Month: June 2020

Pollster and analyst Ruy Texeira took a look at the senior citizen defection from the GOP fold in today’s New York Times:

[T]he Democrats have a secret weapon in 2020 on the other side of the age spectrum: senior voters. Among this age group — voters 65 and older — polls so far this year reveal a dramatic shift to the Democrats. That could be the most consequential political development of this election.

The bipartisan States of Change project estimates that Mrs. Clinton lost this group by around 15 points. By contrast, the nonpartisan Democracy Fund + U.C.L.A. Nationscape survey, which has collected over 108,000 interviews of registered voters since the beginning of the year, has Mr. Biden leading among seniors by about six points. We are looking at a shift of over 20 points in favor of the Democrats among a group that should be at least a quarter of voters in 2020. That’s huge.

This pro-Democratic shift is very much in evidence in 2020 battleground states. The list includes Florida, where seniors should be an unusually high 30 percent of voters (a 17 point shift); Pennsylvania (24 points); and Michigan (26 points). In short, the age group that was President Trump’s greatest strength in 2016 is turning into a liability. In an election where he will need every vote against a strong Democratic challenge, that could be disastrous — and a harbinger of a new, broader coalition for the Democrats.

Who are these seniors who are turning against Mr. Trump? As you might expect, the racial composition of the 65 and over population is majority white — about four in five. And among white seniors, we see the same shift as among seniors as a whole, over 20 points. The movement of white seniors against the president is clearly driving this trend.

There are a number of possible reasons for this disenchantment. First, while they are a relatively conservative population group, they are not as conservative as their reputation suggests. For example, according to the Nationscape data (over 20,000 interviews with registered white senior voters since the beginning of the year), white seniors support increasing taxes on those earning over $600,000 a year by 44 points. They also support paid family leave by 29 points and a $15-an-hour minimum wage by 21 points. On health care, they support a public option for government health insurance by 34 points.

He goes on to show that they are also quite conservative on many culture issues like trans rights, 10 Commandments in public buildings etc, so we can’t get all warm and fuzzy about the elder progressivism. But it may be that they aren’t quite as bad on economics as people think and that could be important going forward.

They see Good Ole Joe as a moderate guy, decent and wholesome and that matters to a lot of people after Trump. But there’s also this:

No doubt his appeal has been strengthened by the president’s response to the coronavirus, which has hit this group far worse than it has younger Americans. The president’s performance, and his ostentatious concern with reopening the economy rather than preventing deaths among the most vulnerable, has not gone down well with these voters.

For many, disenchantment actually predates the current crisis. But the pandemic, and Mr. Trump’s handling of it, has reinforced the shift.

Tuxeira thinks Trump may be able to get these voters back with his calls to “Law and Order” if they think the protests are getting out of hand. He may be right about that. Older people are more afraid of violence than younger people because they feel physically vulnerable and many of them no doubt harbor racist beliefs that fuel their reactions.

However, I’m not sure Trump’s calls for “Law and Order” are very reassuring. His non-stop bluster and overreactions don’t exactly sound like someone who knows what he’s doing.

When Trump yells “Law and Order”, what he doesn’t realize is that he’s actually agitating against his re-election. After all, he is, as we speak, having his Attorney General turn the Justice Department into a joke to cover for his and his cronies’ crimes. And his chaotic presidency is overwhelmingly exhausting. If you really care about “law” and “order” Donald Trump is the last person you want in the White House.

Update: I am reminded of this piece in the Atlantic from October 2016:

Trump supporters were older, on average, [in the primaries] than those of other Republican candidates. Despite the stereotype of the Trump supporter as a prime-aged working man, Trump’s campaign has actually been fueled primarily by support from the elderly.

This makes sense, doesn’t it? Trump’s whole candidacy is predicated on nostalgia—not just making America great, but making it great again, returning it to an imagined, prelapsarian state of greatness. (Appropriately, Trump stole the slogan from Ronald Reagan.) More so even than most Republican candidates, Trump has run a campaign aimed squarely and frankly at old people’s nostalgia, fear of danger, and anxiety about social change.

How’d that work out for them? Do they feel safer today than they did four years ago? I doubt it…

QOTD by cartoonist Pat Bagley:

This isn’t hard. Every single R Senator, with the exception of Romney, voted to acquit that criminal currently squatting in the WH bunker, protected from the American people by barbed wire and (the irony is exquisite) a wall. Barr isn’t a civil servant; he’s a mob boss lawyer

They were all cowards. Every last one. They sold their souls for the worst president in American history.

