It was the kind of live television event that the reality show star president has often staged himself. Vice President Mike Pence stepped in front of a bank of cameras on the White House campus on Friday to receive the new coronavirus vaccine, hailing it as “safe and effective” no fewer than eight times. He urged people to wear masks, wash their hands and do whatever they can to help defeat a disease that has killed more than 300,000 Americans.

Intended as a public service announcement as the country reaches a milestone in fighting the pandemic, these 10 minutes of morning television also distilled the various ways that President Donald Trump and his political allies have repeatedly undermined confidence in the science about the virus and fed suspicion and misinformation.

No sooner had the vice president congratulated a health care worker who stuck him in the arm — “Great job, great job. I didn’t feel a thing,” Pence said, his voice muffled by the mask covering his face — than Trump logged into Twitter and undercut him. Trump posted a message from a right-wing radio host who questioned the effectiveness of masks, writing: “‘Masks work’ is the mantra. Not allowed to say anything else.”

On Fox News, which carried the vice president’s vaccination live and aired his plea urging “every American to continue to do your part,” a spat erupted among the hosts of “Fox &amp;amp; Friends” over whether the public health orders that have shuttered businesses in some states were doing more harm than good.

Geraldo Rivera, a Fox News correspondent, gently questioned whether his own network had spent too much time focusing on the plight of business owners suffering from the economic pain rather than highlighting the loss of life when Brian Kilmeade, a co-host, tersely dismissed the suggestion. “You can have a balance,” Kilmeade said, describing long lines of people waiting at food banks.

This seemed to go too far for one of the other hosts, Steve Doocy, who interjected, “But 3,700 people died yesterday.”

Inconsistent and contradictory messages like these have stymied the nation’s response to the coronavirus for the nine months that it has been spreading. Often the confusion is compounded by the most visible allies of the president — including Pence, the leader of the task force overseeing the government’s coronavirus effort, and the president’s defenders in the media.

Reluctant to get on the wrong side of the president or Americans who believe concern about the virus is overblown, they have toggled back and forth from denial to cautiousness to defiance.

For months, Pence was seen in public flouting the guidance from public health officials to wear a mask when in proximity to others. He refused to put one on when he visited the Mayo Clinic at the height of the first wave of infections in April, even as other members of the administration traveling with him did.

A few weeks later he wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal titled “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave.’” Even after members of his own staff caught the virus, including his chief of staff, Pence continued to attend and host official social gatherings, including a holiday party at the vice president’s residence this week where guests mingled in an outdoor tent and posed for pictures without masks, according to attendees.

Like most other Republicans, Pence has never second-guessed Trump’s leadership during the pandemic. He insisted in August in an interview with “Good Morning America” that he “couldn’t be more proud of the leadership Trump has provided from the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.”

In the conservative media, there has rarely been daylight between the president and his most supportive hosts, who echoed his insistence at first that the virus was not what the media were making of it, then later shifted course and defended his response while denying that he — and they — had ever minimized the risks.

Throughout February, Fox personalities like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity helped amplify the president’s claims that his critics were exaggerating the possible dangers of the virus to harm him politically.

Ingraham called it “a new pathway for hitting President Trump.” Hannity mocked the “media mob” for running stories that said Trump wasn’t taking it seriously enough. “The apocalypse is imminent and you’re going to all die, all of you in the next 48 hours. And it’s all President Trump’s fault,” he seethed on Feb. 27.

Later, as Trump started to acknowledge the severity and congratulate himself for leading a historic and effective response, his media allies also pivoted to praising the president for putting the “greatest” and “best” health officials the government has to offer on the case, as Hannity put it. He also compared Trump’s stewardship of the country during the pandemic to FDR and Churchill.

Trump, who caught the coronavirus in October and required hospitalization after falling seriously ill, has not committed to taking the vaccine — a step that could put at ease those who are skeptical and reassure them of its safety. Other high-profile public figures and political leaders either have taken it or said they soon would. Surgeon General Jerome Adams was vaccinated Friday, as were congressional leaders Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader. President-elect Joe Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, are to be vaccinated Monday.

And there were signs that some in the media were providing Trump cover. Tucker Carlson of Fox News spent his opening monologue on Thursday night questioning whether the vaccine could be trusted and suggested that a “slick” government marketing campaign to promote its safety was a reason to be suspicious. “It all seems a bit much, it feels false because it is, it’s too slick,” he said.

Twelve hours later, Fox viewers saw Pence and his wife, Karen Pence, inoculated by a team from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the facility where Trump was treated for complications from the virus. In a short speech afterward, the vice president mentioned the president by name several times and credited his leadership with helping produce a vaccine in just a few months.

Pence did not dwell too long on the virus’s death toll or on his admonition that Americans should do more to protect themselves and others before returning to the kind of optimistic message that Trump prefers. “As President Trump often says, we are rounding the corner. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Pence said.

It was the kind of live television event that the reality show star president has often staged himself. Vice President Mike Pence stepped in front of a bank of cameras on the White House campus on Friday to receive the new coronavirus vaccine, hailing it as “safe and effective” no fewer than eight times.

It was the kind of live television event that the reality show star president has often staged himself. Vice President Mike Pence stepped in front of a bank of cameras on the White House campus on Friday to receive the new coronavirus vaccine, hailing it as “safe and effective” no fewer than eight times. He urged people to wear masks, wash their hands and do whatever they can to help defeat a disease that has killed more than 300,000 Americans. Intended as a public service announcement as the country reaches a milestone in fighting the pandemic, these 10 minutes of morning television also distilled the various ways that President Donald Trump and his political allies have repeatedly undermined confidence in the science about the virus and fed suspicion and misinformation. No sooner had the vice president congratulated a health care worker who stuck him in the arm — “Great job, great job. I didn’t feel a thing,” Pence said, his voice muffled by the mask covering his face — than Trump logged into Twitter and undercut him. Trump posted a message from a right-wing radio host who questioned the effectiveness of masks, writing: “‘Masks work’ is the mantra. Not allowed to say anything else.” On Fox News, which carried the vice president’s vaccination live and aired his plea urging “every American to continue to do your part,” a spat erupted among the hosts of “Fox &amp; Friends” over whether the public health orders that have shuttered businesses in some states were doing more harm than good. Geraldo Rivera, a Fox News correspondent, gently questioned whether his own network had spent too much time focusing on the plight of business owners suffering from the economic pain rather than highlighting the loss of life when Brian Kilmeade, a co-host, tersely dismissed the suggestion. “You can have a balance,” Kilmeade said, describing long lines of people waiting at food banks. This seemed to go too far for one of the other hosts, Steve Doocy, who interjected, “But 3,700 people died yesterday.” Inconsistent and contradictory messages like these have stymied the nation’s response to the coronavirus for the nine months that it has been spreading. Often the confusion is compounded by the most visible allies of the president — including Pence, the leader of the task force overseeing the government’s coronavirus effort, and the president’s defenders in the media. Reluctant to get on the wrong side of the president or Americans who believe concern about the virus is overblown, they have toggled back and forth from denial to cautiousness to defiance. For months, Pence was seen in public flouting the guidance from public health officials to wear a mask when in proximity to others. He refused to put one on when he visited the Mayo Clinic at the height of the first wave of infections in April, even as other members of the administration traveling with him did. A few weeks later he wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal titled “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave.’” Even after members of his own staff caught the virus, including his chief of staff, Pence continued to attend and host official social gatherings, including a holiday party at the vice president’s residence this week where guests mingled in an outdoor tent and posed for pictures without masks, according to attendees. Like most other Republicans, Pence has never second-guessed Trump’s leadership during the pandemic. He insisted in August in an interview with “Good Morning America” that he “couldn’t be more proud of the leadership Trump has provided from the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.” In the conservative media, there has rarely been daylight between the president and his most supportive hosts, who echoed his insistence at first that the virus was not what the media were making of it, then later shifted course and defended his response while denying that he — and they — had ever minimized the risks. Throughout February, Fox personalities like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity helped amplify the president’s claims that his critics were exaggerating the possible dangers of the virus to harm him politically. Ingraham called it “a new pathway for hitting President Trump.” Hannity mocked the “media mob” for running stories that said Trump wasn’t taking it seriously enough. “The apocalypse is imminent and you’re going to all die, all of you in the next 48 hours. And it’s all President Trump’s fault,” he seethed on Feb. 27. Later, as Trump started to acknowledge the severity and congratulate himself for leading a historic and effective response, his media allies also pivoted to praising the president for putting the “greatest” and “best” health officials the government has to offer on the case, as Hannity put it. He also compared Trump’s stewardship of the country during the pandemic to FDR and Churchill. Trump, who caught the coronavirus in October and required hospitalization after falling seriously ill, has not committed to taking the vaccine — a step that could put at ease those who are skeptical and reassure them of its safety. Other high-profile public figures and political leaders either have taken it or said they soon would. Surgeon General Jerome Adams was vaccinated Friday, as were congressional leaders Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader. President-elect Joe Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, are to be vaccinated Monday. And there were signs that some in the media were providing Trump cover. Tucker Carlson of Fox News spent his opening monologue on Thursday night questioning whether the vaccine could be trusted and suggested that a “slick” government marketing campaign to promote its safety was a reason to be suspicious. “It all seems a bit much, it feels false because it is, it’s too slick,” he said. Twelve hours later, Fox viewers saw Pence and his wife, Karen Pence, inoculated by a team from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the facility where Trump was treated for complications from the virus. In a short speech afterward, the vice president mentioned the president by name several times and credited his leadership with helping produce a vaccine in just a few months. Pence did not dwell too long on the virus’s death toll or on his admonition that Americans should do more to protect themselves and others before returning to the kind of optimistic message that Trump prefers. “As President Trump often says, we are rounding the corner. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Pence said.

Can a televised vaccination undo months of skepticism?

US President-elect Joe Biden has expressed full confidence in his son Hunter after it was revealed last week that he was under a federal tax investigation.

"We have great confidence in our son," Biden said, sitting next to his wife Jill, in an interview on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," which aired Thursday on CBS.

"I am not concerned about any accusations that have been made against him. It used to get to me. I think it's kind of foul play but... as long as he's good, we're good," he said in his first full remarks on the issue since the tax probe became public.&nbsp;

During his unsuccessful re-election campaign, the outgoing president Donald Trump launched repeated attacks at Hunter and said the Bidens were a "corrupt" family and a "criminal enterprise."

Trump's allies have also regularly assailed Hunter for his business dealings in Ukraine and China.

From 2014 to 2019, while his father was vice president, Hunter, a lawyer and lobbyist, served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company.

Trump has also accused Biden of seeking the removal of Ukraine's top prosecutor to protect Burisma -- and his son -- from a corruption investigation.

Hunter, 50, now an artist based in Los Angeles, has admitted to displaying "poor judgment" in some of his business dealings, but denied any wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Biden had a sincere response when he was asked about Trump.

Colbert asked Biden if there was anything he could "sincerely" thank Trump for accomplishing during his time in the White House.

After a short pause, Biden responded: "There are some things... Getting the vaccine moving has been positive, but by and large, he has been a president who's decided that the way he succeeds is by dividing us."

Biden also said he believes by next Christmas, life in the US will be "awfully close" to normal, "if not there."

US President-elect Joe Biden has expressed full confidence in his son Hunter after it was revealed last week that he was under a federal tax investigation. "We have great confidence in our son," Biden said, sitting next to his wife Jill, in an interview on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," which aired Thursday on CBS.

US President-elect Joe Biden has expressed full confidence in his son Hunter after it was revealed last week that he was under a federal tax investigation. "We have great confidence in our son," Biden said, sitting next to his wife Jill, in an interview on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," which aired Thursday on CBS. "I am not concerned about any accusations that have been made against him. It used to get to me. I think it's kind of foul play but... as long as he's good, we're good," he said in his first full remarks on the issue since the tax probe became public. During his unsuccessful re-election campaign, the outgoing president Donald Trump launched repeated attacks at Hunter and said the Bidens were a "corrupt" family and a "criminal enterprise." Trump's allies have also regularly assailed Hunter for his business dealings in Ukraine and China. From 2014 to 2019, while his father was vice president, Hunter, a lawyer and lobbyist, served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. Trump has also accused Biden of seeking the removal of Ukraine's top prosecutor to protect Burisma -- and his son -- from a corruption investigation. Hunter, 50, now an artist based in Los Angeles, has admitted to displaying "poor judgment" in some of his business dealings, but denied any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Biden had a sincere response when he was asked about Trump. Colbert asked Biden if there was anything he could "sincerely" thank Trump for accomplishing during his time in the White House. After a short pause, Biden responded: "There are some things... Getting the vaccine moving has been positive, but by and large, he has been a president who's decided that the way he succeeds is by dividing us." Biden also said he believes by next Christmas, life in the US will be "awfully close" to normal, "if not there."

Joe Biden backs son Hunter after US tax probe revealed

As lawmakers race to put the final touches on a $900 billion bipartisan stimulus package, one thing is becoming clear: Congress has left a significant challenge for the incoming president, Joe Biden, and his efforts to revive the faltering economy.

To seal the deal after months of struggle, lawmakers agreed to exclude a direct stream of money for state and local governments, which Republicans objected to as a blue state “bailout” but Democrats said was needed to prevent job cuts and economic pain.

Biden has promised to help local governments, which are struggling with plunging tax revenue and increased costs, creating huge budget gaps that have already resulted in 1.3 million state and local jobs lost since March. Economists warn that, without further help, states and cities could further slow the economic recovery by cutting more jobs and spending.

“States and cities are already facing large, large budget shortfalls this year,” Biden said this month. “They’ve already laid off more than a million workers. Even more teachers, firefighters, cops will lose their jobs unless federal government steps up now.”

As people steer clear of hotels, restaurants and sporting events because of the coronavirus pandemic, the plunge in economic activity has walloped tax revenue in many states, particularly those that rely heavily on tourism or on oil, coal and other sources of energy whose prices have fallen from reduced demand. Budgets have been further strained by spending on social assistance programs, like unemployment, and other pandemic-related costs, like safety measures in public buildings.

With most states required to balance their budgets, governments have turned to cutting jobs and other services rather than raising taxes on struggling households and businesses. The state and local government jobs shed since March — primarily in education — are a far higher toll than during the Great Recession, when cities and states laid off 800,000 workers from 2008 to 2013.

Democrats had made state aid a priority for a second round of stimulus, a demand that became a sticking point with Republicans. A centrist group of senators, trying to break the impasse, had included $160 billion in a direct stream of aid for state and local governments as part of a compromise bill. But congressional leaders excluded that funding this week. In exchange, they decided to drop a Republican priority, shielding businesses that opened amid the pandemic from certain lawsuits, to try to get the broader $900 billion package approved by both chambers and signed by President Donald Trump.

The deal is not yet final and could still be derailed by disputes over last-minute details, including a Republican effort that would prevent the Federal Reserve from restarting some pandemic-era loan programs without congressional permission. It is expected to include money for public transit authorities and potentially additional emergency assistance for state and local governments, though Republicans are opposing that aid, which would run through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The compromise is also expected to include billions of dollars for education and health programs, which state and local governments will most likely help distribute.

But the package is not expected to contain funding anywhere close to what Democrats and many economists say is necessary to avoid more public sector layoffs in the years to come.

State and local governments face more than $500 billion in revenue shortfalls from the pandemic, spread over three fiscal years, research published this fall by the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity estimates.

The researchers found that those governments entered the crisis in relatively strong fiscal positions, often with large rainy-day funds. But even with those reserves and an estimated $250 billion in federal aid approved earlier this year, they warned, the shortfalls could lead to tax increases or budget cuts.

The decision to exclude state aid will present an economic challenge for Biden, who is likely to face the same political dynamic if Republicans keep the Senate by winning the Jan. 5 election runoffs in Georgia.

The U.S. economy struggled to shake off the last recession, with historically slow growth and a sluggish job market, in part because cities and states continued to lay off workers years into the recovery, pushing up the unemployment rate. It took until 2019 for state and local jobs to return to 2008 levels of unemployment. Democrats and liberal activists have warned that Congress risks repeating those mistakes.

On Wednesday, Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said that while “the picture is mixed” on state finances, the Fed is concerned about the 1.3 million jobs already lost.

“It’s a very large number of people to be out of work from just that one source,” he said.

Calculations from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office support the case for more aid, concluding that money for states and localities provided the most cost-effective economic boost of any of the provisions in the first wave of economic assistance this spring.

But the political argument has been muddled by the diverging experience of state revenues in the crisis, which does not hew neatly to party lines. States that depend heavily on tourism, like Florida, or on energy taxes, like Wyoming, face large shortfalls, along with liberal bastions like California and New York.

“There are many states that are doing reasonably well right now and a few that are struggling substantially,” said Jared Walczak, who compiles data on state and local aid as vice president of state projects for the Tax Foundation in Washington. “That makes it very difficult to put a coalition together. That list of states isn’t red or blue, but there is a divide.”

Some Republicans in the Senate have supported more aid to states, including negotiators in the bipartisan group such as Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. But lawmakers have struggled to reach agreement on how much is necessary and how to divvy up the funds.

“Some states have rainy day funds and are telling us they don’t need more money,” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said at a news conference this week. “Others are saying they need much more than we can possibly imagine sending to them, so a lot of difference in data and difference in terms of how well they’ve managed themselves in the past.”

Many Republicans have consistently opposed state aid, saying it would reward Democratic states that mismanaged their finances. One of their main talking points has been that states could use federal assistance to shore up public employee pensions — though the draft bipartisan agreement would have prohibited such spending.

“What Democrats really want is for Congress to just send money to liberal politicians who have already shown they can’t be trusted with it,” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla. — a state that faces a $2.7 billion budget shortfall — wrote in an op-ed for National Review last week. “If these politicians have budget shortfalls, it’s because they did not prioritize their struggling constituents in the first place and instead wasted money on other things.”

Influential conservative groups like Americans for Tax Reform and Heritage Action for America have called the issue a “red line for conservatives.”

“When you have less money, it makes you do reforms to reduce spending,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “Don’t bail them out,” he said, “or there will be no normal budget discipline.”

On Monday, the centrist group of negotiators split its original $908 billion framework into two bills — a $748 billion measure with broad consensus on how to provide support for unemployment benefits, food assistance, small businesses and vaccine distribution and a $160 billion measure with state and local government funding and liability protections.

To gain support for the $160 billion — which was significantly smaller than the nearly $1 trillion House Democrats sought for state and local governments May — lawmakers agreed to a number of guardrails, including prohibiting the use of the funds for pension obligations and distributing the funds based on the proportion of revenue loss and population.

Still, it was not enough to win buy-in from a critical mass of Republican senators, including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and was excluded from the emerging agreement.

As lawmakers race to put the final touches on a $900 billion bipartisan stimulus package, one thing is becoming clear: Congress has left a significant challenge for the incoming president, Joe Biden, and his efforts to revive the faltering economy.

As lawmakers race to put the final touches on a $900 billion bipartisan stimulus package, one thing is becoming clear: Congress has left a significant challenge for the incoming president, Joe Biden, and his efforts to revive the faltering economy. To seal the deal after months of struggle, lawmakers agreed to exclude a direct stream of money for state and local governments, which Republicans objected to as a blue state “bailout” but Democrats said was needed to prevent job cuts and economic pain. Biden has promised to help local governments, which are struggling with plunging tax revenue and increased costs, creating huge budget gaps that have already resulted in 1.3 million state and local jobs lost since March. Economists warn that, without further help, states and cities could further slow the economic recovery by cutting more jobs and spending. “States and cities are already facing large, large budget shortfalls this year,” Biden said this month. “They’ve already laid off more than a million workers. Even more teachers, firefighters, cops will lose their jobs unless federal government steps up now.” As people steer clear of hotels, restaurants and sporting events because of the coronavirus pandemic, the plunge in economic activity has walloped tax revenue in many states, particularly those that rely heavily on tourism or on oil, coal and other sources of energy whose prices have fallen from reduced demand. Budgets have been further strained by spending on social assistance programs, like unemployment, and other pandemic-related costs, like safety measures in public buildings. With most states required to balance their budgets, governments have turned to cutting jobs and other services rather than raising taxes on struggling households and businesses. The state and local government jobs shed since March — primarily in education — are a far higher toll than during the Great Recession, when cities and states laid off 800,000 workers from 2008 to 2013. Democrats had made state aid a priority for a second round of stimulus, a demand that became a sticking point with Republicans. A centrist group of senators, trying to break the impasse, had included $160 billion in a direct stream of aid for state and local governments as part of a compromise bill. But congressional leaders excluded that funding this week. In exchange, they decided to drop a Republican priority, shielding businesses that opened amid the pandemic from certain lawsuits, to try to get the broader $900 billion package approved by both chambers and signed by President Donald Trump. The deal is not yet final and could still be derailed by disputes over last-minute details, including a Republican effort that would prevent the Federal Reserve from restarting some pandemic-era loan programs without congressional permission. It is expected to include money for public transit authorities and potentially additional emergency assistance for state and local governments, though Republicans are opposing that aid, which would run through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The compromise is also expected to include billions of dollars for education and health programs, which state and local governments will most likely help distribute. But the package is not expected to contain funding anywhere close to what Democrats and many economists say is necessary to avoid more public sector layoffs in the years to come. State and local governments face more than $500 billion in revenue shortfalls from the pandemic, spread over three fiscal years, research published this fall by the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity estimates. The researchers found that those governments entered the crisis in relatively strong fiscal positions, often with large rainy-day funds. But even with those reserves and an estimated $250 billion in federal aid approved earlier this year, they warned, the shortfalls could lead to tax increases or budget cuts. The decision to exclude state aid will present an economic challenge for Biden, who is likely to face the same political dynamic if Republicans keep the Senate by winning the Jan. 5 election runoffs in Georgia. The U.S. economy struggled to shake off the last recession, with historically slow growth and a sluggish job market, in part because cities and states continued to lay off workers years into the recovery, pushing up the unemployment rate. It took until 2019 for state and local jobs to return to 2008 levels of unemployment. Democrats and liberal activists have warned that Congress risks repeating those mistakes. On Wednesday, Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said that while “the picture is mixed” on state finances, the Fed is concerned about the 1.3 million jobs already lost. “It’s a very large number of people to be out of work from just that one source,” he said. Calculations from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office support the case for more aid, concluding that money for states and localities provided the most cost-effective economic boost of any of the provisions in the first wave of economic assistance this spring. But the political argument has been muddled by the diverging experience of state revenues in the crisis, which does not hew neatly to party lines. States that depend heavily on tourism, like Florida, or on energy taxes, like Wyoming, face large shortfalls, along with liberal bastions like California and New York. “There are many states that are doing reasonably well right now and a few that are struggling substantially,” said Jared Walczak, who compiles data on state and local aid as vice president of state projects for the Tax Foundation in Washington. “That makes it very difficult to put a coalition together. That list of states isn’t red or blue, but there is a divide.” Some Republicans in the Senate have supported more aid to states, including negotiators in the bipartisan group such as Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. But lawmakers have struggled to reach agreement on how much is necessary and how to divvy up the funds. “Some states have rainy day funds and are telling us they don’t need more money,” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said at a news conference this week. “Others are saying they need much more than we can possibly imagine sending to them, so a lot of difference in data and difference in terms of how well they’ve managed themselves in the past.” Many Republicans have consistently opposed state aid, saying it would reward Democratic states that mismanaged their finances. One of their main talking points has been that states could use federal assistance to shore up public employee pensions — though the draft bipartisan agreement would have prohibited such spending. “What Democrats really want is for Congress to just send money to liberal politicians who have already shown they can’t be trusted with it,” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla. — a state that faces a $2.7 billion budget shortfall — wrote in an op-ed for National Review last week. “If these politicians have budget shortfalls, it’s because they did not prioritize their struggling constituents in the first place and instead wasted money on other things.” Influential conservative groups like Americans for Tax Reform and Heritage Action for America have called the issue a “red line for conservatives.” “When you have less money, it makes you do reforms to reduce spending,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “Don’t bail them out,” he said, “or there will be no normal budget discipline.” On Monday, the centrist group of negotiators split its original $908 billion framework into two bills — a $748 billion measure with broad consensus on how to provide support for unemployment benefits, food assistance, small businesses and vaccine distribution and a $160 billion measure with state and local government funding and liability protections. To gain support for the $160 billion — which was significantly smaller than the nearly $1 trillion House Democrats sought for state and local governments May — lawmakers agreed to a number of guardrails, including prohibiting the use of the funds for pension obligations and distributing the funds based on the proportion of revenue loss and population. Still, it was not enough to win buy-in from a critical mass of Republican senators, including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and was excluded from the emerging agreement.

