Month: September 2020

I have been meaning to write about this and Paul Waldman beat me to it. It’s been driving me crazy ever since Trump came down that escalator:

We’re discussing the legacy and persistence of racism more now than in decades. And Trump understands that all this talk about institutional racism and White privilege makes many White people feel attacked and defensive, as though they’re being personally accused of sins they feel they haven’t committed.

So in response he gives them permission to stop feeling bad. Not only will I protect Confederate statues and banish talk of racism from schools, he claims, I’ll convince everyone that the real thing we need to eradicate isn’t racism itself but talking about racism.

Call it the White Innocence Project.

“We’re launching a new pro-American lesson plan,” Trump said later that day on a campaign trip. But the truth is that this will have precisely zero practical impact; the president himself has no power to dictate what schools teach, and even the federal government’s powers are limited.

There will be no “pro-American” curriculum distributed to every school district, no Trump-approved teaching materials vetted for their appropriately over-the-top boosterism — even though for most of our history, textbooks painted just the kind of cheery picture of slavery Trump seems to want.

Of course, a Republican candidate running on the idea that his love for America is deeper than that of his opponents is nothing new. Mitt Romney’s campaign biography written for 2012 was called “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness,” a reference to the conservative fantasy that President Barack Obama had gone on an “apology tour” belittling America around the world.

Yet Trump talks about America’s shortcomings all the time, just as conservatives always have. Four years ago, he told us that we were a country full of losers, suckers and fools. “Nothing works in our country,” he said, and his campaign book was called “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again.”

He understood that the people whose votes he needed, particularly White men, felt a loss of status that was only partly economic; it also came from the ever-increasing diversity of American society. He channeled their anger and resentment, promising to deliver them back to their rightful place at the top of the hierarchy.

No idea was more central to that promise than his proposal to build a wall on the southern border and make Mexico pay for it: We’d kick out all the immigrants, then enact a ritual humiliation on someone else that would allow us to stand tall again.

The fact that it would never happen was almost beside the point. Just electing someone who talked that way was nearly an end in itself, the validation that allowed his supporters to feel like winners.

Now, with his new crusade against critical race theory, Trump offers his supporters another restoration, in which once again he will grant them back their dignity.AD

Having enacted a positively historic performance of cruelty toward immigrants — what says “America is great again” more than ripping children from their parents’ arms and throwing them in cages? — now he’ll show those ungrateful Black people and their White liberal enablers a thing or two.

This is the message Trump wants those supporters to hear: We’re done talking about slavery and racism. You don’t have to do any soul-searching, you don’t have to question how American institutions operate, and you sure as hell don’t have to feel guilty about anything. You, beleaguered White man, are the best there is, because you are America, not them.

Conservatives often convince themselves that when liberals point to societal problems and conditions that demand remedial action — the large number of Americans in poverty, or our high rates of homicide, or the fact that American police kill so many people — it’s because they hate America.

By contrast, when conservatives complain about problems and conditions they don’t like — increasing secularism; the fact that automated customer service systems give you an option for Spanish — they’re only being patriotic, because the things they don’t like about America are betrayals of its true spirit.

It is a neat trick. But it’s ridiculous. Nobody has had more complaints about how terrible America is and has been than Donald Trump. His inaugural address is known as “the American Carnage” speech, forgawdsakes. His followers are all upset about the “cancelling” of American founders and leaders of the past when their Dear Leader is the king of cancel culture. He even says he’s the greatest president in history, including Abraham Lincoln who he says didn’t do as much for Black people as he has done.

So let’s not hear anything more about “the left” hating America. Nobody hates America more than Donald Trump.

This woman has more courage than the four-star generals who will only speak to Bob Woodward and whisper what they know on background to the press. She’s probably blown up her career since Mike Pence has thrown her over the side, which she knew would happen.

