Month: December 2020

Bill Bishop (“The Big Sort“) passed on a pre-SCOTUS-decision link from a conservative site arguing that the outgoing president should invoke the Insurrection Act to force the U.S. Supreme Court to restore “election integrity” or else “the greatest democracy the world has ever known would come to an immediate end.”

It is a lengthy litany of rumors, supposition, and talking points presented as “proof” of massive election fraud. As with any good conspiracy theory, what believers lack in quality they make up for in quantity.

https://twitter.com/niubi/status/1337715334820876291?s=20

See, we face a black-and-white choice, the lawyer writes. If Trump prevails in court, “Democrats, including radical groups such as Antifa, could, and likely would, revolt openly and violently.” On the other hand, if Joe Biden’s election subterfuge is allowed to stand, “Trump supporters could take the streets, and violence doubtless would erupt.” One guess as to which he prefers.

Then came last night’s Supreme Court decision to reject the lawsuit from Texas and 17 other state attorneys general, supported by almost two-thirds of the Republican House caucus, to throw out the presidential votes in four states. But not any down-ballot votes from those states in elections Republicans won, mind you.

“There is no place left on earth for liberty. Come Lord Jesus,” wrote one respondent on Mark Levin’s Twitter feed. Keep an eye on the streets outside your windows.

Meantime, Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-N.J.) called for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to sanction, if not refuse to seat, the 126 House Republicans who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election, including the minority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy. Pascrell cites Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Pascrell’s letter gets right to it:

Stated simply, men and women who would act to tear the United States government apart cannot serve as Members of the Congress. These lawsuits seeking to obliterate public confidence in our democratic system by invalidating the clear results of the 2020 presidential election attack the text and spirit of the Constitution, which each Member swears to support and defend, as well as violate the Rules of our House of Representatives, which explicitly forbid Members from committing unbecoming acts that reflect poorly on our chamber.

Consequently, I call on you to exercise the power of your offices to evaluate steps you can take to address these constitutional violations this Congress and, if possible, refuse to seat in the 117th Congress any Members-elect seeking to make Donald Trump an unelected dictator.

Per House rules and Article I, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution, Pelosi could do it. She has that authority. It is tempting. These Republican members have effectively renounced the U.S. Constitution and their oaths anyway — on top of demonstrating lack of seriousness required for their jobs. And it would be fun to reply to their objections with the parental trope, “you should have thought of that before ….”

I’m just going to leave this link right here.

I was self-pitying.

Or was I?

In any case, I slunk away in shame, thoroughly chastised for being so very, very silly.

If you believe …

The “world’s loneliest elephant” has a new lunch companion.

Cher was seen feeding fruit to Kaavan, a 9,000-pound Asian elephant, Wednesday after she fought for his resettlement to his new home in northern Cambodia from a dilapidated zoo in Pakistan.

Kaavan had been suffering from mental health issues following the loss of his partner, Saheli, who died in 2012 at the Marghazar Zoo in Islamabad, according to Four Paws, a Vienna-based animal rescue group.

The elephant was often observed throwing his head from side to side, which is a sign of boredom and misery, the group said.

In May, Pakistan’s high court ordered the closure of the zoo due to its poor conditions and neglect.

Kaavan’s plight earned him the moniker of the “world’s loneliest elephant” and gained him the support of celebrities such as Cher, who traveled to Cambodia this week to greet him.

“I thought long & Hard about going out into Covid But Kaavan’s Freedom was a Promise I Made. On My Site I Say ‘Stand & Be Counted,Or Sit & Be Nothing’ WE ALL STOOD & WE WERE COUNTED & KAAVAN WILL BE FREE,” the singer wrote on Twitter.

