more consumed by his grievances. That he would go against past supplicants, like Attorney General Bill Barr and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and become more aggressive toward his perceived enemies. That his wits would begin to turn, in the words of King Lear. That he would begin to lose his mind.

So he has. And, as a result, President Trump has become even more destabilizing and dangerous.

“I’ve been covering Donald Trump for a while,” Jonathan Swan of Axios tweeted. “I can’t recall hearing more intense concern from senior officials who are actually Trump people. The Sidney Powell/Michael Flynn ideas are finding an enthusiastic audience at the top.”

Trump today was retweeting crap from Gateway Pundit and a string of people I never heard of that claimed more votes were counted for POTUS than there are registered voters in the U.S. He’s not giving up. We may have to send in marshalls to haul him out of the White House after all. Fun!

The best stimulus? A job.

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) December 18, 2020

I can’t even.

This is juicy. Business Insider reported that Jared Kushner set up a shell company that siphoned off $617 million from the Trump campaign to parts unknown. I wasn’t able to read the Business Insider article because of the popups demanding that I subscribe, but I did pull out some blurbs:

Kushner directed Lara Trump, Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew John Pence, and Trump campaign CFO Sean Dollman to serve on the shell company’s board, the person told Insider.

American Made Media Consultants became the source of consternation for Trump’s own campaign staff, who were kept in the dark about its operations.

Despite its $617 million spending through AMMC, the Trump campaign publicly disclosed little information about the company, including how it used the money.

Here is a report on what BI reported from Daily Beast:

Mitch McConnell has budged just a tad on a mini-stimulus bill that includes direct payments, and yesterday CNN reported why.

During the call with GOP senators, McConnell noted that direct payments for individuals and families have become a major issue in the race.

“Kelly and David are getting hammered” on the issue, he said, according to a source who heard his remarks, a reference to incumbent GOP Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who are both facing off against Democratic challengers.

However, they’re talking $600 instead of $1,200 this time, which might seem like an insult to people who are months behind on house and utilities payments. There is also talk of $300 additional weekly unemployment benefits, but it’s not clear to me what might happen to people whose benefits are ending entirely. Beyond that, the negotiations are moving so fast, while still going nowhere, that it’s really hard to keep track of what’s in and what’s out.

Also, even if Congress manages to pass something before Christmas, there will almost certainly be a lapse in benefits to millions of workers. Emily Stewart writes for Vox:

After months of a will-they-or-won’t-they dance that’s left workers, businesses, and much of the economy in limbo, lawmakers yet again have a potential deal: a $748 billion proposal to help boost the economy as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on. While it may have some shortcomings — Democrats dropped state and local government aid from the main bill in exchange for Republicans dropping corporate liability protections — it’s not the worst deal in the world, and it does have new payments for the unemployed.

But there is a hiccup: Even if a bill passes, millions of workers will likely face a lag in receiving those payments while the regulators and states responsible for distributing them iron out the new process.

An estimated 4 million workers have likely already had their benefits run out, some of them for months, after they maxed out the number of weekly payments to them established by the CARES Act, the first stimulus package. However long it takes to get a new system up and running is how long they’ll have to wait before they get another check. Other programs expanded by the CARES Act are set to expire in December, and given the bureaucratic intricacies of the 50-state unemployment insurance system, the transition will probably be a messy one.

At this point, whether Congress passes its mini-relief bill or not, there will be massive evictions. There already is hunger, and that’s getting worse. Lots of people are probably going to try to get through the winter with the heat turned off.

But McConnell is only giving in to a bill to help Kelly and David. That’s because their opponents, Raphael and Jon, are running ads like this:

Kelly and David are selling themselves to voters as a “firewall” against “socialism,” Greg Sargent writes. If Mitch keeps control of the Senate, you can bet there will be no more relief/stimulus bills passed next year, no matter how many businesses close for good and how many families end up living in cars and shelters. But, by damn, Kelly and David will keep us all safe from socialists and antifa! Let’s remember what’s important!

Elsewhere

The Week reports that Trump still genuinely believes he won the election.

President Trump was privately coming to terms with his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, but he “has now reversed and dug in deeper — not only spreading misinformation about the election, but ingesting it himself,” CNN reports, “egged on by advisers like Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis who are misleading Trump about the extent of voting irregularities and the prospects of a reversal.” One adviser told CNN, “He’s been fed so much misinformation that I think he actually thinks this thing was stolen from him.”

Even the Electoral College formalizing Biden’s win “did not appear enough to shake Trump from his delusions of victory,” CNN says, “but it is adding urgency to a push by several of his advisers to gently steer Trump toward reality.” Discussions of Trump’s post-presidency future tend to go nowhere because Trump “all but shuts down,” CNN reports. “In his moments of deepest denial, Trump has told some advisers that he will refuse to leave the White House on Inauguration Day, only to be walked down from that ledge. The possibility has alarmed some aides, but few believe Trump will actually follow through.”

Oh, but it would be so much fun to see him evicted.

A food bank in the Cleveland area.

More reporting has revealed that Mitch had a come-to-Jesus meeting with Republican senators yesterday, and he told them they weren’t going to file any challenges to the presidential election results. So that’s that. Unless Ron Johnson or Rand Paul get the nerve to disobey Mitch, it won’t matter what the minority House Republicans might do. Congress will certify the election results on January 6.

Greg Sargent: