Month: December 2020

There is a lot of jockeying among Republicans for the job of who will inherit the Trump cult going forward. A lot depends upon Trump himself, of course. If he keeps up his crusade for the next four years it’s hard to see how any mere politician can unseat him. But you never know. He’s no spring chicken and the bloom could come off the rose as time goes by. He’s exhausting.

However, Republicans have discovered that minority rule through white nationalist “populism”, whether it grows into an American version of the right wing German Christian Democrats or a more familiar straight up neo-fascism, is one way they might be able to maintain their power. That would be a long-term project and we can see who the young turks are who are jumping on the possibilities.

Marco Rubio has been screeching about elites on his twitter feed and Tom Cotton has been going on about America First military might. But it’s everyone’s favorite Missouri “populist” Josh Hawley who seems to see the future most clearly. He teamed up with Bernie Sanders to ask for more cash for the folks. And now he’s announced that he will object to the certification of the vote on January 6th:

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced Wednesday that he would object next week when Congress convenes to certify the electoral college vote, a move that will force a contentious floor debate that top Senate Republicans had hoped to avoid before President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is cemented.

President Trump has repeatedly and falsely suggested that the ceremonial milestone presents a last-ditch way to reverse the election results. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other leading Republicans, who have conceded it is bound to fail and will put their members in an awkward position.

In a statement, Hawley said he feels compelled to highlight purported election irregularities.

“At the very least, Congress should investigate allegations of voter fraud and adopt measures to secure the integrity of our elections. But Congress has so far failed to act,” Hawley said.

He will force his fellow Republicans to vote on this, which Mitch did not want to happen because anyone who votes against Dear Leader will have a problem with the cult. But who knows, maybe they’ll all vote to overturn the election which will save them from the wrath of the conspiracy addled base, even as it further destroys our democracy.

This “constitutional coup” attempt can’t work unless the House votes to overturn the election too which isn’t going to happen. But the mere fact that this gambit has gotten this far is absolutely chilling. Trump and the right wing media managed to create a stolen election myth out of whole cloth and then use it as an excuse to restrict voting. It’s the Reichstag fire of vote suppression.

Hawley seems to have a real understanding of what makes the Trump cult click beyond Trump himself. He sees the utility of giving white working class people money. (I’ll be interested to see whether that holds. White racists generally really do not want Black and Brown people to have anything, even if it means they don’t get it themselves.) And he understands the usefulness of feeding the right’s ongoing sense of grievance. If he can put that together in a way that gives the Trump cult that same tribal feeling of togetherness he might just have a winning formula.

The one thing he’s missing is the fun factor that has been a huge aspect of Trump’s triumph. Hawley is basically a wonk. Trump is an entertainer and I think that’s actually the most important part of his appeal. He makes hating fun.

Hawley isn’t fun. Neither are Rubio or any of the other wannabes. It’s going to take a good long while for the cult to come down from that high.

Nonetheless, they are using Trump’s loss to their own advantage. They are Republicans, after all.

Cheerleaders for people like Hawley insist the 2020 results show that "conservative populism" has potential for genuine majoritarian appeal. They must be deeply disappointed that one of its leading champions wants to overturn millions of votes, right?https://t.co/GrHzMWkdug pic.twitter.com/ckGNYs6npc

— Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) December 30, 2020

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):

One year ago today, in the wake of the House of Representatives voting to impeach President Trump, the New York Times published a deeply reported insider account of the president’s dealings with Ukraine the previous summer and how the White House had reacted to it. The story brought home just how alarmed the president’s own henchmen had been at what he was attempting to do. So, as we headed into 2020, the anticipation was palpable.

Trump’s many scandals had overwhelmed the system for years and his ongoing incompetence and corruption were simply part of what had become normalized, every day, shock and outrage. Finally, the country was going to get a big, national tableau in which to lay out the case against Trump in a televised Senate trial in the most important election year in modern memory. It seemed likely that such a historic political event would mean that the next year would be spent in trench warfare litigating Trump’s record of corruption, abuse of power and malfeasance.

2020 being a bad year is a cliche at this point.

It started off with the spectacle of the entire Republican Party, except for Mitt Romney, endorsing the idea that their president was perfectly within his rights to use congressionally appropriated military aid to a foreign country to extort its leaders to sabotage his political opponent’s presidential campaign. There was no doubt as to the facts. The president himself provided a transcript of the extortion phone call, calling it “perfect.” Republicans simply decided there was nothing wrong with what he did, leaving it unlikely that Trump would be removed since it would require a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate.

That should have been a clue as to how they would react if Trump played the same game he played in 2016 and promised that he would only accept the results of the election if he won.

There was also, you’ll recall, a spirited primary race happening at the time which had the country on pins and needles to see who would be challenging Trump in the fall. A year ago today, we had no idea who that person would be although if you looked at the polls that day it showed Joe Biden up by 10 points nationally, a result that most of us shrugged off as a function of name recognition or familiarity that would wear off once the primaries started in earnest. Go figure.

We all know by now the basic outlines of how badly the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic under Donald Trump turned out to be. We learned, through the tapes made by Bob Woodward, that Trump believed he needed to be a cheerleader, admitting to the famed journalist, “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” He wanted to play it down because he was afraid that he would lose the election if the economy wasn’t roaring. So he encouraged states to open up prematurely and created a movement of people who refused to take the health crisis seriously by refusing to endorse the strategies that might have lowered the caseload, failing to properly ramp up testing and using his platform to push snake oil and miracle cures that made everything worse.

338,000 COVID deaths and counting, many of them preventable, is beyond tragic. The lost incomes, shuttered businesses and ruinous economic hardship that went along with it are heartbreaking. And while our country has botched the pandemic response on a level unlike any other developed nation, the rest of the world has suffered greatly as well even if they didn’t have the appalling number of deaths that we have endured.

By the time summer 2020 rolled around, Trump was desperate to retake control — but the George Floyd murder brought people all over the world into the streets.

Trump saw another opportunity to win his election by fanning the flames of division and hate. His response in that famous phone call to the governors — “dominate, dominate dominate!” — said everything about his political instincts. The world is very lucky that a man such as he was so incapable that he never truly understood how to use the immense power he had. His instinct was to use overwhelming force against protesters to stage an offensive photo-op and thankfully it backfired spectacularly. The Black Lives Matter movement gained strength instead of losing it.

COVID was still stalking us, however, with deadly hot spots flaring all summer culminating in the current massive winter surges we are now experiencing. Major parts of the country are again on stay-at-home orders even though many people are just ignoring them. The vaccines are on the way but sadly they will be too late to save the lives of many thousands of people who didn’t have to die.

Donald Trump believed that if he “played down” the virus he could win the election which was, literally, the only thing he cared about. Indeed, no one has ever wanted to win an election more than he did. But by November it was clear that his failure was overwhelming and 80 million people came out to vote against him, besting GOP turnout nationally by over 7 million votes. He still refuses to accept this and has created an absurd conspiracy theory to explain that he actually won. Tens of millions of people believe him and will likely be convinced to the end of their days that this ridiculous, provably false nonsense is true.

We couldn’t have predicted the pandemic last January but we certainly could have predicted that Donald Trump would do anything and everything to degrade our democracy and further divide the American people. That was his one very special talent brought into stark relief from the impeachment to the election.

During the campaign he liked to brag that he was nominated for “two Nobel Prizes” and his staff even put the Nobel prize into a little vanity video this week as if to imply he’d won it. He will never win a Nobel Prize, obviously. But after all he’s done, the Gallup Poll shows him to be the most admired man in the world in 2020. Maybe that will finally make him feel better. It would make me depressed except that I know 2021, whatever the challenges and crises it’s going to bring, will be better than this dumpster fire of a year because Donald Trump will no longer be running the country. That’s enough to make you feel downright optimistic about the future.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):

Twitter has a policy that can be used to remove or flag COVID-19 misinfo, but not everyone knows how to use it. To illustrate how this policy can be used I wrote a letter to Joshua Clayton, South Dakota’s Department of Health State Epidemiologist.

On Dec 22 Governor Noem retweeted the following thread by Justin Hart.
It disputes the efficacy of a mask mandate. (Twitter Link)

@TwitterSafety Enforce your policy on @justin_hart RT
"We will label or remove false or misleading information about:
Personal protective equipment (PPE) such as claims about the efficacy and safety of face masks to reduce viral spread"https://t.co/BLHAtBPdRj@suekroll https://t.co/BNnqGTg9cQ

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) December 22, 2020

Do mask mandates work?

See the evidence for yourself👇 https://t.co/97YnuGf0if

— Governor Kristi Noem (@GovKristiNoem) December 21, 2020

• Do you, the state epidemiologist, agree with this “evidence“?
• Does the South Dakota Department of Health agree with this analysis?
• If you disagree, what steps has your agency taken to prevent misinformation about this serious public health crisis from being distributed by the Governor?

I know you are busy, I’m only contacting you because your communications director, Derrick Haskins, has been gone since Nov. 3 (although his info was still on your website as of 12/28/20)

If you have already answered this question for state & local media please have someone send me the response you gave them.

I’m aware people have gotten death threats when they advocated for mask mandates publicly. If that is a concern in your case:

Please contact @TwitterSafety to put a flag on COVID-19 misinformation retweeted by the Governor.

