Month: November 2021

I believe this is the greatest scandal of the Trump administration and that is saying something. I find it rather surprising that the reports of this Committee hearing aren’t getting much play in the media. This report is from Salon:

Documents released Friday reveal how in early 2020 the Trump administration downplayed the deadly danger posed by the nascent Covid-19 pandemic, silencing and sidelining top health officials who tried to warn the public and destroying evidence of political interference while issuing rosy declarations that the outbreak was “totally under control” and would soon be over.

The emails and transcripts—released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis—show that as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) became aware that the highly infectious virus that causes Covid-19 was spreading rapidly, agency officials requested to hold briefings about mask guidance and other issues. Their requests were denied.

Top Trump officials also moved to block the CDC from publishing information about the pandemic and tried to alter the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWRs) to reflect former President Donald Trump’s unrealistically optimistic Covid-19 messaging—which infamously included such claims in January and February 2020 as “we have it totally under control,” that the outbreak is “going to have a very good ending,” and that infections would “be down close to zero” with days.

As of Friday, there have been more than 760,000 U.S. deaths from Covid-19, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University, making it the deadliest pandemic in the nation’s history.

According to Politico:

The emails and transcripts detail how in the early days of 2020 Trump and his allies in the White House blocked media briefings and interviews with CDC officials, attempted to alter public safety guidance normally cleared by the agency, and instructed agency officials to destroy evidence that might be construed as political interference.

The documents further underscore how Trump appointees tried to undermine the work of scientists and career staff at the CDC to control the administration’s messaging on the spread of the virus and the dangers of transmission and infection.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), who chairs the coronavirus subcommittee, said in a statement that “the Trump administration’s use of the pandemic to advance political goals manifested itself most acutely in its efforts to manipulate and undermine CDC’s scientific work,” adding that the investigation “has uncovered a staggering pattern of political interference.”

Peter Suwondo, a former CDC global health adviser, said the new revelations are “more evidence of how health leaders at the CDC were silenced and overruled in the early days of the pandemic.”

“Top elected officials preferred to keep Americans in the dark and set policy based on political considerations, not science,” he added.

In addition to interfering with the work of CDC officials, the documents show that Dr. Scott Atlas, Trump’s special adviser, weakened Covid-19 testing while pushing a dubious herd immunity strategy. They also reveal Trump’s anger at Dr. Nancy Messonnier—then director of the agency’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases—after she gave a February 25, 2020 press conference to warn about the outbreak’s severity.

So, we’re going to pretend that’s just hardball politics now?

Look what this has led to. Even aside from the monstrous body count, we are dealing with a huge number of citizens who are convinced that the pandemic is no big deal and that they can cure it with bullshit snake oil. And where do you suppose they got that idea?

The media is busy blaming Joe Biden for inflation and Afghanistan and everything else that orange miscreant dumped at his feet as he was metaphorically dragged screaming out of the White House.

We had to shut down the world for a time for the pandemic and that jackass made everything worse through his incompetence and narcissism. Now we are paying the price with a nation full of fools who won’t get vaccinated.

And it looks like there won’t be any accountability for any of it. In fact, from the looks of it, there’s a pretty fair chance they’re going to facilitate his re-election.

An astute analysis from Dan Pfeiffer:

​Biden has been stuck in a bad news vortex for months. It would be hard to have picked a worse time to hold the Virginia and New Jersey elections. Biden’s legislative agenda was stuck, inflation and gas prices were up, and schools are still dealing with messy COVID protocols that interrupt learning and stress out parents. To give an example of how poor the timing was, kids aged five to twelve started getting vaccinated just as the polls closed. There is no question the bad political environment put downward pressure on Democrats on the ballot last week.

While things are bad now, they were not going that great when Californians voted back in September. According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s approval rating, which some polls show ticking up, was 43.8 approve/50.8 disapprove on Election Day — suboptimal for sure. But it was only marginally better when Californians were voting on the recall — 45.9/49.2 on September 14th. Economic sentiment is worse now, but according to Navigator Research polling, people are more optimistic about the pandemic now than in September.

The recall also took place in the aftermath of the worst news cycle of Biden’s young presidency. As most Californians were casting the ballot, President Biden was being hammered from all sides about his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. It is fair to say the political atmosphere is worse now than it was in September, but that alone is not enough to explain the differing results. Nor can you attribute the poor performance to frustration with school closures or changes. Like New Jersey and Virginia, California had some of the longest and most troubled school closures in the nation.

Campaign Lessons

It’s important to stipulate that recall elections are different from standard elections. They have different dynamics and voting patterns, but the 2021 California recall functioned more like a standard election than the 2003 election. 2003 saw Democratic Governor Gray Davis recalled and Arnold Schwarzenegger elected. For the most part, the recall functioned as both an up or down vote on Democratic leadership and a one-on-one contest between Newsom and Larry Elder, a pro-Trump, conservative radio host. Having said all that, I wanted to examine the messaging and strategies Newsom used to find some actionable guidance for Democrats looking to avoid McAuliffe’s fate next year. While the comparisons are imperfect, I found two lessons from Newsom’s winning strategy:

How You Talk about Trump Matters:

McAullife’s relentless focus on trying to tie his opponent to Trump convinced commentators that focusing on Trump when the man is out of the White House, out of the news, and off Twitter is a losing proposition. Yes, McAuliffe talked A LOT about Trump and yes, McAuliffe lost. However, A + B does not always equal C. I don’t think Democrats have the option of ignoring Trump. He is the former president, the leader of the Republican Party, and the overwhelming frontrunner for the GOP nomination. But how we talk about Trump matters.

