Month: September 2020

My  friend Lisa Graves testified Monday in front of the House Subcommittee on Government Operations Hearing on “Postal Update.” 

“I am calling on Mr. DeJoy to be fired or resign,”  government watchdog Lisa Graves told lawmakers on Monday morning, during a briefing on postal operations before the House Oversight Committee. True North Research, the organization Graves heads, found that DeJoy — who runs a North Carolina shipping firm — had been sued by his brother Dominick for allegedly siphoning money from the trucking company founded by their father.  –– Alexander Nazaryan  Yahoo News

Lisa’s an expert on vetting people and she found out that the Board of Governors missed some doozies.  Like this one she uncovered, ( Bloomberg)   

DeJoy Gave $600,000 to GOP After Postmaster Job Opened Up

DeJoy  gave President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee more than $600,000 over eight weeks after the opening was announced, Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, which investigates the influence of money on public policy, said in written testimony submitted to a panel of the House Oversight Committee in advance of a hearing Monday

But the part that got my attention was how Louis DeJoy’s own brother sued him for hiding mail and money from him.  From Graves’ research (link)

Louis DeJoy Was Sued by His Brother Who Alleged a Pattern of Financial Deception, which DeJoy Denied

• Dominick alleged that Louis DeJoy opened three different bank accounts in his name, forging his signature without his permission, and that he did not know these financial accounts–that held millions of dollars–were in his name.
  Louis DeJoy claimed they often signed each other names on documents.

• Dominick also alleged that Louis DeJoy hid the mailed bank statements for three different bank or investment accounts in Dominick’s name from him for more than five years, from 1994-2000, or had employees of the company hide that monthly mail from him.

Graves goes into detail based on the public information that the Board of Governors could have found if they did a simple Lexis/Nexis search.

Dominick DeJoy, Jr., who alleged that Mr. DeJoy told him certain companies were subsidiaries of the family business they owned jointly but then it turned out that Mr. DeJoy had secretly created companies with a similar name that were held only in his name and the name of another brother, Michael DeJoy, who also denied wrongdoing.

Dominick DeJoy, Jr., swore in his complaint that Mr. DeJoy cheated him out of millions of dollars of business that he helped generate through this secret arrangement, and that Mr. DeJoy was able to do so because he had trained as an accountant and knew how to structure different legal entities.

The DeJoy brothers reached a confidential settlement in 2000. There were never any charges brought for the allegations regarding signing someone else’s name. Nevertheless, the claims alleged are troubling given the position of enormous public responsibility Mr. DeJoy now holds. 

Look, I don’t want to draw comparisons between the DeJoy Family and The Trump Family. Maybe Mary Trump could explain the mind of someone who  manipulates financial documents to screw his brother (and family) out of millions from the family business.  
Raw Story has more details, like how they haven’t talked since 2001.
(“You never call you never write. What, you need stamps? I’ve got a million of ’em!” )

The other big thing I learned from talking to Lisa  about this  is that only the Board of Governors can fire DeJoy.  Congress can’t impeach Postmaster General DeJoy. so what can people do?

Tell the USPS board of governors to fire Louis DeJoy. 
Mail them a Postcard titled Fire DeJoy
at…
475 L’Enfant Plaza SW, Washington, D.C. 20260
Just kidding. Here are their emails.

Robert Duncan, Chairman: mduncan@inezdepositbank.com
John Barger: barger.jm@gmail.com
Ron Bloom: ron.bloom@brookfield.com
Ramon Martinez IV: roman@rmiv.com
Donald L. Moak: lee.moak@moakgroup.com
William Zollars: DirectorAccessMailbox@cigna.com

I’d suggest you tweet #FireDeJoy at the Board of Governors but none of them are on Twitter! (“We get no revenue from Twitter! Mail us a letter if you want to talk to us!” -BoG probably) 
Here’s the kicker about this  board–they are all Trump approved!  It turns out that the entire board of Governors are new! Some have served less than a year. And Chairman Duncan? Huge McConnell donor buddy.

