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More than 100 GOP security experts urge congressional Republicans to repudiate Trump’s election claims (nationthailand.com)

More than 100 GOP security experts urge congressional Republicans to repudiate Trump’s election claims

InternationalNov 24. 2020President Donald Trump, right, meets with Republican leadership, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, center, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California in 2017. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Bill O’Leary 

By The Washington Post · Tom Hamburger, Ellen Nakashima · NATIONAL, POLITICS, COURTSLAW, CONGRESS

WASHINGTON – A group of leading GOP national security experts — including former homeland security secretary Tom Ridge — urged congressional Republicans on Monday to demand President Donald Trump concede the election and immediately begin the transition to the incoming Biden administration.

“President Trump’s refusal to permit the presidential transition poses significant risks to our national security, at a time when the U.S. confronts a global pandemic and faces serious threats from global adversaries, terrorist groups, and other forces,” said a statement signed by more than 100 GOP luminaries.

The signers included Ridge, the former Pennsylvania governor who served as homeland security secretary under President George W. Bush, former CIA Director Michael Hayden and John Negroponte, who served as director of national intelligence.

The message called on “Republican leaders – especially those in Congress – to publicly demand that President Trump cease his anti-democratic assault on the integrity of the presidential election.”

Trump has refused to acknowledge his defeat to Democrat Joe Biden, and continues to wage a clamorous, unsuccessful bid to overturn the election’s outcome in several key states that turned the race in Biden’s favor. In the popular vote, Biden is projected to best Trump by a margin of approximately 6 million.

In a nod to these developments, the statement’s signers urged Republican leaders to “strongly oppose” Trump’s “dangerous and extra-legal efforts to threaten and intimidate state officials in order to prevent a vote by the Electoral College.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office on Monday referred to comments he made last week, dismissing requests to speak out. “In all of these presidential elections we go through this process. What we all say about it is frankly irrelevant,” McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters Tuesday. “All of it will happen right on time, and we will swear in the next administration on January 20.”

A spokesperson for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the White House.

The national security officials’ statement was released hours before officials in Michigan certified the election results in that state showing Biden defeated Trump by more than 155,000 votes. Last week the president personally called a county canvass board official in Wayne County, Mich., home to Detroit. That official subsequently tried to rescind her vote to certify results there.

“President Trump’s continued efforts to cast doubt on the validity of the election and to interfere in state electoral processes undermines our democracy and risks long-term damage to our institutions,” the statement says.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The organizers of Monday’s statement led previous efforts before the election to get Republican national security experts and others to support Biden over Trump. Among other initiatives, they published a newspaper ad signed by many of the same names that appeared on Monday’s statement. The organizers said they were motivated by concern that so many Republican leaders have declined to repudiate Trump’s unfounded election claims.

“It was a sense of both alarm that the President of the United States is trying to undermine our election . . . and disappointment that so many Republican leaders are abetting that effort either with active support or with their silence,” said Ken Wainstein, a former U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who later served during the George W. Bush administration as assistant attorney general for national security.

Another organizer of the effort, John Bellinger, said that he encouraged the statement out of dismay that many congressional Republicans have remained silent. Bellinger served as legal adviser to the National Security Council and the State Department during the George W. Bush era.

“It is shocking to me and other senior national security officials, who have dedicated much of our careers to protecting the country, that congressional Republicans are allowing Trump to impugn the integrity of our elections,” Bellinger said, adding that elections are “the very core of American democracy.”

Negroponte, who served nine successive presidents, said of the Trump team: “They’re in denial about the loss and therefore not allowing the transition to go forward.” It takes time to identify and vet nominees for core jobs within the new government, including the roughly 1,000 or so people who need Senate confirmation, he said. “Every day that’s lost is not only unfair to the new administration, it’s harmful to the country and our national security.”

Blocking the transition, he said, “is wrongheaded. It’s just immature.”

Hayden, who as CIA director briefed then-President-elect Barack Obama in 2008 on covert action programs, said that the agency “very much” wants to brief Biden, but is being prevented from doing so. “That,” he said, “is very concerning.”

The statement added to complaints from a small but growing number of Republicans who describe Trump’s election response as a threat to the nation’s security.