“We will label or remove false or misleading information about:
Personal protective equipment (PPE) such as claims about the efficacy and safety of face masks to reduce viral spread”

Twitter misleading info update

2. Is the claim demonstrably false or misleading?
“Under this policy, we consider claims to be false or misleading if (1) they have been confirmed to be false by subject-matter experts, such as public health authorities”

When you contact @TwitterSafety please let them know your titles and positions so they know you are not just some random person, but a subject-matter expert in your state .

You should also know that as of December 16th Twitter @Policy has updated their policy to include misinformation about vaccinations.

…we are expanding the policy and may require people to remove Tweets which advance harmful false or misleading narratives about COVID-19 vaccinations.

Twitter December 16 Covid 19- vaccine misleading information update

I understand your careers may be threatened if you speak out publicly against the governor. I have worked with whistleblowers in the past and watched how Governors in Florida and Nebraska have attacked their critics in their own government, I trust that you are keeping good email records and contemporaneous memos for future investigations and lawsuits.

To help you in that regard I’ve copied ASTHO, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and NACCHO, the National Association of County and City Health Officials. I’ve listed the regional directors that you may know professionally and staff members of these professional organizations who may be able to help you in dealing with elected officials sending out misinformation.

I’ve also copied South Dakota Nurses Association, South Dakota Health Care Association and the Nurse Practitioner Association of South Dakota, who have a vested interest in making sure the Governor of your state sends out an accurate message on public health. They will want to know what steps you are taking behind the scenes, since publicly there is no change in the Governor’s message on a mask mandate.

Finally, I’ve listed a few media outlets you regularly communicate with such as KELO-TV’s Angela Kennecke who did a piece disputing the claims about mask mandates.

https://www.keloland.com/news/healthbeat/coronavirus/areas-with-mask-mandates-see-69-fewer-new-covid-19-cases/

I am not an expert on how to save lives during this pandemic, but you are. The Governor has found other sources to justify her decision not to pass a mask mandate or implement and enforce other public health policies.

Joshua, you have the expertise and tools to prevent misinformation from spreading and to have it removed from Twitter, please do so.

You may have already addressed this issue, but as of December 29th that retweet still stands with no label.

LLAP,
Michal Spocko
Senior Health, Safety & Activism Reporter

South Dakota Department of Health
Kim Malsam-Rysdon, Secretary of Health
Beth Dokken, Division Director, Family and Community Health
Mark Gildemaster, Health Statistics
Dustin Ortbahn, Infectious Disease Surveillance
Bill Chalcraft, Public Health Preparedness & Response

ASTHO, Association of State and Territorial Health Officials
Rachel Levine, MD President
Secretary of Health, Pennsylvania Department of Health
Region 8 Director: ND, SD, CO, WY, MT, UT
Gregory S Holzman, MD, MPH, State Medical Officer
Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services

NACCHO, National Association of County and City Health Officials 
Lori Freeman, CEO
Lilly Kan, Senior Director, Infectious Disease and Informatics
Theresa Spinner, Director, Media & Public Relations  

Renae Moch, MBA, FACMPE, Bismarck-Burleigh Public Health,
NACCHO HHS Region 8: ND, SD, CO, WY, MT, UT    

South Dakota Nurses Association
Eric Ollila, Executive Director
Deb Fischer-Clemens, President

Nurse Practitioner Association of South Dakota
Abigail Gramlick-Mueller, CNP, President.   

South Dakota Health Care Association, 
Mark B. Deak, Executive Director
Brett Hoffman, Director of Public Policy and Communications

Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain.

We are the other people
We are the other people
We are the other people
You’re the other people too
Found a way to get to you . . .

— from “Mother People” by Frank Zappa

I don’t know if I should be amazed or uneasy:

They can run. They can open doors. And now, most terrifyingly of all: They can dance better than you.

Boston Dynamics, the Waltham robotics company behind a popular line-up of agile, acrobatic, and regularly fear-inducing robots, released a new video Tuesday of an ensemble of machines dancing to the classic Motown hit “Do You Love Me” by The Contours.

Y’all get this is how they’ll dance on our graves, right? https://t.co/9Tf2eBjEZ9

— Phillip Atiba Goff (@DrPhilGoff) December 30, 2020

The engineering and programming behind these devices is more than amazing. The video almost gives the impression that they are listening to the music and responding rather than executing a carefully pre-choreographed set of maneuvers. Impressive mechatronics, surely. The listening and “Dancing with the Stars” comes later. After adding AI, naturally. Naturally.

Hyundai now owns 80% of Boston Dynamics. Let me know when their cars can climb their way out of traffic jams.

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, you will help make 2021 brighter.