Name	Title	Political party	Term begin	Term expiration	Notes
Louis DeJoy	Postmaster General	Republican	June 15, 2020	No term limit	75th United States postmaster general[16]
Robert M. Duncan	Governor, Chairman	Republican	August 2018	December 8, 2025	Re-elected as chairman in November 2019[17]
Ron A. Bloom	Governor	Democratic[18]	August 20, 2019	December 8, 2020	Chair of Strategy and Innovation Committee[19]
Roman Martinez IV	Governor	Republican[20]	August 1, 2019	December 8, 2024	Chair of Audit and Finance Committee[21]
John McLeod Barger	Governor	Republican[22]	August 1, 2019	December 8, 2021	Chair of Compensation and Governance Committee[23]
Donald L. Moak	Governor[24]	Democratic[25]	June 18, 2020	December 8, 2022	Replacing Alan C. Kessler[26]

UPDATE: Full disclosure, as I said, Lisa’s a friend and I’ve been an advisor to her and did a project for Center for Media and Democracy in the past on journalism and drones. She is working now on The Ben Franklin Project to protect the Post Office. Twitter: @ProjectBenFrank
or Facebook Link

I’m always trying to figure out effective actions activists can take to have an impact. Graves’ research got in front of Congress and made the news, but that doesn’t always translate to the kind of pressure that is needed to force action. There needs to be more pressure on the Board of Governors.

Sadly in America it often comes down to money above all else. Saying “Save Democracy!” is too abstract. I would tell the millions of people who sell & buy items through Etsy and Ebay to write the Board of Governors and tell them “DeJoy is hurting my bottom line and needs to be fired right now.”

(I’m also thinking that the millionaires on the boards of those companies should make some calls to the Board of Governors too since they travel in the same circles. ‘Hey our stocks are going to take a hit this quarter if DeJoy keeps messing with the P.O.”)

If people don’t want to write postcards or send email they could donate to the Ben Franklin Project, because that is where people like Lisa are doing these kind of strategic and tactical actions to save the USPS.

Not a big fan of phone banking, but have knocked doors in the rain and snow. So much for the latter this year. But there is reason to believe a tactic much-discussed lately — “deep canvassing,” even by phone — is more than just the flavor of the month:

The results of that experiment — shared with Rolling Stone ahead of their release on Tuesday — are striking: Even when done by phone, deep canvassing can indeed have a measurable effect on an individual’s voting preference. According to a study conducted by political-science professors David Broockman and Josh Kalla in partnership with People’s Action, this summer’s deep canvassing by phone led to a 3.1-point swing on average in favor of former Vice President Joe Biden. In other words, for every 100 completed phone calls, three votes were added to Biden’s vote margin after they received a deep canvassing call. That number was even higher for independents (5 points) and independent women (8.5 points), according to the study.

If those numbers seem small, bear in mind that Broockman and Kalla in a 2018 study found that the most common persuasion tactics used by partisan general election campaigns had an measurable effect of less than 1 percent and, in some cases, practically zero. Going by their research, deep canvassing by phone is estimated to be 102 times more effective than classic presidential campaign persuasion tactics like TV and radio advertising, direct mail, and brief door-to-door canvassing or phone banking.

The experiment was not a big sample: 700 phone calls to Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Kalla says, that while “these kinds of compassionate conversations were originally meant to happen in person, this new data shows that deep canvassing can still move the needle even when done over phone during a public-health crisis.”

Caveats: One study; over the phone; during a public-health crisis; 700 calls. But still. We know what doesn’t work. Ask Green and Gerber.

Andy Kroll continues:

Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive consultant whose work combines political strategy and psychological research, says deep canvassing seems to work because it tries to reach voters in a way that TV ads or traditional door-knocking don’t. “At some level, all of political messaging is ‘You should think this. You should think this. Here’s why, here’s why, and here’s why,’ ” she says. An honest, nonjudgmental conversation with someone who disagrees with you, however, is really an attempt to find a common ground and a connection, and to lead someone to their own conclusions, not batter them over the head with what you want them to believe, she says.

It helps if progressive volunteers are not bent on browbeating voters into submission with the power of their superior command of the facts or on checking off a voter’s level of support and hurrying on to the next call. Listening to them may not run up the numbers the national campaign wants to measure every night, but tally sheets don’t vote.

A summary from People’s Action is here.

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“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” poet Allen Ginsburg began in 1954. Shortly thereafter, the Kennedy administration employed “the best and the brightest,” as David Halberstam put it, who while they launched the U.S. to the moon, nevertheless concocted “brilliant policies that defied common sense.” Well over half a century later, amid a movement that views expertise with derision and science with scorn, common sense itself — sanity, even — has been thrown onto the ash heap of history.

