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Donald Trumps flirtation with declaring martial law in battleground states and appointing a conspiracy theorist as special counsel to help his attempt to overturn defeat by Joe Biden are really sad and nutty and loopy, Mitt Romney said on Sunday.

Hes leaving Washington with a whole series of conspiracy theories and things that are so nutty and loopy that people are shaking their head wondering what in the world has gotten into this man, the Utah Republican senator said.

Joe Biden won the 3 November election by 306-232 in the electoral college and leads by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote. Nonetheless, Trump is entertaining outlandish schemes to remain in office, egged on by allies like former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who Trump pardoned for lying to the FBI, and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, the presidents personal attorney.

During a Friday meeting at the White House first reported by the New York Times then widely reported elsewhere, Trump discussed security clearance for Sidney Powell, a conspiracy-spouting attorney who was cut from Trumps campaign legal team.

It was unclear if Trump would actually attempt to install Powell as a special counsel, a position appointed by the US attorney general, not the president. Numerous Republicans, from outgoing attorney general William Barr to governors and state officials, have said repeatedly there is no evidence of the voter fraud Trump alleges.

Its not going to happen, Romney told CNN. Thats going nowhere. And I understand the president is casting about trying to find some way to have a different result than the one that was delivered by the American people, but its really sad in a lot of respects and embarrassing.

Because the president could right now be writing the last chapter of this administration, with a victory lap with regards to the [Covid-19] vaccine. After all he pushed aggressively to get the vaccine developed and distributed, thats happening on a quick timeframe. He could be going out and championing this extraordinary success.

Instead this last chapter suggests what he is going to be known for.

Trumps campaign and allies have filed around 50 lawsuits alleging voting fraud almost all have been dismissed. Trump has lost before judges of both parties, including some he appointed, and some of the strongest rebukes have come from conservative Republicans. The supreme court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority and three Trump appointees, has refused to take up cases.

During the Friday meeting, Giuliani pushed Trump to seize voting machines. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) made clear that it had no authority to do so. It is unclear what such a move could accomplish.

Barr told the Associated Press this month the Department of Justice and DHS had looked into claims voting machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results and so far, we havent seen anything to substantiate that. Paper ballots have been used to verify results, including in Georgia, which performed two audits of its vote tally, confirming Bidens victory.

Flynn went yet further, suggesting Trump could impose martial law and use the military to re-run the election. Chief of staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone voiced objections, people familiar with the Friday meeting told news outlets. Trump, who spent much of the weekend tweeting and retweeting electoral fraud claims, responded on Twitter.

Martial law = Fake News, he wrote. Just more knowingly bad reporting!

John Bolton, a successor to Flynn as national security adviser, told CNN the martial law idea was appalling and said Trump was incompetent. Trump responded: What would Bolton, one of the dumbest people in Washington, know?

Trump maintains a secure grip on the Republican party, seemingly guaranteeing challenges to the electoral college result in Congress on 6 January. Such objections will be for political ends and will not in all likelihood succeed in overturning the election result. Democrats hold the House and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he will knock down challenges in the Senate.

On Sunday, Trump called Georgia senator David Perdue up for re-election in one of two crucial runoffs in January a great guy and patriot for apparently planning to lodge a challenge himself.

On NBCs Meet the Press, Romney, who did better at the polls in his 2012 defeat by Barack Obama than Trump did in 2016 and 2020, was asked if his party could ever escape Trumps grip.

I believe the Republican party has changed pretty dramatically, he said. And by that, I mean that the people who consider themselves Republican and voted for President Trump I think is a different cohort than the cohort that voted for me.

You look at those that are thinking about running in 2024, [they are] trying to see who can be the most like President Trump. And that suggests that the party doesnt want to take a different direction.

Josh Hawley of Missouri, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Ted Cruz of Texas are among senators thought likely to run to succeed Trump in the White House should he not run himself and therefore likely to challenge the electoral college result.

