The New York Times on Monday covered the announcement that Manhattan DA Cyrus R. Vance Jr. is investigating far more than the acting president’s hush-money payments made to cover-up of his extra-marital sexual dalliances. Vance has been seeking eight years of Trump’s personal and corporate tax records, something Trump’s lawyers called “wildly overbroad” and issued in “bad faith” regarding hush-money payments.
But after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the president does not get preferential treatment above any other citizen, Trump’s attorneys went back to court to challenge that overbroad demand. Whoops (AP):
In a court filing Monday, though, attorneys for Vance said Trump’s arguments that the subpoena was too broad stemmed from “the false premise” that the probe was limited to so-called “hush-money” payments.
“This Court is already aware that this assertion is fatally undermined by undisputed information in the public record,” Vance’s lawyers wrote.
They said public reporting demonstrates that at the time the subpoena was issues “there were public allegations of possible criminal activity at Plaintiff’s New York County-based Trump Organization dating back over a decade.”
By challenging the subpoena, Trump gave Vance leave to reveal that the Trump Organization is under investigation not only for misreporting hush-money payments but for “alleged insurance and bank fraud,” part of an investigation of “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.”
The speculation is over. Trump’s resistance revealed how much of his operation is under criminal investigation.
Every day courts allow Trump to delay producing the documents, the DA’s office states, brings him closer to achieving in effect the “temporary absolute immunity” he claimed … and that courts up to and including the Supreme Court rejected. Trump is trying to run out the statute of limitations clock and evade justice (assuming his company is guilty).
Monday evening, Trump dismissed the Manhattan investigation as “just a continuation of the worst witch hunt in American history.”
It is unclear what potential bank or insurance fraud may be part of the district attorney’s probe, but Monday’s filing cited a Washington Post report from March 2019 that detailed how Trump created documents titled “Statements of Financial Condition” that inflated his assets and played down his debts to seek bank loans.
The DA’s office interviewed Cohen at least three times last year. The acting president’s collars must be feeling tighter every day.
Now, on top of families losing their $600/wk of supplemental unemployment payments days ago and their kids being unable to return to school this fall, Trump’s company coming under criminal investigation could further undermine his support. This is a man who has spent his whole life bullshitting or lawyering his way out of trouble. His usual tricks are failing him.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like. Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
…experts inside and outside the government … say they fear the White House will push the Food and Drug Administration to overlook insufficient data and give at least limited emergency approval to a vaccine, perhaps for use by specific groups like front-line health care workers, before the vote on Nov. 3.
“There are a lot of people on the inside of this process who are very nervous about whether the administration is going to reach their hand into the Warp Speed bucket, pull out one or two or three vaccines, and say, ‘We’ve tested it on a few thousand people, it looks safe, and now we are going to roll it out,’” said Dr. Paul A. Offit of the University of Pennsylvania, who is a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee.
“They are really worried about that,” he added. “And they should be.”
Every time I’ve seen The Third Man, a movie I love (especially for that great soundtrack), I find the villain to be implausibly evil. No one is that twisted.
Actually, someone is, and he’s in charge of our government. By not testing properly for side effects — an all but inevitable result of rushing development of a vaccine — people will suffer and die…All for no other reason than to save Donald Trump’s political career.
As entertaining as they may be, I have concluded they are probably counter-productive to democracy for all the reasons Elizabeth Drew lays out in this NYT op-ed:
Nervous managers of the scheduled 2020 presidential debates are shuffling the logistics and locations to deal with the threat of the coronavirus. But here’s a better idea: Scrap them altogether. And not for health reasons.
The debates have never made sense as a test for presidential leadership. In fact, one could argue that they reward precisely the opposite of what we want in a president. When we were serious about the presidency, we wanted intelligence, thoughtfulness, knowledge, empathy and, to be sure, likability. It should also go without saying, dignity.
Yet the debates play an outsize role in campaigns and weigh more heavily on the verdict than their true value deserves.
Perhaps the most substantive televised debate of all was the first one, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, which Nixon was considered to have won on substance on the radio, while the cooler and more appealing Kennedy won on television. Since these weren’t true debates, the concept of “winning” one of these odd encounters was always amorphous. (To be sure, many questions by panels of journalists were designed less to stimulate debate than to challenge one of the candidates.)
Over time, the debates came to resemble professional wrestling matches, and more substantive debates were widely panned in the press. Points went to snappy comebacks and one-liners. Witty remarks drew laughs from the audience and got repeated for days and remembered for years.
Some of them have been less than hilarious, but they did the job of dominating reaction to a debate. Whatever substance existed was largely ignored. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan debated the incumbent Jimmy Carter, Carter made a serious point about Reagan’s position on Medicare, and Reagan’s riposte, “There you go again,” a non-answer if ever there was one, brought down the house and that was that.
In the first 1984 debate, Reagan, seeking re-election and at 73, the oldest person to be nominated for the presidency, seemed tired and tended to wander off mentally at times. His lackluster performance caused panic among his staff. Democratic supporters of former Vice President Walter Mondale saw an opening.
But another debate soon followed. Thoroughly prepared, Reagan got off the crack, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
The audience roared and Mr. Mondale feigned a laugh, knowing he was cooked. Not even Reagan’s ending of that debate, reminiscing about driving along the Pacific Coast and musing about time capsules, was enough to undermine his political prospects. Reagan’s “joke” aimed at nullifying the age issue dominated the post-debate chatter.
But what is the point or relevance of the carefully prepared one-liner? It’s as spontaneous as a can of sardines. It’s usually delivered from a memory chip in the mind, having been fashioned and rehearsed with aides. When is a president called upon to put down an interlocutor, be it a member of Congress or a foreign leader?
This, by the way, isn’t written out of any concern that Donald Trump will prevail over Joe Biden in the debates; Mr. Biden has done just fine in a long string of such contests. The point is that “winning” a debate, however assessed, should be irrelevant, as are the debates themselves.
The better way to pay attention to and choose among the presidential candidates is to follow the long campaign that so many complain about. The reason for such moaning has always been a mystery, because unless the campaign is taking place in your living room, you can simply switch it off.
The key words are “pay attention to,” because over the stretch of 2015-2016 it wasn’t impossible to see the implications of a Trump presidency. Not just the vulgarity but the ignorance and insensitivity and extreme narcissism were apparent more than a year before Election Day.
Moreover, we didn’t need the debates to tell us that Trump had chosen to be the P.T. Barnum of American politics. For him, it was (and still is) all about the show, about distracting the public from reality. It was obvious that Mr. Trump had no real affinity for the working-class people whose votes he was chasing. Nothing in his life suggested that his heart was with struggling workers and farmers. It wasn’t impossible to know that he wasn’t the skilled businessman he professed to be. His bankruptcies and shady business practices and discrimination against Black tenants were no secret.
The debates took us nowhere nearer the realities about arguably the most disastrous president in our history. They became simply another tool in his arsenal.
The party conventions, also vestigial organs of a political system that no longer exists, are close to being done away with, if not for the reasons they should be. There’s no reason not to throw the presidential debates on the trash heap of useless (at best) rituals that are no help in our making such a fateful decision.
Agreed.
Trump will not allow that to happen, of course. He thinks he won the presidential debates in 2016 but he didn’t. Clinton was widely considered to have won all three and got a nice bump in the polls. Then James Comey did what he did and that was that.
But they really are just performance vehicles and that just leads inevitably to political leaders like Reagan and Trump who are literally performers.
Trump, who has been actively working to hinder the USPS, laments without a shred of irony that the USPS isn't ready to handle the volume of mail-in ballots it will have to deal with this fall pic.twitter.com/TxyzcvnG4P
The following headline from Politico would normally make me feel optimistic but Trump’s headlong assault on mail-in voting means that he really is working himself up into a frenzy that it’s pretty clear he’s planning to contest the result if the counts go on longer than election day.
Entering August, Trump trailed Biden by 7 percentage points in national polls, according to RealClearPolitics’ polling average. Biden also holds an edge in nearly every swing state.
For months, Trump’s hope for a rebound in public opinion polls rested on an expectation that the coronavirus would subside by fall, and that the economy would show signs of improvement. Neither has happened, and the race has stagnated, with Biden maintaining — or even expanding — on his leads.
The one thing Trump needs most is time. “And that’s the one thing that he has none of with this calendar,” said Doug Herman, who was a lead mail strategist for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns.
