Attention to the Unseen

CNN reports: The Trump administration has carried out sweeping changes atop the Defense Department’s civilian leadership structure, removing several of its most senior officials and replacing them with perceived loyalists to the President. The flurry of changes, announced by the Department of Defense in a statement roughly 24 hours after President Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, have put officials inside the Pentagon on edge and fueled a growing sense of alarm among military and civilian officials, who are…

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The Washington Post reports: A Pennsylvania postal worker whose claims have been cited by top Republicans as potential evidence of widespread voting irregularities admitted to U.S. Postal Service investigators that he fabricated the allegations, according to three officials briefed on the investigation and a statement from a House congressional committee. Richard Hopkins’s claim that a postmaster in Erie, Pa., instructed postal workers to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day was cited by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in a letter…

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The New York Times reports: Election officials in dozens of states representing both political parties said that there was no evidence that fraud or other irregularities played a role in the outcome of the presidential race, amounting to a forceful rebuke of President Trump’s portrait of a fraudulent election. Over the last several days, the president, members of his administration, congressional Republicans and right wing allies have put forth the false claim that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump…

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Reuters reports: Nearly 80% of Americans, including more than half of Republicans, recognize President-elect Joe Biden as the winner of the Nov. 3 election after most media organizations called the race for the Democrat based on his leads in critical battleground states, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. Biden – who needed 270 Electoral College votes to win – had 279 of those votes to 214 for Trump with results in three states not yet complete, according to Edison Research. In…

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Reuters reports: Top Republicans in the U.S. Congress for now are supporting President Donald Trump’s attempt to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, but some senior aides said Trump must soon produce significant evidence or exit the stage. A handful of Republican senators have said they recognize Biden as last week’s winner. Many more have not but are suggesting limits to their patience in giving Trump the benefit of the doubt. Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a state that Trump won…

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The Hill reports: President-elect Joe Biden began having calls with foreign leaders this week, as President Trump continues to challenge the results of the election. Biden spoke with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday and with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Irish Prime Minister Taoiseach Micheál Martin on Tuesday. The former vice president addressed the calls in an exchange with reporters later Tuesday, saying he communicated to other global leaders…

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Fred Kaplan writes: The election has left many Democrats in a turbid pool of dread, a daze of disappointment, a gnawing ache of incompletion. Yes, Joe Biden won the presidency, but the Republicans are likely to retain control of the Senate, and that means … hey, now, wait a minute, the complainers are burying the lede! Let’s put it up top: Joe Biden is going to be president. Before tallying the grim implications of the Senate contests, focus for a…

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Bill McKibben writes: Joe Biden has reached two hundred and seventy votes in the Electoral College, and getting him there was hard as hell—harder than anyone who’d been reading the polls or, for that matter, just reading the tweets of the debased incumbent had expected. It barely happened: Wisconsin, where one poll had Biden up seventeen points, was decided by 20,534 votes—a scant half a per cent. Had just a few of other similar close calls broken in the other…

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Edward-Isaac Dovere writes: For half a century, across three presidential runs he made and three more he thought about making, Joe Biden had never won a single primary delegate before his South Carolina romp in February catapulted him to the Democratic nomination. But his strategy never changed. Biden won the White House the same way he won his first race, for New Castle County council in 1970: by being himself. He won while giving the same speeches, and telling literally…

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Zeynep Tufekci writes: Now that Joe Biden has won the presidency, we can expect debates over whether Donald Trump was an aberration (“not who we are!”) or another instantiation of America’s pathologies and sins. One can reasonably make a case for his deep-rootedness in American traditions, while also noticing the anomalies: the early-morning tweeting, the fondness for mixing personal and government business, the obsession with ratings befitting a reality-TV star—the one job he was good at. From an international perspective,…

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Yascha Mounk writes: As president, Donald Trump has caused needless suffering on a staggering scale and subjected the country’s democratic institutions to their most serious test in more than a century. They survived that test. Joe Biden has narrowly defeated Trump, putting an end to the nightmare of the past four years. A competent and humane administration is now preparing to enter the White House. Although the nation’s deep problems won’t vanish, the 46th president of the United States will…

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Deutsche Welle reports: An international election observer mission to the US has concluded there was no evidence of election fraud and Tuesday’s presidential vote was “competitive and well managed,” despite “logistical challenges” as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) noted statements made by President Donald Trump about deficiencies within the country’s electoral system were baseless and eroded trust in democracy. “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including…

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The Washington Post reports: A Republican firm run by a top aide to President Trump’s 2020 campaign appears to have helped send unmarked text messages on Thursday that urged supporters in Philadelphia to converge outside a building where local election officials were counting votes. “ALERT: Radical Liberals & Dems are trying to steal this election from Trump!” began the short text, sent in the hours before former vice president Joe Biden took the lead in the state. “We need YOU!…

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