Month: July 2020

As we observe Trump’s grand plan to “save” America’s cities from the anarchists, Black Lives Matter activists, criminal gangs and depraved Democrats, I’m reminded of this piece by Rick Perlstein from 2016. If you want to know why Trump thinks this is such a winning gambit, this explains it better than anything else I’ve read on the subject:

I’ve been studying the history of American conservatism full time since 1997—almost 20 years now. I’ve read almost every major book on the subject. I thought I knew what I was talking about. Then along comes Donald Trump to scramble the whole goddamned script.

Now, historians must begin to consider alternate genealogies of the American right: lineages for the orange-haired monster that no one saw coming. Our received narrative of the movement encompassed by Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley and Strom Thurmond and Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan just doesn’t cut it any longer.  I’ve done my best to begin the work—thinking through, for instance, Trumpism’s connection to fascism, a political tradition not heretofore considered all that relevant in the American context. Other bodies, however, are buried closer to home.

No history of modern conservatism I’m aware of finds much significance in the 22,000 Nazi sympathizers who rallied for Hitler at Madison Square Garden in February 1939, presided over by a giant banner of General George Washington that stretched almost all the way to the second deck, capped off by a menacing eagle insignia. Nor the now-infamous Ku Klux Klan march through the streets of Queens in 1927, when The New York Times reported “1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all,” in which according to one contemporary news report all the individuals arrested were wearing Klan attire, and that one of those arrestees was Donald Trump’s own father.

In the specter of the son’s likely ascension as Republican nominee, however, such events gather significance. Consider the subsequent history of Fred Trump’s career as a developer of middle-class housing in the outer boroughs of New York City. We now know Fred Trump was notorious enough a racist to draw the attention of Woody Guthrie, who wrote a song about him in the 1950s: “I suppose/ Old Man Trump knows/ Just how much/ Racial Hate/ he stirred up/ In the bloodpot of human hearts/ When he drawed/ That color line/ Here at his/ Eighteen hundred family project.”

Twenty years later—by which time he had brought his son in as his apprentice—the hate Old Man Trump stirred in the bloodpot of human hearts became a matter of legal record, when the United States Justice Department sued Trump père et fils for violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in operating 39 buildings they owned. Testifying in his own defense, young Donald (who would soon be seen around town in a chauffeured limousine with a license plate reading “DJT”), testified that he was “unfamiliar” with the landmark law. As the evidence in the federal case against the Trump organization became close to incontrovertible, he told the press the suit was a conspiracy to force them “to rent to welfare recipients,” a form of “reverse discrimination.” This proud and open refusal to rent to welfare recipients—whom he said contribute to “the detriment of tenants who have, for many years, lived in these buildings, raised families in them, and who plan to live there”—was Donald Trump’s defense against racism.

It is in this saga that we locate the formation of Donald Trump’s mature political vision of the world, in continuity with America’s racist and nativist heyday of the 1920s, and within the context of a cultural world much more familiar to us: New York in the 1970s, that raging cauldron of skyrocketing violent crime, subway trains slathered with graffiti, and a fiscal crisis so dire that even police were laid off in mass—then the laid off cops blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, deflating car tires, and yanking keys from car ignitions.

Think of Trump coming of age in the New York of the 1977 blackout, the search for the Son of Sam, and Howard Cosell barking out “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning” during game two of the World Series at Yankee stadium as a helicopter hovered over a five-alarm fire at an abandoned elementary school (40 percent of buildings in the Bronx were destroyed by the end of the 1970s, mostly via arson—often torched by landlords seeking insurance windfalls).

Think of Trump learning about the ins and outs of public life in this New York, a city of a frightened white outer-borough middle-class poised between fight or flight, in which real estate was everywhere and always a battleground, when the politics of race and crime bore all the intensity of civil war.

In The Invisible Bridge I wrote about what it was like in this New York in 1974, the summer when the federal lawsuit against the Trumps was approaching its climax, the summer when a controversial new movie began packing theaters across the five boroughs.

Death Wish starred a then-obscure Charles Bronson as a New York City architect who used to be liberal, until his daughter was raped and his wife murdered. His son-in-law pronounces defeat: “There’s nothing we can do to stop it. Nothing but cut and run.” The architect, by contrast, learns to shoot a gun—in an Old West ghost town—so he can start mowing down muggers at point-blank range. He soon cuts the city’s murder rate in half, and wins a spot on the cover of Time.

Liberal reviewers registered their disgust: The Times’s Vincent Canby called it “a bird-brained movie to cheer the hearts of the far-right wing,” then, 10 days later, branded Bronson a “circus bear.” Time called it “meretricious,” “brazen,” and “hysterical.” Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times labeled it “fascist.” But in the real-life New York City, where the murder rate had doubled in 10 years, and where a psychiatrist published a Times op-ed bragging about the violence he had prevented by leveling a pistol that he kept “never far from my reach while I attend to patients in my mid-Manhattan office,” each onscreen vigilante act won ovations from grateful fans—sometimes standing ovations.

Two years later came an even darker, and considerably more critical, portrait of New York City’s escalating culture of vigilantism. In Taxi Driver, a deranged Vietnam veteran speaks what must have been the unspoken inner monologue of any number of real-life New Yorkers who felt trapped in an urban sewer: “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Pistol in hand, he rehearses his revenge in the mirror: “Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it any more. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up.”

When, around that time, Wall Street Journal columnist Irving Kristol coined the phrase “a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality”—a bowdlerization of the older adage “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged”—he probably didn’t have Charles Bronson in mind, let alone taxi driver Travis Bickle. Nonetheless the politics is all of a piece. Charles Bronson conservatism, Travis Bickle conservatism, the conservatism of avenging angels protecting white innocence in a  “liberal” metropolis gone mad: this is New York City’s unique contribution to the history of conservatism in America, an ideological tradition heretofore unrecognized in the historical literature. But without it, we cannot understand the rise of Donald Trump.

