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"what digby sez..."
Month: July 2020
Do you remember that night early in the administration when Trump was sitting with Japan’s prime minister Abe at Mar-a-lago when news of a North Korean nuclear test was shared in the presence of a bunch of Trump’s paying customers?
Here’s the inside story of how that went down from a new book by some Miami Herald reporters:
At dinner Trump’s team took the terrace with a newfound swagger.
They posed for pictures with club members. Businessman Richard DeAgazio, who had recently joined the club, posted several photographs to Facebook, including one with a man he identified as “Rick,” saying he was the aide-de-camp who carries the nuclear football — the briefcase that serves as a mobile command center from which the president can launch a nuclear attack. Steve Bannon sauntered to his seat, glancing to the side and giving a sort of celebrity-style finger point and nod to some nearby diners. Another member, the Palm Beach crystal merchant Ildikó Varga, congratulated Bannon for masterminding such a successful campaign. “Thank you, but it was a team effort,” he responded. The notoriously camera-shy advisor then posed for a picture with her and a few other dinner guests.
The Saturday dinner was a stately affair. The small round table of the previous night — when Trump and Abe dined with Mar-a-Lago member Robert Kraft — had been replaced by a long table where various aides now joined the mix.
Dawn Basham, one of Trump’s favorite lounge singers, was the evening’s entertainment. A few years before Trump took office Basham had performed at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, where the former beauty queen’s voice — and her ability to stun in an evening gown — caught the Don’s attention.
Intent on showing off to Abe, Trump sent his aides to bring Basham right up to their table. This happens a lot to performers at Mar-a-Lago: They are asked to stand next to the table and sing his requests. Usually something from Phantom of the Opera or Cats.
As Abe listened, Trump requested four songs and told Basham what a great job she was doing.
Then the president asked Basham to twirl around for the men, according to someone who witnessed the exchange.
[…]
Standing in front of Abe, Basham began to twirl, careful not to slip on the slick terrace made of surf-polished stones that Mar-a-Lago’s original owner, the cereal fortune heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, collected from the shores of her Long Island hunting preserve. Her silvery evening gown glittered in the dim light. Almost precisely at mid-twirl, things began to change. A flurry of activity began at the president’s table. Something had happened. Something with North Korea. Basham tried to make her exit.
“Mr. President, I shouldn’t know this,” someone heard the performer say.
Trump shrugged.
“It’s just nukes,” the president said. “Sing us a song.”
Trump’s operatic priorities were quickly overruled. North Korea had launched a missile in the direction of Japan.
Basham retreated. Aides with laptops and sheets of paper converged on the table, using cell phones to illuminate the documents for Trump and Abe. The president got on a phone — possibly his unsecure Android that he had tweeted from before the dinner. “Wow … the center of the action!!!” DeAgazio wrote on Facebook. Press had not been allowed into the dinner, so DeAgazio and others on the terrace posted photos and reported what they saw. “Trump and Abe will delivery [sicJ joint statement soon about North Korea Missile,” longtime member Guido Lombardi tweeted from his nearby table, along with a photo of Trump and Abe.
Within about ten minutes of the calls interrupting their dinner, the two grim-faced leaders walked past Lombardi’s table to get a briefing on the North Korean missile test and face the cameras.
“North Korea’s most recent missile launch is absolutely intolerable,” Abe said in Japanese. “During the summit meeting that I had with President Trump, he assured me that the United States will always be with Japan 100 percent. And to demonstrate his determination as well as commitment, he is now here with me at this joint press conference.”
Trump stood stiff armed, off to the side, wearing his resting pout face until it was his turn to speak. He said very little.
“I just want everybody to understand and fully know that the United States of America stands behind Japan, its great ally, 100 percent,” Trump said, giving the classic “okay” sign with his fingers. “Thank you.”
After the press conference Trump stopped by the wedding, where he delivered an impromptu toast — “You really are a special, beautiful couple,” the president said — and then went back to the terrace to continue mingling with his guests. Some members expressed their awe at how he handled the situation, even celebrating Trump’s apparent transparency with concerns of national security.
“He chooses to be out on the terrace, with the members. It just shows that he’s a man of the people,” DeAgazio said to the Washington Post.
