Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[hrothgar]

Well the TV commercials here are nauseating. I'm glad you don't have to suffer through them in Massachusetts. Warnock's, primarily, are "Kelly Loeffler made money in the stock market." Loeffler's, primarily, are "Warnock ran over his wife's foot in a domestic dispute." Ossoff's, primarily, are "Perdue made money in the stock market." Perdue's, primarily, are "Ossof's a communist." Sadly, the useful idiots on both sides of the spectrum buy into this kind of bullshit. It's very depressing. I may start drinking.

 

There is a big difference between "Made money in the stock market" and "Used their position in congress to facilitate insider trading"

[Zelandakh]

There is a big difference between "Made money in the stock market" and "Used their position in congress to facilitate insider trading"

You still think you can have some sort of reasonable debate with the BBF racist-in-chief, Richard?

[Zelandakh]

Angela Merkel seems to know what she's doing. Boris Johnson doesn't.

Merkel is not standing for re-election and has the authority to follow the science. There was some resistance at first from state level but she was able to force it through and that coordinated response has proven to be very effective.

 

Johnson is in quite a different position, with a very strong right wing pushing him towards premature re-opening and business-friendly policies, with potential serious leadership challengers waiting in the wings. He has therefore not been able to follow the science and has had to try to balance the two. This has meant that the UK has consistently had a higher transmission factor than Germany. In addition, local challenges have been greater and any national coordination has been cloaked in heavy politics rather than showing any overarching strategy. All I can say is that I am thankful for dodgy Donald in this regard, since America's response has been so bad it stops Britain being the laughing stock of the world. On this topic at least - Brexit is obviously a different matter entirely.

[pilowsky]

Merkel is not standing for re-election and has the authority to follow the science. There was some resistance at first from state level but she was able to force it through and that coordinated response has proven to be very effective.

 

Johnson is in quite a different position, with a very strong right wing pushing him towards premature re-opening and business-friendly policies, with potential serious leadership challengers waiting in the wings. He has therefore not been able to follow the science and has had to try to balance the two. This has meant that the UK has consistently had a higher transmission factor than Germany. In addition, local challenges have been greater and any national coordination has been cloaked in heavy politics rather than showing any overarching strategy. All I can say is that I am thankful for dodgy Donald in this regard, since America's response has been so bad it stops Britain being the laughing stock of the world. On this topic at least - Brexit is obviously a different matter entirely.

 

Do you read the threads before you comment or do you just like to flame and troll people? I'm finding it hard to tell.

You do understand that Merkel has a PhD in science (Chemistry/Physics) right. Please explain what your comment has to do with the original point.

Clearly, the German experience of having a person that understands rational thinking during the COVID crisis has proven useful. Don't forget that the first vaccine was invented because of the work of Turkish immigrants to Germany.

In complete contrast to "Operation warp whatever" where they are happy about lorry's and can't even get that right.

In WW2 when Florey and Chain discovered and produced penicillin (I knew one of the people through whose urine the first batch was purified), the Americans stole the IP. Florey then had to make sure that Oxford patented the next -cillin. Yet another example of useless British governance.

The number of British comedies based on the incompetence of the British civil service and government is legendary.

Parkinson's law, Yes minister, etc etc.

[johnu]

All I can say is that I am thankful for dodgy Donald in this regard, since America's response has been so bad it stops Britain being the laughing stock of the world.

I would come up with a snappy comeback, but the best I can do is say "You are welcome!". Things in the US will change for the better at 12:00:00 January 20, 2021, but it will take many months to turn things around. The US vaccine program is already in serious trouble. 10+ million doses have been shipped out but only about 2+ million people have been vaccinated so far. At that rate, it could take years, not months to vaccinate everybody who wants to be vaccinated.

[pilowsky]

I would come up with a snappy comeback, but the best I can do is say "You are welcome!". Things in the US will change for the better at 12:00:00 January 20, 2021, but it will take many months to turn things around. The US vaccine program is already in serious trouble. 10+ million doses have been shipped out but only about 2+ million people have been vaccinated so far. At that rate, it could take years, not months to vaccinate everybody who wants to be vaccinated.

 

My point exactly. Apparently - according to the other Cohen (not Larry) - Trump could have invoked the defence production act and had much more vaccine made available - but oh no, don't want to interfere with the invisible hand.

