There are plans afoot to mess with the congressional tally of the Electoral College vote on January 5, the New York Times says.

But as the president continues to refuse to concede, a small group of his most loyal backers in Congress is plotting a final-stage challenge on the floor of the House of Representatives in early January to try to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory.

Constitutional scholars and even members of the president’s own party say the effort is all but certain to fail. But the looming battle on Jan. 6 is likely to culminate in a messy and deeply divisive spectacle that could thrust Vice President Mike Pence into the excruciating position of having to declare once and for all that Mr. Trump has indeed lost the election.

Overturning the election at that stage would require a majority vote in both houses of Congress, which isn’t going to happen. But it’s Mike Pence’s constitutionally appointed task to tally the votes of the states and announce the winner. What if he refuses? And if he does his duty, what does that do to his political future? Not that I care about Pence’s political future, but it’s a measure of Trump’s narcicissm that he would ask his vice president to commit political suicide.

Trump has also turned against Attorney General Bill Barr and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. Nobody gave more fawning deference to Trump that these two, but it wasn’t enough. And in yesterday’s street theater in Washington, pro-Trump protesters chanted “Destroy the GOP” and booed the Georgia Republican Senate candidates.

Nick Fuentes speaks to a crowd of Trump supporters and gets them chanting “destroy the GOP!” for failing to protect Trump from not getting a second term. pic.twitter.com/AUAqU402Dz

— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) December 12, 2020

This is radicalism worthy of la Terreur. And do not doubt these are dangerous people. If the Republican establishment has any sense left it will back away from Trump and Trumpism, now, to give people a couple of years to get over it before the 2022 midterms. Because there will be no such thing as being pure enough to appease these people. Even Trump may have to be careful they don’t turn on him eventually.

Last night a counter-protester was shot in Olympia, Washington, and several people in Washington DC were stabbed. This won’t stop any time soon.

On the streets in the District of Columbia last night.

Trump is throwing a Pity Party for the Ages on Twitter today. See also Imploding MAGA World Turns to Civil War Fantasies, Secession After Supreme Court Disaster. I understand Milo Yiannopoulos had a psychotic break on Parler.

And the Proud Boys have showed up in force in Washington, DC.

Hundreds of Proud Boys are marching in downtown D.C. Thousands are expected for pro-Trump protests today pic.twitter.com/vohgn8RenA

— Debbie Truong (@debbietruong) December 12, 2020

The leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, claimed to have been invited to the White House. The White House says Tarrio just took the public tour.

Trump swears he will fight on.  According to CNN, “Before the high court rejected his bid Friday, his campaign announced a cable ad buy to further his fraudulent claims about the election, and he clearly intends to try and meddle in Congress’ counting of the Electoral College results in January.” According to several reports, Melania wants to go home and is packing, already.

The Electoral College votes on Monday.

Trump, of course, is using the chaos to raise money and establish a post-presidential role for himself in the Republican Party. What the Republican Party is getting out of the deal isn’t clear. And we need to give serious thought about the 126 Republican members of Congress (listed at the end of this post) and the 18 state attorneys general who signed on to the embarassing Texas court challenge of other states’ elections.

The suit amounted to a loaded gun at the head of our democracy, said Chris Hayes.

If there is one potential silver lining to this sorry episode of U.S. history, it’s that a considerable portion of the political and media establishment is publicly recognizing that the Republican Party is no longer acting on behalf of the United States.

No one expressed this better than former Republican political consultant Steve Schmidt: “The Republican Party is an organized conspiracy for the purposes of maintaining power for self-interest, and the self-interest of its donor class.”

See also Paul Waldman, who writes that hatred of liberals is all that’s left of conservatism.

The Republican Party has proved that its hatred of liberals is so foundational that it will abandon any pretense of commitment to democracy, if democracy allows for the possibility that liberals might win an election. They have come to regard Democratic voters as essentially undeserving of having their will translated into power, no matter how large their numbers.  …

… Forget all that inspiring talk about the genius of the Framers and their vision for democracy; if having an election means that the people we hate might win, then the election must simply be nullified.

