 In what I believe is a shocking turn of events, Donald J. Trump, current president of the United States, has admitted that he lost the selection. He has conceded to Joe Biden, albeit informally and unofficially, but nonetheless, it still is a concession. Now, what this means is that his coup attempt has officially failed. I can confidently say that Donald Trump will not be able to steal the selection. And we'll talk about all the specifics as to why I think that it's safe to conclude this. But let's talk about why he is conceding because he has instructed the individual in charge of the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy, to go ahead with the transition process, meaning I know I'm leaving and I know that Biden is coming in and let's begin that process. So he tweeted out, I want to thank Emily Murphy at GSA for his steadfast dedication and loyalty to our country. Yeah, right, more like loyalty to Donald Trump. She has been harassed, threatened and abused and I do not want to see this happen to her, her family or employees of GSA. Our case strongly continues, sure. We will keep up the good fight and I believe we will prevail, no you don't. Nevertheless, in the best interest of our country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols and I've told my team to do the same. Now when he says do what needs to be done, that's his way of saying start the transition process because Biden is going to be the next president. Now, look, publicly he's still, in spite of this, going to maintain the facade that there's still a chance because we talked about this before. This is a grift for Donald Trump. What he's doing is he's trying to get all of his supporters, primarily his cultists, to donate to his legal defense fund when in actuality they're paying down his campaign debt and contributing to his newly formed super PAC so he can still have control over the Republican Party. Meanwhile, it's over. In fact, his lawyers are still going on television saying Donald Trump won and we're going to prove that he won. Take a look. The point of all this. The point of this, of course, is to get to fair and accurate results because the election was stolen and President Trump won by a landslide. And how you're mischaracterizing this, I think that your viewers need to understand the truth of this. So Donald Trump didn't just win, he won by a landslide. I mean, we're getting further and further away from reality, but meanwhile, it's over. Trump has told his aides that he knows it's over and he's already planning for his life after the presidency and he may announce a 2024 run. You wouldn't be talking about these things if you didn't acknowledge that you lost this election. But again, he has to maintain this facade so he can continue to raise money. He's going to maintain this as long as he possibly can. Meanwhile, it's already official. Emily Murphy has already signed off on the transition process. So there's nothing left that he can do. It's over. States are certifying the results. The electoral college will make it official in December and there's nothing left for him to do. There's no more avenues that he can take to steal the selection. Now, I will say that even though his coup attempt was unsuccessful, that doesn't necessarily mean that what he did throughout these last couple of weeks did not do long term damage to our democracy. Because what he was able to prove was that if you truly want to pull off a coup attempt in America, it's really not that difficult. It's really, really easy to get at least half of the Republican Party's base to believe that this election was rigged. And furthermore, Democrats proved that even while there's an active coup attempt, they're not going to fight back. They're just going to fist bump individuals who are trying to get entire counties that went for Biden invalidated, as we saw with Kamala Harris and Lindsey Graham. And on top of that, they're not really going to say anything as there's this active effort to overturn the results of the election. So in the event down the road, we get an election result that's closer, not as easy to steal with a more competent fascist that the Republican Party establishment likes, we could actually see a coup be successful. And that's horrifying and I want people to understand the gravity of this situation. There are some people who just love to do damage control for Donald Trump and downplay the severity of the coup, like Michael Tracy, who is talking about how, oh, well, this isn't a coup. Trump going ahead with this transition process basically proves that this was never a coup attempt, except a coup isn't black or white. There are different types of coups. Not all coups occur violently and by use of force. Some coups are soft coups, political coups, where you have an individual who is an opportunist exploit the flaws in our political institutions to consolidate power in an illegitimate way. That's exactly what Donald Trump tried to do. I mean, to say that this wasn't a coup attempt is as ridiculous as saying there wasn't a coup in Bolivia, where we saw the results of the election be called into question this time by an international entity OAS. And then we have the fascists. They ousted Eva Morales, but when MAS, the Socialist Party, won that election, the fascists ultimately accepted the results of that election and they conceded. That was still a coup. The coup ultimately failed, but nonetheless, it was still a coup attempt. So I think that we have to call it what it is. That's really important because if we don't call it what it is, then we can't fix the problem and prevent it in the future. We have to make fundamental changes to our system to prevent a coup from taking place. Donald Trump, in a way, kind of did us a service by proving how