Biden faces challenge as US Congress drops state aid to secure stimulus

President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Deb Haaland to lead the Interior Department, according to people familiar with the matter, putting the Democratic representative in line to become the first American Indian cabinet secretary in US history.

Tribal leaders and activists around the country, along with many Democratic figures, cheered Haaland’s selection after urging Biden for weeks to choose her. They stood behind her candidacy even when concerns that Democrats might risk their majority in the House if Haaland yielded her seat in Congress appeared to threaten her nomination.

With Haaland’s nomination, Indigenous people will for the first time in their lifetimes see a Native American at the table where the highest decisions are made — and so will everyone else, said OJ Semans, a Rosebud Sioux vote activist who was in Georgia on Thursday helping get out the Native vote for two Senate runoffs. “It’s made people aware that Indians still exist,” he said.

The Interior Department is a vast agency of more than 70,000 employees overseeing the country's natural resources, including national parks, and oil and gas drilling sites, as well as tribal lands -- home to 578 federally recognized tribes.

In Congress, the 60-year-old Haaland has prioritized the improvement of services to tribal communities, especially assistance during the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately hurt Native American families.

"It would be an honour to move the Biden-Harris climate agenda forward, help repair the government-to-government relationship with tribes that the Trump Administration has ruined, and serve as the first Native American cabinet secretary in our nation's history," Haaland said in a statement published by The New York Times.

Biden also has reportedly tapped Michael Regan, a top North Carolina environmental regulator who brokered the nation's largest coal ash cleanup, to be the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Regan, who is Black, served at the EPA in the Clinton and Bush administrations. He would be tasked with helping to carry out Biden's ambitious climate plans, which call for embracing clean energy and crafting higher fuel-efficiency standards for the country's automobiles and trucks.

(With inputs from agencies)

President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Deb Haaland to lead the Interior Department, according to people familiar with the matter, putting the Democratic representative in line to become the first American Indian cabinet secretary in US history.

President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Deb Haaland to lead the Interior Department, according to people familiar with the matter, putting the Democratic representative in line to become the first American Indian cabinet secretary in US history. Tribal leaders and activists around the country, along with many Democratic figures, cheered Haaland’s selection after urging Biden for weeks to choose her. They stood behind her candidacy even when concerns that Democrats might risk their majority in the House if Haaland yielded her seat in Congress appeared to threaten her nomination. With Haaland’s nomination, Indigenous people will for the first time in their lifetimes see a Native American at the table where the highest decisions are made — and so will everyone else, said OJ Semans, a Rosebud Sioux vote activist who was in Georgia on Thursday helping get out the Native vote for two Senate runoffs. “It’s made people aware that Indians still exist,” he said. The Interior Department is a vast agency of more than 70,000 employees overseeing the country's natural resources, including national parks, and oil and gas drilling sites, as well as tribal lands -- home to 578 federally recognized tribes. In Congress, the 60-year-old Haaland has prioritized the improvement of services to tribal communities, especially assistance during the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately hurt Native American families. "It would be an honour to move the Biden-Harris climate agenda forward, help repair the government-to-government relationship with tribes that the Trump Administration has ruined, and serve as the first Native American cabinet secretary in our nation's history," Haaland said in a statement published by The New York Times. Biden also has reportedly tapped Michael Regan, a top North Carolina environmental regulator who brokered the nation's largest coal ash cleanup, to be the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Regan, who is Black, served at the EPA in the Clinton and Bush administrations. He would be tasked with helping to carry out Biden's ambitious climate plans, which call for embracing clean energy and crafting higher fuel-efficiency standards for the country's automobiles and trucks. (With inputs from agencies)

Joe Biden picks Deb Haaland as first Native American interior secretary

President-elect Joe Biden will get the coronavirus vaccine as soon as next week, transition officials said on Wednesday, as US authorities try to build public confidence in a measure that promises to stanch the deadly pandemic.

Vice President Mike Pence will get the vaccine on Friday, the White House said. Both men will receive the shot publicly in an effort to boost confidence in the safety of the vaccine, which will become widely available to the public next year.

“I don’t want to get ahead of the line but I want to make sure that we demonstrate to the American people that it is safe to take,” Biden said at an event earlier on Wednesday.

Biden, 78, is in a high-risk category for the coronavirus because of his age.

Biden has vowed to make the fight against the virus his top priority when he takes office on Jan. 20. President Donald Trump, who lost the Nov. 3 election to Biden, has frequently downplayed the severity of the pandemic, which has killed 304,187 Americans so far and feuded with his top public health officials.

Trump will get the vaccine himself as soon as his medical team determines it is best, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Tuesday. The president was hospitalized after testing positive for COVID-19 this fall.

Initial doses of the vaccine, which became available in the United States this week, have been set aside for doctors, nurses and other frontline medical workers, along with residents and staff of nursing homes and some U.S. government officials.

U.S. officials aim to get 2.9 million doses of the vaccine, developed by Pfizer Inc and German partner BioNTech SE, by week’s end.

One health worker in Alaska had a severe allergic reaction after receiving the vaccine, officials said on Wednesday in what is believed to be the only adverse reaction so far in the United States.

A significant portion of the American public has shown disdain for basic public health recommendations, such as wearing a mask, and only 61% of respondents in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll said they were open to getting vaccinated.

Scientists believe that “herd immunity” against the virus could be achieved once about 70% of the population has been exposed to it, either through natural infection or a vaccine.

Some 16.7 million Americans have been infected so far, equal to roughly 5% of the population. Pence’s wife, Karen, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams also will get the vaccine on Friday, the White House said.

Biden’s transition team did not say when Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would get the vaccine.

‘US SHOULD LEAD THE WAY’

Biden is building his incoming administration as he prepares for his inauguration next month.

On Wednesday, he introduced former presidential rival Pete Buttigieg as his choice for U.S. transportation secretary to take the lead in upgrading America’s ageing infrastructure.

Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, would be the first openly gay Cabinet secretary confirmed by the Senate if he is approved.

“The Biden-Harris Cabinet will be a historic Cabinet - a Cabinet that looks like America, a Cabinet that taps into the best of America, a Cabinet that is opening doors and breaking down barriers and accessing the full range of talent ... in this nation,” Biden said as he puts forth what is shaping up to be the most diverse Cabinet in U.S. history.

Appearing with Buttigieg in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden said the 38-year-old would confront the task of restoring what he called “our crumbling roads, bridges and ports.” Biden has proposed a massive boost in infrastructure spending.

Buttigieg emerged from relative obscurity to mount a surprisingly robust campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination eventually won by Biden. A military veteran who served in Afghanistan, Buttigieg is in the vanguard of the next generation of Democratic politicians and is widely seen as a future presidential contender.

“Americans shouldn’t settle for less than our peers in the developed world when it comes to our roads and bridges, our railways and transit systems. The U.S. should lead the way, and I know that in this administration we will,” Buttigieg said.

President-elect Joe Biden will get the coronavirus vaccine as soon as next week, transition officials said on Wednesday, as US authorities try to build public confidence in a measure that promises to stanch the deadly pandemic.

President-elect Joe Biden will get the coronavirus vaccine as soon as next week, transition officials said on Wednesday, as US authorities try to build public confidence in a measure that promises to stanch the deadly pandemic. Vice President Mike Pence will get the vaccine on Friday, the White House said. Both men will receive the shot publicly in an effort to boost confidence in the safety of the vaccine, which will become widely available to the public next year. “I don’t want to get ahead of the line but I want to make sure that we demonstrate to the American people that it is safe to take,” Biden said at an event earlier on Wednesday. Biden, 78, is in a high-risk category for the coronavirus because of his age. Biden has vowed to make the fight against the virus his top priority when he takes office on Jan. 20. President Donald Trump, who lost the Nov. 3 election to Biden, has frequently downplayed the severity of the pandemic, which has killed 304,187 Americans so far and feuded with his top public health officials. Trump will get the vaccine himself as soon as his medical team determines it is best, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Tuesday. The president was hospitalized after testing positive for COVID-19 this fall. Initial doses of the vaccine, which became available in the United States this week, have been set aside for doctors, nurses and other frontline medical workers, along with residents and staff of nursing homes and some U.S. government officials. U.S. officials aim to get 2.9 million doses of the vaccine, developed by Pfizer Inc and German partner BioNTech SE, by week’s end. One health worker in Alaska had a severe allergic reaction after receiving the vaccine, officials said on Wednesday in what is believed to be the only adverse reaction so far in the United States. A significant portion of the American public has shown disdain for basic public health recommendations, such as wearing a mask, and only 61% of respondents in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll said they were open to getting vaccinated. Scientists believe that “herd immunity” against the virus could be achieved once about 70% of the population has been exposed to it, either through natural infection or a vaccine. Some 16.7 million Americans have been infected so far, equal to roughly 5% of the population. Pence’s wife, Karen, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams also will get the vaccine on Friday, the White House said. Biden’s transition team did not say when Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would get the vaccine. ‘US SHOULD LEAD THE WAY’ Biden is building his incoming administration as he prepares for his inauguration next month. On Wednesday, he introduced former presidential rival Pete Buttigieg as his choice for U.S. transportation secretary to take the lead in upgrading America’s ageing infrastructure. Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, would be the first openly gay Cabinet secretary confirmed by the Senate if he is approved. “The Biden-Harris Cabinet will be a historic Cabinet - a Cabinet that looks like America, a Cabinet that taps into the best of America, a Cabinet that is opening doors and breaking down barriers and accessing the full range of talent ... in this nation,” Biden said as he puts forth what is shaping up to be the most diverse Cabinet in U.S. history. Appearing with Buttigieg in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden said the 38-year-old would confront the task of restoring what he called “our crumbling roads, bridges and ports.” Biden has proposed a massive boost in infrastructure spending. Buttigieg emerged from relative obscurity to mount a surprisingly robust campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination eventually won by Biden. A military veteran who served in Afghanistan, Buttigieg is in the vanguard of the next generation of Democratic politicians and is widely seen as a future presidential contender. “Americans shouldn’t settle for less than our peers in the developed world when it comes to our roads and bridges, our railways and transit systems. The U.S. should lead the way, and I know that in this administration we will,” Buttigieg said.

Joe Biden to get Covid-19 vaccine next week; Mike Pence to receive it on December 18

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he had "NOTHING to do" with any potential prosecution of President-Elect Joe Biden's son, Hunter.

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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
I have NOTHING to do with the potential prosecution of Hunter Biden, or the Biden family. It is just more Fake News. Actually, I find it very sad to watch!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1339585047481917441?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 17, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Trump's tweet came just one day after Jeffrey Rosen, the incoming Acting Attorney General, declined to say in an interview with Reuters whether or not he would appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden and his foreign business dealings.

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/gravitas-hunter-bidens-business-links-with-china-330056/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

Trump, who leaves office on Jan. 20, has privately been mulling whether to pressure the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel for Hunter Biden, according to a person familiar with the matter.

According to a US Senate Committee report,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-elections-2020-trump-applauds-selfs-approach-towards-covid-calls-bidens-approach-anti-science-329852">Joe Biden's</a>&nbsp;son Hunter was paid $50,000 a month to serve as the board of Burisma which is a Ukrainian natural gas company with a corrupt owner while his father was the US vice president&nbsp;to Democratic President Barack Obama.

The report said the Treasury records accessed by Chairman Grassley and Chairman Johnson showed Hunter<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/us-election-2020-facebook-removes-fake-pages-created-in-china-targeting-trump-biden-329641">&nbsp;Biden&nbsp;</a>and his family including his associates were involved in "potential criminal activity relating to transactions with Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh and Chinese nationals."

On December 9, Hunter Biden disclosed his tax affairs were under investigation by the US&nbsp;Attorney for the District of Delaware.

However,&nbsp;Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied Trump's allegations saying&nbsp;that Joe Biden's son, Hunter did ''made very good money in Ukraine'' but Moscow is not aware of anything criminal about his&nbsp;past business.

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he had "NOTHING to do" with any potential prosecution of President-Elect Joe Biden's son, Hunter. I have NOTHING to do with the potential prosecution of Hunter Biden, or the Biden family.

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he had "NOTHING to do" with any potential prosecution of President-Elect Joe Biden's son, Hunter. I have NOTHING to do with the potential prosecution of Hunter Biden, or the Biden family. It is just more Fake News. Actually, I find it very sad to watch! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 17, 2020 × Trump's tweet came just one day after Jeffrey Rosen, the incoming Acting Attorney General, declined to say in an interview with Reuters whether or not he would appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden and his foreign business dealings. Trump, who leaves office on Jan. 20, has privately been mulling whether to pressure the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel for Hunter Biden, according to a person familiar with the matter. According to a US Senate Committee report, Joe Biden's son Hunter was paid $50,000 a month to serve as the board of Burisma which is a Ukrainian natural gas company with a corrupt owner while his father was the US vice president to Democratic President Barack Obama. The report said the Treasury records accessed by Chairman Grassley and Chairman Johnson showed Hunter Biden and his family including his associates were involved in "potential criminal activity relating to transactions with Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh and Chinese nationals." On December 9, Hunter Biden disclosed his tax affairs were under investigation by the US Attorney for the District of Delaware. However, Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied Trump's allegations saying that Joe Biden's son, Hunter did ''made very good money in Ukraine'' but Moscow is not aware of anything criminal about his past business.

Have nothing to do with potential prosecution of Hunter Biden: Donald Trump

The United States set a grim double record Wednesday notching more than 3,700 deaths and over 250,000 new Covid-19 cases in 24 hours.

The tally marks the third time in the past week that the United States has crossed the 3,000 deaths threshold. The country has seen a spectacular spike in Covid infections for more than a month now.

The previous 24-hour record was set in late April at the height of the country's first wave -- which never totally ended.

Over the last two weeks, the number of new Covid-19 cases in 24 hours has climbed above 200,000 for 11 out of 14 days. Wednesday's exact death toll was 3,784 fatalities over the previous 24 hours leading up to 8:30 pm (0130 GMT Thursday).

Experts now fear the situation will become even more dire following end of year celebrations, including the Christmas holiday.

The latest records were set even as the United States undergoes its first week of a mass vaccination program aimed at stopping the surging pandemic.

On Monday the first Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine injections were administered in the United States.

Also, the US Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday that six or even seven doses could be squeezed out of vials that were supposed to contain only five doses to avoid unused vaccine being discarded.&nbsp;

To this end, lawmakers on Capitol Hill said they were nearing a long-elusive bipartisan deal on $900 billion in economic relief to help bolster a US economy ravaged by the pandemic.

Rollout of the first tranche of 2.9 million doses of a newly authorized vaccine from Pfizer Inc and German partner BioNTech SE continued for a third full day, with shipments headed to 66 more distribution hubs nationwide.

A second vaccine from Moderna Inc could win emergency-use approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week.

Express delivery companies FedEx and United Parcel Service, sharing a leading role in vaccine shipments, said they were monitoring the potential impacts of heavy snow and ice that had begun to disrupt transportation systems along the Eastern Seaboard on Wednesday.

President-elect Joe Biden, who has said he would get the vaccine publicly to help instill confidence in its safety, is expected to receive his first injection as soon as next week, according to his transition team.

Biden, 78, is in a high-risk category for the coronavirus due to his age.

Meanwhile, with hospitalisations setting a record for the 18th day in a row -- more than 112,000 patients under treatment on Tuesday -- health experts warn the death toll will rise higher still in the weeks ahead, even as the vaccine campaign steadily expands.

Another 2 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 5.9 million doses of the Moderna vaccine could be allocated next week, US Health Secretary Alex Azar said on a conference call on Wednesday. Two doses of the vaccines, given three or four weeks apart, would be required for each person being inoculated.

The Trump administration was also in talks to secure additional antibody treatment doses from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc and Eli Lilly and Co, Operation Warp Speed chief adviser Moncef Slaoui told the same conference call.

(with inputs from agencies)

The United States set a grim double record Wednesday notching more than 3,700 deaths and over 250,000 new Covid-19 cases in 24 hours. The tally marks the third time in the past week that the United States has crossed the 3,000 deaths threshold.

The United States set a grim double record Wednesday notching more than 3,700 deaths and over 250,000 new Covid-19 cases in 24 hours. The tally marks the third time in the past week that the United States has crossed the 3,000 deaths threshold. The country has seen a spectacular spike in Covid infections for more than a month now. The previous 24-hour record was set in late April at the height of the country's first wave -- which never totally ended. Over the last two weeks, the number of new Covid-19 cases in 24 hours has climbed above 200,000 for 11 out of 14 days. Wednesday's exact death toll was 3,784 fatalities over the previous 24 hours leading up to 8:30 pm (0130 GMT Thursday). Experts now fear the situation will become even more dire following end of year celebrations, including the Christmas holiday. The latest records were set even as the United States undergoes its first week of a mass vaccination program aimed at stopping the surging pandemic. On Monday the first Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine injections were administered in the United States. Also, the US Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday that six or even seven doses could be squeezed out of vials that were supposed to contain only five doses to avoid unused vaccine being discarded. To this end, lawmakers on Capitol Hill said they were nearing a long-elusive bipartisan deal on $900 billion in economic relief to help bolster a US economy ravaged by the pandemic. Rollout of the first tranche of 2.9 million doses of a newly authorized vaccine from Pfizer Inc and German partner BioNTech SE continued for a third full day, with shipments headed to 66 more distribution hubs nationwide. A second vaccine from Moderna Inc could win emergency-use approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week. Express delivery companies FedEx and United Parcel Service, sharing a leading role in vaccine shipments, said they were monitoring the potential impacts of heavy snow and ice that had begun to disrupt transportation systems along the Eastern Seaboard on Wednesday. President-elect Joe Biden, who has said he would get the vaccine publicly to help instill confidence in its safety, is expected to receive his first injection as soon as next week, according to his transition team. Biden, 78, is in a high-risk category for the coronavirus due to his age. Meanwhile, with hospitalisations setting a record for the 18th day in a row -- more than 112,000 patients under treatment on Tuesday -- health experts warn the death toll will rise higher still in the weeks ahead, even as the vaccine campaign steadily expands. Another 2 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 5.9 million doses of the Moderna vaccine could be allocated next week, US Health Secretary Alex Azar said on a conference call on Wednesday. Two doses of the vaccines, given three or four weeks apart, would be required for each person being inoculated. The Trump administration was also in talks to secure additional antibody treatment doses from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc and Eli Lilly and Co, Operation Warp Speed chief adviser Moncef Slaoui told the same conference call. (with inputs from agencies)

US sets a grim record with over 3,700 Covid deaths; vaccine campaign grows

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden’s allies have begun an ambitious campaign to raise millions of dollars from corporations and individuals by offering special “VIP participation” in reimagined inaugural festivities that will be largely virtual because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Far fewer tickets than normal are being distributed for people to attend the actual swearing-in ceremony outside the Capitol on Jan. 20, which is organized and funded by the government.

To create an air of celebration, Biden’s inaugural committee said it was raising private funds to pay for virtual events that will echo the Democratic convention this year, which featured a 50-state roll call from spots around the nation. There are also plans for a “virtual concert” with major performers whose names have not yet been released — and possibly for an in-person event later in the year.

