Month: June 2021

Bravo to the NY Times for this:

Even now, however, Republican politicians and their allies in the media are still playing down the most brazen attack on a seat of power in modern American history. Some have sought to paint the assault as the work of mere tourists. Others, going further, have accused the F.B.I. of planning the attack in what they have described — wildly — as a false-flag operation.

The work of understanding Jan. 6 has been hard enough without this barrage of disinformation and, hoping to get to the bottom of the riot, The Times’s Visual Investigations team spent several months reviewing thousands of videos, many filmed by the rioters themselves and since deleted from social media. We filed motions to unseal police body-camera footage, scoured law enforcement radio communications, and synchronized and mapped the visual evidence.

What we have come up with is a 40-minute panoramic take on Jan. 6, the most complete visual depiction of the Capitol riot to date. In putting it together, we gained critical insights into the character and motivation of rioters by experiencing the events of the day often through their own words and video recordings. We found evidence of members of extremist groups inciting others to riot and assault police officers. And we learned how Donald J. Trump’s own words resonated with the mob in real time as they staged the attack.

Just watch it. It’s astonishing:

I want them to take Donald Trump and every single Republican in the US Congress who refuses to acknowledge the violent actions of their supporters that day and make them watch that. Like this:

I don’t think these dumbasses ever listen to the lyrics. They love the gay pick-up song “YMCA” and the patently obvious “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” And now this one …

Trump's soundtrack for events like this remains extremely bizarre https://t.co/6gJ1Os0Qra

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 30, 2021

Gloria, you’re always on the run now
Running after somebody, you gotta get him somehow
I think you’ve got to slow down before you start to blow it
I think you’re headed for a breakdown, so be careful not to show itYou really don’t remember, was it something that he said?
Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?

Gloria, don’t you think you’re fallin’?
If everybody wants you, why isn’t anybody callin’?
You don’t have to answer
Leave them hangin’ on the line, oh oh oh, calling Gloria

Gloria (Gloria), I think they got your number (Gloria)
I think they got the alias (Gloria) that you’ve been living under (Gloria)
But you really don’t remember, was it something that they said?
Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?

A ha ha, a ha ha, Gloria, how’s it gonna go down?
Will you meet him on the main line, or will you catch him on the rebound?
Will you marry for the money, take a lover in the afternoon?
Feel your innocence slipping away, don’t believe it’s comin’ back soon

And you really don’t remember, was it something that he said?
Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?

Gloria, don’t you think you’re fallin’?
If everybody wants you, why isn’t anybody callin’?
You don’t have to answer
Leave them hangin’ on the line, oh-oh-oh, calling Gloria

Gloria (Gloria), I think they got your number (Gloria)
I think they got the alias (Gloria) that you’ve been living under (Gloria)
But you really don’t remember, was it something that they said?
Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?

Oh, henny penny, Donald Rumsfeld died today at 88. I wrote a whole lot about him here back in the day. The Villagers just loved him to pieces and treated him like a rock star. And the right wingers and neocons thought he was just dreamy. They actually called him “Rumstud.”

I’m reminded of this by Midge Dector, the wife of Norman Podhoretz, the Godfather of neoconservatism. It still makes me groan to read it all these years later:

Midge Decter’s lovelorn paean to Don Rumsfeld may stand as the most unintentionally funny of all the over-the-top Bush years hagiography:

“He works standing up at a tall writing table, as if energy, or perhaps determination, might begin to leak away from too much sitting down”

This one never fails to make me laugh out loud:

Decter: What Rumsfeld’s having become an American sex symbol seems to say about American culture today is that the assault on men leveled by the women’s movement, having poisoned the normally delicate relations between men and women and thereby left a generation of younger women with a load of anxiety they are only now beginning to throw off, is happily almost over. It’s hard to overestimate the significance of the term “stud” being applied to a man who has reached the age of 70 and will not too long from now be celebrating his 50th wedding anniversary.

It’s hard to overestimate it all right.

The Podhoretz’s are America’s first family of neoconservatism, dysfunctional masculinity and world domination. It’s quite an achievement.

He was a menace for many, many years going all the way back to the Nixon years. The passing of that generation of Neocons, Kissingerian/Nixonian “realists” and right wing imperialists cannot come too soon. No, they weren’t like crazy MAGAs. They knew what they were doing and it was very bad.

