Month: July 2020

Well, that was a Fourth of July weekend for the books, wasn’t it? As a deadly pandemic continues to sweep through the country, resulting in an economic disaster, the president of the United States gave a couple of fiery speeches in which he barely mentioned any of that and instead declared war on half of America.

On Friday the 3rd, Donald Trump flew to Mount Rushmore to appear before a flock of adoring fans and deliver the message he intends to carry him through November. He declared that the country is under siege, not just by the “invisible enemy” COVID-19, or even the usual invading hordes of foreigners and terrorists storming the borders. He thundered:

Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.

That wasn’t all:

Very patriotic. https://t.co/Nhpy38dOli

— digby (@digby56) July 6, 2020

The next night, back in Washington, he delivered a solemn promise to his small but devoted audience of specially invited guests on the White House lawn:

Trump's July 4 message to the nation: "We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who in many instances have absolutely no clue what they are doing." pic.twitter.com/zh7wPYmT3z

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 4, 2020

He also repeatedly promised to unify the nation, presumably after all the left-wing fascists, Marxists, anarchists, agitators and looters have been vanquished. First things first.

If you liked his “American Carnage” inaugural address, you had to love this pair of angry declarations of war against fellow Americans on the day the country celebrates its freedom and independence. They certainly reeked of patriotism and love of country.

Actually, they just reeked. Reportedly they were the work of Trump’s senior adviser and dark passenger Stephen Miller, who is usually known for his odious demonization of immigrants. It seems he’s turned his evil talents to vilifying American citizens as well.

Of course, Miller had plenty of inspiration from the man himself. The president’s loathing for any American who doesn’t bathe him in glory and admiration has long been obvious. But lately he’s turned the volume up to 11 in the hopes that he can whip the culture war to fever pitch by persuading people that these enemies within are literally coming to kill them in their beds. We’ve known his feelings on these issues since he took out a full-page newspaper ad back in the 1980s headlined, “Bring back the death penalty. Bring back our police.”

Trump has made a decision that he’s not going to talk about unarmed Black people who are killed by police and he’s certainly not going to discuss the pandemic that is still ravaging our nation while the rest of the developed world is returning to some version of normal. He’s decided instead to take up the lost cause of the Confederacy and Richard Nixon.

He’s been getting advice — from someone who has recently received what Trump no doubt considers the most impressive accolade the world has to offer:

“Tucker Carlson Tonight” finished the quarter as the highest-rated program in cable news history, tallying an average of 4.33 million viewers.

As you know, in Trump’s mind TV ratings are far more indicative of popularity than political polling, which he still doesn’t understand. And Tucker Carlson is killing it on Fox News with his white supremacist fear-mongering, night after night. That is bound to impress the president as a sign that it’s the winning formula.

Jonathan Swan of Axios has rounded up a few of the rhetorical parallels between Carlson’s recent monologues and Trump’s July 4 speech. Here’s a small sampling:

• Carlson: “For more than a month, mobs of violent crazy people have roamed this country, terrorizing citizens and destroying things.”
• Trump: “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”
• Carlson: “The education cartel, enforced on your children, enforces their demands.”
• Trump: “In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.”
• Carlson: “The Cultural Revolution has come to the West.”
• Trump: “Make no mistake: This left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.”

Carlson should sue Trump for plagiarism. The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman has compiled and annotated some of Carlson’s other white supremacist screeds, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Carlson is definitely having a moment. Politico reports that those high ratings (even though they have cost him virtually all his advertisers) have Republican insiders buzzing that Carlson is a natural presidential contender for 2024. Apparently, they are assuming that, win or lose this fall, Trumpism is their future.

Carlson is far more savvy than Trump, as are a number of others who define themselves as right-wing populists and natural heirs to the house that Trump built. I’ve written about Carlson’s specific brand before, and it’s considerably more dangerous than anything Trump, with his George Wallace old-school Confederate-flavored racism, can come up with. Carlson is much more in line with the new right-wing populism of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, which is a sophisticated program that plays on the same fears and resentments as Trumpism but has deeper ideological roots and more serious authoritarian goals.

