Month: July 2020

“The U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic is a raging dumpster fire,” Helen Branswell laments at Stat News as “We’ll Meet Again” plays in my head.

Florida on Sunday chalked up more new COVID-19 cases in a single day — 15,000 — than South Korea has so far in the entire pandemic. The website Covidexitstrategy.org just updated its U.S. map to include a color-coded category for states, adding “bruised red” to indicate states with uncontrolled spread and hospitals nearing capacity. Seventeen states meet the new criteria.

The bulk of Branswell’s “How to fix the Covid-19 dumpster fire in the U.S.” amounts to admitting “that for now the virus has the upper hand” and deciding what to do to mitigate it. There is much the U.S. might do that it is not doing.

“My best read of the data is that a large chunk of the transmission is happening when people gather indoors. So, cut out the indoors. No restaurants, no bars, no nightclubs, obviously no schools right now,” says Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute. The U.S. should ban all indoor activities that cluster groups of people.

And, of course, wear masks and social distance.

The problem is Jha and Branswell and national infectious disease experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci are not calling the shots on a national strategy. There is no national strategy. The only strategy in evidence is not for controlling death and disease but for jump-starting an economy on life support in hopes it will recover enough by November for Acting President Donald J. Trump to win reelection.

Trump dithered for months as he sought a way to either ignore the pandemic, wish it away, or pawn off responsibility for it on state governors. The result is a U.S. leading the world in failing at controlling the pandemic.

States that reopened (under pressure) too soon have seen the virus spread faster than it did in March, Annie Lowry explains at The Atlantic. With no leadership from the top, many consumers remain cautious and at home. Others rushed back to bars and restaurants assuming a state’s reopening meant “All Clear”:

In other ways, the spread of COVID-19 is keeping Americans from going back to work. The perception of public transit as unsafe, for example, makes it expensive and tough for commuters to get to their jobs. Schools and day-care centers are struggling to figure out how to reopen safely, meaning millions of parents are facing a fall juggling work and child care. This is a disaster. “The lingering uncertainty about whether in-person education will resume isn’t the result of malfeasance, but utter nonfeasance,” the former Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem has argued in The Atlantic. “Four months of stay-at-home orders have proved that, if schools are unavailable, a city cannot work, a community cannot function, a nation cannot safeguard itself.”

For the economy to recover, parents have to go back to work. Inside. For parents to go back to work inside, children have to go back to school. Inside. Trump demands schools reopen so he can remain in the White House. Inside and unindicted.

So, with 60,000 Americans testing positive for the disease daily, schools must reopen. And restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Keeping them closed in the interest of public health and safety is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Deep State plot Trump has ever had to face. And “Chi-na.”

He’s not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But he is saying 135,000 dead is no big deal compared to the potential millions who might have died. Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, projected on Tuesday that over 208,000 people could be dead by November. In March, Trump considered 200,000 deaths a “a very good job” on his part.

Teachers’ unions are less sanguine about their members being mussed. “Normally, people don’t play with kids’ lives. They’ll play with adults’ lives, but they don’t play with kids’ lives,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said last week. The AFT will spend an additional $1 million on TV and digital ads demanding GOP leaders provide funds to reopen schools safely. Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, believes “3 million teachers, support staff, secretaries, bus drivers,” and any one of her members is more qualified than Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to determine how to reopen schools safely.

Dr. Strangelove‘s Gen. Jack T. Ripper believed fighting wars was too important to be left to politicians. Acting President Donald J. Trump believes leading a national fight against a deadly pandemic is too important to be left to presidents. His ineptitude and madness have already cost many of the 135,000 American lives lost to date. He has left the country without a national strategy for saving lives, and in trying to save his own hide is content to lose 200,00 or more — children included. Uh… depending on the breaks.

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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.

