In case you were wondering how the Republicans are handling the ongoing disaster of the Trump COVID response, here’s an illuminating illustration:
Huh? Rubio should stick to drinking water and lay off the jokes. They never land.
While GOP Senators are making obscure jokes about football, here are the latest stats on America’s response compared to the rest of the world. It is a disgrace:
Over the past several weeks, the coronavirus has killed Americans at six times the average rate in other rich countries. And we’re recording about eight times more infections.
The virus burned through the rich world like wildfire in the spring, but this new data confirms that the U.S. is one of very few wealthy countries that have failed to suppress it since then.
The World Bank’s list of “high-income economies” includes 83 countries and territories, ranging from Austria to Bermuda to Chile. Their populations add up to 907 million — 2.7 times America’s.
As of July 1, they’d collectively recorded virtually the same number of cases as the U.S., and 1.6 times as many deaths.
Since then, however, 69% of all new cases and 75% of all deaths recorded anywhere in the rich world came in the U.S., which accounts for 27% of the group’s population.
The U.S. is conducting more testing than many other countries. But that’s only a small part of the story.
Other rich countries saw pandemic peaks that were just as terrifying as America’s. But while they climbed down afterwards, the U.S. remained trapped near the summit.
Italy, for example, had recorded 34,767 deaths as of July 1 but has seen just 458 since.
The story is similar in other European countries that had devastating first waves. Despite occasional flare-ups, the current numbers hardly register compared to those we saw in the spring.
That’s also true of some parts of the U.S., like New York, but certainly not of the country as a whole.
A few high-income countries in Latin America and the Middle East — Chile, Panama, Israel, Oman — have actually seen sharper increases in cases and deaths than the U.S. this summer.
Others that managed to avoid large initial outbreaks, like Australia or Hong Kong, have seen their caseloads multiply far more quickly than America’s — but from low starting points.
Even some countries that have seen dramatic improvements since the spring, like Spain, are now responding to worrying hotspots.
America remains an exception in that it was hit so hard so early, and has never truly recovered.
Daily case counts in U.S. have declined recently, but are still the second-highest in the world, behind India. Of the 10 countries currently recording the highest daily caseloads, the U.S. is the only high-income country.
I just want to reiterate this one point:
69% of all new cases and 75% of all deaths recorded anywhere in the rich world came in the U.S., which accounts for 27% of the group’s population.
It is a bloodbath.
These Republicans are drenched in it. And they think they should re-elect the barbarian and his idiot minions who are responsible for it for another four years.
I realize that Kanye West is to to many people of his generation what The Beatles were to mine. His revolutionary genre-busting music has arguably changed the face of hip-hop in the same way The Beatles changed the face of rock. And his influence on modern popular culture is profound.
Like the rest of their generation, the Beatles were political, although their general message was mostly anti-war and the anodyne “all you need is love” rather than explicit endorsement of particular issues. Kanye, on the other hand, wants to be president of the United States.
But as much as West’s contribution to music and popular culture are legitimately great, his politics and political style are depressingly akin to Donald Trump. He also has mental health issues and an extremely limited understanding of history and politics and virtually everything else. And like his fellow rich narcissist he doesn’t seem to know that and believes his “gut” and “talent” to be so superior that he needs nothing else.
Unlike Trump, Kanye is truly successful on his own merit, something that Trump, the heir to a fortune, cannot say. And there isn’t any evidence that West is a fraud and a conman. But they are more alike than different: famous, arrogant, wealthy, spoiled, childlike, mentally unstable, grandiose and megalomaniacal. I hope we’ve learned that this is a very scary combination in someone with political ambitions, a vast amount of money and a large fan base.
Before Trump, I might have said that Kanye West as president was a joke. But I said the same thing about Trump, so …
Anyway, he’s “running” this time, probably in the midst of a manic episode and manipulated by Trump people who think he will siphon off younger voters in the Black community the way Jill Stein siphoned off younger voters in the white community in places where it ended up making the difference between winning and losing. I think that’s kind of silly but they are stupid and desperate so they’re doing anything and everything to shake up the election.
There are people who think Kanye actually siphons off votes from Trump and for good reason. For one thing, Kanye appeals to young white people too. And there are plenty of young white potential Trump voters who would like what they hear from Kanye. He’s not a liberal. He’s like Trump, an amalgam of philosophies that doesn’t have any intellectual consistency but appeals in a sort of contrarian non-political, “pox on both their houses” Chinese menu sort of way.
Frankly, I don’t think he’ll have much effect at all, but you never know. What I do wonder is if he might emerge as something more formidable in a few years. American political culture is very confused. Anything can happen.
Anyway, this article in the Atlantic about Kanye’s campaign is quite interesting if you’re of a mind to look into this:
[W]hatever West’s emotional or mental status is from moment to moment, his campaign must, on some level, be thought of as real. He’s been talking about running in 2020 since 2015. Even despite a rash of missed deadlines and accusations of forged signatures, canvassing efforts have resulted in him getting onto the ballot in at least four states thus far, with more potentially to come. He’s currently polling at 2 percent nationally, and although he may have little chance of victory, he could have an impact on which major-party candidate is elected in November, given how slim the margins can be in crucial swing states. The vote differential between Trump and Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin in 2016, for example, was slightly smaller than the number of write-in ballots cast there, and much smaller than the total number of votes for third-party candidates.
Indeed, West’s constituency so far appears to largely consist of people rooting for him to cause chaos in November. Jared Kushner met with West in private last weekend, and veteran GOP operatives have been helping him organize and petition. The Billings Gazette reported that one of West’s signature gatherers was yelling out to passersby in Montana, “You want to help Trump? … We’re trying to take votes away from creepy Uncle Joe.” The assumption that West will help Trump appears to rest on the idea that Black people will vote for a Black celebrity with his own take on Black political advancement, but thus far West is polling at only 2 percent among Black voters. One survey suggests that Trump, more than Biden, stands to lose votes with West in the race.
The question of which candidate a West run “hurts” is in fact at the core of West’s bid—not because of the electoral math, but because of West’s stated ideology. If he has had a consistent message in the past four years, it’s that Black people should not vote for Democrats in the overwhelming numbers that they have historically. The party of Biden and Barack Obama, he’s said over and over, has a “plantation” mentality and hasn’t delivered on promises of racial justice. Yet to assume that Black people will flock to West is to assume that Black people are as unthinking as West claims Black Democrats to be. In 2018, he said that 400 years of slavery sounded like a “choice.” At his South Carolina rally last month, he yelled that Harriet Tubman did not actually free slaves so much as hand them off to different white masters. Such comments have received fierce condemnation as ahistorical and offensive. They demonstrate a fundamentally conservative outlook that implies defeating racism is a matter of individual mindset.
