Peter Beinert/NY Times:

Why Are There So Few Courageous Senators?

Here’s what we need to do if we want more Mitt Romneys and fewer Josh Hawleys.

Now that Donald Trump has been defanged, leading Republicans are rushing to denounce him. It’s a little late. The circumstances were different then, but a year ago, only one Republican senator, Mitt Romney, backed impeachment. In a party that has been largely servile, Mr. Romney’s courage stands out.

Why, in the face of immense pressure, did Mr. Romney defend the rule of law? And what would it take to produce more senators like him? These questions are crucial if America’s constitutional system, which has been exposed as shockingly fragile, is to survive. The answer may be surprising: To get more courageous senators, Americans should elect more who are near the end of their political careers.

This doesn’t just mean old politicians — today’s average senator is, after all, over 60. It means senators with the stature to stand alone.

WKRG:

Actions by GOP attorneys general could damage credibility

By supporting efforts to overturn the results of the presidential election, most of the nation’s Republican state attorneys general may have undermined their offices’ long-held special status in federal courts.

In December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed legal papers attempting to overturn the results of the presidential election based on unfounded claims of election fraud in four states that voted for President-elect Joe Biden. The Republican attorneys general for 17 other states made legal filings supporting his effort, which was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Daily Beast:

Fox News Launches ‘Purge’ to ‘Get Rid of Real Journalists’

Fox News on Tuesday fired the political editor who was tasked with defending the network’s election night decisions that especially angered President Donald Trump and his allies.

Politics editor Chris Stirewalt’s exit from the network coincided with the sacking of at least 16 digital editorial staffers, including senior editors. People familiar with the situation said the layoffs—a “blood bath,” as multiple Fox News insiders described it—were perpetrated by Porter Berry, the Sean Hannity crony now in charge of remaking Fox’s digital properties in the image of its right-wing opinion programming.

Lou Zickar/USA Today:

Centrist Republicans, speak up! We must take a stand against the insurrectionists

If you are a principled centrist or principled conservative, now is not the time to remain silent.

For as the tragic events on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol made clear, the divide in the Republican Party is no longer between the center and the right wing. The divide in today’s GOP is between the insurrectionist wing and everyone else.

David Leonhardt/NY times:

Underselling the Vaccine

And what else you need to know today.

Now a version of the mask story is repeating itself — this time involving the vaccines. Once again, the experts don’t seem to trust the public to hear the full truth.

This issue is important and complex enough that I’m going to make today’s newsletter a bit longer than usual. If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to email me at themorning@nytimes.com.

Right now, public discussion of the vaccines is full of warnings about their limitations: They’re not 100 percent effective. Even vaccinated people may be able to spread the virus. And people shouldn’t change their behavior once they get their shots.

These warnings have a basis in truth, just as it’s true that masks are imperfect. But the sum total of the warnings is misleading, as I heard from multiple doctors and epidemiologists last week.

“It’s driving me a little bit crazy,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown School of Public Health, told me.

“We’re underselling the vaccine,” Dr. Aaron Richterman, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, said.

“It’s going to save your life — that’s where the emphasis has to be right now,” Dr. Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine said.

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are “essentially 100 percent effective against serious disease,” Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said. “It’s ridiculously encouraging.”

But still, don’t change your behavior immediately. Iit’s a short term thing but keep your guard up until community spread drops.

Ronald Brownstein/CNN:

Trump leaves America at its most divided since the Civil War

The January 6 assault on the US Capitol capped four years in which Trump relentlessly stoked the nation's divisions and simultaneously provided oxygen for the growth of White nationalist extremism through his open embrace of racist language and conspiracy theories.

In the process, Trump has not only shattered the barriers between the Republican Party and far-right extremists but also enormously intensified a trend that predated him: a growing willingness inside the GOP's mainstream to employ anti-small-d-democratic means to maintain power in a country demographically evolving away from the party.

The result has been to raise the stakes in the ideological polarization of the parties that has been reshaping American politics for decades.

McKay Coppins/Atlantic:

The Coming Republican Amnesia

How will the GOP recover from the Trump era? Pretend it never happened.

As Donald Trump lurches through the disastrous final days of his presidency, Republicans are just beginning to survey the wreckage of his reign. Their party has been gutted, their leader is reviled, and after four years of excusing every presidential affront to “conservative values,” their credibility is shot. How will the GOP recover from the complicity and corruption of the Trump era? To many Republicans, the answer is simple: Pretend it never happened.

Monmouth University Poll:

Authoritarianism Among Trump Voters

Among panelists who reported voting for Trump in the 2020 election, just over 4 in 10 score in the highest quartile of the Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale when the original survey weights from the 2019 survey are applied. This leaves just over half of Trump supporters who are not classified as having high authoritarian inclinations. [It should also be noted that only a handful of President-elect Joe Biden’s voters in the panel have a high RWA score – too few to break out in this analysis.]

Dave A Hopkins/Honest Graft:

In the End, the Trump Presidency Was a Failure on Its Own Terms

Trump succeeded in preventing Hillary Clinton from leading the country, but he wound up empowering Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer instead. He railed against liberal elites who predominate within social institutions like universities, media organizations, and technology companies, but his time in office only saw a continued progression of leftward cultural change in American society and a parallel departure of highly-educated voters from the Republican Party. The conservative intellectual project has not suffered as much damage in many decades as it did over the past four years; conservative thinkers and writers were internally divided into pro- and anti-Trump factions, were exposed as holding a limited ability to speak for the conservative mass public, and were deprived by Trump's behavior of a precious claim to moral superiority over the left. And the fact that the Trump administration is leaving office complaining of being "silenced" and "canceled" by a multi-platform social media ban imposed on its leader is evidence enough of its lack of success in gaining influence over the tech sector.

A final, inadvertantly-acknowledged testimony to the failure of the Trump administration was its prevailing communication style. Both the outgoing president and his succession of spokespeople stood out for two distinctive traits: a lack of commitment to factual accuracy and a perpetually grouchy demeanor. The typical public statement from this White House was a misleading claim delivered with a sarcastic sneer. Of course, no member of the administration would admit on the record that the Trump presidency was anything less than a parade of unparalleled triumphs. But it doesn't make sense to lie so much unless the truth isn't on your side, and there's no good reason to act so aggrieved all the time if you're really succeeding as much as you claim.

Axios with a must-read:

Beginning on election night 2020 and continuing through his final days in office, Donald Trump unraveled and dragged America with him, to the point that his followers sacked the U.S. Capitol with two weeks left in his term. This Axios series takes you inside the collapse of a president.

Episode 1:  A premeditated lie lit the fire

Trump’s refusal to believe the election results was premeditated. He had heard about the “red mirage” — the likelihood that early vote counts would tip more Republican than the final tallies — and he decided to exploit it.

Episode 2: Barbarians at the Oval

Episode 2: Trump stops buying what his professional staff are telling him, and increasingly turns to radical voices telling him what he wants to hear.