McAuliffe’s message treated the voters like idiots. He called his opponent “Glenn Trumpkin” and talked about Trump so much it was easy to forget who he was running against. Newsom also went out of his way to draw parallels between Larry Elder, the leading Republican candidate, and the former president. But he did so with more nuance and in a more credible way. Compare their messaging from the final rallies. Here’s McAuliffe:

“Donald Trump wants to win here tomorrow night so he can the next day announce [himself] for president of the United States of America, but we’re going to put an end to Donald Trump’s future plans, right here in Virginia.”

And here’s a CNN report from Newsom’s election eve rally with President Biden:

“Does it surprise any of you that we have someone on the other side of this that is to the right of Donald Trump,” Newsom said.

Newsom continued, saying that while the 2020 was the “most important election in our lifetime,” Elder represented the fact that “Trumpism is still on the ballot in California.”We may have defeated Donald Trump, but we have not defeated Trumpism.”

Now Elder, a MAGA adherent with a long record of outrageous statements, was a much easier target than Youngkin, a political outsider who deftly navigated the cross-pressures of Trump. But there is a key difference between how the two candidates used Trump in their message. Newsom used Trump to define his opponent as a dangerous extremist. McAuliffe ran against Trump. The former clearly worked better than the latter.

A Focus on Biden Voters:

Gavin Newsom’s campaign understood something very important about the race — there were enough voters out there to easily defeat the recall. All they had to do was turn out people who voted for Democrats in 2018 or 2020. Turnout is always the biggest challenge in an off-year election, whether it is a recall or a gubernatorial election. Instead of trying to persuade “swing voters” to vote no on the recall, they focused on simply persuading Democrats to turnout.

The Newsom folks presumed, correctly, that the Republicans would be fired up to vote and job one was getting Democrats to vote. In addition to ads defining Elder, the bulk of their paid communications were spent informing Californians that the recall was happening and when and how they could cast their ballot.

Because they focused on Democrats, the No on Recall ads featured testimonials from the most popular Democrats including Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, and Bernie Sanders. Newsom did not draw the fatally false distinction between persuasion and turnout.

McAuliffe took a more traditional approach and focused his messaging on swing voters. While turnout on both sides was high, it was much higher for Republicans. As the Cook Report’s Amy Walters pointed out on Twitter:

In almost every race that matters in 2022, Democrats do not need to persuade a single person who voted for Trump in order to win. Remember, Biden won Georgia, Arizona, New Hampshire, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. These happen to be the states key to maintaining and/or expanding our majority. Maintaining the Biden coalition without Trump on the ballot won’t be easy, but it will be impossible if we don’t make it our top priority.

A lot of us have been saying for years that it was a huge mistake to center everything on Trump without tying him to the GOP like a big orange albatross. He is a problem but he’s not THE problem (as Kamala would say.) The problem is the Republican Party that embraces someone like him, profits from his nihilism and racism and uses it to maintain power by any means necessary. It’s all of them, every last one.

Here is one of the Senators the Villagers 2.0 turn to as a voice of the Real GOP establishment:

He won’t condemn Trump in any way, not even to say that he doesn’t think he meant it that way. And basically he defends the idea that the election was fraudulent, bringing up Pennsylvania. He’s all in.

This “establishment” GOPer is Trump Uber Alles and it doesn’t matter if he truly loves him or if he’s just so immoral and opportunistic that he sees Trump as important to maintaining power at all costs. Trump is going to die someday but Republicans like Barasso are spawning by the millions.

More tea from Jonathan Karl:

In a memo not made public until now, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed to Vice President Mike Pence’s top aide, on New Year’s Eve, a detailed plan for undoing President Joe Biden’s election victory, ABC News’ Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl reports.

Ellis, in the memo, outlined a multi-step strategy: On Jan. 6, the day Congress was to certify the 2020 election results, Pence was to send back the electoral votes from six battleground states that Trump falsely claimed he had won.

The memo said that Pence would give the states a deadline of “7pm eastern standard time on January 15th” to send back a new set of votes, according to Karl.

Then, Ellis wrote, if any state legislature missed that deadline, “no electoral votes can be opened and counted from that state.”

Such a scenario would leave neither Biden nor Trump with a majority of votes, Ellis wrote, which would mean “Congress shall vote by state delegation” — which, Ellis said, would in turn lead to Trump being declared the winner due to Republicans controlling the majority of state delegations with 26.

The day after Meadows sent Ellis’ memo to Pence’s aide, on Jan. 1, Trump aide John McEntee sent another memo to Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, titled, “Jefferson used his position as VP to win.”ADVERTISING

Although McEntee’s memo was historically incorrect, Karl says, his message was clear: Jefferson took advantage of his position, and Pence must do the same.