Knowing what you don’t know — the limits of your competence — is one of the foremost pieces of advice I give. “A man’s got to know his limitations,” said an actor who one day performed a widely panned improvisation with an empty chair at the Republicans’ presidential nominating convention.

Another piece of sound advice is not to take yourself too seriously. Loss of the ability to laugh at yourself is the first warning sign of fundamentalism. A priest I know once said it was a healthy thing, now and then, to spit on your idols.

We have quite a few idols in this country. Images, ideas, fanciful notions to which it is obligatory we genuflect: the flag, the military, American exceptionalism, freedom (as an abstraction), meritocracy, hard work. “Values” too: small-town, Midwestern, mountain, Texas, however regionalized as unique to here, to my clan.

I was just trying to buy some groceries at @ErewhonMarket when 50 anti-maskers stormed the entrance in a stampede. Wtf. Please stay safe, everyone. Wear a mask. 😷 pic.twitter.com/yy9IZAYpui

— ira brian miller (@irabrianmiller) December 29, 2020

Rugged individualism is another of those idols. The coronavirus pandemic illustrates how far the notion has run amuck untempered by the two pieces of advice above. Rugged is now toxic (NPR):

Ten years ago, Dr. Kristina Darnauerand her husband, Jeff, moved to tiny Sterling, Kan., to raise their kids steeped in small-town values.

“The values of hard work, the value of community, taking care of your neighbor, that’s what small towns shout from the rooftops, this is what we’re good at. We are salt of the earth people who care about each other,” Darnauer says. “And here I am saying, then wear a mask because that protects your precious neighbor.”

But Darnauer’s medical advice and moral admonition were met with contempt from some of her friends, neighbors and patients. People who had routinely buttonholed her for quick medical advice at church and kids’ ballgames were suddenly treating her as the enemy and regarding her professional opinion as suspect and offensive.

It is hard for backsliders to walk their talk once acclimated to accepting and repeating lies.

There was a massive smallpox epidemic during the American Revolution.

Washington quarantined the infected, refused to let people from hot spots travel to his army, and even sent a thousand soldiers to Boston to prevent the spread there.

You should try reading a book sometime.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) December 29, 2020

“It’s heartbreaking,” Darnauer told NPR. “Because we say, this is what we value. And then when we actually had the chance to walk it out, we did it really poorly.”

Darnauer resigned as Rice County medical director in July. The toxicity was too much.

More than a quarter of all the public health administrators in Kansas quit, retired or got fired this year, according to Vicki Collie-Akers, an associate professor of population health at the University of Kansas. Some of them got death threats. Some had to hire armed guards.

“These are leaders in their community,” Collie-Akers says. “And they are leaving broken.” Collie-Akers notes these professionals also leaving at a terrible time. The pandemic is still raging. Vaccines still need to get from cities to small towns and into people’s arms; public health officers are as important as ever.

But under these conditions in communities already under-served, who will want to fill these positions, she asks.

Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association, tells NPR what is happening in Rice County is occurring in rural communities all across the country. Many remote hospitals are becoming desperate for staff. For that matter, so are hospitals in Los Angeles County.

Chris Merrett, director of the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs, tells NPR that towns driving away health professional over the divisive politics surrounding the pandemic and mask-wearing are choosing “toxic individualism” over the common good.

Rugged individualism is a holdover from westward expansion, the up-by-the-bootstraps pioneer myth. It’s rubbish, but it is deeply ingrained rubbish. Herbert Hoover may have coined the phrase in a 1928 campaign speech, framing the choice before voters as “rugged individualism and a European philosophy of … paternalism and state socialism.” The pandemic demonstrates once again that all that talk about the values of hard work, community, and caring for your neighbor is just that — talk. Self-aggrandizing bluster. Selfishness rules.

Move over, toxic masculinity.

A small group rebuffing mask-wearing guidelines at North Star Mall clashed with security, resulting in a chaotic Christmas showdown.#kens5eyewitness https://t.co/LHq7005kb4

— Marvin Hurst (@MHurstMedia1) December 28, 2020

Anti-masker in Austin, Texas claims to have a "medical health condition" pic.twitter.com/U6le8q11dQ

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) December 29, 2020

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, you will help make 2021 brighter.

No wonder Trump doesn’t want to leave the White House:

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has retained forensic accounting specialists to aid its criminal investigation of President Trump and his business operations, as prosecutors ramp up their scrutiny of his company’s real estate transactions, according to people familiar with the matter.

District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. opened the investigation in 2018 to examine alleged hush-money payments made to two women who, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, claimed to have had affairs with him years earlier. The probe has since expanded, and now includes the Trump Organization’s activities more broadly, said the people familiar with the matter.