ICYMI: It's the beginning of a new life for Pakistan's lonely elephant Kaavan, who now heads for a wildlife sanctuary in rural Cambodia pic.twitter.com/cnpcMpmvGU

— Reuters (@Reuters) December 6, 2020

There is nothing left but the hatred. Paul Waldman has this right:

Some years ago, I wrote a book arguing that Democrats should learn from the things Republicans did well. One of these was that the GOP had a simple foundation of shared beliefs that could be easily communicated to voters. Ask a Republican running for any office from dogcatcher all the way up to president what it meant to be a conservative, and they’d tick off some version of the same four pillars: small government, low taxes, a strong military and traditional social values.

Conservatives still believe in those things. But no one could seriously argue that they are any longer the animating purpose of the Republican Party. Instead, the one thing that unites the right and drives the GOP is hatred of liberals. That hatred has consumed every policy goal, every ideological principle and even every ounce of commitment to country.

“But Democrats hate conservatives, too!” you might say. Indeed they do. Negative partisanship — being more motivated by your dislike of the other party than by affection for your own — is a key feature of contemporary politics. But when 18 Republican state attorneys general, more than half of House Republicans and multiple conservative organizations all demand that the results of a presidential election where no fraud was found be simply tossed aside so that Trump can be declared winner, something more profound has been revealed.

The Republican Party has proved that its hatred of liberals is so foundational that it will abandon any pretense of commitment to democracy, if democracy allows for the possibility that liberals might win an election. They have come to regard Democratic voters as essentially undeserving of having their will translated into power, no matter how large their numbers.

They might have believed it before, but now they’re willing to proclaim it even after they just lost a presidential election by 7 million votes and a 306-232 electoral college margin. Forget all that inspiring talk about the genius of the Framers and their vision for democracy; if having an election means that the people we hate might win, then the election must simply be nullified.

You might say that the Republican officials signing on to this deeply anti-American crusade are doing so out of fear as much as conviction, but the two are not mutually exclusive. All elected officials worry about contradicting their base, but in today’s Republican Party, that worry is almost completely divorced from policy. Yes, you’d get flak if you voted to raise taxes, but the greatest danger comes from failing to fight the left with sufficient vigor.

That danger, furthermore, is not only electoral but physical; the Republican leader in the Pennsylvania state Senate said this week that if she refused to sign a letter demanding that Congress toss out her state’s votes in the presidential race, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.” It might not actually happen, but the point is that Republican officeholders understand well what their party values above all else and what kinds of transgressions will not be tolerated.

Trump has often cited the extraordinary loyalty he has received from his party’s voters; it’s one of the few things he says that’s true. But it isn’t because Trump signed a corporate tax cut and slashed environmental regulations.

When you ask the typical Trump supporter what they love about him, they don’t mention some substantive policy position; what they say is that he is a fighter. The petty squabbles, the insulting tweets, the deranged conspiracy theories — the things that the Never Trumpers and most other Americans find off-putting are exactly what endears him to the Republican base.

Trump fights and fights, angrily, bitterly, endlessly driven forward by his hatred of the people his supporters hate. That’s what the base loves, and every other Republican knows it.

Everything about the election that just ended reinforced for conservatives that nothing is more important than hating liberals. The rhetoric of the 2020 campaign, starting with Trump but going all the way down the ballot, was that if Democrats were elected, then it would not be suboptimal or bad or even terrible, but the end of everything you care about. Towns and cities would burn, religion would be outlawed, America as we know it would cease to exist. These horrors were not presented as metaphors, but as the literal truth.In the face of that potential apocalypse, who could possibly care about mundane policy goals? So no Republican argued that if we didn’t cut the capital gains tax then it would be the end of life as we know it. They want to cut the capital gains tax, sure — but its importance pales next to the urgency of stopping the cataclysm that would engulf us all if Democrats were to hold power.

To be clear, there are still thoughtful conservatives out there trying to advance a coherent ideological project. But seldom have they mattered less to their movement and their party. They may produce white papers on free-market health-care solutions or innovative tax plans, but no one really cares.

If it doesn’t Own the Libs, it doesn’t matter on the right. That’s what the Republican Party and the conservative movement are about today, and it might take a long time for them to change.

