To my not very great surprise Mike Pence has indicated that he’ll be counting the electoral votes as presented. While there will be objections to various states’ electors those are unlikely to be sustained by either the House or the Senate. Which will mean that, likely by the end of today, Joe Biden will be President elect and Trump will be packing up his White House.
I have never been an all in Trumpist. When he was elected I supported him simply because Hillary was so dreadful. Biden is not nearly as dreadful and, while I will miss Trump’s anti-Swamp activities, the election of the thoroughly corrupt Biden is, in itself, a major disaster. Biden will nod along and the assorted loons in the Democratic party will fight among themselves.
What is a disaster is the fact that there was, apparently, nothing either Trump nor the Republican Party could do about the rampant cheating which led to Biden’s astonishing vote. Ballots in the night, the Dominion voting machines’ algorithms, the dead, non-resident and illegals voting, the mass mailing of ballots: nothing moved the needle.
The needle stayed put because the American media had absolutely no interest in what was and is the most significant political story of my lifetime. Not because they loved Joe Biden, rather because they hated Donald Trump and the people who supported him.
As I write the hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters who have flooded into Washington are, apparently, breaching the Capitol Building grounds. Where that goes will be interesting. Right thinking bow tie Republicans will see this as “deplorable” and it is. But the complete bad faith of the American ruling elite, the corruption of the voting systems, the resolute unwillingness of the Courts to hear actual evidence and the failure of the Vice President to find a way forward leaves those deplorables with very few choices.
They are inside the Capitol now and both the House and the Senate are recessed. This is not the day Joe Biden will be President Elect.
We’ll see how this turns out: there is a fair bit of shouting left to be done in Washington.
Update: It looks like the Capitol has been cleared and the Joint Session has recommenced. The great and the good have deplored “violence” and “riot” and Twitter has suspended President Trump’s account.
Unfortunately, a woman was shot and killed at the Capitol. Exactly how and by whom is unknown.
Washington insiders have closed ranks to push Biden across the line. Functionally, this should be enough to have him achieve a Presidency of a sort. Biden will start with the asterisk of a stolen election and an absence of any real personal support. There will be no inauguration parade and, I suspect, citing COVID and security, the actual swearing in will take place behind closed doors.
Will Trump retreat to the golf course and lick his wounds? Perhaps, for a while; but everything I have seen suggests that Trump will be back.
Jay Currie 
I realize your primary criterion for evaluating the merits of any Trump initiative is the degree to which it “makes lefty heads explode”, but I couldn’t help but note your airy acceptance of the Massive Election Steal Theory. I’ m not sure why you view Biden’s win as “astonishing”, in that it reflects his consistent lead heading into the election. But let’s explore that hypothesis in a less volatile setting than the usual venues.
You refer to the “Dominion voting machine” algorithms” as an element of the Great Steal. Could you expand on that? I ask because every time I try to chase to an actual quantifiable assertion about the voting machines, I seem to run into a fairly firm rebuttal. Could you expand on your view that these machines were part of the Conspiracy, and the evidence you reviewed to support that view?
Terry, I don’t know how Jay will answer your questions, but I certainly share his view of the Biden win as being astonishing for the following reasons. Tghere are a number of things incredibly suspicious about Biden’s supposed win. Yes, it reflects the polls prior to the election that gave him a lead. It conflicts with other factors that are usually more reliable indicators of the outcome of the election than polls. Trump won the major bellwether states – Florida, Ohio, and Iowa – and all but one of the bellwether counties, and by comfortable margins in most cases. While this sort of predictor is not infallible, it has historically been far more reliable than polling, especially when a sweep of the bellwethers is involved.
There is also the fact that Trump outdid his own performance in 2016 by over ten million votes, which alone is almost a guarantee of re-election, but to which must be added the fact that Trump scored historic wins among ethnic communities long regarded as being solidly in the Democrat base, and, that apart from the very cities and counties in the battleground states that apparently gave him his victory, Biden underperformed Hilary Clinton in 2016. If you think through the math of that you will realize that the likelihood of Biden having won legitimately is astronomically low.