What followed during that first week of January was an effort by Trump, both personally and publicly, to push his vice president to take away Biden’s victory.MORE: Read the memo from Trump aide’s office making the case to fire Defense Secretary Mark Esper

“I hope Mike Pence comes through for us,” Trump said at a roaring Georgia rally on Jan. 4, a day before Republicans would also lose their Senate majority. “I have to tell you I hope that our great vice president comes through for us. He’s a great guy. Of course, if he doesn’t come through, I won’t like him quite as much.”

At a March 18 sit-down interview with Trump for the upcoming book, Karl asked the former president about a report from The New York Times that on the morning of Jan. 6, Trump pressured Pence with a crude phone call, reportedly telling his vice president, “You can be a patriot or you can be a p****.”

“I wouldn’t dispute it,” Trump said to Karl.

“Really?” Karl responded.

“I wouldn’t dispute it,” Trump repeated.

It wasn’t just Eastman musing in a single memo. It was a full-fledged plan.

I have to wonder if Pence regrets not going with it. He would certainly be more popular with the MAGA base if he had.

We know how reluctant the Trump administration was to document (or release) who visited the White House. Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham tells CNN’s Jim Acosta there may be notes from “off the books” meetings from the residence that Trump and company will try to conceal from the House investigation into Jan. 6.

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance finds the prospect tantalizing.

“If you’re investigating Jan 6 & a few of the 150 witnesses you interview have recollections or even private notes of secretive meetings in the residence, particularly if there are, as Grisham suggests, some that didn’t make it onto visitor logs, you’re hitting pay dirt,” Vance tweets.

Mark Meadows was in charge of planning those meetings in the Trump administration’s last days, and the former chief of staff is stalling on answering questions about them. His attorney, one George J. Terwilliger III, all but says so in the Washington Post.

Terwilliger is very disappointed that President Biden has chosen not to support Donald Trump’s executive privilege claim he’s using to stall the House investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection. To resolve the dispute over Meadows’s stalling, Terwilliger proposes stalling the investigation by agreeing to written questions Meadows still might not answer by claiming privilege. Barring that, “the only path to resolution may run through the courts.”

More stalling.

Will Steve Bannon wear an American flag as a shirt to his trial? Sorry, two shirts?

Former Donald Trump advisor Stephen K. Bannon defied a subpoena to appear for a deposition on the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and refused to turn over requested documents to a House investigation. Skeptics convinced that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice was toothless heard Friday that a grand jury had indicted Bannon on a charge of contempt of Congress. Sorry, two counts.

Bannon will turn any jail time into a meal ticket the way G. Gordon Liddy did after Watergate, and Oliver North did after his Iran-Contra conviction, and as Kyle Rittenhouse will if he walks free. But David Frum believes before that Bannon will turn his trial into a circus the way the Chicago Seven did:

They were a disparate group of radicals—some who knew each other, some who didn’t—who went to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 to spark trouble. Trouble did indeed erupt, although maybe not the exact trouble they had wanted. They were indicted and prosecuted. And then things went terribly wrong for the government.

The prosecution thought it was running a trial, a legal proceeding governed by rules. The defendants decided that they would instead mount a new kind of media spectacle intended to show total contempt for the rules, and to propagandize the viewing public into sharing their contempt. The prosecution was doing law; the defense countered with politics.

The indictment of Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress is the opening bell of a similar kind of fight over law, justice, and authority. The attack of January 6, 2021, to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power struck nearer the heart of American democracy than the disorder in the streets of Chicago had. In 1968, the worst of the violence was mostly initiated by police; in 2021, it was initiated by the pro–Donald Trump mob forcing a police officer to shoot to defend the officeholders whom it was his duty to protect. But though the details of the riots were different, there is a striking parallel between the gleeful contempt for legal authority of the far-left defendants of long ago and the pro-Trump authoritarian nationalists of today. Congress wants to hear from pro-Trump partisans about their advance knowledge, if any, of the January 6 attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election. At former President Trump’s direction, those partisans have adopted a no-cooperation strategy, pleading that the defeated ex-president should permanently enjoy the legal privileges of his former office.

That’s not a very smart legal strategy. But it’s not meant as a legal strategy. It’s a political strategy, intended, like the Chicago Seven’s strategy in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom all those years ago, to discredit a legal and constitutional system that the pro-Trump partisans despise.

Frum believes Bannon and Trump partisans could use the platform to further their attempt to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 and the 2020 election, to deny that Trump radicalized his followers into assaulting the Capitol, and to claim that if something violent (we all saw live) did happen, it was justified.

“Their argument doesn’t have to make sense,” Frum writes, “because their constituency doesn’t care about it making sense. Their constituency cares about being given permission to disregard and despise the legal rules that once bound U.S. society.”

Now, in 2021–22, the project is to repeat that kind of kaleidoscope shift of denial and justification. Like the Chicago Seven, Bannon understands the political power of ridicule and contempt. He’s not coming to trial to play by somebody else’s rules. If he does eventually testify about the events of January 6, he won’t play by the rules then, either.

Bannon and Trump’s strategy of distraction and denial won’t necessarily succeed. Most people recognize reality. But to prevent the strategy from working, it’s important to anticipate it and be ready for it.