In fact, a quick scan of West’s campaign site gives a rather Republican impression. His 10-point policy agenda is listed under the headline “Creating a Culture of Life,” and it features a Bible verse for each item. The No. 1 priority is restoring school prayer, and other ideas include supporting faith-based groups, a strong national defense, and “America First” diplomacy. Also mentioned, however, are seemingly progressive goals: equitable policing, funding the arts, protecting the environment. To put much stock into any of these thinly sketched bullet points would be naive, especially given that West recently told Forbes he’s ignorant on issues such as taxes and foreign policy. But the list does feel in line with his creative sensibility and teacherly aspirations over the years. He wants to “break the simulation” and help the people see the world anew. Or maybe not anew, exactly. He wants to help people see the world the way Kanye sees it.
There is, of course, a group of people already accustomed to seeing the world how Kanye sees it—his fans. But even with them, it’s not clear how much political clout he has. When West put on a make america great again hat in 2018, it was natural to wonder what would happen to his supporters, many of whom are young, extremely online men, a demographic especially prone to right-wing radicalization. At one point, West shouted out the so-called “alt-right” pundit Candace Owens, a Black woman who argues that the Black Lives Matter movement is filled with “losers.” She then saw a sudden influx of followers on social media. As I wrote back then, “it’s not unreasonable to think that [West’s] tweet may well have a measurable effect on this country’s politics.”
If Trump can do it, I see no reason that Kanye West couldn’t become a real candidate in the future if he wants to. Obviously, there are no barriers to winning the White House if you’re rich and famous and believe you are a god.
If you’ve been watching the White Houe Trump rallies you may have wondered who those sycophants are who ask Trump all the softball questions. Robert Mackey of the Intercept reveals all:
IN AN APPARENT effort to make his daily news conferences even more like campaign events than they already are, the White House press office has been packing the briefing room with supporters of President Donald Trump from far-right media outlets who can be relied on to toss him softball questions and initiate attacks on his political rivals.
Clearly in on the plot, Trump solicited a question each day this week from one of the guests invited by his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to stand at the back of the room — where representatives of One America News, The Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit compromised the health of reporters by violating social distancing and mask-wearing guidelines.
Rion gave Trump the opportunity to unleash a familiar riff from his pre-pandemic rallies by suggesting to him that Biden might have been considering President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, Susan Rice, as his running mate because, “she can best cover up a lot of the Obamagate surveillance crimes that have taken place during your campaign.” Trump responded by accusing Obama and Biden of “probably treason.”
The next day, Rion triggered another familiar Trump diatribe by asking for his take on the resignation of Carmen Best, the first Black woman to lead Seattle’s police force, after the city council voted to cut her department’s budget. “What does this say about our country?” Rion asked Trump. “And what does this say about the Defund Police movement?” The president replied by repeating the lie that Seattle’s Democratic mayor had let “a radical left group, Antifa and others, take over a big portion of the city.”
On Wednesday, Rion drew Trump’s attention to what looked like a fairly lame conservative prank — the fact that the obscure website antifa.com was suddenly redirecting traffic to Biden’s campaign site. Suggesting that this stunt might somehow indicate support for Biden from the loose network of antifascist groups Trump has falsely portrayed as a shadow army, Rion asked if the president thought Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, should “publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?”
.@ChanelRion: Should Joe Biden, Kamala Harris publicly denounce Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?
“They should,” Trump replied. “I think they’re afraid to. In my book, it’s virtually a part of their campaign: Antifa.” There was nothing remotely surprising in Trump making the absurd argument that Biden, a centrist Democrat, is secretly part of an antifascist subculture, but Rion’s play-acting as a White House correspondent is not intended to elicit any new information from the president. The point of these exchanges is to shield Trump from actual questions about his failure to lead a coordinated federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic and to give him an opportunity to repeat lines he has already rehearsed, delivered as if they were answers to questions of vital importance.
Rion, who has been attending briefings as a guest of the White House press secretary since April, previously traveled to Ukraine with the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to promote false accusations about Biden spread by the pro-Russian lawmaker Andriy Derkach. An American intelligence assessment released last week concluded that Derkach was involved in a Russian plot to undermine Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party by “spreading claims about corruption — including through publicizing leaked phone calls” from 2016 between the former vice president and Ukraine’s president.
On Thursday, shortly after Trump praised the crackpot legal scholar who invented a racist conspiracy theory that Harris was not eligible to be vice president, even though she was born to immigrant parents in Oakland, he turned again to Rion. This time, however, she asked if he would, instead, take a question from Emel Akan of The Epoch Times, another of his press secretary’s guests from an equally rabid pro-Trump media outlet.
When Trump agreed, Akan asked him how the U.S. would respond to “the recent attack on press freedom in Hong Kong,” specifically the arrest of the publisher of the popular Apple Daily tabloid news site, Jimmy Lai, who has been an outspoken critic of the pro-Beijing leadership in the semiautonomous Chinese city. Lai could be charged with “collusion” with the United States for meeting Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington last summer to discuss Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protest movement.
Although Trump began by saying, “Well, I think it’s a terrible thing,” he appeared to have little familiarity or interest in the subject of press freedom, or democracy in Hong Kong, pivoting quickly into his stock complaints about China’s trade policies. He even seemed to gloat a bit when he said that, as a result of the U.S. withdrawing the “tremendous financial incentives” for businesses based in Hong Kong, American companies might profit from the crackdown on the territory.
“We’ve now withdrawn all of those incentives. It’s going to be very hard for Hong Kong to compete,” Trump said. “And I will tell you that the United States… will end up making a lot more money because of it, because we lost a lot of business to Hong Kong,” he added. “We made it very convenient for people to go there, for companies to go there. We’ve withdrawn all of that and the United States will be a big beneficiary from an economic standpoint.”