Trump’s political debut, after all, came in response to a mugging. Following the infamous attack on a female jogger in Central Park, Trump purchased full pages in four New York newspapers demanding, “Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!” All the hallmarks of his present crusade against “political correctness” were in evidence, such as the harkening to that bygone day when men were men, cops were cops, and punks were punks. He concluded: “I miss the feeling of security New York’s finest once gave the citizens of this City.” As I previously reported, these same police straight-jacketed by liberal timorousness had already coerced the rape suspects into confessions later proven to be false.

That’s N.Y.C.’s avenging-angel conservatism in a nutshell. And now that Trump is gliding toward an expected landslide in the New York primary on Tuesday, April 19, we must begin the work of excavating its history.

We might start with William F. Buckley—though other scholars can surely date it back further. The National Review editor’s quixotic campaign for New York mayor in 1965 is best remembered for a self-effacing quip. (“What will you do if you win?” he was asked. “Demand a recount.”) Buckley himself is now celebrated as the genteel warrior of the conservatism of a more civilized age: The New York Times, upon his death in 2008, averred of that 1965 race, “He injected a rare degree of lofty oratory into city politics.”

Think of Trump coming of age in the New York of the 1977 blackout, the search for the Son of Sam, and Howard Cosell barking out “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.”

What he also injected was an unprecedented reactionary thuggishness. Like his idea to “undertake to quarantine all addicts, even as smallpox carriers would be quarantined during a plague.” Or “relocating chronic welfare cases outside the city limits”—in what his critics described as concentration camps for the poor. The campaign might have begun as a lark. He received hardly more than 10 percent of the vote. But in a harbinger of things to come, he finished second in some Catholic neighborhoods in Queens. Cops wore “Buckley For Mayor” buttons. When the election’s winner, the very liberal John Lindsay, campaigned in those same neighborhoods, young white men waved “Support your Local Police” placards in his face.

The stage was set, in 1966, for the next New York City law-and-order melodrama. Lindsay, now mayor, fulfilled a campaign pledge by establishing a Civilian Complaint Review Board to protect citizens from abusive cops, the better to restore trust in a police force whose utter rot was the subject that year of a bestselling book about a cop named Frank Serpico, whose reward for refusing to break the law was an attempt by fellow cops on his life.

The president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association responded to Mayor Lindsay’s new board: “I am sick and tired of giving in to minority groups and their gripes and their shouting.” After a Brooklyn riot in which cops had been ordered not to use their nightsticks, the PBA got 96,888 signatures to put a referendum on the November ballot to dissolve the review board (they only needed 25,000). Their TV commercials brayed, Trump-like, Bronson-like, “The addict, the criminal, the hoodlum: only the policeman stands between you and him.” Buckley—who had orated on the campaign trail, “We need a much larger police force, enjoined to lust after the apprehension of criminals,” unencumbered by “any such political irons as civilian review boards”—might only have received 10 percent of the vote. But 12 months later, the anti-CCRB referendum won 63 percent of the popular vote. Even Jews, who were supposed to be liberal, opposed it 55 percent to 40 percent.

Two years later, George Wallace brought his independent presidential bid to Madison Square Garden. “We need some meanness,” Wallace brayed. And he got it: police had to rescue black protesters from a mob that surrounded them and chanted, “Kill ‘em!” The New Republic observed, “Never again will you read about Berlin in the ’30s without remembering this wild confrontation of two irrational forces.”

The confrontation is the key: one of the things that makes New York’s conservatism of avenging angels so feral is its proximity to so many damned left-wingers. Left-wingers like Mayor Lindsay—who only won reelection in 1969 because the white ethnic backlash vote was split between two candidates, one of whom, Mario Procaccino, helped popularize the phrase “limousine liberal” in describing Lindsay.

In 1971, Lindsay elected to build publicly subsidized housing in the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills, partly upon the presumption that its largely Jewish population, only two and half decades on from the Holocaust, would be relatively free from racism of the Fred Trump sort. Apparently hizzoner wasn’t paying attention to the growing following behind Rabbi Meir Kahane, the domestic terrorist who was another of New York City’s sui generis contributions to the history of the American right.

Village Voice columnist Jack Newfield reported from one of the mayor’s damage-control sessions at the Forest Hills Jewish Community Center, where Jews called “Lindsay redneck names under the shadow of the Torah.” The Voice’s Paul Cowan heard a picketer boast, “If Lindsay ever gets to be president, I’ll kill him. I’ll do just what Oswald did to John Kennedy.” His companion replied, “You won’t get the chance. Lindsay is going to get shot right here in New York.”

Donald Trump, 25 years old, was just then beginning his apprenticeship in his father’s real estate organization.

He made the acquaintance of Roy Cohn, who represented the family against the federal racial bias lawsuit, devising the defense that Fred Trump had no intention of excluding black tenants, just welfare recipients. Trump became a student of the legendarily reptilian thug who came to prominence as Joseph McCarthy’s lawyer. Long-time Trump-watcher Michael D’Antonio has explained: “Both were members of Le Club, a private hot spot where the rich and famous and social climbers could meet without suffering the presence of ordinary people.” Writes D’Antonio, “Cohn modeled a style for Trump that was one part friendly gossip and one part menace. . . . Trump kept a photo of the glowering Cohn so he could show it to those who might be chilled by the idea that this man was his lawyer.”

It was Cohn, indeed, who introduced Trump to the nearly-as-reptilian Roger Stone, the professional dirty trickster and sexual adventurer with the giant tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back—and who, even though Trump has called him a “stone-cold loser,” has managed to hang on to a position of influence in the Trump presidential campaign. He certainly maintains an influence on Donald Trump’s view of the world. “When somebody screws you,” Stone told a reporter, “Screw ’em back—but a lot harder.” Figures like Cohn and Stone represent another branch in the New York conservative tradition: flashy, hedonistic right-wing operatives who gargle with razor blades and wear their shiny silver three-piece suits like armor.