So where does this lead? Obviously, just losing isn’t going to do it. Trump is leading them down his delusional rabbit hole and I think they are starting to believe this is going to work. And hey, maybe it will! It’s not over until it’s over.

But assuming that Trump does leave and operates as the president-in-exile from Mar-a-lago, it’s pretty clear that they will use this phony issue to make voting much harder and obstruct the “illegitimate” Joe Biden even more energetically than they obstructed Barack Obama. They have learned a lot about how to “erode democracy” over the past few years, thanks to Trump. It’s going to be trench warfare. I hope Democrats are ready for that.

Shamelessness is their super-power.

Yet another disgusting scandal to put on top of the mountain of scandals during the Trump administration:

Hospitals around the country are carefully rationing the treatments for COVID-19 that have been given to President Trump and those in his inner circle, which remain in very short supply as case counts in the U.S. continue to climb.

Rudy Giuliani said this week that he received the monoclonal antibody treatment manufactured by Regeneron after President Trump ordered his doctor to help the former New York City mayor. After leaving the hospital on Wednesday, Giuliani thanked the physician, Dr. Sean Conley, and credited it with helping him.

But Giuliani isn’t the only one in Trump’s orbit to have gotten the rare treatment. Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development, wrote on Facebook last month that, after having been “desperately ill,” Trump “cleared” him for the “monoclonal antibody therapy,” which he said “saved my life.”

And Chris Christie, hospitalized with COVID-19 in October, refused to participate in a trial of a Regeneron treatment out of concern that he would get a placebo, and instead gained access to a drug based on a similar technology manufactured by Eli Lilly.

All received monoclonal antibody treatments manufactured either by Regeneron or Eli Lilly, a scarce and expensive-to-manufacture medicine that has been found to stave off serious disease in early-stage COVID-19 sufferers.

And while Trump and his inner circle have managed to get potentially life-saving doses, the treatment remains extremely hard for most patients to gain access to. Hospitals are rationing the medicines, with some openly admitting that there’s just not enough for those who need the treatment to receive it.

In Utah and Massachusetts, for example, patients need to win a lottery to get the treatment. In Seattle, it’s being given via experimental trials because of the scarcity…

It remains unclear how Giuliani got access to the drug in the face of that massive scarcity. According to HHS statistics, D.C. is being allocated only 108 doses of Regeneron’s treatment per week.

Eric Topol, a cardiologist and professor of molecular medicine at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, told TPM that hospitals in that city had just started using the treatment on Thursday.

“The total number of doses that are allocated for California — 5,728 — that’s around how many people there are in that risk category getting sick every day here,” he said.

TPM found that various hospitals around the country are rationing the medicine, which the FDA recommends be used for people 65 and older, with a BMI of 35 and above. The New York Times reported that some FDA officials are concerned about how people connected to Trump have managed to get access to the treatments.

[…]

The FDA says that it takes over an hour to inject the monoclonal antibodies via an IV hookup.

“The facilities are not well set up yet,” Topol said, adding that areas which were hard-hit are finding difficulty making the space to feed the treatment to patients intravenously.

He added that he was baffled that those in Trump’s inner circle appear to have received the treatment.

“They have been superspreaders, denounced the public health mitigation strategies, and they are the few people getting this treatment, and they’re bragging about how it saved their lives,” Topol said. “In my view, its reprehensible — it’s bad enough that they got special treatment, but then they have to brag about it.”

That’s just how they roll. And, for some reason, many average people who couldn’t get that treatment in a million years are happy to let their Dear Leaders have privileges they could never have. It’s what some people call populaism, which I will never understand.

Trump knows nothing about history and, as far as I know, has never read a book, not even the ones his ghostwriters write for him. However, early in his term, Steve Bannon made a point of giving him a tutorial on Andrew Jackson, even taking him to visit the Hermitage, Jackson’s estate, to show him around. He said some stupid things about Jackson and the civil war and moved his picture into the oval office although I’m fairly sure what he really admires about him is that his picture is on currency.