One prominent Republican strategist, noting the dates that ballots will be sent to voters in Florida and elsewhere, declined even to talk about the accelerated timeline of this election.
“No,” he said. “It’s bad news.”
The Trump campaign recognizes the calendar squeeze: On Monday, it is launching an ad offensive that will focus on the earlier voting states.
Four years ago, Trump benefited from a longer runway with a less decisive electorate. About 13 percent of voters in 2016 said they made their decision between the candidates in the last week before the election, according to exit polls, with Trump carrying late deciders by about 3 percentage points.
But the number of undecided voters is smaller than it was in 2016, now representing about 10 percent of the electorate, according to both Democratic and Republican internal polling. And the sliver of voters who are undecided or registered third party are more likely to support Biden than Trump, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, with 61 percent saying they would support Biden if they had to choose now.
“Election Day is October 24 — 48 hours after the last debate,” Frank Luntz, the veteran Republican consultant and pollster, said in an email. “On that Sunday, people will wake up, have their coffee, go to church (or not) and make up their minds. On that day, the election is over.”
One reason Republicans worry about mail voting is that Democrats have been outpacing them in mail ballot requests throughout the primaries and in the run-up to the general election in many states. In 2016, about 40 percent of voters cast ballots in person before Election Day or by mail, a number is expected to dramatically expand because of concerns about in-person voting amid a pandemic.
In North Carolina, nearly six times as many voters had requested absentee ballots by last week as had at the same time in 2016, according to Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College who is tracking the requests. And the increase overwhelmingly favors Democrats, who account for more than half of all requests. Republicans made up just 14 percent of requests, according to Bitzer, down from about 36 percent in 2016.
Many of those voters will not immediately return their ballots, and it is difficult to predict when most ballots will besent in. In a normal year in California, a populous state with a traditional 29-day mail ballot period, about half of the total mail vote typically is returned about 10 days before Election Day, said Paul Mitchell of Political Data Inc., avoter data firm used by both Republicans and Democrats in California.
Still, even a portion of the early vote could swing the election in competitive states decided by a relatively small number of votes.
In Minnesota, where Trump lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016 by only about 45,000 votes, early voting will start on Sept. 18. “If you’re talking about just winning on the margins here, and it being a close election … if you don’t have your s— together by Sept. 18, it’s going to be harder to catch up,” said Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chairman, Ken Martin.
In Arizona, where early voting starts Oct. 7, Steven Slugocki, Democratic Party chairman in the swing county of Maricopa, tells party activists that “Election Day is not Nov. 3. It’s October 7, and it goes until Nov. 3.”
He said, “I tell people all the time: Literally, you could win or lose in that first week, three weeks before Election Day.”
Republicans are scrambling to narrow Democrats’ mail voting advantage, with state and county parties appealing to voters to request mail ballots despite Trump’s rhetoric. In Minnesota, Republican phone-bankers are urging Trump supporters to request absentee ballots “so you can put more time and effort to helping our Republican candidates from President Trump and all GOP candidates up and down the ballot,” according to a call script obtained by POLITICO.
Jack Brill, acting chairman of the local Republican Party in Sarasota County, Fla., said his county party has “spent a ton of money” trying to increase Republican mail voting rates, and his family registered to vote by mail “to help the numbers.”
But Brill expects Republicans in his county will largely wait to swamp the polls on Election Day, as do party officials elsewhere. Jennifer Carnahan, chairwoman of the Minnesota Republican Party, said that while the party is making a “strong push” for absentee voting, “Election Day is still, as it stands now, the day when the majority of people vote.”
Meanwhile:
Trump is working against a Democratic apparatus that is furiously trying to put the election out of reach before Election Day. Through the Biden-Democratic National Committee coordinated campaign, there are now hundreds of field staffers working on early voting efforts across the battleground states, a DNC official said. Priorities USA, the Biden campaign’s preferred big-money vehicle, is preparing to spend heavily on digital ads in August pushing Democratic-leaning voters without a history of voting by mail to request mail-in ballots, part of a $24 million vote-by-mail and voter mobilization program.
I don’t know how this is going to come out but when you considering the hysteria over mail-in ballots coming from the president, I suspect we are in for a shitshow even if the vote counting goes smoothly. Trump will make sure of it.