Next comes an avenging angel named Ed Koch.

A former liberal, Koch won his underdog mayoral victory in 1977 in a madcap electoral free-for-all whose tenor was set on the night of July 13, when a series of lightning strikes shut down transmissions lines, the city shuddered to black, and so much crime ensued that buses filled with men in chains shuttled from jailhouse to jailhouse in search of available cells.

Neoconservative Midge Decter wrote in Commentary that it was like “having been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one’s house and seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away.” The supposedly liberal readership of The New York Times wrote letters to the editor like this one: “The Puerto Ricans can go back to Puerto Rico. They belong there anyway, and if the blacks do not shape up they can go to the South.”

Ed Koch was virtually unknown outside his Greenwich Village neighborhood, but with a pledge to restore the death penalty, his campaign took off like a rocket. Never mind that the New York mayor had no power over capital punishment. The people had spoken: a mere 25 percent opposed bringing back what New York Daily News called “little hot squat.”

Meanwhile Koch berated the “poverty pimps” and “povertitians” holding a broke city hostage, demanded the abolition of the Board of Education (a “lard barrel of waste”), denounced alleged welfare fraud, decried “the nuts on the left who dump on middle class values.” He promised, too, to unwind New York’s experiments with free college, generous welfare, and subsidized housing, which its cheerleaders on the left called “socialism in one city.”

One of those cheerleaders was the one-time front-runner in the race, the very liberal Congresswoman Bella Abzug. After the blackout riots, her campaign went into a tailspin; she didn’t even make it into the runoff.

An underdog did instead: the young Mario Cuomo. He said, “the death penalty cannot provide jobs for the poor. The electric chair cannot balance the budget. The electric chair cannot educate our children. The electric chair cannot give us a sound economy or save us from bankruptcy or even save my seventy-seven-year-old mother.” And besides, he would add, America was better than that. Or was it?  One time when he tried to make that same point, an old lady in Brooklyn spat in his face. Another time, someone stood up and cried, “Kill them!”

Koch won, of course, and then served as New York’s mayor for the next dozen years. Although to outer-borough reactionaries like state Senator Chris Mega of Brooklyn, he was just another liberal sellout on gun control. At a December 1984 press conference, Mega demanded to know: “When will Mayor Koch provide the same level of protection to the citizens who ride the subways and pay their taxes that he enjoys surrounded by a phalanx of New York’s finest, guns at the ready?”

That particular press conference was called by the National Rifle Association in support of Bernhard Goetz, an electronics salesman from Kew Gardens, Queens, who shot five young men on a graffiti-encrusted subway car who, depending on whom you believed, were either preparing to mug him or aggressively panhandling for $5. Like the character played by Charles Bronson, Goetz made the cover of Time magazine. Celebratory bumper stickers bloomed: “Ride With Bernie—He Goetz Them.” In a later interview he reflected, Travis Bickle-like, “The guys I shot represented the failure of society. . . . Forget about their ever making a positive contribution to society. It’s only a question of how much a price they’re going to cost. The solution is their mothers should have had an abortion.”

One of Goetz’s biggest backers was Bob Grant, who beginning on WMCA in 1970, and then on WOR (until he was fired in 1979 for saying the only reason a black woman got her job was that “she passed the gynecological and pigmentation test”), virtually invented right-wing talk radio—and when you think about it, it hardly could have been invented anywhere else but New York. Grant won the first live radio interview with Goetz, in 1986, lamenting that he had not “finished the job by killing them all.”

Three years later, after the assault in Central Park, Donald Trump offered his memorable argument to bring back little hot squat. “What has happened is the complete breakdown of life as we know it. . . . How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS.”

In 2011, Bob Grant, impressed with Donald Trump’s campaign to force President Obama to produce his birth certificate, announced he had found his presidential candidate for 2012. Grant died in 2014, but two years later, his brand of vigilante conservatism has gone fully national. The wall Fred Trump sought to build in Queens in the early 1970s has been relocated 2,000 miles south. On Tuesday, Donald Trump will win a landslide in his home state. And somewhere, Bob Grant will be smiling.

Perlstein’sinsight into Trump’s special brand of conservatism was prescient. The Avenging Angel myth is the thread that holds the Trump cult together. And it’s why his gut is telling him to go there now.

The problem is that it’s not 1977. And Trump is anything but an angel, avenging or otherwise. He’s just a doddering, orange phony who can’t do anything right.

*I wrote some stuff on this theme for Salon back in 2016 as well: Trump the vigilante, They all think they’re Dirty Harry

Yesterday a reporter asked Trump about accused underage sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and he replied:

Trump on Ghislaine Maxwell: I just wish her well frankly. I’ve met her numerous times over the years especially since I lived in Palm Beach and I guess they lived in Palm Beach but I wish her well pic.twitter.com/wCfzsZfjTT

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 21, 2020

Note the tone in Trump’s voice. It’s how he sounds when he knows his lie is treading on very dangerous, personal territory. Here are some other examples:

Listen to how he sounds when he’s talking about Paul Manafort in the second tweet below:

Trump says he "didn't know anything" about his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, sharing polling data with a person connected to Russian intelligence pic.twitter.com/wgbHsTh3vD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 10, 2019

Here’s an earlier remark about Prince Andrew in which he can’t find it in himself to condemn him:

https://twitter.com/kofibaah2020/status/1201921993756565506?s=20

That’s the tone when he knows this is dangerous territory. Here he is when he feels free to sound like he’s in the know. Newly unearthed tape of Trump talking about Prince Andrew and Epstein back in 2015:

Meanwhile, here’s footage of Trump partying with Epstein:

Trump is lying about his relationship with Epstein and Prince Andrew. Obviously.

