• It’s self-evident that T***p has no concern for his country or the American people, as the damage from his misinformation campaign mounts and the toll of the pandemic worsens; he’s the one doing the “rigging” of the election and subverting the obvious will of the people.

Mitt Romney: “Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the president has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election,” Mr. Romney wrote. “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American president.”

Ben Sasse: “Based on what I’ve read in their filings, when Trump campaign lawyers have stood before courts under oath, they have repeatedly refused to actually allege grand fraud—because there are legal consequences for lying to judges,” Sasse said. “President Trump lost Michigan by more than 100,000 votes and the campaign and its allies have lost in or withdrawn all five lawsuits in Michigan for being unable to produce any evidence,” he added.

Michael Beschloss, in the NYT: “In this case, no serious person thinks enough votes are in dispute that Donald Trump could have been elected on Election Day…This is a manufactured crisis. It is a president abusing his huge powers in order to stay in office after the voters clearly rejected him for re-election.” He added: “This is what many of the founders dreaded.”

Brad Raffensperger, in the NYT, affirming that Georgians voted for Biden: “I live by the motto that numbers don’t lie,” the Georgia official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said at a Friday morning news conference at the state capitol. “I believe that the numbers that we have presented today are correct.”

• Roger Cohen at the NY Times sums it up very nicely in his Mr. President, Pack Your Bags and Be Gone  essay. Some excerpts:

-Donald Trump, departing president, lost in an election that a division of the Department of Homeland Security has now called“the most secure in American history,” with no “evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.”

-Trump can no more accept defeat than recall the fact that he took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

-The world needs an American democracy restored, rid of its brooding ruler, and led by the man who won, Joe Biden. End of story.

• The toll continues.  Possessors of integrity, moral gravitas and capable decision making based on science continue to be disposed of, as they are inconvenient to this lame duck administration’s self-interested aims – or perhaps simply due to mindless revenge.  It’s detestable. From the NY Times, see:

• Climate Scientist Removed
• Secretary of Defense Fired

• Frank Bruni, writing in the NYT about the election of our president, captures the essence of how I feel quite nicely in his How Will I Ever Look at America the Same Way Again? column. An excerpt:

“In him we forgave florid cruelty, overt racism, rampant corruption, exultant indecency, the coddling of murderous despots, the alienation of true friends, the alienation of truth itself, the disparagement of invaluable institutions, the degradation of essential democratic traditions.

He played Russian roulette with Americans’ lives. He played Russian roulette with his own aides’ lives. In a sane and civil country, of the kind I long thought I lived in, his favorability ratings would have fallen to negative integers, a mathematical impossibility but a moral imperative. In this one, they never changed all that much.”

• From the New York Times:

“A group of 20 Republican former federal prosecutors endorsed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday, calling President Trump “a threat to the rule of law in our country” who uses the Justice Department “to serve his personal and political interests.”

“He has politicized the Justice Department, dictating its priorities along political lines,” the signatories said in an open letter. “We do not support his re-election.”

The letter from the former U.S. attorneys includes signatures from appointees of every Republican administration since President Eisenhower’s.

“The president has clearly conveyed that he expects his Justice Department appointees and prosecutors to serve his personal and political interests in the handling of certain cases — such as the investigations into foreign election interference and the prosecution of his political associates — and has taken action against those who have stood up for the interests of justice,” the letter said.”

• This NYT editorial lays it all out – “End Our National Crisis – The Case Against Donald Trump“; as they opine, “This is the moment when Americans must recover that sense of outrage” and act to remove “the worst American president in modern history” from office. Vote.

• NY Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie talks about long lines at the polls in low-income areas acting as the equivalent of poll taxes – one of the many ways voter suppression continues to manifest itself. From Bouie’s lates newsletter: “Voters in affluent precincts don’t face long lines. White voters don’t tend to face long lines. Long lines for voting are most common in areas where Black Americans and Hispanics make up a majority of voters, and they are generated by concrete policy decisions: cuts to voting resources in the form of fewer polling stations, poll workers and voting machines.

The culprits, as has often been the case in decisions that limit access to the ballot, are Republican lawmakers and officials who have made the reduction of voting resources a deliberate strategy for shrinking the size of the electorate. In Georgia, for example, the Republican former secretary of state (and current governor) Brian Kemp closed 214 polling stations between 2012 and 2018, often in rural, high-poverty areas with significant Black populations. In Texas, as well, Republicans have fought to reduce options for early voting, contributing to long waits this past week.

When you see long lines for voting, Americans devoting entire days to exercising their right to suffrage, you should remember that these lines are a choice meant to burden our ability to choose our leaders. You should be angry.”

And then there’s Paul Krugman’s How the G.O.P. Can Still Wreck America column.  Sigh. Please make sure you vote.

• Anne Applebaum’s excellent piece in The Atlantic references the Cornell University misinformation study in laying it all out (italics are my own):

“…Trump’s super-spreading of disinformation has already changed America. Just a few days ago, Cornell University published a study showing that 38 percent of media stories containing misinformation about the virus refer to the president: Trump is literally, not metaphorically, the single most important reason so many Americans distrust information they receive about the disease. He is literally, not metaphorically, the reason so many Americans distrust our electoral system too. He is literally, not metaphorically, the reason so many Americans distrust one another…And we are all … unsurprised. This kind of obfuscation, this level of confusion, is exactly what we have come to expect from our national leader. Trump has destroyed our trust with wanton abandon—trust in our political system, trust in our institutions, trust in science, trust in America itself—simply because it benefits him, personally, to do so. Whatever happens to Trump over the next few weeks, that is the legacy that will outlast his presidency. It has already distorted and changed and altered the country just as profoundly as the coronavirus itself.”

• Barton Gellman, writing in the  Atlantic, lays out ways in which DJT could hijack the election.  Don’t read it before bedtime, the nightmares could be horrific.  This story, appearing in conjunction with the orange one’s response to questions about a peaceful White House transition should he lose the election, are most alarming. “We’re going to have to see what happens,” he told reporter Brian Karem during a news conference at the White House. “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.”, “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation,” The potential ways things could go sideways are terrifying.