Politics
Dem Party blame game: Accusations fly as to who is responsible for Harris' massive loss to Trump
The Democratic blame game is at a fever pitch after Vice President Kamala Harris was swiftly defeated by President-elect Donald Trump at the ballot box in an election that had been anticipated to drag out for days as polling indicated the match-up was razor-thin.
Trump sailed to victory in the early morning hours last Wednesday, after locking down key battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania and Georgia and clearing 270 electoral votes. He concluded the race with 312 electoral votes to Harris’ 226, and won the popular vote.
In the final days of the campaigning cycle, polling indicated that the results for the election would likely be very close, which could have resulted in state recounts and lawsuits before the winner was announced.
Following Trump’s clear victory, Democrats across the nation issued statements accepting the results and congratulating the president. Fallout from the devastating loss, however, has reverberated across the party as members point fingers at each other for the Trump win.
5 MISTAKES THAT DOOMED KAMALA HARRIS’ CAMPAIGN AGAINST TRUMP
Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi spar over claims Dems ‘abandoned working class’
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders pinned blame for the loss on the Democratic Party for “abandoning” the working class, sparking rebuke from former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change,” Sanders posted to X last week, accompanied by a press release on the election results. “And they’re right.”
NANCY PELOSI FIRES BACK AT BERNIE SANDERS FOR COMMENTS ON DEMS’ SWEEPING ELECTION LOSS: NO ‘RESPECT’
Pelosi responded that the party has not left the working class behind in favor of kowtowing to “big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party,” as Sanders had argued in his press release.
“With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him [Sanders], for what he stands for, but I don’t respect him saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class families. That’s where we are,” Pelosi told The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast on Saturday.
“Under President Biden, you see the rescue package, money in the pockets of people, the shots in the arm, children in school safely, working people back to work. What did Trump do when he was president? One bill that gave a tax cut to the richest people in America,” she continued.
Sanders doubled down on his remarks Sunday, telling NBC’s Kristen Welker that “the working people of this country are extremely angry.”
“Nancy is a friend of mine,” Sanders said. “But here is the reality. In the Senate in the last two years, we have not even brought forth legislation to raise the minimum wage to a living wage despite the fact that some 20 million people in this country are working for less than $15 an hour.”
SANDERS DOUBLES DOWN ON HIS CRITICISM OF DEMOCRATS, FIRES BACK AT PELOSI’S PUSHBACK
“Bottom line, if you’re a working person out there, do you really think that the Democratic Party is going to the max, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no,” Sanders said.
Harris, Biden campaigns pin blame on each other
The Harris campaign and Biden campaign have reportedly pinned blame for the loss on each other, Axios reported last week.
“The 107-day Harris campaign was nearly flawless. The Biden campaign that preceded it was the opposite,” one Harris campaign member told the outlet.
“We did what we could. I think the odds against us were insurmountable,” another individual involved with the Harris campaign said, referring to President Biden’s exit from the presidential race in July and his low approval ratings.
Biden dropped out of the race over the summer following his disastrous debate performance against Trump, where he frequently lost his train of thought and stumbled over his words. The debate opened the floodgates to both conservatives and traditional Democrat allies calling on the president to pass the torch to a younger generation as concerns mounted surrounding his mental acuity and his age.
THE ‘SQUAD,’ WARREN AND SANDERS AMONG PROMINENT POLITICAL FIGURES WHO CRUISED TO RE-ELECTION VICTORIES
Many of those who worked on the Biden campaign also joined the Harris campaign following the president’s endorsement of his VP to take up the mantle as Democratic presidential candidate.
A person who worked on the Biden campaign shot back in comment to Axios that the Harris team was to blame: “How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the f—?”
“The Harris team benched [Biden], and then they lost, so now the people who represent Biden are saying, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have benched him,’” another person familiar with the dynamics between the teams said.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates told the outlet, “Anyone criticizing the vice president’s campaign is at odds with President Biden.”
Pelosi points to Biden for loss
Pelosi appeared to pin blame for the loss on the president, claiming that Biden had dropped out of the race too late in the game and that that hadn’t provided an opportunity for an open primary.
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” she told the New York Times podcast.
“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” Pelosi continued. “. . . Because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”
TRUMP WINS ARIZONA TO SWEEP SWING STATES AND SECURE 312 TOTAL ELECTORAL VOTES
Biden dropped out of the presidential race on a Sunday afternoon in July via a social media post. He endorsed Harris minutes later in a follow-up X post, sparking other Democrats to rally around the VP.
Pelosi did defend Biden in June, when the Wall Street Journal ran an article doubting Biden’s mental fitness as president.
”Many of us spent time with @WSJ to share on the record our first-hand experiences with @POTUS, where we see his wisdom, experience, strength and strategic thinking,” Pelosi wrote on X at the time. “Instead, the Journal ignored testimony by Democrats, focused on attacks by Republicans and printed a hit piece.”