[johnu]

My point exactly. Apparently - according to the other Cohen (not Larry) - Trump could have invoked the defence production act and had much more vaccine made available - but oh no, don't want to interfere with the invisible hand.

One legitimate problem Operation Warp Speed had was they didn't know which vaccines were going to be successful, and which would complete phase 3 trials first. So they placed orders with around 6 or 7 vaccine makers for 100-200 million doses each. So, if all the vaccine makers are successful, the US would have more than enough doses to vaccinate everybody in the country by mid year or thereabouts. So far, only Pfizer and Moderna are approved for emergency use, and AstraZeneca isn't ready but apparently doesn't have the same effectiveness as the first 2 according to preliminary press releases. Based on polling, the US may only need around 400 million doses or so (200 million vaccinated if 2 shots are needed).

[awm]

When there's a crisis, we'd like our leaders to think "how can I help the people of my country get through this?" (or maybe more broadly, "how can I help the world get through this?") Obviously not all leaders will (or should) have a lifetime of experience dealing with each specific crisis that comes up, but they should be well-meaning and willing to listen to people with more expertise (in the case of Covid, doctors and public health experts and biologists). Angela Merkel's PhD in quantum chemistry is interesting, but she's not a medical doctor. She just has the health of the German (and to a lesser extent, EU) people at heart and willingness to do what the experts recommend. Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand has no significant science background but has done as well or better in listening to the experts and trying to keep her people safe.

 

The problem is that an awful lot of US leaders look at a crisis and think "how can this benefit me personally?" This is what we see with Jared Kushner deciding not to implement the plan his own working group came up with to ramp up testing because "people in blue states will be hit harder by this." This is what we see with Loeffler and Purdue prioritizing stock trades to make money off the crisis rather than working to get more money for people who have lost their jobs. The amount of graft in the current administration is very high, and even when they are not thinking about their personal benefit they are usually working to help wealthy donors and not the country as a whole. Of course, Donald Trump was basically elected to "stick it to the liberals, the city-dwellers, and the non-white minorities" (and not to actually help anyone) so perhaps he's doing what his voters wanted.

[pilowsky]

One legitimate problem Operation Warp Speed had was they didn't know which vaccines were going to be successful, and which would complete phase 3 trials first. So they placed orders with around 6 or 7 vaccine makers for 100-200 million doses each. So, if all the vaccine makers are successful, the US would have more than enough doses to vaccinate everybody in the country by mid year or thereabouts. So far, only Pfizer and Moderna are approved for emergency use, and AstraZeneca isn't ready but apparently doesn't have the same effectiveness as the first 2 according to preliminary press releases. Based on polling, the US may only need around 400 million doses or so (200 million vaccinated if 2 shots are needed).

 

I agree, on the other hand, Biden complained today that the rollout was too slow because of insufficient vaccine availability.

An important distinction to understand regarding the Moderna vaccine is that it is not a 'vaccine' in the usual sense. I suppose the name is a giveaway - it's a portmanteau of 'mode' and 'rna' - works by using RNA - nothing to do with being modern.

 

Instead, a small piece of viral genetic code (mRNA) is injected. This code is then taken up by host cells which start producing the small bit of viral protein (from the binding region of the virus that enables the virus to get into the cell). The host cells excrete the foreign protein creating a pseudo-autoimmune response. Our cells making a bit of foreign protein provokes an immune response.

This brilliant idea is completely new - thanks to two Turkish (Moslem) immigrants working in Germany. It had never been used in humans which is why the infrastructure was so deficient.

The big advantage is that the whole process occurs 'in silico'. What is needed until the moment of injection is chemistry not biology (we do that part).

The big negative is that the product must be kept at temperatures that render the approach useless for the rest of the world. Obviously, this is not good since infected individuals elsewhere continue to get infected. The virus is a world problem (like the climate) - saving America doesn't help in the long term and its incredibly expensive.

The other - more usual - vaccine presents the body with the actual antigen(that's the name of the bit of virus protein that antibodies detect) and we then make the antibodies from that Australia is famous for its work on vaccines and blood products amongst other things.

Anyway, the great thing about the usual vaccine is that it can be kept at normal freezer temperature in the doctor's office.