I think this says it all:

Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh: Americans should “adapt” to coronavirus, like pioneers who “had to turn to cannibalism” https://t.co/QudCS7zPZb pic.twitter.com/FfmDattqlb

— Media Matters (@mmfa) July 14, 2020

Welp. That’s it for me …

Oh look. It seems that people aren’t impressed with their GOP Governors following the Trump model of lying, blowing smoke, blaming and otherwise acting like assholes during a major public health crisis:

While governors’ ratings for communicating about the virus and caring about their communities are down slightly, this is not uniform across the country but varies by the party of the sitting governor.

For this analysis, residents were sorted into two groups based on the political party of the governor: this includes residents in the 26 states currently led by Republican governors and residents in the 24 states led by Democratic governors.

There have been clear declines in residents’ ratings of their governor in Republican-led states as a whole. This includes an 11-point decrease, from 54% in early June to 43% most recently, in those agreeing their governor is communicating a clear plan of action for addressing the pandemic. There has also been an eight-point decline, from 61% to 53%, in those agreeing their governor cares about the safety and health of the community.

Meanwhile, there has been no meaningful change in the governor ratings of residents in Democratic-led states as a whole.

Further analysis of the Gallup data shows that Republican governors lost the most support over the past month from political independents, with lesser declines seen among Republican residents. Democrats’ already low ratings of their Republican governors’ response to the situation were fairly flat by comparison.

The majority of independents in Republican-led states rated their governors positively at the start of June on all three dimensions; however, these evaluations slid 19 points to 39% for communicating a clear plan, fell 20 points to 37% for keeping residents informed and slipped 13 points to 47% for caring about the safety and health of the community.Ratings of Republican Governors’ Handling of COVID-19By party ID of residents in Republican-led states

Meanwhile, in states led by Democratic governors, independents’ ratings of their governors’ handling of the situation increased slightly in June, by six to eight points across the dimensions analyzed. Republicans living in these states also grew slightly more positive about their Democratic governors’ leadership over the course of June, while Democratic residents’ already high ratings didn’t change much at all.Ratings of Democratic Governors’ Handling of COVID-19By party ID of residents in Democrat-led states

Two patterns emerge from these changes:

• While Republicans and Democrats living in states led by their own party were equally satisfied with their governor at the start of June, a month later, Democrats were significantly more positive about Democratic governor’s leadership on the coronavirus situation than Republicans were with Republican governors.
• Additionally, whereas at the start of June, political independents in Republican states initially gave their governor higher ratings than those in Democratic states, the reverse was true four weeks later.

Republican governors, as a whole, are rated less well today by residents of Republican-led states than they were at the start of June. This coincides with a sharp increase in COVID-19 infections across the country, but particularly in red states, including most of the nation’s Sun Belt…

The political implications of these trends aren’t clear. There are only 11 gubernatorial elections this year, including seven involving Republican sitting governors, so their electoral exposure this year is low. However, Republican governors’ reduced performance ratings could affect their ability to influence citizens to follow state guidelines or affect their clout with other state policymakers. And given the prominence of the COVID-19 crises, it could permanently shape how governors — many of them in their first term — are perceived by their constituents, ultimately influencing what happens at the ballot box in 2022 or beyond.

I’m going to guess that Independents don’t watch Fox News religiously so that may account for the fact that they can see just how dishonest and lethal these GOP Governors have been with their responses.

The analysis looked at correlations with Trump and it appears that the Governors are losing steam on their own. The mistrust of Trump’s response remains the same. But I would suggest that

The administrtion is telling hospitals to bypass the CDC and send their numbers directly to them:

The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and, beginning on Wednesday, send all coronavirus patient information to a central database in Washington — a move that has alarmed public health experts who fear the data will be distorted for political gain.

The new instructions are contained in a little-noticed document posted this week on the Department of Health and Human Services’ website, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports. From now on, H.H.S., and not the C.D.C., will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, how many beds and ventilators are available, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.

Officials said the change should help ease data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus task force in allocating scarce supplies like personal protective gear and the drug remdesivir.

Oh no. They are putting that ridiculous bunch of Keystone Kops in charge again. Jesus. How many health care workers are going to die. How many people who live in states that aren’t run by Trump’s personal bootlickers will get what they need?