While Trump’s answer was not the kind of stirring endorsement of press freedom Akan might have expected from an American president, inciting an attack on China’s government was probably gratifying to the owners of The Epoch Times. The paper is owned by members of the dissident Chinese Falun Gong spiritual movement who have spent heavily to promote Trump as a useful battering ram against their ultimate enemy: the Chinese Communist Party that considers the banned sect a cult. An Epoch Times coronavirus explainer video echoes Trump’s rhetoric that China is to blame for the global pandemic, but urges people to call it not “the China Virus,” as Trump does, but the “CCP Virus.”
The White House press secretary’s invitation to the Epoch Times writer to participate in the briefing alongside reporters and photographers from some of America’s leading news organizations is remarkably brazen given that last year, when The Epoch Times was the largest buyer of pro-Trump ads on Facebook outside of the president’s own campaign, the site spent heavily to promote the baseless conspiracy theory that Biden had abused his power as vice president in 2016 to protect his son’s business interests in Ukraine.
Since then, the site has been banned from advertising on Facebook, after NBC reported that the newspaper had secretly placed Facebook ads promoting President Trump. Last week, Facebook also removed 303 fake accounts linked to The Epoch Times for spreading misinformation about Covid-19 and pro-Trump conspiracy theories about supposedly shadowy figures behind the ongoing racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Powe, who has claimed that the Clinton Foundation controls the FBI and is stifling investigations of child sex-trafficking rings and the murder of Seth Rich, asked Trump to comment on the accusation that Biden had claimed credit for the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
Powe’s question was based on a blog post by the founder of Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, which amplified an attack on Biden from the Kremlin-owned site Russia Today. Hoft’s post also quotes the analysis of Heshmat Alavi, a supporter of a militant Iranian cult called the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, who, as my colleague Murtaza Hussain revealed last year, is a fictional character.
McEnany did not respond to a question about whether she or someone else in her office invited Powe to the briefing on Friday, but Powe is a former blogger for WorldNetDaily, the far-right website that helped create the racist “birther” conspiracy theory to undermine President Barack Obama. Alyssa Farah, the White House director of strategic communications, is the daughter of Joseph Farah, who founded WorldNetDaily. In the 1990s, Joseph Farah was a leading proponent of the conspiracy theory that deputy White House counsel Vince Foster might have been murdered.
The presence of Rion, Akan and Powe also infuriated the White House Correspondents Association, whose members have agreed to send only 14 reporters a day during the pandemic, to maintain safe social distance. The WHCA also wants the aisles at the sides and the back of the room to be open for photographers and video crews to operate safely. “It is outrageous that the White House continues to invite ‘guests’ to press briefings, putting the health and safety of everyone in that workspace at greater risk,” the WHCA president, Zeke Miller, said in an email. “The WHCA’s social distancing guidelines were crafted in consultation with the White House based on the recommendations of the CDC and the nation’s leading public health professionals. Trampling on those guidelines endangers the critical work of reporters who have maintained independent press coverage of the presidency throughout the pandemic.”
Unlike the original, freewheeling coronavirus task force briefings — which came to a sudden halt in April when Trump mused that doctors should “check” to see if injecting patients suffering from Covid-19 with bleach or isopropyl alcohol, or exposing them to ultraviolet light, might cure them — the president’s current news conferences are much shorter and seem designed mainly to get his lengthy, written opening statements on the air and get him out of the briefing room after taking just a handful of questions.
Trump’s opening statements at the latest briefings are often nakedly political in nature, featuring crude, jarring attacks on Biden and other Democrats. “Today, we saw Joe Biden continue to politicize a pandemic and to show his appalling lack of respect for the American people. That’s what it is,” Trump said at the start of Thursday’s briefing. “At every turn, Biden has been wrong about the virus, ignoring the scientific evidence and putting left-wing politics before facts and evidence.”
After then blatantly lying about Biden’s suggested response to the pandemic in the most idiotic terms — “Sleepy Joe rejects the scientific approach in favor of locking all Americans in their basements for months on end” — Trump concluded, with a stunning lack of self-awareness: “To Joe, I would say: Stop playing politics with a virus. Too serious. Partisan politics has no place here. It’s a shameful situation for anybody to try and score political points while we’re working to save lives and defeat the pandemic.”
His readings are almost certainly written by a tag team of Stephen Miller and Kayleigh McEneny. You can tell by the extremely snotty tone and total disregard for the facts. But you have to admire the “I know you are but what am I” stylings of that comment coming from the guy who pimped hydroxychloroquine and tasked scientists to see if injecting disinfectant might clean the lungs.
Trump’s prepared remarks at these briefings almost always feature highly misleading health and economic statistics intended to convey the false impression that the federal government’s pandemic response is the envy of the world.
At Tuesday’s briefing, for example, Trump said in his opening statement: “Since the end of July, the seven-day average for cases in the United States has fallen by nearly 20 percent, but the virus continues to increase in nations across the globe. Last week, France and Germany both recorded their highest daily number of new cases in three months — not that I want to bring that up, but might as well explain it to the media.” While those statistical measures of the increase by percentage of new cases in Europe and decrease by percentage in the U.S. were accurate, what they hid was the fact that, in raw numbers, the pandemic is obviously far less under control here than there. The day Trump made those remarks, 53,315 new Covid-19 infections were confirmed by testing in the U.S. Germany’s highest number of daily infections in three months, recorded this week, was 1,445. Cases are down more in the U.S. but from a very high level to a slightly less high level. In much of Europe, cases are rising but from very low baseline. Adjusted for population, the U.S. recorded 154 new cases per million on Friday, while France had 41 and Germany 17.
I suspect it’s very hard for his to retain any attention from the public with his droning, wooden, halting recitations. But in any case, most people are not buying it:
While the pandemic is resurgent in many parts of the world, Trump has been unable so far to brow-beat the public into accepting his obviously false claims that things are better in the United States than in Europe or Asia. A new poll released by Monmouth University on Thursday showed that 52 percent of Americans “think the United States’ handling of the pandemic is worse than other countries,” while just 15 percent feel the U.S. is doing a better job than others and 29 percent say it is doing about the same.
I’m actually a little bit surprised that so many people think the US is doing about the same job on the pandemic as other countries. But then, that represents many Republicans which means that the “USA!USA!” crowd isn’t all that impressed.
Those of you who have been reading blogs awhile may recall the brouhaha over a guy named Jeff Gannon who was a Bush shil who wrote for some fringe outlet and was given press credentials. He had a sex scandal and was eventually fired and that was the end of that.
