Amid 'Tumultuous' 2 Days, 2 Views of Trump

Tuesday's election in Georgia and Wednesday's certification of the presidential vote in DC have given pundits no shortage of things to write about. As Mike Allen puts it at Axios, the "next two days look to be the most tumultuous and telling of the wild, never-ending 2020 election." A sample:

• At the New Yorker, John Cassidy writes that President Trump's "authoritarian moment" has arrived. "If there were any doubt remaining that Donald Trump still represents a dire threat to American democracy, the events of this weekend dispelled it," he writes, referring to Trump's Georgia phone call. He also lays plenty of blame on the GOP for embracing a "populist personality cult" and getting the US into its current position. "If the Republic gets through the next two weeks without a catastrophe, we must surely take steps to protect ourselves against the next would-be authoritarian, which could well be Trump himself in 2024."
• But in Trump's camp is Rep. Jim Jordan, one of about 100 GOP members of the House who plan to object to the election results. "This is about President Trump and the Constitution," he says, per Newsmax. "He has fought for us, the American people. He has done more of what he said he would do than any president in our lifetimes, I mean, he's accomplished so much in his four years as president. It's time for us to fight for him and the Constitution."

• In a scathing column in the Washington Post, George Will calls out Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and the dozen or so GOP senators who plan to formally object to certifying Joe Biden's victory. The "Hawley-Cruz cohort will violate the oath of office in which they swore to defend the Constitution from enemies 'foreign and domestic,'" he writes. "They are its most dangerous domestic enemies."
• In regard to the Senate vote, Patrick Buchanan at RealClearPolitics points out that the GOP objections will be futile because the Democrat-controlled House will obviously not go along. So what is this really about? "The succession struggle inside the GOP, about who inherits the Trump estate if the president elects not to run again," he writes. "The [Hawley] and Cruz challenges are signals to the Trump faithful that they stood by Trump when the faint of heart had abandoned him to do the establishment's bidding." He predicts this "family brawl" within the GOP will be long-lasting.
• At the New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg demands an investigation of Trump over the Georgia call. She cites a federal law saying that anyone who "knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process" can get five years in prison. Trump "certainly seems to have violated this law," she writes.

(More President Trump stories.)