2020 election

The Democrats face so many problems that it’s hard to remember the Republicans face a big one of their own. Donald Trump is not just a problem for Republicans. He’s a problem for the Republic. The problem is not Trump’s policies, whether you agree with them or not. Their populist/nationalist thrust differs from traditional conservativism, but his policies are coloring within the traditional lines of American politics. Many of them — tax cuts, immigration enforcement, increased military spending, credible threats against foreign adversaries — worked well and received enthusiastic popular support. Trump’s emphasis on state and local solutions over centralized ones was a welcome return to standard Republican practice.

Cockburn was weighing his post-Thanksgiving options this past weekend: the fifth leftover sandwich of the day or the rest of the pricey claret that his hedgie brother had brought to lunch (a rare act of generosity from the spoiled brat). Just as he had settled on the correct answer to this conundrum (both), his appetite was quickly satisfied by a particularly juicy morsel buried the pages of Politico. Christopher Cadelago and Meridith McGraw report that after his 2020 victory, Joe Biden called Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt to “say thank you for the group’s work helping him get elected.

When we focus on the rise of the Hispanic male Republican, we overlook the emergence of his consort and counterpart, the right-wing Latina. Donald Trump made gains across the board with Hispanics in the 2020 election, but the media fixated on “multiracial whiteness” and “toxic masculinity” in the voting choices of Hispanic men. Meanwhile, Trump gained more votes between 2016 and 2020 among Hispanic women than any other sector of the electorate. The woke tell themselves that Hispanic men, with their supposed chauvinism and machismo, control the lives and voting choices of the Latina. But the opposite is the case. The Latina, with her preternatural seduction skills, holds the power in the relationship. If her curves sway to the right, the men, as they always do, will follow along.

Election audits of the 2020 election are under attack in the media. It’s easy to see why some calls for audits have drawn criticism. But audits can serve a very useful purpose. Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia Republican nominee for governor, is calling for an ‘audit’ of the state’s voting machines. The former co-CEO of the Carlyle group says: ‘I grew up in a world where you have an audit every year, in businesses you have an audit. So let’s just audit the voting machines, publish it so everybody can see it.’ Kari Lake, a former Phoenix news anchor whose candidacy for governor of Arizona has been endorsed by Donald Trump, said she would not have certified the 2020 election results in the state. She cited ‘serious irregularities and problems with the election’.

What is it about Donald Trump that his closest associates seem to all go irredeemably insane? On Thursday, the CEO and chief priest of MyPillow Mike Lindell announced that he is suspending his advertising on Fox, 'immediately and indefinitely'. This is no minor boycott or tiff. MyPillow and Fox News are tethered together like no sponsor and sponsee since Michael Jordan spiritually merged his consciousness with Nike. Lindell claims his firm bought $50 million in ads on Fox in 2020, meaning he supplies almost two percent of Fox’s revenue. Fox doesn’t just market Lindell’s cushions, but also his life: the channel has aired the ad for his self-published memoir, What Are The Odds?

What makes America America? An answer available to most of us is our shared dedication to the principles of liberty and equality. We are ‘the land of the free’. Or at least we were until five minutes ago. Our freedom these days seems a little shaky. And in the world of higher education, those simple declarations are especially faint. By the time they arrive as freshmen (or ‘first years’ in today’s man-phobic argot) students are generally well-versed in all the ways we aren’t ‘free’ and most of the reasons why ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ are doubtful propositions. ‘America’ is increasingly defined for this generation as a place where some really bad things happened and continue to happen.

Donald Trump has issued another statement after being criticized by his former staffers in recent days. Here’s an excerpt: ‘Every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more, that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome.’ Sorry, that was George Washington. I must have mixed up my notes. Here’s Trump: ‘Many say I am the greatest star-maker of all time. But some of the stars I produced are actually made of garbage.’ There’s the elder statesman we all know and love! That may be the closest thing to an admission of error I’ve yet seen from our 45th president. And certainly Trump is correct in even the most literal sense.

Tucker Carlson has never shied from diverging with the GOP orthodoxy. In a recent interview with the prestigious Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche, the Fox News host blamed Donald Trump for the ‘unfair’ 2020 election and doubts he can make a comeback in 2024. Carlson told Die Weltwoche that Trump inflamed the political left during his four years in office but allowed them to join forces and ‘change the system’. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, both Republican and Democratic states passed measures to ensure people could vote by mail instead of in-person before election day. 'He made them self-consciously his opponents, and then he didn't neutralize them,’ Carlson said. 'There's no question that Trump inflamed his enemies. He's allowed them to coalesce, to organize.

