Biden’s speech was necessary andgood:
Meanwhile:
Trump is going to Kenosha tomorrow even though every official and in the state andcity are begging him not to do it.
He’s going to descend on the town like conquering hero, and e’s expecting a raucous MAGA crowd on the streets of Kenosha and personal greetings from the boys in blue.
He will have nothing to say about the very different treatment of these two people:
We are weeks away from hitting that milestone of COVID deaths. And there is simply no doubt that they have made everything much worse:
Senior Trump administration officials in June privately warned seven states about dangerous coronavirus outbreaks that put them in the highest risk “red zone” while publicly dismissing concerns about a second wave of Covid-19, according to White House documents House Democrats released on Monday.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released eight weeks of previously confidential reports obtained from the White House coronavirus task force that Democrats said showed the administration acting over the summer to willfully cover up public health risks for political gain.
“Rather than being straight with the American people and creating a national plan to fix the problem, the president and his enablers kept these alarming reports private,” Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), the subcommittee’s chair, said in a statement. “As a result of the president’s failures, more than 58,000 additional Americans have died since the Task Force first started issuing private warnings, and many of the Task Force’s recommendations still have not been implemented.”
White House spokesperson Judd Deere accused the lawmakers of “irresponsibly” releasing the documents “for the purpose of falsely distorting the President’s record.”
White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah said the administration began a public health messaging campaign in July to states with large outbreaks “to warn the public to follow mitigation practices to bring down the number of cases.”
“The notion that we are trying to hide information from the public is absurd,” she said.
The documents released by the committee also reveal that several states have failed to implement public health recommendations the task force made more than two months ago — including mask mandates, closing bars and banning large gatherings — and that the administration has made little effort to enforce its guidance or make the same recommendations publicly.
The highlights:
Nothing but lies and propaganda. And hundreds of thousands got sick and died.
The March on Washington people required masks, urged people to socially distance, took temperatures and observed the guidelines to the greatest extent possible. So the Trump people pointing to the protest as their excuse is just fatuous nonsense.
These people are trying to kill us in order to show their fealty to Donald Trump. Hell, they’re willing to kill themselves.
Military Times Polls, surveying active-duty troops in partnership with the Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University, have seen a steady drop in troops’ opinion of the commander in chief since his election four years ago.
In the latest results — based on 1,018 active-duty troops surveyed in late July and early August — nearly half of respondents (49.9 percent) had an unfavorable view of the president, compared to about 38 percent who had a favorable view. Questions in the poll had a margin of error of up to 2 percent.
Maybe sucking up to President Putin and refusing to condemn the bounties on American troops wasn’t such a good move. But really, this has been happening for a long time. Maybe troops just don’t feel that having a lunatic ignoramus for a Commander-In -Chief is a smart defense strategy.
Trump loves that musical. He’s seen it many times and talks about it all the time. It appears to be one of his greatest political influences. Not that he knows anything about the real story. It’s just the musical, nothing else. It’s probably why he wanted that opera singer on the balcony too…
Daily Beast reports:
On Monday night, former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, a top fundraiser for the Trump reelection effort and girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., delivered a booming, scenery-chewing speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention that immediately went viral.
It concluded, her arms outstretched, with Guilfoyle’s bellowed vow, “The. Best. Is. Yet. To. Come!”
CNN personalities were flabbergasted by it, with correspondent Dana Bash remarking, “Oh, my goodness. I just feel like that was so intense, and so dark.” Late Show host Stephen Colbert mocked the pretaped address as a series of “very nuanced screams.”
Her critics found the speech to be over-the-top and “strange.” The leader of the free world vehemently disagreed.
Minutes after her speech aired on Monday evening, President Donald Trump called Guilfoyle, to effusively praise her for the address he’d just watch on TV, comparing her to Eva “Evita” Perón, according to two people familiar with the phone conversation.
Perón, a former first lady of Argentina, is also the subject of the famous Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita, of which Trump has long been a huge fan and has seen multiple times on stage.
