A progressive daily ledger of Trump-world self-owns, legal pain, policy blowback, and bad-faith chaos.
Backfill edition for December 18, 2020. The dominant Trump-world screwup that day was the military publicly swatting down talk that it could be used to contest the election, while the administration also moved to choke off transition cooperation and keep the post-loss chaos going.
On December 18, 2020, Trump-world kept running into the same wall: institutions that were not willing to play along with the fantasy that a lost election could be muscled into a different outcome. The Army’s top civilian and uniformed leaders issued a blunt public statement rejecting any role for the military in deciding the election, a direct rebuke to the wave of wild talk swirling around Trump’s allies. At the same time, the Pentagon was preparing to delay some transition meetings, underscoring how the outgoing administration was still making the transfer of power harder than it had any right to be.
The big picture from that day is not subtle. When your allies are floating military intervention to undo an election and the Army has to publicly say “no” in plain English, that is not a show of strength. It is an admission that Trump’s post-election pressure campaign had become so untethered that major institutions felt obligated to quarantine it.
5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.
The Army’s civilian secretary and chief of staff issued an unusually direct statement saying the military had no role in deciding the outcome of an American election. The rebuke landed as Trump allies were openly floating schemes that would drag the armed forces into the post-election fight, making the administration’s refusal to accept the result look even more reckless.
Defense Secretary Christopher Miller moved to postpone a slate of meetings between the Pentagon and the incoming Biden team until after January 1, 2021. In the middle of a national security transition, that kind of delay fed the sense that Trump appointees were still trying to make the handoff harder than necessary, even as the country was headed toward a new administration.