Much of the rest of the world was horrified.
No biggie. It’s just nukes.
Video of then-businessman Donald Trump struggling to vote in-person before declaring he would fill out an absentee ballot in 2004 has resurfaced this week amid a new round of unfounded attacks on mail-in voting from the President.
The “Access Hollywood” segment, filmed as Trump was attempting to vote in the 2004 election, shows Trump alongside TV host Billy Bush visiting multiple New York City polling locations. Trump, however, is blocked from voting at each location because he is not on any of the voter rolls at each stop.
Trump can be seen becoming increasingly frustrated before declaring, “I’m going to fill out the absentee ballot.”The segment ends with Trump filling out what Bush describes as a provisional ballot in his car.”I just voted,” Trump touted. “At least you can say the Trumpster doesn’t give up.”
Yeah. Hullabaloo readers have known about this since 2016:
August 5, 2016: The Donald tries to vote (I was unable to download the video from Access Hollywood at the time.)
October 2, 2016: When Trump tried to fraudulently vote they wouldn’t let him
And just a couple of months ago:
Remember when Trump had trouble voting in 2004?
Published by digby on May 21, 2020
Access Hollywood got it all on tape.
Trump is making a big deal about vote by mail, insisting that it’s rife with fraud. It isn’t, of course. Many states have been providing this option for some time and some even do it entirely by mail now.
But whatever. My personal feeling is that he’s just setting up the “fraud” excuse in case he loses. He knows he can’t stop states from doing vote by mail. If he wins, he’ll just do what he did last time and say that he won in spite of a huge number of fraudulent Democratic votes. In fact, it was really a landslide!
Yesterday he said that voting in person is an “honor” and that the only people who should be allowed to vote absentee should be those who are sick or are not going to be in the state on election day.
I guess he doesn’t remember this:
I’d guess he forgot to register and so his absentee ballot wasn’t counted. Some Republicans would say people like him should be charged with voter fraud.
But by his reasoning he should never have been allowed to vote that year at all. He didn’t have an excuse for voting absentee. He just didn’t turn up on the rolls.
BTW: You’d think this would have “resurfaced” in the mainstream media in 2016 from the moment Trump started braying about voter fraud and a “rigged” election.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of President Donald Trump‘s handling of three major challenges facing the country — the coronavirus pandemic, nationwide unrest over racial inequality and relations with Russia — in a new ABC News/Ipsos poll, a sign of the obstacles that his reelection bid faces just three months before Election Day.
With the White House confronting the most significant reckoning on race since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the worst public health crisis in a century, and a hostile Russia reminiscent of the Cold War, Americans have little confidence in the job Trump is doing in all three of these major areas.
Trump closes out the month of July the way it began, with his approval on the coronavirus in the low 30s. His approval sits at 34%, right about where it was earlier this month (33%) when it reached a new low since ABC News/Ipsos began surveying on the virus in March.
In the new poll, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos’ Knowledge Panel, Trump’s approval is also deeply underwater — at 36% — for how he is handling both the protests over racial inequality and relations with one of the country’s greatest geopolitical foes, Russia.
An election that comes down to be a referendum on Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, his response to the race movement or his dealings with foreign adversaries spells trouble for the incumbent president. With all three crises, Trump only consistently has the support of his own party and his base.
Republicans back Trump’s handling of the coronavirus (74%), the protests (78%) and Russia (80%) by overwhelming margins. Democrats are almost uniformly in opposition to Trump’s managing of the three issues, with approval of the president in single-digits on the pandemic (7%), the unrest (8%) and Russia (8%).
Roughly 1 in 5 Republicans disapprove of the president on coronavirus (26%), the protests (22%) and Russia (20%), and just over 9 in 10 Democrats disapprove on all three matters.
Independents trace the country’s attitudes, with his approval falling between 30% to 33% and his disapproval landing between 66% and 69% on COVID-19, the demonstrations and his approach to Russia. About half of Trump’s base — white, non-college educated Americans — approve of his leadership on the outbreak (50%), the protests (51%) and Russia (51%).