Hospital officials want to streamline reporting, saying it will relieve them from responding to requests from multiple federal agencies, though some say the C.D.C. — an agency that prizes its scientific independence — should be in charge of gathering the information.

“The C.D.C. is the right agency to be at the forefront of collecting the data,” said Dr. Bala Hota, the chief analytics officer at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

Public health experts have long expressed concerns that the administration is politicizing science and undermining the disease control centers; four former C.D.C. directors, spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations, said as much in an opinion piece published Tuesday in The Washington Post. The data collection shift reinforced those fears.

“Centralizing control of all data under the umbrella of an inherently political apparatus is dangerous and breeds distrust,” said Nicole Lurie, who served as assistant secretary for preparedness and response under former President Barack Obama. “It appears to cut off the ability of agencies like C.D.C. to do its basic job.”

The shift grew out of a tense conference call several weeks ago between hospital executives and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator.

After Dr. Birx complained that hospitals were not adequately reporting their data, she convened a working group of government and hospital officials who devised the new plan, according to Janis Orlowski, chief health care officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, who participated.

But news of the change came as a shock inside the C.D.C., which has long been responsible for gathering public health data, according to two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it. A spokesman for the disease control centers referred questions to the Department of Health and Human Services, which has not responded to a request for comment.

This is very bad news. Alex Azar’s HHS is run as a direct adjunct to Trump’s re-election campaign. If there was any hope of a dispassionate, reasoned, scientific, federal, response during this current surge we can forget it.

Who wrote this?

Is the Republican Party a lost cause?

Let me be definitive and unequivocal: I don’t know.

On the one hand, with embarrassingly few exceptions at every level, the Republican party is Donald Trump’s party. So in many ways it deserves to be a lost cause.

On the other hand, after November 3, the GOP may stop—more or less suddenly, and more or less convincingly—being Donald Trump’s party. It might even stop being the party of Trumpism.

On the third hand, it will still have been Donald Trump’s party. And that moral and political stain can’t, and shouldn’t, simply be wished away.

On the fourth hand: It would be good for the country if there were a conservative party that wasn’t a nativist / proto-authoritarian / nationalist-populist party. This would be the case for not giving up on the GOP, but rather fighting to save it.

But on the fifth hand, wishing for a sound conservative party won’t make it so. And even fighting for one may not make it so, either. It may be that American conservatism has been so damaged that a “new center”—whether as a party or some sort of cross-partisan coalition—is a better way to go than trying to save the GOP.

On the sixth hand (I know, we’re in octopus territory here): Maybe we should root for the GOP to be salvaged, while acknowledging it won’t be saved by us people like us. After all, if the GOP is to be rebuilt, it will likely have to be done by people who have been complicit in Trumpism. Because one thing that is certain is that the Republican apostates will never be forgiven by their erstwhile colleagues. Not because we were wrong about Trump, but because we were right.

So Never Trumpers will be personae non gratae. The only people who will be afforded the opportunity to save the GOP are the ones who helped wreck it. Which doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen, of course. But it may suggest that the attempt is less likely to happen. And perhaps less likely to succeed.

Who knows? So many hands, so little clarity!

Such is politics sometimes; such is life sometimes. In these cases, often the best one can do is to stop planning for a triple-bankshot inside-straight at some point in the unspecified future, and instead simply to fight for an outcome that is right and just in the short term. While at the same time keeping an open mind for the medium and long term.

I will admit that my heart, today, is with “the Republican party is a lost cause” faction.

But then my still somewhat conservative mind remembers the admonition of T.S. Eliot:

“If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.”

On the other hand, maybe Pascal trumps Eliot: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.”

Heart or mind? Lost cause or worth trying to save? I don’t know.

Lost cause if you ask me. Start over.

That’s from Bill Kristol, the neocon, Iraq war cheerleader (among other awful things.)