That was the beginning of this sort of degradation of the idea of an independent press corps querying the president. Trump has taken that to its logical end by simply going around the White House Press Association and inviting his blatant shills as “guests” and calling on them with obviously planted questions.
This is the new Republican Party. Since there is no accountability for doing anything they just do what they want. I doubt that going forward they will forget how easy this is.
Casanova Frankenstein:It’s so easy to get the best of people when they care about each other. Which is why evil will always have the edge. You good guys are always so bound by the rules (throws switch & electrocutes the Frat Boys). You see, I kill my own men. And lucky me…I get the girl. (Mystery Men, 1999.)
Donald “Little Donny” Trump, the would-be mob boss supposedly running the White House, told the New York Post on Thursday he would give his RNC acceptance speech from the White House lawn.
“We’d do it possibly outside on one of the lawns, we have various lawns,” the acting president said. “It’s very big, a very big lawn.” A big, beautiful, taxpayer-owned lawn. The President and Vice President exempted, “federal civilian executive branch employees” are prohibited from engaging in political advocacy on the taxpayers’ dime or using taxpayer resources. Likely, it will take a lot of them to stage Trump’s White House beauty pageant.
Which begs the question: How many of Trump’s staff are so corrupt that they will knowingly violate the Hatch Act — even knowing they will likely never be held to account for it?
A Twitter user responded, “An Act can only be as strong as the people that ENFORCE the Act.”
Not so. Honest citizens obey a host of laws despite the low chance of punishment for violations. They don’t cheat on their taxes, don’t litter, obey stop signs at 3 a.m., and don’t impersonate dead people at the polls. They behave ethically not because they fear punishment but from respect for the law and from strength of character. Little Donny has a character deficit. His pageant will showcase how many around him do.
It was strength of character that compelled national security analyst Kyle Murphy to resign from the Defense Intelligence Agency when he decided the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff might lack the character to refuse unlawful orders from Trump.
It is lack of character, Mark Sumner suggests at Daily Kos, that allows Republican House leaders Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise to declare QAnon conspiracy kook Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “abject racism, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim rhetoric” offensive while ratifying “every lie and ludicrous claim” from the acting president.
In reviewing Rick Perlstein’s epic, four-part history of the American right from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan, The New Republic’s Patrick Iber observes how over time Republicans sacrificed principle for power:
In some ways, this history shows how short a step it was from all this to Trump. How could the United States elect a paranoid and vulgar man who trafficked in racial division, and who made criminal behavior standard operating procedure in the White House? Well, it elected Nixon. How could it elect an intellectually shallow entertainer, who was seemingly incapable of speaking truthfully on a consistent basis? Well, it elected Reagan. And as powerful as the right grew, its entrepreneurs in media and politics stoked culture war divisions to cultivate a powerful sense of grievance.
Former Trump personal attorney and convicted felon, Michael Cohen, reflects on his own character deficits, writing, “I wanted to climb the highest mountains of Manhattan’s skyscraping ambition, to inhabit the world from the vantage point of private jets and billion-dollar deals, and I was willing to do whatever it took to get there.” Cohen’s “willingness to deceive to get ahead” and damn the consequences landed him in federal prison wearing a green jumpsuit:
As the months passed by and I thought about the man I knew so well, I became even more convinced that Trump will never leave office peacefully. The types of scandals that have surfaced in recent months will only continue to emerge with greater and greater levels of treachery and deceit. If Trump wins another four years, these scandals will prove to only be the tip of the iceberg. I’m certain that Trump knows he will face prison time if he leaves office, the inevitable cold Karma to the notorious chants of “Lock Her Up!” But that is the Trump I know in a nutshell. He projects his own sins and crimes onto others, partly to distract and confuse but mostly because he thinks everyone is as corrupt and shameless and ruthless as he is; a poisonous mindset I know all too well.
Leaders of Trump’s party confirmed his assumptions long before he ran for office. It is said adversity does not build character, it reveals it. Confronted with the adversity of a global pandemic and economic collapse, Trump’s cult of sycophants revealed theirs. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) sent the Senate home this week without a voting on a coronavirus relief bill for Americans out of work and struggling to survive the deadliest pandemic in 100 years. That inaction, Salon reports, “could deny benefits to as many as 30 million Americans currently collecting unemployment” and “force another 4 million people out of work and cause the economy to contract by another 4%.”
With Trump’s poll numbers going the way of the Titanic, Cohen warns that losing reelection will mean exposing the Trump administration’s “tangle of frauds and scams and lawlessness.” To prevent that, he writes, “Trump and his minions will do anything to cover up that reality, and I mean anything.” So after failing miserably at containing the virus that has sickened 5.3 million Americans and killed almost 170,000, Trump vows not to sign any relief bill that includes “$25 billion in aid to the U.S. Postal Service and $3.5 billion in supplemental election funding.” Anything includes sabotaging the U.S. Post Office. Trump and his lieutenants have targeted Post Office funding, sorting equipment, even mail boxes voters — especially Democratic voters (Monmouth poll) — will need to vote safely by mail this fall. Anything also includes leaving millions of Americans desperate, hungry, and even homeless until after Labor Day when the Senate is scheduled to return.
Pandemic relief non-developments prompted this response from Josh Holland, contributor to The Nation:
This is a big reason why the GOP always does well in these hostage negotiations. If you’re willing to just fuck people over and damn the political consequences, you’ll have the upper hand. https://t.co/zQlID2iIkz
All the bullying and bluster from Trump and the right are not as indicative of strength as they suppose. “MAGA men are weak,” John Pavlovitz charged last week while observing male peacocking at the annual Bike Rally in Sturgis, South Dakota:
The sad irony of America, is how terribly terrified the quivering coward is who professes to lead this nation: how much he hides behind a phone screen and rows of White House barricades, how he ducks from accountability, the way he runs from reporters, how he uses our military as a shield—his completely inability to stand in the raking light of criticism without withering like a tiny orange flower in the scorching midday sun. He is a man fully lacking humanity.
Sadder still, is a generation of American men who’ve so placed their identity in him that they have lost the ability to criticize him or oppose him, men who cannot stand up for themselves and their loved ones, men who are so enamored with this fraudulent shell, that they will risk their own lives just to flex in the face of a deadly pandemic that is not impressed.