Anyway, there was a lot of talk at one point about how Trump was the leader of a new 21st century Jacksonian populism which was defined by the Jackson scholar Walter Russell Mead as “grass-roots disdain for elites, deep suspicion of overseas entanglements—and obsession with America power and sovereignty.”

I’m not sure that panned out. Trump is basically an incoherent chaos agent, but Mead and Bannon seemed to think that a yearning for that was what drove the Trump phenomenon. For whatever reason, this notion of a “Jacksonian moment” seemed to fade as the Trump dumpster fire continued.

But this piece by Ed Kilgore suggests that it’s still active, even if Trump himself is unaware of the parallels:

Among the Republicans who are quietly urging Donald Trump to stop his futile and divisive effort to contest his 2020 loss are those who believe it compromises his future prospects at winning the White House again. Take, for example, Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who said Trump may be “creating a narrative that the presidency was stolen and setting up a campaign to ‘reclaim’ it in four years.” As other commentators have noted, there’s a pretty clear historical precedent for this sort of vengeful campaign, and as it happens, it was waged by Trump’s own favorite predecessor, Andrew Jackson.

Historian Jasmim Bath presented the parallels starkly soon after the election:

In 1824, before the antebellum two-party system was established, none of the four presidential candidates with significant support in the Electoral College had a majority, and the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. Under the scheme laid out in the Twelfth Amendment, the House was required to choose among the top three candidates, which meant the fourth, Henry Clay, was eliminated. Andrew Jackson and his supporters expected Clay to support his fellow westerner, who won a popular and electoral vote plurality, in the House. But he instead helped engineer the election of New England patrician and presidential scion John Quincy Adams. When Adams later made Clay his Secretary of State (then considered the second most important office in the land), Jacksonians concluded a “corrupt bargain” had robbed their candidate of victory.

The analogy has almost certainly occurred to Trump himself. No, he’s not a literate man in terms of either current events or political history, but his interest in Old Hickory (one observer called it a “bromance across the centuries”) is a well-established exception to his general indifference to anything he didn’t learn from watching television or conducting real-estate deals. He drew particular attention to his self-identification with Jackson when he told friendly reporter Salena Zito that this “very tough person” with a “big heart” would have prevented the Civil War had he been in office at the time. Jackson’s truculent nationalism — and perhaps even his racism — appeals to Trump, along with his self-proclaimed championship of the interests of the heartland white working class of his day in their battles with coastal elites.

So it would be natural if Trump identified himself (either sincerely or cynically) with Jackson’s grievances in 1824 and his grievance-driven comeback four years later, even if his prime motivation for behaving as he does is his own flawed character and zest for spite.

Pro-Trump pundit John Feehery agrees with Bath that the truth of these grievances doesn’t matter as much as their intensity: “To Trump partisans, there doesn’t have to be overwhelming evidence of voter fraud. After all, what Henry Clay did for John Quincy Adam[s] was fully legal. It just didn’t smell right.”

The analogy is imperfect, of course. Jackson’s comeback victory in 1828 was attributable to developments other than the righteous indignation of backwoodsmen angered by “the Establishment.” Most important was the emergence of a two-party system in which a powerful new Democratic Party forged by Martin Van Buren united behind Jackson. Trump, moreover, was not robbed by elites of a chance to serve as president; if anything, his elevation to the Oval Office in 2016 was made possible by an arguably corrupt Electoral College system. But if you wonder why the 45th president seems willing to risk his chances of becoming the 47th by his irresponsible refusal to concede defeat today, the example of the seventh president may help provide an answer.

Some of Trump’s associates may have brought this to his attention but honestly, I think Kilgore is giving him way too much credit. If he is following this playbook it is because of a similarity in temperament and instinct to Jackson not because he’s studied him. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has whispered in his ear that his favorite guy on the money came back by running as the man whose election was stolen from him.