Vox co-founder Ezra Klein’s interview Wednesday night on “The Last Word” encapsulated the self-destructive decision Trump voters made in choosing a true Washington outsider with no experience in governing.

“Drain the swamp” was one of Trump’s staple applause lines during his 2016 campaign. Maybe No. 2 behind “Lock her up.” (You can hear the chants inside your head.) Trump’s white grievance campaign was not rooted in anger at Washington so much as at the looming fact that the election of Barack Obama brought home. Shifting national demographics conservative pundits had long warned about suddenly became real. White people, especially white men, were losing their grip on power. They would have to share.

The horror.

It is not even that the moment the white share of the population falls below 50 percent a dark bell will toll across the land. (The white population stands now at roughly 60 percent.) Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by 2 percent. Not all white people are in the angry faction that backed Trump. White people terrified of losing “their” country do not control a 50-percent share of it even now except on political maps in which Republican red predominates based on acreage not population. But Obama’s 2008 win was a kind of political 9/11, a shock to the system that set off a backlash that gave the Oval Office to Trump.

A black president was bad enough, but Hillary Clinton? Racial prejudice is powerful, but so is misogyny.

By electing a white-grievance huckster with no experience in government to lead a party with no interest in governing, Trump voters handed the government to a man whose conception of how to be president he learned from television. Instead of draining the swamp, like his Manhattan apartment Trump gilded it. It seemed to work at first.

“There is simply no better politics than governing well,” Klein began.

But Trump did not know how. Nor did he care to learn.

“He ran in politics as a pure, political entertainment character,” Klein continued. He still does not understand that he cannot run a re-election campaign as an outsider as he did in 2016. But that is his shtick. It is the only act he has.

Trump took credit for economic up-trends he inherited from Obama’s eight years. That worked for Trump until it didn’t. As did xenophobia-based domestic and foreign … policy is too kind a word. He got by for three years on phoning in his presidency to “Fox & Friends” or “Hannity,” by tweeting his way through his morngings, and by appointing cronies who would not call him on it except behind his back or in tell-all books. The White House, meanwhile, was in perpetual chaos.

The appearance of the coronavirus, 120,000-plus American dead, and an economy in crisis stripped away the proscenium arch to reveal an empty backstage.

“He functionally was not acting as president at all,” Klein continued. “He was acting as president on TV, but he was not running a White House, not running an administration, not setting an agenda.”

The Republican Party has collapsed as a governing institution, Mitt Romney’s 2012 chief strategist tells Klein. It is not just Donald Trump. Republicans not fully absorbed into the cult cannot step in to fill the void.

The party is now only devoted to maintaining power. That makes it a reflection of Trump’s unsettled base. But don’t expect his most devoted followers to accept responsibility for what their choice has wrought. The least Trumpish, however, are beginning to shake off the spell. Trump is crashing in national polls against former Vice President Joe Biden.

“People can actually see what it looks like when the president isn’t doing his job during a crisis,” says Klein. “And it is terrifying.”

More terrifying even than a black man or a woman president? How about none at all?

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

Eric Boehlert has a great piece today in Press Run about an issue that still makes me burn. (Boehlert has generously extended his discount offer to Hullabaloo readers so sign up to get a good deal for more good stuff in your email box.)

It seems Democrat Joe Biden is proving to be an “elusive” target for Republicans.  Campaign reporters note how Trump has been unable to land many punches against his Democratic rival this year. Journalists are scratching their heads wondering why Biden’s opponent isn’t able to rough him up, the way he did Hillary Clinton on 2016. But journalists are looking right past the answer — misogyny.

The Washington Post this week reported Trump, “has not yet found a line of attack that has resonated with voters.” The New York Times stressed that going into the campaign Trump, “believed he could recreate his race against Hillary Clinton by caricaturing Mr. Biden as a version of her — a fixture of the so-called “swamp” whose purported corruption would turn off voters,” but that it’s not working. “Despite Mr. Trump’s prodding, the [Tulsa rally] crowd couldn’t work up the bloodlust for his opponent that his throngs reliably did (and still do) for Hillary Clinton.”

The Times claims the pandemic and weeks of Black Lives Matter street protests have thwarted Trump’s attempt to turn Biden into a “swamp” creature like Clinton. But that ignores the pivotal role gender plays in American politics. And it ignores the fact that sexist campaign coverage was a key reason Trump was elected president. News outlets don’t want to dwell on those uncomfortable topics, or dwell on their role in securing Trump’s win, so journalists scratch their heads and wonder why the Trump jabs aren’t landing like they did four years ago.