Should Democrats retake the Senate this fall and should the republic survive the transfer of power, Republicans on Capitol Hill will become born-again deficit hawks. They will bluster and stonewall and plead poverty over any Democratic proposals aimed at digging the country out of the hole they themselves dug in shameless obeisance to that “fraudulent shell.” Little Donny has a character deficit. His enablers have made a pageant of theirs.
To defeat them, Democrats will need more than polite scolding. They need to reveal their character via their actions.
Things I never thought I'd see, volume 1,303: Protests outside of the Postmaster General's home this morning pic.twitter.com/nUc7ErR6hk
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.
Some good news: Koalas are having a successful breeding season at this Australian wildlife park after the devastating bushfires that began at the end of 2019 and threatened much of their population pic.twitter.com/zGgNsIBpr3
This is such good news. Last year’s horrible fires just devastated the population of these little guys. Fingers crossed that we can get our act together as a species to deal with climate change so this doesn’t happen more and more often.
In my earlier post I wrote that the GOP is simply eschewing the normal adherence to even the appearance of democracy in favor of outright cheating, which their followers will reward because it shows that they are willing to be the thuggish monsters they belive are required to fully own the libs.
Ron Brownstein describes in detail how Trump and his henchmen are deploying he entire federal government for their own crude political benefit:
President Donald Trump’s open admission yesterday that he’s sabotaging the Postal Service to improve his election prospects crystallizes a much larger dynamic: He’s waging an unprecedented campaign to weaponize virtually every component of the federal government to partisan advantage.
Trump is systematically enlisting agencies, including the Postal Service, Census Bureau, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security, that traditionally have been considered at least somewhat insulated from political machinations to reward his allies and punish those he considers his enemies. He is razing barriers between his personal and political interests and the core operations of the federal government to an extent that no president has previously attempted, a wide range of public-administration experts have told me.
“There’s always been temptation … but no president in modern times has taken action so explicitly and obviously—or transparently—to influence and actually direct these agencies to favor the party in power,” Paul Light, a public-service professor at New York University, told me. “None. None.”
Presidents have always put their stamp on the federal government. It’s common for regulatory agencies, for instance, to dramatically shift direction in their attitude toward Big Business when partisan control of the White House changes. And presidents have always rewarded their political supporters, at times causing scandals because of questionable Cabinet appointments or procurement decisions.
But no matter which individuals were appointed to lead them, some agencies have always been considered more protected from politics. It’s those barriers that Trump, with the tacit support of congressional Republicans, is steadily dismantling. Presidents have used the Postal Service to reward loyalists with jobs since the country’s earliest history. But they didn’t expect what Trump does from the agency. “The whole spoils system goes back to having supporters who were appointed as postmasters,” says Kedric Payne, the general counsel of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center and a former top official at the Office of Congressional Ethics. “But it wasn’t to disrupt the election.”
The result of Trump’s moves: an executive branch whose full reach and power is being conscripted to serve the president’s immediate interests. “All of it comes from a place that whatever is in his personal interest—whether it’s financial, reputational, or political—if it benefits him, the government is merely a tool for serving himself,” Walter Shaub, the director of the Office of Government Ethics under former President Barack Obama, told me. “He has simply crossed lines that no one would even conceive of crossing in the past.”
His determination to harness federal power to his personal advantage links his choices throughout his presidency, including funneling federal dollars into businesses he owns and withholding military aid for Ukraine in exchange for an election favor, the actions that led to his impeachment in the House last year.
Experts I spoke with said that Trump has dramatically accelerated the pace of his efforts to weaponize federal actions since his Senate acquittal, when every Republican, except Utah’s Mitt Romney, voted to dismiss the charges against him with no sanction and not even a full-scale trial to explore the evidence.
Beyond his recent efforts to impede mail delivery, Trump has:
rapidly purged inspectors general across the federal government, replacing five of them within a short period, including the intelligence-community IG who forwarded to Congress the whistleblower complaint that triggered Trump’s impeachment.
openly pressured the Justice Department to back off the prosecution of his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and to request more lenient sentencing for his ally Roger Stone. Trump later commuted Stone’s sentence outright.
deployed federal law-enforcement officials from the Department of Homeland Security to confront protesters in Portland, Oregon, and other cities over the explicit objection of governors and mayors.
enlisted the military into his campaign against protesters, drafting Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley to accompany him during his walk to St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C., after armed personnel forcibly cleared out peaceful protesters. The decision prompted so much concern in the military that Milley later apologized.
taken repeated steps to manipulate the results of the decennial census in a manner that could undercount people of color and benefit the Republican Party. The Supreme Court stopped Trump from adding a citizenship question to the census, but the administration now says it intends to exclude undocumented immigrants from the population counts used to apportion congressional seats and Electoral College votes among the states. It also announced it will cut off efforts to contact households that haven’t responded to the census on September 30, despite the disruption caused by the coronavirus outbreak. Census experts and former Census Bureau directors have said that such a truncated schedule is guaranteed to undercount minorities.
The deployment of federal agents this summer may represent the most tangible manifestation of Trump’s determination to wield the federal government as a weapon against his political enemies. Light, who has studied the federal government’s operations for decades and is usually no alarmist, describes it as “shocking.” Sending those assets into cities over the objection of their mayors, he told me, “does resemble the early days of a police state, I’m sorry to say it.”
But if those deployments comprise the most visceral example, Trump’s attempts to manipulate the census may provide the most revealing measure of just how much he’s willing to distort federal operations to benefit himself and his party—and how far congressional Republicans will go in abetting him.
In the past, the census has occasionally faced questions about its accuracy. But never before has there been evidence of a president deliberately trying to skew the results in a manner that helps one party. “I don’t think there’s ever been a charge that the census was systematically unfair,” says Donald Kettl, a longtime scholar of federal administration, now at the University of Texas at Austin.
Until now, the reason for avoiding census tampering has seemed obvious: It was thought that everyone benefits from an accurate count (just as everyone was thought to benefit from an apolitical military, among other institutions Trump has tried to manipulate). Billions of dollars in federal aid are tied to population, so presumably every state would want as many of its people counted as possible. “A complete count is important no matter what state you are in, because so many federal and state programs are tied to the numbers of people,” Steve Murdock, who served as the Census Bureau’s director under President George W. Bush, told me. “You don’t gain much by not counting the people you have to provide services for.”
