Trump throws in the towel, yanks it back

'Rigged' claims still de rigueur

President Donald Trump has been Donny One-Note since it became clear that Joe Biden defeated him in the election. Democrats "stole" the election through various sinister and fantastical schemes, Trump says, and he'll be staying on for a second term. But now and then, perhaps inadvertently, a nod to reality slips through.

"He won because …" began a Trump tweet Sunday at 7:47 a.m. that went on to recycle unfounded claims. But it looked enough like the start of a concession that a deep-red-state Republican governor felt free to welcome it.

"It was good actually" to see the tweet, said Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, who was on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I think that’s the start of an acknowledgment. … We want to make sure that there is a smooth transition," Hutchinson said. Biden’s incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, said on the show: "If the president’s prepared to begin to recognize that reality, that’s positive."

Trump took it back in consecutive tweets at 9:16 and 9:19 a.m.: "RIGGED ELECTION. WE WILL WIN!" Trump wrote. "He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!"

Trump previously seemed to acknowledge at least the potential that his time as president will soon be up during comments Friday on future pandemic policy, with a reference to "whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration it will be."

So he'll press on with his lawsuits — mostly losers so far — aiming to throw out wholesale numbers of Biden votes in swing states that decided the election. Newsday's Tom Brune writes that Trump's team has about three weeks to substantially erode Biden’s winning margins by enough to shift electoral votes to Trump. Most election lawyers consider that a long shot at best. Part of the problem is that Trump’s approach has been backward: Declare crimes first, then look for proof afterward, wrote The Washington Post.

Since lawyers from two major firms withdrew from the effort and the legal fight's former top honcho, David Bossie, contracted the coronavirus, the president has put his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in overall charge. In an interview on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures," Giuliani took several wild swings with debunked allegations, including that "corrupt machines" had deleted millions of Trump votes. "We have proof that I can’t disclose yet," he said. Another Trump lawyer who spoke on the show, Sidney Powell, who frequently retweets QAnon conspiracy cultists, darkly suggested CIA complicity.

Trump suit gets alterations

Trump’s campaign on Sunday gave up on a major part of its federal lawsuit challenging the election results in Pennsylvania, The Washington Post reported.

The president's attorneys filed a revised version, removing allegations that election officials violated the Trump campaign’s constitutional rights by limiting the ability of their observers to watch votes being counted. Trump and Giuliani have said repeatedly that more than 600,000 votes in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh should be invalidated because of this issue.

The lawsuit now focuses on allegations that Republicans were illegally disadvantaged because some Democratic-leaning counties allowed voters to fix errors on their mail ballots. Counties have said that move affected only a small number of votes.

Cliff Levine, an attorney representing the Democratic Party, said the pared-down lawsuit could not possibly change the state's result. "Now you’re only talking about a handful of ballots," said Levine.

Biden led by nearly 69,000 votes in Pennsylvania as of Sunday night.

Biden's hurdle: Suspicious minds

President-elect Biden has amassed at least 5 million more votes than Trump, but political analysts and those close to Biden’s orbit say the weight of the more than 72 million Americans who voted for Trump also will help shape the Democrat’s first term in office, writes Newsday's Laura Figueroa Hernandez.

While Trump's refusal to accept the results won't change the outcome, it is casting narrative of suspicion over Biden’s victory and may deepen divisions in an increasingly polarized electorate, said Jennifer McCoy, a political science professor at Georgia State University who has written extensively about political polarization in the U.S. and abroad.

Moe Vela, a Washington-based attorney who worked as a senior adviser to both Biden and former Vice President Al Gore, said Biden and his advisers are not "naive" about the challenges.

"He needs to stay the course, and continue this message of unity and healing," Vela said of the president-elect, adding: "This is not going to happen overnight. There's no magic, miraculous wand that he can wave that in 12 or 20 or 40 months from now and of all of this division will be gone. That is not the case. But what you do is, you chip away at it."

Janison: Let de-Trumpification begin

For those who worried for the republic, it finally looks as if the basic American institutions of governance will survive Trump's four years, writes Newsday's Dan Janison. In the end, his self-interested verbal attacks on one U.S. system after another failed to either cause irreparable damage or bring lasting or constructive reform.

The worrisome prospect of Trump pulling off an Electoral College coup by effectively nullifying valid votes is abating. The departing president proved no more capable of seizing illegitimate power than of governing wisely in a federal republic. For the most part, while Trump may have damaged the credibility of the executive branch, he failed to impose his will.

