I’m not talking about the Boogaloo Bois or the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers or the 3 Percenters or any of the the pro-Trump Militia extremist gun nuts. It goes without saying that they are prepared to do violence. This story is about a group of Trump appointees, led by Steve Bannon, who are preparing to take over the government and immediately change every rule and norm that might stand in the way of Trump exerting unilateral power, unobstructed:

Scores of former Trump political appointees gathered at a GOP social club Wednesday night to hear Steve Bannon detail how they could help the next Republican president reconfigure government.

“If you’re going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately,” Bannon said in a telephone interview with NBC News. “I gave ’em fire and brimstone.”

Bannon, who ran former President Donald Trump’s first campaign and later worked as a top adviser in the White House, said that Trump’s agenda was delayed by the challenges of quickly filling roughly 4,000 slots for presidential appointees at federal agencies and the steep learning curve for political officials who were new to Washington.

He is not alone in that view. His appearance at the Capitol Hill Club came at the invitation of a new organization called the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, which was formed to create a resource for future GOP officials tapped to fill federal jobs.

“There are so many statutes and regulations as well as agency and departmental policies, it can be very overwhelming when you first come in,” said Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, a former Broadcasting Board of Governors official who is one of the organizers of the group. “This is an organization that has a very narrow, clear and much-needed purpose, and, once it is operational, I think it could do a lot of good not just for the Republican Party but for the country.”

Trump often railed publicly about career civil servants and Obama administration political appointee holdovers whom he saw as obstacles to his agenda, referring to them collectively as the “deep state.”

Bannon said he wants to see pre-trained teams ready to jump into federal agencies when the next Republican president takes office. For the most part, that means the tiers of presidential appointees whose postings don’t require Senate confirmation.

“We’re going to have a sweeping victory in 2022 and that’s just the preamble to a sweeping victory in 2024, and this time we’re going to be ready — and have a MAGA perspective, MAGA policies, not the standard Republican policies,” he said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan and describing a 2024 electoral victory as a “second term.”

The launch party Wednesday drew a crowd of roughly 200 former officials from multiple Republican administrations — though mostly Trump appointees — according to a person who attended and is not one of the organizers of the group.

Shapiro said organizers are still trying to determine who will lead the association, but he said the need for institutional memory is apparent.

“What we’re hoping to do is build a base of people that can be available as a support system for political appointees who are coming in for the first time,” he said. “It’s easy, if you know the rules, to accomplish your objective.”

Yes, Bannon is a clown and a grifter. And yes, he’s been talking about “deconstructing the administrative state” for years. The Trump administration managed to do a lot of that simply by being incompetent, chaotic and corrupt. Four years of that can really degrade an institution. But this idea has taken hold in the Republican establishment and they have learned from the Trump experience that there are very few limits to what they can get away with. Whether this crew is involved or not, this “plan” is going to be in play in one way or another. Just look at Mitch McConnell if you want to see what a bedrock establishment figure will do to maintain power.

In the United States, 400,000 covid deaths (of 700K) occurred after the 1st vaccines were given. Almost all of the last 200,00 deaths would have been prevented if these people had been vaccinated

The unnecessary loss of lives of young people (age 25-54) were the highest for the pandemic in recent weeks, at a time when vaccines were abundantly available to all

Originally tweeted by Eric Topol (@EricTopol) on October 2, 2021.

The New York Times has its problems but today the Editorial Board tells it like it is:

However horrifying the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol appeared in the moment, we know now that it was far worse.

The country was hours away from a full-blown constitutional crisis — not primarily because of the violence and mayhem inflicted by hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters but because of the actions of Mr. Trump himself.

In the days before the mob descended on the Capitol, a corollary attack — this one bloodless and legalistic — was playing out down the street in the White House, where Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and a lawyer named John Eastman huddled in the Oval Office, scheming to subvert the will of the American people by using legal sleight-of-hand.

Mr. Eastman’s unusual visit was reported at the time, but a new book by the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa provides the details of his proposed six-point plan. It involved Mr. Pence rejecting dozens of already certified electoral votes representing tens of millions of legally cast ballots, thus allowing Congress to install Mr. Trump in a second term.