Pundits and commentators seem to be taken with the fact that Carlson often excoriates the Republican establishment and puts out curious feelers to certain ideas more commonly associated with the left, as if he were some new and unique brand of open-minded conservative. Apparently they forget that until Trump came along and “tamed” the GOP establishment, the Tea Party types had excoriated Republican leadership for years. Recall that then-House Speaker Paul Ryan was booed heavily at a Trump rally in 2016.

As for Carlson’s supposed populism, he’s simply stoking the same white grievances that Trump does, but simply has a better understanding of how to wrap economics into it. It’s a shtick that works for him as a cable news host. It seems that many people in the Republican Party have now decided that the only people they trust to run the country are TV celebrities, so that makes Carlson an early favorite to carry the Trump banner.

There’s one highly intriguing wrinkle in this scenario: What if Donald Trump loses this fall and decides he wants to take another run at it in 2024? He’ll be the same age then as Joe Biden is now, and it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t seize the opportunity to bilk his cult followers out of as much money as possible over the next four years to prepare for a rematch. I don’t think anyone’s going to be allowed to run with Trumpism until Trump himself is finished with it.

We know what Trump is capable of. But Tucker Carlson already looks like one of the nastiest pieces of work in American politics for a long time — and he’s not technically in politics quite yet. A primary battle between them would be brutal.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

“There comes a point — and we’re way past it — when reporters covering Trump should be honest with what they’re witnessing,” Eric Boehlert writes in his Monday edition of Press Run. Blunt honesty should not be left to opinion columnists. Dancing around the truth does a disservice to readers and to the country. Much coverage of the acting president’s holiday weekend speeches refused to call his rhetoric incitement to civil war:

This kind of chronic whitewashing has come to define political journalism in the Trump era. As he becomes increasingly desperate while his polling numbers fall, Trump’s loud cries for armed confrontation may become more acute, and it’s the job of journalists to describe exactly what’s happening, and not hide behind polite euphemisms.

Like “fiery” to describe Donald Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech. Or using “stormy” or “combative” to describe Trump statements both at odds with objective reality and aimed at inflaming animosities. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last year, Trump described political opponents as “maniacs” who “hate their country.”

The man who inaugurated his presidency with a mind-bending speech about “American carnage” grew even more toxic over the weekend. He described adversaries as representing a “new far-left fascism” whose goal is “the end of America.”

A flood of demonizing rhetoric from radio station RTLM aimed at a political minority preceded the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The station described the Tutsi minority as “snakes” and urged listeners to “exterminate the cockroaches.” An estimated 1 million died in the violence. The world soon forgot. Trump’s speech writers took notes.

There were a couple signs this morning that a few in the press are done pulling their punches.

As Trump gaslights America about coronavirus, Republicans face a critical choice

“The gulf between reality and President Donald Trump‘s delusional vision of a waning coronavirus threat was on full display this weekend,” CNN reported under the headline above. The column by Maeve Reston still posted under “analysis.”

Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him

Bill Moore (bmaz) posted the image at the top highlighting a Washington Post column by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker bearing the headline shown. Usually, it is only Greg Sargent at Plum Line who is blunt enough for such straight talk. Even then, punches are pulled, yes?

“Trump allies say the president’s words and actions are not racist but rather attentive to his core voters.” See, it’s not him who is racist, just his core supporters. He’s just catering to them.

Print and broadcast journalists are accustomed to cleaning up awkward pauses, “you knows” and “ums” in statements. Tidying up Trump’s statements goes beyond politeness. It obscures derangement an informed electorate needs to see clearly.

Boehlert adds:

When traveling to the U.S. to cover Trump for several days last year, Guardian journalist Lenore Taylor wrote about how amazed she was to watch him speak in person for extended monologues, how utterly illogical his comments were, and how often reporters clean up those comments in order to make them appear sensible within the context of news articles. “Watching just one press conference helped me understand how the process of reporting about this president can mask and normalize his full and alarming incoherence,” she wrote in a piece headlined, “As a foreign reporter visiting the US I was stunned by Trump’s press conference.”  