Episode 3: Descent into madness ... Trump: "Sometimes you need a little crazy"

Episode 3: The conspiracy goes too far. Trump's outside lawyers plot to seize voting machines and spin theories about communists, spies and computer software.

Inquirer Editorial Board:

This MLK Day, Congress should remember Dr. King’s economic agenda

“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made this warning in his famous ”Beyond Vietnam” speech, exactly one year before his assassination on April 4, 1968.

In 2020, we’ve seen the “giant triplets” in full force. Militarized police forces crack down on racial justice protesters nationwide. The racially driven inequities in America’s provision of health care, as well as inequities in the social determinants of health such as housing and poverty, has made an allegedly “color blind” coronavirus much deadlier for Black people and people of color. And while renters faced eviction, business owners went bankrupt, and people rushed to food pantries, billionaires got richer. Each one of these economic hardships loomed larger and disproportionately impacted the lives of Black, brown, and Indigenous people.

Here is that new CRS piece:

The Impeachment and Trial of a Former President

January 15, 2021

For the second time in just over a year, the House of Representatives has voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump. The House previously voted to impeach President Trump on December 18, 2019, and the Senate voted to acquit the President on February 5, 2020. Because the timing of this second impeachment vote is so close to the end of the Trump Administration, it is possible that any resulting Senate trial may not occur until after President Trump leaves office on January 20, 2021. This possibility has prompted the question of whether the Senate can try a former President for conduct that occurred while he was in office...

The Constitution does not directly address whether Congress may impeach and try a former President for actions taken while in office. Though the text is open to debate, it appears that most scholars who have closely examined the question have concluded that Congress has authority to extend the impeachment process to officials who are no longer in office. 

Anand Ghiridharadas:

We are falling on our face because we are jumping high

A dash of perspective in a dark hour

It’s scary out there right now. It’s going to be scary for some time to come. What has been unleashed, what has been revealed, is ugly. It is what makes democracies die.

In the despair, it is easy to lose perspective. I certainly do all the time. But from time to time, I step back and try to remember where we are as a country on the arc of things.

And I see then that this is both a very dark time and, potentially, a very bright time. It's important to hold these truths together.

When I look down at the ground of the present right now, I feel depressed. If I lift my head to the horizon, I see a different picture.

This is not the chaos of the beginning of something. This is the chaos of the end of something.

Daniel Dale/CNN:

The 15 most notable lies of Donald Trump's presidency

Trying to pick the most notable lies from Donald Trump's presidency is like trying to pick the most notable pieces of junk from the town dump.

There's just so much ugly garbage to sift through before you can make a decision.

But I'm qualified for the dirty job. I fact checked every word uttered by this President from his inauguration day in January 2017 until September 2020 -- when the daily number of lies got so unmanageably high that I had to start taking a pass on some of his remarks to preserve my health.

Forbes:

Fox News Viewership Plummets: First Time Behind CNN And MSNBC In Two Decades

"The unified wall of support for Trump has splintered after last week's assault on the Capitol," said Mark Lukasiewicz, a former TV executive and who now serves as Dean of Hofstra's School of Communication. "Tristan Harris famously said that social networks are about 'affirmation, not information' — and the same can be said about cable news, especially in primetime."

Alexandra Petri:

Now is not the time to point fingers, Julius Caesar. Now is the time for healing.

Julius Caesar, these Ides have been stressful for everyone, and I think the last thing the Roman people need right now is for you to be pointing fingers — at Brutus, at me, or at anyone, as you clutch at yourself and sink onto the Senate steps.

Now is not the time to cast blame and call out names. Now is the time for healing. Please stop bleeding on my toga; that is a sad reminder of a hurtful time I hope we can put behind us. The last thing we need is to be thinking about the past, when I have already dropped my dagger, forgotten every threatening or negative thing I ever said, and am, frankly, ready to move on. Now is the time to come together, for the good of Rome.

For someone who always made a big point of how he was uniting Rome, and who historically was so fond of Brutus, you certainly seem bent on dividing us and making Brutus look bad with your remarks now! “You too, Brutus?” Seriously?

We must focus on the future, Julius, and get back to the people’s business. The Roman people didn’t elect us (technically, the sentence could stop there!) to stand around engaging in pointless recriminations about who stabbed whom with what dagger concealed under whose toga. Ultimately, aren’t both sides at fault here? We can certainly agree that if you had not come to the Senate today, no one would have been stabbed. I’m just saying this to show we all bear some responsibility.

And your final piece:

That’s too bad. 

Greg Sargent/WaPo:

A leaked intelligence memo suggests Trump’s lies could incite more violence

Not long after President Trump earned the crowning distinction of becoming the first U.S. president to get impeached twice, he released a video in which he went further than ever in calling for an end to post-election violence. But here’s what Trump did not say:

First, that Joe Biden is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. Second, that Trump’s own big lie to the contrary was the singular cause of the deadly mob assault on the Capitol — and is perhaps the fundamental reason we face the threat of more right-wing insurgent violence to come.

A new federal intelligence bulletin that I’ve obtained underscores the stakes of this omission: It flatly warns that the lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent could be a key inspiration of domestic extremist violence going forward.

The Jan. 13 memo doesn’t cite Trump or his role in spreading this lie, but, of course, Trump has relentlessly promulgated it for months.

WaPo:

Biden unveiling $1.9 trillion economic and health care relief package

Proposal is aimed at addressing the nation’s immediate needs; larger recovery package to follow

Poised to inherit a health-care disaster and a deteriorating economy, President-elect Joe Biden is laying out a $1.9 trillion emergency relief plan Thursday night that will serve as an early test of his ability to steer the nation out of the pandemic disasters and make good on his promises to unite a divided Congress.

The wide-ranging package is designed to take aim at the twin crises Biden will confront upon taking office Jan. 20, with a series of provisions delivering direct aid to American families, businesses, and communities, and a major focus on coronavirus testing and vaccine production and delivery as the pandemic surge continues.

Christian Vanderbrouk/Bulwark:

Make. Them. Testify.

Call the Trump officials who resigned in protest to testify at the impeachment trial.

The people closest to Donald Trump knew the risks.

For years, Trump and his most ardent supporters threatened their opponents with violence, insurrection, secession, and even civil war.

Some of his closest aides and establishment enablers gambled that such outcomes might be avoided, that they might escape the Trump administration with their reputations and career prospects enhanced. Or at least intact.

“There’s safety in numbers,” they may have told themselves. “I made the best of a bad situation and advanced causes I believe in.” “My hands are cleaner than others. I wasn’t part of the corruption, the child separation policies, the plot against democracy.”

But this was delusional because this was never a gamble. It was a Faustian bargain. And now some of them are trying to get out of it.

AJC:

Election deniers in state Senate stripped of chairmanships

It’s payback time. The Republican rift in the state Senate came to a head Tuesday when Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan demoted three Republican senators who have backed attempts to overturn the presidential vote in Georgia over baseless allegations of irregularities.

