Month: September 2020

CNN got look at Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage.” And lordy, there are tapes:

President Donald Trump admitted he knew weeks before the first confirmed US coronavirus death that the virus was dangerous, airborne, highly contagious and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” and that he repeatedly played it down publicly, according to legendary journalist Bob Woodward in his new book “Rage.””This is deadly stuff,” Trump told Woodward on February 7.

In a series of interviews with Woodward, Trump revealed that he had a surprising level of detail about the threat of the virus earlier than previously known. “Pretty amazing,” Trump told Woodward, adding that the coronavirus was maybe five times “more deadly” than the flu.Trump’s admissions are in stark contrast to his frequent public comments at the time insisting that the virus was “going to disappear” and “all work out fine.”

The book, using Trump’s own words, depicts a President who has betrayed the public trust and the most fundamental responsibilities of his office. In “Rage,” Trump says the job of a president is “to keep our country safe.” But in early February, Trump told Woodward he knew how deadly the virus was, and in March, admitted he kept that knowledge hidden from the public.”I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward on March 19, even as he had declared a national emergency over the virus days earlier. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”I

f instead of playing down what he knew, Trump had acted decisively in early February with a strict shutdown and a consistent message to wear masks, social distance and wash hands, experts believe that thousands of American lives could have been saved.

The startling revelations in “Rage,” which CNN obtained ahead of its September 15 release, were made during 18 wide-ranging interviews Trump gave Woodward from December 5, 2019 to July 21, 2020. The interviews were recorded by Woodward with Trump’s permission, and CNN has obtained copies of some of the audio tapes.

“Rage” also includes brutal assessments of Trump’s presidency from many of his former top national security officials, including former Defense Secretary James Mattis, former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Mattis is quoted as calling Trump “dangerous” and “unfit” to be commander in chief. Woodward writes that Coats “continued to harbor the secret belief, one that had grown rather than lessened, although unsupported by intelligence proof, that Putin had something on Trump.” Woodward continues, writing that Coats felt, “How else to explain the president’s behavior? Coats could see no other explanation.”

The book also contains harsh evaluations of the President’s leadership on the virus from current officials.Dr. Anthony Fauci, the administration’s top infectious disease expert, is quoted telling others Trump’s leadership was “rudderless” and that his “attention span is like a minus number.””His sole purpose is to get reelected,” Fauci told an associate, according to Woodward.

Woodward reveals new details on the early warnings Trump received — and often ignored.

In a January 28 top secret intelligence briefing, national security adviser Robert O’Brien gave Trump a “jarring” warning about the virus, telling the President it would be the “biggest national security threat” of his presidency. Trump’s head “popped up,” Woodward writes.

O’Brien’s deputy, Matt Pottinger, concurred, telling Trump it could be as bad as the influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, including 675,000 Americans. Pottinger warned Trump that asymptomatic spread was occurring in China: He had been told 50% of those infected showed no symptoms. At that time, there were fewer than a dozen reported coronavirus cases in the US.

Three days later, Trump announced restrictions on travel from China, a move suggested by his national security team — despite Trump’s later claims that he alone backed the travel limitations.

Nevertheless, Trump continued to publicly downplay the danger of the virus. February was a lost month. Woodward views this as a damning missed opportunity for Trump to reset “the leadership clock” after he was told this was a “once-in-a-lifetime health emergency.””Presidents are the executive branch. There was a duty to warn. To listen, to plan, and to take care,” Woodward writes.

But in the days following the January 28 briefing, Trump used high-profile appearances to minimize the threat and, Woodward writes, “to reassure the public they faced little risk.”During a pre-Super Bowl interview on Fox News February 2, Trump said, “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.” Two days later during his State of the Union address, Trump made only a passing reference to the virus, promising, “my administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.”

Asked by Woodward in May if he remembered O’Brien’s January 28 warning that the virus would be the biggest national security threat of his presidency, Trump equivocated. “No, I don’t.” Trump said. “I’m sure if he said it — you know, I’m sure he said it. Nice guy.”

The book highlights how the President took all of the credit and none of the responsibility for his actions related to the pandemic, which has infected 6 million Americans and killed more than 185,000 in the US.”The virus has nothing to do with me,” Trump told Woodward in their final interview in July. “It’s not my fault. It’s — China let the damn virus out.”