When I spoke with Olivia Troye on Thursday afternoon, she sounded more than a little scared. She was about to go public with a scorching video, in which she would denounce President Donald Trump and his stewardship of the country during the coronavirus pandemic. Troye, who served as Vice-President Mike Pence’s adviser for homeland security until late July, has witnessed the Administration’s response to the crisis, as Pence’s top aide on the White House coronavirus task force. She had seen Trump rant in private about Fox News coverage as his public-health advisers desperately tried to get him to focus on a disease that has now killed some two hundred thousand Americans. She had decided that Trump was lying to the American public about the disease, and that “words matter, especially when you’re the President of the United States,” and that it was time to speak out. She was nervous and scared and worried for her family and her career. But she plunged ahead anyway…

Troye joined the coronavirus task force when it was first established, in late January, before any Americans had died from covid-19. Her experience on it, Troye told me, convinced her that Trump’s handling of the situation—the conscious spreading of disinformation, the disregard for the task force’s work—had made the crisis far worse for Americans. She warned about the President’s push for a vaccine before the November election and said that she did not trust him to do the right thing for the country’s health and safety. “What I’m really concerned about is if they rush this vaccine and pressure people and get something out because they want to save the election,” she said.

Troye is the first White House staff member who has worked on the coronavirus response to speak out publicly against Trump, but the President and the Administration she described were drearily consistent with portraits that have emerged in countless other tell-all interviews and books: a White House riven by backstabbing and suspicion, where trouble flowed from the top and good governance was subordinate to Presidential whim and partisan calculation. She told me she believed that most other staffers on the coronavirus task force were genuinely motivated to help Americans weather the pandemic but that Trump blocked them from implementing the right policies. “Everything that you’re putting in place is derailed not just by a random person—it’s derailed by a No. 1. It’s derailed by the person at the very top,” she said.

Sadly, the surprise here is not that Trump acted so callously in the midst of a pandemic but that so many senior government officials know that this is happening and are doing nothing to stop it. Troye’s testimony, like that of so many others, is from inside the room—in this case, from inside the very room that is supposed to be dealing with the single biggest crisis currently afflicting the United States.

This is the real point:

Every Presidency has its dissenters, people who leave and tell tales after they do so. But there has never been anything like the stories that have emerged from the Trump White House, from so many who worked with the President and observed him up close. People like his former national-security adviser John Bolton, who called Trump “unfit” for office. And people like the former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, the former White House chief of staff John Kelly, and the former director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, all of whom have relayed grave concerns about Trump that have made their way to Bob Woodward and other journalists.

In the end, this is what struck me most during my conversation with Troye: she is young, only forty-three years old, with a long career ahead of her, and she was willing to put it all on the line publicly, whereas people like Mattis and Kelly were not. That contrast could not have been more stark as I read a Coats Op-Ed in the Times that published the same day as Troye’s video. Coats, clearly referring to Trump’s recent undermining of faith in the upcoming election, said that a national commission should be established by Congress to insure confidence in this fall’s voting. Coats never once referenced Trump by name, and he has never publicly come forward to share with Americans his misgivings about the President. Why not? He is a veteran U.S. senator and a former U.S. ambassador who closed out his career as the head of the massive U.S. intelligence bureaucracy. What does he have to risk?

Troye, with much more to lose—and with none of the stature of a former member of Congress or a former Marine general—had much more courage than all of them. She went ahead when they have not, knowing that she would be attacked. And, sure enough, when the video went online, the White House released a comment about her that was harsh and personal. Her direct supervisor in Pence’s office, Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, told the Washington Post that Troye was a “disgruntled” former detailee from the Department of Homeland Security who was “no longer capable of keeping up with her day-to-day duties.” Later, when Pence himself was asked about Troye, he told reporters that she was just “one more disgruntled employee who’s left the White House [and] decided to play politics during an election year.” When I spoke with Troye once more, on Thursday evening, she was bracing for more such comments from powerful men.

I asked her if she was bothered by the failure of senior officials who share her views to speak out as she had done. Troye was generous. “I know that I am not alone—and how hard it is,” she said. But, she added—and this is a point that cannot be repeated enough between now and November 3rd—this is not a time for silence. “I hope that this will encourage other voices who were obviously much more senior than I was to tell the truth about the situation here we’re in,” she said. “And how dangerous this is.”

People like this woman and Fiona Hill and Alexander Vindeman and many of the other career employees who had the guts to speak out and put themselves on the line are the brave ones. These top level people who know that Trump is a monster who presents a clear and present danger to this country and refuse to speak out clearly and energetically are cowards, every one of them.