Confrontations so far between Trump’s white nationalist supporters and, basically, everyone are trending in only one direction. People are going to die. It is not a matter of if, but when and how many. Trump, the reality TV star and former wrestling promoter, is just hyping the main event:

Less than an hour after it was finished on Saturday afternoon, vandals came for the Black Lives Matter street slogan in Martinez, Calif.

A woman in flip-flops and a patriotic shirt splattered a can of black paint over the bright yellow “L” in “Black” heaving her paint roller over the letters outside the Contra Costa County courthouse. Her companion, a man in a red “Four More Years” shirt from President Trump’s campaign and red “Make America Great Again” hat, told onlookers, “No one wants Black Lives Matter here.”

“What is wrong with you?” someone asked the unidentified vandals from off-camera, in a viral video of the incident also shared by police.

“We’re sick of this narrative, that’s what’s wrong,” the man responded. “The narrative of police brutality, the narrative of oppression, the narrative of racism. It’s a lie.”

The woman scrubbed away with her black paint roller, looking up to say, “Keep this s— in f—– New York. This is not happening in my town.”

Such deeply, deeply damaged people. https://t.co/FmMAIlTtpR

— Ari Kohen (@kohenari) July 6, 2020

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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.

And I’m not talking about sea creatures.

From Harry Enten at CNN:

A new Monmouth University poll finds former Vice President Joe Biden with a 53% to 41% lead over President Donald Trump.

The average live interview poll conducted over the last month has Biden ahead by a similar 11-point margin.

What’s the point: Usually, this is the point where someone like myself says we have four months to go until the election and polls are a snapshot in time. Both of those statements are true, but they obscure an important fact. Polls taken around Independence Day in an election year are actually pretty highly correlated with the November results in incumbent contests. That means Trump is in a lot of trouble.

Take a look at the 13 incumbent elections dating all the way back to 1940. Usually going all the way back in time will lead you to find a lot of volatile campaigns, as more modern ones tend to be more steady. Yet, since 1940, the final result differs from the polls at this point by an average of just 7 points. The median difference is only about 4.5 points.

These should be quite worrisome for Trump given he’s already down double-digits, and there’s no guarantee any polling miss would benefit him. Indeed, we can translate past polling to give us odds about the current election. At least 8-in-10 to 9-in-10 times based solely on the horserace polling, Biden would be expected to take more votes in the fall.

More troublesome for Trump: no one in an incumbent presidential election has been polling above 50% at this point like Biden and gone on to lose.

In other words, Trump already needs something quite unusual to occur in order to come back in this race. Many of the previously hopeful examples for Trump are no longer ones that should make Trump happy.

Republican Wendell Willkie significantly cut an over 20-point deficit in early 1940 to be within about 10 points of Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in July 1940. Willkie would lose by 10 points.

Democrat Jimmy Carter had jumped out to a mid-single digit advantage over non-elected incumbent Republican Gerald Ford in early July 1976, after being down in the winter. Carter would win by 2 points in the fall. Republican Ronald Reagan blew past Carter to an 11-point lead by early July in 1980 despite trailing by double-digits a few months earlier. Reagan emerged victorious by 10 points in the fall.

Even Republican George H.W. Bush’s lead over Democrat Bill Clinton had turned into basically a tie by this point, after Clinton was down nearly 40 points in some of the earliest polling of the race. By July 10, Clinton was ahead in some polling before going on to win by a little less than 6 points in the fall.

There have been only two races since 1940 in which the difference between the polls now and the eventual result was greater than the margin by which Trump is down now. Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s 56-point blowout edge over Republican Barry Goldwater translated into a 23-point blowout in the fall. Johnson’s advantage, however, defied the bounds of political gravity, as he still was likely benefiting from a polling bump after succeeding the assassinated John Kennedy.

The only really good example for Trump is Democrat Harry Truman in 1948. He was down by a little over 10 points to Republican Thomas Dewey. Truman would win by a little less than 5 points. Unlike Biden, however, Dewey was under 50%.

Now, the past isn’t necessarily prologue. There is time for volatility. The polls will probably bounce around during the convention period. (Part of the reason the first 10 days of July are a good snapshot is that it is usually after the primary season but before the conventions.) Trump could close the gap and could very well win.