It’s lucky that most of you aren’t near me when I watch Fox News. It’s an ugly experience since I inevitably become enraged and the language gets more than a little bit salty. If I didn’t have to watch it I wouldn’t but it’s important to my work to keep up with what they’re saying. (As citizens you can follow Media Matters and Right Wing Watch to get the highlights without subjecting yourself to the horror of Fox News.)
One of the people who inevitably turns my rage level up to 11 is Mollie Hemingway. So I enjoyed this piece in the New York Times about the certain breed of right wing personality who cleverly evades some of the Dear Leader bootlicking in favor of another tried and true wingnut crowd pleasing strategy:
When President Trump ran for office four years ago, a conservative writer with a growing following vented the kind of doubt and cynicism that was common among people like her who worried about the damage he could do to their cause. She called him “a demagogue with no real solutions for anything at all.” She accused him of betraying the anti-abortion movement. And she wrote that his constant complaining about being treated unfairly was “ineffectual and impotent.”
Today, that writer, Mollie Hemingway, is one of Mr. Trump’s favorites. Her pieces for The Federalist, where she is a senior editor, have earned presidential retweets and affirmation for their scathing criticism of Democrats and the news media, whom she accuses of lying about just about everything when it comes to the president. Recently she claimed that journalists had fabricated reports about tear gas and the excessive use of force against protesters outside the White House (law enforcement, in fact, has acknowledged shooting a pepper-based irritant into the crowd), and said “a large group of Democrats” was defending the destruction of federal property (there is no such group).
Ms. Hemingway is part of a group of conservative commentators — who have large social media followings, successful podcasts and daily Fox News appearances — that has helped insulate the president and preserve his popularity with his base, even as many Americans say they are likely to vote against him in November.
What these writers and pundits don’t tend to do is make the doggedly pro-Trump defenses that appear on Breitbart and erupt from the mouth of Sean Hannity. Often, they don’t bother at all with the awkward business of trying to explain away Mr. Trump’s latest folly.
Instead, they offer an outlet for outrage against those the president has declared his enemies, often by reducing them to a culture war caricature of liberalism.
The capacity that many Trump supporters have developed to focus so intensely on the perceived wrongdoing of his opponents is a powerful asset for the president as he runs for re-election amid growing economic and social turmoil and a public health crisis that a majority of voters say they don’t trust him to handle. This almost entirely white cohort of conservative commentators can spend ample time mocking the mainstream and liberal media for focusing on Mr. Trump’s racist and divisive messaging without giving nearly as much consideration to the harm caused, for instance, when he promotes a video of someone shouting “white power.”
Through this lens, Mr. Trump’s transgressions seem irrelevant compared with the manifold misdeeds of everyone from the Clintons to CNN. Their portrayal of what the country would look like if the Democrats win big in November is indeed a frightening one to Trump supporters: a White House with Senator Bernie Sanders as the shadow socialist president; a Democratic House of Representatives where Representative Ilhan Omar calls the shots; a society in which mask mandates are the first step in a government experiment with social control; a political arena where conservatives are badgered into silence.
To many conservatives these scenarios seem perfectly plausible, especially as some prominent figures on the right contend that their voices are unwelcome in mainstream media — and even some liberals face a backlash for arguing that shaming and ostracism of opposing points of view has grown too common.
“There are a lot of conservatives reading ‘1984’ right now,” said Allie Beth Stuckey, who hosts a podcast, “Relatable” and is the author of a forthcoming book on self-esteem, “You’re Not Enough (And That’s OK).” Ms. Stuckey has a growing fan base and a large platform through her affiliations with right-leaning outfits like Turning Point USA and PragerU that are aimed at reaching millennials. While she does not go out of her way to defend the president, she said she got the sense from her audience that there are a lot of young women like her: socially conservative and religious, who sometimes cringe at Mr. Trump’s behavior but don’t let it bother them over all.
“There’s fear. It’s real fear. And I understand if you’re not a conservative it’s hard to be empathetic and it seems like an exaggeration,” Ms. Stuckey said. “But like the same kind of fear on the left that Trump is a unique threat to the country, there’s a real fear on the right, especially I would say from Christians, of what the country would look like under a Democratic president.”