The latest numbers for Trump are particularly problematic on his combative response to the nationwide protests — as his approval is in dire straits across racial lines. Only 45% of whites, 7% of Black Americans and 28% of Hispanics approve of Trump’s handling on this specific issue.
Over half of whites (55%), and clear majorities of Black Americans (92%) and Hispanics (72%), disapprove.
Meanwhile, less than one-third of the country believes that sending federal officers to respond to demonstrations in cities makes the situation better.
A slight majority (52%) view the response as exacerbating the situation, and 19% say it doesn’t have an effect either way.
Even among Americans who are supposed to be Trump loyalists, only 42% of white non-college educated Americans say that the presence of federal agents improves the situation. Over a third (37%) of this demographic see the move as making the situation worse.
The new poll comes after the president made a hard pivot back to pushing for an unproven treatment for the virus, hydroxychloroquine, against the advice of top health experts — after appearing to break from months of downplaying the virus’s severity by encouraging the country to wear masks and practice social distancing last week.
It also comes amid the backdrop of clashes in Portland, Oregon, where the president dispatched federal agents into the city to halt the nightly protests that were sparked two months ago by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis in May. On Wednesday, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said that she was assured that officers would begin a phased withdrawal from the city — an announcement that Trump appeared to contradict by Thursday morning, arguing that the officers would only leave once “safety” was restored.
His disapproval on his handling of relations with Russia, in particular, comes at a precarious time for the president, who has dismissed U.S. intelligence that indicates Russia paid the Taliban to kill American troops in Afghanistan.
Trump, in an interview with Axios earlier this week, said he “never discussed” the matter in a July 23 phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and when pressed on why he didn’t raise it, he said, “That was a phone call to discuss other things and frankly that’s an issue that many people said was fake news.”
I confess that I’m surprised at these numbers regarding sending troops to confront protesters among the white, non-college educated. If they don’t like it, then Trump has completely misunderstood even his own base. By the way, this monologue by Brianna Keillor about Russia is spot-on:
We still don’t understand Trump’s bizarre behavior toward Russia. I’m willing to believe that it started out as a simple desire to butter up Vladimir Putin in the hopes of getting a Trump Tower Moscow is he lost the election. (He may have even thought he could do that as president — he’s that dumb.) And maybe he stuck with it out of sheer, emotionally immature stubbornness — they say I’m soft on Russia so I’m gonna be soft on Russia just to show them they push me around!
I really don’t know what has motivated him on this issue. But something has made him behave in a truly weird way and I wonder if we’ll ever find out what it was.
A Trump croney is throwing sand into the gears of the postal service:
The U.S. Postal Service is experiencing days-long backlogs of mail across the country after a top Trump donor running the agency put in place new procedures described as cost-cutting efforts, alarming postal workers who warn that the policies could undermine their ability to deliver ballots on time for the November election.
As President Trump ramps up his unfounded attacks on mail balloting as being susceptible to widespread fraud, postal employees and union officials say the changes implemented by Trump fundraiser-turned-postmaster general Louis DeJoy are contributing to a growing perception that mail delays are the result of a political effort to undermine absentee voting.
The backlog comes as the president, who is trailing presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the polls, has escalated his efforts to cast doubt about the integrity of the November vote, which is expected to yield record numbers of mail ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic.
On Thursday, Trump floated the idea of delaying the Nov. 3 general election, a notion that was widely condemned by Democrats and Republicans alike. He has repeatedly gone after the Postal Service, recently suggesting that the agency cannot be trusted to deliver ballots.
DeJoy, a North Carolina logistics executive who donated more than $2 million to GOP political committees in the past four years, approved changes that took effect July 13 that the agency said were aimed at cutting costs for the debt-laden mail service. They included prohibiting overtime pay, shutting down sorting machines early and requiring letter carriers to leave mail behind when necessary to avoid extra trips or late delivery on routes.
Postal Service memos detail ‘difficult’ changes, including slower mail delivery
The new policies have resulted in at least a two-day delay in scattered parts of the country, even for express mail, according to multiple postal workers and union leaders. Letter carriers are manually sorting more mail, adding to the delivery time. Bins of mail ready for delivery are sitting in post offices because of scheduling and route changes. And without the ability to work overtime, workers say the logjam is worsening without an end in sight.