But in a political environment defined by widening polarization along racial and geographic lines, that traditional restraint has apparently broken down. Hardly any congressional Republicans have raised concerns about Trump’s determination to curtail the census count. That includes Republicans from highly diverse states across the Sun Belt, which are likely to be among the biggest losers if minority populations are systematically undercounted, both in terms of federal aid and the apportionment of congressional seats and Electoral College votes. This week, I asked the offices of GOP senators from Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Georgia if they had any objection to Trump short-circuiting the census count. All refused to respond, except Florida’s Marco Rubio, whose staff referred me only to a comment he’d made on a related issue, Trump’s effort to exclude the undocumented from apportionment. (And even on that question, Rubio avoided taking a definitive position.) Republican governors in those states have not raised concerns publicly either.
They don’t want to take a stand because they believe they too will benefit from this. In other words they are just like Trump. Don’t ever believe otherwise.
Brownstein’s whole piece is well worth reading. Gird yourselves.
Update
Tom Sullivan pointed me to this:
Several United States Postal Service collection boxes are set to be removed across Montana.
“I write today regarding reports of United States Postal Service (USPS) collection boxes being removed from numerous communities in Montana,” wrote Tester. “If true, this seems to be occurring without any transparency or communication with impacted Montanans.”
Sen. Steve Daines issued a statement after writing a letter to Postmaster General to investigate the removal of USPS collection boxes.
Union: "At first management said they were just removing double boxes… when fact checked and that was incorrect, they said they were not used much. In the past they have done density tests and one might be removed or the location changed. 30 in Billings is massive." #mtnews
This seems to undermine the explanations given in Oregon earlier after concerns about people seeing mailboxes being rounded up on trucks and taken away this week: https://t.co/H8XPrLOMUgpic.twitter.com/3zChkdYg3u
Sen. Tom Barrett, R-Charlotte, shown here in a blue short-sleeved shirt and brown hair, didn’t wear a mask, nor did most attendees at a July 18 event in Eaton Country to collect signatures for a petition drive to limit the emergency powers of Gretchen Whitmer and other Michigan governors. Less than two weeks later, he was diagnosed with COVID. Health officials say the event was not linked to a coronavirus outbreak. (Courtesy photo)
Just one little story of someone being too lazy or doctrinaire or uninformed to do the right thing:
A Michigan state senator who says he took “reasonable precautions” to protect against COVID-19 did not wear a mask at an outdoor petition drive attended by hundreds less than two weeks before he tested positive for the virus.
Public health officials have not linked any COVID-19 cases to the July 18 event at Sharp Park in Eaton County, where Sen. Tom Barrett was photographed talking and shaking hands with other maskless attendees.
The Charlotte Republican, who tested positive for COVID-19 on July 31, was helping collect signatures for a petition drive to limit the kind of emergency powers Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has used to issue executive orders amid the coronavirus pandemic, including a mandate that residents wear face coverings in “crowded outdoor spaces.”
At the time, Barrett said more than 580 people from 21 Michigan counties came to sign petitions despite “no paid advertising and only a couple of days’ notice.”
That was over the course of six hours, however. Photos obtained by Bridge show roughly two-dozen attendees at the event, only one of whom was wearing a mask. In one photo, Barrett shook hands with an elderly man despite social distancing rules in effect at the time.
Under a Whitmer order that took effect July 13, residents are required to wear masks in indoor public spaces and outdoors when they are “unable to consistently maintain a distance of six feet or more from individuals who are not members of their household.”
I know they were outdoors and that’s considered pretty safe. And it’s really fine to hold events like this outdoors if you take the proper precautions. How hard is it for a political leader either to stay distanced from people or wear a mask, preferably both? It’s just not that hard!
Look at that crowd, the vast majority of whom are vulnerable to getting sick from this thing either because of age, weight or some other underlying health problem that is common among people with those characteristics.
Maybe they all got lucky. I hope so. But this guy is asymptomatic and he probably spread it to people and somewhere along the line somebody’s going to get very sick and possibly die because he couldn’t do the simplest thing.
Prodigal Son-sim is the tendency for the media to privilege the opinions of Republicans who have come to their senses over the opinions of those who never lost their mind in the first place. I dislike prodigal son-ism because, among other things, every moment spent getting a lapsed Republican up to speed on reality-based thinking is a moment not spent actually addressing real problems. Another problem is that so many prodigal son-ists are merely cynical opportunists, a character flaw blatantly obvious, for example, in the mien of the Never Trumpers. They don’t have a deep understanding of how misbegotten their thinking is; they’re just trying to hold onto their status and salaries.
And that is what makes Michael Cohen’s bombshell of a foreword to his new book so interesting. This man is a Republican, a thug, a bully. He is as amoral as all those epithets imply. Cohen is also a damn fool who should have known better than to trust a godfather wannabe like Trump with his career. And yet, this mea culpa feels oddly honest and heartfelt. Why?
It is certainly the case that, if this sample is typical, Cohen is a compelling writer (or he’s got the world’s best ghostwriter). But lurking behind the rhetorical skill appears to be something close to genuine contrition. I’m hedging because it is quite possible that, like Ted Bundy (another Republican), Cohen is merely exceptionally skilled at faking normal human emotions. But this feels real:
…please permit me to reintroduce myself in these pages. The one thing I can say with absolute certainty is that whatever you may have heard or thought about me, you don’t know me or my story or the Donald Trump that I know. For more than a decade, I was Trump’s first call every morning and his last call every night. I was in and out of Trump’s office on the 26th floor of the Trump Tower as many as fifty times a day, tending to his every demand. Our cell phones had the same address books, our contacts so entwined, overlapping and intimate that part of my job was to deal with the endless queries and requests, however large or small, from Trump’s countless rich and famous acquaintances. I called any and all of the people he spoke to, most often on his behalf as his attorney and emissary, and everyone knew that when I spoke to them, it was as good as if they were talking directly to Trump.
Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did. In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.
There are reasons why there has never been an intimate portrait of Donald Trump, the man. In part, it’s because he has a million acquaintances, pals and hangers on, but no real friends. He has no one he trusts to keep his secrets. For ten years, he certainly had me, and I was always there for him, and look what happened to me. I urge you to really consider that fact: Trump has no true friends. He has lived his entire life avoiding and evading taking responsibility for his actions. He crushed or cheated all who stood in his way, but I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them. I was the one who most encouraged him to run for president in 2011, and then again in 2015, carefully orchestrating the famous trip down the escalator in Trump Tower for him to announce his candidacy. When Trump wanted to reach Russian President Vladimir Putin, via a secret back channel, I was tasked with making the connection in my Keystone Kop fashion. I stiffed contractors on his behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife Melania to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump’s path to power. From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise—I was an active and eager participant.
