Not sure why anyone thought transition would go well. Trump spent years gutting the executive branch; there's not that much left to transition. Also, we didn't win an election; we won a war. Trump is now a prisoner of war, threatening not to give up his secrets. Good luck to him.
These outcomes are always determined by who has leverage. Trump is headed for prison and bankruptcy, and the only asset he has left is his 73 remaining days in office. He'll use that asset to try to give himself a softer landing with regard to prison and bankruptcy.
Trump has two approaches: one is to go nicely, and hope it softens how the jury pool views him. The other, which he's trying on for size right now but won't get him very far, is to threaten to go out ugly and see if he can leverage it into some kind of immunity deal.
If you think Trump is literarily suicidal and that he wants us all to die with him, that's one thing. But I don't believe that. I believe he's merely looking to leverage his transition into a softer landing with regard to prison and bankruptcy. It's the only play he has left.
Endgame negotiations, between rational participants, always end somewhere in the middle – depending on which side had the most leverage to begin with. The transition will play out the same way. Trump will get some (real or imagined) minor concession in exchange for conceding.
And yes, even though Trump is quite deranged, he appears to be a rational villain. That's to say he understands what his options are and aren't, and he'll ultimately choose the one that he thinks gives him the best (or least bad) result.
You really have to worry when you've cornered someone who truly wants to die in a blaze of glory, because then you don't have easy leverage over them. But nothing about Trump suggests he's that type. He may, however, try to gain leverage by scaring us into believing he is.

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More from @PalmerReport

12 Nov
All you panickers running around yelling things like "authoritarianism" and "it's a coup" are just handing Trump leverage that he doesn't have. He's totally cornered, and here you're helping him out. When is our side going to stop being stupid, and learn how to fight and win?
When you panic and cower to someone who is making threats that he knows he doesn't have the power to pull off, you're handing him the ability to hold it over you in exchange for other concessions. If you can't understand this concept, get the fuck out of political activism.
What the gullible naive types on the left never do figure out is that they're SEVERELY HARMING their own cause by choosing to fall for these kinds of empty threats. THIS is why we lose half the elections we should win. This gullible panicky idiocy.
Read 8 tweets
12 Nov
America's night so far:

- Ron Klain is Biden's White House Chief of Staff
- Trump pocketing election legal fund donations smaller than $8K
- Just a cash grab
- Karl Rove tells Trump it's over
- Biden is going to the White House
- Trump is going to prison
- It's still only 8:30pm
Karl Rove tells Donald Trump it’s over palmerreport.com/analysis/karl-…
President-elect Joe Biden introduces his White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain palmerreport.com/analysis/presi…
Read 15 tweets
11 Nov
Once again a reminder that the current mass hysteria over Trump somehow magically overturning the election result literally does not exist outside of Twitter. Everyone in the real world understands this isn’t a thing. Stay calm, fight hard. We won. We’ll keep on winning.
Even MSNBC, which never met a scary doomsday narrative it didn’t want to exploit for ratings, keeps making clear that there is a 100% chance Biden will take office. Twitter has become a paranoid delusionsl fantasy land today, to the point of doing real harm to people’s minds.
Surveys show that the vast majority of Americans, including a majority of Trump’s voters, agree that Biden won and it’s over. This hallucination about Trump magically taking over, largely doesn’t even exist among his own voters. It’s just us going clinically insane for no reason.
Read 4 tweets
11 Nov
We're not on the verge of a "civil war." Give me a break. Polls show 80% of Americans agree Biden won. That includes a majority of Trump's own voters. The only place this election is being "contested" is on Twitter and cable news. In the real world, this discussion doesn't exist.
It's not being contested in the streets; there were zero violent skirmishes when the winner was called. It's not (really) being contested in court; Trump is 0-for-12 in his frivolous suits, all of which had literally zero chance of going anywhere.
It's not being "contested" in the Pennsylvania state legislature; that's not a thing, no matter how many conspiracy theorists (on both sides) keep insisting it's a thing.
Read 10 tweets
10 Nov
Now that Joe Biden has won the election, it's worth examining the almost fictional manner in which the media covered Biden during the democratic primary race, in an attempt at generating higher TV ratings.
Based on the numbers and demographics, Biden was the primary frontrunner the entire time. There was never much doubt he'd be the nominee. The other candidates simply had very poor numbers with Black voters. The race was always going to turn for Biden in South Carolina.
Biden was never in trouble during Iowa or New Hampshire. Those lily white states don't determine who's going to be the nominee anyway. But "frontrunner wins as expected" doesn't make for good TV ratings, so they made up a fictional version of it instead.
Read 9 tweets
10 Nov
The final month before the election was a dark time for me. My timeline was flooded with fatalist hysteria about how Trump would win "no matter what" or how he'd magically stop the election from even happening. We were obviously going to win, but there wasn't much for me to do.
My role is to inform, organize, mobilize. But when that many people on our side have their heads that far up their fatalist asses, there's not much for me to work with. I had to waste that month trying to shout down the dummies who were insisting the election was doomed for us.
Now that the fatalists have been proven overwhelmingly wrong, and the election wasn't even close, we got to have like 48 productive hours before these damn fatalists managed to hijack our agenda again with this hysterical nonsense about Trump magically staying in office.
Read 9 tweets

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