Vance has contracted with FTI Consulting to look for anomalies among a variety of property deals, and to advise the district attorney on whether the president’s company manipulated the value of certain assets to obtain favorable interest rates and tax breaks, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter remains highly sensitive. The probe is believed to encompass transactions spanning several years.

Spokesmen for Vance and FTI Consulting declined to comment.

Representatives for the Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment. In the past, company officials have rejected the merits of Vance’s investigation, calling it politically motivated.

Headquartered in Washington, FTI provides a range of financial advisory services to clients worldwide in public and corporate sectors. “We provide the industry’s most complete range of forensic, investigative, data analytic and litigation services,” according to a corporate brochure, which also noted FTI’s “extensive experience serving leading corporations, governments and law firms around the globe.”

The analysts hired by Vance probably have already reviewed various bank and mortgage records obtained from Trump’s company as part of the ongoing grand jury investigation, and they could be called on to testify about their findings should the district attorney eventually bring criminal charges, said the person familiar with the arrangement.

Vance is engaged in a long-running legal battle to obtain eight years of Trump’s tax records and other financial information from the president’s accounting firm, Mazars USA. Those records are considered the final piece of what is already a well-developed investigation, according to the person.

Trump can’t pardon his way out of this one.

On the other hand, I think we should probably be prepared to be disappointed. It’s entirely possible that Trump’s sleazebag way of doing business is perfectly legal. What’s legal in the real estate and development business is mind-boggling. And they may have been a lot more careful with his money than they ever were with other people’s.

Trump is worried about more than this. One of the unexplored theories about his unwillingness to sign the Defense Authorization bill is very likely to be of much bigger importance to him that confederate monuments:

The National Defense Authorization Act this year does something else, though, that seems to me of far more importance to the president than the naming of military bases.

It includes a measure known as the Corporate Transparency Act, which undercuts shell companies and money laundering in America. The act requires the owners of any company that is not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file a report that identifies each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercises substantial control over it. That report, including name, birthdate, address, and an identifying number, goes to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The measure also increases penalties for money laundering and streamlines cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities.

America is currently the easiest place in the world for criminals to form an anonymous shell company which enables them to launder money, evade taxes, and engage in illegal payoff schemes. The measure will pull the rug out from both domestic and international criminals that take advantage of shell companies to hide from investigators. When the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists dug into leaked documents from FinCEN this fall, they discovered shell companies moving money for criminals operating out of Russia, China, Iran, and Syria.

Shell companies also mean that our political system is awash in secrecy. Social media giants like Facebook cannot determine who is buying political advertising. And, as Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) noted, shell companies allow “foreign bad actors” to corrupt our system even more directly. “[I]t’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns,” he reminded Congress in a speech for the bill, “but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.”

We know the Trump family uses shell companies: Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen used a shell company to pay off Stormy Daniels, and just this month we learned that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner approved a shell company that spent more than $600 million in campaign funds.

The new requirements in the NDAA apply not just to future entities, but also to existing ones.

Trump has also sold thousands of real estate properties to shell companies, adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of such transactions to entities widely suspected to be laundering money. It’s been a huge part of his business model.

Of all the bills for Trump to veto this seemed to be the most unlikely of all. He loves to spend massive sums on the military and brags about it as his greatest accomplishment. I think this was likely the real reason and he thought he might be able to strongarm enough of his cult followers to stop the override. It didn’t work.

Trump is facing a whole bunch of serious financial problems which is one of the reasons why he’s so intent upon staying a major political figure for as long as possible. He will be able to claim that he’s being targeted for political reasons. And a lot of people will believe it. After all, that’s exactly what they would do in the Democrats’ position.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):

I wonder if this is why Marco suddenly seems to be more Trumpy than Trump?

The recent purchase of a Florida mansion by Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner has raised speculation that outgoing US President Donald Trump’s daughter plans to run for the Senate or try to become the state governor in the future.

Ivanka Trump and Kushner have recently bought a $31 million waterfront estate on Indian Creek Island, a wealthy Miami locale known as the “Billionaire’s Bunker,” the New York Post’s Page Six first reported earlier this month.

The 1.8-acre estate previously belonged to singer Julio Iglesias. The island is known for its high security, with a 13-member police force for 29 homes.

But that might be only part of what drew Trump there, according to a report by CNN earlier this month.

“Ivanka definitely has political ambitions, no question about it,” the report quoted a source who has been working with the Trump family as saying. “She wants to run for something, but that still needs to be figured out.”

Analysts have estimated that Trump could be planning to run for the US Senate on a Florida ticket, or try to run for governor — although the latter option would take time since one must be a Florida resident for seven years to run for that position.