Mr. Pence ultimately refused to sign on, earning him the rage of Mr. Trump and chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” by the rioters, who erected a makeshift gallows on the National Mall.

The fact that the scheme to overturn the election was highly unlikely to succeed is cold comfort. Mr. Trump remains the most popular Republican in the country; barring a serious health issue, the odds are good that he will be the party’s nominee for president in 2024. He also remains as incapable of accepting defeat as he has ever been, which means the country faces a renewed risk of electoral subversion by Mr. Trump and his supporters — only next time they will have learned from their mistakes.

That leaves all Americans who care about preserving this Republic with a clear task: Reform the federal election law at the heart of Mr. Eastman’s twisted ploy, and make it as hard as possible for anyone to pull a stunt like that again.

The Electoral Count Act, which passed more than 130 years ago, was Congress’s response to another dramatic presidential dispute — the election of 1876, in which the Republican Rutherford Hayes won the White House despite losing the popular vote to his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden.

After Election Day, Tilden led in the popular vote and in the Electoral College. But the vote in three Southern states — South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana — was marred by accusations of fraud and intimidation by both parties. Various officials in each state certified competing slates of electors, one for Hayes and one for Tilden. The Constitution said nothing about what to do in such a situation, so Congress established a 15-member commission to decide which electors to accept as valid.

The commission consisted of 10 members of Congress, evenly divided between the parties, and five Supreme Court justices, two appointed by Democrats and three by Republicans. Hayes, the Republican candidate, won all the disputed electors (including one from Oregon) by an 8-to-7 vote — giving him victory in the Electoral College by a single vote.

Democrats were furious and began to filibuster the counting process, but they eventually accepted Hayes’s presidency in exchange for the withdrawal of the last remaining federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction and beginning the era of Jim Crow, which would last until the middle of the 20th century.

It was obvious that Congress needed clearer guidelines for deciding disputed electoral votes. In 1887, the Electoral Count Act became law, setting out procedures for the counting and certifying of electoral votes in the states and in Congress.

But the law contains numerous ambiguities and poorly drafted provisions. For instance, it permits a state legislature to appoint electors on its own, regardless of how the state’s own citizens voted, if the state “failed to make a choice” on Election Day. What does that mean? The law doesn’t say. It also allows any objection to a state’s electoral votes to be filed as long as one senator and one member of the House put their names to it, triggering hours of debate — which is how senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley were able to gum up the works on Jan. 6.

A small minority of legal scholars have argued that key parts of the Electoral Count Act are unconstitutional, which was the basis of Mr. Eastman’s claim that Mr. Pence could simply disregard the law and summarily reject electors of certain key battleground states.

Nothing in the Constitution or federal law gives the vice president this authority. The job of the vice president is to open the envelopes and read out the results, nothing more. Any reform to the Electoral Count Act should start there, by making it explicit that the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 is purely ministerial and doesn’t include the power to rule on disputes over electors.

The law should also be amended to allow states more time to arrive at a final count, so that any legal disputes can be resolved before the electors cast their ballots.

The “failed” election provision should be restricted to natural disasters or terrorist attacks — and even then, it should be available only if there is no realistic way of conducting the election. Remember that the 2012 election was held just days after Hurricane Sandy lashed the East Coast, and yet all states were able to conduct their elections in full. (This is another good argument for universal mail-in voting, which doesn’t put voters at the mercy of the weather.) The key point is that a close election, even a disputed one, is not a failed election.

Finally, any objection to a state’s electoral votes should have to clear a high bar. Rather than just one member of each chamber of Congress, it should require the assent of one-quarter or more of each body. The grounds for an objection should be strictly limited to cases involving clear evidence of fraud or widespread voting irregularities.

The threats to a free and fair presidential election don’t come from Congress alone. Since Jan. 6, Republican-led state legislatures have been clambering over one another to pass new laws making it easier to reject their own voters’ will, and removing or neutralizing those officials who could stand in the way of a naked power grab — like Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, did when he resisted Mr. Trump’s personal plea to “find” just enough extra votes to flip the outcome there.