You don’t have to be crazy to work for the Trump administration, but….

The acting president himself, as those retaining their wits realize, is a thick bundle of pathologies. “A very sick man,” niece Mary Trump describes him. “[H]e will do and say whatever he feels he needs to in order to benefit somehow, even if tens of thousands Americans die.”

Journalist Bob Woodward collected hours of interviews with Trump for his new book, “Rage.” They seem to confirm the assessment of Trump’s clinical psychologist niece.

“This is more deadly,” Trump said privately of the coronavirus on Feb. 7. “This is five per — you know, this is 5 percent versus 1 percent and less than 1 percent, you know. So, this is deadly stuff.” Publicly, Trump downplayed the risk. On Apr. 13, he said, “It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it.” Yet even now he invites throngs to indoor rallies. He might as well serve poisoned Kool-Aid.

On a perfunctory visit to California on Monday to meet officials coping with wildfires, Trump assured them, “It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.”

“I wish science agreed with you,” replied Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary for natural resources.

“OK, well, I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump smirked.

Meanwhile, Michael R. Caputo, Trump’s assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, has drawn attention for alleging “career government scientists were engaging in ‘sedition’ in their handling of the pandemic and that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election,” the New York Times reports.

Caputo has drawn attention for editing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weekly bulletins to align them with administration statements. (Caputo has no training in science or medicine.)

Caputo told viewers he believes his life is in danger and advised, “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”

And later, “I don’t like being alone in Washington,” he said, saying “shadows on the ceiling in my apartment, there alone, shadows are so long.” 

Or incompetent

The Make America Great Again Committee operated by the Republican National Committee and the Trump reelection campaign issued an online ad last week urging supporters to “support our troops.” Politico reports the image is a stock photo of Russian-made fighter jets and weapons:

“That’s definitely a MiG-29,” said Pierre Sprey, who helped design both the F-16 and A-10 planes for the U.S. Air Force. “I’m glad to see it’s supporting our troops.”

Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Moscow, confirmed that the planes are Russian MiG-29s, and also said the soldier on the far right in the ad carries an AK-74 assault rifle.

The ad ran from Sept. 8 to Sept. 12. The creator of the image is based in Andorra, Politico reports. How many from the committee (or Trump himself) could say where that is?

Or corrupt

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy continues to draw fire not just for his management of the U.S. Postal Service, but for how he got the job. Experts testifying before a House Oversight subcommittee Monday presented alleged a litany of conflicts of interest and past misfeasance if not malfeasance.

DeJoy donated over $600,000 in the eight weeks after the position came open, Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, said in written testimony. DeJoy donated “more than $1.5 million to GOP candidates and campaigns, the bulk of which has gone to aid Trump’s 2020 election strategy,” Graves reports. “This level of partisanship,” Graves said, in addition to his disruptive management decisions, “undermines public trust in the Postal Service as an institution.”

DeJoy already faces scrutiny over allegations of using “straw donors” to evade personal contribution limits. Five people who worked for DeJoy at New Breed Logistics in High Point, North Carolina allege he pressured them to make political contributions which he “later reimbursed through bonuses.” The practice is illegal in North Carolina and has no statute of limitations.

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein commented:

“Any credible allegations of such actions merit investigation by the appropriate state and federal authorities,” he said. “Beyond this, it would be inappropriate for me as Attorney General to comment on any specific matter at this time.”

But Graves was not done with DeJoy:

Given the gaps in what Congress and the American people know about Mr. DeJoy’s current or recent financial holdings, it is troubling that he was sued by his brother, Dominick DeJoy, Jr., who alleged that Mr. DeJoy told him certain companies were subsidiaries of the family business they owned jointly, only to later discover Mr. DeJoy had secretly created companies with a similar name that were held only in his name and the name of another brother, Michael DeJoy, who also denied wrongdoing. 

Dominick DeJoy, Jr., swore in his complaint that Mr. DeJoy cheated him out of millions of dollars of business that he helped generate through this secret arrangement, and that Mr. DeJoy was able to do so because he had trained as an accountant and knew how to structure different legal entities. Dominick DeJoy, Jr., also alleged that Mr. DeJoy forged his signature on documents submitted to U.S. banks to open various accounts.

“This suit was easily discoverable through a basic Lexis/Nexis search,” Graves observed, suggesting shoddy vetting, recommending DeJoy resign or be fired.