Allie Beth Stuckey, right, has a growing fan base and a large platform through her affiliations with right-leaning groups aimed at reaching millennials.Credit…Jason Kempin/Getty Images
The thread of commentary that isn’t explicitly pro-Trump as much as it is witheringly anti-left has blossomed into a big business, led by personalities like Ben Shapiro, the host of one of the most successful podcasts in the country and the author of best-selling books. His most recent is “How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps,” in which he offers a stark take on how the “rising tide of radicalism from the left” threatens to tear the country apart.
Mr. Shapiro isn’t shy about calling out the president for his divisive and unfocused leadership. But far more often he takes shots at Mr. Trump’s critics. In this line of attack, Mr. Shapiro echoes other conservatives who deflect: Mr. Trump wasn’t helping anyone, for instance, by asking top public health officials to study whether disinfectant could be injected into the human body as a coronavirus treatment. But, Mr. Shapiro explained he didn’t actually tell people to put bleach in their bodies. “That doesn’t mean he was recommending actually injecting Clorox, people.”
Some media scholars see the desire to pick apart Mr. Trump’s critics as a form of entertainment disinformation. “They try to get you not to believe other kinds of information that you might hear in the larger media sphere, and it’s just fun,” said Khadijah White, a professor at Rutgers University who studies race, gender and the media. “It’s really fun to see the other side lose. And that just buttresses the idea that maybe Trump is corrupt, but they’re corrupt too.”
This is the future of the Trump Cult. They will seamlessly move from their love of Trump to their hatred of “the libs” because it’s never really been about him — it’s about them. He said what they were thinking and what they were thinking is how much they hate all their enemies. They don’t really care about trade or America being laughed at or taxes or Jesus. They just hate liberals, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, all foreigners of all races, ethnicity and religion, and all uppity feminists. In other words, they hate everyone but themselves. And Trump made their hatred mainstream and took it all the way to the White House.
Wingnut welfare recipients like Hemingway will continue to make a tidy living feeding their hatred with lies, propaganda and cant. There is absolutely nothing new about any of that. It’s just that their political leaders (with the exception of clowns like Steve King and Louis Gohmert) left it to the wingnut welfare queens and hate radio hates to feed that grotesque impulse directly. Politicians would indirectly validate these people with attention, dogwhistle their endorsement of the hate, but usually left the crude insults and blatant lies to them so they could appear to be above it all.
Trump was too stupid to understand how that worked. That’s why he could never get out of the low 40s. It’s also why his core base loved him so much. He was one of them.
It’s not about class or region. It’s about who you hate.
The article goes on to look at The Federalist, Hemingway’s home, which is sort of interesting but I can’t say that it’s doing anything that we didn’t see in plenty of conservative rags in the past. It’s just going with the Breitbart model — and the Newsmax model and the American Spectator model and Drudge and blah,blah, blah. It has shadowy funding which means it’s got a rich right wing sugar daddy and that’s also nothing new. This is how the right wing gravy train works.
Republicans who are no fans of Mr. Trump or the turn that their party has taken under him say that its fuming commentariat is a symptom of a deeper problem: its inability to govern. Though the G.O.P. controls half of Washington, its leading voices still often sound like the aggrieved opposition party.
“Ask them what they are building, and they can’t answer,” said Evan McMullin, who ran against Mr. Trump in 2016 as a third-party candidate. “They aren’t trying to build anything. They’re just tearing things down.”
Yeah, ok. Again, nothing new about any of this. McMullin only thinks it is because Trump is such a brutish ignoramus.
Maybe Trump has lowered America’s tolerance for right wing bullshit but I’ll believe it when I see it. This is a financial model that benefits rich Republicans and professional GOP propagandists. If it ain’t broke …
It’s highly unlikely that the Manhattan DA will bring an indictment against Trump before the election so there’s little chance we’ll see any of Trump’s tax returns and financial records until later. It’s a shame.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office is probing the Trump Organization over fraud allegations, state prosecutors suggested in a Monday court filing.
The probe covers allegations of potential bank and insurance fraud, wrote Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance in a motion to dismiss a federal case that President Trump filed to block a subpoena that New York prosecutors obtained for the President’s tax returns, which are held by a third-party accounting firm.
The Supreme Court dismissed a challenge from President Trump to the subpoena last month, but left room for him to continue objecting to the demand for documents at the district court level.
