Really Surreal
His Majesty, King Donald of 5th Ave, now insists (by Tweet of course) that he could have won the popular vote had he chosen to do so. The basis for this latest round of nonsense is that he would have run a different campaign if the popular vote determined the winner. While it is arguably true in the case of Bush v. Gore that Bush could have run up the vote in places like Texas in a popular vote campaign, there is no chance that Trump could have harvested an extra 3 million votes or so around the country, much less in places like California and New York.
Trump sycophants have now taken to arguing that His Majesty beat Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes if you don’t count California and New York. Which is to say that Trump did even better if you don’t count the other guy’s votes.
In the meantime Politico reports that His Majesty intends to maintain his own private security force rather than rely exclusively on the Secret Service, a move that Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent, calls “playing with fire.”
The Long Goodbye
To the surprise of almost no one, it turns out that remnants of the Clinton campaign kept tabs on the attempt to derail the Electoral College vote for Trump. Documents leaked to Politico show that while the campaign didn’t come out and endorse the effort, they didn’t wave it off either, just as they gave tacit support to the ill-fated recount efforts mounted by Jill Stein.
Spendathon
In a looming sign that fiscal sanity is unlikely to make an appearance in Washington any time soon, Charles Schumer, Senate minority leader, has said that Trump’s trillion dollar infrastructure plan “sounds good to him.” The spendathon is about to begin.
About that Russian Influence
Politico reports that Senator Tom Cotton, long a hawk on Russia, tried to force the White House to create a panel with representatives from various agencies to “counter Russian efforts ‘to exert control or influence’ including by exposing Russian ‘falsehoods, agents of influence, corruption, human rights abuses, terrorism, and assassinations’.”
The Administration rejected Cotton’s call saying that it would duplicate existing efforts.
The Youth Vote
A recent poll found that 62% of Democrats do not want Hillary Clinton to take a third run at the White House, leading to the obvious question, where did they find the other 38%? Anyway, the two candidates Democrats are most focused on for 2020 are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. In 2020 Biden will turn 78 and Sanders will turn 79.
JFB