David Graham, The Atlantic:

It’ll have to be short today, but … this is fascinating. See Aaron Blake at WaPo, The Trump team throws in the towel on proving voter fraud.

Executive summary: The Trump Team is still claiming voter fraud, but they admit they have no proof. Get this:

Charles Pierce, Esquire, The Confederacy of Dunces Wants to Disenfranchise Millions of Americans

Today is supposed to be “safe harbor day,” the day states are supposed to have their election results settled and certified and their electors chosen. And I believe all have done so; I can’t find any exceptions. Trump’s lawsuits have continued to crash and burn. One of my Facebook friends quipped that our president-elect has won Georgia so many times they’re calling him Joseph Tecumseh Biden.

Naturally, the Attorney General of Texas has just filed another suit to overturn the election.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing four battleground states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — whose election results handed the White House to President-elect Joe Biden.

In the suit, he claims that pandemic-era changes to election procedures in those states violated federal law, and asks the U.S. Supreme Court to block the states from voting in the Electoral College.

Legal experts politiely call this suit a “long shot.” Others call it a “publicity stunt.” And “bonkers.” Note that AG Paxton is under investigation by the FBI for “bribery” and “abuse of office.”

At least AG Paxton is going through the courts. The Arizona Republican Party is calling for insurrection.

He is. Are you? https://t.co/OY8qxNMPxm

— Arizona Republican Party (@AZGOP) December 8, 2020

There was another Arizona Republican Party tweet that more explicitly called for killing Biden supporters, but that one was removed.

Greg Sargent makes a critical point:

What Republican voters think, or say they think, about who really won matters less than the fact that, as a consequence, they actively want their elected representatives to subvert our democracy and keep Trump in power illegitimately. …

…For instance, The Post reports, protesters have descended on the houses of the GOP state House speaker in Pennsylvania and the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, chanting, “Stop the steal.” Some have been armed.

That Pennsylvania official has received thousands and thousands of voice mails, prompting his office to describe the pressure on him as “intense.” And the Michigan secretary of state has said her 4-year-old child felt threatened.

More broadly, as Reuters reports, “Elections officials across the United States” have described a “tide of intimidation, harassment and outright threats.”

As always, the Republican Party pays no political price for this behavior.

To excuse the right-wing extremism, many have pointed out that Democrats have raised questions about past elections. The 2000 presidential election is a prime example. Yes, a lot of us think Al Gore was the rightful winner of that election. But I don’t recall anyone in the Democratic Party urging us to go out and start killing Republicans. There was some bitching and grumbling, Al Gore conceded, and then George W. Bush was inaugurated.

Michelle Goldberg recalls the nationwide pearl-clutching that went on after then White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was refused service at a restaurant, and after the homeland security secretary who had overseen child separations was yelled at by a customer in another restaurant.

These two insults launched a thousand thumb-suckers about civility. More than one conservative writer warned liberals that the refusal to let Trump officials eat in peace could lead to Trump’s re-election. “The political question of the moment,” opined Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal, is this: ‘Can the Democratic Party control its left?’”

Somehow, though, few are asking the same question of Republicans as Trump devotees terrorize election workers and state officials over the president’s relentless lies about voter fraud.

And in those previous cases, the perpetrators of the outrage were not Democratic Party officials but private citizens. Now actual Republican officials are calling for violence against Biden supporters. We’re supposed to just accept this as normal and justified.

And it keeps escalating.

Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, described her family’s experience this past weekend: “As my 4-year-old son and I were finishing up decorating the house for Christmas on Saturday night, and he was about to sit down and to watch ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas,’ dozens of armed individuals stood outside my home shouting obscenities and chanting into bullhorns in the dark of night.”

So far, what happened to Benson doesn’t appear to be turning into a big cultural moment. There’s no frisson of the new about it; it’s pretty routine for Trumpists to threaten and intimidate people who work in both public health and election administration.

Remember the St. Francois County public health director who was bullied into resigning? (You can read here what she went through.) I take it there has been no effort whatsoever to find out who threatened her. The bullies won.

Back to Michelle Goldberg.