“The Republican Party is not going to be saved by hiding in a spider hole,” said Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, during an appearance Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Bolton is not among those who signed the statement. “We need all of our leaders to come out and say, ‘The election is over.’ We’re not talking about an abstract right for Trump to use his legal remedies. We’ve passed that.”

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Link to meatpacking found in up to 8% of early U.S. covid cases (nationthailand.com)

Link to meatpacking found in up to 8% of early U.S. covid cases

InternationalNov 24. 2020An employee handles sides of pork on a conveyor at a Smithfield Foods pork processing facility in Milan, Mo., on April 12, 2017. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Daniel Acker 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Mike Dorning · NATIONAL, BUSINESS, HEALTH, HEALTH-NEWS

A new study ties 6% to 8% of U.S. covid-19 cases through late July to outbreaks at meatpacking plants and subsequent spread in surrounding communities.

The findings show “a strong positive relationship” between meatpacking plants and “local community transmission,” suggesting the plants act as “transmission vectors” and “accelerate the spread of the virus,” according to a peer-reviewed study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.

The conclusions are sure to further inflame controversy over the role of the meatpacking industry in the pandemic and the Trump administration’s enforcement of workplace safety laws as outbreaks at slaughterhouses emerged. Trump issued an executive order on April 28 directing meatpackers to reopen closed facilities.

Researchers at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business found that the risk of excess death primarily came from large meatpacking plants operated by industry giants. Communities that acted to shut down slaughterhouses reduced spread, according to the researchers.

Overall, the researchers found 236,000 to 310,000 covid-19 cases through July 21 associated with “proximity to livestock plants,” comprising 6% to 8% of virus cases at the time. Between 4,300 and 5,200 covid-19 deaths were tied to being near meatpacking plants, representing about 3% to 4% of U.S. deaths in that time period.

“The vast majority” of those cases were “likely related to community spread outside these plants,” the researchers wrote.

The researchers also found plants that received waivers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to increase their production-line speeds had relatively more countywide cases. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture submitted a proposal to raise maximum line speeds nationwide for chicken-processing plants.

“Ensuring both public health and robust essential supply chains may require an increase in meatpacking oversight and potentially a shift toward more decentralized, smaller-scale meat production,” the study concluded.

Press representatives from the USDA and the North American Meat Institute didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Detroit had more vote errors in 2016 when Trump won Michigan by a narrow margin. He didn’t object then. (nationthailand.com)

Detroit had more vote errors in 2016 when Trump won Michigan by a narrow margin. He didn’t object then.

InternationalNov 24. 2020Election workers processes absentee ballots Nov. 4 at the TFC Center in Detroit. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Salwan Georges 

By The Washington Post · Kayla Ruble · NATIONAL, POLITICS, WHITEHOUSE

DETROIT – Republican Party leaders who are urging Michigan’s state canvassing board to hold off certifying the Nov. 3 election results when it meets Monday have cited what they described as “significant problems and irregularities” in Wayne County, home of Detroit.

The GOP officials have pointed to the number of “unbalanced” precincts, where there were small discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters logged by election workers in the poll books. Party officials are calling on the board to conduct an audit before it certifies President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

“To simply gloss over those irregularities now without a thorough audit would only foster feelings of distrust among Michigan’s electorate,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and state GOP Chair Laura Cox wrote in a letter Saturday.

But state and county election data show that four years ago – when Donald Trump carried the state by a much narrower margin – twice as many Detroit precincts were out of balance.

At the time, the problems were widely condemned by Democratic leaders, including Garlin Gilchrist, now the state’s lieutenant governor, who called the city’s handling of the election “a complete catastrophe.”

But neither Trump nor the Republican Party questioned the validity of the election results – or demanded an audit to verify the vote tally.

In the fall of 2016, 392 Detroit precincts, or 59% of the total, had discrepancies of at least one ballot, accounting for at least 916 votes, the data show.

This fall, 179 Detroit precincts, or 28% of the total, had discrepancies of at least one ballot, accounting for at least 433 votes.

Democrats say that the GOP’s focus now on Detroit’s voting errors is simply an effort to undermine Biden’s victory.