As for Ghislaine Maxwell, Vanity Fair reported:

“I don’t know,” he shrugged, after a reporter asked whether he thought Maxwell would reveal which powerful men were involved in Epstein’s trafficking ring. “I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly.”

“I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach, but I wish her well,” he continued. “Whatever it is.”

[…]

And while the remarks were a rich sound bite for those who’ve been tracing out Maxwell and Epstein’s associations in all their still-emerging detail, they were also a reminder of their history with Trump that’s already known. The Palm Beach milieu that Trump mentioned was the occasion for his early relationship with Epstein: as the New York Times pointed out, he told reporters at the White House last July that he knew Epstein “like everybody in Palm Beach knew him.” The paper reported last year that Trump and Epstein hosted a party at Mar-a-Lago in 1992 with a guest list comprising the two of them and “28 girls.” The Florida businessman George Houraney told the Times that he organized the event and told Trump, “Look, Donald, I know Jeff really well, I can’t have him going after younger girls.” Houraney said Trump dismissed the warning.

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Last year, though, after Epstein was arrested, Trump told reporters, “I had a falling-out with him. I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years. I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.” The full nature and timing of any conflict still isn’t clear, but Trump called Epstein’s private Caribbean island an “absolute cesspool” in 2015 and told reporters to ask Andrew about it.

Photos of Trump with Epstein and Maxwell continue to circulate, especially in recent weeks since Maxwell’s arrest.

But Trump’s comments yesterday brought other things to mind, specifically Trump’s assurances to Roger Stone and ultimate commutation. It’s pretty clear that Stone put the squeeze on Trump and Trump knew he had to deliver. It’s not hard to see his comments yesterday as similar in tone.

I can think of four times when Trump has publicly extended his best wishes to people charged with federal crimes by DOJ: Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort — and now Ghislaine Maxwell.

— Elie Honig (@eliehonig) July 21, 2020

A Justice Department prosecutor told Politico, “in the aftermath of the Stone pardon, it reeks of the president indicating to her that he might reward her if she’ll stay silent about whatever she knows about him.”

Of course that’s what he was doing.

Ron Brownstein lays it out. I don’t think it will end well for them:

New offensives against major cities from President Donald Trump and GOP governors are pushing at the central geographic fault line between the Republican and Democratic coalitions.

On one front, Trump is taking his confrontational approach toward big cities to an ominous new level by deploying federal law-enforcement officials to Portland and potentially other locales over the objection of local officials.

On the other, Republican governors, especially but not exclusively across the Sun Belt, have repeatedly blocked mostly Democratic local leaders from locking down their communities, despite exploding caseloads in cities from Atlanta to Phoenix. These orders represent a new crest in a decade-long wave of actions by Republican state officials to preempt decisions made by local Democratic governments.

“We haven’t had issues that are so immediately pressing and so much involving public health and safety,” says Richard Briffault, a Columbia University law professor who has studied state preemption of municipal actions. While states moving to block cities from raising the minimum wage or declaring themselves an immigration sanctuary “are important issues … in the sense that these are pressing, in-the-moment decisions that are directly affecting the health and welfare of a lot of people, this is unique,” he told me.

The common thread in these twin confrontations is that they pit Republican officials who rely on support primarily from exurban, small-town, and rural voters against major metropolitan areas that favor Democrats. In the process, these Republicans—Trump in particular—may be hoping to rally their nonurban voter base by defining themselves explicitly in opposition to the cities. Trump is likely to underscore that message in his White House speech this afternoon on “combating violent crime in American cities.”

In deploying federal forces, Trump appears to be trying to provoke clashes with protesters, which he can use to convince white suburban voters that he’s the last line of defense between them and the chaos allegedly incubating in cities, Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor, told me. Referring to the street battle between construction workers and anti-war protesters in Manhattan in 1970, Emanuel said, “Trump is trying to create his own hard-hat riot, and they are wearing [law-enforcement] helmets.”

The political risk for Republicans in that strategy, many political observers told me, is not only that it could provoke more opposition from residents in the city centers, but that it could also accelerate the shift toward Democrats in the large, well-educated, and more and more diverse inner suburbs around the major cities. Over time, the “larger denser suburbs” have become “like cities and throw in with the cities”—they don’t identify as much with the less-populated areas, says Robert Lang, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program and a co-author of the upcoming book Blue Metros, Red States.

The two conflicts between cities and Republican leaders represent the culmination of long-running trends. Tensions between GOP-controlled state governments and Democratic-led cities notably intensified after the 2010 midterm election, which delivered to Republicans unified control of the statehouse and governorship in about two dozen states. Since then, states have moved much more frequently than before to overturn city policies, such as those establishing paid sick leave, regulating gun sales, and imposing rent control.

These disputes generated national headlines when the Republican governor and state legislature in North Carolina approved legislation known as the “bathroom bill” in 2016, overturning a Charlotte city ordinance meant to guarantee equal rights for trans individuals. While Democratic states have occasionally overturned local actions, Briffault wrote in a 2018 analysis, the “preponderance of … preemptive actions and proposals have been advanced by Republican-dominated state governments.”

From the start, the response to the coronavirus outbreak in many of the states with GOP governors has followed this pattern. In some northern states, including Ohio, Maryland, and Massachusetts, GOP governors moved quickly to lock down the economy. Elsewhere, that didn’t happen: In Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona—among others—Republican governors rejected pleas in March from big-city mayors to shut down the economy as the virus spread, and agreed only after Trump reluctantly acknowledged the need for closures.