How many thousands of others still languish?

On the day Bill Cosby is released from prison on a technicality you may be cynical about lawyers and judges and the justice system, and for good reason. But here’s an incredible story about an innocent Black man being exonerated that will make your heart swell, at least for a moment — until you think about all the others languishing in jail who don’t have the money or the good luck to have lawyers and advocates who can challenge their unfair sentences.

Emily Bazelon and her lawyer sister deserve all the plaudits for this one. It’s called,

I Write About the Law. But Could I Really Help Free a Prisoner? For years as a journalist, I’ve covered attempts to exonerate incarcerated people. But a letter from Yutico Briley led to a different kind of story.

Read it. It’s an amazing piece of writing and an amazing story. Our system of justice is so very broken in so many ways.

This story made me think of this:

“Why must you always concentrate on color?”

“Why must we always talk about Critical Race Theory?”

As always, this answer from James Baldwin is what you were looking for. Must watch. pic.twitter.com/p80F8CNCrd

— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) June 24, 2021

There is no doubt that Bill Cosby was a serial predator over the course of many years. But the law is apparently inadequate to deal with that when it comes to someone with as much money as Cosby has:

Pennsylvania’s highest court overturned Bill Cosby’s sex assault conviction Wednesday after finding an agreement with a previous prosecutor prevented him from being charged in the case.

Cosby has served more than two years of a three- to 10-year sentence at a state prison near Philadelphia. He had vowed to serve all 10 years rather than acknowledge any remorse over the 2004 encounter with accuser Andrea Constand.

The 83-year-old Cosby, who was once beloved as “America’s Dad,” was convicted of drugging and molesting the Temple University employee at his suburban estate.

The trial judge had allowed just one other accuser to testify at Cosby’s first trial, when the jury deadlocked. However, he then allowed five other accusers to testify at the retrial about their experiences with Cosby in the 1980s.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said that testimony tainted the trial, even though a lower appeals court had found it appropriate to show a signature pattern of drugging and molesting women.

Cosby was the first celebrity tried and convicted in the #MeToo era, so the reversal could make prosecutors wary of calling other accusers in similar cases. The law on prior bad act testimony varies by state, though, and the ruling only holds sway in Pennsylvania.

Prosecutors did not immediately say if they would appeal or seek to try Cosby for a third time.

The justices voiced concern not just about sex assault cases, but what they saw as the judiciary’s increasing tendency to allow testimony that crosses the line into character attacks. The law allows the testimony only in limited cases, including to show a crime pattern so specific it serves to identify the perpetrator.

Sigh. Keep in mind that the prosecutor who made the original deal not to prosecute Cosby that is at the center of this case is one of Donald Trump’s craziest impeachment lawyers. I guess he has a real afinity for sexual predators.

This guy:

There are a lot of books coming out over the next few months that chronicled the final days of the Trump administration and it’s pretty clear there are a lot of stories to tell. Of course, there is also a burning desire on the part of some members of Trump’s entourage to buff up their severely tarnished reputations.

Michael Wolff of “Fire and Fury” fame has a new book coming out about the post-election period called “Landslide” that sounds as though it will be as lurid and gossipy as his previous Trump book. ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl’s book called “Betrayal” (which I referenced in this piece about Bill Barr on Monday) appears to take a look at the same period as another new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender called “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.” It makes sense that there would be a number of books about the election, Trump’s Big Lie and the subsequent nsurrection. The assault on democracy is the biggest political story of our time and it’s still unfolding.

But I think the most serious story of the Trump administration and granted, it’s hard to choose, has to be the massive, overwhelming failure to deal with the COVID pandemic that’s killed over 600,000 people and counting. I still can’t quite wrap my mind around that number or the fact that the leadership of the United States of America was so inept. According to yet another new book, aptly entitled “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” it was all actually much worse than we even thought.

The authors, Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, tell the coronavirus story from the perspective of the science advisers as well as the political people around Trump who were desperately trying to get him to take the problem seriously. We knew from Bob Woodward’s earlier reporting that Trump had consciously made the decision to “downplay” the virus, ostensibly to keep people from panicking. Nobody really believed that, of course. It was obvious that he was “downplaying” the virus because he was afraid that the stock market would panic and that the ensuring economic turmoil would cost him the election. It seemingly never even occurred to him that mass deaths might be a bigger drag on his campaign.