Here’s an outtake from Truyo’s video. Good God:

Outtake: @OliviaTroye on that time the President spent 45 minutes complaining about @TuckerCarlson during an urgent task force meeting about Americans stranded on cruise ships with COVID. pic.twitter.com/lkKuTeTXjD

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) September 18, 2020

Remember this?

William Barr, President Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, said during his confirmation hearing Tuesday that it would be illegal for the president to pardon someone in exchange for that person’s silence.

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy asked Barr if a president can “offer a pardon in exchange for the witness’s promise not to incriminate the president.”

“No, that would be a crime,” Barr replied.

It’s clear that Roger Stone was threatening to sell Trump down the river and Trump commuted his sentence (almost almost certainly with the promise to pardon him before he leaves office) and Barr was right in the middle of that cover-up, so so much for that promise.

You’ll note that he didn’t say it would be a crime if a president offered a pardon in exchange for a witness revealing information, so I’d imagine Barr has no problem with this either:

Lawyers representing the United States at Julian Assange’s extradition trial in Britain have accepted the claim that the WikiLeaks founder was offered a presidential pardon by a Congressman on the condition that he would help cover up Russia’s involvement in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer, told the court that she had attended a meeting between Assange, then Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and pro-Trump troll Charles Johnson at Assange’s hide-out, the Ecuadorian embassy in London, on August 15, 2017.

Robinson said the two Americans claimed to be emissaries from Washington and “wanted us to believe they were acting on behalf of the president.” The pair allegedly told Assange that they could help grant him a pardon in exchange for him revealing information about the source of the WikiLeaks information that proved it was not the Russians who hacked Democratic emails.

“They stated that President Trump was aware of and had approved of them coming to meet with Mr. Assange to discuss a proposal—and that they would have an audience with the president to discuss the matter on their return to Washington, D.C.,” Robinson said.

The White House has denied that Trump took part in any such plan.

The claim itself is not new—Assange’s lawyers previewed the allegation in a pre-trial hearing in February—but this is the first time Robinson’s testimony has been heard in full. The WikiLeaks lawyer said Rohrabacher offered Assange the deal a year after emails that damaged Hillary Clinton in the presidential race had been published, when the Russia investigation was gathering pace. The stolen DNC emails posted by WikiLeaks were hacked by Russian operatives.

After Robinson read her testimony in a London courtroom on Friday, lawyers representing the U.S. accepted the witness statement as accurate and confirmed they had no intention of cross-examining the claim. They did dispute, however, that President Donald Trump gave his blessing for the pardon offer.

Sure. That’s all perfectly normal. A US Congressman and and internet troll offering pardons to people involved in sabotaging an election campaign if they lie and say Russia wasn’t involved. There’s nothing to see here at all.

Much of this has been reported before and Mueller certainly knew about it. But it would have been impolite to suggest that the president was dangling pardons. Which he has been doing from the beginning of this mess, in public and without shame. But, you know, no obstruction, no collusion and all that rot.

One of the greatest lessons of the Trump era is one we should have learned a long time ago. The idea of a Republican establishment made up of straight-arrow, patriotic, All-American “adults” has been a myth for decades now, and it needs to be thrown in the rubbish bin once and for all. There may have been a time when most GOP officials, whether conservative or moderate, were “traditionalists” or “institutionalists” or maybe “constitutionalists,” but that time is long past. Indeed, at this point there is only one Republican among the 53 in the U.S. Senate whom you could even remotely identify as being in that mold: Mitt Romney. And he is hardly a fearless crusader for truth, justice and the American way.

Just because someone’s been around since the days when all those Poppy Bush types were running things doesn’t mean they must be benign compared to today’s culture warriors. That was a huge mistake, and no one has proved that more dramatically than Attorney General Bill Barr.

We should have known. Barr’s record was out there for all to see and he hasn’t exactly been quiet about his views. After all, he was hired on the basis of an unsolicited letter in which he laid out the case for the president being answerable to no one but the voters. Barr simply does not believe that the normal understanding of constitutional checks and balances in the American political system is correct.