 

The Regeneron antibodies are completely different. What makes them so clever is that first, they get a mouse to make antibodies then they take the mouse spleen and isolate the antibody making cells which they fuse to a cancer cell line and voila an immortal cell line that produces vast amounts of antibody to give to Donald and Rudy and anyone else that can afford them. The real breakthrough that made Regeneron successful is that they found a way to make the mice produce antibodies that look exactly like human antibody protein. If you just gave someone regular monoclonal antibodies really bad things would happen.

 

And then along came the third (after SARS and MERS) virus - actually called SARS-Cov-2. When I went to get a test back in April (I had a regular sort of cold as it turned out) the report came back negative for sars-cov-2 making wonder if they had done a coronavirus test! At that time there were only 2 places to get tested in Sydney and no queues. I warned the Bridge clubs to shut but was ignored because "what would I know" and some of them just wanted to stay in business. Some of them were/are managed by self-confessed Trump supporters. I will not name names.

 

In summary, the RNA vaccine is a great stop-gap, but the population will not become immune at a level that will achieve population immunity until the regular vaccine is rolled out in large amounts.

 

This is a very low-key explanation of how the different methods work. I can go into a lot more detail, but it is a Bridge forum. For example, the virus gains entry by binding to a protein involved in the renin-angiotensin system - something that I have worked on and published extensively about.

 

That's why I had to give up on Bridge and chess when I was 17 - my mother said "Paul, you can do anything you want as soon as you finish medicine." - I actually wanted to be a film director. That's what my younger sister does.

[Zelandakh]

1. Biden's primary complaints were about the distribution and implementation of the vaccination program, not about the source availability. What you have sourced matters little if you are not getting it to the people that need it.

 

2. ModeRNA was founded in 2010 by a Canadian stem cell biologist called Derrick Rossi (plus partners). His research had made a breakthrough that was inter alia described by Time magazine as one of the Top 10 medical breakthroughs of the year. AstraZeneca come into the story because they paid an exorbitant amount of money (~$240 million) for limited rights to the technology.

 

3. Time will tell how critical the required freezing is in distribution of the mRNA vaccines. It should probably not be a fatal flaw for Western Europe or most, perhaps all, of the USA. It may well be impractical for much of Africa, Asia and parts of South America.

 

4. Not every disagreement is a flame. The increasingly personal comments that I have received in the last year on BBF certainly count as flames in the normal sense, and would probably erupt that way if I chose to respond in kind. I trust that Barry has been monitoring the situation and will step in before it comes to such a point.

[pilowsky]

1. Biden's point is one that I also made in an earlier discussion when I pointed out that statistics don't cure people. Although the two RNA products are packaged differently, cold chain logistics is still a problem. Antibodies will survive for days at room temperature - proteins are very hardy. DNA is also pretty tough as any follower of crime drams knows. RNA is a different ball of fish. Leave it out of the fridge and the magic disappears. The stuff can get all the way from source to sink but if the people at the other end leave it out for very long then it will not work. Not all medical practitioners are careful or have a solid grounding in how this completely new technology works.

2. I stand corrected re modeRNA - I meant the original creators of the method e.g. BBC, NYT - it is this couple that actually came up with the idea. Time magazine put all sorts of people on their front page. Famously Hitler and Stalin, and modally Nixon (55 times) - source Wikipedia - Time doesn't award prizes in science, it sells magazines. Let's wait and see who gets acknowledged for the work. My bet is that history will thank Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci and not the manufacturers and distributors.

3. It will not be time that tells. The stability of mRNA is a matter of scientific knowledge. I have worked inter alia with both phosphorothioate DNA and mRNA silencing techniques and published reviews on the topic.

4. True - I have known other people that disagree with and comment on absolutely everything even when they are not experts on the topic. The right to comment is not an obligation - even in the Water Cooler but I suppose it is fun for some.

 

Sometimes ill-informed comments or poorly chosen words have serious real-world consequences and lead to bad outcomes - people have died from consuming bleach. In the peer-reviewed world (mentioned elsewhere) scientists - presumably in order to gain more 'likes' (or citations as they call them - preface their work with phrases along the lines of "the novel coronavirus accesses the cell via the angiotensin receptor, this may mean that taking ARB's could worsen COVID19...etc". I personally have had to prevent this happening twice this last year. Ill-informed people might stop taking their ARB's and other effective anti-hypertensive medication. Imagine what would happen if a really influential person such as Trump were to 'retweet' (cite) stuff like this. I'm sure Barry is busy with other things like making sure that BBO works well and the robots become more (or less) devious.