“All of this ruckus that they’re raising, none of these issues are in a worse state than they were in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost by a much smaller margin,” said Jonathan Kinloch, a Democratic member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers.

“From Day 1, it has been their intention to try to discredit and try to remove the Black vote from this election,” Kinloch added. “They know that removing the Black vote in this election would change the outcome.”

President Trump attacked the voting process in key states around the country as corrupt and rigged in an unprecedented attempt to overturn the results.

He and his legal advisers have fixated on the predominantly Black city of Detroit, where 94% of the roughly 250,000 votes went for Biden. “It changes the result of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County,” Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, said last week at a news conference in Washington.

GOP consultant Stu Sandler, who serves as legal counsel to the Michigan state Republican Party, acknowledged that Republicans did not request an audit in 2016. But he said what is at issue is not whether the GOP complained in the past, but chronic issues with the management of Detroit’s elections.

“There is no clear evidence that things have improved,” Sandler said.

Out-of-balance precincts can occur for several reasons. A machine may fail to scan the name of a voter on an absentee ballot envelope. A voter can make a mistake on a ballot and request a new one, or sign into the poll book but leave before casting a ballot.

After the high number of Detroit precincts that were out of balance in 2016, then-Republican Secretary of State Ruth Johnson and her Bureau of Elections conducted a post-election audit in the city of Detroit. The bureau concluded that almost half of the out-of-balance precincts could have been rectified if staff had taken prompt actions to address the imbalanced numbers on election night, or if the county canvassing board had been given more time to dig into the problems and reconcile the differences.

“[The Bureau of Elections] found no evidence of pervasive voter fraud, yet an abundance of human errors,” the bureau said in a 2017 report.

At the time, local officials, including Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, D, acknowledged the need for improvements.

“We can’t have that happen again,” Duggan told the Detroit News at the time. “Everybody in the city knows it was terrible, and the good news was Michigan didn’t decide the national election because it would have shown a real spotlight.”

Trump, however, did not note the issue when he celebrated his win in the state.

“The Great State of Michigan was just certified as a Trump WIN giving all of our MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN supporters another victory,” he tweeted in late November 2016.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment about why he did not object to the vote certification at the time.

In the run-up to this fall’s election, Wayne County officials vowed to reduce the number of errors. After Election Day, county Elections Director Gregory Mahar said that the number of votes that did not match the poll books amounted to 0.001% of the roughly 250,000 ballots cast in Detroit.

“Our canvassers really did a heck of a job,” Mahar said as he addressed the Wayne County Board of Canvassers meeting last week.

State officials agreed that the city’s error rate had improved.

“A review of data from the November 2020 Wayne County Canvass showed a substantial improvement in the percentage of [Detroit] precincts that were in balance and recountable as compared both to the August 2020 Primary and the November 2016 General Election,” the Michigan Bureau of Elections wrote in a memo on Friday.

However, Republican officials have continued to press the issue, focusing on an even narrower category: the percentage of unbalanced absentee counting boards – jurisdictions set up by the city election commission to count absentee ballots separately from Election Day precincts.

This month, 94 of those boards – 70% of the total – could not reconcile their numbers, affecting at least 263 votes. That is a similar rate found during the August primary, when 363 absentee counting boards – about 72% of the total – were unbalanced, affecting at least 914 votes.

The number of errors in the August primary drew bipartisan condemnation from state officials. “I find this whole thing appalling,” Julie Matuzak, a Democratic member of the state canvassing board said at a meeting after the primary.

Republican Senate candidate John James, who lost his challenge to Sen. Gary Peters, D, by more than 95,000 votes, cited the error rate at absentee counting boards in a letter he sent to the state board of canvassers last week requesting that they hold off certifying the vote for two weeks to conduct an audit.

“A 30% accuracy rate in any industry, whether its business, education, healthcare or manufacturing scores as failure,” James wrote. “While I don’t doubt that many of our poll workers and volunteers worked hard, we need to do better for our elections.”

Charles Spies, an attorney for the James campaign, said the absentee ballot board figures show Wayne County has not improved since August. He acknowledged, however, that the audit James is seeking will likely not change the results of either the Senate or presidential race. “That’s very unlikely,” he said.