When Woodward spoke to Trump on February 7, two days after he was acquitted on impeachment charges by the Senate, Woodward expected a lengthy conversation about the trial. He was surprised, however, by the President’s focus on the virus. At the same time that Trump and his public health officials were saying the virus was “low risk,” Trump divulged to Woodward that the night before he’d spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping about the virus.

Woodward quotes Trump as saying, “We’ve got a little bit of an interesting setback with the virus going in China.””It goes through the air,” Trump said. “That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”

But Trump spent most of the next month saying that the virus was “very much under control” and that cases in the US would “disappear.” Trump said on his trip to India on February 25 that it was “a problem that’s going to go away,” and the next day he predicted the number of US cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

By March 19, when Trump told Woodward he was purposely downplaying the dangers to avoid creating a panic, he also acknowledged the threat to young people. “Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too, plenty of young people,” Trump said.

Publicly, however, Trump has continued to insist just the opposite, saying as recently as August 5 that children were “almost immune.“Even into April, when the US became the country with the most confirmed cases in the world, Trump’s public statements contradicted his acknowledgements to Woodward. At an April 3 coronavirus task force briefing, Trump was still downplaying the virus and stating that it would go away. “I said it’s going away and it is going away,” he said.

Yet two days later on April 5, Trump again told Woodward, “It’s a horrible thing. It’s unbelievable,” and on April 13, he said, “It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it.”

Click to the next page for Woodward’s revelations about what Trump’s top military and intelligence officials had to say about him. Mattis and Coates are on the record. And it isn’t pretty. Mattis truly believed nuclear war was possible at one point. Also new stuff about Russian meddling in 2016 and the love letters with Kim Jong Un. Stunningly ridiculous, even for him.

If you go to the CNN link, you can hear excerpts of the tapes Woodward has to prove what he says. Trump will have to claim Woodward hired an impersonator to declare this fake news.

Trump knew how bad it was. He kept it from the public and we know why: controlling the pandemic meant that he would have to take drastic action that would hurt the economy. He believed that would endanger his re-election chances.

But Trump totally misunderstood the moment. Had he acted as a statesman instead of a cheap con man selling miracle cures and going against all the scientific advice, he probably would have sealed his re-election. Americans always want to rally around the president in a crisis.

But everyone could sense he was full of shit. After all, this isn’t our first time at the Trump circus sideshow.

Now we have almost 200,000 dead and untold tens of thousands more with long term effects. The economy remains in shambles and we’re looking at a fall surge that will probably kill another hundred thousand people at least.

He knew, and we know he knew. The best that can be said is that he screwed up because he’s just too ignorant and unfit to do the job of president. The worst is that he did it all on purpose because he’s just too ignorant and unfit to do the job of president.

Trump lied, 190,000 people died.

You’d have to have been in a coma since last Thursday not to have heard about Jeffrey Goldberg’s big article for The Atlantic in which a number of anonymous former Trump administration figures reveal that the president has expressed total disdain for military service. The political world has talked of little else for the past five days, and all this chatter took place over a holiday weekend, when a lot of people who usually pay little attention to the news undoubtedly heard about it.

Just to recap briefly, Trump has allegedly referred to soldiers as “losers” and “suckers” for joining the military in the first place, and for having the poor judgment to die in battle when they could have been making money instead. Indeed, he’s reported to have remarked to former White House chief of staff and retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” He said this at Arlington National Cemetery at the gravesite of Kelly’s son, a Marine who died in Afghanistan.

Trump also reportedly had a temper tantrum during his 2018 visit to France over something that President Emmanuel Macron said (probably his denunciation of “nationalism”) and refused to attend a ceremony honoring the U.S. Marines who died in the World War I battle of Belleau Wood. Then the president reportedly proceeded to strip the home of the U.S. ambassador to Paris of every piece of artwork that took his fancy to display in the White House. And he really, really didn’t want to acknowledge the late Sen. John McCain’s funeral.

These anecdotes and more have been confirmed by The Associated Press, the Washington Post and the New York Times among others, including Fox News. Trump has denied them in a flurry of desperate-sounding tweets, even as he continued to denigrate McCain, making it clearer than ever that the claims were true. Nobody can claim that these sorts of insults “just don’t sound like something he’d say,” even as numerous of his current and former henchmen and sycophants stepped forward to say just that.

We’ve all seen the video of his nasty insult toward John McCain in 2015:

And we have recently been reminded that he said the same thing 16 years earlier when he was interviewed by Dan Rather, so that insult wasn’t just issued in a fit of pique over something McCain said in 2015. He has clearly believed for a long time that a naval pilot who gets himself shot down is no hero.

