Month: August 2020

“I believe”

I believe the president Made America Great Again. I believe we need him reelected to Make America Great Again Again.

I believe Joe Biden is “Sleepy” and “weak.” I believe Biden could “hurt God” and the Bible.

I believe that if Biden is elected, there will be “no religion, no anything,” and he would confiscate all guns, “immediately and without notice.” He would “abolish” “our great,” “beautiful suburbs,” not to mention “the American way of life.” There would be “no windows, no nothing” in buildings.

I believe the news media would have “no ratings” and “will go down along with our great USA!” if the president loses — and that this would be bad even though the media is fake.

I believe it’s normal for the president to say “Yo Semites” and “Yo Seminites,” “Thigh Land,” “Minne–a–napolis,” “toe-tally-taria-tism,” “Thomas Jeffers” and “Ulyss-eus S. Grant.” I believe it’s Biden who’s cognitively impaired.

I believe the president “aced” a “very hard” impairment test, and that his “very surprised” doctors found this “unbelievable.” I believe it was “amazing” he remembered five words, such as “person, woman, man, camera, TV” — in correct order. I believe he took the SAT himself.

I believe the president has “a natural ability,” like his “great, super-genius uncle” from MIT, which is why he understands “that whole world” of virology and epidemiology.

So I believed the president in January and February when he said covid-19 was “totally under control,” that it was Democrats’ “new hoax,” and that he was “not at all” worried about a pandemic. I believed him in March when he said he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

I believe the president and the doctor who believes in demon sperm and the medical use of space alien DNA, and not Anthony S. Fauci, who’s an “alarmist” and “wrong.”

I believe the president’s suggestions that physicians should try injecting patients with household disinfectants, and shining ultraviolet light inside their bodies, make perfect sense.

I believe the “books” and “manuals,” if someone would just read them, say “you can test too much” for covid-19. I believe we now have 5 million cases because we test so much, and that the president was right to slow testing down, unless he was kidding — in which case he was right not to.

I believe that the president has done a tremendous job fighting the virus — and that he shouldn’t “take responsibility at all”— even though about 160,000 Americans have died. I believe the virus “is what it is.”

I believe it isn’t racist to call the coronavirus “kung flu” or “the China Virus.” It isn’t racially divisive to say Black Lives Matter is a “symbol of hate,” to celebrate Confederate generals as part of our “Great American Heritage,” or to share video of someone shouting “white power,” which, like displaying the Confederate flag, is “freedom of speech.”

I believe that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” and that the president was just stating a fact, not making a threat, when he said that. I believe it was fine for federal law enforcement to fire tear gas and rubber pellet grenades at protesters so that the president could pose with a Bible in front of a church.

I believe that a 75-year-old protester in Buffalo may have been “an ANTIFA provocateur” who intentionally cracked his own skull in a “set up.”

I believe Rep. John Lewis made a “big mistake” not attending the president’s inauguration. I believe the president has done more for Blacks than any other president — perhaps even Abraham Lincoln, who “did good” although the “end result” was “questionable,” and certainly more than Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which hasn’t “worked out” so well.

I believe the president has been treated worse than Lincoln, even though Lincoln was assassinated. I believe the president should be added to Mount Rushmore, pronto.

I believe it’s normal that the president wished his friend Ghislaine Maxwell “well” and good luck,” even though his administration charged her with sex trafficking teenage girls for another presidential friend, Jeffrey Epstein, whom the president says may have been killed in federal custody.

I believe the president rightly said of Maxwell, “Let them prove somebody was guilty.” I believe we don’t need evidence against former acting attorney general Sally Yates, because she was “part of the greatest political crime of the Century,” about which “ObamaBiden knew EVERYTHING!” And I believe it was fine for the president to baselessly suggest that a television host committed murder since the host said mean things about the president.

I believe that the reports Russia paid bounties to have U.S. soldiers killed, and that the president was briefed on it, are another “Fake News Media Hoax,” and that such intelligence never reached the president’s desk, even though his administration said otherwise.

I believe absentee voting, where voters mail in their ballots, is good, and that mail-in voting, where voters mail in their ballots, is totally different, and bad — and will result in “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election” in history. Except in Florida, where absentee and mail-in voting are the same and both good, “because Florida has got a great Republican governor.”

