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Josh Marshall

9 Nov, 10 tweets, 2 min read

President Trump's extended tantrum is a complicated thing to get a hold of. On the one hand it's basically criminal in any civic sense. I'm pretty confident it will result in at least some people getting killed - hopefully not many. It also leaves at least some of his ...

2/ opponents with some lingering fear that somehow he'll cheat the system and stay. And yet at the same time it has created a sort of schadenfreude time dilation event. Politics is a contact sport with a lot of heartache and jubilation at critical moments. Normally ...

3/ Trump's diehard opponents would have had one press conference or evening where they savored the reality of his defeat. But here, he basically keeps losing each day. His own furious impotence keeps driving headlong into the same wall each day we move forward.

4/ One of the defining features of the Trump era has been the spectacle of dignity wraithing, the one reasonably respectable men and women would enter into his gravitational pull and slowly be shorn of whatever dignity they once had. And the key point being that there was ...

5/ some voodoo he possessed that got people to surrender their dignity, just taking an axe to themselves and lop off larger pieces every day. And yet here now at the end it's him. Trumpism may not be over. The republic may be destined for destruction. And yet on January 20th ...

6/ he's done. That's like the speed of light right now. A barrier that the basic laws of the universe won't brook any violation of. And for him that's just like eating a kryptonite sandwich. His lawyers are clearly humoring him with lawsuits that keep getting thrown out ...

7/ of court. His stop staffers are leaking to journalists that they're happy to see it be over and that the whole effort at this point is just to shelter his ego, not extend his presidency. We know that in the crude and arrested Trumpian mental world the worst thing is ...

8/ that people are laughing at you and that you're weak. There's only the dominating and the dominated. He is helpless and entirely incapable of doing the things that preserve any amount of personal dignity. And with this, I see it in people's response, people are losing ...

9/ the fear. He may always have been a joke. But he was a scary joke. Now he's more of a joke. Like I said we may be doomed. But he can't get past Jan 20th. He can neither accept it nor escape it. He's extending the agony but also threatening his legions of detractors with ...

10/ a kind of grave schadenfreude toxicity and he implodes anew each day with no end in sight.

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More from @joshtpm

Josh Marshall

@joshtpm

10 Nov

Remember this too. It's not even that the GOP claims are unsubstantiated. They don't actually have any claims. They amount to just saying it just doesn't look right and mail in voting seems weird. Those aren't claims. The closest they come is this charge that GOP ...

2/ election observers were removed from the counting area. But that charge is one the campaign's lawyers have admitted in court is not true. There's no argument to have because they're not actually making any claims. Indeed, in their pressers they kept asking for "patience" ...

3/ so they can come up with some explanation of why they're not accepting that the President lost.

Read 4 tweets

Josh Marshall

@joshtpm

9 Nov

@MattGrossmann

To expand on exchange with @MattGrossmann, first yes, this is a uphill. This is absolutely true. I want to be cleat I'm not disputing that at all. Also, it will be nationalized. Again, that's obvious. There are key advantages GOPs have. One of the biggest is that suburban ...

2/ crossover has been driven by Trump. This will be a first test of the durability of that shift. Additionally, GOPs will now be able to play on voters' desire for balance. Can say, sure you voted for Biden. But don't you want a check on Biden too? Well, vote for the GOP, etc.

3/ On the other hand, it's clear that Trump turned out a lot of people for him, a lot of fairly occasional voters. It's an open question to me how many of those voters still turn out now that he's not on the ballot and (as will become clear) and that he lost.

Read 8 tweets

Josh Marshall

@joshtpm

8 Nov

Oh dear. I was just checking out this new fusillade from Glenn Greenwald which I had heard announces that Donald Trump's presidency was far more lawful and benign than President Obama's. This seems entirely in character and provides some helpful context to his generally ...

2/ loyal defenses of Donald Trump. I will say this. Given the particulars of the blow up last month, someone really does need an editor pretty badly. But then I noticed there's actually a dig at me! I may have gotten under Glenn's skin.

Read 6 tweets

Josh Marshall

@joshtpm

8 Nov

Let me explain something about this "faithless electors" issue because I keep getting asked about it. This is the idea that the election could be overturned by Trump convincing electors in the electoral college to switch their votes. This will absolutely not happen. Here's why.

2/ The electors aren't random people or government bureaucrats. Each candidate has a slate of electors in each state chosen by the candidate, by the campaign. These are hardcore party loyalists and hardcore supporters of the candidate. They're going to think it over again ...

3/ and cast their vote for Trump? I don't think so. One might as well imagine that members of Biden's own campaign leadership are going to vote for Trump. The whole idea is absurd. The only case where the 'faithless elector' issue can come up is if there's some staggering ...

Read 5 tweets

Josh Marshall

@joshtpm

7 Nov

A bit on people talking about the destruction of records and whether President Trump or his associates will do so over the next two months.

2/ The first thing to remember is that the federal government is very large and is essentially a document production machine. It’s simply not that easy to do, not and get everything. It’s also hard to do thoroughly without the assistance of career civil servants who are ...

3/ trained not to break the law and in this case have little incentive to do so. The second thing and perhaps even more important thing is this: most forms of executive branch wrongdoing either do not fit into or do not fit neatly into the four walls of federal criminal ...

Read 5 tweets

Josh Marshall

@joshtpm

6 Nov

Here's the best way to understand what's happening with the network calls. Calls don't end elections. They help the public understand what happened. The usual standard is something roughly comparable to the "reasonable doubt" standard. Because they're scared of Trump ...

2/ they appear to have shifted to a "theoretical doubt" standard. Is it theoretically possible something could change. That's a high standard. And it is important to note that calls don't end the counting and obviously they shouldn't. They never do. But there is absolutely ...

3/ no doubt that the networks and the Associated Press are applying a different standard than has ever been applied to a presidential or any other election in the United States. He's won in multiple states that could individually secure his electoral college victory. It's over.

Read 4 tweets

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