How to ensure that frivolous objections are rejected while legitimate ones get a hearing? One approach would be to establish a panel of federal judges in each state to hear any challenges to the validity or accuracy of that state’s election results. If the judges determine that the results are invalid, they would lay out their findings in writing and prevent the state from certifying its results.

There is plenty more to be done to protect American elections from being stolen through subversion, like mandating the use of paper ballots that can be checked against reported results. Ideally, fixes like these would be adopted promptly by bipartisan majorities in Congress, to convey to all Americans that both parties are committed to a fair, transparent and smooth vote-counting process. But for that to happen, the Republican Party would need to do an about-face. Right now, some Republican leaders in Congress and the states have shown less interest in preventing election sabotage than in protecting and, in some cases, even venerating the saboteurs.

Democrats should push through these reforms now, and eliminate the filibuster if that’s the only way to do so. If they hesitate, they should recall that a majority of the Republican caucus in the House — 139 members — along with eight senators, continued to object to the certification of electoral votes even after the mob stormed the Capitol.

Time and distance from those events could have led to reflection and contrition on the part of those involved, but that’s not so. Remember how, in the frantic days before Jan. 6, Mr. Trump insisted over and over that Georgia’s election was rife with “large-scale voter fraud”? Remember how he called on Mr. Raffensperger to “start the process of decertifying the election” and “announce the true winner”? Only those words aren’t from last year. They appear in a letter Mr. Trump sent to Mr. Raffensperger two weeks ago.

Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it.

Here’s what Trump was talking about just yesterday:

Cory Doctorow this week: “No-tax brain worms are a hell of a drug” and other commentary on the willingness of libertarians to “trade other peoples’ fundamental rights for preferential tax treatment.”

In my previous post, we just looked at what price libertarians such as Charles Koch are willing for other people to pay as their pawns.

Doctorow committed a tweet rant on that topic to a permanent archive. It’s worth a read:

“Are you calling me a racist?” (permalink)

In “I Can’t Breathe,” Matt Taibbi’s book on Eric Garner’s murder he writes, “You could reduce…Fox News and afternoon talk radio to a morbid national obsession that could be summarized on a t-shirt: ‘Are you calling me a racist?'”

It’s a passage I found myself turning to regularly during the Trump years, when right wing figures bristled at being called racist merely for supporting an explicitly racist party that took power by appealing to white nationalism.

The media spent a lot of that period asking itself whether being a Republican was the same as being a racist, and one commonsense answer that cropped up a lot was, “It may not mean that you are racist, but it does mean that you’ll accept racism as the price of GOP rule.”

I was reminded of this by the current episode of Backbench, Canadaland’s national politics podcast. This week, host Fatima Syed interviews a listener who sent an angry email to the show after hearing voters for the People’s Party of Canada called “racist.”

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/14-a-conversation-with-a-ppc-voter/

The caller was angry because he was not a racist: he’s a “libertarian” who wants low taxes. At the start of the interview, he insists that the manifestly racist People’s Party is not racist.

But as Syed points out the explicit racism in its platform its extensive ties to avowed neo-Nazis, the caller’s position gradually shifts – from denying racism to describing racism as a universal factor in all parties.

Finally, he acknowledges the party’s racist ties but excuses them as the price of low taxes – “You gotta take the good with the bad.”

Interestingly, the caller was able to speak intelligently about the nature of systemic racism and identify it as a serious problem.

He just doesn’t think it’s as big a problem as high taxes.

This is what we mean when we talk about saying the quiet part out loud.

Of all the brain-worms that prey upon the conservative mind, none are quite so powerful as the “no tax” pathology.

After all, clowns like Doug and Rob Ford were not solely elected by people who were swayed by promises of $1 beers and a ban on teaching butt stuff in sex ed – the Fords’ constituency includes millions who’d vote for a dead squirrel if it would knock $0.25 off their taxes.

Likewise, many wealthy Texan GOP donors are going to continue to procure abortions for themselves, their spouses and their kids. They’re likely horrified by the state’s new forced childbirth law. It’s not that they don’t believe in abortion rights.

Rather, it’s that a $1 discount on their tax bill is worth more to them than the suffering of every person who endures a forced birth, and every child produced by those births. No-tax brain worms are a hell of a drug.

