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FOCUS: How Far Could Republicans Take Trump's Election-Fraud Claims? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=46091"><span class="small">Jeannie Suk Gersen, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Wednesday, 11 November 2020 13:05 |
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Excerpt: "There is a limit to what Biden's team can do, particularly in national security, if the Trump Administration holds up a transfer of power."
As Trump's litigation looks unlikely to change the outcome of the election, Republicans are looking to strategies that might remain even after rebuffs both at the polls and in court. (photo: Mark Kauzlarich/Reuters)
How Far Could Republicans Take Trump's Election-Fraud Claims?
By Jeannie Suk Gersen, The New Yorker
11 November 20
 mong the “firsts” associated with the 2020 election, the most norm-shattering of all will be if the candidate who lost never concedes to the one who won. After the major news outlets called the election for Joe Biden on Saturday, Donald Trump switched from insisting, “I won this election, by a lot,” to claiming that his loss was due to election fraud. Trump’s conduct seemingly has not fazed President-elect Biden as he proceeds into the transition; at the least, it was not a surprise, since Trump spent months making ominous and ungrounded predictions of voter fraud. There is, however, a limit to what Biden’s team can do, particularly in national security, if the Trump Administration holds up a transfer of power, as the head of the General Services Administration has done thus far by not formally recognizing the transition.
As if to fill the void, on Sunday, former President George W. Bush, the previous Republican in the highest office, issued a statement pointedly supporting the legitimacy of the election results. “The American people can have confidence that this election was fundamentally fair, its integrity will be upheld, and its outcome is clear,” Bush said. Twenty years ago, it was Republicans who were outraged that Al Gore retracted his initial concession to Bush, refused to concede when Bush was narrowly ahead during recounts in Florida, and then fought Republican state officials’ move to certify Bush as the winner, by suing to have the recount continue. The Supreme Court finally ordered an end to the Florida recount, in Bush v. Gore, on December 12th, 2000, and Gore conceded the next day. Now Democrats are calling upon Republicans to accept that Biden has won, and Republicans are looking to legal remedies to try to flip the result. But, because Biden’s win does not hinge on the results in one state, as Bush’s did, and because the margin of victory is not as thin, Trump’s legal remedies are far less realistic than Gore’s were.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, on Monday, that “President Trump is a hundred per cent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.” Since Election Day, Republicans have pursued a smorgasbord of lawsuits, but they have been dismissed or are otherwise unlikely to succeed. The Trump campaign filed multiple suits in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona, generally alleging fraud, or demanding that states stop counting ballots or allow closer observation of the counting. Though some cases are ongoing (for example, a lawsuit to compel Pennsylvania to impose an earlier date for voters’ proof of identification), the vast majority were quickly dismissed for lack of evidence.
One case that Republicans began pressing before the election has gone to the Supreme Court. On September 28th, the Pennsylvania Republican Party challenged the state Supreme Court’s decision that, notwithstanding the Election Day deadline set by the Pennsylvania legislature, mail ballots postmarked by that day but arriving up to three days afterward were to be counted. The case has already produced three orders from the Justices: first, in mid-October, the Court deadlocked 4–4 on whether to lift the state court’s order while the Republicans prepared a request to decide whether a state court may alter the state legislature’s deadline for receipt of ballots. The Court therefore left the extended deadline in place for the election. Second, days before the election, the Court refused to expedite its consideration of the Republicans’ petition, again, leaving the extension in place. And, third, three days after Election Day and before Biden was declared the winner in Pennsylvania, Justice Samuel Alito ordered County Boards of Elections to comply with existing state guidance that mail ballots received after Election Day should be segregated and “if counted, be counted separately.” Had Biden’s victory ended up depending upon Pennsylvania, or, more precisely, on the mail votes that arrived after Election Day, then a Supreme Court decision on whether those votes must be disqualified would have been relevant to the election outcome. But the fact that Biden’s win did not hinge on any one state deflated the potential for the Supreme Court to decide the election.