On Monday, Trump held another of his campaign “briefings” at the White House in which he inexplicably added yet another insult to the litany:

I’m not saying the military’s in love with me — the soldiers are, the top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.

According to a recent poll of the military, even before this latest flap, while it’s true that officers dislike him even more than enlisted personnel, the latter aren’t “in love” with him either:

More than 59 percent of officers said they have a poor view of the president, with more than half saying they strongly disapprove. Among enlisted respondents, 47 percent said they have an unfavorable view, and nearly 39 percent a favorable view.

Among all the active-duty service members in the poll, 41 percent said they would vote for Joe Biden and only 37 percent said they planned to vote for Trump, a striking decline in the president’s popularity among a generally pro-Republican demographic. About “40 percent of troops surveyed identified as Republican or Libertarian,” Military Times reported, while 44 percent said they were independent or another third party — and only 16 percent identified as Democrats.

This explains the White House’s massive pushback on this issue. Trump thinks of the military and veterans as part of his base. At this point, he knows he cannot afford to lose even one of his loyal voters if he hopes to win in November.

Regardless of the politics, it’s worth considering what Trump’s insults toward the military actually mean. First of all, it’s nonsensical for the man who continuously boasts of having raised military spending by the trillions to pretend to condemn what Dwight Eisenhower famously called the “military-industrial complex.” Trump goes around the world bragging about all the arms contracts with despots and dictators that he has personally brought home to American contractors. Not to mention his dramatic expansion of airstrikes and drone strikes, while eliminating all accountability for civilian casualties. After nearly four years of unkept promises he’s just now scrambling, in the last weeks of his re-election campaign, to withdraw some troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump lied and said he had been against the Iraq war from the beginning, and too many people have naively assumed that he’s some kind of isolationist. His comments about the Pentagon and defense contractors the other day had him sounding like he was trying to appeal to anti-war Democrats rather than rank-and-file soldiers in the military. But according to CNN, Trump said those things because he was in a snit that the top brass hadn’t stepped forward to defend him. He apparently insulted Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who actually was a top lobbyist for military contractor Raytheon, causing White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to feel compelled to tell the press that Trump wasn’t attacking Esper personally.

Amid all the spin, here’s one thing Trump said on Monday that many people missed: “I will be a better warrior than anybody, but when we fight a war, we’re going to win them.”

According to Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s book “A Very Stable Genius,” Trump at one point lashed out at his top Pentagon chiefs, calling Afghanistan a “loser war” and saying, “You’re all losers. You don’t know how to win anymore.”

Trump made that “philosophy” clear over and over again during the 2016 campaign when he said he planned to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS and insisted that “torture works.” As president he has threatened war crimes and nuclear war and has pardoned war criminals.

Trump believes the U.S. military as soft and cowardly and doesn’t have what it takes to win. He thinks Navy pilots who are captured, Marines who lose their lives on the battlefield, military regulations that forbid war crimes and generals who refuse to accept mass civilian casualties are all “losers” because it’s weak to adhere to the laws of war instead of “winning” by any means necessary.

Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing any voters. But it’s possible that one group within his former base that isn’t quite as gung-ho about his definition of “winning” are members of the military. After all, they’re the ones who will have to pay for his bellicose ignorance, not him. And then he’ll call them losers and suckers for being foolish enough to follow his orders.

Biden’s lead, that is:

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump in six 2020 swing states, as the Republican National Convention changed little in the race for the White House, according to a new CNBC/Change Research poll.

Across Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the former vice president holds a 49% to 45% edge over the Republican incumbent, the survey released Wednesday found. It compares with a 49% to 46% edge Biden held in a poll taken two weeks ago, after the Democratic National Convention but before the GOP’s nominating events. 

But is it close enough to steal it?

The Donald found himself another live one. I wonder how much he cost?

Via The Independent:

Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a right-wing member of the Norwegian parliament, has nominated Donald Trump for the 2021  Nobel Peace Prize for his role in brokering a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The White House announced Trump will hold a signing ceremony to conclude the deal on September 15.

“I’m not a big Trump supporter,” Tybring-Gjedde told Fox News of his decision to nominate the president, who is trailing Joe Biden badly in a host of major polls for November’s election.

“The committee should look at the facts and judge him on the facts — not on the way he behaves sometimes. The people who have received the Peace Prize in recent years have done much less than Donald Trump,” Tybring-Gjedde added.