Vance cited news reports and an article referencing former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony in the filing. At a hearing before the House Oversight Committee last year, Cohen alleged that Trump would change the book value of his properties for lenders and insurers.
The filing does not appear to cite a specific act of alleged wrongdoing as the focus of the investigation, however, instead arguing that “undisputed information in the public record” invalidates Trump’s earlier accusation that the subpoena was “wildly overbroad.”
Rather, Vance argued, there have been “public allegations of possible criminal activity at Plaintiff’s New York County-based Trump Organization dating back over a decade.”
“Although the Office bears no affirmative burden to justify the breadth of the Mazars Subpoena, and although Plaintiff is not entitled to know the scope and nature of the grand jury investigation, publicly available information itself establishes a satisfactory predicate for the Mazars Subpoena,” Vance argued.
[…]
A New York grand jury first issued the subpoena to Trump’s longtime accountant Mazars USA LLP in August 2019. The subpoena has remained dormant for the past year as litigation progressed up to the Supreme Court.
State prosecutors had suggested at the time that their focus was on whether any New York State laws were broken when Cohen set up hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.
Who knows what they’ll find in those tax returns? I think we have a right to now, even if he loses the election. It’s important to see everything he may have put in motion for his own enrichment.
So Crazy Nancy Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah Birx, going after her because she was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combatting the China Virus, including Vaccines & Therapeutics. In order to counter Nancy, Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!
Pelosi said yesterday that she didn’t have faith in Birx, and for good reason. She’s been Ms Happy Talk for months. But Pelosi criticized her after Birx appeared on CNN in which her hair was on fire about the rapidly spreading pandemic.
Birx was much, much more alarmed about the virus than I’ve ever seen her.
Dr. Deborah Birx says, "we are in a new phase" of the coronavirus pandemic adding, "This epidemic right now is different and it's … more widespread and it's both rural and urban" #CNNSOTUpic.twitter.com/w09X9GrhL0
Perhaps Birx thought that her months of bootlicking would protect her from Trump’s wrath if she decided to try to save lives (and her reputation.)
She was wrong. Surprise.
This guy went off the reservation too:
ICYMI: @HHS_ASH says there's a "debate" over whether Americans would rebel against a universal mask wearing mandate: "It really has to be voluntary by the American people."
"We are very concerned. … Deaths will continue to increase for the next few weeks." pic.twitter.com/a1hdp2SiyZ
After all, the crowds LOVE him. You do see the crowds…right?
My visits last week to Texas and Florida had massive numbers of cheering people gathered along the roads and highways, thousands and thousands, even bigger (by far) than the crowds of 2016. Saw no Biden supporters, and yet some in the Fake News said it was an equal number. Sad!
Donald Trump isn’t the first president to fail on a grand scale, and he certainly isn’t the first to test the boundaries of the system to see what he can get away with. But he is unique in certain respects. The full panoply of grotesque personality defects and openly corrupt behaviors is something we’ve never seen before in someone who ascended to the most powerful office in the land. People will study this era for a very long time to try to figure out just what cultural conditions allowed such an advanced, wealthy nation to end up with such an ignorant, unqualified leader.
But that’s actually less interesting in some ways that how party officials came to support him so unquestioningly and why so few career bureaucrats and civil servants have publicly stood up to him. What kind of system produces that kind of loyalty for a man who never had the support of more than 45% of the country, and who won by virtue of an anachronistic electoral system that allowed him to take office with nearly 3 million fewer votes than his opponent?
Trump may be a uniquely unfit leader, but the party that has backed him without question is not unique. In fact, the last Republican administration showed many of the same characteristics. Robert Draper’s new book “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq” reminds us that just 17 years ago, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration used propaganda and disinformation to persuade the American people to go along with a war that made no logical sense on its face.
As almost the entire world looked on in astonishment, the U.S. — with the shameful cooperation of the U.K. under Tony Blair — invaded a country that had no involvement in that attack. A certain faction within the administration had come into office with the intention of finding a reason to do that if they could. They seized the moment, cooked up some flimsy evidence, constructed a convoluted rationale and just went for it.