Brownstein goes on to lay out all the instances of GOP states following Trump’s terrible COVID advice and the clashes within states between Republican Governors and Democratic Mayors. And he discusses at some length Trump’s strategy to send federal troops to Democratic cities in the obvious ploy to spark a white, conservative backlash. (I mean, he’s even using Nixon’s slogans…)

He continues:

The politics of all these proliferating battles between Republican officials and Democratic cities may unfold at two levels. With Trump monumentally unpopular in urban centers but still strong in rural places, the most immediate political question is how suburban voters will respond.

Like other observers, Lang from Brookings notes that, historically, families moved to the suburbs explicitly because they wanted to separate themselves from the cities, and in many cases, from the large minority populations that they contained.

But since the 1990s, more suburbanites have concluded that their political views align more with the diverse, cosmopolitan cities nearby than with the more culturally conservative, preponderantly white, and Christian smaller places far from the urban core. Under Trump that process has intensified: He’s precipitated a significant shift toward the Democrats in white-collar suburbs that fueled the party’s sweeping gains in the House in 2018. Though Republicans once could count on big margins as soon as they crossed a city’s boundaries, Lang notes, now, in most places, “the line for Republicans has moved outward further” in the metro, he says.

The Atlanta area encapsulates this shift. As Reed noted, Cobb and Gwinnett Counties, the two giant suburbs immediately outside the city, were “the Republican base in the state” not long ago. But Hillary Clinton narrowly carried both of them in 2016, Stacey Abrams won them by much more in her close loss to Kemp in the 2018 governor’s race, and Joe Biden could expand those margins even more in November. “The inner suburbs aren’t moving—they are running,” Reed said. “Republicans are having to go further and further away from the city center in order to prevail.”

Trump’s alarms about “angry mobs” and “violent mayhem” in Democratic cities might allow him to recapture some Republican-leaning white suburbanites and energize his rural and small-town support, analysts in both parties told me. But as I’ve written before, his belligerent tone simultaneously risks hardening the opposition he’s facing from the many suburban voters who feel that he’s exposing them to more danger—both in his response to the policing protests and his unrelenting push to reopen the economy despite the coronavirus’s resurgence. In last week’s national Quinnipiac University poll, just over seven in 10 white voters holding at least a four-year college degree disapproved of Trump’s handling of both race relations and the outbreak.

The larger political implication of these battles is to deepen the sense that the nation is hardening into antagonistic camps separated by an imaginary border that circles all of the major population centers, dividing the metropolitan core within from the less densely settled places beyond.

Trump is determined to widen that trench. He is trying to rally red America by portraying blue cities as a threat, and then positioning himself as the human wall against them. Until now, Trump has advanced that divisive vision through rhetoric denouncing cities and through policies that cost them money and influence, such as eliminating the federal deduction for state and local taxes, trying to block Justice Department grants for cities that don’t fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities, and his renewed efforts to strip undocumented immigrants from the census.

But in these final months before the November election, Trump’s deployment of federal forces is transforming his political war on big cities into something much closer to the real thing. “It’s breathtaking in its danger,” said Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor. And if Trump wins a second term—especially if that victory relies on another rural surge to overcome massive opposition across the big metros—the chaos in Portland might look like only the preliminary skirmish for an even more incendiary collision to come.

Maybe it was destined to happen this way. The fault lines have always been there. But I think the fact that it’s Donald Trump making this move in such a blatantly political way may set them back much further than would otherwise be.

But don’t kid yourself. This faction has always been with us and probably always will be in some form or another. But it appears they are going to have to make a decision about whether this is something they literally want to go to war over. I honestly don’t know what they’ll choose.

It’s bad:

Yesterday, Trump justified slashing unemployment benefits by claiming he had created a “tremendous number of jobs.”

TRUMP: “They’re thinking about doing 70 percent of the amount. The amount would be the same, but doing it in a little bit smaller initial amounts so that people are going to want to go back to work, as opposed to making so much money that they really don’t have to. But we were very generous with them. I think that it’s been a tremendously successful program. The whole thing has been successful, if you look. I mean, we have — we’re in a pandemic, and yet we’re producing tremendous number of jobs.”

Today, new Census Bureau data shows the number of employed people fell by four million last week, wiping out all the job gains since mid-May.

New York Times: “Data from the Census Bureau on Wednesday showed that the number of employed people fell by more than four million last week, the fourth-straight weekly decline. Taken literally, the results indicate that the economy has given up all the job gains since mid-May, before the recent surge in coronavirus cases.”

Meanwhile:

Sen. @tedcruz: "We are paying a whole lot of people a lot more money to stay home and not work than they made on their jobs — and that is terrible." pic.twitter.com/EfqTJERkNt

— The Hill (@thehill) July 22, 2020

GOP FL Sen Rick Scott on if he would block a coronavirus bill: Absolutely. Democrats just want to spend money

— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) July 22, 2020

Meanwhile, the Republicans are in very serious disarray on this bill. I have no idea what’s going to come out of it. We know they don’t care about the well-being of their constituents but apparently many of them are so far gone they no longer even care about keeping their majority. In fact, it appears they are actively trying to hurt the American people. But, of course, there’s nothing particularly unusual about that.

This is a joke:

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) — in a rare break with his own party’s campaign arm — is calling on the National Republican Senatorial Committee to pull a controversial television ad that attacks his Democratic opponent, former Gov. John Hickenlooper.

The ad criticizes Hickenlooper over a deadly gas explosion in the state in 2017. After the spot began airing last week, Erin Martinez, whose husband and brother died in the explosion, called it “horrifying” and said it disgraced her family members’ legacy. Hickenlooper and Democrats in the state echoed her calls for it to be taken down.

Gardner, who was the NRSC chair in the 2018 election cycle, said in a statement to POLITICO that he spoke to Martinez on Tuesday. He disavowed the committee’s ad and said he wanted Republicans to stop running it.