But, of course, people sometimes just say what they like - not much anyone else can do about it except call it out when it's a danger to themselves or others.

 

I try not to disagree - just learn. When you work in science you learn that anything that you say or think will turn out to be wrong tomorrow. People that fall in love with their ideas and promote them even when new knowledge contradicts them are on a hiding to nothing.

[PeterAlan]

I remember reading this article at the time: it would appear that the work of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman was fundamental to all that followed.

[y66]

Free idea for ambitious Republicans:

 

Make the case that Trump lost the election and in the future core conservative values would be better served in 2024 by nominating someone who is *different* from Trump in one or more key respects and explain what those are.

[Chas_P]

You still think you can have some sort of reasonable debate with the BBF racist-in-chief, Richard?

 

Fare thee well pilgrim.

[hrothgar]

You still think you can have some sort of reasonable debate with the BBF racist-in-chief, Richard?

 

I think Al-U-Card is worse

Its close though

[y66]

As Ben Smith, the media columnist for The Times, suggested a few weeks ago, pretty much every journalist who passed through Washington, D.C., during the past half century knows President-elect Joe Biden and has a story to tell. I’d like to end this strange year, and welcome the new one and the new president, by telling mine.

 

I met then-Senator Biden in the mid-1980s, when he was a member of the Judiciary Committee and I was covering the occasional judicial confirmation. By 1987, he was chairman of the committee, after the Democrats retook the Senate in the 1986 midterms. That summer, President Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.

 

Given the president’s success the year before in naming Justice William Rehnquist as chief justice and a little-known judge, Antonin Scalia, to fill Rehnquist’s associate justice seat, this nomination presented a huge challenge to Judge Bork’s opponents, and a disheartening one. Leaders of the liberal groups that assembled to fight the nomination of the outspoken conservative, a judge with reactionary views on civil rights and free speech, had little confidence that the Judiciary Committee’s chairman was up to the job.

 

Mr. Biden, then 44 years old, was generally viewed — and by “generally,” I mean to include the capital’s newsrooms — as an amiable lightweight, a showboat in love with the sound of his own voice. How could he go one on one with a nominee regarded as the leading conservative constitutional scholar of the age? In addition, the senator was competing in a lively race for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, certain to have his mind on his own future rather than Judge Bork’s.

 

In what is now a well-known part of his biography, Mr. Biden surprised the doubters. He spent days and weeks over the summer in intense preparation for the September hearing, learning constitutional law in tutoring sessions with the country’s leading liberal law professors. In concert with some liberal groups, but against the advice of some on his staff, he decided to focus the hearings on the constitutional right to privacy.

 

This right is found nowhere in the Constitution’s actual text, but as developed by the Supreme Court in the mid-20th century, it had become the basis for, among other things, the right to contraception and abortion. Judge Bork was famously hostile to privacy as a constitutional concept in general, and to Roe v. Wade, the court’s 14-year-old abortion precedent, in particular.

 

Mr. Biden thought that if he could sell privacy to the general public as a concept under threat from a Justice Bork, he wouldn’t need to turn the hearing into a referendum on abortion. With six Republican senators joining all but two Democrats in opposition, the nomination was defeated by a vote of 42 to 58.

 

The contentious Supreme Court confirmation fights of the subsequent decades shouldn’t be permitted to erase the memory of the galvanizing ideological conflict that was the Bork battle. The hearing lasted three weeks. Mr. Biden presided with confidence and grace, all the more notable because during those weeks, his presidential candidacy imploded over what now seems like one of the sillier scandals of modern politics: his unattributed appropriation, at the end of a candidates’ debate at the Iowa State Fair, of a few catchy lines from a speech by a British politician. The morning he withdrew from the race, he walked into the hearing room and opened the proceedings with the comment “Look, my business is behind us. Let’s move on.”

 

When the hearing was over and the nominee’s defeat on the Senate floor assured, I asked Mr. Biden for an on-the-record interview. We talked for a long time. He said he knew exactly what the doubters had thought of him and that people raised three questions: “Can Biden be fair? Can Biden control himself? And is there any substance there, any depth to Biden?” He continued, “The expectations of me were so low that I could have done almost anything except punch Bork and people would have said, ‘He’s not as bad as I thought.’”

