Experts Game Out What Might Happen If The Election Goes Off The Rails
July 30, 20204:19 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
4-Minute Listen

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SHAPIRO: Rosa Brooks, who worked in President Obama's Defense Department, is the co-organizer of the Transition Integrity Project. Last month, this bipartisan group of political operatives, academics and former government officials spent a day exploring what might happen if the election goes off the rails. Brooks told me it's fair to say all of them participated out of concern for this fall's election.

ROSA BROOKS: We had about 70 or 80 people. We put them on two teams. We had a Team Trump - a Trump campaign team, a Team Biden. We had GOP and Democratic elected official teams. We had a media team and teams representing sort of career civil servants. And we essentially did a number of exercises where we gave them each a scenario. One of our scenarios was a decisive Biden win. One was a decisive Trump win. One was a narrow Biden win. One was a period of extended uncertainty as in the election of 2000.

In each of our exercises, the Trump campaign team came right out of the gate, tried to stop the counting of mail-in ballots, tried to assert that they were fraudulent, in one case closed the post office to prevent additional ballots from reaching the ballot counters, in another case seized and tried to sequester the ballots to prevent additional counting.

In all of our scenarios, the team that feared an electoral - a ballot count loss attempted to persuade legislators, state-level legislators and governors sympathetic to them to send rival slates of electors to Congress. We had both sides attempting to mobilize street protesters. And I can say that in each of the exercises, the players playing the Trump team were significantly more ruthless and willing to play fast and loose with the truth than the team playing the Biden campaign.

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I think it really shocked people out of that and made them see there's a very real chance that it won't be fine if you all sit back and just assume it won't be fine (laughter). If you want it to be fine - if you want this to be a normal, free and fair election, you need to be thinking right now about how we protect the integrity of the election and the transition.

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/30/897345056/experts-game-out-what-might-happen-if-the-election-goes-off-the-rails

How I learned to relax and love Donald Trump | Opinion
Posted: June 23, 2020 - 10:14 AM
Curtis Milam, For The Inquirer

I am the son of an Air Force brigadier general and served myself to the rank of colonel. Of my 57 years drawing breath, I’ve spent 51 of them directly or indirectly serving this once great nation. So, as you might imagine, I found myself on Nov. 8, 2016, more than a little dismayed at the news we had elevated Donald J. Trump to the nation’s highest office — a man so clearly unfit to lead America.

But over time I’ve come to appreciate Trump in ways I did not expect. Now, I am thankful that we elected Trump. Because Donald Trump is exactly what America needed. Trump is a mirror, a warning, and ultimately a catalyst for change. Reflected in Trump is all that is wrong with the United States: the injustice of our broken social contract, the crassness of our politics, and the cruelty of our economy. Trump is also the shock that a mature democracy needs for action. To use a timely metaphor, Trump and his supporters are a virus, and they have activated our democratic antibodies. What we are seeing in the streets is the body fighting the infection.

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Beginning with Newt Gingrich in 1994, Republicans stopped trying to govern and instead began accumulating power. McKay Coppins writes in his profile of Gingrich in the Atlantic, “… few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise.” Effective governance requires compromise, trust, and mutual respect. Gingrich’s new version of Republican had no interest in that. He destroyed the bipartisan structures for governing and even resorted to name-calling and conspiracy theories — over the line at the time, but in hindsight presaging Trumpism.

A straight line can be drawn from Gingrich’s “Contract with America” to the tea party in 2009. Another outsider movement characterized by distrust of government, expertise, and experience, the tea party helped elect a rogues’ gallery of loathsome lawmakers — I’m looking at you, Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ted Cruz (Texas). Trump’s dystopian vision of America is the ultimate flowering of the outsider, populist, anti-government thinking that has metastasized in the Republican Party over the past decades.

More: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/donald-trump-revolution-uprising-election-2020-20200623.html

Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First
5/28/20 2:01PM

MINNEAPOLIS—Calling for a more measured way to express opposition to police brutality, critics slammed demonstrators Thursday for recklessly looting businesses without forming a private equity firm first. “Look, we all have the right to protest, but that doesn’t mean you can just rush in and destroy any business without gathering a group of clandestine investors to purchase it at a severely reduced price and slowly bleed it to death,” said Facebook commenter Amy Mulrain, echoing the sentiments of detractors nationwide who blasted the demonstrators for not hiring a consultant group to take stock of a struggling company’s assets before plundering. “I understand that people are angry, but they shouldn’t just endanger businesses without even a thought to enriching themselves through leveraged buyouts and across-the-board terminations. It’s disgusting to put workers at risk by looting. You do it by chipping away at their health benefits and eventually laying them off. There’s a right way and wrong way to do this.” At press time, critics recommended that protestors hold law enforcement accountable by simply purchasing the Minneapolis police department from taxpayers.

https://www.theonion.com/protestors-criticized-for-looting-businesses-without-fo-1843735351

Events / All Ages
Museum 360°: Giants of Florida’s Prehistoric Past
Thursday, June 25
3:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Florida Museum of Natural History
Bring the Florida Museum to your home! Take a 360° virtual tour and learn about five of the most spectacular giants on display with Bruce MacFadden, curator of vertebrate paleontology and director of the University of Florida Thompson Earth Systems Institute. Discover the stories of the Columbian Mammoth, American Mastodon, Megalodon Shark, Terror Bird and Giant Ground Sloth, including how they got so big and why they went extinct.

The tour will be livestreamed on Facebook and Zoom. Ask questions along the way and have a Museum experience from home!
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/event/museum-360-florida-giants/

Melania Trump was in no rush to move into the White House. That’s when she renegotiated her prenup, a new book says.
By Jada Yuan
June 12, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

When Melania Trump stayed behind in New York after her husband’s presidential inauguration, she said it was because she didn’t want to interrupt their then-10-year-old son Barron’s school year. News stories at the time concentrated on an apparent frostiness between the first couple and on the exorbitant taxpayer costs to protect Melania and Barron away from Washington.

Those stories are true, but Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan reveals in a new book that the first lady was also using her delayed arrival to the White House as leverage for renegotiating her prenuptial agreement with President Trump.

The campaign had been full of harsh news about Trump’s alleged sexual indiscretions and infidelities, from the “grab them by the p---y” Access Hollywood tape to an affair with Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal; Melania Trump learned new details from the media coverage, Jordan writes.

The incoming first lady needed time to cool off, and “to amend her financial arrangement with Trump — what Melania referred to as ‘taking care of Barron,’ ” Jordan writes in “The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump.”

More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/melania-book-art-of-her-deal-prenup-white-house/2020/06/11/ce63ec02-abec-11ea-94d2-d7bc43b26bf9_story.html