For months, I’ve been resisting (more successfully some weeks than others) the urge to focus entirely on the election. I’ve especially tried not to get lost in speculating about who’s going to win, because that’s a black hole that can suck down all your brain cycles without leading to any productive action.

But now voting is well underway. This year, Election Day marks the end of the voting season, and that’s a week from tomorrow. More than a third of the expected electorate has already voted. I dropped my own ballot off at the local court house a few days ago. I feel like I’ve crossed the event horizon — not thinking about the outcome is not an option any more.

But it’s a real challenge to think about it sanely. 2016 was the kind of nightmare you don’t soon recover from. Hillary was supposed to have it in the bag, and then everything went wrong. I didn’t even entertain the thought that she might lose until about 6 in the evening, when I heard over the radio that black turnout in Cleveland was unexpectedly light.

Time hasn’t eased those wounds, because Trump pokes at them every day. The last four years have been every bit as bad as we feared, and then some. Even Bill Barr isn’t corrupt enough or subservient enough for him now. Another four years of this and we’ll have a true autocracy that he can hand off to Don Jr. or Jared or Ivanka.

So it’s hard to feel sanguine no matter how good the signs look. But all the same, they do look good. That’s what I’ll talk about in the featured post “I Want To Believe”. That should be out around 10 EDT.

In the weekly summary I’ll also cover the virus, which has surged to a new peak in daily new cases. Unlike the spring and summer surges, this fall surge is just about everywhere: all sections of the country, urban and rural alike. The Northeast is probably the safest region right now, because we got the crap scared out of us in the spring and so we’re following the guidelines better than most other places. But cases are ramping up here too.

But I’ll also tempt fate a little and start thinking about what we need to fix after Trump is gone. Even if we dodge this bullet, his administration has stress-tested our democracy and exposed a lot of flaws. (I expect this to become a major theme of the Sift after the election is safely over.) I’ll talk some about the media and the environment (which needs a lot more attention in future weeks).

Also: what’s wrong with originalism, the all-electric Hummer, hacking Trump’s Twitter, and what can happen to a Twinkie if you leave in the basement for eight years. I’ll try to get that out by noon.

When our leaders speak, their words matter. They carry weight. When our leaders meet, encourage or fraternize with domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions and they are complicit. When they stoke and contribute to hate speech, they are complicit.

– Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on October 26.

This week’s featured post is “The Hidden Threat of a Conservative Supreme Court (and what Biden should say about it)“.

This week everybody was talking about the White House coronavirus cluster

The Trump White House is displaying its usual lack of transparency. We still don’t know exactly who’s infected, when Trump’s last negative test was, whether he had been tested before his debate with Biden (as the rules stipulated), or who White House Patient Zero is. The Washington Post tried to summarize what we do know.

There’s also a lot we don’t know about Trump’s current condition. He held his comeback rally on the White House lawn Saturday, speaking from a balcony. (Almost forgotten in the hoopla is that using the White House for rallies used to be taboo. The Marine Band played, which was “pushing the boundaries of U.S. law and the military tradition of political neutrality”. More and more, Trump treats all government resources as his personal property.) He will hold a rally in Florida today.

Is that safe, either for him or for the people around him? We get carefully worded statements from his doctor that don’t really answer the question.

and right-wing terrorism in Michigan

Thursday, 13 right-wing domestic terrorists were charged with participating in a plot to kidnap (and possibly kill) Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Confidential informants taped conversations about storming the Capitol, placing Whitmer on trial for treason, and taking her from her vacation home. And they did more than just talk.

The conspirators conducted surveillance of Whitmer’s vacation home on two occasions in late August and September, the complaint said. Croft and Fox discussed detonating explosive devices to divert police from the vacation home area, according to the FBI.

President Trump stands back from groups like this when they get caught, but he has also been encouraging them. When armed protesters (including some of the conspirators) surrounded and entered the Michigan state capitol in April, Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN“, and urged Whitmer to “make a deal” with them because they are “very good people”. (It’s worth noting that Whitmer did not give in to Trump’s pressure to reopen prematurely, but the Republican governors of Arizona, Texas, Georgia, and Florida did, with disastrous results. Whitmer was right and Trump wrong.)

In his debate with Joe Biden, Trump addressed another right-wing hate group, the Proud Boys, telling them to “stand by” because “somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left”.

Whitmer has refused to let Trump off the hook for this:

When our leaders speak, their words matter. They carry weight. When our leaders meet, encourage or fraternize with domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions and they are complicit. When they stoke and contribute to hate speech, they are complicit.

Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow (who sits next to the senator who took the picture above) amplified that message:

It’s clear all 13 of these men — and probably many more like them — were and still are listening for signals like these, and interpret them as permission and direction. When Republican leaders call the governor a “tyrant,” we see that language take hold among protesters, who then take to carrying signs saying, “Tyrants Get the Rope.” (In Michigan, protestors even brought a naked brunette doll hanging by a noose to a rally.)

Republicans didn’t create these 13 angry men, but they have absolutely encouraged them — like blowing on a tinder to start a campfire.

I think it’s time to stop dignifying Republican conspiracy theories about Antifa, or taking seriously their complaints about left-wing violence. It’s time for the media to stop their both-sides framing. Men plotting to kidnap political leaders, or ramming their cars into protesters, or gunning down protesters, or making heroes out of teen-agers who gun down protesters, or slaughtering Hispanics in a Walmart — that stuff only happens on the right. And no number of left-wing window-breakers or water bottles thrown at police can even it out.

What’s more, when there is some violent incident on the left, no one praises it. You don’t hear local officials or presidents of the United States justifying it. That stuff only happens on the right.

and Trump’s collapsing support

Two weeks ago, 538’s polling average had Biden leading Trump by 6.9%: 50.1%-43.2%. Now it’s up to 10.6%: 52.4%-41.8%. Then, the tipping point state was Pennsylvania, where Biden led by 5.2%. Now it’s Wisconsin, where Biden is up by 7.1%.

What I would call the coup de grâce state, the one that could tell us on election night that Biden has won, is Florida, where 538 has Biden ahead by 4.5%. Two weeks ago, Biden’s lead was only 1.7%.

Worse for Trump, nobody is coming to save him. There will be no just-in-time-for-the-election vaccine. The Durham investigation is not going to indict Biden, or even produce a report in the next three weeks.

Another bad sign for Trump is that Republican senators are slowly backing away from him. They’re still complicit in his crimes, but they don’t want to stand next to him any more.

Mitch McConnell is saying that literally, claiming that he hasn’t been to the White House in two months, because he “personally didn’t feel that they were approaching the protection from this illness in the same way that I thought was appropriate for the Senate.” And Joni Ernst says, “I’m running my own race.“

and the off-again on-again stimulus deal

Right now it looks like it’s off, largely because McConnell shows no interest. I think McConnell is already looking past the Trump administration, and thinking about how he can sabotage the Biden economy.

and the 25th Amendment

The 25th Amendment cleaned up a bunch of possible problem areas related to presidential succession, including what happens when the President is incapacitated. Section 3 covers when the President knows he is (or is about to be) incapacitated: He sends a note to both houses of Congress telling them that the Vice President is taking over for a while. Ronald Reagan did it once and George W. Bush twice before going under general anesthetic for surgery.

Section 4 covers presidents who don’t know they’re incapacitated, either because they’re unexpectedly unconscious, or because they’re off their rockers.

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

That’s the situation we have appeared to be in this week. The steroid treatment Trump is receiving may have side effects:

While this commonly used drug is generally safe, there are a range of known side effects. “By far, the most common is hyperglycemia, so that’s where your blood sugars will shoot up,” [Dr. Celine] Gounder [of the New York University School of Medicine] said.

Also quite common, especially among older patients are a range of psychiatric side effects, she added. “Anything from feeling like you’re on top of the world … your arthritic aches and pains of age just melt away, you have lots of energy,” she said. “There may be some grandiosity.” The drug can also cause agitation, insomnia and even, psychosis, Gounder said.

It should be obvious that no one taking this drug should wield the powers of the presidency. And since he came back to the White House, Trump has been even more unstable than usual.

• He has pulled out of negotiations with Speaker Pelosi on another round of Covid stimulus, then made unilateral demands for new $1,200 checks and for an airline bailout, then restarted negotiations, and made a new offer. “The President is, shall we say, in an altered state right now,” Speaker Pelosi commented, “so I don’t know how to answer for his behavior.”
• He has demanded that Attorney General Barr arrest his enemies, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. “Wow!!! NOW DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN – GOT CAUGHT!!!” He reiterated that demand in a phone interview with Fox Business Network. MSNBC comments: “These hysterical rants have no basis in reality.”
• In that same FBN interview, he referred to Kamala Harris as “this monster“, and attacked his own appointees Mike Pompeo and Christopher Wray. Eventually the host said, “Mr. President, I know you have to go.”
• While tweeting about the plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer — denying that he all but endorsed it with his “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” tweet this summer — he mixed his message with “Governor Whitmer of Michigan has done a terrible job.” He seemed much more upset that he might be blamed than that his supporters had planned a political crime unprecedented in US history.

So Nancy Pelosi has started the 25th-Amendment conversation, with a bill that establishes “such other body as Congress may by law provide” to assess the President’s fitness for office. But I disagree with one part of that article’s interpretation:

The commission, if called upon through House and Senate approval of a concurrent resolution, would “carry out a medical examination of the president to determine whether the president is mentally or physically unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office,” according to the bill text. The president could refuse the examination, but the commission would be authorized to factor that into their decision.

If the commission determines the president is unfit to perform his executive duties, the vice president would take over.

As I read the “or” in the 25th Amendment, the commission replaces the cabinet’s role the process, but not the Vice President’s. If the VP stands by the President, I don’t think the President can be removed.

and the fly on Mike Pence

I didn’t last long watching the vice presidential debate [transcript]. The first substantive exchange was about the administration’s handling of the Covid pandemic, which Pence absurdly claimed “saved hundreds of thousands of American lives”. Harris then made the obvious response:

Whatever the vice president is claiming the administration has done, clearly, it hasn’t worked. When you’re looking at over 210,000 dead bodies in our country …

And Pence then spun her attack on his administration as an attack on the American people, because Trump is the People, apparently.

when you say what the American people have done over these last eight months, hasn’t worked, that’s a great disservice to the sacrifices the American people have made

I turned it off right there. I’ve given this administration plenty of opportunities to explain their point of view, and all they do is bullshit me. I’m done listening.

So I missed the news event of the night: the fly who spent two minutes on Pence’s head without him noticing.

For what it’s worth, 60% in a CNN poll said Harris performed better.

but don’t lose sight of Trump’s taxes

The NYT continues its series, looking at how Trump properties became a vehicle for corruption.

Mr. Trump did not merely fail to end Washington’s insider culture of lobbying and favor-seeking. He reinvented it, turning his own hotels and resorts into the Beltway’s new back rooms, where public and private business mix and special interests reign. …

Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire, which was disclosed by The New York Times last month, showed that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades.

But once Mr. Trump was in the White House, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president. An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration.

and you also might be interested in …

The featured post includes yet another of my rants against minority rule. Somewhat coincidentally, though, this week two Republican senators openly expressed doubt or discontent with democracy.

In an odd series of tweets, Mike Lee of Utah said “We’re not a democracy” and then proceeded to explain why it’s better that way.

democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity are. … We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that

Vox’ Zack Beauchamp looks at the vague but ubiquitous conservative talking point that “We’re a republic, not a democracy.” It’s true that the Founders worried about the tyranny of the majority, but modern Republicans are using this rhetoric to justify rule by the minority, which is surely worse.

modern conservatism has long had a built-in intellectual justification for ruling without popular support. … [T]he tradition Lee is operating out of … casts doubt on the most basic democratic principle: that the people who win the public’s support should rightly govern.

… The idea that majority rule is intrinsically oppressive is necessarily an embrace of anti-democracy: an argument that an enlightened few, meaning Republican supporters, should be able to make decisions for the rest of us. If the election is close, and Trump makes a serious play to steal it, Lee’s “we’re not a democracy” argument provides a ready-made justification for tactics that amount to a kind of legal coup.

Ben Sasse is similarly anti-democratic in his proposal to repeal the 17th Amendment, so that senators would once again be chosen by state legislatures rather than by popular vote. As he surely realizes, that would allow the Senate to be even more gerrymandered than the House. Just as the voters of Michigan, Wisconsin, and several other states can’t get rid of the Republican majorities in their gerrymandered legislatures, they also wouldn’t be able to get rid of their Republican senators.

More and more Americans are realizing that science is on the ballot this year. A few weeks ago Scientific American made its first presidential endorsement ever. This week The New England Journal of Medicine did:

Reasonable people will certainly disagree about the many political positions taken by candidates. But truth is neither liberal nor conservative. When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.

A research project in British Columbia picked 115 homeless people and randomly choose 50 of them to receive $7,500. Then it tracked all of them.

The people who received the money managed it pretty well: They were more likely to be food secure and got off the streets more quickly than the control group. Their spending on alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs went down.

“It challenges stereotypes we have here in the West about how to help people living on the margins,” [Claire Williams, CEO of the funding foundation] said. 

and let’s close with something analytic

This is from 2013, but I just found it, so maybe you haven’t seen it either. It’s a quiz the NYT’s Upshot column put together to analyze what your word usage says about where you’re from. My own dialect heat map doesn’t pick out my central Illinois home town precisely, but my years in Chicago apparently pulled my usage north a bit.

Three weeks ago, in “The Illegitimacy of a Conservative Supreme Court“, I focused on the Court as both the product and the enabler of minority rule: Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, and yet the rural small-state bias built into the Electoral College has given us eight additional years of Republican presidencies. Combined with Mitch McConnell’s maneuvers and the luck of who dies when, Republican presidents have replaced four of the eight justices who left the Court during that time, with Amy Coney Barrett nominated to be the fifth, joining Clarence Thomas (appointed by the first President Bush, who did win the popular vote) to make a 6-3 conservative majority.

The Senate has an even larger rural small-state bias, which allowed McConnell’s minority-supported Senate majority to refuse to consider President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland, stealing the seat for Neil Gorsuch, who was appointed by popular-vote-loser Donald Trump.

In short, the 6-3 majority Barrett’s confirmation would produce flies in the face of the will of the American people, who are considerably more liberal than a 6-3 Court would be. Worse, the 5-4 conservative majority has already shown a partisan Republican bias that makes rule by the Republican minority even more likely: unleashing a torrent of corporate money in Citizens United, gutting the Voting Rights Act, and refusing to recognize partisan gerrymandering as a violation of the right to vote. (The last two opinions were written by Chief Justice Roberts. In Rucho v Common Cause, he wrote that even the most extreme gerrymandering is “beyond the reach of the federal courts” and should be corrected “through legislation” that would need to pass precisely the legislatures where a minority party has been gerrymandered into power.) In its next term, the Court will hear a case that could undo the rest of the Voting Rights Act.

Why should you care? “But so what?” a voter might ask, particularly an independent voter who holds no particular sympathy for Democratic politicians kept out of power by Republicans who represent fewer people. The public associates certain high-profile issues with the Court — abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, and affirmative action pop to mind — but what if those aren’t your issues? If you’re white, straight, unlikely to get pregnant, and not worried about mass shootings, why should a Court with an outside-the-mainstream conservative bias matter to you?

Even if you belong to some vulnerable group, you can fix most of the problems in your personal situation just by moving to a blue state. If you’re sick of being dominated by the Republican minority in Wisconsin, move to Minnesota or Illinois, where the majority still rules. And if you worry that federal courts will no longer protect you from the authentic conservative majority in Mississippi, go to Vermont or Oregon. Your abortion rights will be safe, no one will threaten your marriage, and white supremacy will be much less onerous.

So what do you need the Supreme Court for?

A recent state-court decision in Michigan, highlighted in an article in The Atlantic, points to a different kind of danger: Conservative courts can reinterpret the fundamental rules of our system of government in such a way that many important issues are placed beyond the reach of government entirely.

That’s worth caring about.

The Lochner Era. We’ve seen this before in American history, though it is passing out of living memory. Beginning in the late 1800s, the original Progressive movement tried to rein in the robber barons of the Gilded Age. People who felt crushed by a system that favored employers over employees elected representatives who passed laws to make that dominance less oppressive: child-labor laws, limits on the work-week, worker safety laws, minimum wage laws, and so on.

And the courts threw those laws out.

The case that gave the era its name in the legal history books is 1905’s Lochner v. New York. Joseph Lochner owned a bakery in Utica and liked to overwork people. But New York had passed the Bakeshop Act, a workplace-safety measure that limited bakers to working 60 hours a week or 10 hours a day. (Not only is it a bad idea for exhausted people to tend fires, but constant exposure to flour dust can cause respiratory problems.) Lochner appealed his fine to the Supreme Court, which overturned the Bakeshop Act as an “unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right and liberty of the individual to contract”.

In practice, the “right to contract” meant this: If the only job available to you requires you to work yourself to death, and if your alternative is to watch your children starve, you have the “freedom” to accept that arrangement. The state can’t interfere.

In essence, Lochner put workplace issues beyond the reach of government. No matter what the voters thought, employers could use the scarcity of jobs and the surplus of workers to enforce their will. If workers lacked the market power to say no, government couldn’t say no for them.

The swan song of the Lochner Court came when it declared FDR’s National Recovery Administration unconstitutional in 1935. The threat to block the entirety of the New Deal motivated Roosevelt’s court-packing plan, the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. And while that bill did not pass, the Court seemed to take it as a shot across the bow. It started to back off, the New Deal was allowed to proceed, and FDR eventually stayed in office long enough to replace eight of the nine justices he inherited.

Non-delegation. The Michigan case examined in The Atlantic’s article concerns a law the Michigan legislature passed in 1945 titled “Emergency Powers of Governor“. It’s a short but sweeping bill whose stated intent is

to invest the governor with sufficiently broad power of action in the exercise of the police power of the state to provide adequate control over persons and conditions during such periods of impending or actual public crisis or disaster. The provisions of this act shall be broadly construed to effectuate this purpose.

In March, Governor Gretchen Whitmer invoked these emergency powers to fight the coronavirus pandemic. On October 2, on a party-line 4-3 vote, the Michigan Supreme Court not only invalidated Whitmer’s orders, but closed the door on future emergency orders by ruling that

the [EPG] Act unlawfully delegates legislative power to the executive branch in violation of the Michigan Constitution.

The portion of the Michigan Constitution in question is rather general and open to interpretation:

The powers of government are divided into three branches: legislative, executive and judicial. No person exercising powers of one branch shall exercise powers properly belonging to another branch except as expressly provided in this constitution.

The whole point of a state-of-emergency laws is that legislation is a slow process that events can outrun. So the 1945 legislature, recognizing its limited speed, pre-loaded some powers into the governorship.

But that is now unconstitutional in Michigan.

Minority rule in Michigan. It’s worth noting that Michigan is currently a minority-rule state. A majority of the voters have repeatedly tried to elect Democrats to the legislature, but have failed to take control away from Republicans, who have gerrymandered themselves into power. In 2018, Michigan voters tried to deal with this by passing a ballot proposition to create an independent commission to draw legislative-district boundaries. Republicans sued in federal court to invalidate that law, but so far have failed. Even if the independent commission succeeds, though, the new districts won’t be in force until the 2022 election.

Governor Whitmer, meanwhile, won election in 2018 by a wide majority, 53%-44%. Despite armed protests against her emergency orders, culminating in a plot to kidnap (and possibly kill) her that was foiled this week, Whitmer remains popular, with 51/41 favorable/unfavorable rating.

She is popular for good reason: After being hit hard by coronavirus early on, Michigan has fared better than neighboring states. Currently the daily average new Covid cases per hundred thousand residents is 12 in Michigan, 21 in Indiana, and 45 in Wisconsin. (Wisconsin is another state where a minority-rule Republican majority in the legislature has blocked the efforts of a Democratic governor to fight the virus, with assistance from the state supreme court.)

In short, Governor Whitmer represents the voters of Michigan; the Republican leadership of the gerrymandered legislature does not. Moreover, even though critics of majority rule sometimes smear it as “mob rule”, in this case it is the minority-rule Republicans who are supported by a violent mob.

Neil Gorsuch. The Michigan Court’s invocation of “non-delegation” explicitly references a dissenting opinion by US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, in which he calls for reviving the non-delegation doctrine of the Lochner Court.

Before the 1930s, federal statutes granting authority to the executive were comparatively modest and usually easily upheld. But then the federal government began to grow explosively. And with the proliferation of new executive programs came new questions about the scope of congressional delegations. Twice the Court responded by striking down statutes for violating the separation of powers.

The two cases Gorsuch cites so approvingly are the Court’s 1935 Schecter Poultry and Panama Refining decisions — precisely the ones that threatened the New Deal.

Gorsuch’s target is what conservatives pejoratively call “the administrative state”, which is embodied in agencies like the SEC, FDA, EPA, FCC, IRS, and many others that keep powerful economic interests in line.

In the same way that emergencies can develop too quickly for a legislative response, corporate interests can repackage and reinvent themselves much faster than Congress or a state legislature can counter. Congress has responded by laying out broad principles and delegating their enforcement to administrative agencies.

For example, the Clean Air Act did not list every pollutant, or lay out precise standards for controlling each one. Instead, it empowered the EPA (according to Wikipedia)

to construct a list of Hazardous Air Pollutants as well as health-based standards for each one. There were 187 air pollutants listed and the source from which they came. The EPA was given ten years to generate technology-based emission standards.

This kind of thing happens across the government. The FDA might ban some food additive, and then respond immediately with a new ban if food companies just tweak the formula in some trivial way.

Under non-delegation, though, every such decision could be challenged in court, and ultimately be decided by the corporate-favoring regulation-hating 6-3 majority. The Atlantic’s Nicholas Bagley (a University of Michigan law professor) draws the conclusion:

The nondelegation doctrine isn’t about democracy. It’s about the power to restrain government. And it will be wielded as opportunistically against a President Biden as it has been wielded against Whitmer.

What Biden should say about expanding the Court. When FDR threatened to “pack the Court” by increasing its size so that he could appoint new justices, there was good reason to do so. The Court was enforcing a theory of economics and of the government’s relationship to the economy that the American people no longer believed in. The country wanted to change, and the Supreme Court would not let it. Only by relenting did the Court make Roosevelt’s power move unnecessary.

We are not quite in that situation yet, but we could be soon. Accordingly, new court-expansion proposals are being kicked around in Democratic circles. So far, Joe Biden has been dodging the question of whether or not he supports them.

And if all you are allowed is a short answer, that’s the right response, because “yes” and “no” are both premature. I’d like to hear Biden answer the question like this:

Pack the Court? I hope it doesn’t come to that. I can promise you this: I will not come into office on Day 1 saying, “We need to change the Supreme Court.”

But as everyone can see, there are several conservative biases in our system, and those biases are combining to produce a Supreme Court that radically diverges from the American people.

Twice in the last seven elections, a Republican has become president even though another candidate got more votes. Similarly, Republicans currently have a majority in the Senate, even though their senators represent fewer voters. That situation has not been uncommon in recent years. And since the President and the Senate choose the Supreme Court, over time the Court has become far more conservative than the American people.

Now, that doesn’t have to be a problem. When John Roberts was being confirmed as chief justice, he said his political opinions didn’t matter, because a justice is just an umpire, calling balls and strikes according to a strike zone defined by the laws and the Constitution. If he, and the rest of the Court, can hold to that discipline, then they won’t get any trouble from me.

But I can’t help noticing that several times in the last two decades, the Court hasn’t called balls and strikes, but has put its thumb on the scale of politics, nearly always on the Republican side. The Court wasn’t calling balls and strikes when it opened the spigots of corporate money in Citizens United. It wasn’t calling balls and strikes when it undid the Voting Rights Act, which had been renewed by Congress in a near-unanimous vote. It wasn’t calling balls and strikes when it shrugged off partisan gerrymandering. In those cases, it was taking a political position and favoring a political party.

If it continues down that road, then we will have a problem.

Right now, the Court is considering whether to undo the biggest achievement of progressive politics in the last few decades, the Affordable Care Act — ObamaCare. If they do, they will take health insurance away from tens of millions of Americans, and remove protections from the additional tens of millions who have preexisting conditions — including everyone who has survived Covid-19. The argument for striking down that law is based on a novel legal theory that no one who voted either for or against the ACA ever considered at the time. It’s bogus, and they know it.

The ACA passed because the American people were worried about their healthcare and wanted change. They still want change; they want more change than we were able to give them then. And healthcare is just one area where the American people are crying out for change.

Early in the 20th century, the American people were also crying out for change. And so they elected state and federal representatives who legislated for a minimum wage, a limited work week, a safe workplace, and the right to organize a union. But the Supreme Court of that era said no, and invalidated law after law — hundreds of them. What that Court said to the American people was: “I don’t care what you want, you can’t have change.”

And so the change that the American people had wanted since the turn of the century was delayed until the New Deal in the 1930s.

Now if that’s what this Court has in mind, to thwart the will of the voters for decades, for as long it can, in service to an ideology that the American people don’t share, then I think the elected branches of our government will have to respond.

What will that response look like? I don’t know yet, because I haven’t seen what the Court will do. If it behaves itself, if it lets the elected branches of government do the things that the American people elect us to do, then there will be no response, because there will be no problem.

But if I’m not going to begin my administration with a plan to change the Court, I’m also not going to begin my administration by writing this Court a blank check, by saying, “Abuse your power any way you like, and I’ll just sit on my hands.”

If I’m elected, then I will have a responsibility to the voters who elected me. And if I find that the will of those voters is consistently being blocked and subverted by judges who not only are unelected, but who were appointed by people who lost the popular vote themselves, then I will have to consider the options that our constitutional system provides.

People, not politicians. That position represents a subtle shift in framing from what many other Democrats are saying. Yes, the problem has been caused by shenanigans in the Senate, capped off by the plan to rush Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination through before the voters can do anything about it. But framing this as tit-for-tat shenanigans — we’ll pack the Court if you jam Barret through — is bad politics. That’s a threat to make behind closed doors, not to broadcast to the public.

Biden should hinge his position not on how the Senate behaves, but on how the Court behaves. Striking back because Mitch McConnell stole Merrick Garland’s seat is a he-hit-me-first argument that just increases a lot of Americans’ disgust with politics, because it’s about politicians, not about them. But framing the argument as “The Supreme Court is taking away your health insurance” or “The Supreme Court won’t let us protect your drinking water” or “The Supreme Court won’t let us stop mass shootings” is a different story.

You want change, but the Supreme Court won’t let it happen. Help us fix the Supreme Court. That’s the right argument to have.

Three weeks from Tuesday, we start counting the votes, which are already being cast. I’m sure it will seem like forever. Right now, Trump is sinking, and his October surprises are looking like the “secret weapons” Hitler was counting on as the Russians closed in on his bunker: No vaccine is coming before the election, and John Durham isn’t going to indict Joe Biden.

This week, I decided to step back from the Trump Circus and look once again at the prospect of a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court: what it means for the continuance of minority rule, how it might change the fundamental rules of our government, and what Joe Biden should say about it. In particular, I look away from the issues we usually associate with the Court — abortion, guns, gay rights, affirmative action — and focus on the possibility that a conservative Court might undermine the legal basis for government to regulate big corporations by reviving a “non-delegation” doctrine from the Bad Old Days of the Supreme Court: the Lochner Era.

That post looks at what’s going on now in conservative jurisprudence and how it relates to legal history. I close by recommending a long answer for Joe Biden to give to the question “Do you support packing the Supreme Court?” (The short answer is: not if they behave themselves.)

That’s done but for proofreading, so it should be out shortly.

The weekly summary will discuss the White House Covid Cluster, and just how little we’ve been allowed to know about it. Also the 25th Amendment, and why it should have been invoked this week. The increasing likelihood that no further stimulus is coming. And, BTW, let’s not forget that this week included a right-wing plot to overthrow the government of Michigan, one of the states Trump urged his supporters to “liberate” this summer. Who could have imagined that armed yahoos would respond to something like that?

Republican senators are openly dissing democracy. Trump’s return to campaigning despite being infected completely obscured his abuse of the White House grounds and the Marine Band as campaign props. The NYT outlined the scope of Trump’s pay-to-play corruption. And the virus is running wild again, especially in the Dakotas.

That should all be in the weekly summary, which should be out by noon, EDT.

Schadenfreude was our top lookup on October 2nd, by a very considerable margin, following President Trump’s announcement that he and the First Lady had tested positive for COVID-19.

– Merriam-Webster

This week’s featured posts are “Schadenfreude, and seven other reactions to Trump’s illness” and “About Those Taxes“.

This week everybody was talking about Trump getting covid

That gets covered in one of the featured posts.

and that horrible debate

I feel like it’s my responsibility to watch things like this, or review the video later, or at least read the transcript. But in fact, I have done none of those things. The next morning (Wednesday), I watched the first ten minutes, plus the clips the media wanted to show me, and decided that life is too short.

In early September, Politico did an article on Trump’s debate strategy, and it rings pretty true: The point of all the interruptions and other antics was to provoke Biden into an embarrassing stuttering incident. It didn’t work. However, it did hide the fact that Biden has plans for his administration and Trump doesn’t.

A post-debate Politico article “Trump Is Not the Man He Used to Be” compares this debate performance to his 2016 debates, particularly the one with Hillary Clinton right after the Access Hollywood tape threatened to derail his entire candidacy.

With his back to the wall, facing scrutiny like no presidential hopeful in memory, Trump turned in his strongest stage performance of 2016. He was forceful but controlled. He was steady, unflappable, almost carefree. Even his most noxious lines, such as suggesting that Clinton belonged in jail, were delivered with a smooth cadence and a cool smirk, as if he knew a secret that others didn’t.

On substance, I thought he lost that 2016 debate, as he lost all the Clinton debates. But he restored an image that just enough voters found appealing: the mischievous boy thumbing his nose at authorities and all their stupid rules. The supposed “gaffes” of 2016 — calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”, refusing to be impressed by John McCain’s war-hero status, mocking a reporter’s disability, telling his supporters to “knock the hell” out of protesters at his rallies, and so on — were delivered with an air of “look what I can get away with”.

A certain kind of voter, particularly the white male non-college voter Trump was hoping to turn out, loved that. (Rush Limbaugh appeals in the same way, for example, when he tries to see how close he can come to saying the N-word on the radio.) To them, it was fun. While Trump was often compared to a bull in a china shop, his base saw something equally destructive but much more humorous, like the Blues Brothers driving a stolen police car through a shopping mall, leaving a trail of broken glass and crushed mannequins. Sure, it’s wrong and would make a lot of people mad, but wouldn’t you love to get away with something like that?

It might be hard to remember through the fog of these past four years, but the animating sentiment for Trump during his first run for the presidency wasn’t hatred or division. It was fun. He was having the time of his life. Nothing Trump had ever experienced had showered him with so much attention, so much adulation, so much controversy and coverage. He loved every moment of it.

But that look-at-me-I’m-a-bad-boy attitude was completely absent from the Biden debate. He seemed more like the bad boy who gets caught and then whines about his punishment.

The president wasn’t enjoying himself last night. … There was no mischievous glint in his eye, no mirthful vibrancy in his demeanor. He looked exhausted. He sounded ornery. Gone was the swagger, the detached smirk, that reflected bottomless wells of confidence and conviction. Though described by Tucker Carlson in Fox News’ pregame show as an “instinctive predator,” Trump behaved like cornered prey—fearful, desperate, trapped by his own shortcomings and the circumstances that exposed them. He was a shell of his former dominant self. … Watching the president on Tuesday night felt like watching someone losing his religion. Trump could not overpower Biden or Wallace any more than he could overpower Covid-19 or the cascading job losses or the turmoil engulfing American cities. For the first time in his presidency, Trump appeared to recognize that he had been overtaken by events.

You might think denouncing violent white supremacists would be an easy call for any American politician, but Trump couldn’t get it done during the debate. Prodded by Chris Wallace to ask the Proud Boys to “stand down”, Trump instead asked them to “stand back and stand by” because “somebody has to do something about Antifa and the left”.

After considerable pearl-clutching (but no sharp criticism) from Republican senators, Trump backed off, sort of. In his last interview before announcing his Covid infection, Trump told Sean Hannity:

Let me be clear again: I condemn the KKK. I condemn all white supremacists. I condemn the Proud Boys. I don’t know much about the Proud Boys, almost nothing, but I condemn that.

Let’s parse all this a little. Antifa is largely a right-wing myth. (We’ll discuss below the possibility that something else is going on.) As FBI Director Christopher Wray has explained: “It’s not a group or an organization. It’s a movement or an ideology.” Even if somebody needs to “do something” about Antifa (and I suspect nobody does), that “somebody” should be local law enforcement, not armed gangs of right-wing vigilantes.

But let’s say Trump really didn’t know anything about the Proud Boys Tuesday night, and still knew “almost nothing” about them after two days of controversy. Then why was he giving them instructions on national TV?

and the Barrett nomination

How many senators can the GOP lose to quarantine and still get Barrett on the Court before the election?

So far, three senators — Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Thom Tillis — have tested positive. Two of them — Lee and Tillis — are on the Judiciary Committee that needs to hold hearings on Barrett. Two others — Ted Cruz and Ben Sasse — are self-quarantining.

The first obstacle for Republicans may be the committee vote, tentatively planned for Oct. 22.

To report out a nomination, a majority of the 22-member committee will need to be present, and Democratic senators will not help Republicans make quorum, aides said Sunday. Although proxy voting is allowed in the Judiciary Committee, it works only when there is a quorum present and the proxy votes don’t change the outcome of the vote, according to committee officials.

I am sure we will see many procedural maneuvers between now and November 3, and I don’t want to predict how they will play out.

but let’s think about undecided voters

Several people this week have asked me some version of: “After everything we’ve seen these last four years, how can anybody be undecided in this election?”

Given my advanced case of male answer syndrome, of course I have a theory: I picture two kinds of undecided voters: the apathetic and the torn.

To understand apathetic voters, think about some level of government you don’t usually pay attention to. For example, maybe you don’t have kids, and school board elections go by without you noticing. Or maybe you just moved to a new town, and haven’t found a reason yet to care about who your alderman is.

Probably you hear something about these elections, but it just goes in one ear and out the other. You know some of your neighbors care, but to you it just sounds like a bunch annoying people yelling at each other.

That’s how apathetic voters are about national politics, and the media’s both-sides-do-it narrative feeds their inclination to stay ignorant. “Some people love Trump, and some people hate him, but they’re all crazy and I steer clear of them.”

if these people do end up voting, it’s a last-minute decision. The night before or the morning of Election Day, they’ll look up some issue they care about on the internet, or talk to some friend they think is well informed, and that’s how they’ll make up their minds. They’re highly vulnerable to misinformation, so they’re largely who the Russians target with their social-media bots. But I think Biden does have a persuasive last-minute message to offer them: “Given the 200,000 dead of coronavirus, the restrictions on what the rest of us can safely do, the high unemployment, the enormous budget deficit, and the growing racial tensions in our country, do you think America is better off than it was four years ago? Has Trump kept his promise to make us ‘great again’, or should somebody else get a chance to lead us?”

Torn voters are fighting an internal battle. Some part of them has an irrational attraction to or repulsion from one of the candidates, but they don’t know how to justify giving in to that urge. (I irrationally wanted to vote for John McCain in both the 2000 and 2008 New Hampshire primaries. In 2000 I did.)

I believe torn voters were the key to Trump’s 2016 victory. They knew Hillary Clinton would be the better president, but they didn’t like her, and wouldn’t it be a hoot to have that other guy? And since he wasn’t going to win anyway, what harm would it do to vote for him? The Crooked Hillary meme and the last-minute Comey announcement about her emails gave them the permission they needed, and so the Undecideds all broke to Trump at the last minute.

This year, I think a lot of the undecided are Trump’s 2016 voters who now are torn. They know he’s a bad president, but they don’t want to admit they were wrong. I think a lot of them will break to Biden at the last minute, largely because of the point made in the Politico article I quoted above: Trump isn’t fun any more. On Election Day, the thought “All this bullshit could just be over” will ripple through the electorate.

and you also might be interested in …

Three big-name constitutional lawyers — Neil Buchanan, Michael Dorf, and Lawrence Tribe — debunk some of the scarier scenarios for the election.

Without getting into the legal weeds, the bottom line is that there is no way to throw the election into the House — where the Republicans would win if they could hold their current 26-24 advantage in state delegations — without either a 269-269 tie or a third candidate getting electoral votes. If some votes are thrown out, the candidate with the most electoral votes still wins, even if the total falls below 270.

Texas Governor Gregg Abbott engaged in some serious voter suppression this week: He limited each county to one mail-in-ballot dropbox.

Mail-in ballots, of course, are designed to be mailed. But if you aren’t confident in the mail delivering your ballot on time — say, because Trump is intentionally sabotaging the Post Office — you might set your mind at ease by taking your ballot to a dropbox that election officials will open themselves.

Except in Texas, apparently.

The rule affects mainly a few populous counties, including Harris, home of Houston, which had set up twelve collection spots for its 2.4 million registered voters.

The highly populated counties are exactly the ones where Democrats need a big turnout. Abbott claimed his order will “help stop attempts at illegal voting”, without presenting any evidence that illegal voting is a problem. But the move is certain to reduce attempts at legal voting, if courts let it stand.

Another underhanded scheme comes from Michigan, where two Republican operatives face charges in a robocall campaign to scare people out of voting by mail.

The calls told the recipients falsely that voting by mail would put their information in databases used for arrest warrants, debt collection and “mandatory vaccines.” … According to Thursday’s announcement, the robocalls went out to nearly 12,000 residents in Detroit. Attorneys general offices in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois also told [Michigan Attorney General Dana] Nessel that there were similar calls in their states, Nessel’s announcement said.

If Covid forces Bill Stepien to step down as Trump campaign chair, would you want to replace him, given what’s happened to your predecessors? Paul Manafort is serving a prison term (at home, due to Covid), Steve Bannon is under indictment, Brad Pascale is in the middle of some kind of personal crisis that has seen him arrested and hospitalized, and now Bill Stepien has Covid. Corey Lewandowski is the lucky one, so far: the misdemeanor battery charge against him was dropped.

I hadn’t been taking seriously the possibility that Iowa Senator Joni Ernst could lose, but apparently I should: A recent poll has her down 51%-39%.

The NYT’s Farah Stockman drew attention to a fairly obscure blog Public Report by Santa Monica photographer Jeremy Lee Quinn. Quinn has been studying anarchist groups that have been trying to turn Black Lives Matter protests into riots.

Mr. Quinn began studying footage of looting from around the country and saw the same black outfits and, in some cases, the same masks. He decided to go to a protest dressed like that himself, to figure out what was really going on. He expected to find white supremacists who wanted to help re-elect President Trump by stoking fear of Black people. What he discovered instead were true believers in “insurrectionary anarchism.”

These folks appear to be the root of what Trumpists call “Antifa”, but really they are something different. Quinn offers this Venn diagram., and writes: “Anarchist action is distinct from Antifacist action in which counter-demonstrators clash with the right wing to actively counterprotest their rallies”

I hope to have time to examine this better in coming weeks.

and let’s close with something weird

Weird Al Yankovich turned the presidential debate into a song with a catchy title: “We’re All Doomed“.

Bad as it is, what we know so far about Trump’s taxes may not be the worst of it.

One persistent problem of 2020 is that it’s hard to hold an issue in your mind for any length of time. The New York Times revealed Trump’s taxes just a little over a week ago, and since then two other big stories — the debate disaster and the White House coronavirus outbreak — have all but washed the tax issues out of the news. I think they deserve a little more attention than that.

Narratively, the problem with the tax story is that it’s a bunch of smaller stories, none of which encompasses the whole thing. It’s certainly about tax avoidance, maybe legal and maybe not. But it also could be about laundering money for people we can’t identify.

$750. The headlines that came out of the original NYT article were how little Trump has paid in taxes: $750 in each of 2016 and 2017, and nothing at all in many other years. And that certainly is scandalous, whether or not it turns out to be legal. I pay considerably more than that every year, and probably you do too. Nobody thinks Joe Biden is a billionaire, but he paid $299,346 in 2019.

Trump famously said “that makes me smart” when Hillary Clinton accused him of not paying his fair share of taxes in 2016. But that’s the same kind of “smart” that got him excused from Vietnam with bone spurs — unlike the “suckers” and “losers” who died for their country. It’s similarly “smart” to stiff your contractors, trade in your wives when they start to age, hire illegal immigrants to tend your golf courses, create a phony university and a phony foundation, and do a lot of the other things that have kept Trump safe and rich and feeling pleased with himself.

But I don’t think most Americans want to be led by someone with those kinds of smarts. Trusting “smart” people like Trump will usually get you outsmarted eventually. Someday, it will be smart to screw you the way he has screwed everybody else.

The bad businessman. The other headline from the NYT article was that many of Trump’s most famous properties are money-losers, and always have been.

The second article in the NYT series (the newspaper claims more are coming) showed how the windfall of income related to his TV show “The Apprentice” bailed him out of the financial difficulties created by his other business failures. In other words: His ability to play a successful businessman on TV covered up the fact that he actually isn’t one.

He sold his image in a variety of ways, many of which were harmful to the people who trusted him. The NYT finds he was paid $8.8 million to promote ACN, a multi-level marketing company that promoted what were essentially pyramid schemes.

The NYT paints a picture of a man who gets big windfalls (the first one being at least $400 million from his father), and then proceeds to fritter them away.

Debt. Trump owns a lot of assets and has taken out a lot of loans against them. The NYT estimates that about $400 million of loans come due in the next four years. We know some of the lenders (Deutsche Bank), but not all of them.

Nothing Trump is doing as a businessman is generating much cash. So during his prospective second term, he will either need to get new loans or sell assets. The security vulnerabilities here are obvious: If he gets loans or finds buyers, particularly from abroad, we will never know whether there is a bribe hidden somewhere in that money.

Ivanka? One way Trump lowered his taxes was to claim millions in “consulting fees” as business expenses. In at least some of those cases, it looks like he was funneling money to his kids, who shouldn’t be getting consulting fees from businesses that also list them as employees.

This resembles an apparently illegal scheme that Trump’s father used to funnel money to him.

The Times traces about $750K that went to Ivanka via this path. But CNN speculates about the other $25 million in consulting fees:

So we don’t know who received the other $25-ish million that Trump wrote off to “consulting fees” during that time. (Worth noting: The Times reports that Trump wrote off roughly 20% of all income he made on projects over that time to “consulting fees.”) Given the apparent payment to Ivanka Trump revealed by the Times, however, it’s not terribly far-fetched to wonder whether all (or much) of those “consulting fees” went through a similar process: Paid to one of Trump’s offspring who were serving as both managers of these operations for the Trump Organization and as consultants to the projects as well.

Money laundering? The most serious accusation is speculative, but the speculation explains transactions that are otherwise mysterious. A tweetstorm by author Adam Davidson delves into one Trump property (his golf course in Scotland) in detail, and finds some strange bookkeeping.

The thing everyone reports is the losses–the shareholder (Trump) has lost more than £7M. But the interesting stuff is the fixed asset value and the creditors — over one year. Trump is all of them: he owns the asset, lends the money, owes the money, is owed the money. …

There’s much more to say–each line here is fascinating. But the overall picture is crystal clear: Every year, Trump lends millions to himself, spends all that money on something, and claims the asset is worth all the money he spent.

He cannot have spent all that money on the properties. We have the planning docs. We know how much he spent — it’s far less than what he claims. The money truly disappears. It goes from one pocket to another pocket and then the pocket is opened to reveal nothing is there.

… These financials are clear: this is not a golf business, it’s a money disappearing business.

… If this is a money disappearing business and it is not only tax fraud, then he is making money disappear for somebody else and charging some sort of fee. Which might explain why a money-losing golf course pays huge fees to its owner.

Two obvious questions:

• What would happen if Trump’s other money-losing properties came under similar scrutiny?
• Didn’t the Mueller investigation look into all this?

The answer to the first is that we don’t know. And the answer to the second, we now know, is no. Mueller did not follow the money.

Trump had also done lots of business with Deutsche Bank, and although Mueller issued his subpoenas secretly, word somehow leaked to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. When the White House asked Mueller’s team what they were examining, Mueller responded that Manafort, not Trump, was the target.

“At that point, any financial investigation of Trump was put on hold,” writes Andrew Weissmann, a veteran federal prosecutor who played a senior role in Mueller’s investigation, in a new book. “That is, we backed down — the issue was simply too incendiary; the risk, too severe.

Of all the things I hold against Trump, this is the one I will have the hardest time forgiving: He has made me realize how spiteful I can be.

Schadenfreude and karmic justice. I wish I could report that when I heard about Trump testing positive for the coronavirus, I felt a wave of human compassion. Because politics is one thing and life is another, and we’ve got to hang on to our humanity.

But what I actually thought was: “Maybe there really is a just God.” It wasn’t exactly schadenfreude, which would be more like “I’m glad that bastard is suffering.” (Coincidentally, Merriam-Webster reported a 305-times increase in the number of searches for schadenfreude on October 2.) But it’s close: Hearing about his diagnosis made the Universe seem like a safer, saner place.

This is the kind of thing a good person would never say about another human being, but (in both a karmic and a practical sense) nobody had this coming like Trump. Practically, he has been ignoring precautions, running around the country maskless, not enforcing sound workplace hygiene practices at the White House (which The Atlantic’s Peter Nicholas presciently described as “a petri dish” in August), and doing everything he could to discourage others from taking precautions (like berating a White House reporter for wearing a mask to a briefing).

Karmically, nobody — or at least no American — bears more responsibility for the spread of Covid-19 than he does. He consistently pressures state and local governments to relax their health restrictions too soon, encourages his followers to flout mask mandates, pushes the CDC to relax its guidelines, advocates for less testing, pushes misinformation about the virus, promotes quack “cures”, and even travels around the country holding super-spreader events, one of which seems to have gotten Herman Cain killed (just to put a face on a larger phenomenon).

How many of America’s 214K-and-counting coronavirus deaths are Trump’s fault? It’s impossible to say precisely, but here’s how I think about it: Culturally and economically, the country that best resembles the US is Canada. Canada currently has 251 Covid deaths per 100K people. The US has 647. If our government could have handled the virus as well as Canada’s, and kept our deaths-per-100K down to 251K, we’d have only 39% of the deaths we currently have, or 83K rather than 214K.

That calculation would say that about 131K American deaths are on Trump. That’s about 33,000 Benghazis or 44 9-11s. If you make Germany or Australia the reference country, the number gets even bigger. If you use Japan, practically all the deaths are his fault.

So, am I rooting for him to suffer and die? No. But a Universe where he skates along unaffected by the damage he causes just feels wrong to me.

BTW, if you find yourself feeling guilty about your own lack of sympathy for Trump, take a look at how he responded during the 2016 campaign when Hillary came down with pneumonia.

The philosopher Aaron James has defined a technical term to describe people who want to claim the benefits of rules governing politeness and propriety, while always holding themselves exempt from the duties, inconveniences, and sacrifices those rules impose: They are assholes.

