Graeme Wood at The Nation:
Blinken, Flournoy, and Sullivan will not be broadly remembered by peculiar, non-Beltway individuals, as a result of they had been hypercompetent public servants who tended to not make hilarious, unforced errors. They didn’t, like the present secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, joke about canceling the results of a U.S. election, or swear at a journalist whereas quizzing her about world geography. They knew their job and took it severely—in contrast to, say, Rick Perry, who discovered solely after his nomination as secretary of power that his primary activity was to supervise a nuclear arsenal able to rendering the planet uninhabitable. At any level prior to now eight years or so, you possibly can have shaken Blinken, Flournoy, and Sullivan awake in the midst of the night time and appointed them to those positions, and they’d have been at their desk and able to do their job by dawn.
Dana Milbank at The Washington Publish on the standing of Trump’s assault on the election:
It’s throughout however the pouting.
At The New York Occasions, Jamelle Bouie highlights the racism underscoring the Trump group’s authorized challenges:
Donald Trump is exiting political life a lot the identical means he entered it, pushing conspiracy theories for private achieve. Now, as then, these aren’t simply any outdated conspiracy theories, however ones that hinge on the basic illegitimacy of a complete class of Individuals. […]
Trump made his first severe foray into nationwide politics with “birtherism,” the conspiracy principle that Barack Obama was born outdoors the USA, making him an unlawful president. It was a public expression of Trump’s perception that citizenship is tied to blood and ethnicity — that some Individuals are Individuals, some are much less so and a few simply aren’t.
The voter fraud conspiracy to which Trump hitched his try to carry onto energy falls beneath the identical umbrella, an try to jot down hundreds of thousands of Individuals out of the citizens on the premise of race and heritage, as an alternative of only one particular person out of the workplace of the presidency.
Again to the Biden transition, Saikat Chakrabarti at The Nation highlights strikes Biden could make even with a Republican Senate:
Because it seems, Biden can straight and swiftly implement virtually all of his plan to “Construct Again Higher” and renew the American financial system with out Congress—utilizing solely his presidential powers and obligations. A brand new memo despatched to the Biden transition group by my colleagues at New Consensus lays out precisely how he can achieve this. In a nutshell, similar to Bush and Obama did in 2008–09, Biden would work together with his secretary of the Treasury and the chair of the Fed to make accessible trillions of {dollars} in low-interest loans. Solely this time, as an alternative of lending solely to banks, the Fed would make long-term, productive investments to assist small companies struggling due to the pandemic, modernize current industries, and construct the industries of the longer term.
On a last notice, don’t miss this update on the Georgia Senate run-off election at The Each day Beast:
Conservative operatives and an excellent PAC with ties to notorious GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone are calling for Trump supporters to punish Republicans by sitting out Georgia’s crucial Senate runoffs or writing in Trump’s title as an alternative. And although their efforts stays on the get together’s fringes, the trajectory of the motion has Republicans fearful that it might price the GOP control of the Senate.
Probably the most aggressive name to boycott or solid protest ballots within the two runoff races has, to date, come from a dormant pro-Trump tremendous PAC with ties to Stone, which unveiled a brand new initiative to retaliate towards the Republican Occasion’s supposed turncoats by handing Democrats management of the U.S. Senate.