The contrast between the constraints of putting on inaugural festivities in the midst of a public health crisis and fundraising as usual underscores how donations to an inaugural are not just about getting good seats for the swearing-in or tickets to the glitziest black-tie balls. They are also a way for corporations and well-heeled individuals to curry favor with a new administration, a reality that prompted liberal groups on Wednesday to ask Biden’s inaugural committee to forgo corporate donations.

President Donald Trump’s inauguration nearly four years ago took the practice to a new level. It became an access-peddling bazaar of sorts, and aspects of its record fundraising and spending emerged as the subjects of investigations.

Biden’s inaugural committee is promising corporations that give up to $1 million and individuals who contribute $500,000 — the largest amounts the committee said it would accept — some form of “VIP participation” in the virtual concert.

This special access is among the perks detailed on a one-page sponsorship menu from the committee that circulated among donors Wednesday. Perks include “event sponsorship opportunities,” as well as access to virtual briefings with leaders of the inaugural committee and campaign, and invitations to virtual events with Biden and his wife Jill, the future first lady, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff.

Top donors will also get a fitting memento for the coronavirus era — “virtual signed photos” with the president-elect and the first lady, as well as Harris and her husband, replacing the traditional in-person rope-line photo opportunities for which donors usually pay handsomely at fundraisers and other political events.

Incoming presidents have long raised private funds to organize and pay for inaugural festivities beyond the swearing-in ceremony, which is hosted by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies and funded with taxpayer money.

Top donors typically get intimate in-person access at parties and dinners to celebrate with members of an incoming president’s campaign and administration.

Among the corporate giants who have indicated they are ready to donate despite the lack of in-person events is Boeing, the aerospace manufacturer and military contractor. The company is contributing $1 million to Biden’s inauguration, an amount it said is consistent with its past contributions to inaugural committees. Representatives from Bank of America and Ford Motor Co. also said their companies intended to donate.

“We have supported inauguration events over many administrations on a nonpartisan basis because we view it as part of our civic commitment for an important national event,” Bill Halldin, a spokesman for Bank of America, said in a statement. “The private sector has traditionally done so and we expect to provide support for ceremonies in January as appropriate, given the health crisis and other factors that may impact it.”

A number of corporations that have been major donors to past presidential inaugurations — like Coca-Cola, Google and United Parcel Service — said this week that they still had not decided how much, or whether, to donate, though Google noted it had provided “online security protections for free” to the inaugural committee.

“As you know this is a very different year and as such we have not yet made a decision,” Ann Moore, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola, said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for the investment bank JPMorgan Chase, which has donated to past inaugurations, said that instead of giving to Biden’s committee, it would be donating to food banks in Washington and the hometowns of Biden (Wilmington, Delaware) and Harris (Oakland, California) “to help those impacted by the pandemic.”

An inauguration spokesman would not say how much had already been raised, or what the fundraising goal was.

Funds raised for inaugurations cannot be transferred to federal campaigns or party committees. Past inaugural committees have donated unspent funds to charities including those engaged in disaster relief, as well as groups involved in decorating and maintaining the White House and the vice president’s residence.

The effort by Biden’s inaugural committee to raise funds from corporate donors prompted puzzlement and objections from liberal activists, who have expressed concern about what they see as the Biden team’s coziness with corporate interests.

A coalition of about 50 liberal groups released a letter to the inaugural committee Wednesday, urging it to forgo donations from corporations to prevent them “from wielding undue influence,” and questioning the need for such donations, given the likelihood that Biden’s inauguration would cost less than previous inaugurations.

“The drive to raise so much money without a clear use for it is perplexing, and the appearance of doing so is disconcerting,” said the letter, which was organized by Demand Progress, a group that has also urged Biden not to hire corporate executives and consultants or lobbyists.

Federal law does not require the disclosure of donations to inaugural committees until 90 days after the event, and limited disclosures about expenditures are not required until months after that. But the Biden inaugural committee said it intends to disclose the names of at least its larger donors before Jan. 20.

There are no legal limits on the sizes of donations that inaugural committees can accept, and there are few restrictions on who can give.

Biden’s inaugural committee announced last month that it would voluntarily forgo donations from fossil fuel companies, registered lobbyists and foreign agents, in addition to limiting corporate donations to $1 million and individual donations to $500,000.

Those restrictions are less stringent than the ones adopted by former President Barack Obama for his 2009 inauguration. His inaugural committee refused corporate donations and said it limited individual donations to $50,000, though he loosened the rules for his second inauguration in 2013.

While Trump’s team said it would not accept contributions from lobbyists for his 2017 inauguration, its fundraising was otherwise mostly unrestricted, resulting in a record $107 million haul.

The Biden team has released few specifics regarding plans for the inauguration, other than a statement Tuesday urging people not to travel to Washington to attend the event given the pandemic and noting that the “ceremony’s footprint will be extremely limited.”

In an expression of just how unusual the event will be, the Biden inaugural committee named Dr. David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, as an adviser to help with decisions on what kinds of events it can hold.

“We are asking Americans to participate in inaugural events from home to protect themselves, their families, friends and communities,” Kessler said in a statement.

In a typical inauguration year, a congressional committee that organizes the swearing-in ceremony typically distributes 200,000 tickets to lawmakers for seats on the platform, risers and seating close to the West Front of the Capitol, which are then distributed to constituents and friends who want to attend.

But this year, the committee announced it would give just two tickets to the outdoor festivities to each of the 535 members of Congress, for them and a guest to attend.

Beyond this event, it is largely up to the Biden inauguration committee, where officials have said in recent days they are still working to “reimagine” and “reinvent” the inauguration.

There will still be some kind of an inauguration parade, but it will be considerably pared down and will most likely feature video or live shots of groups performing from spots across the country.

The inaugural committee this week disclosed that it had retained Ricky Kirshner, a New York-based entertainment industry television and events producer. His past experience includes the Super Bowl halftime show this year that featured Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, as well as past Tony Awards and Kennedy Center Honors events, and the largely virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention, among many other events.

Major donors will also get “VIP tickets” to some kind of future event to celebrate the start of the new administration in person, according to the one-page menu of donor perks.

But given the continued uncertainty associated with the pandemic, that event is listed as “date to be determined.”

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden’s allies have begun an ambitious campaign to raise millions of dollars from corporations and individuals by offering special “VIP participation” in reimagined inaugural festivities that will be largely virtual because of the coronavirus pandemic.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden’s allies have begun an ambitious campaign to raise millions of dollars from corporations and individuals by offering special “VIP participation” in reimagined inaugural festivities that will be largely virtual because of the coronavirus pandemic. Far fewer tickets than normal are being distributed for people to attend the actual swearing-in ceremony outside the Capitol on Jan. 20, which is organized and funded by the government. To create an air of celebration, Biden’s inaugural committee said it was raising private funds to pay for virtual events that will echo the Democratic convention this year, which featured a 50-state roll call from spots around the nation. There are also plans for a “virtual concert” with major performers whose names have not yet been released — and possibly for an in-person event later in the year. The contrast between the constraints of putting on inaugural festivities in the midst of a public health crisis and fundraising as usual underscores how donations to an inaugural are not just about getting good seats for the swearing-in or tickets to the glitziest black-tie balls. They are also a way for corporations and well-heeled individuals to curry favor with a new administration, a reality that prompted liberal groups on Wednesday to ask Biden’s inaugural committee to forgo corporate donations. President Donald Trump’s inauguration nearly four years ago took the practice to a new level. It became an access-peddling bazaar of sorts, and aspects of its record fundraising and spending emerged as the subjects of investigations. Biden’s inaugural committee is promising corporations that give up to $1 million and individuals who contribute $500,000 — the largest amounts the committee said it would accept — some form of “VIP participation” in the virtual concert. This special access is among the perks detailed on a one-page sponsorship menu from the committee that circulated among donors Wednesday. Perks include “event sponsorship opportunities,” as well as access to virtual briefings with leaders of the inaugural committee and campaign, and invitations to virtual events with Biden and his wife Jill, the future first lady, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff. Top donors will also get a fitting memento for the coronavirus era — “virtual signed photos” with the president-elect and the first lady, as well as Harris and her husband, replacing the traditional in-person rope-line photo opportunities for which donors usually pay handsomely at fundraisers and other political events. Incoming presidents have long raised private funds to organize and pay for inaugural festivities beyond the swearing-in ceremony, which is hosted by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies and funded with taxpayer money. Top donors typically get intimate in-person access at parties and dinners to celebrate with members of an incoming president’s campaign and administration. Among the corporate giants who have indicated they are ready to donate despite the lack of in-person events is Boeing, the aerospace manufacturer and military contractor. The company is contributing $1 million to Biden’s inauguration, an amount it said is consistent with its past contributions to inaugural committees. Representatives from Bank of America and Ford Motor Co. also said their companies intended to donate. “We have supported inauguration events over many administrations on a nonpartisan basis because we view it as part of our civic commitment for an important national event,” Bill Halldin, a spokesman for Bank of America, said in a statement. “The private sector has traditionally done so and we expect to provide support for ceremonies in January as appropriate, given the health crisis and other factors that may impact it.” A number of corporations that have been major donors to past presidential inaugurations — like Coca-Cola, Google and United Parcel Service — said this week that they still had not decided how much, or whether, to donate, though Google noted it had provided “online security protections for free” to the inaugural committee. “As you know this is a very different year and as such we have not yet made a decision,” Ann Moore, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola, said in a statement. A spokeswoman for the investment bank JPMorgan Chase, which has donated to past inaugurations, said that instead of giving to Biden’s committee, it would be donating to food banks in Washington and the hometowns of Biden (Wilmington, Delaware) and Harris (Oakland, California) “to help those impacted by the pandemic.” An inauguration spokesman would not say how much had already been raised, or what the fundraising goal was. Funds raised for inaugurations cannot be transferred to federal campaigns or party committees. Past inaugural committees have donated unspent funds to charities including those engaged in disaster relief, as well as groups involved in decorating and maintaining the White House and the vice president’s residence. The effort by Biden’s inaugural committee to raise funds from corporate donors prompted puzzlement and objections from liberal activists, who have expressed concern about what they see as the Biden team’s coziness with corporate interests. A coalition of about 50 liberal groups released a letter to the inaugural committee Wednesday, urging it to forgo donations from corporations to prevent them “from wielding undue influence,” and questioning the need for such donations, given the likelihood that Biden’s inauguration would cost less than previous inaugurations. “The drive to raise so much money without a clear use for it is perplexing, and the appearance of doing so is disconcerting,” said the letter, which was organized by Demand Progress, a group that has also urged Biden not to hire corporate executives and consultants or lobbyists. Federal law does not require the disclosure of donations to inaugural committees until 90 days after the event, and limited disclosures about expenditures are not required until months after that. But the Biden inaugural committee said it intends to disclose the names of at least its larger donors before Jan. 20. There are no legal limits on the sizes of donations that inaugural committees can accept, and there are few restrictions on who can give. Biden’s inaugural committee announced last month that it would voluntarily forgo donations from fossil fuel companies, registered lobbyists and foreign agents, in addition to limiting corporate donations to $1 million and individual donations to $500,000. Those restrictions are less stringent than the ones adopted by former President Barack Obama for his 2009 inauguration. His inaugural committee refused corporate donations and said it limited individual donations to $50,000, though he loosened the rules for his second inauguration in 2013. While Trump’s team said it would not accept contributions from lobbyists for his 2017 inauguration, its fundraising was otherwise mostly unrestricted, resulting in a record $107 million haul. The Biden team has released few specifics regarding plans for the inauguration, other than a statement Tuesday urging people not to travel to Washington to attend the event given the pandemic and noting that the “ceremony’s footprint will be extremely limited.” In an expression of just how unusual the event will be, the Biden inaugural committee named Dr. David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, as an adviser to help with decisions on what kinds of events it can hold. “We are asking Americans to participate in inaugural events from home to protect themselves, their families, friends and communities,” Kessler said in a statement. In a typical inauguration year, a congressional committee that organizes the swearing-in ceremony typically distributes 200,000 tickets to lawmakers for seats on the platform, risers and seating close to the West Front of the Capitol, which are then distributed to constituents and friends who want to attend. But this year, the committee announced it would give just two tickets to the outdoor festivities to each of the 535 members of Congress, for them and a guest to attend. Beyond this event, it is largely up to the Biden inauguration committee, where officials have said in recent days they are still working to “reimagine” and “reinvent” the inauguration. There will still be some kind of an inauguration parade, but it will be considerably pared down and will most likely feature video or live shots of groups performing from spots across the country. The inaugural committee this week disclosed that it had retained Ricky Kirshner, a New York-based entertainment industry television and events producer. His past experience includes the Super Bowl halftime show this year that featured Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, as well as past Tony Awards and Kennedy Center Honors events, and the largely virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention, among many other events. Major donors will also get “VIP tickets” to some kind of future event to celebrate the start of the new administration in person, according to the one-page menu of donor perks. But given the continued uncertainty associated with the pandemic, that event is listed as “date to be determined.”

Biden’s inaugural will be mostly virtual, but money from donors will be real

It's official! Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46th U.S. President. With 306 votes, the U.S. Electoral College has confirmed Biden's victory

Gravitas: Joe Biden's victory confirmed

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday called US sanctions against Ankara over its purchase of Russian missile defences an "open attack" on its sovereignty.

"What kind of an alliance is this? This decision is an open attack on our sovereignty," Erdogan said during a televised speech in Ankara.

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Erdogan&nbsp;hit back on after the United States imposed sanctions on Turkey over its purchase of Russian ground-to-air defences and targeted the top Turkish defence development body, its president and three employees.

The move, focused on the defence sector, including Turkey's Defence Industries Directorate (SSB), has drawn a condemnation from NATO-ally Ankara and is likely to further strain&nbsp;Erdogan's relations with Western allies.

Erdogan&nbsp;said Turkey expects the United States to support it and not sanction it over its purchase of the missiles, and added he was upset that Washington went ahead with the sanctions process.

Neither sanctions from the United States nor the European Union would deter Turkey from defending its rights,&nbsp;Erdogan&nbsp;added in an address after a cabinet meeting.shortly before the announcement.

The sanctions target Turkey's top defence procurement and development body Presidency of Defence Industries, its chairman Ismail Demir and three other employees.

While limited to one company, they are still likely to weigh on the Turkish economy, analysts said, at a time when it is struggling with a coronavirus-induced slowdown and double-digit inflation.

Ankara acquired the Russian system in mid-2019 and says they pose no threat to its allies in the NATO military alliance. But Washington has long threatened sanctions and last year removed Turkey from an F-35 jet programme.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday called US sanctions against Ankara over its purchase of Russian missile defences an "open attack" on its sovereignty.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday called US sanctions against Ankara over its purchase of Russian missile defences an "open attack" on its sovereignty. "What kind of an alliance is this? This decision is an open attack on our sovereignty," Erdogan said during a televised speech in Ankara. Erdogan hit back on after the United States imposed sanctions on Turkey over its purchase of Russian ground-to-air defences and targeted the top Turkish defence development body, its president and three employees. The move, focused on the defence sector, including Turkey's Defence Industries Directorate (SSB), has drawn a condemnation from NATO-ally Ankara and is likely to further strain Erdogan's relations with Western allies. Erdogan said Turkey expects the United States to support it and not sanction it over its purchase of the missiles, and added he was upset that Washington went ahead with the sanctions process. Neither sanctions from the United States nor the European Union would deter Turkey from defending its rights, Erdogan added in an address after a cabinet meeting.shortly before the announcement. The sanctions target Turkey's top defence procurement and development body Presidency of Defence Industries, its chairman Ismail Demir and three other employees. While limited to one company, they are still likely to weigh on the Turkish economy, analysts said, at a time when it is struggling with a coronavirus-induced slowdown and double-digit inflation. Ankara acquired the Russian system in mid-2019 and says they pose no threat to its allies in the NATO military alliance. But Washington has long threatened sanctions and last year removed Turkey from an F-35 jet programme.

US sanctions over Russian defence system 'open attack against sovereignty', says Erdogan

I was speaking recently to Matt Dunne, founder of the Center on Rural Innovation, which promotes digital economic development in small-town America, and he was telling me about a Vermont community near his home with a great public library: “You could drive by on any Sunday and the parking lot would be full,” he said. “There was just one problem: The library was closed on Sundays.”

The parking lot was full of cars with kids doing their homework and adults doing their office work — using the wireless connectivity spilling out of the empty building because their rural homes lacked high-speed broadband. Alas, stories abound of rural Americans going to Subway sandwich shops and Dairy Queens in search of free Wi-Fi.

And that is why I want to talk today about Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

Harris is too smart and energetic to be just the vice president, a position with few official responsibilities. I’d love to see President-elect Joe Biden give her a more important job: his de facto secretary of rural development, in charge of closing the opportunity gap, the connectivity gap, the learning gap, the startup gap — and the anger and alienation gap — between rural America and the rest of the country.

President Donald Trump feasted off those gaps in our last two presidential elections to dominate Democrats in rural America. Putting Harris in charge of fixing them would be a real statement by the Biden team.

It would provide a vision for American renewal and signal that Democrats were no longer going to cede rural America to Republicans but were instead going to seize it from them. And it would make Harris a super-relevant vice president from Day 1.

Democrats must not kid themselves. Biden won this election by narrowly winning the suburbs and urban centers in key battleground states, where just enough people decided that they wanted to “de-Trump” the White House but not “defund” the police.

That is, a lot of suburban voters rejected Trump personally but also rejected far-left Democratic ideas that had percolated up in the past few years. Democrats won the presidency but took a beating from those same suburban voters in many statehouse, U.S. House and U.S. Senate races.

If Democrats go into 2022 — let alone 2024 — appealing only on the cities and suburbs, they’re crazy. They will be highly vulnerable if the GOP is led by a smarter, less offensive populist than Donald Trump.

Most important, lifting rural America is the right thing to do for all of America and fulfills Biden’s vision of a nation that “grows together” in every way.

That concept remains in the DNA of the Democratic Party, which in my home state, Minnesota, is still known as the “DFL” — the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The party needs to reconstitute that coalition.

“One way to do that is by reconnecting with its populist roots — when it really was a party focused on the empowerment of workers and farmers and ordinary citizens,” argued Harvard’s Michael Sandel, author of “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?” “Trump gave populism a bad name. Democrats should provide an alternative to Trump’s xenophobic, plutocratic populism by showing how populism can be a source of civic activism, engagement and renewal across urban and rural America.”

That should be Harris’ mission, and it’s one worthy of a vice president. And it starts in rural America.

“I fear the word ‘rural’ connotes a geography that is not my problem,” Beth Ford, president of Land O’Lakes, the influential farmer-owned cooperative headquartered in Minnesota, said to me. But, in fact, spreading connectivity and technology to rural America “is an American issue, an American competitiveness issue and an American national security issue,” she argued.

Persistent “underinvestment in rural America will leave us less secure and less prosperous as a nation” — and less competitive with China, which is rapidly connecting its rural heartland, Ford said. “Some 35% of farmers lack enough bandwidth to run the equipment on their farms, ensure their kids get a good education and that Grandma has access to telemedicine.”

What should a Biden-Harris rural strategy look like? It would start with showing up regularly. “Showing up” and “just listening to people” with respect goes a long way in rural America, Emily Larson, the mayor of Duluth, Minnesota, told me. Actually, nothing earns more respect than listening to people respectfully.

“Rural areas have their own social networks,” Larson said, but they’re different from the metropolitan ones. “Here, people will show up for you in the middle of the night, but they don’t post about it on Facebook.”

On policy specifics, the Biden-Harris team should commit that in four years every rural community in America will have access to broadband — the basic infrastructure needed for an inclusive modern economy.

Dunne suggests a new federal loan program that would offer 50-year, no-interest loans to communities and co-ops (and ease regulations) so rural public-private coalitions can build broadband networks with a minimum 100 megabits per second of speed for downloading and uploading all kinds of remote learning tools, work tools and telehealth tools. Rep. James Clyburn has already won passage of a bill in the House with a similar approach.

Traveling with Dunne last year to Red Wing, Minnesota, to see how gigabit networks can support high-tech startups and traditional farmers, I wrote about a couple of inventors we met who had created a robotic rooster that patrols the poultry house for dead birds and tills the bedding, but with an unexpected byproduct: The birds exercise more and gain weight faster, because they are constantly running away from or pecking at the robot.

While these “Poultry Patrol” robots work autonomously 80% of the time, said Dunne, “there are significant periods when they need to be remotely operated and receive coding updates from afar, which is only possible with very fast broadband.”

But while better connectivity is necessary, it’s not sufficient. “We also need to ensure investment in digital skills training in rural communities and incentives for tech companies to hire remote workers in small towns,” added Dunne. “Today rural America represents 15% of the nation’s workforce, but only 5% of digital economy jobs of the future. But the pandemic has opened people’s eyes to the idea that digital economy jobs can be created anywhere.”

Kamala Harris is a natural for that task. Who better to bridge Silicon Valley and the rural valleys of America?

She is also a natural bridge builder to a more inclusive American heartland, because &lt;em&gt;rural America is not white America.&lt;/em&gt; According to a report by the Urban Institute, “1 in 5 Americans lives in rural communities, and more than one in five (22%) rural residents are people of color.” I wrote last year about Willmar, Minnesota, a town that was all white back in the 1950s and today is nearly half Hispanic, Somali, Asian and Native American.

In Minnesota, small towns like Willmar that can manage inclusion and diversity are the ones now thriving, because they can attract new labor and homebuyers when so many of the young white adults have left for the big cities.

Harris will soon be the first woman, the first Black and the first Indian American vice president, which certainly resonates with a lot of urban voters. However, if she could make herself the person in the Biden cabinet who always shows up FIRST to listen in rural America and the FIRST to appreciate its concerns and the FIRST to make sure its concerns are addressed, she and the Democrats could make themselves competitive in a lot more rural counties.

Even if it is just 10 or 15% more competitive, it might be enough to deprive today’s deeply warped Trump-led GOP from taking back the White House or the House in the next four years — and maybe force it back to sanity. The Republican Party needs shock therapy, and nothing would shock this GOP more than losing its automatic hold on rural America.