This phenomena also played out during the Democratic primary, when the attacks that proved so effective against Clinton back in 2016 failed the move the needle in 2020. In both the primary and now in the general election, Biden’s political opponents incorrectly assumed that the playbook used successfully against Clinton could be easily replicated against Biden. His opponents failed to acknowledge that misogyny was a driving force in 2016. Without that element in play this year, Biden’s opponents have scrambled to connect.

It was sexist, double-standard coverage that drove big, damaging Clinton stories during the campaign, including her use of a private email server (which lots of men do), giving paid speeches (which lots of men do), and running a charitable foundation (which lots of men do). 

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Let’s state the obvious: It’s a good thing the attacks aren’t weighing down Biden, mostly because they’re bogus, starting with the GOP’s Ukraine fiasco, which got Trump impeached. Democrats should be relieved that so far this campaign the party’s message has not been hijacked by the press the way it was in 2016, when so much of the Clinton news coverage and commentary read and sounded like it was dictated by the RNC. That, combined with the D.C. media’s open disdain for Clinton, meant a campaign coverage that dripped with contempt.

Was sexism the only reason Clinton lost? It was not. She has admitted key campaign missteps. It’s true that Clinton has been a very public target for the conservative movement for nearly 30 years. Two points: First, Biden has been in public life for longer than Clinton, so why hasn’t he been saddled with same level of toxic, “swamp” attacks? Second, when Clinton served as secretary of state under President Barack Obama she enjoyed extraordinarily high public approval ratings. It wasn’t until she became a candidate and the D.C. press teamed up with GOP attack machine (see: Clinton Cash) that the public perception of her drastically changed, as she was portrayed as a conniving, unlikable, power hungry pol.

And it all stuck to the first woman nominee in U.S. history. Four years ago in June 2016, Clinton posted a net -22 negative rating in a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. In that most recent survey, Biden negative approval was a net -1 point negative rating. (Trump stands at -11).

Just in case folks forgot what the glaring double standard looked like four years ago, from a piece I did for Media Matters, following a Democratic primary debate in 2016:

“She shouts,” complained Washington Post editor Bob Woodward last week on MSNBC, deducting points for Clinton’s speaking style. “There is something unrelaxed about the way she is communicating, and I think that just jumps off the television screen.” “Has nobody told her that the microphone works?” quipped Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough, who led a lengthy discussion about Clinton’s voice (the “tone issue”). Scarborough and his guests dissected Clinton’s “screaming,” and how she is supposedly being “feisty” and acting “not natural”… The New York Times’ debate coverage pushed the same “angry” narrative, detailing “The ferocity of Mrs. Clinton’s remarks,” and how she appeared “tense and even angry at times,” “particularly sensitive,” and was “going on the offensive.” (By contrast, her opponent “largely kept his cool.”)

The 2008 campaign was arguably worse. As Dr. Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University reported, “Clinton was “was referred to as a “white bitch” on MSNBC and CNN; a blood-sucking “vampire” on Fox; the “wicked witch of the west” on CNN; and “everyone’s first wife standing outside of probate court,” a “she devil” and the castrating Lorena Bobbitt, all on MSNBC.”

Today, Joe Biden doesn’t have to deal with that of any of that sexist nonsense. For Democrats, that’s a good thing. But let’s not ignore what’s happening and turn a blind eye to the power of misogyny in American politics.

Hear, hear. I supported Elizabeth Warren for president and I still hold out hope that we’ll have a Democratic woman president before I die. (I think the Republicans could nominate a right wing anti-feminist like Liz Cheney or Nikki Haley and she might win.) But I’m a little bit relieved that Democrats were pragmatic enough to give the American people a familiar white guy to run against Trump in 2020. The threat to the world is so acute and the hostility to feminist women still so strong that I’ve reluctantly accepted that we needed all the help we could get in 2020.

It’s unfortunate, but I think Boehlert’s piece backs up my cynicism.

These women in Florida sound exactly like the women in Orange County a couple of weeks ago.

"You literally cannot mandate somebody to wear a mask knowing that that mask is killing people … we know what citizen's arrest is" — these rants from a Palm Beach County meeting are among the nuttiest I've heard pic.twitter.com/ky5lXFon1M

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 24, 2020

Here’s Orange County:

Ventura County:

Tell me this isn’t a cult. These people are completely brainwashed.