The Court could still agree to hear the case, in order to decide whether the Constitution’s provisions that “the Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof,” and that “each State shall appoint” electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” prohibit state courts from modifying state legislatures’ election rules. Even if the answer can’t affect this Presidential race, the question could recur in future elections. But the Justices might bear in mind that any decision could still influence the perceived legitimacy of this election: even hearing this case would fuel Republicans’ claims that the election procedures were awry, while refusing to hear it would seem to Democrats a vindication of Biden’s victory.
Prominent Republicans have largely refrained from acknowledging that Biden has won, and from challenging the President’s allegations of fraud—with the notable exceptions of Representative Will Hurd and Senators Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Ben Sasse, who each publicly congratulated Biden. Some Republican leaders have urged rejection of the results. On Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham said, “Do not concede, Mr. President. Fight hard.
But what would it mean to fight hard, when Trump’s barrage of litigation is extremely unlikely to change the outcome? Graham has laid some groundwork for the strategies that might remain even after rebuffs both at the polls and in court. In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News last Thursday, as it became clear that Biden would soon be declared the winner, Graham signalled his approval of the idea that Republican-controlled state legislatures might appoint electors who would cast votes for Trump, even though Biden won those states’ popular votes. Referring to Article II of the Constitution, which provides that a state “shall appoint” its electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, also urged people in battleground states to push their Republican legislatures to override popular-vote results.
It would be outlandish for a state legislature to deviate from the wishes of the state’s voters. But states have the power to determine that fraud affected the vote count and choose Presidential electors who do not reflect that supposedly faulty result. States with Republican legislatures that could, theoretically, override a popular vote in favor of Biden include Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. This possibility remains far-fetched in any of these states, perhaps particularly Pennsylvania, where last month, the Republican majority leaders of the state Senate and House wrote, in an op-ed, “The only and exclusive way that presidential electors can be chosen in Pennsylvania is by the popular vote. The legislature has no hand in this process whatsoever.” The majority leaders reaffirmed that commitment on Friday. But, on Tuesday, a group of Pennsylvania lawmakers announced that it wants the legislative committee to conduct a “comprehensive examination” of “irregularities and inconsistencies” in the election “prior to the certification of the election results and the empanelment of Pennsylvania’s electors to the Electoral College.”
If several states’ electors were to diverge from the popular vote, in theory, on December 14th, the Electoral College vote could result in a win for Trump, and, on January 6th, the newly seated Congress tabulating the electoral votes could declare Trump reëlected. Alternatively, neither candidate might garner a majority of the electoral votes, in which case the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution says that “the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.” Because Democrats retain a majority of the House, one might assume that would mean a Biden Presidency. But the Twelfth Amendment specifies that each state delegation gets one vote, meaning that a state that has more Republican than Democratic representatives would likely vote for Trump. Though there will be more Democratic than Republican members, there will be more Republican than Democratic state delegations in the House. Trump could well be the House’s choice for President.
Yet another disastrous situation would be if some states’ officials split and choose rival slates of electors. This would leave Congress to decide which of the electoral votes from those states to count. And, even though Trump will likely fail to convince courts to credit his allegations of election fraud, he could still press his fraud claim to Congress and urge its members to disqualify some states’ electoral votes. Given Trump’s continuing hold on Republican lawmakers, it appears not out of the question that they would take such an appeal seriously. And, as I wrote last week, if Congress cannot ultimately agree on how to count the electoral votes, it is unclear how the Presidential election would be resolved. Even if the American people wanted the Supreme Court to settle it, the Constitution and other laws would not provide clear means for the Court to decide.
None of these doomsday scenarios are likely yet. Perhaps Republicans are merely tiptoeing around Trump for the time being, waiting for his lawsuits to fizzle out, and expecting them to show the fraud and illegality claims to be unfounded. But the more time that passes without Trump conceding, and without Republican lawmakers publicly acknowledging that power will indeed transfer to Biden as a result of the election, the more it is imaginable that a portion of Congress may be persuaded to use the fraud claim to decline to count some electoral votes for Biden, come January 6th. In the meantime, on Monday, contrary to the long-standing practice of the Department of Justice, Attorney General William Barr explicitly authorized federal prosecutors to investigate voting fraud in the 2020 election “prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions.” (Barr’s decision prompted the resignation of Richard Pilger, the director of the Department’s Election Crimes Branch.) The move, coming at this delicate time, seems designed to improve Trump’s chances of influencing states’ certification of the election results, their appointment of electors, and Congress’s counting of electoral votes. It became particularly alarming when followed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement, on Tuesday, that “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump Administration.”