On Sunday, the website Axios reported that Trump has abandoned plans to announce his own candidacy for 2024 before Biden is inaugurated, because it would show his base hes given up his fight to overturn this years result.

I dont think anyone whos looking at running in 2024 has the kind of style and shtick that President Trump has, Romney said. He has a unique and capable politician But I think the direction youre seeing is one that he set out.

Id like to see a different version of the Republican party. But my side is very small these days I think we recognise that character actually does count.

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Romney decries martial law discussion in Trump's White House - The Guardian

Donald Trump decreed on Monday that all new US federal buildings should be beautiful, in a long-expected executive order which excoriated architectural modernism but stopped short of demanding that all such projects should be in the classical style.

The Pulitzer prize-winning architectural critic Paul Goldberger said the order was mostly symbolic and just a chance [for Trump] to lob another grenade on his way out the door.

When a draft of the order first surfaced, in February, critics reacted with horror to its promise to make federal buildings beautiful again by mandating a return to the classical architectural style.

Both the American Institute of Architects and the National Trust for Historic Preservation objected, while Goldberger told the Guardian the problem was not with classical architecture per se, but that the mandating of an official style is not fully compatible with 21st-century liberal democracy.

Ten months later, and with the end of Trumps time in office looming, the finished order arrived.

Its text extols examples of classical US public architecture including the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, the Pioneer Courthouse in Portland, Oregon, and the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse in New York City.

In Washington DC, it adds, classical buildings such as the White House, the Capitol building, the supreme court, the Department of the Treasury and the Lincoln Memorial have become iconic symbols of our system of government.

It also bemoans buildings put up from the 1950s onwards, from the undistinguished to designs even [the General Services Administration] now admits many in the public found unappealing.

Encouraging classical and traditional architecture does not exclude using most other styles of architecture where appropriate, the order says. Care must be taken, however, to ensure that all federal building designs command respect of the general public for their beauty and visual embodiment of Americas ideals.

Saying the GSA must seek public and staff input on designs, the order also establishes a Presidents Council on Improving Federal Civic Architecture, meant to police if not forbid outright any federal project that diverges from the preferred architecture set forth in this order, including brutalist or deconstructivist architecture or any design derived from or related to these types of architecture.

Given his career in real estate developments marked by a love for gold, gilt, black marble and baroque excess, not to mention the brutal treatment of beloved old buildings, Trumps professed love for classicism has attracted critical comment.

Some federal projects in neoclassical style have been initiated but the inauguration of Joe Biden on 20 January may spell the end of Trumps attempt to impose beautiful buildings by order.

On Monday, Goldberger wrote on Twitter: This is weakened from the original proposal and in any case is mostly symbolic, just a chance to lob another grenade on his way out the door. I dont think it means too much. And unlike last-minute pardons, the next administration can mitigate its impact, or reverse it.

Before the order was issued, a Democratic member of Congress, Dina Titus of Nevada, introduced legislation to stop the GSA blocking modernist designs.

Imposing a preferred architectural style for federal facilities runs counter to our nations democratic traditions, Titus said in a letter to the GSA administrator, Emily Murphy, reported by Bloomberg News.

Attempting to implement this misguided mandate from Washington DC by circumventing Congress and gutting decades of GSA policy and practice without any public notice or hearing is even worse.

Link:
Trump issues order to demand new US federal buildings be 'beautiful' - The Guardian

Donald Trump will leave the White House without any major drug pricing plan to his name.

A federal judge on Wednesday agreed to issue a temporary restraining order against Trumps controversial most favored nation plan, which Trump tried to push through in an executive order. The plan would have limited Medicare reimbursements to what drug companies are paid in other affluent nations which is currently far less than the premiums available in the US.

The plan had been pushed through the process in an attempt to make it effective New Years day. With the restraining order, however, its unlikely to ever see the light of day.

PhRMA and a whole phalanx of industry groups like the AHA who sought the order were prepared to fight tooth and nail against the proposal. And come January 20, all the players will reassess a debate that has run on for years as Joe Biden is sworn in.