There are limits to what the law can do. The Kyle Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin as well as the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial in Brunswick, Georgia will test what juries will accept as proof in criminal cases.

Bringing charges against someone as ethically stunted as Donald Trump will be even harder. Robert Mueller’s investigation demonstrated ” the inadequacy of the criminal process in a political context,” Frum explains:

… a businessman hoping for a giant payday from shady characters around a foreign dictator is not a prosecutable crime. A businessman lying on camera about his dealings with the shady characters around a foreign dictator is not a prosecutable crime. Being tipped off that the foreign dictator has potentially damaging information about a political opponent is not a prosecutable crime. Appealing on television to that dictator to hurry up and release that information is not a prosecutable crime. Once the statute of limitations has lapsed, even money laundering ceases to be a prosecutable crime.

Actions that a normal, functioning society recognizes as clearly unethical may not be illegal. Furthermore, Democrats are hamstrung by their own faith in the law in a fight against adversaries without any.

Frum concludes:

The fight to uphold law cannot be won by law itself, because the value of law in the face of violence is the very thing that’s being contested. The fight ahead is an inescapably political fight, to be won by whichever side can assemble the larger and more mobilized coalition. The Trump side is very clear-eyed about that truth. The defenders of U.S. legality and democracy against Trump need to be equally aware.

It is not clear that civil society — or what remains of it — yet comprehends what is going on any more than Judge Julius Hoffman did when he faced off against Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale. Recall Al Gore sighing and rolling his eyes during debate with George W. Bush in what looked like a “You don’t deserve to be on stage with me” attitude but ended up more like “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” Civil society has yet to come to grips with the looking-glass nature of adversaries bent on tearing it down and the country with it.

This is not “Law and Order.” It’s professional wrestling. Expect Bannon to turn any public legal proceding into a MAGA circus. He won’t wear an American flag shirt (or two) but it would not be unprecedented.

Hoffman, one of the Chicago Seven, founded the Youth International Party (“Yippies”). Bannon means to lead the Trippies.

It’s good to see the paper of record noting this phenomenon. It’s been obvious for some time.

At a conservative rally in western Idaho last month, a young man stepped up to a microphone to ask when he could start killing Democrats.

“When do we get to use the guns?” he said as the audience applauded. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” The local state representative, a Republican, later called it a “fair” question.

In Ohio, the leading candidate in the Republican primary for Senate blasted out a video urging Republicans to resist the “tyranny” of a federal government that pushed them to wear masks and take F.D.A.-authorized vaccines.

“When the Gestapo show up at your front door,” the candidate, Josh Mandel, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, said in the video in September, “you know what to do.”

And in Congress, violent threats against lawmakers are on track to double this year. Republicans who break party ranks and defy former President Donald J. Trump have come to expect insults, invective and death threats — often stoked by their own colleagues and conservative activists, who have denounced them as traitors.

From congressional offices to community meeting rooms, threats of violence are becoming commonplace among a significant segment of the Republican Party. Ten months after rioters attacked the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, and after four years of a president who often spoke in violent terms about his adversaries, right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him from power.

In Washington, where decorum and civility are still given lip service, violent or threatening language still remains uncommon, if not unheard-of, among lawmakers who spend a great deal of time in the same building. But among the most fervent conservatives, who play an outsize role in primary contests and provide the party with its activist energy, the belief that the country is at a crossroads that could require armed confrontation is no longer limited to the fringe.

Political violence has been part of the American story since the founding of the country, often entwined with racial politics and erupting in periods of great change: More than 70 brawls, duels and other violent incidents embroiled members of Congress from 1830 to 1860 alone. And elements of the left have contributed to the confrontational tenor of the country’s current politics, though Democratic leaders routinely condemn violence and violent imagery.

But historians and those who study democracy say what has changed has been the embrace of violent speech by a sizable portion of one party, including some of its loudest voices inside government and most influential voices outside.

In effect, they warn, the Republican Party is mainstreaming menace as a political tool.

Omar Wasow, a political scientist at Pomona College who studies protests and race, drew a contrast between the current climate and earlier periods of turbulence and strife, like the 1960s or the run-up to the Civil War.

“What’s different about almost all those other events is that now, there’s a partisan divide around the legitimacy of our political system,” he said. “The elite endorsement of political violence from factions of the Republican Party is distinct for me from what we saw in the 1960s. Then, you didn’t have — from a president on down — politicians calling citizens to engage in violent resistance.”

From his earliest campaigning to the final moments of his presidency, Mr. Trump’s political image has incorporated the possibility of violence. He encouraged attendees at his rallies to “knock the hell” out of protesters, praised a lawmaker who body-slammed a reporter, and in a recent interview defended rioters who clamored to “hang Mike Pence.”

Yet even with the former president largely out of the public eye and after a deadly attack on the Capitol where rioters tried to overturn the presidential election, the Republican acceptance of violence has only spread. Polling indicates that 30 percent of Republicans, and 40 percent of people who “most trust” far-right news sources, believe that “true patriots” may have to resort to violence to “save” the country — a statement that gets far less support among Democrats and independents.

Such views, routinely expressed in warlike or revolutionary terms, are often intertwined with white racial resentments and evangelical Christian religious fervor — two potent sources of fuel for the G.O.P. during the Trump era — as the most animated Republican voters increasingly see themselves as participants in a struggle, if not a kind of holy war, to preserve their idea of American culture and their place in society.

