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The president has suggested he may not accept the results of the 2020 election enough times to prompt alarm over whether he may actually be serious.

Trump displayed the same non-commitment in 2016, but this year an expectation of delays in the result gives the president more scope to claim election results can’t be trusted

“I have to see,” Trump said. “Look – I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.”

The death of the iconic Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has shocked the political world, altered the contours of the upcoming election and induced an overwhelming dread among liberals who fear some basic rights could now be in jeopardy.

it remains unclear whether the Senate will hold a vote before Election Day. If it did, it would represent a colossal act of hypocrisy since many of the same senators refused to even give Barack Obama’s last nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing, arguing that it was inappropriate to fill a seat on the court in an election year.

But Republicans have the power to force a vote, and barring defections, they could exercise it.

The 2020 election is over, and Joe Biden won.

It's time to get on with the transition and move America forward.

President-elect Joe Biden ran a campaign to heal the nation. He wants to turn the political temperature down in America and seek bipartisan agreements on matters of public policy. In short, Biden wants to steady the ship of state and return White House operations to some semblance of normalcy.

Americans today are far more racially diverse, less Christian, better educated, more urbanized, and less likely to be married. In polls, they are more tolerant of interracial and same-sex relationships, more likely to acknowledge the existence of racial discrimination, and less concerned about crime.

Almost all of these changes complicate Trump’s task in trying to rally a winning electoral coalition behind his alarms against marauding “angry mobs,” “far-left fascism,” and “the violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats.” The Americans he is targeting with his messages of racial resentment and cultural backlash are uniformly a smaller share of American society now than they were then.

The demographic shifts that have most reshaped politics since Nixon’s day sit at the crossroads of race, education, and religion.

Trump's intransigence, included in his latest assault on perfectly legitimate mail-in ballots on Wednesday, posed a grave threat to the democratic continuum that has underpinned nearly 250 years of republican government.

"Well, we're going to have to see what happens. You know that I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster,"

"(G)et rid of the ballots and you'll have a very ... there won't be a transfer, frankly. There'll be a continuation."

With no end in sight, many people are flocking to bars, family parties, bowling alleys and sporting events much as they did before the virus hit, and others must return to school or work as communities seek to resuscitate economies. And in sharp contrast to the spring, the rituals of hope and unity that helped people endure the first surge of the virus have given way to exhaustion and frustration.

In parts of the world where the virus is resurging, the outbreaks and a rising sense of apathy are colliding, making for a dangerous combination. Health officials say the growing impatience is a new challenge as they try to slow the latest outbreaks, and it threatens to exacerbate what they fear is turning into a devastating autumn.

The issue is particularly stark in the United States

Intensifying the mistrust, experts said, are the power and reach of social media. They said the quest to turn minor irregularities into signs of political malintent — enabled by an information ecosystem that rewards outrage and partisan groupthink — poses among the greatest threats to the integrity of the Nov. 3 election.

“The amplification of these kinds of stories can have, in and of itself, a suppressive effect,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The events in Utah, she said, show the ripple effects of attacks by Trump and his allies on “legal, safe, secure voting methods.”

. But the most lasting consequence of the false and misleading narratives coursing through the Internet, often using real examples but exaggerating them to create the appearance of an alarming trend, could be a form of democratic backsliding in parts of the country where the widespread adoption of mail balloting has been shown to expand electoral participation.

“This is what totalitarianism looks like in our century,” the Post’s Op-Ed editor, Sohrab Ahmari, wrote in response: “Not men in darkened cells driving screws under the fingernails of dissidents, but Silicon Valley dweebs removing from vast swaths of the internet a damaging exposé on their preferred presidential candidate.”

In his new book “Live Not By Lies,” for instance, Rod Dreher warns against the rise of a “soft totalitarianism,” distinguished not by formal police-state tactics but by pressure from the heights of big media, big tech and the education system, which are forging “powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse.”

what we call the American “right” increasingly just consists of anyone, whether traditionalist or secularist or somewhere in between, who feels alarmed by growing ideological conformity within the media and educational and corporate establishments.

The Taliban are advancing while peace talks stall.

At this hour, as America edges closer to ending its longest war, it seemed fitting that a visiting delegation of senior American and Afghan military officers should pause at this spot to acknowledge a 32-year-old CIA officer - the first US casualty in the war to topple the Taliban in 2001.

The Taliban, now at their greatest strength since 2001, are advancing and attacking in districts across Afghanistan - despite a deal signed with the US in February which seemed to promise a respite to a nation exhausted by war and increasingly worried it will only get worse.

Following signals from President Donald J. Trump — who had tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” after an earlier show of force in Lansing — Michigan’s Republican Party last year welcomed the support of newly emboldened paramilitary groups and other vigilantes. Prominent party members formed bonds with militias or gave tacit approval to armed activists using intimidation in a series of rallies and confrontations around the state. That intrusion into the Statehouse now looks like a portent of the assault halfway across the country months later at the United States Capitol.

“We knew there would be violence,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, about the Jan. 6 assault. Endorsing tactics like militiamen with assault rifles frightening state lawmakers “normalizes violence,” she told journalists last week, “and Michigan, unfortunately, has seen quite a bit of that.”