“Marco Rubio is up for reelection in 2022 and is expected to run again. But I wouldn’t think Rubio would deter her if she wanted to run. The last time Marco Rubio ran against a Trump in Florida, in the 2016 presidential primary, Rubio was crushed by 19 percentage points,” Adam C. Smith, a consultant with Mercury Public Affairs, told CNN.

“Normally, you’d expect a credible candidate for US Senate to spend years building a political and financial network, but those normal rules would not apply to Ivanka. I think she’d be the immediate frontrunner if she ran for US Senate against Rubio, given her father’s popularity in the Sunshine State,” Smith said.

This makes sense. Javanka got a little taste of power and they like it a lot. I can easily see her going for a Senate seat. It will be interesting, however, to see how Rubio would react. Trump himself will be the star of that Senate race. He won’t be able to help himself. And he will destroy Li’l Marco for his little girl.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):

The Atlantic’s McCay Coppins takes up the subject of how the media is going to adjust to not having the incredible, astonishing, addicting Trump story after January 21st. I’ve thought a lot about this myself, recognizing just what a drug it has become to me and everyone else.

It’s not a pleasurable drug. It’s more like cigarettes, which I quit with a lot of difficulty, decades ago. I hated smoking but I couldn’t stop and it felt to me like its only purpose was to make me want to smoke more. It did nothing for me, no high, no pleasure, only the need to do it and the relief I felt when I got that hit of nicotine. That’s how covering Trump feels to me. The question, of course, is how hard he’s going to make it to move on.

Coppins asked some journalists what they think of this question:

Few reporters have been at the center of more high-profile spats with the Trump White House than CNN’s Jim Acosta. A veteran TV newsman with salt-and-pepper hair and a concerned-dad demeanor, Acosta has spent the past four years picking fights with Trump flacks in the briefing room. Once, he walked out of a press conference after then–Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to say reporters weren’t enemies of the people; on another occasion, the White House temporarily revoked his press credentials. Detractors have accused Acosta—who published a book in 2019 titled The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America—of showboating. But he insists that his on-air indignation has always been genuine. “You can’t just go and trash the press and totally lie to the American people and tell them real news is fake news,” Acosta told me. “I couldn’t stomach it.”

The drama has made him famous, but Acosta said he doesn’t expect to bring the same crusading style to his coverage of the next administration. “I don’t think the press should be trying to whip up the Biden presidency and turn it into must-see TV in a contrived way,” he said.

If that sounds like a double standard, Acosta told me it’s not partisan—it’s a matter of professional solidarity. In his view, Trump’s campaign to discredit the press has constituted a “nonstop national emergency,” one that required a defiant response. “If being at the White House is not an experience that might merit hazard pay,” he said, “then perhaps it is going to be approached differently.”

Daniel Dale, the former Toronto Star correspondent who rose to stardom at CNN for his exhaustive cataloging of Trump’s lies, says his beat will necessarily expand come January. “It will not be a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week job to fact-check Biden,” he told me. Though he stressed that the same “intensity and rigor” should be applied to the incoming president, the simple reality is that Biden doesn’t lie nearly as often as Trump does. Consequently, Dale hopes to spend more time debunking online disinformation and digging into claims made by congressional leaders.

The Washington Post reporter Philip Rucker notes that the Trump story won’t end once he leaves office. “You’re going to have a former president pretending he really won the election, threatening to run again in 2024,” he told me. “You’re going to have a Republican Party torn between Trump allegiance and a desire to cleanse itself of these past four years.”

“I do think the story of politics in America is not going to suddenly become boring on January 21,” he said. At least, that’s what Rucker is banking on. Next year, he’ll take a leave from the Post to write a follow-up to A Very Stable Genius, the best-selling Trump White House book he co-authored with his colleague Carol Leonnig.

For those remaining on the White House beat, pivoting to a more conventional administration presents its own odd set of challenges. Should the press strive for a similarly adversarial relationship with Biden? Will their new fans revolt if they start doing tough stories on Democrats? And has the bar for presidential conduct been so lowered that any criticism of Biden will look like both-sides nitpicking?

Yamiche Alcindor, a correspondent for PBS NewsHour, told me she hopes her colleagues will retain the lessons they’ve learned from covering Trump. The default skepticism toward government officials, the aversion to euphemism, the refusal to accept approved narratives—to Alcindor, these are features of a healthy press, not signs that something is amiss. She attributes this attitude to her background covering race and policing. “When something is racist, we should just say it’s racist,” she said. “When someone is lying, we should just say they’re lying.” (Trump has repeatedly singled Alcindor out at press conferences, calling her “threatening” and her questions “nasty.”)