“I spoke to Erin Martinez today and expressed to her that I would not have personally run the ad, and I hope the ad comes down,” Gardner said in the statement. “If I had the power to take down the ad, I would.”

The NRSC declined to take the ad down. Imagine that.

Please. This is so transparent it made me laugh out loud when I read it. Poor Gardner, the former chair of the NRSC, has no power to stop this terrible ad even though he really, really wants to. He’s such a nice guy. But if the Republicans want to smear his opponent there’s not a lot he can do about it. Oh heck.

If there really is a big blue wave in November, it is likely to take this guy out with the tide. Good riddance.

It seems like only yesterday that Republicans were wringing their hands and rending their garments over federal officers attempting to arrest a large group of armed militia members who had taken over a federal building in Oregon and were refusing to leave. (The 2016 “Oregon standoff” is the subject of Anthony McCann’s fascinating book “Shadowlands.”) They were led by Ammon Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who triggered an earlier standoff with government forces in 2014, and they said they were planning to occupy the building at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge “for years” as a protest against the conviction of two local ranchers who had been found guilty of arson for setting fire to government land. After six weeks of negotiating with federal authorities, the protesters were finally dispersed. Some did time but Ammon Bundy and a dozen others were tried and acquitted.

From 2014 to 2016, the right wing had been up in arms about the federal jack-booted thugs who were allegedly interfering in the protests by the God-fearing, freedom-loving Bundys and their armed allies who were just standing up for their rights. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., met personally with Cliven Bundy during the earlier standoff and said the group had legitimate constitutional questions. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was all-in, calling that protest “the unfortunate and tragic culmination of the path that President Obama has set the federal government on.”

Donald Trump also expressed support for Cliven Bundy, saying, “I like him, I like his spirit, his spunk and the people that are so loyal … I respect him.” (Bundy supported him right back.) In fact, Trump respected the Bundy movement so much he later pardoned Dwight and Stephen Hammond, the two ranchers who had been convicted of arson. They just burned federal land and their supporters only desecrated Native American artifacts on a federal wildlife refuge. It’s not like they tore down a statue or anything important.

I bring that story up now only because as we have watched the events unfold in Portland, Oregon, over the past few days — a few hours west of the Malheur refuge — with federal police in full military regalia attacking and kidnapping protesters, I’m struck by the deafening silence from all those erstwhile defenders of free speech and the right to protest. I guess in order for them to speak out, the protesters have to be carrying AR-15s.

Trump’s decision to send in DHS stormtroopers to Portland is anything but surprising. He’s been telegraphing his intention to do this since the George Floyd murder sparked protests in the beginning of June. And let’s be clear about the reasons. Trump doesn’t care about American cities or statues or “anarchy” or any of the rest of it. He cares about getting re-elected, and since he doesn’t know how to deal with the pandemic crisis, he figured he could use the Black Lives Matter protests to spark a white backlash that will carry him to victory.

Sending troops onto the streets to “dominate” the protesters has been his plan from the beginning. He hasn’t kept it a secret. It’s just that since the military balked at being used for this purpose, he’s had to cobble together units from the Department of Homeland Security and get them outfitted to look like they’re about to take Fallujah. (Using rented minivans seems a little off-brand, but I guess they must not have had time to roll in the tanks. )

I urge you to read the transcript of the call Trump had with state governors on the Monday in June after he had to scurry into his bunker when the protests got close to the White House. His disrespectful language and the daft demands for domination were typical Trump rambling. But he included Attorney General Bill Barr on that call as well, and he was explicit about what they planned to do:

[F] ederal law enforcement, working with your state and local law enforcement, to be more dynamic and to go after the troublemakers. To go after the guys that are throwing the bricks and (INAUDIBLE) … running around starting fires. They have to be taken from the street and arrested and processed. The structure we’re going to use is the joint terrorist task force, which I know most of you are familiar with. Tried and true system, it’s worked for domestic and homegrown terrorists, and we’re going to employ that model. It already integrates your state and local people and it’s intelligence driven and it will go operational.

That is exactly what they are doing in Portland, no? The only glitch is that they’re apparently detaining people without probable cause so they can’t arrest them. But what they can do is photograph them and otherwise catalog their identity, which is almost certainly a big part of the project. They are creating a database of dissidents.

Chicago may be next. According to the AP, DHS is planning to send in 150 officers to help the city with “crime,” assistance that no one has asked for and no one wants. That tracks with yet another Barr project, “Operation Legend,” announced earlier this month “to combat the disturbing uptick in violence by surging federal agents and other federal assets into cities like Kansas City, a city currently experiencing its worst homicide rate in its history.”

As this Just Security post points out, Barr has a long history of manipulating the law to put armed federal troops on the streets, and now he’s found a president who thinks that’s a great idea for his own reasons and has given him the green light. DHS is happily on board. But as Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir observed last Sunday, it doesn’t really matter what the reasons are:

The president and his sniveling retinue of “acting” factotums up and down the national security chain may not have a coherent master plan to rip out the rest of American democracy by the roots and replace it with something more to their liking. But that is unquestionably what their collective hive-mind desires, and there are people behind them, just out of view, who are willing and able to articulate such an agenda clearly. That’s generally how fascism seems to work …

Let’s face it: It would be a lot harder for Trump and Barr to pull this off if we didn’t have a massive federal police apparatus called the Department of Homeland Security in the first place. It was only a matter of time before someone used it to quell dissent. Its fascistic potential was there from the start.

Andrew Feinberg, in the UK Independent, quotes Paul Rosenzweig, who served as DHS deputy assistant secretary for policy during the Bush administration:

There were many who thought that DHS should not be created precisely because they were worried that it would be essentially an internal police force, and there were many like me, who said: “Oh, that’s absurd. Come on. You know we need a coordinated unity of effort against terrorism, and this is a good way to do it.” But there’s a lot of justice to that now.

