One idea Trump considered while still at Walter Reed was wearing a Superman T-shirt under his dress shirt as he left the hospital.
@maggieNYT

Lindsey Graham, facing a Black challenger: "If you're a young African American...you can go anywhere in this state, you just need to be conservative not liberal." #SCSen

The part about Gore is true. But Nixon did no such thing. In fact, his top aides and the Republican Party, almost certainly with Nixon’s backing, waged a campaign to cast doubt on the outcome of the election, launching challenges to Kennedy’s victories in 11 states. Far from providing a counterexample to Trump, the 1960 election aftermath amounts to one more way in which Nixon, known for his contempt for the Constitution, furnished Trump with a playbook for thinking about political power. And let’s remember that in the end, it didn’t work: While Nixon’s gambit was cynical and disruptive, it went nowhere, suggesting it’s harder to overturn a presidential election result than doomsayers suppose.

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In fact, from election night onward, Nixon hedged his bets. As the vote totals came in favoring Kennedy, the vice president pulled back from a full-throated concession. He cagily couched his formal remarks in tricky caveats. “I want Senator Kennedy to know,” he said on television at 4 a.m., “and I want all of you to know, that if this trend does continue, and he does become our next president, then he will have my wholehearted support.” The wording was pure Nixon, leaving himself abundant wiggle room with that little if.

Nixon’s crew recognized that overturning an election result would be an extreme long shot. They often admitted as much to the press. But that didn’t stop them from trying. They calculated that even if they failed, it would still be possible to cast doubt over Kennedy’s victory, imbuing his presidency with a whiff of illegitimacy. This in turn would rally their base voters for future elections.

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Ironically, a recount did end up changing the vote totals in one state: Hawaii. When the state finally finished counting its votes, on November 16, Nixon led by 141 votes. Given the Republican challenges elsewhere, Democrats called for a recount, which began on December 13. Fifteen days later, a judge ruled that the state’s electors—at first awarded to Kennedy, then reassigned to Nixon after auditing mistakes were found—was rightfully Kennedy’s all along. The result of all the Republican lawyering and politicking had been a net loss of three electoral votes. “The recount in the one state the Democrats asked for turned from Republican to Democrat,” Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger noted dryly, as if suppressing the temptation to gloat, “and nothing happened at all in the 11 states that they were going to seek recounts in.

For Republicans, fearful of a possible electoral disaster just weeks away, it has become safe at last to diss Donald Trump — or at least to distance themselves from him in unmistakably purposeful ways.

A barrage of barbed comments in recent days shows how markedly the calculus of fear has shifted in the GOP. For much of the past four years, Republican politicians were scared above all about incurring the wrath of the president and his supporters with any stray gesture or remark that he might regard as not sufficiently deferential. Now, several of them are evidently more scared of not being viewed by voters as sufficiently independent.

This is far from an insurrection. Republicans in the main aren’t outright repudiating Trump. But they are effectively rolling their eyes in exasperation with him, and especially his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Among the most vivid recent examples:


* Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas acknowledging in a Friday interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that he’s “worried” about the election, which he warned could be a “bloodbath of Watergate proportions” for his party, depending on how voters view the pandemic and economy on Election Day.

President Trump will hold his first rally outside of Washington following his coronavirus diagnosis at the Orlando Sanford International Airport on Monday, his reelection campaign said Friday.

“Will be in Sanford, Florida on Monday for a very BIG RALLY!” Trump tweeted.

The event will come 10 days after his originally scheduled rally at the airport was canceled because of the positive virus test he and First Lady Melania Trump received. He revealed that news in a tweet early that Friday morning.

It will also happen two days after Vice President Mike Pence’s campaign swing through Orlando and The Villages on Saturday, as Trump and Vice President Joe Biden battle for votes in the crucial swing state of Florida.

Pence and Mrs Pence have tested negative again today, per a senior administration official

Pence didn’t answer the question, refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer himself. He then aired the false claim that the Obama-Biden administration “spied” on the Trump campaign in 2016, citing new “documents” supposedly showing Hillary Clinton’s campaign concocted the claim of Russian interference.

For a good unraveling of this latest nonsense, see Glenn Kessler’s new piece. But what’s important here is the connection between this latest turn in the bogus “Obamagate” scandal and the refusal to commit to a peaceful transition.


This link is being increasingly drawn of late. Indeed, Trump himself drew it on Hannity. Just before hailing Pence’s answer on the transition question, Trump railed that the previous administration had been caught “spying on our campaign,” which he called an act of “treason.”

In short, that invented scandal is morphing into the justification for refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer as the election nears. (bolding mine) The Trump campaign also just echoed this in a fundraising email highlighted by reporter Kyle Cheney, which shrieks that due to that fake scandal, “Biden shouldn’t be allowed to run.”