Weekend Reads 11/14/20

Trump's last-ditch US election lawsuits not going well for president, experts say

“It could be reflex. On most people, if you hit their patellar tendon with a small rubber mallet, you get a knee jerk. With Trump, it’s possible that if you hit his patellar tendon with a small rubber mallet, you get a lawsuit,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

How Biden swung the religious vote

The marginal decline in Trump’s appeal among Christian constituencies that overwhelmingly supported him against Clinton has led to finger-pointing inside his campaign. Some aides blamed the president’s inability to garner the same levels of support this cycle on his transactional view of religious voters, suggesting white evangelicals and Catholics in some parts of the country may have felt taken advantage of. Others accused the Trump campaign of becoming complacent in a race that saw unprecedented outreach by the Democratic nominee to evangelical and Catholic voters.

Can Donald Trump Really Be This Clueless About How Elections Work?

For Trump, the ordinary ups and downs of Election Night are immediate cause for suspicion, except when they favor him. "We were getting ready for a big celebration, we were winning everything, and all of a sudden, it was just called off," he said. "We won states. And all of a sudden I said, 'What happened to the election? It's off.' And we have all these announcers saying, 'What happened?' And then they said, 'Oh.'"

He’s Fired

An overwhelming repudiation of this man’s cruelty was something that many of us craved, deep down in our bones. The election denied us the gratification of seeing our country unite and say, with one voice, that this is not who we are. That here, right matters.