But make no mistake: An incumbent trailing by double-digits in early July with an opponent over 50% is a heavy underdog for reelection.

Don’t get your hopes up. The pandemic may be raging uncontrollably in November and voting could be severely suppressed. Trump will almost certainly cheat in every possible way. So there are no guarantees.

But if the polls are a reflection of where the country is these days and if history is still any guide in these troubled times, at least a few Republicans and many Independents have decided that they’ve had enough of Trump.

It’s hard to believe 41% still plan to vote for him, but as I’ve written many times, Herbert Hoover got 39% in the depth of the Great Depression, in one of the biggest landslide elections in American history.

That 40% right wing has always been with us. No. Matter. What.

They privately worry and wring their hands — and then sit on them:

On Capitol Hill, some Republicans fret — mostly privately, to avoid his wrath — that Trump’s fixation on racial and other cultural issues leaves their party running against the currents of change. Coupled with the coronavirus pandemic and related economic crisis, these Republicans fear he is not only seriously impairing his reelection chances but also jeopardizing the GOP Senate majority and its strength in the House.

“The Senate incumbent candidates are not taking the bait and are staying as far away from this as they can,” said Scott Reed, a veteran Republican operative and chief strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has invested heavily in keeping GOP control of the Senate. “The problem is this is no longer just Trump’s Twitter feed. It’s expanded to the podium, and that makes it more and more difficult for these campaigns.”

Trump has all but ignored the outcry and remains convinced that following his own instincts on race and channeling the grievances of his core base of white voters will carry him to victory against former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, according to a White House official and an outside Trump adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment candidly.

“It’s the 2016 campaign all over again, when we had the Muslim ban and the wall, just add Confederate statues,” the outside adviser said.

Trump allies say the president’s words and actions are not racist but rather attentive to his core voters.

“President Trump has been more exposed to black people, black leaders and black culture than most previous presidents,” said Armstrong Williams, a longtime adviser to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. “He doesn’t see the implications of his tweets in the way that his critics do. He just loves his supporters.”

Thus proving once again that being a celebrated neurosurgeon doesn’t pr3vent you from being completely delusional.

Williams added: “This is someone who spoke at length on the phone to Don King on election night — I was with Trump when he took the call. This is someone who welcomed Kanye West at the White House. That’s who Trump is.”

Right. He loves his African Americans. Especially the celebrities.

Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said “the mainstream media is never going to give the president the credit he deserves, in terms of his optimism and his belief in the American spirit.”

He added, “There is a backlash against this counterculture, this cancel culture, and Americans are proud we’re a beacon for freedom.”

Freedom for white wingnuts who love Trump. They are the only people who count. Everyone else is an enemy. […]

Trump’s commentary of late has been dizzying and visceral. He has referred to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, which originated in China, as the “kung flu.” He has called racial justice demonstrators “thugs.” He has attacked efforts to take down Confederate statues as an assault on “our heritage.” And in an ominous hypothetical scenario, he described a “very tough hombre” breaking into a young woman’s home while her husband was away.

https://youtu.be/iYCg0aX6M94

Trump’s Twitter feed, meanwhile, has become something of a crime blotter, with posts of grainy photos of suspected vandals the president labels anarchists and demands for lengthy prison sentences.

Former Ohio governor John Kasich, a Republican who ran against Trump in 2016, said the GOP’s muted and scattered response to the president on race this week underscores how the party is “in decline” and has become a vessel for Trumpism — even as polls show Trump losing ground among seniors and white evangelicals and trailing Biden in every key battleground state. 

“They coddled this guy the whole time and now it’s like some rats are jumping off of the sinking ship. It’s just a little late,” Kasich said. “It’s left this nation with a crescendo of hate not only between politicians but between citizens. . . . It started with Charlottesville and people remained silent then, and we find ourselves in this position now.”

Kasich added, “I’m glad to see some of these Republicans moving the other way but it reminds me of Vichy France where they said, ‘Well, I never had anything to do with that,’ ” a reference to the French government that continued during Nazi occupation in the 1940s. 