Tom Sullivan has been talkng about this and I just want to add my voice to his cri de guerre:,
WHEN YOU GET YOUR BALLOT IN THE MAIL FILL IT OUT IMMEDIATELY AND SEND IT IN!
In fact, if you can drop it off personally at the election office far in advance, do that instead. Trump and his henchmen are trying to sabotage the post office so the ballots are delayed and they can claim that the election was rigged.
I found this report to be quite informative on the subject of mail-in voting around the country:
All voters should check with their state and local election officials about mail-in voting deadlines. We found, however, that some states give far more time than others for ballots to be received, which chips away at the premise there’s a fixed deadline for all Americans who vote-by-mail.
In California, for example, election officials must accept mail-in ballots that arrive up to 17 days after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by Nov. 3. That’s the result of a new law passed this year.
In North Carolina, ballots are accepted three days after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by that day. In Georgia, Hawaii, Connecticut and many other states, there’s no extension: ballots must arrive by the time polls close on Nov. 3.
“The most common state deadline for election officials to receive absentee or mail ballots is on Election Day when the polls close,” the National Conference of State Legislatures says on its website. “Some states, however, accept and count a mailed ballot if it is received after Election Day but postmarked prior to the election.”
Deadlines for all 50 states are listed on the NCSL website here.
Amber McReynolds, a national expert on election administration and Denver’s former elections director, said the social media posts present a blanket warning that might be accurate for some states, but wrong for others.
Registered voters in seven states — California, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado and Vermont, plus Washington D.C. — don’t have to request a mail-in ballot. They’ll automatically receive one in the mail several weeks ahead of the election, removing one hurdle and some time in the process, McReynolds noted.
Voters in these states, and the dozens of others where people can request a mail-in ballot, can also return them at a drop box at designated locations to avoid concerns about postal service delays.
In California, voters can also return their vote-by-mail ballots at any in-person voting location, said Sam Mahood, a spokesman for the state’s Secretary of State’s Office.
“To say Election Day is October 20th or it takes 14 days misses the mark,” added McReynolds, chief executive officer of the National Vote At Home Institute, which advocates for putting voters’ needs first. “It’s not taking into account all of these other factors.”
That’s not to say voters should wait until the last minute. Experts, including McReynolds, say people should make sure they are registered to vote, request a mail-in ballot as early as possible and return it well in advance of their state’s deadline.
One of the social media posts claims “tens of thousands” of ballots went uncounted in 2016. That is correct. In May, The Washington Post reported that of the roughly 33.2 million mail ballots received and tabulated during the 2016 general election, approximately 1 percent weren’t counted. That would amount to about 332,000 ballots. The reasons for rejection included the lack of a matching signature, problems with the return envelope and missing the deadline, the Post reported.
Response From Postal Service
While the suggestion that Oct. 20 is the real vote-by-mail deadline is off base in several states, there is some truth to what the social media posts are saying about recommendations from the U.S. Postal Service.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the agency wrote: “We recommend that jurisdictions immediately communicate and advise voters to request ballots at the earliest point allowable but no later than 15 days prior to the election date.”
It went on to say: “The Postal Service recommends that domestic, non-military voters mail their ballots at least one week prior to their state’s due date to allow for timely receipt by election officials. The Postal Service also recommends that voters contact local election officials for information about deadlines.”
There have been a lot of changes in Donald Trump’s campaign in the last couple of weeks, but they haven’t been able to change the candidate. He’s more Trumpy than ever.
When the last round of terrible polls were released, showing Trump badly trailing Joe Biden both nationwide and in the key battleground states, Kellyanne Conway and others inexplicably suggested that the president should reignite the dumpster fire formerly known as the coronavirus briefings. That’s not going well. Have they been as bad as the White House coronavirus rallies in the spring, where Trump spent what seemed like hours every day insulting the press corps and generally making a fool of himself? Not yet. But that’s only because he has managed to stick to answering a few questions after droning on for 20 minutes as if he were reading someone else’s book report.