Cases are rising here. But death rates and hospitalizations seem to be holding steady, which is why this isn’t the same intensity of other hot spots. There is a much bigger population here than other states so the case numbers still aren’t that high per capita and there is a lot of capacity.

Still, it’s worrying. The Governor has mandated mask wearing in public and I can report that I’ve seen huge improvement in that in the last few days in my neighborhood in Santa Monica, I’m happy to say. For a while there it was pretty obvious that a whole lot of people here in LA thought the pandemic was over and had gone back to normal. Hopefully, they have sobered up.

Anyway, here are some charts from the LA Times which show what’s going on here:

Today’s Judiciary Committee hearing is, as usual, being disrupted by GOP nutcases:

Donald Ayer: "I was privileged to serve in the DOJ under 2 Republican and 1 Democratic president, and I am here because I believe that William Barr poses the greatest threat in my lifetime to our rule of law and to public trust in it." pic.twitter.com/hywNKn3vjw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 24, 2020

Louie Gohmert uses his questioning time to thank his wife for not leaving him pic.twitter.com/JQ0HMDxmwj

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 24, 2020

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, real information was elicited, largely due to bumbling by Jim Jordan:

This was the tense exchange Zelinsky had with Cooney in the aftermath of the Stone sentencing. https://t.co/rq8n0QG98x https://t.co/q5BCjk7c3M

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) June 24, 2020

If you are investigating the politicization of the Stone prosecution, the name of the DOJ official through whom the political influence was transmitted to the prosecution team is likely to be *the most important fact* a member of the prosecution team can give you.

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) June 24, 2020

Will Nadler now subpoena J.P. Cooney?

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) June 24, 2020

I’d imagine Gene Krupa will be joined by the full Tommy Dorsey big band to try to drown him out if that happens. This is where we are: these Republicans are all acting like four year olds in honor of their Dear Leader who acts like an 8 year old.

Earlier today, two Trump toadies on the DC Circuit delivered a blow to Judge Emmett Sullivan who is refusing to do a simple sign-off on that Michael Flynn case dismissal saying he is required to do Bill Barr’s bidding regardless of how corrupt it all is. It remains to be seen if Sullivan will request the case be heard by the full panel which might reverse the opinion. But apparently, GOP judges will even undermine their own branch to service Dear Leader. I wonder how that will play out once he’s out of office?

The first New York Times A+ poll of the campaign is out and it’s bad news for Trumpie:

Joseph R. Biden Jr. has taken a commanding lead over President Trump in the 2020 race, building a wide advantage among women and nonwhite voters and making deep inroads with some traditionally Republican-leaning groups that have shifted away from Mr. Trump following his ineffective response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new national poll of registered voters by The New York Times and Siena College.

Mr. Biden is currently ahead of Mr. Trump by 14 percentage points, garnering 50 percent of the vote compared with 36 percent for Mr. Trump. That is among the most dismal showings of Mr. Trump’s presidency, and a sign that he is the clear underdog right now in his fight for a second term.

Mr. Trump has been an unpopular president for virtually his entire time in office. He has made few efforts since his election in 2016 to broaden his support beyond the right-wing base that vaulted him into office with only 46 percent of the popular vote and a modest victory in the Electoral College.

But among a striking cross-section of voters, the distaste for Mr. Trump has deepened as his administration failed to stop a deadly disease that crippled the economy and then as he responded to a wave of racial-justice protests with angry bluster and militaristic threats. The dominant picture that emerges from the poll is of a country ready to reject a president whom a strong majority of voters regard as failing the greatest tests confronting his administration.

It’s not just the New York Times.

New Reuters Poll:

American approval of President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has dropped to the lowest level on record, the latest Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll shows, as new COVID-19 cases surged and Trump was widely criticized for suggesting he wanted to slow down testing.

The poll shows that 37% of Americans approved of the way Trump has responded to the pandemic, the lowest on record since Reuters/Ipsos started asking the question at the beginning of March. Fifty-eight percent said they disapproved.

He does have his fans, though. Unfortunately for Trump, it doesn’t appear that there are quite enough of theme to win re-election. (And frankly, the way he’s encouraging them to kill themselves, there are likely to be even fewer by election day.)

From C&L:

Vaughn Hillyard was in Phoenix on Tuesday to cover the crowds that lined up for Trump’s event later in the day. Arizona has seen a particularly acute spike in Covid-19 cases this week, and Trump’s event there comes days after his under-attended rally in Tulsa that reportedly enraged him.