When the bloodletting was over, state Sens. Brandon Beach of Alpharetta, Matt Brass of Newnan and Burt Jones of Jackson were sapped of their political influence on the second day of the winter session.

As our AJC colleague Maya T. Prabhu reports, Duncan stripped Beach of his chairmanship of the Transportation Committee, while Jones will no longer lead the Insurance and Labor Committee. Neither will serve as even a rank-and-file member on the two panels they once led.

Isaac Chotiner/New Yorker:

Learning from the Failure of Reconstruction

To better understand the lessons of Reconstruction for our times, I recently spoke by phone with Eric Foner, an emeritus professor of history at Columbia, and one of the country’s leading experts on Reconstruction. During the conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed the use of Confederate imagery by those who stormed the Capitol, balancing unity and punishment in the wake of terror, and the historical significance of the two Georgia Senate runoffs.

The most common historical parallel over the past four years has been to European fascism, for a variety of reasons. But there have also been references to American history going back to Jim Crow and the Civil War. How does what we’ve seen in the past week, and specifically what we saw on Wednesday, fit into the larger American story and make those American comparisons especially vivid or interesting in your mind?

Well, I guess the sight of people storming the Capitol and carrying Confederate flags with them makes it impossible not to think about American history. That was an unprecedented display. But in a larger sense, yes, the events we saw reminded me very much of the Reconstruction era and the overthrow of Reconstruction, which was often accompanied, or accomplished, I should say, by violent assaults on elected officials. There were incidents then where elected, biracial governments were overthrown by mobs, by coup d’états, by various forms of violent terrorism.

NPR:

These Are The 10 Republicans Who Voted To Impeach Trump

Ten Republicans crossed President Trump on Wednesday and voted to impeach him for "incitement of insurrection."

It was a historic vote and one that came exactly a week after a pro-Trump mob laid siege to the U.S. Capitol after attending a Trump rally on the Ellipse outside the White House. The Capitol was ransacked and occupied for hours, and, in the end, five Americans died and many others were injured as a result.

The 10 House members who voted to impeach Trump don't cut a singular profile. They come from a range of districts, from coast to coast, some representing places Trump won handily in 2020, while others are in more moderate seats.

Tom Nichols/USA Today:

Trump impeachment: No unity until his morally bankrupt defenders get over him and repent

The people who have supported Trump need to come to terms with what they’ve done and with what they’ve allowed to happen — or it will happen again.

This is moral charlatanism and I say to hell with it.

It is almost impossible to comprehend the sheer moral poverty of the people calling now for unity. Elected Republicans now admit they fear for their physical safety from their own constituents, but instead of thunderous defenses of the Constitution, we have soft mewling from people like Sen. Marco Rubio and his Bible-Verse-A-Day tweets, or the head-spinning duplicity of Sen. Lindsey Graham, who within days of saying “count me out” of any further sedition was jollying it up with the president on Air Force One.

Yascha Mounk/CFR:

After Trump, Is American Democracy Doomed by Populism?

President Donald J. Trump is an authoritarian populist. And one of the key characteristics of populism lies in a leader’s belief that they, and they alone, truly represent the people.

That explains why Trump has kept clashing with democratic institutions over the course of his presidency. Whenever he ran up against the limits of his constitutional authority, he balked at the idea that somebody else—a judge, a bureaucrat, or a member of Congress—could tell him what to do. In his mind, only he had the right to speak for the country.

This helps to make sense of the storming of the Capitol. On one hand, it was a terrible surprise. Before January 6, nobody had expected that a mob of insurrectionists could so easily enter “the People’s House.” But on the other hand, it was a fitting end point for Trump’s presidency: the mob was incited by the populist president of the United States—and that president incited it to action because somebody who believes that he, and only he, represents the people could not possibly accept the legitimacy of an election he lost.

NBC:

This chaotic moment has one root cause: Trump's refusal to accept his loss

First Read is your briefing from "Meet the Press" and the NBC Political Unit on the day's most important political stories and why they matter.

The president begging Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn the election results … More than 140 House and Senate Republicans objecting to the Electoral College count … Trump addressing supporters in Washington (“You will have an illegitimate president … And we can't let that happen.”) … Many of those supporters later storming the Capitol … Trump saying that he won’t attend the inauguration (and getting banned from Twitter) … The drafting of articles of impeachment … And now authorities warning of more armed protests.

All of these events have taken place in just the last 10 days.

And of all them have a simple root cause — the president of the United States refusing to concede an election he clearly lost. (Yes, he acknowledged there would be a new administration and a transition of power, but that’s as far as he’s gone.)

We still need to work on whether there were higher-ups involved with Wednesday’s abysmal law enforcement response.

Richard North Patterson/Bulwark:

The Political Context of the Assault on the Capitol

Bonfires of grievance and dispossession in a country riven by alternate realities.

Demographic sorting and racial and cultural antagonisms have enlisted Trump’s base in a zero-sum war of subjugation against antagonists most will never meet, but with whom they can never compromise. A society so polarized cannot deal with its most urgent problems—or even acknowledge what they are.

Amid the ravages of COVID this schism has turned deadly: The resistance to public health measures has become a form of suicide which doubles as a lethal attack on others. More broadly, the political stasis bred of division is killing our capacity to master our collective future. Inevitably, such a system will disintegrate—or explode.

The paralysis reflects a deeper social pathology with multiple tributaries—the toxins of racial and cultural estrangement; the disintegration of communal bonds; the proliferation of mind-numbing misinformation; the accelerating gaps in wealth and opportunity; the increasingly ossified class system—which, in turn, erode faith in democracy as a means of resolving our problems. Running through this is the crabbed doctrine of shareholder capitalism which reduces human beings to disposable units of production divorced from the conditions that give life dignity: health, safety, security, opportunity.

Nicholas Grossman/Arc Digital:

F*** You, Ted Cruz

You un-American, anti-democracy, lying sack of sh*t

“Liar or believer?” is often hard to answer. Trump-loving Congressmen Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan, Fox personality Sean Hannity, MAGA “youth activist” Charlie Kirk, and President Trump himself seem to really believe some of it (though can’t possibly believe it all).

With Ted Cruz it’s easy. There’s no doubt that the Republican Senator from Texas is fully aware that Trumpist claims of mass voter fraud are complete and utter bunk. He’s a Harvard-educated attorney, clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and taught law at UT Austin. He knows that Team Trump lost 61 court cases in their effort to overturn state election results, winning only one (a Pennsylvania case with no effect on the outcome). He knows, contra Trump’s whining, that lack of standing is a perfectly legitimate reason for courts to reject a case. And he knows that the time for legal challenges is over now that states have recounted and audited their votes, and certified Electoral College results.