Draper goes into some detail about how the administration successfully brought the bureaucracy into line, illustrating the fact that it tends to serve any president, even when individuals may stand up or resist. In fact, he pretty much blows up the idea of an unaccountable “deep state,” showing instead that it’s pretty much impotent to stop a determined president from using the powerful levers of government when he wants to.
Trump hasn’t attacked another country, thank goodness, although I think that’s been a matter of luck more than anything else. We came extremely close last January when he decided to assassinate Iran’s top general right before his impeachment trial was about to start. Iran didn’t take the bait and we avoided that disaster.
As it turns out, the inevitable Trump catastrophe happened right here at home with his tragically inept management of the COVID-18 pandemic and subsequent economic crisis. But he has certainly done everything he can to stoke a war at home this summer as people took to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd and show support for the Black Lives Matter movement. If Americans weren’t already overwhelmed from the other two crises and Trump was even slightly more skilled, he might have pulled it off as deftly as Bush and Cheney.
Over the past several weeks Trump and his top henchmen, Attorney General Bill Barr and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, directed a disastrous paramilitary operation in Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to “protect” a federal building from protesters. This article in the Daily Beast by Asawin Suebsaeng and Erin Banco reveals chilling details of how Trump wanted to expand that operation into Chicago, and potentially other cities:
According to three people familiar with the president’s private remarks, Trump previously envisioned an ostentatious, camera-ready show of force. He wanted to go after what he saw as violent gang leaders, flush them out of hiding in ways that would have them “shaking in their boots” like they never had before, and have alleged perpetrators marched out in front of the news cameras. Violent crime has long plagued Chicago, and murders are spiking to highs not seen in decades. But Trump insisted that with the right leader, and the right muscle, crime there could be reduced “very quickly.”
The president said he wanted something similar to what his administration has done in Portland, an ongoing melee between protesters and rioters and unmarked federal authorities. Trump has been closely monitoring the conflict — largely on his favorite channel, Fox News — and trumpeting it as a sign of his own supposed strength.
Some senior members of the White House team reportedly realized that such an assault “would almost certainly result in extreme backlash and hellishly bad PR,” so they ended up scaling back the plan to “Operation Legend,” which is simply an expansion of earlier programs to lend federal investigative help to local jurisdictions.
This was described to the Daily Beast reporters as a pattern in which Trump demands “large-scale, draconian, and potentially disastrous action, with senior officials actively working to temper or inflame, those desires”:
“There was rarely a time I spoke to him about violent crime when two things didn’t come up: Number One, that it’s all happening in Democrat-run cities, with Chicago being shorthand for that kind of [blight],” said one former senior Trump administration official. “And Number Two, if it were up to him, we would return to the old days where it was eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth — or we would forget about proportionality altogether. He would talk about lining up drug dealers and gang members in front of a firing squad … If it were solely up to him, that is how the country would solve crime in Democrat-run cities [such as Chicago and Detroit].”
That’s his impulse and it’s been more or less kept in check, often by his own short attention span. Trump tweets something, and it makes him feel better for the moment. But what about the rank and file, the lower levels of officialdom? What do they do?
Judging from the Portland operation, they go along. Some go even further. Just this week the acting DHS undersecretary for intelligence and analysis, Brian Murphy, was removed from his job after he was found compiling “intelligence reports” about journalists and protesters in Portland. According to the Washington Post, “Murphy tried to broaden the definition of violent protesters in Portland, in a way that some officials felt was intended to curry favor with the White House,” calling them “violent antifa anarchists.”
If Trump wins the validation he craves by being elected to a second term, true believers like Murphy will be further empowered up and down the line. And we can expect that Trump’s own Deep State will be more than happy to implement his program. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Twenty years ago, a Time cover story on East Asian bailouts dubbed Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and Undersecretary Lawrence Summers “The Committee to Save the World.” Needless to say, that was hyperbole and, no, they didn’t.
Now it’s your turn.
Okay, Joe Biden has a big role to play. And, says New Yorker’s John Cassidy, some big challenges:
The first was uniting the Democratic Party after a chaotic primary season. To this end, Biden has reached out to the Party’s progressive wing and tacked to the left in some of his own policy proposals. He created a Unity Task Force—including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other supporters of Bernie Sanders—that released a lengthy set of recommendations earlier this month. Biden now supportsElizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy plan, which would make it easier for financially strapped people to discharge their debts. He has put forward a proposal to insure free tuition for many students at public colleges, modelled on an earlier Sanders plan. His climate-change strategy sets a target of 2035 for the creation of a zero-emissions power grid, which is just five years later than the deadline laid out in the Green New Deal. Some Sanders supporters are still scornful of Biden, but there has been no repeat of the internecine conflict that occurred in 2016.