As Hillyard reported on the health hazards at the Arizona event, he was heckled by a number of Trump supporters, and he eventually moved to ask them questions about why they aren’t wearing masks.

“It’s not about the mask,” one supporter told him. “It’s about the hypocrisy that it’s okay for tens of thousands of people to go and riot, to go and protest, but you cannot have a group of a group of a thousand people… I don’t know how many people are here, this is not okay?”
…
After some more dialogue, a heckler was heard saying, “You talkin’ about that Covid-1984 bullsh*t?” That prompted Hillyard to throw the broadcast back to Craig Melvin.

Dying and killing others to make the point that your political enemies are hypocritical may be just a teensy bit self-defeating. But this is a Death Cult and these people are willing to die to support Donald Trump. It makes you wonder what else they’re willing to do for him.

President Trump had his spirits lifted a little bit on Tuesday when he visited his beloved unfinished border wall and held an event in a megachurch filled with 3,000 cheering fans demonstrating their devotion in Phoenix, one of the most intense COVID-19 hotspots in the country. Virtually none of the crowd wore masks and they sat together, shoulder to shoulder, for hours, screaming and laughing, sharing their aerosols with abandon.

Trump was no doubt reassured by the spectacle. They love him so much they are ready to die for him.

He droned on for 70 minutes or so, hitting most of his greatest hits and complaining about mail-in voting, saying this election will be the most corrupt in history. But the main thrust of his message was that he had directed the best pandemic response of any leader in the world and that the U.S. is back, baby!

This is Trump speaking right now in Arizona, where coronavirus cases are spiking. Hospitals are overrun. The 3,591 new cases reported Tuesday marks the highest one-day total yet. https://t.co/XEFA7PHDCo

— Eli Stokols (@EliStokols) June 23, 2020

The “numbers” he was referring to there were economic statistics. But as you know, he’s been complaining about the COVID case numbers for months as well, even insisting earlier this week that if we didn’t do all this testing we wouldn’t have so many cases. He appears to have a mental block on this subject and is simply unable to comprehend that if we weren’t testing we would still have the cases. Apparently no one has asked him if he thinks fewer tests would result in fewer deaths, but it would certainly be interesting to know the answer.

In fact, those numbers are intertwined, although Trump doesn’t seem to understand exactly how. He persists in his delusion that if we just “open up” then pent-up demand will result in a massive economic revival just in time for the election. He believes we must all buck up and ignore the ongoing stress, sickness and death we’ve been experiencing for more than four months now and just go back to normal. It must have cheered him to no end to see all those adoring fans doing just that.

His demand that the country open up is inexorably leading to unprecedented economic distress because, as much as he would like to pretend the crisis isn’t happening, it is. The economy is going to suffer far longer than necessary because of Trump’s unwillingness to treat the pandemic with the same seriousness as the leaders of many countries that actually are finding a way back from this. He is the instrument of his own failure with this magical thinking. But then that’s the story of his life.

As Trump was jetting off for his latest rally, Congress was convening a hearing with four of the government’s top health experts, CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield, infectious-disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci, FDA director Dr. Stephen Hahn and HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Adm. Brett Giroir, also a physician. These four medical doctors were not feeling the magic. In fact, their message was clear: it’s not over and it’s not looking good.

Fauci described a “disturbing surge” of coronavirus infections that he found very “troublesome.” He said, “The next couple of weeks are going to be critical in our ability to address those surges we are seeing in Florida, Texas, Arizona and other states” and begged people to stay home as much as possible and to wear masks if they must go out. He seemed to be genuinely worried.

He isn’t alone. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who ostentatiously opened up his state early and arrogantly proclaimed, “We’ve got this,” seemed more than a bit nervous on Tuesday. COVID patients may be close to overloading the state’s hospital capacity after hospitalizations jumped from an average of 1,600 a day to 3,200 a day.

“Because the spread is so rampant right now, there is never a reason for you to have to leave your home unless you do need to go out,” he said. “The safest place for you is at your home.”

“There remain a lot of people in the state of Texas who think the spread of Covid-19 is really not a challenge,” said Mr. Abbott, who has resisted the idea of another lockdown.

That is a far cry from a couple of months ago when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, even more of a true-believer Trumper than Abbott, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to say the economy should completely reopen because “there are more important things than living.”

