El Trumpo Continues His Hissy Fits

A Trump administration appointee is refusing to sign a letter allowing President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team to formally begin its work this week, in another sign the incumbent president has not acknowledged Biden’s victory and could disrupt the transfer of power.

The administrator of the General Services Administration, the low-profile agency in charge of federal buildings, has a little-known role when a new president is elected: to sign paperwork officially turning over millions of dollars, as well as give access to government officials, office space in agencies and equipment authorized for the taxpayer-funded transition teams of the winner.

It amounts to a formal declaration by the federal government, outside of the media, of the winner of the presidential race.

But by Sunday evening, almost 36 hours after media outlets projected Biden as the winner, GSA Administrator Emily Murphy had written no such letter.

Butt-Monkey Barr has given the DoJ the green light to investigate fraud if any is found to exist:

Attorney General William Barr has authorized federal prosecutors across the U.S. to pursue “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities, if they exist, before the 2020 presidential election is certified, despite no evidence of widespread fraud.

Barr’s action comes days after Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump and raises the prospect that Trump will use the Justice Department to try to challenge the outcome. It gives prosecutors the ability to go around longstanding Justice Department policy that normally would prohibit such overt actions before the election is certified. ... On Monday night, the Justice Department’s top prosecutor for election crimes, Richard Pilger, said he would step down from that post in response to the attorney general’s memo, according to an email he sent to colleagues and obtained by the AP.

Meanwhile, even Fox News has had enough with Trump's lies:

Moments into a Trump campaign press conference on Monday afternoon at which White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany charged that Democrats were “welcoming fraud” and “illegal voting,” Fox News host Neil Cavuto had heard enough.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, I just think we have to be very clear. She’s charging the other side is welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting,” Cavuto said, interrupting the video feed of the briefing, which McEnany said she was conducting in her “personal capacity” rather than in her official White House role. “Unless she has more details to back that up I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this. I want to make sure that maybe they do have something to back that up, but that’s an explosive charge to make — that the other side is effectively rigging and cheating.”

I have varying feelings about this. On the one hand, Trump is ginning up the paaranoia and frothing of those elements of his base that are batshit crazy. We'll see more protest by Trumpist lunatics with guns. Trump and his base are doing the work of the Chinese and of the Russians, both of whom like nothing better than to see Americans tear down their own institutions.

Think of that: If you are one of those parroting baseless claims of fraud, you are one of Putin's useful idiots.

On the other hand, what Trump is doing, right now, is sealing his historical legacy as one of the worst presidents in American history. The spirits of Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Warren Harding are smiling and saying to one another: "Hey, even we weren't as bad as that guy."