David Rohde of the New Yorker has delved deeply into Barr’s history and it’s clear that although he’s been in and around Republican government circles since the 1980s, he was never an institutionalist and his views of the Constitution are anything but traditional. He grew up in the 1960s as a right-winger and believes that ever since the reforms enacted in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation the presidency had been rendered impotent, which he claims makes the country vulnerable to all manner of threats, both internal and external. Barr is also an extremely conservative Catholic, who thinks the whole culture has gone to hell in a handbasket because of liberal Hollywood and the media. It’s pretty clear that he’s always been a down-the-line racist, constantly excusing the marginalization of Black people as a consequence of their own alleged shortcomings.

His brain has not, in fact, been rotted by Fox News, as I and others have speculated. He’s always been this way. The problem is that Washington has never grappled with the fact that these people have been at the heart of the conservative movement from the very beginning.

Barr has eagerly demonstrated the validity of his theory that a president cannot be held accountable by the Congress, law enforcement or the courts if he simply refuses to cooperate. It’s helpful, of course, that President Trump is completely shameless and ignorant, which is not something you could expect from any other president. Time after time, Barr has acted as Trump’s consigliere, helping his friends and confidants, spinning and propagandizing on behalf of the administration, and energetically supporting the president’s authoritarian impulses.

But Barr doesn’t do any of that out of loyalty to Trump, or because Trump had ordered him to do it. He does it to advance his own views, which align in many respects with the president’s but are driven by his own ideology and cultural mindset.

Barr gave yet another of his shocking speeches this week, this time at ultra-conservative Hillsdale College. (He does this every few months and causes a mini-firestorm, after which we all shake our heads and gird for the next assault on what we thought was the rule of law.) He discussed his own far-right worldview, which he always couches in accusations that the other side (by which he means the secular left) are the real authoritarians doing the things he himself is doing. Presenting himself as the real civil libertarian is one of his most infuriatingly duplicitous poses.

He claimed that America is becoming like an Eastern European country where “you have to call your adversary a criminal and instead of beating them politically, you try to put them in jail. … if you’re not in power, you’re in jail — or you’re a member of the press.”

The smug hypocrisy of this statement by a man who serves Donald “Lock her up” Trump is overwhelming. In fact, coming from a man who has explored ways to bring criminal charges against the mayors of Seattle and Portland for allegedly failing to uphold law and order, and recently directed his U.S. attorneys to charge protesters with “sedition,” it is obscene.

Lest anyone get the idea that Barr is a man of principle, he isn’t. During Whitewater, Barr said that Clinton’s claims of lawyer-client privilege were preposterous and said, “I’ve been upset that a lot of the prerogatives of the presidency have been sacrificed for the personal interests of this particular president.” (Yes, the man who just intervened in a civil defamation case by a woman who claims she was raped by Donald Trump 25 years ago actually said that.) When George W. Bush came in, Barr argued in op-eds and congressional testimony that the president had “maximum power.” But when every right-winger in Congress was screeching hysterically about Barack Obama using “dictatorial powers” by issuing executive orders, he had nothing to say.

I think this proves that Barr’s loathing for “the left,” along with his culture war goals and old-fashioned racism, are his true north. The powerful presidency is only important if it’s used for the advancement of right-wing conservative ideology.

And as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has recently pointed out, he is ready, willing and able to put the full force of the Department of Justice behind that cause, with his apparent commitment to helping Trump cause chaos in the upcoming election. Despite the utter hypocrisy of anyone associated with this president railing against political influence in prosecutions, Barr will undoubtedly be out there shaking his fist at anyone who tries to hold the corrupt Trump administration accountable for its crimes. For all we know, he might even be seeking to inoculate himself.

So the next time anyone tries to pass off some senior Republican who has been around politics and government for a long time as a “traditionalist” or an “institutionalist,” we had best ask what traditions and what institutions they are talking about. Most often, I’m afraid they aren’t the ones most people would define as democratic or constitutional or even American.

My Salon column republished by permission.

Yesterday’s hearing was not good for Donald Trump:

Christopher A. Wray, the director of the F.B.I., warned a House committee on Thursday that Russia is actively pursuing a disinformation campaign against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and expressed alarm about violent extremist groups.

“Racially motivated violent extremism,” mostly from white supremacists, has made up a majority of domestic terrorism threats, Mr. Wray told the House Homeland Security Committee. He also echoed an intelligence community assessment last month that Russia is conducting a “very active” campaign to spread disinformation and interfere in the presidential election, with Mr. Biden as the primary target.