This makes for very strong grounds to suspect foul play. Especially considering what we saw on the night of the election. Biden, predictably, was off to an early lead. Then, as they moved from counting advance poll votes to day of votes, the states on the map began to turn red. All the media – including FOX – were obviously reporting in a heavily biased manner. They called states for Biden as early as they could, prematurely in some instances, while delaying calling states for Trump until they could not avoid doing so. As midnight was approaching, anyone who, like myself, did not trust what the media was saying, and added up the state totals for himself, would have realized that Trump had won or was leading in enough states to give him 298 electoral votes. The media refused to acknowledge the size of this lead, although they could not avoid letting people work it out for themselves from the map, and instead claimed a lead for Biden by considering only the states that had been indisputably called. Actually, that was what Decision Desk was doing. The media consistently awarded 10 to 15 more electoral votes to Biden than Decision Desk by counting, but only for Biden, states in which he led, but which had not been officially called. That was the state of things when all of a sudden they stopped counting, everything froze for hours, and then in the early morning, Trump’s megalead had disappeared. The odds against legitimately overcoming a lead like Trump had, even if you factor in that mail-in ballots would strongly favour Biden, are incredible. The fact that it was not a matter of Biden votes trickling in all night long while the Trump lead slowly evaporates but the whole thing being done when the count was stopped for hours, is all the more damning. Those are the hours for which over two hundred affidavits of eyewitnesses and whistleblowers, in some cases confirmed by video recordings, testifies to everything from the destruction of ballots, the filling in of ballots by election workers, and ballots showing up by the thousands by truck in the middle of the night to the exclusion of Republican observers or obstructions being placed in their way.
Even if there were nothing to the allegations about voting machines and software, the above is sufficient to demonstrate that the allegations of massive fraud are anything but “baseless”.
You’d prefer not to reveal your evidence on Dominion voting machines? No problem. Could you expand on your “ballots in the night” comment? There are a few allegations that this could, I suppose apply to (all debunked, as far as I know), but I’d love to review the incident and supporting evidence you’re referring to.
Terry, Gerry does an excellent job of summarizing why many of us believe the election was stolen. Deroy Murdock provides an overview of the steal at https://trumptrainnews.com/2021/01/06/murdock-allegedly-illegal-ballots-exceed-bidens-victory-margins-in-six-swing-states-rs-dm/
As to the Dominion machines: the fact they were actually hooked up to the internet meant that they were inherently insecure. How that insecurity was exploited needs to be investigated. The fact that you can run ballots through the tabulating machines more than once is another potentially significant issue. The “glitches” and the fractional ballots in the tallies also suggest that all was not well with Dominion.
Jay, both Gerry and the site you referred me to do an excellent job of recapitulating the list of talking points recited by President Trump in his strange, rambling address just before his followers smashed into the Capital. I’m aware of those allegations, anecdotes and interpretations. I was asking whether you had actually followed any of them down the rabbit hole, chased the allegations to their source and data, looked for other interpretations or rebuttals, and drawn a conclusion based on a little actual digging.
On the basis of your comment regard the voting machines (which, if I may summarize, was: “no, there’s no evidence of malfeasance, but it might have been possible”), I’ll assume you have not, and don’t intend to.
I remains curious about the degree to which you personally believe fraud occurred, as opposed to supporting the Trump strategy of sewing doubt and seeking to delay a final decision. But I realize you regard questions about actual “belief” as somehow naive.
The site you referred me to, for example, cites unconfirmed testimony by Jesse Morgan, the part-time, contract postal worker who claims he delivered thousands of mail-in ballots from New York to Pennsylvania in October. Morgan is an individual with apparent mental health and addiction problems, a criminal record, and belief that he and his family are being haunted by evil spirits. His Go Fund Me campaign, which casts him as a freedom fighter and defender of democracy, is doing really well, though. https://www.ydr.com/story/news/2020/12/08/witness-pa-election-fraud-suit-ghost-hunter-long-criminal-record/6496500002/
You may or may not like the source, but ABC News has an impressive fact checking post.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/17/fact-check-2020-election-whats-true-and-whats-false/6266732002/
The depth of the analysis is actually pretty good and it has numerous links. Under the section on the Dominion voting machines I found the following:
Dominion calls the claim from Trump that its machines deleted 941,000 votes for him in Pennsylvania alone “impossible.”
That’s because Dominion only serves 14 counties in the state, which produced a total of 1.3 million votes — 52%, or 676,000, of which went to Trump. That only leaves 624,000 other votes, fewer than what Trump claims were switched.
This is the kind of thing that makes me suspicious of the other claims (I have spent far too much time dealing with spaghetti in global warming – people throwing everything at it in the hopes that one thing sticks).
And of course you have the fact that most (all?) legal challenges were dismissed (not in Trump’s favour).
I also listened to the phone calls between Trump and the Georgian state officials and even through the officials were strong trump supporters they were very clear that there was no evidence of voter fraud in Georgia.
All in all the claims about the election being stolen have very few facts to back then up.
The problem with the spaghetti-on-the-wall metaphor is that NONE of it has stuck. Examined strand by strand (which is what I was gently attempting to do), each spaghetto dries up and falls to the floor. Which leaves you and I staring at an empty wall, while Jay and Jerry point at the floor and say “Yeah, but look how MUCH non-evidence there is!”