Trump is losing support

FIFTY-NINE DAYS TO GO: More Republicans by the day are removing their support for Donald Trump's lone battle against the election result, the election organisers, anyone who says he didn't win. Georgia and Michigan are now definitely Biden's, so where else to turn. He can't seriously believe a bunch of states will suddenly reverse the results and announce Trump as the winner. But every time someone high profile says the election went fine thank you, he gets mad. Like when he sacked Chris Krebs, head of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for daring to say in public that the election was trouble-free. Under normal circumstances he would have been praised from the rooftops by the whole of Congress and the nation for saving the election from outside foreign interference. He kept the Russians at bay. That was a helluva success, especially after all the warnings of hostile cyber attacks. But for announcing that he had the done the job he was paid to to do, he gets fired. What Krebs did fail to do, however, was to stop the president of the United States from trying to interfere in the election process. Because that's exactly what he's doing, trying to overturn a democratic vote because he didn't win. His Republican and Democratic predecessors must be weeping into their pillows at night to see the standard bearer of the Republican Party refusing to do business with the president-elect. Barack Obama has been going around saying how gracious and helpful George W Bush was when he was president-elect in 2008. That's the way it's supposed to be done. But it doesn't look like the 45th president is going to be either gracious or helpful towards Joe Biden.

How much longer will Trump wait before conceding?

When the recount results came through from Georgia today you would have thought someone in the White House would have got their abacus out and made a quick arithmetical calculation before paying a visit to the Oval Office. Not that anyone in the white House wants to be the one to say to the president, sorry it's all over. But the Georgia recount was pretty definitive. Biden won, Trump lost. You can't go on recounting, the counters will get sore fingers. There are few options left for the president. None of the judges so far have shown any interest in reversing the count in any of the disputed states, and even if one did, it wouldn't make any difference now. Biden has won 306 electoral college votes as opposed to Trump's 232. And he has won 51.1 per cent of the popular vote against Trump's 47.2 per cent. That's a relatively significant gap I would have thought, big enough to make it impossible for the president to continue to insist that he won the election. There is no evidence that some dark force stole the election and handed it to Biden. So how much longer can Trump wait before he finally concedes that he lost and Biden won? The intriguing thing is that even while Trump refuses to acknowledge the reality of the election result, he is rushing ahead with policy decisions to make sure his favourite administration issues are wrapped up before Januay 20. Like for example his order to the acting defence secretary Chris Miller to cut the US troop presence in Afghanistan from 4,500 to 2,500 by January 15. That smacks of a president doing stuff in his final days because he knows they are his final days. He will have other last-minute actions up his sleeve I have no doubt. Let's hope they are not too drastic, like his calling for options to bomb Iran's nuclear installations. Fortunately his advisers, including Chris Miller, opposed such an idea. Well that was a relief. Meanwhile, without an official concession from Trump, Biden and his team are planning ahead in the dark, refused access to intelligence and any form of mutual discussion about the pandemic, the economy or anything ese. At least Kamala Harris is able to help out a little on the intelligence side. She is on the Senate intelligence committee which gets secret briefings. But who knows whether the real secret stuff is being withheld for the moment?

Australian report on their SAS shame

MY STORY IN THE TIMES THIS AFTERNOON: The Australian report into evidence of unlawful killings by special forces in Afghanistan will cast a dark shadow over the heroism and courage of tens of thousands of men and women who have served in the frontline of battle in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two decades.The stark details of the accusations against Australian SAS soldiers will provoke widespread condemnation. But they will also raise questions about why such highly trained soldiers, elite in every sense, could have resorted to such brutality, violating, beyond any reasonable understanding of risk and danger, the accepted code of conduct in war. Soldiers with long experience of special forces combat do have an explanation but without offering any excuse for it. War is brutal and dehumanising, particularly for those who serve in tight military units involved in covert operations where maximum violence and aggression against the enemy are vital ingredients both for the success of their mission and for their own survival. “Recognising the incredible burden placed on each individual deployed to just survive through to another day isn’t well understood,” one former special forces commander said. No excuses were good enough, he said, but merely to see brutality devoid of context was to ignore the life soldiers in such units endured: “solitary, brutish and for many, short”. Small, very close military groups operating within a special forces bubble can sometimes reinforce a course of action which would seem to others outside the unit to be outrageous and beyond comprehension. In Iraq and Afghanistan over the years, atrocities and war crimes have been committed that have led to doubts about the moral, ethical and legal state of mind of individual soldiers and units within the US-led coalition. Among the most notorious was the Abu Ghraib prison abuses in Iraq in 2003 when Iraqi captives were subjected to physical, sexual and humiliating treatment by US soldiers, much of it caught on video camera. In November 2005 a squad of US Marines in Haditha took revenge after a roadside bomb killed one of their group. Twenty-four Iraqi civilians were killed including women and children. In Afghanistan on March 11 2012, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, a US soldier, went on a rampage killing 16 Afghan villagers in Kandahar province. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The spotlight put on the Australian SAS has shown that war can turn even the most disciplined soldier into a reckless and out-of-control human being. What is disturbing in the Australian SAS case is that this was not a one-off single deployment problem but rather a culture that became deeply embedded. However, the former special forces commander pleaded: “That one group of soldiers acted improperly, probably illegally and absolutely immorally shouldn’t paint all others in the same light.” Military leaders also have to share the blame. They are supposed to set the tone and moral compass for the units under their command. If they turn a blind eye to unlawful actions and decisions when they become apparent they are as guilty as the soldiers accused.