Libertarianism is notionally grounded in the idea of self-determination and personal responsibility, but in practice, powerful libertarians routinely trade off (others’) freedom for (their own) tax savings.

Sure, the Kochs donate a lot of money to fighting private prisons – but it’s eclipsed by their campaign contributions and dark money for GOP candidates who support private prisons. They sincerely oppose private prisons, but not as much as they support low taxes.

It was ever thus. Von Hayek and Friedman – those great defenders of freedom! – endorsed and gave material aid to Pinochet’s military dictatorship, as it butchered 40,000 of its opponents, leaving their body parts in roadside trash-bags or pushing them out of helicopters.

There’s nothing “libertarian” about a military dictatorship, but the Chicago Boys were all about low taxation. Indeed, Friedman never met a form of oppression he wouldn’t trade for lower taxes.

Take school segregation: as Nancy MacLean writes, Milton Friedman saw racist fury at school integration as an opportunity to draw supporters to his plan to end public education (thus lowering taxes):

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-milton-friedman-aided-and-abetted-segregationists-in-his-quest-to-privatize-public-education

Friedman helped start the Charter School movement as a way for white parents to get public money to send their kids to private, whites-only schools, after the Supreme Court and Congress ended public school segregation.

I have no idea if Friedman was racist. I don’t even care. It doesn’t matter if you do racism because you are racist, or because you have anti-tax brain-worms that make you throw in your lot with violent, racist would-be genociders. Being “pro-genocide” is incompatible with being “pro-liberty.”

In contemplating rightist thought, I have three definitions. The first is Steven Brust’s (quoted in my novel Walkaway): “Ask what’s more important, human rights or property rights. If they say ‘property rights ARE human rights’ they’re on the right.”

https://craphound.com/category/walkaway/

The second is Corey Robin’s, from The Reactionary Mind: Some people (bosses, white people, Americans, men) are born to rule, and others (racialized people, women, workers, foreigners) to be ruled over. We thrive when natural rulers are in charge.

https://coreyrobin.com/the-reactionary-mind/

The third is Frank Wilhot’s: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/

The willingness to trade other peoples’ fundamental rights for preferential tax treatment fits neatly into all three of these, as does the delusion that somehow this can be resolved with sufficient “personal responsibility.”

(Image: HKDP, CC BY-SA, modified)

The pro-liberty-self-branded are a dangerous bunch, both the nattiest-dressed among them and those wrapped in the flag while brandishing weapons and wearing tee shirts lionizing Pinochet. The only thing missing is carrying crosses. Give them time.

Just to be clear on who the Proud Boys are, when they wear shirts that say “Pinochet did nothing wrong” – that means that like 70’s-80’s Chilean dictator Pinochet, they would torture & kill every left leaning person they could, if they had the power to do so. pic.twitter.com/0qGbCSKoE4

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) August 17, 2019

This is the back of that tee shirt:

And the difference between these bozos on the left and *terrorist* terrorists is what? Party affiliation? Sartorial choice? It's not their choice of weapon anymore. https://t.co/oHXxUJO4d3 @digby56 pic.twitter.com/ACNAikS3NT

— @TomSullivan@mstdn.social (@BloggersRUs) October 2, 2021

Right-wing billionaire ideologues do like to drive wedges. Divide and conquer, eh? The Washington Post obtained a Koch-supported draft letter designed to give public schools a wedgie they won’t forget:

The letter sounds passionate and personal.

It is motivated, the author explains, by a desire to “speak up for what is best for my kids.” And it fervently conveys the author’s feelings to school leaders: “I do not believe little kids should be forced to wear masks, and I urge you to adopt a policy that allows parental choice on this matter for the upcoming school year.”

But the heartfelt appeal is not the product of a grass roots groundswell. Rather, it is a template drafted and circulated this week within a conservative network built on the scaffolding of the Koch fortune and the largesse of other GOP megadonors.

That makes the document, which was obtained by The Washington Post, the latest salvo in an inflamed debate over mask requirements in schools, which have become the epicenter of partisan battles over everything from gender identity to critical race theory. The political melee engulfing educators has complicated efforts to reopen schools safely during a new wave of the virus brought on by the highly transmissible delta variant.