White House coverage may get more “wonky” in the coming years, Alcindor told me, but she rejected the notion that it would be less interesting. She rattled off a list of questions that hang over the incoming administration: How will Biden address the effects of the pandemic? How will he reunite immigrant children separated from their parents? Will he make good on campaign promises related to climate change and policing and health care? These are rich story lines with high stakes that will demand strong accountability journalism. “As a journalist,” Alcindor said, “I don’t think it’s going to be boring.”

I think Alcindor has this right. The press made some strides under Trump in being more straightforward in their reporting. They should keep at it.

But they are also going to feel under pressure to even the scales by blowing up minor Democratic missteps, spin and political maneuvering into Trump level scandals, using “hypocrisy” as a weapon (which has no effect on Republicans because shamelessness is their superpower) to tie them up in knots.

I would just remind you how this looks in practice:

I feel quite confident that this will be a problem. It always has been in the past. And it serves GOP purposes. It makes everyone even more cynical by reinforcing a myth that “they all do it.” Yes, Democrats can be corrupt, sneaky, self-serving, hypocritical and shallow. They are politicians, not saints. But the differences between the two parties in the institutionalizing of all those traits on an unprecedented scale is massive and “both-sidesing” it empowers Republicans to go to extremes knowing they will pay no greater price than if they acted like decent leaders.

I can see already that there will be great pressure to pooh-pooh anyone who points out the double standards and reminds people of the abject irresponsibility of the GOP during these years of Trump, particularly their acquiescence to his corruption and betrayal of democracy in both campaigns and their aftermaths. They will say “get over it!” and what they did will be relegated to to “that’s old news!”

I’ve watched this happen over and over again in the past 30 years. It always gets worse. Which means that Trump was not the low point. Think about that.

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As we know, Trump and his minions are shameless so pointing out their hypocrisy is politically useless. But it is worth noting, nonetheless, for the sake of posterity. And one of Trump’s most glaring acts of hypocrisy is the fact that he relentlessly criticized president Obama for playing golf and then:

Since taking office on Jan. 20, 2017, Mr. Trump has reportedly been on the grounds of his golf courses or played golf elsewhere 308 times since becoming President, and that’s as of Dec. 29, 2020.

The cost of Trump’s golf rounds to the American taxpayer varies by round and course, but it has totaled so far in the tens of millions of dollars. The Secret Service has spent at least $550,000 in third-party golf cart rentals and over $500,000 to stay overnight at Trump-owned properties, including his New Jersey country club.

He previously was on pace to visit his golf clubs more than 650 times in an eight-year presidency. However, his pace as of Aug. 6, 2018 now indicates Trump would spend as much as 745 days of his presidency at a golf course if he wins a second term and serves both terms to completion.

Trump ended 2017 with 91 golf course visits and was just shy of 100 visits in Year 1 as President. In his second year as President, Trump played golf 76 times.

Trump has spent nearly 22 percent of his days in office at one of his golf properties for some portion of the day. There have been days where Trump has visited one of his golf clubs and not played golf. He made a 40-minute visit to his Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., and he has made a three-day visit to Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., to watch the 2017 US Women’s Open, unfolding at that club. Trump spent a 17-day “working vacation” at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., in August, which meant all of those days count as days on his golf courses, even though he didn’t necessarily play golf on all of those days.

Trump claims to have a USGA handicap index under 5, but he is thought to have a vanity handicap that makes him seem better at the sport than he is.

I don’t really care if Trump plays golf. At least he isn’t watching Fox and rage tweeting. The problem is that he’s forcing the taxpayers to put money in his own pocket while he’s doing it. It’s obviously been a grift from the beginning. He could have played golf at other courses at least some of the time. But he insisted on only playing at his own golf courses ensuring that the money it costs to fund his recreation financially benefits him.

This is on top of the fact that his resorts all have paying customers who directly give him money for access. It is as corrupt as it gets. And I’m so old I remember when Republicans had a full blown hissy fit over the idea that people would give money to a global charity in order to be in good graces with a potential president. At the time everyone agreed it was the grossest example of outright corruption the world has ever known, despite the fact that the money went to save the lives of millions around the world. But personally giving Donald Trump a few hundred thou in order to get his ear to roll back a regulation or get some help with a legal problem is a-ok. I have little doubt that’s how some of those pardons of Palm Beach denizens came about.

I hope he spends all of his time on the golf course starting January 21st. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that he’ll be spending even more time on politics.

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I’ve wondered why we haven’t seen much footage of COVID in hospitals. I certainly understand why they would be required to blur faces of people who can’t or don’t want to give consent. But we see much more images of warzones than we have seen of the horror that’s befallen our health care system in this crisis.