Former Michigan GOP chair Jeff Timmer, who previously served as a member of the state canvassing board, said Republicans are failing to give an accurate picture of the election process – and Wayne County’s progress since 2016.

“They’re cherry picking and feeding into a public relations narrative, not exercising any analysis or judgment related to the conduct of elections,” said Timmer, who now serves as an adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project.

Kinloch said the GOP is trying to “drive a false narrative that could jeopardize citizens’ faith in our elections.”

“They will not win in the end. Whether this election is certified on time or not, I know for sure that it will be certified,” he added. “We are a country of laws and we’re governed by them, whether we like it or not, whether we win or whether we lose.”

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What the coronavirus successes of Taiwan and Iceland have in common (nationthailand.com)

What the coronavirus successes of Taiwan and Iceland have in common

InternationalNov 23. 2020

By Linda Hsieh and John Child
The Jakarta Post

Taiwan and Iceland have won praise for their effective responses to the coronavirus pandemic. They are among a group of countries that adopted a cooperative strategy early on in the pandemic, bringing together multiple organizations to tackle the challenges in containing COVID-19.

A cooperative strategy is when organizations try to achieve their goals through cooperation with other organizations. Our own recent synthesis of research explains the attraction of this approach. It can allow public authorities or companies to speed up their response to new challenges by partnering with other organizations that have complementary resources and expertise.

While other countries, including South Korea and Germany, have deployed a cooperative approach, it’s been a key part of both Taiwan and Iceland’s response to the pandemic.

Taiwan’s handling of COVID-19 has been exemplary. As of June 29, Taiwan, with a population of 23.8 million, had recorded only seven deaths linked to the virus, with 447 confirmed cases – 435 of which had fully recovered.

The Taiwanese government acted quickly to control its borders. It activated a Central Epidemic Command Centre (CECC) on Jan. 20 to coordinate cooperation across different government ministries and agencies, and between government and businesses. The CECC also coordinates big data analytics, testing, quarantine and contact tracing.

Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Administration and National Immigration Agency worked together to identify suspected cases for COVID-19 testing, integrating their databases of citizens’ medical and travel history. Since late March, all new arrivals have had to quarantine for 14 days.

The CECC also partnered with police agencies, local officials and telecom companies to enforce quarantine with the support of mobile phone tracking. Local officials would call quarantined citizens to ask about their health and bring them basic daily supplies if required. Along with a 24-hour helpline, Taiwan’s Center for Disease Control collaborated with two tech companies – HTC and LINE – to create a chatbot that allowed people to report their health status and get advice about the virus.

Taiwan can now test about 5,800 samples a day through a cooperative network of public and private testing centers and certified laboratories.

To avoid the panic buying of face masks, the government rationed their distribution and ramped up production. In February, the government partnered with the Machine Tool & Accessory Builders’ Association and manufacturers, investing in new machinery to produce surgical face masks. In return, manufacturers have to sell the masks back to the government at an agreed price.

This effective government-led cooperative strategy resulted in the establishment of 60 production lines in 25 days, something that would normally have taken several months. More production lines have been added, and Taiwan can now produce about 20 million masks a day.

The public can interact with the government on vTaiwan, a virtual democracy platform for open discussion to build consensus on policy solutions. A face mask map app grew out of a suggestion on vTaiwan and now provides real-time information on stock availability. The app was developed through collaboration between the Digital Ministry and a group of entrepreneurs and hacktivists.

Iceland provides another example of a country that used a cooperative strategy to manage the pandemic. As of June 29, Iceland had recorded 10 deaths and 1,838 confirmed COVID-19 infections, of which 1,816 had fully recovered. Its success can be explained by the government’s quick action in activating the National Crisis Coordination Center on Jan. 31 to coordinate the country’s response to COVID-19 through mass testing, quarantine and tracing close contacts of infected citizens.

A public-private partnership between the National University Hospital of Iceland and deCODE Genetics enabled Iceland to carry out aggressive testing from February.

Testing in Iceland was recorded by NUHI (National University Hospital of Iceland, The Department of Microbiology) and private firm deCODE Genetics.  