fragile democracy is, even here in America. Now, what he did was he tried to steal the selection by two methods. The first method was through the courts. We all know that he stacked the federal judiciary with his loyalists, but still he lost because his legal team presented zero evidence in court. They had more than 30 cases thrown out and all that they were left to do was try to, you know, grasp for some procedural victories. You know, they had a recount in Georgia and then Trump says, OK, well, let's do another recount, even though that's not going to change anything. Let's do it anyway so we can convince my, you know, cultists that we're doing something. But I mean, it's abundantly clear that legally and through the courts, Trump isn't going to be able to overturn the results of this election. That's just not a feasible way of stealing it. So what he then tried to do was pivot to Plan B where he tries to find loyalists in each state to overturn the will of voters in that state. Now, we talked about this before the election because Barton Gelman wrote an article for the Atlantic where he explains that Trump's legal team already said they were pursuing this as an option, where basically if Biden wins a state and it's close, they try to cry fraud and then get that state's Republican legislature to overturn the results. Now, this is tough to do because Biden won multiple states in battleground states. So it's not like there was just like one or two states that Trump needed to overturn. There were a lot of states that Trump needed to overturn and steal in order to make this coup successful. So it was more difficult. But he focused on Michigan because if he were able to be successful in Michigan, well, perhaps that could, you know, give more Republicans in other states confidence that they too can pull off this coup. So after Republican lawmakers in Michigan vocalized some interest in appointing their own electors to vote against Biden, even though he won their state. Well, the Republican Senate majority leader Mike Shirke basically stated that that's not going to happen. We're not going to do that because, you know, just overturning the results in that one state, you're not going to change the result of the election nationally and you're just going to piss off a lot of people. So if you need this to happen, it's got to happen in multiple states. It's got to be much more of a coordinated effort. So Mike Shirke said, no, we're not going to do this. And Mike Shirke, he may be seemingly reasonable based on what I'm telling you that he won't just like overturn the will of his state's voters. I know the bar is low, but this also is a right wing extremist. And once he vocalized that he's not going to be stealing the selection, overturning his state's results in favor of Donald Trump by appointing their own electors to the electoral college to vote against Biden. Well, then what happened was incredibly disturbing. Mike Shirke was then invited to meet with Donald Trump and he agreed to set a meeting, which I mean, since he's a Republican and also an extremist Republican, a lot of people, myself included, were worried that Trump would be able to convince him, which led to people protesting Mike Shirke when he arrived in D.C. Because they thought, oh my God, is this actually happening? Are you going to be convinced to overturn the will of voters in Michigan? Take a look. Now, thankfully, Michigan certified the results of the election on Monday, so Mike Shirke was not convinced to his credit. But the fact that people had a reason to be concerned, that shows you how fragile democracy is. And if we don't actually make institutional changes, a coup is possible in the near future, assuming the Republican Party continues to shift further and further to the right and openly embrace authoritarianism. I mean, it's not just Donald Trump. Remember that? Lindsey Graham was trying to get entire counties in Georgia overturned. Now, not all Republicans are as authoritarian as Donald Trump, even though Brian Kemp successfully suppressed enough votes in Georgia to win his gubernatorial race. He still refused to just openly overturn the results of the election because you can't close Pandora's box once you open it. Like that is something entirely different. Like voter suppression is evil in and of itself. But to actually take it to the next step where the results are in and you overturn those results, we're just in straight-up authoritarian territory. So because Trump's legal battle has failed, because now he just, he can't win by appointing his own electors at the state level, it's over. And I think that you could argue that Trump's coup attempt really started to unravel once Trump's lawyers proved to people that they are not serious individuals. So Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, they put on a press conference that I think can only be described as batshit fucking insane, where for whatever reason Rudy Giuliani was secreting black liquid and Sidney Powell claimed that millions of votes were switched from Trump to Biden and of course presented no evidence. But the problem is that they got too crazy to the point where they were undermining their own argument even at their original argument was not factual and it was just laughable. So think about how far away they strayed from their original claim. They originally started out by claiming that the mail-in ballots was the Democrats way of rigging this election. That was the catalyst. That's where they're going to be committing fraud. But then they moved the goalpost so much to where Sidney Powell publicly is saying actually millions of votes were flipped. And this is also some coordinated conspiracy between Venezuela, Cuba, the Democrats, Bernie Sanders. I mean, it's just, it's so