Abbott wasn’t the only one sounding the alarm. That’s playing out around the country in a number of states with Republican governors that are seeing spikes in cases, hospitalizations and deaths since they began to reopen in May. It’s not clear how this is affecting these governors’ approval ratings but the president’s are getting worse. His head-in-the-sand strategy is not selling well. The first New York Times/Siena College general-election poll, released Wednesday, shows him trailing Joe Biden by 14 points.

According to the Washington Post, the campaign is getting increasingly worried:

At the core of the erosion is a dramatic abandonment of Trump by key demographic groups. The rebellion by college-educated women against the president in 2018, which gave Democrats control of the U.S. House via victories in the suburbs, has begun to register more deeply in recent months among non-college-educated and older women.

Trump’s weekend rally in Tulsa, which focused more on his personal grievances than on solutions to America’s pressing problems, reinforced the sentiments that political strategists say have driven women to desert him.

It’s understandable that women, many of whom are overtaxed in this crisis with jobs, full-time child care and vulnerable elderly parents, would be specifically turned off by Trump’s self-centered obsession with his “numbers” and the single-minded focus on opening up the economy. Most people understand it isn’t safe to resume normal life while a dangerous virus is stalking the population. They want serious leadership, not bluster and posturing.

“These women really describe their lives as filled with exhausting chaos,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who is advising the Biden campaign and who traced the recent shifts to Trump’s pandemic response. “It is something new every day. And they want someone who will lead them through this, not someone who will make it more chaotic.”

Trump is the ultimate chaos agent, lurching from one catastrophe to another, unable to discipline himself in even the smallest ways. That may have worked well enough for him when we were dealing with political battles and palace intrigue, all of which was important but didn’t bear directly on the everyday lives of Americans. The coronavirus crisis does and it’s brought home the fact that his narcissism and emotional incontinence makes everything worse. He is a walking disaster, and that’s the last man you want in charge during a real crisis.

My Salon column reprinted with permission.

So, this is going well.

The United States has the world’s highest number of coronavirus deaths and infections. The European Union is considering a ban on travelers from the U.S.

Unlike most of the rest of the developed world, American cases have not declined. Americans keep dying in unprecedented numbers. Where New York City was once the epicenter of the outbreak, now more-rural Trumplandia is. The acting president keeps fanning the spread by hosting super-spreader events. In Oklahoma. In Arizona.

The southwest is now under severe epidemic pressures. Yet, “accordion hands” insists the virus is “fading away.” These are not the graphs you’re looking at. Move along.

That is not what health professionals on the front lines see. Rachel Maddow Tuesday night featured several from El Centro Medical Center, 100 miles east of San Diego. They themselves are overwhelmed. “This is not the flu. This is a monster.”

"We don't see an end. The numbers keep going up. The patients keep coming in." pic.twitter.com/qR2rVHxYHw

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) June 24, 2020

Donald Trump believes people who wear masks do so not to suppress the spread of the contagion, but to express disapproval of him. Naturally, his cultish faithful won’t wear them. They may have private doubts about Dear Leader, but wearing a mask is a public confession of apostasy, a scarlet “A” sure to draw the leader’s and fellow cultists’ wrath. Even excommunication. They’ll risk death first and infect others in their paths.

They are out of ICU beds at El Centro Medical Center.

"Today has been one of the worst days by far." pic.twitter.com/s7WcIrwKgq

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) June 24, 2020

Michelle Goldberg is mighty unimpressed with the federal response:

This is what American exceptionalism looks like under Donald Trump. It’s not just that the United States has the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths of any country in the world. Republican political dysfunction has made a coherent campaign to fight the pandemic impossible.

At the federal level as well as in many states, we’re seeing a combination of the blustering contempt for science that marks the conservative approach to climate change and the high tolerance for carnage that makes American gun culture unique.

The rot starts at the top. At the beginning of the crisis Trump acted as if he could wish the coronavirus away, and after an interval when he at least pretended to take it seriously, his administration has resumed a posture of blithe denial.

Is it denial? Or is it worse than that? The stinging ad below suggests intent.

Remember when "Party of Life" Republicans cried "death panels!" on Fox News and the mainstream debate credulously dissected the issue?

Trump and his obsequious @GOP allies, Mitch McConnell all party to the murder of thousands of Americans.#TrumpKillsUSpic.twitter.com/Jqw3tZDNft

— Grant Stern  (@grantstern) June 24, 2020

Murder requires intent. Trump sees others as objects of his own gratification. He does not care enough about them to want them to die. He simply does not care if they do.

Unless it makes him look bad.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.