I was speaking recently to Matt Dunne, founder of the Center on Rural Innovation, which promotes digital economic development in small-town America, and he was telling me about a Vermont community near his home with a great public library: “You could drive by on any Sunday and the parking lot would be full,” he said.

I was speaking recently to Matt Dunne, founder of the Center on Rural Innovation, which promotes digital economic development in small-town America, and he was telling me about a Vermont community near his home with a great public library: “You could drive by on any Sunday and the parking lot would be full,” he said. “There was just one problem: The library was closed on Sundays.” The parking lot was full of cars with kids doing their homework and adults doing their office work — using the wireless connectivity spilling out of the empty building because their rural homes lacked high-speed broadband. Alas, stories abound of rural Americans going to Subway sandwich shops and Dairy Queens in search of free Wi-Fi. And that is why I want to talk today about Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Harris is too smart and energetic to be just the vice president, a position with few official responsibilities. I’d love to see President-elect Joe Biden give her a more important job: his de facto secretary of rural development, in charge of closing the opportunity gap, the connectivity gap, the learning gap, the startup gap — and the anger and alienation gap — between rural America and the rest of the country. President Donald Trump feasted off those gaps in our last two presidential elections to dominate Democrats in rural America. Putting Harris in charge of fixing them would be a real statement by the Biden team. It would provide a vision for American renewal and signal that Democrats were no longer going to cede rural America to Republicans but were instead going to seize it from them. And it would make Harris a super-relevant vice president from Day 1. Democrats must not kid themselves. Biden won this election by narrowly winning the suburbs and urban centers in key battleground states, where just enough people decided that they wanted to “de-Trump” the White House but not “defund” the police. That is, a lot of suburban voters rejected Trump personally but also rejected far-left Democratic ideas that had percolated up in the past few years. Democrats won the presidency but took a beating from those same suburban voters in many statehouse, U.S. House and U.S. Senate races. If Democrats go into 2022 — let alone 2024 — appealing only on the cities and suburbs, they’re crazy. They will be highly vulnerable if the GOP is led by a smarter, less offensive populist than Donald Trump. Most important, lifting rural America is the right thing to do for all of America and fulfills Biden’s vision of a nation that “grows together” in every way. That concept remains in the DNA of the Democratic Party, which in my home state, Minnesota, is still known as the “DFL” — the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The party needs to reconstitute that coalition. “One way to do that is by reconnecting with its populist roots — when it really was a party focused on the empowerment of workers and farmers and ordinary citizens,” argued Harvard’s Michael Sandel, author of “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?” “Trump gave populism a bad name. Democrats should provide an alternative to Trump’s xenophobic, plutocratic populism by showing how populism can be a source of civic activism, engagement and renewal across urban and rural America.” That should be Harris’ mission, and it’s one worthy of a vice president. And it starts in rural America. “I fear the word ‘rural’ connotes a geography that is not my problem,” Beth Ford, president of Land O’Lakes, the influential farmer-owned cooperative headquartered in Minnesota, said to me. But, in fact, spreading connectivity and technology to rural America “is an American issue, an American competitiveness issue and an American national security issue,” she argued. Persistent “underinvestment in rural America will leave us less secure and less prosperous as a nation” — and less competitive with China, which is rapidly connecting its rural heartland, Ford said. “Some 35% of farmers lack enough bandwidth to run the equipment on their farms, ensure their kids get a good education and that Grandma has access to telemedicine.” What should a Biden-Harris rural strategy look like? It would start with showing up regularly. “Showing up” and “just listening to people” with respect goes a long way in rural America, Emily Larson, the mayor of Duluth, Minnesota, told me. Actually, nothing earns more respect than listening to people respectfully. “Rural areas have their own social networks,” Larson said, but they’re different from the metropolitan ones. “Here, people will show up for you in the middle of the night, but they don’t post about it on Facebook.” On policy specifics, the Biden-Harris team should commit that in four years every rural community in America will have access to broadband — the basic infrastructure needed for an inclusive modern economy. Dunne suggests a new federal loan program that would offer 50-year, no-interest loans to communities and co-ops (and ease regulations) so rural public-private coalitions can build broadband networks with a minimum 100 megabits per second of speed for downloading and uploading all kinds of remote learning tools, work tools and telehealth tools. Rep. James Clyburn has already won passage of a bill in the House with a similar approach. Traveling with Dunne last year to Red Wing, Minnesota, to see how gigabit networks can support high-tech startups and traditional farmers, I wrote about a couple of inventors we met who had created a robotic rooster that patrols the poultry house for dead birds and tills the bedding, but with an unexpected byproduct: The birds exercise more and gain weight faster, because they are constantly running away from or pecking at the robot. While these “Poultry Patrol” robots work autonomously 80% of the time, said Dunne, “there are significant periods when they need to be remotely operated and receive coding updates from afar, which is only possible with very fast broadband.” But while better connectivity is necessary, it’s not sufficient. “We also need to ensure investment in digital skills training in rural communities and incentives for tech companies to hire remote workers in small towns,” added Dunne. “Today rural America represents 15% of the nation’s workforce, but only 5% of digital economy jobs of the future. But the pandemic has opened people’s eyes to the idea that digital economy jobs can be created anywhere.” Kamala Harris is a natural for that task. Who better to bridge Silicon Valley and the rural valleys of America? She is also a natural bridge builder to a more inclusive American heartland, because rural America is not white America. According to a report by the Urban Institute, “1 in 5 Americans lives in rural communities, and more than one in five (22%) rural residents are people of color.” I wrote last year about Willmar, Minnesota, a town that was all white back in the 1950s and today is nearly half Hispanic, Somali, Asian and Native American. In Minnesota, small towns like Willmar that can manage inclusion and diversity are the ones now thriving, because they can attract new labor and homebuyers when so many of the young white adults have left for the big cities. Harris will soon be the first woman, the first Black and the first Indian American vice president, which certainly resonates with a lot of urban voters. However, if she could make herself the person in the Biden cabinet who always shows up FIRST to listen in rural America and the FIRST to appreciate its concerns and the FIRST to make sure its concerns are addressed, she and the Democrats could make themselves competitive in a lot more rural counties. Even if it is just 10 or 15% more competitive, it might be enough to deprive today’s deeply warped Trump-led GOP from taking back the White House or the House in the next four years — and maybe force it back to sanity. The Republican Party needs shock therapy, and nothing would shock this GOP more than losing its automatic hold on rural America.

Kamala Harris deserves a more important job

United States' President Elect Joe Biden has announced his former rival Pete Buttigieg as U.S. Secretary of Transportation. This made Buttigieg the first of Biden's democratic rivals to play a role in his cabinet for the presidency.

U.S. President elect Joe Biden chooses Pete Buttigieg as U.S. Secretary of Transportation

Donald Trump's legal campaign to subvert the election is nearly over, with the victory of Joe Biden announced by the Electoral College of the United States.

United States: Top republicans recognise Joe Biden's victory

The electoral college has confirmed Joe Biden's victory in state by state voting in the United States. This has now closed all doors on Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the result the 2020 US Presidential election.

US Election 2020: Joe Biden wins by getting 306 electoral college votes

US Election 2020: Electoral college formalises Joe Biden's victory

US&nbsp;Attorney General William Barr will step down next week, he said on Monday, shortly after the Electoral College confirmed President Donald Trump`s loss to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden. 
 
Barr, who had angered Trump by not supporting his incorrect claims that the Nov. 3 election result had been tainted by widespread fraud, said he would leave office on Dec. 23, a little less than a month before Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20. 
 
Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen will take over as acting attorney general after Barr`s departure, Trump said. 
 
"Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job!" Trump said of Barr on Twitter. 
 
A White House official told Reuters that Barr resigned on his own accord. 
 
Trump lashed out at Barr on Twitter over the weekend after the Wall Street Journal reported that Barr knew earlier this year about an investigation into Biden`s son Hunter`s taxes. 
 
Trump retweeted a comment from radio host Todd Starnes saying Barr should be fired for not disclosing the probe during the campaign. "A big disappointment!" Trump said in his tweet. 
 
Barr`s fate in the waning days of the Trump administration had been in question since he said earlier this month that a Justice Department investigation had found no sign of major fraud in the election, contradicting Trump`s claims. 
 
Trump`s legal team accused Barr of failing to conduct a proper inquiry into the allegations. 
 
Barr`s resignation letter was released shortly after he briefed the president about the Justice Department`s review into the Trump campaign`s voter fraud claims. In it, Barr pledged the allegations "would continue to be pursued." 
 
The White House official said Barr`s meeting with Trump was amicable. 
 
In the letter, Barr also praised what he called Trump`s historic record, saying he had helped boost the economy, strengthen the military and curb illegal immigration. 
 
"I am proud to have played a role in the many successes and unprecedented achievements you have delivered for the American people," Barr wrote. 
 
Biden beat Trump by 306 to 232 votes in the state-by-state Electoral College that chooses the president, as well as by more than 7 million ballots in the popular vote. 
 
Despite that, Trump has refused to concede and continues to promote his baseless voting fraud allegations, which have been repeatedly rejected by state and federal officials. 
 
Trump has pursued a series of legal challenges in numerous states, but he has not managed to prevail in any of them. 
 
Last week, the US&nbsp;Supreme Court rejected a long-shot lawsuit by Texas that was backed by Trump and a number of other states seeking to throw out voting results in four states, dealing what is seen as the fatal blow in his quest to undo his election loss. 
 
CORE TRUMP SUPPORTER 
 
Barr has long been a staunch Trump ally, drawing scorn from Democrats and many of the department`s own career prosecutors who have accused him of putting Trump`s personal interests ahead of those of the country. 
 
"William Barr was willing to do the President’s bidding on every front but one. Barr refused to play along with President Trump’s nonsensical claims to have won the election," Democratic House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said in a statement. 
 
"Whomever Joe Biden chooses as the new Attorney General will have a tremendous amount of work to do to repair the integrity of the Department of Justice," Nadler added. 
 
Prior to the 2020 election, Barr repeated Trump`s unfounded claims that mail-in ballots could be subject to fraud, and he also intervened in several high-profile criminal cases in ways that benefited Trump`s political allies such as Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. 
 
In May 2019, Barr tapped federal prosecutor John Durham to investigate Obama-era intelligence and law enforcement officials for possible crimes in connection with their early stage probe into whether Trump`s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with the Russian government. 
 
On Dec. 1, Barr disclosed he had elevated Durham to the role of special counsel in October so that he could continue his criminal investigation - a move that will make it politically difficult for Biden to remove him from the post until the probe has concluded. 
 
Noah Bookbinder, a former federal prosecutor who is now executive director for the progressive advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, said on Monday that Barr "has done tremendous damage to the Department of Justice and to the American people`s very faith in our justice system. 
 
"It is beyond ironic that Barr seems to have been pushed out for not going quite far enough to abuse his position for Trump`s benefit, however unconscionably far he did go," Bookbinder`s statement said. "The reason may be ridiculous, but good riddance.”

US Attorney General William Barr will step down next week, he said on Monday, shortly after the Electoral College confirmed President Donald Trump`s loss to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden.

US Attorney General William Barr will step down next week, he said on Monday, shortly after the Electoral College confirmed President Donald Trump`s loss to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden. Barr, who had angered Trump by not supporting his incorrect claims that the Nov. 3 election result had been tainted by widespread fraud, said he would leave office on Dec. 23, a little less than a month before Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20. Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen will take over as acting attorney general after Barr`s departure, Trump said. "Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job!" Trump said of Barr on Twitter. A White House official told Reuters that Barr resigned on his own accord. Trump lashed out at Barr on Twitter over the weekend after the Wall Street Journal reported that Barr knew earlier this year about an investigation into Biden`s son Hunter`s taxes. Trump retweeted a comment from radio host Todd Starnes saying Barr should be fired for not disclosing the probe during the campaign. "A big disappointment!" Trump said in his tweet. Barr`s fate in the waning days of the Trump administration had been in question since he said earlier this month that a Justice Department investigation had found no sign of major fraud in the election, contradicting Trump`s claims. Trump`s legal team accused Barr of failing to conduct a proper inquiry into the allegations. Barr`s resignation letter was released shortly after he briefed the president about the Justice Department`s review into the Trump campaign`s voter fraud claims. In it, Barr pledged the allegations "would continue to be pursued." The White House official said Barr`s meeting with Trump was amicable. In the letter, Barr also praised what he called Trump`s historic record, saying he had helped boost the economy, strengthen the military and curb illegal immigration. "I am proud to have played a role in the many successes and unprecedented achievements you have delivered for the American people," Barr wrote. Biden beat Trump by 306 to 232 votes in the state-by-state Electoral College that chooses the president, as well as by more than 7 million ballots in the popular vote. Despite that, Trump has refused to concede and continues to promote his baseless voting fraud allegations, which have been repeatedly rejected by state and federal officials. Trump has pursued a series of legal challenges in numerous states, but he has not managed to prevail in any of them. Last week, the US Supreme Court rejected a long-shot lawsuit by Texas that was backed by Trump and a number of other states seeking to throw out voting results in four states, dealing what is seen as the fatal blow in his quest to undo his election loss. CORE TRUMP SUPPORTER Barr has long been a staunch Trump ally, drawing scorn from Democrats and many of the department`s own career prosecutors who have accused him of putting Trump`s personal interests ahead of those of the country. "William Barr was willing to do the President’s bidding on every front but one. Barr refused to play along with President Trump’s nonsensical claims to have won the election," Democratic House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said in a statement. "Whomever Joe Biden chooses as the new Attorney General will have a tremendous amount of work to do to repair the integrity of the Department of Justice," Nadler added. Prior to the 2020 election, Barr repeated Trump`s unfounded claims that mail-in ballots could be subject to fraud, and he also intervened in several high-profile criminal cases in ways that benefited Trump`s political allies such as Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. In May 2019, Barr tapped federal prosecutor John Durham to investigate Obama-era intelligence and law enforcement officials for possible crimes in connection with their early stage probe into whether Trump`s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with the Russian government. On Dec. 1, Barr disclosed he had elevated Durham to the role of special counsel in October so that he could continue his criminal investigation - a move that will make it politically difficult for Biden to remove him from the post until the probe has concluded. Noah Bookbinder, a former federal prosecutor who is now executive director for the progressive advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, said on Monday that Barr "has done tremendous damage to the Department of Justice and to the American people`s very faith in our justice system. "It is beyond ironic that Barr seems to have been pushed out for not going quite far enough to abuse his position for Trump`s benefit, however unconscionably far he did go," Bookbinder`s statement said. "The reason may be ridiculous, but good riddance.”

US Attorney General Barr steps down as Trump election defeat confirmed

President-elect Joe Biden tore into Donald Trump on Monday with his strongest criticism since the election, saying the Republican and his allies defied the constitution and the "will of the people" in not accepting the results.

"It's a position so extreme we've never seen it before. A position that refused to respect the will of the people refused to respect the rule of law, and refused to honour our constitution," Biden said in a speech after the Electoral College formally confirmed his victory.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/trump-vows-to-reject-defense-bill-passed-by-veto-proof-majority-349569" hreflang="en">Trump vows to reject defense bill passed by veto-proof majority</a>

Biden was referring to a Republican lawsuit, supported by Trump, that sought to overturn Biden's wins in several key states, but which was rejected by the Supreme Court last Friday.

Biden praised voters for turning out in record numbers despite fears of Covid-19 and "enormous political pressure, verbal abuse and even threats of physical violence" against those running the elections.

Also read|<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/misogynistic-op-ed-urging-incoming-first-lady-jill-biden-to-drop-dr-stirs-a-furore-on-social-media-349673">&nbsp;'Misogynistic' op-ed urging incoming First Lady Jill Biden to drop 'Dr.' stirs a furore on social media</a>

"The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago. And we now know nothing, not even a pandemic or an abuse of power can extinguish that," Biden said.

"It is my sincere hope we never again see anyone subjected to the kind of threats and abuse we saw in this election," Biden said, calling the harassment of officials "unconscionable."

Biden said that Trump has had full opportunity to contest the results in court and "in every case no cause or evidence was found to reverse or question or dispute."

Biden lashed out at the Republican Party for standing behind Trump's evidence-free claims of mass fraud. But he said the Supreme Court last week sent "a clear signal."

Following the Electoral College vote, Biden said, "It’s time to turn the page."

"I'm convinced we can work together for the good of the nation," he said.

President-elect Joe Biden tore into Donald Trump on Monday with his strongest criticism since the election, saying the Republican and his allies defied the constitution and the "will of the people" in not accepting the results.

President-elect Joe Biden tore into Donald Trump on Monday with his strongest criticism since the election, saying the Republican and his allies defied the constitution and the "will of the people" in not accepting the results. "It's a position so extreme we've never seen it before. A position that refused to respect the will of the people refused to respect the rule of law, and refused to honour our constitution," Biden said in a speech after the Electoral College formally confirmed his victory. Also read: Trump vows to reject defense bill passed by veto-proof majority Biden was referring to a Republican lawsuit, supported by Trump, that sought to overturn Biden's wins in several key states, but which was rejected by the Supreme Court last Friday. Biden praised voters for turning out in record numbers despite fears of Covid-19 and "enormous political pressure, verbal abuse and even threats of physical violence" against those running the elections. Also read| 'Misogynistic' op-ed urging incoming First Lady Jill Biden to drop 'Dr.' stirs a furore on social media "The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago. And we now know nothing, not even a pandemic or an abuse of power can extinguish that," Biden said. "It is my sincere hope we never again see anyone subjected to the kind of threats and abuse we saw in this election," Biden said, calling the harassment of officials "unconscionable." Biden said that Trump has had full opportunity to contest the results in court and "in every case no cause or evidence was found to reverse or question or dispute." Biden lashed out at the Republican Party for standing behind Trump's evidence-free claims of mass fraud. But he said the Supreme Court last week sent "a clear signal." Following the Electoral College vote, Biden said, "It’s time to turn the page." "I'm convinced we can work together for the good of the nation," he said.

Donald Trump ‘refused to respect the will of the people’, says Joe Biden 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has finally congratulated Joe Biden for victory in US Election 2020. Putin's message came after electoral college confirmed Biden's win.

Russian President Vladimir Putin finally congratulates Joe Biden for victory in US Election 2020

You could say that the Donald Trump presidency effectively ended when the polls closed election night or when news outlets called the contest for Joe Biden four days later. You could say that it ended when the Electoral College voted Monday to make Biden the president, or that it will end when Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20.

But by one measure, the Trump presidency ended in mid-November, when online conservatives went bonkers over a picture of Harry Styles in a dress.

The photo of the British singer on the cover of the December Vogue prompted YouTube personality Candace Owens to tweet, “Bring back manly men.” To Ben Shapiro, the photo shoot was an assault on the concept of manhood itself: “Anyone who pretends that it is not a referendum on masculinity for men to don floofy dresses is treating you as a full-on idiot.”

What does all this have to do with the president’s impending exit? First, it suggests that other conservatives are retaking the role of Troll-Warrior-in-Chief that Trump conferred on himself.

But it’s also a reminder that the kind of button-pushing cultural politics that predated him — that in many ways helped make a President Trump possible — will survive his tenure.

‘Duck Dynasty’ Politics

A million years ago in the Obama era, proxy wars over culture were handled on the periphery of conservatism, in social media and right-wing talk. It was the era of the Gamergate attacks on feminists in the video gaming community, of umbrage over the foreign-language lyrics of a Coca-Cola commercial and over a female-cast reboot of “Ghostbusters.”

With the election of Trump, a pop-culture figure himself who intuited the connection between cultural fandom and political tribalism (he himself made a “Ghostbusters” outrage video the year he announced his campaign), the political and culture-war wings of conservatism merged.

For four years, we had a president whose portfolio of concerns included protests at NFL games, speeches at TV awards ceremonies, the loyalty of Fox News and the reboot of “Roseanne.” He scoured and fretted over Nielsen ratings — his own and those of shows he saw as allies and enemies — with the intensity a wartime president might devote to troop movements.

Now, with a waning Trump self-soothing with OANN and Newsmax and tweeting out the elaborate sci-fi serial that the election was stolen from him, command of that battle is returning from the White House to the field.

For decades, the expression of politics through culture war has been a staple of conservative media. Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing online publisher, declared that “politics is downstream from culture” (borrowing an idea from Marxist theorists like Antonio Gramsci). Fox News made an annual production of the “war on Christmas” (with occasional spinoffs like “Santa Claus and Jesus are white”).

The appeal was emotional; people have a personal connection to family holidays and their favorite shows that they don’t to, say, marginal tax-rate policy. But it was also a way to appeal to a specific audience in a country where, increasingly, people had not just different political beliefs but entirely different cultural experiences.

As far back as the early 1970s, the “rural purge” in TV — which eliminated bucolic sitcoms like “Green Acres” to make room for urban ones like “All in the Family” — reinforced the idea that there were different Americas with different, and even competing, popular cultures. This dynamic only spread with cable TV and the internet, which sliced and diced us into a nation of niche demos, sharing a geography but occupying different psychic spaces.

As historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer write in “Fault Lines,” their study of American polarization since the 1970s, all this led to “a world with fewer points of commonality in terms of what people heard or saw.” This was true in politics and in entertainment, and the two often overlapped.

There was now identifiable red and blue pop culture. A 2016 New York Times study found a TV divide that mirrored the rural-urban split in the election. “Deadliest Catch,” the reality show about Alaskan crab fishing, was popular in red America; in blue zones, “Orange Is the New Black,” the Netflix drama and critique of the prison system.

A 2014 poll found that 53% of Democrats, compared with 15% of Republicans, believed “Twelve Years a Slave” should win the best-picture Oscar. Neither party had taken a position on the movie; the culture war was just well-enough ingrained that people could intuit where their side would land, just as the Iraq War movie “American Sniper” became a conservative favorite and liberal target.