The only certain thing about all this: The debate over drug pricing shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

Trump tried to get this to fly through an interim final rule, which would have circumvented the usual discussion period.

In a statement, PhRMA general counsel James Stansel lambasted the policy and the procedure.

The Most Favored Nation Interim Final Rule is bad policy that is contrary to law and that the administration expressly admits will disrupt patients access to medicines. By pushing through a nationwide, mandatory policy change, the administration is essentially rewriting the Medicare statute. It is circumventing Congress entirely, ignoring the roles assigned to the executive and legislative branches.

Originally posted here:
A federal judge blocks Donald Trump's 'most favored nation' drug pricing plan as the lease runs out on the White House - Endpoints News

WASHINGTON (AP) The most improbable of presidents, Donald Trump reshaped the office and shattered its centuries-old norms and traditions while dominating the national discourse like no one before.

Trump, governing by whim and tweet, deepened the nations racial and cultural divides and undermined faith in its institutions. His legacy: a tumultuous four years that were marked by his impeachment, failures during the worst pandemic in a century and his refusal to accept defeat.

He smashed conceptions about how presidents behave and communicate, offering unvarnished thoughts and policy declarations alike, pulling back the curtain for the American people while enthralling supporters and unnerving foes and sometimes allies both at home and abroad.

While the nation would be hardpressed to elect another figure as disruptive as Trump, it remains to be seen how much of his imprint on the office itself, occupied by only 44 other men, will be indelible. Already it shadows the work of his successor, President-elect Joe Biden, who framed his candidacy as a repudiation of Trump, offering himself as an antidote to the chaos and dissent of the past four years while vowing to restore dignity to the Oval Office.

For all four years, this is someone who at every opportunity tried to stretch presidential power beyond the limits of the law, said presidential historian Michael Beschloss. He altered the presidency in many ways, but many of them can be changed back almost overnight by a president who wants to make the point that there is a change.

Trumps most enduring legacy may be his use of the trappings of the presidency to erode Americans views of the institutions of their own government.

From his first moments in office, Trump waged an assault on the federal bureaucracy, casting a suspicious eye on career officials he deemed the Deep State and shaking Americans confidence in civil servants and the levers of government. Believing that the investigation into Russian election interference was a crusade to undermine him, Trump went after the intelligence agencies and Justice Department calling out leaders by name and later unleashed broadsides against the man running the probe, respected special counsel Robert Mueller.

His other targets were legion: the Supreme Court for insufficient loyalty; the post office for its handling of mail-in ballots; even the integrity of the vote itself with his baseless claims of election fraud.

In the past, presidents who lost were always willing to turn the office over to the next person. They were willing to accept the vote of the American public, said Richard Waterman, who studies the presidency at the University of Kentucky. What were seeing right now is really an assault on the institutions of democracy.

Current polling suggests that many Americans, and a majority of Republicans, feel that Biden was illegitimately elected, damaging his credibility as he takes office during a crisis and also creating a template of deep suspicion for future elections.

Thats a cancer, Waterman said. I dont know if the cancer can be removed from the presidency without doing damage to the office itself. I think hes done tremendous damage in the last several weeks.

Jeopardizing the peaceful transfer of power was hardly Trumps first assault on the traditions of the presidency.

He didnt release his tax returns or divest himself from his businesses. He doled out government resources on a partisan basis and undermined his own scientists. He rage tweeted at members of his own party and used government property for political purposes, including the White House as the backdrop for his renomination acceptance speech.

Trump used National Guard troops to clear a largely peaceful protest across from the White House for a photo-op. He named a secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, who needed a congressional waiver to serve because the retired general had not been out of uniform for the seven years required by law. In that one example, Biden has followed Trumps lead, nominating for Pentagon chief retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, who also will need a waiver.