Nicholas Grossman/Arc Digital:

QAnon Woke Up the Real Deep State

An open letter to QAnon, “stop the steal,” and other communities involved in the Capitol attack

To the QAnon community, and others involved in storming the Capitol:

The Deep State is real, but it’s not what you think. The Deep State you worry about is mostly made up; a fiction, a lie, a product of active imaginations, grifter manipulations, and the internet. I’m telling you this now because storming the Capitol building has drawn the attention of the real Deep State — the national security bureaucracy — and it’s important you understand what that means.

You attacked America. Maybe you think it was justified — as a response to a stolen election, or a cabal of child-trafficking pedophiles, or whatever — but it was still a violent attack on the United States. No matter how you describe it, that’s how the real Deep State is going to treat it.

The impact of that will make everything else feel like a LARP.

LARP is live action role-playing. After a few more repetitions, i won’t need to keep defining it.

Emily Gorcenski/Twitter:

Here's the challenge with disrupting militia plots: most militia dudes are Dunning-Kruger levels of incompetent, but not Dunning-Kruger levels of dangerous. 

So the problem is that militia culture is wrapped up in this sort of virtue signalling nonstop. It's all around trying to project yourself as a leader, a military expert, a tactical master, based entirely on what you've read in Tom Clancy novels 

So a militia might say things like, alright, here's the plan. We're gonna get 1000 guys, and we're gonna set up a barricade at each of the three entrances to the statehouse, and then we're gonna neutralize the security forces. 

Super scary stuff! Just one problem. Where are they gonna get 1000 guys? How are they going to implement a Command and Control structure for 1000 guys? What are they gonna make the barricades out of? 

Kurt Bardella/USA Today:

Trump doesn't deserve post-presidential benefits. Remove him and ensure he won't get them.

In spite of the U.S. Capitol siege incited by President Donald Trump, Republican leaders in Congress continue to oppose any meaningful action to hold him accountable for his seditious conduct. They seem to think that in spite of his dangerous and undemocratic behavior, he should still be the beneficiary of taxpayer-financed perks for the rest of his life.

It has become clear that Republicans are trying to run out the clock on the Trump presidency, using his short-timer status to justify their inaction. “I firmly believe impeachment would further destroy our ability to heal and start over,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy maintained that impeaching Trump so close to the end of his term "will only divide our country more.”

For the record, I don’t remember Republicans in Congress worrying about healing the country when they created the Select Committee on Benghazi for the sole purpose of undermining Hillary Clinton, the Democrats' leading presidential prospect in the runup to the 2016 race. Does this mean that if there was more time in the Trump presidency,  they’d magically be for impeaching him? Last time I checked, they had the chance to impeach him a year ago, and they refused.

Dan Kois/Slate:

They Were Out for Blood

The men who carried zip ties as they stormed the Capitol weren’t clowning around.

I can’t stop thinking about the zip-tie guys.

Amid the photos that flooded social media during Wednesday’s riot at the Capitol—shirtless jokers in horned helmets, dudes pointing at their nuts, dumbasses carrying away souvenirs—the images of the zip-tie guys were quieter, less exuberant, more chilling. And we’d better not forget what they almost managed to do.

It’s easy to think of the siege of the U.S. Capitol as a clown show with accidentally deadly consequences. A bunch of cosplaying self-styled patriots show up, overwhelm the incomprehensibly unprepared Capitol Police, and then throw a frat party in the rotunda. The miscreants smear shit on the walls and steal laptops and smoke weed in conference rooms. Someone gets shot; someone else has a heart attack, possibly under ludicrous circumstances. When they finally get rousted, they cry to the cameras about getting maced.

Olivia Nuzzi/New York:

Senior Trump Official: We Were Wrong, He’s a ‘Fascist’

Advisers have expressed concern and anger over Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, whose actions have been perceived as an effort to secure employment with Trump in his post-presidency, perhaps at the Trump Organization.  “Jared has been telling people, ‘Don’t even deal with him anymore,’” one adviser said. “Mark’s responsible for bringing kook after crazy after conniver after Rudy into the West Wing.” A former senior White House official said, “Morale plummeted under him, huge mistakes were made — and now he’s scrambling to stick around after. He’s a dishonest asshole who pretends to be this religious Southern gentleman. Fuck that.”

The senior administration official put it this way: “The only way it gets to this point are a thousand really bad small decisions. The first time Sidney Powell calls the White House switchboard and is allowed to speak to the president, the next thing you know she and others are in the West Wing — these are areas where the chief of staff has unilateral authority to do what he wants to do.” Instead, the official said, Meadows tells Trump what he wants to hear, and often calls whomever Trump has directed him to call, repeats what Trump told him to say, and then apologizes, explaining that he just needs to be able to tell the boss that he followed his orders.

Facebook and Instagram have banned Donald Trump, and Twitter has frozen his account. Sen Schumer and Speaker Pelosi have called for the 25th Amendment, or failing that, impeachment.

Elaine Chou and Betsy DeVos have resigned (too cowardly to invoke the 25th?). And Donald Trump is sorry as the House moves to impeach.

Welcome to Friday. 

WSJ editorial board:

Donald Trump’s Final Days

The best outcome would be for him to resign to spare the U.S. another impeachment fight.

Adam Davidson/Twitter:

I woke up furious. I have received so much anger from old friends at NPR and the NYT for warning them, telling them, and, yes, sometimes publicly tweeting about how their coverage is normalizing Trump and his followers, legitimizing their lies and downplaying the crisis.  

Yesterday's crisis was created by Trump and his followers. And yesterday showed that many journalists are willing to state that some actions by an elected leader are unacceptable. But they will return to institutional cowardice.

“That is the overwhelming sentiment of my caucus,” from her presser yesterday.

WaPo on LARPing (live action role play):

Internet detectives are identifying scores of pro-Trump rioters at the Capitol. Some have already been fired.

As he strolled past gold-framed portraits of past Congressional leaders, one rioter who stormed the Capitol in a pro-Trump mob on Wednesday wore a red Trump hat, a commemorative sweatshirt from the president’s inauguration and a lanyard around his neck.

When a photo of him went viral, it didn’t take Internet sleuths long to realize that the lanyard held his work badge — clearly identifying him as an employee of Navistar Direct Marketing, a printing company in Frederick, Md.

On Thursday, Navistar swiftly fired him.

He’s not alone among the rioters who wreaked havoc in Congress. While police and the FBI work to identify and arrest members of the mob, online detectives are also crowdsourcing information and doxing them — exposing the rioters to criminal prosecution, but also more immediate action from their bosses.

USA Today editorial:

Invoke the 25th Amendment: Donald Trump forfeited his moral authority to stay in office

Our View: By egging on a deadly insurrection and hailing the rioters, the president's continuance in office poses unacceptable risks to America

This month, time is short, and Trump retains considerable support among congressional Republicans. Shamefully, even after Wednesday’s insurrection, 139 representatives and eight senators backed Trump’s efforts to overturn the will of the voters in Arizona and Pennsylvania.  

