Month: July 2020

Shamelessness is their superpower, Part XXX. This New York Times piece features something I haven’t seen throughout this crisis in Portland. Right-wing concern about the federal jack-booted thugs:

Among the others concerned by the federal crackdown was Joey Gibson, a far-right activist who has long battled with Portland’s antifa demonstrators. He said he found it somewhat frightening to see video of one officer whacking a Navy veteran with a baton, and he worried that the Trump administration was setting a precedent that would encourage other presidents to embrace a more expansive use of federal forces.

“It is very concerning,” Mr. Gibson said.

You’d think he’d be more concerned about the current expansive use of federal forces but I suppose it’s better than nothing that one supposed, freedom-loving, anti-government, right winger is able to articulate a tiny bit of consistency.

I just want to remind people of some of the right wing shrieking over an earlier situation. This is from 2015:

On Saturday, a large group of armed militia members took over a federal building in rural Oregon, claiming the property to protest the conviction of two local ranchers found guilty of setting fire to government land. The protesters — many of whom openly brandish firearms — say they are “planning on staying…for years,” and have not ruled out violently defending themselves against any attempt to expel them.

Three of the group’s leaders are sons of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who was thrust into the national spotlight when he triggered an armed standoff with government forces in 2014 for refusing to remove cattle from federal land. Bundy has also reportedly been advising the Oregon ranchers, Steven and Dwight Hammond, on how to respond to the federal charges lodged against them, and many see the current occupation as a continuation of an anti-government movement Bundy started in 2014.

None of the Republican presidential candidates have weighed in on the rapidly escalating situation, which is certain to become a point of discussion in a heated 2016 election season. However, several current candidates did weigh in on Cliven Bundy’s actions in Nevada:

Rand Paul

Sen. Paul was one of the earliest endorsers of Cliven Bundy, telling Fox News in 2014, “There is a legitimate constitutional question here about whether the state should be in charge of endangered species or whether the federal government should be.”Advertisement

He rejected classifying Bundy and his gun-toting supporters as domestic terrorists, urging Sen. Harry Reid and others who used the term to “calm the rhetoric.”

Paul also personally met with the rancher for about 45 minutes during a campaign stop last June, when he two “mainly discussed federal land oversight and states’ rights, in addition to education policy,” according to Politico. One of Bundy’s sons was reportedly also present during the encounter, although it’s unclear which one.

Despite Paul’s support, however, Bundy wasn’t impressed with the senator’s support for groups such as the American Lands Council, which raises money to buy land from the federal government and return it to the states.

“I disagree with that philosophy,” Bundy said. “My stand is we are already a sovereign state. The federal government doesn’t need to turn this land back to us. It’s already state land. I don’t want to sell this land to private ownership, because I believe I already have stewardship…I don’t claim ownership. I claim rights.”

He added, “I educated Rand on that point.”

Ted Cruz

In April 2014, Cruz aligned himself with Bundy’s core complaint — government overreach — and called the standoff “the unfortunate and tragic culmination of the path that President Obama has set the federal government on.”

Ben Carson

Carson was a vocal supporter of Bundy, saying he and the militia members who stood with him were “pretty upstanding people.” He also outlined a dystopian vision for the future that closely mirrors conspiracy theories embraced by branches of the radical right.Advertisement

“But the fact of the matter is if you look back through history, what our government is doing is not unprecedented by any stretch of the imagination. It always starts like this, and freedom is not free — and there may come a time when people have to actually stand up against the government,” Carson said. “I hope that doesn’t happen.”

While appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show in April 2014, Trump expressed sympathy for Bundy, saying, “I like him, I like his spirit, his spunk and the people that are so loyal…I respect him.”

Trump stopped short of uniformly endorsing Bundy’s resistance to the government, however, noting, “You do have laws in the country and you know, if everybody did what he’s doing, where does it all go?” Instead, Trump saw the protest as an opportunity for the rancher to “cut a deal” with the government.

“He’s in a great position to cut a great deal and I think that’s what he should do,” he said.

Meanwhile, Bundy himself is a Trump supporter.

Mike Huckabee

Huckabee addressed the Bundy standoff while speaking at the conservative Freedom Summit in April 2014. He insisted that he didn’t want address Bundy’s specific grievances about land usage, explaining, “I’m not here to jump in to the middle of whether Cliven Bundy ought to pay the state or pay anybody for the chance for his cows to eat some grass.”

But Huckabee did criticize the federal government taking action to enforce the law.

“There is something wrong when a government believes that some blades of grass that a cow is eating is so…an egregious affront to the government of the United States that we would literally put a gun in a citizen’s face and threaten to shoot him over it,” Huckabee said, drawing applause from the crowd.

I don’t recall any of the feds rolling up in military gear and kidnapping the Bundys but maybe I’m wrong about that.

By the way, Donald Trump pardoned Bundy.