You can bet there’s a lifetime pass to Trump resort properties if Tybring-Gjedde publicly names one particular Peace Prize winner.

https://twitter.com/ZaidSabah/status/1303536365766881284

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FDR was right, mostly. Fear is not the only thing we have to fear. We also have the coronavirus, plus the economic and social disruptions it precipitated. But fear itself is insidious, like the virus, and just as contagious.

FBI background checks for gun sales hit a record high in June, Fred Kaplan writes at Slate. Many of those were first-time buyers. Along with the rise of militias and virulent rhetoric propagated via cable TV and social media, gun sales are among the signs that led David Kilcullen, a scholar on insurgencies, to conclude America is in a state of “incipient insurgency,” defined as the “organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify, or challenge political control” of an area.

Kaplan explains:

Kilcullen argues that this is what we’ve been seeing the past few months in the waves of provocations and street violence that have blown through American cities since the May 25 police killing of George Floyd. By and large, the protesters haven’t been at fault. It’s been the extremists—left and right—who have tagged alongside the protests and counterprotests, exploiting the disorder.

More interesting is what drives the extremists:

Kilcullen sees a pattern similar to the patterns that precipitated insurgencies in Colombia, Libya, and Iraq. The key factor is the rise of fear. He cites Stathis Kalyvas’ book The Logic of Violence in Civil War as observing that fear, not hate, drives the worst atrocities. “Every civil war and insurgency of the last 50 years has been driven by fear,” Kilcullen told me. Today’s politics and social tensions are dominated by three fears: fear of other social groups, fear that those other groups are encroaching on one’s territory, and fear that the state no longer has the ability to protect the people.

We have seen this before. Discrimination against Irish immigrants is family lore. But as far down the social ladder as they were in the mid-nineteenth century, like poor Whites in the South, at least they were not Black. Leslie M. Harris explains “In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863” (caveat: language):

Increasing support for the abolitionists and for emancipation led to anxiety among New York’s white proslavery supporters of the Democratic Party, particularly the Irish. From the time of Lincoln’s election in 1860, the Democratic Party had warned New York’s Irish and German residents to prepare for the emancipation of slaves and the resultant labor competition when southern blacks would supposedly flee north. 

[…]

In the month preceding the July 1863 lottery, in a pattern similar to the 1834 anti-abolition riots, antiwar newspaper editors published inflammatory attacks on the draft law aimed at inciting the white working class. They criticized the federal government’s intrusion into local affairs on behalf of the “ni**er war.” Democratic Party leaders raised the specter of a New York deluged with southern blacks in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. White workers compared their value unfavorably to that of southern slaves, stating that “[we] are sold for $300 [the price of exemption from war service] whilst they pay $1000 for negroes.” In the midst of war-time economic distress, they believed that their political leverage and economic status was rapidly declining as blacks appeared to be gaining power.

That should sound familiar. Then there were racist Democrats and newspaper editors. Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and anti-police violence protests today we have social media, right-wing talk radio, Fox News, and Donald J. Trump stoking fear.

“People weigh their well-being relative to those around them,” Sean McElwee wrote in 2015. “There is strong evidence that whites often oppose actions against inequality because of ‘last place aversion,’ the desire to ensure that there is a class of people below oneself.”

Race and ethnicity in America are ready shorthands for class. While racial animosity is strongly associated with the incipient insurgency Kilcullen sees, the real fear runs deeper than race, especially among White nationalists.

The liberal charge that poor whites vote against their economic best interests is not only smug and condescending, it misunderstands them entirely. President Lyndon Johnson understood that when he told Bill Moyers, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Preserving their social status among what Adam Serwer calls the “aristocracy of race” is worth more than financial benefit. Voting for “equalizing” programs that give others a leg up — especially those they perceive as lower on the ladder — challenges their social status, and they will have none of that even if it helps them too. The very idea that Black Lives Matter as much as theirs is a mortal threat to their social status. They will take up arms to preserve that order.

Kaplan continues:

Trump’s aim is to incite fear—fear of violence, disorder, change—and to paint himself as the bastion of law and order. It’s an odd tactic for an incumbent president, and it’s unclear whether the ploy is working. But, as Kilcullen and Kalyvas point out, he’s right about the fear’s potency. And the first violent incidents can spark a self-reinforcing cycle of violence, retaliation, and retaliation for that. “It doesn’t matter what the original grievance is,” Kilcullen says. “It becomes self-sustaining.”

Kilcullen does not believe insurgency is inevitable yet. A “pre-McVeigh moment,” Kilcullen dubs it.