As we have learned in the past four years, it was not one aberrant President, by himself, but rather Trump’s hold on important Republican Party officials, that enabled the proliferation of chaos and erosion of norms. Even now that Trump has lost the election, the death grip will perhaps be slow to loosen because of his undeniable popularity with Republican voters. And Republican leaders may expect to be rewarded rather than punished by their constituents for fighting between now and January to prevent a Biden Presidency. This form of democratic responsiveness, in which leaders need only to appease adherents of their own party, underscores the difficulties that Biden will have in fulfilling his self-proclaimed mandate to unite the country. There are still significant partisan hurdles to clear before Biden is inaugurated, even though the voters have democratically chosen him as their next President.
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FOCUS: No Votes Which the White Man Was Bound to Respect |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48731"><span class="small">Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone</span></a>
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Wednesday, 11 November 2020 11:52 |
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Smith writes: "Trump never wanted to be a president for all Americans. Now he'll be president for none of them."
Donald Trump supporters. (photo: Damon Winter/NYT)
No Votes Which the White Man Was Bound to Respect
By Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone
11 November 20
Trump never wanted to be a president for all Americans. Now he’ll be president for none of them
 onald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden was a fitting denouement to a presidency replete with hateful policy, deliberate neglect, and slothful governance. The vote count looked good for Trump on Election Day, in part because he’d discouraged his own supporters from using the postal service he’d sabotaged to mail in their ballots. As the count went on, Biden benefited, and Trump behaved as if math was magical.
Trump didn’t see the punch coming, or acted like he didn’t, because he was fighting an opponent he didn’t see. Not an apparition or someone who could bend light, but someone whom he simply refused to recognize. As if he were a villain in Ralph Ellison’s great American novel, Trump lost to the invisible voter. During the campaign, Trump was never subtle about his preference: he’d rather lose as the president of white people than even attempt to be the president of the United States. So those of us whom he erased, along with our allies, were fine with that. In this election, by a considerable margin, we got him squared away.
As the election came to its end on Saturday, it was clear that voters of color were carrying the day. Indigenous tribal nations were key for President-elect Biden in Arizona, as were Latinx voters in Nevada and Muslims in Michigan. Turnout in cities such as Detroit, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia became a threat to Trump. These were places that had been ignored by many a politician before Trump, but he’d compared them to Middle East war theaters, all to scare white suburbanites and cement false stereotypes about urban crime. It was somewhat poetic, then, to see a man who got his start discriminating against black tenants in New York City evicted from the White House by black and brown voters.
This likely has at least partly to do with Trump can’t handle the result. Perhaps he thought the regressive MAGA nation he’s been trying to turn America into is what the nation actually is. Or, even more curiously, he could have believed that he had committed enough sabotage with his vandalism of the postal service and planted Supreme Court picks that he could just order up a fixed election, as one might a fast-food meal. Whatever he is attempting, whether it be revenge on Biden or an actual coup, the backdrop for it — the surge of marginalized voices at the ballot box amidst a deadly pandemic and Republican voter suppression and intimidation efforts — is what someone like Trump must truly lament having as a political epitaph. The very kinds of people he spent four years attempting to silence and suppress came forth to paint him forever as the one thing he cannot stand to be known as: a loser.
It is vital that we understand this kind of insecurity as we look at what Trump and the Republican Party are doing now during this epilogue of the election. As they quixotically attempt to challenge a decided contest, it is evident things have gone well beyond Saturday’s moment of exhaustive relief and declarative delight, during which those of us who voted for both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and against Trump and his training-wheels totalitarianism could freely indulge in our schadenfreude.
Trump was just whining then. It’s gotten real now.