Yuval Levin at NR notices something about Donald Trump:

[T]he most interesting and telling bit of the interview was at the very end, and wasn’t about the virus. Here’s the final question and answer:

WALLACE: Whether it’s in 2021 or 2025, how will you regard your years as President of the United States?

TRUMP: I think I was very unfairly treated. From before I even won I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation.

WALLACE: But what about the good –

TRUMP: Russia, Russia, Russia.

WALLACE: But what about the good parts, sir?

TRUMP: No, no. I want to go this. I have done more than any president in history in the first three and a half years, and I’ve done it suffering through investigations where people have been – General Flynn, where people have been so unfairly treated.

The Russia hoax, it was all a hoax. The Mueller scam, it was all scam. It was all false. I made a bad decision on – one bad decision. Jeff Sessions, and now I feel good because he lost overwhelmingly in the great state of Alabama.

Here’s the bottom line. I’ve been very unfairly treated, and I don’t say that as paranoid. I’ve been very – everybody says it. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. But there was tremendous evidence right now as to how unfairly treated I was. President Obama and Biden spied on my campaign. It’s never happened in history. If it were the other way around, the people would be in jail for 50 years right now.

That would be Comey, that would be Brennan, that would be all of this – the two lovers, Strzok and Page, they would be in jail now for many, many years. They would be in jail, it would’ve started two years ago and they’d be there for 50 years. The fact is, they illegally spied on my campaign. Let’s see what happens. Despite that, I did more than any president in history in the first three and a half years.

WALLACE: Mr. President, thank you, thanks for talking with us.

TRUMP: Thank you, thank you very much.

Asked to reflect on his term so far as he seeks re-election, the president’s answer is that he was treated unfairly. Even when he is literally invited by his interviewer to say good things about himself, all he can reach for is resentment.

There is more to this than there might seem to be at first. The sense that he was being treated unfairly had a huge amount to do with why Donald Trump ran for president in the first place, and the sense that they were being treated unfairly had a lot to do with why his earliest supporters and voters found him appealing. Channeling resentment is near the source of his political prowess.

And of course, he’s not wrong. The sense of resentment he has channeled has been rooted in some important realities, and even his own sense that he has been treated unfairly by his opponents as president is not mistaken. Sure he has. But that this sense of resentment is chiefly what drives him, that he can’t see past it or point beyond it, has been a crucial factor in many of his biggest failures as an executive.

He has treated the world’s most powerful job as a stage from which to vent his frustrations with the world’s mistreatment of him, and this has often kept him from advancing durable aims, from capitalizing on opportunities, from learning from mistakes, and from leading. In reasonably good times, it meant that he turned our national politics into a reality-television performance—focused, as those often are, on the drama of bruised egos. But in a time of crisis, it has left him incapable of rising to the challenge of his job, and the consequences have been dire.

He recognizes that the reason many people like Trump is his articulation of their grievances. But I’m not sure if any of the right has fully grasped just how fundamental this spoiled, whining, self-pitying airing of grievances has been to the conservative movement. It is the air these people breathe. And yet they live in the richest country on earth and have opportunities people elsewhere can only dream of. Their resentment comes from the fact that they are having to share this country with people who don’t look like them and who they believe are usurping their place at the top of the social and economic hierarchy.

Donald Trump is the pure essence of the conservative movement.

Trump is going to start his White House coronavirus again. He’s been wanting to do it and at least one of his advisers, Kellyanne Conway, said publicly that she thinks it’s a good idea (which makes me wonder if she’s working for his defeat.)

He had this to say yesterday:

"Well, we had very successful briefings. I was doing them, and we had a lot of people watching" – what Trump doesn't mention is that the coronavirus briefings hurt him politically because he was totally unhinged & uninformed. That's why they stopped happening in the first place. pic.twitter.com/DIoDHDJS6K

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 20, 2020

James Poniewozik of the New York Times reports on a little known moment in Trump’s career that explains his deep, yearning need for ratings:

The pinnacle of Donald J. Trump’s TV career lasted one night, and he has never stopped trying to relive it.

The finale of the first season of “The Apprentice” in 2004 was the top-rated show on TV. Afterward the host, finally a mass-media star after decades of courting fame, believed that giving people twice as much of him would be twice as good.

NBC agreed, scheduling the show for two cycles the following year (and then a spinoff with Martha Stewart). The “Apprentice” that returned was more Trump-centric, the host more brash, loud and insulting, his boardroom firings more dramatic and stunt-filled. Mr. Trump himself took to the talk- and comedy-show circuit like a starlet in Oscar season, appearing in ads and on red carpets delivering his trademark “You’re fired” finger-point and sneer. He was everywhere.

It didn’t work. The ratings declined, first gradually, then precipitously. While competitors like “American Idol” topped the charts for years, “The Apprentice” declined until Mr. Trump was left hosting a gimmick version with C-list celebrities. For years after, he would cling to that one glorious stat from 2004 like an Electoral College map, to claim that his reality show was still the biggest thing on TV.