batshit insane that even Trump's lawyers like Rudy Giuliani thought that this was making them look bad, which is why Trump's team decided to distance themselves from Sidney Powell after that press conference. In other words, they fired her. She's not a part of Trump's legal team, which caused a lot of chaos and confusion within MAGA cultist circles because they're wondering, wait, she is the most firebrand, most loyal individual. So why would Trump want to distance himself from her? Well, it's because you can only be so crazy to where you're laughed out of the room. And that's where we were getting. I mean, it was bad enough that Rudy Giuliani was getting laughed out of courts across the country. And it was already laughable, but they took it to the next level. Like you have to dial down the craziness. Otherwise, you're going to look even more dumb than you already do. Now, in terms of why they distanced themselves from Sidney Powell, I'm going to let Rudy Giuliani explain why they decided to do this, because I think his explanation is very telling. The question I've got is now we've been watching you pursue both electoral fraud through the mail-in ballots, electoral fraud as well through the software and the claims about Dominion, a break with Sidney Powell over the weekend. What's behind that and what is the motive, the reason for the split between Powell and Giuliani at all? Well, I think it's because we're pursuing two different theories. Our theory of the case to get to the Supreme Court now in four places, and it's soon going to be in two others, and there'll be an overall lawsuit, is basically misconduct of the election by state officials in at least five or six different states in which the misconduct of the election involved deprivation of constitutional rights for the president. So in other words, Sidney Powell was let go because she's even too crazy for someone like me. I am a ghoul who literally secretes black fluid from my skull, and I'm worried that she is going to make us look bad. If you're too crazy for someone like Rudy Giuliani, that's a problem. And even Donald Trump reportedly was worried that his lawyers are just too crazy. Like they're going to make him look bad and undermine his effort. Like he worked so hard to lie about mail-in ballots, and now they're like taking it to the next level where they're saying, no, no, no, it's not just mail-in ballots, like votes are literally being flipped. Okay, show us evidence. Even Tucker Carlson asked for evidence. Now he has since done a 180, but nonetheless, when you have the biggest propagandists for the Republican Party questioning your narrative and not towing the party line when you have more and more Senate Republicans break from Donald Trump because they can't possibly maintain this insane facade any longer, it's over. The best move for Trump is to understand he's run out of options and he's running out of time. And the best thing that he can do now is save face and possibly prep for 2024. So this is a concession. Like I think that that is the only way to characterize this. For Donald Trump to go ahead and initiate this process, give Emily Murphy the go-ahead, that is a concession. It's over. This is him publicly admitting defeat in a very cowardly way, but nonetheless, it's still defeat. So I think it's important, but still, the extent to which he tried to steal this election in a number of ways, it should scare everyone because Donald Trump isn't as unique as people want to believe. Like, sure, he is a unique threat to democracy because he's so brazen, but the Republican Party throughout this process, they showed their cards. Lindsey Graham, again, tried to meddle to get entire counties invalidated. Trump's legal team has been arguing to basically invalidate the votes of millions of black voters in Detroit, in cities across the country that went for Biden. This is insane and brazen. And if they're this brazen now, I mean, they're not going to change in the future. Look, I'm glad that Trump conceded. It's a little bit of a relief that he now knows that he can't steal this election because that means that there will in fact be a transition of power. I didn't necessarily think that the odds of him succeeding in this coup would be successful, but still the fact that he's attempting it and he's trying to find any way to steal this election, that was deeply unsettling. Anyone who's worried about democracy or cares about democracy should have been watching this worried about the results because democracy, it's fragile and every single democracy, it does have an expiration date. And the question was whether or not our democracy would die now or if it still has a little bit life left in it or can possibly be saved. So it's over for Donald Trump, but trust me, the Republican Party is not suddenly going to have this coming to Jesus moment once he's out of office and out of power. He'll still have influence over the Republican Party and the shift to the right that he has facilitated within the Republican Party, that will continue. The Trump legacy is going to be a pretty long-lasting legacy, if not politically, then at least judicially since he stacked the courts with federalist society goons. So now we move on to the next chapter and we just hope that he doesn't cause that much damage before leaving office. Hopefully he won't start a war with Iran or fuck up too much stuff. We know he's going to be insufferable, but so long as he doesn't do too much to ruin the country. That will be great, but of course we are not going to be able to sleep until he's out. And then we have to fight Biden. So it's a never ending battle, but nonetheless, at least we can check off coup from things we have to worry about now. And I just hit my microphone, so we'll end that there.