Governmentally, basic functions can be restored, though the deficits Trump and Congress leave Biden won't easily be dealt with. Give it a year, and Trump's institutional footprints might barely be visible, except perhaps for judicial appointments that any Republican president would have made. Whether that's a good or bad thing remains to be seen.

Transition stall threatens COVID fight

Biden's top coronavirus advisers raised concerns Sunday that the delay in an official presidential transition has hampered their ability to communicate with Trump administration counterparts even as cases surge nationwide, reports Newsday's Figueroa and Scott Eidler.

Former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, a member of Biden’s advisory panel, told "Fox News Sunday" that it was "critical" for both sides to exchange information as Biden prepares to assume the presidency on Jan. 20.

"There are thousands and thousands of career civil servants and political appointees who’ve been working very hard on this pandemic for many months now. They have plans that are in process. They have data they’ve collected that the public hasn’t always had access to," Murthy said. "These dialogues are critical, you want to get them started as soon as possible."

MAGA mayhem, two views

Brawls broke out in downtown Washington on Saturday night between Trump supporters and leftist counterprotesters hours after a rally by thousands of Trump backers.

Though accounts reported aggressive actions on both sides, Trump saw bad people on just one side — antifa and Black Lives Matter. He retweeted a video clip of a MAGA supporter in a sports team jacket getting hit from behind and knocked out, tweeting: "Human Radical Left garbage did this." The original video was deleted by anti-antifa Portland, Oregon, videographer Andy Ngô, but he later posted a similar one.

Neither of the Ngô videos showed what preceded that assault, but this one does: The man in the jacket pushed down and stomped on the head of a counterprotester with a bullhorn. He took on more counterdemonstrators, some who were going after him. After he turned to walk away, he got decked and bloodied.

Earlier, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tweeted ridiculously that "more than one million marchers" for Trump joined the daytime rally. Trump himself tweeted Sunday that "tens of thousands" had demonstrated; USA Today, among other outlets, found that estimate plausible. Trump waved at rallygoers Saturday morning from the presidential limo on his way to a round of golf at his Virginia club.

Cuomo warns of vaccine suit

New York State will sue the federal government if the Trump administration's distribution of an eventual COVID-19 vaccine gives short shrift to minority communities, which have been hit hardest by the pandemic, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Sunday.

The governor's threat of legal action came in a fiery speech at Riverside Church in Manhattan, just two days after Trump said he would not send the COVID-19 vaccine to New York because of Cuomo's past comments questioning whether the White House can competently manage its distribution. Cuomo also has said he wants an independent evaluation to determine if the vaccine would be safe.

See the story by Newsday's reporting staff, written by Lisa L. Colangelo, on Cuomo's battle with the White House and more of the latest regional pandemic developments from Long Island and beyond.

More coronavirus news

For a full list of Newsday's coronavirus stories, click here.

What else is happening:

• Chad Wolf was not legally serving as acting Homeland Security secretary when he signed rules limiting applications and renewals for the "Dreamers" program, a federal judge in New York ruled Saturday. As a result, the judge said, those rules are now invalid. The judge's ruling is subject to appeal.
• When Trump leaves the White House in January, he will face some of the deepest financial and legal challenges in decades in his family business empire, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Trump Organization may have to sell properties to deal with a potential cash crunch caused by debts coming due, some of it personally guaranteed by Trump.
• Without a president's legal protections, Trump also will be more vulnerable than ever to the risk of prosecution from a pending grand jury investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into his family business and its practices, as well as his taxes, The New York Times writes. Engineering a pardon of himself, as Trump has claimed he has the right to do, could help him only on the federal side.
• While Biden has been reaching out to Trump voters for unity, the president seems to feel no comparable need. Trump approvingly retweeted a report about a Virginia Wesleyan University business professor who wrote that anyone who chose Biden for president is "ignorant, anti-American and anti-Christian."
• Trumpists mad at Twitter and Facebook for policing their posts for disinformation have migrated to a newer social media platform, Parler, and The Wall Street Journal has a new look at its financing. The lead investor at its outset was Rebekah Mercer, daughter of Long Island hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. Both Mercers have been big contributors to right-wing causes.
• Democratic lawyer David Boies and Republican lawyer Theodore Olson, who in 2000 were on opposite sides of the Bush v. Gore recount legal fight, agree in a Washington Post op-ed: "It is time to accept that Biden won the election and it is time to accept that result and come together as a nation."