Pelosi, as well as other high-profile Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, also notably called on Biden to run for a second term ahead of the 2024 cycle kicking off in earnest.
Obama to blame?
Other Democrats and insiders pointed to former President Barack Obama for the loss, after Obama reportedly worked in the background over the summer to encourage Biden’s ouster from the race.
A handful of Obama’s allies and former advisers helped lead the charge in calling on Biden to drop out of the 2024 race earlier this summer, including former Obama adviser David Axelrod saying that Biden was “not winning this race;” longtime Obama friend George Clooney calling on the president to drop out of the race in a bombshell op-ed; and Jon Favreau, who served as former director of speech writing for Obama, also calling on Biden to drop out of the race ahead of his eventual departure.
“There is no singular reason why we lost, but a big reason is because the Obama advisers publicly encouraged Democratic infighting to push Joe Biden out, didn’t even want Kamala Harris as the nominee, and then signed up as the saviors of the campaign, only to run outdated Obama-era playbooks for a candidate that wasn’t Obama,” one former Biden staffer told Politico.
DNC National Finance Committee member and Harris campaign fundraiser Lindy Li told Fox News this weekend that Obama’s seemingly delayed endorsement of Harris after Biden dropped out added to Harris’ defeat.
”I want to point out they waited three days – Michelle and Barack Obama waited three days to endorse Kamala Harris,” Li said on “Fox & Friends Weekend” on Saturday. “It was the silence heard round the world.”
“The truth is, this is just an epic disaster – this is a $1 billion disaster,” Li added during the interview.
‘ABANDON HARRIS’ MOVEMENT FLIPPED DEARBORN TO TRUMP ON ELECTION DAY
Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, with the Obamas endorsing Harris in a video message posted to social media on July 26, five days after Biden’s announcement. The silence was not lost on the media, as headlines spread across the nation on Obama’s “silence.”
David Axelrod says Dem Party morphing into ‘smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party’
Similar to Sanders, longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod appeared to pin blame for the loss on the Democratic Party’s shift away from blue-collar, middle class voters.
“You can’t approach working people like missionaries and say, ‘We’re here to help you become more like us.’ There’s a kind of unspoken disdain, unintended disdain in that,” the CNN contributor said last week.
“The only group … Democrats won among were people who make more than $100,000 a year,” Axelrod said. “You can’t win national elections that way, and it certainly shouldn’t be that way for a party that fashions itself as the party of working people.”
“I think Biden has done programmatically some good things for working people. But the party itself has increasingly become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party, and it lends itself to the kind of backlash that we’ve seen,” he continued.
Claims of underwhelming VP choice
Politics
Biden supports bringing adversarial nations into new UN cyber crime alliance
The Biden administration will support a U.N. treaty this week that will create a new cybercrime convention that includes China and Russia — which has not sat well with some lawmakers and critics.
Since 2001, the global governance around cybercrime has largely been coordinated by the Budapest Convention, a product of the Council of Europe that includes 76 countries. It does not include Russia or China. However, under the U.N.’s new cybercrime convention, these two adversarial nations will be welcomed into the global cybercrime governance fold.
The move, confirmed by top officials familiar with the issue, has been met with concern from those who fear that a new global alliance on cybersecurity involving two of the nation’s most adversarial nations could spell trouble.
CYBER-ATTACKS AGAINST AMERICANS AT ALL TIME HIGH OVER PAST TWO YEARS
“We recognize that defending human rights and core principles of internet freedom is not easy,” a group of Democratic lawmakers on the Hill wrote last week to top officials in the Biden administration, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Jake Sullivan. “Russia, China and other regimes opposed to democratic freedoms are always working to create international legitimacy for their actions and worldview … Unfortunately, these efforts – while laudable – are insufficient to fix fundamental flaws in the convention.”
IRAN TRIED TO INFLUENCE ELECTION BY SENDING STOLEN MATERIAL FROM TRUMP CAMPAIGN TO BIDEN’S CAMP
The decision to support the new treaty came after months of deliberations between the Biden administration and others, including hundreds of nongovernmental entities involved in human rights and other relevant issues. According to a senior administration official, the U.S. “decided to remain with consensus,” arguing the U.S.’s sway on global “rights-respecting” cybersecurity policy will be greater under the new convention.
To help address concerns that have been raised about the convention, the Biden administration plans to develop a risk management plan and will engage with nongovernmental stakeholders to help refine it.
A “consensus proceeding” took place Monday, and the resolution was approved without a vote. According to Politico, it is expected to be adopted by the General Assembly later this year.
Meanwhile, President-elect Donald Trump announced on Monday that he would be nominating New York GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik to be the next U.N. ambassador in his administration.
The White House declined to comment on the record for this story.