Is he really sick? On Friday, just about everybody I talked to was asking this question, and wondering if the Covid thing was a play for sympathy or an excuse for ducking the rest of the debates or a way to divert attention from his taxes or keep Biden out of the headlines. It’s crazy that we even have to consider the possibility of a presidential health hoax, but we do. Trump has lied about everything else, so why not this?

In general, though, I don’t believe in big conspiracies, and the longer this goes on, the more people would have to be in on it. So by now I’m pretty sure that he really is sick.

But even Friday morning the hoax explanation seemed unlikely, because catching Covid undermines so many things Trump has been working to accomplish. For months, he’s been trying to induce voters to think about anything else. He’s been telling his rallies that the pandemic is fading. Plus, he wants to present an image of larger-that-life strength. Trump aims to inspire awe and love in his supporters, and hate and fear in his enemies. People like me wondering if we ought to feel sorry for him is the last thing he wants.

His scandalous response. It’s not a scandal that Trump caught the virus, but what he did next is: After he knew he had been exposed, he continued to meet people who were not warned about the risk. (What the Wall Street Journal is reporting is even more damning: He had already seen a positive test before phone interview with Sean Hannity Thursday evening, but pretended he hadn’t.)

There’s been a lot of controversy about the timeline, but we do know this much: Hope Hicks was diagnosed Wednesday, so by Thursday afternoon Trump knew that he (and probably a lot of his staff) had been exposed and might be carrying the infection; his positive test was announced several hours later. Nonetheless, he went to a fund-raiser at his club in New Jersey and schmoozed with his donors. He traveled there with his staff on Marine One, a close-quarter helicopter without proper ventilation.

The fund-raiser included a round-table photo op with 18 quarter-million-dollar donors, few (or perhaps none) of whom were wearing masks. A larger photo op was held for mere $50K donors, and there was an outdoor event for the low-rollers who may have only given a few thousand. In all, we’re talking about hundreds of people. They aren’t his enemies; they’re the people he’s depending on to get him a second term.

Friday, the campaign emailed attendees to tell them about Trump’s positive test. The email did not recommend that they quarantine or get tested themselves, but merely said they should contact their doctors if they developed symptoms.

If you ever need an example to back up the point that Trump cares about no one but himself, here it is. He doesn’t even care about his staff, or the people who give big donations to his campaign.

And if you need an example to make the case that Trump is typical of an entire generation of conservative assholes, use Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Friday, he went to a fund-raiser after he had a positive test.

What if he can’t go on? One question on everybody’s mind: What happens if illness causes Trump to withdraw or die? The Washington Post has it covered:

The bottom line is that the RNC would determine who the replacement candidate would be, should it come to that unfortunate situation. And Republican slates of electors in states the president won, because he remains on the ballot, would very likely follow the RNC’s recommendation.

But one last possibility to ponder: If the RNC were deeply divided, and Republican electors then did not coalesce around a single replacement candidate, there might not be a majority winner in the electoral college. In that case, the House would choose the president from among the top three vote getters in the electoral college. In that process, each state delegation gets one vote.

The Atlantic surveys the same ground with more emphasis on the chaotic scenarios. That article also reveals history I didn’t know: Presidential candidate Horace Greeley died between the 1872 election and the date when electors cast their ballots, and VP candidate James Sherman died before election day in 1912. Both were on losing tickets, so the course of the nation didn’t hinge on how the rules were interpreted.

The White House cluster. After learning that the President and First Lady were infected, the next question was “Who else?” Many political movements fail by believing their own rhetoric, and Trump has been saying for a long time that the virus isn’t a big deal; we should all just get back to normal as fast as possible. Among Trumpists, mask-wearing and other good public-health practices are looked on as wimpy, as “living in fear“. (Packing heat at the supermarket, on the other hand, is just a reasonable precaution.)

Here’s a little more from that August article by Peter Nicholas:

when I arrived at the White House this morning, I was struck by the lack of safety protocols in place. The most famous address in America now feels like a coronavirus breeding ground. … Some of the West Wing desks are spaced so closely together, and some of the offices are so cramped, that it’s tough to see how people avoid exposure at all. In one small office today, two aides stood and spoke to each other without masks. Young aides sat at desks in an open bullpen-style space without masks. Walking through the hallways accessible to the press, I wore a mask, but I haven’t been tested for COVID-19; had I removed my mask for some reason and coughed or sneezed, there was no hint of a mask patrol prepared to whisk me out the building. The vibe was shockingly lax.

Apparently nothing is going to change. The White House is saying that CDC guidelines make mask-wearing optional, so that’s what they’ll stick with.

So, who else has been infected so far? Hope Hicks was the first person whose infection was announced. Subsequently: KellyAnne Conway, presidential assistant Nicholas Luna, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, campaign manager Bill Stepien, Senators Mike Lee, Thom Tillis and Ron Johnson, debate coach Chris Christie, and Notre Dame President John Jenkins, who attended the Rose Garden announcement of Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination. Barrett herself, it turns out, already had the virus during the summer.

How is he doing? This gets into the breaking-news area I try to avoid. (I can’t compete with CNN, and you shouldn’t get your breaking news from a weekly blog anyway.) But the striking thing about this weekend’s announcements was how much bullshit you had to wade through to find out anything. Had the President needed oxygen? The doctor kept dodging the question and repeating that he wasn’t on oxygen now. Had his x-rays revealed any pneumonia or lung damage? Another dodge.

Eventually we found out that he did spike a high fever at some point. (How high? They won’t say.) He had a couple of episodes of low blood oxygenation. He has received multiple cutting-edge treatments, some of which are only recommended for severe cases. That raises three possibilities:

• He’s sicker than the White House is letting on.
• Doctors are being super-aggressive because he’s the President.
• Trump is a victim of “VIP syndrome”, where doctors yield to the judgment of an important patient rather than doing what they think is best.

Photo ops. Whatever energy Trump does have has been devoted to controlling the narrative, rather than getting well or running the country. He has released two Twitter videos from Walter Reed Hospital, and Sunday he had two Secret Service agents risk their lives to drive him around the building, so that he could wave to his fans.

George Washington University professor and Walter Reed attending physician Dr. James Phillips tweeted:

Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential “drive-by” just now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.

… That Presidential SUV is not only bulletproof, but hermetically sealed against chemical attack. The risk of COVID19 transmission inside is as high as it gets outside of medical procedures. The irresponsibility is astounding. My thoughts are with the Secret Service forced to play.

So file this with the other examples of Trump not caring about anyone but himself.

During the Trump Era we tend to forget that America has had previous presidents who behaved differently. But it’s worth thinking about that now. It’s not crazy for a president to want to reassure the country that he’s OK and that America is still in good hands. But other presidents would have used their limited energy to do work, not pull a stunt.

For a normal president, it would make perfect sense to, say, be on the phone lobbying senators to support his Supreme Court nominee, or urging members of Congress to work out their differences and send him a stimulus bill. Mark Meadows could tell us he was doing those things, and the people he was calling could verify how on-the-ball he was.

Instead, he had to leave the hospital and wave to his adoring public.

Political impact. Something you have to bear in mind is that prior to announcing his infection, Trump was losing the presidential race pretty badly. So anything that shakes up the race at least interrupts a story that was trending against him. 538’s national polling average has Biden up by 8%, and polling above the magic 50% mark that Hillary couldn’t get to, no matter far ahead she was. Ditto for the RCP average, which has Biden up by 8.1% at 50.6%.

Focusing on the Electoral College, 538’s most likely tipping-point state is Pennsylvania, where Biden is ahead by 5.3%, and its tipping-point status depends on Trump also winning Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, and Ohio, where Biden has smaller leads.

For comparison, Texas is closer than that: Trump is ahead by only 4%. So a landslide where Biden takes Texas (and Iowa and Georgia) is currently more likely than the narrowest possible Trump win.

If anything, the more recent polls, taken after Tuesday’s debate but before Trump’s positive test was announced, were even worse for Trump: Biden was up 14% in an NBC/WSJ poll released Sunday.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the short-term effect of Trump’s diagnosis is a small sympathy bump. But long-term I don’t see how it serves him. Anything that keeps the pandemic in the headlines is bad for him, because he has bungled our government’s response so badly. Anything that makes him look weak is bad for him. Cancelling rallies is bad for him. I don’t think his first debate performance did him any good, but cancelling the remaining two debates would remove opportunities for him to turn things around.

So no. Even if he recovers completely, I don’t think getting sick does Trump any good.

Just when you think you know what you need to cover, something else happens. This week the Sift was going to be about Trump’s taxes and that horrible debate, and maybe a brief discussion of undecided voters — and then Friday morning I wake up to find that Trump has tested positive for Covid-19.

That development has so many angles that it outgrew the weekly summary and became its own article. So “Schadenfreude, and seven other reactions to Trump’s illness” should be out soon. I’m still going to try to write about the implications of what the NYT has revealed about Trump’s taxes, which I hope to post around 11 EDT. That puts the weekly summary off to around 1.

When an ostrich buries its head in the sand as danger approaches, it very likely takes the happiest course.

– Charles S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief”
Popular Science Monthly (November, 1877)

This week’s featured post is “Staying Sane in Anxious Times (without being useless)“.

This week everybody was talking about the looming Trump coup

The most important article of the week was Barton Gellman’s alarming “The Election That Could Break America“. Together with Trump’s repeated refusal to commit himself to a peaceful transfer of power — something that has gone without saying in all previous administrations — we face the possibility that a significant majority of the American people might try to remove Trump from office and fail.

Biden’s current polling lead averages around 7.2%, which is sizeable and has been quite stable. But (as we saw in 2016), the Electoral College favors Trump, so Biden’s margin is smaller — 4.5% — in 538’s current tipping-point state of Pennsylvania.

Imagine that Trump’s voter-suppression tactics knock that margin down further, and that Trump’s people (who believe his claims that Covid-19 is not a big deal) are more likely that Biden’s to vote in person on election day. So on election night, Trump appears to be leading, but the lead shrinks as more and more mail-in ballots are counted.

Now Trump’s bogus drumbeat about mail-in voting fraud comes into play, and he charges that he has actually won, but fraudulent votes are being manufactured to steal his victory. Like most of what Trump says, this is bullshit, but it gives cover for Pennsylvania’s gerrymandered-into-power Republican legislature to exercise a long-dormant constitutional power to ignore the vote count and name its own slate of Trump-supporting electors.

Something similar happens in Ohio and Arizona and North Carolina and Florida, which represent enough electoral votes to put Trump over the top. Disputes about this percolate through Congress, and nobody is sure what happens then.

The bigger Biden’s national margin, and the more states that he appears likely to win if all votes are counted, the farther-fetched all this gets. But it’s scary to realize that it is not an impossible scenario.

If that does start to play out, the difference may come down to Belarus-style demonstrators in the streets in Harrisburg or Columbus or outside the White House or wherever the bad stuff seems to be centered. Think about what you’re prepared to do and where you’re prepared to do it, and check websites like Choose Democracy for suggestions.

But above all, don’t freeze. Pushing Biden to a sizeable legitimate margin is the first line of defense against the Trump coup.

Republicans pushed back gently and uncertainly against Trump’s threats to democracy. Lindsey Graham:

Now, we may have litigation about who won the election, but the court will decide and if the Republicans lose, we will accept that result. But we need a full court

That’s still a long way from “Let the voters decide”, as Garrett Graff observes:

What Republicans are really saying here is they’ll support a peaceful transition to Biden *if* their outright voter suppression, hostile efforts to curtail the ability of people to vote at all, AND court packing to influence election disputes all fail.

Here’s how determined Florida Republicans are to suppress the vote:

Florida’s attorney general has requested that the FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigate Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to reinstate the voting rights of felons by paying their fees, according to a letter to the agencies provided to CNN by the attorney general’s office.

Florida voters thought they had reinstated the voting rights of felons who had served their time (except for murderers and sex offenders) when they overwhelmingly passed Constitutional Amendment 4 in 2018. But immediately the legislature added the provision that all fines and court costs needed to be paid as well. Many of the felons are poor, so the extra requirement amounts to a poll tax: If you can’t pay, you can’t vote.

It is also difficult for felons to determine what they owe. The Florida Division of Elections web site says:

If a person is still unsure about fines, fees, costs, and restitution, and the impact upon restoration of voting rights, the person can ask for an advisory opinion from the Florida Division of Elections. Please review section 106.23(2), Florida Statutes, and Florida Administrative Code Rule 1S-2.010 for how to ask for an advisory opinion and what information is required.

So Bloomberg and others have stepped in to clear the ledger. That’s the effort the Florida AG wants to investigate.

If things are going well for Trump, why is the campaign mastermind behind the Tulsa rally threatening to kill himself?

and his (lack of) taxes

This week’s Trump exposé:

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office.

What do those records show?

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

… The picture that perhaps emerges most starkly from the mountain of figures and tax schedules prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants is of a businessman-president in a tightening financial vise.

Most of Mr. Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.

Revenue from “The Apprentice” cancelled out a lot of his business losses, but that money is drying up. Meanwhile, $300 million in loans are coming due in the next few years, and the IRS has challenged a $72.9 million tax refund he claimed many years ago.

This all came out yesterday, so I’m only seeing snap reactions. Chris Hayes:

Some people I’m seeing comment on this are vastly overestimating how “normal for a rich guy” these taxes are. Mitt Romney’s taxes were “normal for a super rich guy.” These are not.

Romney released returns showing he paid

$1.9 million in taxes on $13.69 million in income in 2011, most of it from his investments, for an effective rate of 14.1 percent

You may well have paid more than 14.1%, but $1.9 million is still way more than $750 or zero.

James Fallows:

With near-zero tax payments, either (a) he’s lying about being a business success, or (b) he’s lying to the IRS about his losses. Take your pick.

My own snap reaction to Trump’s precarious finances: If he can hold on to the presidency, he has nothing to worry about. Vladimir Putin is worth plenty of money, and so is MBS. I’m sure they’d be more than willing to prop up a President of the United States.

If he loses the election, though, he might have a problem. That (along with the possibility of going to jail) might be why he refuses to promise a peaceful transfer.

and Amy Coney Barrett

As was widely predicted, here and elsewhere, Trump has nominated Judge Amy Comey Barrett to rise from the Seventh Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court.

She has been on the short list for previous Supreme Court appointments, so all the major court-watching organizations have their points and counterpoints well prepared. Basically, she is the most religiously radical of the Trump nominees. She’s not just Catholic — like five current justices — she belongs to People of Praise, an inter-denominational group that was one of the inspirations for Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The group believes in prophecy, speaking in tongues and divine healings, staples of Pentecostal churches that some Catholics have also adopted in a movement called charismatic renewal. The People of Praise was an early leader in the flowering of that movement in North America. It is ecumenical, but about 90 percent of its members are Catholic.

… Some former members criticize the group for deviating from Catholic doctrine, which does not teach “male headship,” in contrast to some evangelical churches. The personal advisers can be too controlling, the critics say; they may betray confidences, and too often they supplant the role of priest.

Mr. Lent [a PoP leader] said the group’s system of heads and handmaids promotes “brotherhood,” not male dominance. He said the group recently dropped the term “handmaid” in favor of “woman leader.”

“We follow the New Testament pattern of asking men to take on some spiritual responsibility for their families,” he said.

Conservatives are already gearing up their charges of “anti-Catholic bigotry“, but so far there is no substance behind those claims. Literally no one is attacking Barrett for being Catholic.

E. J. Dionne notes the double standard:

It wasn’t the American Civil Liberties Union or some other bastion of liberalism that questioned Joe Biden’s Catholic faith. No, it was a speaker at this year’s GOP convention, former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz, who called Biden a Catholic “in name only” because of Biden’s support for abortion rights. A conservative group called CatholicVote is spending $9.7 million in Michigan, Pennsylvania and other battleground states attacking the devout Biden as an “existential threat” to the church.

And Trump himself rather astonishingly declared that Biden would “hurt God,” and “hurt the Bible,” too. I didn’t hear Pence say anything about Trump’s “intolerance” toward Biden’s faith.

Josh Marshall:

I don’t know a lot about Amy Coney Barrett. But I know she’s accepting nomination from a President actively trying to subvert a national election and threatening to hold on to power by force, an attack on the constitution unparalleled in American history. Do I need to know more?

BTW, I don’t think it’s “bigotry” even if someone suggests that the Court doesn’t need a sixth Catholic. Maybe we could have just a bit of religious diversity, beyond the two Jews and one Episcopalian in the current non-Catholic minority.

If you really want to see religious bigotry, suggest putting an atheist on the Court. Or a Muslim, or a Hindu.

and the lack of Breonna Taylor charges

Wednesday, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron announced the findings of the grand jury in the police shooting of Breonna Taylor in her Louisville apartment on March 13. None of the three police officers were charged with offenses related to Taylor’s death, though one was charged with reckless endangerment because his bullets penetrated a neighboring apartment. (The NYT summarizes the officer’s action: He “fired into the sliding glass patio door and window of Ms. Taylor’s apartment, both of which were covered with blinds, in violation of a department policy that requires officers to have a line of sight.”)

Cameron recounts events one way. Georgetown law professor Paul Butler tells the same story differently in a Washington Post op-ed “I am a former prosecutor. The charge in Breonna Taylor’s death is pathetically weak.” Butler asserts that all three officers should have been charged with manslaughter.

The two accounts agree on certain facts: Breonna Taylor was not a suspect in any crime, but police believed her ex-boyfriend was using her apartment to receive packages that could be drugs. They obtained a search warrant and broke down the door. Taylor’s current boyfriend Kenneth Walker fired once and wounded the first officer through the door. The three officers shot 30 rounds; none hit Walker, but six hit Taylor. There is no body-camera video from any of the three officers.

Police claim they knocked repeatedly and announced themselves as police before breaking down the door. Walker reported being awakened by knocking, but says he believed he was shooting at home invaders, not police with a legitimate warrant. (Walker called 911 and said, “I don’t know what’s happening. Somebody kicked in the door and shot my girlfriend.”) Butler adds this detail:

We know the officers continued to fire long after any threat ceased. A neighbor called 911 to report gunfire, and 68 seconds into the call, you can still hear the shots.

Cameron mentioned the lack of bodycam video, but only as a challenge for investigators to overcome, not as a suspicious detail to interpret against the police. One of the officers who fired was photographed wearing a body-cam holder on his vest. VICE News says: “This contradicts statements by the Louisville Metro Police Department that the officers involved, who work narcotics, do not wear body cameras.”

and the third wave of the virus

The first wave of the virus was centered in the Northeast during March and April. The second wave hit the South and West in June and July. The third wave is attacking the Midwest. The highest per-100K-people new-case rates are in the Dakotas and Wisconsin.

Nationally, the daily new-case rate bottomed out at around 35K two weeks ago, and has risen to 45K. Death rates run 2-3 weeks behind, so we should start seeing an increase there soon.

Governor DeSantis has ended all Covid-19 restrictions in Florida, including placing barriers in the way of local governments having their own restrictions. Bars, movie theaters, sporting events — it’s all fair game now.

Florida’s new-case numbers have flattened out at just under 3,000 a day, and deaths are averaging about 100 per day, with 203 reported on Wednesday. The CDC guidance back in April recommended two weeks of declining numbers before any move to relax restrictions.

More turmoil at the CDC. A week ago Friday it published new guidance about how Covid-19 spreads, saying that virus-carrying aerosol droplets can hang in the air and carry further than the previously recognized six feet. Last Monday it withdrew that guidance.

The CDC said that a draft version of proposed changes had been posted in error. The agency said it was updating information about airborne transmission of covid-19 and would post the new information once the review was completed.

The NYT adds this:

Experts with knowledge of the incident said on Monday that the latest reversal appeared to be a genuine mistake in the agency’s scientific review process, rather than the result of political meddling. Officials said the agency would soon publish revised guidance.

It is a sad fact of the Trump Era that we even need to consider the possibility of political meddling with CDC announcements.

and you also might be interested in …

You may not have noticed, but Trump signed his long-promised executive order on healthcare. Presidents who can’t even unite their own party in Congress can do very little, so this does very little. It is essentially a long list of intentions, without any funding or programmatic change to back them up. Example:

It has been and will continue to be the policy of the United States to give Americans seeking healthcare more choice, lower costs, and better care and to ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions can obtain the insurance of their choice at affordable rates.

Who’s going to provide that insurance and how it will be paid for is not spelled out. It might as well be the policy of the United States to give all American children a pony.

Trump’s executive orders banning anti-racism training in both government agencies and government contractors speak volumes. Being openly racist isn’t acceptable in most of America, but Trump is anti-anti-racist, just like he’s anti-anti-fascist.

A big part of Biden’s electability case during the primaries was that he could draw votes from disaffected Republicans. We won’t know for sure until the election, but he is drawing a considerable number of Republican endorsements — most recently from former Pennsylvania Governor and DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, and from John McCain’s widow. Ridge says this:

Pennsylvania voters, along with voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida, are likely to ultimately determine the next president. So much is at stake. For me, voting is not just a privilege, but a responsibility. And this year, I believe the responsible vote is for Joe Biden. It’s a vote for decency. A vote for the rule of law. And a vote for honest and earnest leadership. It’s time to put country over party. It’s time to dismiss Donald Trump.

and let’s close with something cute

I’ve had cute-puppy weeks, so I guess it’s time for a cute-kitten week. Here’s a kitten who is clearly the reincarnation of a blissed-out yoga master. Meditate on that.

Everything dies. But not today.

On this blog, I usually report news, analyze trends behind the news, and save pastoral counseling for my occasional talks at churches. But this week I’ve been sensing an unusual level of anxiety and depression in the people I interact with, and I imagine that Sift readers are sharing a lot of those feelings. So let’s address that.

If the election were tomorrow rather than five weeks from tomorrow, I think I’d tell you all just to suck it up and think about your own issues later. But five weeks is a long time to stay in the states of mind I’m seeing, and carries risks of longer-term psychological and psychosomatic damage. So I think it makes sense to take a little time to get our heads together before the home stretch.

The depression, I think, has been building for some while, as the virus takes away more and more of what we look forward to in life. (I’m currently wondering if my usual Christmas plans can work out this year. Will I ever get to travel again?) But the anxiety is largely election-related, and increased suddenly this week in response to Barton Gellman’s article in The Atlantic, “The Election that Could Break America“.

Worst cases. I’ll have more to say about the content of that article in this week’s summary post, which should be out a few hours after this one. For now, I’ll just sum up the gist: There are scenarios in which Trump hangs onto power despite the voters’ desire to be rid of him, and he seems to be angling to push the country into those scenarios.

The worries raised by Gellman’s article (and others with similar themes) go well beyond the usual election anxieties: that some last-minute surge of support could carry Trump to an ordinary victory, or even that he might repeat 2016’s dubious achievement of winning the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by a wide margin. Those outcomes would be disappointing, and would have a number of horrible consequences. But at the same time, they would be part of the normal ebb and flow of American politics. If the American people show the bad judgment to re-elect Trump, we’ll just have to work harder to convince them to turn the country in a new direction in future elections.

But if Trump can totally circumvent the will of the people, then something fundamental has changed. In that case, it’s hard to say what we would need to do next time, because this time we already did what we thought we needed to do, and failed anyway. And if the ordinary limits on political power-seeking can be ignored without consequence, then who can have confidence that we will have a chance to do anything at all next time? By 2024, the United States might be the kind of country where the ruling party counts the votes itself, and proclaims that it has been re-elected (for a third term, and then a fourth) by a margin that no one really believes.

In short, if the worst outcomes Gellman pictures come to pass, the American experiment with democracy might be over.

Personally, I don’t believe the worst scenarios will play out. I think the margin Biden has in the polls is real, and that it will hold up as the election approaches. (It’s worth pointing out that we all had the same doubts about the polls going into the Blue Wave of 2018, which played out exactly as the polls predicted.) In 538’s analysis, the current tipping-point state is Pennsylvania, where Republicans have gerrymandered their way into a majority in the legislature. But it’s worth noting that Biden is currently favored in four states beyond that — Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio — any of which might put him over the top. (Arizona would leave Biden 1 vote short, which could come from either Nebraska’s or Maine’s second congressional district.) It’s one thing to imagine one cabal of local Republicans venturing into near-treasonous territory to give Trump another term, but overthrowing democracy in five states simultaneously would be much harder to pull off.

In short, Trump’s anti-democratic tactics may nudge the dial a little, or even more than a little, but still not enough to overcome a decisive message from the electorate. As Michelle Goldberg has pointed out, his strongman talk is a sign of weakness, not of strength.

Autocrats who actually have the power to fix elections don’t announce their plans to do it; they just pretend to have gotten 99 percent of the vote.

And as many people have observed: You don’t question the legitimacy of an election you expect to win. Further: “I’m going to stay in power no matter what you think” is hardly a closing message designed to convince undecided voters.

But having said that, I don’t deny the possibilities Gellman lays out, and I don’t recommend you simply put them out of your mind. There is a chance — not a likelihood, in my opinion, but a chance — that we are living in the last days of American democracy.

It’s no wonder that people are telling me they lose sleep about that. That loss of sleep is the problem I want to address.

Anxiety and denial. It’s not that you have nothing to worry about, but being low-level anxious all the time — or occasionally going into high-level anxiety and melting into a puddle — is not a useful response. No one is better off because you’re not sleeping.

So what’s a better response? Let’s start by thinking about what anxiety is and what it’s for. People in the middle of emergencies typically don’t get anxious. If your child starts to run in front of a car, you don’t get anxious, you reach out and snatch her back from the path of the car — and maybe shake for a while afterwards about what might have happened. When the wolves are chasing you, you just run, and your mind is filled with nothing but running.

In short, when you really can fight or flee, you fight or flee. Anxiety happens when you get a fight-or-flight reaction that you can’t immediately act on. You hear that a lay-off is coming at work, but who can you fight and where can you run? You just have to wait and see what happens.

Anxiety is fight-or-flight on hold. It keeps you keyed up in case you have to fight or flee soon.

And that was a fine reaction when our primitive ancestors saw a motion in the grass and had to wait a bit for more information about what it was. But it’s poorly adapted to civilized times, when problems play out over months or years. Staying keyed up for months or years will kill you just as surely as whatever might be hiding in the grass.

That’s why denial is such a popular alternative. As the 19th century philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce put it: “When an ostrich buries its head in the sand as danger approaches, it very likely takes the happiest course.”

The downside of denial is that it makes you useless, both to yourself and to others. That’s been the problem with the Trump administration’s response to coronavirus. From the top on down, they have assured us that it isn’t that bad and will go away soon, so nobody has to do anything they don’t want to do. And everybody is doing a great job, so there’s no need for recriminations and nothing to stress over. In the short term, their it’s-all-fine denial may be more pleasant than acknowledging the reality of the danger, but it has been a big factor in the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans.

The reason anxiety is unpleasant is that it’s a promissory note: We owe the future some action, and we’re keyed up so that we don’t forget.

Perhaps the most dysfunctional role for anxiety, though, is that it can become an end in itself: We’re not keyed up to do something, we’re keyed up to punish ourselves for not doing something. We hang the promissory note on the wall, not because we’re going to pay it, but so that we can feel guilty about not paying it.

That kind of self-punishment serves no one. You might as well be in denial. You’d be happier and the rest of the world would be no different.

So what should we do? The best response to chronic anxiety, in my opinion, is to kluge together a combination of action and denial.

Years ago, when I was first starting to make money I could invest towards retirement — thank you, younger self — I found myself worrying about my fledgling portfolio nearly every day. Not just checking stock prices, but wondering if my whole approach was right. Eventually I realized that daily reconsideration of my strategy was an extremely inefficient use of my attention. Rather than worry for a few minutes here or there every day, what I really needed to do was set aside some serious thinking time about once a quarter.

So I set a date to think things through in depth, and I kept that appointment. I did that every three months. In between, I might watch the market in a casual way, but I cut myself off every time I started to fret. “I have set aside a time to think that through properly, and that approach is going to work  better than anything I could figure out while I’m standing here waiting for the tea kettle to boil.”

I recommend something similar now. Using the stray moments of your attention to think about the looming end of American democracy is not going to serve either you or the nation. Instead, block out a time on your calendar (within the next few days, I suggest) to think seriously about the question: “What am I willing to do to keep Trump from hanging onto power?” Are you willing to send money to the Biden campaign or some other political group? Volunteer? Call your friends and encourage them to vote? Write or call your representatives in Congress? Write letters to the editor? Post on social media? Demonstrate against anti-democratic actions, either at your state capitol or in Washington?

Maybe all you’re willing to do is vote. OK, admit that and figure out how you’re going to do it. Are you registered? Where is your polling place? How does early voting or voting-by-mail work in your state? Don’t let your inability to take some grand action get in the way of the little you can actually do.

Once you have your list of actions, start doing them, and set aside another block of time in a week or two to think about how it’s going. Is it enough? Is it already more than I can handle? Should I correct my approach somehow?

But once you’ve decided what you’re doing and are in the process of doing it, tell your anxiety to go away. You’ve set aside a time to think about it, but that time is not now. So STFU, monkey mind. I’m working on it; it’s all going to be fine.

Plan. Do. Then do your best to put it out of your mind until it’s time to replan. Are you feeling guilty that you’re not doing enough? Make a note of that, so you can think about it during your next planning session. But don’t think about it now. You’ve already dealt with it.

When it’s time for me to be the fox, I’m the fox. But when it’s not, I’m the ostrich, and I take the happier course.

Accepting limitation. You may already be raising this objection: The problem with telling yourself “I’ve already dealt with that” is that you really haven’t. Write your check, make your phone calls, plan your march on Washington — and Donald Trump is still out there, still in power, and still plotting to hang onto power no matter what the voters want.

When you realize that, you may find yourself thinking: “As long as Trump’s coup is still possible, I haven’t done enough.”

That way lies madness. Because you are an individual, and the problems of the world are out of your scale. You’re not going to stop Trump by yourself, just like you’re not going to stop global warming or end racism. You can play a part in those stories and I hope you do. I hope you never stop looking for some way to play a bigger part (at sensible intervals, and not for a few minutes several times every day). But you are not the solution. At some point, you have to do what you’re going to do and let it go, trusting the rest of us to play our parts, and trusting God or the Universe or whatever powers work on higher scales to make things come out right.

Because you can’t guarantee a happy ending. The World is not Your Story.

So figure out what you’re going to do, do it, and then let it go.

Accepting fate. It may not shock you to learn that my midlife crisis was more philosophical than most. It wasn’t just that I had a growing bald spot or was losing my vertical leap, although those things were certainly happening. And it wasn’t even the realization that I was going to decline and die, which we all understand at some level, but don’t fully grok until the downhill path starts to open up in front of us.

My midlife crisis centered on the larger realization that none of the substitutes for personal immortality work either: All the people whose lives you change will die too. The organizations and institutions you serve may outlive you for some while, but not forever; in time, they also will collapse. Someday, the last of your descendants will die. Ultimately, civilization will fall, humanity will go extinct, the Sun will swallow up the Earth, and the Universe itself will go cold.

It’s the Ozymandias problem: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

Why am I mentioning this now? Because the possibility of a Trump coup is causing a lot of Americans to see for the first time that our democracy is mortal. And that vision can raise a primitive terror even bigger than the prospect of living under some tinhorn dictator, as people around the world have been doing since the beginning of Time.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Ever. Not to us.

But it might.

My midlife crisis and its resolution were bracketed not by insights from deep philosophers, but by two quotes from TV shows. At some point in The X-Files, an otherworldly character makes a matter-of-fact statement to the series’ main character: “Everything dies, Mr. Mulder.”

And in Game of Thrones, young Arya Stark mentions to her swordmaster that she has been praying to the gods. “For us,” says the master, “there is only one god. His name is Death, and we have only one thing to say to him: Not today.”

These days, I always hold those two quotes in mind. The thought that we might be living in the last days of American democracy is indeed horrible. But it shouldn’t be unthinkable, because it’s going to happen someday. Everything dies, and that includes the Constitution.

But the inevitability of Death doesn’t undo the lives we are living. We can’t save anything forever, but we can say “Not today.” And we can struggle to make good on that vow.

American democracy will die someday, because everything does. But not today. Not on November 3. Not on January 20.

That’s what we’re fighting for.

So figure out what you’re going to do, and go do it. But then let it go and live, because you’re not dying today either.

I don’t know if you felt it, but a wave of anxiety went through the country in response to Barton Gellman’s Atlantic article “The Election That Could Break America“. It’s one thing to worry about a Biden collapse or Trump voters who have been lying to the pollsters. But it’s another thing entirely to worry about the ways Trump could circumvent the People, and stay in power despite the voters’ desire to get rid of him.

Gellman’s article raises two problems, which I’ll try to address in two ways. There are the practical considerations, the what-can-I-do-to-prepare stuff, which I don’t have completely knocked, but will try to address in the weekly summary.

Simultaneously, though, there’s the psychological challenge of it all. How are we going to deal with five more weeks of this kind of anxiety? That’s the subject of the featured article “Staying Sane in Anxious Times (without being useless)”, which should be out soon.

As I’ve said before, “Another week, another damaging Trump exposé.” This week the NYT has gotten several years of his tax information, which show that he pays less tax than you probably do. New Republicans have announced for Biden. The police who killed Breonna Taylor face no consequences. The virus is ramping up a third wave, just as Florida withdraws all restrictions. Trump issued a meaningless executive order on healthcare. And we all steel ourselves for tomorrow’s debate.

I’ll imagine the summary going out sometime between noon and one EDT.

The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people — because he rejects evidence and science.

– “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden“

This week’s featured post is “The Illegitimacy of a Conservative Supreme Court“.

This week everybody was talking about Justice Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday at the age of 87.

Anyone who reads the major Supreme Court decisions, as I have been doing since I started this blog, develops opinions about the thinking abilities and writing styles of the justices. Justice Kennedy, for example, used to drive me nuts, even when I agreed with what he had decided. The reason so many gay-rights cases had to go all the way to the Supreme Court was that Kennedy’s majority opinions — despite their marvelous rhetorical flourishes — never got around to stating clear principles that lower-court judges could confidently apply to future cases. Invariably, two appeals courts would apply his decision in two different ways, and only new Supreme Court ruling could straighten the situation out.

Chief Justice Roberts can do good law when he wants to, but often he has some other agenda. His opinion striking down the heart of the Voting Rights Act mainly rested on the notion that “things have changed” since the original version of the Act was passed — a political point some conservative senator should have made during the vote to reauthorize the Act, but not a legal principle that should have influenced the Court. Justice Alito I have no respect for at all; in every case I have read, he wants a certain outcome and will say whatever is needed to get there.

Ginsburg’s opinions, though, have consistently been my favorites. Beyond the fact that I have generally agreed with her in principle, I never came away from a Ginsburg opinion wondering what it really meant or how she arrived at that conclusion. She always defined her terms clearly, and recounted the precedents that had shaped their meanings through time. She rooted her statements in facts rather than rhetoric. Some of her best opinions have been dissents. I greatly appreciated her demolition of Alito’s Hobby Lobby decision and Roberts’ VRA decision. Those are both sterling examples of how a legal mind should work.

I can tell I’m hurting when I start generating fantasy-novel alternative histories. Why couldn’t some billionaire have whisked Ginsburg away to his private island for some hush-hush new “treatment”, then covered up her death until January?

and what comes next

Yes, we all remember Mitch McConnell refusing to give Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland a hearing because an election was coming up. Garland was nominated in March, 2016, and there was plenty of time to consider his nomination, but McConnell wanted to steal the seat for the next president.

Even at the time, no one really believed McConnell was standing on principle, and now it is clear that he was not. He has already said that the Senate will vote on a Trump nominee. Two Republican senators — Murkowski and Collins — have said the vote should not be held, but McConnell can afford to lose one more, and he probably won’t.

Trump has promised a nominee soon and says it will be a woman. (Remember how he criticized Joe Biden for restricting his VP candidates to women?) Probably that means Amy Coney Barrett. Having talked (in the featured post) about the pointlessness of speculation, I’ll make a prediction: Republicans have the votes and have no shame, so they’ll get it done. Probably they’ll do the hearings before the election, and hold the vote during the lame duck session. That will allow Susan Collins to wring her hands during the campaign, but fall into line for the vote.

Some are speculating that this helps Trump, but I don’t see it. The issues facing the Court, especially abortion rights, are ones where the public agrees more with Biden.

and Trump undermining his own government

A series of government experts said sensible things, only to have Trump contradict them.

CDC chief Robert Redfield told a Senate hearing:

I think there will be vaccine that will initially be available some time between November and December, but very limited supply, and it will have to be prioritized. If you’re asking me when is it going to be generally available to the American public so we can begin to take advantage of vaccine to get back to our regular life, I think we’re probably looking at late second quarter, third quarter 2021.

He also said that face masks are “the most important, powerful public health tool we have”.

Trump said Redfield was “confused“, because of course Trump knows more about vaccines than the head of the CDC.

Apparently the CDC is not in charge of its own website, and White House political appointees can publish things in the CDC’s name.

A heavily criticized recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month about who should be tested for the coronavirus was not written by C.D.C. scientists and was posted to the agency’s website despite their serious objections, according to several people familiar with the matter as well as internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

… Similarly, a document, arguing for “the importance of reopening schools,” was also dropped into the C.D.C. website by the Department of Health and Human Services in July and is sharply out of step with the C.D.C.’s usual neutral and scientific tone, the officials said.

The information comes mere days after revelations that political appointees at H.H.S. meddled with the C.D.C.’s vaunted weekly reports on scientific research.

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress that Antifa — which Trump and conservative media has turned into a boogy-man responsible for all kinds of nefarious and violent activity — is “not a group or an organization. It’s a movement or an ideology.”

Trump immediately had to contradict him, because he knows more about Antifa than the FBI:

And I look at them as a bunch of well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS who are protected because the Comey/Mueller inspired FBI is simply unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source, and allows them to get away with “murder”.

I’m not sure what “murder” is supposed to mean, and I’m always mystified by the “well-funded” part of the conspiracy theory. What does Antifa do that requires money?

and Republicans turning on Trump (sort of)

It’s hard to know what to make of the NYT op-ed “What’s At Stake in This Election? The American Democratic Experiment” written by Trump’s former Director of National lntelligence Dan Coats.

His main premise is certainly valid: For our system of government to work, the American people need to believe that the elections they vote in are legitimate.

Our democracy’s enemies, foreign and domestic, want us to concede in advance that our voting systems are faulty or fraudulent; that sinister conspiracies have distorted the political will of the people; that our public discourse has been perverted by the news media and social networks riddled with prejudice, lies and ill will; that judicial institutions, law enforcement and even national security have been twisted, misused and misdirected to create anxiety and conflict, not justice and social peace.

If those are the results of this tumultuous election year, we are lost, no matter which candidate wins. No American, and certainly no American leader, should want such an outcome.

But his bipartisan view-from-nowhere loses credibility when he can’t state the obvious: The current American leader does want such an outcome. Trailing badly in the polls, Trump works tirelessly to sow doubt about the possibility of a fair election. Without offering evidence of any kind, he proclaims that if he loses, the election is a fraud. He claims mail-in voting can’t be trusted, despite the fact that it has been used for years in states as politically different as Oregon and Utah, without any of the problems Trump predicts. Avoiding the mail by using drop-boxes, Trump says, is also a “voter security disaster”. He warns that the election won’t be decided “until two months later“, during which time “lots of things will happen”.

In every case, Trump offers no solution other than “Don’t do it.” Don’t vote by mail. Don’t use a dropbox. Don’t vote early. Don’t open more polling stations. Don’t appropriate money to help election officials in any way. Just don’t do it. If you’re afraid to wait in a long line on Election Day, don’t vote.

Whenever he has been asked for evidence to support his wild claims, he has failed to produce any. Early in his administration, he assembled a commission for the sole purpose of proving that he didn’t really lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016. The commission disbanded without issuing a report, having found nothing to back up Trump’s charge that 3-5 million fraudulent votes — or any significant number of fraudulent votes — were cast.

Coats’ call for Congress to establish a “supremely high-level bipartisan and nonpartisan commission to oversee the election” will go nowhere, because establishing it will become a partisan issue. Even if it could be established, Trump would denounce it too as soon as it blessed the legitimacy of an election he lost. The “supremely bipartisan and nonpartisan commission” would be just another manifestation of the Deep State.

The root of Coats’ vision — members of both parties coming together to save American democracy — is already flawed. Democrats are for democracy and Republicans are not; that’s where we’ve gotten to. If Coats wants to save democracy, he needs to support Biden. Nothing short of that will make the slightest difference.

Olivia Troye, who worked as homeland security, counterterrorism and coronavirus adviser to Vice President Pence for two years, has made a video for Republican Voters Against Trump.

and you also might be interested in …

Scientific publications that usually stay out of national politics feel like they have to weigh in. Science has an editorial “Trump Lied About Science“.

Over the years, this page has commented on the scientific foibles of U.S. presidents. Inadequate action on climate change and environmental degradation during both Republican and Democratic administrations have been criticized frequently. Editorials have bemoaned endorsements by presidents on teaching intelligent design, creationism, and other antiscience in public schools. These matters are still important. But now, a U.S. president has deliberately lied about science in a way that was imminently dangerous to human health and directly led to widespread deaths of Americans.

This may be the most shameful moment in the history of U.S. science policy.

And Scientific American endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in its 175-year history.

The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges. That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment.

Bill Barr’s Department of Trump is once again following the Leader’s instructions: It has opened a criminal investigation of John Bolton for blaspheming against the Leader in his book The Room Where It Happened.

Since Trump blasphemy is not yet in the legal code, the purported charge a grand jury has been impaneled to investigate is revealing classified information. The basic facts are well understood: Bolton submitted his manuscript for government review, and was told by the reviewer that his edits had satisfied her objections. But when an official OK was slow to materialize, Bolton published anyway. The administration sued to stop distribution of the book and lost.

The basis of the dispute is why the OK never came. The administration claims the manuscript still contained classified information; Bolton says Trump wanted to delay publication until after the election.

In general, classified-information cases are difficult for the public to judge. (Example: the Clinton email investigation.) If Bolton really has revealed classified information, the government can’t just point to a line in the book and say: “There”, because that announcement in itself would violate security. (When I was being taught about classification in my old job, the instructor told us about an article in Aviation Week that gave the specs of a new aircraft. Someone who had inside knowledge of the program had gone through the article with a highlighter, picking out the classified information. Those highlights made that copy of the article a classified document, despite the fact that the underlying article had already been published. The specs were just a rumor until the insider’s highlights verified them. It’s a little like the stoning scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where the prosecutor gets stoned for repeating what the blasphemer said.)

And from the outside, it’s often hard to tell whether a fact is classified or not. Publishing the nuclear codes would be obvious, but there also might be good reasons why the government doesn’t want some apparently innocuous detail to get out, like that a particular official was in a certain city on a certain day.

On the other hand, Trump has made ridiculous claims about classified information in the past, and in particular with regard to Bolton and his book.

I will consider every conversation with me, as president, highly classified. So that would mean that if he wrote a book and if the book gets out, he’s broken the law. And I would think that he would have criminal problems. I hope so.

With all those caveats in mind, this investigation looks bad. It has all the appearances of using the Justice Department to persecute a political enemy, and to intimidate any Trump insiders who might turn against the Leader in the future.

Another credible sexual assault charge against Trump. Every week seems to have new revelations. I think people realize we’re at a speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-peace point with Trump. In 2016, you could imagine that he would lose anyway, so your story didn’t need to reach the public. This year, with the possible end of democracy staring us in the face, those people are coming forward.

It looks like TikTok will continue to operate in the US. Trump has indicated acceptance of a deal in which a new US-centered TikTok Global will be owned 80% by the Chinese company ByteDance (the previous owner of TikTok) and 20% by an Oracle/Walmart consortium.

Wired comments:

From the beginning, Trump’s strategy for TikTok, like so many things, was messy and incoherent. For weeks, the president said that only selling the app to an American company would alleviate national security concerns. Now, the deal with Oracle is being described as merely a “partnership,” which caused Republican lawmakers to call for its rejection.

… All along, the administration has failed to provide evidence that TikTok, which employs over 1,000 people in the United States, was doing anything particularly nefarious. The company, as well as outside security researchers, have said TikTok’s data collection practices are in line with those of similar domestic social media platforms. “Here we are banging on the table that we are the ones who have rule of law,” says Jason Healey, a senior research scholar at Columbia University specializing in cyber conflict. “Then where is the evidence?”

Maybe there are real national security issues and maybe this arrangement solves them. Or maybe Trump is doing some kind of shakedown. I wish we had a president I could trust.

There is some confused rumbling about Oracle/Walmart contributing $5 billion to an education fund, which may or may not be the “1776 Project” Trump wants to indoctrinate American schoolchildren with “patriotic education”. Or maybe the project and the money alike are part of Trump’s alternative reality.

You know which corporate giant is pledging to “achieve zero emissions across our global operations by 2040 … without relying on carbon offsets”? Walmart.

Whenever you hear an announcement like this, you always have to wonder how seriously to take it. Corporations have a way of doing whatever they were going to do anyway and calling it “green”. But even though I don’t trust Walmart, I do trust Vox’ environmental writer David Roberts, who tweets:

Wal-Mart is not The Libs. It’s not doing something this big to virtue signal or appeal to a particular upscale market niche (those are just gravy). It’s doing this because it’s going to save a shitload of money.

Maybe that’s where we are now: solar-paneling your big flat roof, fleets of electric vehicles, and so on — maybe that’s just good cost management.

The Big Ten has reversed itself and is now planning to start its football season on October 23.

and let’s close with something rewarding

The Daily Show announces the first (and hopefully only) Pandemmy Awards “celebrating the most breathtaking achievements of this pandemic season”. You can still vote for the winners, who will be announced on tonight’s show.

A minority-elected President and a minority-elected Senate “majority” might cement an unpopular Supreme Court majority for decades to come — and such a Court might bless the tricks that will allow the further expansion of minority rule.

The death of liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the likelihood that President Trump and the Republican Senate will replace her with an extreme conservative, creating a 6-3 conservative majority on the Court, raises a number of immediate questions: Can Democrats slow the process down somehow, so that Ginsburg will be replaced by a new president and a new Senate in January? Can Republicans be shamed by the hypocrisy of confirming Trump’s nominee so close to the election (after denying President Obama a Supreme Court appointment much further from the election) that they will forego a confirmation vote? If not, as is almost certain, can four Republican senators be pealed off to prevent Trump’s nominee from being confirmed? And so on.

Speculation. This kind of speculation is addictive, but of limited use. News channels love it, because the production cost of speculation is near zero — just bring your usual talking heads together and turn them loose. Viewers easily get obsessed with it, because speculation appeals to both our hopes and our fears. (Maybe something awful will happen. Or maybe we’ll be saved.) Pundits get to demonstrate their superior savvy by crafting complex House-of-Cards-style scenarios based on loopholes in the rules that lesser pundits haven’t noticed.

And in the end, what does it matter whether or not we divine the future? The useful actions we might take — expressing our desires both publicly and privately, putting pressure on our elected representatives, giving time or money to campaigns, or convincing our neighbors to share our opinions — don’t depend on knowing the future. We could just do them without knowing how they’ll come out.

Living with uncertainty is uncomfortable, but it is honest, because we don’t actually know what’s going to happen. We almost never need to know. We would all be more effective forces for justice and democracy if we spent less time speculating about events beyond our control and more time planning our actions.