I follow him on twitter and it’s interesting to watch him wrestle with this problem. And he actually is wrestling with it and not just in terms of Trump but in terms of conservative ideology itself:

It's said if you're not a liberal when you're twenty, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative when you're forty, you have no head. I'd add, at least in my case: If you're not rethinking some conservative orthodoxies in your sixties, you haven't been learning from life.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) November 4, 2019

I find that interesting. However, for all of his wrestling, I don’t think he’s fully grasped how his conservatism set the table for Trumpism. There is a reason the establishment Republican George W. Bush, who slithered into the presidency under very dubious circumstances, went from a 90% approval rating after 9/11 to 28% in the year he left office. The twin debacles of Iraq and Katrina had a lot to do with that. Something was very wrong long before Trump came along.

But hey, baby steps. There will always be some kind of conservative faction in America so I’m happy to see a re-evaluation of the one we’ve been dealing with. The ugliness has been escalating for a long time and the intellectuals among them turned a blind eye to it. Trump made it impossible to ignore so, in that sense, he did everyone a favor.

Whether these guys can resist the impulse to go back to their orthodoxy and comfort themselves with reflexive resistance to the left remains to be seen. But for now, they are looking inward in a new way and that’s something. It’s not easy to do that.

That is the question:

Four former directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention blasted the Trump administration’s “repeated efforts to subvert” agency guidelines related to reopening schools, accusing the White House in a scathing Washington Post op-ed of undermining science with “partisan potshots.”

 The directors, Tom Frieden, Jeffrey Koplan and David Satcher and acting head Richard Besser, served in parts of the Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations. They said they “cannot recall over our collective tenure a single time when political pressure led to a change in the interpretation of scientific evidence.”

 In his push to reopen schools this fall in order to help juice the economy, Trump last week criticized the CDC’s guidelines as “very tough & expensive” and demanded that the agency issue new ones.

• Education Secretary Betsy DeVos then said on Sunday that the CDC guidance is simply a recommendation, and that kids “cannot afford” to not return to in-person learning.

“Through last week, and into Monday, the administration continued to cast public doubt on the agency’s recommendations and role in informing and guiding the nation’s pandemic response,” the former CDC directors wrote.

• “On Sunday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos characterized the CDC guidelines as an impediment to reopening schools quickly rather than what they are: the path to doing so safely. The only valid reason to change released guidelines is new information and new science — not politics.”
• “These efforts have even fueled a backlash against public health officials across the country: Public servants have been harassed, threatened and forced to resign when we need them most. This is unconscionable and dangerous.”

“We’re seeing the terrible effect of undermining the CDC play out in our population. Willful disregard for public health guidelines is, unsurprisingly, leading to a sharp rise in infections and deaths,” the authors wrote.

• “America now stands as a global outlier in the coronavirus pandemic. It is not too late to give the CDC its proper role in guiding this response. But the clock is ticking.”

 By the way, L.A. schools’ decision to go virtual may be a nationwide tipping point

• California is also re-entering lockdown: Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered restaurants, wineries, movie theaters and other family entertainment to stop serving customers indoors, and he ordered bars to close in their entirety.

This could start a domino effect among officials who haven’t made a final decision, especially with the coronavirus surging across much of the U.S.

• It also sets up a conflict with the Trump administration and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who are pushing schools to have students in classrooms.

Los Angeles is the first big district to make this move, with plenty more at a crucial point in the decision-making process.

1. New York City will be allowed to open schools if positive test rates remain below 5%.
2. Chicago let high school athletes return to practice last week, but hasn’t decided whether to have classes in person.
3. Miami-Dade is asking parents to vote on their preference of online, hybrid or in-person, but this only applies if the state goes to the next phase of re-opening.
4. Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools released its draft plan this weekend to start September with online-only classes. In-person classes would then be phased in, and blocked off by different periods and grades, Axios’ Orion Rummler reports.
5. Las Vegas will have a hybrid system with the potential for alterations.
6. Atlanta’s school board is voting today on whether to start the first nine weeks online.
7. In Seattle, students are “likely to go to school in person only once or twice a week” in the plan under consideration as of July 8, per the N.Y. Times.

Teachers unions are flexing some muscle here, the LA Times notes.