Knowingly or not, audience members enlisted in the culture war as volunteers. For conservatives in particular, the liberal tilt of Hollywood was a useful font of grievance, allowing them to claim cultural victimhood no matter how much political and judicial power they held.

And people increasingly saw their favorite stars as their proxies and champions. When Phil Robertson, the bayou patriarch of “Duck Dynasty,” was briefly suspended from the reality show in 2013 for homophobic and racist comments, one America saw it as political correctness taking down a beloved star for speaking his mind. Another America — if they had ever heard of “Duck Dynasty” at all — saw a bigot getting what he had coming to him.

The Culture-Troll-in-Chief

All of this, in retrospect, was an advance trailer for the it-came-from-“The Apprentice” Trump era.

Politicians, especially on the right, have dabbled in culture war before: George H.W. Bush vs. “The Simpsons,” Dan Quayle vs. “Murphy Brown,” Bob Dole vs. rap. But their forays tended to be awkward, tone-deaf and often as not, self-defeating.

But Trump, a child of TV who made himself into a TV character as an adult, understood media instinctively. It was where he lived, ever since he gave up his youthful fantasies of running a movie studio, vowed to “put show business into real estate” and forged his tabloid persona in the 1980s.

Having used media to build a reality-show career and a business-success myth, having experienced the rush of prime-time celebrity, he knew that culture makes the kind of gut connection that mere politicians can only dream of. Ordinary politics argues: Those other people don’t believe what you believe. Culture-war politics argues: Those other people don’t love what you love.

So Trump’s campaign, as much as it was about wall-building or Islamophobia or “law and order,” was also about a promise to defend and uphold his followers’ culture over the enemy’s. His rallies combined a concert vibe with the theatrics of pro wrestling (another genre Trump had experience with).

To an audience that had been told for years that showbiz celebrities disdained their values, here was one of&nbsp;their&nbsp;celebrities, a&nbsp;real&nbsp;celebrity from TV, taking their side. An alt-rightist essay on Breitbart.com hailed the erstwhile NBC host as “the first truly cultural candidate for president” since Patrick J. Buchanan, the CNN “Crossfire” co-host who declared a “cultural war” for “the soul of America” at the 1992 Republican National Convention.

Trump’s 2016 RNC didn’t have a lot of high-profile politicians, but it did have a “Duck Dynasty” star. As president, he gloried in inviting conservative celebrities like Kid Rock and Ted Nugent (who once called President Barack Obama a “subhuman mongrel”), as well as the newly conservative-curious Kanye West, to take photos in the Oval Office.

The pictures felt like spoils of war, a political end-zone dance. And his fiercest celebrity critics often played into his me-vs.-Hollywood narrative, cursing him out at the Tony Awards or feuding with him on Twitter.

He praised Western culture as superior because “we write symphonies,” tooting a white-nationalist dog whistle from the orchestra pit. And he threw himself wholeheartedly into fights like the one over ABC’s reboot of “Roseanne,” whose star, Roseanne Barr, had become a real-life, vituperative Twitter Trumpist, and which worked her politics into the storylines.

He didn’t, like previous presidents attending the Kennedy Center honors or sharing a something-for-everyone Spotify playlist, see culture as a way to find common ground. He saw it as a battleground with winners and losers, and one full of opportunities to inflame divisions.

When the “Roseanne” premiere dominated the ratings, he crowed about it as his team trouncing the enemy. “It’s about us!” he told a crowd of supporters.

Later, when ABC fired Barr from the show over a racist tweet, Trump joined the argument, not to condemn Barr’s remarks but to accuse the network of hypocrisy because of “HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC.” It echoed his Twitter attack on the network in 2014 when it picked up the sitcom “black-ish”: “Can you imagine the furor of a show, ‘Whiteish’! Racism at highest level?”

His bellyaching against Hollywood wasn’t just a bread-and-circuses distraction. It was political messaging. Pushing back on Barr’s firing — for likening a Black former Obama aide to an ape — echoed the right’s fixation on “cancel culture.” The message: Your stars are being canceled. Your shows are being canceled.&nbsp;You&nbsp;are being canceled. Only I am the network executive who can ensure your renewal.

His fixation on ratings (dating back to “The Apprentice,” whose ratings he routinely lied about) vibed with his worldview of competition and scorekeeping. Fights about representation, American identity and the boundaries of acceptable speech aligned with messages expressed, in more blunt and ugly ways, by Trump’s campaign and supporters — especially the insidious language of “replacement.”

“Now they’re making ‘Ghostbusters’ with only women. What’s going on!” was a way of telling men that he would protect them from becoming superfluous. “We can say ‘Merry Christmas’ again” was a way of saying: Your culture used to be the assumed default in America, and I’m going to bring that back. The enemy wants to demote you to a supporting player; I’m going to make you the star again.

The Tug-of-Culture-War Goes On

Much of this, of course, was a reaction to the expansion of the American story implied by the election of America’s first Black president and by the representative pop culture of Obama’s era, like “black-ish” and “Hamilton.” Often, there’s a sense (at least in retrospect) of a new cultural era beginning with a new presidential administration: JFK, the New Frontier and youth culture; Reagan, “Family Ties” and “greed is good.”

Though the Biden administration has yet to begin, it doesn’t feel like that kind of definitive shift at the moment, so much as the flag moving to the other side of the centerline in a continuing tug of war. Things may get quieter on the surface; Biden is neither as big a pop-culture guy nor as zealous a culture warrior as the president he’s replacing.

But as every tempest over a Vogue cover proves, the fight goes on. The divides are too deep, the incentives for widening them too great. Whether Trump continues to have a major part in this after he leaves office, or whether his ratings ragetweets simply echo in some musty corner of the internet, the ongoing narrative he has left us with will continue.

The secret of a long-running show, after all, is that it can survive a cast change.

You could say that the Donald Trump presidency effectively ended when the polls closed election night or when news outlets called the contest for Joe Biden four days later.

You could say that the Donald Trump presidency effectively ended when the polls closed election night or when news outlets called the contest for Joe Biden four days later. You could say that it ended when the Electoral College voted Monday to make Biden the president, or that it will end when Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20. But by one measure, the Trump presidency ended in mid-November, when online conservatives went bonkers over a picture of Harry Styles in a dress. The photo of the British singer on the cover of the December Vogue prompted YouTube personality Candace Owens to tweet, “Bring back manly men.” To Ben Shapiro, the photo shoot was an assault on the concept of manhood itself: “Anyone who pretends that it is not a referendum on masculinity for men to don floofy dresses is treating you as a full-on idiot.” What does all this have to do with the president’s impending exit? First, it suggests that other conservatives are retaking the role of Troll-Warrior-in-Chief that Trump conferred on himself. But it’s also a reminder that the kind of button-pushing cultural politics that predated him — that in many ways helped make a President Trump possible — will survive his tenure. ‘Duck Dynasty’ Politics A million years ago in the Obama era, proxy wars over culture were handled on the periphery of conservatism, in social media and right-wing talk. It was the era of the Gamergate attacks on feminists in the video gaming community, of umbrage over the foreign-language lyrics of a Coca-Cola commercial and over a female-cast reboot of “Ghostbusters.” With the election of Trump, a pop-culture figure himself who intuited the connection between cultural fandom and political tribalism (he himself made a “Ghostbusters” outrage video the year he announced his campaign), the political and culture-war wings of conservatism merged. For four years, we had a president whose portfolio of concerns included protests at NFL games, speeches at TV awards ceremonies, the loyalty of Fox News and the reboot of “Roseanne.” He scoured and fretted over Nielsen ratings — his own and those of shows he saw as allies and enemies — with the intensity a wartime president might devote to troop movements. Now, with a waning Trump self-soothing with OANN and Newsmax and tweeting out the elaborate sci-fi serial that the election was stolen from him, command of that battle is returning from the White House to the field. For decades, the expression of politics through culture war has been a staple of conservative media. Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing online publisher, declared that “politics is downstream from culture” (borrowing an idea from Marxist theorists like Antonio Gramsci). Fox News made an annual production of the “war on Christmas” (with occasional spinoffs like “Santa Claus and Jesus are white”). The appeal was emotional; people have a personal connection to family holidays and their favorite shows that they don’t to, say, marginal tax-rate policy. But it was also a way to appeal to a specific audience in a country where, increasingly, people had not just different political beliefs but entirely different cultural experiences. As far back as the early 1970s, the “rural purge” in TV — which eliminated bucolic sitcoms like “Green Acres” to make room for urban ones like “All in the Family” — reinforced the idea that there were different Americas with different, and even competing, popular cultures. This dynamic only spread with cable TV and the internet, which sliced and diced us into a nation of niche demos, sharing a geography but occupying different psychic spaces. As historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer write in “Fault Lines,” their study of American polarization since the 1970s, all this led to “a world with fewer points of commonality in terms of what people heard or saw.” This was true in politics and in entertainment, and the two often overlapped. There was now identifiable red and blue pop culture. A 2016 New York Times study found a TV divide that mirrored the rural-urban split in the election. “Deadliest Catch,” the reality show about Alaskan crab fishing, was popular in red America; in blue zones, “Orange Is the New Black,” the Netflix drama and critique of the prison system. A 2014 poll found that 53% of Democrats, compared with 15% of Republicans, believed “Twelve Years a Slave” should win the best-picture Oscar. Neither party had taken a position on the movie; the culture war was just well-enough ingrained that people could intuit where their side would land, just as the Iraq War movie “American Sniper” became a conservative favorite and liberal target. Knowingly or not, audience members enlisted in the culture war as volunteers. For conservatives in particular, the liberal tilt of Hollywood was a useful font of grievance, allowing them to claim cultural victimhood no matter how much political and judicial power they held. And people increasingly saw their favorite stars as their proxies and champions. When Phil Robertson, the bayou patriarch of “Duck Dynasty,” was briefly suspended from the reality show in 2013 for homophobic and racist comments, one America saw it as political correctness taking down a beloved star for speaking his mind. Another America — if they had ever heard of “Duck Dynasty” at all — saw a bigot getting what he had coming to him. The Culture-Troll-in-Chief All of this, in retrospect, was an advance trailer for the it-came-from-“The Apprentice” Trump era. Politicians, especially on the right, have dabbled in culture war before: George H.W. Bush vs. “The Simpsons,” Dan Quayle vs. “Murphy Brown,” Bob Dole vs. rap. But their forays tended to be awkward, tone-deaf and often as not, self-defeating. But Trump, a child of TV who made himself into a TV character as an adult, understood media instinctively. It was where he lived, ever since he gave up his youthful fantasies of running a movie studio, vowed to “put show business into real estate” and forged his tabloid persona in the 1980s. Having used media to build a reality-show career and a business-success myth, having experienced the rush of prime-time celebrity, he knew that culture makes the kind of gut connection that mere politicians can only dream of. Ordinary politics argues: Those other people don’t believe what you believe. Culture-war politics argues: Those other people don’t love what you love. So Trump’s campaign, as much as it was about wall-building or Islamophobia or “law and order,” was also about a promise to defend and uphold his followers’ culture over the enemy’s. His rallies combined a concert vibe with the theatrics of pro wrestling (another genre Trump had experience with). To an audience that had been told for years that showbiz celebrities disdained their values, here was one of their celebrities, a real celebrity from TV, taking their side. An alt-rightist essay on Breitbart.com hailed the erstwhile NBC host as “the first truly cultural candidate for president” since Patrick J. Buchanan, the CNN “Crossfire” co-host who declared a “cultural war” for “the soul of America” at the 1992 Republican National Convention. Trump’s 2016 RNC didn’t have a lot of high-profile politicians, but it did have a “Duck Dynasty” star. As president, he gloried in inviting conservative celebrities like Kid Rock and Ted Nugent (who once called President Barack Obama a “subhuman mongrel”), as well as the newly conservative-curious Kanye West, to take photos in the Oval Office. The pictures felt like spoils of war, a political end-zone dance. And his fiercest celebrity critics often played into his me-vs.-Hollywood narrative, cursing him out at the Tony Awards or feuding with him on Twitter. He praised Western culture as superior because “we write symphonies,” tooting a white-nationalist dog whistle from the orchestra pit. And he threw himself wholeheartedly into fights like the one over ABC’s reboot of “Roseanne,” whose star, Roseanne Barr, had become a real-life, vituperative Twitter Trumpist, and which worked her politics into the storylines. He didn’t, like previous presidents attending the Kennedy Center honors or sharing a something-for-everyone Spotify playlist, see culture as a way to find common ground. He saw it as a battleground with winners and losers, and one full of opportunities to inflame divisions. When the “Roseanne” premiere dominated the ratings, he crowed about it as his team trouncing the enemy. “It’s about us!” he told a crowd of supporters. Later, when ABC fired Barr from the show over a racist tweet, Trump joined the argument, not to condemn Barr’s remarks but to accuse the network of hypocrisy because of “HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC.” It echoed his Twitter attack on the network in 2014 when it picked up the sitcom “black-ish”: “Can you imagine the furor of a show, ‘Whiteish’! Racism at highest level?” His bellyaching against Hollywood wasn’t just a bread-and-circuses distraction. It was political messaging. Pushing back on Barr’s firing — for likening a Black former Obama aide to an ape — echoed the right’s fixation on “cancel culture.” The message: Your stars are being canceled. Your shows are being canceled. You are being canceled. Only I am the network executive who can ensure your renewal. His fixation on ratings (dating back to “The Apprentice,” whose ratings he routinely lied about) vibed with his worldview of competition and scorekeeping. Fights about representation, American identity and the boundaries of acceptable speech aligned with messages expressed, in more blunt and ugly ways, by Trump’s campaign and supporters — especially the insidious language of “replacement.” “Now they’re making ‘Ghostbusters’ with only women. What’s going on!” was a way of telling men that he would protect them from becoming superfluous. “We can say ‘Merry Christmas’ again” was a way of saying: Your culture used to be the assumed default in America, and I’m going to bring that back. The enemy wants to demote you to a supporting player; I’m going to make you the star again. The Tug-of-Culture-War Goes On Much of this, of course, was a reaction to the expansion of the American story implied by the election of America’s first Black president and by the representative pop culture of Obama’s era, like “black-ish” and “Hamilton.” Often, there’s a sense (at least in retrospect) of a new cultural era beginning with a new presidential administration: JFK, the New Frontier and youth culture; Reagan, “Family Ties” and “greed is good.” Though the Biden administration has yet to begin, it doesn’t feel like that kind of definitive shift at the moment, so much as the flag moving to the other side of the centerline in a continuing tug of war. Things may get quieter on the surface; Biden is neither as big a pop-culture guy nor as zealous a culture warrior as the president he’s replacing. But as every tempest over a Vogue cover proves, the fight goes on. The divides are too deep, the incentives for widening them too great. Whether Trump continues to have a major part in this after he leaves office, or whether his ratings ragetweets simply echo in some musty corner of the internet, the ongoing narrative he has left us with will continue. The secret of a long-running show, after all, is that it can survive a cast change.

Donald Trump lost his battle. The culture war goes on.

Joe Biden's march to the White House -- overshadowed by President Donald Trump's frantic attempts to overturn the US election -- is to be formalized Monday when the Electoral College meets to confirm the Democrat's win.

Electors in all 50 states were meeting to cast their votes in a tradition that has long been considered mostly a formality for confirming the will of the people expressed at the polls.

But this year the somewhat arcane procedure is at the center of an unprecedented -- and many warn dangerous -- challenge to the credibility of US democracy led by Trump.

Also read|<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-pence-among-top-us-officials-to-be-offered-covid-19-vaccine-on-priority-report-349600">&nbsp;Trump, Pence among top US officials to be offered COVID-19 vaccine on priority: Report</a>

Soundly beaten by Biden on November 3, Trump continues to claim, without evidence, that he was the real winner. Court after court has turned down his team's claims of election fraud around the country and last Friday the Supreme Court dealt a final legal blow when it threw out an appeal lodged by Trump allies from Texas and other Republican-led states.

Based on the already legally certified state-by-state vote tallies, the Electoral College representatives are expected to vote by 306 to 232 in favor of Biden over Trump -- a process expected to take much of Monday.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/trump-vows-to-reject-defense-bill-passed-by-veto-proof-majority-349569" hreflang="en">Trump vows to reject defense bill passed by veto-proof majority</a>

This will draw a thick line under a contest that saw Biden make Trump a rare one-term president after campaigning on a message of vanquishing the Covid-19 pandemic, healing bitter political division and restoring traditional US diplomacy on the world stage.

Biden, who has largely avoided responding to Trump's conspiracy theories, announced he would deliver an address in the evening dedicated to "the strength and resilience" of US democracy.

Disinformation

Until now, a majority of Republicans in Congress have either backed Trump's claims or at least turned a blind eye, with many refusing to call Biden the president-elect.

Also read|<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/misogynistic-op-ed-urging-incoming-first-lady-jill-biden-to-drop-dr-stirs-a-furore-on-social-media-349673">&nbsp;'Misogynistic' op-ed urging incoming First Lady Jill Biden to drop 'Dr.' stirs a furore on social media</a>

Disinformation spearheaded by the president and spread by popular commentators on Fox News and new conspiracy theory-mongering outlets like Newsmax means that many Americans have all but given up faith in their own institutions.

Polls show that as few as one in four Republican voters accept the election results.

Thousands of Trump supporters, including members of far-right groups, protested in Washington at the weekend, fighting with counter-protesters. The threat of violence required that extraordinary security measures be established for the Electoral College meetings in several states, including Arizona and Michigan, The New York Times reported.

Also read|&nbsp;Trump rescinds plan for White House staff to be quickly vaccinated

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, a senior Trump advisor, told Fox News on Monday that an "alternate slate of electors" had been created to send its own results to Congress.

"We have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner of the election," Miller said, without explaining the idea of a shadow Electoral College.

Trump was also still at it on Monday, tweeting more accusations with no basis in reality.

"Swing States that have found massive VOTER FRAUD, which is all of them, CANNOT LEGALLY CERTIFY these votes as complete &amp; correct without committing a severely punishable crime," he said.

The legal Electoral College vote, however, will leave the Trump train almost no place left to go.

Only one big formality remains before Biden's inauguration on January 20, when Congress, presided over by Vice President Mike Pence, opens up and counts the electoral votes on January 6.

Despite rumblings that Trump allies may seek to turn this largely ceremonial event into another battlefront against the election results, it seems clear that support for continued theatrics is steadily ebbing.

In the latest sign of a shifting tide, the staunchly Trump-supporting editorial board of The Wall Street Journal told Trump on Monday that his time is up.

"President Trump's legal challenges have run their course, and he and the rest of the Republican Party can help the country and themselves by acknowledging the result and moving on," the editorial said.

No one expects Trump to refuse to leave the White House. However, there is no indication he will ever agree to concede, let alone bow to tradition by inviting Biden to the White House for a friendly chat.

Asked on Fox News this weekend whether he would even attend Biden's inauguration, Trump answered: "I don't want to talk about that."

Joe Biden's march to the White House -- overshadowed by President Donald Trump's frantic attempts to overturn the US election -- is to be formalized Monday when the Electoral College meets to confirm the Democrat's win.

Joe Biden's march to the White House -- overshadowed by President Donald Trump's frantic attempts to overturn the US election -- is to be formalized Monday when the Electoral College meets to confirm the Democrat's win. Electors in all 50 states were meeting to cast their votes in a tradition that has long been considered mostly a formality for confirming the will of the people expressed at the polls. But this year the somewhat arcane procedure is at the center of an unprecedented -- and many warn dangerous -- challenge to the credibility of US democracy led by Trump. Also read| Trump, Pence among top US officials to be offered COVID-19 vaccine on priority: Report Soundly beaten by Biden on November 3, Trump continues to claim, without evidence, that he was the real winner. Court after court has turned down his team's claims of election fraud around the country and last Friday the Supreme Court dealt a final legal blow when it threw out an appeal lodged by Trump allies from Texas and other Republican-led states. Based on the already legally certified state-by-state vote tallies, the Electoral College representatives are expected to vote by 306 to 232 in favor of Biden over Trump -- a process expected to take much of Monday. Also read: Trump vows to reject defense bill passed by veto-proof majority This will draw a thick line under a contest that saw Biden make Trump a rare one-term president after campaigning on a message of vanquishing the Covid-19 pandemic, healing bitter political division and restoring traditional US diplomacy on the world stage. Biden, who has largely avoided responding to Trump's conspiracy theories, announced he would deliver an address in the evening dedicated to "the strength and resilience" of US democracy. Disinformation Until now, a majority of Republicans in Congress have either backed Trump's claims or at least turned a blind eye, with many refusing to call Biden the president-elect. Also read| 'Misogynistic' op-ed urging incoming First Lady Jill Biden to drop 'Dr.' stirs a furore on social media Disinformation spearheaded by the president and spread by popular commentators on Fox News and new conspiracy theory-mongering outlets like Newsmax means that many Americans have all but given up faith in their own institutions. Polls show that as few as one in four Republican voters accept the election results. Thousands of Trump supporters, including members of far-right groups, protested in Washington at the weekend, fighting with counter-protesters. The threat of violence required that extraordinary security measures be established for the Electoral College meetings in several states, including Arizona and Michigan, The New York Times reported. Also read| Trump rescinds plan for White House staff to be quickly vaccinated Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, a senior Trump advisor, told Fox News on Monday that an "alternate slate of electors" had been created to send its own results to Congress. "We have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner of the election," Miller said, without explaining the idea of a shadow Electoral College. Trump was also still at it on Monday, tweeting more accusations with no basis in reality. "Swing States that have found massive VOTER FRAUD, which is all of them, CANNOT LEGALLY CERTIFY these votes as complete & correct without committing a severely punishable crime," he said. The legal Electoral College vote, however, will leave the Trump train almost no place left to go. Only one big formality remains before Biden's inauguration on January 20, when Congress, presided over by Vice President Mike Pence, opens up and counts the electoral votes on January 6. Despite rumblings that Trump allies may seek to turn this largely ceremonial event into another battlefront against the election results, it seems clear that support for continued theatrics is steadily ebbing. In the latest sign of a shifting tide, the staunchly Trump-supporting editorial board of The Wall Street Journal told Trump on Monday that his time is up. "President Trump's legal challenges have run their course, and he and the rest of the Republican Party can help the country and themselves by acknowledging the result and moving on," the editorial said. No one expects Trump to refuse to leave the White House. However, there is no indication he will ever agree to concede, let alone bow to tradition by inviting Biden to the White House for a friendly chat. Asked on Fox News this weekend whether he would even attend Biden's inauguration, Trump answered: "I don't want to talk about that."