The summertime auguries bode badly for former president Donald Trump, who has made a business of harmlessly splashing his feet in the Rubicon. He has reportedly made up his mind about running for president again in 2024 but won't say whether he'll cross the river yet — so you'll just have to keep giving him your money to find out. Naturally, people are growing bored and frustrated with the spectacle. QAnon supporters are probably Trump's most fervent followers, and they received his recent rally in Wellington, Ohio, with a sigh of ennui. Apart from the standard artillery blasting traitorous RINOs, Trump railed against the rising tide of crime and ridiculed 'woke' generals. But the diehards snored.

If you lay down with dogs you get fleas. If you make your bed with demented conspiracy theorists, you become mentally ill. This is the unfortunate position that certain sections of the American right have found themselves in following the presidential election last year. Lots of Americans had — and still have — suspicions about the massive surge in mail-in voting in November. It’s hard to blame them. The 2020 election was a very strange one on any number of fronts. But no sane person can possibly now deny that the Trump campaign, in its attempts to prove the election a fraud, engaged in and with some serious charlatanry.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in one of the most important cases for voting rights in decades. Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee centers on two Arizona measures aimed at voter integrity. The first prevents individuals from casting their ballot in the wrong precinct and the second prohibits ballot harvesting. The question at stake is whether these measures and others like them violate Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits election rules from disenfranchising minorities. The DNC's lawyers seem to argue that any election safeguard measure is discriminatory. If Biden thinks people of color don't know how to use the internet, then the DNC thinks they can't follow election laws.

You’ve succeeded in business, made it as a TV star and got yourself elected president. What could possibly top that? Donald Trump may have stumbled on the answer. He has, perhaps accidentally, become a religious leader. Christianity has always played a major role in US politics. What’s new about Trump is the fervor he excites in his supporters, and how easily it can be combined with a kind of religious devotion. Trump fans bring crucifixes and rosaries to his rallies.

‘You’re a cuck, Tobes, an absolute cuck.’ My friend James Delingpole was furious. ‘Honestly, I thought I could depend on you of all people, but you’ve surrendered, just like every other right-wing commentator I know. I can’t begin to describe how disappointing this is. I would have expected it from some — Dan Hannan, Jonah Goldberg, the editors of the National Review — all bloody cucks, the lot of them. But not you, Tobes. I’m alone in the foxhole.’ This outburst would have been hard to listen to under normal circumstances, but it occurred on air during our weekly podcast on Ricochet. Needless to say, we were discussing the presidential election and James is 100 percent convinced that Donald Trump was the victim of a massive electoral fraud.

William P. Barr is out. Joe Biden is in. And Donald Trump has a few more weeks left to bemoan his fate and lash out at his subordinates now that the Electoral College vote has taken place. Poor Trump! He wanted a no-holds-Barred assault on the election. But Barr, who was supposed to be Trump’s faithful janissary, has proved less than reliable in recent weeks, earning him the ultimate opprobrium of the President today, who declared that at least Robert Mueller, in contrast to Barr, would have set the record straight about Hunter Biden. Yup. Mueller. He would have 'set the record straight’, Trump claimed. So the author of the putative Russia witch-hunt is now being used to highlight the shortcomings of Barr?

Does Joe Biden write his own speeches? Surely not. Yet his campaign says Biden was his own speechwriter for the address he made to the nation a week after the election, when he stressed his campaign theme: ‘We must restore the soul of America.’ The Soul of America is the title of a book by the historian Jon Meacham and the New York Times figured out that Meacham had helped with the speech. The campaign’s national press secretary, TJ Ducklo, was forced to concede that, yes, Biden had ‘consulted a number of important, and diverse, voices as part of his writing process, as he often does’.

The winner of this year’s presidential election may be different than the last, but the struggles of the polling industry continue.Although, one lesser-known but historically successful poll appeared to have predicted the exact result: IBD/TIPP, headed by Raghavan Mayur, president and founder of TechnoMetrica. But Mayur, an immigrant from India with a strong Hindu faith, could care less. He’s too focused on his work to worry about the excuses of his competitors.‘At the end of the day, there’s an Indian saying: the dancer who doesn’t know how to dance will say the stage is crooked,’ Mayur told The Spectator.

For all the caterwauling on the left about one William P. Barr, he hasn’t really delivered for Donald Trump, apart from performing some fancy footwork on the release of the Mueller report. The latest affront arrived today when Barr declared that he has discovered nary a shred of evidence of voter fraud. Presumably, Barr searched high and low, like one of those fanatics you see using wearing headphones and deploying metal detectors to sweep a grassy era for precious metals or valuables. But he arrived at the conclusion that 'to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election’.To be sure, Barr was careful to specify 'to date’, suggesting that perhaps something might yet emerged.