Or criminal

Really, there is not enough time in the day.

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He is so sick:

When Woodward asks what it was like to meet Kim at their first summit in Singapore, Trump responds, “It was the most cameras I think I’ve seen, more cameras than any human being in history,” even more than he’d seen at the Academy Awards.

He then gives Woodward a poster-size copy of a photo of Trump and Kim shaking hands at the border separating North and South Korea. “This is me and him,” he tells Woodward, all excited. “That’s the line, right? Then I walked over the line. Pretty cool.”

He goes on to brag that Kim “tells me everything. … He killed his uncle and put the body right in the steps where the senators walked out. And the head was cut, sitting on the chest. …

Nancy Pelosi said, ‘Oh, let’s impeach him.’ You think that’s tough? This is tough.”

He loves Kim. The man who bragged to him about decapitating his own uncle.

He’s dumber than usual today. And proud of it.

"They can explode" — Trump's attempt to explain how poor forest management leads to wildfires is totally beyond parody pic.twitter.com/8yYmJ7lR8O

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 14, 2020

"It'll start getting cooler, you just watch." – President Trump.

"I wish science agreed with you" – CA Natural Resources Secretary.

"I don't think science knows actually."- President Trump.#NBC7. pic.twitter.com/0tMvYX3IUN

— Danny Freeman (@DannyEFreeman) September 14, 2020

Meanwhile, in the real world:

Science knows. https://t.co/Pwx8meY4zw

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 14, 2020

Biden: "If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze? If you give a climate denier four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised when more of America is underwater?" pic.twitter.com/pUFhJ4AmgE

— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 14, 2020

Remember this guy, Roger Stone’s protege who worked for Paul Manafort when he was the campaign manager in 2016?

Wednesday morning at 11:30, Michael Caputo was directed to meet a sedan with dark-tinted windows outside of the Washington, D.C., hotel where his lawyer, Dennis Vacco, is staying. The sedan was arranged by the government for the purpose of discreetly transporting Caputo to a mysterious office building where, once inside, he would arrive to his noon appointment with federal investigators working for special counsel Robert Mueller. Caputo confirmed the scheduled meeting to New York.

A year into his review of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the former FBI director has questioned dozens of individuals connected to Donald Trump’s political activities. A senior official on the campaign during the Republican primary with an unusual background as a political operative in the U.S. and in Russia, Caputo is the latest to march through the corridors of what he refers to as the deep state to answer questions in an investigation he’s called, “an attack on the presidency.”

Last July, Caputo spoke to the House Intelligence Committee, and this past Tuesday, he appeared before its counterpart in the Senate. After three hours, he delivered a closing statement of more than 800 words in which he condemned the investigation and asked who he could blame for the negative effects it’s had on his life, in the form of death threats and more than $125,000 in legal fees he said have forced him to dip into the college fund for his kids and consider moving from his home in Buffalo to Washington or Miami, where he believes he would make more money (last week, he announced the Michael Caputo Legal Fund). His statement concluded, “I want to know because God Damn you to Hell.”

Guess what?

The top communications official at the powerful cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus made outlandish and false claims on Sunday that career government scientists were engaging in “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election.

Michael Caputo, 58, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, said without evidence that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was harboring a “resistance unit” determined to undermine President Trump.

Mr. Caputo, who has faced criticism for leading efforts to warp C.D.C. weekly bulletins to fit Mr. Trump’s pandemic narrative, suggested that he personally could be in danger.

“You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going,” Mr. Caputo, a Trump loyalist installed by the White House in April, told followers in a video he hosted live on his personal Facebook page. Mr. Caputo has 5,000 Facebook friends, and the video has been viewed more than 850 times. It has been shared by 44 followers.

The department said in a statement: “Mr. Caputo is a critical, integral part of the president’s coronavirus response, leading on public messaging as Americans need public health information to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Mr. Caputo said Monday, “Since joining the administration my family and I have been continually threatened” and harassed by people who have later been prosecuted. “This weighs heavily on us, and we deeply appreciate the friendship and support of President Trump as we address these matters and keep our children safe.”

Mr. Caputo delivered his broadside against scientists, the media and Democrats after a spate of news reports over the weekend that detailed his team’s systematic interference in the C.D.C.’s official reports on the pandemic and other disease outbreaks. Former and current C.D.C. officials described to Politico first, then The New York Times and other outlets how Mr. Caputo and a top aide routinely demanded the agency revise, delay and even scuttle the C.D.C.’s core public health updates, called Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, that they believed undercut Mr. Trump’s message that the pandemic is under control.