I believe we should “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote” — but that “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!”

I believe the president won the popular vote in 2016 “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” I believe he shouldn’t accept the election results if he loses in November.

Lol. That’s from George Conway, the husband of Kellyanne Conway, senior counsellor to the president.

Conway had an earlier “I believe the president and in the president” that’s also well worth a laugh.

We still don’t know what the deal is with the Conways, whether they’re estranged, pulling some “good guy, bad guy” scam for the post-Trump years or if it’s a cynical inside the beltway “all’s fair in politics” arrangement.

The fact remains, however, that Kellyanne has shown herself to be a destructive Trumpist monster and that’s unforgivable no matter what’s going on with the two of them. She’s in there, enabling him every step of the way.

Trump suggested this morning that Biden really tied his hands by limiting himself to over half the population and more than 60% of the Democratic Party by saying he’ll choose a woman for VP:

“He roped himself into a certain group of people … Some people would say that men are insulted by that. And some people would say it’s fine.”

You men aren’t going to take that lying down are you? Any man who votes for a ticket with a woman on it is nothing but a wimp, amirite?

And anyway, he added:

“People don’t vote for the Vice President. In the end it doesn’t really matter.

Then he snapped his fingers and said, “Mike, bring me another diet coke and this time make sure it’s icy cold, goddamnit.”

But Biden said "billion" when he meant "million" once and that means he's senile. https://t.co/3LC7DxzeRr

— digby (@digby56) August 11, 2020

To be clear, the guy on the left is campaigning on the guy on the right allegedly being in decline pic.twitter.com/MWduos00nX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 9, 2020

Trump has repeatedly said he wants to terminate the payroll tax. And yes, he may be too stupid to realize that it means he’s eliminating the funding stream for Social Security and Medicare, but his Freedom Caucus Tea Party henchmen, led by Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, certainly aren’t. They know exactly what they’re doing, filling his head with this nonsense.

Sure, he will say “don’t worry, I’m going to take care of the Seniors” and all his accomplices will have to tell him is that they’ll find the money somewhere else in the budget, but we know that’s impossible. He doesn’t.

Anyway, he’s said it over and over again:

Last night, Trump doubled down on his plan to make the payroll tax cut permanent if he’s reelected.

1. TRUMP: “After the election, on the assumption that it would be victorious for an administration that’s done a great job, we will be ending that tax. We will be terminating that tax.”

On Saturday, Trump vowed three times to make the payroll tax cut permanent if he won reelection.

2. TRUMP: “If I’m victorious on November 3rd, I plan to forgive these taxes and make permanent cuts to the payroll tax.  So I’m going to make them all permanent.”

3. TRUMP: “But if I win, I may extend and terminate.  In other words, I’ll extend it beyond the end of the year and terminate the tax.”

4. TRUMP: “And this is deferral payroll tax obligations.  So this is your payroll tax obligations, which we’re going to end up terminating eventually, right?”

In April, Trump said twice that he wanted to permanently cut the payroll tax.

5. TRUMP: “I would love to see a payroll tax cut. There are many people that would like to see it as a permanent tax cut — payroll tax cut.”

6. TRUMP: “I mean, there are a lot of people — I’m one of them — that would have liked to have seen the payroll tax cut as a permanent cut.” 

In March, Trump was privately encouraging Republican lawmakers to permanently eliminate the payroll tax cut.

7. Wall Street Journal: “Following the meeting, Mr. Trump told reporters he had discussed stimulus measures with Republicans, but offered few details. Mr. Trump wants to suspend the payroll tax through Dec. 31, an administration official said, though he has also said privately he wants the tax to be permanently eliminated.”

History will judge us. Perhaps, it has already happened. Then again, maybe this next year will play out like one of those cliffhanger serials from the 1930s and 1940s. At the last moment, America will leap from the running board of the Packard before it hurtles over the cliff. The republic will live to fight evil another day.

But that happens at the beginning of the next reel (or the next Congress). Right now, things are not looking promising. Axios outlines the good, the bad, and the depressing.

Americans are paying off their credit cards and lowering overall household debt in the second quarter of 2020. Personal income is up thanks to the combination of stimulus checks and supplemental unemployment checks (that just expired). The stock market is rebounding. That’s good. For somebody.