That leaves the 25th Amendment, which sets out procedures for replacing an unfit president.  

EE News:

Biden climate team says it underestimated Trump's damage

Some climate moves can't happen until Biden officials remedy those deficiencies, a senior transition official said, because "those have been very carefully directed budget cuts to the very parts of the [EPA] that are going to be necessary to get rid of [Trump's] outrageous rollbacks."

For instance, the official said, EPA's research laboratories have been hollowed out, and its science advisory boards have been depopulated. At the operational level, each of Trump's rollbacks has shuffled the staff and funding that had been in place to carry out regulations.

The EPA workforce has shrunk by more than 600 people since the beginning of Trump's term, another source familiar with the agency review process said.

That's on top of the agency's moves to restrict the kinds of public health research that EPA can use for regulations, and its watering down of the social cost of carbon, the government's metric for analyzing the benefits of emissions cuts.

NY Times:

Trump Is Said to Have Discussed Pardoning Himself

The discussions occurred in recent weeks, and it was not clear whether he has brought it up since he incited supporters to march on the Capitol, where some stormed the site.

In several conversations since Election Day, Mr. Trump has told advisers that he is considering giving himself a pardon and, in other instances, asked whether he should and what the effect would be on him legally and politically, according to the two people. It was not clear whether he had broached the topic since he incited his supporters on Wednesday to march on the Capitol, where some stormed the building in a mob attack.

Mr. Trump has shown signs that his level of interest in pardoning himself goes beyond idle musings. He has long maintained he has the power to pardon himself, and his polling of aides’ views is typically a sign that he is preparing to follow through on his aims. He has also become increasingly convinced that his perceived enemies will use the levers of law enforcement to target him after he leaves office.

KHN:

In Los Angeles and Beyond, Oxygen Is the Latest Covid Bottleneck

It’s gotten so bad that Los Angeles County officials are warning paramedics to conserve it. Some hospitals are having to delay releasing patients as they don’t have enough oxygen equipment to send home with them.

“Everybody is worried about what’s going to happen in the next week or so,” said Cathy Chidester, director of the L.A. County Emergency Medical Services Agency.

History will not be kind.

Greg Sargent/WaPo:

Democrats are drafting new impeachment articles. Inaction is increasingly untenable.

Some Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are circulating drafts of new articles of impeachment directed at President Trump for his role in inciting the violent mob assault on the Capitol, a Democratic aide tells me.

It’s unclear whether these will get a vote, or whether they’re intended to pressure members of Trump’s Cabinet to seriously consider removing Trump via the 25th Amendment. Judiciary Committee Democrats have already signed a letter urging Vice President Pence to proceed with that process.

And Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who will be senate majority leader in the new Congress, has now called for the 25th Amendment to be invoked, adding in a statement: “If the Vice President and the Cabinet refuse to stand up, Congress should reconvene to impeach the president.”

The new articles of impeachment circulating among House Judiciary Democrats argue that Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors and violated his oath to defend the Constitution and faithfully execute the office of the presidency by inciting Wednesday’s violence.

Max Boot/WaPo:

Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy have led Republicans to disaster. They must go.

In 2016, Never Trumpers predicted that by nominating an ignorant and egomaniacal bigot, the Republican Party would lead the country and itself to ruin.

The consequences have proved far worse than even President Trump’s opponents could have predicted. Who, after all, could have imagined that more than 360,000 Americans would die during Trump’s last year in office because of his catastrophic mismanagement of a pandemic? Or that the U.S. Capitol would be invaded by a mob of Trump supporters?

But the political consequences for the Republican Party have not been as dire as they should have been. Until now.

Aaron Astor on this NYT “How Joe Biden Won the Presidency” piece:

Good piece of reporting overall. Takeaways:

1. Biden himself was more important to the campaign's direction than generally thought
2. Twitter isn't real life
3. The pandemic "helped" bc it underscored Biden's already-developed "healing" theme
4. GA>NC>FL

"We won, and it was because of what my folks did" is so much better than "we lost and it's because of what you folks did".

Jonathan Chait/New York:

The End of an Error

This country was always better than Donald Trump.

Trump has been fanatical on the subject of portraying his shocking election in the cloak of an imagined popular mandate. It is why he instructed his press secretary to tell farcical lies about his inaugural crowds, why he has circulated misleading maps showing the vast land areas occupied by his supporters, and why he has depicted his enemies as an elite and alien force. They needed to depict Trump as the true representative of the volk.

In a strange way, liberals needed to believe this, too. The shock of Trump’s election provoked a crisis of self-confidence for his opponents. Humans have an innate need to believe events with profound importance must have profound causes. Trump’s success must reveal some vast and terrible secret. They — Trump’s America — must be, if not more numerous, then at least more authentic, bound together by a secret bond inaccessible to the rest of us. Trump benefitted from polling errors both in 2016 and 2020 that imbued him with a mystical aura, a wizard possessing a secret connection to the heartland that was invisible to the elite.

The simple truth is that was all a mistake — a ghastly, deadly mistake, the toll of which will linger for decades. The precise causes have all been exhumed: bad decisions by Hillary Clinton, an easily manipulated press corps, the FBI, the GRU, the Electoral College sorting out the votes just so.

More from Aaron:

I keep coming back to how hard it is to unseat an incumbent President. Ultimately it was Trump himself who flubbed the Presidency away. Each misstep added up. Not one single incident - a bunch of failures on pandemic and Floyd protests pushed enough non-Twitter people away.

 

There absolutely was a reservoir of support for Trump that could have carried him over the top - every incumbent carries it (think of Ford nearly winning 1976; W in 2004 & Obama 2012 each beating their poll numbers in the end). So Biden had to take advantage of each Trump error. 

This is especially true for a challenger running on a "restoration" campaign and not on a "new direction" theme. It would be more important to get all anti-Trump voters to vote than to create whole new groups of supporters who might flake out in the end. JOMD helped on that end. 

Politico:

‘This f---ing virus’: Inside Donald Trump’s 2020 undoing

How Biden prevailed and Trump fell short in an unforgettable election, according to conversations with 75 insiders.

Trump was perplexed. The economy was strong. The president had built an enormous political infrastructure and was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. That month, Trump’s campaign conducted a $1.1 million polling project showing him leading prospective Democratic challengers even in blue states such as Colorado, New Mexico, and New Hampshire.

“Sir, regardless, this is coming. It’s the only thing that could take down your presidency,” Parscale told the president.

Trump snapped.

“This fucking virus,” Trump asked dismissively, according to a person with direct knowledge of the exchange, “what does it have to do with me getting reelected?”

That was exactly the attitude Joe Biden expected from the president. And Biden saw his task as unambiguous.

Create a contrast. Follow the scientists whom Trump ignored. Wear a mask, halt public events and reinvent campaigning to avoid putting people in harm’s way.