The chief organizer of that protest, Meshawn Maddock, on Saturday was elected co-chair of the state Republican Party — one of four die-hard Trump loyalists who won top posts.

pocalypse often feels inevitable. After all, aren’t we in the “sixth mass extinction”? Haven’t populations of wild animals already crashed by 60 percent? Don’t we have just “10 years left” to avert climate meltdown? Do we really dare to hope?

in every case, there is a path through.

framing can make extinction feel like a force too huge and powerful to avert.

"He told them to 'fight like hell,' and they brought us hell that day," Rep. Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, said as he kicked off the House's presentation.

"The evidence will show you that ex-President Trump was no innocent bystander. The evidence will show that he clearly incited the January 6 insurrection. It will show that Donald Trump surrendered his role as commander-in-chief and became the inciter-in-chief of a dangerous insurrection."

One security video played by the House impeachment managers showed Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman running as the mob begins to enter the Capitol. Goodman passes Romney and redirects him from the rioters' path before continuing to the first floor to respond to the breach and divert the mob from lawmakers.

From the Black Death of the 14th century to cholera in war-torn Yemen, it was a baleful history. But Professor Whitty, who had spent most of his career fighting infectious diseases in Africa, was reassuring. Britain, he said, had a special protection.

Wealth “massively hardens a society against epidemics,” he argued, and quality of life — food, housing, water and health care — was more effective than any medicine at stopping the diseases that ravaged the developing world.

Professor Whitty’s confidence was hardly unique. As recently as February, when European health ministers met in Brussels to discuss the novel coronavirus emerging in China, they commended their own health systems and promised to send aid to poor and developing countries.

It must be clear to almost everyone by now that the sudden and sharp economic downturn that began in late March is something more than a severe recession

“This situation is so dire that it deserves to be called a ‘depression’ — a pandemic depression,” write economists Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Reinhart in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. “The memory of the Great Depression has prevented economists and others from using that word.”

People don’t want to be accused of alarmism and making a bad situation worse. But this reticence is self-defeating and ahistoric. It minimizes the gravity of the crisis and ignores comparisons with the 1930s and the 19th century. That matters. If the hordes of party-goers had understood the pandemic’s true dangers, perhaps they would have been more responsible in practicing social distancing.

WASHINGTON — Democratic leaders in Congress and a pair of Republicans on Tuesday condemned President Trump for his response to protests around the country and in the capital, the day after peaceful demonstrators were gassed in front of the White House so he could pose for a photograph with a Bible.The rare bipartisan rebukes reflected a broad sense of alarm at the president’s behavior as protests of police violence and racial discrimination reach a boiling point throughout the country. They followed a remarkable spectacle that unfolded Monday evening, when the police fired flash-bang explosions and tear gas and used officers on horseback to drive away peaceful protesters as Mr. Trump appeared in the Rose Garden and threatened to send the United States military into states where governors could not bring protests under control.He then left the White House and, with Attorney General William P. Barr and other aides, crossed a park that had been cleared of demonstrators to have his picture taken holding the Bible outside a historic church that had been vandalized in the unrest.“After the president’s reality show ended last night, while the nation nervously watched the chaos that engulfs us, President Trump probably laid in bed pleased with himself for descending another rung on the dictatorial ladder,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said on the Senate floor on Tuesday morning. “He probably wore out his remote control watching the clips of General Barr’s victory over the unarmed in the battle of Lafayette Square.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyHe added: “It’s all so sad, so pathetic, so weak.”On the other side of the Capitol, wielding her own Bible and quoting from the Book of Ecclesiastes, Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged the president to focus on “a time to heal,” adding that the aggressive scene that played out in Washington on Monday had “no place” in the nation’s capital.

The United States, it seems, has gotten over covid-19 and moved on to other things.

as the pandemic has worn on, and everyone has learned more, covid-19 no longer seems so threatening.

Yet that is a little too sunny; even as the initial spike in cases has receded, covid-19 is still the third-leading cause of death in the United States, behind only cancer and heart disease. And while 40 percent of victims had ties to nursing homes, 60 percent did not

Snyder says he has seen an “explosion” in cases among 20-44 year-olds.

Some of those, he said, are coming in severely ill – requiring oxygen, intubation and ventilators. “We even had people in that age group die, unfortunately. So it’s very troubling and it’s very difficult to watch young people die from this disease. It’s horrible.”

On Friday, vice-president Mike Pence said half of new cases in the US in recent weeks were adults under 35.

When Disease X actually arrived, as Covid-19, governments, businesses, public-health officials and citizens soon found themselves in a state of chaos, battling an invisible enemy with few resources and little understanding—despite years of work that outlined almost exactly what the virus would look like and how to mitigate its impact.

Governments had ignored clear warnings and underfunded pandemic preparedness. They mostly reacted to outbreaks, instead of viewing new infectious diseases as major threats to national security. And they never developed a strong international system for managing epidemics, even though researchers said the nature of travel and trade would spread infection across borders.

Underlying it all was a failure that stretches back decades. Most everyone knew such an outcome was possible. And yet no one was prepared.

surveys have consistently found that about 70 percent to 80 percent of Republicans don’t buy the results. They don’t agree that Joe Biden won fair and square. They say the election was rigged. And they say enough fraud occurred to tip the outcome.

Research has shown that the answers that partisans (on the left as well as on the right) give to political questions often reflect not what they know as fact, but what they wish were true.

She suggested, however, that these results be taken with something between alarm and skepticism.