Unpresidented sabotage

(That’s ˈsabəˌtäZH for Donald Trump and Dinesh D’Souza.)

Donald Trump’s psychologist niece, Mary Trump, relates in her book a conversation with her aunt, Maryanne Trump Berry, the now-president’s sister.

“Does anybody even believe the bullshit that he’s a self-made man?” Mary Trump asks. “What has he even accomplished on his own?”

“Well,” Maryanne said, as dry as the Sahara, “he has had five bankruptcies.”

If you are still hunkered down at home sheltering against a pandemic scourge and watching savings wither, if you worry about eviction or if your children can return to school without bringing home a deadly pathogen, you know this firsthand: one thing the acting president is good at is running things into the ground. Public health officials are alarmed. The coronavirus now largely under control in other developed countries is still spreading here. It has killed 160,000 Americans so far. It is killing 1,200 per day. Maybe 300,000 casualties by December 1, per one influential model.

And that is just Trump being incompetent. Lately, he is going out of his way not only to secure himself a second term and avoid prosecution under a Joe Biden Department of Justice. Through deliberate sabotage he hopes to preserve for the near future control of the government by a white, Republican minority.

U.S. Post Office

Trump’s and his party’s animosity towards USPS was already legend before 2020 rolled around. With a deadly virus driving voters to vote by mail, Trump, as we have discussed, is actively trying to sabotage the mail service.

Slate’s Jordan Weissman writes that the slowdown in mail service engineered by the current postmaster general has become a major issue in the next coronavirus relief bill:

On Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told told White House negotiators that the next coronavirus relief bill would have to include more funding for the financially battered agency and scrap rules that have created massive delivery delays, which many worry could disrupt voting by mail this year by preventing Americans from getting their ballots in on time. The pair also met with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, the Trump donor and former logistics executive who, shortly after being appointed this year, imposed a series of cost-cutting measures that have slowed service to a crawl.

Afterward, Schumer called the conversation “heated” and told reporters that the party would continue pressing the issue. “We will advocate strongly for money so that they can hire all the people necessary, both overtime and new people, to make sure that every single ballot is counted,” he said. “That is a sine qua non for us.”

Even if Pelosi and Schumer succeed in getting the funding they want, they will need to be sure to cut off avenues for Trump and his lackeys to avoid actually spending it or running out the clock on doing so.

U.S. Census

Trump tried and failed in court to include a citizenship question on this year’s census forms, something critics argued was designed to produce an undercount of non-white residents. He issued a memorandum in July intended to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the census count for the purpose of drawing congressional districts. Common Cause and other advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit to stop him in court.

This week, the administration announced amidst the pandemic it would cut short field operations for the 2020 census by a month. Data collection will end September 30. Vox’s Nicole Narea writes:

It’s likely Monday’s decision will mean that hard-to-count populations, which include renters, low-income people, and children under the age of 5, could be undercounted, eroding their political power and undercutting their federal funding over the next decade:

Jamelle Bouie recounts how slaveholders influenced the apportionment of representatives in the new republic and states the obvious about Trump’s census gambits:

The goal is to freeze political representation in place as much as possible; to keep demographic change — the growing share of Americans who are Black, Hispanic and Asian-American — from swamping the Republican Party’s ability to win national elections with a white, heavily rural minority.

Immigration trap

Catherine Rampell points to new under Trump to sabotage admission of new immigrants. It set booby traps for applicants:

Last fall, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services introduced perhaps its most arbitrary, absurd modification yet to the immigration system: It began rejecting applications unless every single field was filled in, even those that obviously did not pertain to the applicant.

“Middle name” field left blank because the applicant does not have a middle name? Sorry, your application gets rejected. No apartment number because you live in a house? You’re rejected, too.

No address given for your parents because they’re dead? No siblings named because you’re an only child? No work history dates because you’re an 8-year-old kid?

All real cases, all rejected.

Who needs a steel border wall when you can erect one from paperwork and red tape? Rampell asks. There are as many ways to keep out undesirable Others as there are to keep undesirables from voting.

TikTok and WeChat

Not only does the sabatour-in-chief target people and public services he does not like, but private Internet platforms. Josephine Wolff writes at the New York Times that Trump’s actions to silence platforms known for mocking him are right out of China’s playbook:

The one thing my students all invariably know about China is that you can’t use Facebook there, or YouTube or Google. For at least a decade, China has maintained strict control over the internet and aggressively blocked foreign tech platforms within its borders.

So when President Trump issued two executive orders Thursday night that all but ban two Chinese social media networks — the video app TikTok and the messaging app WeChat — from operating in the United States, citing national security concerns, the decision seemed straight out of China’s own playbook.

[…]

But make no mistake: the president’s executive orders are not about cybersecurity — they are a retaliatory jab in the ongoing tensions between China and the United States. In fact, the ban’s greatest impact will probably not be on the bottom lines of TikTok and WeChat’s parent companies, but instead on promoting a fundamentally Chinese view of internet security.

What else might Trump sabotage with another four years to wreak havoc, or even in the few months left after a humiliating loss in November?

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