Serwer reviews the history of Reconstruction and white backlash and concludes this moment in history may be different. “This time I know our side will win,” as Victor Laszlo might say. Serwer concludes:

There has never been an anti-racist majority in American history; there may be one today in the racially and socioeconomically diverse coalition of voters radicalized by the abrupt transition from the hope of the Obama era to the cruelty of the Trump age. All political coalitions are eventually torn apart by their contradictions, but America has never seen a coalition quite like this.

History teaches that awakenings such as this one are rare. If a new president, and a new Congress, do not act before the American people’s demand for justice gives way to complacency or is eclipsed by backlash, the next opportunity will be long in coming. But in these moments, great strides toward the unfulfilled promises of the founding are possible. It would be unexpected if a demagogue wielding the power of the presidency in the name of white man’s government inspired Americans to recommit to defending the inalienable rights of their countrymen. But it would not be the first time.

But transformation will mean more than tinkering around the edges of police reforms and whatnot. Deeper, more structural reforms are required for a new Reconstruction to take hold. That will depend on whether the Democratic Party in the 21st century is up to the task and on how well Trump’s campaign of fear succeeds.

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There is a lot in Michael Cohen’s book that sounds like it has the ring of truth. (I haven’t read it yet, I’m going on news reports and reviews.) This one from TPM talks about Cohen and Jerry Fallwell, and it sounds like it came out of the Godfather. Everything we now know about Falwell and his uhm … private life lends credibility to this story:

In his new book, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen linked Jerry Falwell Jr.’s early Trump endorsement in 2016 to Cohen’s suppression of “personal” pictures of Falwell and his wife, Becki.

According to Reuters, which obtained a copy of “Disloyal: The Memoir,” Cohen said that he “killed” the photos.

“In good time, I would call in this favor, not for me, but for the Boss, at a crucial moment on his journey to the presidency,” Cohen wrote. He did not say explicitly what the favor was.

“Like the Bieber favor a few years earlier, this would have a huge impact on the 2016 election, evangelicals, the Supreme Court and the fate of the nation,” Cohen added, per Reuters, referring to a time when he secured Justin Bieber tickets for the Falwells’ daughter. “If Becki Falwell was seen half-naked by the students of Liberty University, let alone evangelicals all over the country, it would be an unmitigated disaster.”

Falwell endorsed Trump before the Iowa caucus in 2016, well before many prominent Republicans were on board. The vote of confidence from such a prominent evangelical was a surprise to many and a huge boost to Trump’s legitimacy. Cohen has said before that he was a main driver behind that endorsement.

This story from the Daily Beast about Trump’s relationship to Fox News and the National Enquirer:

President Donald Trump’s most influential supporters in the media—Fox News star Sean Hannity, his boss Roger Ailes, and National Enquirer executive David Pecker—were so desperate for Trump’s approval that they frequently humiliated themselves to win it, according to the just-released memoir by the president’s disgruntled former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen…

During the early Republican primary race, Cohen writes, Hannity was distraught about being “put in the penalty box” by the Trump campaign and anxious to get back into the candidate’s good graces after then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told Trump that Hannity was a secret supporter of Trump’s strongest opponent, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

“In the summer of 2015,” Cohen writes, “I knew that Hannity was doing what he could for the Trump campaign, but that he had to be careful. His viewership wasn’t monolithically for Trump, yet, and there were more than a dozen candidates, some commanding large segments of the Republican Party. Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and each of the other declared candidates had to be given time to make their case, meaning that Trump didn’t absolutely dominate Hannity’s highly rated show in the way that the Boss wanted—and that Lewandowski demanded.”

Cohen continues: “Hannity’s best efforts didn’t stop Lewandowski from attacking him; like every reporter covering Trump, he was submitted to a brutal and frequently idiotic set of rules and expectations that required strict conformity to the Boss’s campaign manager’s idea of what the press should cover. Corey’s way of punishing the allegedly wayward was to put them in the penalty box… Reporters didn’t take kindly to this treatment, of course, and neither did powerful opinion talk show hosts like Sean Hannity….

“‘Why am I in the penalty box?’ Hannity asked me one day. ‘We’ve got to stop this bullshit.’ I rolled my eyes at the idiocy of the situation. I quickly discovered that Lewandowski was telling Trump that Hannity was secretly a Cruz supporter and that he was insidiously undermining the Boss by pretending to be neutral but subliminally messaging his viewers to vote for the Texas senator. Trump was always prone to listen to the last person who spoke to him, frequently the advisor floating the worst and most destructive idea, and in those days, Lewandowski was often that person. Appealing to Trump’s paranoia and rage was a surefire way to get him to take rash action,” Cohen further recalls.