Bearing in mind the pointlessness of being an armchair tactician, I want to back up and look at the larger picture: Why is the current situation a problem? Supreme Court justices, like all the leading voices in our Republic, are supposed to come and go. The Constitution defines a process by which our elected representatives replace them.

That process has gone wrong. In the long term, that’s the real problem.

Recent trends have emphasized the anti-democratic nature of our constitutional system, and the worst aspects of those trends have coalesced around the Supreme Court, creating a Court that is far more conservative than the American people. As that conservative Court increasingly excuses minority-rule tactics of gerrymandering and voter suppression, a vicious cycle has developed that threatens the legitimacy of both the Court and the government as a whole.

Democracy and the Founders. When the Constitution was written, large-scale democracy was still an untried notion. England, for example, had a Parliament, but it shared power with the King, and its electorate was still fairly small. (Universal suffrage even for men wasn’t achieved until 1918.) The Founders themselves were of two minds: The sovereignty of the People was good, but “mob rule” was bad.

The Constitution was an attempt to thread that needle. All power did eventually come from the People (minus women and non-white people), and if the (white male) People held an opinion consistently over time, they would eventually get their way. But in practice a number of institutional dams were built to control the floods of public opinion:

• The President was chosen by an electoral college, and not by popular vote. Popular vote was not even tabulated until John Quincy Adams’ election in 1824 — and he lost that popular vote by a considerable margin to Andrew Jackson.
• Senators were not only allocated equally to all states regardless of size, but were chosen by the state legislatures rather than direct election. Popular election of senators was established by the 17th Amendment, which wasn’t ratified until 1913.
• Supreme Court justices were appointed for life, and became completely insulated from the electorate once they were seated. They were nominated by presidents and approved by the Senate, and so were already fairly distant from the people.

In short, not only could you not vote on Supreme Court justices, you couldn’t even vote directly for anybody involved in choosing Supreme Court justices.

The era when it didn’t matter. Over time, the entire Western world got more comfortable with democracy. Suffrage gradually expanded, as religious tests and property tests were eliminated, and finally women and racial minorities were allowed to vote. Monarchies were either overthrown or turned into showpieces. Anti-democratic institutions like the House of Lords gradually lost their power.

In the US, voters got the right to elect senators, but the rest of the anti-democratic structure remained intact. It wasn’t eliminated largely because it didn’t matter: Presidential candidates who won the popular vote won the Electoral College as well, and parties that won the House typically won the Senate also.

Oversimplifying just a bit, the anti-democratic features of our system didn’t matter because the major conflicts were regional: the North against the South, or the East against the West. To the extent that they weren’t regional, the same sorts of issues played out in large and small states alike. As recently as the 1970s, South Dakota and Idaho produced liberal icons like George McGovern and Frank Church, while New York could elect a conservative like James Buckley.

A final factor: Until the 90s, California was a swing state. The same factors that turned an election in California were likely playing out all over the country.

Why it matters now. The big divide in the country today is urban vs. rural. Even in a red state like Texas, which Trump won by 9% in 2016, the big cities — Houston, Dallas, San Antonio — voted Democratic. Other red-state cities, like Louisville, Nashville, and Atlanta, went Democratic as well.

Largely this split reflects another split: white vs. non-white. Rural populations are overwhelmingly white, urban populations overwhelmingly non-white.

Small states are small precisely because they don’t have big cities. (Rhode Island, where the Providence metro area has more people than the state itself, is the exception.) So a system that favors small states favors rural interests. In the current environment, small-state privilege means white privilege and Republican advantage.

Meanwhile, the biggest state, California, has shifted far to the left of the rest of the country. Hillary Clinton won California in 2016 by 4.3 million votes. In the rest of the US, Trump had a 1.5 million vote advantage.

The result is that the Electoral College has overruled the voters twice in the last five elections, after not causing any problems since 1876. Both times it gave us Republican presidents who led the country into major disasters: George W. Bush (the Iraq War and the Great Recession) and Donald Trump (Covid-19).

The Senate has become increasingly difficult for Democrats to win, even when the majority of voters back them. Nate Silver has done the numbers on this.

At FiveThirtyEight, our favorite way to distinguish between urban and rural areas is based on using census tracts to estimate how many people live within a 5-mile radius of you. Based on this, we can break every person in the country down into four buckets:

• Rural: Less than 25,000 people live within a 5-mile radius of you;
• Exurban or small town: Between 25,000 and 100,000 people within a 5-mile radius;
• Suburban or small city: Between 100,000 and 250,000 people within a 5-mile radius;
• Urban core or large city: More than 250,000 people within a 5-mile radius.

As it happens, the overall U.S. population (including Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico) is split almost exactly evenly between these buckets: 25 percent rural, 23 percent exurban/small town, 27 percent suburban/small city, and 25 percent urban core/large city.

But when Silver constructs, the “average state” — weighing small states the same as big states — he gets very different numbers: 35% rural, 14% urban core.

In the U.S. as a whole, 60 percent of the population is non-Hispanic white and 40 percent of the population is nonwhite. But in the average state, 68 percent of people are white and 32 percent are nonwhite.

Another way to get at the same issue is to look at how many Americans the current Republican Senate majority actually represents. (I did this same calculation on my own before realizing that Silver had already done it.)

[D]espite their current 47-53 deficit in the Senate, Democratic senators actually represent slightly more people than Republicans. If you divide the U.S. population by which party represents it in the Senate — splitting credit 50-50 in the case of states such as Ohio that have one senator from each party — you wind up with 167 million Americans represented by Democratic senators and 160 million by Republicans.

In other words, a truly representative Senate would have a 51-49 Democratic majority, not a 53-47 Republican majority. After looking at various other sorts of data, he concludes:

the Senate is effectively 6 to 7 percentage points redder than the country as a whole, which means that Democrats are likely to win it only in the event of a near-landslide in their favor nationally.

What this means for the Supreme Court. Democrats have won the presidential popular vote in six of the last seven elections, but have only gotten to take office four times. This year, Trump’s hopes for re-election hinge on repeating his 2016 path: squeaking out an Electoral College majority from a voting minority. Silver estimates that Biden has to win the popular vote by 3-4% to be confident of taking office.

Similarly, to win the Senate, Democrats will have to win at least two seats in traditionally red states like Arizona, North Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, or Montana.

In other words, the Constitutional mechanisms that were supposed to insulate the Court from mercurial swings in public opinion now serve to insulate them from the People’s sovereignty entirely. If the People split 50/50, the Court will be conservative.

The current travesty. A minority-elected President and a minority-elected Senate “majority” are now in position to appoint their third Supreme Court justice, and establish a 6-3 conservative tilt. The current conservative justices are Clarence Thomas (age 72), Samuel Alito (70), John Roberts (65), Brett Kavanaugh (55), and Neil Gorsuch (53). Add another young justice, like Amy Coney Barrett (48), and it is not hard to imagine another 15 years going by before a liberal or even moderate Court majority is possible — no matter what the voters want.

Worse, the Court has become part of a vicious cycle: Because of its partisan Republican leanings, the Court is already unwilling to defend voting rights. Chief Justice Roberts eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in 2013, and the Court has given a green light to partisan gerrymandering. We already see the result of this at the state level: In states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, control of the legislature is out of the reach of Democratic voters, even when they form a clear majority. Republicans regularly win 13 of Pennsylvania’s 18 seats in the House of Representatives, despite getting fewer total votes.

The United States caught in a downward spiral: Republicans empowered by a rigged system rig the system further.

Extreme action is justified. If Joe Biden wins the presidency and Democrats take the Senate, they should take action to reverse the structural rigging. Republicans and their captive media will paint these actions as extreme, but they are both justified and necessary:

• Eliminate the Senate filibuster. With luck Democrats will have 51 votes. If it takes 60 to get anything done, nothing will get done.
• Make states out of the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. In addition to just being the right thing to do — taxation without representation is tyranny — this would help reverse the conservative rigging of the Senate and the Electoral College.
• Pass voting rights laws. Gerrymandering and voter suppression can be outlawed by statute, even if the Court believes they are constitutional.
• Add seats to the Supreme Court. The size of the Supreme Court is not in the Constitution and does not take a constitutional amendment to change. This will open a huge can of worms, but not doing it is the worse alternative.

Just when you think you’ve seen the worst of 2020, it hits us with something else. Friday, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, sparking yet another Supreme Court nomination battle and threatening to cement Trump’s legal legacy with a 6-3 conservative majority.

At moments like this, it’s tempting to indulge in speculation: What will Trump and McConnell do? What tactics can the Democrats use? How will the battle affect the presidential election or the various Senate races? I can’t totally resist that urge myself, but I recognize it as mostly a waste of effort: We’ll know soon enough, and whether we have speculated right or wrong probably won’t help us respond.

What I want to do instead this morning is use the Court as an example of a larger point: We are living under a system of minority rule. Because of the Electoral College, we elected a president with only 46% of the vote, in spite of another candidate getting 48%. The institutional structure of the Senate, meanwhile, inflates the value of rural conservative votes, so that Mitch McConnell can be “majority” leader, in spite of the fact that his senators represent a minority of the nation’s population.

Because the House plays no role in choosing federal judges, McConnell and Trump are able to pack the judicial branch with conservatives who not only are out of step with a majority of the country, but who in turn reinforce minority rule by refusing to protect voting rights.

I’ll flesh that argument out, with a little quantitative help from Nate Silver, in this week’s featured post “The Illegitimacy of a Conservative Supreme Court”. That should be out around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will mourn Justice Ginsburg, indulge in some speculation about what happens next, and try to at least touch the bases on the week’s other major stories. That should be out by 1.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.

– Winston Churchill

It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.

– Donald Trump

There is no featured post this week.

This week everybody was talking about the wildfires in the West

The fires are still being battled in California, Oregon, and other western states. I’m not going to try to cover the breaking news: Here’s CNN’s latest.

Even in a year with so many signs of the Apocalypse that we joke about it, the smoke-filled orange skies of San Francisco stand out. The local ABC TV station shot a drone video at 10 a.m. on Wednesday.

This shot of the Golden Gate Bridge was taken about an hour later.

Air quality measures in parts of Oregon and California have literally been off the charts.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index – or AQI – measures air pollution on a scale of one to 500, with lower numbers indicating healthier air. A reading over 200 is considered “very unhealthy” for humans. Above 300 is considered “Hazardous.” On Wednesday afternoon, AQI readings along the I-5 corridor in Oregon hit 599 on the EPA’s map for Oregon, and upwards of 700 in some locations on the popular PurpleAir monitoring site.

Grist explains the health hazzard:

The problem is all the fine particulate matter that’s being generated by the West Coast wildfires. These particles get suspended in the air and can cause health problems when they’re inhaled. The smallest particles — known as PM 2.5 — are especially concerning, since the body can’t filter them out.

“The 2.5 will just cruise past everything in your nose,” said Amy MacPherson, a public information officer for the California Air Resources Board. These particles can get lodged in people’s lungs, she explained, “and if they’re even smaller than that they can get into your bloodstream.” Health effects include an increased chance of cardiac arrhythmias, asthma attacks, and heart attacks.

These are all major concerns for a particulate matter AQI value as low as 300. It’s unclear what could happen to human health with an AQI that more than doubles that number.

Lest you think those off-the-charts air quality index readings were in obscure smoke-collecting valleys, it also went over 500 in Portland.

Right-wing disinformation is becoming a permanent part of the landscape: Q-Anon and numerous other conservative voices have been pushing the false rumor that Antifa agents have been arrested for starting the fires.

The next note talks about the things Trump wants or doesn’t want the public to panic about: Don’t panic about real threats like Covid-19; do panic about Mexican rapists and caravans of migrant “invaders” and planeloads of Antifa terrorists headed for your town to start a riot.

One of the real threats he doesn’t want the public to lose sleep over is climate change, which creates the conditions that produce massive wildfires. He does seem to have stopped calling climate change a “hoax” (though with him you can never tell when a zombie lie will rise again). Instead, he just doesn’t mention it, as if he could make it go away by refusing to talk about it.

I had planned to demonstrate how little Trump cares about climate change by quoting the Issues section of his campaign web site, but instead I made an even more startling discovery: There is no Issues section of the Trump 2020 web site. Instead, there is an entirely backward-looking “Promises Kept” page promoting Trump’s “accomplishments” while stating no intentions or goals for a second term — just like the 2020 Republican platform, which is the 2016 platform.

Anyway, the “Energy and Environment” page of Promises Kept — can’t let the Environment steal top billing from Energy — does not contain the word “climate”. It mentions “greenhouse gases” only once: in a claim that Trump’s Affordable Clean Energy plan will reduce greenhouse gases. (The claim is false.) The page does brag about rescinding Obama’s “costly” regulations, many of which were intended to reduce America’s contribution to climate change. (The methane emissions regulation, for example.) But the only thing to know about these regulations is that they cost somebody something; what they might have achieved is not discussed.

While we’re talking about “promises kept”, the NYT’s Nicholas Kristoff evaluates:

• The Wall isn’t built.
• Mexico isn’t paying for it.
• Undocumented immigrants are still here
• If the “crime and violence” had “soon” gone away, as he promised, he wouldn’t be running on law and order again.
• Instead of defending the lives of Americans, he bears a lot of responsibility for the 195K dead of Covid.
• He made the burden of student loans heavier, not lighter.
• He neither repealed ObamaCare nor presented any plan for replacing it.
• Five million jobs have been lost since the start of his administration.
• Rather than “drain the swamp”, his administration has eviscerated ethics rules, and eight of his associates have been either accused or convicted of crimes.
• He fulfilled his promise to appoint a lot of conservative judges.
• He promised “the truth” and delivered an unprecedented number of lies.
• He never tried to pass an infrastructure bill.
• His tax cut mainly benefits the rich, not the middle class.
• Rather than pay off the national debt, he has seen it increase from $19 trillion to $26 trillion.
• He did increase the military budget, as he promised.
• ISIS was defeated, largely by continuing the strategy Obama left behind.
• There is still no peace between Israel and Palestine.
• He claimed “nobody will be pushing us around”, but Vladimir Putin leads Trump by the nose.

and the Woodward book

Another week, another damaging Trump exposé. This week, it’s Bob Woodward’s Rage, which is based on 18 on-the-record conversations with Trump, all on tape. So we can skip the did-he-really-say-that part of last week’s exposé, the Atlantic article that has him calling American soldiers killed in combat “losers” and “suckers”.

Here’s the most frequently quoted revelation:

“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a Feb. 7 call. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”

“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.

At that time, Trump was telling the nation that the virus was no worse than a seasonal flu, predicting it would soon disappear and insisting that the U.S. government had it totally under control. It would be several weeks before he would publicly acknowledge that the virus was no ordinary flu and that it could be transmitted through the air.

Trump admitted to Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Woodward assesses the damage:

Trump never did seem willing to fully mobilize the federal government and continually seemed to push problems off on the states. There was no real management theory of the case or how to organize a massive enterprise to deal with one of the most complex emergencies the United States had ever faced.

Woodward also spent hundreds of hours talking to current and former top Trump administration officials, including the ones collectively known as “the adults in the room” (back in the early days of the administration when there were adults in the room): Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, and Dan Coats, who seem unified in their belief that they needed to cover for a president who was dangerously unfit.

For the most part, I have to agree with Washington Post reviewer Rosa Brooks: “we knew all this already”. And yet, I have to wonder if hearing Trump say this stuff himself will make a difference. All those times when he compared coronavirus to the flu, or claimed that it would soon go away “like a miracle”, he knew better. That’s not debatable now, we have it in his own words.

And for all his followers who are still claiming the virus has been overblown by some deep-state conspiracy: We have Trump on tape saying the opposite.

A bunch of bloggers and columnists have made this point: Trump’s I-didn’t-want-people-to-panic explanation for playing down the virus doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Trump tries to raise panic all the time. He wants us to panic about caravans of MS-13 gangsters and Middle Eastern terrorists coming to “invade” or “infest” our country, about planes full of Antifa conspirators going from city to city starting riots, about babies being “executed” just after birth, and so on. His campaign ads look like trailers for the horror movie Joe Biden’s America. Sometimes people get so panicked by Trump’s wild rhetoric that they start shooting Hispanics in an El Paso mall.

The primary difference between Covid-19 and all the stories Trump has told to panic his followers is that Covid-19 is a real danger.

A real leader would have told the country to the truth back in February: that this is serious, and it’s going to require some adjustments and sacrifices from all of us. That leader wouldn’t have stoked panic, but would have reassured the country that we will get through this if we take appropriate action.

Instead, again and again, Trump has undercut appropriate actions, while telling the public fairy tales. He has never put together a national plan of action or mobilized the power of the federal government. He has pushed states to reopen too quickly, and is still pushing. He has encouraged protesters who threatened violence against governors who followed medical advice. He has held dangerous rallies. He has ridiculed Joe Biden and others for taking appropriate precautions. He has promoted snake-oil cures like hydroxychloraquine and oleandrin.

Trump and the usual collection of Trump sycophants have placed the Woodward quotes in the context of calming statements from the great leaders of World War II.

Trump compared himself to Churchill, which caused Daniel Dale to look up Churchill’s first speech as prime minister in May, 1940:

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.

What Churchill never said during the Blitz was “The Luftwaffe is very much under control in Great Britain.”

Keeping to the theme, Fox & Friends’ Steve Doocy invoked Franklin Roosevelt:

The president said he did not want to freak people out. He wanted to keep people calm during this time of great national uncertainty. Think about it, during the depression, it was FDR who had his fireside chats to calm America.

Similarly, it’s worth a minute or two of your time to look at the text of FDR’s first fireside chat on March 12, 1933 (eight days after his inauguration). He explained why he had temporarily closed the banks, what the government had done since to make banks more secure, and what the public could expect as banks began to reopen. He did not say that the Depression was just the sniffles, or promise that it would disappear “like a miracle“. (That sounds more like the quote Herbert Hoover is known for, but never actually said: “Prosperity is just around the corner.”) Instead, FDR closed like this:

Confidence and courage are the essentials of success in carrying out our plan. You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system; it is up to you to support and make it work. It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.

Imagine if Trump had done that in February: explained what the government would do to get the epidemic under control, described the public’s role in that plan, and then said “Together we cannot fail.” Instead, he repeatedly sugar-coated the situation and did nothing.

Here’s a Trump comparison that fits much better than Churchill or Roosevelt: the mayor from Jaws.

Republicans in Congress have almost uniformly either made excuses for Trump or dodged questions about the Woodward book. Friday, Susan Collins had the misfortune to be in a televised debate with her challenger Sara Gideon — a setting where you can’t just have an aide jump in and say, “No more questions.” Forced to comment, Collins came up with this: Trump “should have been straightforward with the American people … I have said since the beginning that the President’s performance has been uneven.”

Uneven? Getting 200K Americans killed, probably about half of them through sheer incompetence, is an uneven performance?

A meme for attacking these spineless politicians: Pathetic Cowards for Trump.

and Bill Barr’s latest corruptions of the Justice Department

Tuesday, the Justice Department filed a motion to take over the defense of a defamation lawsuit against Trump. in her book What Do We Need Men For? published last year, E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Trump accused her of lying and claimed he had never met her and could not have raped her because she’s “not my type”. Carroll sued for defamation, and a New York state court had moved the case into the discovery phase, when Trump might be obliged to produce a DNA sample.

That’s the case that Barr thinks the Justice Department should defend, using taxpayer funds. He also wants the case moved to federal court where it would go away,

because Trump would come under the protection of the federal government’s “sovereign immunity.” Barr’s minions are, quite literally, trying to deny Carroll her day in court. At taxpayer expense.

Barr’s rationale is that Trump denied Carroll’s charges, and commented on her type, while “acting in his official capacity”. Apparently, insulting women accusing you of rape is now considered part of the President’s job. I hope the federal judge who rules on this motion asks a lot of probing questions about exactly which line in Article II of the Constitution defines that presidential responsibility.

Marcy Wheeler:

As I contemplated Barr’s decision to claim that accusing a credible alleged rape victim was all part of Trump’s job as President, I thought briefly about what it says of Bill Barr’s faith, that he would make it official DOJ policy to condone attacks on claimed rape victims like this. But then I remembered that Bill Barr is of the generation of Catholics where that is the job of the official bureaucracy, to throw all the institutional weight of the Church into protecting alleged rapists and suppressing credible accusations, even to the point of attacking the victims.

A different case is disturbing in a different way. In fact, I’m not sure which is more disturbing: federal agents killing the suspected Portland shooter Michael Reinoehl on September 3, or the way Trump and Barr have been crowing about it.

Killing a suspect, even justifiably (and it’s not clear yet whether this killing was justified), should always be a regrettable event for law enforcement officers. They’re not supposed to be judge and jury; they’re supposed to apprehend suspects and let the judicial system do its work. But Bill Barr’s statement expressed none of that regret:

The tracking down of Reinoehl — a dangerous fugitive, admitted Antifa member, and suspected murderer — is a significant accomplishment in the ongoing effort to restore law and order to Portland and other cities. I applaud the outstanding cooperation among federal, state, and local law enforcement, particularly the fugitive task force team that located Reinoehl and prevented him from escaping justice. The streets of our cities are safer with this violent agitator removed, and the actions that led to his location are an unmistakable demonstration that the United States will be governed by law, not violent mobs.

In fact, killing Reinoehl does exactly the opposite: It calls into question whether the United States will be ruled by law or by federal death squads.

[BTW, Reinoehl said on social media he was “100% Antifa all the way”, but that’s the only evidence connecting him to Antifa. Whether he was a “member” or just a sympathizer is still debatable. It’s not even clear what being a “member” of Antifa means. It’s not like they have a directory and ID cards.]

Meanwhile, Trump makes Portland sound like the Wild West, with lawmen killing Reinoehl like he was Jesse James or Billy the Kid.

In Portland the other day we had to send in the U.S. Marshals. A man who’s a bad guy, bad guy, shot somebody right in the middle of the street. … Two and a half days nothing happened, I said, “What’s going on?” We sent in the U.S. Marshals, it was taken care of in 15 minutes.

And his crowd cheered. In a country under the rule of law, murder suspects should not be “taken care of in 15 minutes”. That’s nothing to brag about or cheer about. The previous day he said something similar to Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro:

Two and a half days went by, and I put out “When are you going to go get him?” And the U.S. Marshals went in to get him in a short period of time, and it ended in a gunfight. This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him. And I will tell you something: That’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.

Retribution is not for the Marshals — or anyone in the Executive Branch — to dish out. And we certainly don’t want the President to be able to call the Justice Department and ask them to go kill somebody (which is what Trump seems to be claiming he did). But we have a President who either doesn’t know or doesn’t believe that.

and the virus

The daily new cases and new deaths numbers are declining, but are still at levels that just about any other country would consider disastrous. The seven-day rolling averages are down to about 35,000 new cases per day and 800 deaths. These death rates are like 200 Benghazis a day or two 9-11s each week.

We’re getting close to 200,000 total deaths, and should pass that total this week or next (depending on how you total up). In deaths-per-million-people, the US will likely pass 600 today. That leaves us still doing better than countries like Belgium (856), Spain (636), and the UK (613), but considerably worse than Germany (112), Canada (243), Japan (11), and South Korea (7). Our numbers are now even worse than Italy’s (589). Remember when Italy was the country nobody wanted to be?

Recently, the virus has faded in the South and broken out in the Great Plains. Friday, Kansas (population 2.9 million), had 13 deaths. Canada (population 37.6 million), zero.

Meanwhile, we wait to see if Labor Day socializing or the reopening of schools or the fans returning to some sporting events will spark a new surge. We probably won’t know for another couple weeks.

Last night, Trump held an indoor rally in Henderson, Nevada. Despite a statewide ban on meetings of over 50 people, he spoke to thousands of supporters inside a manufacturing plant. The rally ignored social distancing and few attendees wore masks. It was Trump’s first large indoor rally since the Tulsa rally that was blamed for a surge in coronavirus cases in the area and may have killed Herman Cain.

Astra Zeneca briefly stopped its vaccine trials after a patient got sick in a way that suggested an adverse reaction. But Saturday testing resumed.

and you also might be interested in …

Lots of speculation concerns how long we’ll have to wait after Election Day to find out who won. Well, there is one scenario where we know right away: if Biden wins North Carolina.

North Carolina allows election officials to begin counting mail-in ballots before Election Day. (Technically, the ballots are run through tabulating machines, but election officials don’t see results until Election Day. Only on November 3 can somebody push a button to see what the tabulator knows.) People who mailed early plus those who voted in person might be enough of the electorate to call the state.

North Carolina is a state that Trump has to have, but Biden doesn’t, and Biden currently has a tiny lead in the state polling. So if we know early that Biden took North Carolina, we can be pretty sure he’s going to win the election. If Trump wins it, we might not know for a long time who will be the next president. If it’s too close to call, that suggests Biden will win, but isn’t as conclusive as if he had NC’s 15 electoral votes in his pocket.

Protesters are continuing to brave repression in Belarus. Meanwhile, their dictator Lukashenko is meeting with Putin.

Brexit is still not a done deal. There is a treaty, but details of trade between the UK and EU are still to be worked out. The treaty, though, protects the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland: The Ireland/Northern Ireland border has to stay open. But that puts the burden on the UK to keep goods out of Northern Ireland that would be either banned or tariffed in the EU. Prime Minister Johnson is now saying the UK won’t fulfill that obligation, which means the whole thing could still fall apart into a no-deal Brexit.

The Trump/Russia conspiracy is ongoing: Rudy Giuliani has been working with a Russian agent to smear Joe Biden.

Thursday, the Treasury Department sanctioned “four Russia-linked individuals for attempting to influence the U.S. electoral process”. One of them is kind of significant.

Treasury designated Andrii Derkach (Derkach) pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13848 for his efforts to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Derkach, a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services. Derkach has directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election.

… From at least late 2019 through mid-2020, Derkach waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election, spurring corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the United States designed to culminate prior to election day. Derkach’s unsubstantiated narratives were pushed in Western media through coverage of press conferences and other news events, including interviews and statements.

Russian agents like this don’t work alone, though. They work through American dupes and accomplices, including two you may have heard of.

[Derkach] was a key source for baseless information touted by [Rudy] Giuliani and [President Donald] Trump smearing Biden and his son, Hunter, over activities in Ukraine when Biden was vice president.

Jonathan Capehart asked Giuliani the obvious question, and got no substantive answer.

You’re a former prosecutor from the Southern District of New York, a former mayor of New York City, you have a national security firm. How could you not know that this person you were talking to was a known Russian agent?

A crazy epilogue to the tear-gas-protesters-for-Trump’s-photo-op story: It may have caused a Covid-19 outbreak in the Farmville, Virginia immigrant detention center.

Trump wanted ICE agents to join Bill Barr’s non-army army to quash the protests in D.C., and the quickest way to do that was to charter flights. But rules prevent ICE agents from flying on those planes unless they are accompanying detainees. So they shipped detainees to Virginia unnecessarily. Some of those transported immigrants were Covid-positive.

I don’t think of the NYT as a neutral source when the subject is The Intercept, the left-of-center online publication started by Glenn Greenwald after he received the trove of information leaked by Edward Snowden. But its account of how The Intercept mishandled the Reality Winner leak pulls together a story I had only heard in pieces.

I have mixed feelings about Greenwald, whose “Unclaimed Territory” blog was one of the influences that got me into blogging. In the early days of the Iraq War, he was a rare voice speaking out bluntly against the militaristic rah-rah-America spirit of the times. In recent years, though, he has been so stubbornly unwilling to see the Russian disinformation and manipulation threat that at times I wonder if he came out of the Snowden Affair compromised in some way. (WikiLeaks followed a more extreme version of the same trajectory, from pro-freedom-of-information to pro-Russia.)

The Chinese company ByteDance has a proposal to retain ownership of TikTok, but still escape US sanctions: US software giant Oracle takes over management of TikTok’s US operations and data in the cloud. Ars Technica summarizes the issues:

The big challenge facing ByteDance is the need to to satisfy the potentially conflicting demands of the US and Chinese governments. The US government has threatened to shut down TikTok over concerns that the Chinese government would compromise Americans’ privacy or exercise undue influence over the content Americans see. Transferring TikTok’s US operations to an American company could address those concerns.

But the Chinese government isn’t happy about the possibility of the US government essentially seizing a major Chinese technology asset for the benefit of a US competitor. Late last month, Beijing announced new export control rules restricting the sale of artificial intelligence technology—rules that apparently apply to the algorithm TikTok uses to recommend videos to its users. This means that ByteDance will need the approval of the Chinese authorities—as well as the Trump administration—before any deal can go through.

The non-sale to Oracle might thread the needle via corruption:

It’s a victory for Larry Ellison, the chairman of Oracle and one of the few technology tycoons who has been openly supportive of Donald Trump. Ellison held a fundraiser for Trump in February. … So if ByteDance believed Larry Ellison could use his personal relationship to Trump to get the deal approved, that would have been a compelling reason to choose Oracle [rather than accept a competing bid from Microsoft].

If the deal goes through, it is another step down the road to Putinism: A valuable corporate franchise can be channeled to a Trump-allied oligarch.

NBC’s Think blog provides tips for talking to friends and relatives who have gone down the Q-Anon rabbit hole. The tricky thing about any cultlike system is its epistemic closure: If the only information that can be trusted comes from the cult itself, the cult’s beliefs become unassailable.

In any such situation, I remember the Danny DeVito character from The War of the Roses. At one point his good friend says something truly insane about the process of splitting up with his estranged wife. And DeVito observes in a tone of concerned fascination: “This seems rational to you.”

A pattern that probably deserves a longer discussion sometime: Once belief systems start closing themselves off, they can become incubating grounds for even more closed systems.

For example: During the 20th century, Evangelical Christianity developed defense mechanisms to keep Darwinism at bay. The scientific community, and any media that trusts the scientific community, became suspect. Hence conservative Christians need their own news network and their own research institutes.

More recently, Trumpism has grown into a cult inside this protective Evangelical shell, and now Q-Anon is growing inside Trumpism. The kind of objective thinking that Evangelicals need to do if they’re going to root out these cancers could also threaten Evangelicalism itself.

and let’s close with something graphic

I grew up loving maps, especially ones that make you look at something in a different way. This map asks the question: What if we made US states out of the river basins, the way political divisions are drawn in Gambia? Some states, like Alabama or Tennessee, remain recognizable distortions of their current selves, and Santee is more or less South Carolina. But Mississippi goes all the way up to Minneapolis, Ohio goes from Erie to beyond Louisville, and Missouri winds up west of Yellowstone.

Nothing jumped out at me this week as a topic I have to cover myself rather than quote other people. (I also spent a bunch of the week carrying boxes up and down stairs, so it’s a good thing I wasn’t distracted by a writing project.) So there won’t be a featured post this week.

That doesn’t mean we had a light week for news: apocalyptic wildfires in the West, the Bob Woodward book, more political interference in the Justice Department, a lull in the pandemic while we wait to see the effects of Labor Day and school openings, TikTok, Q-Anon, polls, Rudy’s pal is a Russian agent, and new Trump superspreader events.

I’m still looking for a lead quote and a closing. I’m hoping to get the summary out by noon EDT.

In a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay.

– Martin Luther King

This week’s featured post is “Trump Despises His Supporters Too“.

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s disrespect for military service and death in war

Jeffrey Goldberg’s “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’” dominated the weekend’s news. This story is covered in the featured post, but I did want to add some context from Chris Jones :

Seems like a good time to remind everyone that The Atlantic’s fact checkers once challenged my belief that Lorne Michaels was eating snow peas during a meeting and later verified that he was, in fact, eating edamame. They are extremely thorough.

Joe Biden’s comment is also worth your attention:

When my son volunteered and joined the United States military as the attorney general and went to Iraq for a year, won the bronze star and other commendations, he wasn’t a sucker. The servicemen and women he served with, particularly those who did not come home, were not ‘losers.’ If these statements are true, the president should humbly apologize to every gold star mother and father and every blue star family that he has denigrated and insulted. Who the heck does he think he is?

and violence from the left and right

Vox’ Aaron Ross Coleman says that condemning riots is not an adequate response:

If looting and rioting have no place in a well-functioning democracy, then perhaps we should pause to consider that these are signs that Americans are not, in fact, in a functioning democracy. … In declining to reconcile the failure of America’s democratic institutions and in their strong denouncements of riots as political protest, elected officials like Trump and Biden avoid the truth — there is no more effective force for stopping riots than making a serious effort to stop police from killing Black people.

… Today it is perhaps the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie who most pithily expressed how this relationship works. “Kenosha would be quiet if not for an incident of police brutality and abuse,” he wrote this week. “The same is true for other cities where rioting and disorder have taken place.”

I got the MLK quote above from this article, and then I looked up the larger context. It’s from a speech he gave in March, 1968 near Detroit, which had been through a massive riot the previous summer.

Now every year about this time, our newspapers and our televisions and people generally start talking about the long hot summer ahead. What always bothers me is that the long hot summer has always been preceded by a long cold winter. And the great problem is that the nation has not used its winters creatively enough to develop the program, to develop the kind of massive acts of concern that will bring about a solution to the problem. And so we must still face the fact that our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nations winters of delay. As long as justice is postponed we always stand on the verge of these darker nights of social disruption. The question now, is whether America is prepared to do something massively, affirmatively and forthrightly about the great problem we face in the area of race and the problem which can bring the curtain of doom down on American civilization if it is not solved.

Coleman describes what we’re not getting done in the periods between a George Floyd murder and a Jacob Blake shooting:

In the executive branch, the recommendations from President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing failed to be implemented nationwide. In the judicial branch, legal precedent still protects officers from the consequences of deadly force with qualified immunity. In the legislative branch, this summer’s police reform bills have stalled out. The institutional stalemate persists at the local level even in the bluest of districts like in New York City or Minneapolis, where police brutality persists, despite years of activism and electoral support for reform candidates.

All of which brings me back to a JFK quote I’ve used before: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

But the real violence story these days is happening on the right, where Kyle Rittenhouse is on his way to hero status. Joe Biden is denouncing political violence in all its forms, but Trump is not.

Meanwhile, polls are making it clear that the law-and-order theme is not working for Trump. a majority believes that he is making protests worse, that Biden would do a better job on criminal justice issues, and that Trump makes them feel less safe.

The 538 polling average currently has Biden ahead by 7.5%. But because of Trump Electoral College advantage, Biden needs a 3-4% margin to be confident of winning.

The Right is trying to make something out of Biden not denouncing Antifa by name, but where is their evidence that Antifa is doing anything? Tucker Carlson is talking to Chad Wolf about using the RICO laws against Black Lives Matter and Antifa, but they have the process backwards: RICO can never be the first crime a group is accused of. After you have a record of proven members of a group committing proven crimes, then you can make a case that those crimes are connected by a corrupt organization.

Show me two convictions for serious violent crimes, and then we can talk about whether something connects them.

Meanwhile, why don’t we stop police from killing and maiming Black people for no good reasons? Maybe that will solve the problem.

If we’re going to talk about militias, we should know what one really is. Erik Schechter writes at NBC New’s Think blog:

In 1903, we officially divided the militia into an “organized militia,” i.e., the National Guard (and, later, state defense forces), and the “unorganized militia.” This other militia includes every able-bodied male age 17 to 45 and serves as a reserve body that, at least theoretically, could be called up for service by the president. (States have their own rules for militia membership; Illinois, for instance, now counts women in its state militia.)

So, does being part of an unorganized militia give you and your buddies the right to sling AR-15s across your chest, don cammies and patrol the streets of Kenosha and other cities as the self-declared Super-Patriot Constitutional Militia for Liberty and Tricorn Hats? No, because a militia is not an armed gang; it operates under orders from a legal authority that a self-governed group does not.

… Amy Swearer, a legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, notes that “there isn’t an affirmative right” to form one’s own militia. She cites Presser v. Illinois, in which the Supreme Court ruled in 1886 that a German immigrant didn’t have a Second Amendment right to march his socialist militia in Chicago without authorization from the state.

In Rochester, New York, a grand jury will investigate the death of Daniel Prude, who suffocated in March after police hooded him and pinned him to the ground.

Mr. Prude went into cardiac arrest during a struggle with officers and died a week later. The county medical examiner labeled his death a homicide caused by complications of asphyxiation in a prone position. But for months, the police in Rochester treated the case as a drug overdose after PCP, or angel dust, was found in his bloodstream.

… The case came to public attention only on Wednesday, more than five months after Mr. Prude’s death, when his family’s lawyer released body camera footage from the officers involved in detaining Mr. Prude. The footage was obtained through a public records request by the lawyer.

This case sums up my problem with the few-bad-apples/most-cops-are-good argument: Let’s say the cop who pinned Prude was a bad apple. But he didn’t cover this up by himself. Months ago, the authorities had access to the same body-camera footage they’re acting on now, but they did nothing until the video was made public and caused public outrage.

This pattern recurs again and again: When a cop kills someone, assaults someone, or commits some other crime, the other cops, the local prosecutors, and the police union circle the wagons around him. When they do that, they all join Team Bad Apple.

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Jon Lovett compares two ways of covering the same story. The Washington Post’s headline is “Trump and allies rachet up disinformation efforts in late stages of campaign“, while AP has “Dueling versions of reality define 1st week of fall campaign“. Lovett’s comment:

The Post is honest about this moment while the AP is a victim of it.

The difference goes to the heart of what journalism is supposed to do: Does the journalist cover a real world? Or is the world nothing but conflicting opinions which the journalist can only repeat? AP goes the second route:

On the campaign trail with President Donald Trump, the pandemic is largely over, the economy is roaring back, and murderous mobs are infiltrating America’s suburbs.

With Democrat Joe Biden, the pandemic is raging, the economy isn’t lifting the working class, and systemic racism threatens Black lives across America.

If only there were a real world that AP could examine these claims against. Does their weather report balance the people who say it rained today against the people who say it was sunny?

The Post, on the other hand, believes in a real world where reportable events happen.

On Aug. 30, the president retweeted footage of a Black man violently pushing a White woman on a subway platform under the caption, “Black Lives Matter/Antifa” — but the man was not affiliated with either group, and the video was shot in October. White House social media director Dan Scavino shared a manipulated video that falsely showed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden seeming to fall asleep during a television interview, complete with a fake TV headline.

And Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the second-ranking House Republican, released a video splicing together quotes from activist Ady Barkan — who has Lou Gehrig’s disease and uses computer voice assistance — to falsely make it sound as if he had persuaded Biden to defund police departments.

… The slew of false and misleading tweets and videos stood in contrast to the approach taken by Biden, the former vice president, who in 2019 took a pledge promising not to participate in the spread of disinformation over social media, including rejecting the use of “deep fake” videos.

If Republicans are looking for a way to torpedo Trump without actively endorsing Biden, Arnold Schwarzenegger provides a model: Come out against the underhanded tactics that Trump won’t admit to.

Schwarzenegger’s issue is voter suppression. Tweeting a link to a Reuters article about polling places closing in the South, Arnold comments:

I’m a fanatic about voting. Most people call closing polls voter suppression. Some say it is “budgetary.” What if I made it easy & solved the budgetary issue? How much would it cost to reopen polling places?

This is a serious question. Is closing polling stations about making it harder for minorities to vote, or is it because of budgets? If you say it’s because of your budget, let’s talk.

The Trump boat parade is a phenomenon that completely escapes me. I don’t get why a campaign would want to emphasize how many rich people support it. But if you’re going to do one, you should do it right, and not get a bunch of your boats sunk by each other’s wakes. If you wanted a metaphor for the Trump economy, very rich people swamping the boats of lesser rich people is pretty good.

Just because you don’t show obvious symptoms of Covid-19 doesn’t mean you’re not being harmed by it. Penn State has been looking at athletes who have been infected, and finds that a sizeable minority of them (one doctor said 30-35% and another corrected to 15%) suffer an enlargement of the heart muscle called myocarditis. The condition can lead to “arrhythmia, cardiac arrest and death, especially in a person who doesn’t know they have it and performs rigorous exercise”. Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez, who won 19 games in 2019, will miss the entire 2020 season because of myocarditis brought on by Covid-19.

Question and answer:

Q: Can you help me understand the Portland riots? Why haven’t you stopped the violence?

Portland Press Herald: Well, we’re a newspaper in Maine is the main reason.

and let’s close with something childish

The closer we get to Election Day, the less I want to be challenged by the closings. So light and fluffy is in. Last week we had puppies, this week a countdown of the top ten Muppet Show guest stars.

By privately insulting veterans and servicemen killed in the line of duty, Trump has raised a suspicion many of his supporters try not to think about: What does he say about them behind their backs?

He says what he thinks. When his supporters try to explain what is so appealing about Donald Trump, one point that almost always comes up is: “He says what he thinks.”

If you don’t like Trump, that line has probably never made sense to you, because a lot of what he says seems so nonsensical that he can’t possibly believe it. Surely he doesn’t really think he’s been treated “worse than Lincoln“, when Lincoln was assassinated in office, or that he has “done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln — nobody has even been close”. He was already an adult when President Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, laws that made it possible for millions of Black Americans to vote and to begin living something that at least resembled a normal American life. Surely he doesn’t imagine that a few months of low Black unemployment compares to that, does he? Or that it balances his decades-long history of racism.

He doesn’t say those things because he believes them. He says them because he wants us to believe them.

But “He says what he thinks” is actually code for something else: “He says what I think.” People in Trump’s base, particularly older conservative Christian white men, have lived for decades under constant social disapproval for the little things they habitually do and the words that come out of their mouths. Put yourself in their shoes: Maybe you grew up saying the N-word — you didn’t mean anything by it, it’s just what Black people were called in your neighborhood. (I missed out on the N-word: I grew up in a time and place where good little children weren’t supposed to say it, and by the time I was an adult, no one was.) Maybe you said “fag” instead of “gay”, or referred to women in the workplace as “girls”.

Comments or pats on the butt that would once have been accepted as compliments suddenly because “harassment”. Overnight, jokes that everyone used to laugh at became offensive — racist or sexist or some other ist-word you’d never heard before. Affirmations of good Christian values became “homophobia”, and who knows what the heck “intersectionality” means? Every day there was a new set of toes you supposedly had been tromping on for years — so you’d better watch your step from now on. And it never stops: You can’t even make fun of transsexuals these days. Who knows what it will be next? You’ll never be free to just speak your mind.

And there was Trump, ignoring all those rules and not censoring himself. Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals and drug smugglers. America accepts too many people from “shithole countries” like Haiti or those places in Africa that were better off when the British or French ran things. When you thought stuff like that, you didn’t dare say so — but he did. That crippled reporter wrote bad things about him, so Trump just mocked him and his disability right out in front of everybody, with the TV cameras running. The Disability Police came after him with guns blazing, but did he apologize? No way. Women came out of the woodwork to say he harassed, abused, or even raped them. Did he let that intimidate him? Not on your life. He insulted them right back, said they were too ugly to be worth it. “Believe me, she would not be my first choice. That I can tell you.”

What’s more, you would also love to deny that you ever make mistakes, to blame everything that goes wrong on somebody else, and to claim that everything you do or say or own is the biggest and best and most wonderful thing ever. But you don’t, because people would laugh at you. Well, Trump does that, and people do laugh at him, but he just doesn’t care. How can you not love that?

The liberal media and all the people who have been pushing the new standards, they keep trying to bring him down. But they can’t. They try to make him a villain, but he beats them.

And that’s why he’s a hero.

Mean girls. One stereotypic character of high school dramas is the Mean Girl: From her perch at the top of the social pyramid, she can say whatever she wants about anybody — and what she wants to say is nasty. The more cruel or unjust it is, the more it proves her power. She can say anything, and everybody else has to accept it, because if you object, she’ll turn her fire on you. And if you want to be popular like she is, you can’t just silently go along, you have to praise her cleverness and insight. If you want to stay in the Queen’s court, you have to repeat her insults and push the party line. She tells you who’s in and who’s out, and then sends you off to work her will.

Being close to the Mean Girl can be exhilarating. All your life you’ve had to repress your own cruelty, and now it’s an asset — as long as she approves. If you come up with a particularly biting nickname for some rival queen-wannabee or for some kid who thinks he or she can get along outside the social structure, maybe the Mean Girl will start using it too. You’ll never get credit for it directly, but maybe you’ll rise in her esteem, until you’re almost a Mean Girl yourself.

But no matter how close you get to the throne, you never stop wondering: What does that cruel tongue say about you when you’re not there to hear?

In their heart-of-hearts, even Trump’s biggest fans must recognize how much Mean Girl he has in him. That champion-of-the-common-man mantle has always fit badly on someone who lives in a gilded penthouse. Do you think anyone who isn’t rich or famous has ever set foot in his Trump Tower residence except as a servant, a workman, or for sex?

He didn’t make that money by working his way up from the bottom; he inherited hundreds of millions from his father. He’s always been rich, he’s always been on top, and he’s always been a bully. Those famous Twitter insults — Pocahontas, pencil-neck Adam Schiff, Crooked Hillary — that’s not the language of presidents. It’s the language of the Mean Girl.

So even if you’re the most rabid MAGA-hatter in the world, deep down you have to wonder: When he’s with his real buddies — the billionaires or reality TV stars or whoever he likes to hang with — what does he say about you? Does he make fun of how gullible you are, that you think he cares about you and you believe all the crap he tells you?

No matter how much you may try to deny that possibility, silently in your own mind you know he does.

Trump U. Before Donald Trump ever ran for president, he was the founder of Trump University. The target market for Trump U was all the people who admired the great businessman they saw on The Apprentice, people who bought The Art of the Deal and wanted to be like the guy it described. And they didn’t just admire Trump, they trusted him. If he was ready to tell people how to get rich the way he did — which wasn’t to inherit a real estate empire from your Dad — they were ready to pay money to hear it.

They weren’t the Enemy. They weren’t what’s wrong with America. They were his biggest fans.

And he scammed them.

Trump U wasn’t a good idea that got out of hand. It wasn’t a generous impulse that turned bad after he handed it off to a corrupt subordinate. Trump U was a scam from Day 1.

One of the company’s ads said of Trump, “He’s the most celebrated entrepreneur on earth. . . . And now he’s ready to share—with Americans like you—the Trump process for investing in today’s once-in-a-lifetime real estate market.” The ad said that Trump had “hand-picked” Trump University’s instructors, and it ended with a quote from him: “I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you.”

In fact, Trump hadn’t handpicked the instructors, and he didn’t attend the three-day seminars. Moreover, the complaint said, “no specific Donald Trump techniques or strategies were taught during the seminars, Donald Trump ‘never’ reviewed any of Trump University’s curricula or programming materials, nor did he review any of the content for the free seminars or the three day seminars.” So what were the attendees taught? According to the complaint, “the contents and material presented by Trump University were developed in large part by a third-party company that creates and develops materials for an array of motivational speakers and Seminar and timeshare rental companies.” The closest that the attendees at the seminars got to Trump was when they were encouraged to have their picture taken with a life-size photo of him.

Trump U’s business plan was to constantly up-sell its marks. Drawn in by a free presentation, they’d be given a glowing description of everything they’d learn if they ponied up $1,500 for the three-day seminar. At the three-day seminar, they’d hear about the even more expensive “mentorship” program where they’d learn Trump’s real secrets.