Trumps disruption extended to the global stage as well, where he cast doubt on once-inviolable alliances like NATO and bilateral partnerships with a host of allies. His America First foreign policy emanated more from preconceived notions of past slights than current facts on the ground. He unilaterally pulled troops from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and Syria, each time drawing bipartisan fire for undermining the very purpose of the American deployment.

He pulled out of multinational environmental agreements, an action that scientists warn may have accelerated climate change. He stepped away from accords that kept Irans nuclear ambitions, if not its regional malevolence, in check.

And his presidency may be remembered for altering, perhaps permanently, the nature of the U.S.-China relationship, dimming hopes for a peaceful emergence of China as a world power and laying the foundation for a new generation of economic and strategic rivalry.

While historians agree that Trump was a singular figure in the office, it will be decades before the consequences of his tenure are fully known. But some pieces of his legacy already are in place.

He named three Supreme Court justices and more than 220 federal judges, giving the judiciary an enduring conservative bent. He rolled back regulations and oversaw an economy that boomed until the pandemic hit. His presence increased voter turnout both for and against him to record levels. He received unwavering loyalty from his own party but was quick to cast aside any who displeased him.

President Trump has been the person who has returned power to the American people, not the Washington elite, and preserved our history and institutions, while others have tried to tear them down, said White House spokesman Judd Deere. The American people elected a successful businessman who promised to go to Washington, not to tear it down, but to put them first.

At times, Trump acted like a bystander to his own presidency, opting to tweet along with a cable news segment rather than dive into an effort to change policy. And that was one of the many ways Trump changed the way that presidents communicate.

Carefully crafted policy statements took a back seat, replaced by tweets and off-the-cuff remarks to reporters over the whir of helicopter blades. The discourse hardened, with swear words, personal insults and violent imagery infiltrating the presidential lexicon. And there were the untruths more than 23,000, according to a count by The Washington Post that Trump tossed out with little regard for their impact.

It was that lack of honesty that played a role in his defeat in an election that became a referendum on how he had managed the COVID-19 pandemic, which has now killed more than 300,000 Americans.

Day after day during his reelection campaign, Trump defied health guidelines and addressed packed, largely mask-less crowds, promising the nation was rounding the corner on the virus. He admitted that from the beginning, he set out to play down the seriousness of the virus.

He held superspreader events at the White House and contracted the virus himself. And while his administration spearheaded Operation Warp Speed, which helped to produce coronavirus vaccines in record time, Trump also undermined his public health officials by refusing to embrace mask-wearing and suggesting unproven treatments, including the injection of disinfectant.

We have seen that Donald Trumps style was one of the contributing factors to his failure as a president, said Mark K. Updegrove, presidential historian and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. His successor can look at his presidency as a cautionary tale.

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Trump's legacy: He changed the presidency, but will it last? - Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) President Donald Trump, said to be making progress in his recovery from COVID-19, tweeted his eagerness to return to the campaign trail Tuesday even as the outbreak that has killed more than 210,000 Americans reached ever more widely into the upper echelons of the U.S. government.

As Trump convalesced out of sight in the White House, the administration defended the protections it has put in place to protect the staff working there to treat and support him. Trump again publicly played down the virus on Twitter after his return from a three-day hospitalization, though even more aides tested positive, including one of his closest advisers, Stephen Miller.

In one significant national coronavirus action, Trump declared there would be no action before the election on economic-stimulus legislation an announcement that came not long after the Federal Reserve chairman said such help was essential for recovery with the nation reeling from the human and economic cost of the pandemic. Stocks fell on the White House news.

As for Trumps own recovery, his doctor, Navy Cmdr. Sean Conley, said in a letter that the president had a restful Monday night at the White House and reports no symptoms.

Meanwhile, Trump was grappling with next political steps exactly four weeks from Election Day. Anxious to project strength, Trump, who is still contagious with the virus, tweeted Tuesday that he was planning to attend next weeks debate with Democrat Joe Biden in Miami and It will be great!

Biden, for his part, said he and Trump shouldnt have a debate as long as the president remains COVID positive.