Sowing conflict is a cynical strategy in the libertarian war against democratic governance and public safety in the name of personal freedom. The people behind it care not one whit for the people they send to the “front” as cannon fodder.

The letter was made available on Tuesday to paying members of the Independent Women’s Network, a project of the Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Voice that markets itself as a “members-only platform that is free from censorship and cancellation.” Both are nonprofits once touted by their board chairman and CEO, Heather Higgins, as part of a unique tool in the “Republican conservative arsenal” because, “Being branded as neutral but actually having the people who know, know that you’re actually conservative puts us in a unique position.”

A unique position to dupe the unsuspecting and possibly to contribute to their deaths. The Post reports that a spokesman for the Charles Koch Institute and associated organizations said financial support for Independent Women’s Forum was “steered toward a program opposing occupational and labor regulations.”

As I said above….

The letter drafted by Independent Women’s Forum illustrates how national groups are “inflaming the political fight over broadly popular mask protections,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, a liberal watchdog group, and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy. “The effect is really to distort public debate.”

And to further undermine support for tax-funded public schools. If theses efforts get people killed, they get people killed. (Believe it or not, an atomic wedgie can do that.)

It is a pity that the video from a 2011 T-party protest in Madison, Wisc. is no longer online. Amanda Terkel spoke to people bussed in at Koch expense to argue that the state should balance its budget without raising corporate taxes. Told that two-thirds of corporations in the state pay no taxes, protesters denied it:

“Corporations shouldn’t pay taxes at all. That’s a terrible idea,” said Jay from LaCrosse, who identified as a libertarian and said that businesses would just raise prices and relocate to China if they faced higher taxes.

“No, they pay their taxes. They pay their taxes,” said John from Milwaukee, when The Huffington Post asked if it was fair that he was paying taxes and corporations weren’t.

Corporatists were finding dupes willing to carry their messages for them a decade ago. Trump had them believing Barack Obama was born in Kenya earlier than that. Identify a wedge issue and someone to blame, then work it.

Zooborns reports:

Red panda newborns are deaf, blind, and small enough to fit into an average adult’s palm. It takes over 2 weeks for cubs to open their eyes, and about month before they begin venturing out of their nest. Until then, Maliha and the cubs will remain off-exhibit. However, footage from a nest box camera will be shared on Potter Park Zoo’s social media. Deagan-Reid will remain in his outside habitat for all to visit.

Ok, I can’t say this is soothing but it’s weirdly funny. WTF?????

This is the best thing I’ve seen on the internet in a long time. pic.twitter.com/UIz0ghBfgi

— Zoë McLaren, Ph.D. (@ZoeMcLaren) September 30, 2021

Look at what those Democrats are trying to do!

pic.twitter.com/nCjvl4QnvP

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 1, 2021

The bastards!

In a normal political world I would think it is a mistake to tell their prime audience that the Democrats are trying to give them benefits but after watching them commit suicide rather than take a COVID vaccine, I’m not so sure. If Fox and Trump tell them that they are supposed to hate getting benefits they will gladly suffer to remain members in good standing of the Trump cult.

All Trump himself has to do is tell them that these benefits are terrible and he will give them much better (and cheaper!) benefits. They will believe anything from him.

I have to admit an unseemly pleasure in reading these excerpts of Stephanie Grisham’s new book. Yes, she is a terrible person and doesn’t deserve to make a lot of money from her time working with the Trump cult.

But the tea she’s serving is delicious. This is an excerpt about one day during the administration as COVID was starting to peak:

The year 2020 started on a promising enough note for the president, at least considering all we’d endured the previous three years. The economy was good, the impeachment effort on Ukraine looked like a dud and the polls were decent.

Trump was for the most part in a good mood and, as always, up for chatting about anything under the sun. Once, on Air Force One, I was sitting with him in his cabin, and for whatever reason — maybe he had just read something or seen his face on TV — Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau popped into the president’s head. Trump looked at me. “Are you OK if I say this?” That was always a troubling question. Who knew what was going to come out of his mouth? Sure, I nodded. “Trudeau’s mom. She f—ed all of the Rolling Stones.”(In fact, Margaret Trudeau denied having affairs with any members of the Rolling Stones, but later said, “I should have slept with every single one of them.”)