There never were any Trump secrets in the program. He couldn’t tell them how to be born rich, he wasn’t going to tell them how to launder money for Russian oligarchs, and nobody wants to know how to go bankrupt running Atlantic City casinos — so there was really nothing to teach. Trump admirers paid upwards of $30,000 for that lesson, and Trump eventually had to give back $25 million to settle their fraud lawsuit.

Most of the victims of Trump U were people who couldn’t afford to lose that amount of money. But there was a hole in their lives that they thought they could fill by becoming real estate moguls like their hero Donald Trump. In other words, they were losers. And Trump was able to take advantage of their loser-ness (and their admiration of him) to turn them into suckers.

And if you think he’s only done that once, you’re wrong.

The Atlantic article. Thursday, The Atlantic published an article by its editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg: “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’“. The article made a number of startling accusations:

• In 2018, while he was in France to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, he cancelled a planned visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, the grave site of 1,800 American Marines who died at Belleau Wood, because “It’s filled with losers.” He also described the Marines as “suckers” for getting killed.
• When tortured Vietnam POW John McCain had died a few months earlier, he said, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral.”
• When he accompanied his Chief of Staff John Kelly on a visit to the grave of Kelly’s son, a Marine who died in 2010 in Afghanistan, he said to Kelly “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” A retired four-star general who is a friend of Kelly later told Goldberg, “He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,. He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.”
• After hearing Joint Chiefs Chairman Joe Dunford give a briefing, Trump said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?”
• When planning a military parade, Trump told his aides not to include amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.

Immediately, the White House tried its standard defense: Fake news, put out by a failing magazine. The story is “totally false”, and the anonymous sources Goldberg quotes are made up.

That explanation broke down almost immediately when other news organizations — AP , The New York Times, Fox News, CNN, and The Washington Post — had little trouble finding their own sources, who may or may not have been the same ones Goldberg found. If someone is making these stories up, it’s not Jeffrey Goldberg.

Worse, there was one obvious person who could have blown the whole thing up: John Kelly. If his son’s memory is being used to smear his former boss, you’d think he might try to put a stop to it. He hasn’t said a word. Trump knows what that means. So he attacked Kelly Friday at the White House:

I know John Kelly. He was with me, didn’t do a good job, had no temperament, and ultimately he was petered out. He got — he was exhausted. This man was totally exhausted.

He wasn’t even able to function in the last number of months. He was not able to function. He was sort of a tough guy. By the time he got eaten up in this world, it’s a different world than he was used to, he was unable to function. And I told him, John, you’re going to have to go. Please give me a letter of resignation. And we did that, and now he goes out and badmouths.

He has also lashed out at Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin, who corroborated some of Goldberg’s accounts via her own sources, and added this anecdote:

According to one former senior Trump administration official: “When the President spoke about the Vietnam War, he said, ‘It was a stupid war. Anyone who went was a sucker’.”

Griffin, Trump tweeted, “should be fired for this kind of reporting” and added “FoxNews is gone.”

Other pundits and talking heads have pointed out the obvious: The quotes in the Atlantic article may be new and more extreme, but they sound like Trump quotes we already know. Early in his term, he called the military brass “a bunch of dopes and babies“. One of Candidate Trump’s first political flaps came when he bad-mouthed John McCain’s service: “I like people who weren’t captured.” He publicly contradicted the widow of a soldier killed in Niger.  He attacked the Gold Star parents of slain Captain Humayun Khan. He dodged the Vietnam draft by claiming bone spurs, a diagnosis provided by a doctor who owed his father a favor. Michael Cohen quotes Trump saying, “You think I’m stupid? I wasn’t going to Vietnam.” The only person in Trump’a family who did any military service was his black-sheep brother Fred Jr., who was in the Air National Guard. As President, Trump won’t even challenge Vladimir Putin for paying bounties to kill American soldiers. Putin counts; soldiers don’t.

So yes, it fits perfectly: He said these things. Trump and his flunkies can deny as vehemently as they want, but they’re not fooling anybody.

Why this story hit a nerve. Ever since he came down the escalator in 2015 talking about Mexican rapists, barely a week has gone by without some Trump-said-a-bad-thing story. They arise, people who never liked Trump anyway get upset about them, and they fade away in a day or two. Some political observers believe Trump uses or even engineers this process in order to distract the public from more damaging stories. For example, 1080 Americans died of coronavirus on the day the Atlantic article came out. What’s more important: a few quotes from 2018 or the equivalent of three simultaneous jumbo-jet crashes?

And yet, this time the story doesn’t seem to be going away. I think I know why.

Trump’s usual escape from he-said-a-bad-thing stories is to invoke tribalism. Both the people he insulted and the media that reported the insult are from the Other Side. Who are you going to believe: Trump or the New York Times? Whose side are you one: Trump’s or the Squad? Trump or some Muslim?

But the people he has insulted this time are in his own tribe, and even Fox News is reporting it. John Kelly was a good guy not that long ago, and he went away without making a fuss.

A key part of the Trump base are veterans, especially white veterans from the South or rural areas whose families have a tradition of military service. The kind of guy who goes to the cemetery on Memorial Day to put flowers on the grave of a father who died on D-Day or a grandfather who barely escaped from Belleau Wood — lots and lots of them are Trump voters. And he thinks they’re losers and suckers, just like the people he scammed at Trump U. Then he got his marks’ money, now he gets their votes. But does he respect them? Not at all.

And even if you’re not a veteran, or a veteran’s spouse or son or daughter, you have to know that your position in the Trump base is no more secure than theirs. If he talks that way about them, you know he’s talking that way about you too.

He’s not the hero you want to believe he is. He’s the Mean Girl who finds you useful as long as you do what she wants. He bears you no affection or loyalty, and the more you do for him, the more you convince him that you’re a sucker too.

This will be the first Sift posted from our new apartment. My wife and I are still eating off a card table while we wait for furniture to arrive from storage, but I have my desk and computer, and the internet is hooked up, so I’m ready to go.

I don’t usually give much attention to Trump-said-a-bad-thing stories, because he’s always saying bad things. His fans love him for it, so publicizing his over-the-top insults just builds his brand. That’s why my first instinct was to ignore Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article about him calling American soldiers who died in battle “suckers” and “losers”. I figured the story would be another two-day wonder that soaked up a lot of liberal energy without changing anything. If you loved him, you’d just love him more.

But for some reason the story isn’t going away. The article came out Thursday, and some of the claims broke before that. And it’s still in the headlines. It’s hitting a nerve in a way that Mexican rapists, mocking the disabled, shithole countries, and the other Trump outrages never did. I had to stop and think about why that might be.

The featured article is my attempt to answer that question, and the gist of my answer is that veterans — particularly white veterans from families with a military tradition in the South and in rural areas, the kind of guys who visit the graves of their Greatest Generation fathers who either died on D-Day or nearly did — are part of Trump’s base. So he can’t get out of this with tribalism; it’s his own tribe that he has insulted.

All along, Trump has been like the stereotypic Mean Girl from high school dramas. If you’re part of his in-group, you love how he insults “pencil-neck” Adam Schiff and Crooked Hillary and Pocahontas.  But like everybody in the court of the Mean Girl, you always have to wonder what he says about you when you’re not around. That’s the fear this story pokes at: If you’re Joe Sixpack, charter member of the MAGA-hatters, you may tell yourself that Trump is the champion of men like you. But is he really? When he’s with his real buddies, the other billionaires, does he laugh at what a sucker you are, and how you repeat every stupid thing he tells you?

Deep down, you know he does.

So “Trump Despises His Supporters Too” is the featured post this week. It should be out before 11 EDT. The weekly summary also talks about the role of riots in creating change, the mainstreaming of right-wing violence, what the polls are saying, and a few other things. It should be out by 1.

All you hear is Donald Trump and all of them talking about fear. We’re the ones getting killed. We’re the ones getting shot. … It’s amazing to me why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back.

– Doc Rivers, coach of the L.A. Clippers basketball team,
responding to the Jacob Blake shooting

This week’s featured post is “The Four Big Lies of the Republican Convention“.

This week everybody was talking about the Kenosha and Portland shootings

As I often remind Sift readers: You don’t want to follow breaking news through a weekly blog put out by one person. We know that a caravan of MAGA trucks went through Portland Saturday night, ramming their way through BLM protesters who they pepper-sprayed. Eventually, there was a fatal shooting of someone who appears to have been a Trump supporter.

Meanwhile in Kenosha, where eight days ago Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times by a police officer as he tried to get into a vehicle where his kids were sitting in the back seat, a 17-year-old vigilante from Illinois killed two people and wounded a third on Tuesday. He has been charged with murder, but has become a hero to the far right. The boy walked right past police officers while holding his AR-15 and was not stopped or questioned. He went home to Illinois, where he will face an extradition hearing September 25.

James Fallows:

I can’t recall any pairing of events as closely-comparable-yet-starkly-different:
-Black man is shot in the back 7 times, while getting in car w his kids;
-White youth carrying AR-15 walks away, after killing people.

By the same police force, in the same town, in the same week.

As best I can make out, the Republican response to the current violence is that none of this would be happening if Trump were president.

The quote at the top of the page is from a three-minute, thoughtful, emotional — and apparently spontaneous — speech from L.A. Clippers Coach Doc Rivers. Here’s some more of it.

The training has to change in the police force. The unions have to be taken down in the police force. My Dad was a cop. I believe in good cops. We’re not trying to defund the police and take all their money away. We’re trying to get them to protect us just like they protect everybody else. … All we’re asking is that you live up to the Constitution — that’s all we’re asking — for everyone.

Before becoming a coach, Rivers was a player. He has never been a politician or a pundit. But I would argue that this statement was far more astute and well-spoken than anything ever said by Laura Ingraham, who famously told LeBron James to “shut up and dribble”.

Fahrad Manjoo:

With the arrest in Kenosha it’s time for moderate white leaders and clergy to speak out against fundamentalist white violence.

In case the snark went past you: A similar demand is made of moderate Muslims every time a Muslim commits an act of terrorism, and is often made of Black leaders after violence arises from a protest against racism. Of course you won’t hear any similar demand directed at “moderate white leaders”. That’s a major aspect of white privilege: Whites are individuals; they don’t bear responsibility for the crimes of other whites.

I can’t find the video, but Wednesday night I heard TNT basketball commentator (and NBA Hall-of-Famer) Charles Barkley talk about how “exhausting” it is to be black, and complain that nobody expects Tom Brady to explain what’s happening in the white community.

and the NBA-led general sports strike

When we think about changing government policy from the outside, we usually only talk about three tactics: voting, peaceful protest, and violence. This week the world of sports reminded us that there is another arrow in the quiver: general strike.

Historically, general strikes have been associated with broad organizations: radical multi-industry unions like the Wobblies, or a national Communist or Labor Party. In America, the only example I can think of is the Seattle general strike of 1919, which was called by the Wobblies and the AFL.

What swept the sports world this week, though, was a bottom-up strike in response to the Jacob Blake shooting discussed above. It started during a team meeting of the Milwaukee Bucks, the team whose territory is closest to Kenosha. (Currently, all NBA games are being played in a Covid-free bubble at Disney World in Orlando.) We can’t say exactly who started the conversation, but some reports attribute it to George Hill.

Wednesday, the Bucks were about to play a game that could send them to the next round of the playoffs, but the team decided not to take the floor. Their opponents, the Orlando Magic, could have responded by claiming a forfeit, but instead they joined the Bucks in refusing to play. Two more games were scheduled later that day (one had already been played), and those four teams also voted not to take the floor.

After the fact, the Bucks team owners — three rich white guys — got in line behind their players. TNT announcer Kenny Smith walked off the set in support of the NBA players. The WNBA joined the boycott. (In the photo below, players from the Washington Mystics and Atlanta Dream wear t-shirts with seven bullet holes in the back.) So did professional tennis, soccer, baseball, and hockey. The NFL season won’t begin for nearly two weeks, but practices were cancelled.

The entire sports world was on strike.

The downside of a spontaneous strike is that it’s not clear how to end it, because you don’t go in with a set of demands. The NBA playoffs resumed on Saturday, after an agreement between the players union and the league. Team owners will contribute $300 million over the next decade to economic growth in Black communities. In addition, several teams will help make voting easier in their home cities.

The Toyota Center will become a voting center in October, and this, this is something NBA owners should be getting behind. The Hawks have turned State Farm Arena into a polling place, the Pistons have done the same with their practice center.

At a minimum, the players made a lot of people pay attention to their concerns. Wednesday night, the NBA TV network had no games to cover, so the network’s commentators — many of whom are black ex-players or coaches — mostly talked among themselves about racial justice, sharing stories of their own experiences. It was the kind of conversation you might have expected to hear on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show, but it was all the more effective for being people not known as political reporters or pundits.

That evening was a reminder that even though sports fans are spread across the political spectrum, and may even be more conservative than liberal, the athletes who entertain us are largely Black or Hispanic or immigrants. It may be CEOs who buy the corporate boxes in the stadiums, but a large number of players come from poverty.

Workers have power, if they just say no. We’ve known that ever since the plebians walked out of Rome in 495 BC. But we tend to forget.

It’s hard to say what could provoke a general strike in the wider world, but I’m going to guess it would happen in exactly the same way: Not because some political leader called for it, but because a person here and a person there decided they just couldn’t keep doing nothing. And from there, no one would want to be the first person to disrespect those already striking.

and natural disasters related to climate change

It wouldn’t be 2020 if we didn’t also have some natural disasters to report. Hurricane Laura hit Louisiana as a Category 4 storm. (Remember when something like that would lead the news for an entire week?) And wildfires in California forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate. (If I didn’t have Facebook friends in California, I don’t think I’d have noticed.)

and the virus

We’ve had our 6 millionth confirmed case now, but that’s just a number. American deaths are now up to 187K.

A couple of incidents looked like evidence of the Trump administration corrupting the CDC and the FDA. The CDC changed its testing guidelines:

The new guidelines raise the bar on who should get tested, advising that some people without symptoms probably don’t need it — even if they’ve been in close contact with an infected person. Previously, the CDC said viral testing was appropriate for people with recent or suspected exposure, even if they were asymptomatic.

The change literally happened while Dr. Fauci was knocked out; he was having surgery at the time. CNN claims the CDC gave into White House pressure:

A sudden change in federal guidelines on coronavirus testing came this week as a result of pressure from the upper ranks of the Trump administration, a federal health official close to the process tells CNN, and a key White House coronavirus task force member was not part of the meeting when the new guidelines were discussed.

“It’s coming from the top down,” the official said.

The point seems to be to push case-counts down by doing less testing.

Matt Yglesias:

It’s notable that the White House keeps using “it’s okay we had everyone tested” as their explanation for holding various events while simultaneously pressuring the CDC to shut down testing of asymptomatic people in an effort to juke the Covid stats.

Which is to say it’s sometimes hard to know in politics what’s incompetence and what’s malice, but in this case we know that the White House knows the value of frequent testing of non-symptomatic people. They use it all the time and speak publicly about it.

Meanwhile, a planned FDA announcement of approval of convalescent plasma as a treatment for covid-19 got turned into something else.

The White House would upend those plans, turning a preliminary finding of modest efficacy into something much bigger — a presidential announcement of a “major therapeutic breakthrough on the China Virus,” as White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany previewed in a tweet late that Saturday night. …

The misrepresentations became a stunning debacle for the FDA, shaking its professional staff to the core and undermining its credibility as it approaches one of the most important and fraught decisions in its history amid a divisive presidential election — deciding when a coronavirus vaccine is safe and effective. Yet again, the president had harnessed the machinery of government to advance his political agenda — with potentially corrosive effects on public trust in government scientists’ handling of the pandemic.

I have to believe that, no matter where the testing is and what the science says, Trump will announce a vaccine before the election. Will that be followed by mass resignations at the FDA? Or will yet another government agency be corrupted?

and the Republican Convention

This got covered in the featured post.

and you also might be interested in …

Actor Chadwick Boseman died Friday at 43 after a long battle with colon cancer. Here’s how good an actor he was: I saw both 42 and Black Panther and never connected that the same guy had the lead in both. I just saw T’Challa on the screen; the thought “Isn’t that Jackie Robinson?” never crossed my mind.

In the current environment, why should Congress be kept informed about whatever Russia might be doing to help Trump get re-elected? Rep. Adam Schiff tweeted:

The [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] has cancelled all further briefings on foreign election interference.  The Administration clearly does not want Congress or the country informed of what Russia is doing. The last DNI was fired for doing so, and the [intelligence community] has now been fully brought to heel.

I had a hard time figuring out what to do with the Falwell sex scandal. It’s salacious and couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, but I try not to encourage my weakness for schadenfreude. So I wondered: Is there anything insightful being written about this?

Fortunately, there was. Slate’s Jeffrey Guhin used this incident as a reason to review the official Catholic meaning of scandal: It isn’t just to have something shameful exposed, but to do spiritual harm to others by demoralizing them religiously.

As Thomas Aquinas put it, to scandalize someone is to cause their spiritual downfall. This is why the Catholic Church’s sex abuse crisis was a scandal in both senses: not only was it a devastating blow to the reputation of the church, but it also led many to stop believing in the existence of God, or at least in the necessity of the Catholic Church.

So while most people debate whether the sex or Falwell’s hypocrisy is worse, Guhin sees something else:

[S]ociologists like me are interested in scandal because it connects to our social construction of reality, the idea that just about every social thing, when you get down to it, is rooted in beliefs we all work together to maintain. Money’s only money because we say the numbers means something. Voting only counts because a bunch of people agree it should. And while this is largely a collective effort, some people have more power over what we believe than others. For evangelicals, it’s people like the son of Jerry Falwell Sr., the president of Liberty University. And Falwell’s scandal isn’t just a religious scandal—his downfall can cast doubt on religion and broader themes of authority. .. [W]hen these powerful figures scandalize us, we lose our faith in our social world, or in our capacity to govern it.

Yet for many, watching Trump and the third or so of the country who will never give up on him has been an experience of ongoing existential anxiety. Was everything we believed about America hopelessly naïve? What if democracy will never actually work?

Like so many conservative grifters, Falwell is managing to fail up. Because Liberty University didn’t want to go through the ordeal of firing him for cause, they owe him a $10.5 million severance package in exchange for his resignation. This is in addition to whatever he may have made off suspicious real estate deals.

If you work for state government and have to deal with sexual harassment, it’s good to know that the state attorney general is there to enforce the law. Unless you work for Alaska, where the AG has been doing the harassing.

Here’s a good example of systemic racism:

Dermatology, the medical specialty devoted to treating diseases of the skin, has a problem with brown and black skin. Though progress has been made in recent years, most textbooks that serve as road maps for diagnosing skin disorders often don’t include images of skin conditions as they appear on people of color.

That’s a glaring omission that can lead to misdiagnoses and unnecessary suffering, because many key characteristics of skin disorders — like red patches and purple blotches — may appear differently on people with different complexions, experts say.

Like a lot of systemic racism, it’s not KKK-style get-those-bastards race hatred. It’s just a presumption that white is normal, and that white problems are the ones that matter. “What about people of color?” just kind of slips the minds of decision-makers.

You think you’ve moved to a sleepy-but-sophisticated Boston suburb, and then there’s a feral pig attack.

and let’s close with something distracting

It’s definitely been a cute-puppies week. Enjoy this husky and 49 other puppy photos.

Creationism defender Duane Gish became famous for a debating technique now known as the Gish Gallop: tossing out so many lies, exaggerations, mischaracterizations, and other deceptions so quickly that your opponent simply can’t respond to them all. Debaters who try will just exhaust their own time (and the audience’s patience) on factual details without ever getting around to addressing the galloper’s main points, much less making their own case.

The trap of fact-checking. This week’s Republican Convention was essentially a four-day Gish gallop. Speaker after speaker gave fact-checkers a workout. CNN’s Daniel Dale listed 20 “false or misleading claims” in Trump’s speech from the White House lawn. FactCheck.org “didn’t find anything to fact-check from Sen. Kamala Harris’ speech accepting the Democratic nomination for vice president”, but made six corrections to Mike Pence’s speech. For example, he blamed blamed Joe Biden for not denouncing “the riots in Oakland” that killed a federal officer.

But he didn’t explain that the death was unrelated to demonstrators protesting in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Federal prosecutors have charged a right-wing extremist with the killing.

Both Pence and Trump claimed Biden wants to “defund the police”, a position Biden has explicitly denied. The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump assessed that “Nearly every claim Trump made about Biden’s positions was false“.

The non-headline speakers were just as dishonest. Rudy Giuliani blamed the violence that coincided with some George Floyd protests on Antifa, a claim unsupported by evidence.

According to multiple reports, including a Washington Post fact check, there were no signs that that antifa was behind violence at these protests. As of earlier this month, federal prosecutors had not been able to link dozens of people arrested in protests in Portland, Ore., to antifa.

Nikki Haley falsely said that Biden wanted to “ban fracking”, while Eric Trump falsely claimed that “Biden has pledged to … take away your cherished Second Amendment.” In addition to dishonesty, speakers displayed appalling ignorance and sloppiness. Lara Trump used a fake Lincoln quote. And Trump Jr.’s girl friend Kimberley Guilfoyle said:

As a first-generation American, I know how dangerous their Socialist agenda is. My mother, Mercedes, was a special education teacher from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. My father, also an immigrant, came to this nation in pursuit of the American Dream.

Guilfoyle, who introduced herself as a “proud Latina”, ought to know that Puerto Ricans are American citizens. So she’s not “a first-generation American” and her mother was not “an immigrant”.

So you can imagine how easy it would be to take the Gish-gallop bait: I could go on for screens and screens listing specific errors of fact and logic. And if you dislike the Republican Party anyway, you might read that list with a certain I-was-right-all-along satisfaction. [1]

The four big lies. However, that’s not the case that needs to be made right now. The RNC wasn’t like a Liar’s Convention or a Festival of Tall Tales. The week’s disinformation wasn’t a random scattering of fanciful notions. The point of the lesser lies was to support bigger lies, which often stayed in the background. So even if an undecided voter who watched the convention also read all the fact-checks, and came to understand that Puerto Ricans are citizens and Biden isn’t planning to defund the police, he or she might still come away believing one or more of these four falsehoods:

1. Trump had an extraordinary economic record before the coronavirus hit.
2. Trump is not responsible for consequences of the Covid-19 epidemic. The 200,000 excess deaths this year are not his fault, since he did everything that could have been done to control the epidemic. And since the epidemic is not his fault, he should get a mulligan for it. He should be judged by February’s economy rather than today’s, as if the last six months never happened.
3. The unrest in America’s cities this summer is not a response to excessive police violence and a long history of racial injustice, but is due to a dark conspiracy of liberal anarchists. The way to control violence in our cities is with an overwhelming show of force, which Trump is willing to order and Biden is not.
4. If Covid-19 was ever a serious threat, it no longer is. America should get back to normal as fast as possible; any additional sickness or death this causes is a price worth paying.

None of this is true. The convention’s little lies about who-did-what-when pale in comparison; they’re only relevant to the extent that they prop up these four big lies.

Correcting the first big lie: Even pre-Covid, Trump’s economic performance was nothing special. In 2016, Trump supporters argued that his amazing business acumen would translate from the private sector to government: Rather than creating wealth for himself, Trump as president would create wealth for all of us.

We now understand that the myth of Trump’s financial genius was false from the beginning. Far from the self-made man he purported to be, Trump became wealthy through inheritance from his father and tax fraud (including allegedly defrauding some of his relatives). After losing the money his father left him, he became rich again via money laundering for Russians and other former Soviet nationals, as well as profiting from schemes that created losses for people who trusted him.

But one thing has carried over: The same myth-making genius that created the image of Trump the Great Businessman has created a new myth of the Great Trump Economy. At the Convention, Larry Kudlow told this tall tale:

Donald Trump’s economic plan … was a roaring success. Inheriting a stagnant economy on the front end of recession, the program of tax cuts, historic rollback of onerous regulations that crippled small business, unleashing energy to become the world’s number one producer, and free, fair and reciprocal trade deals to bolster manufacturing, agriculture, technology, and other sectors. The economy was rebuilt in three years.

This is its own little Gish gallop that could be debunked phrase by phrase — for example, the US became the world’s top oil producer in 2013 under Obama — but it’s more important to look at the big picture: A graph of US GDP growth by year shows that from 2010 to the beginning of the Covid pandemic, growth was slow but steady, bouncing in a range between 1.6% and 3.1%. (Compare to 1966 or 1955, when GDP grew 6.6% and 7.1%.)The peak growth rate of that period came in 2015 under Obama. There was never a Trump boom, just the same kind of economic growth we had under Obama.

If the pre-Covid Trump economy felt different from Obama’s, that was because periods near the end of economic expansions have strikingly low unemployment rates. So in the Trump years the unemployment rate got very low, reaching 3.6% by November of 2018 and staying at about that level for more than a year. In February, it was 3.5%. [2]

However, if you look at a graph of the unemployment rate, you’ll see the same pattern as GDP: Trump inherited positive trends from Obama. The slow-but-steady growth that started in 2010 gradually knocked down the unemployment rate. That positive trend continued — without any acceleration at all after Trump became president — until the epidemic disrupted it. [3]

In some ways it’s surprising that growth didn’t improve under Trump, because Mitch McConnell loosened the purse strings once he had a Republican president. Even though it was late in the economic cycle — a time when conventional economic theory calls for government to run surpluses — Congress allowed Trump to stimulate the economy with deficits far larger than it had allowed Obama after his first term. [4]

So the gist of the pre-Covid Trump economic record is this: Until Covid, Trump managed to maintain the positive trends Obama had set in motion. And even this steady-as-she-goes result did come about through an ingenious trade policy or business-friendly tax policy or cuts in regulation; he simply got to spend more money than Obama did.

Correcting the second big lie: Trump didn’t start the Covid-19 epidemic, but the length and depth of it is his fault. It is fairly typical for presidents to face unexpected and undeserved challenges during a four-year term. Obama didn’t create the Great Recession, but it dominated his first term and got in the way of all his plans. George W. Bush didn’t blow up the Twin Towers on 9-11. His father didn’t force Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. Jimmy Carter didn’t invite the Iranians to hold our embassy staff hostage. JFK didn’t ship Russian nuclear missiles to Cuba. FDR didn’t attack Pearl Harbor. And so on. Unexpected things happen in the course of four years, and presidents are judged by how they respond to those challenges. We don’t give them mulligans for bad luck.

Covid-19 is the defining crisis of Trump’s term, and by any measure he has handled it very badly. The most obvious evidence for that is in this chart of Covid-19 cases per million people. (Enlarged version here.)

Not only does the US curve outrun all the others by a wide margin, it also has a different shape: The initial outbreak here was only slightly worse than in the European Union and Canada, which were also hard-hit. But only the US goes on to have a second hump bigger than the first. There are two simple reasons for that:

• The Trump administration wasted the time bought by the March-May shutdown. While other countries developed national test/quarantine/contact-trace strategies, the Trump administration still has no plan other than to wait for a “miracle” vaccine. [5]
• Trump himself pushed the states to reopen too soon, and undercut governors who tried to implement a more cautious policy based on science and standards. That second hump in our graph is a direct result of that too-soon reopening, and the June/July outbreak was centered in states like Florida and Texas, where Trumpist governors ignored the medical experts and re-opened too soon.

It is probably unfair to have expected the United States’ Covid-19 response to lead the world: Small island nations like New Zealand and Iceland are easier to protect and mobilize than a sprawling place like the US or the EU. So Trump should not get all the blame for the fact that our 565 (and counting) deaths per million is shamed by New Zealand’s 4 or South Korea’s 6 or even Japan’s 10.

But we still had less than 100,000 deaths on June 1, when it was first becoming clear that our curve was not collapsing the way that other nation’s curves were. It may be unreasonable to hold Trump responsible for all our Covid-19 deaths, which are now up to a world-leading 187,000. But certainly tens of thousands of those deaths are his fault, and I personally blame him for every death over 100,000.

Correcting the third big lie: The violence in our cities is happening because Trump has sharpened racial divisions and encouraged police brutality. It will only get worse if he is given a second term. After the racial violence that followed Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, the Obama Justice Department issued two reports: One examined the details of the shooting and determined that police officer Darren Wilson should not have been charged with murder. To that extent, it affirmed that justice had been done.

The other report, however, painted a very dark picture of policing in Ferguson: The city budget depended on squeezing fines out of poor Blacks, and the police department was tasked with making that happen. Ferguson police did not “serve and protect” its Black citizens. Instead, police and the Black community had a predator/prey relationship in which police were constantly on the lookout for violations to cite in order to raise revenue. The report also revealed widespread and blatant racism among Ferguson officers, who routinely mistreated Blacks they came into contact with.

In short, the Fox News portrait of Ferguson was wrong: The problem wasn’t the Black community’s short-term emotional reaction to its misperception of Brown’s death. Instead, the long-term racial injustice in Ferguson, and citizens’ inability to address that injustice through the system, created a situation in which some kind of violent outbreak was inevitable. Michael Brown was the spark, not the cause.

In combination, the two reports provided a ray of hope and a path forward: Incidents like Michael Brown’s death need not lead either to individual policemen being railroaded or to purely local investigations that sweep police violence under the rug. But at the same time, the long-term injustice at the heart of the problem can be addressed. The Justice Department soon worked out a consent decree with Ferguson and its police department to reform local practices. Similar decrees were negotiated in other sites of racial violence, such as Baltimore.

But when Jeff Sessions became Trump’s first attorney general, he quickly got to work closing off that path forward. And one of his final acts before leaving was to undercut the whole process.

Sessions’ memo will make it challenging to negotiate any effective police reform agreement going forward. It also makes it more difficult for the Justice Department’s civil rights lawyers to enforce agreements already in place.

Today, Black people oppressed by abusive police departments know that the Justice Department is not their ally. No one is coming to help them.

Police, on the other hand, know that no matter how they misbehave, Trump has their backs. He has famously encouraged police officers not to be “too nice” when they apprehend suspects. He told border patrol officers to break the law, and promised their chief a pardon if he were prosecuted. When Buffalo police assaulted an elderly protester in Buffalo, Trump falsely attacked the protester as an “ANTIFA provocateur”.

Meanwhile, Trump has been encouraging white supremacists. He defended the Nazi rally in Charlottesville. He stands up to support the Confederate flag and Confederate statues.

And now, Trump is openly encouraging right-wing violence. The Kenosha vigilante was in the front row of a Trump rally in January. Yesterday, Trump tweeted “GREAT PATRIOTS” about a caravan of trucks that pepper-sprayed demonstrators in Portland.

What in all of this is going to get better if Trump is re-elected? Has Trump ever been a peace-maker? Will he improve race relations? Will police stop murdering Black men and women, or stop shooting them in the back? Will Blacks trust that they can get justice through the system, without taking to the streets?

Obviously not. If Trump is re-elected, everything that has caused this summer’s violence will only get worse.

Correcting the fourth big lie: The Covid epidemic is still raging and is still killing Americans in large numbers. But Trump has learned nothing from his blunders in May. If he gets the responses he wants, we’ll see a third big hump in the case graph. During the Republican Convention, speakers often talked about the coronavirus in the past tense. “It was awful,” Larry Kudlow recalled. “Health and economic impacts were tragic. Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere.”

But in the real world, more Americans died of Covid-19 during the Convention’s four days than died in the 9-11 attacks. We are nowhere near herd immunity, and a vaccine probably won’t be widely available until spring — unless Trump once again follows Putin’s lead and ignores the usual safety rules to release a vaccine that hasn’t been properly tested.

Meanwhile, Trump is once again pushing states and cities to ignore medical guidelines and take big risks. In the same way that he applauded as states catastrophically opened bars and restaurants in May, he’s pushing for schools to open now, and threatening communities that want to be more careful. He has repeatedly promoted the myth that kids don’t get the virus or can’t spread it.

But now we are seeing virus outbreaks on college campuses, causing some schools to reverse their plans (including my alma mater, Michigan State). More than 1,000 University of Alabama students tested positive in the first two weeks of classes.

Trump’s speech Thursday night was not just an illegal use of the White House lawn, it was a public health hazard, as 1,500 or more people packed into a small area and mostly did not wear masks.

He encourages a return of large-crowd gatherings of all sorts: churches, movie theaters, and even football games., which he would like to see played in front of full stadiums. (“We want big big stadiums loaded with people. We don’t want to have 15,000 people watching Alabama-LSU.”) Inside the White House, masks are seldom worn, even when people work in close quarters.

We saw this movie in May, and we know how it ends: If the nation’s children return to in-person classes (which Barron Trump is not doing), if college campuses reopen, and if crowds return to major sporting events, we’ll have a third wave of Covid outbreaks — and more tens of thousands of deaths that will be Trump’s fault.

[1] I might also list all the RNC activities that were illegal, unethical, or based on trickery. That too would be satisfying. And while such examples should not go by without notice or objection, what really deserves notice is that Republicans in Congress are unwilling to condemn blatant law-breaking.

At the beginning of his term, when Trump saw no Republican pushback for ignoring the norms of our democracy (like refusing to divest his business holdings or take any action to avoid the resulting conflicts of interest), many imagined that there was a line beyond which Trump would lose his party’s support. We still haven’t found it. So it’s still an open question whether Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, Joni Ernst, Thom Tillis, or any of the other Republican senators would lift a finger to stop a straight-out military coup to keep Trump in power.

[2] But even focusing only on unemployment, Trump did not oversee “the greatest economy in the history of our country“, as he often claims. Unemployment was 2.5% in 1953.

[3] This unemployment graph is not current — I couldn’t find one that was. There has been some recovery since. By the end of July, the 14.7% unemployment rate had come down to 10.2%, which is still alarmingly high.

[4] The 2020 deficit looks likely to top $3 trillion, and is already well past the $1.4 trillion record set by Bush and Obama in fiscal 2009.

[5] For a more complete play-by-play explanation of how Trump bungled even the initial reaction to the virus, see James Fallows article “The 3 Weeks that Changed Everything“. Just to give you a taste: Obama had an agreement with China that allowed us to have observers in Wuhan, where the virus first appeared. But Trump never bothered to appoint anybody to fill those roles.

This week the US witnessed its first Fascist Party convention. Laws didn’t matter. Norms didn’t matter. Truth didn’t matter. Public health didn’t even matter. Just a lot of flags and pageantry and praise for our Great Leader. They didn’t even have a party platform — just whatever the Leader wants.

Going into the convention, I warned you not to get caught up in the small lies — the single false statements that fact-checkers love to focus on. Instead, I encouraged you to look for the big lies in the background. They are a forest that can easily get lost behind the trees.

So of course I have to take my own advice. The first featured post is “The Four Big Lies of the Republican Convention”. It should be out before 11 EDT, though it’s hard to say how much before. I’d also like to write something about the unexpected general strike we saw in the sports world this week, and what it says about the general strike as a tool if Trump manages to steal the election. But time and effort are in short supply today — I’m in the middle of moving — so I may not get to it.

The weekly summary has a lot to cover: the Kenosha shootings, both by police and by a Trump-inspired vigilante; the Portland shooting of a right-wing protester; the hurricane and wildfires; the US has its 6 millionth virus case, as the administration corrupts the CDC and FDA; and Jerry Falwell Jr. is in the middle of a sex scandal that would dominate the news if this weren’t 2020. Maybe I’ll look for a cute animal video to close on, just for the sake of sanity. I’ll predict the summary to be out by around 1.

– Joe Biden, 8-20-2020

This week’s featured post is “The Underlying Differences Between Liberals and Conservatives“.

This week everybody was talking about the Democratic Convention.

The DNC ran Monday-to-Thursday. Unlike all previous conventions, it was virtual: No big ballroom full of people in funny hats or balloons dropping from the ceiling. To their credit, the organizers didn’t just put together a sad imitation of an in-person convention. Occasionally they took advantage of the new medium and did something creative, like the tour-of-America roll call. I suspect it was actually shorter than a traditional roll call, and much more fun.

The feel-good moment of the convention was when 13-year-old Brayden Harrington spoke about how Biden helped him with his stuttering problem, a disability Biden shares.

It is impossible to imagine Trump doing something like this. Trump never admits to any failing, and certainly doesn’t see himself in people with similar-but-worse problems. They’re nothing like him, because they’re losers and he’s a winner.

The center of every convention is the nominee’s acceptance speech. Biden is never going to be the orator Barack Obama is or Bill Clinton could be at his best, and the virtual-convention format is new and hard. (Trust me on this. I occasionally speak at churches. Talking to a congregation is much easier than talking to my computer and trusting that Zoom is putting my words out there.) But I thought he gave a powerful speech. It takes him a minute or two to get into it, but by the end it’s clear that the text represents what he really believes. (I recognize that too. When I start speaking, my head is full of good advice about where to look and what to do with my hands and which phrases I tripped over in rehearsal. But then the words hit me and I realize: “This is my speech. I want to tell people these things.”)

Here is the text and the video.

The visionary quote at the top comes from the speech’s conclusion, but Biden also laid out an agenda: First, deal with the virus.

As president, the first step I will take will be to get control of the virus that’s ruined so many lives. Because I understand something this president doesn’t. We will never get our economy back on track, we will never get our kids safely back to school, we will never have our lives back, until we deal with this virus. The tragedy of where we are today is it didn’t have to be this bad. Just look around. It’s not this bad in Canada. Or Europe. Or Japan. Or almost anywhere else in the world.

Then: create jobs by building infrastructure, and extend ObamaCare to provide healthcare to more people. Also: college you can access without “crushing” amounts of debt, immigration reform, labor unions, clean energy, protect Social Security, revise the tax code so that the super-rich and the big corporations pay their fair share, and embrace democratic nations and stand up to dictators, rather than the other way around.

But don’t write off the visionary stuff as meaningless, because I think that’s the message that will pull in the voters who can still be convinced: We’re really tired of having fear and hatred thrown at us every day. We don’t want a leader who endlessly focuses on resentments and grievances, and sees an enemy in anyone who doesn’t applaud his every move. We want a leader who will bring out the best in us, not the worst.

Biden’s “American darkness” contrasts with Trump’s “American carnage”. Carnage evokes anger and violence, while darkness is sad and regrettable. We don’t need to strike back at anybody, we just need some illumination.

The video where Biden answers a question about his faith was moving in its own right. And then Comedian Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the emcee for Night 4, delivered this zinger: “Joe Biden goes to church so regularly that he doesn’t even need tear gas and a bunch of federalized troops to get there.”

An interesting tactical choice: Biden did not name Trump. He mentioned “the current president” (twice), “this president” (five times), “the current occupant of the office”, “the President” (twice), and “our current president”. It was like the old commercials where the advertised product is tested against Brand X.

Trump also made some interesting choices during the Democratic Convention. He went to Pennsylvania to do some White Birtherism, claiming that because Biden’s family left when Joe was “8, 9, or 10” (actually 13 — Trump can’t tell the truth about anything), he wasn’t really born in Scranton. (Coming from a medium-size city myself, I know that isn’t how it works. We were always looking for a way to claim famous people, not a way to reject them.)

Kamala’s speech (video, text) had to cover a lot of ground: telling us who she is, explaining how her positions are rooted in where she comes from, acknowledging the historic aspect of a woman of color being on the ticket, making the case against Donald Trump, and explaining why Joe Biden is the right response to the problems Trump has created.

I thought she did a good job, and I look forward to seeing her debate Mike Pence, if that actually happens. I sense something cat-like in Kamala. She seems calm and relaxed, but there’s a spring wound tight in there, and she could pounce at any moment. I wouldn’t want to debate her.

And here’s Trevor Noah’s take on the suggestion that Kamala isn’t “really black” or isn’t “black enough”.

and getting ready for the Republican Convention

One bizarre aspect of the two conventions is that the Democratic one arguably had a more impressive list of Republican participants than the Republican Convention will have: John Kasich, Susan Molinari, Christine Todd Whitman, Colin Powell, and Cindy McCain.

By contrast, the RNC will be all Trump. He plans to appear himself all four nights (though the schedule only lists him as a speaker on Thursday), with other major speaking slots reserved for Melania, all four Trump children, and Don Jr.’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle. Ben Carson and Rand Paul are the only speakers who have run for president themselves. Living ex-President George W. Bush and 2012 nominee Mitt Romney will not appear. Neither will ex-Speakers Paul Ryan, John Boehner, or Newt Gingrich. Major Leader Mitch McConnell has no role.

It will be interesting to see how Trump answers the challenge this week. In his 2016 convention speech, he fearmongered about Muslim and Mexican immigrants. They were the primary threats to your safety, and he was going to stop them almost immediately. “Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.” The obvious sequel would be to fearmonger about Antifa and Black Lives Matter. (But what happened to safety being “restored”? How is it that we’re still threatened nearly four years later?)

If he does that, though, I think he’s playing into Biden’s hand. Biden offered a vision of an America where we aren’t all constantly afraid and angry. If Trump just doubles down on “American carnage”, he makes Biden’s vision that much more appealing.

In preparation for listening to Trump’s 2020 acceptance speech, let’s review my discussion of his 2016 convention speech. I led that off with two quotes, one from the 2015 Sift article “How Propaganda Works”

If your target audience has a flawed ideology, then your propaganda doesn’t have to lie to them. The lie, in some sense, has already been embedded and only needs to be activated.

and another from 2012’s “How Lies Work“:

You can’t be blamed for the false information, irrational prejudices, and ugly stereotypes that already sit inside people’s heads, waiting to be exploited. So good propaganda contains only enough false or repulsive information to leverage the ignorance and misinformation that’s already out there.

From those two, I drew this conclusion:

In other words, the central lie in an effective propaganda campaign is the one you never explicitly say. It’s out there already, sitting in the minds of your followers, so you just need to allude to it, suggest it, and bring it to consciousness in as many ways as you can. Your target audience will hear it, and afterwards most will believe you said it. But because you aren’t saying it in so many words, it’s immune to fact-checkers, and you barely need to defend it at all.

The Big Lie of Trump’s 2016 speech was one he never explicitly stated, but it was the constant background assumption: The main threat to your safety comes from Mexican and Muslim immigrants. That proposition was totally false and could not have been defended with facts. But it didn’t have to be, because he never specifically said it, leaving fact-checkers with no summing-up quote to grab hold of or object to.

So I advise you to look for that this week. Don’t just nitpick his speech with “This is false” and “That is false”. Listen for the Big Lie in the background, the one that goes without saying.

McSweeney’s gives its version of the RNC schedule. Tonight we can look forward to:

9:20 pm
Marjorie Taylor Greene, QAnon congressional candidate, explains why COVID-19 can’t be transmitted through the air because there is no such thing as “air.”

9:40 pm
Scott Baio triggers libs from his hot tub.

10:20 pm
Silicon Valley CEO Peter Thiel shares a PowerPoint about how minimum-wage workers can balance their budgets by scavenging for edible weeds and building traps to catch small rodents.

10:40 pm
Keynote speech: Axulythor, Sorcerer of Darkness, on the importance of restricting women’s access to reproductive healthcare.

OK, conventions have to be strange in this plague year. But one of the stranger moves was the RNC’s decision to keep its 2016 platform unchanged. And so it includes sections like this:

America has been led in the wrong direction. Our economy has become unnecessarily weak with stagnant wages. People living paycheck to paycheck are struggling, sacrificing, and suffering. Americans have earned and deserve a strong and healthy economy. Our standing in world affairs has declined significantly – our enemies no longer fear us and our friends no long[er] trust us. People want and expect an America that is the most powerful and respected country on the face of the earth. … The President appoints judges who legislate from the bench rather than apply the law.

The resolution adopted by the Republican National Committee is, well, weird.

WHEREAS, The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden Administration, as well as those espoused by the Democratic National Committee today; therefore, be it RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda; RESOVLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;

In the era of Zoom and email, there is no reason a Platform Committee couldn’t put something together, even if they couldn’t get together in the same room. (And what does it say about opening schools, if the RNC Platform Committee thought meeting was too dangerous?) The 2016 platform was assembled when the party was out of power, and focused on running against the Obama administration. But now, four years later, the accomplishments of the Trump administration are apparently so insignificant that no item of the platform needs to be updated, and no sights need to be raised. Nothing at all needs to be said about problems unforeseen in 2016, like Covid-19 or the current economic crisis.

Instead, the RNC resolution makes the GOP precisely what its critics have claimed: a personality cult. The Party has no positions on issues, but it supports whatever Trump’s agenda is.

And then there’s the question about whether the law-and-order President’s convention activities are even legal. He intends to use the White House lawn for his own and Melania’s speeches, which mixes politics with government in a manner that is at best unethical. Although the convention remains technically in Charlotte, many of the speeches will happen in D. C., and many of them on federal property.

The unusual arrangement is already drawing ethical concerns that federal resources will be used for campaign events and that administration officials will violate the law by campaigning for the president on government property. And it’s not lost on Trump critics that the president’s flagship hotel, already a gathering spot for Republicans, will be conveniently located a short walk from the Mellon Auditorium.

“Picking a venue across the street from Trump’s D.C. hotel is no coincidence,” said Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.), who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee with jurisdiction over Trump’s Washington hotel. “The Republican National Committee has privately paid Donald Trump throughout his presidency and it’s sadly no surprise that their largest event would continue that shameful practice.”

Mike Pompeo will address the convention even though he is on a government-sponsored trip to the MIddle East.

Matt Yglesias annotates a Federal Reserve chart of job growth to sum up the Trump economic narrative:

and the Senate Intelligence Committee Trump/Russia report

I got daunted by the 966 pages of the report, so I’ve barely looked at it myself. Here’s LawFare’s page of commentary.

One overarching note: There is a fair amount of overlap between this document and the Mueller report. But the Senate report covers a fair bit more ground for a few reasons. For one thing, it was not limited to information it could prove beyond a reasonable doubt in court, as Mueller was. Just as important, the committee included counterintelligence questions in its investigative remit—whereas Mueller limited himself to a review of criminal activity. So the document reads less like a prosecution memo and more like an investigative report addressing risk assessment questions.

The gist: Yes, there was a serious national-security threat for the FBI to look into. Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort was in regular (and encrypted) communication with Konstantin Kilimnik, who the report identifies as a Russian intelligence officer. Lawfare’s summary:

In other words, throughout his work on the Trump campaign, Manafort maintained an ongoing business relationship with a Russian intelligence officer, to whom he passed nonpublic campaign material and analysis.

So what did Kilimnik do with the data—and why did Manafort share it? This was one of the great mysteries left unsolved by the Mueller report, and the Senate was also unable to come up with an answer.

… Perhaps the most tantalizing suggestion in this section involves the redacted pages following the committee’s assertion that “[s]ome evidence suggests Kilimnik may be connected to the GRU hack-and-leak operation related to the 2016 election”—that is, the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.

So a line can be drawn from the DNC and Podesta hacks to Kilimnik to Manafort to Trump. On the other side of the conspiracy, the Russians connect to WikiLeaks to Roger Stone to Trump.

The Senate report does not directly conclude that Trump was lying, but it gets pretty close. It draws this conclusion: “Despite Trump’s recollection, the Committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his Campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.”

The campaign didn’t just get advance warning about WikiLeaks intentions; they made requests.