Those reports, deemed “the holiest of the holy” by one former top health official for their international respect and importance, have traditionally been so shielded from political interference that political appointees see them only just before they are published.

Mr. Caputo on Sunday complained on Facebook that he was under siege by the media and said that his physical health was in question and his “mental health has definitely failed.”

“I don’t like being alone in Washington,” he said, describing “shadows on the ceiling in my apartment, there alone, shadows are so long.” He then ran through a series of conspiracy theories, culminating in a prediction that Mr. Trump will win re-election but his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., will refuse to concede.

“And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.” He added: “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”

Mr. Caputo’s installation at the agency was a White House move to assert greater control over Alex M. Azar II, who has been Mr. Trump’s secretary of health and human services since 2018. His job is to coordinate the messaging of an 80,000-person department that functions as the center of the American public health bureaucracy and includes the Food and Drug Administration, the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health, which lead the government’s pandemic response.

Mr. Caputo boasted in his Facebook talk that the president had personally put him in charge of a $250 million public service advertising campaign intended to help America to get back to normal.

Despite the criticism of his team’s interference with C.D.C., Mr. Caputo said he expected to remain in his post because Mr. Trump supported him. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I swear to God, as God is my witness, I am not stopping.”

His Facebook presentation comes as Mr. Trump has increasingly singled out federal government scientists as targets, complaining without evidence that they were deliberately trying to subvert his administration’s efforts to fight the pandemic for their own political reasons.

Mr. Caputo echoed those sentiments, saying scientists “deep in the bowels of the C.D.C. have given up science and become political animals.”

They “haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants except for meetings at coffee shops” to plot “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next,” Mr. Caputo said. “There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president.”

He seems nice.

Actually, he has always been a despicable, horrible person. That they put him in charge of communications during a deadly pandemic says … everything.

There is no bottom.

Brian Stelter shared this in his newsletter:

CNN weekend programming manager Ed Meagher texted this to me… and I told him I wanted to share it with all of you, because it reflects the reality for reporters in the field:

“We have one reporter in Nevada outside a packed Trump rally where no one is wearing masks, and another in California who is wearing his Wayfarer sunglasses because his eyes are blood red with smoke and ash. When I worked for CNN International, I used to worry all the time about the safety of reporters in the field. Gaza, Syria, Iraq. Now I’m focused on the US, and every weekend this country feels a little more like a war zone…”

It hits me every once in a while just how bad everything is in this country right now. There is a deadly pandemic, massive civil unrest, raging fires and hurricanes, a political system in turmoil, rampant disinformation, corrupt law enforcement institutions, conspiracy theories and an immoral, demagogic, ignoramus for a leader who is willing to win by any means necessary.

It’s bad. And defeating Donald Trump is just the necessary first step in a long process to put the country back together and move forward. It can be done. But it appears that everything’s going to get worse before it gets better. Hang on.

Donald Trump recently held his first indoor rally since the super-spreader event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June. The campaign sent out a snotty statement to justify this:

If you can join tens of thousands of people protesting in the streets, gamble in a casino, or burn down small businesses in riots, you can gather peacefully under the 1st Amendment to hear from the President of the United States.

The protests take place outdoors with people moving about mostly wearing masks. The casinos hand out masks and adhere to social distancing guidelines — and have the most advanced air ventilation systems in the nation. Putting several thousand people indoors, telling them that those who wear masks have psychiatric issues and encouraging them to stand closely together, screaming and cheering for hours, is something else again. Considering the age and evident comorbidities of many of Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, some will get sick and perhaps die. Who knows how many others they will spread it to?

It seems counterintuitive that you would want to kill your own voters but it’s clear that Trump and his henchmen have decided that we’re close enough to the election now that the sickness and death that will likely result won’t make a difference in the outcome. And that’s all they care about.

There’s a problem here for the Trump campaign, though. Every super-spreader rally he holds also spreads Joe Biden’s message that Trump is an irresponsible, reckless, unfit leader. There he is, mocking his own government’s public health guidelines that save lives, up on a big stage demonstrating his total disregard for the American people, including his own cheering crowds.