Queen Nancy Pelosi wins reelection

SIXTY-TWO DAYS TO GO. Donald Trump doesn't like Nancy Pelosi. They have had words in the past. Now he must be staeming with rage to hear that she has won reelection as Speaker of the House. If she can do it, why couldn't he? Well, of course, he still doesn't accept that he failed to win reelection but eventually he will implicitly accept defeat when he leaves the White House for the last time in January and he will have to put up with seeing Nancy ruling the roost in the House of Representatives in her 80s and remaining third in line to the presidency. Very galling for him. Nancy meanwhile is unbelievable. She had originally said she would only stand for one term this time, partly because of her age I assume but also partly because of the firebrand younger generation Congresswomen who feel her time is up and that she needs to be replaced by a progressive Democrat. But she won some of them round and has sailed into another two years as Speaker. Good for her. She managed to sweet-talk her opponents who were angry at the relatively poor showing the Democrats made in the Congressional elections. But the anti-Pelosi brigade feel a lot more cheerful now of course because Joe Biden has become president-elect and Kamala Harris is vice president-elect. That has dramatically changed the atmosphere, even though a number of House Democrats lost their seats. Queen Nancy will continue to reign.

Joe Biden pushes on regardless as Trump thinks of 2024

SIXTY-THREE DAYS TO GO. Every day there is something new from Joe Biden. As president-elect and only nine weeks before he is inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States - 46th POTUS - he has a helluva lot of things to do and sort out, notably fix his cabinet and all the key officials he wants around him in the White House, in between taking calls from around the world from leaders desperate to get their spoke in before anyone else. It must be a non-stop time for Biden, giving him only an inkling of what he will face each day when he takes over. But while the Biden planning is getting to fever pitch, the incumbent president is carrying on as if nothing dramatic happened two weeks ago. It really is bizarre. Donald Trump will not, absolutely will not concede that he lost, let alone that Biden won. What is going to happen when we get really close to Inauguration Day? Will Trump refuse to participate? Will he demand a helicopter to take him to Florida? Will he go golfing? Or will he lock the door of his private bedroom in the White House and decline to come out? I think in the end Trump will do what's right but with huge reluctance. I believe he will be there at the January 20 inauguration and will try and look disinterested. He will probably never officially concede but he might use slighty concessionary language in a tweet or in a statement that vaguely embraces the idea that he will leave the White House and allow Biden in as caretaker president before he, Donald Trump, comes back in 2024 for his second four-year term. If he goes ahead and announces he is going to stand in 2024, there is no question that he will expect not only to be chosen as the Republican nominated candidate but that he will defeat Biden and Kamala Harris. So any concession he makes between now and January 20 will be marginalised as he promises to his millions of supporters: "I'll be back."