• Los Angeles teachers union leadership pushed for online-only, and “83% of teachers agreed in a one-day snap poll.”

 Cost will be a big factor in these decisions.

• San Diego faced a $90 million price tag to add the necessary support staff and disinfecting procedures to keep schools open. (N.Y. Times)
• The bill could average out to nearly $1.8 million per school district, the School Superintendents Association estimates. (ABC News)

She really needs to stop:

The US unemployment rate, currently at 11.1 percent, is higher than at any point during the Great Recession—a grim stat that in the face of ballooning coronavirus cases and, in some states, a return to lockdown measures, is unlikely to see substantial improvement in the months ahead. To make matters worse, the $600 federal unemployment insurance weekly subsidy is set to expire at the end of the month, thanks to Republicans, even as experts credit the benefit as a crucial lifeline preventing countless families from descending into poverty.

In the midst of this economic crisis facing millions of Americans, enter Ivanka Trump with advice for the unemployed: Embrace the chaos, she urges, and “Find Something New.” The initiative comes as her most recent diamond-encrusted middle finger to American families since the pandemic hit.

The campaign’s website, which boasts ties with companies like Apple, reads like a choose-your-own-adventure where options like vague certificate and intensive programs are presented but with scant detail on how to pursue such paths, much less pay for some of them. Click on Apple, for example, and you’re simply rerouted to a page offering free beginner coding courses that surely won’t be enough to even land you an interview with the company. It’s the equivalent of directing someone to Indeed.com, wishing them good luck, and congratulating yourself for helping them in a meaningful way.

That isn’t to say that “Find Something New” will fail to inspire. For a growing number of Americans, it’s a reminder that they’ll have the chance to do exactly that come November.

Donald J. Trump has ended the United States as a world leader. He has in three-plus years reduced the U.S. to a monster truck bristling with guns and Trump flags. Impressive maybe. Intimidating to some. But not what the world views as leadership. Unless your name is Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.

A decade ago, I reviewed U.S. history post-September 11, 2001:

A flood of post-September 11 articles asked how the attacks happened, what we would do next, and why terrorists hate us. One savvy pundit asked, Would America keep its head?

We invaded Iraq on trumped-up intelligence. We conducted illegal surveillance on our own citizens. We imprisoned people without charge, here and abroad. We rendered prisoners for torture and tortured others ourselves in violation of international law. All the while, millions of staunch, law-and-order conservatives supported and defended it, and still do. Vigorously.

Would America keep its head? No.

Damon Linker covers some of the same ground this morning for The Week. Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House did not reverse the trends set by George W. Bush, nor did the Obama administration display the fortitude to repudiate Bush’s crimes. But Obama’s attempts over eight years to reestablish international norms made the Bush years look like “a momentary lapse in America’s responsible global leadership.”

Running in parallel were the T-partiers, the birthers, the death-panelers, Glenn Beck, town hall shouters, Sarah Palin, and right-wingers parading with guns. And finally Donald Trump.

In addition to insulting allies across the globe and courting autocrats and dictators, Trump has undone every international initiative put in place by his predecessor, Linker writes:

All of that is bad. Very bad. But too often our discussions of Trump administration malfeasance take insufficient account of the broader context of recent alarming events. Trump is not merely an agent of international disorder. He’s the second agent of international disorder to be elected president of the United States in the past two decades. Even worse than handing the White House to someone as unfit as Trump is to have done so immediately after his predecessor spent two terms in office attempting to demonstrate to the world that the mistakes of his predecessor were a temporary hiccup.

By now our allies and adversaries alike have learned the lesson that the United States is thoroughly unreliable. We will work for years to accomplish a series of goals in multiple regions of the world and then in an instant turn 180 degrees in the opposition direction, blowing up all of those efforts without the least hesitation or forethought. If Joe Biden wins the presidency, many will be relieved that Trump is gone, but no one will be fooled into believing for a second time that America has righted itself. Everyone will know that 2024 and yet another potential reversal is just four short years away.