The substance of that book report is the same old happy talk and cheerleading, virtually always based on half-truths and outright lies. And the Q&A period is predictably a disaster. One day he wished his old friend Ghislaine Maxwell, the accused sex trafficker, well, spurring speculation that he was sending her the kind of signal he had earlier sent to his pal Roger Stone, whose sentence he commuted after Stone made clear he hadn’t ratted him out. (Perhaps that’s unfair, but since Trump commonly says things that sound like a slightly less erudite Tony Soprano, it’s only natural to wonder.)
When it comes to dealing with the pandemic, Trump just keeps stepping in it, regardless of what’s in his prepared text. This week he came close to reprising the memorable moment when he asked the scientists to look into using disinfectant to clean out people’s lungs, since it cleans countertops so well. Responding to what was reportedly a coordinated campaign to push hydroxychloroquine, his favorite miracle cure, the president endorsed a quack doctor who has a history of making bizarre claims, including a belief that doctors are injecting alien DNA into their patients and that various reproductive disorders are the consequence of “dream sex” with witches and demons. He said he was very impressed by her.
If Trump actually allowed his public health officers to run the briefings, he might get credit for having a competent professional administration, but he cannot tolerate anyone else getting the attention. In fact, this week featured perhaps the most immature whine he’s ever delivered, and that’s really saying something:
He simply cannot grasp that his performance during this pandemic has shown him to be incapable of handling a crisis, which is the single most important duty of the president. Nor is he willing to delegate the task to others, which makes his embarrassing incompetence all the more conspicuous. And he seems not to understand that his reckless flailing in pursuit of something that might aid his dwindling chances of re-election is entirely transparent.
Trump at the podium spewing misinformation to the public isn’t the only problem. The policies that have been pursued by his administration are blatantly corrupt. Katherine Eban at Vanity Fair reported on a previously unknown shocking decision made back in April.
We knew that there were various people working on the same issue on separate tracks in the White House. There was the official coronavirus task force, the recently revealed political group that met privately in chief of staff Mark Meadows’ office, and the notorious Jared Kushner task force that operated completely independently. Advertisement:
According to Eban, Kushner’s group of whiz kids actually worked up a somewhat sophisticated and comprehensive national testing and tracing program all the way back in April:
Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.
Who knows if their plan would have worked? This is the Trump administration after all. But the people involved were under the impression that it had been approved and that the president would announce it in a Rose Garden briefing in early April. Obviously, that didn’t happen, and the reasons it didn’t are appalling.Advertisement:
As we know, the president never wanted to do a lot of testing because he didn’t want to see “his numbers” go up, so he was no doubt reluctant from the beginning. During this time he was obsessed with the stock market and the economic cost of the shutdowns, which he believed were hurting his re-election chances. This was right around the period when Dr. Deborah Birx was passing around her optimistic models showing that the virus was rapidly running its course.
But this is a new detail:
[B]ecause the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.
In other words, the Rube Goldberg system that has allowed the virus to surge all over the country resulting in millions of cases and more than 150,000 deaths was understood months ago to be unworkable. But people close to the president of the United States believed that the virus would be confined to states that don’t vote Republican, so letting those people get sick and die was smart politics.
I wish I could say that this is too awful to be believed, but let’s recall that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell clearly stated that he didn’t want to enact a “blue-state bailout” to ease the economic pain of states hit hard by the coronavirus. So this line of thinking wasn’t confined to the White House.
Obviously, these people have since gotten schooled as to the reality that the virus isn’t confined to blue states or big cities, and it’s now hitting their own voters hard. Indeed, as the Washington Post reported, that’s what persuaded Trump to start talking about the crisis again after many weeks of pretending it wasn’t happening.
But Trump’s commentary about the pandemic is making things worse, as always. He erroneously insists that kids are immune, that most of the country is doing great and that a vaccine will be available any day now. (In an extremely optimistic projection, there could be a vaccine in place by January, although there’s no guarantee it will be universally available or effective.) The testing system the Trumpers thought wouldn’t hurt “their people” is once again failing miserably as people have to wait for weeks to get results, and the nationwide surge is so widespread that contact tracing is almost useless anyway. Most of this is happening in red states that followed Trump over the cliff like a bunch of lemmings back in the spring when he told them the virus was going away and it was safe to reopen damn near everything.