The earliest unforgettable moment in the saga was the day when Trump went down to the CDC and bragged that everyone there was so impressed by his grasp of the complexities that perhaps he should have been a scientist instead of a president. And he made the comment that would guide the entire response from that point forward:

It's not like he ever tried to hide what he was doing… https://t.co/8sJei3udxq

— digby (@digby56) March 6, 2021

According to “Nightmare Scenario” Trump was so upset by the idea that these people would “double his numbers” that he asked his staff if there wasn’t “an island we own” that we could send them to and he asked more than once about the possibility of sending them to Guantánamo. The staff finally got the idea scuttled but because they were all just as shallow and self-serving as he was, they did it not because it was grotesquely inhumane but because they were “worried about a backlash over quarantining American tourists on the same Caribbean base where the United States holds terrorism suspects.” They had a point. Sending sick old people to a terrorist prison camp is pretty bad optics.

The “numbers” continued to anger Trump. He demanded that the officials who allowed the cruise passengers into the US be fired (it didn’t happen) and when he said at his infamous Tulsa Oklahoma rally back in June of 2020, “when you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down please” — he was not joking. The book quotes Trump having a tantrum over the phone to Health and Human Services Director Alex Azar, saying “Testing is killing me! I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?” (Azar replied, hilariously, “Uh, do you mean Jared?”)

This response was a trainwreck in every way, mostly because of Trump’s ignorance which made his decisions erratic and ineffectual, which I suspect also led to the magical thinking that had him demanding that everyone be a cheerleader and if you just tell people that everything is fine, it will be. He’s quoted as saying to his team, “I am sick and tired of how negative you all are. . . . I spend half of my day responding to what Tony Fauci has to say, and I’m the president of the United States!” He told Dr. Deborah Birx, “Every time you talk, I get depressed. You have to stop that.”

Perhaps the biggest revelation in this book is the fact that Trump was much, much sicker from COVID than we knew. His doctors were seriously afraid he was going to die and pushed the FDA to break all the rules to get him the experimental drugs that might save him. As we know, they did that and pumped him full of steroids and he recovered quite quickly. But in one of the more eye-rolling moments in this story, apparently, some of the advisers like CDC Director Robert Redfield, assumed his very close brush with death would automatically force him to take the COVID protocols more seriously and go out and tell people about his own experience in order to convince them to do the same. That’s just laughable. It would mean he had to admit he was wrong and that’s impossible. You’ll recall that he defiantly ripped off his mask when he returned to the White House and then made a video telling everyone to go out and live their lives. He promised that he was going to make those experimental drugs available for free to everyone. That didn’t happen, although he did arrange for his cronies Chris Christie and Ben Carson to get them.

This book reinforces the story that we already knew which is that the death toll in the U.S. from the pandemic is so high largely because the president of the United States at the time was an incompetent narcissist who was incapable of handling the crisis. So instead he said it was all bad press and poor optics and tried to happy talk his way out of it. It ended up killing people. A lot of people. Despite his desire to be seen as the man who single-handedly created the vaccines and saved the world, his followers heard him “downplay” the virus and they believed him. Now many of them are refusing to get the shots and Trump’s American carnage continues to this day. 

Salon

Wallace Shawn, he of The Princess Bride fame, contemplates seeing Trumpism in the rear view mirror. Not without what the elite might call “learnings” about Trump’s faux-populist appeal to the non-elite:

To put it differently, the elite had wounded their dignity, had hurt their feelings. For Trump, it was purely personal. He knew these people. He’d gone to school with them. He’d gone to parties with them, night after night. And he loathed them because they looked down on him. They thought he was stupid. They thought he was crude. They thought he didn’t know how to speak. They thought he was dishonest, and he didn’t follow the rules. They thought he was undisciplined, loud, boastful, and overweight.