After it became clear to Trump associates that the famous Access Hollywood tape would be coming out, Stone sought to time the much-sought-after release of Podesta emails by Wikileaks to divert attention from the tape. Corsi recalled that Stone “[w]anted the Podesta stuff to balance the news cycle” either “right then or at least coincident.”

And Stone got his wish: “At approximately 4:32 p.m. on October 7, approximately 32 minutes after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, WikiLeaks released 2,050 emails that the GRU had stolen from John Podesta, repeatedly announcing the leak on Twitter and linking to a searchable archive of the documents.”

You get the picture. All of the key figures in the Trump campaign—including Trump himself—knew about, and anticipated, the Podesta Wikileaks dump.

and Steve Bannon

Returning to the subject of conservative vulnerability to con-men that I raised two weeks ago: SDNY announced Thursday that former Trump “chief strategist” Steve Bannon had been indicted for fraud. He and three others were charged in connection with the crowdfunding campaign “We Build the Wall”, which supposedly was collecting money to build Trump’s border wall. (Text of indictment.)

In particular, to induce donors to donate to the campaign, [co-defendant Brian] KOLFAGE repeatedly and falsely assured the public that he would “not take a penny in salary or compensation” and that “100% of the funds raised . . . will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose” because, as BANNON publicly stated, “we’re a volunteer organization.”

Those representations were false. In truth, KOLFAGE, BANNON, BADOLATO, and SHEA received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from We Build the Wall, which they each used in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s public representations. In particular, KOLFAGE covertly took for his personal use more than $350,000 in funds that donors had given to We Build the Wall, while BANNON, through a non-profit organization under his control (“Non-Profit-1”), received over $1 million from We Build the Wall, at least some of which BANNON used to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in BANNON’s personal expenses. To conceal the payments to KOLFAGE from We Build the Wall, KOLFAGE, BANNON, BADOLATO, and SHEA devised a scheme to route those payments from We Build the Wall to KOLFAGE indirectly through Non-Profit-1 and a shell company under SHEA’s control, among other avenues. They did so by using fake invoices and sham “vendor” arrangements, among other ways, to ensure, as KOLFAGE noted in a text message to BADOLATO, that his pay arrangement remained “confidential” and kept on a “need to know” basis.

Bannon, you might remember, became Trump’s campaign chairman after Paul Manafort left. Manfort was later convicted of multiple felonies.

SDNY is a traditionally independent US Attorney office that Bill Barr tried to take over a few months ago. He got the sitting US attorney to leave, but failed to install a crony. Instead, Geoffrey Berman was succeeded by his assistant Audrey Strauss, who announced the Bannon indictment. Whether a Barr crony would have swept this investigation under the rug is an interesting question. SDNY is also rumored to be working on an investigation of Rudy Giuliani.

Evan Hill tweets:

It gets better: Kolfage used boat he bought with illegally-siphoned “We Build the Wall” funds to sail in the July 4 Trump boat parade in Destin, Florida https://instagram.com/tv/CCRxjWLj6im/?igshid=91tryu76e16p (spotted by @ZacAlf)

And there’s more, gleaned from the We Build the Wall web site.

Kris Kobach is the general counsel of the Build the Wall PAC that Steve Bannon was just arrested for being involved in as chairman. The advisory board includes Erik Prince, former CO congressman Tom Tancredo, Sheriff Dave Clarke and former pitcher Curt Schilling.

and you also might be interested in …

When the extra unemployment payments of the CARES Act ran out at the end of July, and Congress and the President couldn’t agree on a new stimulus package, it was widely predicted that many American households would be in trouble. Well, it’s happening.

In 2018 and 2019, Trump’s niece Mary taped conversations with her aunt, Donald’s sister, retired Judge Maryanne Barry. Mary says she was hoping to gather evidence to prove that Maryanne, Donald, and Robert misrepresented the size of their father (and Mary’s grandfather) Fred Trump’s estate, and so got Mary and her brother to agree to a settlement far lower than they would have sought if they had understood that the estate was worth closer to $1 billion than the $30 million they were told. [Lesson: Don’t cheat your relatives.]

The Washington Post article revealing these tapes doesn’t say whether Mary ever got the evidence she was looking for, but she did record her aunt saying a lot about the current president: “You can’t trust him”, “He has no principles. None.”, “The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”, and “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

After this story posted online Saturday night, the White House issued this statement from the president that said in full: “Every day it’s something else, who cares. I miss my brother, and I’ll continue to work hard for the American people. Not everyone agrees, but the results are obvious. Our country will soon be stronger than ever before!”

There’s a lot in that statement that I agree with: Almost every day there’s something else. Another major Trump associate indicted. A new Senate report outlining his collusion with the Russians. A new snake-oil coronavirus-cure scam. Putin poisoning a rival and Trump saying nothing. Day in, day out.

And who can deny that the results are obvious? 180,000 Americans dead of a virus that almost all other countries have controlled much better, with another thousand still dying every day. 16.3 million unemployed. An FY2020 budget deficit that will easily top $3 trillion. (That’s more than double the previous record: $1.4 trillion in the Bush-to-Obama transition year of FY 2009.)

But will our country soon be stronger than ever before? Probably not. The virus is far from beaten, and even if there is a vaccine by spring, it will take some time for the country to recover. But Trump is way behind in the polls, so there is a good chance America will be stronger than ever in a few years.

Cy Vance wins again in his bid to see Trump’s tax returns and other business-related documents. Here is Judge Victor Marrero’s 103-page ruling.

Originally, Trump’s lawyers argued the ridiculous claim that as long as he is president he is “absolutely immune” from any legal process, including grand jury investigations into his companies and associates. (They literally claimed that if Trump shot someone on Fifth Avenue “nothing could be done”.) Every court that looked at that claim rejected it, and no justice on the Supreme Court defended it. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the federal district court with the instructions that Trump could challenge the subpoena in the same way that anybody else would, without any blanket immunity from his office.

So Trump did put together a challenge on the grounds that the Manhattan grand jury’s subpoena was too broad was issued in bad faith. His lawyers supported that claim with a narrative rather than a set of facts: Because Democrats in the House were having trouble getting Trump’s documents, they got Cy Vance to subpoena the same documents under his investigation of the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal pay-offs, even though most of the documents have nothing to do with that investigation. Once Vance gets the documents, he will either give them to the House Democrats or leak them to the public. So the subpoena is too broad and issued in bad faith.

Again and again in his rejection of Trump’s challenge, Judge Marrero explained that you can’t just tell a story, you need to back it up with facts. We don’t actually know (and shouldn’t know at this stage) the full scope of the grand jury’s investigation. Grand juries deserve an assumption of good faith, unless there is serious evidence otherwise. And you can’t just assume that somebody in the grand jury or in Vance’s office will break the law and leak the documents.

the Court need not deem plausible the mere possibility of misconduct.

Marrero dismissed Trump’s challenge to the subpoena “with prejudice”, meaning that he will not consider another revision.

The Court also need not ignore that the President has now twice failed to present a valid cause for relief, despite guidance from the Supreme Court, which further counsels against allowing a third attempt at litigating the threshold validity of the Mazars subpoena.

This ruling now goes up the ladder again, to an appellate court. That process has already started, with this announcement Friday:

Trump’s personal attorneys asked the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit to halt Marrero’s ruling from taking effect while they mount an appeal.

The circuit court on Friday afternoon agreed to hold a Sept. 1 hearing on the issue, but declined Trump’s request for an emergency stay. It’s unclear if Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. will attempt to enforce the subpoena in the interim, and his office did not respond to a request for comment.

The earliest day Vance could enforce the subpoena is next Friday.

Again, grand jury investigations are secret, so Vance getting the documents doesn’t necessarily mean we the people will ever see them.

In a somewhat clueless effort to attract women’s votes, Trump pardoned Susan B. Anthony on Tuesday. Anthony was convicted of illegally voting in the 1872 election. Since accepting a pardon requires admitting committing a crime, which Anthony never did, the Anthony Museum rejected the pardon on her behalf.

I wish my memory allowed me to attribute this quip to the proper source: It’s not the first time Trump did something to a woman without first seeking consent.

The Good Liars pranked Trump Jr. by changing his book’s dust jacket.

The Arkham Board of Health comments on the reopening plans of Miskatonic University.

Attorney General Barr met with media mogul Rupert Murdoch in October, 2019. That’s been widely reported before, and already it should raise suspicions. I mean, Barr has power over a lot of stuff Murdoch would care about. So what conversation could they possibly have that fits within ethics guidelines?

Now a new book tells us they had the worst possible kind of conversation: Barr told Murdoch that Fox News commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano had annoyed the President, and that Fox should “muzzle” him. They did.

Though Barr’s words to Murdoch “carried a lot of weight”, Stelter writes, “no one was explicitly told to take Napolitano off the air”. Instead, Stelter reports, Napolitano found digital resources allocated elsewhere, saw a slot on a daytime show disappear, and was not included in coverage of the impeachment process.

Eddie Glaude’s book Democracy in Black includes an anecdote about a family getting evicted by the police in the middle of the night. No warning, just breaking into the house to throw them out and pile their possessions in the street.

“When they came for me at three in the morning, they didn’t have a place for me and my family to go, but the animal shelter came because they knew that there were dogs there. They came with a place for my dog.”

Goodyear banned political attire at its plants, including both MAGA hats and Biden hats. Trump took offense and called for a boycott of the Ohio tire maker. So: first his bungling of the virus response causes Ohio State to cancel its football season, and now he’s going after one of the state’s major employers. A few weeks ago I didn’t expect Biden to carry Ohio, but now I wonder.

and let’s close with something to waste your time

The reddit subgroup r/disneyvacation (don’t ask me why) is a series of recaptioned images from WikiHow. Like this one:

How to describe 2020 to your future grandkids.

Or this:

How to forget your contacts and think you’ve spotted an old college buddy.

People are adding new ones constantly, so you can say “I’ll quit after the next one” more or less forever.

– Joe Biden, 8-20-2020

This week’s featured post is “The Underlying Differences Between Liberals and Conservatives“.

This week everybody was talking about the Democratic Convention.

The DNC ran Monday-to-Thursday. Unlike all previous conventions, it was virtual: No big ballroom full of people in funny hats or balloons dropping from the ceiling. To their credit, the organizers didn’t just put together a sad imitation of an in-person convention. Occasionally they took advantage of the new medium and did something creative, like the tour-of-America roll call. I suspect it was actually shorter than a traditional roll call, and much more fun.

The feel-good moment of the convention was when 13-year-old Brayden Harrington spoke about how Biden helped him with his stuttering problem, a disability Biden shares.

It is impossible to imagine Trump doing something like this. Trump never admits to any failing, and certainly doesn’t see himself in people with similar-but-worse problems. They’re nothing like him, because they’re losers and he’s a winner.

The center of every convention is the nominee’s acceptance speech. Biden is never going to be the orator Barack Obama is or Bill Clinton could be at his best, and the virtual-convention format is new and hard. (Trust me on this. I occasionally speak at churches. Talking to a congregation is much easier than talking to my computer and trusting that Zoom is putting my words out there.) But I thought he gave a powerful speech. It takes him a minute or two to get into it, but by the end it’s clear that the text represents what he really believes. (I recognize that too. When I start speaking, my head is full of good advice about where to look and what to do with my hands and which phrases I tripped over in rehearsal. But then the words hit me and I realize: “This is my speech. I want to tell people these things.”)

Here is the text and the video.

The visionary quote at the top comes from the speech’s conclusion, but Biden also laid out an agenda: First, deal with the virus.

As president, the first step I will take will be to get control of the virus that’s ruined so many lives. Because I understand something this president doesn’t. We will never get our economy back on track, we will never get our kids safely back to school, we will never have our lives back, until we deal with this virus. The tragedy of where we are today is it didn’t have to be this bad. Just look around. It’s not this bad in Canada. Or Europe. Or Japan. Or almost anywhere else in the world.

Then: create jobs by building infrastructure, and extend ObamaCare to provide healthcare to more people. Also: college you can access without “crushing” amounts of debt, immigration reform, labor unions, clean energy, protect Social Security, revise the tax code so that the super-rich and the big corporations pay their fair share, and embrace democratic nations and stand up to dictators, rather than the other way around.

But don’t write off the visionary stuff as meaningless, because I think that’s the message that will pull in the voters who can still be convinced: We’re really tired of having fear and hatred thrown at us every day. We don’t want a leader who endlessly focuses on resentments and grievances, and sees an enemy in anyone who doesn’t applaud his every move. We want a leader who will bring out the best in us, not the worst.

Biden’s “American darkness” contrasts with Trump’s “American carnage”. Carnage evokes anger and violence, while darkness is sad and regrettable. We don’t need to strike back at anybody, we just need some illumination.

The video where Biden answers a question about his faith was moving in its own right. And then Comedian Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the emcee for Night 4, delivered this zinger: “Joe Biden goes to church so regularly that he doesn’t even need tear gas and a bunch of federalized troops to get there.”

An interesting tactical choice: Biden did not name Trump. He mentioned “the current president” (twice), “this president” (five times), “the current occupant of the office”, “the President” (twice), and “our current president”. It was like the old commercials where the advertised product is tested against Brand X.

Trump also made some interesting choices during the Democratic Convention. He went to Pennsylvania to do some White Birtherism, claiming that because Biden’s family left when Joe was “8, 9, or 10” (actually 13 — Trump can’t tell the truth about anything), he wasn’t really born in Scranton. (Coming from a medium-size city myself, I know that isn’t how it works. We were always looking for a way to claim famous people, not a way to reject them.)

Kamala’s speech (video, text) had to cover a lot of ground: telling us who she is, explaining how her positions are rooted in where she comes from, acknowledging the historic aspect of a woman of color being on the ticket, making the case against Donald Trump, and explaining why Joe Biden is the right response to the problems Trump has created.

I thought she did a good job, and I look forward to seeing her debate Mike Pence, if that actually happens. I sense something cat-like in Kamala. She seems calm and relaxed, but there’s a spring wound tight in there, and she could pounce at any moment. I wouldn’t want to debate her.

And here’s Trevor Noah’s take on the suggestion that Kamala isn’t “really black” or isn’t “black enough”.

and getting ready for the Republican Convention

One bizarre aspect of the two conventions is that the Democratic one arguably had a more impressive list of Republican participants than the Republican Convention will have: John Kasich, Susan Molinari, Christine Todd Whitman, Colin Powell, and Cindy McCain.

By contrast, the RNC will be all Trump. He plans to appear himself all four nights (though the schedule only lists him as a speaker on Thursday), with other major speaking slots reserved for Melania, all four Trump children, and Don Jr.’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle. Ben Carson and Rand Paul are the only speakers who have run for president themselves. Living ex-President George W. Bush and 2012 nominee Mitt Romney will not appear. Neither will ex-Speakers Paul Ryan, John Boehner, or Newt Gingrich. Major Leader Mitch McConnell has no role.

It will be interesting to see how Trump answers the challenge this week. In his 2016 convention speech, he fearmongered about Muslim and Mexican immigrants. They were the primary threats to your safety, and he was going to stop them almost immediately. “Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.” The obvious sequel would be to fearmonger about Antifa and Black Lives Matter. (But what happened to safety being “restored”? How is it that we’re still threatened nearly four years later?)

If he does that, though, I think he’s playing into Biden’s hand. Biden offered a vision of an America where we aren’t all constantly afraid and angry. If Trump just doubles down on “American carnage”, he makes Biden’s vision that much more appealing.

In preparation for listening to Trump’s 2020 acceptance speech, let’s review my discussion of his 2016 convention speech. I led that off with two quotes, one from the 2015 Sift article “How Propaganda Works”

If your target audience has a flawed ideology, then your propaganda doesn’t have to lie to them. The lie, in some sense, has already been embedded and only needs to be activated.

and another from 2012’s “How Lies Work“:

You can’t be blamed for the false information, irrational prejudices, and ugly stereotypes that already sit inside people’s heads, waiting to be exploited. So good propaganda contains only enough false or repulsive information to leverage the ignorance and misinformation that’s already out there.

From those two, I drew this conclusion:

In other words, the central lie in an effective propaganda campaign is the one you never explicitly say. It’s out there already, sitting in the minds of your followers, so you just need to allude to it, suggest it, and bring it to consciousness in as many ways as you can. Your target audience will hear it, and afterwards most will believe you said it. But because you aren’t saying it in so many words, it’s immune to fact-checkers, and you barely need to defend it at all.

The Big Lie of Trump’s 2016 speech was one he never explicitly stated, but it was the constant background assumption: The main threat to your safety comes from Mexican and Muslim immigrants. That proposition was totally false and could not have been defended with facts. But it didn’t have to be, because he never specifically said it, leaving fact-checkers with no summing-up quote to grab hold of or object to.

So I advise you to look for that this week. Don’t just nitpick his speech with “This is false” and “That is false”. Listen for the Big Lie in the background, the one that goes without saying.

McSweeney’s gives its version of the RNC schedule. Tonight we can look forward to:

9:20 pm
Marjorie Taylor Greene, QAnon congressional candidate, explains why COVID-19 can’t be transmitted through the air because there is no such thing as “air.”

9:40 pm
Scott Baio triggers libs from his hot tub.

10:20 pm
Silicon Valley CEO Peter Thiel shares a PowerPoint about how minimum-wage workers can balance their budgets by scavenging for edible weeds and building traps to catch small rodents.

10:40 pm
Keynote speech: Axulythor, Sorcerer of Darkness, on the importance of restricting women’s access to reproductive healthcare.

OK, conventions have to be strange in this plague year. But one of the stranger moves was the RNC’s decision to keep its 2016 platform unchanged. And so it includes sections like this:

America has been led in the wrong direction. Our economy has become unnecessarily weak with stagnant wages. People living paycheck to paycheck are struggling, sacrificing, and suffering. Americans have earned and deserve a strong and healthy economy. Our standing in world affairs has declined significantly – our enemies no longer fear us and our friends no long[er] trust us. People want and expect an America that is the most powerful and respected country on the face of the earth. … The President appoints judges who legislate from the bench rather than apply the law.

The resolution adopted by the Republican National Committee is, well, weird.

WHEREAS, The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden Administration, as well as those espoused by the Democratic National Committee today; therefore, be it RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda; RESOVLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;

In the era of Zoom and email, there is no reason a Platform Committee couldn’t put something together, even if they couldn’t get together in the same room. (And what does it say about opening schools, if the RNC Platform Committee thought meeting was too dangerous?) The 2016 platform was assembled when the party was out of power, and focused on running against the Obama administration. But now, four years later, the accomplishments of the Trump administration are apparently so insignificant that no item of the platform needs to be updated, and no sights need to be raised. Nothing at all needs to be said about problems unforeseen in 2016, like Covid-19 or the current economic crisis.

Instead, the RNC resolution makes the GOP precisely what its critics have claimed: a personality cult. The Party has no positions on issues, but it supports whatever Trump’s agenda is.

And then there’s the question about whether the law-and-order President’s convention activities are even legal. He intends to use the White House lawn for his own and Melania’s speeches, which mixes politics with government in a manner that is at best unethical. Although the convention remains technically in Charlotte, many of the speeches will happen in D. C., and many of them on federal property.

The unusual arrangement is already drawing ethical concerns that federal resources will be used for campaign events and that administration officials will violate the law by campaigning for the president on government property. And it’s not lost on Trump critics that the president’s flagship hotel, already a gathering spot for Republicans, will be conveniently located a short walk from the Mellon Auditorium.

“Picking a venue across the street from Trump’s D.C. hotel is no coincidence,” said Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.), who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee with jurisdiction over Trump’s Washington hotel. “The Republican National Committee has privately paid Donald Trump throughout his presidency and it’s sadly no surprise that their largest event would continue that shameful practice.”

Mike Pompeo will address the convention even though he is on a government-sponsored trip to the MIddle East.

Matt Yglesias annotates a Federal Reserve chart of job growth to sum up the Trump economic narrative:

and the Senate Intelligence Committee Trump/Russia report

I got daunted by the 966 pages of the report, so I’ve barely looked at it myself. Here’s LawFare’s page of commentary.

One overarching note: There is a fair amount of overlap between this document and the Mueller report. But the Senate report covers a fair bit more ground for a few reasons. For one thing, it was not limited to information it could prove beyond a reasonable doubt in court, as Mueller was. Just as important, the committee included counterintelligence questions in its investigative remit—whereas Mueller limited himself to a review of criminal activity. So the document reads less like a prosecution memo and more like an investigative report addressing risk assessment questions.

The gist: Yes, there was a serious national-security threat for the FBI to look into. Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort was in regular (and encrypted) communication with Konstantin Kilimnik, who the report identifies as a Russian intelligence officer. Lawfare’s summary:

In other words, throughout his work on the Trump campaign, Manafort maintained an ongoing business relationship with a Russian intelligence officer, to whom he passed nonpublic campaign material and analysis.

So what did Kilimnik do with the data—and why did Manafort share it? This was one of the great mysteries left unsolved by the Mueller report, and the Senate was also unable to come up with an answer.

… Perhaps the most tantalizing suggestion in this section involves the redacted pages following the committee’s assertion that “[s]ome evidence suggests Kilimnik may be connected to the GRU hack-and-leak operation related to the 2016 election”—that is, the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.

So a line can be drawn from the DNC and Podesta hacks to Kilimnik to Manafort to Trump. On the other side of the conspiracy, the Russians connect to WikiLeaks to Roger Stone to Trump.

The Senate report does not directly conclude that Trump was lying, but it gets pretty close. It draws this conclusion: “Despite Trump’s recollection, the Committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his Campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.”

The campaign didn’t just get advance warning about WikiLeaks intentions; they made requests.

After it became clear to Trump associates that the famous Access Hollywood tape would be coming out, Stone sought to time the much-sought-after release of Podesta emails by Wikileaks to divert attention from the tape. Corsi recalled that Stone “[w]anted the Podesta stuff to balance the news cycle” either “right then or at least coincident.”

And Stone got his wish: “At approximately 4:32 p.m. on October 7, approximately 32 minutes after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, WikiLeaks released 2,050 emails that the GRU had stolen from John Podesta, repeatedly announcing the leak on Twitter and linking to a searchable archive of the documents.”

You get the picture. All of the key figures in the Trump campaign—including Trump himself—knew about, and anticipated, the Podesta Wikileaks dump.

and Steve Bannon

Returning to the subject of conservative vulnerability to con-men that I raised two weeks ago: SDNY announced Thursday that former Trump “chief strategist” Steve Bannon had been indicted for fraud. He and three others were charged in connection with the crowdfunding campaign “We Build the Wall”, which supposedly was collecting money to build Trump’s border wall. (Text of indictment.)

In particular, to induce donors to donate to the campaign, [co-defendant Brian] KOLFAGE repeatedly and falsely assured the public that he would “not take a penny in salary or compensation” and that “100% of the funds raised . . . will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose” because, as BANNON publicly stated, “we’re a volunteer organization.”

Those representations were false. In truth, KOLFAGE, BANNON, BADOLATO, and SHEA received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from We Build the Wall, which they each used in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s public representations. In particular, KOLFAGE covertly took for his personal use more than $350,000 in funds that donors had given to We Build the Wall, while BANNON, through a non-profit organization under his control (“Non-Profit-1”), received over $1 million from We Build the Wall, at least some of which BANNON used to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in BANNON’s personal expenses. To conceal the payments to KOLFAGE from We Build the Wall, KOLFAGE, BANNON, BADOLATO, and SHEA devised a scheme to route those payments from We Build the Wall to KOLFAGE indirectly through Non-Profit-1 and a shell company under SHEA’s control, among other avenues. They did so by using fake invoices and sham “vendor” arrangements, among other ways, to ensure, as KOLFAGE noted in a text message to BADOLATO, that his pay arrangement remained “confidential” and kept on a “need to know” basis.

Bannon, you might remember, became Trump’s campaign chairman after Paul Manafort left. Manfort was later convicted of multiple felonies.

SDNY is a traditionally independent US Attorney office that Bill Barr tried to take over a few months ago. He got the sitting US attorney to leave, but failed to install a crony. Instead, Geoffrey Berman was succeeded by his assistant Audrey Strauss, who announced the Bannon indictment. Whether a Barr crony would have swept this investigation under the rug is an interesting question. SDNY is also rumored to be working on an investigation of Rudy Giuliani.

Evan Hill tweets:

It gets better: Kolfage used boat he bought with illegally-siphoned “We Build the Wall” funds to sail in the July 4 Trump boat parade in Destin, Florida https://instagram.com/tv/CCRxjWLj6im/?igshid=91tryu76e16p (spotted by @ZacAlf)

And there’s more, gleaned from the We Build the Wall web site.

Kris Kobach is the general counsel of the Build the Wall PAC that Steve Bannon was just arrested for being involved in as chairman. The advisory board includes Erik Prince, former CO congressman Tom Tancredo, Sheriff Dave Clarke and former pitcher Curt Schilling.

and you also might be interested in …

When the extra unemployment payments of the CARES Act ran out at the end of July, and Congress and the President couldn’t agree on a new stimulus package, it was widely predicted that many American households would be in trouble. Well, it’s happening.

In 2018 and 2019, Trump’s niece Mary taped conversations with her aunt, Donald’s sister, retired Judge Maryanne Barry. Mary says she was hoping to gather evidence to prove that Maryanne, Donald, and Robert misrepresented the size of their father (and Mary’s grandfather) Fred Trump’s estate, and so got Mary and her brother to agree to a settlement far lower than they would have sought if they had understood that the estate was worth closer to $1 billion than the $30 million they were told. [Lesson: Don’t cheat your relatives.]

The Washington Post article revealing these tapes doesn’t say whether Mary ever got the evidence she was looking for, but she did record her aunt saying a lot about the current president: “You can’t trust him”, “He has no principles. None.”, “The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”, and “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

After this story posted online Saturday night, the White House issued this statement from the president that said in full: “Every day it’s something else, who cares. I miss my brother, and I’ll continue to work hard for the American people. Not everyone agrees, but the results are obvious. Our country will soon be stronger than ever before!”

There’s a lot in that statement that I agree with: Almost every day there’s something else. Another major Trump associate indicted. A new Senate report outlining his collusion with the Russians. A new snake-oil coronavirus-cure scam. Putin poisoning a rival and Trump saying nothing. Day in, day out.

And who can deny that the results are obvious? 180,000 Americans dead of a virus that almost all other countries have controlled much better, with another thousand still dying every day. 16.3 million unemployed. An FY2020 budget deficit that will easily top $3 trillion. (That’s more than double the previous record: $1.4 trillion in the Bush-to-Obama transition year of FY 2009.)

But will our country soon be stronger than ever before? Probably not. The virus is far from beaten, and even if there is a vaccine by spring, it will take some time for the country to recover. But Trump is way behind in the polls, so there is a good chance America will be stronger than ever in a few years.

Cy Vance wins again in his bid to see Trump’s tax returns and other business-related documents. Here is Judge Victor Marrero’s 103-page ruling.

Originally, Trump’s lawyers argued the ridiculous claim that as long as he is president he is “absolutely immune” from any legal process, including grand jury investigations into his companies and associates. (They literally claimed that if Trump shot someone on Fifth Avenue “nothing could be done”.) Every court that looked at that claim rejected it, and no justice on the Supreme Court defended it. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the federal district court with the instructions that Trump could challenge the subpoena in the same way that anybody else would, without any blanket immunity from his office.

So Trump did put together a challenge on the grounds that the Manhattan grand jury’s subpoena was too broad was issued in bad faith. His lawyers supported that claim with a narrative rather than a set of facts: Because Democrats in the House were having trouble getting Trump’s documents, they got Cy Vance to subpoena the same documents under his investigation of the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal pay-offs, even though most of the documents have nothing to do with that investigation. Once Vance gets the documents, he will either give them to the House Democrats or leak them to the public. So the subpoena is too broad and issued in bad faith.

Again and again in his rejection of Trump’s challenge, Judge Marrero explained that you can’t just tell a story, you need to back it up with facts. We don’t actually know (and shouldn’t know at this stage) the full scope of the grand jury’s investigation. Grand juries deserve an assumption of good faith, unless there is serious evidence otherwise. And you can’t just assume that somebody in the grand jury or in Vance’s office will break the law and leak the documents.

the Court need not deem plausible the mere possibility of misconduct.

Marrero dismissed Trump’s challenge to the subpoena “with prejudice”, meaning that he will not consider another revision.

The Court also need not ignore that the President has now twice failed to present a valid cause for relief, despite guidance from the Supreme Court, which further counsels against allowing a third attempt at litigating the threshold validity of the Mazars subpoena.

This ruling now goes up the ladder again, to an appellate court. That process has already started, with this announcement Friday:

Trump’s personal attorneys asked the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit to halt Marrero’s ruling from taking effect while they mount an appeal.

The circuit court on Friday afternoon agreed to hold a Sept. 1 hearing on the issue, but declined Trump’s request for an emergency stay. It’s unclear if Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. will attempt to enforce the subpoena in the interim, and his office did not respond to a request for comment.

The earliest day Vance could enforce the subpoena is next Friday.

Again, grand jury investigations are secret, so Vance getting the documents doesn’t necessarily mean we the people will ever see them.

In a somewhat clueless effort to attract women’s votes, Trump pardoned Susan B. Anthony on Tuesday. Anthony was convicted of illegally voting in the 1872 election. Since accepting a pardon requires admitting committing a crime, which Anthony never did, the Anthony Museum rejected the pardon on her behalf.

I wish my memory allowed me to attribute this quip to the proper source: It’s not the first time Trump did something to a woman without first seeking consent.

The Good Liars pranked Trump Jr. by changing his book’s dust jacket.

The Arkham Board of Health comments on the reopening plans of Miskatonic University.

Attorney General Barr met with media mogul Rupert Murdoch in October, 2019. That’s been widely reported before, and already it should raise suspicions. I mean, Barr has power over a lot of stuff Murdoch would care about. So what conversation could they possibly have that fits within ethics guidelines?

Now a new book tells us they had the worst possible kind of conversation: Barr told Murdoch that Fox News commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano had annoyed the President, and that Fox should “muzzle” him. They did.

Though Barr’s words to Murdoch “carried a lot of weight”, Stelter writes, “no one was explicitly told to take Napolitano off the air”. Instead, Stelter reports, Napolitano found digital resources allocated elsewhere, saw a slot on a daytime show disappear, and was not included in coverage of the impeachment process.

Eddie Glaude’s book Democracy in Black includes an anecdote about a family getting evicted by the police in the middle of the night. No warning, just breaking into the house to throw them out and pile their possessions in the street.

“When they came for me at three in the morning, they didn’t have a place for me and my family to go, but the animal shelter came because they knew that there were dogs there. They came with a place for my dog.”

Goodyear banned political attire at its plants, including both MAGA hats and Biden hats. Trump took offense and called for a boycott of the Ohio tire maker. So: first his bungling of the virus response causes Ohio State to cancel its football season, and now he’s going after one of the state’s major employers. A few weeks ago I didn’t expect Biden to carry Ohio, but now I wonder.

and let’s close with something to waste your time

The reddit subgroup r/disneyvacation (don’t ask me why) is a series of recaptioned images from WikiHow. Like this one:

How to describe 2020 to your future grandkids.

Or this:

How to forget your contacts and think you’ve spotted an old college buddy.

People are adding new ones constantly, so you can say “I’ll quit after the next one” more or less forever.

It’s policy, but it’s more than that.

Everyone knows that liberals and conservatives differ on policy: Liberals support abortion rights, gay rights, and gun control, while conservatives oppose all three. Conservatives want to deport undocumented immigrants and build a wall to keep more from coming, while liberals want to provide a path to citizenship for people who have been living and working here for years without incident. Liberals believe climate change is a real problem that requires serious action, while conservatives don’t. And so on.

But underneath all that are much broader and vaguer differences.

Conventions are designed to be popular TV, so they don’t go that deeply into policy. Instead, they focus on identity and present values rather than five-point plans. Consequently, watching the two conventions back-to-back is a good way to get a handle on the underlying differences. The following questions are intended to help focus your thinking as you watch.

1. Is your ideal America in the past or the future? One of President Trump’s major complaints against the Democratic Convention was that its speakers ran America down.

“Over the last week, the Democrats held the darkest and angriest and gloomiest convention in American history,” President Trump said in remarks to members of a conservative group in Arlington, Va. He accused Democrats of “attacking America as racist and a horrible country that must be redeemed.”

If you’re a liberal (as I am), you probably don’t remember the convention that way. What sticks in my mind are all the expressions of hope: We are a great people. We have it in us to overcome the current challenges and “build back better”. I saw a celebration of decency, of families that stick together through tough times, and of people’s simple desire to help each other.

This perception gap arises largely because of one of the major liberal/conservative splits: Conservatives see their ideal America in the past, while liberals see it in the future.“Make America Great Again” only makes sense if you believe that at some point in the past America was greater than it is now. Trump has always been vague about what era his “again” points to, but different segments of the MAGA community have their own favorites:

• The Founding. Many Evangelicals (and Mormons) go so far as to claim that the Constitution is divinely inspired, putting the Founding Fathers on a level very near the Biblical prophets.
• The Confederacy. Republicans tend to minimize the role that white supremacy plays for their base, but all those Confederate flags and rallies around statues of Robert E. Lee point to something else: nostalgia for the noble Lost Cause of the slave empire.
• The Wild West. There was a magic moment just after the Native Americans had been driven away, but before civilization arrived. The land was too vast and empty for anything you did to pollute it. And you could shoot all the buffalo you wanted, because there was nobody to tell you not to.
• The Gilded Age. Libertarians and Ayn Rand followers idealize the late 1800s, before antitrust laws and other progressive reforms involved government so deeply in the economy.
• The Greatest Generation. According to the myth, we single-handedly saved the World from fascism and never got the gratitude we deserved.
• The Happy Days. The idealized 1950s, when a white man could support his family on a single income, women knew their place was in the home, gay sex was a crime, and Negroes were invisible.

Democrats, on the other hand, have an annoying habit of throwing dirt on these beautiful images by talking about slavery, Jim Crow, the Native American genocide, or the indiscriminate massacre of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When we honor the Founders, it’s not because their era was so great, but because they left us a vision of a government where authority bubbles up from the People rather than streams down from Heaven, and of a world where “all men are created equal”. They never achieved that vision, but they wrote a Constitution flexible enough that we could evolve towards it, and a Declaration we could edit to say “all people are created equal”. Yes, they were hypocrites to wax eloquent about their own freedom while enslaving others. But in the long run, their visionary hypocrisy has served us better than realistic cynicism would have.

Liberal patriotism revolves around the Future America, the one we could build that will finally live up to that never-achieved vision. That’s why Kamala Harris talked “the beloved community … a country where we look out for one another, where we rise and fall as one, where we face our challenges, and celebrate our triumphs—together.” But then she admitted: “Today, that country feels distant.”

Trumpists hear negativity and gloom there, while liberals find it inspiring: Even in moments as dark as this one, the American ideal is still out there, still beckoning for us to achieve it.

In contrast, the theme President Trump has chosen for the Republican Convention is “Honoring the Great American Story“. Taking a wild guess, I suspect we’ll hear a lot about “left-wing mobs” who have been tearing down or defacing statues that honor major players in that great story: mostly Confederate leaders, but occasionally non-Confederates like Columbus or even George Washington. We might also hear denunciations of the 1619 Project, an American history curriculum that emphasizes the central role slavery played the Great American Story. (Senator Cotton wants to deny federal funds to schools that teach this curriculum. Remember when conservatives opposed federal control of education?)

This next week, expect to hear a lot of reverence for the America of days gone by. But the only vision you’ll hear for our future is to return to that past greatness.

2. Do you think mainly about We or I? There’s a reason masks have proven to be such a divisive left/right issue, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that they are great tools for controlling the Covid epidemic: Masks are a we-solution, not an I-solution.

Does wearing a mask guarantee that you won’t catch the virus? No. If you walk into a crowded room and you’re the only person wearing a mask, it’s going to improve your odds of escaping infection a little, but not really that much.

So if your demand is “Give me something I can do that will keep me safe”, telling you to wear a mask is not a great answer. But if you revise that to “Give me something my community can do that will help us get the virus under control faster”, masks are a great answer. If everyone starts wearing masks when they leave the house, instead of each infected person passing the virus on to three other people, you might have three infected people passing it on to just one new person. Instead of exponential growth, you’ll have exponential decay. And in a struggle like this, that’s what victory looks like.

But conservatives hate we-solutions. They would much rather hear about snake-oil cures like hydroxychloroquine or oleandrin, because those are I-solutions: If I get sick, I take oleandrin, and I get better — if it works.

This shows up across the board. Why should I give up my AR-15, when I was never going to do anything illegal with it anyway? Well, because if we all give up our AR-15s, the next mass shooting might not have quite so much “mass” to it. If you think taxes are too low, why don’t you just make a voluntary contribution to the Treasury? Because changing my tax rate doesn’t solve any national problem, while changing the rate we all pay does. And so on.

3. Are problems solved best by punishing individuals or reforming systems? Related to the focus on I rather than We is the conservative belief that problems are caused by individuals: The crime problem is caused by the individuals who commit crimes. The drug problem is caused by smugglers and pushers. Terrorism is caused by terrorists. And so on. This leads to a belief that the way to solve a problem is to figure out who is causing it and punish them until they stop doing whatever it is they’re doing.

That’s why the conservative reaction to immigrants and asylum seekers is so harsh: Border-crossers cause our immigration problem by coming to our country, and so they need to be punished until they stop. Herd them into detention centers and let people debate whether those centers qualify as “concentration camps”. Take their kids away and lose them in your system. Just make them stop coming.

Liberals are more apt to ask why they are coming and if there’s some way to unplug whatever process is pushing them here. Maybe we could promote reform in the hellish places they come from, or reform the trade practices that make those countries so poor. Maybe we could fund programs there that give them reasons to stay. But no, conservatives say, that would be rewarding the behavior we want to stop. And it wouldn’t work anyway, because … well, it just wouldn’t. If you’re not punishing anybody, you’re not solving anything.

Ditto for the violence that has sometimes accompanied the protests against police brutality after George Floyd’s murder. People are making trouble, so they need to be punished. So fire the tear gas, pepper-spray the peaceful and violent protesters indiscriminately, and send police into crowds swinging their nightsticks. Systemically, it makes no sense to answer a protest against police brutality with more police brutality. But those individuals are wrong and they need to be punished.

The flip side of this way of thinking is that whenever liberal tinkering with a dysfunctional system inconveniences conservatives, they interpret it as punishment. Raising taxes on the wealthy isn’t a sound fiscal plan to raise revenue, it’s punishing success. Affirmative action isn’t a way to compensate for the old-boy networks disadvantaged groups lack, it’s punishing white men. Green taxes punish coal miners and people who drive a lot. Laws preventing discrimination against gays punish Evangelical Christians. And so on.

From a liberal perspective, the weirdest thing in this mindset is the joy they imagine we feel as we punish them. Spend much time inside the conservative bubble, and you will hear a lot about how much we liberals hate the rich, and the coal miners, and the Evangelicals, and anybody else who will be disadvantaged by a liberal policy. We’re just rubbing our hands in sadistic glee whenever Harvard turns down some deserving white male.

My only explanation is projection. They know how they feel when a policeman clubs a BLM protester, so they imagine we must feel the same way.

4. When do you trust systems, and when do you trust people? Dr. Anthony Fauci had such a long and distinguished career before Covid-19 that I must have seen him somewhere — maybe during the Ebola scare or during the height of the AIDS epidemic. But I didn’t remember him. Certainly I had no reason to either trust or distrust him as a person. However, when Covid-19 started spreading, I recognized him as the spokesman for a system of medical science that I do trust. I don’t trust it absolutely or blindly, but when there’s a new disease and I have to make decisions about how to avoid it or seek treatment for it, that’s where I look for answers.

I trust a lot of other systems within certain bounds. I trust academic climate scientists to tell me how we’re doing on climate change. (And I don’t trust scientists employed by energy companies.) Their models may or may not make perfect predictions, but like the weather service’s forecasts, they’re the best we have. I trust geologists and astrophysicists to tell me the age of the Earth, and biologists to tell me how long ago various animals evolved. I trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics to tell me the unemployment rate and the Treasury to report the deficit. I read major newspapers with a mix of trust and distrust: They don’t always characterize events properly, and they sometimes misjudge which stories are or aren’t important, but if they put quotation marks around something, I’m pretty sure somebody really said it. If there’s a publicly checkable fact, I trust that somebody has checked it. The New York Times may not be perfect, and I may or may not agree its opinion columnists, but it is not fake news.

Those attitudes don’t have anything to do with the issues we normally think of as defining liberalism or conservatism. That last paragraph didn’t state any position on abortion or gun control or tax rates or immigration. But all the same, it marks me as a liberal. There are systems for gathering knowledge, and I believe that (with occasional but fairly rare exceptions) they work.

Conservatives, by and large, don’t share my faith in systems, and would rather trust people. Many of them (God help them) trust Trump. Some trust their religious leaders, even on topics that have little to do with religion. Some trust media personalities like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. Some trust people who share their religion or their economic class or their DNA. Or they look at a TV talking head and make their own judgment: That guy wouldn’t lie to me.

So they look at Dr. Fauci and don’t see the mouthpiece of medical science. They see a guy like any other guy — and what did he ever do for them? But that My Pillow guy, he speaks the same religious language they do, and his pillow was pretty good, and Trump likes him, so maybe he knows what he’s talking about. Maybe he’s right and Dr. Fauci is wrong.

5. Is the United States a member of the world community that leads by example? Or are we “exceptional”? Trump appears not to recognize the existence of a “world community” at all. He has been relentless about blowing up agreements that involve the US submitting to rules that bind large groups of nations. He pulled us out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Climate Accord and the multi-nation agreement to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. He supported Brexit, and chafes at the idea that he can’t have one-on-one trade agreements with the EU countries. He keeps making noises about undercutting NATO, even at one point questioning whether we would really defend some small NATO country like Montenegro.

At this point, the Republican view seems to be that the US is entirely exceptional: No rules should apply to us at all. We should be able to torture people if we want to, we can violate other nation’s sovereignty with impunity, and above all we should not get out in front of other countries to set an example. If somebody needs to be virtuous, let some other nation go first.

Liberals want our vision of the Future America to eventually spread to the Future World. Not that we will conquer the world, but that our ideals of equality and human rights will take hold everywhere once people see how they work here. In his convention speech, President Obama put it this way:

Joe knows the world, and the world knows him. He knows that our true strength comes from setting an example the world wants to follow. A nation that stands with democracy, not dictators. A nation that can inspire and mobilize others to overcome threats like climate change, terrorism, poverty, and disease.

6. Are some Americans more “real” than others? I don’t think Sarah Palin invented the phrase “real Americans”, but her 2008 vice-presidential campaign popularized it. “Real America”, she explained, is in the rural areas and small towns that just happened to support the McCain-Palin ticket rather than Obama-Biden. Since then, Republicans haven’t liked to define the term precisely, but the usage of “real Americans” favors white, native-born, English-speaking conservative Christians.

You can see the current emphasis on “real” Americans in the revived Birtherism that questions Kamala Harris’ eligibility for the vice presidency. Her parents were not citizens at the time of her birth; her mother was an immigrant from India, her father from Jamaica. But she was born in Oakland, and the 14th Amendment declares that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” So she is a citizen by birth rather than by naturalization, making her a “natural born Citizen” as demanded by the Constitution’s Article II.

While any challenge to Kamala’s 14th Amendment rights would be doomed in court — at least until Trump gets to appoint another Supreme Court justice or two — conservatives don’t like the birthright citizenship the 14th guarantees, or the “anchor babies” it makes citizens. Trump has described birthright citizenship as “frankly ridiculous” and has suggested that he might do away with it in some unspecified way. Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation then tried to put meat on those bones by finding a loophole in “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”.

Consistent with the liberal notion that the ideal America is in the future, liberals view America as a project that anyone can join, while conservatives have a more blood-and-soil definition. They see an important difference between people who are citizens due to some legal technicality and “real” Americans.

So those are the things I recommend you listen for this week, if you decide to watch the Republican Convention: real Americans, American exceptionalism, suspicion of systems contrasted with trust in particular people, the importance of punishment, We vs. I, and whether we should be trying to move back towards an idealized past or forward to an idealized future.

It’s policy, but it’s more than that.

Everyone knows that liberals and conservatives differ on policy: Liberals support abortion rights, gay rights, and gun control, while conservatives oppose all three. Conservatives want to deport undocumented immigrants and build a wall to keep more from coming, while liberals want to provide a path to citizenship for people who have been living and working here for years without incident. Liberals believe climate change is a real problem that requires serious action, while conservatives don’t. And so on.

But underneath all that are much broader and vaguer differences.

Conventions are designed to be popular TV, so they don’t go that deeply into policy. Instead, they focus on identity and present values rather than five-point plans. Consequently, watching the two conventions back-to-back is a good way to get a handle on the underlying differences. The following questions are intended to help focus your thinking as you watch.

1. Is your ideal America in the past or the future? One of President Trump’s major complaints against the Democratic Convention was that its speakers ran America down.

“Over the last week, the Democrats held the darkest and angriest and gloomiest convention in American history,” President Trump said in remarks to members of a conservative group in Arlington, Va. He accused Democrats of “attacking America as racist and a horrible country that must be redeemed.”

If you’re a liberal (as I am), you probably don’t remember the convention that way. What sticks in my mind are all the expressions of hope: We are a great people. We have it in us to overcome the current challenges and “build back better”. I saw a celebration of decency, of families that stick together through tough times, and of people’s simple desire to help each other.

This perception gap arises largely because of one of the major liberal/conservative splits: Conservatives see their ideal America in the past, while liberals see it in the future.“Make America Great Again” only makes sense if you believe that at some point in the past America was greater than it is now. Trump has always been vague about what era his “again” points to, but different segments of the MAGA community have their own favorites:

• The Founding. Many Evangelicals (and Mormons) go so far as to claim that the Constitution is divinely inspired, putting the Founding Fathers on a level very near the Biblical prophets.
• The Confederacy. Republicans tend to minimize the role that white supremacy plays for their base, but all those Confederate flags and rallies around statues of Robert E. Lee point to something else: nostalgia for the noble Lost Cause of the slave empire.
• The Wild West. There was a magic moment just after the Native Americans had been driven away, but before civilization arrived. The land was too vast and empty for anything you did to pollute it. And you could shoot all the buffalo you wanted, because there was nobody to tell you not to.
• The Gilded Age. Libertarians and Ayn Rand followers idealize the late 1800s, before antitrust laws and other progressive reforms involved government so deeply in the economy.
• The Greatest Generation. According to the myth, we single-handedly saved the World from fascism and never got the gratitude we deserved.
• The Happy Days. The idealized 1950s, when a white man could support his family on a single income, women knew their place was in the home, gay sex was a crime, and Negroes were invisible.

Democrats, on the other hand, have an annoying habit of throwing dirt on these beautiful images by talking about slavery, Jim Crow, the Native American genocide, or the indiscriminate massacre of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When we honor the Founders, it’s not because their era was so great, but because they left us a vision of a government where authority bubbles up from the People rather than streams down from Heaven, and of a world where “all men are created equal”. They never achieved that vision, but they wrote a Constitution flexible enough that we could evolve towards it, and a Declaration we could edit to say “all people are created equal”. Yes, they were hypocrites to wax eloquent about their own freedom while enslaving others. But in the long run, their visionary hypocrisy has served us better than realistic cynicism would have.