Trump and Kushner could have come out of this looking like heroes — which would obviously have benefited the president’s odds of re-election — but they decided to play vindictive, divisive politics instead. But who knows? Maybe Trump will get lucky and that miracle cure will arrive any day. Maybe, as he’s been saying from the beginning, this virus will just disappear overnight. That’s really all there is to Trumpian politics at this point: punishing their enemies and magical thinking.
“The Lighter Side of Swimming Pools” ran in a 1968 edition of Mad Magazine. In a short panel, a Bobby Hill-looking child standing on a diving board shouts, “Mommy, look at me! Daddy, look at me!” Pool party guests turn away from their cocktails to watch.
“Okay,” Dad says, exasperated. “You’ve got everybody watching.”
SPLAT!!!
Coming up for air spluttering, the kid cries, “Not now. BEFORE when I did it good!”
A future Donald Trump, that kid. The U.S. economy shrank 32.9% on an annualized basis in the 2nd quarter, the worst performance since the second world war. The acting president still wants to run for reelection based people’s memory of the economy as it was before his coronavirus denials and non-response contributed to the deaths of what looks to be 230,000 Americans dead by Election Day.
Masks are un-Donald, his supplicants believed, refusing to wear them in public and making angry scenes in private businesses. FREE-DOM! The virus is a Democratic hoax no worse than the flu, they cried, taking cues from the denialist-in-chief.
This week, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain died of COVID-19, having contracted it about the time he attended Trump’s masks-optional rally in Tulsa, Okla. in late June. Nine days later, Cain tested positive and was soon hospitalized.
And Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), another mask refusenik, tested positive for the virus this week, setting off a minor firestorm among Republican Hill staff:
Now, legislative aides, chiefs of staff, press assistants, members of Congress, career workers and maintenance men and women are venting their fury with an institution that does not have uniform rules or masking requirements, does not mandate testing, is run with minimal oversight and must contend with a gaggle of lawmakers who doubt scientists and hold themselves out as experts on everything from disease hygiene to pharmacology.
Gohmert’s diagnosis, Politico reports, “has become a tipping point” for workers at the Hill complex. Gohmert insisted his staff not wear masks and speculated that he contracted the virus by wearing one on occasion. (At least he did not claim it was from inhaling his own CO2.) It is a wonder the man can dress and feed himself. I wish him a speedy recovery.
Politico reports at least 86 Hill workers have contracted the virus. Some aides avoid riding elevators with certain members out of fear of the disease. Mask use is near universal among Democrats, but after Gohmert’s diagnosis, Speaker Nancy Pelosi implemented policy making it mandatory that members wear masks on the House floor.
Reporters’ inboxes have exploded with complaints and tales of lax safety measures, careless bosses and a widespread feeling that their health was viewed as expendable.
Many described feeling uncomfortable taking the very kinds of health steps recommended by public health experts, and feeling pressured to report to work in person despite the risks. Multiple aides said it was common to mock those wearing masks, or brush off concerns among staff members with specific health issues.
I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in these parts “Hey, watch this!” often prefaces a stupid stunt leading to injury or death. Please, somebody get it on tape.
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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.
I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including voting for Donald Trump in 2016. I wrote op-eds and a law review article protesting what I believe was an unconstitutional investigation by Robert Mueller. I also wrote an op-ed opposing President Trump’s impeachment.
But I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.
Here is what President Trump tweeted:
I guess having the head of he Federalist Society call this out in no uncertain terms is a good thing. But really, this is hardly the first time Trump has expressed fascistic ideas. Indeed, it’s fundamental to his personality.
Trump evaded the question about this at his press briefing today instead choosing to focus on his later tweet:
I think this is one of those things Trump wanted to cause a bunch of screeching about by just about everyone. Why?
This:
He wanted a big brouhaha over this. I don’t know why but I suspect he didn’t want people paying attention to Bush, Clinton and Obama speaking eloquently at John Lewis’s funeral which he must know makes him look bad. And the economic numbers that were released today were absolutely brutal.