“We certainly have seen very active — very active — efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020,” Mr. Wray said, specifically “to both sow divisiveness and discord, and I think the intelligence community has assessed this publicly, to primarily to denigrate Vice President Biden in what the Russians see as a kind of an anti-Russian establishment.”

Mr. Wray’s blunt comments were the latest example of a top national security official contradicting President Trump’s downplaying of Russian election interference. A homeland security official has accused the Trump administration of soft-pedaling both the Russian and white supremacist threats because they would make “the president look bad.”

Democrats pressed him on whether the administration was focusing enough on armed militias and white supremacists, while Republicans expressed similar concerns about Antifa, which Mr. Wray described as an “ideology or movement” rather than an organization

“That seems to me to be downplaying it,” said Representative Daniel Crenshaw, Republican of Texas, citing recent episodes in mass demonstrations where people targeted officers with lasers.

Mr. Wray defended his assessment.

“I by no means mean to minimize the seriousness of the violence and criminality that is going on across the country, some of which is attributable to people inspired by or who self-identify with that ideology or movement,” Mr. Wray said. “We’re focused on that violence, that criminality.”

He said the F.B.I. averaged roughly 1,000 domestic terrorism investigations annually and had recorded about 120 arrests on domestic terrorism suspicions this year. But he made it clear that white supremacist and anti-government groups were the primary threats.

In particular, neo-Nazi groups such as Atomwaffen Division and the Base have drawn the attention of the F.B.I., which has arrested violent members of those organizations. White supremacists have carried out the most lethal attacks on American soil in recent years.

Somebody did NOT like any of that:

But Chris, you don’t see any activity from China, even though it is a FAR greater threat than Russia, Russia, Russia. They will both, plus others, be able to interfere in our 2020 Election with our totally vulnerable Unsolicited (Counterfeit?) Ballot Scam. Check it out! https://t.co/mH3vrHWvS8

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 18, 2020

…And I look at them as a bunch of well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS who are protected because the Comey/Mueller inspired FBI is simply unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source, and allows them to get away with “murder”. LAW & ORDER! https://t.co/yHLzB0RQ8e

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 18, 2020

Your president, ladies and gentlemen. A screeching, conspiracy nut.

If you don’t know Moe Davis from cable TV appearances, you know his GOP challenger. Howie Klein (Down With Tyranny) provides some background to the race in North Carolina’s newly drawn (yet again) 11th Congressional District:

North Carolina’s 11th district on the western edge of the state includes the stunning Blue Ridge Mountains, Great Smoky Mountains National Park and some of the most beautiful forests, waterfalls and vistas in the country. It also includes Asheville, a small, artsy, craft beer-loving liberal city that anchors this district … but hardly defines it. Asheville and some of Buncombe County are a bright blue dot in a sea of deep red conservative voters. Despite redrawn lines that ended the gerrymander and Republican stranglehold on the 11th, there remains a highly divided electorate in this still red-leaning district that makes challenging it challenging for a Democrat.

This year though, NC-11 has a really exception candidate, Moe Davis, former Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo, who retired over the government’s use of torture. An Air Force colonel (ret.) and former Director of the Air Force Judiciary, Davis is up against the GOP’s “it boy,” Madison Cawthorn who isn’t even in office yet and has been caught lying about:

… about plenty. Click through both for Howie’s color commentary on Cawthorn and for more about Moe’s vision for bridging the digital divide in the mostly rural district: for students , for teleheath, and economic development. In much of it, I can make a phone call (maybe) but cannot access the web. Good luck using digital campaigning tools on the ground without it.

https://youtu.be/WGEkZw5KGao

Howie finishes:

Please hear him out and consider contributing to his campaign here or by tapping on the Blue America 2020 Trump District Democrats thermometer on the right.

(Please click through.)

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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.

The United States — the world, in fact — is in the grip of an economic cult and has been for decades. Midas cult members are free-market fundamentalists operating on the principle that anything that might be turned into gold should be. It would be hard to find a more paradigm case then the account in Vanity Fair of Jared Kushner’s White House Situation Room meeting in March to address COVID-19 shortages.