On another occasion around the new year, a young boy started publicly challenging Trump to go vegan in TV ads and on highway billboards. If the president agreed, the boy said, the charity he represented would donate $1 million to veterans. I was communications director at the time and I playfully asked the president if he would ever consider doing that, since the challenge would raise a lot of money for a good cause. I knew he loved his steaks and cheeseburgers, but one month didn’t seem that long.

Trump’s response was swift, and his tone was suddenly very serious.

“No, no. It messes with your body chemistry, your brain,” he said, offering his views on vegetarian diets. “And if I lose even one brain cell, we’re f—ed.”

In late February 2020, the president and first lady were scheduled to travel to India. The president had tentatively agreed to the trip during a bilateral meeting, and it had been added to his calendar as a placeholder. But that was before a new, contagious disease called Covid-19 began spreading across the world. As the date grew near, most of the senior staff, and the first lady, started to have misgivings about the travel because of the virus. For whatever reason, Jared Kushner was insistent that we go, and as he was the “real” chief of staff, that carried weight. A final meeting was set in the Oval to determine whether the trip should move forward.

As other members of the senior staff and I were waiting to enter, Jared and Ivanka Trump blew past us and into the president’s private dining room to speak with him privately first — shocker. The start of the meeting actually coincided with the impeachment vote, so we all ended up watching that together before discussing the India trip. Although the Senate acquitted him, the president was in a sour mood, and made his thoughts clear to the room, saying, “I don’t really want to go. It is a long trip for not even two days, and we’re dealing with Covid. I’ll explain to [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi that it isn’t a good time, and I will come later, in my second term.” Jared chimed in to remind the president that with all the visits he had already promised to undertake “in his second term” he would never be in the United States to do his job. When the first lady raised her concerns about Covid, many in the room assured her that the virus hadn’t really hit India yet.

The president stuck to his original plan to cancel the trip. Then Jared said, “OK, but you should talk to Modi personally to tell him.” This showed just how well Jared had his father-in-law’s number because, like the rest of us, he knew that the president had a hard time saying no to someone and that Modi would likely talk him into going. To this day I don’t know why that trip was so important to Jared, or what, if anything, he got out of it. Jared and his team also ended up negotiating with the Indian government directly over what our security assets and personnel would be on the ground — negotiations that were normally reserved for the Secret Service. It was another example of Jared sticking his nose into things that weren’t his expertise. It felt completely irresponsible and against protocol, which is the epitome of Jared Kushner in the Trump White House.

No one in the Trump inner circle seemed to be taking the new virus too seriously at first. During a meeting with Modi in India, Trump mentioned the 34 people who were suffering from Covid-19 in quarantine on military ships. He complained that the news was affecting the stock market. “I wonder if this is overrated versus the flu,” he said. Of course, those 34 people would not be the only ones to contract the disease. As the number grew, Trump still seemed resistant to doing anything too drastic. Contrary to what he would say later, he didn’t immediately want to ban travel to China. And he asked officials in the White House if we were making “too big a deal out of this.”

On March 11, 2020, one of my deputies came into my office to let me know that they had stumbled into a meeting among Hope Hicks (who had just returned to the White House as counselor to the president after a two-year stint at Fox), Jared, and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. The WHO had just declared Covid a pandemic, and the three of them had apparently been discussing the need for the president to give an address to the nation on Covid-19 from the Oval Office that evening. An address to the nation is serious stuff, and whenever possible you need plenty of time to prepare properly — unless, of course, you were in the Trump White House, where everything was like a clown car on fire running at full speed into a warehouse full of fireworks.

A couple of hours later, a meeting was called in the Oval Office so that members of the Coronavirus Task Force could brief the president on the latest involving the virus. I wasn’t invited to that either, which was typical. Meetings just “happened” all the time in that White House. Random people would wander into the Oval Office and start talking about random things, and suddenly something would be decided or Trump would agree to do something — and anyone who wasn’t in the room would find out about it later on Twitter or on cable news. So I invited myself.