Liberal patriotism revolves around the Future America, the one we could build that will finally live up to that never-achieved vision. That’s why Kamala Harris talked “the beloved community … a country where we look out for one another, where we rise and fall as one, where we face our challenges, and celebrate our triumphs—together.” But then she admitted: “Today, that country feels distant.”

Trumpists hear negativity and gloom there, while liberals find it inspiring: Even in moments as dark as this one, the American ideal is still out there, still beckoning for us to achieve it.

In contrast, the theme President Trump has chosen for the Republican Convention is “Honoring the Great American Story“. Taking a wild guess, I suspect we’ll hear a lot about “left-wing mobs” who have been tearing down or defacing statues that honor major players in that great story: mostly Confederate leaders, but occasionally non-Confederates like Columbus or even George Washington. We might also hear denunciations of the 1619 Project, an American history curriculum that emphasizes the central role slavery played the Great American Story. (Senator Cotton wants to deny federal funds to schools that teach this curriculum. Remember when conservatives opposed federal control of education?)

This next week, expect to hear a lot of reverence for the America of days gone by. But the only vision you’ll hear for our future is to return to that past greatness.

2. Do you think mainly about We or I? There’s a reason masks have proven to be such a divisive left/right issue, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that they are great tools for controlling the Covid epidemic: Masks are a we-solution, not an I-solution.

Does wearing a mask guarantee that you won’t catch the virus? No. If you walk into a crowded room and you’re the only person wearing a mask, it’s going to improve your odds of escaping infection a little, but not really that much.

So if your demand is “Give me something I can do that will keep me safe”, telling you to wear a mask is not a great answer. But if you revise that to “Give me something my community can do that will help us get the virus under control faster”, masks are a great answer. If everyone starts wearing masks when they leave the house, instead of each infected person passing the virus on to three other people, you might have three infected people passing it on to just one new person. Instead of exponential growth, you’ll have exponential decay. And in a struggle like this, that’s what victory looks like.

But conservatives hate we-solutions. They would much rather hear about snake-oil cures like hydroxychloroquine or oleandrin, because those are I-solutions: If I get sick, I take oleandrin, and I get better — if it works.

This shows up across the board. Why should I give up my AR-15, when I was never going to do anything illegal with it anyway? Well, because if we all give up our AR-15s, the next mass shooting might not have quite so much “mass” to it. If you think taxes are too low, why don’t you just make a voluntary contribution to the Treasury? Because changing my tax rate doesn’t solve any national problem, while changing the rate we all pay does. And so on.

3. Are problems solved best by punishing individuals or reforming systems? Related to the focus on I rather than We is the conservative belief that problems are caused by individuals: The crime problem is caused by the individuals who commit crimes. The drug problem is caused by smugglers and pushers. Terrorism is caused by terrorists. And so on. This leads to a belief that the way to solve a problem is to figure out who is causing it and punish them until they stop doing whatever it is they’re doing.

That’s why the conservative reaction to immigrants and asylum seekers is so harsh: Border-crossers cause our immigration problem by coming to our country, and so they need to be punished until they stop. Herd them into detention centers and let people debate whether those centers qualify as “concentration camps”. Take their kids away and lose them in your system. Just make them stop coming.

Liberals are more apt to ask why they are coming and if there’s some way to unplug whatever process is pushing them here. Maybe we could promote reform in the hellish places they come from, or reform the trade practices that make those countries so poor. Maybe we could fund programs there that give them reasons to stay. But no, conservatives say, that would be rewarding the behavior we want to stop. And it wouldn’t work anyway, because … well, it just wouldn’t. If you’re not punishing anybody, you’re not solving anything.

Ditto for the violence that has sometimes accompanied the protests against police brutality after George Floyd’s murder. People are making trouble, so they need to be punished. So fire the tear gas, pepper-spray the peaceful and violent protesters indiscriminately, and send police into crowds swinging their nightsticks. Systemically, it makes no sense to answer a protest against police brutality with more police brutality. But those individuals are wrong and they need to be punished.

The flip side of this way of thinking is that whenever liberal tinkering with a dysfunctional system inconveniences conservatives, they interpret it as punishment. Raising taxes on the wealthy isn’t a sound fiscal plan to raise revenue, it’s punishing success. Affirmative action isn’t a way to compensate for the old-boy networks disadvantaged groups lack, it’s punishing white men. Green taxes punish coal miners and people who drive a lot. Laws preventing discrimination against gays punish Evangelical Christians. And so on.

From a liberal perspective, the weirdest thing in this mindset is the joy they imagine we feel as we punish them. Spend much time inside the conservative bubble, and you will hear a lot about how much we liberals hate the rich, and the coal miners, and the Evangelicals, and anybody else who will be disadvantaged by a liberal policy. We’re just rubbing our hands in sadistic glee whenever Harvard turns down some deserving white male.

My only explanation is projection. They know how they feel when a policeman clubs a BLM protester, so they imagine we must feel the same way.

4. When do you trust systems, and when do you trust people? Dr. Anthony Fauci had such a long and distinguished career before Covid-19 that I must have seen him somewhere — maybe during the Ebola scare or during the height of the AIDS epidemic. But I didn’t remember him. Certainly I had no reason to either trust or distrust him as a person. However, when Covid-19 started spreading, I recognized him as the spokesman for a system of medical science that I do trust. I don’t trust it absolutely or blindly, but when there’s a new disease and I have to make decisions about how to avoid it or seek treatment for it, that’s where I look for answers.

I trust a lot of other systems within certain bounds. I trust academic climate scientists to tell me how we’re doing on climate change. (And I don’t trust scientists employed by energy companies.) Their models may or may not make perfect predictions, but like the weather service’s forecasts, they’re the best we have. I trust geologists and astrophysicists to tell me the age of the Earth, and biologists to tell me how long ago various animals evolved. I trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics to tell me the unemployment rate and the Treasury to report the deficit. I read major newspapers with a mix of trust and distrust: They don’t always characterize events properly, and they sometimes misjudge which stories are or aren’t important, but if they put quotation marks around something, I’m pretty sure somebody really said it. If there’s a publicly checkable fact, I trust that somebody has checked it. The New York Times may not be perfect, and I may or may not agree its opinion columnists, but it is not fake news.

Those attitudes don’t have anything to do with the issues we normally think of as defining liberalism or conservatism. That last paragraph didn’t state any position on abortion or gun control or tax rates or immigration. But all the same, it marks me as a liberal. There are systems for gathering knowledge, and I believe that (with occasional but fairly rare exceptions) they work.

Conservatives, by and large, don’t share my faith in systems, and would rather trust people. Many of them (God help them) trust Trump. Some trust their religious leaders, even on topics that have little to do with religion. Some trust media personalities like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. Some trust people who share their religion or their economic class or their DNA. Or they look at a TV talking head and make their own judgment: That guy wouldn’t lie to me.

So they look at Dr. Fauci and don’t see the mouthpiece of medical science. They see a guy like any other guy — and what did he ever do for them? But that My Pillow guy, he speaks the same religious language they do, and his pillow was pretty good, and Trump likes him, so maybe he knows what he’s talking about. Maybe he’s right and Dr. Fauci is wrong.

5. Is the United States a member of the world community that leads by example? Or are we “exceptional”? Trump appears not to recognize the existence of a “world community” at all. He has been relentless about blowing up agreements that involve the US submitting to rules that bind large groups of nations. He pulled us out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Climate Accord and the multi-nation agreement to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. He supported Brexit, and chafes at the idea that he can’t have one-on-one trade agreements with the EU countries. He keeps making noises about undercutting NATO, even at one point questioning whether we would really defend some small NATO country like Montenegro.

At this point, the Republican view seems to be that the US is entirely exceptional: No rules should apply to us at all. We should be able to torture people if we want to, we can violate other nation’s sovereignty with impunity, and above all we should not get out in front of other countries to set an example. If somebody needs to be virtuous, let some other nation go first.

Liberals want our vision of the Future America to eventually spread to the Future World. Not that we will conquer the world, but that our ideals of equality and human rights will take hold everywhere once people see how they work here. In his convention speech, President Obama put it this way:

Joe knows the world, and the world knows him. He knows that our true strength comes from setting an example the world wants to follow. A nation that stands with democracy, not dictators. A nation that can inspire and mobilize others to overcome threats like climate change, terrorism, poverty, and disease.

6. Are some Americans more “real” than others? I don’t think Sarah Palin invented the phrase “real Americans”, but her 2008 vice-presidential campaign popularized it. “Real America”, she explained, is in the rural areas and small towns that just happened to support the McCain-Palin ticket rather than Obama-Biden. Since then, Republicans haven’t liked to define the term precisely, but the usage of “real Americans” favors white, native-born, English-speaking conservative Christians.

You can see the current emphasis on “real” Americans in the revived Birtherism that questions Kamala Harris’ eligibility for the vice presidency. Her parents were not citizens at the time of her birth; her mother was an immigrant from India, her father from Jamaica. But she was born in Oakland, and the 14th Amendment declares that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” So she is a citizen by birth rather than by naturalization, making her a “natural born Citizen” as demanded by the Constitution’s Article II.

While any challenge to Kamala’s 14th Amendment rights would be doomed in court — at least until Trump gets to appoint another Supreme Court justice or two — conservatives don’t like the birthright citizenship the 14th guarantees, or the “anchor babies” it makes citizens. Trump has described birthright citizenship as “frankly ridiculous” and has suggested that he might do away with it in some unspecified way. Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation then tried to put meat on those bones by finding a loophole in “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”.

Consistent with the liberal notion that the ideal America is in the future, liberals view America as a project that anyone can join, while conservatives have a more blood-and-soil definition. They see an important difference between people who are citizens due to some legal technicality and “real” Americans.

So those are the things I recommend you listen for this week, if you decide to watch the Republican Convention: real Americans, American exceptionalism, suspicion of systems contrasted with trust in particular people, the importance of punishment, We vs. I, and whether we should be trying to move back towards an idealized past or forward to an idealized future.

Today we are at the odd and fleeting vantage point between the two conventions.

Conventions are how a party tells the country what it is all about. We’ve just seen what the Democrats are about, and we’re about to see the Republicans. (If you don’t have time to watch: The GOP is about Trump. They didn’t even write a platform this year, they just said they support Trump.)

To me, this is a good moment to contemplate the more vague attitudes and identities that form the cultural difference between the parties. It’s easy to list issues where they have different positions — immigration, guns, abortion, racism, healthcare, climate change, and so on. But if we’ve learned anything from the Trump era, it’s that positions on issues can be ephemeral. The Republican Party has changed its mind about free trade and deficits and NATO and the importance of character and a long list of other things. And yet, the party’s base consists of the same people who were there a decade ago.

So what defines the real boundary line between a liberal and a conservative? I’ll look at that in the featured post, which should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary also has a lot to cover: A Senate report verifies that the Trump campaign really did collude with Russia. Steve Bannon got arrested for fraud. The Manhattan District Attorney is one step closer to seeing Trump’s tax returns. And the all-virtual Democratic Convention seems to have worked pretty well. That post should appear between noon and one.

Today we are at the odd and fleeting vantage point between the two conventions.

Conventions are how a party tells the country what it is all about. We’ve just seen what the Democrats are about, and we’re about to see the Republicans. (If you don’t have time to watch: The GOP is about Trump. They didn’t even write a platform this year, they just said they support Trump.)

To me, this is a good moment to contemplate the more vague attitudes and identities that form the cultural difference between the parties. It’s easy to list issues where they have different positions — immigration, guns, abortion, racism, healthcare, climate change, and so on. But if we’ve learned anything from the Trump era, it’s that positions on issues can be ephemeral. The Republican Party has changed its mind about free trade and deficits and NATO and the importance of character and a long list of other things. And yet, the party’s base consists of the same people who were there a decade ago.

So what defines the real boundary line between a liberal and a conservative? I’ll look at that in the featured post, which should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary also has a lot to cover: A Senate report verifies that the Trump campaign really did collude with Russia. Steve Bannon got arrested for fraud. The Manhattan District Attorney is one step closer to seeing Trump’s tax returns. And the all-virtual Democratic Convention seems to have worked pretty well. That post should appear between noon and one.

They need that money in order to have the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. But if they don’t get those two items that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it. If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money, that means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it.

– Donald J. Trump

This week’s featured post is “What Makes Trump an Autocrat?”

This week everybody was talking about Kamala Harris

“Well, we aren’t particularly excited about him, but rumor has it that he’ll have an exciting, female No. 2.”

Even before Kamala Harris left the presidential race, backers of other candidates were talking about her as a vice-presidential candidate. As a woman of color who is two decades younger and a forceful speaker, she fills a lot of holes for the Biden ticket. There has been a lot of speculation about other women, but Harris was the leader on almost every pundit’s list from wire to wire.

Conventional wisdom says that people don’t change their votes based on the VP, and in terms of conscious thinking that’s probably true. But the second name on the ticket modifies the first as an adjective modifies a noun. A candidate’s first major choice changes how we think about him or her. When Bill Clinton went for a second white male southerner in Al Gore, that said, “I really mean it.” Ronald Reagan picking George Bush said that he wanted to change the Republican Party, but not burn it down. Barack Obama choosing Joe Biden sent a similar message.

And so Biden-Harris is a subtly different candidate than Biden-Warren or Biden-Booker or Biden-Bloomberg. In addition to the obvious demographic messages, I read something else into the Harris choice: Biden doesn’t need to be a maverick. He’s the anti-John-McCain in that sense. If the obvious choice makes sense, he’ll go with it. In the current climate, where science is being sidelined in favor of miracle cures like hydroxychloroquine or oleandrin, that’s kind of comforting. I want a president who will take the standard public-health playbook and implement it, not one who needs to be original.

Like a cover band playing a medley of bigotry’s greatest hits, Republicans went after Harris with whatever racist or sexist attacks they had left over from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Unscrupulous presidents used to let hidden minions spread such dreck, but Trump came right out with this reprise of birtherism:

“I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris. “I have no idea if that’s right,” he added. “I would have thought, I would have assumed, that the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president.”

That’s so Trump. He makes a charge even though he has “no idea if that’s right”, and then faults somebody else for not checking things out, as if the President of the United States bears no responsibility to know what he’s talking about before opening his mouth. Friday on CBS Jared Kushner used that as a dodge:

He just said that he had no idea whether that’s right or wrong, I don’t see that as promoting it. But look, at the end of the day, it’s something that’s out there.

I keep waiting for an interviewer to throw this standard back at Trump or his spokespeople: “You know, I heard it today that President Trump owes his presidency to Vladimir Putin, and so his first loyalty is to Putin rather than the United States. I have no idea if that’s right, and I’m not promoting it, but at the end of the day it’s something that’s out there.”

BTW: There’s nothing to the Harris-is-ineligible claim. She was born in Oakland, which makes her a natural-born citizen of the United States according to the 14th Amendment. Conservatives may not like the 14th Amendment, but it’s in the Constitution all the same.

The charge was given publicity by Newsweek, which is not the magazine you may remember from years ago, and hasn’t been since 2012. The Newsweek brand has changed hands many times since 2012; the current owners have held it since 2018, have nothing to do with the original Newsweek, and do not maintain the journalistic standards you may associate with that name.

One of the sillier attacks on Harris is that she’s “not really Black” or “Black, but not African American” or something-but-not-something-else because her parents came from India and Jamaica, and so her ancestors were never enslaved in America. (Snopes says the Jamaican branch of Harris’ family are “quite likely to be descendants of slaves”.  Barack Obama’s father was born in Africa, so his ancestors weren’t slaves at all.) This is one of the criticisms Trump is dog-whistling when he calls Harris “phony”.

Race is a lived experience, not a fact of your DNA. There’s a continuum of genetic variation from one local community to the next, and always has been. So at no point in history did humanity ever split neatly into some number of biological “races”. Race is a social reality, which means that your race is a matter of how you live and are treated, not some objective fact about you.

To me, then, (and as I read the NYT’s Jamelle Bouie) the key question is: Has Kamala Harris lived with the kinds of discrimination and prejudice that Black people face in America? If (as I can observe from the responses to her nomination) the answer is Yes, then I don’t really care where her parents were born.

Back in December, Devorah Blachor wrote a great satire piece for McSweeney’s “I Don’t Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary and Coincidentally I’m Starting to Hate Elizabeth Warren“, and then followed up in March with “I Don’t Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary and Now I Believe Elizabeth Warren is Responsible for the Collapse of the Republic“. Both called out the kind of man who denies being sexist in general, but somehow finds reasons to oppose any specific woman who has a chance to be elected. The reasons don’t have to be too good, they just have to be specific to this woman rather than expressions of prejudice against women in general.

I’d love to see a female President. Just not Hillary Clinton. Or Elizabeth Warren. I am totally open to all other women leaders, but I have to admit that Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar are beginning to make me angry and I’m not sure why yet, but I know the reason will become clear soon, and I’m also wondering what they might look like if someone photoshopped their heads onto the bodies of prisoners and put them behind bars.

Well, she’s back with “I Don’t Hate Black or Woman Candidates, but Kamala Harris is Running for Vice President and My Head Just Exploded“.

If there’s one thing we can learn from Harris’s many accomplishments  —  as a district attorney, state attorney general, and a U.S. senator, she advocated for LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, women’s rights, victim’s rights, helped defend Obamacare, worked for website data collection transparency, and consistently supported a progressive agenda —  it’s that she’s too ambitious.

What’s more, Kamala Harris is too left-wing and also too right-wing. She’s too Black, but she’s also not Black enough. She’s too angry, and I don’t like how she has money. She’s dated men and her campaign was flawed, and she’s an authoritarian, and something about Sean Hannity and a Twitter official?

and Trump’s open admission that he’s suppressing the vote

I focused on this more in the featured post, so here I’ll just look at the reactions Trump got. I don’t think he appreciates what a live wire he picked up. One striking thing about the attack on the Post Office is how visual the response has been.

Apparently this next image isn’t from the postal workers union (which says it would never use the USPS logo on a political message). But it does give the Post Office’s unofficial motto a needed update.

The attack includes removing mailboxes and mail-sorting machines. So from now forward, every late prescription or check or payment is going to be blamed on Trump. And they should be.

and the virus

The World-o-meter death total is up to 173,000. The US death rate has stopped increasing and has leveled off at about 1200 a day.

Trump introduced a new doctor at a coronavirus briefing a week ago: Scott Atlas.

A senior fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, Atlas is a neuroradiologist and not an expert on infectious diseases or pandemics. But he is a frequent contributor to Fox News where he has called on schools to open, endorsed the return of college football, raised questions about mask wearing and spoken out against lockdowns and the “frenzy” of mass testing — all stances Trump has taken.

“You know that there’s no real good science on general population widespread in all circumstances wearing masks,” Atlas told Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

I continue to shake my head at the short-sightedness of everything Trump does with respect to the virus. OK, you found a doctor who is either arrogant enough or unethical enough to speak authoritatively outside his area of expertise, and that doctor says the same stuff you say. But reality gets the last word. You may convince people to open schools or go to football games or whatever, but we will all see the results. It does you no good to convince people to do stupid things, if there is enough time before the election for the results of that stupidity to become apparent.

Even if you’re just trying to get re-elected, the best thing you can do is beat the virus, not convince people that you’ve been right all along.

and schools

I was surprised that The Wall Street Journal picked my hometown (Quincy, Illinois) as a place to center their back-to-school-debate piece. If you watch the video, you’ll see exterior shots of my high school and junior high.

Florida’s Governor DeSantis has a new analogy for opening schools: It’s like the Navy SEALs taking out Bin Laden. Don’t ask me to make sense of it. But if I were teaching in Florida, it would say to me that the governor expects me to risk my life.

Will college football happen at all this year? The Big Ten and Pac 12 have canceled their seasons. The ACC, Big 12, and SEC are still planning to go ahead, at least for now. To me, though, the important question isn’t “Who starts their season?” but “Who manages to finish a season?”. I predict no one will. A number of teams (Rutgers, LSU, Clemson, Oklahoma) already have had outbreaks.

To see just how irresponsible it is to play football this year, look at how Florida State is planning to do it: Claiming that they are following CDC guidelines that limit venues to 25% capacity, they plan to have 15K-20K fans at their home games. Naturally, we can expect well-behaved college students to use that extra space for social distancing, rather than gathering together for crowd-surfing and other unsafe activities.

I think this has huge political implications. I’ve already gotten this on a Trump email list: “The Radical Left is trying to CANCEL College Football. Can you believe it?”

But I don’t think Trump is going to be able to shift the blame on this. The reason we can’t have college football is that he has screwed this up so badly. Biden should find some famous Ohio State graduate in the NFL and get him to do an ad where he says that Trump’s incompetent response to the virus is why we can’t have OSU football this year. “If we had a president who could do the job, Justin Fields would be on his way to a Heisman. It’s really that simple.” I think that argument locks up Ohio (where Biden already has a very narrow lead) and hence the Electoral College.

and you also might be interested in …

This week’s entry in Apocalypse Bingo is an inland hurricane-force storm hitting Iowa. (Did your card have that?) What about a “firenado“?

Technically a “derecho“, a band of high-wind thunderstorms hit Iowa last Monday. With winds above 100 mph, the system would be Category 2 on the hurricane scale. Cedar Rapids reports losing “thousands” of trees, and about 1/3 of the state’s cropland was affected.

As of midday Friday, some 140,000 customers remained without power in Iowa, according to poweroutage.us. Another 60,000 were without power in Illinois.

One of the more striking things about this storm was that nationally, nobody noticed.

If somebody is telling you that voting for Biden will make no difference, show them this link: A federal appeals court just ruled 2-1 that California’s ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines is unconstitutional. This is one of several similar bans in states around the country. The opinion was written by a judge Trump appointed. If Clinton had won in 2016, the decision would have gone the other way.

High-capacity magazines allow mass shooters get to take down more people before they have to reload. Banning them is one of the few things states have managed to do in response to mass shootings.

Ever since the Jacksonville portion of the Republican Convention got canceled, Trump has been searching for the perfect place to give his acceptance speech. For a while he was considering the Gettysburg Battlefield, site of another famously disastrous Confederate overreach. Unfortunately, holding a partisan event on federal property is probably illegal.

The president is not subject to the Hatch Act, a Depression-era law that prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities while on the job. But everyone who works for him is. By delivering a speech with the Gettysburg battlefield as a backdrop, experts said, Mr. Trump would risk putting park rangers and other park employees at risk of a violation.

So instead, Trump plans to give the speech from the lawn of the White House, which is also a federal property. I’m sure he will not grasp the irony of delivering a law-and-order speech at an illegal venue.

In my opinion, the most appropriate spot would be Death Valley, the lowest point in the United States.

Trump on Mount Rushmore? Well maybe, if they do it right.

Reuters took some aerial photos of the Border Patrol’s camp for migrants near McAllen, Texas. Is this the kind of thing you want your country doing?

And speaking of immigrants:

and let’s close with something difficult

The Onion has been having a really hard time coming up with stories more ridiculous than what’s actually been happening, so I want to congratulate them on this one: “Federal Troops Tear-Gas Yankees Off Field So Trump Can Throw Out First Pitch“. The real backstory of this is that Trump announced he was throwing out the first pitch of the Yankees’ season, and then announced that he was cancelling. In fact, he had never been invited, but he was jealous of Dr. Fauci throwing out the first pitch for the Nationals. It had to be hard to top a news story that ridiculous, but The Onion was up to the job.

They need that money in order to have the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. But if they don’t get those two items that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it. If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money, that means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it.

– Donald J. Trump

This week’s featured post is “What Makes Trump an Autocrat?”

This week everybody was talking about Kamala Harris

“Well, we aren’t particularly excited about him, but rumor has it that he’ll have an exciting, female No. 2.”

Even before Kamala Harris left the presidential race, backers of other candidates were talking about her as a vice-presidential candidate. As a woman of color who is two decades younger and a forceful speaker, she fills a lot of holes for the Biden ticket. There has been a lot of speculation about other women, but Harris was the leader on almost every pundit’s list from wire to wire.

Conventional wisdom says that people don’t change their votes based on the VP, and in terms of conscious thinking that’s probably true. But the second name on the ticket modifies the first as an adjective modifies a noun. A candidate’s first major choice changes how we think about him or her. When Bill Clinton went for a second white male southerner in Al Gore, that said, “I really mean it.” Ronald Reagan picking George Bush said that he wanted to change the Republican Party, but not burn it down. Barack Obama choosing Joe Biden sent a similar message.

And so Biden-Harris is a subtly different candidate than Biden-Warren or Biden-Booker or Biden-Bloomberg. In addition to the obvious demographic messages, I read something else into the Harris choice: Biden doesn’t need to be a maverick. He’s the anti-John-McCain in that sense. If the obvious choice makes sense, he’ll go with it. In the current climate, where science is being sidelined in favor of miracle cures like hydroxychloroquine or oleandrin, that’s kind of comforting. I want a president who will take the standard public-health playbook and implement it, not one who needs to be original.

Like a cover band playing a medley of bigotry’s greatest hits, Republicans went after Harris with whatever racist or sexist attacks they had left over from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Unscrupulous presidents used to let hidden minions spread such dreck, but Trump came right out with this reprise of birtherism:

“I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris. “I have no idea if that’s right,” he added. “I would have thought, I would have assumed, that the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president.”

That’s so Trump. He makes a charge even though he has “no idea if that’s right”, and then faults somebody else for not checking things out, as if the President of the United States bears no responsibility to know what he’s talking about before opening his mouth. Friday on CBS Jared Kushner used that as a dodge:

He just said that he had no idea whether that’s right or wrong, I don’t see that as promoting it. But look, at the end of the day, it’s something that’s out there.

I keep waiting for an interviewer to throw this standard back at Trump or his spokespeople: “You know, I heard it today that President Trump owes his presidency to Vladimir Putin, and so his first loyalty is to Putin rather than the United States. I have no idea if that’s right, and I’m not promoting it, but at the end of the day it’s something that’s out there.”

BTW: There’s nothing to the Harris-is-ineligible claim. She was born in Oakland, which makes her a natural-born citizen of the United States according to the 14th Amendment. Conservatives may not like the 14th Amendment, but it’s in the Constitution all the same.

The charge was given publicity by Newsweek, which is not the magazine you may remember from years ago, and hasn’t been since 2012. The Newsweek brand has changed hands many times since 2012; the current owners have held it since 2018, have nothing to do with the original Newsweek, and do not maintain the journalistic standards you may associate with that name.

One of the sillier attacks on Harris is that she’s “not really Black” or “Black, but not African American” or something-but-not-something-else because her parents came from India and Jamaica, and so her ancestors were never enslaved in America. (Snopes says the Jamaican branch of Harris’ family are “quite likely to be descendants of slaves”.  Barack Obama’s father was born in Africa, so his ancestors weren’t slaves at all.) This is one of the criticisms Trump is dog-whistling when he calls Harris “phony”.

Race is a lived experience, not a fact of your DNA. There’s a continuum of genetic variation from one local community to the next, and always has been. So at no point in history did humanity ever split neatly into some number of biological “races”. Race is a social reality, which means that your race is a matter of how you live and are treated, not some objective fact about you.

To me, then, (and as I read the NYT’s Jamelle Bouie) the key question is: Has Kamala Harris lived with the kinds of discrimination and prejudice that Black people face in America? If (as I can observe from the responses to her nomination) the answer is Yes, then I don’t really care where her parents were born.

Back in December, Devorah Blachor wrote a great satire piece for McSweeney’s “I Don’t Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary and Coincidentally I’m Starting to Hate Elizabeth Warren“, and then followed up in March with “I Don’t Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary and Now I Believe Elizabeth Warren is Responsible for the Collapse of the Republic“. Both called out the kind of man who denies being sexist in general, but somehow finds reasons to oppose any specific woman who has a chance to be elected. The reasons don’t have to be too good, they just have to be specific to this woman rather than expressions of prejudice against women in general.

I’d love to see a female President. Just not Hillary Clinton. Or Elizabeth Warren. I am totally open to all other women leaders, but I have to admit that Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar are beginning to make me angry and I’m not sure why yet, but I know the reason will become clear soon, and I’m also wondering what they might look like if someone photoshopped their heads onto the bodies of prisoners and put them behind bars.

Well, she’s back with “I Don’t Hate Black or Woman Candidates, but Kamala Harris is Running for Vice President and My Head Just Exploded“.

If there’s one thing we can learn from Harris’s many accomplishments  —  as a district attorney, state attorney general, and a U.S. senator, she advocated for LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, women’s rights, victim’s rights, helped defend Obamacare, worked for website data collection transparency, and consistently supported a progressive agenda —  it’s that she’s too ambitious.

What’s more, Kamala Harris is too left-wing and also too right-wing. She’s too Black, but she’s also not Black enough. She’s too angry, and I don’t like how she has money. She’s dated men and her campaign was flawed, and she’s an authoritarian, and something about Sean Hannity and a Twitter official?

and Trump’s open admission that he’s suppressing the vote

I focused on this more in the featured post, so here I’ll just look at the reactions Trump got. I don’t think he appreciates what a live wire he picked up. One striking thing about the attack on the Post Office is how visual the response has been.

Apparently this next image isn’t from the postal workers union (which says it would never use the USPS logo on a political message). But it does give the Post Office’s unofficial motto a needed update.

The attack includes removing mailboxes and mail-sorting machines. So from now forward, every late prescription or check or payment is going to be blamed on Trump. And they should be.

and the virus

The World-o-meter death total is up to 173,000. The US death rate has stopped increasing and has leveled off at about 1200 a day.

Trump introduced a new doctor at a coronavirus briefing a week ago: Scott Atlas.

A senior fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, Atlas is a neuroradiologist and not an expert on infectious diseases or pandemics. But he is a frequent contributor to Fox News where he has called on schools to open, endorsed the return of college football, raised questions about mask wearing and spoken out against lockdowns and the “frenzy” of mass testing — all stances Trump has taken.

“You know that there’s no real good science on general population widespread in all circumstances wearing masks,” Atlas told Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

I continue to shake my head at the short-sightedness of everything Trump does with respect to the virus. OK, you found a doctor who is either arrogant enough or unethical enough to speak authoritatively outside his area of expertise, and that doctor says the same stuff you say. But reality gets the last word. You may convince people to open schools or go to football games or whatever, but we will all see the results. It does you no good to convince people to do stupid things, if there is enough time before the election for the results of that stupidity to become apparent.

Even if you’re just trying to get re-elected, the best thing you can do is beat the virus, not convince people that you’ve been right all along.

and schools

I was surprised that The Wall Street Journal picked my hometown (Quincy, Illinois) as a place to center their back-to-school-debate piece. If you watch the video, you’ll see exterior shots of my high school and junior high.

Florida’s Governor DeSantis has a new analogy for opening schools: It’s like the Navy SEALs taking out Bin Laden. Don’t ask me to make sense of it. But if I were teaching in Florida, it would say to me that the governor expects me to risk my life.

Will college football happen at all this year? The Big Ten and Pac 12 have canceled their seasons. The ACC, Big 12, and SEC are still planning to go ahead, at least for now. To me, though, the important question isn’t “Who starts their season?” but “Who manages to finish a season?”. I predict no one will. A number of teams (Rutgers, LSU, Clemson, Oklahoma) already have had outbreaks.

To see just how irresponsible it is to play football this year, look at how Florida State is planning to do it: Claiming that they are following CDC guidelines that limit venues to 25% capacity, they plan to have 15K-20K fans at their home games. Naturally, we can expect well-behaved college students to use that extra space for social distancing, rather than gathering together for crowd-surfing and other unsafe activities.

I think this has huge political implications. I’ve already gotten this on a Trump email list: “The Radical Left is trying to CANCEL College Football. Can you believe it?”

But I don’t think Trump is going to be able to shift the blame on this. The reason we can’t have college football is that he has screwed this up so badly. Biden should find some famous Ohio State graduate in the NFL and get him to do an ad where he says that Trump’s incompetent response to the virus is why we can’t have OSU football this year. “If we had a president who could do the job, Justin Fields would be on his way to a Heisman. It’s really that simple.” I think that argument locks up Ohio (where Biden already has a very narrow lead) and hence the Electoral College.

and you also might be interested in …

This week’s entry in Apocalypse Bingo is an inland hurricane-force storm hitting Iowa. (Did your card have that?) What about a “firenado“?

Technically a “derecho“, a band of high-wind thunderstorms hit Iowa last Monday. With winds above 100 mph, the system would be Category 2 on the hurricane scale. Cedar Rapids reports losing “thousands” of trees, and about 1/3 of the state’s cropland was affected.

As of midday Friday, some 140,000 customers remained without power in Iowa, according to poweroutage.us. Another 60,000 were without power in Illinois.

One of the more striking things about this storm was that nationally, nobody noticed.

If somebody is telling you that voting for Biden will make no difference, show them this link: A federal appeals court just ruled 2-1 that California’s ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines is unconstitutional. This is one of several similar bans in states around the country. The opinion was written by a judge Trump appointed. If Clinton had won in 2016, the decision would have gone the other way.

High-capacity magazines allow mass shooters get to take down more people before they have to reload. Banning them is one of the few things states have managed to do in response to mass shootings.

Ever since the Jacksonville portion of the Republican Convention got canceled, Trump has been searching for the perfect place to give his acceptance speech. For a while he was considering the Gettysburg Battlefield, site of another famously disastrous Confederate overreach. Unfortunately, holding a partisan event on federal property is probably illegal.

The president is not subject to the Hatch Act, a Depression-era law that prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities while on the job. But everyone who works for him is. By delivering a speech with the Gettysburg battlefield as a backdrop, experts said, Mr. Trump would risk putting park rangers and other park employees at risk of a violation.

So instead, Trump plans to give the speech from the lawn of the White House, which is also a federal property. I’m sure he will not grasp the irony of delivering a law-and-order speech at an illegal venue.

In my opinion, the most appropriate spot would be Death Valley, the lowest point in the United States.

Trump on Mount Rushmore? Well maybe, if they do it right.

Reuters took some aerial photos of the Border Patrol’s camp for migrants near McAllen, Texas. Is this the kind of thing you want your country doing?

And speaking of immigrants:

and let’s close with something difficult

The Onion has been having a really hard time coming up with stories more ridiculous than what’s actually been happening, so I want to congratulate them on this one: “Federal Troops Tear-Gas Yankees Off Field So Trump Can Throw Out First Pitch“. The real backstory of this is that Trump announced he was throwing out the first pitch of the Yankees’ season, and then announced that he was cancelling. In fact, he had never been invited, but he was jealous of Dr. Fauci throwing out the first pitch for the Nationals. It had to be hard to top a news story that ridiculous, but The Onion was up to the job.

The most dangerous thing about Trump is that he doesn’t see his power as belonging to the Office of the Presidency. It belongs to Donald J. Trump.

When used sloppily, the word autocrat is little more than an insult. An “autocrat” may simply be an executive who makes decisions you don’t like, one who acts on his own judgment rather than factoring in your point of view. The baseball GM who trades your team’s best pitcher is an autocrat. The boss who rejects all your suggestions is an autocrat.

But the sloppiness isn’t in the word itself; autocrat and autocracy really do have meanings that can be applied precisely. Calling a government an autocracy distinguishes it from a republic under the rule of law. Under the rule of law, powers belong to offices rather than individuals. The people who occupy those offices hold those powers in trust for the republic, and are constrained to use them to fulfill the missions the law assigns.

But in an autocracy, the distinction between person and office vanishes. The powers of an office belong to the person holding it, to use as that individual sees fit, including for financial or political benefit. Lower officials may or may not be disciplined by higher officials, but the law itself does not constrain them, and the highest official is accountable to no one.

Applying that word to the current administration has seemed like a stretch for most of the last 3 1/2 years. Sure, Trump has been cutting corners, subverting democratic norms, and fairly often even breaking laws, but life in the US just hasn’t felt like North Korea or Russia or Saudi Arabia. For the most part, it still doesn’t.

However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the non-autocratic feel of the United States has been due to Trump not getting everything he wants. He is, at heart, an autocrat. Those are the leaders he admires and the club he wants to join.

I am the State. In his heart, Trump has been an autocrat from the beginning. He has never understood or recognized the difference between his office and his person. That has been clear, for example, in the way he speaks and tweets. To him, speaking as President is no different than speaking as Donald Trump. His monologues flow easily from announcements of policy to expressions of petty resentments to grade-school insults against those who challenge him. While often hidden in the beginning, this attitude also has shown up in his behavior: Recently the public discovered that early in 2018, he tasked the Ambassador to the United Kingdom with bringing the British Open to the Trump Turnberry golf course. After all, why shouldn’t his ambassador drum up business for his golf course? He often has used his power as president to draw business to his hotels or his resorts.

His rhetoric equates threats to his personal future in politics with threats to the United States, in an I-am-the-State fashion. He has often described the Russia investigation — the attempt to discover just how involved the Trump campaign was in Russia’s effort to get him elected — as “treason” or a “coup“. His well-deserved impeachment, which flawlessly followed a process laid out in the Constitution, was likewise “treason” and a “coup“. The whistleblower who made Congress aware of his illegal attempt to extort political favors from Ukraine is “a spy”, and Trump strongly implied that he should be executed: “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.” Removing Trump from office, no matter how lawfully or justifiably, is equivalent to overthrowing the government of the United States.

In his book, James Comey tells the story of President Obama inviting him to have a conversation before nominating him to be FBI director. After the nomination, Obama tells him, they won’t be able to do this any more, because the President and the FBI director conversing outside of official channels would be improper. But Trump recognizes no such propriety. He regularly tweets out instructions for the Justice Department to investigate or lay off of people he either likes or doesn’t like. He has opinions as an individual, so why shouldn’t he express them as President?

The presidential power to pardon, more than any other power of the presidency, has been treated as a personal power to be used according to Trump’s whims and interests. All other recent administrations have made the pardoning power into a process centered on the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, usually with a few additional special cases (some of which were regrettable). But Trump has abandoned that process entirely; his pardons and commutations are pure expressions of personal favor granted to political allies, co-conspirators who might otherwise rat him out, criminals popular with his base, former contestants on his TV show, and friends of celebrities he wants to impress.

The original purpose of the pardoning power in a lawful republic, according to Alexander Hamilton, was to temper the justice system with mercy, so that it would not “wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel”. (Obama used his power this way, for example, when he commuted the excessively harsh sentences in hundreds of nonviolent drug cases.) But under Trump, the pardon has reverted to its royal roots: It is an expression of the sovereign’s personal beneficence, and puts the recipient in his debt, as Dinesh D’Souza clearly understands, as does Rod Blogojevich.

Adults in the room. The primary reason America hasn’t felt like an autocracy these last few years is that Trump’s efforts have not gone unopposed. The fundamental drama of the last 3 1/2 years has been the battle between Trump’s autocratic impulses and the republican values embedded in the United States government. (From the point of view of his supporters, who are rooting for the autocrat, this has been cast as a struggle against the “Deep State”.) Trump’s initial set of appointees had reputations and careers before they entered his administration, and many of them imagined that they were taking positions in a merely eccentric version of a typical Republican government. As a result, they frequently frustrated their boss’s desires.

• Jeff Sessions may have been a racist and a xenophobe, but he also believed he was Attorney General of the United States. Power over the Justice Department belonged to Sessions’ office, not to him personally. And although the President had appointed him, his power did not derive from the person of Donald Trump. Sessions infuriated Trump by following Justice Department rules and recusing himself from the Russia investigation. He also ignored Trump’s repeated demands to launch investigations into “the other side”, i.e, Trump’s political opponents.
• John Kelly and his deputy (and eventual replacement) Kirstjen Nielsen were anti-immigrant and went along with the cruel policy of family separations, but both saw the Department of Homeland Security as being defined by law. Nielsen was forced out after she refused to do “things that were clearly illegal, such as blocking all migrants from seeking asylum”.
• Rex Tillerson shared Trump’s pro-Russia views, had a basic hostility to the institutional culture of the State Department, and signed off on the second and third Muslim bans. But he believed he represented the United States rather than Trump, whom he regarded as a “moron“. Trump, Tillerson said later, hated to be reminded that his foreign policy was bound by laws and treaties. He “grew tired of me being the guy every day that told him, ‘You can’t do that, and let’s talk about what we can do’.”
• Jim Mattis and H. R. McMaster enjoyed the large budgets Trump gave the Pentagon, but held traditional conservative views about America’s special role in global security. Their primary loyalty was to the longstanding mission of the Defense Department, not to Donald Trump. Consequently, they supported NATO and resisted abandoning allies like the Kurds.
• Don McGahn was the primary lawyer for Trump’s 2016 campaign. But as White House Counsel, he repeatedly ignored Trump’s orders to obstruct justice.
• Dan Coats was an early opponent of President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and shared a number of Trump’s other views. But as Director of National Intelligence he believed in the mission of the intelligence services: to figure out what is going on in the world and report it as accurately as possible. After Trump sided with Putin against the intelligence services in Helsinki, Coats was not cowed: “We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy, and we will continue to provide unvarnished and objective intelligence in support of our national security.”

I’m not sure who started using this phrase, but early on these people (plus a few others) came to be known (behind Trump’s back) as “the adults in the room“. Any kind of crazy idea might pass through Trump’s head, but the “adults” would keep him from doing too much harm. Republican Senator Bob Corker even tweeted about it: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.”

It’s not my intention to idealize the “adults”, because (as I indicated above) a lot of nasty stuff happened on their watch. I also don’t want to paper over the widespread corruption in the early Trump years. In addition to the “adults”, Trump’s Class of 2017 included Scott Pruitt, Michael Flynn, Tom Price, Ryan Zinke, and many others who left in well-deserved disgrace. Wilbur Ross belongs in that group as well, but is somehow still running the Commerce Department.

In spite of their flaws, though, each “adult” in his or her own way believed in the United States as a republic under the rule of law. They believed that there were things Trump could not do, and could not order them to do.

They’re all gone now. Jeff Sessions was replaced by Bill Barr, who has no trouble using the Justice Department to protect Trump’s friends and attack his enemies. The roles Kelly and Nielsen had at DHS are now filled (illegally, it seems) by Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, who created and managed the masked federal police who invaded Portland against the will of all local officials. Dan Coats’ job is now held by Trump loyalist John Ratcliffe, who has shown little interest in telling Trump anything he doesn’t want to hear, or keeping the public informed about Russia’s continuing efforts to aid Trump’s re-election. In place of Jim Mattis, we have Mark Esper, who was slow to oppose Trump’s impulse to use active-duty troops to put down peaceful protesters, but still not docile enough to make his job secure. McGahn’s replacement Pat Cipollone was in the room when Trump discussed pressuring Ukraine for dirt on Democrats, and said nothing.

Autocratic achievement unlocked. At this point, Trump’s conquest of the executive branch of government is virtually complete. The Pentagon is still holding out, but most of the rest has become his personal instrument, to do with as he will. Two recent examples stand out: the abuse of the Justice Department to suppress Michael Cohen’s book, and the sabotage of the Postal Service to undermine voting by mail.

Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen is serving a prison sentence, part of which results from him following Trump’s instructions to break the law. Like many non-violent criminals (Paul Manafort was another), Cohen was furloughed from prison to reduce crowding during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the Justice Department tried to use that situation as leverage to eliminate a problem for Trump’s reelection campaign:

But to remain at home, he was asked to sign a document that would have barred him from publishing a book during the rest of his sentence. Mr. Cohen balked because he was, in fact, writing a book — a tell-all memoir about his former boss, the president. The officers sent him back to prison. On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that the decision to return Mr. Cohen to custody amounted to retaliation by the government and ordered him to be released again into home confinement.

In America as we have known it, no one connected with overseeing a federal convict should know or care how that person’s writings will affect the presidential race. But in Trump’s autocracy, things are different. If you work for the Justice Department, you work for Trump.

Trump’s continuing failure to mobilize the country against Covid-19, a failure unparalleled in any other first-world nation, has made the prospect of voting in person in November risky. (It is still unclear how many infections resulted in Wisconsin after the Republican legislature forced voters to wait in long lines to vote in the state’s primary.) Certainly the prospect of voting in person has become less attractive, particularly to citizens with prior conditions that make them especially vulnerable.

Voting by mail, which states like Washington have been doing for years anyway, is the obvious solution. But that’s only if you want people to vote and to have their votes counted. If you’re trailing badly in the polls, as Trump is, and might be looking for an excuse to influence or challenge or ignore the election results, raising uncertainty about voting by mail is one possible strategy. And the best way to cast doubt on the viability of voting by mail is to cast doubt on the Post Office’s ability to deliver ballots in a timely way, particularly if those ballots are mailed from zip codes known to include many Democrats.

“If carriers are being told that, at the end of your shift, you need to be back at the office even if you haven’t collected all the mail that day, there could be ballots in those mailboxes,” says Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the nonprofit Democracy Fund Voice and a former Obama appointee to the Commission on Election Administration, a panel created in 2013 to identify best practices in running elections. “If the truck drivers are being told, ‘You leave the post office to take that day’s mail to the processing plant at your scheduled time to leave, even if all the carriers aren’t back in yet with that day’s mail,’ that can have an impact.”

And so the Trump donor newly installed as Postmaster General is intentionally slowing down the mail: eliminating overtime, getting rid of sorting machines, and in general gumming up the works. Trump has been quite open about what he’s doing. Commenting on negotiations on a new Covid-response package, Trump told Fox News:

If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money [for the Post Office]. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting; they just can’t have it.

In any past election, it would be inconceivable that the President would be manipulating the Post Office in an effort to stay in power. But something has changed during the Trump administration: It’s not your Post Office any more, it’s his Post Office.

That’s how autocracy works.

The most dangerous thing about Trump is that he doesn’t see his power as belonging to the Office of the Presidency. It belongs to Donald J. Trump.

When used sloppily, the word autocrat is little more than an insult. An “autocrat” may simply be an executive who makes decisions you don’t like, one who acts on his own judgment rather than factoring in your point of view. The baseball GM who trades your team’s best pitcher is an autocrat. The boss who rejects all your suggestions is an autocrat.

But the sloppiness isn’t in the word itself; autocrat and autocracy really do have meanings that can be applied precisely. Calling a government an autocracy distinguishes it from a republic under the rule of law. Under the rule of law, powers belong to offices rather than individuals. The people who occupy those offices hold those powers in trust for the republic, and are constrained to use them to fulfill the missions the law assigns.

But in an autocracy, the distinction between person and office vanishes. The powers of an office belong to the person holding it, to use as that individual sees fit, including for financial or political benefit. Lower officials may or may not be disciplined by higher officials, but the law itself does not constrain them, and the highest official is accountable to no one.

Applying that word to the current administration has seemed like a stretch for most of the last 3 1/2 years. Sure, Trump has been cutting corners, subverting democratic norms, and fairly often even breaking laws, but life in the US just hasn’t felt like North Korea or Russia or Saudi Arabia. For the most part, it still doesn’t.

However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the non-autocratic feel of the United States has been due to Trump not getting everything he wants. He is, at heart, an autocrat. Those are the leaders he admires and the club he wants to join.

