Aides make attempts to soothe Trump’s hurt feelings

Stephen Lyons, The Independent

On the morning the presidential election was called for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, a hawk flew down from the heavens in my back yard and grabbed a squirrel. Huge crows then swooped in and made a raucous protest, but it was all for naught. The last I saw of the squirrel was its bushy tail soaring upward into the clouds.

Today, as I write this, with a handful of exceptions, Republicans in Congress refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming results of a legitimate election. And they are hardly silent in their denial of democracy. Like those noisy, obnoxious crows, senators like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham have dutifully parroted President Trump’s talking points: the media does not decide elections; widespread fraud in Democratic-run cities led to Biden’s victory; and refusing to concede power is therefore the right thing to do.

Texas Sen. Cruz said on (surprise!) Fox News that the election results are “way premature. At this point, we do not know who has prevailed in the election.”

South Carolina Sen. Graham — who won his re-election, but lost all claims to being an independent thinker, or really anything but a lapdog for the president — warned that, “If Republicans don’t challenge and change the US election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again.”

OK then. So be it.

Then there is this transparently partisan development: General Services Administration head Emily Murphy (a Trump appointee) has thus far refused to release the necessary monetary resources to the Biden transition team. The last time there was a delay in releasing the transition funds was in the contentious, highly litigated Gore v. Bush election in 2000.  At this moment, not surprisingly, President Trump has still not conceded the election to Biden. No congratulatory call has been made according to our American tradition. Yet those calls have come in from many world leaders.

Then there is the matter of upcoming Trump rallies where the victimized president can take his grievances to his angry base. Far-right activists say they are planning a “March for Trump” this weekend in Washington DC (or a “Million MAGA March” depending on who you speak to); we don’t know yet if Trump himself will speak at it.

One wonders if this planned “MAGApalooza” is part of an effort to soothe Trump’s hurt feelings as he adjusts to being what he has never wanted to be: a loser. As I listen to the chattering class and read the pundits, I can’t help but be amazed at the attention to the various moods of Trump. His aides seemingly tiptoe around him for fear that he will learn the truth and explode. Instead they send him golfing and freshen his Diet Cokes. They were, reportedly, so afraid to tell him that polls suggested the election might not go his way that he was genuinely shocked at the result.

His son-in-law advises him to exhaust all quixotic legal challenges. Rudy Giuliani, just in from Ukraine, with rest stops in hotel suites and odd landscaping joints, continues to carry the water for his paymaster. (His other personal litigator, Attorney General Bill Barr, has not been seen in public in weeks, despite ordering that the Justice Department take Trump’s claims of election fraud seriously from behind the scenes and thus provoking the resignation of his top election crimes prosecutor. Well, shredding documents does take time.)

Throw in voices such as failed media darling Megyn Kelly and B-level celebrity enablers such as James Woods, Scott Baio, Jon Voight (who openly compared Biden to Satan) and Kirstie Alley, and you have a veritable mob of crows cawing into the wind. At this point, with the nation and the world celebrating an end to four nightmarish years of an autocratic and venal administration, it’s just so much noise.