* Axios is doing some longer form reporting on the post election White House - basically painting a picture of a "professional" team of advisers who knew he had lost and encouraged him to accept it, or at least to try some "sensible" legal challenges, but they lost out to the "mad" team:
On the day after the election, Nov. 4, top staff including Stepien,
Clark, Miller, general counsel Matthew Morgan and Jared Kushner had
gathered at Trump campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. They
believed this would be a serious search for a path to 270 electoral
votes through credible legal challenges.
Then Giuliani, Sidney Powell and a swelling conspiracy crew marched into the room — literally.
These
two groups — the professional staff and the Giuliani cabal — filled in
around one long, rectangular table in a conference room walled in by
frosted glass. The pattern repeated itself the day after that and the
day after that.
A bizarre routine set in. These
meetings would begin with official staff raising plausible legal
strategies. Then Giuliani and Powell, a lawyer with a history of
floating “deep state” conspiracy theories, would take over, spewing wild
allegations of a centralized plot by Democrats — and in Powell's view,
international communists — to steal the election.
Bewildered
campaign aides would look around the table at one another, silently
asking what the hell was going on. One would invariably shuffle out of
the room, followed by another a few minutes later. Then another. Then
another. The professional staff would reconvene in Stepien's office,
about 20 yards down the hall.
Eventually, Giuliani would realize that he and his crew were alone in
the conference room. He'd walk down the hall and knock on the glass
outside Stepien's office, where about eight aides had squeezed onto a
pair of couches. "You guys, where did you go?" Giuliani would say. "This
is serious!"
Asked to provide comment on this
reporting, which was confirmed by two sources in the room, Powell said
in an emailed statement to Axios: "Your story is materially false, but
I'm sure the 'elitist and consultant class' that make millions of
dollars lying to the American people are behind it and will push that
propaganda." Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.
Officials
including Clark, Morgan and Bossie, who played a key role in Trump's
2016 victory, spent many hours trying to stop the former New York mayor
from running to the press or the president and muddling the campaign's
legal approach. But they were outmatched, and Trump was tweeting his own
spiraling conspiracies.
....
On Nov. 13, Clark was in the Cabinet room of the White House with
Stepien, Miller and campaign aide Erin Perrine for a meeting on
communications strategy when deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino summoned
Clark into the Oval Office to settle a legal question.
Trump had
Giuliani on speakerphone, and Giuliani, seemingly unaware of Clark’s
arrival, was trashing the campaign staff's legal strategy in Georgia —
and floating a debunked conspiracy theory about rigged Dominion voting
machines.
"Hey, I've got Justin in here," Trump interrupted.
"What do you think, Justin?" Clark laid out the legal process in Georgia
and told the packed Oval Office that Georgia state law barred
requesting a recount until after an election is certified.
"They're lying to you, sir!" Giuliani erupted.
"We're not lying," Clark shot back. "You're a fucking asshole, Rudy."
The
following night — without notifying his campaign staff — Trump tweeted
that he was putting Giuliani in charge of his legal challenges, along
with pro-Trump lawyers Powell, Joseph diGenova, Victoria Toensing and
Jenna Ellis.
Trump has never had a clue as to who to take advice from. If they can pander to his narcissism well enough, they'll be on the inside for a while, until things start to look bad, then they're out in a flash.
* An interesting article at Slate about the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, and what it may, or may not, indicated as lessons for today.
* Polling shows the terrible problem of conspiracy belief (and Trump's personality cult) in the Republican Party:
The public mostly rejects the baseless conspiracy theory behind the
rioting -- that Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to become
president: 65% say that he did legitimately win enough votes, but a
sizable share (23%) -- and particularly among Republicans (58%) --
believe that conspiracy theory to be true and that there is solid
evidence to support it. There is no evidence that the election was
illegitimate, nor that there was widespread fraud in the vote count.
The Washington Post reported very similar figures:
- By 66 percent to 30 percent, Americans overall
say Trump acted irresponsibly in his statements and actions since the
election. But Republicans say Trump acted responsibly by 66 percent to 29 percent.
- By
62 percent to 31 percent, Americans say there’s no solid evidence of
the claims of voter fraud that Trump cited to refuse to accept Joe
Biden’s victory. But Republicans say there is solid evidence of fraud by 65 percent to 25 percent.
- 57 percent of Americans say Trump bears a great deal or good amount of responsibility for the assault on the Capitol. But 56 percent of Republicans say Trump bears no responsibility at all, and another 22 percent say he bears just some, totaling 78 percent who largely exonerate him.
- 52 percent of Americans say Republican leaders went too far in supporting Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. But 51 percent of Republicans say GOP leaders didn’t go far enough, while 27 percent say they got it right, a total of 78 percent who are fully on board or wanted more. Only 16 percent of Republicans say they went too far.
I predict some sort of formal denouncing of Trump will need to be made by the establishment GOP to try and get his dumb base back into the fold.