Daily Beast:

As the nation is in a fit of laughter that may never stop over the Trump campaign press conference that was, through a hot potato game of incompetence, held not at Philadelphia’s swank Four Seasons hotel but at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping company’s parking lot next to a porn shop, it was only fitting that Kate McKinnon’s Rudy Giuliani made a stop at the Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” desk.

“Did you see my press conference today?” McKinnon’s Giuliani greeted Update co-anchor Colin Jost. “It was at the Four Seasons. Fancy!”

“I’m glad I made it to the show on time,” he continued. “First I went to 30 Rocks. That’s a granite quarry in New Rochelle.”

Garry Kasparov/NY Daily News:

The damage Donald’s done: How Trump’s ongoing tantrum against democracy hurts America

The election is over at last, called decisively for Joe Biden after four days of extreme care and caution in the democratic process. Unsurprisingly, the sitting president’s response is to attack that process with baseless accusations. For someone who talks so much about law and order, Donald Trump never wants it to apply to him. He cares little for what is legal and not at all about what is right.

I have spent much of my life at the chessboard taking the measure of people under tremendous stress while trying to manage my own. When we’re under pressure, we show our true colors. Sometimes we rise to the challenge to find character and resources we didn’t know we had. Or we collapse, unable to deal with the rush of emotions as the clock ticks down.

With time ticking away on his presidency on Thursday night, Trump cracked under the pressure. He’d managed to keep quiet for two days as the returns slowly came in, but as the results in key states tipped toward a Biden victory, he could control himself no longer and took to the podium.

What followed was Trump reduced to his purest self, a lying, self-centered bully who has finally been punched in the nose. The result was called “the most dishonest speech of his presidency” by CNN expert Daniel Dale, no small achievement.

Daily Beast:

WATCH: Cheering, Honking Erupts Moment Biden is Declared Winner

As Joe Biden was declared the 46th president at 11:30 a.m. ET Saturday, the sound of cheering, horns honking and champagne bottles popping broke out in streets across the county.

I’ve lived in NYC my whole life and I’ve never seen anything like this pic.twitter.com/KVZakF7F5n

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) November 7, 2020

It wasn’t just the general elation, it was celebrating the new heroes, the USPS:

That happened every time a postal truck drove by.

A lot of Tim Alberta today for his excellent sources:

The Election That Broke the Republican Party

By lashing themselves to the president’s desperate conspiracies of fraud, GOP officials have undermined their own legitimacy.

Never has the unprecedented been so utterly predictable.

At the conclusion of a campaign that exceeded their expectations in almost every sense — picking up House seats, thwarting an outright Democratic takeover of the Senate, running competitively in every presidential battleground state — Republicans could have walked away from 2020 with some dignity intact. They could have conceded defeat to Joe Biden, celebrated their hard-fought successes elsewhere and braced for the battles ahead

But that was never going to happen. This is Donald Trump’s party — at least, for another 76 days — and no Republican who hopes to remain relevant after he’s gone was going to deny him the bloody farewell he’s been building toward.

Did we really think the president worked so diligently these past eight months to create an environment conducive to allegations of mass voter fraud, only to stop short of alleging mass voter fraud? Of course not. Even if the president had been swept in every swing state, and by big margins, he was always going to cry foul. That he lost such close contests — and lost them in a style so unfamiliar to so many voters — only made his reaction all the more inevitable.

The Bulwark:

Those Obama-Trump Counties

What it means that the president held most of them.

Since Trump’s victory in 2016, some Democrats have concluded that the relationship is not worth repairing since these former blue strongholds are simply the home to racist deplorables. That has been a mistake. As we argue in our new book, Trump’s Democrats, citizens in these communities admire Trump not primarily because of defects in their personal character. Rather, they like Trump for reasons that are more cultural than psychological.

After living in three blue strongholds that flipped in 2016, we found that many were Trumpy well before Trump arrived on the national political stage. Some of these communities’ most beloved Democratic leaders are brazen, thin-skinned, nepotistic, and promise to provide for their constituents by cutting deals—and corners, if needed. This is partly because their political culture has been shaped by a working-class honor culture that prizes strong men and a tradition of boss-style politics that is more transactional than ideological.

These citizens also have strong loyalties to hometowns that are confronting serious social and economic problems. Unlike the Proud Boys, most Trump Democrats take more pride in their hometown than their skin color. And while the extent of Trump’s success among black and Latino voters this week won’t be understood until the exit polls have been reweighted—and maybe not even then—just looking at some of the places where he performed well at the polls suggests that his appeal cannot be reduced to white nationalism.

Kristine Phillips and Kevin Johnson/USA Today:

'Vulnerable to prosecution': When Trump leaves White House, presidential 'cloak of immunity' goes away

"The short answer is that once he leaves the office, his cloak of immunity, actual or implied by (Justice Department guidelines), will disappear," said David Weinstein, a former Florida federal prosecutor.

The Justice Department has a long-standing policy that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted for criminal offenses. Former special counsel Robert Mueller cited the policy when investigators elected not to make a determination on whether Trump obstructed justice during the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election.

But that immunity is for actions he took while in office, and "it stops there," Weinstein said.

The most significant threats against Trump once he leaves office are brewing in his hometown, New York City.  

AP:

Election emerges as referendum on race relations in America

Omari Barksdale, a Black man, watched with alarm as the toll of the country’s racial injustice mounted. People of color bore the brunt of pandemic-related job losses. Police shot and killed Breonna Taylor inside her Kentucky home, and a Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee into George Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes as Floyd gasped, “I can’t breathe,” in his final moments.

The convergence of the pandemic, joblessness and police brutality has forced the U.S. to confront its centuries-old legacy of systemic racism this year. And for Barksdale and many Black Americans, it’s turned next week’s presidential election into a referendum on the future of race relations, an opportunity to take steps toward healing or the potential of a deeper divide.

Charlie Cook/National Journal:

Don't expect a contested election

The cone of uncertainty has narrowed considerably. Now, the question seems to be whether we'll see a "skinny" Biden win or a landslide.

The RealClearPolitics average of national polls pegs Biden’s lead at 7.4 points, 51.1 to 43.7 percent. But that’s a less discriminating measure, including as it does some mediocre surveys, some that seemed congenitally slanted toward one side or the other, and some that would be better utilized lining hamster cages. The FiveThirtyEight modeled average of national polls, which is more selective than the RCP average but still includes some surveys that I consider rather sketchy, puts the Biden lead at 8.8 points, 52 to 43.2 percent.

I believe his actual lead is more like 9 or 10 points, based on the higher-quality, live-telephone-interview national polls conducted since the first debate, as well as the gold standard of online polling, the Pew Research Center’s mammoth poll of 11,929 voters released two weeks ago.

Any way you slice it, these are pretty good leads, considerably higher than the 3.2-point national margin that Hillary Clinton had over Trump in the RCP average on Oct. 29, 2016. When all the votes were counted, the margin ended up being 2.1 percent.