“That was fantastic…so amazing,” Trump said on the Monday night call. “So much energy…so much passion.” According to these sources, the president added that “nobody could have done that but you,” calling her “my Kimberly.” He told her that hers was one of the “greatest” speeches he’d ever seen.
Guilfoyle’s Monday night speech stuck with the president throughout the week. He continued to privately rave about it days after its initial airing, going around telling various people in the West Wing how “terrific” it was and that it was one of his favorites from the convention.
“You are capable! You are qualified! You are powerful and you have the ability to choose your life and determine your destiny!” Guilfoyle delivered thunderously on Monday. “Don’t let the Democrats take you for granted. Don’t let them step on you. Don’t let them destroy your families, your lives, and your future. Don’t let them kill future generations because they told you and brainwashed you and fed you lies that you weren’t good enough!”
One senior Trump administration official said that the president joked last week that it was “better than Don’s,” referring to the convention speech delivered by his eldest son.
Poor Junior. Daddy likes his girlfriend better.
President Trump was having a normal one on Sunday morning, tweeting and retweeting 89 times over the course of three and a half hours. Many of them were tweets of polling numbers from obscure firms showing him in the lead after the Republican convention. But most of the tweets and retweets were incitement to violence among his true believers and complaints about “Democrat cities,” an ongoing mantra which he seems to think is a slam dunk to get him re-elected.
He repeatedly insulted and mocked Joe Biden, of course, and Portland, Oregon Mayor Ted Wheeler will undoubtedly have to change his phone number after the president of the United States posted it on Twitter so his followers could call and demand his resignation.
He also showed support for one of his fans in Wisconsin:
It was a manic tweet spree and one that couldn’t have show the president’s state of mind any more clearly. Biden has said Trump is “rooting for violence,” and I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue with that.
In fact, Trump’s surrogates are saying it right out loud. Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked Trump campaign adviser Lara Trump whether she agreed with White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s assertion that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.” Lara answered, “Well, I think it paints a very clear picture.” She might as well have said, “You go, boys!”
On CNN on Sunday, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., agreed with Trump that the shootings by a 17-year-old Trump fan last Tuesday night in Kenosha were understandable:
What the president did was he offered to surge manpower and resources so the violence could end. The governor did not accept that that day, that night tragically two people lost their lives because citizens took matters into their own hands. I’m not for vigilantism. I’m not sure that’s what was happening. People felt, because the governor — local officials were looking for help. The governor did not accept the help, and so there was not the resolve to end the rioting, and so people took matters into their own hands, and that’s what ended up happening. People die.
Johnson is confused about everything, as usual. Trump publicly berated Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers for failing to call in the National Guard hours after Evers had already done so, telling his followers that Evers wasn’t protecting the city. Johnson basically said that people felt they needed to take matters into their own hands because the president had lied to them and told them the governor wasn’t protecting them. Yet somehow he’s against vigilantism. Everything about that is a grotesque inversion of anything one could call “law and order.”
Trump was at it again later on Sunday, tweeting in response to a press conference by Wheeler, the Portland mayor. Trump called him a “dummy” and ranted on, saying, “He would like to blame me and the federal government for going in, but he hasn’t seen anything yet. We have only been there with a small group to defend our U.S. courthouse, because he couldn’t do it.”
Conway’s little gaffe in which she admitted that the White House and the Trump campaign believe street violence is good for them illuminates the president’s fanning of the flames. He has finally grasped that he cannot unilaterally sending in a bunch of federal cops, as he did in Washington to stage his photo-op last June. Instead, he’s not-very-subtly signaling to his gun-toting fans that they are going to have to take action on their own if they hope to scare people into voting for him. Leave the propaganda to him, just ramp up the chaos.
He tweeted that MAGA “protesters” who came to Portland in a caravan on Saturday night were “Great Patriots!” and later explained why their behavior was understandable:’
The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein wondered on Twitter whether “suburban voters look at these pictures and say, ‘yes, where I belong is in the same political coalition as men who crowd into pickup trucks w/guns, as in Bosnia 1998 or a Third World dictatorship?'” (Those huge flags flying behind them reminded me of men crowded “into pickup trucks w/guns,” as in news photographs of ISIS fighters.)