Well, the Trump administration has made sure we won’t see it:

AS COVID-19 TORE through the United States in the spring, a senior official in the Trump administration quietly reinforced a set of guidelines that prevented journalists from getting inside all but a handful of hospitals at the front line of the pandemic. The guidelines, citing the medical privacy law known as HIPAA, suggested a nearly impossible standard: Before letting journalists inside Covid-19 wards, hospitals needed prior permission from not only the specific patients the journalists would interview, but also other patients whose names or identities would be accessible.

The onerous guidelines were issued on May 5 by Roger Severino, who worked at the conservative Heritage Foundation before Donald Trump appointed him to direct the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS. The guidelines made it extremely difficult for hospitals to give photographers the opportunity to collect visual evidence of the pandemic’s severity. By tightening the circulation of disturbing images, the guidelines fulfilled, intentionally or not, a key Trump administration goal: keeping public attention away from the death toll, which has surpassed 300,000 souls.

“The last thing hospital patients need to worry about during the Covid-19 crisis is a film crew walking around their bed shooting B-roll,” Severino said dismissively in a short press release accompanying the guidelines.

In the pandemic’s early days, when hospitals were first inundated with media requests, the prevailing HIPAA guidelines were quite restrictive, even on matters that had nothing to do with media access. Those guidelines predated the Trump administration and were not written for a pandemic. But the scale of the Covid-19 crisis quickly forced the Trump administration to loosen a wide range of privacy restrictions on medical providers — except, as it turned out, the ones that kept Americans from viscerally seeing the ailing and the dying.

For instance, HHS allowed hospitals to share Covid-19 information with first responders and with organizations involved in Covid-19 testing. Hospitals were told that they would not face sanctions for sharing information with the families or friends of Covid-19 patients. Doctors were freed to discuss or transfer patient information with technologies that were not secure, such as email, FaceTime, and Skype. As it relaxed these restrictions, the agency said that medical providers would not be punished for breaches of patient confidentiality if they acted in good faith during the pandemic.

The government’s permissiveness did not extend to journalists. The media guidelines announced by Severino in May reinforced HIPAA’s restrictions and warned hospitals that violations could bring fines in the millions of dollars. The announcement was not reported by general-interest publications, but news outlets for the health care industry noticed what had happened. The headline of one of those industry stories was blunt: “Patient Privacy Prevails Over Covid-19 Media Coverage.”

Severino’s guidance, little known outside the health care industry, may help solve one of the mysteries of the pandemic: Why have Americans seen relatively little imagery of people suffering from Covid-19? While there is a long-running debate over the influence of disturbing images of death and dying — whether they actually move public opinion — the relative paucity of videos and photographs of the pandemic’s victims might help explain why Covid-19 skepticism has thrived as the death toll in America reaches the level of a 9/11 every day.

“For society to respond in ways commensurate with the importance of this pandemic, we have to see it,” wrote art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis. “For us to be transformed by it, it has to penetrate our hearts as well as our minds. Images force us to contend with the unspeakable. They help humanize clinical statistics, to make them comprehensible.”

Michael Kamber, a former war photographer who directs the Bronx Documentary Center in New York City, recalls security guards shooing him off the sidewalks in front of Lincoln Medical Center. “This is the greatest loss of life on the American continent in such a concentrated time, and we’re seeing almost no images that really convey the devastation and the death,” Kamber said. “Photography has played such a key role in the civil rights movement, in ending the Vietnam War, and any number of key moments in American history — and it just seems missing in action on this crisis.”

Kamber, like other photographers, accepts that safety and privacy concerns need to be upheld, but he believes that those concerns are used as excuses for the repression of journalism that is manifestly in the public interest. In the cases in which hospitals have allowed journalists inside during the pandemic, there have been no privacy breaches — which proves that reporters can work at the medical front line without violating patient privacy. “The government and nearly all health care facilities have banded together in the name of protecting the privacy of the sick and have done an excellent job of keeping photographers as far away from the grief and devastation as possible,” Kamber said.

Trump knows that if it isn’t on TV it doesn’t exist for many Americans, especially his followers. It’s unlikely that Fox or Newsmax would show much of it, of course, but they might see some of it in passing while they’re out in bars and restaurants or traveling to visit family.

Here in LA the hospitals are overflowing and we have seen some pictures of make-shift waiting rooms in the parking lots and people being treated in the gift shop and lobby. It’s scary. I think for a lot of people, it’s no longer just COVID that scares them but the idea of something else happening and the hospitals not being able to adequately treat them. (Don’t get COVID, but don’t have a heart attack or appendicitis either!) Maybe if more people saw this they would take it more seriously.

I think it’s true that there is a distance between what people are personally experiencing and what’s happening with this virus. And part of the problem is that we aren’t allowed to see it. But that was part of the plan.

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