You didn’t have to be a national security expert to see where all that was going. My mantra throughout the post-9/11 build-up of this massive surveillance and police apparatus has been, “If you build it, they will use it.” They are using it. Of course they are.

Final passage of the Homeland Security appropriations bill is coming up soon. Democrats need to put their feet down and demand that these uninvited incursions into American cities stop immediately. Beyond that, there must be a complete re-evaluation of the department, including consideration of breaking it up entirely. The country managed to function without it quite well for centuries.

The least they can do is change the name. From the moment they started talking about “Homeland Security” we knew it was only a matter of time before we’d see federal police in the streets. How could it be otherwise? The only surprise is that it took this long.

My Salon column this morning reprinted with permission.

After the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, the Paramount Network cancelled the reality-TV show “Cops” ahead of its June 1 premier. The show ran for 32 seasons. Its Wikipedia entry observes that “Party in a Box” from December 12, 2015 featured Atlanta Police Officer Garrett Rolfe, charged in the murder of 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks during a DUI stop on June 12 this year. More reality ensued after both killings. Protests of police brutality and systemic racism have continued around the country ever since, including in Portland, Ore.

Acting president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, a former reality-TV show star himself, finds his ratings down and he needs a hit. Trump has decided to bring back “Cops” on the taxpayers’ nickel.

His target audience is his base of authoritarian followers he thinks enjoy seeing hippies’ and black people’s heads busted as Trump does. There could be 200,000 Americans dead from COVID-19 by Election Day. The economy is collapsing. His poll numbers are in free fall. His reelection is in peril. Trump has failed miserably to mount a coordinated national response to the coronavirus pandemic, and it shows. The reality star’s answer: bread and circuses. Without the bread.

Trump and his chief henchman, Attorney General Bill Barr, have decided the Portland preview was successful enough to take the show on tour. Jamelle Bouie writes in the New York Times:

Apparently cobbled together using personnel from Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard, these “rapid deployment teams” are formally tasked with securing federal buildings from graffiti and vandalism in tandem with the Federal Protective Service, which is ordinarily responsible for the job. But they’re being used to suppress protests in what appears to be an election year gambit by the Trump administration to create images of disorder and chaos on which the president can then campaign. “This political theater from President Trump has nothing to do with public safety,” Kate Brown, the Democratic governor of Oregon, said last week. “Trump is looking for a confrontation in Oregon in the hopes of winning political points in Ohio or Iowa.”

It has happened here

Department of Homeland Security officials has plans for fielding additional forces (ostensibly to protect federal property) in other cities that experience “unrest.” The Department of Justice plans to expand “Operation Legend,” Politico reports, an initiative Barr launched this month in Kansas City, Mo. to fight “the sudden surge of violent crime.” Those efforts will include FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration personnel.

Thomas Freidman considers a future historian’s account of how Trump responded to his 2020 dilemma:

“As the virus spread, and businesses had to shut down again and schools and universities were paralyzed as to whether to open or stay closed in the fall, Trump’s poll numbers nose-dived. Joe Biden opened up a 15-point lead in a national head-to-head survey.

“So, in a desperate effort to salvage his campaign, Trump turned to the Middle East Dictator’s Official Handbook and found just what he was looking for, the chapter titled, ‘What to Do When Your People Turn Against You?’

“Answer: Turn them against each other and then present yourself as the only source of law and order.”

Except Trump’s view of “Law n’ Order” he could as easily have picked up in the gift shop at Cracker Barrel as from authoritarian pals in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey or North Korea. Dangerous, either way.

Recurring guest villains in Trump’s made-for-Election 2020 nightly drama are secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, who believes Americans protesting police violence are “violent anarchists and extremists.” Also guest-starring is “Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Deputy Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security” Ken Cuccinelli who informs Democrat-led cities, “I don’t need invitations by the state, state mayors or state governors to do our job…. We’re going to do that, whether they like us there or not.”

The problem Trump has is the limited appeal of his format and lack of Writers Guild talent for crafting engaging entertainment. Trump’s toy soldiers were easily upstaged by a “Wall of Moms” in Portland and by “Naked Athena.”

Entirely naked save for a stocking cap and mask, the anonymous woman dared Trump’s internal security squad to assault or arrest her simply for being there in silent challenge, Molly Roberts writes for the Washington Post:

Legs splayed across the pavement opposite an exquisitely equipped line of officers, she was everything they were not: natural where the camouflage-clad cops were unnatural, vulnerable where they were armored. Perhaps at a loss for how to contend with an unclothed female body, they shot rubber balls at her feet — and then, dumbstruck or defeated, retreated. 

[…]

These forces the president has dispatched to defend a city that hasn’t asked for defending, dressed up to take down an enemy army that barely exists, are doing exactly what the utterly exposed woman was doing right back at them: putting on a show.

Like everything else Trump has done in his life, his “Cops” revival is ham-fisted and destined to fail. The Department of Homeland Security could end up the latest in Trump’s string of bankruptcies and cancelled in January.

https://twitter.com/DonovanFarley/status/1284411119260463105?s=20

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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.

Grab yourself a little evening cocktail or cup of tea if that’s what you prefer and curl up with Story Hour by The Lincoln Project : excerpts from Mary Trump’s new book.

Natasha Bertrand reports:

Democratic leaders are asking the FBI for an urgent briefing arising out of concern that members of Congress are being targeted by a foreign operation intended to influence the 2020 presidential election, according to a letter they released publicly on Monday.

Among the Democrats’ concerns is that a Senate investigation being led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has become a vehicle for “laundering” a foreign influence campaign to damageDemocratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, according to two people familiar with the demand.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded the all-Congress briefing Monday, citing “specific” intelligence that a foreign influence operation targeted lawmakers to “launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity.”