The host, of course, rebooted himself, parlaying his network celebrity into a second life as a political commentator on Fox News, then candidate, then president. But his reality-TV experience is worth keeping in mind as he plans to revive his evening coronavirus briefings, in the apparent belief that rebooting last spring’s ratings hit will reboot his poll numbers.

NBC’s mistake with “The Apprentice” was partly an eternal TV pitfall: milking the prize cow until it runs dry. Donald Trump, it turned out, was no more immune to overexposure than Regis Philbin and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” (“Idol,” on the other hand, aired just one season a year, and aimed to make stars of its contestants, not just its hosts.)

But it was also an error distinctive to Mr. Trump, who was both the star and a producer of “The Apprentice”: Since his 1980s tabloid days, he never believed there was such a thing as bad publicity, at least for him. Or as the “Pod Save America” host and former Obama strategist Dan Pfeiffer put it in a Tweet on Tuesday: “Trump always thinks more Trump is the solution when it is always the cause of the problem.

Sure, attention is an asset, in politics as in reality TV. Mr. Trump’s willingness to feed the news beast in 2016 earned him billions in free media and effectively made him the election’s protagonist.

And as I wrote during Mr. Trump’s first run of briefings in the spring, they offered him an opportunity he hadn’t had since he started “The Apprentice”: a regular TV platform in which he could speak to a mass audience beyond his loyalist base. For a moment, they allowed him to create the visual impression that he was acting on the pandemic, by going out and speaking on it. For a moment, his approval ratings — and TV ratings — went up.

But what you do with the attention turns out to matter, at least when the stakes are hundreds of thousands of lives, not a game-show prize. It matters if you suggest that household disinfectants could be a medical treatment. It matters if you go to war with your own medical experts. It matters if you minimize, on Page 1, a terrible reality that everyone can read about for themselves in the obituaries.

Judging by the president’s decision, he doesn’t see this as the problem. Instead the problem is not enough him on TV, giving the people what worked for him before — zinging, blustering, pointing fingers and fighting.

His plan to return to prime time was not accompanied by an announced shift in public-health policy. The thinking simply seems to be: People want to see the president doing something. And to Donald Trump, going on TV is the doing-somethingest thing of all.

Thus we saw him on Sunday, sitting for an excruciating interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, doubling down on blatant disinformation — like his claim that the United States has the lowest Covid-19 mortality rate in the world — in the face of ruthless fact-checking. As in his “You’re fired” days, he fell back on his trusty catchphrase, calling Mr. Wallace “fake news” as if the words could dispel the interviewer from the boardroom.

At one point, Mr. Wallace brought up the president’s past criticisms of him, asking if he understood that it was a journalist’s duty to interview the president’s rivals, too. A more blunt way of putting it would be: Does the president think it’s Fox’s job to help him win the election?Sign up to receive an email when we publish a new story about the 2020 election.Sign Up

He seems to think so. He tweeted a complaint in May that Fox was “doing nothing to help Republicans, and me, get re-elected.” But in a broader sense, he has suggested that TV itself owes him payback for all he’s given it. TV networks, he has said, will miss the ratings he brings if he is voted out of the White House.

He may be right, but he also assumes that TV viewers think like TV networks. He acts as if Americans would suffer anything rather than the boredom he imagines they would endure without him. Thus his preferred epithet for his opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr. — “Sleepy” — which may not be the killer burn he imagines to a populace tired of staying up all night in anxiety.

And yet Mr. Trump is, if you trust the current polls, currently losing to a challenger who is running a quasi-incumbent-like media strategy, avoiding making big splashes and letting his rival do the work for him. Mr. Trump seems resentful of this — “Let him come out of his basement,” he told Mr. Wallace — or maybe just incredulous. Why would any sane person not get as much media attention as possible?

Mr. Trump seems to believe that Americans are yearning for a TV star more than they are yearning for a leader — or, at least, that they do not recognize a difference between the two.

Criticize his approach, of course, and there is a ready answer: The “Too much is never enough” strategy worked for him in 2016. It worked in 2004, too, in the first season of “The Apprentice.”

It always works until it stops working. Until someone decides that too much, in fact, is enough already.

He has never understood that a little of him goes a long way. And when it comes to this crisis, nobody wants to see him at all. But it looks like we’re going to have them.

By the way, as I write this he hasn’t invited any of the task force member to the rally.

The attraction of power is as lizard-brain as it gets. Power comes in many flavors: wealth, celebrity, sexual, political, and sheer physical domination. As much as we attribute racism to meanness of spirit, racism, too, is about power. Pecking order. “The alpha males are back,” former Donald Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka told Fox News a month before the inauguration.

Who is on top and who isn’t. It’s a dog-eat-dog world where you are predator or prey. Survival of the fittest.