 

I’ve interviewed many politicians during a career in daily journalism that included covering Congress and, earlier, New York State government and politics for The Times. I’ve known officeholders who could talk endlessly about policy or hand out political gossip as if it were candy. What I hadn’t encountered was a politician like Mr. Biden, willing to let his guard down and reflect on his vulnerabilities. I was hardly the first or the last to discover this trait in our next president.

 

Mr. Biden told me as we ended the interview that he had telephoned Judge Bork, impelled to reach out to a fellow human being whose dream had just died — as, in a way, his own had at roughly the same time. “It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels,” he told me. “I don’t know how he feels. But I empathize intellectually and emotionally. It once looked so certain for him. He was so up. I know how that feels.”

 

As the years passed, I saw Mr. Biden from time to time. He occasionally invited me to his Senate office to talk about a Supreme Court case that had caught his interest. By the time he ascended to the second-highest office in the country in 2009, I had left both the Supreme Court beat and Washington, and we didn’t stay in touch.

 

Cleaning out some old files this fall, I came upon an envelope addressed to me at the office, with a United States Senate return address and marked “personal and confidential.” Inside was a handwritten note from Mr. Biden, dated the day my article based on our interview had appeared. It read, in full, “Dear Linda, Thanks! As someone said, ‘I needed that.’ Joe.”

 

I had forgotten receiving it, and only after reading it over did I get the gentle self-mockery in the “as someone said,” from a onetime presidential candidate whose campaign had foundered on a ridiculous accusation of plagiarism.

 

I evidently never replied to the letter, so I’ll do it now. Thanks, Joe Biden. We needed you.

[y66]

From ‘Covid, Covid, Covid’: In Trump’s Final Chapter, a Failure to Rise to the Moment by Michael D. Shear, Maggie Haberman, Noah Weiland, Sharon LaFraniere and Mark Mazzetti at NYT

 

As the U.S. confronted a new wave of infection and death through the summer and fall, the president’s approach to the pandemic came down to a single question: What would it mean for him?

19 days 19 hours 11 minutes

[thepossum]

So section 230 is now being tied to Covid support payments, after previously tying it to defence spending

 

I know politics is complicated and you probably wouldnt really know what anyone's motives are either way

 

But seriously. What's going on?

 

Its kind of a bit awkward being in a country/democracy where local politics has such global implications

 

EDIT The way everything from recent years (and I repsume) 2021 has looked or is looking, its another case of a few generations where people were given opportunity, but it went too far so the elites are trying to reassert their control. Seems to happen from time to time. And even better if you can use your technology to gain full control over the world (or large parts of it) it makes putting your foot down on the people easier and "cleaner" than in the past. But its still all the same gig. The elites play their power games any way they can while the people suffer cruelly and fight each other over scraps or under the orders of said elites with some phony conflict. It could actually be dirtier and crueller than past oppressions. Maybe even the worst ever

 

Important edit. Please dont misread that. I do not have a scale of cruelty and oppression. That could easily be misunderstood. That is not what I meant. Apologies if anyone was upset by that comment. Im talking about the scale, size and level of control over the whole world with the technology now available.

 

I do understand though that when the "utilities" we use for all our communications have become so tied up with media and other services there is a very important structural and trust issue for us all

[johnu]

So section 230 is now being tied to Covid support payments, after previously tying it to defence spending

 

I know politics is complicated and you probably wouldnt really know what anyone's motives are either way

 

But seriously. What's going on?

It's nothing more than Moscow Mitch McConnell being hypocritical. He doesn't want to enable $2000 payments, but the larger payments have wide public support, and majority Senate support. Section 230 is something the Democrats and a few Republicans are firmly against so by tying Section 230 to the $2000 payments in the same bill, he will sink the payments because enough Senators will vote against Section 230 even though that also means voting against the $2000 payments.

 

That way Moscow Mitch can say that he brought up a bill for the $2000 payments without mentioning that he put a poison pill provision into the bill that guaranteed that it would fail.

[cherdano]

So section 230 is now being tied to Covid support payments, after previously tying it to defence spending

 

I know politics is complicated and you probably wouldnt really know what anyone's motives are either way

 

Yeah there is absolutely no way to find out why Section 230 is tied to the $2000 payments, and what the motivations are for doing so. No way except to read the news. Absolutely no way to find out that McConnell inserted a poison pill because he didn't want the support payments to pass, but knows they are unpopular so he doesn't want to hold a vote on them. It's just so completely unknowable.