On the bad and depressing side, unemployment remains “alarmingly high” and demand at food pantries is at record levels. Eviction moratoriums are expiring and debt collectors are showing no mercy despite industry assurances of lenience.

Axios adds this:

• A massive wave of homelessness is starting to swell. (“Eviction cairns” are cropping up in New Orleans, where piles of people’s belongings are being thrown out on the street.)
• People are even surrendering pets because they can’t afford to take care of them.

Either one has to be emotionally devastating. A reader notes the toll the loss of simple pleasures is having on his family. Everything from seeing grandchildren to splitting wood for the winter to going out to dinner has been taken by the pandemic.

Ed Mierzwinski, senior director of the federal consumer program at U.S. PIRG tells Axios there are “two Americas” (shades of John Edwards).

“There are a lot of people who are just weathering the storm, hunkered down at home,” he says. “And there are a lot of people who are getting paid less than they used to be paid, and they are painfully going through this pandemic economic crisis.”

Households with children, especially. Job loss for them means “a decline in overall income,” says Wilbert van der Klaauw of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. For those of you not central bankers, that means less to eat and more dependence on overtaxed food banks.

No surprise, people of color are at greatest risk. Richard Curtin, director of the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, warns there is “no indication that consumers expect the recession to end anytime soon.” 

“There’s going to be a cliff,” Mierzwinski says. Tune in next year if you survive to see it.

Hopeful signs

“We’ve hit a tipping point in the pandemic,” writes Margaret Talev for Axios. “Half of Americans now know someone who’s tested positive, according to this week’s installment of the Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index.”

“The coronavirus is becoming reality for most people and it will only increase,” predicts Cliff Young, president of Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs. Soon enough, the percentage who know someone who died of the virus will be large enough to show up in polling. Neither will make a difference to the empathy-deficient acting president until voters turn on him on November 3.

May not be decisive in November, but Republicans wondering about Trump's long-term impact on party might consider this stunning finding in new Battleground (Lake/Goeas) Poll: among possible 2020 voters who have turned 18 since 2016, Biden leads 94-6. @MoElleithee

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) August 10, 2020

But those voters have to turn out to have an impact, as we have discussed before. The future is Democratic and under-45, Simon Rosenberg argued at Medium one year ago, if Democrats will just orient campaigns towards engaging those voters and turning them out. That was before COVID_19 and before Donald Trump decided the only way he could win an election conducted heavily by mail is to fix the election by destroying the U.S. Postal Service and worse. Polls don’t vote. You must find a way to.

Absentee ballots go out in North Carolina on September 4. Kentucky follows 10 days later. Almost half the other states send out absentees days after that. DO NOT WAIT to request one if you plan to vote absentee. DO NOT SIT on your ballot once it arrives. Drop it off in person at your local Board of Elections if you can or at a drop box if your state allows. If you must mail it, do not mail it less than two weeks in advance of November 3.

Be the hand writing on the wall.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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.

This piece by Will Saletan in Slate gets to the heart of the matter:

On July 17, President Donald Trump sat for a Fox News interview at the White House. At the time, nearly 140,000 Americans were dead from the novel coronavirus. The interviewer, Chris Wallace, showed Trump a video clip in which Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned of a difficult fall and winter ahead. Trump dismissed the warning. He scoffed that experts had misjudged the virus all along. “Everybody thought this summer it would go away,” said Trump. “They used to say the heat, the heat was good for it and it really knocks it out, remember? So they got that one wrong.”

Trump’s account was completely backward. Redfield and other U.S. public health officials had never promised that heat would knock out the virus. In fact, they had cautioned against that assumption. The person who had held out the false promise of a warm-weather reprieve, again and again, was Trump. And he hadn’t gotten the idea from any of his medical advisers. He had gotten it from Xi Jinping, the president of China, in a phone call in February.