Racist symbols and ideas have long plagued U.S. politics, but Trump has tested the tolerance of Americans of a leader who shouts rather than whispers them. More than a strategy, this has been an expression of Trump’s character and his dominance of a Republican base in which older white voters remain the key demographic.

He has quite the racist legacy:

As president, Trump has banned travel from seven Muslim-majority countries; equivocated over the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; questioned the intelligence of basketball star LeBron James and numerous other African American figures; attacked the national anthem protests of black football players; and demanded that four Democratic congresswomen of color “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came,” among other actions and episodes.

Trump claimed last month that he had done more for black Americans than any president with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, who freed slaves and ended the Civil War — but added to Fox News Channel anchor Harris Faulkner that Lincoln “did good, although it’s always questionable.”

That’s just for starters.

Some senators and their advisers believe they must expand their vote share beyond Trump’s base to win reelection.

“The president’s base is locked in. They love him, they’re going to turn out and they’re going to vote for him,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres said. “The problem is that the base is not enough to win. You can make a case that protecting Confederate monuments is very popular among at least a portion of his base, but it does nothing to expand the coalition, and that’s the imperative at the moment and will be going forward if the party hopes to govern.”

Trump has not made it easy for embattled Republicans to duck him. He reaffirmed Tuesday that he would veto this year’s proposed $740 billion annual defense bill if an amendment is included that would require the Pentagon to change the names of bases named for Confederate military leaders — an amendment that has bipartisan support. 

At times, some Republicans have been moved to speak out more forcefully on race, but when they have done so it has often been about lower-profile Republicans, such as Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who in June was defeated in a primary election, or various GOP candidates out in the country who pop up in the news for making racist statements — far easier targets than a sitting president with zero tolerance for dissent.

They are all quivering cowards. An embarrassment to the human species.

Most congressional Republicans in challenging races this year have long been mute on Trump’s racist comments, or they have cast them as unhelpful or combative but not racist — a method that has largely helped them avoid Trump’s anger.

When asked two summers ago about Trump calling Omarosa Manigault, the president’s former highest-ranking black adviser in the White House, a “dog,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) gave a typical GOP response: “I know you have to ask these questions but I’m not going to talk about that. I just think that’s an endless little wild goose chase and I’m not going there.” 

Senate Republicans looking to hold onto the party’s 53-seat majority are trying to balance their political alliance with Trump with their attempt to win over more moderate voters amid the reckoning over race. For instance, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) recently co-sponsored a bill with Cornyn — both are up for reelection in November — and others to make Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery, a federal holiday.

A cost-free act that means nothing if you are licking the Orange Supremicist’s boots 24/7 — which they are.

Kasich is right. These are cowardly, opportunistic, Vichy collaborators. And they must never be allowed to forget what they have done.

God bless America:

Ok, so they’re a bunch of rightwing assholes. But check out what the cops do:

A man had entered the cemetery wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt. The man, Trent Somes, later told The Post he was visiting the grave of an ancestor, not protesting. A seminarian and associate pastor at First United Methodist Church in Hanover, Pa., Somes said a crowd of about 50 people surrounded him and aggressively questioned him about his shirt.

“I didn’t do anything to them,” he said.

Police arrived and encouraged Somes to leave.

“For his own safety, federal law enforcement made the decision to remove him, and he was escorted out of the cemetery,” Jason Martz, acting public affairs officer for Gettysburg National Military Park, later said.

I understand that they were trying to prevent these disgusting jackasses from physically assaulting this man. But the message the idiots got was that he brought it on himself by deigning to wear a t-shirt that said something they don’t like.

In the cemetery on the anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg where his ancestor is buried.

The whole story of this ridiculous confrontation is interesting as well. Apparently, there’s a fake Antifa persona online which got the wingnuts all excited by saying Antifa was gathering at Gettysburg to deface the place on the 4th of July. So these morons, including armed militia, converged on the place to “confront” them and the only one who showed up was a lone pastor with a BLM t-shirt who didn’t know anything about it.

According to the Post, this “persona” has a long trail and comes from somewhere in the US. In other words it doesn’t appear to be a Russian bot. For all we know it’s an undercover government agent on Bill Barr’s”Antifa” crusade who ended up getting the idiot right wingers to come out instead of the radical left wingers.