Similar to Taiwan, cooperation and coordination between Iceland’s government ministries and agencies have played a key role in quarantine and contact tracing.

The Directorate of Health worked with the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management to create a team of 60 contact tracers in February, drawn from police investigators and healthcare workers. In this collaboration, the police contributed their expertise in traditional detective methods and enforced quarantine rules.

These two departments also partnered with a group of companies to create the Rakning C-19 tracing app in consultation with Iceland’s Data Protection Authority.

The governments of both Taiwan and Iceland have secured high levels of public trust in their responses to coronavirus. In Taiwan, YouGov polls in May showed that public trust in the government and healthcare professionals on COVID-19 was very high – at over 80 percent. A combination of transparency and effectiveness may explain polling in April which suggested that 84% of Icelanders were willing to sacrifice some human rights if it helped to prevent the spread of the virus.

The example of these two countries shows how trust can be promoted by speedy government action to activate a crisis management and command center which is headed by medical experts rather than politicians. Its purpose should be to coordinate cooperation between government and business and to communicate transparently with the public. This fits with a general lesson from cooperative strategies: openness between all parties is crucial and is a foundation for collaborative trust.

———-

Linda Hsieh is a reader in Strategy and International Business, University of Birmingham

John Child is a professor of Commerce, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

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Chris Christie calls the conduct of Trump’s legal team a ‘national embarrassment’ (nationthailand.com)

Chris Christie calls the conduct of Trump’s legal team a ‘national embarrassment’

InternationalNov 23. 2020Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, center, and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, left, listen as President Donald Trump speaks during a news briefing Sept. 27 at the White House. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Salwan Georges 

By The Washington Post · Paul Kane, Felicia Sonmez · NATIONAL, POLITICS, CONGRESS

WASHINGTON – Several prominent Republicans said President Donald Trump’s legal arguments had run their course, and called on him to allow the presidential transition process to begin.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/e9bcd5ae-0bce-41f6-b2eb-3af067d0e5bf?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

Chris Christie, a Trump confidant who helped prepare the president for the debates, called the conduct of Trump’s legal team a “national embarrassment.” Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said Trump had “exhausted all plausible legal options,” and urged him to concede. Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said it’s time to begin the transition.

The comments are the latest signs of dissent from within the president’s party, with increasingly more Republicans urging Trump to accept the results of the election and move on.

And they come as President-elect Joe Biden moved forward with his selection of key members of his administration, with incoming chief of staff Ronald Klain saying Biden’s first Cabinet picks will be revealed Tuesday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/5b2c19c0-b2fb-4e1c-83ee-b2616651e830?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

Klain and other Biden transition team members declined to say which positions will be announced.”If you want to know what Cabinet agencies they are and who’s going to be in those Cabinet agencies, you’ll have to wait for the president-elect to say that himself,” he said Sunday morning.

In an interview on ABC News’s “This Week,” Christie said the president should give up his legal strategy. “Elections have consequences, and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen,” he said.

“The conduct of the president’s legal team has been a national embarrassment,” Christie added, noting that Trump’s lawyers have made a flurry of fraud allegations but have offered no evidence to back them up in court.

Christie criticized Trump’s lawyers for proffering false conspiracy theories at news conferences and other media appearances.

“They don’t do it in the courtroom,” the 2016 Republican presidential candidate said, suggesting that attorneys are fearful of making baseless arguments under oath before federal judges.

“It must mean the evidence doesn’t exist,” Christie said.

Christie said the Republican Party should focus on trying to win Georgia’s two runoff elections Jan. 5 to secure the Senate majority, rather than continuing with its unsuccessful legal challenges of the presidential election results.

“The rearview mirror should be ripped off,” Christie said.

Late Saturday night, after a federal judge threw out Trump’s legal attempt to invalidate millions of votes, Toomey congratulated Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory and encouraged the president to accept that result.

“President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania,” Toomey said in a statement, noting that the deciding judge, Matthew Brann, is a “longtime conservative Republican.”

This result, Toomey noted, followed Georgia’s certification Friday of Biden’s victory there and Michigan’s GOP legislative leaders rejecting efforts to block the certification of Biden’s clear victory in that state.