There is a handful of sane Republicans in the country, at least when it comes to the pandemic. Unfortunately, they are few and far between:

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) on Thursday blasted his fellow Republicans over their refusal to wear masks after New Hampshire state Rep. Dick Hinch (R) died from COVID-19.

During a press briefing, Sununu said Hinch’s death was a “cautionary tale” after the lawmaker attended an event with his GOP colleagues where they didn’t wear masks.

The governor emphasized the importance of facial coverings in preventing the spread of the virus.

“For those who are just out there doing the opposite just to make some ridiculous political point, it is horribly wrong,” Sununu said. “Please use your heads. Don’t act like a bunch of children, frankly.”

71-year-old Hinch died on December 9, one week after he was sworn in as New Hampshire House speaker. He had attended an indoor meeting with his fellow Republican lawmakers, all of whom declined to wear masks, approximately three weeks prior to his death. Four of those lawmakers became infected with COVID-19, though it is unclear if Hinch had contracted the virus from the event.

Here’s a US Congressman acting like one of those children Sununu describes:

On day one I will tell you to kiss my ass. #StandUpForAmerica https://t.co/1Yqygxcu69

— Chip Roy (@chiproytx) December 9, 2020

This is where we are, people. This man believes he has a right to kill people. Because he is free.

By the way, it isn’t just right wingers. I have people in by family, one a far left Bernie supporter, who thinks this whole thing is overblown, won’t get the vaccine and laughs about people wearing masks because people die every year from car accidents. He is one of those white, middle-aged, male know-it-alls . You know the type. The other one is a woman who lives on the westside of LA and is a right wing, anti-vaxer, animal activist (yes, such a thing does exist — probably only in LA.) She believes this is all an encroachment on her personal freedom and refuses to take any precautions.

Why these people haven’t caught the virus is a mystery but if they do get it at some point they will surely spread it to more vulnerable people without a second thought. There is no talking to either one of them. The only thing you can do is avoid them.

Interestingly, the actual Donald Trump voters in my family are being far more careful. Most of them are older and have health problems so that’s part of it. I think they trust their doctors who are telling them they will die if they don’t observe the guidelines and wear masks.

I had thought that if everyone who respects science would get the vaccine all that would be left are the people who don’t and they would just infect each other rather than kill people who are trying to do the right thing. That’s not great but it’s more just than it is now. But apparently, people with immunodeficiencies, allergies, pregnant women and other vulnerable people may not be able to take the vaccine and will depend on herd immunity to protect them. So these people who refuse to wear masks or get the vaccine will still be putting them in danger. And that’s just not right.

It was inevitable that people would begin to argue that because Donald Trump has so far been unable to overturn an election that he lost by a decisive margin, we can all relax: There were no tanks in the streets and “the system worked.” There are people who have blithely brushed off his machinations as some kind of therapy for the poor guy, who just needed some time to deal with his disappointment. One Republican famously told the Washington Post, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change. He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on January 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”

Apparently, this person sees no harm in allowing Trump to convince 70% of Republicans to believe that Joe Biden’s presidency is illegitimate. Indeed, he no doubt sees that as the party’s consolation prize. That dismissive view of Trump’s refusal to accept his loss has more recently taken hold among others who believe that for all the Democrats’ fears that Trump wouldn’t leave office, it’s apparent that the courts are rejecting his sloppy, evidence-free legal filings, which means the “guardrails” are holding.

Election prognosticator Nate Silver mocked concerns about Trump’s coup attempt as hysterical, writing in a tweet that “‘SCOTUS will steal the election for Trump’ is one of those takes that was popular (for different reasons) both among a certain type of liberal and on the Trumpy right and obviously doesn’t look too good in retrospect.”