Ryan Matsumoto/The Hill:

Why Biden could actually win Texas

The biggest political realignment of the 2016 election was a shift based on education. Trump made big gains with white voters without a college degree, allowing him to crack the “Blue Wall” and win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The flipside, however, was that Clinton made big gains with white voters with a college degree, especially in Sun Belt states where they had historically been pretty Republican.

In Texas, this political tradeoff was a net negative for Republicans. Although Trump won Texas by 9 points in 2016, this was a substantial underperformance compared to Mitt Romney’s 16-point margin in 2012, John McCain’s 12-point margin in 2008, and George W. Bush’s 23-point margin in 2004.

In Texas, the counties with the highest percentage of college graduates are large suburban counties in the major metropolitan areas (Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio). One key example is Collin County, which includes the upscale northern Dallas suburbs of Plano, McKinney, and Frisco. After voting for Romney by 32 points in 2012, it voted for Trump by 17 points in 2016. Two years later, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz only carried the county by 6 points in his re-election bid against Democrat Beto O’Rourke.

Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux/FiveThirtyEight:

Trump Is Losing Ground With Some — But Not All — White Christians

So is Biden’s plan working? Are white Christians, including white evangelical Protestants, who have been among Trump’s most loyal supporters, actually abandoning the president for Biden?

The answer depends on which white Christians you’re looking at.

Despite Biden’s claims that he can appeal to white evangelical Protestants, there really aren’t any signs that Trump is losing support among this group. But Trump may have reason to worry about his level of support among white Catholics. Politicians and the media typically pay less attention to these voters during election season, but white Catholics are especially important to watch this year because they’re a sizable group — and they’re concentrated in Rust Belt swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Trump won white Catholics handily in 2016, but there are signs that his hold on this group is slipping. That’s doubly worrisome for the president because white Christians are declining as a share of the population overall. And if overall turnout is high and he loses some support from white Catholics without making up the difference among other groups, Trump could be in trouble — even if he overwhelmingly wins white evangelicals again.

USA Today:

Poll: Most Americans disapprove of Trump's decision to hold massive campaign rallies during COVID-19 pandemic

It's the most stark stylistic difference between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden: The incumbent has surrounded himself with thousands of supporters at dozens of rallies while the Democratic challenger is literally keeping his distance.

But as Trump and Biden embrace strikingly different approaches to campaigning during the coronavirus pandemic, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll finds that nearly two-thirds of likely voters prefer Biden’s low-key strategy to Trump's raucous fanfare.

Nearly six in 10 Americans disapprove of Trump's decision to continue to hold large rallies during the pandemic, according to the poll, while nearly 64% approve of Biden's decision to jettison big events in favor of much smaller gatherings.

Tom Nichols/USA Today:

Why this conservative voted for Biden and you should too: Trump is a morally defective man

I'm a conservative and former Republican who did not vote based on policy. Neither should you. The 2020 election is about the moral future of America.

Don’t get me wrong: As a conservative and former Republican who has already voted for former Vice President Joe Biden, I could create an entire inventory of issues, even without the lightning strike of the pandemic, where I think Biden is a better pick for president than another four years of President Donald Trump. From budget deficits to nuclear arms control, I could easily make the case for Biden, even if I might concede that I would prefer a few of Trump’s policies (such as cutting government regulations and increasing defense spending) over any Democratic administration.

But I did not vote in this election based on policy. Neither should you. The election of 2020 is about the moral future of the American nation, and so I voted for a good man with whom I have some political disagreements over an evil man with whom I share not a single value as a human being. Trump is the most morally defective human being ever to hold the office of the presidency, worse by every measure than any of the rascals, satyrs or racists who have sat in the Oval Office. This is vastly more important than marginal tax rates or federal judges.

Will Bunch/Philly.com:

Trump’s politicized Supreme Court has lost legitimacy. 2021’s Dems, do something!

We don’t yet know what will happen after Tuesday when the voting stops and the serious counting starts, nor is the Supreme Court’s role in determining the final outcome cast in stone — as dramatized later in the week when Kavanaugh again surprised the legal scholars by shifting gears and siding with the court’s remaining liberals to not — for now — limit the vote counting here in Pennsylvania or North Carolina, two other key states.

But even before the election is decided, we’ve already seen enough to know that Republicans have essentially politicized the nation’s highest court to a level where the judiciary can no longer be expected to fulfill its primary constitutional function, to serve as a balance and to check any abuses of power by the other two branches, the presidency and Congress. The faint echoes were there when five GOP-appointed justices twisted legal logic to halt the 2000 vote counting and declare George W. Bush the 43rd president, then ratcheted up to a volume of 11 when democracy-hating Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used brute authoritarian logic to steal Supreme Court seats on either end of the Trump presidency. That’s all been against a drumbeat of rulings that have enhanced a warped notion called “corporate personhood,” while empowering billionaire donors and making it harder for historically oppressed people to vote.

All of this is causing policy wonks, including a handful of thinkers on Capitol Hill, to ask if it’s time for a radical overhaul of a court whose size and exact mission weren’t really spelled out when the Constitution was drafted in 1787.

Persuasion for the win.

WaPo:

America is poised to enter into its worst stretch yet of the pandemic

The nation nears a record-breaking daily number of coronavirus cases.

The current surge is already considerably more widespread than the waves from last summer and spring. On Thursday, the number of cases topped 70,000 for the first time since July.

The unprecedented geographic spread of the current surge makes it especially dangerous, with experts warning it could lead to dire shortages of medical staff and supplies. Already, hospitals are reporting shortfalls of basic drugs needed to treat covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

And it’s not simply a matter of increased testing identifying more cases. Covid-19 hospitalizations increased in 38 states over the past week and are rising so quickly that many facilities in the West and Midwest are already overwhelmed. The number of deaths nationally has crested above 1,000 in recent days.

FiveThirtyEight:

Who Won The Last Presidential Debate?

We partnered with Ipsos to poll voters before and after the candidates took the stage.

Most respondents went into the debate with a clear candidate preference, and that didn’t really change. The debate also didn’t have much of an effect on who respondents thought would win the presidency, although fewer people said the race was a toss-up (14 percent, compared to 16 percent before the debate). The share who thought Biden had a better chance of winning increased from 43 percent to 46 percent, though both those changes are well within the poll’s margin of error.

Upshot:

Not the huge win Trump needed. 

For Mr. Trump, even a draw would have been a blow to his chances. He trails by nearly 10 percentage points in national surveys, and although he still has a chance in the most crucial battleground states, like Florida and Pennsylvania, his path to an Electoral College victory remains narrow. With just 11 days to go, there aren’t many obvious opportunities remaining for him to change the attitudes of voters.