“I made my way to Trump’s office. ‘We’ve gotta end this bullshit with Hannity,’ I said to Trump. “Fuck him,” Trump said. ‘The guy’s a fucking traitor.’” 

However, after Cohen assured Trump of Hannity’s undying loyalty, the candidate and the commentator got on the phone. 

“‘I’m with the Boss,’ I said, my phone on speaker. “He’s listening to us now. Feel free to tell Mr. Trump what you told me.” 

“Mr. Trump, Lewandowski’s a piece of shit and a liar,’ Hannity said, according to Cohen. “I can’t come out publicly to endorse you at this time. It would destroy my credibility as it relates to you. But I want you to know that I am today and have always been behind you.”

The Fox News star added, per Cohen, “I speak to Michael on a daily basis. Anything he has asked me to do that benefits you, I have done.”

After Cohen affirmed this to Trump, telling him, “That’s true, Boss,” the former fixer writes, the future president replied: “Okay, fine, let’s forget about it.”

“Hannity was keen to do more supplication, it seemed,” Cohen writes, adding that the Fox host concluded the conversation, “Thank you, sir. Thank you for believing in me, because I believe in you.” 

Cohen claims in the book that he never served as Hannity’s attorney, contradicting news reports at the time, and that he simply gave the radio and television host free advice on financial and personal matters. In one episode, Cohen writes, Hannity confided that his marriage was on the rocks and divorce was probable.

“‘You don’t want to do that,’ I said. ‘What about your kids? You want to lose half your money?’ ‘You have a point there,’ Hannity said. ‘Is there another woman involved?’ I asked. ‘You been screwing around?’ Sean sighed,” Cohen recounts.

“There are so many women in the world,” Hannity sighed, per Cohen. “There are just so many women out there.” (In recent months, published reports said Hannity has been dating Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt.)

Elsewhere in the book, Cohen calls Lewandowski—a bitter rival for Trump’s approval—“an alcoholic piece of shit,” seconding Hannity’s description of the campaign manager as “a liar and a piece of shit.” Lewandowski didn’t reply to a detailed text message from The Daily Beast seeking comment.

Hannity, meanwhile, said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “Michael Cohen was never my attorney as I said at the time. Michael even called and apologized after his attorney falsely made the claim he was my attorney in a court of law. As for anything else Michael is suggesting in his book, such allegations are simply meaningless to me for obvious reasons. I wish him and his family the best.”

Reached by phone on Tuesday morning while he was “walking in the park with my son,” as he put it, Cohen texted The Daily Beast that the accounts in his book—which include many direct quotes from Trump, Ailes, Hannity and Pecker—are based on “memory and voice recordings.” The federal investigation into Cohen’s crimes, which included an FBI raid on his Rockefeller Center law office and his Park Avenue hotel room, revealed that he was in the habit of secretly recording his conversations with Trump and others.

In another episode, Cohen describes his dealings with Roger Ailes, whom he characterizes as eager to place Fox News at Trump’s disposal in order to get Trump to stop inciting his supporters to harm Megyn Kelly after the then-Fox News star grilled Trump about his misogyny during the August 2015 Republican debate hosted by the cable outlet.

Cohen quotes Ailes during a phone call: “Donald, we’ve got a problem. Megyn can’t come to the studio to do the show. She can’t go to her apartment. She’s got little kids. We can’t have this.”

Trump’s reply, per Cohen: “She came after me. If you come after me, I come after you ten times harder.” 

Cohen further quotes Ailes as groveling: “We’ve got to figure out a way to work this out. We’ve got to have you come on Megyn’s show. We’ll make it go the way you want it to.” 

Ailes was fired by Rupert Murdoch in July 2016 after Gretchen Carlson sued him for sexual harassment and discrimination—and died 10 months later after suffering a fall in his Palm Beach mansion.

The book also focuses at length on Trump’s relationship with the fact-challenged tabloid company American Media Inc. and its recently departed longtime chairman David Pecker.

Though Cohen laments many choices he made during his time working for Trump, the AMI ordeal seems to weigh most heavily on the former fixer. The symbiotic partnership between Trump and Pecker, an acolyte of the celebrity real-estate mogul, eventually landed Cohen in jail after Cohen, shortly before the Nov. 8, 2016 election, concealed illegal payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal in exchange for their silence about affairs with Trump.  