Marlene Cimons argues in the Washington Post that, like so much folk wisdom, we have this (and Darwin) wrong too:

Scientists Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, both researchers at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, believe something else has been at work among species that have thrived throughout history, successfully reproducing to sustain themselves, and it has nothing to do with beating up the competition.

Their new book, “Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity,” posits that friendly partnerships among species and shared humanity have worked throughout centuries to ensure successful evolution. Species endure — humans, other animals and plants — they write, based on friendliness, partnership and communication. And they point to many life examples of cooperation and sociability to prove it.

Dogs, for example. While their wolvish progenitors find themselves on the endangered list, dogs adapted themselves to humans and thrived. Hare explains, “Dogs were the population of wolves that decided to rely on humans — rather than hunting — and that population won big.”

Plant adaptations also rely on mutually beneficial relationships. Pollinators get food. Plants spread their seeds and reproduce.

In the simian world, the researches compared the behaviors of bonobos and chimpanzees:

Chimps make war — males take charge — and can be quite violent, even killing one another. Bonobos, on the other hand, are governed by females, don’t kill one another and engage in sex to maintain a peaceful collective temperament. Bonobos also are natural sharers. They enjoy sharing food with other bonobos, and never outgrow their willingness to do so, unlike chimpanzees, who become more selfish in adulthood.

“The friendliest male bonobo is more successful than the unfriendliest chimpanzee,” Hare says, referring to reproduction. “The most successful bonobo males have more offspring than the most successful alpha male chimpanzees”

Friendliness is the winning strategy that allowed our species to outlast hominids now extinct, Woods and Hare argue. “When that mechanism is turned off, we can become unbelievably cruel. When it is turned on, it allows us to win. We win by cooperation and teamwork. Our uniquely human skills for cooperative communication can be used to solve the hardest social problems.”

I don’t really need to frame that in the context of our present societal predicament for you. But I will.

The U.S. is failing to quell the coronavirus outbreak, save the economy, and stop the mounting death count because a political faction that measures success by domination controls many of the levers of power. Call it racism. Call it classism. Call it free-market fundamentalism (or the religious kind). We are failing because we as a culture have devolved over the decades. We lust for power over one another rather than seek cooperation. A faction that sees its power dwindling has reverted to a failed evolutionary strategy.

The acting president, as damaged a human being as ever occupied his office, sees domination as the path to success. As do his hangers-on from Gorka to Attorney General William Barr to Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the business titans of Wall Street and petrochemical giants. In the short term, it may appear to work. But in evolutionary terms?

Days before Gorka made his remarks on “Hannity,” Neal Gabler wrote at Bill Moyer’s site about the right’s embrace of Ayn Rand’s reformation of greed from deadly sin to moral imperative:

To identify what’s wrong with conservatism and Republicanism — and now with so much of America as we are about to enter the Trump era — you don’t need high-blown theories or deep sociological analysis or surveys. The answer is as simple as it is sad: There is no kindness in them.

In the name of neutrality, the media sat by while “extremists who advocate a bizarre morality that elevates selfishness and deplores altruism” took over a major political party. Years later, the media are only beginning to shake off somnambulism.

Read those Ayn Rand quotes to your children as moral instruction, and you will see how far we have fallen. This is Republican morality. This is Trump morality. And the media, loath to defend traditional American values in an increasingly hostile conservative environment, let it happen. That is what value neutrality will get you.

Not to mention thousands of children separated from their parents at the border. And 140,000 dead Americans, with more on the way. And secret police in Portland abducting pedestrians in unmarked vans. An economy teetering on collapse. Ignoring science and inviting disease or death in the name of personal freedom.

Research by Hare and Woods, as well as more before them, suggests cooperation holds the longer-term evolutionary advantage. I wrote in 2014:

What strikes me is how this research echoes something paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey said about Turkana Boy in speculating about the development of compassion in early Man:

Bipedalism carried an enormous price, where compassion was what you paid your ticket with. You simply can’t abandon somebody who’s incapacitated because the rest will abandon you next time it comes to be your turn.

There but for the grace of God. Compassion has an evolutionary advantage, Leakey suggests. Perhaps it is what helped us rise above the law of the jungle.

In pursuit of power, often for its own sake, our neighbors have failed to learn the lessons of evolutionary history and have reverted to the jungle. The unresolved competition now at issue is which faction will survive in the short term: the cooperators or the dominators. In the longer term, history has already decided. But that may not help us survive another four years of Trumpism.

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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.

Here’s what happens when you try to pretend the virus is no big deal and you can do whatever you want:

Arizona had been one of the last states to close, and first to reopen, when the coronavirus started to sweep the nation this spring. But a brazen gamble to restart its struggling economy has backfired months later, threatening to plunge workers and businesses into a deeper financial hole.