It was Saturday, March 20 at 6:30 p.m. The acting president’s son-in-law is “an observant Jew and normally wouldn’t work during Shabbat” who has a “rabbinic dispensation” to work on affairs of public importance, an administration official told Vanity Fair‘s Katherine Eban.

The assembled group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, business executives, and venture capitalists were prepared to mobilize corporate resources to meet shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) in the spreading pandemic. Photos had already circulated of intensive care nurses wearing garbage bags for surgical gowns. If Donald Trump would invoke the Defense Production Act, America’s industrial might was prepared to meet the challenge.

What happened next is right out of a movie, or soon will be:

Kushner, seated at the head of the conference table, in a chair taller than all the others, was quick to strike a confrontational tone. “The federal government is not going to lead this response,” he announced. “It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do.”

One attendee explained to Kushner that due to the finite supply of PPE, Americans were bidding against each other and driving prices up. To solve that, businesses eager to help were looking to the federal government for leadership and direction.

“Free markets will solve this,” Kushner said dismissively. “That is not the role of government.”

The same attendee explained that although he believed in open markets, he feared that the system was breaking. As evidence, he pointed to a CNN report about New York governor Andrew Cuomo and his desperate call for supplies.

“That’s the CNN bullshit,” Kushner snapped. “They lie.”

According to another attendee, Kushner then began to rail against the governor: “Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state…. His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.” 

“That’s when I was like, We’re screwed,” the shocked attendee told Vanity Fair.

Rigid ideology can be deadly. Left or right, it can blind one to the suffering of others when pursuing an idea, preserving it pure and unblemished, is more important than its real-world consequences. That it crushes skulls under its wheels, incinerates them in ovens, or leaves them scattered beside bones in muddy fields is of no interest to zealots.

Margaret Thatcher’s famous 1987 quote is often stripped of its context. But even in context, it reveals a mind more interested in pursuit of the idea than in its effects:

“I think we have been through a period when too many people have been given to understand that when they have a problem it is government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant. I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They are casting their problems on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no governments can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours. People have got their entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There is no such thing as an entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”

“People must look to themselves first” has merit as far as it goes. The problem with zealots is they go too far. Insisting people or states act alone in a global pandemic is (someone suggested) like believing you can have a smoking section in an elevator.

This government’s constitutional obligation is to look after “the general welfare,” especially where individual effort is insufficient to the situation, as the name of the West Wing conference room suggests. Even the capitalists gathered there recognized that if Kushner did not (Vanity Fair again):

“We had so much potential to commandeer against this,” said one person who attended the meeting. “We had a real system for contact tracing, the world’s best mobile engineers on standby. There was a real opportunity to have a coordinated response.”

That attendee said he remains “angry” over the federal government’s intransigence in stockpiling supplies and feels certain that people died because of it. “At the time I just thought of it as blind capitalism and extreme libertarian ideals gone wrong,” he said. “In hindsight it’s not crazy to think it was some purposeful belief that it was okay if Cuomo had a tough go of it because [New York] was a blue state.”

According to another attendee, it seemed “very clear” Kushner was less interested in finding a solution because, at the time, the virus was primarily ravaging cities in blue states: “We were flabbergasted. I basically had an out-of-body experience: Where am I, and what happened to America?”

The Midas cult puts its faith first in entrepreneurship. Any product or service the government might provide on a not-for-profit basis that the private sector might provide at a profit (even if only in theory) is an abomination, a crime against capitalism. Hence the privatization of military supply and logistics in Iraq, the diversion of education funding to privately run charter schools, and the erosion of the constitutionally authorized U.S. Postal Service. The only reason cultists have not privatized more of the country’s defense is there is no market for carrier strike groups and missile systems outside the Pentagon. Besides, privately owned defense-industry companies are already comfortably awash in tax dollars.

There are more layers to the Trump family’s pathologies beneath the worship of mammon. Social, political, and personal animus among them, clearly. But the economic cult behind recent deadly decisions did not begin with this administration. That the Midas cult eventually would cost people their lives was inevitable. In this case, tens of thousands, and we are not done yet.

Religious faith or no faith is no prophylactic against such ideological contagion. Christian evangelicals are among Trump’s most devoted followers. QAnon with its anti-Semitic overtones and other paranoid theories infect not only street-level Republican believers, but the upper echelons of the Trump administration. The left wing has zealots just as committed to consequence-free ideological clarity. An advisory: Loss of the ability to laugh at yourself is the first warning sign of fundamentalism.