His not-well-educated followers probably didn’t know any members of the elite, had never met any members of the elite. They knew what they’d seen of them on their computer screens and their television screens. But strangely, just as there is an economic web that links together every person in a given country, from the poorest to the richest, there is also an invisible web of emotion that enables a struggling truck driver in Idaho to resent a Syrian immigrant in Michigan whom he’s never met and to feel shamed and diminished by a prosperous corporate executive in New York City whom he’s never met. And so millions of followers of Donald Trump could feel humiliated by the imagined contempt that they felt flowing down in their direction through this invisible web from the same well-educated people that Trump had sat with at dinner parties a thousand times.

There is indeed contempt among many of the better-educated for the less-educated. “Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so,” David Freedman wrote in The Atlantic five years ago now. “Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart.” All it takes is a casual insult here and there to reconfirm that imagined contempt is real and universal among the better-educated.

Shawn believes any sense of elite superiority is misguided.

Those of us who were in a better frame of mind should not have been congratulating ourselves on our superiority to those who were depressed. We were not superior, we were simply luckier. We were less depressed because we’d had better luck. The machinery of society had operated to our benefit, and we’d been able to do more interesting things. But a lot of us enjoyed feeling contempt for Trump’s followers, just as they enjoyed feeling contempt for us.

The amazing political paradox that the United States faces at the moment is that an enormous number of people of color, many of whom are objectively poorer and much worse off than most of Trump’s supporters, have joined up with the minority of whites who dislike Trump to form a slim majority of Americans who apparently believe in the current American political system, but at the same time there now exists a staggering number of white people in the country—should we make a guess based on current polls and say 50 million out of Trump’s 74 million voters?—who are shockingly alienated from the whole American game, utterly indifferent to the prevailing political setup, with its elections, its Constitution, and its three branches of government, and absolutely delighted to follow a “leader” who attractively performs the part of a rebel but who also may happen to be mentally ill.

For all the elite conservative insistence that the less-well-off have skin in the game when it comes to government safety net programs, they are remarkable unbothered by how many of their own supporters feel they have no skin in the game of the “prevailing political setup, with its elections, its Constitution,” etc.

https://twitter.com/CleverTitleTK/status/1409959359703044096?s=20

Pervasive inequality overrides more ivory-tower theories of governance. For strivers who lack spare time, holding power itself is more important than niceties about how one acquires and maintains it. Especially in the face of economic inequality beyond the imaginations of Gilded Age barons and pauperish immigrants with “funny” names.

Trump gave his cult people to blame in lieu of higher wages and better health care. For many that was acceptable. But at the core, it is “economic inequality that has split us into groups that confront each other just short of war. It’s economic inequality that has split us into the well educated and the not well educated,” Shawn writes. And those alienated Trump fans are still critical to what happens next:

Our common future, the future of everyone in the society, depends on which way these particular tens of millions of people will turn, what they become, what will happen with them. Like it or not, this is the group that will determine our fate.

Perhaps. But for now they are not only in thrall to a man who is mentally ill, but addicted to a network of propagandistic media that exploits them for the purposes of some of the very elite he encourages them to hate. So long as it feeds their animosity, they seem not to notice they are being actively manipulated and encouraged to destroy the very (imagined) country they claim to love.

Getting out of this mess is like extracting oneself from a Chinese finger trap. Struggling against it seems only to tighten it.

Louisiana slowly sinks. Florida, too. (A building just collapsed there; perhaps it’s unrelated.) The American West is bone dry and bracing for a historic wildfire season. The Northwest bakes; city streets buckle. Hundreds have died in the heat in British Columbia. It is enough for a time to take your mind off the prospects of American democracy collapsing.

The Washington Post’s Charlie Warzel ponders “a lingering existential dread about the future” in Bellingham, Wash. in a region where air conditioning is rare:

All week, a sinking feeling has accompanied each day’s heat; there’s a distinct psychological pain that accompanies the thought that the unbearable present is only a preview of the extreme climate to come. It was 116 degrees in British Columbia on Sunday. And it was 73 degrees on snow-covered Mt. Rainier, above 10,000 feet. In one city in Pakistan, a different system pushed temperatures to levels “hotter than the human body can handle.”

It’s not hard to imagine what comes next. And that’s what makes it so horrifying.

The phenomenon of climate anxiety has sharpened for many over the past few years. In a poll from October, 55 percent of respondents said they were “somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on their own mental health.” People who had been insulated from the disastrous effects of warming — thanks to geography, or privilege, or both — are newly confronting this uncomfortable reality in their daily lives.

