Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Voters have decided that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. should guide the country through the next four years. But on issues of war, the environment, criminal justice, trade, the economy and more, President Trump and top administration officials are doing what they can to make changing direction more difficult. Mr. Trump has spent the last two weeks hunkered down in the White House, raging about a “stolen” election and refusing to accept the reality of…

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The New York Times reports: For the next three weeks, the integrity of American democracy is in the hands of people like Norman D. Shinkle, a proud Michigander who has, until recently, served in relative obscurity on the state board that certifies vote results. But now Mr. Shinkle faces a choice born from the national election turmoil created by President Trump, his preferred candidate, for whom he sang the national anthem at a campaign rally in Lansing last month. Mr….

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Keith E. Whittington writes: President Trump has refused to accept the obvious — that he lost his bid for reelection. His campaign has pursued increasingly desperate gambits in a bid to flip the apparent election results in various swing states, and Republican leaders have generally indulged those efforts by a repeated insistence that the president was entitled to let the “process” play itself out. But what exactly does that “process” include? For some supporters of the president, that might include…

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Reuters reports: Brett Fryar is a middle-class Republican. A 50-year-old chiropractor in this west Texas town, he owns a small business. He has two undergraduate degrees and a master’s degree, in organic chemistry. He attends Southcrest Baptist Church in nearby Lubbock. Fryar didn’t much like Donald Trump at first, during the U.S. president’s 2016 campaign. He voted for Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries. Now, Fryar says he would go to war for Trump. He has joined the…

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Politico reports: Senate Republicans are signaling they will confirm most of President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet picks in January — a rare bright spot for a White House that may clash with a GOP majority for years to come. Many Republicans won’t even publicly concede that Biden will be the next president while President Donald Trump fights to overturn the election results. But a critical mass of GOP senators said in interviews that Biden has the right to his Cabinet, indicating…

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CNN reports: A growing number of veteran GOP lawmakers are pushing back on President Donald Trump’s tactics to overturn election results showing he lost the race, raising concerns that his tactics could hurt the US response to the coronavirus crisis and undercut a key pillar of democracy. In recent days, more Republicans have spoken out — even though party leaders and a vast majority of congressional Republicans continue to back Trump’s efforts to challenge the results. Sen. Lamar Alexander of…

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CNN reports: President Donald Trump told an ally that he knows he lost, but that he is delaying the transition process and is aggressively trying to sow doubt about the election results in order to get back at Democrats for questioning the legitimacy of his own election in 2016, especially with the Russia investigation, a source familiar with the President’s thinking told CNN on Thursday. The President’s refusal to concede, as CNN has previously reported, stems in part from his…

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Edward B. Foley writes: If the losing party can’t accept defeat, the whole enterprise of electoral democracy is finished. Two-party competition means each party taking turns depending on what the voters want in any given election. President Trump himself will never acknowledge this. But the Republican Party institutionally must. That is the critical challenge facing Senate Republicans and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.): When and how decisively will they pull the plug on Trump’s desperate effort to force upon…

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CNN reports: Elizabeth Warren’s fingerprints are all over the Biden transition, much to Wall Street’s dismay. President-elect Joe Biden’s agency review teams include several people who share Warren’s reputation for being tough on the financial industry. It’s more evidence of the influence of Warren, a fierce opponent of big banks and the excesses of Wall Street — as well as an early signal that Wall Street will be under much greater scrutiny, especially compared to four years of President Donald…

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Dana Milbank writes: As partisans and analysts puzzle over the higher-than-expected turnout for President Trump (nearly 6 million fewer votes than for President-elect Joe Biden, but still high), they are poring over groups and subgroups: White, non-college-educated men. Suburban women. Young Black men. But much of the Trump 2020 phenomenon can be explained by a far simpler way of looking at the electorate: There are White evangelical Christians — and there is everybody else. White evangelicals are only 15 percent…

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