I am the State. In his heart, Trump has been an autocrat from the beginning. He has never understood or recognized the difference between his office and his person. That has been clear, for example, in the way he speaks and tweets. To him, speaking as President is no different than speaking as Donald Trump. His monologues flow easily from announcements of policy to expressions of petty resentments to grade-school insults against those who challenge him. While often hidden in the beginning, this attitude also has shown up in his behavior: Recently the public discovered that early in 2018, he tasked the Ambassador to the United Kingdom with bringing the British Open to the Trump Turnberry golf course. After all, why shouldn’t his ambassador drum up business for his golf course? He often has used his power as president to draw business to his hotels or his resorts.

His rhetoric equates threats to his personal future in politics with threats to the United States, in an I-am-the-State fashion. He has often described the Russia investigation — the attempt to discover just how involved the Trump campaign was in Russia’s effort to get him elected — as “treason” or a “coup“. His well-deserved impeachment, which flawlessly followed a process laid out in the Constitution, was likewise “treason” and a “coup“. The whistleblower who made Congress aware of his illegal attempt to extort political favors from Ukraine is “a spy”, and Trump strongly implied that he should be executed: “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.” Removing Trump from office, no matter how lawfully or justifiably, is equivalent to overthrowing the government of the United States.

In his book, James Comey tells the story of President Obama inviting him to have a conversation before nominating him to be FBI director. After the nomination, Obama tells him, they won’t be able to do this any more, because the President and the FBI director conversing outside of official channels would be improper. But Trump recognizes no such propriety. He regularly tweets out instructions for the Justice Department to investigate or lay off of people he either likes or doesn’t like. He has opinions as an individual, so why shouldn’t he express them as President?

The presidential power to pardon, more than any other power of the presidency, has been treated as a personal power to be used according to Trump’s whims and interests. All other recent administrations have made the pardoning power into a process centered on the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, usually with a few additional special cases (some of which were regrettable). But Trump has abandoned that process entirely; his pardons and commutations are pure expressions of personal favor granted to political allies, co-conspirators who might otherwise rat him out, criminals popular with his base, former contestants on his TV show, and friends of celebrities he wants to impress.

The original purpose of the pardoning power in a lawful republic, according to Alexander Hamilton, was to temper the justice system with mercy, so that it would not “wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel”. (Obama used his power this way, for example, when he commuted the excessively harsh sentences in hundreds of nonviolent drug cases.) But under Trump, the pardon has reverted to its royal roots: It is an expression of the sovereign’s personal beneficence, and puts the recipient in his debt, as Dinesh D’Souza clearly understands, as does Rod Blogojevich.

Adults in the room. The primary reason America hasn’t felt like an autocracy these last few years is that Trump’s efforts have not gone unopposed. The fundamental drama of the last 3 1/2 years has been the battle between Trump’s autocratic impulses and the republican values embedded in the United States government. (From the point of view of his supporters, who are rooting for the autocrat, this has been cast as a struggle against the “Deep State”.) Trump’s initial set of appointees had reputations and careers before they entered his administration, and many of them imagined that they were taking positions in a merely eccentric version of a typical Republican government. As a result, they frequently frustrated their boss’s desires.

• Jeff Sessions may have been a racist and a xenophobe, but he also believed he was Attorney General of the United States. Power over the Justice Department belonged to Sessions’ office, not to him personally. And although the President had appointed him, his power did not derive from the person of Donald Trump. Sessions infuriated Trump by following Justice Department rules and recusing himself from the Russia investigation. He also ignored Trump’s repeated demands to launch investigations into “the other side”, i.e, Trump’s political opponents.
• John Kelly and his deputy (and eventual replacement) Kirstjen Nielsen were anti-immigrant and went along with the cruel policy of family separations, but both saw the Department of Homeland Security as being defined by law. Nielsen was forced out after she refused to do “things that were clearly illegal, such as blocking all migrants from seeking asylum”.
• Rex Tillerson shared Trump’s pro-Russia views, had a basic hostility to the institutional culture of the State Department, and signed off on the second and third Muslim bans. But he believed he represented the United States rather than Trump, whom he regarded as a “moron“. Trump, Tillerson said later, hated to be reminded that his foreign policy was bound by laws and treaties. He “grew tired of me being the guy every day that told him, ‘You can’t do that, and let’s talk about what we can do’.”
• Jim Mattis and H. R. McMaster enjoyed the large budgets Trump gave the Pentagon, but held traditional conservative views about America’s special role in global security. Their primary loyalty was to the longstanding mission of the Defense Department, not to Donald Trump. Consequently, they supported NATO and resisted abandoning allies like the Kurds.
• Don McGahn was the primary lawyer for Trump’s 2016 campaign. But as White House Counsel, he repeatedly ignored Trump’s orders to obstruct justice.
• Dan Coats was an early opponent of President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and shared a number of Trump’s other views. But as Director of National Intelligence he believed in the mission of the intelligence services: to figure out what is going on in the world and report it as accurately as possible. After Trump sided with Putin against the intelligence services in Helsinki, Coats was not cowed: “We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy, and we will continue to provide unvarnished and objective intelligence in support of our national security.”

I’m not sure who started using this phrase, but early on these people (plus a few others) came to be known (behind Trump’s back) as “the adults in the room“. Any kind of crazy idea might pass through Trump’s head, but the “adults” would keep him from doing too much harm. Republican Senator Bob Corker even tweeted about it: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.”

It’s not my intention to idealize the “adults”, because (as I indicated above) a lot of nasty stuff happened on their watch. I also don’t want to paper over the widespread corruption in the early Trump years. In addition to the “adults”, Trump’s Class of 2017 included Scott Pruitt, Michael Flynn, Tom Price, Ryan Zinke, and many others who left in well-deserved disgrace. Wilbur Ross belongs in that group as well, but is somehow still running the Commerce Department.

In spite of their flaws, though, each “adult” in his or her own way believed in the United States as a republic under the rule of law. They believed that there were things Trump could not do, and could not order them to do.

They’re all gone now. Jeff Sessions was replaced by Bill Barr, who has no trouble using the Justice Department to protect Trump’s friends and attack his enemies. The roles Kelly and Nielsen had at DHS are now filled (illegally, it seems) by Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, who created and managed the masked federal police who invaded Portland against the will of all local officials. Dan Coats’ job is now held by Trump loyalist John Ratcliffe, who has shown little interest in telling Trump anything he doesn’t want to hear, or keeping the public informed about Russia’s continuing efforts to aid Trump’s re-election. In place of Jim Mattis, we have Mark Esper, who was slow to oppose Trump’s impulse to use active-duty troops to put down peaceful protesters, but still not docile enough to make his job secure. McGahn’s replacement Pat Cipollone was in the room when Trump discussed pressuring Ukraine for dirt on Democrats, and said nothing.

Autocratic achievement unlocked. At this point, Trump’s conquest of the executive branch of government is virtually complete. The Pentagon is still holding out, but most of the rest has become his personal instrument, to do with as he will. Two recent examples stand out: the abuse of the Justice Department to suppress Michael Cohen’s book, and the sabotage of the Postal Service to undermine voting by mail.

Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen is serving a prison sentence, part of which results from him following Trump’s instructions to break the law. Like many non-violent criminals (Paul Manafort was another), Cohen was furloughed from prison to reduce crowding during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the Justice Department tried to use that situation as leverage to eliminate a problem for Trump’s reelection campaign:

But to remain at home, he was asked to sign a document that would have barred him from publishing a book during the rest of his sentence. Mr. Cohen balked because he was, in fact, writing a book — a tell-all memoir about his former boss, the president. The officers sent him back to prison. On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that the decision to return Mr. Cohen to custody amounted to retaliation by the government and ordered him to be released again into home confinement.

In America as we have known it, no one connected with overseeing a federal convict should know or care how that person’s writings will affect the presidential race. But in Trump’s autocracy, things are different. If you work for the Justice Department, you work for Trump.

Trump’s continuing failure to mobilize the country against Covid-19, a failure unparalleled in any other first-world nation, has made the prospect of voting in person in November risky. (It is still unclear how many infections resulted in Wisconsin after the Republican legislature forced voters to wait in long lines to vote in the state’s primary.) Certainly the prospect of voting in person has become less attractive, particularly to citizens with prior conditions that make them especially vulnerable.

Voting by mail, which states like Washington have been doing for years anyway, is the obvious solution. But that’s only if you want people to vote and to have their votes counted. If you’re trailing badly in the polls, as Trump is, and might be looking for an excuse to influence or challenge or ignore the election results, raising uncertainty about voting by mail is one possible strategy. And the best way to cast doubt on the viability of voting by mail is to cast doubt on the Post Office’s ability to deliver ballots in a timely way, particularly if those ballots are mailed from zip codes known to include many Democrats.

“If carriers are being told that, at the end of your shift, you need to be back at the office even if you haven’t collected all the mail that day, there could be ballots in those mailboxes,” says Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the nonprofit Democracy Fund Voice and a former Obama appointee to the Commission on Election Administration, a panel created in 2013 to identify best practices in running elections. “If the truck drivers are being told, ‘You leave the post office to take that day’s mail to the processing plant at your scheduled time to leave, even if all the carriers aren’t back in yet with that day’s mail,’ that can have an impact.”

And so the Trump donor newly installed as Postmaster General is intentionally slowing down the mail: eliminating overtime, getting rid of sorting machines, and in general gumming up the works. Trump has been quite open about what he’s doing. Commenting on negotiations on a new Covid-response package, Trump told Fox News:

If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money [for the Post Office]. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting; they just can’t have it.

In any past election, it would be inconceivable that the President would be manipulating the Post Office in an effort to stay in power. But something has changed during the Trump administration: It’s not your Post Office any more, it’s his Post Office.

That’s how autocracy works.

Two big pieces of news happened this week. The first was expected: Joe Biden announced his vice presidential choice. We didn’t know for sure that it would be Kamala Harris, but she had been the leading candidate since speculation on the topic began. Her selection was met with a wave of racist and sexist comments from Republicans high and low, which shouldn’t have been a surprise either. If you had ever imagined that Republicans look back at their racist attacks against Obama with shame or regret, clearly you were wrong. They’re doing it all again, up to and including Birtherism.

The second big story was more shocking: Trump admitted in so many words that he was disrupting the Post Office in order to influence the election. It had already become clear that the newly installed Trump crony running the postal service was slowing down the mail, and that his actions made voting by mail more precarious. But Trump himself connected the dots.

That admission puts us in entirely new territory. Presidents have long used the powers of the presidency to help their re-election chances in indirect ways: The ribbon-cutting on your town’s new bridge might happen to coincide with your state’s primary, for example; a diplomatic tour might happen precisely when a president needs to point out his opponent’s lack of foreign-policy experience; and so on. But this is arguably the first time since the Bad Old Days of the spoils system that the everyday machinery of government has been tied to a president’s re-election campaign. That something as historically apolitical as the Post Office could be harnessed to pull the election one way or another — and that the President takes this to be a legitimate use of his power — is completely new.

At least it’s new in the United States. But it’s business as usual in autocratic countries, which we are more and more coming to resemble. And that’s the subject of this week’s featured post “What Makes Trump an Autocrat?”. That still needs work, so I’ll predict it to appear around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover Harris and the attacks against her, the continuing angst about the looming school year (including the loss of Big 10 and Pac 12 football), the inland hurricane that hit Iowa without the rest of the country noticing, an appeals court’s startling gun-control decision, the government letting methane leaks run wild, and a partial Middle East peace deal that leaves the Palestinians out in the cold. I’m still looking for a closing, but let’s say that appears around 1.

Two big pieces of news happened this week. The first was expected: Joe Biden announced his vice presidential choice. We didn’t know for sure that it would be Kamala Harris, but she had been the leading candidate since speculation on the topic began. Her selection was met with a wave of racist and sexist comments from Republicans high and low, which shouldn’t have been a surprise either. If you had ever imagined that Republicans look back at their racist attacks against Obama with shame or regret, clearly you were wrong. They’re doing it all again, up to and including Birtherism.

The second big story was more shocking: Trump admitted in so many words that he was disrupting the Post Office in order to influence the election. It had already become clear that the newly installed Trump crony running the postal service was slowing down the mail, and that his actions made voting by mail more precarious. But Trump himself connected the dots.

That admission puts us in entirely new territory. Presidents have long used the powers of the presidency to help their re-election chances in indirect ways: The ribbon-cutting on your town’s new bridge might happen to coincide with your state’s primary, for example; a diplomatic tour might happen precisely when a president needs to point out his opponent’s lack of foreign-policy experience; and so on. But this is arguably the first time since the Bad Old Days of the spoils system that the everyday machinery of government has been tied to a president’s re-election campaign. That something as historically apolitical as the Post Office could be harnessed to pull the election one way or another — and that the President takes this to be a legitimate use of his power — is completely new.

At least it’s new in the United States. But it’s business as usual in autocratic countries, which we are more and more coming to resemble. And that’s the subject of this week’s featured post “What Makes Trump an Autocrat?”. That still needs work, so I’ll predict it to appear around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover Harris and the attacks against her, the continuing angst about the looming school year (including the loss of Big 10 and Pac 12 football), the inland hurricane that hit Iowa without the rest of the country noticing, an appeals court’s startling gun-control decision, the government letting methane leaks run wild, and a partial Middle East peace deal that leaves the Palestinians out in the cold. I’m still looking for a closing, but let’s say that appears around 1.

Today I find the mask useful

along with sunglasses

to hide my tear streaked face,

not wanting to scare the barista

who has enough to deal with

behind his own mask.

– “Transitions” by Tammi Truax,
poet laureate of Portsmouth, NH

This week’s featured posts are “The NRA and the Long Con” and “Those Executive Orders“.

This week everybody was talking about executive orders

Saturday, Trump responded to the impasse in negotiations to extend provisions of the CARES Act by signing an executive order and three memoranda. He claimed they provide all sorts of relief to people economically stressed by the Covid-19 epidemic, especially the unemployed and those facing eviction. However, as one featured post points out, what the orders actually accomplish is much less than Trump claims, and yet they still threaten the constitutional order.

and the NRA

The other featured post discusses the legal problems of the National Rifle Association, which is threatened with dissolution by the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit. (The article uses that example to segue into a discussion of the conservative vulnerability to scams and con artists.) Basically, the NYAG claims that the NRA has become more about Wayne LaPierre’s luxurious lifestyle than about the Second Amendment, and that the corruption enabling this abuse is so pervasive and so top-to-bottom that no solution is possible that leaves the NRA intact.

The Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri takes that first point and runs with it, suggesting a fund-raising letter for people who have never given to the NRA before.

We bet that what’s been holding you back all this time is the belief that if you donated to the NRA, it would help put more guns in more places and that such a goal, in your opinion, would make the United States a more dangerous place. Well, we urge you to take a second look and ask: Is that really what the NRA is doing?

A misconception that a lot of people have about the NRA is that we are some sort of gun lobby, trying to put guns into and keep them in the (cold, dead) hands of as many people as possible. But as allegations in a recent lawsuit demonstrate, the NRA is about so much more than that. We are also about subsidizing the personal travel of CEO Wayne LaPierre, his family members and a few trusted affiliates! We’re not just a gun lobby whose annual convention did not take place this year and which seems as though it hasn’t been very active around the coming election. We also believe in the power of travel, and the need to support America’s small-ship owners, or large-yacht owners, depending on your perspective.

An obvious question I didn’t get around to answering in the featured post  is why these are civil lawsuits rather than criminal indictments. The answer has to do with jurisdiction. In the Daily Beast, former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade (who appears fairly ofteny on Rachel Maddow’s show) wrote:

this easily could have been framed as a criminal case. Filing false registration and disclosure documents as part of a scheme to defraud can serve as the basis for federal mail or wire fraud, and often does in public corruption cases.

Her article strongly implies that criminal jurisdiction here belongs to Bill Barr’s Justice Department, which has no interest in prosecuting Trump’s friends. The NYAG is using a civil suit because that’s the tool at hand. However, the NYT quotes James:

It’s an ongoing investigation. If we uncover any criminal activity, we will refer it to the Manhattan district attorney. At this point in time we’re moving forward, again, with civil enforcement.

and the virus

Deaths seem to be peaking, which makes sense given that cases peaked 2-3 weeks ago. In the US, we’re up to about 165,000 dead, a number still rising at the rate of about 1,100 a day.

I worry that we are once again just seeing a transition. As the center of the virus moved from the Northeast to the South, there was an in-between period where the national numbers dropped. Now it is shifting again from the South to the Midwest, and staging a bit of a comeback in the Northeast. The national numbers may drop for a while now, but it remains to be seen if we’re really turning the corner as a nation.

Trump’s pro-mask conversion didn’t last very long.

An 8th-grade teacher from central Iowa lists nine ways that the current discussions about schools are off-base. If you picture real kids having the kinds of classroom experiences they’ll actually have if their schools reopen, the conversation changes.

and you also might be interested in …

Another executive order this week bans “transactions” with Chinese companies ByteDance and WeChat, beginning in 45 days. ByteDance owns TikTok, a popular social media platform that I know literally nothing about. (I also own a small amount of stock in the Chinese company TenCent, which owns WeChat, another app I have never used.)

A good summary of the possible security threats posed by a Chinese social-media app that has been downloaded onto millions of American phones is at LawFare. (A sequel discussing the current executive orders is here.) As I read that post, the risks posed by TikTok and WeChat are more-or-less the same as the ones posed by Facebook or Twitter or any other social media app, compounded by the possibility that the Chinese government might get hold of the data it collects and use it for nefarious purposes.

I’m reminded of an old Travels With Farley comic strip where Farley talks to the strip’s military character, Major Mishap. Mishap explains that it’s his job to keep nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands. And Farley asks, “Does that mean you think they’re in the right hands now?”

If the Chinese angle on TikTok gets everyone to take seriously what a nefarious actor could do with Google’s data trove (and why we’re so convinced that Google isn’t already that nefarious actor), that would be great. But I worry that this is just Trump acting out against a social-media universe populated by people who don’t like him, like Sarah Cooper.

If at the beginning of the year you’d asked me to list the threats to democracy, I don’t think I’d have come up with “a purge at the Post Office“.

Pulitzer-prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson’s new book Caste: the origins of our discontents has her out doing interviews. Here’s an amazing anecdote she recounted during her appearance on NPR’s Fresh Air, beginning around the 29 minute mark:

I had this experience in Chicago years ago when I was reporting a story that was fairly routine. I had made arrangements to interview all these people. I made the arrangements over the phone to interview a number of people for this story, and all the interviews had gone well, until I got to the last one. It was the last interview of the day. I was very much looking forward to it.

The person that I was speaking with, or going to speak with, had been very excited to talk with me over the phone. But when I got there, he happened not to have been there at the time, and the place where I went — it was a retail establishment — happened not to have other people in it, so I was waiting for him to get there. The door opens and this man comes in. He was vary harried, and he’s got this overcoat on. He’s very late for an appointment, ultimately, with me. But he’s harried, he’s frazzled, he’s anxious, and the clerk who had helped me earlier told me to go up to this man, that this was the man I was there to interview.

And I went up to him and he said, “Oh no, no, no, no. I can’t talk with you right now.” And I was flummoxed by that. I mean, we’re here for the interview, why are you saying you don’t have time to talk? And he said, “No, I can’t talk with you right now, I’m getting ready for a very, very important interview. I cannot talk with you right now.” And I said, “Well, I think I’m the person interviewing you. I’m Isabel Wilkerson with The New York Times.”

And he said, “Well, how would I know that? How do I know that you’re Isabel Wilkerson?”  And I said, “I am here. This is the time. It’s 4:30. You were here for the interview.” And he said, “Do you have a business card?” And I said, I actually happened not to have had any, because it was the end of the day and I’d been interviewing people all day and this was the last interview, which I was very much looking forward to. And I said, “I’m sorry, I’m out of business cards right now.” And he said, “Well, do you have something that … do you have some ID? Could I see some ID?”

And I said, “I shouldn’t have to show you ID. We’re already into the time where we were supposed to have the interview. We should be talking right now.” He said, “Well, I need to see some ID.” And so I pulled out my driver’s license to show it to him, and he said, “You don’t have anything with The New York Times on it?” And he said, “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to ask you to leave, because I have a very important interview coming. She’ll be here any minute. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

So I was actually accused of impersonating myself, because I was not perceived as being the person, I was not perceived as being someone who should have been in the position of a New York Times national correspondent there to interview him.

She’s goes on to explain that when something like that happens, you don’t tell your editors, for fear that they’ll lose faith in your ability to do the job. You just figure out some other way to get the story.

Recently released police body-cam video from Phoenix proves that cops kill white people too. An upstairs neighbor complained about noise from a video game Ryan Whitaker was playing with his girlfriend, and so the police showed up. AZ Central reports:

As they approach the apartment, no sounds of fighting or loud noises are heard coming from the unit.

Moments later, [Officer John] Ferragamo knocks on the door, identifying himself as Phoenix police. The officers stand to either side of the door, making it impossible for anyone looking out of the peephole to see who was there.

Whitaker opens the door, with the gun in hand and rapidly takes a couple of steps out of the apartment as Ferragamo flashes a light in his face. Ferragamo greets Whitaker and then repeatedly yells, “Hands,” according to the footage.

Whitaker is seen in the video starting to get on his knees, putting his left hand up and putting the gun behind his back when [Officer Jeff] Cooke fires into Whitaker’s back.

In the video, Whitaker appears to realize that these people are cops and start putting the gun down just before he was killed.

In addition to its influence on the national police-are-out-of-control discussion, this video also points out the problem created by the ubiquity of guns. Whitaker’s gun pushes Cook into a snap decision, which he makes badly. The number of guns in the US raises the possibility of deadly force in way too many situations, and limits people’s time to think.

After Trump pronounced Yosemite as “Yo Semite”, I joked on Facebook that soon Fox News would claim that was the actual pronunciation, and before long conservatives would all be saying “Yo Semite” just to prove they were on the right side. (The National Museum of American Jewish History is now selling “Yo Semite” t-shirts.)

Turns out it’s no joke. Two days later, Trump mispronounced Thailand as Thighland (and hilarity ensued). Conservative author (and Trump pardon recipient) Dinesh D’Souza tweeted in all seriousness:

This is actually the correct pronunciation. Most Americans say it wrong. Thailand is pronounced phonetically. It’s “Thighland,” not “Tai-land.”

When everyone laughed at him, D’Souza doubled down.

Let me clarify. I’m not saying “Thighland” is how it is said in the Thai language. The French say “Paree” but that’s not how it is pronounced in English. “Thighland,” not “Tai-land,” is how English speakers around the world say it.

That’s how it is in TrumpWorld. If the Great Leader says something out of step with reality, reality needs to change. He doesn’t speak Truth, he defines Truth. I can hardly wait for the Exalted One’s tour of Thighland to take him to Fuck It (Phuket).

Kathleen Parker’s “Covid-19 isn’t going anywhere. So schools must reopen.” isn’t wrong so much as it’s just clueless. Everyone want schools to be able to open safely, and businesses to be able to open safely, and voting to be safe, and on and on and on. The question is, “What do we do when it’s not safe?” Parker has no answers for that.

I wanted to have watched Trump’s Axios interview. I really did. But even the prospect of the interviewer pushing back couldn’t sustain me through Trump’s endless bullshit. I include the link for those of you with more endurance.

and let’s close with something electric

like Toto played on Tesla coils. That much electrical discharge is likely to bring the rains down in Africa.

Like everything Trump does, they don’t match what he’s says he’s doing.

Remember the government shutdown that lasted from December 22, 2018 to January 25, 2019? Congress was refusing to fund Trump’s border wall, so he pulled out of a previously settled deal to fund the government. When public opinion didn’t rally behind his position, he relented on funding the government, but declared a state of emergency and used it to seize money Congress had appropriated for other purposes and redirect it to his wall. The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the legality of this move, which seems to usurp Congress’ constitutional power of the purse, but it has allowed construction to continue so long that the case may become moot because the money is already spent.

Cases like these are never one-offs. Having gotten away with something once, Trump is bound to try it again.

So here we are: The CARES Act was passed in March as an emergency appropriation intended to see the country through the economic impact of the Covid-19 epidemic. At the time, no one imagined that the US would botch its response to the epidemic so badly that a thousand people a day would still be dying in August, so most of the CARES provisions ran out on July 31, including a moratorium on evictions and the $600-per-week enhanced unemployment payments.

Nancy Pelosi’s House had the foresight to pass a follow-up, the HEROES Act in May. But Mitch McConnell refused to bring it to the floor of the Senate, and did not start negotiating any CARES extensions at all until late July. With much of the Republican Senate caucus already plotting their resistance to the Biden administration, McConnell doesn’t have the votes to pass any CARES-extension bill without Democratic buy-in. So he left the negotiations to the White House team of Steve Mnuchin and Mark Meadows.

The White House refused to budge from its plan, which is about 1/3 the size of the HEROES plan, and contains no money to fill the budget gaps of state and local governments. Politically, Trump looks like the one with the most to lose if nothing gets done and the economy crashes, so Pelosi is not inclined to cave in to his demands without getting some concessions in return. So no deal has gotten done. (Has anybody noticed that our Art-of-the-Deal President never seems to get to Yes on a deal?)

So we’re back to the emergency-executive-powers trick. Or something. Maybe.

Saturday Trump signed three memos and an executive order which, in typical Trumpian fashion, don’t actually do what he claims. Here’s what is kinda/sorta in them.

• A $400 unemployment enhancement to replace the CARES $600 replacement. Except that $100 has to come from the states, which may not have any money to cover it. The $300 federal contribution comes from a $44 billion pot of money that FEMA has, and of course won’t need during this record-threatening hurricane season. (This is literally an idea out of House of Cards, which FEMA officials rejected as unrealistic at the time.) Since we’re talking about 30 million unemployed people, the money will run out in about five weeks, assuming that they actually receive it and that it’s legal for Trump to spend it this way at all.
• Eviction protection. Except, not really. The executive order asks relevant government officers to “consider” doing something to stop evictions, and to “identify” existing federal appropriations that might help stressed renters and homeowners, assuming that there are any such appropriations. If your landlord has a court date for your eviction, nothing in this order interferes with that proceeding.
• Cuts in payroll tax deductions. The order doesn’t actually cut what you or your employer owe in Social Security and Medicare taxes. It just stops collecting those taxes for a while. So temporarily you might see more money in your paycheck, assuming you’re still getting one from somewhere, but your arrears will be building up, and will come due after the election. If he’s re-elected, Trump wants to cancel that debt too, but that just raises a new question: How do Social Security and Medicare get funded?

So basically what we have is flim-flam put together with a constitutionally questionable claim on FEMA money. In the context of the border-wall emergency, Trump is pushing us closer and closer to a model where the President can take any money Congress appropriates and spend it however he wants. It should go without saying that this is very, very far from the process the Founders thought they were establishing.

James Fallows raises the question we should all be asking:

I am not aware of any of the “strict constructionists” who blasted Obama for executive-order overreach, who have weighed in about Trump’s l’etat-c’est-moi wave of appropriation-by-exec-order. Are there any?

To be fair, a handful of Republican lawmakers have said something that expressed concern of some sort. But most of the hand-wringing was of the “Now look what the Democrats made him do” variety. If you’re looking for a flat-out “This is unconstitutional”, you won’t find it. Apparently respect for the Constitution is like fiscal responsibility or free trade or freedom or any of the other high-minded principles Republicans have put forward over the years. All such principled expressions are made in bad faith, and go out the window as soon as they become inconvenient.

Remember the government shutdown that lasted from December 22, 2018 to January 25, 2019? Congress was refusing to fund Trump’s border wall, so he pulled out of a previously settled deal to fund the government. When public opinion didn’t rally behind his position, he relented on funding the government, but declared a state of emergency and used it to seize money Congress had appropriated for other purposes and redirect it to his wall. The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the legality of this move, which seems to usurp Congress’ constitutional power of the purse, but it has allowed construction to continue so long that the case may become moot because the money is already spent.

Cases like these are never one-offs. Having gotten away with something once, Trump is bound to try it again.

So here we are: The CARES Act was passed in March as an emergency appropriation intended to see the country through the economic impact of the Covid-19 epidemic. At the time, no one imagined that the US would botch its response to the epidemic so badly that a thousand people a day would still be dying in August, so most of the CARES provisions ran out on July 31, including a moratorium on evictions and the $600-per-week enhanced unemployment payments.

Nancy Pelosi’s House had the foresight to pass a follow-up, the HEROES Act in May. But Mitch McConnell refused to bring it to the floor of the Senate, and did not start negotiating any CARES extensions at all until late July. With much of the Republican Senate caucus already plotting their resistance to the Biden administration, McConnell doesn’t have the votes to pass any CARES-extension bill without Democratic buy-in. So he left the negotiations to the White House team of Steve Mnuchin and Mark Meadows.

The White House refused to budge from its plan, which is about 1/3 the size of the HEROES plan, and contains no money to fill the budget gaps of state and local governments. Politically, Trump looks like the one with the most to lose if nothing gets done and the economy crashes, so Pelosi is not inclined to cave in to his demands without getting some concessions in return. So no deal has gotten done. (Has anybody noticed that our Art-of-the-Deal President never seems to get to Yes on a deal?)

So we’re back to the emergency-executive-powers trick. Or something. Maybe.

Saturday Trump signed three memos and an executive order which, in typical Trumpian fashion, don’t actually do what he claims. Here’s what is kinda/sorta in them.

• A $400 unemployment enhancement to replace the CARES $600 replacement. Except that $100 has to come from the states, which may not have any money to cover it. The $300 federal contribution comes from a $44 billion pot of money that FEMA has, and of course won’t need during this record-threatening hurricane season. (This is literally an idea out of House of Cards, which FEMA officials rejected as unrealistic at the time.) Since we’re talking about 30 million unemployed people, the money will run out in about five weeks, assuming that they actually receive it and that it’s legal for Trump to spend it this way at all.
• Eviction protection. Except, not really. The executive order asks relevant government officers to “consider” doing something to stop evictions, and to “identify” existing federal appropriations that might help stressed renters and homeowners, assuming that there are any such appropriations. If your landlord has a court date for your eviction, nothing in this order interferes with that proceeding.
• Cuts in payroll tax deductions. The order doesn’t actually cut what you or your employer owe in Social Security and Medicare taxes. It just stops collecting those taxes for a while. So temporarily you might see more money in your paycheck, assuming you’re still getting one from somewhere, but your arrears will be building up, and will come due after the election. If he’s re-elected, Trump wants to cancel that debt too, but that just raises a new question: How do Social Security and Medicare get funded?

So basically what we have is flim-flam put together with a constitutionally questionable claim on FEMA money. In the context of the border-wall emergency, Trump is pushing us closer and closer to a model where the President can take any money Congress appropriates and spend it however he wants. It should go without saying that this is very, very far from the process the Founders thought they were establishing.

James Fallows raises the question we should all be asking:

I am not aware of any of the “strict constructionists” who blasted Obama for executive-order overreach, who have weighed in about Trump’s l’etat-c’est-moi wave of appropriation-by-exec-order. Are there any?

To be fair, a handful of Republican lawmakers have said something that expressed concern of some sort. But most of the hand-wringing was of the “Now look what the Democrats made him do” variety. If you’re looking for a flat-out “This is unconstitutional”, you won’t find it. Apparently respect for the Constitution is like fiscal responsibility or free trade or freedom or any of the other high-minded principles Republicans have put forward over the years. All such principled expressions are made in bad faith, and go out the window as soon as they become inconvenient.

The New York and D.C. attorneys general have uncovered self-dealing, lavish spending on executive luxuries, and outright fraud at the National Rifle Association. Why is the conservative movement such fertile ground for this kind of thing?

Alarm bells. In 1973 I was a junior in high school, and a friend who had recently discovered the John Birch Society gave me a copy of their 1971 best-seller None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Thus was I introduced to the conspiracy theory of history: Forget all this talk of deep social forces evolving in unpredictable ways; in reality a cabal of powerful people has (for decades, or maybe centuries) been steering the planet towards a one-world dictatorship.

I was open to stuff like that in those days. Being 16, I wasn’t exactly invested in any other theory of history, or in established worldviews of any sort. In addition to conspiracies, I also had an open mind about ancient astronauts, lost continents, and the Velikovsky theory of the solar system. I had recently broken away from the literal-truth-of-the-Bible religion I had learned in a Christian elementary school, so the idea that authority figures of all sorts had been telling me tall tales seemed pretty credible. Why shouldn’t the world be explained by a sweeping hidden truth that the Powers That Be didn’t want me to know?

So I was undecided about NDCiC until I got to the last chapter, the one explaining what You the Reader could do to save America and the World from these sinister forces: Buy a lot of copies of None Dare Call It Conspiracy and pass them out to people in your neighborhood.

To summarize: You do not necessarily have to be an articulate salesman to make this “end run” [around what we now call “the mainstream media”]. You do not necessarily have to know all the in’s and out’s of the total conspiracy – the book is intended to do this for you. All you have to do is find the wherewithal to purchase the books and one way or another see that you blanket your precinct with them.

If 30 million copies got bought and distributed before the 1972 election, the conspiracy would be exposed beyond the conspirators ability to cover it back up again. (Apparently they fell short, because the cover of the 2014 edition claimed only 5 million copies sold. And so the Great Conspiracy rolls on.)

In short, an author was telling me that in order to save the world, I needed to “find the wherewithal” to “one way or another” make him rich. That set off alarm bells in my head, and caused me to re-evaluate the book’s whole argument.

Looking back, I now think those alarm bells are why I eventually became a liberal. Conservatives might have their internal alarm bells tuned to a variety of other threats — and perhaps are often appalled that mine stay silent when theirs start clanging — but apparently not to scams.

Grifters and their marks. As many writers have observed, entering the conservative information bubble puts you in a high-grift zone. Amanda Marcotte put it like this:

Look at the ads in conservative publications or on right-wing sites: It’s a chaotic dogpile of snake oil pitches, predatory gold-bug scams, and “survivalist” supplies that are drastically overpriced or worthless. Most of the familiar characters in the Fox News pundit universe — as well as Donald Trump’s Cabinet — have their own email newsletters, and subscribing to one means a nonstop onslaught of email pitches for “miracle” cures and get-rich-quick scams. There are countless shady conservative political action committees that promise to help elect Republican candidates, but whose real purpose is to enrich the folks who run them. Onetime GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin ran one such PAC that drew lots of incoming donations and spent very little of it on real-world political campaigns. To a significant degree, the conservative movement exists as a way to compile lists of gullible marks used by scammers and con artists.

Liberal media personalities like Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes may occasionally also have a book to sell you, but Sean Hannity endorses the Homearly Real Estate Group, which claims to donate $500 to the Wounded Warrior Project every time it sells a home. In daisy-chain fashion, Wounded Warrior has at times been a scam itself; its top executives were fired in 2016 after CBS News discovered that the “charity” was spending tens of millions of dollars a year on lavish parties at five-star resorts.

This kind of thing has been going on a long time. In his 2012 article “The Long Con“, Rick Perlstein traced it back as far as the 1970s (my high school days), and gave 2012 examples like Ann Coulter’s endorsement of a skeezy investment newsletter. (For contrast, I admire Nobel-prize winning liberal economist Paul Krugman, but it never occurs to me to wonder where he gets investment advice.)

Liberal and conservative pundits, it seems, are doing something subtly different. Liberals are telling you what is happening; conservatives are telling you who to trust. Liberals divide the world into True and False; conservatives into Good People and Bad People. Good People can introduce you to other Good People, and those introductions are worth serious money.

Foundational myths. If you wonder why conservatives are such easy prey for con-men, the answer is pretty simple. The conservative movement’s whole ideology is based on a series of easily disprovable myths: tax cuts pay for themselves, the American healthcare system is the best in the world, racism ended with Jim Crow in the 1960s, more guns make us all safer, and so on. The movement’s movers and shakers expected Obama’s decreasing deficits to enrage their people to the point of violence, but Trump’s increasing deficits to pass without comment. Obama’s executive orders (like DACA) were outrageous steps towards dictatorship, but Trump’s far more sweeping decrees (like this week’s unilateral extension of unemployment benefits without the consent of Congress) are legitimate expressions of Article II power. And so on.

The people Rush Limbaugh refers to as “dittoheads” don’t just mouth these absurdities, they actually believe them. They are, in short, easy marks. If you can collect a lot of them in one room, or on one mailing list, you have created an ideal fishing pond for hucksters.

In “The Long Con” Perlstein began with the pervasive mendacity of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. (I believe Romney was the first major-party nominee to continue repeating a lie after the media had fact-checked him on it; that may seem like par for the course now, but as recently as 2012 it was flabbergasting.) Then he pulled back to examine the central role con-men and scams have played in the conservative movement.

The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.

To adapt another bit of Perlstein imagery: Once the politicians have you worrying about an invisible river, the grifters will happily sell you an invisible bridge.

The NRA. Here’s what brings this topic to mind this week: Thursday, New York Attorney General Letitia James laid out in a lawsuit an explicit account of one of the conservative movement’s longest-running cons: the National Rifle Association. According to the NYAG’s press release:

four individual defendants [Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre and three other top executives] failed to fulfill their fiduciary duty to the NRA and used millions upon millions from NRA reserves for personal use, including trips for them and their families to the Bahamas, private jets, expensive meals, and other private travel.

These actions contributed “to the loss of more than $64 million in just three years for the NRA”. The corruption is so pervasive that James is asking a New York court to dissolve the NRA, which it can do because the NRA has been incorporated there since 1871.

The same day, D. C. Attorney General Karl Racine sued the National Rifle Association Foundation, a charitable foundation incorporated in the District of Columbia. Donations to the NRA Foundation are tax-exempt, while donations to the NRA are not. Consequently, there are more restrictions on what the Foundation can do. (This arrangement may look suspicious, but in itself is not uncommon or necessarily corrupt. For example, the ACLU has an associated Foundation, which can pay legal fees for the ACLU’s clients, but can’t lobby for legislation. As long as the laws are followed, there shouldn’t be a problem.)

Just as James accuses executives like LaPierre of using the NRA as a “personal piggy-bank”, Racine charges that the officers of the NRA Foundation were allowing the NRA to abuse Foundation funds by making sweetheart loans to the NRA, letting the NRA overcharge it for management fees, and in general placing the interests of the NRA above the interests of the Foundation. In short, the Foundation was just a pass-through that allowed the NRA to use tax-exempt donations.

The D.C. lawsuit is not seeking to dissolve the NRA Foundation, but to force the NRA to repay the money it took from the Foundation, and to reorganize the Foundation to restore its integrity as a charitable institution.

Marcotte comments on how the con has worked:

The NRA’s grift has been almost comical in its bluntness. The group traffics in over-the-top rhetoric designed to play on some of the darkest and most irrational emotions of American conservatives, including racist fears over the nation’s changing demographics, overblown fears of crime and paranoid fantasies that liberals are trying to “take over” the country in illegitimate ways. So much of the hyperventilating conspiracy-theory discourse found on the right, especially the wild fever-dreams about progressive “violence,” starts with the NRA, which sought to convince conservatives that they needed to spend ungodly amounts of money on buying guns and on supporting the NRA itself, in order to protect themselves from the imaginary threat of gun-grabbing libtards and antifa terrorists.

Misdirected outrage. The two lawsuits led to howls of rage from conservatives pundits. You might think the howls would be directed at LaPierre and his crooked cronies, for ripping off the millions of NRA members and contributors, and for spending the conservative movement’s money on themselves. But no: The outrage is at the two attorneys general for catching them. Marcotte summarizes:

Far from thanking James for trying to shut down an organization that spreads shameless lies in order to separate conservatives from their money, Republican leaders and right-wing pundits are crying foul. Some of the defenses have been, uh, interesting.

“I prosecuted organizations or individuals who cheated their organizations, OK,” said Jeanine Pirro, the former New York prosecutor turned histrionic Fox News commentator on Friday morning. “It happens all the time. It’s no big deal, all right?”

The previous night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham warned that this was a sign of things to come and Democrats will soon “go after pro-life groups, conservative think tanks, conservative radio shows, cable networks, even churches.”

And well they might, if executives of “pro-life groups, conservative think tanks, conservative radio shows, cable networks, even churches” have been ripping off their organizations and spending the donors’ money on their own lavish perks. Ingraham seems to be taking for granted that they are. (I’m particularly amused by the “even churches” in that quote, because mega-church and televangelist ministries have been famous for spending money collected for “the Lord’s work” on the lavish lifestyles of their ministers. The worst offenders are preachers you have probably never heard of if you don’t watch Christian cable channels, but Jerry Falwell Jr., who finally lost his job this week for a fairly silly reason, had previously been accused in Politico of self-dealing with Liberty University’s money.)

And of course our Law & Order President is perfectly fine with thieves running the NRA. New York’s lawsuit is “a terrible thing”, Trump says, and he suggests that the organization dodge the law by moving the Texas. (He should know that wouldn’t work, because it wasn’t an option when New York dissolved the fraudulent Trump Foundation, or when he had to pay $25 million to settle the Trump University fraud.)

Marcotte sums up:

It’s not just that the NRA has been a major player in helping Republican politicians over the years, both in terms of funding and in keeping the right-wing base riled up over imaginary threats. It’s that grifting and con artistry are the backbone of the conservative movement.

If New York is actually successful in dissolving the NRA, it’s quite true that, as Ingraham suggested, similar efforts could follow against right-wing activist groups. But that won’t happen because of their ideology, but because so many of them rely on the same kinds of grifting and fraud the NRA has thrived on for years. The entire right-wing movement is awash in this kind of corruption.

Will they learn? It would be pleasant to imagine conservatives all over the country finally hearing the kinds of alarm bells I heard in 1973, and realizing that they need to be more careful about what ideas they accept and who they send their money to. But that’s almost certainly not going to happen.

When a series of televangelists had scandals in the 1980s, the effect on televangelism as a whole was small and short-lived. Believers disillusioned by one preacher mostly just changed channels and watched another. And when Jim Bakker got out of prison, he made a comeback. After all, why shouldn’t you send your money to a convicted fraudster, if he sounds good on television?

There is still considerable attraction in conservatism’s Manichean worldview, in which Good People struggle against Bad People, and you don’t need to do the work to figure out what’s true, you just need to know who to trust. It is in some perverse way comforting to believe that our problems do not arise from the fact that life is difficult, or that substantial effort is required to find solutions to hard problems. There is no need to spend your life looking for cures and treatments, like Dr. Fauci has; miracle cures like hydroxycholaquine are everywhere, and we just need to listen to the Good People like Donald Trump who tell us about them. There are simple secrets to getting rich, and we could all be rich if only we could put aside our doubts and trust the Good People who want to let us in on the ground floor. No one needs to work out the details of complex programs like Medicare for All, we just need a Good Leader with the courage to tell the healthcare system to work better.

And so, as the NRA faces a possibly fatal legal storm, Q-Anon is rising. They have a conspiracy theory that swallows all the others like the plot of Illuminatus! made real. And their founder can never be discredited, because we don’t know who it is.

And guess what? There’s plenty of merchandise you can buy.

The New York and D.C. attorneys general have uncovered self-dealing, lavish spending on executive luxuries, and outright fraud at the National Rifle Association. Why is the conservative movement such fertile ground for this kind of thing?

Alarm bells. In 1973 I was a junior in high school, and a friend who had recently discovered the John Birch Society gave me a copy of their 1971 best-seller None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Thus was I introduced to the conspiracy theory of history: Forget all this talk of deep social forces evolving in unpredictable ways; in reality a cabal of powerful people has (for decades, or maybe centuries) been steering the planet towards a one-world dictatorship.

I was open to stuff like that in those days. Being 16, I wasn’t exactly invested in any other theory of history, or in established worldviews of any sort. In addition to conspiracies, I also had an open mind about ancient astronauts, lost continents, and the Velikovsky theory of the solar system. I had recently broken away from the literal-truth-of-the-Bible religion I had learned in a Christian elementary school, so the idea that authority figures of all sorts had been telling me tall tales seemed pretty credible. Why shouldn’t the world be explained by a sweeping hidden truth that the Powers That Be didn’t want me to know?

So I was undecided about NDCiC until I got to the last chapter, the one explaining what You the Reader could do to save America and the World from these sinister forces: Buy a lot of copies of None Dare Call It Conspiracy and pass them out to people in your neighborhood.

To summarize: You do not necessarily have to be an articulate salesman to make this “end run” [around what we now call “the mainstream media”]. You do not necessarily have to know all the in’s and out’s of the total conspiracy – the book is intended to do this for you. All you have to do is find the wherewithal to purchase the books and one way or another see that you blanket your precinct with them.

If 30 million copies got bought and distributed before the 1972 election, the conspiracy would be exposed beyond the conspirators ability to cover it back up again. (Apparently they fell short, because the cover of the 2014 edition claimed only 5 million copies sold. And so the Great Conspiracy rolls on.)

In short, an author was telling me that in order to save the world, I needed to “find the wherewithal” to “one way or another” make him rich. That set off alarm bells in my head, and caused me to re-evaluate the book’s whole argument.

Looking back, I now think those alarm bells are why I eventually became a liberal. Conservatives might have their internal alarm bells tuned to a variety of other threats — and perhaps are often appalled that mine stay silent when theirs start clanging — but apparently not to scams.

Grifters and their marks. As many writers have observed, entering the conservative information bubble puts you in a high-grift zone. Amanda Marcotte put it like this:

Look at the ads in conservative publications or on right-wing sites: It’s a chaotic dogpile of snake oil pitches, predatory gold-bug scams, and “survivalist” supplies that are drastically overpriced or worthless. Most of the familiar characters in the Fox News pundit universe — as well as Donald Trump’s Cabinet — have their own email newsletters, and subscribing to one means a nonstop onslaught of email pitches for “miracle” cures and get-rich-quick scams. There are countless shady conservative political action committees that promise to help elect Republican candidates, but whose real purpose is to enrich the folks who run them. Onetime GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin ran one such PAC that drew lots of incoming donations and spent very little of it on real-world political campaigns. To a significant degree, the conservative movement exists as a way to compile lists of gullible marks used by scammers and con artists.

Liberal media personalities like Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes may occasionally also have a book to sell you, but Sean Hannity endorses the Homearly Real Estate Group, which claims to donate $500 to the Wounded Warrior Project every time it sells a home. In daisy-chain fashion, Wounded Warrior has at times been a scam itself; its top executives were fired in 2016 after CBS News discovered that the “charity” was spending tens of millions of dollars a year on lavish parties at five-star resorts.

This kind of thing has been going on a long time. In his 2012 article “The Long Con“, Rick Perlstein traced it back as far as the 1970s (my high school days), and gave 2012 examples like Ann Coulter’s endorsement of a skeezy investment newsletter. (For contrast, I admire Nobel-prize winning liberal economist Paul Krugman, but it never occurs to me to wonder where he gets investment advice.)

Liberal and conservative pundits, it seems, are doing something subtly different. Liberals are telling you what is happening; conservatives are telling you who to trust. Liberals divide the world into True and False; conservatives into Good People and Bad People. Good People can introduce you to other Good People, and those introductions are worth serious money.