Got so hot in Portland today that Denver St buckled. pic.twitter.com/Mz5v3gNif3

— Maury Brown (@BizballMaury) June 29, 2021

Americans are painfully slow to confront inconvenient truths that take us out of our “you can have it all” comfort zones.

Slow enough that, over a century and a half since the end of the Civil War, Americans are still trying to come to grips with our 400-year legacy of slavery and its lingering harms.

Slow enough that multiple red states have passed Stalinesque “memory laws” to prevent the teaching of historical facts that might induce (in white students) “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.”

Slow enough that we are just now considering removal of memorials to Confederate traitors from town squares and the halls of Congress.

Slow enough that many in that same Congress oppose acknowledging climate change, sea level rise, blackouts in Texas and California, and the 40-year failure of trickle-down economics to trickle down.

Slow enough that those same politicians oppose investigating a bloody insurrection at the Capitol that just months ago threatened their own lives and the unmaking of American democracy.

Slow enough that one of the Internet’s most persistent memes shows a cartoon dog surrounded by raging fire and dismissing it with “This is fine.”

Britt Wray, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, suggests one way for coping with climate anxiety is by embracing it:

It feels unfair to come out from pandemic lockdowns and confront yet another crisis that requires reserves of resilience. But Wray argues that squaring up to your anxiety and dread around climate change “gives you resources to draw from and ultimately makes intense moments like this heat wave easier to bear.”

“If we can acknowledge our feelings and bear the fact that we’re faced with extremely difficult truths about the planet, we can use that to gather strength,” she said. “This is not easy. You need to know you’re not alone but also know that you’re not going to find a silver-bullet solution.”

We should talk about the climate crisis with friends and family, Wray suggests. Weave it into our social fabric so it is not such an uncomfortable topic.

Squaring up to your anxiety is fine. Acknowledge our feelings is fine. Talking with friends and family is fine.

Doing is better.

Jill Biden graces the cover of Vogue magazine, an honor in American fashion and culture that famously eluded her predecessor, Melania Trump, probably because Donald Trump’s wife was heavily criticized by likely Vogue readers for enabling his divisive presidency, including during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Melania Trump herself acknowledged this lack of recognition by Vogue and other top U.S. life-style magazines with a notorious f-bomb-laced comment. “I don’t give a (expletive) about Vogue or any other magazine. They would never put me on the cover,” Melania Trump was recorded as saying to her ex-best friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff.

Jill Biden’s glowing Vogue cover story comes as Melania Trump faces renewed interest in her tenure as first lady, including her reported attempt to help her husband spin the political fallout after the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Late last week, Trump defended his wife’s glamour, the controversial Rose Garden makeover and White House Christmas decorations during in an interview with the Trump-friendly outlet, Newsmax. The Slovenian-born ex-model also was a trending topic on Twitter over the weekend, with people asking why she had been absent from her husband’s side lately, including being missing from photos at his 75th birthday party at his New Jersey golf resort earlier this month.

Now this week, with Vogue unveiling its 6,000-word profile of Jill Biden, Melania Trump is shown in a new book, playing a brief but telling role in trying to help her husband and his close associates avoid responsibility for the attack on the Capitol.

I posted about this earlier, but it’s worth doing again:

According to “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency” by controversial author Michael Wolff, Trump’s family knew he had lost the election and understood there was little chance of upsetting the electoral count.

Nonetheless, they did little to try to stop Trump who was being encouraged in this “derangement” by his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was drinking heavily and “in a constant state of excitation, often almost incoherent in his agitation and mania,” Wolff wrote in his book, which is excerpted in New York Magazine.

In fact, some family members, including Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, made public statements at Trump’s Jan. 6 rally, showing support their father’s election fraud claims and likewise urging his supporters to “fight.”

Meanwhile, Melania Trump had reportedly already “checked out” of her job as first lady by Jan. 6, and was preparing for her post-White House life at Mar-a-Lago, according to CNN and other reports. That day, she was busy with a post-White House project: overseeing a photo shoot for a coffee-table book on decorative projects she had amassed and restored during his time as first lady.

Later that night, Melania Trump joined her husband in a phone call with senior advisor Jason Miller. Trump said, “This looks terrible. This looks really bad,” after watching television coverage of his fans ransacking the Capitol.