To underscore that last crucial point, let me say now that I had agency in my relationship with Trump. I made choices along the way—terrible, heartless, stupid, cruel, dishonest, destructive choices, but they were mine and constituted my reality and life. During my years with Trump, to give one example, I fell out of touch with my sisters and younger brother, as I imagined myself becoming a big shot. I’d made my fortune out of taxi medallions, a business viewed as sketchy if not lower class. On Park Avenue, where I lived, I was definitely nouveau riche, but I had big plans that didn’t include being excluded from the elite. I had a narrative: I wanted to climb the highest mountains of Manhattan’s skyscraping ambition, to inhabit the world from the vantage point of private jets and billion-dollar deals, and I was willing to do whatever it took to get there. Then there was my own considerable ego, short temper, and willingness to deceive to get ahead, regardless of the consequences.
As you read my story, you will no doubt ask yourself if you like me, or if you would act as I did, and the answer will frequently be no to both of those questions. But permit me to make a point: If you only read stories written by people you like, you will never be able to understand Donald Trump or the current state of the American soul. More than that, it’s only by actually understanding my decisions and actions that you can get inside Trump’s mind and understand his worldview. As anyone in law enforcement will tell you, it’s only gangsters who can reveal the secrets of organized crime. If you want to know how the mob really works, you’ve got to talk to the bad guys. I was one of Trump’s bad guys.
Another reason Cohen may be, on some level, sincere, is that it doesn’t read like an attempt to self-aggrandize in order to launch a Mooch-like punditry career. Cohen appears actually to understand he’s blown his reputation, his life, and his family’s life, to smithereens. Perhaps one day he’ll have a status similar to a downscale John Dean. But there appear to be only two motives here: first and foremost, make some money in the only way left to him to pay his immense legal bills (not unreasonable). Second, to come clean possibly for no other reason than to square things with his family.
A foreword this powerfully written almost makes me want to read Cohen’s book. Hmmm…. on second thought, nah.
I don’t know what’s going on with this. Trump keeps saying different things about it and I’m not sure if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about (always a safe bet) or if they are doing some kind of weird public negotiating:
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy broke ranks with Donald Trump on Friday, telling CNBC that he supports funding the U.S. Postal Service.
“The Postal Service will have the funding that it needs,” McCarthy said, adding, “We will make sure of that.” McCarthy claimed Trump would not oppose the funding despite repeated statements by Trump saying he would do just that.
In May, McCarthy voted against a House coronavirus relief bill, the HEROES ACT, that would have provided $25 billion for the post office.
Shortly before the vote, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), chair of the House Government Operations subcommittee, warned: “If President Trump and the Senate GOP demand anything less than the Heroes Act provides, the Postal Service will continue to sink.”
There is restiveness in the caucus about McCarthy apparently. And it is laughable.
Next year’s collective Republican amnesia will be something to behold. Forget “I didn’t read this tweet” responses to the latest outrage from America’s buffoon “leader” Donald Trump. They’re all going to pretend that he never existed as they rediscover their supposed “values” like not surrendering to Russia, family values (for thee, not me), and concern over budget deficits.
But for now, Republicans are still marching in lockstep toward that November cliff called “Election Day.” At least they’re doing so publicly. Privately? They’re being extra ridiculous.
“Discontent with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is on the rise in the House, as Republicans increasingly fearful of a loss by President Trump on Election Day gear up for an intraparty war over the future of the GOP,” reportsTheWashington Post. “A cluster of GOP lawmakers is starting to privately question whether the California Republican is putting loyalty to the president over the good of the conference. And a small group of members is discussing whether someone should challenge him for minority leader if Trump is defeated Nov. 3.”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
[Deep breath]
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
This is rich.
Every single Republican in the House voted against articles of impeachment against Trump. The lone conservative who voted yes, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, had to leave the party and become an independent to do so.
And now, as House Republicans face further decimation in the House, two years after they got body slammed into the minority, they’re wondering if someone else has been too close to Trump?
Oh, and these profiles in courage still can’t talk on the record, “[T]he frustration with McCarthy had already been brewing for weeks as Trump’s polling has sagged behind presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. According to interviews with more than 10 House Republicans — all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to be frank — some GOP lawmakers are worried that McCarthy has tied the conference too much to Trump, refusing to stand up to the president or act as a buffer to distinguish the conference from him.” [Emphasis mine.]
Those 10 “worried” Republicans sure didn’t vote to impeach, that’s for sure. And when it came time to vote for the now-stalled coronavirus relief measure in May, only onevoted yes—New York Rep. Peter King. And we know he’s not one of the 10 fretting GOPers. How do we know? Because he already announced his retirement.
That’s not Kevin McCarthy casting those votes.
Of course, all Republicans have every reason to worry about November. Democrats maintain a healthy 8-10 point lead in the Civiqs generic congressional ballot daily tracker. (The same tracker spotted Democrats a 6-point 50-44 lead in 2018, an election in which the Democrats won the House popular vote by 8.6 points, 53.4-44.8.)
And for sure, being tied to Trump has been an electoral disaster for the GOP. Look at college-educated white women, the lone demographic to have significantly moved in the past four years:
Polling this year has consistently shown continuing trouble among all college-educated whites, and especially women. (Trump and his party are even losing ground among non-college whites, but I don’t trust them to deliver Democratic votes just yet. They’ve been shown to be susceptible to racist appeals in the past.)
Trump is going down. He’s taking down his party’s Senate majority, and another chunk of House Republicans in mostly suburban districts. All that is clear.
But anonymously whining that some guy is too pro-Trump, while every one of your public actions are explicitly and proudly pro-Trump, is a new level of ridiculous.
Everyone who has enabled Trump, and that’s a near-unanimous calculation when it comes to Republican elected officials, deserves to be wiped out electorally. That entire QAnon-fueled party needs to be burned to the ground. And if a science- and reason-based conservative party emerges from its ashes? Fine. Let’s have debates on the future of our country based on observable reality.
But unless your name is Mitt Romney, you don’t get to complain about the sorry, sad state of the modern GOP.
Sorry, Republicans. You created the party that has been running the country for the past four years. The results are obvious.
Trump is your creature. You cannot escape him. He is you and you are him.