Politics
Chloe Fineman confirms that 'rude' Elon Musk was the 'SNL' host who made her cry
Comedian Chloe Fineman says Space X owner Elon Musk made her cry when he hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 2021.
Fineman recalled working with the tech billionaire in a since-deleted TikTok, months after fellow cast member and writer Bowen Yang alluded to the behind-the-scenes drama during an appearance on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live!” Yang cryptically revealed in August that a host brought several staffers to tears because “he hated the ideas” they had. Speculation abounded and Fineman confirmed her part in it Monday.
The “SNL” star broke her silence after blowing up the Tesla chief executive’s “butt hurt” reaction to “SNL” alumnus Dana Carvey’s impression of him in Saturday’s post-election episode. (Carvey returned to Studio 8H as a bouncy, fist-pumping version of the “Dark MAGA”-boasting Musk in the cold open, claiming he would run the country after former President Trump’s re-election last week. Fineman said that world’s richest man and Trump loyalist is “clearly watching the show” despite his barrage of “rude” criticism on his X platform.
“I’m gonna come out and say at long last that I’m the cast member that he made cry, and he’s the host that made someone cry,” Fineman said in her video. “Maybe there’s others.”
“Guess what, you made I, Chloe Fineman, burst into tears,” she continued, “because I stayed up all night writing this sketch. I was so excited. I came in, I asked if you had any questions and you stared at me like you were firing me from Tesla and were like ‘It’s not funny.’”
The “Megalopolis” and “Despicable Me 4” star said she waited for Musk to say he was just kidding, but he did not. Then she accused him of “pawing” through her script and — while mimicking his South African accent — claimed he didn’t laugh at the sketch a single time. She did not name the sketch; however, she and Musk appeared together in “The Ooli Show” sketch of the May 2021 episode on which she received a writing credit. Fineman played an Icelandic talk-show host and Musk played her smitten producer.
She conceded that the sketch that made it into the episode “was fine” and that she “actually had a really good time” doing it. She also admitted that Musk was “really funny in it.
“But, you know, have a little manners here, sir,” she concluded.
Although Fineman deleted the video, it was saved and re-posted on X where Musk replied to it Monday and explained his assessment of the work.
“Frankly, it was only on the Thursday before the Saturday that ANY of the sketches generated laughs,” Musk said. “I was worried. I was like damn my SNL appearance is going to be so f— unfunny that it will make a crackhead sober!! But then it worked out in the end”
Musk did not apologize or mention making any cast members cry.
Representatives for Fineman and “Saturday Night Live” did not immediately respond Tuesday to The Times’ requests for comment.
Before Fineman posted her TikTok, Musk ranted about the most recent episode on X.
“Dana Carvey just sounds like Dana Carvey,” Musk tweeted in response to a clip from the cold open, adding in another tweet that, “They are so mad that @realDonaldTrump won.”
He also claimed that the long-running, Emmy-winning sketch series “has been dying slowly for years, as they become increasingly out of touch with reality.” Musk, who is expected to be an influential voice in Trump’s incoming administration, also accused the show of a “last-ditch effort to cheat the equal airtime requirements” when Vice President Kamala Harris appeared in the Nov. 2 episode, before the election, claiming that it “only helped sink her campaign further.”
Politics
Trump tells world leader election gives him a 'very big mandate'
President-elect Donald Trump said his election victory “gives me a very big mandate to do things properly” in a newly released video by Indonesia’s president.
Prabowo Subianto could be heard congratulating Trump, adding, “Wherever you are, I am willing to fly to, to congratulate you personally sir.”
“We had a great election in the U.S…. Amazing what happened, we had tremendous success. The most successful in over 100 years they say. It’s a great honor and so it gives me a very big mandate to do things properly,” Trump told him at one point in the conversation.
Subianto also told Trump, “We were all shocked when they tried to assassinate you, but we are very happy that the almighty protected you sir.”
TRUMP EXPECTED TO NAME SEN. MARCO RUBIO AS SECRETARY OF STATE
“Yes, I got very lucky. I just happened to be in the right place in the right direction otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to you right now,” Trump responded. “I got quite lucky actually, somebody was protecting me I guess.”
Subianto, a former Indonesian military general and defense minister, was sworn in as the country’s eighth president on Oct. 20.
TRUMP LIKELY TO MAKE SEVERAL BORDER SECURITY MOVES ON FIRST DAY, SAYS EXPERT
“Whenever you are around you let me know and I’d like to also get to your country sometime, it’s incredible, the job that you are doing is incredible,” Trump told Subianto during the call. “You’re a very respected person and I give you credit for that, it’s not easy.”
“Please send the people of Indonesia my regards,” he added.
In a statement on X alongside the video, Subianto said, “I am looking forward to enhance the collaboration between our two great nations and to more productive discussions in the future.”
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