Patterico's Pontifications

12/14/2020

Trump Camp: More Than Enough Time To Right The Wrong of Fraudulent Election

Filed under: General — Dana @ 10:33 am



[guest post by Dana]

An “alternate” slate of electors from an alternate reality:

President Trump’s allies are preparing to send an “alternate” slate of electors to Congress, senior White House adviser Stephen Miller said Monday, signaling Trump will drag out his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election even after the Electoral College certifies Joe Biden as the winner.

Miller, appearing on Fox News as a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, brushed off the idea that the Electoral College vote marked any kind of end to the process.

“The only date in the Constitution is Jan. 20. So we have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner of the election,” Miller said on “Fox & Friends.”

“As we speak, today, an alternate slate of electors in the contested states is going to vote and we’re going to send those results up to Congress,” he continued. “This will ensure that all of our legal remedies remain open. That means that if we win these cases in the courts, that we can direct that the alternate state of electors be certified.”

More:

Miller indicated that Trump supporters will act as “alternates” in a handful of contested states, including Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, to submit their own, unofficial results. Should the Trump campaign succeed in overturning the outcome in any of those states, Miller said, the alternate electors could then be recognized by Congress.

Clearly, Trump has no plans to accept the election loss, even after today’s proceedings. Which leads me to this:

But do ardent Trump supporters really deserve credit for their loyalty through the “thick and thin”? Or has their support only helped to enable an unhinged president not to accept an election loss? Has their loyalty further compelled him to dangerously plow ahead with the destructive undermining of a presidential election?

For the sake of this post, I’m focusing only on post-election activities. And what I see is that the President has dragged the country through a miserable and delusional slog by refusing to accept the election results. And to those “ardent supporters,” the truth is, he isn’t concerned about you, he is concerned and consumed by his own bruised ego. It’s a strange symbiotic relationship that Trump and his ardent supporters have. He plays them by tapping into their anger and resentment for feeling dismissed by the political class, and they, in turn, offer fealty to him, convinced that only he fights for them. There is as much chance of changing their minds as there is of convincing Trump that he lost the election bigly. This willingness to surrender all common sense and reason, and render oneself deaf and blind on his behalf is the proverbial indescribable gift to Trump. He continues to pull in a substantial financial haul from his loyal subjects as he keeps them hanging on to his every promise to overturn the election results and convinces them that they are once again being ignored by the political elite. And now, judging from President Trump’s sidekick Steven Miller’s comments, we know that they will continue on the same fruitless and deluded path until at least January 20. That the President has now seen almost 60 lawsuits tossed by the courts makes no difference.

I am going to say firmly and without hesitation that, no, his “ardent supporters” do not deserve credit. Their “ardent support” has enabled a self-consumed toddler-in-chief to indulge a dug-in refusal to accept reality. I would even go so far as to suggest that they are indirectly complicit in helping to drag our nation through Trump’s worst temper tantrum as he undermines democracy and attempts to disenfranchise voters with an endless string of baseless claims of fraud and conspiracy.

And don’t even get me started on the complicity and enabling of Trump by the spineless GOP members of Congress….

–Dana

Russians Hacked Trump Administration’s Treasury and Commerce Departments

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 8:29 am



The Succeeding New York Times has the story:

The Trump administration acknowledged on Sunday that hackers acting on behalf of a foreign government — almost certainly a Russian intelligence agency, according to federal and private experts — broke into a range of key government networks, including in the Treasury and Commerce Departments, and had free access to their email systems.

Officials said a hunt was on to determine if other parts of the government had been affected by what looked to be one of the most sophisticated, and perhaps among the largest, attacks on federal systems in the past five years. Several said national security-related agencies were also targeted, though it was not clear whether the systems contained highly classified material.

The Trump administration said little in public about the hack, which suggested that while the government was worried about Russian intervention in the 2020 election, key agencies working for the administration — and unrelated to the election — were actually the subject of a sophisticated attack that they were unaware of until recent weeks.

The hackers have had access since the spring. A similar attack happened to the Obama administration in 2014 and 2015.

Coincidentally, this morning I began reading Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers Kindle Edition, by Andy Greenberg (affiliate link). Two chapters in, it’s a compelling book that reads like a novel. Before reading the New York Times story, I had planned to write a post about how cyber attacks are like pandemics: a handful of people warn about them, but nobody listens until it is too late.

The attack on Treasury and Commerce is small potatoes. Much worse could happen. But maybe we should start paying attention now, rather than later.


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