Trump openly admitted that he wanted Amy Coney Barrett to be confirmed to the Supreme Court before the election in order to ensure his victory in any election case. That was reason enough for worry. Slate’s Mark Stern laid out another reason why people were justified in their concern, despite the fact that the courts have so far rejected Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. Stern points out that there were three important pre-election cases argued by real election lawyers (not by Trump’s “elite strike force”) in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Minnesota. These cases were all denied by the court but they featured some very disturbing arguments by Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas (and quite likely Barrett would have joined them if similar cases had followed the election). It seems apparent that in a narrowly-decided election the Supreme Court might well have mustered a majority to discard a whole bunch of legal votes and hand the election to Donald Trump. As Stern explained:

I tried to make it clear before Nov. 3 that (1) these scenarios were possible though not probable; (2) four SCOTUS justices telegraphed their intent to toss out these ballots; and (3) this was the only way SCOTUS could throw the race for Trump.

So we dodged that bullet. Meanwhile, in courts across the land, in all the battleground states — Nevada Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Arizona — Trump has been losing, which is reassuring. The judicial system has apparently not completely lost its bearings. That does not mean the system “worked.” In a healthy democracy the president of the United States would not be attempting to overturn a legal election, nor would he be able to convince tens of millions of his followers that he was justified in doing so based upon a series of lies so preposterous that normally only a naive child could believe them. In a system that was working, any leader would be humiliated at having been shown to be such a pathetic sore loser in one courtroom after another. His party would show him the door.

Instead, Trump has been working the phones, strong-arming, threatening and cajoling Republicans in those states, hoping to convince them to discard the election results and have the state legislatures send Trump electors to vote in the Electoral College on Monday. He has not had any luck with that — largely because state laws generally make that impossible — but has succeeded in making Republican election officials the target of threats of violence, for which he has shown not one iota of concern.

Now we have reached a new front in the battle to overturn the election, with a lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been under indictment for securities fraud for the last five years and has recently been accused of various legal violations by his own staff. Paxton is using an obscure procedure to ask the Supreme Court to intervene directly to discard all the electoral votes from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, on the theory that alleged voting irregularities in those states have had the effect of disenfranchising Texas voters. The case is absurd on its face, a silly Hail Mary that no one would even pay attention to at this stage if it weren’t for the fact that 17 other state attorneys general and 106 Republican members of Congress have signed on to the case — which no legal observer believes has the remotest chance of success.

It’s impossible to know the motivations of all of these people. Some are opportunists looking for money or higher office, while some are probably true believers. Paxton himself is almost surely angling for a presidential pardon (although that wouldn’t clear him of the charges he faces in Texas). One thing they all have in common is a desire to delegitimize the Biden presidency, regardless of the facts. Even some of the so-called Republican heroes who stood up to Trump are already using the fake voter fraud claims to restrict voting in their states. That’s as cynical as it gets.

The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein asked some scholars for their view on where this might all be leading. This response made the hair on the back of my neck stand up:

“Where their hearts are is hard to know, but their behavior is not small- ddemocratic,” Susan Stokes, a political-science professor and the director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, told me.

Stokes, like other experts, says the Republican Party is on a continuum toward the kind of “democratic erosion” visible in other countries, including Turkey under Recep Erdoğan, Hungary under Viktor Orbán, or, in the most extreme example, Russia under Vladimir Putin. In those nations, a party that wins office through a democratic election then seeks to use state power to tilt or completely undermine future elections.

The guardrails are hanging by a thread. You would be a reckless fool not to be worried about how long they are going to hold. The system is not working.

My Salon column.

I missed this article in Forbes from last October. How in the world was it ok for a president to have such conflicts of interest?

Donald Trump has a lot of customers. There are people who purchase his food in Trump Tower, spending $20 on a burger. There are those who stay in his hotel rooms, paying $475 for a bed. There are others who join Trump-owned clubs, perhaps doling out as much as $200,000. But the president’s most important customers—by far—are the companies renting space in his buildings.

There aren’t all that many of them, but they pay big money. In fact, just 25 tenants pay an estimated $115 million in rent every year. Those payments alone account for roughly 20% of all revenue flowing into the president’s business empire. And since leasing space tends to be a high-margin business, that $115 million might translate into $65 million of operating profit, or roughly 40% of the estimated total Trump Organization earnings in a typical year.