I believe Cohen on this stuff. He was certainly involved with Hannity and Pecker, we know that. And it makes perfect sense that he knew all about the stuff with Ailes during the campaign. This is an extremely twisted perversion of the role of the press and the presidency. Pledging fealty to the candidate while explaining how you need to keep your credibility is corruption, plain and simple. The rest is propaganda, dirty tricks and blackmail. The whole enterprise essentially operated like the Mob, even including the ostentatious kissing of The Don’s ring.

Read on for more about the National Enquirer.

This kind of ad isn’t meant for me. I’m not a big flag-waver. But there are Independent veterans in the country who may be reachable with something like this.

It hits hard:

NEW AD: Trump inherited everything and sacrificed nothing — as commander-in-chief, he denigrates service members who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for our country.

America deserves a leader who understands the weight of these sacrifices — not one who disparages them. pic.twitter.com/smxX35neZB

— DNC War Room (@DNCWarRoom) September 8, 2020

I grew up in a conservative military family. And, sadly, I’m sure my Dad would have loved Trump. He wasn’t one to be super-reverent about the military but he was deeply attached to it. It was an intrinsic part of his identity. This would have affected him, I think.

It’s not this:

That’s the question Paul Krugman asks in today’s newsletter. Hint: it’s not about money:

“I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor,” said Mae West. “Believe me, rich is better.” Words of wisdom. But getting richer doesn’t necessarily improve your life as much as you’d expect, and what goes for individuals goes double for societies.

Today’s column was about what’s happening now, with the economy partially recovering from the coronavirus recession but the lives of millions getting sharply worse. Blame for the extreme current disconnect rests squarely with Donald Trump and his party, who have yanked away the safety net that helped many people cope with bad times. But in fairness, this kind of disconnect isn’t new; it has been an increasingly glaring feature of American society for decades.

By the usual measures, the U.S. economy is highly successful. We have the highest GDP per capita of any major nation. Before the coronavirus hit, we had low unemployment. Our tech companies alone are worth more than the entire European stock market. We clearly have the means to live la dolce vita.

But do we actually manage to live good lives? Some of us do. Overall, though, America seems to get much less satisfaction out of its wealth than one might have expected.

People who make this point often compare us to the Nordic countries, which are success stories by any standard. For today’s newsletter, however, I thought it might be worth comparing us to a country that is widely regarded — indeed, in some respects really is — a failure: Italy.

A few weeks ago our own Roger Cohen wrote about Italy’s remarkable cohesiveness in the face of the coronavirus: after a terrible start, the famously fractious nation pulled itself together, and has done a vastly better job of containing the pandemic than we have. (Soon after writing that column, Roger himself was diagnosed with Covid-19: let’s all wish him the best.)

The thing is, among those who study international economics, Italy is best known as a cautionary tale of economic failure. For reasons that are endlessly debated, it somehow seems to have missed out on the information technology revolution. Its economy has stagnated for decades. Incredibly, Italy’s real GDP per capita on the eve of the pandemic was lower than it had been in 2000, even as the same measure rose 25 percent in the U.S.:

Italy’s stagnation.World Bank

But there’s more to life than money. To take just one crude example, one thing you surely have to do in order to live a good life is, well, not die. And that’s one area in which Italians have been outperforming Americans by an ever-widening margin. In the mid-1980s, the two nations had roughly the same life expectancy. These days Italians can expect to live around 4 ½ years longer:

Life is better when you aren’t deadOECD

OK, I don’t want to speculate on the hidden strengths of Italian society. But the weaknesses of American society, despite our national wealth, are obvious: Extreme inequality, including racial inequality on a scale whites can find hard to comprehend. A weak social safety net, including a unique failure among advanced countries to guarantee universal health care. Terrible work-life balance, with far less vacation and family time than a wealthy nation should have.

And a personal, informal observation: Trump is an extreme case, but we are a nation obsessed with the notion of winners and losers. The nature of my various careers has brought me into contact with a number of extremely successful people, in various walks in life, and what always strikes me is how insecure many of them are, because there’s always another money manager who makes even more billions or another professor who’s won even more prizes.

Imagine what this kind of competitive mentality does to people who aren’t objectively successful, who — usually through no fault of their own — have been stranded by economic or social change.

Of course, I’m far from the first person to make observations like this. Still, maybe this strange, ugly time in America will help teach us some lessons about building a better society once the pandemic is over.