In attendance at the meeting were the two new stars of the Trump administration, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx. I guess you could include Robert Redfield, the CDC director, on that list, but he was kind of an afterthought. Fauci and Birx — especially Fauci — ran that particular show. Trump had liked Fauci — for about ten minutes. Then he had decided, as most everyone in the White House did, that Fauci was a showboat who liked seeing his face on television. The Office of the Vice President tried to keep him in line and make sure his statements were coordinated with ours, but it seemed that Fauci couldn’t care less what we thought. I will say this: He sure knew a heck of a lot more about Covid and other infectious diseases than the rest of us ever could. So I couldn’t blame people for listening to him. But let’s not pretend he didn’t love being a media hero.

The meeting was packed. Redfield, Birx and Fauci were sitting in front of the Resolute Desk, along with Vice President Mike Pence and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. I sat on one of the couches with Ivanka to my left,which I found odd as she hadn’t been involved in anything to do with Covid until now. Jared stood behind us, and National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien (who had replaced John Bolton) and his deputy, Matt Pottinger, were sitting in the chairs to my right. Across from me on the couch was Keith Kellogg, Pence’s national security advisor, and standing behind him was Hope Hicks. No one was wearing a mask — not the president, not Fauci, not Birx. There was no social distancing. The subject didn’t even come up.

Hope had left the White House about two years earlier. I think she had been understandably stressed out by the communications director job and didn’t like the fact that she had been subpoenaed and had had to testify in the Robert Mueller investigation (during which she admitted to congressional investigators that she had, in her words, told some tiny “white lies” on behalf of the president). She was also being hounded by the paparazzi about her personal life. She had left for a sabbatical at Fox, where she had a great title and reportedly made close to $2 million. I can’t pretend that her presence didn’t irritate me. In my eyes and the eyes of others who had stayed to deal with all of the craziness, Hope had taken the easy way out. We all would have loved to take a cushy job somewhere else for two years so that we would be begged to come back to the White House to “save” the administration.

The meeting began in a pretty standard way. Members of the task force, which was led by the vice president, updated the president on what information they had, the numbers of infected by country, and the projections for the weeks ahead, which were quite sobering. Their recommendation was to temporarily close the country’s borders to travelers coming from Europe. Obviously that was seen as a drastic move, the logistics of which would be huge and complex. If there were U.S. citizens across the pond, could we get them home first? What about connecting flights from other countries to the United States? How would the move impact the economy? What about trade? How long would the travel ban last?

In the middle of all the discussion, Ivanka kept chiming in, “But I think there should probably be an address to the nation tonight.” I let that pass because in my mind there was no way we could pull one off with no speech prepared, no communications strategy, no consensus on anything we had just started discussing, and only a few hours’ notice. We did a lot of random things in Trump World, but that just seemed too crazy even for us.

As the discussion continued, Mnuchin kept raising the potential impact on the economy. He felt that the recommendation to shut down the borders was far too severe and the financial impact to our country and the world would be something we would not recover from for years. The discussion got quite heated, especially between the secretary and National Security Advisor O’Brien, who at one point said to Mnuchin, “You are going to be the reason this pandemic never goes away.” Hope Hicks continued to chime in with questions and ideas that had been discussed weeks before. And Ivanka, the women’s rights / small-business / crisis communications / and now Covid expert, just kept repeating, “There should be an address from the Oval.”

Finally, Ivanka turned to her most powerful ally besides her father. “Jared, don’t you agree?” Any guesses as to what Jared replied?

When I worked for the first lady in the East Wing, we had all come to call Jared and Ivanka “the interns” because they represented in our minds obnoxious, entitled know-it-alls. Mrs. Trump found that nickname amusing and occasionally used it herself. Now, during one of the most important crises to hit the country in a century, the interns were behaving true to form.

At one point I called Ivanka out on her plan with what seemed an obvious question. “What is it we’d be saying?” Because if she had a message she wanted her father to deliver, it was still a mystery to me. She just looked at me, seemingly confused.