William Barr just gave the green light for federal prosecutors to take seriously Trump’s rectal-sourced claims of voter fraud. It prompted Richard Pilger, the director of the elections crimes branch in the Department of Justice, to immediately resign. The White House is blocking Biden from receiving his Presidential Daily Briefing, a custom that, while not mandated by law, has been vital to presidential transitions and to actual safety — both of those who have been newly elected and the American people. Trump and his minions aren’t much for doing the laborious for real government, especially in the midst of a pandemic that has now infected more than 10 million people in this country. But they sure can mobilize when it’s time to cover the president’s ass and mete out punishment to his enemies. There are names for such organizations, but not in politics.
Republicans may think that echoing Trump’s rubbish is a way to placate the anger of a colicky president in his final two months. One senior Republican official told the Post, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” adding, “It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on January ?20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”
It is evident that Republicans don’t care a whit how Trump’s false claim to the election damages our democracy, nor how their allegiance to him sows distrust amongst his supporters whom Biden will eventually have to lead. What they are perpetrating distills the purpose of modern Republicanism: a party uninterested in governance using the emotional entitlement, resentment, and bigotries of a predominantly white base to make the nation ungovernable. Why? To maintain power and exploit public resources for private industrial profit. The public-service part becomes ancillary, if not altogether forgotten. For the last four years, Republicans have had this president as a mascot for their cause. A mascot with the nuclear codes, mind you. Why not just let him ride for two more months, right? Use the mascot to get the crowd riled up, no matter the damage he may cause.
Trump isn’t on the ballot in Georgia, where two run-off elections in early January will decide the balance of the Senate. But McConnell, who has supported the president’s refusal to concede the election, likely wishes that he were. The Washington Post’s Robert Costa on Monday, tweeted that, based on conversations with Republicans last weekend, “most everything McConnell does from here isn’t about January 20th … but January 5th,” the date of the run-off Senate elections when incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler will face Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, respectively. “To win the latter,” Costa wrote, “Rs believe the base must be stoked, esp in a fast changing state.”
That “fast changing state” surely refers not merely to the racial demographics of Georgia, but to its dramatic change in its approach to voting. In 2016’s presidential election, 22% of the eligible population wasn’t registered. This year, that number went down to 2%, and the overall percentage of those who actually cast a ballot increased by 8%. Republicans tend to lose when more people are registered and more people vote, and Biden won the state — the first Democrat to do so since Bill Clinton in 1992.
If Republicans lose again in Georgia’s Senate run-offs, that would be yet another comeuppance. Many would surely enjoy seeing Harris, the incoming Senate president, be able to break a tie on every partisan-line vote, right in front of newly minted Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. However, there isn’t enough schadenfreude in the world to make up for their enabling of the boy-president who couldn’t give a damn about the country, about the job he claims he wants to keep, and certainly not about the 75 million people who fired him from that position.
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We May Be a Divided Nation, but We're United in Not Trusting the News Media |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54550"><span class="small">Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Los Angeles Times</span></a>
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Wednesday, 11 November 2020 09:12 |
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Abdul-Jabbar writes: "Tuesday's election made clear, once again, how politically divided we are as a nation. But there's at least one thing Americans agree on across the political gulf: They don't trust the news media."
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. (photo: Getty Images)
We May Be a Divided Nation, but We're United in Not Trusting the News Media
By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Los Angeles Times
11 November 20
 uesday’s election made clear, once again, how politically divided we are as a nation. But there’s at least one thing Americans agree on across the political gulf: They don’t trust the news media.
A recent Gallup poll in conjunction with the Knight Foundation found that, although 84% of Americans agree the news media are crucial to the survival of democracy, two-thirds worry about it being biased. It’s our job as Americans to be skeptical of information attempting to manipulate us. Yet lately, distrust in the news is more than healthy skepticism: It’s outright hostility.
Some of this lack of trust can be laid at the feet of the Trump administration, which waged a relentless four-year campaign to undermine public confidence in media reports critical of the president. But some of the blame falls on the media, both on the left and right.
Each year since 1975, Americans’ trust in news sources has eroded further, and a new Pew Research Center poll reveals that Americans’ confidence in the news media is well below that in education, medicine, science and the military.