Though the letter did not mention the Johnson investigation, it included a classified addendum that the two sources say identified the probe as one of the sources of their concern.

“We are gravely concerned, in particular, that Congress appears to be the target of a concerted foreign interference campaign, which seeks to launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity, public debate, and the presidential election in November,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote in their letter, which was also signed by the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.).

All four Democratic signatories are members of the Gang of Eight, a group of eight lawmakers who are briefed on classified intelligence by the executive branch.

Asked about Democrats‘ contention, Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told POLITICO: “They‘re simply wrong.“

“And Schiff is the last person to talk,“ he added.

Keep in mind that Ron Johnson is easily the dumbest Senator and that includes James Inhofe. He might even be the dumbest ever.

Anyway:

[…]

The probe centers on claims that a Democratic public-relations firm sought to leverage Hunter Biden’s role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, to influence the State Department under the Obama administration. Johnson has asked several former State Department officials to testify, and he is eyeing subpoenas as soon as this week if they do not agree to appear for depositions voluntarily.

Johnson renewed his demand for transcribed interviews and documents from the former officials days after a Ukrainian lawmaker — Andriy Derkach, who has met with Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to discuss investigating the Biden family — used a news conference to accuse the Bidens and Amos Hochstein, a former special envoy for international energy affairs at the State Department, of an elaborate conspiracy to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from Ukraine.

The last time senators were briefed on election security and foreign influence operations, Democratic lawmakers confronted Johnson behind closed doors about his investigation, arguing that it threatens the integrity of the 2020 election and relies on Russian disinformation to tar a political opponent.

They cited in particular Johnson’s initial effort to subpoena Andrii Telizhenko, who has pushed unsubstantiated claims about coordination between the Ukrainian government and the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Johnson dropped plans to subpoena Telizhenko after the FBI’s foreign influence task force briefed senators about him, focusing on concerns over his credibility.

Last week, Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, renewed his request for defensive briefings from the FBI as Johnson’s investigation intensifies.

Some Senate Republicans, too, have previously signaled unease with Johnson’s investigation. In December, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who was chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, privately told Johnson that his inquiry could aid Russia, according to two congressional sources familiar with the meeting. And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) warned in February that any derogatory information coming out of Ukraine about any American should be vetted by intelligence agencies because “Russia is playing us all like a fiddle.”

This is ridiculous, ofcourse. But it has one good thing going for it. It means when they start shrieking about political investigations in the next congress the Democrats can tell them to go to hell.

Axios boils it down in their way…

America spent the spring building a bridge to August, spending trillions and shutting down major parts of society. The expanse was to be a bent coronavirus curve, and the other side some semblance of normal, where kids would go to school and their parents to work.

The bottom line: We blew it, building a pier instead.

There will be books written about America’s lost five months of 2020, but here’s what we know:

We blew testing. President Trump regularly brags and complains about the number of COVID-19 tests conducted in the U.S., but America hasn’t built the infrastructure necessary to process and trace the results.

• Quest Diagnostics says its average turnaround time for a COVID-19 test has lengthened to “seven or more days” — thus decreasing the chance that asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic carriers will self-quarantine.
• The testing delays also make it harder for public health officials to understand current conditions, let alone implement effective contact tracing.
• Speaking of contact tracing, it remains a haphazard and uncoordinated process in many parts of the country.

We blew schools. Congress allocated $150 billion for state and local governments as part of the CARES Act, but that was aimed at maintaining status quo services in the face of plummeting tax revenue.

There was no money earmarked for schools to buy new safety equipment, nor to hire additional teachers who might be needed to staff smaller class sizes and hybrid learning days.

• U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was not among the 27 officials included in the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and rarely appeared at Task Force press conferences.
• The administration insists that schools should reopen this fall because kids are less likely to get very sick from the virus, but it has not yet offered detailed plans to protect older teachers, at-risk family members, or students with pre-existing respiratory or immune conditions.
• Silicon Valley provided some free services to schools, but there was no coordinated effort to create a streamlined virtual learning platform. There also continue to be millions of schoolkids without access to broadband and/or Internet-connected devices.

We blew economics. The CARES Act was bold and bipartisan, a massive stimulus to meet the moment.

• It’s running out, without an extension plan not yet in place.
• Expanded unemployment benefits expire in days. Many small businesses have already exhausted their Paycheck Protection Program loans, including some that reopened but have been forced to close again.
• There has been no national effort to pause residential or commercial evictions, nor to give landlords breathing room on their mortgage payments.

We blew public health. There’s obviously a lot here, but just stick with face masks. Had we all been directed to wear them in March — and done so, even makeshift ones while manufacturing ramped up — you might not be reading this post.

We blew goodwill. Millions of Americans sheltered in place, pausing their social lives for the common good.

• But many millions of other Americans didn’t. Some were essential workers. Some were deemed essential workers but really weren’t. Some just didn’t care, or didn’t believe the threat. Some ultimately decided that protesting centuries of racial injustice was a worthy trade-off.
• All of this was complicated by mixed messages from federal and state leaders. Top of that list was President Trump, who claimed to adopt a wartime footing without clearly asking Americans to make sacrifices necessary to defeat the enemy.
• Five months later, many of those who followed the “rules” are furious at what they perceive to be the selfishness of others.

The bottom line: America has gotten many things right since March, including the development of more effective hospital treatments for COVID-19 patients.

• But we’re hitting daily infection records, daily deaths hover around 900, and many ICUs reports more patients than beds. It didn’t have to be this way.

With the exception of thinking that having Betsy DeVos in the task force meetings would have been a good thing, this is pretty much correct.

We knew it was happening but I think we were just hoping against hope that we were wrong and Trump was right — that something magic would happen to change the trajectory. It’s not as if we had much choice. It turns out that a president is actually necessary to activate the federal government in an emergency. We had an absurd orange circus clown instead.

So here we are.