The phone call, the talking points Trump picked up from it, and his subsequent attempts to cover up his alliance with Xi are part of a deep betrayal. The story the president now tells—that he “built the greatest economy in history,” that China blindsided him by unleashing the virus, and that Trump saved millions of lives by mobilizing America to defeat it—is a lie. Trump collaborated with Xi, concealed the threat, impeded the U.S. government’s response, silenced those who sought to warn the public, and pushed states to take risks that escalated the tragedy. He’s personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

This isn’t speculation. All the evidence is in the public record. But the truth, unlike Trump’s false narrative, is scattered in different places. It’s in emails, leaks, interviews, hearings, scientific reports, and the president’s stray remarks. This article puts those fragments together. It documents Trump’s interference or negligence in every stage of the government’s failure: preparation, mobilization, public communication, testing, mitigation, and reopening.

Trump has always been malignant and incompetent. As president, he has coasted on economic growth, narrowly averted crises of his own making, and corrupted the government in ways that many Americans could ignore. But in the pandemic, his vices—venality, dishonesty, self-absorption, dereliction, heedlessness—turned deadly. They produced lies, misjudgments, and destructive interventions that multiplied the carnage. The coronavirus debacle isn’t, as Trump protests, an “artificial problem” that spoiled his presidency. It’s the fulfillment of everything he is.

Read on …

Tens of thousands of Americans are dead because of him.

Trump the philosopher king:

Deep thoughts with Trump: "The world has always been a dangerous place. Not something that is unique. You look back over the centuries, the world has been a dangerous place, very dangerous place, and it will continue, I guess, for a period of time." pic.twitter.com/pQfjDSW6Xw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 10, 2020

He deep…

Embarrassing. And it’s getting worse:

With confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. hitting 5 million Sunday, by far the highest of any country, the failure of the most powerful nation in the world to contain the scourge has been met with astonishment and alarm in Europe.

Perhaps nowhere outside the U.S. is America’s bungled virus response viewed with more consternation than in Italy, which was ground zero of Europe’s epidemic. Italians were unprepared when the outbreak exploded in February, and the country still has one of the world’s highest official death tolls at over 35,000.

But after a strict nationwide, 10-week lockdown, vigilant tracing of new clusters and general acceptance of mask mandates and social distancing, Italy has become a model of virus containment.

“Don’t they care about their health?” a mask-clad Patrizia Antonini asked about people in the United States as she walked with friends along the banks of Lake Bracciano, north of Rome. “They need to take our precautions. … They need a real lockdown.”

Much of the incredulity in Europe stems from the fact that America had the benefit of time, European experience and medical know-how to treat the virus that the continent itself didn’t have when the first COVID-19 patients started filling intensive care units.

M ore than four months into a sustained outbreak, the U.S. reached the 5 million mark, according to the running count kept by Johns Hopkins University. Health officials believe the actual number is perhaps 10 times higher, or closer to 50 million, given testing limitations and the fact that as many as 40% of all those who are infected have no symptoms.

“We Italians always saw America as a model,” said Massimo Franco, a columnist with daily Corriere della Sera. “But with this virus we’ve discovered a country that is very fragile, with bad infrastructure and a public health system that is nonexistent.”

With America’s world’s-highest death toll of more than 160,000, its politicized resistance to masks and its rising caseload, European nations have barred American tourists and visitors from other countries with growing cases from freely traveling to the bloc.

France and Germany are now imposing tests on arrival for travelers from “at risk” countries, the U.S. included.

“I am very well aware that this impinges on individual freedoms, but I believe that this is a justifiable intervention,” German Health Minister Jens Spahn said last week.

Indeed it is. We just can’t do this right, not on a governmental or individual level.

It’s going to get worse. Here is health care reporter Helen Branswell at STATnews. If you have any booze handly, pour yourself a tall one and read this:

Winter is coming. Winter means cold and flu season, which is all but sure to complicate the task of figuring out who is sick with Covid-19 and who is suffering from a less threatening respiratory tract infection. It also means that cherished outdoor freedoms that link us to pre-Covid life — pop-up restaurant patios, picnics in parks, trips to the beach — will soon be out of reach, at least in northern parts of the country.

Unless Americans use the dwindling weeks between now and the onset of “indoor weather” to tamp down transmission in the country, this winter could be Dickensianly bleak, public health experts warn.

“I think November, December, January, February are going to be tough months in this country without a vaccine,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

It is possible, of course, that some vaccines could be approved by then, thanks to historically rapid scientific work. But there is little prospect that vast numbers of Americans will be vaccinated in time to forestall the grim winter Osterholm and others foresee.