Numerous studies have found Fox News to be among the most biased and least accurate of popular news sources. Not only did its blatant cheerleading for President Trump severely undermine the network’s credibility as “fair and balanced,” studies have found that its viewers reject established science on issues such as climate change and are generally less informed than even people who watch no news at all. Yet, the network was the most watched over the summer and remains the most trusted news source by 65% of Republicans and those who lean toward that party.
The heavy reliance of Republicans on Fox made me pay more attention to the network in the run-up to the election. What I found most disturbing was the complete blurring of news and opinion.
An online news story from Fox News on Oct. 4 demonstrated one of the most common problems. The article was titled “Tucker: Biden used ‘illusion of reasonableness’ at debate to disguise plans to ‘tear down our system.’ ” There was nothing to indicate this article was opinion. Rather, it was cast as a news report, but the report was about what the highly opinionated Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson had to say about the first presidential debate. It quoted Carlson as saying that during the debate “Biden all but admitted onstage that he plans to tear down our system” while “nothing Trump said onstage was radical.”
The story was one of many on the website reporting on what one of its highly opinioned commentators had to say, as if that were actual news. Other stories deliberately distort the news to mollify their audience, which seems to lack the ability to apply critical thinking. In a country that depends on truth in reporting, this is akin to undermining democracy.
Fox News is in the bias confirmation business, and its success can be seen in the last four years of rising skepticism, especially among conservatives, on a range of issues, including COVID-19 risks, vaccine efficacy and the need for climate mitigation. The raising of doubts about proven facts — an effort embraced by President Trump — is like the iceberg ripping into the hull of the Titanic, letting the icy water of irrationality and “gut feelings” pull us under.
And Fox isn’t alone in abandoning the straightforward reporting of facts. Take this Oct. 8 article from the Washington Post: “Isolated in the White House, Trump struggles to project a sense of normalcy after canceled debate.” The article included passages such as: “President Trump has tried to project an image of strength and normalcy that belies his troubled circumstances,” and “Trump immediately lashed out,” and “the commission’s decision seemed to spark a frenzy of aggressive acrimony from Trump, and claims that were notable even by the president’s standards.” The article was filled with interpretation, opinion and hyperbole rather than just reporting what was said and by whom, yet nowhere did it have an “opinion” or “analysis” label.
The same editorial intrusions can be found in most newspapers and television networks. Before the last presidential debate, the “Today” show promoted a story as a “head-spinning development on the head-to-head debates.” To get that cute play on words required an injection of editorial hyperbole: “head-spinning development” (which it wasn’t). Recently, several Los Angeles news shows referred to the recovery of two sheriff’s deputies as “miraculous,” boldly introducing medical opinion.
Many journalists have become like poets at an open mic night, telling us the meaning of the sonnet they’re about to read lest we misinterpret it. But all these loaded editorial words grind down objectivity and therefore our trust in the source.
I regularly watch CNN and MSNBC, and I believe Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow, Jake Tapper, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper and the rest of their reporters are smart and articulate. And I generally agree with almost everything they say. But I wince at the relentless and repetitious propagandizing they all engage in. Sometimes their “news” shows feel more like pep rallies.
As for newspapers, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Guardian are all excellent, and I continue to trust them. But it disturbs me how often I find melodramatic writing and editorial intrusions in all of them.
With the incursion of the Russian, Chinese and Iranian troll farms polluting our news sources, we have more need than ever for reliable and trustworthy gatekeepers of the news. We need journalists who rigorously check facts and sources to weed out propaganda, and we need stories presented with neutral language.
Thomas Jefferson emphasized the importance of news in a letter he wrote from Paris in 1787, “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” The next part of Jefferson’s quote, often omitted, is even more important: “But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.”
Jefferson clearly expected readers to use critical thinking in weighing the reliability of the words they read. The ethical burden of reporting the news without bias falls on the news media, but the patriotic burden of evaluating news reports falls on each citizen. Lately, both have fallen short of their responsibility.
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Alarm Grows Over Trump's 'Dictator Moves' as He Denies Election Defeat |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35878"><span class="small">Stephen Collinson, CNN</span></a>
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Wednesday, 11 November 2020 09:12 |
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Collinson writes: "President Donald Trump's administration is taking on the characteristics of a tottering regime - with its loyalty tests, destabilizing attacks on the military chain of command, a deepening bunker mentality and increasingly delusional claims of political victory."