It’s a jarringly familiar sight, but it doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen in America before.
There was an actual shooting that night and someone died. It’s unclear what exactly happened. But it is very clear that this kind of confrontation is something that Trump and his henchmen are actively stoking for political gain..
As I wrote on Friday, this is hardly the first time Trump has deployed crude, racist fear-mongering. He’s been doing it for years, going all the way back to the full-page Central Park Five ad. If it isn’t marauding gangs of Black teenagers, it’s Muslim terrorists or Mexican rapists or left-wing anarchists. There’s always some bogeyman coming to get you.
The only thing he knows how to do is point a finger at “the other” and then promise people that he’s the only one who can save them. He feels confident that he’s got the troops to back him up, one way or the other. He gave an interview with Breitbart back in 2019 in which he made this explicit:
You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.
Yes, it would be very bad. The question is whether or not anyone will believe that Donald Trump is the man who can save America from all this mayhem he is creating. After all, he’s been promising to do that ever since he came down that elevator. Here he is at the 2016 Republican convention:
I guess that’s yet another promise he’ll fulfill after he makes America Great Again — Again.
One unverified accounting of some of the acting president’s biggest failures puts the average time to failure at 4.6 years. But that is skewed a bit by outliers. The median is 4 years. Donald Trump has had some spectacular failures in his career. But no big problem, he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in 2011: “I’ve used the laws of this country to pare debt. … We’ll have the company. We’ll throw it into a chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal. You know, it’s like on ‘The Apprentice.’ It’s not personal. It’s just business.”
Trump fails, someone else eats the losses.
As we come up on the four-year anniversary of the Trump Organization’s acquisition of the White House, he seems on track to drive the business of state into the ground on a familiar schedule.
Jennifer Rubin had a busy Sunday, publishing two columns at the Washington Post critical of the acting president’s mismanagement. The RNC convention last week worked at stoking the fears of white Americans across the country as Trump has his entire presidency. When all else fails, he plays that eponymous card he always plays.
Rubin writes:
He vowed to keep suburbs (read: White suburbs) safe from integrated housing (read: Black people). He encouraged police not to be “too nice” in handling suspects. He denies systemic racism and instead paints all protesters as anarchists, socialists and violent extremists. He has refused to condemn police officers who kill unarmed Black men and women or White armed groups engaged in violence. He invited to the Republican National Convention a couple charged with a felony for brandishing weapons at Black Lives Matter marchers. President Trump’s senior adviser Kellyanne Conway confesses the more violence in the streets, the better for him.
White supremacists reveling in the violence they themselves stoke has a name — accelerationism — she writes, quoting a Brookings Institution report:
Some white supremacists already see the riots and broader polarization as vindication of this idea, and law enforcement and civil society activists concerned about the growth of extremism should watch to see if this idea takes further hold within white supremacist groups and organizations in the coming weeks and months.
Accelerationism is the idea that white supremacists should try to increase civil disorder — accelerate it — in order to foster polarization that will tear apart the current political order. The System (usually capitalized), they believe, has only a finite number of collaborators and lackeys to prop it up. Accelerationists hope to set off a series of chain reactions, with violence fomenting violence, and in the ensuing cycle more and more people join the fray. When confronted with extremes, so the theory goes, those in the middle will be forced off the fence and go to the side of the white supremacists.
The acting president has white supremacist leanings, but we know by now his only real interest is himself. With over 200,000 projected deaths by Election Day from his failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and with unemployment at Great Depression levels, Trump has all the more incentive for concealing his own failure by setting fire to the business to hide the bodies and collect the insurance money. It’s his M.O.
With his frenzied blast of 89 tweet Sunday morning, Trump is flinging gasoline on a situation already smoldering from protest-adjacent killings in Kenosha, Wisc. and Portland, Ore, over the last week.