Whatever happened, these yahoos are pathetic. And from the looks of them they’ve got a boatload of co-morbidities so I just hope for their sakes that they didn’t spend a lot of time in close quarters with an asymptomatic carrier. It would be a shame if any of these obese, older, infirm, morons wound up in the hospital.

First he came for the immigrants and I said nothing …

In his inaugural address, President Trump sketched the picture of “American carnage” — a nation ransacked by marauders from abroad who breached U.S. borders in pursuit of jobs and crime, lured its companies offshore and bogged down its military in faraway conflicts.

Nearly 3½ years later, in the president’s telling, the carnage is still underway but this time the enemy is closer to home — other Americans whose racial identity and cultural beliefs are toppling the nation’s heritage and founding ideals.

Trump’s dark and divisive 42-minute speech at the foot of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota late Friday served as a clarion for his campaign reelection message at a time when the nation — already reeling with deep anxiety over the devastating public health and economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic — is also facing a cultural reckoning over the residue of its racially segregated past.

As he has so often during his tenure, the president made clear that he will do little to try to heal or unify the country ahead of the November presidential election but rather aims to drive a deeper wedge into the country’s fractures.

For Trump, that has meant defining a new foil. If his 2016 campaign to put “America first” was focused on building a wall to keep out immigrants and shedding alliances with nations he believed were exploiting the United States, the president is now aiming his rhetorical blasts at groups of liberal Americans who, he believes, constitute a direct threat to the standing of his conservative base.

At Mount Rushmore, under the granite gaze of four U.S. presidents, Trump railed against “angry mobs” pursuing “far-left fascism” and a “left-wing cultural revolution” that has manifested in the assault on statues and monuments celebrating Confederate leaders and other U.S. historical figures, including some former presidents, amid the mass racial justice protests of recent weeks.

“Their goal is not a better America; their goal is the end of America,” the president declared.

“We are now in the process of defeating the radical left — the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters,” Trump told guests Saturday during an Independence Day celebration on the South Lawn of the White House.

In making the case that a radical and violent ideology underpins much of the social justice movement that propelled the nationwide demonstrations, Trump has dropped virtually all pretense that he supports millions of peaceful protesters who have called for broad reforms to address what they see as systemic racism and a culture of brutality in police departments.

Trump made no mention Friday of the victims of police violence, including more than half a dozen black families he met with in the Oval Office last month before he signed an executive order to create national training certification guidelines for law enforcement agencies and establish a database to track police brutality cases.

Instead, he warned of a “growing danger” to the values of the nation’s founders — a “merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.”

He boasted of federal authorities apprehending hundreds of looters and vandals, even though the number is lower. He warned of “violent mayhem” in streets of cities run by “liberal Democrats.” He celebrated the arrest of a “ringleader” in the unsuccessful attempt from demonstrators to topple a statue of President Andrew Jackson, Trump’s favorite past president, in Lafayette Square across from the White House. And he asserted that schoolchildren were being taught to “hate their own country.”

“This was a deeply divisive speech aimed at what Trump sees as real Americans versus anarchists,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said. “That’s not just bigotry to the outside world, but now he’s really attacking millions of Americans as worthless, as socialists, as anarchists.”

I watched both speeches. They were appalling. Just because we’ve been watching this grotesque clown for the last three and a half years doesn’t make it any less shocking when he goes full Stephen Miller. Doing it on the 4th of July just makes you feel sick.

He is fomenting violence now and it’s extremely worrisome. He’s can already claim a body count of 130,000 Americans, for whom he has not even the slightest concern, clearly considering them nothing more than collateral damage in his culture war. Now he wants to see some real bloodshed on the streets of America.

I always thought it was just a little bit weird that so many leftist types bought into the idea that this violent jackass was some sort of anti-war peacenik simply because he wanted to “save money” by ending his predecessors wars. (Reversing anything they did is the only thing he knows how to do)

He loves war, don’t kid yourself. He just wants to fight his domestic political enemies. This has been clear from the beginning.

