Biden names a chief of staff as his lead only widens — but still Trump insists, “WE WILL WIN!” It’s Thursday, and this is your politics tip sheet. |
- Joe Biden’s popular-vote lead has topped five million votes as counting continues in states across the country.
- Not only has Biden bested the record set in 2008 by his old boss, Barack Obama, for the most votes won by a presidential candidate, but he is also on pace to win votes from a larger share of the total population than Obama did that year. Biden has received votes from 23.4 percent of the American population, compared with the 22.8 percent that Obama won in 2008.
- But President Trump is not backing down in his effort to dispute the election. He tweeted the words “WE WILL WIN!” last night, accompanied by a video panning across the crowd at a Trump rally and a voice-over featuring the president issuing words of high-flown inspiration.
- “The more people tell you it’s not possible, that it can’t be done, the more you should be absolutely determined to prove them wrong,” he says in the video, using language that would feel benign and nonspecific if he weren’t currently denying his own loss in the presidential election. “Treat the word ‘impossible’ as nothing more than motivation,” he continues.
- Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, yesterday authorized a hand recount of the state’s presidential election, which Biden leads by more than 14,000 votes. The recount was expected, given the narrow margin, but it is unlikely to overturn the result. Despite the low chances of success, the president’s campaign had pushed for a manual recount. Votes in the state’s two Senate races, which are now set to go to runoff elections, won’t be subject to a recount.
- In another tweet yesterday, Trump singled out a Republican city commissioner in Philadelphia by name. The president attacked the official, Al Schmidt, for defending the city’s efforts to count votes.
- Schmidt has appeared on multiple TV stations recently, and he told CNN yesterday that he had read “completely ridiculous allegations” on social media about election impropriety in Philadelphia.
- In a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday, Schmidt said his office had received veiled death threats toward him and his staff members in the days since the election.
- Biden last night named Ron Klain, a longtime Democratic operative, to be his White House chief of staff.
- As was the case when Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, there was hardly an element of surprise. Klain first went to work for Biden in 1989, shortly after graduating from Harvard Law School, when Biden was a senator from Delaware.
- Klain went on to serve as Biden’s chief of staff in the Obama administration, where he also coordinated the White House’s Ebola response. He and Biden have remained in close communication since. The president-elect’s decision to tap Klain was an indicator that he plans to bring members of his inner circle along with him into the White House.
- Facebook is extending its postelection ban on political advertising for an additional month, a move that will constrain the campaigns of the four candidates facing off in the two Senate runoffs in Georgia.
- With Trump refusing to concede, Facebook took the measure “as part of our ongoing efforts to protect the election,” it said in a statement.
- Facebook had said in October that it would halt all political advertising on its network after the polls closed on Nov. 3, in an effort to curtail election-related misinformation.
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 | | Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
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Trump talked with advisers in the Oval Office yesterday. |
We wrote to you in this space yesterday about how Trump has fallen out of favor with Rupert Murdoch, whose news outlets — including Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post — have begun to accept the reality of Biden’s victory. |
There’s another influential conservative media impresario who has soured on Trump — albeit a far more insurgent one. That’s Matt Drudge, who has aggregated news articles on the home page of his influential website, Drudge Report, since 1995. |
He had been a Trump enthusiast from the early days of the 2016 campaign, but he appears to have turned on the president well before Trump lost the election to Biden, as our media reporter Tiffany Hsu writes in a new article. |
We spoke to Tiffany about the evolution of Trump and Drudge’s relationship, and why it appears to have gone south. |
When Donald Trump entered the Republican primary race via escalator in 2015, he was seen as a heterodox conservative, an outsider and a pot-stirrer — not unlike the persona Matt Drudge has cultivated online. What do you think Drudge saw in Trump? |
It’s more what they saw in each other. Matthew Lysiak, who published his book “The Drudge Revolution” this year, wrote that Drudge “had long known that Donald Trump translated into page views” and that “no one in the Republican primary better understood the extent that Matt controlled the conservative echo chamber better than Donald Trump.” They knew from the get-go that there was a mutually beneficial relationship to be had. |
You wrote about how crucial Drudge’s support was to Trump’s rise. Twenty-five years after he started drudgereport.com, how strong does his influence remain today? |
He has more than half a million Twitter followers and just one tweet. Several conservative news sites emerged recently that mimic the look and voice of Drudge Report. This is clearly a guy who holds substantial sway, though data suggests that his readership has declined in recent months. |
When does Drudge appear to have turned against Trump? Do we have any idea why? |
People really started to notice the rift in the summer of 2019, when Drudge Report posted a headline about the slow progress on Trump’s border wall. Lysiak reported that Drudge has a habit of cutting ties with people in his life, including falling out with Ann Coulter in 2017 and ignoring Laura Ingraham when she started a website in 2015. |
Maybe Drudge is used to relationships ending. Maybe he wanted to generate attention by breaking with Trump. It’s unclear. |
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