And yes, whether he actually contests the results he’s preparing the ground for delegitimizing a Joe Biden win. This isn’t just a distraction. He’s not planning on leaving quietly if he loses.
.
He is the US Ambassador to the Netherlands. You know, the country the allies liberated from the Germans? The place in which Anne Frank lived in an attic for two years before the Nazis found her and shipped her off to Auschwitz? What’s wrong with him?
War is an insane human compulsion and the death and suffering it causes is the most terrible waste in human experience. But this is a very weird way for an American ambassador to acknowledge that and frankly, knowing Hoekstra’s politics, I believe he probably feels a special affinity for WWII era Germany.
Lordy:
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shrank at a record 32.9 percent annual rate in the second quarter. While almost all the major categories of GDP fell sharply, a 43.5 percent drop in consumption of services was the largest factor, accounting for 22.9 percentage points of the drop in the quarter. Nonresidential fixed investment also fell sharply, dropping at a 27.0 percent annual rate. Residential investment fell at a 38.7 percent annual rate.
The plunge in service consumption was expected since this was the segment of the economy hardest hit by the shutdowns. Within services, health care, food services and hotels, and recreation were the biggest factors reducing growth by 9.5 percentage points, 5.6 percentage points, and 4.7 percentage points, respectively.
Spending on health care services fell at a 62.7 percent annual rate in the quarter. This was due to people putting off a wide range of medical and dental checkups and procedures, which far more than offset the care needed by coronavirus patients. The annual rate of decline for food and hotel services was 81.2 percent and for recreation services 93.5 percent.
Consumption of nondurable goods fell at a 15.9 percent annual rate. Declines in clothing and gasoline purchases were the biggest factors, taking 1.0 percentage point and 0.9 percentage points off the quarter’s growth, respectively. Demand for durable goods fell at just a 1.4 percent rate, but this followed a decline of 12.5 percent in the first quarter. Interestingly, spending on cars actually rose slightly in the quarter, adding 0.15 percentage points to growth.
Consumption expenditures by nonprofits serving households rose at 182.5 percent annual rate, adding 3.0 percentage points to the quarter’s growth. This reflects the effort by private foundations and charities to ameliorate the hardships being experienced by many households.
Both structure and equipment investment fell sharply in the quarter, declining at 34.9 percent and 37.7 percent annual rates, respectively. The drop in equipment investment is especially striking since it fell at a 15.2 percent rate in the first quarter. Investment in intellectual products fell at a more modest 7.2 percent annual rate. Residential investment fell at a 38.7 percent annual rate, although this followed a jump of 19.0 percent in the first quarter.
Exports and imports both fell sharply, with exports dropping at a 64.1 percent rate and imports falling at a 53.4 percent rate. Because US imports are so much larger than exports, trade actually added 0.7 percentage points to growth in the quarter.
Federal government spending rose at a 17.4 percent annual rate, driven by a 39.7 percent increase in non-defense spending, presumably most of which is pandemic related. State and local spending fell at a 5.6 percent rate, likely reflecting school closings in the quarter.
Prices fell sharply in the quarter, with the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) deflator falling at a 1.9 percent annual rate and the core PCE falling at a 1.1 percent annual rate. These declines reflected sharp drops in the price of items such as gasoline, hotels, and clothes. Many of these declines were already being reversed by the end of the quarter. They will almost certainly not continue into the third quarter.
That’s from Dean Baker at CEPR. He points out that the 3rd quarter will almost certainly be better although not even close to being back to where it was before.
It didn’t have to be this bad. Had the federal government used the lockdown time wisely instead of chasing miracle cures and magical thinking, they might have had the mitigation measures in place to contain the virus enough to have the nation re-opening in a systematic and methodical way instead of these crazy surges that now seem to be uncontainable. As everyone says, there was never any hope for the economy without containing the virus and having systems in place to mitigate the inevitable flare-ups.
The fallout from all this is going to be a nightmare. The government has the capacity to spend the money to give businesses and individuals the lifelines they need to get through it. They made a stab at it but now it seems that the Republicans are just going to throw up their hands and tell all the people without jobs, income, health care, and even food, that they’re just out of luck.
We are in chaos. And it’s not getting any better.