Democrats have just won the popular vote in the seventh out of the last eight presidential elections. In the aftermath, analysts have overwhelmingly focused on what Democrats, not Republicans, must do to broaden their appeal. Partly, this stems from knee-jerk assumptions about the authenticity of the so-called heartland. But it’s also just math — only one of our political parties needs to win an overwhelming national majority in order to govern.

I like that “knee-jerk assumptions about the authenticity of the so-called heartland.” You don’t get any more “heartland” than St. Francois County, Missouri. Even the bullied county health official said “I know in my heart these are good people.” Oh, hell, no, they are not. They are ignorant thugs who get off on being thugs and who are allowed to get away with being thugs. This national myth of the virtuous all-American “heartland” versus the alien and corrupt “elitist coastal cities” has got to stop. I’ve lived among so-called heartlanders and in New York City, and while individuals vary on the whole I’ll take New Yorkers in a heartbeat.

Republican officials remain buffered from the consequences of their rhetoric. They continue to at least wink at, if not openly encourage, violence and lawlessnes, and they don’t have to answer for it. I believe all Democrats running for office this year were pushed to publicly state they don’t condone violent protests, but Republicans get a pass from news media and the general public at intimidation and threats of public officials.

If Republicans are facing consequences, it’s within their own ranks.

State party chairs are tearing into their governors. Elected officials are knifing one another in the back. Failed candidates are seizing on Trump’s rhetoric to claim they were also victims of voter fraud in at least a half dozen states.

If Trump’s attempts at overturning the election — which are ongoing, I should note — had succeeded, there would never be another normal election in this country again. However, it’s also the case that Lou Dobbs and Stephen Miller had a screaming fit at each other, which is worth something, I suppose.

But when’s it going to stop? Members of the Trump Administration are still dragging their feet at cooperating with the transition. Congressional Republican leadership is still refusing to acknowledge that Biden won the election. The election was five weeks ago. News outlets called it a month ago.

All kinds of excuses have been made for the GOP’s spineless deferral to Trump’s attempts at a coup. We’re all supposed to give them time to adjust. And for some reason only Democrats are ever held accountable for the bad actions of their supporters; that’s been true for a long time. But the Republicans are playing with fire, and we are not at all out of danger yet. We won’t be for a while.

We’re being slammed by the pandemic and are about to get slammed harder. Lots of states and cities are reinstating restrictions on businesses, especially bars and restaurants. Every day on the teevee news I see interviews of tearful small business owners who are on the edge of losing, or who have already lost, their businesses. And millions of Americans are heading into the holidays unemployed and over $5,000 behind on rent.

The business owners are angry at whatever government official ordered the restrictions, but they ought to be angry at Congress. People in the same fix in other countries are getting life support funds, but not here.

There is a stimulus bill in Congress. There is also an urgent need to pass a spending bill this week to avoid a government shutdown. It’s expected Congress will pass a one-week extension to that negotiations can continue.

If Congress doesn’t act by Friday, thousands of government workers considered nonessential would again be furloughed or forced to work without pay until the shutdown ends. A shutdown would likely have ripple effects, affecting everything from air travel to government health agencies handling the coronavirus pandemic.

National parks may close, airport operations could slow as workers are furloughed, and the paralysis could affect the economy, which has been battered by the coronavirus pandemic. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated tax revenue was down $2 billion in 2019 because the IRS had halted some operations during the shutdown.

So what’s holding it up?

Some of the biggest sticking points, according to a Democratic aide, revolve around immigration, as they have in years past – with funding for a wall along the southern border and immigrant detention beds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement – at the center of the dispute. Another hurdle is possibly adding language on police reform after a summer of protests over the killings of unarmed Black people, including George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Both sides then would have to agree come to an agreement on COVID-19 relief. The biggest hurdles revolve around money for state and local governments, a key item Democrats have insisted on, and liability protections for businesses, something Republicans have required in any relief bill. Though there is optimism growing on passing relief, Democrats and Republicans will have to quickly come to a deal so both chambers can pass a bill before Friday’s deadline.

