[guest post by Dana]

I have never understood the bizarre need of Trump loyalists have to protect the President from facing the truth as if he weren’t an adult who has to face disappointment like any other living person on the earth. This has been an ongoing complaint of mine during his time in the presidency. Die-hard supporters seem incapable of treating the sitting President of the United States as an adult and holding his feet to the fire like they would a Democratic president. This bootlicking is destructive to the Republican Party, and it will likely take many years for the Party to extricate itself from the tentacles of Trumpism and remake itself into something that actually provides a stable and reasonable tent under which right-of-center voters might once again feel at home. As it now stands, however, the Republican Party has become an organization that has willingly, with eyes wide open, supported the dishonesty, corruption, and destructive behavior of a President determined to harm our nation since the election results were announced. (I’m being charitable with the time frame here.) Because of that, the GOP has sacrificed much of its credibility. The unyielding support and adulation of Trump and all manner of Trumpism has come at a great price. The denial of reality is one thing, but the need to buffer him from said reality does him no favors. And in turn, it does the nation at large no favors as well. On the contrary…

With that in mind, Geraldo Rivera made an appearance on Fox and Friends today, and suggested – incredibly – that, to ease Trump’s suffering, the Covid vaccine should be named after him:

President Speaking on Friday morning’s Fox & Friends, Rivera suggested naming the COVID-19 vaccine after Trump so he doesn’t feel so bad about himself. Rivera said: “With the world so divided and everybody telling him he’s got to give up and it’s time to leave and time to transition and all the rest of it, why not name the vaccine ‘The Trump?’ Make it like, ‘Have you gotten your Trump yet?’ It would be a nice gesture to him, and, years from now, it would become just a kind of generic name.”

**turns on Fox & Friends**

"Why not name the vaccine the Trump, make it — have you gotten your Trump yet? It would be a nice gesture to him." pic.twitter.com/K64Mw8J6Vk

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) November 20, 2020

As a reminder, Pfizer did not accept government money for the development of their vaccine.

Filed under: WAH-WAH-WAH!

–Dana

Trump’s lawsuits are all failing. Increasingly his effort to hold onto power has begun to look less like a legal battle (waged by clownish figures with grand claims but no evidence) and more like a naked extraconstitutional power grab.

President Donald Trump’s strategy for retaining power despite losing the U.S. election is focused increasingly on persuading Republican legislators to intervene on his behalf in battleground states Democrat Joe Biden won, three people familiar with the effort said.

Having so far faced a string of losses in legal cases challenging the Nov. 3 results, Trump’s lawyers are seeking to enlist fellow Republicans who control legislatures in Michigan and Pennsylvania, which went for Trump in 2016 and for Biden in 2020, the sources said.

It’s extraconstitutional because, while the state legislatures have the constitutional authority to decide how electors will be chosen, Congress has the constitutional authority to set the time of the “chusing” of those electors, and Congress chose “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in the month of November” which this year was November 3. State legislatures can’t decide on December 8 to adopt a new mechanism that awards the state’s electoral votes to their preferred strongman when said strongman did not receive the electoral votes as chosen by the voters on November 3.

There has been a division on the right, pre-existing Trump but brought into stark relief by his candidacy and then presidency. Before Trump, this division was harder to discern. The folks who advocated conservative principles but disdained unethical tactics were on one side, and the people who cited the example of supposed abuses of the rules by the left as a wafer-thin justification for throwing all rules out the window were on the other side. On the Internet, the latter group was more vocal and numerous. If someone like me from the former group said that the recently elected Democrat was a “good man” who was misguided but was doing what he believed best for the country, he was shouted down by the far more vocal latter group. If someone like me from the former group said that it is wrong to say of the president “I hope he fails” he was shouted down by the more vocal latter group.

Now that Trump has come along, it is easier to describe the two groups in terms of their relation to Trump, but complications still arise. The group of unprincipled worshippers of power, who praise Trump’s worst excesses, are Trump supporters — but not all Trump supporters are fairly so described. I have taken to calling the worst of this group the “Trump superfans” but even that is not completely satisfactory.

With Trump’s attempt to cast democracy aside, we now have a clearer division. Yes, there are the Trump critics and the Trump supporters; the Trump non-voters and the Trump voters. But within the Trump voter/supporter group there are still sane people who simply accepted a lot of bad aspects of Trump for the parts they liked, and some of those calculations were not irrational. But now we have a further division: the fever swampers who are screaming about a stolen election, and the people who have chosen to accept reality. I don’t have Trump’s talent for labeling, so until I hear a better name I will call the “Stop the Steal” crowd the Fraudsters: literally people who claim the election was stolen by fraud, but in reality people who are (knowingly or ignorantly) perpetrating a dangerous fraud of their own.

That amounts to a further division of the right, and a very clear one. Every person supporting Trump remaining in office at this point in time — the Fraudsters — are the worst of the worst, and should never be taken seriously in public again.

You know who these people are. They are the people who were most vocally shouting me down during the Obama presidency. They are the people I have banned from writing at this site and blocked on Twitter. Some of them edit widely read publications and others are bitter failures, but whatever their differences, the thing that unites the Fraudsters now is that they want Donald Trump to remain in power even though he lost an election.

This is a transparent banana republic style attempt to hold onto power despite a clear electoral rejection. The fact that it is hapless and doomed to failure does not make it any less reprehensible, and anybody complicit in the effort has forfeited any future claim on the attention of sane citizens.