Trump's plans to pull out all US troops from Afghanistan by January 20

SIXTY-FOUR DAYS TO GO: A fuller version of the story I wrote for The Times today: President Trump is expected to order the withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq before he leaves office in January. In a move to honour his longstanding pledge to bring all troops home and to stop American involvement in “endless wars”, his dramatic shake-up at the top echelons of the Pentagon is believed to be part of the plan to bring forward the military pull-out timetable. Christopher Miller, parachuted in a week ago by the president as the acting US defence secretary, was a special forces officer in the first phase of the toppling of the Taliban in 2001. He has given the strongest indication that total troop withdrawals are his top priority. “Now it’s time to come home,” he wrote in a memo to all Pentagon staff over the weekend. “This fight has been long, our sacrifices have been enormous and many are weary of war. I’m one of them,” he wrote. Former US national security and defence officials are expressing concern that, with a new team in the Pentagon, Mr Miller will be under pressure to wrap up Afghanistan and Iraq before Joe Biden becomes president on January 20. There are currently 4,500 US troops in Afghanistan and 3,000 in Iraq. Under White House plans revealed last month by Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, the 4,500 troops in Afghanistan were set to be reduced to 2,500 by early 2021. The February 29 peace deal between the US and the Taliban in Qatar stipulated that all American and coalition troops would be withdrawn “within fourteen months following announcement of this agreement “, a timetable that underwrote a May 1, 2021 deadline. However, General Mark Milley, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, has pushed against the 2,500 figure even though it was thought to be one of the options offered by the Pentagon earlier this year. He said that the timing of further cuts in the American troop presence between now and May 1 had to be based on conditions on the ground in Afghanistan. Mark Esper who was sacked by Mr Trump as defence secretary a week ago, supported the cautious approach towards further cuts in Afghanistan. He believed that Afghanistan was the prime cause of his firing. Before he was sacked, Mr Esper wrote a memo outlining half a dozen reasons why a precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan was a bad idea. He included the importance of coordinating with allies, a former senior US defence official told The Times. Mr Trump had made clear to Mr Esper, through his national security adviser, that he intended to move ahead with withdrawal before January 20. But Mr Esper resisted saying that he and General Milley and the department of defence were "institutionally not on board" because the Taliban had failed to meet the conditions that US officials had agreed would be necessary to enable American troops to be withdrawn, the former official said. Acting defence secretary Christopher Miller has been warned by Senator Mitch McConnel, Republican majority leader of the Senate, and by Senator Jim Inhofe, chairman of the Senate armed services committee, that there would be considerable opposition to "an ill-considered" withdrawal among Congressional Rebublicans. "But Miller appears to be on board with merely doing Trump's bidding and is surrounded by a praetorian guard of Trumpists (Anthony Tata, Kash Patel, Douglas McGregor - all swept into influential Pentagon positions in the last week), who undoubtedly will be trying to pull this off", the former official said. There will be significant push back from General Milley and General Frank McKenzie, commander of Central Command. There would also be serious logistical obstacles to being able to accomplish a withdrawal in the timeframe the White House is talking about. There has been similar caution over Iraq. The 5,200 American troops in Iraq were reduced to 3,000 in September, reflecting growing US military confidence in the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces. However, there are concerns that the military presence in Iraq could also be up for grabs in the remaining nine weeks of Mr Trump’s presidency as a way of ensuring his foreign policy legacy. ReplyReply to allForward More metroops1 Sun, 15 Nov, 18:47 (22 hours ago) Before he was fired, Mr Esper wrote a memo to the White House outlining half a dozen reasons why a precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan was a bad idea. He included the importance of coordinating with allies, a former senior US defence official told The Times. Mr Trump had made clear to Mr Esper that he intended to move ahead with withdrawal before January 20. But the Pentagon was "institutionally not on board", the former official said. Acting defence secretary Christopher Miller has been warned by Senator Mitch McConnell. Republican majority leader of the Senate, and by Senator Jim Inhofe, chairman of the Senate armed services committee, that there would be opposition to "an ill-considered" withdrawal. "But Miller appears to be on board with merely doing Trump's bidding," the former official said. to me

Trump says Biden won but refuses to concede

It looked like Donald Trump had finally given in when he tweeted that Joe Biden had won the election, although it was rigged. But the whole media world leapt on his words and pronounced that the president had at last accepted that his Democrat rival had beaten him. I can just hear Trump's reaction to the headlines. "No, I didn't accept anything of the sort. I never said that. How could they say I said that?" Because in very short order he had tweeted again, this time saying the election was totally rigged and it was fake media who had declared Biden the winner and that he would never concede. Not ever. So totally back to square one. That must have been a huge relief to his supporters who have been gathering in their thousands in Washington to demonstrate their faith in him. It just shows how risky it can be to tweet at all. Once you have thrown a few words together and pressed send, it can't be reversed. It's done, the damage is there for all to see. I'm sure Trump will be more cautious from now on. He knows that every word he utters whether verbally or by Tweet is read, interpreted, reinterpreted, analysed and retweeted by millions. He definitely said what he said and then definitely rowed back furiously. The next time he dares to mention the election we will all be watching and waiting and reading and wondering.