Mike Pompeo. (photo: Drew Angerer/NYT)
Alarm Grows Over Trump's 'Dictator Moves' as He Denies Election Defeat
By Stephen Collinson, CNN
11 November 20
 resident Donald Trump's administration is taking on the characteristics of a tottering regime -- with its loyalty tests, destabilizing attacks on the military chain of command, a deepening bunker mentality and increasingly delusional claims of political victory.
In response, a visibly confident President-elect Joe Biden is going out of his way to project calm amid the deepening chaos, even as Trump and senior Republicans still refuse to acknowledge the President's defeat in a stunning break with America's democratic traditions.
Biden is taking calls with leaders of the country's top allies and appearing on camera, which reflects the inevitability of his ascent to power. Meanwhile the President is staying behind closed doors, tweeting in wild block capital letters and unleashing a purge of the Pentagon's civilian leadership in what one current defense official called "dictator moves." And William Cohen, former Secretary of Defense and Republican senator, told CNN's Don Lemon the administration's conduct is "more akin to a dictatorship than a democracy."
The President-elect is reassuring the American people with a composure granted by an election win that Trump's threadbare legal cases baselessly alleging massive voter fraud have little chance of overturning the will of the voters.
The President-elect on Tuesday consciously avoided escalating a confrontation with Trump, who is withholding the access and funding that incoming presidents normally rely on to stand up their administrations. But while Trump will remain President until January 20, an unmistakable symbolic transfer of authority is taking place despite Trump's efforts to deny his successor legitimacy.
"We don't see anything that's slowing us down, quite frankly," Biden said.
The President-elect has already crossed the necessary threshold of 270 electoral votes, according to projections from CNN and other major news outlets and has a chance of matching Trump's 2016 total of 306 electoral votes given his leads in Georgia and Arizona.
And more false accusations and conspiracy theories touted by Trump supporters to claim electoral fraud are dissolving, a day after Attorney General William Barr stepped into the political fray to advise prosecutors to probe major fraud.
The Department of Homeland Security meanwhile pushed back on rumors that ballots were cast on behalf of dead people.
But the Trump team only dug itself deeper into a bizarre parallel universe -- one where the President has already secured a second term -- consistent with the embrace of misinformation and alternative facts that has characterized the last four years.
Pompeo uses platform to advance electoral fraud claims
The administration's defiance took an even more ridiculous twist on Tuesday when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo showed his loyalty to a leader who shows no sign of working on key issues -- including a pandemic that has now landed more Americans in hospitals than ever before.
"There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration," Pompeo said. Asked whether Trump's refusal to concede undercut traditional US critiques of corrupt elections abroad, Pompeo rounded on a reporter: "That's ridiculous. And you know it's ridiculous, and you asked it because it's ridiculous." As recently as Monday, Pompeo issued a statement warning of electoral issues in Myanmar, which was long ruled by the military and has endured a difficult transition to semi-democracy where dissidents once looked at the US as a lodestar.
In Wilmington, Delaware, the President-elect pointedly refused to pour fuel on the fire, dismissing the idea that he needed to take legal action to release transition funds and making clear that he was confident that the process of assuming power would eventually work itself out.
He described Trump's behavior since Election Day as "an embarrassment" and after saying he was seeking to be tactful added: "It will not help the President's legacy." Asked whether Republicans would ever accept his victory, he said, "They will, they will," and he suggested with a half-smile that GOP senators were "mildly intimidated" by the President.
Biden, who once had a reputation as a windy public speaker, is showing a new persona to the American people. He noticeably chose his words carefully on Tuesday, putting on a show of calm, as he experiences the transformation that often comes over victorious candidates as they begin to assume the weight of the presidency after winning elections.
Pentagon purge
Trump by contrast is tarnishing the instruments of American democracy by refusing to concede and leaving the country more vulnerable with revenge firings that threaten to weaken critical national security agencies.
After Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who had put loyalty to the Constitution ahead of his duty to the President, three other senior Pentagon officials have been fired or resigned. They include the department's top policy official, James Anderson, who resigned and is being replaced by retired Brigadier General Anthony Tata, whose nomination for the post earlier this summer foundered after CNN's KFile reported his numerous past Islamophobic and offensive remarks.
Sources told Barbara Starr and CNN's Pentagon team that the dismissals might be motivated by pushback from Esper and his team against a withdrawal from Afghanistan that would be carried out before the required conditions on the ground were met, and other pending security issues.
"This is scary, it's very unsettling," one defense official told CNN. "These are dictator moves."
Cohen, former Secretary of Defense and Republican senator, too called out the Trump administration's refusal to acknowledge Biden's win Tuesday night, saying "the way they are conducting themselves is more akin to a dictatorship than a democracy."
"I think that the State Department has been politicized, just like the DoD has tried to be politicized, and what we've done to undermine the intelligence community and other agencies, I think is consistent with what has been taking place for four years now," he said Tuesday.
A disputed transfer of power could offer US adversaries an opening, especially if there is a belief abroad that there is disarray in the national security infrastructure. Trump may next turn his ire on CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Christopher Wray, CNN's Jake Tapper has reported. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said on CNN International Tuesday that he feared the US was entering a dangerous period.
"I think (Trump) is going to be uniquely distracted from world events and national security," Murphy said. Former national security adviser John Bolton told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that Pompeo's comments on a Trump transition were "delusional."
"I think he has eviscerated his credibility internationally because I think there are very few people even in the US government who believe that is the case," Bolton said.
Trump's legal battle faces massive odds
Despite Trump's claims that his second term is being stolen from him, the President's legal claim has so far made no headway in its efforts to claim massive fraud. The gambit looks increasingly like a political exercise as Trump struggles to come to terms with his defeat while Republican senators scared of the President's political base refuse to cross him, especially with two Georgia runoff elections scheduled for January that will decide control of their chamber.
Trump's already minuscule opportunity to change the course of the election is diminishing by the day. Biden is now more than 46,000 votes ahead in Pennsylvania, is up by 12,000 in Georgia and has a lead of 14,000 ballots in Arizona. It is not clear whether there are sufficient remaining votes left in the Grand Canyon state for the President to overtake the President-elect.
As the Trump campaign filed a new long-shot lawsuit in Michigan, which Biden won by nearly than 150,000 votes, its communications director Tim Murtaugh said, "We do believe that ultimately President Trump will be declared the winner of this election."
But Benjamin Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election lawyer, said that the Trump campaign "was a long way from nowhere" in its quest to overturn the outcome of the election.
"To win cases, they have to put enough results into play to change the outcome of the election in individual states and in none of the suits they have filed around the country are they anywhere close to doing that in any state," Ginsberg said on CNN's "The Situation Room."
Still, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dug in Tuesday on his insistence that Trump was within his rights to pursue his complaints.
"I think we ought to quit all the hand-wringing and not act like this is extraordinary," the newly reelected Kentucky Republican said.
"We're going to get through this period and we'll swear in the winner on January the 20th, 2021, just like we have every four years since 1793."
While many observers believe McConnell is playing a long political game -- with the Georgia runoffs and the 2022 midterm congressional elections in mind -- the silence of Republican senators is emboldening Trump's intransigence.
The world has already moved on
But while GOP lawmakers aren't willing to break with the President, many world leaders are moving to embrace Biden -- including a number of whom who saw themselves as ideological counterparts of the President.
Biden's campaign released statements on the President-elect's calls with the leaders of France, Germany and Ireland. Biden also spoke to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose populist leanings made him a good fit with Trump. Johnson promised to work with Biden in a post-Covid-19 era.
Even Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, who bonded with Trump over their common strongman tendencies, issued a public message congratulating Biden on his "election success." And Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman -- who has a close and controversial relationship with Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner -- sent Biden a cable in which they conveyed congratulations on "His Excellency's victory in the presidential elections."
Biden said he had a simple message for all the world leaders: "I am letting them know America is back."
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n 2016 as now, he was the candidate of chaos. Yes, he was a 