The current stimulus bill under negotiation does contain $288 billion in assistance for U.S. businesses, it says here. This includes another round of funding for the Paycheck Protection Program. Another portion of the $288 billion is being set aside for restaurants. The bill also provides “another $300 per week from the federal government on top of their existing state unemployment benefits, assuming those have not been exhausted.” But what if those have been exhausted?

And then there’s the money for state and local governments, which Republicans have opposed, on the theory that only those bad Democrat states would get the money. Greg Sargent wrote last week:

Right now some of the states hurting the worst are red states. Whether Mitch McConnell cares, I do not know. What Mitch McConnell mostly cares about is liability protection for businesses, and that’s a sticking point for Democrats.

Here’s something I didn’t expect:

While the vaccine news is certainly welcome, let us not forget that for the next 45 days Trump and his appointees are still in charge. And this crew is known for making big promises and not delivering. We’re dealing with massive logistical challenges here that will take lots of knowledge and experience to sort out. Be afraid.

Heidi Przybyla, NBC News:

A panel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week announced its guidelines for the first phase of the most ambitious national vaccination campaign in modern history.

Yet beyond the guidelines advising states about how to deploy their vaccines — and a large Defense Department operation to deliver them — the Trump administration hasn’t prepared for a major federal role, a lack of planning that is causing significant anxiety among state and local health officials.

The distribution details are being left to states, so availability will depend a lot on your state government. As I live in Missouri, I am screwed. It will be a mess here.

The significant checklist of unmet federal responsibilities underscores the challenges ahead for President-elect Joe Biden, who inherits most of the burden for executing a successful nationwide campaign to vaccinate all Americans, potentially without the billions of dollars in additional funding that will be needed.

That’s the other thing. The states are broke, thanks to the pandemic and Trump’s abdication of federal responsibility. Congress allocated money to Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, but it’s not clear how that money is being spent.  My impression is that the Trumpers have already gone over budget mostly on buying up vaccine doses and other supplies for the stockpile, but more money will be needed to pay for distribution. So we may be about to shift from Operation Warp Speed to Operation Where’s the Bleeping Vaccine?

Jessie Hellmann, The Hill:

Public health experts say state and local governments are underfunded and unprepared for what is expected to be the largest vaccination campaign in U.S. history.

While the Trump administration has spent more than $10 billion supporting the development of COVID-19 vaccines, just $340 million has been allocated to agencies below the federal level to help with distribution efforts that will cost anywhere from $6 billion to $13.3 billion, according to various estimates. …

…“We knew vaccines would be in development, so it’s not a surprise we would need to build up the deployment system. Now we could be weeks away from the first doses going out, and we really haven’t invested in any of that work,” said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs at the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO).

“Things could have been done earlier without having to reach this level of emergency,” she added. “To not have put a single dime toward deployment of it is a real disservice.”

Congress could have allocated this money already, of course, but Mitch McConnell thinks states should just go bankrupt and everybody should just die already.

“I’m not getting a sense from Congress that there’s tremendous urgency on this,” said Topher Spiro, vice president for health policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP).

“This effort is going to be on par, or should be on par, with landing a man on the moon. It should be one of the largest efforts ever undertaken by governments, and it’s really important to get it right to restore faith in the government, and I don’t understand why Congress would nickel and dime this funding. There’s a huge risk of underfunding vaccine distribution, which would be catastrophic,” he added.

I think it’s safe to say there will be some catastrophes.

Part of the problem is that the Trump Administration has totally screwed up data collection. They recommend giving the vaccine to health care workers first, which is sensible, but the only distribution plan at hand is based on the adult populations of states. Public health expert Sema K. Sgaier writes in U.S. News that this will create winners and losers among the states.

This is why we should be concerned about Operation Warp Speed’s recently announced plan to deliver the first 6.4 million vaccine doses to states within 24 hours of Food and Drug Administration approval – not based on prioritized risk groups but on population.

Distributing the very first, precious supply of available vaccines based only on each state’s adult population will lead to unequal distribution of the vaccine among health care workers – our highest-priority population – due to the simple fact that some states have a larger share of health care workers than others. Why should your chances of getting vaccinated depend on whether you happen to be a nurse in West Virginia or Wyoming? For this reason, Operation Warp Speed’s plan to ignore the data on where priority groups live and work is neither fair nor strategic.