US Electoral College to formalize Joe Biden's win

While drafting the constitution, America's founders struggled with how the new nation should choose its leader and ultimately created the electoral college system.

WION Fineprint: What happens when the U.S. electoral college meets?

The Supreme Court repudiation of President Donald Trump’s desperate bid for a second term not only shredded his effort to overturn the will of voters: It also was a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states that were willing to damage American democracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election.

The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joe Biden on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the GOP leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast in November.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-supreme-court-dismisses-trumps-bid-to-overturn-election-result-349183" hreflang="en">US Supreme Court dismisses Trump's bid to overturn election result</a>

Many regular Republicans supported this effort, too — a sign that Trump has not just bent the party to his will, but pressed a mainstay of American politics for nearly two centuries into the service of overturning an election outcome and assaulting public faith in the electoral system. The GOP sought to undo the vote by such spurious means that the Supreme Court quickly rejected the argument.

Even some Republican leaders delivered a withering assessment of the 126 GOP House members and 18 attorneys general who chose to side with Trump over the democratic process, by backing a lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to throw out some 20 million votes in four key states that cemented the president’s loss.

“The act itself by the 126 members of the United States House of Representatives, is an affront to the country,” said Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “It’s an offense to the Constitution and it leaves an indelible stain that will be hard for these 126 members to wipe off their political skin for a long time to come.”

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/photos/five-reasons-why-donald-trump-should-not-be-considered-as-a-useless-president-349181" hreflang="en">Five reasons why Donald Trump should not be considered as a useless president</a>

Speaking on CNN on Friday, Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a Republican, said, “What happened with the Supreme Court, that’s kind of it, where they’ve kind of exhausted all the legal challenges; we’ve got to move on.” It was time, he said, for Congress to “actually do something for the American people, surrounding the vaccines, surrounding COVID.”

With direct buy-in from senior officials like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the president’s effort required the party to promote false theory upon unsubstantiated claim upon outright lie about unproved, widespread fraud — in an election that Republican and Democratic election officials agreed was notably smooth given the challenges of the pandemic.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-17-states-back-texas-bid-to-overturn-us-election-result-at-supreme-court-348692" hreflang="en">Trump, 17 states back Texas bid to overturn US election result at Supreme Court</a>

And it meant that Republican leaders now stand for a new notion: that the final decisions of voters can be challenged without a basis in fact if the results are not to the liking of the losing side, running counter to decades of work by the United States to convince developing nations that peaceful transfers of power are key to any freely elected government’s credibility.

“From a global perspective this certainly looks like many of the cases we’ve seen around the world where an incumbent tries to hold onto power," said Michael Abramowitz, president of Freedom House, a Washington-based group that promotes democracy abroad with support from both parties.

Following the court decision, one of the 126 House Republicans who backed the lawsuit, Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, said that the court’s decision meant the end of Trump’s efforts and “closed the books on challenges to the 2020 election results.”

Democrats took heart in the court’s decision in the case filed by the Republican attorney general of Texas, one of several dozen that judges have soundly rejected on legal or factual bases, even if more lawsuits are certain to come ahead of Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

“Our democracy has withstood Donald Trump for four years,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee, which oversees election law. “It can withstand these baseless lawsuits for four more weeks.”

But civil rights attorneys saw the potential for long-lasting damage outside of the legal realm where the Republican efforts — and the lie that Biden’s win was the result of widespread fraud — have so definitively failed.

Republican state legislators across the country are already contemplating new laws to make voting harder, as they continue to falsely portray the expansion and ease of mail-in voting during the pandemic as nefarious. Many of them view this year’s expanded voting ranks as bad for their party, despite Republican successes further down the ballot. Their consideration of new voting restrictions amounts to an ongoing attack on the integrity of the voting system, involving still more false and debunked claims.

“There is an anti-democratic virus that has spread in mainstream Republicanism, among mainstream Republican elected officials,” said Dale Ho, director of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU. “And that loss of faith in the machinery of democracy is a much bigger problem than any individual lawsuit.”

Indeed, after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Texas Republican Party effectively called for secession by red states whose attorneys general joined in the Texas suit.

“Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution,” a statement from its chairman, Allen West, read. It followed an observation Rush Limbaugh made earlier in the week, when he said, “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession.”

The talk of secession came during a week in which election officials across the country, from both political parties, said they had become the subjects of menacing threats of violence, including to family members, for standing by Biden’s victory.

A website of unknown provenance that caught the attention of law enforcement appeared to promote a hit list of mostly Republican officials who had resisted Trump’s demands to overturn an election he lost, listing their personal information and imposing red cross hairs over their pictures.

Trump made it clear that the Supreme Court decision would not slow a post-campaign campaign, the futility of which has dampened neither its ferocity nor its pertinacity. On Twitter, Trump on Saturday called it a “disgraceful miscarriage of justice” and wrote “WE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT!!!”

Hours before the court made its decision public the Trump campaign released two ads repeating debunked allegations, indicating it would continue to pressure elected Republican officials to somehow reverse Trump’s political fate. “Demand an honest election and an honest count, contact your legislators today,” one ad exhorted. (The campaign claimed that the ads would begin airing on cable television on Saturday morning, but at least one ad tracking firm said they had not seen any reservations made as of Friday night.)

The Supreme Court repudiation of President Donald Trump’s desperate bid for a second term not only shredded his effort to overturn the will of voters: It also was a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states that were willing to damage American democracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election.

The Supreme Court repudiation of President Donald Trump’s desperate bid for a second term not only shredded his effort to overturn the will of voters: It also was a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states that were willing to damage American democracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election. The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joe Biden on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the GOP leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast in November. Also read| US Supreme Court dismisses Trump's bid to overturn election result Many regular Republicans supported this effort, too — a sign that Trump has not just bent the party to his will, but pressed a mainstay of American politics for nearly two centuries into the service of overturning an election outcome and assaulting public faith in the electoral system. The GOP sought to undo the vote by such spurious means that the Supreme Court quickly rejected the argument. Even some Republican leaders delivered a withering assessment of the 126 GOP House members and 18 attorneys general who chose to side with Trump over the democratic process, by backing a lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to throw out some 20 million votes in four key states that cemented the president’s loss. “The act itself by the 126 members of the United States House of Representatives, is an affront to the country,” said Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “It’s an offense to the Constitution and it leaves an indelible stain that will be hard for these 126 members to wipe off their political skin for a long time to come.” Also read| Five reasons why Donald Trump should not be considered as a useless president Speaking on CNN on Friday, Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a Republican, said, “What happened with the Supreme Court, that’s kind of it, where they’ve kind of exhausted all the legal challenges; we’ve got to move on.” It was time, he said, for Congress to “actually do something for the American people, surrounding the vaccines, surrounding COVID.” With direct buy-in from senior officials like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the president’s effort required the party to promote false theory upon unsubstantiated claim upon outright lie about unproved, widespread fraud — in an election that Republican and Democratic election officials agreed was notably smooth given the challenges of the pandemic. Also read| Trump, 17 states back Texas bid to overturn US election result at Supreme Court And it meant that Republican leaders now stand for a new notion: that the final decisions of voters can be challenged without a basis in fact if the results are not to the liking of the losing side, running counter to decades of work by the United States to convince developing nations that peaceful transfers of power are key to any freely elected government’s credibility. “From a global perspective this certainly looks like many of the cases we’ve seen around the world where an incumbent tries to hold onto power," said Michael Abramowitz, president of Freedom House, a Washington-based group that promotes democracy abroad with support from both parties. Following the court decision, one of the 126 House Republicans who backed the lawsuit, Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, said that the court’s decision meant the end of Trump’s efforts and “closed the books on challenges to the 2020 election results.” Democrats took heart in the court’s decision in the case filed by the Republican attorney general of Texas, one of several dozen that judges have soundly rejected on legal or factual bases, even if more lawsuits are certain to come ahead of Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20. “Our democracy has withstood Donald Trump for four years,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee, which oversees election law. “It can withstand these baseless lawsuits for four more weeks.” But civil rights attorneys saw the potential for long-lasting damage outside of the legal realm where the Republican efforts — and the lie that Biden’s win was the result of widespread fraud — have so definitively failed. Republican state legislators across the country are already contemplating new laws to make voting harder, as they continue to falsely portray the expansion and ease of mail-in voting during the pandemic as nefarious. Many of them view this year’s expanded voting ranks as bad for their party, despite Republican successes further down the ballot. Their consideration of new voting restrictions amounts to an ongoing attack on the integrity of the voting system, involving still more false and debunked claims. “There is an anti-democratic virus that has spread in mainstream Republicanism, among mainstream Republican elected officials,” said Dale Ho, director of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU. “And that loss of faith in the machinery of democracy is a much bigger problem than any individual lawsuit.” Indeed, after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Texas Republican Party effectively called for secession by red states whose attorneys general joined in the Texas suit. “Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution,” a statement from its chairman, Allen West, read. It followed an observation Rush Limbaugh made earlier in the week, when he said, “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession.” The talk of secession came during a week in which election officials across the country, from both political parties, said they had become the subjects of menacing threats of violence, including to family members, for standing by Biden’s victory. A website of unknown provenance that caught the attention of law enforcement appeared to promote a hit list of mostly Republican officials who had resisted Trump’s demands to overturn an election he lost, listing their personal information and imposing red cross hairs over their pictures. Trump made it clear that the Supreme Court decision would not slow a post-campaign campaign, the futility of which has dampened neither its ferocity nor its pertinacity. On Twitter, Trump on Saturday called it a “disgraceful miscarriage of justice” and wrote “WE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT!!!” Hours before the court made its decision public the Trump campaign released two ads repeating debunked allegations, indicating it would continue to pressure elected Republican officials to somehow reverse Trump’s political fate. “Demand an honest election and an honest count, contact your legislators today,” one ad exhorted. (The campaign claimed that the ads would begin airing on cable television on Saturday morning, but at least one ad tracking firm said they had not seen any reservations made as of Friday night.)

‘An indelible stain’: How the GOP tried to topple a pillar of democracy

Ahead of electoral college vote, thousands of supporters of U.S President Donald Trump gathered in Washington DC to denounced the results of November 3rd election. Trumps supporters take to streets and chanted 'Four more years' and waving flags &chanting Trumps name.

Nationwide march in support of Donald Trump's Poll claims

Last April, when Rob Flaherty, the digital director for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, told me that the former vice president’s team planned to use feel-good videos and inspirational memes to beat President Donald Trump in a “battle for the soul of the internet,” my first thought was,&nbsp;Good luck with that.

After all, we were talking about the internet, which doesn’t seem to reward anything uplifting or nuanced these days. In addition, Trump is a digital powerhouse, with an enormous and passionate following; a coalition of popular right-wing media outlets boosting his signal; and a flair for saying the kinds of outrageous, attention-grabbing things that are catnip to the algorithms of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And after I wrote about Biden’s comparatively tiny internet presence last spring, I heard from legions of nervous Democratic strategists who worried that using “heal the nation” messaging against the MAGA meme army was like bringing a pinwheel to a prizefight.

Have a look|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/photos/donald-trumps-supporters-take-to-streets-for-another-million-maga-march-349361">Donald Trump's supporters take to streets for another 'Million MAGA March'</a>

But in the end, the bed-wetters were wrong. Biden won, and despite having many fewer followers and much less engagement on social media than Trump, his campaign raised record amounts of money and ultimately neutralized Trump’s vaunted “Death Star” — the name his erstwhile campaign manager, Brad Parscale, gave to the campaign’s digital operation.

Figuring out whether any particular online strategy decisively moved the needle for Biden is probably impossible. Offline factors, such as Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic and the economic devastation it has caused, undoubtedly played a major role. But since successful campaigns breed imitators, it’s worth looking under the hood of the Biden digital strategy to see what future campaigns might learn from it.

After the election, I spoke with Flaherty, along with more than a dozen other people who worked on the Biden digital team. They told me that while the internet alone didn’t get Biden elected, a few key decisions helped his chances.

1. Lean on Influencers and Validators

In the early days of his campaign, Biden’s team envisioned setting up its own digital media empire. It posted videos to his official YouTube channel, conducted virtual forums and even set up a podcast hosted by Biden, “Here’s the Deal.” But those efforts were marred by technical glitches and lukewarm receptions, and they never came close to rivaling the reach of Trump’s social media machine.

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So the campaign pivoted to a different strategy, which involved expanding Biden’s reach by working with social media influencers and “validators,” people who were trusted by the kinds of voters the campaign hoped to reach.

“We were not the biggest megaphone compared to Trump, so we had to help arm any who were,” said Andrew Bleeker, president of Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic strategy firm that worked with the Biden campaign.

One validator at the top of the team’s list was Brené Brown, a popular author and podcast host who speaks and writes about topics like courage and vulnerability. Brown has a devoted following among suburban women — a critical demographic for Biden’s campaign — and when Biden appeared as a guest on her podcast to talk about his own stories of grief and empathy, the campaign viewed it as a coup.

Also high on the list was actor Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, whose following skews center-right and male. Johnson’s endorsement this fall of Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, created a so-called permission structure for his followers — including some who may have voted for Trump in 2016 — to support Biden, members of the campaign staff told me.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/tensions-rise-in-washington-as-pro-trump-protesters-continue-to-decry-his-loss-349375">Tensions rise in Washington as pro-Trump protesters continue to decry his loss</a>

Celebrity endorsements aren’t a new campaign strategy. But Biden’s team also worked with lesser-known influencers, including YouTubers like Liza Koshy, and struck a partnership with a group of creators known as TikTok for Biden, which the campaign paid to promote pro-Biden content on the teen-dominated video app TikTok.

Perhaps the campaign’s most unlikely validator was Fox News. Headlines from the outlet that reflected well on Biden were relatively rare, but the campaign’s tests showed that they were more persuasive to on-the-fence voters than headlines from other outlets. So when they appeared — as they did in October when Fox News covered an endorsement that Biden received from more than 120 Republican former national security and military officials — the campaign paid to promote them on Facebook and other platforms.

“The headlines from the sources that were the most surprising were the ones that had the most impact,” said Rebecca Rinkevich, Biden’s digital rapid response director. “When people saw a Fox News headline endorsing Joe Biden, it made them stop scrolling and think.”

2. Tune Out Twitter and Focus on ‘Facebook Moms’

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/twitter-says-it-inadvertently-limited-engagements-on-trumps-flagged-tweets-349437">Twitter says it inadvertently limited engagements on Trump's flagged tweets</a>

A frequent criticism of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign was that it was too focused on appealing to the elite, high-information crowd on Twitter instead of paying attention to the much larger group of voters who get their news and information on Facebook. In 2020, Biden’s digital team was committed to avoiding a repeat.

“The whole Biden campaign ethos was, ‘Twitter isn’t real life,’” Flaherty said. “There are risks of running a campaign that is too hyperaware of your own ideological corner.”

As it focused on Facebook, the Biden campaign paid extra attention to “Facebook moms” — women who spend a lot of time sharing cute and uplifting content, and who the campaign believed could be persuaded to vote for Biden with positive messages about his character. Its target audience, Flaherty said, was women “who would go out and share a video of troops coming home or who would follow The Dodo,” a website known for heartwarming animal videos.

The campaign experimented with lighter fare, putting virtual Biden for President lawn signs in Animal Crossing, the hit Nintendo game, and setting up a custom “Build Back Better” map in Fortnite, the popular battle royale game, in hopes of reaching younger voters. Some of these efforts were more gimmicky than others. But they all reflected the campaign’s decision to take a pro-Biden message to as many corners of the internet as possible.

“Our goal was really to meet people where they were,” said Christian Tom, head of Biden’s digital partnerships team.

3. Build a Facebook Brain Trust

One of the campaign’s goals, Biden staff members told me, was promoting content that increased “social trust” — in other words, avoiding the kind of energizing, divisive fare that Trump has used to great effect.

But Biden’s digital strategy wasn’t all puppies and rainbows. The campaign also joined ranks with a number of popular left-wing Facebook pages, many of which are known for putting out aggressive anti-Trump content.

They called this group the “Rebel Alliance,” a jokey nod to Parscale’s “Death Star,” and it eventually grew to include the proprietors of pages like Occupy Democrats, Call to Activism, The Other 98 Percent and Being Liberal. On the messaging app Signal, the page owners formed a group text that became a kind of rapid-response brain trust for the campaign.

These left-wing pages gave the campaign a bigger Facebook audience than it could have reached on its own. But they also allowed Biden to keep most of his messaging positive while still tapping into the anger and outrage many Democratic voters felt.

4. Promote ‘Small-Batch Creators,’ Not Just Slick Commercials

In its internal tests, the Biden campaign found that traditional political ads — professionally produced, slick-looking 30-second spots — were far less effective than impromptu, behind-the-scenes footage and ads that featured regular voters talking directly into their smartphones or webcams about why they were voting for Biden.

“All our testing showed that higher production value was not better,” said Nathaniel Lubin, a Biden campaign consultant. “The things that were realer, more grainy and cheaper to produce were more credible.”

So the campaign commissioned a series of simple, lo-fi ads targeted at key groups of voters, like a series of self-recorded videos by Biden supporters who didn’t vote in 2016, talking about their regrets.

In addition to hiring traditional Democratic ad firms, the campaign also teamed up with what it called “small-batch creators” — lesser-known producers and digital creators, some of whom had little experience making political ads. Among the small-batch creators it hired: Scotty Wagner, a former art school professor from California, who produced a video about young people who supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary sharing things they didn’t know about Biden, and Jawanza Tucker, a TikTok creator, who made a video styled after a TikTok meme about why he was voting for Biden.

5. Fight Misinformation, but Pick Your Battles

One of the biggest obstacles the Biden campaign faced was a tsunami of misinformation, much of it amplified by the Trump campaign and its right-wing media allies. There were baseless rumors about Biden’s health, unfounded questions about Harris' citizenship and spurious claims about the business dealings of Biden’s son Hunter.

The campaign formed an in-house effort to combat these rumors, known as the “Malarkey Factory.” But it picked its battles carefully, using data from voter testing to guide its responses.

When the Hunter Biden laptop story emerged, for example, some Democrats — worried that it would be 2020’s version of the Hillary Clinton email story — suggested that the Biden campaign should forcefully denounce it. But the campaign’s testing found that most voters in its key groups couldn’t follow the complexities of the allegations and that it wasn’t changing their opinion of Joe Biden.

“The Hunter Biden conversation was many times larger than the Hillary Clinton email conversation, but it really didn’t stick because people think Joe Biden’s a good guy,” said Bleeker of Bully Pulpit Interactive.

The campaign still responded to the reports, and Biden defended his son on the debate stage. But it stopped short of mounting a full-throated counter-messaging campaign.

When it did respond to misinformation, the Biden team tried to address the root of the narrative. After right-wing influencers posted compilation videos of Biden stumbling over his words and appearing forgetful, the campaign surveyed voters to try to figure out whether the attempt to paint him as mentally unfit was resonating. It discovered that the real concern for many people wasn’t Biden’s age or his health, per se, but whether he was an easily manipulated tool of the radical left.

The Biden team identified the voters who were most likely to see those clips and ran a targeted digital ad campaign showing them videos of Biden speaking lucidly at debates and public events.

Flaherty, the campaign digital director, said the campaign’s focus on empathy had informed how it treated misinformation: not as a cynical Trump ploy that was swallowed by credulous dupes but as something that required listening to voters to understand their concerns and worries before fighting back. Ultimately, he said, the campaign’s entire digital strategy — the Malarkey Factory, the TikTok creators and Facebook moms, the Fortnite signs and small-batch creators — was about trying to reach a kinder, gentler version of the internet that it still believed existed.

“It was about, how do we throw the incentives of the internet for a bit of a loop?” he said. “We made a decision early that we were going to be authentically Joe Biden online, even when people were saying that was a trap.”

Last April, when Rob Flaherty, the digital director for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, told me that the former vice president’s team planned to use feel-good videos and inspirational memes to beat President Donald Trump in a “battle for the soul of the internet,” my first thought was, Good luck with that.