In other words, the Trump presidency was not the product of immaculate conception. His promise to make America great again appealed to a large minority whose sense of itself and its place in the world was shaken to its core. First, by the September 11 attacks. Second, by the majority electing the first black president.

The first demonstrated to generations born since Vietnam that their country is not untouchable. The second forced a white population previously able to ignore shifting demographics to reckon with the fact that it would eventually have to share power with people it considers inferiors. Too many Americans need people to look down on to feel better about themselves. They’re terrified of losing that. #BLM means “black lives matter too. They hear “… more than mine.” Nonwhite demands for equality feel like oppression. They are having none of it. They want their Great White Hope.

Dahlia Lithwick reflects on what Mary Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough” says, not about her irreparably damaged uncle, but about a country that would elect him president. Mary Trump’s book is an indictment of the “institutions” and persons who “all knew and know that the emperor has no clothes, even as they devote their last shreds of dignity to effusive praise of his ermine trim and jaunty crown.”

Even the family patriarch, Fred Trump, found there was no escape from Donald’s myth-making:

But as it became clear that Donald had no real business acumen—as his Atlantic City casinos cratered and his father unlawfully poured secret funds into saving them—Mary realized that Fred also depended on the glittery tabloid success at which Donald excelled. Fred continued to prop up his son’s smoke-and-mirrors empire because, as Mary writes, “Fred had become so invested in the fantasy of Donald’s success that he and Donald were inextricably linked. Facing reality would have required acknowledging his own responsibility, which he would never do. He had gone all in, and although any rational person would have folded, Fred was determined to double down.”

Trump’s political enablers find themselves trapped as well. Whatever transactional advantage they might have hoped to win, “the moment you put him in your pocket, you become his slave,” Lithwick writes. “It is impossible to escape his orbit without having to admit a spectacular failure in moral and strategic judgment, which almost no one can stomach. Donald Trump’s emptiness is simply a mirror of the emptiness of everyone who propped him up. It’s that reflection that becomes unendurable.” They will simply double down.

“Donald isn’t really the problem at all,” Mary Trump concludes. Or as a more storied author before her wrote, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars …”

Once the George W. Bush administration went to “the dark side,” the Bushies and their enablers were all in. Today, so are John Kelly, Kellyanne Conway, John Bolton, Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, Melania Trump, and the Trump administration’s Republican allies. As are the #MAGA faithful. Admitting their “spectacular failure in moral and strategic judgment” and facing the light of truth is unendurable.

In 2008, Blue Century (my 527 committee) ran a series of regional 30-second radio ads aimed at getting out the vote. Not all of the scripts were right for the air. “Compulsion” never ran. It spoke to Bush’s inability to stop throwing good lives after bad decisions. It is ironic now that the setting was a casino:

SFX: Casino ambience, slot machines, coins dropping
AIDE: Sir. Sir, I think it’s time to leave.
GEORGE: Can’t leave. Making progress. Gonna win any time now.
SFX: Casino ambience, coins inserted, slot machine handle cycles
AIDE: But, sir. You’ve already lost a fortu- … um … sir, are those … dog tags? 
GEORGE: Running low here. Here’s a billion for more. [to himself] If you don’t quit, you don’t lose.
SFX: Slot machine handle cycles, casino ambience, more “coins” inserted
VO: You can tell a calculated risk from a bad bet. Call your leaders in Congress. Ask if they can.

The Trump administration and its enablers are exhibiting the same all-in behavior in 2020, not as much with the lives of troops overseas as with citizens at home, including school children. Yours.

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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.

Michelle Goldberg in the NY Times is, I believe, the first person in the Times to so much as mention the possibility that Trump resign:

…there’s no drumbeat of calls for the president’s resignation. People seem to feel too helpless.

I’m not sure that I agree about the “too helpless” part. Speaking personally, I don’t feel helpless. Instead, I’m flabbergasted at the cowardice, especially by the media and the Republicans, at their refusal to take Trump on. For all their faults, at least Pelosi, Schiff, and other Democrats actually did their job and impeached the motherfucker.