Biden told reporters in Pennsylvania that he was looking forward to being able to debate him but said were going to have to follow very strict guidelines.

Elsewhere in the government, the scope of the outbreak was still being uncovered. On Tuesday, the nations top military leaders including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, and the vice chairman, Gen. John Hyten, were in quarantine after exposure to Adm. Charles W. Ray, the vice commandant of the Coast Guard.

It was not known how Ray contracted the virus, but he attended an event for military families at the White House on Sept. 27. The Coast Guard said in a statement that Ray felt mild symptoms over the weekend and was tested on Monday.

Also testing positive Tuesday was Miller, a top policy adviser and Trump speechwriter, who has been an architect of the presidents restrictive immigration measures. Millers wife, Katie Miller, who serves as communications director to Vice President Mike Pence, had the virus earlier this year. She had been in Salt Lake City with Pence where he is preparing to debate Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, but she left as soon as she found out about her husbands diagnosis, officials said. She tested negative on Tuesday.

Trump on Monday made clear that he has little intention of abiding by best containment practices when he removed his mask before entering the White House after his discharge from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Waiting aides were visible when he entered the Blue Room without a face covering.

Trumps attitude alarmed infectious disease experts. And it suggested his own illness had not caused him to rethink his often-cavalier attitude toward the disease, which has also infected the first lady and more than a dozen White House aides and associates.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins said Tuesday, When I saw him on the balcony of the White House, taking off his mask, I couldnt help but think that he sent the wrong signal, given that hes infected with COVID-19 and that there are many people in his immediate circle who have the virus,.

Trump, for his part, falsely suggested that the virus was akin to the seasonal flu.

Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu, he tweeted. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!

In fact, COVID-19 has already proven to be a more potent killer, particularly among older populations, than seasonal flu, and has shown indications of having long-term impacts on the health of younger people it infects. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that influenza has resulted in far fewer yearly deaths than Trump said between 12,000 and 61,000 annually since 2010.

More on Trump and the Virus:

Trump was working out of makeshift office space on the ground floor of the White House residence, in close proximity to the White House Medical Units office suite, with only a few aides granted a face-to-face audience. The West Wing was largely vacant, as a number of Trumps aides were either sick or quarantining after exposure to people infected with the virus, or otherwise working remotely as a precaution.

First lady Melania Trump was isolating upstairs in the White House. On Tuesday, her office released a memo outlining extensive health and safety precautions that have been put in place in the executive residence, including adopting hospital-grade disinfection policies, encouraging maximum teleworking and installing additional sanitization and filtration systems. Residence staff in direct contact with the first family are tested daily and support staff are tested every 48 hours. And since the president and Mrs. Trump tested positive, staff have been wearing full PPE.

Despite Trumps upbeat talk about the disease, his own treatment has been far from typical, as his doctors rushed him onto experimental antiviral drugs and prescribed an aggressive course of steroids that would be unavailable to the average patient. On Tuesday he was to receive his final dose of the antiviral drug remdesivir. It was not known whether he was still being administered the powerful steroid dexamethasone, which was prescribed Saturday after he suffered a second drop in his blood oxygen levels in as many days.

Dr. Conley said Monday that because of Trumps unusual level of treatment so early after discovery of his illness he was in uncharted territory, adding that Trump would not be fully out of the woods for another week.

The coronavirus can be unpredictable, and Conley has noted it can become more dangerous as the body responds. Days seven through ten can be the most critical in determining the likely course of this illness, he said over the weekend.

There were also lingering questions about potential long-term effects to the president and even when he first came down with the virus. Conley has repeatedly declined to share results of medical scans of Trumps lungs, saying he was not at liberty to discuss the information because Trump did not waive doctor-patient confidentiality on the subject.

___

Associated Press writers Lauran Neergaard and Jonathan Lemire in Washington, and Bill Barrow in Wilmington, Delaware, contributed to this report.

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Trump reports 'no symptoms,' returns to downplaying virus - The Associated Press