Rubin continues:
A few Democrats have figured out what is going on. Appearing on CNN, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) observed, “They believe the violence is helpful to them. And the president is only motivated by one thing: ‘What is in it for him?’ He sees this violence — and his ability to agitate more of it — as useful to his campaign.” He added, “What it does to the country, the loss of life, he doesn’t care.”
Biden is now planning to travel on Monday (not clear where he will go) to — again — denounce the violence. But he should also go on offense. Trump incites violence. Trump encourages vigilantism. Trump refuses to acknowledge that slogans such as Blue Lives Matter can encourage vigilantes. (The White suspect who allegedly killed two people in Kenosha, Wis., apparently attended a Trump rally and brandished the Blue Lives Matter slogan.) Biden should demand Trump denounce shootings of unarmed Black men, stop Republican obstruction to police reform, cease veneration of symbols of white supremacy such as the Confederate flag and decry White armed groups.
Rubin’s earlier post called out the absurdity of believing the fading reality show performer will preserve order at a time twice as many Americans who died on September 11 are dying each week:
No wonder Trump loves to highlight any domestic scene of disorder, mayhem and looting he can to frighten White Americans, arguing that if law enforcement “dominates the streets,” we will have public order. This is preposterous. We cannot go to war with millions of demonstrators. That’s simply impossible, not to mention morally objectionable. The demands of the protesters, among them police reform and voting rights legislation are entirely legitimate. But so long as Trump denies the legitimacy of these concerns and the presence of systemic racism, we will not have domestic tranquility.
Other Americans’ concerns are not his. Making things worse is the hostility of red America to losing control of “their” country. One Portland resident explained an alleged tacit alliance between Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys, etc., and local law enforcement. The viral thread is captured by Thread Reader:
Speaking of white rage, here is an example from Alaska over the weekend:
I wish I had something more positive to offer, but these types are seriously threatened. Many are armed. And as Kellyanne Conway said, “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.” They’re looking for a war, and Trump has made his living off giving the marks what they want.
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We still don’t know the answer to that. But we do know that inside the administration there was serious consternation about him. Not that it mattered:
On Feb. 23, 2018, White House counsel Don McGahn sent a two-page memo to Chief of Staff John Kelly arguing that Jared Kushner’s security clearance needed to be downgraded, the New York Times’ Michael Schmidt reports in his forthcoming book, “Donald Trump v. The United States.”
Schmidt reports directly from the confidential McGahn memo for the first time, describing how Kelly had serious concerns about granting Kushner a top-secret clearance in response to a briefing he had received related to the routine FBI investigation into Kushner’s background.
“The information you were briefed on one week ago and subsequently relayed to me, raises serious additional concerns about whether this individual ought to retain a top security clearance until such issues can be investigated and resolved,” McGahn wrote in the memo to Kelly.
The details of the highly sensitive intelligence that raised alarms with Kelly are not revealed in the McGahn memo or in Schmidt’s book. McGahn wrote that he had been unable to receive the briefing or “access this highly compartmented information directly” about Kushner, Schmidt reports.
“Interim secret is the highest clearance that I can concur until further information is received,” McGahn concluded, referring to the level of classified information Kushner would be able to access.
By reducing Kushner’s clearance from top secret to secret, McGahn and Kelly had restricted Kushner’s access to the PDB, the closely held rundown provided by the intelligence community six days a week for the president and his top aides, and other highly sensitive intelligence that exposed sources and methods.”
“McGahn did note that there was a possibility that when the background check was complete, it could be resolved in Kushner’s favor, or there could be a recommendation that he not receive a clearance,” Schmidt writes. “McGahn conceded [in the memo] that Trump could if he chose simply disregard any security concerns and circumvent any standard procedures and grant Kushner the security clearance himself.”
Trump ultimately intervened to ensure Kushner got his top-secret security clearance. Just one more example of this reckless, lawless presidency.
This is the Lincoln Project. They aren’t preaching to our choir. They’re preaching to their own. I don’t know how many there are who can hear this, but those who cannot are simply heartless, soulless people. We’re about to find out how many of them there are.
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