While 6.4 million doses may sound like a lot, it’s meager when you think about how many health care workers we need to vaccinate as soon as possible: Using the free, open-access vaccine allocation planning tool for states that we at Surgo Foundation developed in partnership with Ariadne Labs, we find that with the initial batch of 6.4 million doses announced by Operation Warp Speed, only 17% of our highest-priority health care workers will be covered.

Basically, the Trumpers are just dumping the mess on the incoming administration.

President-elect Joe Biden said Friday that the Trump administration had shared information with his transition team about distributing a vaccine to various states, but Biden said his team had not seen a “detailed plan.”

“There is no detailed plan that we’ve seen, anyway, as to how you get the vaccine out of a container, into an injection syringe, into somebody’s arm,” Biden said at an event in Wilmington, Delaware.
“It’s going to be very difficult for that to be done and it’s a very expensive proposition,” Biden said. He noted, “There’s a lot more that has to be done.”

Yes, there’s a lot more that needs to be done, and Trump’s incompetence will no doubt make vaccine distribution to take longer and be much more haghazard than it might have been. See also What We Know About the U.S. COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Plan.

Close-up medical syringe with a vaccine.

Today’s WTF? involves the Pentagon. Yesterday Politico reported this:

The White House removed nine members of the Pentagon’s Defense Business Board on Friday and installed people loyal to President Donald Trump in their place, including presidential allies Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie.

MSNB, also yesterday:

Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller installed two close allies of President Trump, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, to the Pentagon’s Defense Business Board Friday in an abrupt shake-up of the historically non-partisan advisory group.

Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, was fired from the 2016 campaign but remained close to the president. Both he and Bossie, the former deputy campaign manager, have been involved in the president’s efforts to discredit the results of the 2020 election.

Miller removed nine members of the board and replaced them with a total of 11 others, including Lewandowski and Bossie.

And the advisory board is what?

The board advises the defense secretary and deputy secretary on business management issues and is historically non-partisan. Members are not paid for their participation and serve no less than one year and no more than four years, according to the Pentagon’s website.

The SecDef, Chris Miller, replaced the previous SecDef in August. Miller is a former Green Beret and defense contractor who somehow got pulled into the Trump Administration. More than that I do not know.

This morning there were reports in several news sources that Miller was blocking the Biden transition team from defense intelligence agencies, but Miller has since strongly denied these reports. There was just some procedural issue that has since been cleared up, he says. Or else the Biden team was being blocked until the blocking got in the news.

But it does make me wonder why Trump is so keen to pack the Pentagon with a bunch of his loyalists, now that we’re near the end of his tenure. Is something being hidden? Have the loyalists been charged with destroying records?

And then there’s this — yesterday Trump ordered nearly all U.S. troops to be pulled from Somalia. Every time he issues sudden withdrawal orders the Pentagon argues with him about it. Maybe he wants people who won’t disagree with him.

Also today: Trump calls Georgia governor to pressure him for help overturning Biden’s win in the state. Kemp said no. Seriously, what else could he say?

Update: This explains some of it. Trump loyalist Kash Patel is blocking some Pentagon officials from cooperating with the transition.

Last night someone on MSNB observed that we’re suddenly hearing more from Dr. Anthony Fauci these days. Trump is too busy throwing his temper tantrum over the election to care what the task force is doing, I take it. Mike Pence is still the nominal head of the task force, but he appears to be more focused on the runoff elections in Georgia than in public health.

Dr. Fauci said today that we haven’t hit the Thanksgiving peak yet. And it’s bad enough already.

At least 2,857 new coronavirus deaths and 216,548 new cases were reported in the United States on Dec. 3. Over the past week, there has been an average of 180,327 cases per day, an increase of 8 percent from the average two weeks earlier. …

…As of Friday afternoon, more than 14,331,200 people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 277,600 have died, according to a New York Times database.

Case numbers are spiking across most of the United States, leading to dire warnings about full hospitals, exhausted health care workers and expanding lockdowns.