The second task facing Biden was to fashion a coherent response to the tumultuous events of 2020. That’s where his Build Back Better plan comes in. The members of his policy team have worked on the assumption that the coronavirus-stricken economy will need substantial financial support for years. They think that this presents an opportunity to make it greener, more worker-friendly, and more racially inclusive. Biden’s proposals include spending two trillion dollars on projects to move beyond fossil fuels; seven hundred and seventy-five billion dollars on expanding care for preschoolers and the elderly; and a hundred and fifty billion dollars on supporting small, minority-owned businesses. He’s also promised to insure that forty per cent of the investment in green-energy infrastructure benefits disadvantaged communities, to expand rent subsidies for low-income households, to facilitate labor-union organizing, and to introduce a national minimum wage of fifteen dollars per hour.
The third challenge is not giving Donald Trump a ready target. While the acting president continues to dig his hole deeper, Biden is making a pitch for Trump Country voters, says Cassidy. He is adopting economic nationalism language and calling for rebuilding American manufacturing, but avoiding issues that might alienate white voters in battleground states.
“You cannot cede massive sections of the electorate if you want to be successful politically,” Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress tells Cassidy. Or as I put it, if you don’t show up to play, you forfeit.
Meanwhile, Trump is bleeding support in the suburbs. Let him. Biden is thinking carefully about his Vice-Presidential pick and trying to build a tent broad enough to both win decisively and govern effectively.
What is clearer daily is that Trump is trying to undermine postal delivery to sabotage the election he already sabotaged with his flailing non-response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports mail delays across the area. Some residents have gone “upwards of three weeks without packages and letters, leaving them without medication, paychecks, and bills.” Mail carriers contracting the virus is not helping. But Trump’s actions are making it worse:
The new Postmaster General’s policies eliminate overtime, order carriers to leave mail behind to speed up their workdays, and slash office hours, which — coupled with staffing shortages amid previous budget cuts and coronavirus absences — are causing extensive delivery delays.
[…]
On top of staff shortages, the agency has seen a significant increase in packages due to a boom in online shopping as people stay home. Casselli said Philadelphia’s plant was processing about 30,000 parcels per day before the coronavirus. Now, it’s processing 100,000.
“They were short-staffed before COVID, and now they don’t have the manpower to process the mail that needs to be delivered,” said Casselli. “Mail is sitting for a week to 10 days before they’re even scanned to go out.”
The changes are part of the administration’s plan to turn public opinion against the beloved service and, ultimately, to privatize it, says Philip F. Rubio, author of several books on the Postal Service and professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University.
One might say Trump is attempting to turn the perfect storm to his advantage. Sabotage mail delivery to sabotage the by-mail and absentee vote while insisting the election results announced on November 3 are the only legal ones. Real Americans ignore the virus, don’t wear masks, and vote in person, dontcha know. He’s encouraging Republican voters to do just that and is expected to declare illegitimate late-arriving absentee and by-mail votes that turn against him.
University of Birmingham professor Nic Cheeseman, co-author of “How to Rig an Election,” has five warning signs he looks for ahead of elections in unstable democracies: “Organized militias, a leader who is not prepared to lose, distrust of the political system, disinformation, and a potentially close contest. Right now, the U.S. has all five.”
This means that to save the world, your challenge is not only to vote but to evade additional voter suppression tricks and traps and a deadly virus while doing it. Cue up the “Rocky” trumpet fanfare.
Jennifer Cohn has thread with voting tips you should read and pass on.
If you decide to vote by mail, apply ASAP &, if allowed in ur county (check), return ur ballot in person at a drop box or office, not via the Post Office, which is sufffering delays due to #COVID19 & the GOP effort 2 destroy it. SIGN envelope & follow instructions EXACTLY. TY! 1/ pic.twitter.com/ihOU8zLT5B
— jennycohn@toad.social ✍🏻 📢 (@jennycohn1) July 29, 2020
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like. Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
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