Last April, when Rob Flaherty, the digital director for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, told me that the former vice president’s team planned to use feel-good videos and inspirational memes to beat President Donald Trump in a “battle for the soul of the internet,” my first thought was, Good luck with that. After all, we were talking about the internet, which doesn’t seem to reward anything uplifting or nuanced these days. In addition, Trump is a digital powerhouse, with an enormous and passionate following; a coalition of popular right-wing media outlets boosting his signal; and a flair for saying the kinds of outrageous, attention-grabbing things that are catnip to the algorithms of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And after I wrote about Biden’s comparatively tiny internet presence last spring, I heard from legions of nervous Democratic strategists who worried that using “heal the nation” messaging against the MAGA meme army was like bringing a pinwheel to a prizefight. Have a look| Donald Trump's supporters take to streets for another 'Million MAGA March' But in the end, the bed-wetters were wrong. Biden won, and despite having many fewer followers and much less engagement on social media than Trump, his campaign raised record amounts of money and ultimately neutralized Trump’s vaunted “Death Star” — the name his erstwhile campaign manager, Brad Parscale, gave to the campaign’s digital operation. Figuring out whether any particular online strategy decisively moved the needle for Biden is probably impossible. Offline factors, such as Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic and the economic devastation it has caused, undoubtedly played a major role. But since successful campaigns breed imitators, it’s worth looking under the hood of the Biden digital strategy to see what future campaigns might learn from it. After the election, I spoke with Flaherty, along with more than a dozen other people who worked on the Biden digital team. They told me that while the internet alone didn’t get Biden elected, a few key decisions helped his chances. 1. Lean on Influencers and Validators In the early days of his campaign, Biden’s team envisioned setting up its own digital media empire. It posted videos to his official YouTube channel, conducted virtual forums and even set up a podcast hosted by Biden, “Here’s the Deal.” But those efforts were marred by technical glitches and lukewarm receptions, and they never came close to rivaling the reach of Trump’s social media machine. × So the campaign pivoted to a different strategy, which involved expanding Biden’s reach by working with social media influencers and “validators,” people who were trusted by the kinds of voters the campaign hoped to reach. “We were not the biggest megaphone compared to Trump, so we had to help arm any who were,” said Andrew Bleeker, president of Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic strategy firm that worked with the Biden campaign. One validator at the top of the team’s list was Brené Brown, a popular author and podcast host who speaks and writes about topics like courage and vulnerability. Brown has a devoted following among suburban women — a critical demographic for Biden’s campaign — and when Biden appeared as a guest on her podcast to talk about his own stories of grief and empathy, the campaign viewed it as a coup. Also high on the list was actor Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, whose following skews center-right and male. Johnson’s endorsement this fall of Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, created a so-called permission structure for his followers — including some who may have voted for Trump in 2016 — to support Biden, members of the campaign staff told me. Also read| Tensions rise in Washington as pro-Trump protesters continue to decry his loss Celebrity endorsements aren’t a new campaign strategy. But Biden’s team also worked with lesser-known influencers, including YouTubers like Liza Koshy, and struck a partnership with a group of creators known as TikTok for Biden, which the campaign paid to promote pro-Biden content on the teen-dominated video app TikTok. Perhaps the campaign’s most unlikely validator was Fox News. Headlines from the outlet that reflected well on Biden were relatively rare, but the campaign’s tests showed that they were more persuasive to on-the-fence voters than headlines from other outlets. So when they appeared — as they did in October when Fox News covered an endorsement that Biden received from more than 120 Republican former national security and military officials — the campaign paid to promote them on Facebook and other platforms. “The headlines from the sources that were the most surprising were the ones that had the most impact,” said Rebecca Rinkevich, Biden’s digital rapid response director. “When people saw a Fox News headline endorsing Joe Biden, it made them stop scrolling and think.” 2. Tune Out Twitter and Focus on ‘Facebook Moms’ Also read| Twitter says it inadvertently limited engagements on Trump's flagged tweets A frequent criticism of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign was that it was too focused on appealing to the elite, high-information crowd on Twitter instead of paying attention to the much larger group of voters who get their news and information on Facebook. In 2020, Biden’s digital team was committed to avoiding a repeat. “The whole Biden campaign ethos was, ‘Twitter isn’t real life,’” Flaherty said. “There are risks of running a campaign that is too hyperaware of your own ideological corner.” As it focused on Facebook, the Biden campaign paid extra attention to “Facebook moms” — women who spend a lot of time sharing cute and uplifting content, and who the campaign believed could be persuaded to vote for Biden with positive messages about his character. Its target audience, Flaherty said, was women “who would go out and share a video of troops coming home or who would follow The Dodo,” a website known for heartwarming animal videos. The campaign experimented with lighter fare, putting virtual Biden for President lawn signs in Animal Crossing, the hit Nintendo game, and setting up a custom “Build Back Better” map in Fortnite, the popular battle royale game, in hopes of reaching younger voters. Some of these efforts were more gimmicky than others. But they all reflected the campaign’s decision to take a pro-Biden message to as many corners of the internet as possible. “Our goal was really to meet people where they were,” said Christian Tom, head of Biden’s digital partnerships team. 3. Build a Facebook Brain Trust One of the campaign’s goals, Biden staff members told me, was promoting content that increased “social trust” — in other words, avoiding the kind of energizing, divisive fare that Trump has used to great effect. But Biden’s digital strategy wasn’t all puppies and rainbows. The campaign also joined ranks with a number of popular left-wing Facebook pages, many of which are known for putting out aggressive anti-Trump content. They called this group the “Rebel Alliance,” a jokey nod to Parscale’s “Death Star,” and it eventually grew to include the proprietors of pages like Occupy Democrats, Call to Activism, The Other 98 Percent and Being Liberal. On the messaging app Signal, the page owners formed a group text that became a kind of rapid-response brain trust for the campaign. These left-wing pages gave the campaign a bigger Facebook audience than it could have reached on its own. But they also allowed Biden to keep most of his messaging positive while still tapping into the anger and outrage many Democratic voters felt. 4. Promote ‘Small-Batch Creators,’ Not Just Slick Commercials In its internal tests, the Biden campaign found that traditional political ads — professionally produced, slick-looking 30-second spots — were far less effective than impromptu, behind-the-scenes footage and ads that featured regular voters talking directly into their smartphones or webcams about why they were voting for Biden. “All our testing showed that higher production value was not better,” said Nathaniel Lubin, a Biden campaign consultant. “The things that were realer, more grainy and cheaper to produce were more credible.” So the campaign commissioned a series of simple, lo-fi ads targeted at key groups of voters, like a series of self-recorded videos by Biden supporters who didn’t vote in 2016, talking about their regrets. In addition to hiring traditional Democratic ad firms, the campaign also teamed up with what it called “small-batch creators” — lesser-known producers and digital creators, some of whom had little experience making political ads. Among the small-batch creators it hired: Scotty Wagner, a former art school professor from California, who produced a video about young people who supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary sharing things they didn’t know about Biden, and Jawanza Tucker, a TikTok creator, who made a video styled after a TikTok meme about why he was voting for Biden. 5. Fight Misinformation, but Pick Your Battles One of the biggest obstacles the Biden campaign faced was a tsunami of misinformation, much of it amplified by the Trump campaign and its right-wing media allies. There were baseless rumors about Biden’s health, unfounded questions about Harris' citizenship and spurious claims about the business dealings of Biden’s son Hunter. The campaign formed an in-house effort to combat these rumors, known as the “Malarkey Factory.” But it picked its battles carefully, using data from voter testing to guide its responses. When the Hunter Biden laptop story emerged, for example, some Democrats — worried that it would be 2020’s version of the Hillary Clinton email story — suggested that the Biden campaign should forcefully denounce it. But the campaign’s testing found that most voters in its key groups couldn’t follow the complexities of the allegations and that it wasn’t changing their opinion of Joe Biden. “The Hunter Biden conversation was many times larger than the Hillary Clinton email conversation, but it really didn’t stick because people think Joe Biden’s a good guy,” said Bleeker of Bully Pulpit Interactive. The campaign still responded to the reports, and Biden defended his son on the debate stage. But it stopped short of mounting a full-throated counter-messaging campaign. When it did respond to misinformation, the Biden team tried to address the root of the narrative. After right-wing influencers posted compilation videos of Biden stumbling over his words and appearing forgetful, the campaign surveyed voters to try to figure out whether the attempt to paint him as mentally unfit was resonating. It discovered that the real concern for many people wasn’t Biden’s age or his health, per se, but whether he was an easily manipulated tool of the radical left. The Biden team identified the voters who were most likely to see those clips and ran a targeted digital ad campaign showing them videos of Biden speaking lucidly at debates and public events. Flaherty, the campaign digital director, said the campaign’s focus on empathy had informed how it treated misinformation: not as a cynical Trump ploy that was swallowed by credulous dupes but as something that required listening to voters to understand their concerns and worries before fighting back. Ultimately, he said, the campaign’s entire digital strategy — the Malarkey Factory, the TikTok creators and Facebook moms, the Fortnite signs and small-batch creators — was about trying to reach a kinder, gentler version of the internet that it still believed existed. “It was about, how do we throw the incentives of the internet for a bit of a loop?” he said. “We made a decision early that we were going to be authentically Joe Biden online, even when people were saying that was a trap.”

How Joe Biden’s digital team tamed the MAGA internet

Since President Donald Trump took office, the Justice Department has been under sustained attack as he questioned whether the lawyers and investigators who serve the country were loyalists who supported his personal agenda or traitors who should be rooted out and fired.

But under President-elect Joe Biden, the department’s former and current employees hope that his pick for attorney general will shield the agency from partisan battles and political concerns.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/australian-mp-urges-donald-trump-to-pardon-julian-assange-before-leaving-white-house-349532">Australian MP urges Donald Trump to pardon Julian Assange before leaving White House</a>

More than 40 current and former department employees shared with The New York Times who they thought should run the Justice Department. They all wanted someone who would stand up for the employees and protect them from undue political influence, something that they say Trump’s attorneys general have largely been unable or unwilling to do.

They said that restoring the department’s independence from the White House, repairing morale and engaging both racial justice advocates and law enforcement officials on matters of race and criminal justice were the biggest issues facing the incoming leader.

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More than a dozen people said that they hoped Biden would nominate Sally Q. Yates, the former deputy attorney general in the Obama administration who was fired by Trump for refusing to defend his executive order banning entry to the United States for those from Muslim-majority countries.

Because she had so recently served as a top official in the department, the current and former department employees said they believed Yates would be ready from the get-go to tackle the big national security threats facing the country. As a strong civil rights advocate under President Barack Obama, she would be able to revitalize racial justice work that had languished during the Trump administration, they said.

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They bristled at widespread reports that Biden would disqualify her because he feared the prospect of a difficult confirmation hearing. Focusing on a two-day grilling before Congress, they said, would give short shrift to the seriousness of the work to be done.

Two people made cases for Doug Jones, the departing Alabama senator who, as a U.S. attorney under the Clinton administration, prosecuted members of the Ku Klux Klan who had bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four Black girls. Jones shares the quality that seems, more than any other, essential to securing a nomination from Biden — he is a close friend of the incoming president.

One person said that he believed Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, whose Supreme Court nomination Republicans blocked in 2016, would be ideal, citing his reputation for fairness.

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Biden’s choice of attorney general has been complicated by the fact that his son, Hunter Biden, is under federal investigation for possible tax crimes, shifting some of the calculus over the pick. Among the questions the selection now raises is whether it is an asset or a liability for the attorney general to be known as a close friend when that person will need to handle such a sensitive matter.

The choice gained some urgency Saturday after Trump again attacked Attorney General William Barr, this time for not publicly disclosing the inquiry. Doing so, he contended, could have helped sway the election in his favor, and the public excoriation set off a fresh wave of speculation that he would fire Barr and replace him with a loyalist who department employees feared could inflict untold damage on the institution.

“Why didn’t Bill Barr reveal the truth to the public, before the Election, about Hunter Biden,” Trump said on Twitter, referring to the federal inquiry. Justice Department policies prohibit public discussion about cases that could influence the outcome of the election.

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Some of the people interviewed for this article said that the incoming attorney general should have deep national security experience and expertise in both domestic terrorism issues and challenges from foreign adversaries like China and Iran.

While Democratic administrations often prioritize the work of the civil rights division, the protests prompted by the death of George Floyd this spring have made such work an urgent priority, regardless of which party is in office, most interviewees said. To that end, they hoped for an attorney general who had the strong support of civil rights groups. But many acknowledged that for that to be consequential, on issues including complicated ones like policing, that person should be able to work with groups like the Fraternal Order of Police.

People were deeply divided over how the department should handle the prospect of investigating Trump or his inner circle. Some argued that Biden himself had no appetite for investigating and prosecuting the past and that the attorney general should take a similar approach. Others, mostly prosecutors, said the department must pursue criminal cases without fear or favor.

But those interviewed agreed on one thing: The merits of a case should determine whether the department chose to seek an indictment, and only someone who was seen as nonpartisan could credibly make and explain that sort of sensitive determination.

Nearly everyone said that the incoming attorney general would need to reestablish the idea that prosecutions would be free of political pressure from the president.

“Great damage has been done to the reputation and credibility of the department by the way it has been used for political purposes,” said Jonathan M. Smith, a former prosecutor in the civil rights division who now serves as executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.

He said that Barr had contributed greatly to that process by intervening in high-profile cases involving the president’s allies, such as having the department withdraw its prosecution of the president’s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and presenting the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election as less damning to the president than it really was. But he said the problem of politicization had seeped throughout the agency, preventing career prosecutors from effectively investigating police misconduct.

Some current and former employees argued that the leadership’s decision to largely cut career people out of the decision-making process had contributed to politicization. Others argued that it was not entirely unusual and had been done because of the great amount of information that had found its way into the hands of reporters in the Trump era. Regardless, everyone agreed that it had hurt morale.

The incoming attorney general should solicit opinions from career officials before deciding on significant matters, one former longtime employee of the department said. Moreover, that leader, the former employee said, should trust deputies to bring issues of importance to top leaders when necessary.

An attorney general who adopted “a more inclusive, trust-driven and less hierarchical approach to management” could help repair the department’s culture, said Julie Saltman, a former lawyer in the civil division. “I’d like to see a genuinely good manager.”

Many employees said that they wanted an attorney general who would support their desire for accountability in the wake of the Trump era, even if no one from the current administration was prosecuted.

In a survey of more than 600 Justice Department alumni conducted by the legal group Protect Democracy, 77% said that the attorney general should work to identify all the ways that the departing administration had eroded the department’s norms and policies and build new procedures to restore its integrity. Only 5% said that a change in administration alone would rebuild credibility and restore morale.

“For the government to rebuild norms around Justice Department independence, there needs to be an accounting of what happened and who as involved,” said Rachel Homer, a former lawyer in the civil division.

Since President Donald Trump took office, the Justice Department has been under sustained attack as he questioned whether the lawyers and investigators who serve the country were loyalists who supported his personal agenda or traitors who should be rooted out and fired.

Since President Donald Trump took office, the Justice Department has been under sustained attack as he questioned whether the lawyers and investigators who serve the country were loyalists who supported his personal agenda or traitors who should be rooted out and fired. But under President-elect Joe Biden, the department’s former and current employees hope that his pick for attorney general will shield the agency from partisan battles and political concerns. Also read| Australian MP urges Donald Trump to pardon Julian Assange before leaving White House More than 40 current and former department employees shared with The New York Times who they thought should run the Justice Department. They all wanted someone who would stand up for the employees and protect them from undue political influence, something that they say Trump’s attorneys general have largely been unable or unwilling to do. They said that restoring the department’s independence from the White House, repairing morale and engaging both racial justice advocates and law enforcement officials on matters of race and criminal justice were the biggest issues facing the incoming leader. Also read| Tensions rise in Washington as pro-Trump protesters continue to decry his loss More than a dozen people said that they hoped Biden would nominate Sally Q. Yates, the former deputy attorney general in the Obama administration who was fired by Trump for refusing to defend his executive order banning entry to the United States for those from Muslim-majority countries. Because she had so recently served as a top official in the department, the current and former department employees said they believed Yates would be ready from the get-go to tackle the big national security threats facing the country. As a strong civil rights advocate under President Barack Obama, she would be able to revitalize racial justice work that had languished during the Trump administration, they said. Have a look| Donald Trump's supporters take to streets for another 'Million MAGA March' They bristled at widespread reports that Biden would disqualify her because he feared the prospect of a difficult confirmation hearing. Focusing on a two-day grilling before Congress, they said, would give short shrift to the seriousness of the work to be done. Two people made cases for Doug Jones, the departing Alabama senator who, as a U.S. attorney under the Clinton administration, prosecuted members of the Ku Klux Klan who had bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four Black girls. Jones shares the quality that seems, more than any other, essential to securing a nomination from Biden — he is a close friend of the incoming president. One person said that he believed Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, whose Supreme Court nomination Republicans blocked in 2016, would be ideal, citing his reputation for fairness. Also read| How Joe Biden’s digital team tamed the MAGA internet Biden’s choice of attorney general has been complicated by the fact that his son, Hunter Biden, is under federal investigation for possible tax crimes, shifting some of the calculus over the pick. Among the questions the selection now raises is whether it is an asset or a liability for the attorney general to be known as a close friend when that person will need to handle such a sensitive matter. The choice gained some urgency Saturday after Trump again attacked Attorney General William Barr, this time for not publicly disclosing the inquiry. Doing so, he contended, could have helped sway the election in his favor, and the public excoriation set off a fresh wave of speculation that he would fire Barr and replace him with a loyalist who department employees feared could inflict untold damage on the institution. “Why didn’t Bill Barr reveal the truth to the public, before the Election, about Hunter Biden,” Trump said on Twitter, referring to the federal inquiry. Justice Department policies prohibit public discussion about cases that could influence the outcome of the election. Also read| Twitter says it inadvertently limited engagements on Trump's flagged tweets Some of the people interviewed for this article said that the incoming attorney general should have deep national security experience and expertise in both domestic terrorism issues and challenges from foreign adversaries like China and Iran. While Democratic administrations often prioritize the work of the civil rights division, the protests prompted by the death of George Floyd this spring have made such work an urgent priority, regardless of which party is in office, most interviewees said. To that end, they hoped for an attorney general who had the strong support of civil rights groups. But many acknowledged that for that to be consequential, on issues including complicated ones like policing, that person should be able to work with groups like the Fraternal Order of Police. People were deeply divided over how the department should handle the prospect of investigating Trump or his inner circle. Some argued that Biden himself had no appetite for investigating and prosecuting the past and that the attorney general should take a similar approach. Others, mostly prosecutors, said the department must pursue criminal cases without fear or favor. But those interviewed agreed on one thing: The merits of a case should determine whether the department chose to seek an indictment, and only someone who was seen as nonpartisan could credibly make and explain that sort of sensitive determination. Nearly everyone said that the incoming attorney general would need to reestablish the idea that prosecutions would be free of political pressure from the president. “Great damage has been done to the reputation and credibility of the department by the way it has been used for political purposes,” said Jonathan M. Smith, a former prosecutor in the civil rights division who now serves as executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. He said that Barr had contributed greatly to that process by intervening in high-profile cases involving the president’s allies, such as having the department withdraw its prosecution of the president’s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and presenting the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election as less damning to the president than it really was. But he said the problem of politicization had seeped throughout the agency, preventing career prosecutors from effectively investigating police misconduct. Some current and former employees argued that the leadership’s decision to largely cut career people out of the decision-making process had contributed to politicization. Others argued that it was not entirely unusual and had been done because of the great amount of information that had found its way into the hands of reporters in the Trump era. Regardless, everyone agreed that it had hurt morale. The incoming attorney general should solicit opinions from career officials before deciding on significant matters, one former longtime employee of the department said. Moreover, that leader, the former employee said, should trust deputies to bring issues of importance to top leaders when necessary. An attorney general who adopted “a more inclusive, trust-driven and less hierarchical approach to management” could help repair the department’s culture, said Julie Saltman, a former lawyer in the civil division. “I’d like to see a genuinely good manager.” Many employees said that they wanted an attorney general who would support their desire for accountability in the wake of the Trump era, even if no one from the current administration was prosecuted. In a survey of more than 600 Justice Department alumni conducted by the legal group Protect Democracy, 77% said that the attorney general should work to identify all the ways that the departing administration had eroded the department’s norms and policies and build new procedures to restore its integrity. Only 5% said that a change in administration alone would rebuild credibility and restore morale. “For the government to rebuild norms around Justice Department independence, there needs to be an accounting of what happened and who as involved,” said Rachel Homer, a former lawyer in the civil division.

Under Biden, justice dept. lawyers seek a shield from partisan battles

Conservative groups continued to protest across the United States on Saturday, as tensions rose in downtown Washington after dark as scores of pro-Trump "Proud Boys" protesters and "Antifa" counterprotesters faced off.

The campaigners have been alleging without evidence that President-elect Joe Biden stole the US election.

Organisers of Stop The Steal, linked to pro-Trump operative Roger Stone, and church groups urged supporters to participate in "Jericho Marches" and prayer rallies.

Trump's supporters carrying flags and signs made their way in small knots toward Congress and the Supreme Court through downtown Washington, which was closed to traffic by police vehicles and dump trucks.

Only few of the marchers wore masks, despite soaring COVID-19 deaths and cases, defying a mayoral directive for them to be worn outside. Several thousand people rallied in Washington, fewer than during a similar protest last month.

As some in the crowd echoed far right conspiracy theories about the election, a truck-pulled trailer flew Trump 2020 flags and a sign reading "Trump Unity" while blaring the country song "God Bless the USA."

Around 200 members of the Proud Boys, a violent far right group, had joined the marches earlier on Saturday near the Trump hotel. Many wore combat fatigues and ballistic vests, carried helmets and flashed hand signals used by white nationalists.

The two groups shouted insults at each other across a street near McPherson Square and some set off fireworks, but police kept them apart, according to a Reuters reporter on the scene.

Police pepper-sprayed at least two counter-protesters before the Proud Boys left the area and regrouped several blocks away.

Protests were also planned in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, where Trump's campaign has sought to overturn vote counts.

More than 50 federal and state court rulings have upheld Biden's victory. The US Supreme Court on Friday rejected a long-shot lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Trump seeking to throw out voting results in four states.

General Mike Flynn, Trump's former national security advisor, spoke in his first public address since Trump pardoned him on Nov. 24.

"My charge to you is to go back to where you are from" and make demands, Flynn told the crowd, without being more specific. The US Constitution is "not about collective liberty it is about individual liberties, and they designed it that way," he said.

Trump has refused to concede defeat, alleging without evidence that he was denied victory by massive fraud. On his way to Andrews Air Force Base and then the Army-Navy football game in New York, Trump made three passes in the Marine One helicopter over the cheering protesters.

Some protesters referenced the Biblical miracle of the battle of Jericho, in which the walls of the city crumbled after soldiers and priests blowing horns marched around it.

Conservative groups continued to protest across the United States on Saturday, as tensions rose in downtown Washington after dark as scores of pro-Trump "Proud Boys" protesters and "Antifa" counterprotesters faced off.

