Donald Trump continues to expand his vortex of lies by falsely claiming his very narrow vote margin was a mandate. NOT!

The ‘Landslide’ That Wasn’t: Trump and Allies Pump Up His Narrow Victory.  Echo report published in The New York Times by Peter Baker. 

Donald Trump won in 2024 without obtaining a mandate.  His radical reform MAGA agenda will fail.

(Warning Note: Real landslides have been unmistakable, including Lyndon B. Johnson’s in 1964, by 22.6 points, Richard M. Nixon’s in 1972 by 23.2 points and Ronald Reagan’s in 1984, by 18.2 points. In the 40 years since that Reagan victory, no president has won the popular vote by double digits." So, Johnson essentially resigned and Richard Nixon was forced to resign.  Ronald Reagan's administration was saved by a failed assassination attempt because the Congress was ready to impeach him about his role arms trafficking, in the Iran Contra Scandal.)

The latest vote count shows that Donald J. Trump won the popular vote by one of the smallest margins since the 19th century. But  Trump (falsely) claims a “powerful mandate.”😒

Trump’s victory was neither unprecedented nor a landslide. In fact, he prevailed with one of the smallest margins of victory in the popular vote since the 19th century and generated little of the coattails of a true landslide.

The disconnect goes beyond predictable Trumpian braggadocio. The incoming president and his team are trying to cement the impression of a “resounding margin,” as one aide called it, to make Trump seem more popular than he is and strengthen his hand in forcing through his agenda in the months to come.

The collapse of Matt Gaetz’s prospective nomination for attorney general demonstrated the challenges for Trump in forcing a Republican Congress to defer to his more provocative ideas. While Gaetz, a former Republican congressman from Florida, denied allegations of attending sex and drug parties and having sex with an underage girl, they proved too much even for Republicans eager to stay in Trump’s good graces.

With some votes still being counted, the tally used by The New York Times showed Trump winning the popular vote with 49.988 percent as of Friday night, and he appears likely to fall below that once the final results are in, meaning he would not capture a majority. 

Another count used by CNN and other outlets shows him winning 49.9 percent. By either reckoning, his margin over Vice President Kamala Harris was about 1.6 percentage points, the third smallest since 1888, and could ultimately end up around 1.5 points.

“If the definition of landslide is you win both the popular vote and Electoral College vote, that’s a new definition,” said Lynn Vavreck, a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “Identity Crisis” about Mr. Trump’s first election, in 2016. “I would not classify this outcome as a landslide that turns into evidence of desire for a huge shift of direction or policy.”

But Trump has a clear interest in portraying it that way as he seeks to transform Washington. “It obviously gives you more momentum if you say, ‘The people have spoken, and they want my set of policies,’” Ms. Vavreck said. “Nobody gains any kind of influence by going out and saying, ‘I barely won, and now I want to do these big things.’”

As he assembles a cabinet and administration during the transition, Mr. Trump is certainly acting as if he has the kind of political capital that comes from a big victory. Rather than picking lieutenants with wide appeal, he is opting for highly unconventional figures with scandals to explain, almost as if trying to bend Senate Republicans to his will.

Asked about the president-elect’s characterization of his victory,  Trump’s campaign sent a statement by Steven Cheung, his communications director, attacking The Times and repeating the sweeping claims. “President Trump won in dominating and historic fashion after the Democrats and the fake news media peddled outright lies and disinformation throughout the campaign,” he said.

Trump would not be the first newly elected or re-elected president to assume his victory gave him more political latitude than it really did. Bill Clinton tried to turn his 5.6-point win in 1992, into a mandate to completely overhaul the nation’s health care system, a project that blew up in his face and cost his party both houses of Congress in the next midterm elections.

George W. Bush likewise thought his 2.4-point win in 2004, would empower him to revise the Social Security system, only to fail and lose Congress two years later. 

And President Biden interpreted his 4.5-point win over Trump in 2020, as a mission to push through some of the most expansive social programs since the Great Society, then saw Republicans take control of the House in 2022, and the White House and Senate two years after that.

“Trump’s appointments have already demonstrated that he will continue a bipartisan tradition of presidents, over-reading their electoral mandate,” said Doug Sosnik, who was a White House senior adviser to Mr. Clinton.

Liz Cheney is a "woman for all seasons" in the spirit of Saint Thomas More

Threatened With Jail, brave Liz Cheney Condemns Trump’s ‘Assault on the Rule of Law’: Echo report published in The New York Times by Peter Baker. 

Liz Cheney, (daughter of the former Vice-President Dick Cheney) is the former Republican representative from Wyoming. She said President-elect Donald J. Trump “lied about” 🤥❗ the bipartisan House committee that investigated his role in the January 6, 2021, attack.

Former Representative Liz Cheney on Sunday called President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threat to imprison her and other members of a congressional committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol an “assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”

Responding to comments Trump made in an interview aired on Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC, Ms. Cheney said the incoming president “lied about the Jan. 6 select committee” and that there would be “no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutio" nal basis to prosecute its members. (Unfortvery much on these outrageous Trump accusations. Like why can she not ask, "Where is the proof❓"  Her useless interview was unproductive but gave the orange guy the opportunity to generate more lies and to continue the saga of chaos unlimited.)