Rosh Hashanah begins this evening.

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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.

https://youtu.be/f0j6adNroo4

The White House flunkies are saying she “wasn’t up for the job” of course. But that is long past being a believable excuse.

And the handwashing thing is almost certainly true. Yet he shook hands like never before after this came up. Because he is a psycho:

What was remarkable about Trump’s obstinacy to that point wasn’t that he was flouting elite experts’ advice—more or less par for the course—but rather that he wasn’t jumping at this opportunity to revert to one of his strongest and longest-standing prepolitics precepts. For most of his life, he didn’t just shun shaking hands. He detested shaking hands. And he made this bugaboo of his nothing if not characteristically explicit. A self-described “germaphobe,” “germ freak” and “clean-hands freak,” Trump over the years has called the practice of the handshake “barbaric,” “disgusting,” “very, very terrible” and “one of the curses of American society.”

He so stubbornly kept shaking hands, though, in the estimation of people who know him well, even as the spread of the virus started to spike, in an instinctual effort to avoid any implicit admission that he whiffed on preparedness or miscalculated the virus’ severity and to project as well his preferred patina of sanguine vigor and insusceptibility. Symbolism superseded safety.

“He went from being a germaphobe to being a germaholic,” former Trump Organization executive vice president Louise Sunshine told me.

“It’s a subconscious, if not conscious, way of saying, ‘Relax! Everything’s OK!’ Because if everything is not OK, he was wrong, and he can never be wrong,” added Alan Marcus, a former Trump publicist. “It’s more important for him to be right than to do right.”

“What I’ve been thinking on this issue of one of the more famous germaphobes in the world sort of deliberately shaking hands recently,” Trump biographer Gwenda Blair said, “is that it seemed to have been some kind of show of strength—excuse me, of presumed strength—and invulnerability, a way to telegraph that he is not cowed, not scared, not going to be intimidated.”

In the Rose Garden last Friday, for instance, when he declared a national emergency, “two very big words,” as he put it, Trump also nonetheless shook a bunch of hands. He shook hands with the CEO of Walmart. He shook hands with the CEO of Target. He shook hands with the CEO of Quest Diagnostics. He shook hands with the president of Walgreens. He shook hands with a vice president of CVS. And he tried to shake hands with an executive from the health care company called LHC Group.

Bruce Greenstein, however, left him hanging, instead offering a best-practices elbow bump.

Trump responded with a slight grimace, a sucking in of air, and an awkward attempt to touch elbows.

“Practice that,” Greenstein said.

Everything he did was the opposite of what should have done. Everything.

Naturally, it’s a classic “ugly American” overseas behaving like an ass:

Authorities in southern Germany have recorded three more COVID-19 infections in people who frequented bars visited by a 26-year-old American woman suspected of flouting quarantine rules in the Alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

The latest cases take the total number of recent infections in the town to 59, including 25 staff at a hotel resort where the woman worked that caters to U.S. military personnel.

Anton Speer, who heads the county administration, told reporters Tuesday that authorities are still waiting for the results of about 300 tests conducted Monday and it was too soon to give the “all-clear.” The three new infections emerged from 740 tests conducted over the weekend.

Bavaria’s governor, Markus Soeder, called the outbreak in Garmisch-Partenkirchen “a model case of stupidity” because the 26-year-old American had gone partying despite having COVID-19 symptoms and awaiting a test result.

They have contact tracing so they know how much this is happening and can tell who the “patient zeros” are in these cases.

Here people are refusing to cooperate with contact tracing and neither do we really care about spreading it apparently since half of Americans think giving a deadly disease to their families, neighbors, and strangers is their God-given right. Considering how much bar-hopping and COVID spread we have, it’s pretty clear that this is happening all over the US.

Dear God:

wut pic.twitter.com/GhhcGOUymX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2020

What is hell is up with Trump's delivery today? It sounds like he's just coming out of general anesthesia pic.twitter.com/2lfGoUePGl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2020

His teleprompter speeches are rarely delivered competently. But this is something else again. Did he stay up all night watching re-runs of Hannity or something?