 

It's also completely unknowable hwo McConnell can do so many unpopular things, and yet remain majority leader in the Senate. It's almost as if his party only needs 46% of the two-party vote to win the Senate. I mean, have there been any news stories about the Senate giving more weight to the votes of some citizens than others? I can't remember ever reading something about that.

[pilowsky]

McConnell has said repeatedly that with Trump as a compliant catspaw (he obviously doesn't put it quite like that) the Republicans would be able to stack the Federal and Supreme court system for decades to come.

The 'social contract' between Trump and the republican party was simple. Trump avoids criminal indictment, Republicans get Judges.

Reading Bob Woodward's first book, it begins with a description of the Republicans laughing at the idea of Trump being taken seriously as a candidate. When the evangelicals came on board (solely because Trump was willing to get behind any delusional ideas they had) the Devils pact was solid.

Trump doesn't care about them and they don't care about him. Only a small minority of republican congressweasels such as the 'childlike' Louis Gohmert (see his Wiki entry) and a few slithering eels that think they can grab the rump of Trump's base still back his failed cause.

Now, Ben Sasse and others are saying words like sedition and treason: the obvious confederate nature of the Trump alliance is on full display.

 

What happens next? I predict two things. First, the newly (self) enfranchised young and non-WASP voters will continue to vote. BLM is a big concern in a positive way. Secondly, the 'Trump base' will wither away to its old small group of radical conservatives.

 

The Christians have their Judges the others have had their fun and can now see that it's a total failure and that experts are useful (Fauci is the hero not Giroir - 'the Admiral' as Trump calls him since Trump is illiterate and forgetful and Giroir is not a 16-year female.

 

So back to the normality of 1/3 hating another 1/3 and 1/3 not caring. The remaining problem of the worst wealth inequality, destruction of the climate and infectious diseases will go on the backburner.

 

American omnibus bills are always packed with pork. That's how they get things done. In Australia our parliamentarians are more effectively 'whipped' but each one has some funds to use as untied grants, so it's different.

 

Now they can all go back to putting the jahresendenfiguren on the pine tree - the few that can afford it and forget about reality again. That's what the entertainment industry in America does - anaesthetises the masses. Between TV and religion, Marx is looking pretty smug.

[y66]

From Andrew Sullivan's review of "Conservatism: The fight for a tradition" by Edmund Fawcett

 

The survival of a moderate conservatism, a conservatism that accepts and is comfortable with modernity and liberal democracy, is indispensable to the stability of our polity as a whole. Moderate conservatism is a vital counterbalance to liberalism, as the Trump years have shown. For it to disappear into a populist cult, hostile to democratic norms, contemptuous of all elites, captured by delusions and sustained by hatred and ressentiment, would not be completely unprecedented. But, unchallenged by moderate conservatism, populist or “hard right” conservatism will be deeply destructive. In that sense, the battle for moderate conservatism is now inextricable from a battle for liberal democracy itself.

[Winstonm]

Donald Trump is not smart enough nor cares enough about the details to have orchestrated this attempt to subvert the American democratic republic. The present bunch of Congresspersons and 1 Senator know they have no case. So why do it?

 

It is pretty obvious to me that this is nothing but a dress rehearsal and the brains behind the operation are deeply involved in the GOP. People like Karl Rove who see the diminishing majority of old white folks and who are trying to position themselves to win and hold power in any way they can. This silent coup rehearsal needs to be outed - and anyone associated with its performance needs to be removed from Congress.

 

The one thing the GOP has learned from Donald Trump - there is no room for shame.

[Winstonm]

This quote from Yahoo perfectly sums up the Trump presidency - and sadly, I'm afraid it explains most of his supporters, as well:

 

 

 

Mr Trump apparently sees the end of his term and the congressional certification of his election loss in zero-sum terms. Losing over 50 lawsuits challenging the election and Republican leaders like Senator Mitt Romney saying that Senator Josh Hawley's decision to challenge the results in the Senate "is dangerous for democracy here and abroad", has not deterred the President from digging his heels in.

 

“The way he sees it is: Why should I ever let this go?… How would that benefit me?” The Daily Beast reported a source close to Mr Trump as saying.

my emphasis

[cherdano]

So, there is our answer. US Democracy has been Trumped. And Hawleyed. And Cruzed. And...