“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020, presidential election and seize power,” she said in a statement. “He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave.”

She continued: “This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history. Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”

Her statement came after Trump repeated his unfounded allegation that the committee destroyed evidence during its investigation.

“Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps,” he said, referring to Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee’s chairman. “They deleted and destroyed all evidence.”

(OMG despicable racist languate😟💢❗)

He went on: “And Cheney was behind it. And so was Bennie Thompson and everybody on that committee. For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail.”

In fact, the committee did not destroy all evidence❗ It released an 800-page report as well as 140 transcripts of testimony and various memos, emails and voice mail messages. The evidence remains online. Mr. Thompson explained in a letter last year that the committee had asked the executive branch to go through some material first to protect “law enforcement sensitive operational details and private, personal information that, if released, could endanger the safety of witnesses.”

Ms. Cheney pointed to that letter in her statement. “Donald Trump knows his claims about the select committee are ridiculous and false, as has been detailed extensively, including by Chairman Thompson,” she said. “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting — a Justice Department investigation of the work of a congressional committee — and any lawyer who attempts to pursue that course would quickly find themselves engaged in sanctionable conduct.”

President Biden’s staff is debating whether he should issue blanket pardons before leaving office to people targeted by Mr. Trump like Ms. Cheney as part of the president-elect’s promised “retribution” against his foes. Ms. Cheney did not say in her statement whether she would accept such a pardon to protect herself from a politically motivated prosecution by the next administration.

But she said that the evidence that should be made public was the material gathered by the special counsel Jack Smith in his investigation of Trump’s role in trying to overturn the 2020, election. “The Justice Department should ensure that all that material is preserved and cannot be destroyed. As much of that information as possible should be disclosed in the special counsel’s upcoming report.”

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. 

Saint Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt:  The story of Sir Thomas More (later beatified as Saint Thomas More), who stood up to King Henry VIII.

Political hate speech has been spewed by DonOLD Trump since 2016 but he has short term memory loss

Trump, Outrage and the Modern Era of Political Violence

Trump falsely blames Democrats for two failed assassination attempts but there is zero evidence to back up his lies.

Echo guest opinion published in The New York Times by Peter Baker:

The latest apparent assassination attempt against the former president indicates how much the American political landscape has been shaped by anger stirred by him and against him.

Within days of former President Donald J. Trump vilifying immigrants on national television with false stories about Haitian migrants eating pet dogs and cats in an Ohio town, someone began threatening to blow up schools, City Hall and other public buildings, forcing evacuations and prompting a wave of fear.

Days later, authorities said, a man who described himself online as a disaffected former Trump supporter made his way with a semiautomatic rifle to the former president’s Florida golf course, evidently looking to take a shot. He was thwarted only when an observant Secret Service agent spotted him and opened fire first.

And so it goes in 2024. In the space of less than a week, the once and possibly future commander in chief was both a seeming inspiration and an apparent target of the political violence that has increasingly come to shape American politics in the modern era. Bomb threats and attempted assassinations now have become part of the landscape, shocking and horrific, yet not so much that they have forced any real national reckoning.

“One of the things I’m most concerned about right now is the normalization of political violence in our political system. It’s on the increase,” Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado and a member of a bipartisan task force already investigating the July 13 assassination attempt against Mr. Trump, said in an interview. “Now we’re on the second one in as many months and it just shows the extent to which this has become pervasive.”

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both issued statements condemning the latest incident, but the campaign continued uninterrupted. Barely four hours after Mr. Trump was hustled into a motorcade away from the golf club for his protection, his finance team sent out an email to its fund-raising list with a button to click to make a donation. “My resolve is only stronger after another attempt on my life!” Trump said in the email. Ms. Harris’s fund-raising emails continued as well.

Trump, who as recently as last week’s debate with Ms. Harris blamed Democrats for the shooting at a rally in Butler, Pa., that struck his ear in July, attributed Sunday’s attempt to the president and vice president as well, arguing that the arrested suspect was acting in response to their political attacks.

“He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Mr. Trump told Fox News on Monday. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”

Even as he complained that the Democrats had made him a target by calling him a threat to democracy, he repeated his own assertion that “these are people that want to destroy our country” and called them “the enemy from within” — certainly language no less provocative than that used about him.

Indeed, within hours, his campaign emailed a list of quotes from  Biden, Ms. Harris and other Democrats attacking Trump with phrases like “a threat to our democracy” and a “threat to this nation,” without noting that just last week during the debate the former president said “they’re the threat to democracy.”

One of Trump’s most prominent and vocal supporters went so far as to question why Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have not been targeted for murder. “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Elon Musk, the billionaire social media owner, wrote online.

Musk later deleted the post and called it a joke, but the White House pushed back. “Violence should only be condemned, never encouraged or joked about,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman. “This rhetoric is irresponsible.”