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic:

The safe assumption is that cases, hospitalizations, and deaths will all reach new highs before Christmas. The virus is simply everywhere. While the spring wave slammed into the Northeast and the summer surge swept over the South, the latest surge, while concentrated in the Midwest, is truly national. Almost every state has seen an increase in cases since September, and nearly 40 states saw COVID-19 hospitalizations reach record highs in the past three weeks. Right when Americans should have separated themselves from new exposures, millions of them shuffled and reshuffled themselves into new combinations of people. This epidemiological experiment seems destined to produce more deaths, more grieving, more illness, and more exhausted health-care workers, who were already on a “catastrophic path” before 9 million people filed through TSA checkpoints in the past week.

Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic:

The pandemic nightmare scenario—the buckling of hospital and health-care systems nationwide—has arrived. Several lines of evidence are now sending us the same message: Hospitals are becoming overwhelmed, causing them to restrict whom they admit and leading more Americans to needlessly die.

It’s not just covid patients; it’s anyone with a serious medical condition now who can’t get the treatments that usually would be available. Try real hard not to have a heart attack anytime soon.

This is what we were warned about last spring when they talked about bending the curve. The idea was not to keep the virus from spreading as much as it was to slow down the spread so that everyone didn’t get sick at once. But that’s out the window now. Meyer and Madrigal also write that hospitals have had to revise their standards of which covid patients are admitted, so that they take only the most acutely ill. A patient who might have been admitted a few weeks ago is now sent home.

I’m living in a state with a Republican governor who refuses to impose mask mandates. I’m back to sheltering in place. I can’t say I ever stopped sheltering in place, actually. All because of nitwits who refuse to take precautions because freedom.

Speaking of Republican governors, see Iowa Is What Happens When Government Does Nothing by Elaine Godfrey at The Atlantic. And then go see Charles Pierce’s commentary on Godfrey’s article, We’ve Been Headed Here Since Ronald Reagan Made His First Joke About ‘The Government’.

The piece, which is written just as well as it is reported, illustrates a complete abandonment of the public health by the state government of Iowa. It arraigns Republican Governor Kim Reynolds, whom it reports, “followed President Trump’s lead.” (Among other delights, Reynolds actively opposed efforts by some of the state’s mayors to take precautions, undermining local mask mandates as soon as they were imposed.) This, of course, left hospital workers hung out to dry. …

… This is beyond neglect. It is negligent homicide by ideology. Everybody in Iowa saw what was coming. The meat-packing plants have been hot zones for months. And everybody can see worse coming in the next several months.

So there we are. It didn’t have to be this bad, but it is this bad. Everybody be careful. We’re in for a rough few months.

Let’s talk about something positive. I don’t know much about economics, and what I do know I got from reading Paul Krugman’s column. So it’s very reassuring to me that Krugman says good things about the people Joe Biden has chosen for his economic team.

See also Krugman’s recent column, In Praise of Janet Yellen the Economist.

And then there’s Paul Waldman, Joe Biden Finds a Goldilocks Economic Team.

Today a group called The We the People Convention ran a full-page ad in the Washington Times (Sun Myung Moon, founder) calling for Trump to declare martial law and overturn the election. Here’s more from Gateway Pundit. This effort appears to be led by a Georgia attorney named Lin Wood.

Good morning.

Our country is headed to civil war. A war created by 3rd party bad actors for their benefit – not for We The People.

Communist China is leading the nefarious efforts to take away our freedom.@realDonaldTrump should declare martial law.https://t.co/h3Ym5ytMYt

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 1, 2020

Wood also tweeted today that Dominion Voting Systems is owned by “Communist China” through a Chinese affiliate of the Swiss firm UBS Securities. Here in Real World Land, Dominion was founded by a bunch of Canadians and has headquarters in Toronto and Denver. From what I could find out in a quick web search, Dominion is owned by its management and by Staple Street Capital, a private equity firm headquartered in midtown Manhattan. Apparently there are vast conspiracy theories connecting Dominion to all sorts of nefarious elements, including (as you’ve heard) the ghost of Hugo Chavez. Dominion should sue the socks off a few people, starting with Lin Wood. But let’s go on.