Notably few Republican leaders have spoken out against violent language or behavior since Jan. 6, suggesting with their silent acquiescence that doing so would put them at odds with a significant share of their party’s voters. When the Idaho man asked about “killing” political opponents at an event hosted by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Mr. Kirk said he must “denounce” the question but went on to discuss at what point political violence could be justified.

In that vacuum, the coarsening of Republican messaging has continued: Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, this week tweeted an anime video altered to show him killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and swinging two swords at Mr. Biden.

Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the left-leaning group New America who has studied political violence, said there was a connection between such actions and the growing view among Americans that politics is a struggle between enemies.

“When you start dehumanizing political opponents, or really anybody, it becomes a lot easier to inflict violence on them,” Dr. Drutman said.

“I have a hard time seeing how we have a peaceful 2024 election after everything that’s happened now,” he added. “I don’t see the rhetoric turning down, I don’t see the conflicts going away. I really do think it’s hard to see how it gets better before it gets worse.”

Democrats are seeking Mr. Gosar’s censure, arguing that “depictions of violence can foment actual violence and jeopardize the safety of elected officials.”

The ranking G.O.P. lawmakers, Senator Mitch McConnell and Representative Kevin McCarthy, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Mr. McCarthy, who initially condemned the Jan. 6 attack and said “violence is never a legitimate form of protest,” more recently has joked about hitting Nancy Pelosi in the head with a gavel if he were to replace her as speaker. Like nearly all of the members of his caucus, Mr. McCarthy has said nothing about Mr. Gosar’s video.

For his part, Mr. Gosar suggested that critics were overly thin-skinned, insisting that the video was an allegory for a debate over immigration policy. He was slaying “the policy monster of open borders,” not Ms. Ocasio-Cortez or Mr. Biden, his office said. “It is a symbolic cartoon. It is not real life.”

Carlos Curbelo, a Republican former congressman from Florida who is a critic of Mr. Trump, said Republicans needed to take a stronger approach against violent language and intimidation tactics.

“I do think the problem is more acute among Republicans because there are a handful of Republican officials who have no limits,” he said. “Your country and your integrity should be more important to you than your re-election.”

The increasing violence of Republican speech has been accompanied by a willingness of G.O.P. leaders to follow Mr. Trump’s lead and shrug off allegations of domestic violence that once would have been considered disqualifying for political candidates in either party.

Herschel Walker, the former professional football player running for Senate in Georgia, is accused of repeatedly threatening his ex-wife’s life, but won Mr. Trump’s endorsement and appears to be consolidating party support behind his candidacy. Mr. Trump also backed the Ohio congressional campaign of Max Miller, who faces allegations of violence from his ex-girlfriend, the former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham. Mr. Miller has sued Ms. Grisham for defamation.

And Sean Parnell, a Senate candidate in Pennsylvania who was endorsed by Mr. Trump, appeared in court this week in a custody fight in which his estranged wife accuses him of choking her and physically harming their children. He denies it.

Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, declined to repudiate Mr. Parnell. Asked on CNN whether Mr. Parnell was the right candidate for the job, he said, “We’ll see who comes out of the primary.”

There is little indication that the party has paid a political price for its increasingly violent tone.

Even after corporations and donors vowed to withhold donations to the G.O.P. in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, Republicans out-raised Democrats this year. And they outperformed expectations in the elections this month, capturing the Virginia governorship, winning a host of upset victories in suburban contests and making a surprisingly strong showing in New Jersey.

Yet violent talk has tipped over into actual violence in ways big and small. School board members and public health officials have faced a wave of threats, prompting hundreds to leave their posts. A recent investigation by Reuters documented nearly 800 intimidating messages to election officials in 12 states.

And threats against members of Congress have jumped by 107 percent compared with the same period in 2020, according to the Capitol Police. Lawmakers have been harassed at airports, targeted at their homes and had family members threatened. Some have spent tens of thousands on personal security.

“You don’t understand how awful it is and how scary it is until you’re in it,” said Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who praised a Republican colleague, Representative Fred Upton, for publicly sharing some of the threats he received after voting to approve the infrastructure bill. (Mr. Upton’s office did not respond to requests for comment.) “But not telling people that this violence isn’t OK makes people think it is OK.”

Ms. Dingell, who said she was threatened by men with assault weapons outside her home last year after she was denounced by Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show, shared a small sample of what she said were hundreds of profanity-laden threats she has received.

“They ought to try you for treason,” one caller screamed in a lengthy, graphic voice mail message. “I hope your family dies in front of you. I pray to God that if you’ve got any children, they die in your face.”

Bradford Fitch, president of the Congressional Management Foundation, which advises lawmakers on issues like running their offices and communicating with constituents, said he now urged members not to hold open public meetings, an American tradition dating back to the colonies, because of security concerns. Politics, he said, had become “too raw and radioactive.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea right now,” Mr. Fitch said. “I hope we can get to a point where we can advise members of Congress that it’s safe to have a town-hall meeting.”Attendees prayed at a Take Back Virginia Rally last month that was organized by a conservative radio network.Credit…Carlos Bernate for The New York Times

But even at right-wing gatherings of the like-minded, there is a shared assumption that political confrontation could escalate into violence.