Hundreds of thousands of people are still out of a job, some for the second time this year. Restaurants, gyms and other companies are closing up shop once again — perhaps for good. Even government officials say they are bracing for a crippling blow, with the latest shutdown expected to cleave further into their still-souring finances.

The economic devastation comes as Congress prepares to return Monday and begin debating how to structure another round of federal stimulus. The $2 trillion Cares Act, which lawmakers adopted in March, helped buttress the country during the early days of the pandemic. But many of those benefits are on the verge of expiring, imperiling states that are in worse shape than they were nearly four months ago.

Like Florida, Texas and others that opened early, Arizona now ranks as one of the country’s worst coronavirus hot spots, with more than 143,000 cases and more than 2,700 deaths as of this weekend. Some residents in cities such as Phoenix and Scottsdale say the surge is the result of the state’s return to old routines, after Republican Gov. Doug Ducey lifted his stay-at-home order in May in part to give the local economy a boost — leading people to flock, often without masks, to cramped public places.AD

This time, however, families and businesses that fall into dire straits are at risk of even greater financial trauma: Nearly 1 million Arizonans, for example, are set to lose extra money in unemployment assistance after this week, leaving them with benefits that are much lower than most other states.

“If that happens, it will spell financial disaster for us,” said Erlynne Campbell, a 47-year-old resident of Phoenix who lost her bookkeeping job in March and then struggled for months just to cash her first unemployment check.

“I obediently stayed home and filed for unemployment,” she said, “and trusted I would be provided for in the time frame we needed to stay home to stay safe.”

In Arizona’s turmoil, local leaders and economic experts said they see a cautionary tale with national import: Those that try to prioritize their economic recovery over public health in the middle of the pandemic are at risk of undermining both.

California did everything right except for one thing. When they opened up they didn’t make it clear that social distancing and mask-wearing was still required. People just went back to normal, assuming the crisis was over. It wasn’t.

If you want to save your favorite restaurant you’re probably better off buying gift cards and ordering take-out than insisting on eating indoors. Bars, theatres, concert halls and other entertainment venues are simply screwed unless we can get this thing contained. The government has to step in to help these businesses hang on. What we know now is that if this virus spreads it ends up destroying all these small businesses in the long run anyway.

Nobody should be like this asshole:

Trump came around on masks today, probably because he got a look at his poll numbers:

We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President! pic.twitter.com/iQOd1whktN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 20, 2020

He probably should wear an orange colored mask to match his make-up. But whatever works.

It will be interesting to see if his followers will fall in line now. If even a few of his cult members get excited and start wearing a mask so they can look like their “favorite president” it will help. His and their ridiculous resistance to doing it for months has caused a lot of suffering and death.

I wonder how many people these folks at Trump’s Phoenix rally last month spread the virus to? (And good for the girl at the beginning for at least wearing the bandana.)

Federal police strike protester with baton, use pepper spray and tear gas outside courthouse in Portland pic.twitter.com/VX2xTVaaYq

— Zane Sparling (@PDXzane) July 19, 2020

Portland:

He came to the protest with a question. He left with two broken bones in a confrontation with federal officers that went viral.

Christopher David had watched in horror as videos surfaced of federal officers in camouflage throwing Portland, Ore., protesters into unmarked vans. The 53-year-old Portland resident had heard the stories: protesters injured, gassed, sprayed with chemicals that tugged at their nostrils and burned their eyes.

David, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and former member of the Navy’s Civil Engineer Corps, said he wanted to know what the officers involved thought of the oath they had sworn to protect and defend the Constitution.

So, he said, on Saturday evening, he headed to downtown Portland to ask them.

That night’s protests outside the federal courthouse — the 51st day of ongoing demonstrations since the police killing of George Floyd — began with a line of local moms linking arms and demanding the federal agents stop targeting Portland kids. David, who had never attended a protest before, hung back and watched.

He was trying to keep his distance, he said, as a host of health problems have made him especially vulnerable amid a still-raging coronavirus pandemic. He asked one woman when the feds would show up, but she said it was also her first protest since the Department of Homeland Security deployed tactical units from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to bolster protections for federal buildings and officers in the Pacific Northwest city.

Tensions have escalated in the past two weeks, particularly after an officer with the U.S. Marshals Service fired a less-lethal round at a protester’s head on July 11, critically injuring him.

Just as he was about to leave, David said, the federal officers emerged. They rushed a line of protesters nearby, knocking protesters to the ground. David walked toward a gap in the line, calling out to the officers.

“Why are you not honoring your oath?” he bellowed. “Why are you not honoring your oath to the Constitution?”

An officer trained his weapon on David’s chest as several agents pushed him, sending David stumbling backward. But he regained his center and tried again. Another agent raised his baton and began to beat David, who stood unwavering with his arms at his sides. Then another officer unloaded a canister of chemical irritant spray into David’s face…

Unable to see from the chemicals burning his eyes and blurring his vision, David said, he stumbled into a cloud of gas that made him cough and retch. He found his way to a bench in the park, where a street medic aided him and eventually pulled him away from the advancing officers.