You might think Trump would have sobered up about the virus in the wake of the revelations in Bob Woodward’s tapes that prove that he knew very early on that the virus was “deadly stuff,” much worse than the “most strenuous flu,” and that he admittedly “played it down.” His recent insistence that we are “rounding the corner” on the pandemic is absurd. Logically, that can only be seen as a macabre celebration of rounding the corner to the imminent milestone of 200,000 dead Americans (which is, tragically, now only a few days away).

The president’s disastrous mismanagement of the greatest crisis of his presidency is taking a toll. This Yahoo News/YouGov poll asked the question directly:

Asked if their opinion of Trump’s coronavirus response has changed because of Woodward’s big scoop — a tape of Trump privately acknowledging the virus was “deadly stuff” even as he publicly sought, in his own words, “to play it down”— nearly a quarter of Americans (23 percent) say yes. Even 15 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2016 say the Woodward news has changed their mind about the president’s handling of the pandemic.

Those might seem like small numbers. But in an age of extreme polarization, they could augur a real shift. Overall, 15 percent of Americans say the Woodward quotes have made them less likely to vote to reelect the president in November — and a third of these were 2016 Trump supporters.

It’s obvious by now that Trump is no longer trying to win the election by legitimate means. He’s tried to scare suburban women with the specter of rioters in their cul-de-sacs, and that hasn’t works. He hoped he could hurriedly broker some “deals” in the Middle East and win the Nobel Peace Prize, but nobody takes him seriously on foreign policy. His alleged love of the military has been seriously called into question and his demands that government agencies push unproven cures and vaccines before they are ready haven’t helped his standing.

So this is all that’s left:

https://youtu.be/3LJ9sNsXERU

“The only way we can lose this election is if it’s rigged — remember that,” pretty much says it all. It’s not the first time Trump has made claims like that. Back in 2016 he told rally-goers that he would only accept the results of the election if he won.

Trump’s efforts to delegitimize mail-in voting have been well-covered. He’s not being subtle about it. He’s had his hatchet-man postmaster general sabotage the Postal Service just as it faces a massive upsurge of mail-in ballots. He has literally telling his followers to vote by mail and then show up at their polling places and try to vote again, which of course is illegal. He has repeatedly lied about states sending ballots only to Democratic voters and not Republicans. He has insisted that Democratic officials “control millions of votes” which they intend to steal for their own party.

If you wonder about the veracity of any of these claims, look no further than the words of the most prominent Republican election lawyer in the country, Benjamin Ginsberg, who says in this Washington Post op-ed that it’s all bunk.

It’s clear that Americans are going to vote in large numbers, potentially record numbers. The big question is how long it will take to count the votes and whether the public will accept the results whenever we finally get them. Trump and his Republican allies are working overtime to persuade his supporters that only the in-person votes counted on election night are legitimate.

The idea here is to end election night with Trump in the lead and cement the idea that he’s the winner, no matter what. This isn’t unprecedented. The George W. Bush campaign of 2000 took advantage of the fact that they were in the lead in Florida on election night to frame Bush as the true winner and Al Gore’s campaign as the “sore-losermen” who were trying to overturn the result. The media was complicit in spreading that 20 years ago, and it remains to be seen if they’ll do things differently this time around.

Brian Stelter of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” recently asked ABC’s Jonathan Karl how his network planned to handle election returns and Karl said they would stick to the facts and the numbers and basically report the returns straight. We’ll see.

But considering that the one state Trump has endorsed as having a reliable mail-in voting system is Florida, this observation from Karl was particularly interesting:

In terms of how long this is going to go, look early in the night on election night. Florida — despite what happened 20 years ago, Florida is a state that has its act together, has had a lot of mail-in voting, won’t have a dramatic increase this time. It’ll be very similar to what’s happened before. If you remember, the networks called Florida before 11:00 four years ago. If Donald Trump doesn’t win Florida, it’s not a very long night.

Florida is always important. But doing battle against this “perception of winning” makes Florida even more important than usual, which may just explain this news:

The Bloomberg playbook in '18 often involved striking very late. Most of the time, they didn't show their hand until they played it. And why should they? There's plenty of evidence that late ads are most effective. Striking late means no opportunity to organize a counter.

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) September 13, 2020

It seems that the Democrats are well aware that Florida counts its mail-in votes quickly, so winning there is more important than ever. If that happens Trump will find the tables turned on him and will suddenly have to tell his voters to wait for the mail-in votes in other states to be counted. He’ll still cause chaos and declare that the vote was stolen elsewhere, of course. But it sure won’t look good if his “perfect” state goes the wrong way. 