Human coronaviruses, the distant cold-causing cousins of the virus that causes Covid-19, circulate year-round. Now is typically the low season for transmission. But in this summer of America’s failed Covid-19 response, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is widespread across the country, and pandemic-weary Americans seem more interested in resuming pre-Covid lifestyles than in suppressing the virus to the point where schools can be reopened, and stay open, and restaurants, movie theaters, and gyms can function with some restrictions.

“We should be aiming for no transmission before we open the schools and we put kids in harm’s way — kids and teachers and their caregivers. And so, if that means no gym, no movie theaters, so be it,” said Caroline Buckee, associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“We seem to be choosing leisure activities now over children’s safety in a month’s time. And I cannot understand that tradeoff.”

While many countries managed to suppress spread of SARS-CoV-2, the United States has failed miserably. Countries in Europe and Asia are worrying about a second wave. Here, the first wave rages on, engulfing rural as well as urban parts of the country. Though there’s been a slight decline in cases in the past couple of weeks, more than 50,000 Americans a day are being diagnosed with Covid-19. And those are just the confirmed cases.

To put that in perspective, at this rate the U.S. is racking up more cases in a week than Britain has accumulated since the start of the pandemic.

Public health officials had hoped transmission of the virus would abate with the warm temperatures of summer and the tendency — heightened this year — of people to take their recreational activities outdoors. Experts do believe people are less likely to transmit the virus outside, especially if they are wearing face coverings and keeping a safe distance apart.

But in some places, people have been throwing Covid cautions to the wind, flouting public health orders in the process. Kristen Ehresmann, director of infectious disease epidemiology, prevention, and control for the Minnesota Department of Health, points to a large, three-day rodeo that was held recently in her state. Organizers knew they were supposed to limit the number of attendees to 250 but refused; thousands attended. In Sturgis, S.D., an estimated quarter of a million motorcyclists were expected to descend on the city this past weekend for an annual rally that spans 10 days.

Even on smaller scales, public health authorities know some people are letting down their guard. Others have never embraced the need to try to prevent spread of the virus. Ehresmann’s father was recently invited to visit some friends; he went, she said, but wore his mask, elbow bumping instead of shaking proffered hands. “And the people kind of acted like, … ‘Oh, you drank that Kool-Aid,’ rather than, ‘We all need to be doing this.’”

Ehresmann and others in public health are flummoxed by the phenomenon of people refusing to acknowledge the risk the virus poses.

“Just this idea of, ‘I just don’t want to believe it so therefore it’s not going to be true’ — honestly, I have not really dealt with that as it relates to disease before,” she said.

Buckee, the Harvard expert, wonders if the magical thinking that seems to have infected swaths of the country is due to the fact many of the people who have died were elderly. For many Americans, she said, the disease has not yet touched their lives — but the movement restrictions and other response measures have.

“I think if children were dying, this would be … a different situation, quite honestly,” she said.

Epidemiologist Michael Mina despairs that an important chance to wrestle the virus under control is being lost, as Americans ignore the realities of the pandemic in favor of trying to resume pre-Covid life.

“We just continue to squander every bit of opportunity we get with this epidemic to get it under control,’’ said Mina, an assistant professor in Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and associate medical director of clinical microbiology at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“The best time to squash a pandemic is when the environmental characteristics slow transmission. It’s your one opportunity in the year, really, to leverage that extra assistance and get transmission under control,” he said, his frustration audible.

Driving back transmission would require people to continue to make sacrifices, to accept the fact that life post-Covid cannot proceed as normal, not while so many people remain vulnerable to the virus. Instead, people are giddily throwing off the shackles of coronavirus suppression efforts, seemingly convinced that a few weeks of sacrifice during the spring was a one-time solution.

Osterholm has for months warned that people were being misled about how long the restrictions on daily life would need to be in place. He now thinks the time has come for another lockdown. “What we did before and more,” he said.

The country has fallen into a dangerous pattern, Osterholm said, where a spike in cases in a location leads to some temporary restraint from people who eventually become alarmed enough to start to take precautions. But as soon as cases start to plateau or decline a little, victory over the virus is declared and people think it’s safe to resume normal life.

“It’s like an all or nothing phenomenon, right?” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “You all locked down or you get so discouraged with being lockdown that you decide you’re going to be in crowded bars … you can have indoor parties with no masks. You can do all the things that are going to get you in trouble.”