At the hospital, he said, he learned his right hand had been broken in two places.

In the time since, he has been hailed on social media as a hero. Some have dubbed him Portland’s own man of steel, a defender of the city, an anti-fascist super-soldier.

David said he is none of those things.

“It’s just us normal people out there,” he said. “There were a whole group of pregnant moms standing out there linking arms and they got gassed. You hear people like [President] Trump say it’s just a bunch of wacko fringe people in liberal cities who are out there, but no way. We’re all just normal people who think what’s happening is wrong.”

By definition, if you think what’s happening is wrong you are an enemy of Trump and therefore, not worthy of constitutional protections.

I wrote earlier that I think this is Trump’s big ploy to distract his voters from their growing distress over his monumental failure to manage the COVID crisis. He obviously thinks his voters will be impressed by his deployment of untrained, unqualified, stormtroopers into the streets of America to beat the shit out of Navy veterans and deploy gas against pregnant mothers.

I hve no doubt that millions of his biggest fans are thrilled. Many of them are fascists who love this stuff. But I suspect that he’s losing a fair number of his base as he continues to recklessly deploy violence against Americans and ignores the rising death toll from the pandemic. The man is overseeing a tremendous amount of suffering and dying and all he cares about is himself.

How can anyone like this whiner? I'll never understand it. https://t.co/dHlRYhWpzQ

— digby (@digby56) July 20, 2020

Over the past week or so, there’s been a major attempt by the Trump administration to demean the reputation of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, with anonymous “oppo-research” and open insults from Peter Navarro, a trade adviser close to President Trump. Fauci is widely acknowledged to be one of the world’s foremost experts on pandemics so there was a furious pushback to this crude character assassination. Despite the fact that Trump had made similar remarks about Fauci being “wrong” about the coronavirus, the president was forced to throw Navarro under the bus despite the fact that it’s obvious they’ve been on the same page.

Trump is obviously jealous of the public’s trust in Fauci, compared to the increasing public skepticism of anything he personally says about the crisis. But this attack on Fauci is really just a symbol of the administration’s rejection of the reality we can see with our own eyes: a new explosion of COVID-19 all over the country.

It was an ugly kerfuffle but certainly not something that should have surprised us. Trump has been insulting and purging any government employee he deems disloyal, and since Fauci isn’t blowing smoke about the virus, that’s how Trump sees him.

Over the weekend Trump gave an interview to Fox News’ Chris Wallace and made a fool of himself trying to deny this reality. He insisted, as he always does, that the virus is not spreading and the rising number of cases is entirely due to expanded testing, which is complete nonsense.

"They have the sniffles … many of those cases shouldn't even be cases" — Trump is still downplaying the severity of contracting Covid-19 pic.twitter.com/cT24njBK9n

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 19, 2020

"I'll be right eventually" — Trump defends his comment that the coronavirus will "disappear" on its own pic.twitter.com/OT5zf23emD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 19, 2020

According to the New York Times fact check:

The United States has the eighth-worst fatality rate among reported coronavirus cases in the world, and the death rate per 100,000 people — 42.83 — ranks it third-worst, according to data on the countries most affected by the coronavirus compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

That was far from the only false information Trump shared on the pandemic. And it raises the question: where does he get this stuff? As you can see by that clip above, he had White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany standing by with papers that had headings on them saying things like “The United States has the lowest mortality rate in the world” but that doesn’t mean anything. While it’s possible that Trump just heard this from one of the voices in his head, we don’t need to go there right now.

Well, the Times did another one of those deep dives into how the White House handled the pandemic, which offers up some new information about that question. This time the reporting team looked specifically at the month of April, when the administration made a dramatic shift in strategy to shovel all responsibility for the pandemic response onto the states. That article suggests that if you want to point the finger at one member of the White House coronavirus task force who has consistently fed optimistic projections and questionable data points to the president, it’s Dr. Deborah Birx.

It turns out that many of the most important decisions that were made during that period weren’t done by the official task force headed by Vice President Mike Pence, but by another shadowy group that met every weekday morning in White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ office. (Remember, Jared Kushner was also running his own task force on a secret, separate track.)

This one was single-mindedly dedicated to producing evidence to back up the White House decision to open up the economy, come what may. Dr. Birx was their validator, the only public health official among the group of political hands, and the Times describes her as “the chief evangelist in the West Wing for the idea that infections had peaked and the virus was fading quickly.”

During the morning meetings in Mr. Meadows’s office, Dr. Birx almost always delivered what the new team was hoping for: “All metros are stabilizing,” she would tell them, describing the virus as having hit its “peak” around mid-April. The New York area accounted for half of the total cases in the country, she said. The slope was heading in the right direction. “We’re behind the worst of it.”