NPR asked descendants of Frederick Douglass to deliver excerpts from his speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” It’s pretty fantastic:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBe5qbnkqoM&w=540&h=304]

You can read the full speech here. The descendants’ names and ages are listed on the YouTube page here. NPR notes that “this video was inspired by Jennifer Crandall’s documentary project” Whitman, Alabama. Tom Sullivan posted another version of Douglass’ speech in a recent post here.

“We need to live with it”

After several months of mixed messages on the coronavirus pandemic, the White House is settling on a new one: Learn to live with it.

Administration officials are planning to intensify what they hope is a sharper, and less conflicting, message of the pandemic next week, according to senior administration officials, after struggling to offer clear directives amid a crippling surge in cases across the country. On Thursday, the United States reported more than 55,000 new cases of coronavirus and infection rates were hitting new records in multiple states.

At the crux of the message, officials said, is a recognition by the White House that the virus is not going away any time soon — and will be around through the November election.

As a result, President Donald Trump’s top advisers plan to argue, the country must figure out how to press forward despite it. Therapeutic drugs will be showcased as a key component for doing that and the White House will increasingly emphasize the relatively low risk most Americans have of dying from the virus, officials said.

For nearly six months the administration offered a series of predictions and pronouncements that never came to fruition. From Trump promising that “the problem goes away in April” and predicting “packed churches all over our country” on Easter Sunday to Vice President Mike Pence’s claim that “by Memorial Day weekend we will have this coronavirus epidemic behind us” to Jared Kushner’s pronouncement the country would be “really rocking again” by July because Americans were “on the other side of the medical aspect of this.”

This all followed the White House’s initial message in January that the virus wasn’t a threat at all. Asked if he was worried about a pandemic, Trump said at the time, “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

The message then morphed to the idea that the virus would be swiftly crushed by a robust federal response. “WE WILL WIN THIS WAR,” Trump tweeted in March.

Soon after, the president demanded governors open up their states and said he had the authority to force them to do so. “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA,” he wrote on Twitter in April. Within days he decided to shift responsibility for the pandemic to the governors, saying, “The federal government will be watching them very closely and will be there to help in many different ways.”

In recent weeks, the message has been that the country is back, face coverings and social distancing are optional, even as the number of coronavirus cases across the country surged.

“We have to get back to business. We have to get back to living our lives. Can’t do this any longer,” Trump said in an interview with Axios last month before his campaign rally in Tulsa, where almost no one socially distanced and few wore masks. “And I do believe it’s safe. I do believe it’s very safe.” A number of Trump’s own campaign staffers and Secret Service agents contracted COVID-19 in Tulsa.

Eager to move forward and reopen the economy amid a recession and a looming presidential election, the White House is now pushing acceptance.

“The virus is with us, but we need to live with it,” is how one official said the administration plans to message on the pandemic.

The countries that drove the cases down very low established a serious testing and tracing program to stop any flare-ups before they get out of hand. That requires a national response not some nonsense about how different counties can have different policies (the stupidest thing Dr. Deborah Birx ever came up with.)

We didn’t do that and apparently, we are not going to do it now. So, it will likely be surging out of control someplace for the foreseeable future.

It helps so much that the president is saying that 99% of cases are no big deal, giving permission for all of his cult followers and many others who don’t care about politics to throw caution to the wind. The number is ridiculous, of course. People get very sick and die from this thing and nobody knows if they are going to be that person. It’s playing Russian Roulette with your health. And then there is the fact that these people are spreading it all over the place to vulnerable people.

I don’t know if this is a problem of basic education that people can’t understand how something spreads exponentially or if it’s a problem with brainwashing. But I do know that our government has failed spectacularly and continues to fail. I don’t see any way out.

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We are a mess. That much is plain. Our aspirations, our pretensions of greatness, appear hollow to the rest of the world now more than ever. Few look to the United States as a place for a better life as they once did.

Robin Wright summarizes our state of affairs in the New Yorker:

The Trump Administration’s ineptitude in handling the COVID-19 crisis, as well as the President’s disdain for longstanding allies and international treaties, have compounded the damage to America’s image. A second poll, released last week by the European Council on Foreign Relations, reported that public perceptions of the United States are increasingly negative in virtually all of the European nations surveyed. In France, the country that backed the American Revolution and later donated the Statue of Liberty, forty-six per cent of the people polled said that their opinion of the U.S. has “worsened a lot.” The proportion of respondents who still view America as a key ally is “vanishingly small”—as low as six per cent in Italy.