At a Virginia rally last month for conservative supporters of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor, the urgency of a call to arms was conveyed right from the opening prayer. The speaker warned of the looming threat of “communist atheists.”

“Heavenly Father, we come before you tonight,” said Joshua Pratt, a conservative activist. “Your children are in a battle, and we need your help.”

I’ll just leave this here for you to contemplate. I wonder if the media will contemplate it as well? Or will it take a cataclysmic deadly act to wake them up?

This is not new, by the way. It’s been brewing for some time. I wrote the following 7 years ago, long before Trump became a national political figure:

Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant and a loud group of armed men come through the door. They are ostentatiously displaying their weapons, making sure that everyone notices them. Would you feel safe or would you feel in danger? Would you feel comfortable confronting them? If you owned the restaurant could you ask them to leave? These are questions that are facing more and more Americans in their everyday lives as “open carry” enthusiasts descend on public places ostensibly for the sole purpose of exercising their constitutional right to do it. It just makes them feel good, apparently.  

For instance, in the wake of the new Georgia law that pretty much makes it legal to carry deadly weapons at all times in all places, parents were alarmed when an armed man showed up at the park where their kids were playing little league baseball and waved his gun around shouting, “Look at my gun!” and “There’s nothing you can do about it.” The police were called and when they arrived they found the man had broken no laws and was perfectly within his rights to do what he did. That was small consolation to the parents, however. Common sense tells anyone that a man waving a gun around in public is dangerous so the parents had no choice but to leave the park.  Freedom for the man with the gun trumps freedom for the parents of kids who feel endangered by him. 

After the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, open carry advocates decided it was a good idea to descend upon Starbucks stores around the country, even in  Newtown where a couple dozen armed demonstrators showed up, to make their political point. There were no incidents.  Why would there be? When an armed citizen decides to exercise his right to bear arms, it would be reckless to exercise your right to free speech if you disagreed with them. But it did cause the CEO of Starbucks to ask very politely if these gun proliferation supporters would kindly not use his stores as the site of their future “statements.” He didn’t ban them from the practice, however. His reason? He didn’t want to put his employees in the position of having to confront armed customers to tell them to leave. Sure, Starbucks might have the “right” to ban guns on private property in theory, but in practice no boss can tell his workers that they must try to evict someone who is carrying a deadly weapon.  

Just last week open carry proponents decided to have one of their “demonstrations” by going into a Jack in the Box en masse, scaring the employees so badly that they hid in the walk-in freezer. The so-called demonstrators seemed confused by the response of police who assumed there was an armed robbery in progress and dispatched a phalanx of cops.Advertisement:

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“We’re not breaking the laws,” Haros said. “We’re not here to hurt anybody. We’re not trying to alarm anybody. We’re doing this because it’s our constitutional right.”

Haros, who believes openly carrying firearms helps police, said citizens should know that the demonstrations will continue.

“It’s just for safety purposes,” Haros said. “Officers can’t be there at all times. We understand that. They can only do so much.”

So this fine fellow believes he is doing this to protect the public. And while they don’t wear uniforms so you can’t identify them, have no specialized training in the law, are not bound by police protocols or answer to the authority of the democratic system of government of the people, they have taken it upon themselves to look after all of us because the police are busy. (And presumably, unless you are wearing a hoodie and they think you look suspicious, you probably won’t get shot dead by mistake.) We used to have a name for this. It was called vigilantism. One can only hope that when a “bad guy” really does show up at your Jack in the Box or Starbucks and one of these self-appointed John Waynes decides to draw his weapon you’ll be as lucky as the innocent civilian who narrowly escaped being killed in error at the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.  

All of this is allegedly being done to protect our freedoms. But it’s only the “freedom” of the person wearing a firearm that matters. Those parents who want their kids to feel safe in a public park aren’t free to tell a man waving a gun around to leave them alone, are they? Patrons and employees of Starbucks aren’t free to express their opinion of open carry laws when one of these demonstrations are taking place in the store. Those Jack in the Box employees aren’t free to refuse service to armed customers. Sure, they are all theoretically free to do those things. It’s their constitutional right just like it’s the constitutional right of these people to carry a gun. But in the real world, sane people do not confront armed men and women. They don’t argue with them over politics. They certainly do not put their kids in harm’s way in order to make a point. So when it comes right down to it, when you are in the presence of one of these armed citizens, you don’t really have any rights at all.  

You can see why they think that’s freedom. It is. For them. The rest of us just have to be very polite, keep our voices down and back away very slowly, saying, “Yes sir, whatever you say, sir,” and let them have their way.

Seth takes a closer look at the GOP and Fox News lying about the state of the economy under Joe Biden and attempting to purge anyone who dared to vote for a bipartisan infrastructure bill from their ranks.

Trump’s incessant bragging about the “greatest economy the world has ever known” was one of his most annoying boasts. But it was effective. Even Democrats seem to have absorbed that lie. And it’s not being properly countered.