Speaking of lawsuits, former cyber security chief Christopher Krebs is considering legal action against Trump campaign attorney Joseph diGenova, who called for Krebs to be “taken out at dawn and shot.” You may remember diGenova as part of the legal team Toensing and DiGenova, which has been involved in right-wing plots going back years.

On the other hand, Bill Barr just released a statement saying the Justice Department has not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Even Barr has decided enough is enough. But Trump has a zombie army that will not be deterred, I fear. Barr may need a bigger security detail.

Ron Brownstein has a piece at CNN that compares Trump to Joe McCarthy. I have been thinking the same thing. Trump really is more like McCarthy than like Hitler, IMO. I realize that may be a subtle distinction. But like McCarthy, Trump is a, shall we say, unexceptional man who stumbled into genuine power. And it revealed him to be a monster, but not before doing a lot of damage to a lot of people. But the interesting part here is the relationship between the Republican Party and McCarthy and how much it resembles the relationship between the Republican Party and Trump.

In McCarthy’s era, most of the GOP’s leaders found excuses to avoid challenging conspiracy theories that they knew to be implausible, even as evidence of their costs to the nation steadily mounted. For years, despite their private doubts about his charges and methods alike, the top GOP leadership — particularly Senate Republican leader Robert A. Taft, the Mitch McConnell of his day — either passively abetted or actively supported McCarthy’s scattershot claims of treason and Communist infiltration.

McCarthy in his heyday was very, very powerful. A word from him could ruin somebody. At first McCarthy went after Democrats and career diplomats in the State Department, so he was useful to Republicans. But then he started on President Dwight Eisenhower and other figures in his administration. Still Republicans stayed silent. Then in March 1954 Edward R. Murrow at CBS had the guts to rip McCarthy apart in a See It Now episode. And later that year McCarthy imploded on national television during the Army McCarthy hearings. Support for McCarthy plummeted, and only then did Senate Republicans move to censure McCarthy. McCarthy did the Republican Party a huge favor when he died of liver damage caused by heavy drinking in 1957.

Trump hasn’t yet reacted to Bill Barr’s statement, but he’s been eviscerating Georgia’s Gov. Kemp so ruthlessly I almost feel sorry for Kemp. Any Republican official involved in certifying a contested state for Biden has been subjected to Trump’s wrath. Several have reported receiving death threats. Republicans are worried that Trump is going to cost them the Georgia Senate runoffs (please), but still they are afraid to correct him.

Greg Sargent:

Back to Brownstein at CNN:

“For me it’s the dog that hasn’t barked,” conservative strategist and Trump critic Bill Kristol says of the party’s silence about the President’s unfounded fraud claims. “This is as if we’ve had the Army-McCarthy hearings and everyone is just quiet. No one is rethinking anything.”

It took years for the GOP to unshackle itself from McCarthy, and even then the separation came only after a figure as formidable as Eisenhower, a sitting President and national hero, privately encouraged it.

As Kristol notes, with McConnell and other GOP leaders deferring to Trump so completely — and many in the GOP breathing a sigh of relief over the party’s surprisingly competitive performance in the House and Senate elections — it’s not clear where a critical mass of resistance to him might develop, despite his increasingly open attacks on basic pillars of American democracy.

“It was easier to get beyond McCarthy than it will be to get beyond Trump,” Kristol predicts.

I haven’t looked at it, but apparently there is some kind of “hearing” being shown on One America News in which people are testifying to seeing all kinds of fraudulent voting things going on in the contested states. Joe McCarthy didn’t have the advantage of “alternative” news. In 1954 there were four networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and DuMont). The Army-McCarthy hearings were broadcast gavel to gavel by ABC and DuMont. There were no other outlets, no social media, no filter bubbles, to present an alternative hearing or another version of what happened.

Meanwhile, the Washington Examiner is running a news scoop claiming that the USPS was delivering Biden campaign material but not Trump material. The story also claims all manner of mail-in ballots were lost, without noting that, if true, that probably hurt Biden more than Trump.

As it says here, beware the beginnings.

Viral photo by Joshua A. Bickel, Columbus Dispatch, of Ohio anti-restriction protesters.