Abdulkarim Soroush, an Iranian reformer known as the Martin Luther of Islam for challenging the absolutists of the faith, tells Wright the country is now a capitalist democracy more than liberal one. Capital is the new tyrant here, and justice unaffordable except to the rich.

“I greatly fear that this may be lost—due to racism, and capitalist democracy and the justice system becoming weaker for the poor,” Soroush explains. “Heaven forbid, if that happens, America would not be the aspiration of anyone in the world.”

This July 4th weekend, what moral authority we once claimed (and had) seems as depleted as our capacity for reinventing ourselves.

Where one finds the greatest need for overhauls depends upon one’s own experience. Digby on Saturday cited an insightful column by David Rothkopf focusing on our system for elections, both rusty and monkey-wrenched. “Ending Trump’s misrule and restoring confidence in the presidency demands the undoing of impediments to free and fair elections,” Rothkopf believes. “That will entail root-and-branch campaign finance reform, an end to voter suppression, new defenses against foreign interference in elections, and reining in the digital disinformation engines. These are perhaps only the minimum demands for restoring American democracy.”

In “Our Time is Now,” Stacey Abrams too sees reforming the electoral process as key to renewal. The historic courage of African Americans in claiming their rights as full citizens has paved the way for others to do the same, Charles Kaiser writes in his Guardian review:

Abrams explains why black Americans have been the natural trailblazers in this fight for justice: “At its inception, our nation served as a refuge to those whose difference placed them in danger; but the same newcomers stole land from and murdered the original inhabitants, enslaved blacks, and stripped them of their humanity, and denied basic rights to women and nonwhites from abroad.

“This history means we understand what is at stake, how our opponents will try to block change, and, most important, our obligation to realize our destiny … a multiracial, multiethnic, youth-driven majority has grown over the last 20 years; as a result, we’ve seen nothing less than a sea change toward progress … Obama was not a fluke but a foreshadowing of how we can win even more.”

Instead of giving primacy to the “working-class white man in Ohio who voted for Reagan in 1980”, as American political reporters do over and over again, Abrams urges us to remember that the daughter of that white voter may now “be married to a Kenyan woman who is waiting for permanent residence and their first child in Arkansas”.

The country’s natural impulse is to shove uncomfortable truths under the rug until we can no longer traverse it without falling on our faces. One of the country’s strengths, born perhaps from the regular infusion of immigrants, is, after all other dodges have failed, to launder our dirty linen in public. Or to mix metaphors, to take the country to the shop for major repairs.

Overhauling this democracy will take more than tinkering with election systems. As Soroush observes, capital is a tyrant. Even after the financial collapse of 2008 and the savings and loan scandals before that, we resisted the expensive and exhausting work of getting under the hood and rebuilding the engine burning oil and the transmission grinding gears. We preferred throwing in a can of “miracle goop” from the auto parts joint and hoping for the best. Our reflex is not to do the repairs, but sweep the problems under the rug.

My late father never figured out that his computer would not maintain itself. No matter what tools I installed, he would not use them. His machine was forever being choked with spyware and malware that slowed it to a crawl. When that happened, he either lived with it, fell prey to pop-up scams promising to fix it remotely for a fee, or he went down to the office supply place and bought a fresh one. Even though the problem was not the box.

The deeper problem here is not in our system but in ourselves, as Shakespeare observed. We refuse to learn basic lessons from kindergarten: to share (power) and to live with one another. We refused to do basic maintenance. We swept uncomfortable matters under the rug for centuries. We are again tripping over them. We let the Civil War’s aftermath fester. The miracle goop has stopped working. The country needs a major overhaul we can no longer avoid. We cannot simply go down to the dealership and trade in the country for a new one.

We paid for this one in blood.

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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.

Enjoy your cookout, movie night, fireworks or whatever else you are doing safely on this 4th of July. There is a lot to think about this year.