More tea from the new Jonathan Karl book. Honestly, the bloon on Trump’s hands is overwhelming. What a horror:

On April 24, 2020, Donald Trump received a grim message on a conference call with his campaign advisers. Campaign manager Brad Parscale walked the president through polls conducted by his pollster. The results were dreadful.

“In February, you were on track to win more than four hundred electoral votes,” Parscale told him, saying he had been poised to win even bigger than he won in 2016. “But now you are losing ground everywhere.”

Parscale later told me he didn’t sugarcoat the bad news, telling the president that the pandemic, and public disapproval of his response, had been devastating to his standing and that if he didn’t turn things around, he would lose.

“If I lose, I’m going to sue you,” Trump said.

“I love you, too,” Parscale answered. He insists the president was joking about the lawsuit, but he was obviously angry about his tanking poll numbers.

The next week, Trump did in fact take a break from his daily press conferences. They would come back, but only sporadically. The daily Trump Show in the White House briefing room was over. Trump needed another outlet. The key to turning around his polls, he told his advisors, was to get out on the road again. He had not held a campaign rally since March 2, and he was convinced that was his real problem. He was desperate to get out of the White House and in front of his adoring supporters.

“He was just beside himself,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a close advisor to Trump whom he called frequently throughout the campaign for advice, told me. “All he could think about was the campaign. He didn’t talk much about anything else. COVID would come into it, but really his focus was on the campaign.”

During another contentious campaign conference call in May, Trump demanded that Parscale put together a plan to get him back on the road as soon as possible. He made this demand as coronavirus infections and deaths continued to skyrocket and all large events—from concerts and baseball games to weddings and funerals—were on hold due to a nationwide shutdown.

Parscale presented Trump with a series of options for a first rally in June. He first proposed a drive-in rally in Tampa, Florida. Parscale told him a drive-in rally would be a great spectacle, with a line of cars stretching for miles. But Trump hated that idea. He didn’t want cars; he wanted a crowd. Parscale next put together a presentation of eleven other possible locations, most of them in outdoor venues, including Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. Parscale even pitched Trump on a twelfth option: holding a boat rally outside his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. According to Parscale, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told the campaign to pick a location outside of Florida because the state wasn’t ready to hold a big event due to the threat of the pandemic.

Trump wanted to relaunch his campaign with a bang, a real Trump rally—indoors and packed with people. Exactly the kind of thing that was happening nowhere in America—or anywhere else in the world, for that matter. He chose Tulsa, Oklahoma, which had a friendly Republican governor and mayor—a place where, given COVID, holding a rally might be dangerous, but, unlike in most other states, it wouldn’t be against the law.

The campaign announced the rally for June 19 and then moved it back a day after facing intense criticism for holding it on Juneteenth, the long-celebrated date marking the freedom of the last slaves in America. The controversy and the date change didn’t slow the campaign’s hype machine, which was portraying the rally as the Super Bowl of campaign events. “Trump #MAGA Rally in Tulsa is hottest ticket ever!” Parscale tweeted a week before the scheduled date. Days later, he tweeted again: “Just passed 800,000 tickets. Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x. Saturday is going to be amazing!” The following day, Parscale again bragged about the reservation numbers, claiming they’d received more than 1 million ticket requests.

Trump was thrilled. Not only would he be back on the campaign trail, his massive rally would prove America was back and the pandemic had been defeated. Trump’s campaign aides believed the rally would show that the news media was overhyping the threat of the pandemic. But concerns were being expressed by public health officials in Oklahoma. One week before the scheduled date, the executive director of the Tulsa Health Department pleaded with Trump to delay the rally.

“I think it’s an honor for Tulsa to have a sitting president want to come and visit our community, but not during a pandemic,” Dr. Bruce Dart told the local newspaper, the Tulsa World. “I’m concerned about our ability to protect anyone who attends a large, indoor event, and I’m also concerned about our ability to ensure the president stays safe as well.”

During an event at the White House on June 15, Trump brushed off a question about those concerns, boasting about the size of the crowd he expected to show up.

“As you probably have heard, and we’re getting exact numbers out, but we’re either close to or over one million people wanting to go,” Trump said. “Nobody has ever heard of numbers like this. I think we’re going to have a great time.”

Privately, Trump was even more elated about his return to the campaign trail.

“We’re back, baby,” Trump told Chris Christie over the phone a few days before the rally, repeating the claim that more than a million people had signed up for tickets. “This is gonna be great. We are getting back on the road and the campaign back on track.”

In reality, the Tulsa rally would end up being a political disaster and, for Trump, the worst day of his entire campaign.

The night before the rally, Trump campaign staffers who had traveled to Oklahoma partied together at the restaurant bar of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Tulsa. The tight-knit team had not been all together for a rally in months. They were ready to celebrate, drinking together until well past midnight. After the bar closed, some in the group retreated to a staff room in the hotel and raided the minibar—drinking and celebrating well into the morning hours. Nobody bothered to keep their distance or wear masks. As it turned out, the virus wasn’t just spreading across the country—it was also spreading among the Trump campaign staff.

The following morning, staffers woke up hungover from the festivities and skulked downstairs for breakfast in the hotel restaurant. As one of the senior campaign officials described it, they were eating “crappy bagels” when word came that members of the team had tested positive for COVID- 19.