During much of mid-April, Dr. Birx focused intensely on the experience that Italy had fighting the virus. In her view, it was a particularly positive comparison, telling colleagues that the United States was on the same trajectory as Italy, where there were huge spikes before infections and deaths flattened to close to zero.

Dr. Birx would roam the halls of the White House, sometimes passing out diagrams to bolster her case. “We’ve hit our peak,” she would say, and that message would find its way back to Mr. Trump.

Unlike Fauci, she had an office in the West Wing and fully embraced “her role as a member of the president’s team.” I think we know what that means.

Birx relied on an optimistic model that depended on everyone doing everything exactly right, while Fauci had a more realistic view of probable human behavior and listened to reports on the ground as well as the statistical data. As things got worse, Birx’s rosy scenarios were chosen over Fauci’s darker predictions. Trump didn’t want to hear bad news and Birx was there to give him what he needed.

She still is. Apparently, she remains the go-to for the White House communications team whenever they need some damage control. McEnany was asked the other day how she could claim that everything was well in hand when hospitalizations were going up rapidly. She replied, “I spoke with Dr. Birx this morning — about 10 to 40 percent in the hospitals reaching high capacity are COVID, so a lot of hospitalizations aren’t pertaining to COVID.” (The word on Sunday was that some hospitals in Florida’s Miami-Dade County had run out of available ICU beds. That was not the result of elective surgeries. )

Fauci describes Birx, whom he considers a friend for decades, as more political than him, a “different species.” Indeed she is. In fact she often sounds like Kellyanne Conway or McEnany:

"[Trump is] so attentive to the scientific literature & the details & the data. I think his ability to analyze & integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit” — this is shocking, hackish stuff from Dr. Birx. pic.twitter.com/c2phsRYaJs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 27, 2020

When Birx first came on the scene at the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote about the fact that she was part of a Christian right public health subculture (yes, that actually exists) that surrounds Mike Pence’s office. I don’t think I expected that she’d be willing to sacrifice her reputation as a serious infectious disease expert for the thrill of being on Trump’s “team.” Apparently she has.

Whether Birx’s upbeat scenarios were passed on to the president and his enablers because she truly believed them or because she wanted to be a team player is an interesting question. It doesn’t much matter in reality, because the result has been a disaster. Like so many others who came into Trump’s orbit, she threw her respectable career on the fire to please a president who so far over his head that he’s pretty much buried himself and taken her down with him. Tragically, they’ve both overseen policies that have buried more than 140,000 Americans in the last five months as well.

My Salon column republished with permission.

Seriously:

"We won two world wars. Beautiful world wars. That were vicious and horrible. And we won them out of Fort Bragg, we won them out of all of these forts, and now they want to throw those names away" — Trump pic.twitter.com/ICGy2GTnXn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 19, 2020

They were vicious, horrible, beautiful World Wars that were won because of some forts that were named after obscure, losing Confederate Generals. Sure, that makes sense. He’s fine.

Remember when John Bolton dropped this little tidbit in his book?

On the evening of Nov. 19, 2018, The Washington Post reported that senior presidential adviser Ivanka Trump had sent hundreds of emails to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules.

The next morning, the White House issued a startling defense of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the killing and dismemberment, by bone saw, of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The statement, which included eight exclamation marks, began: “America First! The world is a very dangerous place!” It attacked Khashoggi by repeating the baseless allegations from the regime in Riyadh that the journalist was an “enemy of the state” and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

The Post reported earlier that week that the CIA had concluded, with a high confidence, that the prince personally ordered the assassination of Khashoggi. In his statement, Trump said, “[W]e may never know” if Mohammed was involved. But, “in any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They have been a great ally … The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia.” 

Bolton reveals in his new book, whose publication Trump is trying to block, that the main goal of the president’s missive was to take away attention from the story about his daughter’s emails. After all, Trump had not just spent years attacking Hillary Clinton for using a private email server while she was secretary of state but had also said his 2016 rival should go to prison for doing so. As president, he had egged on chants of “lock her up” at his rallies.

“This will divert from Ivanka,” Trump said, according to Bolton’s book, as he drafted his defense of the Saudis. “If I read the statement in person, that will take over the Ivanka thing.”

I’ve never been one to adhere to the “distraction theory” of Trump behavior. I think he mostly just acts on impulse. But if Bolton is correct, there are occasions where he uses distraction techniques and if the Khashoggi incident is any example, he’ll easily go to extremes in order to get the necessary bang for his buck.

Sooo, I’m thinking it may make sense that this is another one of those distractions:

"We're going to have more federal law enforcement … in Portland, they've done a fantastic job … no problem. They grab 'em, a lot of people in jail … these are people that hate our country" — Trump pic.twitter.com/giDdhP7GdY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 20, 2020

The fact that it is a distraction doesn’t mean it isn’t real, of course. It’s very real. But his motivation is transparent.