My Salon column republished with permission.

I think this is just as bad as the February 7th tape. Woodward talked to Trump on August 14th, one month ago, and CNN has the tape:

CNN has obtained excerpts of the 10-minute conversation, which show Trump was more focused on the economy than the public health crisis.

As the two debated Trump’s response to the pandemic, Trump finally asked: “So you think the virus totally supersedes the economy?”

“Oh sure. But they’re related, as you know,” Woodward responded.

“A little bit, yeah,” Trump replied.

” Oh, a little bit?” Woodward asked.

“I mean, more than a little bit. But the economy is doing — look, we’re close to a new stock market record,” Trump said.

Trump’s question to Woodward underscores the President’s attitude toward the virus. After six months of experts trying to convince Trump that the two are linked — that an economic recovery depends on first stopping the virus — Trump is still focused on the stock market and the economy because he believes those are key to his reelection.

In another part of the conversation, Woodward told Trump there are parts of the book the President won’t like.

“It’s a tough book,” he said, adding that it’s “close to the bone.”

“You know the market’s coming back very strong, you do know that,” Trump responded to Woodward.

“Yes, of course,” Woodward said.

“Did you cover that in the book?” Trump asked.

Woodward and Trump continued to debate Trump’s response to the pandemic and how it will be critical to the presidential election.

When Woodward told Trump that the election will be a contest between him, former Vice President Joe Biden “and the virus,” Trump insisted, “Nothing more could have been done.”He added: “I acted early.”

If you click over you can hear excerpts of the tape. Listen to the sound of his voice. It’s clear what he cares about and he’s angry that Woodward believes the virus is more important than the fucking stock market.

It’s not that he doesn’t know the virus is deadly. Just last night he said this to a reporter in Las Vegas:

The evening reflected a split seen across the country between Americans who want fewer restrictions imposed by state and local governments and those who believe that Trump should not encourage his supporters to risk their health in order to express their political opinions.

No fear of virus

Trump said in his interview with the Review-Journal that he is not afraid of getting the coronavirus from speaking at the indoor rally.

“I’m on a stage and it’s very far away,” Trump said. “And so I’m not at all concerned.”

“I’m more concerned about how close you are, to be honest,” Trump told a Review-Journal reporter who thought she was socially distanced.

Later, when she told Trump she had tested negative earlier in the day, Trump mugged that he felt “100 percent better.”

He knows it’s deadly and worries about himself. He cares nothing for his supporters who are crowded together, screaming and shouting in the crowd in front of him.

All he cares about is money and himself. Nothing else.

Update:

Pompeo is being investigated by the congress for misuse of government funds for his little dinner parties to set up his presidential run in 2024. He stopped them for a while. But just like Dear Leader and all the other henchmen, he is now just saying “fuck it” and doing whatever he wants:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is quietly relaunching his extravagant, taxpayer-funded “Madison Dinners” during the coronavirus pandemic, even as Congress scrutinizes his use of government resources to entertain CEOs, big-dollar Republican donors and television anchors.

Pompeo’s Madison Dinners, which an NBC News investigation revealed in May, had been on pause since March, when the country shut down because of the coronavirus. But now they’re back, with a dinner scheduled for Monday and at least three others on the calendar in September and October, two U.S. officials said.

This time, Pompeo even initially arranged to hold Monday’s dinner at Blair House, the presidential guest house just steps from the White House. It was only at the last minute that the dinner was moved back to the State Department because Blair House became unavailable.

It’s unclear what coronavirus precautions, if any, are being taken, particularly considering that the dinner will be indoors and guests presumably won’t be wearing masks while eating and drinking. A State Department official said guests had been encouraged to get COVID-19 tests before the dinner but was unsure whether that was mandatory.

The State Department declined to answer questions about the resumption of the dinners, but it defended them as “foreign policy-focused social gatherings” that reflect “the finest tradition of diplomatic and American hospitality and grace.”

“The Secretary looks forward to continuing these Madison Dinners as they are an important component of the execution of his duties as Secretary of State,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said.

They do what they want. Congress is no longer relevant. They do not care what it looks like because they only care about the Trump cult which excuses all their actions no matter what.

It will be much worse in a second term.