President Trump on Thursday said he opposes both election aid for states and an emergency bailout for the U.S. Postal Service because he wants to restrict how many Americans can vote by mail, putting at risk the nation’s ability to administer the Nov. 3 elections.
Trump has been attacking mail balloting and the integrity of the vote for months, but his latest broadside makes explicit his intent to stand in the way of urgently needed money to help state and local officials administer elections during the coronavirus pandemic. With nearly 180 million Americans eligible to vote by mail, the president’s actions could usher in widespread delays, long lines and voter disenfranchisement this fall, voting rights advocates said.
Trump said his purpose is to prevent Democrats from expanding mail-balloting, which he has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, would invite widespread fraud. The president has also previously admitted that he believes mail voting would allow more Democrats to cast ballots and hurt Republican candidates, including himself.
In an interview Thursday with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo, Trump said he opposes a $25 billion emergency injection sought by the U.S. Postal Service, as well as a Democratic proposal to provide $3.6 billion in additional election funding to the states. Both of those requests have been tied up in congressional negotiations over a new coronavirus relief package.
“They need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” said the president, claiming again that mail ballots would be “fraudulent,” one of more than 80 attacks he has made against the election’s integrity since March, according to a tally by The Washington Post. Many of his assertions have been misleading or unfounded.
“If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money,” he added. “That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it.”
“They just can’t have it.”
It’s tempting to see this as just Trump babbling incoherently as usual. Unfortunately, that’s not true:
As Trump has lagged in the polls behind Biden, the president and his allies have ramped up their rhetoric questioning the integrity of the vote and intensified their actions in the courts, revealing a far-reaching strategy to restrict mail voting and challenge the results if he lose
The Republican National Committee and conservative groups are pursuing an unprecedented effort to limit expansion of mail balloting before the November election, spending tens of millions of dollars on lawsuits and advertising aimed at restricting who receives ballots and who remains on the voter rolls.
The party is also working to train as many as 35,000 poll-watchers to monitor both in-person voting and ballot counting, mostly in key battleground states.
And the RNC and Trump campaign advisers are now mapping out their post-election strategy, including how to challenge mail ballots without postmarks, as they anticipate weeks-long legal fights in an array of states, according to people familiar with the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
The campaign plans to have lawyers ready to mobilize in every state and expects legal battles could play out after Election Day in such states as Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Nevada, they said.
Trump’s claims about voting by mail have been echoed by Attorney General William P. Barr, who has repeatedly said without evidence that mail-in voting could lead to a “high risk” of fraud and interference by foreign countries.
At the same time, changes put in place at the U.S. Postal Service by a top GOP donor have sparked mail delays across country, sparking fears that ballots will not be delivered in time to count in November.
Many of the president’s critics say he crossed a line with Thursday’s remarks by admitting his willingness to hold back funds necessary to make the election both secure and accessible to all Americans.
There’s a reason McConnell has not brought the relief bill to the floor. It’s this:
Trump’s opposition to the $3.6 billion in election funding could put him at odds with some Republicans, including Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who has indicated his support for some additional money to help the states carry out the vote during the pandemic.
“We need to have enough money to do our best to be sure that the November elections are held safely and results are available,” Blunt told reporters Wednesday.
These are among the problems we can anticipate:
State and local officials say they need money for protective equipment to prevent infection among poll workers and sanitizing supplies for polling locations, along with paper stock, printing costs and high-capacity ballot scanners for an expected surge in mail voting.
Roxanna Moritz, the auditor and commissioner of elections in Scott County, Iowa, said she may have to choose between offering early-voting satellite locations and paying for a second or even third round of mailing voters absentee ballot request forms.
“Depending on my budget I usually do early voting satellites at five libraries for three full weeks,” Moritz said. She said she received $19,000 in funding from the first relief bill, but “$19,000 goes real quick” when you’re purchasing plastic shields and protective equipment for the more than 60 polling locations her office opened in the primary.
Moritz said she doesn’t understand the president’s position on mail balloting, given how many Republicans are also likely to vote absentee.
“At some point in time, the Trump administration or the Republican Party is going to have to realize that if there are 60 to 75 percent of people voting by mail, those are their voters, too,” she said.
Tom Ridge, a Republican and former homeland security secretary under George W. Bush, said in an interview that with “absolutely no historical anecdotes” for the type of massive fraud that Trump claims could occur, it’s impossible not to conclude that the president’s real concern is losing.
“To subvert the process and discredit the use of absentee ballots is a shameful exercise,” Ridge said.
GOP Rep. Tom Cole, who hails from rural Oklahoma and once oversaw the state’s elections systems as secretary of state, said Thursday that he was not concerned about fraud in the election.
“That just doesn’t happen to the degree that a lot of people seem to think it does,” he said, adding that election administrators are “a very able and honorable group of public servants and usually have operations that are above reproach.”
I don’t think those guys represent the thinking among the highest levels of the Party. It’s pretty clear that Republicans have finally just decided that there’s no margin in even pretending to care about democracy and they will simply rely on cheating to win — and that includes down the ballot.
Honestly, they’ve been trying to suppress the vote since the 1960s, with efforts like “Operation Eagle Eye” all through the 80’s with their freak-out over Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. More recently their suppression efforts like “True the Vote” have been implemented throughout the country. And, needless to say, conservative, white supremacists spent a full century suppressing the vote in the Jim Crow South. This is what they do.
But I think they’ve entered a new phase in the modern era. The 2000 debacle proved that they can deploy lawyers to every close state if necessary, focusing on those run by Republicans, and basically steal the election in real-time, right out in the open. It’s more like the old Boss Tweed days than Jim Crow, but with obvious similarities.
They are just going to openly cheat, make thin arguments about “fraud” and assume that their own voters will be thrilled to see their “strong” “powerful” thuggish tactics to just take what they can’t earn legitimately.
This makes sense. Today’s Republicans care about one thing: owning the libs. And nothing will own the libs more than outright stealing the election and then taunting the majority of voters with “waddaya gonna do about it.” This is waaay better than winning legitimately. And that’s why they love Donald Trump. He is just as petty, vengeful, crude, stupid and mean as the average playground bully. And they respect that more than anything.
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/opinion/editorial_cartoon/2016/03/04/patrick-corrigan-trump-frankenstein/patrick-corrigan-trump-frankenstein.jpg?quality=89&ssl=1)