Osterholm said with the K-12 school year resuming in some parts of the country or set to start — along with universities — in a few weeks, transmission will take off and cases will start to climb again. He predicted the next peaks will “exceed by far the peak we have just experienced. Winter is only going to reinforce that. Indoor air,” he said.

Buckee thinks that if the country doesn’t alter the trajectory it is on, more shutdowns are inevitable. “I can’t see a way that we’re going to have restaurants and bars open in the winter, frankly. We’ll have resurgence. Everything will get shut down again.”

Fauci favors a reset of the reopening measures, with a strong messaging component aimed at explaining to people why driving down transmission now will pay off later. Young people in particular need to understand that even if they are less likely to die from Covid-19, statistically speaking, transmission among 20-somethings will eventually lead to infections among their parents and grandparents, where the risk of severe infections and fatal outcomes is higher. (Young people can also develop long-term health problems as a result of the virus.)

“It’s not them alone in a vacuum,” Fauci said. “They are spreading it to the people who are going to wind up in the hospital.”

Everyone has to work together to get cases down to more manageable levels, if the country hopes to avoid “a disastrous winter,” he said.

“I think we can get it under much better control, between now and the mid-to-late fall when we get influenza or we get whatever it is we get in the fall and the winter. I’m not giving up,” said Fauci.

But without an all-in effort “the cases are not going to come down,” he warned. “They’re not. They’re just not.”

There is not going to be an all-out effort. That’s obvious. So those who are vulnerable (or care about inadvertently infecting others if they might be asymptomatic) need to gird themselves for more isolation through the winter.

Here is some new polling. According to this, Biden is seen as better on the economy, which is a switch:

The August 2020 Battleground Poll gave strong evidence that three months out from the 2020 election, President Trump faces eroding support on the economy, and major challenges with Independent, suburban, and middle class voters. Americans trust Vice President Joe Biden more than President Trump on key issues, including the economy, where 49% of voters say they have more confidence in Biden, and 47% have more confidence in Trump. Democrats have a much more narrow lead on the Congressional ballot, which finds Republicans at a disadvantage of just six points (44%-50%) despite voters trending toward Biden on key issues.

The approval rating hasn’t budged much:

As usual, I’m shocked at how high Trump’s numbers are but then I remember that 39% of the public voted for Herbert Hoover in 1932. They’re always there, no matter how bad the candidate might be.

Trump promised again and again that he would protect Social Security and Medicare.

He lied. pic.twitter.com/saP06iGqJC

— DNC War Room (@DNCWarRoom) August 10, 2020

The following is a statement from Nancy Altman, President of Social Security Works, in response to Donald Trump’s press conference in which he promised to “terminate” FICA contributions, Social Security’s dedicated revenue, if he is reelected:

“Donald Trump once promised that he would be ‘the only Republican that doesn’t want to cut Social Security.’ We now know that what he meant is that cutting Social Security doesn’t go far enough for him: He wants to destroy Social Security.

Donald Trump’s executive order, which seeks to defer Social Security contributions, is bad enough. But his promise to ‘terminate’ FICA contributions if he is reelected is a full-on declaration of war against current and future Social Security beneficiaries.

Social Security is the foundation of everyone’s retirement security. At a time when pensions are vanishing and 401ks have proven inadequate, Trump’s plan to eliminate Social Security’s revenue stream would destroy the one source of retirement income that people can count on. Moreover, Social Security is often the only disability insurance and life insurance that working families have. If reelected, Trump plans to destroy those benefits as well.

Every member of Congress must speak up now to denounce Donald Trump’s unconstitutional raid on Social Security. Voters should treat any Senator or Representative who is silent as complicit in destroying Social Security. Furthermore, every American who cares about Social Security’s future must do everything they can to ensure that Trump does not get a second term.”

Not only is this important on the substance, it’s important on the politics. Democrats must alert voters that Trump just promised to terminate Social Security and medicare’s funding.

Here’s the Trump campaign’s lawyer celebrating the devlopment on twitter:

This is actually the biggest news of the day:

President Trump said if he is re-elected, he will look into terminating the payroll tax permanently!

— Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) August 9, 2020