American history has been marked by periods of political violence before. Four sitting presidents have been killed in office, and another was shot and seriously wounded. A former president likewise was shot and survived, and plenty of others who lived in the White House have been targets. But two attempts on the life of a former president within two months still stands out, especially in the heat of an election in which he is a leading candidate for his old job.

Perhaps the closest analogy might be President Gerald R. Ford, who survived two assassination attempts in a little over two weeks in 1975.

More hauntingly, though, the efforts to kill Trump recalled for many 1968, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were gunned down two months apart. Those assassinations came during a moment of broader violence in American streets amid a sense of fraying societal bonds, something that worries many leaders today too.

At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him. He has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed.

While Mr. Trump insists his fiery speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, was not responsible for the subsequent ransacking of the Capitol, he resisted pleas from advisers and his own daughter that day to do more to stop the assault. He even suggested that the mob might be right to want to hang his vice president and has since embraced the attackers as patriots whom he may pardon if elected again.

Mr. Trump does not pause to reflect on the impact of his own words. Just last week, his false pet-eating accusations against Haitian migrants during his debate with Ms. Harris were quickly followed by bomb threats that turned life upside-down in Springfield, Ohio, and he did nothing to discourage them. After 33 bomb threats, Ohio’s governor said Monday that law enforcement would conduct daily sweeps of schools in the town.

Asked by a reporter if he denounced the bomb threats, he demurred. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” he said. “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.”

Mr. Trump’s critics have at times employed the language of violence as well, though not as extensively and repeatedly at the highest levels. The former president’s allies distributed a video compilation online of various Trump opponents saying they would like to punch him in the face or the like. Some of the more extreme voices on social media in the past day have mocked or minimized the close call at the Florida golf course. Mr. Trump’s allies often decry what they call Trump Derangement Syndrome, the notion that his critics despise him so much they have lost their minds.

Anger, of course, has long been the animating force of Trump’s time in politics — both the anger he stirs among supporters against his rivals and the anger that he generates among opponents who come to loathe him. Predictions that he might rethink that after he narrowly escaped death in Butler proved ephemeral.By halfway through his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention five days later, he was back to himself.

But it is a measure of how much political violence has become a part of modern American culture — not accepted, perhaps, but more and more expected — that the latest incident may make no more difference than the first. The shock from the shooting in Butler wore off relatively quickly as attention turned to other developments. The shock from this one may not last any longer.

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. 

Donald Trump failed again in Paris #myUS_apologies

Dear citizens of Europe, as an American citizen, please accept my sincere apologies for the ongoing embarrassment of Donald tRump.

#myUS_apologies

The New York Times reports
By Peter Baker and Alissa J. Rubin

PARIS — Dozens of leaders from around the globe marched in the soaking rain down the Champs-Élysées on Sunday, expressing solidarity for an international order that had its origins in the end of a world war 100 years ago, an order now under increasing pressure on both sides of the Atlantic.

Only after these leaders arrived by foot at the Arc de Triomphe did President Trump show up, protected from the rain as he made an individual entrance. A few minutes later, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia did the same.

For Trump, at least, the separate arrival was attributed to security concerns. But somehow it felt apt that these two leaders would not arrive with the crowd.

No one has done more to break up the postwar global system in the last couple of years than Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin. As the anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I was commemorated on Sunday, Mr. Trump’s brand of “America First” nationalism was rebuked from the podium while he sat stone-faced and unmoved, alienated from some of America’s strongest allies, including his French hosts.

But while he may have been out of step with many of the leaders gathered around him, Trump remains at the vanguard of forces that are redefining the Western political paradigm in countries like Poland, Hungary, Italy and Turkey. In Britain and Germany, two of the Continent’s major powers, nationalist movements have upended the establishment.

Recalling the forces that led to World War I, Mr. Macron warned that “the old demons” have been resurfacing and declared that “giving into the fascination for withdrawal, isolationism, violence and domination would be a grave error that future generations would very rightly make us responsible for.”

Mr. Trump, who recently declared himself “a nationalist,” appeared grim as he listened to the speech through an earpiece and clapped only tepidly afterward.

He had no speaking role and made no mention of the issues Mr. Macron raised during an address later at a cemetery for American soldiers killed in the war.

The ceremony led by Mr. Macron encapsulated the tension in the international arena as Mr. Trump seeks to rewrite the rules that have governed the world in recent decades. He has abandoned international agreements on trade, nuclear proliferation and climate change, and disparaged alliances like NATO and the European Union.

On the campaign trail this fall, Mr. Trump railed against what he called the “rule of corrupt, power-hungry globalists,” as he put it at a rally in Houston. “You know what a globalist is, right? You know what a globalist is? A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much. And you know what? We can’t have that.”

Mr. Macron has now, in effect, given a rebuttal. In addition to the speech, he also used an interview with Fareed Zakaria of CNN that aired Sunday to define himself as “a patriot” rather than a “nationalist.”

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a speech at the Arc de Triomphe, welcoming the leaders and extolling an old system now under siege. “Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism by saying: ‘Our interest first. Who cares about the others?’”