Conservative groups continued to protest across the United States on Saturday, as tensions rose in downtown Washington after dark as scores of pro-Trump "Proud Boys" protesters and "Antifa" counterprotesters faced off. The campaigners have been alleging without evidence that President-elect Joe Biden stole the US election. Organisers of Stop The Steal, linked to pro-Trump operative Roger Stone, and church groups urged supporters to participate in "Jericho Marches" and prayer rallies. Trump's supporters carrying flags and signs made their way in small knots toward Congress and the Supreme Court through downtown Washington, which was closed to traffic by police vehicles and dump trucks. Only few of the marchers wore masks, despite soaring COVID-19 deaths and cases, defying a mayoral directive for them to be worn outside. Several thousand people rallied in Washington, fewer than during a similar protest last month. As some in the crowd echoed far right conspiracy theories about the election, a truck-pulled trailer flew Trump 2020 flags and a sign reading "Trump Unity" while blaring the country song "God Bless the USA." Around 200 members of the Proud Boys, a violent far right group, had joined the marches earlier on Saturday near the Trump hotel. Many wore combat fatigues and ballistic vests, carried helmets and flashed hand signals used by white nationalists. The two groups shouted insults at each other across a street near McPherson Square and some set off fireworks, but police kept them apart, according to a Reuters reporter on the scene. Police pepper-sprayed at least two counter-protesters before the Proud Boys left the area and regrouped several blocks away. Protests were also planned in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, where Trump's campaign has sought to overturn vote counts. More than 50 federal and state court rulings have upheld Biden's victory. The US Supreme Court on Friday rejected a long-shot lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Trump seeking to throw out voting results in four states. General Mike Flynn, Trump's former national security advisor, spoke in his first public address since Trump pardoned him on Nov. 24. "My charge to you is to go back to where you are from" and make demands, Flynn told the crowd, without being more specific. The US Constitution is "not about collective liberty it is about individual liberties, and they designed it that way," he said. Trump has refused to concede defeat, alleging without evidence that he was denied victory by massive fraud. On his way to Andrews Air Force Base and then the Army-Navy football game in New York, Trump made three passes in the Marine One helicopter over the cheering protesters. Some protesters referenced the Biblical miracle of the battle of Jericho, in which the walls of the city crumbled after soldiers and priests blowing horns marched around it.

Tensions rise in Washington as pro-Trump protesters continue to decry his loss

A day after President Donald Trump’s stinging defeat in the Supreme Court, Republicans around the country seemed to be having trouble finding the right words.

The bellicose statements from some quarters that had characterized the postelection period — claims of switched and missing votes, a “rigged” election and even threats of secession from Texas Republicans after the ruling on Friday — had given way to something resembling muted resignation and an acceptance of the inevitable.

Many were completely silent, even in the face of a tweet from Trump himself in which he vowed, “WE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT!!”

Of 17 Republican attorneys general who had endorsed the case, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, none agreed to be interviewed by The New York Times. Paxton, who had issued a statement calling the decision “unfortunate,” did not respond to a request for comment.

Other attorneys general who issued statements mostly seemed to acknowledge that all legal avenues had been exhausted in efforts to overturn the election results.

Mike Hunter, the Oklahoma attorney general, saw the end of the road. “The Supreme Court has ruled. The Electoral College is going to meet Monday. We’ve got to accept the results,” Hunter said in a Facebook interview in Oklahoma City. “We need to play the hand we’re dealt.”

A statement by Wayne Stenehjem, the North Dakota attorney general, echoed that. “It now appears that all reasonably arguable legal challenges have been exhausted, and the members of the Electoral College will meet across the country on Monday.”

Derek Schmidt, the Kansas attorney general, summed it up with a statement saying, “It is time to put this election behind us.”

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican who had disagreed with the decision by his state’s attorney general to join the case, said there was no viable path forward for Trump.

“The electoral votes should be cast on Monday, and all indications are that Joe Biden will be the president-elect at that time,” Hutchinson said in a telephone interview, urging the country to move on. “It’s the tradition of our country and the history of our democracy that we do move on beyond that hard-fought election and we unite and we recognize the president-elect’s leadership.”

Hutchinson said he believed the effort led by Texas was based on a flawed legal theory, a view shared by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who had been among the first in her party to congratulate the president-elect on his victory. She called the court’s ruling “an unsurprising affirmation of the principle that one state cannot tell another state how to run its elections.”

On Capitol Hill, the response was particularly muted among the 126 House Republicans who signed onto an extraordinary amicus brief backing the suit. Aides to Reps. Kevin McCarthy of California and Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the party’s top leaders in the House, had no comment. And questions and requests for comments sent to the office of more than two dozen top congressional Republicans on Saturday were either declined or ignored.

Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who assembled the House’s friend of the court brief, merely posted a quote on Twitter from John Quincy Adams, implying he had done what he could: “Duty is ours, results are God’s.”

Just one lawmaker who signed on, Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, appeared newly ready to accept the president’s road had run out.

In a statement, he called the Texas suit “the best and likely last opportunity” to get the Supreme Court to rule on the election, and said the court’s decision “closed the books on the challenges to the 2020 election results.”

“The casting of electoral votes will end a hotly contested election, and we should come together as Americans to work together for the future of our country,” Westerman said, adding that Biden would be the president-elect by Monday.

Others, like Reps. Jodey Arrington of Texas and Ken Buck of Colorado, stressed that the court had not actually rejected the case based on its merits and insinuated, vaguely, that those claims could still have their day in court. But even as they pledged a continued fight, it was clear their options were dwindling.

Speaking on Fox News, Buck called for congressional hearings on election security and while discussing a pair of Senate runoffs in Georgia, indicated obliquely that he believed Biden would be president.

Another ally of the president, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, raised the prospect of using a normally perfunctory joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to challenge the electoral results, though most lawmakers agree that path is very likely futile.

If anything, the brushback from the Supreme Court served to highlight the divisions running through the president’s party more than a month after Election Day.

“At some point, we have to be that nation of laws,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said on Fox, as he sought to instill confidence among fellow Republicans that the election had been decided fairly, and in Biden’s favor.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., was harsher, warning his party on Twitter against excesses like the secession talk thrown around on Friday by Texas GOP chairman Allen West or any further efforts by Republicans to stoke false hopes among their voters.

“I want to be clear: the Supreme Court is not the deep state,” Kinzinger wrote in one tweet. “The case had no merit and was dispatched 9-0. There was no win here. Complaining and bellyaching is not a manly trait, it’s actually sad. Real men accept a loss with grace.”

A day after President Donald Trump’s stinging defeat in the Supreme Court, Republicans around the country seemed to be having trouble finding the right words. The bellicose statements from some quarters that had characterized the postelection period — claims of switched and missing votes, a “rigged” election and even threats of secession from Texas Republicans after the ruling on Friday — had given way to something resembling muted resignation and an acceptance of the inevitable.

A day after President Donald Trump’s stinging defeat in the Supreme Court, Republicans around the country seemed to be having trouble finding the right words. The bellicose statements from some quarters that had characterized the postelection period — claims of switched and missing votes, a “rigged” election and even threats of secession from Texas Republicans after the ruling on Friday — had given way to something resembling muted resignation and an acceptance of the inevitable. Many were completely silent, even in the face of a tweet from Trump himself in which he vowed, “WE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT!!” Of 17 Republican attorneys general who had endorsed the case, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, none agreed to be interviewed by The New York Times. Paxton, who had issued a statement calling the decision “unfortunate,” did not respond to a request for comment. Other attorneys general who issued statements mostly seemed to acknowledge that all legal avenues had been exhausted in efforts to overturn the election results. Mike Hunter, the Oklahoma attorney general, saw the end of the road. “The Supreme Court has ruled. The Electoral College is going to meet Monday. We’ve got to accept the results,” Hunter said in a Facebook interview in Oklahoma City. “We need to play the hand we’re dealt.” A statement by Wayne Stenehjem, the North Dakota attorney general, echoed that. “It now appears that all reasonably arguable legal challenges have been exhausted, and the members of the Electoral College will meet across the country on Monday.” Derek Schmidt, the Kansas attorney general, summed it up with a statement saying, “It is time to put this election behind us.” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican who had disagreed with the decision by his state’s attorney general to join the case, said there was no viable path forward for Trump. “The electoral votes should be cast on Monday, and all indications are that Joe Biden will be the president-elect at that time,” Hutchinson said in a telephone interview, urging the country to move on. “It’s the tradition of our country and the history of our democracy that we do move on beyond that hard-fought election and we unite and we recognize the president-elect’s leadership.” Hutchinson said he believed the effort led by Texas was based on a flawed legal theory, a view shared by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who had been among the first in her party to congratulate the president-elect on his victory. She called the court’s ruling “an unsurprising affirmation of the principle that one state cannot tell another state how to run its elections.” On Capitol Hill, the response was particularly muted among the 126 House Republicans who signed onto an extraordinary amicus brief backing the suit. Aides to Reps. Kevin McCarthy of California and Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the party’s top leaders in the House, had no comment. And questions and requests for comments sent to the office of more than two dozen top congressional Republicans on Saturday were either declined or ignored. Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who assembled the House’s friend of the court brief, merely posted a quote on Twitter from John Quincy Adams, implying he had done what he could: “Duty is ours, results are God’s.” Just one lawmaker who signed on, Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, appeared newly ready to accept the president’s road had run out. In a statement, he called the Texas suit “the best and likely last opportunity” to get the Supreme Court to rule on the election, and said the court’s decision “closed the books on the challenges to the 2020 election results.” “The casting of electoral votes will end a hotly contested election, and we should come together as Americans to work together for the future of our country,” Westerman said, adding that Biden would be the president-elect by Monday. Others, like Reps. Jodey Arrington of Texas and Ken Buck of Colorado, stressed that the court had not actually rejected the case based on its merits and insinuated, vaguely, that those claims could still have their day in court. But even as they pledged a continued fight, it was clear their options were dwindling. Speaking on Fox News, Buck called for congressional hearings on election security and while discussing a pair of Senate runoffs in Georgia, indicated obliquely that he believed Biden would be president. Another ally of the president, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, raised the prospect of using a normally perfunctory joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to challenge the electoral results, though most lawmakers agree that path is very likely futile. If anything, the brushback from the Supreme Court served to highlight the divisions running through the president’s party more than a month after Election Day. “At some point, we have to be that nation of laws,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said on Fox, as he sought to instill confidence among fellow Republicans that the election had been decided fairly, and in Biden’s favor. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., was harsher, warning his party on Twitter against excesses like the secession talk thrown around on Friday by Texas GOP chairman Allen West or any further efforts by Republicans to stoke false hopes among their voters. “I want to be clear: the Supreme Court is not the deep state,” Kinzinger wrote in one tweet. “The case had no merit and was dispatched 9-0. There was no win here. Complaining and bellyaching is not a manly trait, it’s actually sad. Real men accept a loss with grace.”

Republicans find themselves speechless following a Supreme Court defeat

Four people were stabbed and one shot as rallies backing&nbsp;President Donald Trump's baseless claims of election fraud led to clashes in major US cities on Saturday.

Scuffles broke out in many places between rally-goers and counter-protesters who turned up to criticize the president, who lost the November 3 election to Democrat Joe Biden but is yet to concede.

Washington State Police said in a tweet late Saturday that a shooting had taken place after clashes near the capitol building in Olympia, and that a suspect had been detained.

In the US capital, DC Fire and EMS Department communications chief Doug Buchanan told AFP that four people had been stabbed and were now hospitalized "with serious injuries." The New York Times reported that 23 had been arrested throughout the day.

There was no indication of whether any of the victims had been involved in the protests, on either side of the divide.

The day had begun with a festive atmosphere as thousands of red-hatted protesters filled Washington's streets to support the president, undeterred by the US Supreme Court's rejection on Friday of what may have been his last chance to overturn the results.

Similar events took place in Olympia, Atlanta and St. Paul, Minnesota, as well as in smaller towns in Nebraska, Alabama and elsewhere.

Demonstrators at the DC rally -- noticeably smaller than a similar protest last month -- told AFP they were steadfast in their support for the embattled president.

"We're not gonna give up," said Luke Wilson, a sixty-something protester who had come all the way from the western state of Idaho.

"I believe there is a big injustice being done to the American people," added Dell Quick, a regular at Trump's political rallies, as he brandished a flag defending gun rights.

Protesters offered no shortage of explanations for the poll results, even though they have been affirmed by state election officials -- several of them Republican -- and by judges in several key states.

Every state has now certified the results, giving Biden 306 votes in the Electoral College to Trump's 232. Electors are to formally cast their votes Monday.

But protesters insisted, as Trump has repeatedly, that there was widespread fraud in the election.

Some pointed to "foreign interference," others to software that allegedly erased millions of votes for the president -- but not those for other Republican candidates on the same ballots.&nbsp;

Quick told AFP that "there's no way possible" that Biden won.

Susan Bowman, a 62-year-old from Hampton, Virginia, said "this is not a banana republic. We need to fix the election."

Those who addressed the crowd included Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser who was recently pardoned by the president after admitting that he lied to the FBI over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.

- 'Stolen' election -

Dozens of court cases alleging fraud or contesting the result have been decided -- virtually all in Biden's favor, with some judges offering stinging criticism of the lack of evidence.

But that was not enough for 47-year-old Darlene Denton, who wore a "Trump 2024" badge on her sweatshirt.

"Nobody wants to hear evidence, nobody wants to hear cases, everything just gets thrown out," said Denton, who had come from Tennessee to support a president she said had given "a voice to the people."

Trump, in stark defiance of the clear result and of US tradition, has refused to concede to Biden.

"Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal," he tweeted early Saturday. "Didn't know about this, but I'll be seeing them!"

Not long afterward, his helicopter lifted off from the White House grounds and passed over the crowd -- many singing the US national anthem -- as Trump headed to New York to attend the annual Army-Navy football game.

Among the protesters, members of the far-right militia group the Proud Boys were clearly visible -- in their signature black-and-yellow outfits, some wearing bulletproof vests -- and they often drew cheers from others in the crowd.

Some blocks away, supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement held their own, much smaller, rally, chanting "Nazis out!"

Police, some in riot gear, used their bodies and bicycles to keep the groups apart. There was also at least one clash between police and counter-protesters.

Four people were stabbed and one shot as rallies backing President Donald Trump's baseless claims of election fraud led to clashes in major US cities on Saturday.

Four people were stabbed and one shot as rallies backing President Donald Trump's baseless claims of election fraud led to clashes in major US cities on Saturday. Scuffles broke out in many places between rally-goers and counter-protesters who turned up to criticize the president, who lost the November 3 election to Democrat Joe Biden but is yet to concede. Washington State Police said in a tweet late Saturday that a shooting had taken place after clashes near the capitol building in Olympia, and that a suspect had been detained. In the US capital, DC Fire and EMS Department communications chief Doug Buchanan told AFP that four people had been stabbed and were now hospitalized "with serious injuries." The New York Times reported that 23 had been arrested throughout the day. There was no indication of whether any of the victims had been involved in the protests, on either side of the divide. The day had begun with a festive atmosphere as thousands of red-hatted protesters filled Washington's streets to support the president, undeterred by the US Supreme Court's rejection on Friday of what may have been his last chance to overturn the results. Similar events took place in Olympia, Atlanta and St. Paul, Minnesota, as well as in smaller towns in Nebraska, Alabama and elsewhere. Demonstrators at the DC rally -- noticeably smaller than a similar protest last month -- told AFP they were steadfast in their support for the embattled president. "We're not gonna give up," said Luke Wilson, a sixty-something protester who had come all the way from the western state of Idaho. "I believe there is a big injustice being done to the American people," added Dell Quick, a regular at Trump's political rallies, as he brandished a flag defending gun rights. Protesters offered no shortage of explanations for the poll results, even though they have been affirmed by state election officials -- several of them Republican -- and by judges in several key states. Every state has now certified the results, giving Biden 306 votes in the Electoral College to Trump's 232. Electors are to formally cast their votes Monday. But protesters insisted, as Trump has repeatedly, that there was widespread fraud in the election. Some pointed to "foreign interference," others to software that allegedly erased millions of votes for the president -- but not those for other Republican candidates on the same ballots. Quick told AFP that "there's no way possible" that Biden won. Susan Bowman, a 62-year-old from Hampton, Virginia, said "this is not a banana republic. We need to fix the election." Those who addressed the crowd included Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser who was recently pardoned by the president after admitting that he lied to the FBI over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. - 'Stolen' election - Dozens of court cases alleging fraud or contesting the result have been decided -- virtually all in Biden's favor, with some judges offering stinging criticism of the lack of evidence. But that was not enough for 47-year-old Darlene Denton, who wore a "Trump 2024" badge on her sweatshirt. "Nobody wants to hear evidence, nobody wants to hear cases, everything just gets thrown out," said Denton, who had come from Tennessee to support a president she said had given "a voice to the people." Trump, in stark defiance of the clear result and of US tradition, has refused to concede to Biden. "Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal," he tweeted early Saturday. "Didn't know about this, but I'll be seeing them!" Not long afterward, his helicopter lifted off from the White House grounds and passed over the crowd -- many singing the US national anthem -- as Trump headed to New York to attend the annual Army-Navy football game. Among the protesters, members of the far-right militia group the Proud Boys were clearly visible -- in their signature black-and-yellow outfits, some wearing bulletproof vests -- and they often drew cheers from others in the crowd. Some blocks away, supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement held their own, much smaller, rally, chanting "Nazis out!" Police, some in riot gear, used their bodies and bicycles to keep the groups apart. There was also at least one clash between police and counter-protesters.

Four stabbed and one shot after pro-Trump rallies

Donald Trump's supporters take to streets for another 'Million MAGA March'

US authorities on Friday carried out their 10th execution of the year, the last in a series of capital punishments that President Donald Trump's administration has carried out before he leaves office.

Alfred Bourgeois, a Black man sentenced to death for the murder of his two-year-old daughter, was executed by lethal injection at a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

"Bourgeois was pronounced deceased at 8:21 pm Eastern Standard Time by the Vigo County Coroner," the federal prison said in a statement.

The execution occurred a day after another convicted prisoner, Brandon Bernard, was also executed in Terre Haute.

Following a paternity test, Bourgeois, a 55-year-old former truck driver, took temporary custody of his daughter and brought her on a trucking route for part of the summer of 2002.

He severely abused her and eventually smashed her skull on the windshield.

Since the crime took place on a military base where he was making a delivery, he was tried in federal court and sentenced to death in 2004.&nbsp;

He remained on death row, with the United States having suspended federal executions beginning in 2003, in particular because of questions over the legality of drugs used in injections.

Trump however restarted federal executions in July -- even though states still using capital punishment have delayed theirs due to the dangers posed to prison staff and witnesses by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Seven federal executions occurred before the November 3 election that Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden, who is due to be sworn in on January 20 despite the outgoing president's refusal to concede.

Biden has pledged to work with Congress to bring an end to federal executions.

For 131 years, outgoing presidents traditionally suspended federal executions during the transition period.

But the Trump administration had announced six executions between November and January, including Bourgeois.

His lawyers had asked the US Supreme Court to intervene, saying he suffers from a mental disability.

"The jury that sentenced Mr Bourgeois to death never learned that he was a person with intellectual disability because his trial lawyers did not present the evidence that was available to them," said his new lawyer Victor Abreu.

After the execution, his legal team issued a statement saying that "tonight, the United States killed a man with intellectual disability in spite of clear directives from the US Supreme Court and federal laws that prohibited it."&nbsp;

Bourgeois was the 17th person executed in the United States in 2020, a historic low linked to the suspensions at the state level.

He was the 10th executed at the federal level, the highest in more than a century.

US authorities on Friday carried out their 10th execution of the year, the last in a series of capital punishments that President Donald Trump's administration has carried out before he leaves office.

US authorities on Friday carried out their 10th execution of the year, the last in a series of capital punishments that President Donald Trump's administration has carried out before he leaves office. Alfred Bourgeois, a Black man sentenced to death for the murder of his two-year-old daughter, was executed by lethal injection at a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. "Bourgeois was pronounced deceased at 8:21 pm Eastern Standard Time by the Vigo County Coroner," the federal prison said in a statement. The execution occurred a day after another convicted prisoner, Brandon Bernard, was also executed in Terre Haute. Following a paternity test, Bourgeois, a 55-year-old former truck driver, took temporary custody of his daughter and brought her on a trucking route for part of the summer of 2002. He severely abused her and eventually smashed her skull on the windshield. Since the crime took place on a military base where he was making a delivery, he was tried in federal court and sentenced to death in 2004. He remained on death row, with the United States having suspended federal executions beginning in 2003, in particular because of questions over the legality of drugs used in injections. Trump however restarted federal executions in July -- even though states still using capital punishment have delayed theirs due to the dangers posed to prison staff and witnesses by the Covid-19 pandemic. Seven federal executions occurred before the November 3 election that Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden, who is due to be sworn in on January 20 despite the outgoing president's refusal to concede. Biden has pledged to work with Congress to bring an end to federal executions. For 131 years, outgoing presidents traditionally suspended federal executions during the transition period. But the Trump administration had announced six executions between November and January, including Bourgeois. His lawyers had asked the US Supreme Court to intervene, saying he suffers from a mental disability. "The jury that sentenced Mr Bourgeois to death never learned that he was a person with intellectual disability because his trial lawyers did not present the evidence that was available to them," said his new lawyer Victor Abreu. After the execution, his legal team issued a statement saying that "tonight, the United States killed a man with intellectual disability in spite of clear directives from the US Supreme Court and federal laws that prohibited it." Bourgeois was the 17th person executed in the United States in 2020, a historic low linked to the suspensions at the state level. He was the 10th executed at the federal level, the highest in more than a century.

US executes another inmate before Trump leaves office

U.S supreme court has dismissed a long-shot bid by President Donald Trump and the state of taxes to overturn the election results in 4 states that were won by Joe Biden. Supreme court Blocks Donald Trump's legal path to reverse the loss.

U.S. supreme court rejects Texas lawsuit

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