“Put your mask on,” one campaign aide told another, hunched over breakfast food. “We have staff popping positive.”

“How many?” they replied.

“We’re already at eight.”

After that, members of the campaign staff in Tulsa frantically tried to retrace their steps from the party the night before, worried they would be next to test positive. “We were all trying to figure out who’s testing positive, because we were all thinking, ‘Oh, shit. Was I near that person last night?’” a senior Trump campaign official told ABC News reporter Will Steakin, who was in Tulsa to cover the rally but fortunately had stayed clear of the hotel bar and the infected Trumpers.

Back at the White House and the Trump campaign headquarters, there was less concern about the health of the campaign staffers who had been infected than about the political fallout of the campaign rally turning into a pandemic super-spreader event. According to two senior campaign officials, after the eighth person tested positive, two of them with the Secret Service, word came down from the campaign leadership: STOP TESTING. This directive came after NBC News broke the story that six members of the campaign staff who had traveled to Tulsa to set up the rally had tested positive, a report that actually understated the number of infected staffers. The headlines were embarrassing. Trump was furious that news about infected campaign staffers was getting in the way of news about his triumphant return to the campaign trail.

But that wasn’t the only bad news spreading among the team that day. Steakin was on the ground early outside the Tulsa rally, arriving around ten a.m. for a rally not scheduled until that evening. As a veteran of roughly fifty Trump rallies, Steakin knew you had to arrive hours early to have any chance of finding parking. He also knew that no matter how early he arrived, there would be scores of Trump supporters already in line, many of whom would have camped out overnight. But something seemed off when he made his way to the Tulsa rally—he easily found a parking spot right by the arena. And as he talked to Trump supporters outside, many of them weren’t sure they would go in for the rally. They were concerned about coronavirus at what would be the first large indoor event in America in months.

As Trump flew to Tulsa aboard Air Force One, he watched the news coverage on television. It was all bad—television reporters talking about the positive COVID tests, the massive security, and, worst of all, the lack of a crowd. As Air Force One prepared to land in Tulsa, Trump called Parscale to check in on the thing he cared about the most: the size of the crowd.

“Is it going to be full?” Trump asked.

“No, sir. It looks like Beirut in the eighties,” Parscale responded.

Parscale, who had been watching in disbelief as the disappointing crowd trickled inside the arena, was depressed. He offered a heartfelt apology to the president. “I’m sorry. I threw everything I could at it,” he said. In response, Trump hung up on him. The president was so enraged, some senior aides feared he would refuse to get off Air Force One and instead fly back to Washington. Parscale, knowing Trump was fuming, told senior staff: “None of you should go anywhere near the president today, including me.”

For Trump, Tulsa was a disaster because of the empty seats, but it was much more than that. The rally was a metaphor for how Trump had mishandled the pandemic. He dismissed the warnings of public health professionals, downplayed the danger, believed he could talk his way out of it all, and showed a total disregard for the consequences of his actions.

Incredibly, the Trump campaign staffers who tested positive were told to grab rental cars and to drive, while infected with COVID-19, back to Washington. Under public health guidelines, anybody infected with coronavirus was supposed to self-isolate for at least ten days to prevent further spread of the disease. Instead, these infected Trump campaign staffers were instructed to drive more than 1,200 miles back home. At least one of the cars was pretty crowded with infected staff members. “There was a car of three staffers who had tested positive that drove all the way from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Washington, D.C.,” a senior advisor said. “We called it a COVID-mobile.”

The event caused problems for the Secret Service, as dozens of agents needed to quarantine after two agents who worked at the Tulsa rally tested positive. The consequences were more dire for one prominent Trump supporter. Herman Cain, a former Republican presidential candidate who the president’s team flew out to attend the rally, tested positive for COVID-19 days after the event. Cain, who was 74, was photographed inside the arena without a mask, sitting jam-packed with a group of other well-known Trump supporters who were also not wearing masks. Days after testing positive, Cain was hospitalized. A month later, on July 30, Cain died from complications of the coronavirus. The news devastated Trump campaign staff. Many felt like they were to blame for his death. “We killed Herman Cain,” one senior staffer told Steakin not long after Cain’s death.

There’s something else neither Trump nor his campaign ever disclosed. One of the campaign staffers who tested positive became severely ill. This employee of the Trump campaign, whose name I’ve been asked not to disclose, was unable to drive home like the others. Instead, this staffer was hospitalized in Tulsa for a week. This staffer had been worried about the dangers of working on the rally because of preexisting conditions that made the prospect of being infected especially dangerous, but the president had demanded an indoor rally despite the warnings of public health officials, and the staffer faithfully responded by helping to organize it. Now that the rally was over, the president was back in Washington complaining bitterly that more people had not shown up, while this campaign worker was stuck in Tulsa, lying in a hospital bed thinking his life was about to end.

“It was really scary,” a senior campaign official revealed for the first time in an interview for this book. “He was actually worried he was going to die.

You will recall that this experience did not stop him. He just kept holding super-spreader rallies with no mask mandates all the way through the election. When he got sick, he got the best care and the experimental treatments that were not available to anyone else. And he made sure his buddies like Ben Carson and Chris Christie got them. They all pulled through. About half a million others didn’t make it.