“I congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory. They are both dedicated public servants and I will be praying for them and for our country,” Toomey said.

Senate Republicans have by and large avoided commenting on Trump’s actions, with more than 40 not responding to requests for comment Thursday and Friday about the president’s effort to have Michigan legislators reject the Biden victory there of more than 150,000 votes.

Republicans are aware that any perceived lack of loyalty to the president could prompt him to attack the defectors – just as Trump did Saturday night when he called Brann a “product of Senator Pat ‘No Tarriffs’ Toomey.”

“No friend of mine,” Trump tweeted.

Even some Trump backers who support pushing ahead with legal challenges said that Biden probably will take office and that the General Services Administration should allow the Democratic transition team access to the federal agencies and key briefings, as well as office space and millions of dollars in funding, so the administration can begin work Jan. 20.

“I just think that you have to begin that process, give the incoming administration all the time they need,” Cramer said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Cramer said that transition process should have begun at least a week ago. But he added that the transition could begin even as Trump’s legal team continued to press its cases in the states.

This is, Cramer said, “just a simple legal process.”

The president-elect, meanwhile, has gone ahead with assembling his administration.

Biden last week announced several senior White House staff appointments and told reporters that he has decided on his choice to lead the Treasury Department, though he did not reveal the person’s name. Among the top candidates for the post is Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard, who served as a senior Treasury Department official in the Obama administration.

Klain said the Biden transition was “beating, in fact, the pace that was set by the Obama-Biden transition, beating the pace set by the Trump transition.”

Klain also echoed Biden’s recent comment that Trump’s efforts to hinder the transition have put American lives at risk by making it harder for the Biden team to coordinate with the current administration on pandemic planning.

“The president-elect, the vice president-elect are not getting the kind of intelligence briefings they’re entitled to,” Klain said. “Our transition isn’t getting access to agency officials to develop our plans, so there’s a lot of focus on that vaccine rollout plan that’s going to be critical in the early days of a Biden presidency. We have no access to that.”

Trump, meanwhile, is refusing to concede the election and continues to make false accusations of widespread voter fraud.

The president and his campaign legal team have largely failed in their efforts to challenge the election in the courts. Trump weighed in on the Pennsylvania decision in a Sunday morning tweet shortly before he arrived at his golf club in Sterling, Va., for the second day in a row.

“Other than politics, how do you lose a case where large numbers of voters, far more than you need to flip Pennsylvania, are disenfranchised? Vote Observers thrown out of counting rooms,” he tweeted, even though his campaign’s attorneys have acknowledged that Republican observers were granted access to polling locations.

Trump and some of his defenders have argued that Democrats sought to delegitimize his 2016 election by investigating his business interests and his campaign’s ties to Russia and voting to impeach him last year. Trump was later acquitted by the Senate.

Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, on Sunday pushed back against that comparison, calling it “absurd” and “an apples-and-oranges comparison at best.”

“I don’t think that when a president gets elected that he is no longer held accountable as he moves through his administration,” Bedingfield said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I think that’s an incredibly different thing.”

Trump’s efforts to “overturn the will of the American people” will fail, she added, “because, again, Joe Biden overwhelmingly won this election – 306 electoral college votes.”

“The American people voted for Joe Biden to be sworn in on January 20, 2021, and he will be,” she said.

The president also on Sunday lashed out at Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican who said earlier in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he was “embarrassed that more people in the party aren’t speaking up” against Trump.

“Well, I just don’t think there are a lot of profiles in courage, frankly,” Hogan said. “I mean, we all know how vindictive the president can be, how powerful his Twitter account is, and how he can really pressure Republicans and go after them. Very few of us are willing to stand up.”

Soon after, Trump shared a link to a report on how Hogan spent $9.46 million on coronavirus tests from South Korea that turned out to be flawed. “This RINO will never make the grade,” the president tweeted. “Hogan is just as bad as the flawed tests he paid big money for!”

Later Sunday afternoon, Hogan took to the president’s favorite medium to return fire.

“If you had done your job, America’s governors wouldn’t have been forced to fend for themselves to find tests in the middle of a pandemic, as we successfully did in Maryland,” he tweeted at Trump. “Stop golfing and concede.”