“President Trump’s public and private musings about running again in 2024 are scrambling the calculus for the large field of fellow Republicans considering bids,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Most hopefuls have been quick to show deference. But it’s unclear whether Mr. Trump, who refuses to concede his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, will follow through, and rivals either way will likely seek ways to remain viable. Prospective GOP candidates don’t want to risk alienating Mr. Trump’s base by appearing to push him aside, but they also don’t want to be left unprepared if he decides not to run.”

E.J. Dionne: “Yes, many progressives have been uneasy with these unusual allies. They insist that Trump was not some alien imposition on conservatism but rather the product of long-standing trends in Republican politics. Trafficking in racial division and racism, nativism, extremism, conspiracy theories and voter suppression did not start with Trump.”

“Progressives are entirely right about this. But the Never Trumpers deserve our respect precisely because so many of them stood against these tendencies and, in more cases than not, undertook a deeper critique of their own side.”

“At his campaign rally on Saturday night and a month after his 2020 election loss, President Trump claimed to an energetic crowd in Georgia that if he lost the election, he would be ‘a very gracious loser,'” according to Mediaite.

Said Trump: “If I lost, I would be a very gracious loser. If I lost, I would say ‘I lost,’ and I would go to Florida, and I would take it easy, and I would go around, and I would say I did a good job.”

He added: “But you can’t ever accept when they steal, and rig, and rob. You can’t accept it.”

New York Times: “When it did respond to misinformation, the Biden team tried to address the root of the narrative. After right-wing influencers posted compilation videos of Mr. Biden stumbling over his words and appearing forgetful, the campaign surveyed voters to try to figure out whether the attempt to paint him as mentally unfit was resonating. It discovered that the real concern for many people wasn’t Mr. Biden’s age, or his health per se, but whether he was an easily manipulated tool of the radical left.”

“The Biden team identified the voters who were most likely to see those clips and ran a targeted digital ad campaign showing them videos of Mr. Biden speaking lucidly at debates and public events.”

“Mr. Flaherty, the campaign digital director, said the campaign’s focus on empathy had informed how it treated misinformation: not as a cynical Trump ploy that was swallowed by credulous dupes, but as something that required listening to voters to understand their concerns and worries before fighting back. Ultimately, he said, the campaign’s entire digital strategy — the Malarkey Factory, the TikTok creators and Facebook moms, the Fortnite signs and small-batch creators — was about trying to reach a kinder, gentler version of the internet that it still believed existed.”

“President Trump on Saturday stumped for Republican candidates in Georgia’s Senate runoff elections at a rally during which he repeatedly and falsely insisted that he won the Peach State and the 2020 election,” The Hill reports.

Said Trump: “You must go vote and vote early starting December 14. You have to do it. They cheated and they rigged our presidential election, but we will still win it. We will still win it. We’ll still win it. And they’re going to try and rig this election, too.”

USA Today: “Trump did promote incumbent Georgia Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler –- whose Jan. 5 re-election bids will decide control of the Senate -– but framed most of the rally around his own legacy and false allegations about the election.”

Atlanta Journal Constitution: Trump tells GOP in Georgia to vote in “rigged” election.

Ross Douthat: “Anyone familiar with his career could have predicted that he would claim to have been cheated out of victory. Anyone watching how he wielded power (or, more often, didn’t) as president could have predicted that his efforts to challenge the election results would be embarrassing, ridiculous and dismissed with prejudice in court. And anyone watching how the Republican Party dealt with his ascent could have predicted that its leaders would mostly avoid directly rebuking him, relying instead on the inertial forces of American democracy, the conscientiousness of judges and local officialdom, and Trump’s own incompetence to turn back his final power grab.”

“So far, so predictable. But speaking as a cynical observer of the Trump era, one feature of November did crack my jaded shell a bit: not his behavior or the system’s response, but the sheer scale of the belief among conservatives that the election was really stolen, measured not just in polling data but in conversations and arguments, online and in person, with people I would not have expected to embrace it.”

Rick Hasen: “Three weeks ago, I and others in the election law field determined that Trump’s path to use lawsuits to overturn the results of the election were dead. The campaign had uncovered no significant fraud or irregularities and none of the states where Trump lost were close enough that a recount could plausibly change the results of the election. By one count, Trump has lost 46 of his lawsuits and won only one minor one, in PA.”

“But the lawsuits keep coming and coming. They make much more sense when one thinks of them as about grift and delegitimizing the upcoming Biden presidency.”

President Trump demanded to know who the Republican lawmakers were who acknowledged President-elect Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election when they were asked by the Washington Post.

The newspaper has since updated the count to 27 Republicans.

“President Trump called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on Saturday morning to urge him to persuade the state legislature to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state and asked the governor to order an audit of absentee ballot signatures, the latest brazen effort by the president to interfere in the 2020 election,” the Washington Post reports.

“Hours before he is scheduled to hold a rally in Georgia on behalf of the state’s two GOP senators, Trump pressed Kemp to call a special session of the state legislature to get lawmakers to override the results and appoint electors that would back him… He also asked the governor to demand an audit of signatures on mail ballots, something Kemp has previously noted he has no power to do.

“Kemp declined the entreaty from Trump.”

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) said that pleas from some GOP lawmakers to overturn the results of the state’s presidential election are illegal and “cannot and will not” happen, the Arizona Republic reports.

Said Bowers: “As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election. I voted for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him. But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.”

CNN: “According to conversations with seven Republicans close to Pence, the vice president remains committed to toeing the line for Trump. That’s not only part of Pence’s loyal disposition, it’s also key to what sources say are Pence’s significant ambitions to run for president in 2024.”

“Pence and those around him have long hoped that his fealty would pay off and position him as Trump’s natural successor.”

“There’s just one problem: Trump doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. He has floated the idea of running in 2024, and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars since the election, some of which went to a new leadership PAC Trump has established that could help fuel his future political ambitions.”