This is a subject that interests me intensely and I wonder if the pandemic has made some people take a reappraisal of their lives and recognize that this experience has shown the benefits of some of the simpler things in life. Whatever happens, I think we will see some cultural shifts that change us in ways that last a very long time.

This is one of those cases where Trump is too dumb to realize he’s confirmed a story about his own malfeasance:

President Trump told reporters on Tuesday that he’ll spend “whatever it takes” of his own money if necessary to win in November, stressing that it’s “the most important election in the history of our country.”

The comments come after reports that Trump’s campaign is having real money concerns — an unusual position for an incumbent that has worried GOP operatives. The campaign has yet to release its August fundraising, but Joe Biden and the Democrats say they raised a record-breaking $364.5 million last month.

Some of the notable expenses for the Trump campaign include $11 million on Super Bowl advertising, roughly $4 million to Trump businesses since 2019 and approximately $156,000 on planes for aerial banners, according to the New York Times.

“We have much more money than we had last time going into the last two months, I think double or triple” Trump claimed. “But if we needed any more, I’d put it up personally.”

Late today, he went even further admitting they’re running out of money:

….Like I did in the 2016 Primaries, if more money is needed, which I doubt it will be, I will put it up!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 8, 2020

They had collected well over a billion dollars as of the end of July. Now they are pulling ads in battleground states and apparently don’t have much cash on hand. They have not announced their August fundraising.

Recall that in 2016, Trump barely had a campaign so saying they have more money than last time says they have spent like drunken sailors and are in financial trouble.

And there are a lot of questions about what the hell happened to all that money. Some of it is profligate spending by former campaign manager Brad Parscale and they’ve spent millions of Trump’s legal fees, much of which went to harassment law suits against political enemies and the press. Trump also threw away a ton of money on the two aborted conventions in North Carolina and Florida.

But this is very, very interesting:

Many of the specifics of Mr. Trump’s spending are opaque; since 2017, the campaign and the R.N.C. have routed $227 million through a single limited liability company linked to Trump campaign officials. That firm, American Made Media Consultants, has been used to place television and digital ads and was the subject of a recent Federal Election Commission complaint arguing it was used to disguise the final destination of spending, which has included paychecks to Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the partners of Mr. Trump’s two adult sons.

Golly I wonder who ended up with all that money? If Trump does write a check, I’ll bet it will come right out of that account.

I recommend reading the whole NY Times story. The campaign is being run by Jared Kushner and Trump. And they’ve run it the same way they ran their businesses. Surprise.

I know this will shock you. But an estimated 250,000 infections from Aug. 2 to Sept. 2 — or one-fifth of newly reported cases in the United States during that time — can be traced back to a South Dakota motorcycle rally, according to a San Diego State University paper.

Large in-person gatherings without social distancing and with individuals who have traveled outside the local area are classified as the “highest risk” for COVID-19 spread by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Between August 7 and August 16, 2020, nearly 500,000 motorcycle enthusiasts converged on Sturgis, South Dakota for its annual motorcycle rally.

Large crowds, coupled with minimal mask-wearing and social distancing by attendees, raised concerns that this event could serve as a COVID-19 “super-spreader.”

This study is the first to explore the impact of this event on social distancing and the spread of COVID-19. First, using anonymized cell phone data from SafeGraph, Inc. we document that (i) smartphone pings from non-residents, and (ii) foot traffic at restaurants and bars, retail establishments, entertainment venues, hotels and campgrounds each rose substantially in the census block groups hosting Sturgis rally events. Stay-at-home behavior among local residents, as measured by median hours spent at home, fell.

Second, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a synthetic control approach, we show that by September 2, a month following the onset of the Rally, COVID-19 cases increased by approximately 6 to 7 cases per 1,000 population in its home county of Meade. Finally, difference-in-differences (dose response) estimates show that following the Sturgis event, counties that contributed the highest inflows of rally attendees experienced a 7.0 to 12.5 percent increase in COVID-19 cases relative to counties that did not contribute inflows.

Descriptive evidence suggests these effects may be muted in states with stricter mitigation policies (i.e., restrictions on bar/restaurant openings, mask-wearing mandates).

We conclude that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally generated public health costs of approximately $12.2 billion.

This study may not be conclusive. But it certainly tracks with what we already know about how the virus spreads and those people at the rally were defiantly spreading as much as possible. I wonder how many will die as a result? And how many innocent people vulnerable people who came in contact with them will die too?