Two of the most lucrative deals, involving Gucci and Nike, are close to Trump’s old home. Gucci leases space inside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, and Nike had a location around the corner on 57th Street. The president also brings in significant sums at 40 Wall Street, a skyscraper in Lower Manhattan, where Walgreens Boots Alliance pays a reported $3.4 million a year in rent.

The true hubs for Trump’s big-money tenants, however, are 1290 Avenue of the Americas in New York City and 555 California Street in San Francisco. Trump holds a 30% interest in each building, so our calculations only attribute 30% of the rent from each tenant to the president. Even still, the money adds up. Bank of America pays an estimated $22 million for space inside the 555 California Street complex in San Francisco; Trump’s share of that equals $6.5 million. Goldman Sachs pays a reported $5.8 million, an estimated $1.7 million of which we credit to Trump.

The president has never had to publicly disclose who pays him rent. Federal disclosure laws, designed before anyone imagined a real estate billionaire in the White House, demand that officials disclose which entities pay them directly, but not who pays those entities. Since Trump holds his commercial real estate portfolio through a series of shell companies, he does not have to divulge his tenants. The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.

Forbes first investigated the president’s rent roll around the beginning of 2018, tracking down roughly 75% of all money flowing into the president’s commercial properties. My book White House, Inc., released last month, digs deeper, detailing more than 90% of the money flowing into the portfolio.

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Click over to see the full list, including banks, insurance companies, investment firms and various other businesses all of which have business with the government in one way or another. It should have been a scandal.

Why wasn’t it?

“In just the last few weeks, the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. went from an emergency to a disaster. And it is getting worse — possibly much worse,” begins a report from NBC News, “How America gave up and how we fight back.”

As the COVID-19 disaster reaches new peaks, ten stories examine where we are and where the country is headed, if we still have a country by the time the plague ends. NBC’s Friday landing page continues:

There are more cases of Covid-19, more deaths and more pain for families than ever experienced throughout the darkness of 2020. A fractured government response, combined with growing public malaise and distrust, is threatening once again to overwhelm hospital systems across the country, just as it did in the confused and panic-filled weeks at the beginning of the pandemic.

Vaccines are on the way, with the first U.S. approval pending and distribution networks ready to launch. But that does not change the stark reality of the coming months: Public health professionals expect the winter to be the worst season yet for victims of the virus — assuming that America does not change the path it is on.

Before the year-end holidays begin, providing the easiest possible transmission of the virus, NBC News is presenting these special reports as a last-minute attempt to highlight an urgent truth: We can still turn the tide of the pandemic.

The Washington Post presents a video explaining the dynamics of breath/droplet exchange with and without wearing masks. It is both helpful and unsettling:

To visually illustrate the risk of airborne transmission in real time, The Washington Post used a military-grade infrared camera capable of detecting exhaled breath. Numerous experts — epidemiologists, virologists and engineers — supported the notion of using exhalation as a conservative proxy to show potential transmission risk in various settings.

“The images are very, very telling,” said Rajat Mittal, a professor of mechanical engineering in Johns Hopkins University’s medical and engineering schools and an expert on virus transmission. “Getting two people and actually visualizing what’s happening between them, that’s very invaluable.”

I have an outdated box of 3M N95 masks (individually sealed) left over from the swine flu pandemic of ’09. (Say “back in aught-nine” in your head in Walter Brennan’s voice if you need cheering up about now). Prices have gone way up since then. N95s are more inconvenient to get on and off than the surgical masks littering the house and cars. But after watching the Post’s infrared footage I think I’ll be wearing them more often than the surgical masks.

CDC-approved N95s are listed here. KN95s certified in China are cheaper, may not be as effective, but are more readily available. Some may also be counterfeit. These are not. See here for a primer on the diufferences.

Watch and learn. Be careful out there.