I think what disturbs me even more than Trump is the eager participation of DHS and its unconfirmed, half-wit of an “acting-director.” It’s one thing to “follow orders” but this fellow is downright excited about it.

"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.” — acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf pic.twitter.com/Rr2P8q6Ut1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 20, 2020

Going back more than 17 years when I started writing this blog and they were creating the dystopian-sounding “Department of Homeland Security” I said “if you build it they will use it” meaning that it would eventually devolve into a Stasi-like agency of police repression. They’ve done that at the border already, we know that. Now they’re expanding it to America’s cities to quell dissent. Of course they are.

The next few months are going to be very dangerous and I’m not just talking about the pandemic.

That’s from a George W. Bush joke back in 2002:

“If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier… as long as I’m the dictator. Hehehe.”

It appears that Trump is making that joke into a reality. And look at who’s behind it:

President Trump and top White House officials are privately considering a controversial strategy to act without legal authority to enact new federal policies — starting with immigration, administration officials tell Axios.

The White House thinking is being heavily influenced by John Yoo, the lawyer who wrote the Bush administration’s justification for waterboarding after 9/11.

Yoo detailed the theory in a National Review article, spotted atop Trump’s desk in the Oval Office, which argues that the Supreme Court’s 5-4 DACA ruling last month “makes it easy for presidents to violate the law.”

• The president has brought up the article with key advisers, two Trump administration officials tell Axios.

Yoo writes that the ruling, and actions by President Obama, pave the way for Trump to implement policies that Congress won’t.

• Some could remain in force for years even if he loses re-election.
• Yoo — who next week will be out with a new book, “Defender in Chief,” on Trump’s use of presidential power — tells Axios that he has met virtually with White House officials about the implications of the ruling.

The first test could come imminently. Trump has said he is about to unveil a “very major” immigration policy via executive order, which he says the Supreme Court gave him the power to do.

• The order could include some protections for immigrants who traveled to the U.S. illegally as children, something most Americans support.
• That could be a political olive branch to Latino voters, though the Trump administration moved to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which led to the Supreme Court’s involvement.
• The order could also include significant new restrictions on immigration that couldn’t get through Congress but are favored by the president, Jared Kushner and hardline adviser Stephen Miller.

Yoo told Axios that Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion “sets out a roadmap about how a president can use his prosecutorial discretion to under-enforce the law.”

• The recourse would be if the next president tries to reverse what’s set in motion.
• “Suppose President Donald Trump decided to create a nationwide right to carry guns openly,” Yoo writes in his National Review op-ed. “He could declare that he would not enforce federal firearms laws, and that a new ‘Trump permit’ would free any holder of state and local gun-control restrictions.”
• “Even if Trump knew that his scheme lacked legal authority, he could get away with it for the length of his presidency. And, moreover, even if courts declared the permit illegal, his successor would have to keep enforcing the program for another year or two.”

This is a somewhat strained reading of both procedural history and the law, according to Axios’ Sam Baker. The Supreme Court has never ruled either way on DACA’s legality.

• But the Supreme Court wouldn’t be able to decide the merits of anything Trump does before the election.
• Two administration officials told Axios that although the president has shown an interest in Yoo’s thinking, the White House wouldn’t rely solely on that.
• “You have to act in good faith, and think that what you’re doing is good and legal,” one official said.
• “It’s very much in dispute as to whether or not the president has that much control over immigration through executive order,” a second official said.

Trump told Chris Wallace in an interview for “Fox News Sunday” that in addition to replacing DACA with “something much better,” he’s also going to be unveiling a health care plan within two weeks “that the Supreme Court decision on DACA gave me the right to do.”

I wondered what he was talking about when he said this the other day :

So we have many exciting things that we’ll be announcing over the next eight weeks, I would say. Things that nobody has even contemplated, thought about, thought possible, and things that we’re going to get done and we have gotten done — and we’ve started in most cases.

But it’s going to be a very exciting eight weeks, a eight weeks, like I prob- — I think, Mike, we can honestly say nobody has ever going to see eight weeks like we’re going to have. Because we really have — we have — we’re taking on immigration, taking on education, we’re taking on so many aspects of things that people were hopelessly tied up in knots in Congress. They can’t — they’ve been working on some of these things for 25, 30 years. It wasn’t happening.

But you’ll see levels of detail, and you’ll see levels of thought that a lot of people believed very strongly we didn’t have in this country. We’re going to get things done. We’re going to get things done that they’ve wanted to see done for a long, long time.

So I think we’ll start sometime on Tuesday. We’ll be discussing our one plan on suburbia, but that’s one of many, many different plans. Then we’re going into the immigration — the world of immigration, the world of education. We’re going into the world of healthcare — very complete healthcare.

Good old John Yoo. Always there to make everything worse.

And he’s yet another example of someone who suffered no repercussions for his legal opinion that torture is legal. Now here he is again, working hard to help Republicans complete their destruction of this country.