That said, it’s great that the subject of Trump being forced to leave office immediately is finally being openly discussed in the Times. Thanks, Ms. Goldberg, for getting the ball started.

PS, the rest of Goldberg’s op-ed is brilliant. So, btw, is Krugman’s. The Times has published (and publishes) some terrible opinion columnists, but these two are as good as it gets.

I can’t wait to read Mary Trump’s tell-all. This Politico review lays out why it could be the most important of all of them:

For anybody who’s done the reading these last five years—from Wayne Barrett’s biography that was published in 1992 to Gwenda Blair’s multigenerational study from 2000 to psychology experts’ more recent efforts to explain this president—it’s a takeaway that’s not altogether unfamiliar. And the glut of books about Trump and his aberrant administration has contributed almost inevitably to a tendency to treat even the most hyped fresh releases as cash-grab ephemera to speed-read for damning tidbits and just as quickly forget amid the ruthless whirl of crises.

But hold up here for a sec—for the most devastating, most valuable and all-around best Trump book since he started running for president. In the vast Trump literature, this one is something new.

That’s because of the unprecedented access, and its pathos, which is because of the source—the president’s only niece, the 55-year-old daughter of his oldest brother, who died at 42 in 1981 in her estimation as a result of a pathological, decades-long destruction at the hands of his own twisted kin.

Mary Trump, to be sure, is a partisan (a registered Democrat who’s expressed public admiration for Hillary Clinton) with an ax to grind (she and her brother were all but excised from passed-down riches), and she writes, too, with palpable sadness and anger stemming from the long-ago loss of her father. The White House, meanwhile, predictably has dismissed her account as rife with “falsehoods” and “ridiculous, absurd allegations.” But she also holds a Ph.D. in psychological studies. And in these taut 211 pages, she puts us in new rooms, shows us new scenes with new details and lets us hear from members of the president’s nuclear family who have been conspicuously and obstinately mum. She is, after all, and by blood still, one of them—and “the only Trump,” as she puts it, “who is willing” to dish on what she calls “my malignantly dysfunctional family.”

He points out, rightly, that this book will probably have little effect on the election. There’s just too much else going on and poeple know what they think of Donald Trump at this point. But:

What this book does do is help us understand him, offering the most incisive rendering yet of why he is the way he is.

No matter what happens in November, historians will have to contend with the influences that forged the personality of one of the most consequential presidents ever—and in Mary Trump’s telling, the current occupant of the Oval Office, the man just shy of 63 million voters thought was the most preferable choice to lead their nation, is “a narcissist” whose “pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for,” whose “deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in.” She says he is “a petty, pathetic, little man.” She says he is “ignorant” and “incapable” and “lost in his own delusional spin.” She says deep down he “knows he has never been loved.” She says his reelection “would be the end of American democracy.”

I asked Trump biographers—people who’ve spent extended periods of their lives attempting to plumb his psyche—what they thought of her book.

Michael D’Antonio told me he found it “chilling.”

And Tim O’Brien? He believes it’ll be “indelible.”

“There were a lot of mob movies before ‘The Godfather,’ but ‘The Godfather’ gave us a very specific understanding of being in a mob family because it was this rich, detailed, inside account of how a family dysfunctioned together,” he said. “There was nothing new in ‘The Godfather’ about how mobsters rolled, but the portrait it painted was so searing and rich and authentic that it defined our understanding of a criminal family. And, yes, there have been other books about the Trump family—Wayne’s, mine, Gwenda’s—but none of us captured his family life in the way that she has.”

O’Brien predicted Mary Trump’s work will have “a seismic imprint.” “It gives,” he said, “the deepest understanding of his family dynamics that anyone has provided, and how that shapes his psychosis, and why he’s such a dangerous leader.”

I haven’t received mine yet. But I’m going to devour it. I have always thought he was a twisted and deformed character so I’ll be interested to see where that comes from.

The next project will be figuring out why Republican officials were so cowed by this deranged man-child. (Were they all abused as children too?) And then there is the important question of why tens of millions of Americans would worship such a bizarre person? What does that say about our culture?