Maybe the post-debate coverage will focus on something that could help the president in certain battleground areas, like Mr. Biden’s comments about transitioning away from the oil industry. But the president had his own potentially damaging comments, such as his reaction to separating children from their parents at the border. Maybe there will be another big news event over the final stretch. (It was at this point in the 2016 campaign — with 11 days to go — that the F.B.I. director James Comey sent a letter to Congress about new evidence in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.) Or maybe things will just naturally tighten on their own, which happened after the third debate in 2016, even before the Comey letter and even though Mrs. Clinton won the post-debate instant polls after the final debate.

But if the polls do not tighten significantly over the final stretch, Mr. Trump will be left in an unenviable position. He will once again be left to hope for a large, systematic error in the polling, this time dwarfing the one that barely got him to victory four years ago in a much closer race.

Scott Detrow:

Hi. It me, the campaign reporter who also spent several years literally only reporting on Pennsylvania and fracking. There are a LOT of things us national reporters are oversimplifying and dumbing down here. Hold onto your butts for a thread. 

-Fracking – more accurately the energy economy that has sprung up around it -- has been a real boost to the state, particularly Western Pa. Pittsburgh has become a Houstoneque energy hub. 

-It’s always been controversial and many Pennsylvanians have been skeptical – particularly in the vote-rich eastern half of the state. And as both Dem and GOP governors under-regulated, voters wanted more scrutiny. 

David Rothkopf and Bernard Schwartz/Daily Beast:

Never Forget the Particulars of Trump’s Epic Homestretch Meltdown

From calling fallen soldiers ‘suckers’ to refusing to commit to transfer of power, he’s run the strangest, weakest, and most un-American campaign in history.

Forget Russiagate. Forget the Muslim ban. Forget Charlottesville. Forget Hurricane Maria. Forget attacking our allies and embracing dictators. Forget gutting environmental protections. Forget children in cages. Forget Putin in Helsinki. Forget the racism and the sexism, the stories of abuse and of tax fraud. Forget the obstruction of justice and the impeachment. Forget even the failure of leadership that initially caused the COVID crisis and its economic aftershocks.

In fact, forget the first 44 months of the Trump presidency. Bad as they were, the worst in the history of the American presidency, you don’t need them to make the case that Trump must be defeated on November 3. Just focus on the last few weeks, Trump’s meltdown in the homestretch of the campaign.

Alexander C Kaufman/HuffPost:

At Last, Joe Biden Leaned Into Climate

Polls overwhelmingly show President Trump’s climate denial is his greatest weakness. At the final debate, the Democrat seized on the issue.

Joe Biden finally turned up the heat on climate change.

At his final presidential debate Thursday night, the Democratic nominee leaned into the issue on which polls show he’s most handily outmatching President Donald Trump, a fossil fuel hard-liner who has stubbornly clung to conspiracies and pseudoscience in the face of mounting climate disasters.

“Global warming is an existential threat to humanity,” Biden said. “We have a moral obligation to deal with it.”

Adam Serwer/Atlantic:

The Supreme Court Is Helping Republicans Rig Elections

Adding more justices to the bench might be the only way to stop them.

For a judge with a brilliant legal mind, Amy Coney Barrett seemed oddly at a loss for words.

Does a president have the power to postpone an election? Senator Dianne Feinstein of California asked. Barrett said she would have to approach that question—about a power the Constitution explicitly grants to Congress—“with an open mind.”

Is voter intimidation illegal? Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota asked. “I can’t apply the law to a hypothetical set of facts,” Barrett replied. Klobuchar responded by reading the statute outlawing voter intimidation, which exists and is, therefore, not hypothetical.

Should the president commit to a peaceful transfer of power? Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey asked. Barrett replied that, “to the extent this is a political controversy right now, as a judge I want to stay out of it.”

Ryan Lizza/Politico:

Trump's sideshow fizzles out

The president tried to turn debate day into a trial of the Biden family's allegedly shady business dealings. It didn't go smoothly.

In the end, the Nashville debate was more about Tony Fauci than Tony Bobulinski.

Trailing by nearly 10 points in the polls, and facing the potential for the greatest repudiation of an incumbent president since Jimmy Carter in 1980 — a 400-plus electoral vote victory is possible for Joe Biden — Donald Trump arrived at the final debate of the 2020 campaign seized by an issue that was never really discussed.

Berkman Klein Center:

Partisanship, Impeachment, and the Democratic Primaries: American Political Discourse

PUBLIC DISCOURSE IN THE U.S. 2020 ELECTION: JANUARY AND FEBRUARY

The biggest change we observe in these first two months of 2020 compared to the election cycle of four years ago is the degree to which conservative media activists have shaped mainstream media coverage. In 2016, right-wing media activists succeeded in influencing mainstream coverage of Hillary Clinton, particularly on the unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing associated with the Clinton Foundation, which exacerbated and fed upon coverage of her emails and fueled suspicions of corruption and dishonesty. In the current election cycle, conservative media activists rolled out the same playbook that was so successful in 2016. This time, the corruption allegations were focused on Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and their dealings with Ukraine and China. This story was picked up by mainstream media in 2019, but the core allegation—that Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to remove a prosecutor in order to protect his son—fell apart under scrutiny. By January 2020, while conservative media continued to push out exaggerated and false claims, the dominant mainstream framing of this story had shifted to Donald Trump’s abuse of his presidential power for his own political gain, which overshadowed the well-established and misguided actions of Hunter Biden to cash in on his father’s name. The discredited allegations of corrupt dealings by Joe Biden were getting no play in mainstream media. While conservative media continues to exhibit a remarkable capacity for reframing news coverage to align with the beliefs and perceptions of its core audiences, in January and February of 2020, its power to shape mainstream media coverage was diminished compared to 2016. This is the most notable change we observe and has the potential to alter the electoral calculus in the November election.      

John A Stoehr/Substack:

Trump holds everyone in contempt, including Republican voters

Scorn for real people's real problems is why the debates matter.

Again, I don’t know exactly what about the first debate caused Biden’s margin over the president to grow. No one can really say for sure. Cause-and-effect is not possible to identify in public polling. But the margin did widen. That’s a fact. Trump’s disdain for ordinary human frailty was a part of that. I can’t help thinking (hoping?) even hard-shelled Republican supporters were put off by the sight of such naked disgust for a problem lots and lots of people face, especially amid the scourge of opioid addiction.

The pundit corps was, last night, and is, this morning, noting the differences between the first and second debate, in particular the president did not beclown himself quite so heroically, which, by the magic of punditry, means he did just as well as Biden. Meanwhile, the concrete detail I’m seeing popping up is Trump’s indifference to the suffering of 500-some children in government custody after being taken from their immigrant parents as part of the administration’s sadistic policy of deterrence. Such indifference is appalling—to liberals and others who have living, beating hearts. But I don’t think Trump’s remarks, however soulless they in fact are, are going to move public polling. (Some apparently believe Trump said “good” in response to the fact that these children are still not reunited with their parents. He didn’t. He said “go ahead” to moderator Kristen Welker. Rendered in mush-mouth, it sounded like “good.”)