Trump then said, “Hold on, our great first lady is here.”

After switching to speakerphone, Melania Trump said sharply: “The media is trying to go and say this is who we are. We don’t support this.”

It took Melania Trump another five days before she finally issued a statement about the insurrection. She criticized the violence, but she nonetheless praised the “passion and enthusiasm” of those who joined her husband in protesting the election results.

“It is inspiring to see that so many have found a passion and enthusiasm in participating in an election, but we must not allow that passion to turn to violence,” said Melania Trump, whose “Be Best” platform as first lady centered on promoting civility and kindness.

Melania is very beautiful, a former model who looked fabulous in clothes and portrayed a glamorous image not seen since Jackie Kennedy. But because she is a terrible person, married to a monster, none of that really mattered and I frankly don’t think anyone even noticed that much. Her stepdaughter Ivanka has had much the same fate.

Beautiful is as beautiful does.

You no doubt recall that stunningly grotesque appearance at the CDC. He made if clear he didn’t want the people stuck on the cruise ships to dock in the US. In fact, he suggested they be sent to Guantanamo. That is no lie. Because he wanted to keep “his numbers down.”

Yet another book on the final days and it sounds like a doozy:

Amid chaos at the White House as the coronavirus pandemic worsened, Donald Trump took to referring derisively to the Covid taskforce chaired by his vice-president as “that fucking council that Mike has”.

The revelation about the president’s contempt for his key advisory body is one among many in a new book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History, which is published in the US on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Previous revelations from the book have included that Trump wanted to send infected Americans to Guantánamo Bay and that he mused about John Bolton, his national security adviser, being “taken out” by Covid.

The book is a deeply reported account of the beginning of a pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 in the US and a federal response hamstrung by incompetence and infighting.

Trump’s derisive term for his taskforce, the authors write, was “a signal that he wished it would go away” and “didn’t want anyone to exert leadership”.

“Many on the taskforce didn’t want the responsibility either, fearful of the consequences.”

Under the chairmanship of Vice-President Mike Pence – who is shown resisting his own appointment to replace the outmatched health secretary, Alex Azar – the taskforce was led by Dr Deborah Birx, a US army physician widely praised for her role in the fight against Aids but whose star waned under Trump.

Abutaleb and Paletta portray Birx as a confident leader unafraid to challenge powerful men, but also someone who “overplayed her hand” when she decided to praise and flatter Trump as a way to manage him.

Of an interview Birx gave to the rightwing Christian Broadcasting Network, in which she praised Trump’s “ability to analyse and integrate data”, the authors write: “It was the kind of sycophancy one expected from Pence or [treasury secretary] Steve Mnuchin, not a government scientist.”

The authors also say Birx worked well with Pence and was admired by fellow workers, though by April 2020, the chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was deriding the taskforce as “useless and broken”.

Birx served until the end of the Trump administration in January this year. Unlike her fellow taskforce member Dr Anthony Fauci, now chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, she did not remain in public service.

Abutaleb and Paletta also report that in March, as cases spiraled and the US death toll passed 1,000, unofficial adviser Stephen Moore, Trump’s “emissary [from] the conservative establishment … strode into the Oval Office to convince the president” to end shutdowns and get the economy moving.

Moore is an economist who in 2019 was nominated by Trump to the board of the Federal Reserve, only to withdraw after outlets led by the Guardian reported controversies in his past.

He told Abutaleb and Paletta Trump’s controversial and soon dropped promise to reopen the US economy by Easter was “the smart thing to do”, because “the economic costs of this are mounting and there’s not a lot of evidence that lockdowns are working to stop the spread”.

Lockdowns to stop the spread of Covid-19 remain in use around the world.

Moore is also quoted attacking Fauci, a common target for conservative ire over subjects including mask-wearing and the origins of Covid in China.

“Fauci is the villain here,” Moore says. “He has the Napoleon complex, and he thinks he is the dictator who could decide how to run the country.”

Moore also says conservative activists he advised as they staged protests against lockdowns and masks – and who he famously claimed were successors of the great civil rights protester Rosa Parks – asked: “What’s wrong with this fucking Fauci? Sometimes they’d call him Fucky, not Fauci.”

Arrested development. All of them.