Birx, Fauci and the other professionals in the room watched all the nonsense without comment. To their credit, they pretty much kept straight faces, although I imagine they thought they were surrounded by lunatics. In my mind I kept saying, “This is not a reality TV show. We cannot address the nation with a bunch of mumbo jumbo just so he looks presidential. That’s not how this works.” This was some serious shit, and all they were thinking about was TV and image and optics. But regrettably, I kept those thoughts in in my head. One of my other biggest personal regrets is that I didn’t have the courage to speak out against Jared, Ivanka and Hope about the potential dangers of addressing the nation without any Covid response strategy in place, and what a disservice it could be to the country and the president.

In fact, I was impressed with Mnuchin for that very reason. He did not hesitate to make his views clear. He kept pushing back, over and over, against a roomful of people who supported closing the borders completely. After about an hour of going around in circles, the president told us all to go to the Cabinet Room and “figure out what to do.” I remember thinking to myself how ridiculous it was that the president of the United States had to tell his own staff to go figure this out and then come back to him.

We all headed to the Cabinet Room. We were coming up on 3:00 p.m., and it started to seem inevitable that an address to the nation from the Oval Office was going to happen that night — even though we had no idea what the president should say. The discussion began, and it was much like the previous one. Most everyone except Mnuchin agreed that we needed to close the borders to flights from Europe. What struck me in that meeting was that Jared, who was sitting next to the vice president of the United States, commandeered the meeting and was calling all the shots. As many times as I had seen him behave that way with members of senior staff, that particular time made me uneasy because it was with the vice president. It was disrespectful, and I remember feeling both embarrassed and disgusted.

Ivanka was also doing her “my father” wants this and “my father” thinks that routine, making it impossible for staff members to argue a contrary view. At some point I think Birx decided she’d ridden on the crazy train long enough and excused herself to get back to work. I used that opportunity to leave as well.

More on page 2.

Javanka deserves a book all their own. Or maybe a broadway musical. It’s unbelievable that they actually wielded power in the most powerful nation on earth for four years. Andy country that allows such a thing is in very big trouble.

I know you’ll find it shocking to learn that GOP candidates don’t tell the truth. But the way they casually admit to it when they think they’re among friends is truly impressive.

The Undercurrent’s Lauren Windsor did more of her magic and caught Virginia Gubernatorial candidate Glenn Younkin on camera saying the quiet part out loud:

Glenn Youngkin said he won’t talk publicly about some of his more severe positions on abortion because that ‘won’t win my independent votes that I have to get.’

Virginia’s Republican nominee for governor reportedly told supporters at a fundraising event in June that he couldn’t reveal his true position on abortion rights until after he’s elected.

His reasoning: He needs the independent vote to ensure his victory in November.

Right. In order to win he has to lie because if the majority knew what he really planned to do they would never vote for him. Obviously.

For all the caterwauling from Trump and his flunkies about Antifa and Black Lives Matter violence, it always turns out that it’s more projection than anything:

Boogaloo Bois member Ivan Harrison Hunter of Boerne, Texas, admitted he traveled to Minneapolis to sow chaos after the police murder of George Floyd.https://t.co/xFnqCsCCKg

— MPR News (@MPRnews) September 30, 2021

A man who had been part of a far-right group that wants to foment a civil war admitted in federal court Thursday he traveled to Minneapolis from the San Antonio area to sow chaos after the police murder of George Floyd.

Ivan Harrison Hunter, 24, of Boerne, Texas, pleaded guilty to a single count of rioting. The charge carries a maximum prison term of five years. Hunter admitted that he fired 13 rounds from an AK-47-style rifle into the 3rd precinct police station on May 28, 2020.

After shooting at the building, Hunter was recorded on video high-fiving another person and yelling “Justice for Floyd!” Investigators matched the skull mask Hunter was wearing in the video to a photo on his Facebook page.

I know it is a cliche to say this, but I can’t help it: imagine if this guy was a Muslim who had been radicalized online and did what he did?

Do you think he would have been charged with “rioting?” Yeah, I don’t either. I suspect they’d put him in jail and throw away the key. He fired 13 rounds from an assault rifle into a police station!

Update: More terrorists. This time police officers and GOP officials.