Foundational myths. If you wonder why conservatives are such easy prey for con-men, the answer is pretty simple. The conservative movement’s whole ideology is based on a series of easily disprovable myths: tax cuts pay for themselves, the American healthcare system is the best in the world, racism ended with Jim Crow in the 1960s, more guns make us all safer, and so on. The movement’s movers and shakers expected Obama’s decreasing deficits to enrage their people to the point of violence, but Trump’s increasing deficits to pass without comment. Obama’s executive orders (like DACA) were outrageous steps towards dictatorship, but Trump’s far more sweeping decrees (like this week’s unilateral extension of unemployment benefits without the consent of Congress) are legitimate expressions of Article II power. And so on.

The people Rush Limbaugh refers to as “dittoheads” don’t just mouth these absurdities, they actually believe them. They are, in short, easy marks. If you can collect a lot of them in one room, or on one mailing list, you have created an ideal fishing pond for hucksters.

In “The Long Con” Perlstein began with the pervasive mendacity of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. (I believe Romney was the first major-party nominee to continue repeating a lie after the media had fact-checked him on it; that may seem like par for the course now, but as recently as 2012 it was flabbergasting.) Then he pulled back to examine the central role con-men and scams have played in the conservative movement.

The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.

To adapt another bit of Perlstein imagery: Once the politicians have you worrying about an invisible river, the grifters will happily sell you an invisible bridge.

The NRA. Here’s what brings this topic to mind this week: Thursday, New York Attorney General Letitia James laid out in a lawsuit an explicit account of one of the conservative movement’s longest-running cons: the National Rifle Association. According to the NYAG’s press release:

four individual defendants [Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre and three other top executives] failed to fulfill their fiduciary duty to the NRA and used millions upon millions from NRA reserves for personal use, including trips for them and their families to the Bahamas, private jets, expensive meals, and other private travel.

These actions contributed “to the loss of more than $64 million in just three years for the NRA”. The corruption is so pervasive that James is asking a New York court to dissolve the NRA, which it can do because the NRA has been incorporated there since 1871.

The same day, D. C. Attorney General Karl Racine sued the National Rifle Association Foundation, a charitable foundation incorporated in the District of Columbia. Donations to the NRA Foundation are tax-exempt, while donations to the NRA are not. Consequently, there are more restrictions on what the Foundation can do. (This arrangement may look suspicious, but in itself is not uncommon or necessarily corrupt. For example, the ACLU has an associated Foundation, which can pay legal fees for the ACLU’s clients, but can’t lobby for legislation. As long as the laws are followed, there shouldn’t be a problem.)

Just as James accuses executives like LaPierre of using the NRA as a “personal piggy-bank”, Racine charges that the officers of the NRA Foundation were allowing the NRA to abuse Foundation funds by making sweetheart loans to the NRA, letting the NRA overcharge it for management fees, and in general placing the interests of the NRA above the interests of the Foundation. In short, the Foundation was just a pass-through that allowed the NRA to use tax-exempt donations.

The D.C. lawsuit is not seeking to dissolve the NRA Foundation, but to force the NRA to repay the money it took from the Foundation, and to reorganize the Foundation to restore its integrity as a charitable institution.

Marcotte comments on how the con has worked:

The NRA’s grift has been almost comical in its bluntness. The group traffics in over-the-top rhetoric designed to play on some of the darkest and most irrational emotions of American conservatives, including racist fears over the nation’s changing demographics, overblown fears of crime and paranoid fantasies that liberals are trying to “take over” the country in illegitimate ways. So much of the hyperventilating conspiracy-theory discourse found on the right, especially the wild fever-dreams about progressive “violence,” starts with the NRA, which sought to convince conservatives that they needed to spend ungodly amounts of money on buying guns and on supporting the NRA itself, in order to protect themselves from the imaginary threat of gun-grabbing libtards and antifa terrorists.

Misdirected outrage. The two lawsuits led to howls of rage from conservatives pundits. You might think the howls would be directed at LaPierre and his crooked cronies, for ripping off the millions of NRA members and contributors, and for spending the conservative movement’s money on themselves. But no: The outrage is at the two attorneys general for catching them. Marcotte summarizes:

Far from thanking James for trying to shut down an organization that spreads shameless lies in order to separate conservatives from their money, Republican leaders and right-wing pundits are crying foul. Some of the defenses have been, uh, interesting.

“I prosecuted organizations or individuals who cheated their organizations, OK,” said Jeanine Pirro, the former New York prosecutor turned histrionic Fox News commentator on Friday morning. “It happens all the time. It’s no big deal, all right?”

The previous night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham warned that this was a sign of things to come and Democrats will soon “go after pro-life groups, conservative think tanks, conservative radio shows, cable networks, even churches.”

And well they might, if executives of “pro-life groups, conservative think tanks, conservative radio shows, cable networks, even churches” have been ripping off their organizations and spending the donors’ money on their own lavish perks. Ingraham seems to be taking for granted that they are. (I’m particularly amused by the “even churches” in that quote, because mega-church and televangelist ministries have been famous for spending money collected for “the Lord’s work” on the lavish lifestyles of their ministers. The worst offenders are preachers you have probably never heard of if you don’t watch Christian cable channels, but Jerry Falwell Jr., who finally lost his job this week for a fairly silly reason, had previously been accused in Politico of self-dealing with Liberty University’s money.)

And of course our Law & Order President is perfectly fine with thieves running the NRA. New York’s lawsuit is “a terrible thing”, Trump says, and he suggests that the organization dodge the law by moving the Texas. (He should know that wouldn’t work, because it wasn’t an option when New York dissolved the fraudulent Trump Foundation, or when he had to pay $25 million to settle the Trump University fraud.)

Marcotte sums up:

It’s not just that the NRA has been a major player in helping Republican politicians over the years, both in terms of funding and in keeping the right-wing base riled up over imaginary threats. It’s that grifting and con artistry are the backbone of the conservative movement.

If New York is actually successful in dissolving the NRA, it’s quite true that, as Ingraham suggested, similar efforts could follow against right-wing activist groups. But that won’t happen because of their ideology, but because so many of them rely on the same kinds of grifting and fraud the NRA has thrived on for years. The entire right-wing movement is awash in this kind of corruption.

Will they learn? It would be pleasant to imagine conservatives all over the country finally hearing the kinds of alarm bells I heard in 1973, and realizing that they need to be more careful about what ideas they accept and who they send their money to. But that’s almost certainly not going to happen.

When a series of televangelists had scandals in the 1980s, the effect on televangelism as a whole was small and short-lived. Believers disillusioned by one preacher mostly just changed channels and watched another. And when Jim Bakker got out of prison, he made a comeback. After all, why shouldn’t you send your money to a convicted fraudster, if he sounds good on television?

There is still considerable attraction in conservatism’s Manichean worldview, in which Good People struggle against Bad People, and you don’t need to do the work to figure out what’s true, you just need to know who to trust. It is in some perverse way comforting to believe that our problems do not arise from the fact that life is difficult, or that substantial effort is required to find solutions to hard problems. There is no need to spend your life looking for cures and treatments, like Dr. Fauci has; miracle cures like hydroxycholaquine are everywhere, and we just need to listen to the Good People like Donald Trump who tell us about them. There are simple secrets to getting rich, and we could all be rich if only we could put aside our doubts and trust the Good People who want to let us in on the ground floor. No one needs to work out the details of complex programs like Medicare for All, we just need a Good Leader with the courage to tell the healthcare system to work better.

And so, as the NRA faces a possibly fatal legal storm, Q-Anon is rising. They have a conspiracy theory that swallows all the others like the plot of Illuminatus! made real. And their founder can never be discredited, because we don’t know who it is.

And guess what? There’s plenty of merchandise you can buy.

At the beginning of 2019, Trump asserted emergency powers that let him keep building his border wall even though Congress had explicitly rejected appropriating money for that purpose. The Supreme Court has never ruled on the legality of his maneuver, but has let it continue in the meantime. This week we saw the next step in that march towards dictatorship: executive orders claiming to do a variety of things that would seem to require new money, like continuing a slimmed-down version of the enhanced unemployment benefits Congress passed in March. What will happen next is anybody’s guess.

I’ll talk about that in the weekly summary, but the featured post arises from a different news story: The New York and D.C. attorneys general are suing the National Rifle Association’s executives for diverting $62 million dollars to inappropriate uses — mostly their own luxury. They want to reorganize the NRA Foundation and dissolve the NRA itself. That story is interesting on its own, but it also points to the larger pattern of scams inside the conservative bubble, which Rick Perlstein was drawing attention to back in 2012. What makes the conservative rank-and-file such easy marks, and why do they close ranks around the grifters who take advantage of them?

That post is currently titled “The NRA, Trump University, Hydroxycholaquine, and the Long Con”. It should be out between 10 and 11 EDT. The weekly summary will discuss the executive orders, the back-to-school debate, TikTok, Isabel Wilkerson, Thighland, and a few other things. I’ll predict it to appear between noon and 1.

At the beginning of 2019, Trump asserted emergency powers that let him keep building his border wall even though Congress had explicitly rejected appropriating money for that purpose. The Supreme Court has never ruled on the legality of his maneuver, but has let it continue in the meantime. This week we saw the next step in that march towards dictatorship: executive orders claiming to do a variety of things that would seem to require new money, like continuing a slimmed-down version of the enhanced unemployment benefits Congress passed in March. What will happen next is anybody’s guess.

I’ll talk about that in the weekly summary, but the featured post arises from a different news story: The New York and D.C. attorneys general are suing the National Rifle Association’s executives for diverting $62 million dollars to inappropriate uses — mostly their own luxury. They want to reorganize the NRA Foundation and dissolve the NRA itself. That story is interesting on its own, but it also points to the larger pattern of scams inside the conservative bubble, which Rick Perlstein was drawing attention to back in 2012. What makes the conservative rank-and-file such easy marks, and why do they close ranks around the grifters who take advantage of them?

That post is currently titled “The NRA, Trump University, Hydroxycholaquine, and the Long Con”. It should be out between 10 and 11 EDT. The weekly summary will discuss the executive orders, the back-to-school debate, TikTok, Isabel Wilkerson, Thighland, and a few other things. I’ll predict it to appear between noon and 1.

The election was a necessity. We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.

– Abraham Lincoln, 11-10-1864, two days after his re-election

This week’s featured post is “The Election: Worry or Don’t Worry?“.

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s threat to the election

At 8:30 Thursday morning, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its 2nd quarter GDP report, showing the economy contracting at a record pace. Sixteen minutes later, Trump tweeted:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

Coincidence? Of course not. Again and again, Trump has shown that he would rather have us talking about some outrageous thing he said than about his failures in the real world.

And notice, of course, that Trump presents no plan for making things better. No plan for controlling the virus so that in-person voting will be safer, no safeguards to make mail-in voting more secure. No suggestion of when or how people could “properly, securely, and safely vote”. The tweet is just pure disruption: undermine faith in what is going to happen, without offering any viable alternative.

Republicans in Congress tried to stay clear of this authoritarian overreach, but for the most part they didn’t condemn it either. “I think delaying the election probably wouldn’t be a good idea,” Lindsey Graham said. And Mitch McConnell commented:

Never in the history of the Congress, through wars, depressions and the Civil War have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time, and we’ll find a way to do that again this Nov. 3.

To me, their message to Trump sounded more like “If you want to disrupt the election, leave me out of it” than “Don’t you dare.” I would have liked an elected Republican to react more like Federalist Society founder Steven Calabresi:

I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate. … President Trump needs to be told by every Republican in Congress that he cannot postpone the federal election. Doing so would be illegal, unconstitutional and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says otherwise should never be elected to Congress again.

and the yuge GDP drop

OK, back to the GDP. The BEA report began:

Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 32.9 percent in the second quarter of 2020

That 32.9% number was all over the media coverage of the report, but it’s a crazy way to look at it. Nothing real fell by 32.9% in the 2nd quarter. NPR explains:

GDP swings are typically reported at an annual rate — as if they were to continue for a full year — which can be misleading in a volatile period like this. The overall economy in the second quarter was 9.5% smaller than during the same period a year ago.

To bring this idea home, imagine that you buy a $20,000 car today. So today you are spending at an annual rate of $7.3 million. But nothing in your box of receipts will ever add up to $7.3 million, because you’re not going to buy a $20,000 car every day for a year.

All the same, though, what really happened is bad enough: In the 2nd quarter the economy was 9.5% smaller than it was the year before. In the whole history of quarterly GDP reports, there has never been one this bad. What this proves is that we’re not having the “V-shaped recovery” that Trump has been predicting. People are still hurting, and jobs are hard to find. When Republicans in Congress went along with Democrats on the CARES Act in March, most of them were imagining that we’d be over the hump by now and well on our way back to normal.

Well, we’re not. And Republicans have no idea what to do about it.

The White House’s strategy in the negotiations has shifted multiple times in the past few weeks. Democrats passed a $3 trillion package in May that included an extension of unemployment benefits, new stimulus checks, aid for states and localities, and various other programs. The White House expressed opposition to that bill but did not begin negotiations with Democrats until recently. It also took the White House much longer than expected to broker a unified Republican proposal with the Senate GOP after blowback on several of the White House’s ideas.

One special crisis: The federal eviction ban has lapsed, and estimates say Americans owe $21.5 billion in back rent. “In July alone, 21% of renters paid no rent, according to research firm Apartment List.” Expect a wave of evictions, followed by an increase in homelessness. It’s got to be much harder to protect yourself against Covid-19 if you’re homeless, so this will directly affect the spread of the virus.

Trump and McConnell have been acting like they have all the time they want to figure this out. They don’t. Bad stuff is already happening, and more is going to happen every day they delay.

Renters are just the first domino. If they can’t pay, then landlords won’t be able to pay their mortgages. And then banks will be insolvent, and we’ll be in a credit crunch.

One odd wrinkle in the politics of this is that it’s not clear who McConnell speaks for. Lindsey Graham has claimed that “Half the Republicans are going to vote no on any Phase 4 package.” And Ron Johnson says: “I don’t want to see any new authorization of money.”

On the surface this looks weird, because the economic disaster these Republicans are courting is going to hurt Trump’s re-election campaign.

What’s going on here is that senators who aren’t running this year are looking down the road, and already assuming a Trump loss in the fall. After the George W. Bush administration ended in disaster, Republicans quickly disavowed Bush and claimed that he was never really a conservative. The Tea Party movement of 2009 took aim at all the Republicans who went along with Bush on the $700 billion TARP bail-out bill in October of 2008.

Senators like Johnson and Ben Sasse are foreseeing a similar rebranding trick after Trump is gone. And they sense that Republicans who vote for a new stimulus now will be vulnerable once Biden is president and deficits become anathema again.

Michael Strain of the conservative American Enterprise Institute makes a good point about statistics: The bad 2nd-quarter numbers set the stage for 3rd-quarter numbers that will sound good, even if they’re not.

Economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimate that the June GDP is over five percentage points larger than the average in April, May, and June. So even if the economy does not grow at all in July, August and September, the third quarter is already set to outperform the second by a wide margin.

When a trillion dollars is going out the door, Trump just can’t resist wetting his beak a little. His proposed plan includes money to remodel the FBI building near the Trump International Hotel in D.C. The original plan had the FBI headquarters moving to cheaper quarters in the suburbs, but then the D.C. site might be available for some competing hotel. Trump really doesn’t want that to happen.

His plan also includes a bigger tax break for business restaurant spending — another boost for Trump properties.

and the virus

The death rate continues to rise. The current  7-day moving average is 1,226 deaths a day.

The news continues to be bad for anyone hoping schools will reopen safely.

Central Junior High in Greenfield, Indiana couldn’t get through its first day without an incident.

Just hours into the first day of classes on Thursday, a call from the county health department notified Greenfield Central Junior High School in Indiana that a student who had walked the halls and sat in various classrooms had tested positive for the coronavirus. Administrators began an emergency protocol, isolating the student and ordering everyone who had come into close contact with the person, including other students, to quarantine for 14 days.

… A New York Times analysis found that in many districts in the Sun Belt, at least 10 people infected with the coronavirus would be expected to arrive at a school of about 500 students and staff members during the first week if it reopened today.

A major outbreak happened at a Georgia YMCA camp.

A CDC report released Friday reveals that hundreds of campers at a north Georgia YMCA camp were infected with coronavirus in just days before the camp was shut down. … According to the report, of the 597 residents who attended the camp, 344 were tested and 260 tested positive for the virus. The camp was only open for four days before being shut down because of the virus, and officials followed all recommended safety protocols. …

The CDC said that what happened at High Harbor shows that earlier thinking that children might not be as susceptible to COVID-19 is wrong. According to the report, the age group with the most positive coronavirus tests was 6 – 10 years old.

Former presidential candidate Herman Cain died Thursday of complications from Covid-19. For a brief time in the 2012 cycle, as the slice of the Republican Party that would eventually become the Trump personality cult struggled against Mitt Romney, Cain was the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

With the virus being so ubiquitous, it’s impossible to be confident in any contact-tracing. But Cain went to Trump’s June 20 rally in Tulsa, where (like just about everybody else) he didn’t wear a mask. He tested positive on June 29. (I haven’t been able to determine whether that was when the test was given or the result reported.) He was hospitalized on July 1, and died July 30.

Trump began his July 30 briefing by blaming Cain’s death on “the China virus”. As usual, he takes no responsibility.

Here’s the ad Trump should run:

and John Lewis’ funeral

The funeral was held Thursday.

The presidential eulogies — delivered by every living president but one who is 95 and one who couldn’t be bothered to show up — were not to be missed: Barack Obama (text, video), Bill Clinton, and even George W. Bush. Bush was never known for his eloquence, or for his camaraderie with the civil rights movement, but his speech embodied a basic decency that has not been seen in the White House since the current president arrived.

and you also might be interested in …

The federal storm troopers left Portland, and the situation calmed down almost immediately. It’s almost like the feds never intended to preserve peace and order.

One of the demonstrators described the evolution of the protests like this:

We came out here in t-shirts and with hula-hoops and stuff, and they started gassing us. So we came back with respirators, and they started shooting us. So we came back with vests, and they started aiming for the head. So we started wearing helmets. And now they call us terrorists. Who’s escalating this? It’s not us.

The retail bankruptcies continue: Lord and Taylor, Men’s Wearhouse.

Fascinating tweet-storm in which an ER doctor talks about a surgery patient who was refusing a Covid-19 test, and so couldn’t be operated on. It’s a story of the kind of compassionate interaction we all wish we could receive or were capable of giving others. The doctor listened, reassured, provided factual context, and got the patient’s consent.

In a Fox News interview on July 19, Trump told Chris Wallace:

We’re signing a health-care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health-care plan.

Two weeks was up yesterday, and guess what? Nothing.

Trump usually expects nobody to be paying attention after two weeks, so “in two weeks” usually means “never”. (Remember the news conference where Melania was going to produce all her citizenship documentation, proving that “She came in totally legally.”? During the 2016 campaign he said that would happen “in a few weeks”. It still hasn’t.) But the Washington Post kept track this time, and published an article about all the other times Trump has promised a health-care plan.

In June 2019, Trump said in an interview with ABC News that he would announce a “phenomenal” new health-care plan “in about two months, maybe less.”

Two months later, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters that the president was preparing to introduce an elaborate plan to redesign the nation’s health-care system in a speech the following month. “We’re working every single day here,” Conway said last August. “I’ve already been in meetings this morning on the president’s health-care plan. It’s pretty impressive.”

No speech or plan came.

and let’s close with some great video-editing

Nike … well, they’re a big corporation, and they’ve got some problems. But credit where it’s due: If you want to make the case that people are people and sport is sport, you can’t do a lot better than this video. I wonder how much tape they had to watch to find images that fit together this well.

The election was a necessity. We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.

– Abraham Lincoln, 11-10-1864, two days after his re-election

This week’s featured post is “The Election: Worry or Don’t Worry?“.

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s threat to the election

At 8:30 Thursday morning, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its 2nd quarter GDP report, showing the economy contracting at a record pace. Sixteen minutes later, Trump tweeted:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

Coincidence? Of course not. Again and again, Trump has shown that he would rather have us talking about some outrageous thing he said than about his failures in the real world.

And notice, of course, that Trump presents no plan for making things better. No plan for controlling the virus so that in-person voting will be safer, no safeguards to make mail-in voting more secure. No suggestion of when or how people could “properly, securely, and safely vote”. The tweet is just pure disruption: undermine faith in what is going to happen, without offering any viable alternative.

Republicans in Congress tried to stay clear of this authoritarian overreach, but for the most part they didn’t condemn it either. “I think delaying the election probably wouldn’t be a good idea,” Lindsey Graham said. And Mitch McConnell commented:

Never in the history of the Congress, through wars, depressions and the Civil War have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time, and we’ll find a way to do that again this Nov. 3.

To me, their message to Trump sounded more like “If you want to disrupt the election, leave me out of it” than “Don’t you dare.” I would have liked an elected Republican to react more like Federalist Society founder Steven Calabresi:

I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate. … President Trump needs to be told by every Republican in Congress that he cannot postpone the federal election. Doing so would be illegal, unconstitutional and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says otherwise should never be elected to Congress again.

and the yuge GDP drop

OK, back to the GDP. The BEA report began:

Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 32.9 percent in the second quarter of 2020

That 32.9% number was all over the media coverage of the report, but it’s a crazy way to look at it. Nothing real fell by 32.9% in the 2nd quarter. NPR explains:

GDP swings are typically reported at an annual rate — as if they were to continue for a full year — which can be misleading in a volatile period like this. The overall economy in the second quarter was 9.5% smaller than during the same period a year ago.

To bring this idea home, imagine that you buy a $20,000 car today. So today you are spending at an annual rate of $7.3 million. But nothing in your box of receipts will ever add up to $7.3 million, because you’re not going to buy a $20,000 car every day for a year.

All the same, though, what really happened is bad enough: In the 2nd quarter the economy was 9.5% smaller than it was the year before. In the whole history of quarterly GDP reports, there has never been one this bad. What this proves is that we’re not having the “V-shaped recovery” that Trump has been predicting. People are still hurting, and jobs are hard to find. When Republicans in Congress went along with Democrats on the CARES Act in March, most of them were imagining that we’d be over the hump by now and well on our way back to normal.

Well, we’re not. And Republicans have no idea what to do about it.

The White House’s strategy in the negotiations has shifted multiple times in the past few weeks. Democrats passed a $3 trillion package in May that included an extension of unemployment benefits, new stimulus checks, aid for states and localities, and various other programs. The White House expressed opposition to that bill but did not begin negotiations with Democrats until recently. It also took the White House much longer than expected to broker a unified Republican proposal with the Senate GOP after blowback on several of the White House’s ideas.

One special crisis: The federal eviction ban has lapsed, and estimates say Americans owe $21.5 billion in back rent. “In July alone, 21% of renters paid no rent, according to research firm Apartment List.” Expect a wave of evictions, followed by an increase in homelessness. It’s got to be much harder to protect yourself against Covid-19 if you’re homeless, so this will directly affect the spread of the virus.

Trump and McConnell have been acting like they have all the time they want to figure this out. They don’t. Bad stuff is already happening, and more is going to happen every day they delay.

Renters are just the first domino. If they can’t pay, then landlords won’t be able to pay their mortgages. And then banks will be insolvent, and we’ll be in a credit crunch.

One odd wrinkle in the politics of this is that it’s not clear who McConnell speaks for. Lindsey Graham has claimed that “Half the Republicans are going to vote no on any Phase 4 package.” And Ron Johnson says: “I don’t want to see any new authorization of money.”

On the surface this looks weird, because the economic disaster these Republicans are courting is going to hurt Trump’s re-election campaign.

What’s going on here is that senators who aren’t running this year are looking down the road, and already assuming a Trump loss in the fall. After the George W. Bush administration ended in disaster, Republicans quickly disavowed Bush and claimed that he was never really a conservative. The Tea Party movement of 2009 took aim at all the Republicans who went along with Bush on the $700 billion TARP bail-out bill in October of 2008.

Senators like Johnson and Ben Sasse are foreseeing a similar rebranding trick after Trump is gone. And they sense that Republicans who vote for a new stimulus now will be vulnerable once Biden is president and deficits become anathema again.

Michael Strain of the conservative American Enterprise Institute makes a good point about statistics: The bad 2nd-quarter numbers set the stage for 3rd-quarter numbers that will sound good, even if they’re not.

Economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimate that the June GDP is over five percentage points larger than the average in April, May, and June. So even if the economy does not grow at all in July, August and September, the third quarter is already set to outperform the second by a wide margin.

When a trillion dollars is going out the door, Trump just can’t resist wetting his beak a little. His proposed plan includes money to remodel the FBI building near the Trump International Hotel in D.C. The original plan had the FBI headquarters moving to cheaper quarters in the suburbs, but then the D.C. site might be available for some competing hotel. Trump really doesn’t want that to happen.

His plan also includes a bigger tax break for business restaurant spending — another boost for Trump properties.

and the virus

The death rate continues to rise. The current  7-day moving average is 1,226 deaths a day.

The news continues to be bad for anyone hoping schools will reopen safely.

Central Junior High in Greenfield, Indiana couldn’t get through its first day without an incident.

Just hours into the first day of classes on Thursday, a call from the county health department notified Greenfield Central Junior High School in Indiana that a student who had walked the halls and sat in various classrooms had tested positive for the coronavirus. Administrators began an emergency protocol, isolating the student and ordering everyone who had come into close contact with the person, including other students, to quarantine for 14 days.

… A New York Times analysis found that in many districts in the Sun Belt, at least 10 people infected with the coronavirus would be expected to arrive at a school of about 500 students and staff members during the first week if it reopened today.

A major outbreak happened at a Georgia YMCA camp.

A CDC report released Friday reveals that hundreds of campers at a north Georgia YMCA camp were infected with coronavirus in just days before the camp was shut down. … According to the report, of the 597 residents who attended the camp, 344 were tested and 260 tested positive for the virus. The camp was only open for four days before being shut down because of the virus, and officials followed all recommended safety protocols. …

The CDC said that what happened at High Harbor shows that earlier thinking that children might not be as susceptible to COVID-19 is wrong. According to the report, the age group with the most positive coronavirus tests was 6 – 10 years old.

Former presidential candidate Herman Cain died Thursday of complications from Covid-19. For a brief time in the 2012 cycle, as the slice of the Republican Party that would eventually become the Trump personality cult struggled against Mitt Romney, Cain was the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

With the virus being so ubiquitous, it’s impossible to be confident in any contact-tracing. But Cain went to Trump’s June 20 rally in Tulsa, where (like just about everybody else) he didn’t wear a mask. He tested positive on June 29. (I haven’t been able to determine whether that was when the test was given or the result reported.) He was hospitalized on July 1, and died July 30.

Trump began his July 30 briefing by blaming Cain’s death on “the China virus”. As usual, he takes no responsibility.

Here’s the ad Trump should run:

and John Lewis’ funeral

The funeral was held Thursday.

The presidential eulogies — delivered by every living president but the one who couldn’t be bothered to show up — were not to be missed: Barack Obama (text, video), Bill Clinton, and even George W. Bush. Bush was never known for his eloquence, or for his camaraderie with the civil rights movement, but his speech embodied a basic decency that is has not been seen in the White House since the current president arrived.

and you also might be interested in …

The federal storm troopers left Portland, and the situation calmed down almost immediately. It’s almost like the feds never intended to preserve peace and order.

One of the demonstrators described the evolution of the protests like this:

We came out here in t-shirts and with hula-hoops and stuff, and they started gassing us. So we came back with respirators, and they started shooting us. So we came back with vests, and they started aiming for the head. So we started wearing helmets. And now they call us terrorists. Who’s escalating this? It’s not us.

The retail bankruptcies continue: Lord and Taylor, Men’s Wearhouse.

Fascinating tweet-storm in which an ER doctor talks about a surgery patient who was refusing a Covid-19 test, and so couldn’t be operated on. It’s a story of the kind of compassionate interaction we all wish we could receive or were capable of giving others. The doctor listened, reassured, provided factual context, and got the patient’s consent.

In a Fox News interview on July 19, Trump told Chris Wallace:

We’re signing a health-care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health-care plan.

Two weeks was up yesterday, and guess what? Nothing.

Trump usually expects nobody to be paying attention after two weeks, so “in two weeks” usually means “never”. (Remember the news conference where Melania was going to produce all her citizenship documentation, proving that “She came in totally legally.”? During the 2016 campaign he said that would happen “in a few weeks”. It still hasn’t.) But the Washington Post kept track this time, and published an article about all the other times Trump has promised a health-care plan.

In June 2019, Trump said in an interview with ABC News that he would announce a “phenomenal” new health-care plan “in about two months, maybe less.”

Two months later, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters that the president was preparing to introduce an elaborate plan to redesign the nation’s health-care system in a speech the following month. “We’re working every single day here,” Conway said last August. “I’ve already been in meetings this morning on the president’s health-care plan. It’s pretty impressive.”

No speech or plan came.

and let’s close with some great video-editing

Nike … well, they’re a big corporation, and they’ve got some problems. But credit where it’s due: If you want to make the case that people are people and sport is sport, you can’t do a lot better than this video. I wonder how much tape they had to watch to find images that fit together this well.

Biden’s lead in the polls has Democrats searching for what could possibly go wrong. But some worries should be taken less seriously than others.

Just about every Democrat I know wants to punish him/herself for being overconfident in 2016. Some of us have practical regrets, and wish we’d done more to put Hillary over the top, while others less rationally feel like we jinxed her by saying too loudly that she was going to win. But whatever we did or didn’t do then, we’re now determined to make ourselves suffer by refusing to accept any good news about Joe Biden’s chances. No matter what the polls say, something is going to go horribly wrong.

For what it’s worth, I think we’re going to win this. Not that there’s nothing to worry about, but some of our worries are less serious than others. Let’s assess them one by one.

Worry #1. The polls are wrong.

Biden’s average margin in national polls is somewhere in the 8-9% range, and has been there since mid-June. More importantly, he has solid leads in the swing states he needs to win: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. If he fails in one of those states, polls also give him a good shot at flipping Florida, Arizona, or North Carolina. And even Republican strongholds like Texas and Georgia are not completely out of reach.

But Democrats remember how confident we felt in 2016, and look for reasons to doubt the polls. Republicans, on the other hand, live in constant denial of reality, and doubt the polls because they don’t want them to be true. Poll-skeptics make two related arguments.

• The polls were wrong in 2016, so why should we trust them now?
• There is a “hidden” Trump voter that the polls either can’t count or don’t want to count.

Neither really holds water, as long as you remember that polls are snapshots of public opinion at a moment in time, and not predictions of what people will think or do months from now.

The first thing to understand is that the final polls in 2016 were not far off from the vote totals, and to the extent they were, the more likely explanation is that Comey’s reopening of the Clinton email investigation gave Trump late momentum. The polls probably weren’t wrong at the moment they were taken; but a small shift in public opinion at the last minute put Trump over the top.

Nationally, the final 2016 RCP polling average had Clinton up by 3.3%. Her actual margin in the national popular vote was 2.1%. In Pennsylvania and Michigan the polls were off by a bit more — but still not that much. And in both cases, Trump had been gaining in the final week. The only real surprise was Wisconsin, where Clinton led by 6.5% in the final polls and lost by 0.7%.

But in 2018, the reverse happened: The final general congressional ballot polls had the Democrats up by 7.3%, and their margin in the vote totals was larger: 8.4%.

So if there were “hidden Trump voters” in 2016, were their “hidden Democrats” in 2018? Or is there always a small shift in the final days and hours of a campaign?

For what my opinion is worth, I expect the 2020 last-minute shift to be in Biden’s favor. Late in a campaign, a certain number of voters are just sick of all the noise. This year in particular, those voters will be sick of four years of noise; the thought that the loud, obnoxious Trump Era could be over will just be irresistible.

Assessment: Don’t worry about this. Things could change before Election Day, but Biden really is ahead right now.

Worry #2. Trump will stage a remarkable comeback.

In the Trump Era, when every day brings a a few week’s worth of news, three months is a very long time. A month ago, who was predicting that Portland would be invaded by DHS secret police? So all kinds of things can happen before Election Day, and you can expect Trump to push all the buttons and turn all the knobs as he tries to change the public’s opinion of him.

However, nothing he’s trying right now is working at all, or is likely to work if he just keeps at it and pushes harder. Unleashing his goons on Portland was supposed to produce a wave of support for the “law-and-order President” (who is strangely indifferent when people in his administration break the law). But in the latest Ipsos poll, 52% of Americans say the federal response to protests made things worse, with only 30% saying it made them better.

The not-all-that-veiled racism of his “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” tweet doesn’t seem to be going over all that well either. Suburbs aren’t what they were in the 1950s. Black people already live there (though still not in proportionate numbers), so they aren’t as easy to demonize. And a suburb anywhere near high-tech industries (like Bedford, Massachusetts, where I live) is going to include lots of residents of East Asian or South Asian ancestry. If you’re looking for the lily-white experience, you have to go to ex-urbs or rural small towns.

A second factor: His ability to change tactics is limited by his inability to admit mistakes or take responsibility for bad outcomes. So he has to keep doubling down on points that the public already knows are false. Like: the virus really is spreading, it’s not just that we’re testing more. That stopped fooling anyone other than Trump diehards weeks ago, but he can’t stop saying it.

And it’s not just him. The Trumpists who picture a comeback have to engage in such flights of fancy that reading their scenarios makes me more confident, not less. For example, Grady Means published an op-ed Wednesday in The Hill: “Buy the Dip: Bet on Trump“. In Means’ fantasy world, Trump has done a great job and had a great strategy going into this year, but after Covid-19 got rolling “the president has been a complete failure at playing his winning hand.”

The mainstream media and social networks stepped up their withering and relentless Trump-attacks. Statistically meaningless (increased testing and obvious selection bias) COVID-19 “cases” data were weaponized into a strategy of continued lockdowns and sustained school closures.

That’s Trump’s problem — not that America on his watch has objectively screwed up its pandemic response worse than any other rich country, or that people are genuinely hurting economically with no relief in sight. No, it’s that the media has made something out of nothing, and convinced the public to shut down businesses and schools when the virus isn’t really out of control at all. As soon as Americans realize the virus is already beaten, learn to ignore the hundreds of thousands of bodies piling up in the corner, and recognize what a great job Trump has done on the pandemic and everything else, he’ll surge again.

I just can’t picture that plan succeeding.

If Trump is going to stage a comeback, it’s going to have to be through an October surprise: either foreign help (like he got from Russia in 2016 and tried to extort from Ukraine this time around) or some headline-making indictments from the Barr/Durham investigation of the investigators. In either case, whatever anti-Biden “scandal” Trump manages to puff up will probably have little substance, and the public will have been well warned.

Assessment: Worry a little. In particular, worry enough to keep doing whatever you can to ensure a Biden victory. (If we overshoot and wind up with a landslide, that might teach Republicans to give up not just on Trump, but on Trumpist fascism in general — no Tucker Carlson or Tom Cotton in 2024.) But if anxiety about a Trump comeback is causing you to lose sleep or plunge into depression, feel free to put it out of your mind.

3. Trump might lose the election, but refuse to leave office.

It’s important to keep two things in mind:

• The power of the president functions almost entirely through other people.
• The White House is a symbolic place, but has no legal or institutional significance.

So while it’s very easy to imagine Trump barricading himself in the Oval Office on January 20 and tweeting endlessly about voter fraud and how he’s still president, if the people who make up the government stop taking his orders, he’s not president any more. Removing him from the White House would become a problem for the Secret Service, aided by mental health professionals.

The transition-of-power process defined by the Constitution and implemented in various state and federal laws goes like this:

• On November 3, an election is held — or rather 51 separate elections are held in the states and the District of Columbia. This date could be changed, but only by Congress. The Constitution says: “The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors”. Votes are counted by local officials, until at some point a state official verifies the names of the electors who will represent that state in the Electoral College.
• On December 14 (the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December), the electors cast their votes. Like Election Day, this date was set by Congress and can only be changed by Congress. (The same sentence in the Constitution continues: “The Congress may determine … the Day on which [the Electors] shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.”) The electors meet in their own states, vote, and send the vote totals to Congress.
• On January 6, a joint session of Congress meets and the electoral votes are officially counted. (This is the new Congress, with the new representatives and senators elected in November. The new terms start on January 3.) Whatever disputes there might be — rival slates of electors and so on — Congress has the authority to resolve them. The new president will be who the new Congress says it is.
• On January 20, the new president is inaugurated, swearing an oath specified in the Constitution. There are lots of traditions around the inauguration — it happens just outside the Capitol, the Chief Justice administers the oath, the oath is sworn on a Bible or whatever book the new president holds sacred — but none of that is required.

Here’s something I have great faith in: If the joint session of Congress on January 6 recognizes that Joe Biden has received the majority of electoral votes, he will become president at noon on January 20 and the government will obey his orders. Where Donald Trump is at the time, and whatever he is claiming or tweeting, will be of no consequence.

If Trump’s tweets bring a bunch of right-wing militiamen into the streets with their AR-15s, they can cause a lot of bloodshed, but they can’t keep Trump in office. They are no match for the Army, whose Commander-in-Chief will be Joe Biden.

So if Trump wants to stay on as president, he has to screw the process up sooner; by January 6, it’s all in the bag, and probably it’s all in the bag by December 14. Even stretching out the process with legal proceedings won’t help him: The Constitution specifies that his term ends on January 20. If at that time there is no new president or vice president to take over, the job devolves to the Speaker of the House, who I believe will be Nancy Pelosi.

Assessment: Worry about the ways that Trump might screw with the electoral process (which we’ll get to), but not that he will just refuse to leave the White House.

4. Republican state legislators will overrule the voters and give their state’s electoral votes to Trump.

Awarding a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who wins that state’s popular vote is so traditional that most people think it must be in the Constitution, but it isn’t. The sum total of the Constitution‘s instructions are:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress

So, at least in theory, a legislature could ignore the popular vote and appoint anybody it wants to the Electoral College. However, states have codified their current processes in law, and a new law would have to be passed to circumvent that process. The swing states people are most worried about — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — have been gerrymandered to lock in Republican majorities in the legislatures, but they have Democratic governors who would veto a law to hand Trump the state’s electoral votes. Republicans don’t have enough votes to override a veto.

Assuming Trump wins at least one of those states legitimately, though — or manages to suppress enough Democratic votes to get a majority — Biden could still win if he carries Florida, Arizona, or North Carolina. North Carolina, like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, has a Democratic governor and enough Democrats in the legislature to sustain a veto. So Trump needs to win the popular vote there, too.

That leaves Florida and Arizona, where Republicans have unified control of state government. (You could also talk about Texas and Georgia, but if Biden wins the popular vote in either of those states, he’ll have such a landslide that no amount of backroom finagling could undo it.) Would they dare reverse the decision of their state’s voters? This would be a truly outrageous thing to do — even some people who vote for Trump aren’t going to like the idea that their votes don’t count — and the people who do it would risk being villainized for life. So I can only imagine it happening under two conditions:

• They’re sure it will work. This scheme only makes sense if it gives Trump a second term, where he can reward the people who put him in office. So they need to be sure their law will pass and their electoral votes will make Trump president again.
• Something taints the vote-count that says Biden won. You could imagine a legislature legitimately awarding its electoral votes by special law, if it were clear that the popular vote was fraudulent in some way. (Imagine a surprise win by the previously unknown owner of the company that makes vote-counting machines. Wouldn’t you want your legislature to stop that?) Republicans would need to be able to argue that they were following the real will of the voters, which had been undone by fraud.

That, I think, is the point of Trump’s bogus assertions that voting-by-mail-is-unsafe and the polls are skewed. He’s setting up the argument Republican legislators will need if they want to throw the election his way.

There are a bunch of scenarios where Biden is safe from this:

• He wins the popular vote in enough states that no single state flipping to Trump would reverse the outcome.
• He wins three of these four states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
• He wins Florida and/or Arizona by enough votes that the fraud-made-the-difference argument loses credibility.

There’s also a wild card: If Democrats control both houses of the new Congress, they might decide to not to count the switched electoral votes. It would be an illegitimate, unconstitutional move, but hardball begets hardball. Trump might try to get the Supreme Court to rule against Congress, but it’s not clear they have jurisdiction. And if Congress simply refuses to declare a winner, Pelosi becomes president. (All this would do horrible damage to our political system, but if Republicans don’t care about that, why should Democrats?)

Assessment: Worry moderately. Probably we won’t wind up in a scenario where this is a possibility, and even if we did, it would only take a handful of Republicans with consciences to save democracy. Who knows? There might actually be enough of them.

4. A majority of Americans try to vote Trump out, but between voter suppression and the Electoral College, we fail.

During the impeachment process, Republicans liked to orate on the awesome standards necessary to reverse the choice of the American voters. But of course, the voters did not choose Trump — the Electoral College did. Trump got only 46% of the vote: 66 million votes to Hillary Clinton’s 69 million. His approval has never gone much above that 46% — largely because he has governed as if the other 54% doesn’t count — and is now hovering somewhere around 41%. Quite possibly, there has never been a moment when a majority of the American people supported Trump.

It’s easy to imagine the same thing happening again: Biden piling up millions more votes than Trump in California and New York, while losing by a few thousand in Florida and Wisconsin. With the usual Republican margin in Texas shrinking, the effect could be even more extreme in 2020 than it was in 2016: Biden might get as many as 5 million more votes than Trump, and still not become president.

What’s more, Republican voter suppression efforts are in high gear, and have already shown some success: By a wide margin, the voters of Florida voted in 2018 to re-enfranchise felons who have served their time — nearly 1.4 million Floridians. But yielding to the will of the people is not what the Republican Party is about.

The GOP-controlled Legislature, however, sought to limit the effects of the amendment by passing a law that conditioned the right to vote on payment of all fees, fines and restitution that were part of the sentence in each felon’s case. The state, however, had no central listing of this information, and the Legislature created no system to help felons ascertain how much, if anything, they owed. Even the state ultimately agreed that it would take six years to create such a system. … The estimated 85,000 who are already registered could be prosecuted if they vote and it turns out they have not paid the fees or fines owed.

The Supreme Court, which has consistently favored Republican voter-suppression efforts sincre John Roberts’ evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, thought this was a fine law.

Covid-19 has created new opportunities for mischief, as we saw in Wisconsin in April. The Republican-through-gerrymandering legislature insisted on few polling places and long lines, and resisted the Democratic governor’s attempt to institute vote-by-mail, or even to extend the deadline for submitting an absentee ballot to allow for the fact that many ballots were not mailed out on time. Research indicates that the brave Wisconsinites who came out to vote anyway could not fully avoid spreading the virus.

Nationally, Republicans are doubling down on this yield-or-die strategy for the fall. They are fighting vote-by-mail in states all over the country, trying to force people to brave the virus-spreading crowds if they want to vote. Worse, Trump is intentionally slowing down the mail, which could well result in a Wisconsin-like situation for the whole country: People can’t receive their mail-in ballots and return them soon enough to count. Some of the more obvious suppression tactics include not counting Michigan ballots that arrive late, even if they were postmarked before Election Day (“inherent variations in mail delivery schedules could result in one person having the ballot counted and another not, even if they send them back on the same day”), and trying to stop Pennsylvania from providing drop-off boxes for people who are afraid their mail-in ballots won’t arrive in time. These attempts come wrapped in rhetoric about “election security”, but they’re transparent attempts to keep legal voters from successfully submitting their votes.

I think there’s reason to hope that these efforts will boomerang, and that the more Trump tries to keep Americans from voting, the more determined we will be. In Wisconsin, the people who did risk their lives to vote were pretty pissed off by the time they got to the booth. The Republican Supreme Court candidate this tactic was supposed to save got defeated anyway.

All over the country, people have to be asking themselves: “Why don’t Republicans want me to vote?” Trump is giving Democrats an issue, and we need to run with it. He wants to paint liberals as people who hate America, but this part of Barack Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis sounds pretty fundamental to what America is supposed to mean:

Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better by making sure every American is automatically registered to vote, including former inmates who’ve earned their second chance. By adding polling places and expanding early voting and making Election Day a national holiday, so if you are somebody who’s working in a factory or you’re a single mom, who’s got to go to her job and doesn’t get time off, you can still cast your ballot. By guaranteeing that every American citizen has equal representation in our government, including the American citizens who live in Washington, D.C., and in Puerto Rico. They’re Americans. By ending some of the partisan gerrymandering, so that all voters have the power to choose their politicians, not the other way around. And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.

Who hates America now, Mr. Trump? Not LeBron James, who together with other NBA stars is donating $100K to pay the fees of Florida felons, so that they can vote. We all need to be looking for ways that we can help our fellow Americans vote, and for ways to call out the anti-American politicians who are trying to stop them.

The ultimate voter suppression would be for Trump to deploy his storm troopers Portland-style in swing-state Democratic strongholds like Philadelphia and Milwaukee, harassing people in front of polling places. We can hope that mayors and governors will not stand for that, and that the police will obey their local orders rather than side with the feds. It could get ugly, and again, could boomerang against Trump. Hopefully his advisors will convince him that it will.

Assessment: Trump can put his thumb on the scale, but only up to a point. It shouldn’t have to be this hard to get rid of him, but it is. I think we’re up to the challenge. So worry enough to take action, but not so much that you paralyze yourself.

5. Trump will lose and leave office, but he’ll trash the country on his way out the door.

Of course he will. This isn’t even something to worry about, just start getting ready for it. It’s going to happen.

Look for a flurry of pardons for all his henchmen (and probably himself, leading to an interesting legal battle), abrupt closures of American bases in any country that hasn’t treated him as well as he thinks he deserves, and at least one more big favor to pay off his debt to Vladimir Putin. (Putin would be crazy not to invade Estonia or something as soon as Trump loses.) And what’s more important: Taiwan’s independence, or a new Trump Tower in Shanghai?

Biden is going to have a historic mess to clean up when he takes office. But I believe he will take office.

Biden’s lead in the polls has Democrats searching for what could possibly go wrong. But some worries should be taken less seriously than others.

Just about every Democrat I know wants to punish him/herself for being overconfident in 2016. Some of us have practical regrets, and wish we’d done more to put Hillary over the top, while others less rationally feel like we jinxed her by saying too loudly that she was going to win. But whatever we did or didn’t do then, we’re now determined to make ourselves suffer by refusing to accept any good news about Joe Biden’s chances. No matter what the polls say, something is going to go horribly wrong.

For what it’s worth, I think we’re going to win this. Not that there’s nothing to worry about, but some of our worries are less serious than others. Let’s assess them one by one.

Worry #1. The polls are wrong.

Biden’s average margin in national polls is somewhere in the 8-9% range, and has been there since mid-June. More importantly, he has solid leads in the swing states he needs to win: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. If he fails in one of those states, polls also give him a good shot at flipping Florida, Arizona, or North Carolina. And even Republican strongholds like Texas and Georgia are not completely out of reach.

But Democrats remember how confident we felt in 2016, and look for reasons to doubt the polls. Republicans, on the other hand, live in constant denial of reality, and doubt the polls because they don’t want them to be true. Poll-skeptics make two related arguments.

• The polls were wrong in 2016, so why should we trust them now?
• There is a “hidden” Trump voter that the polls either can’t count or don’t want to count.

Neither really holds water, as long as you remember that polls are snapshots of public opinion at a moment in time, and not predictions of what people will think or do months from now.

The first thing to understand is that the final polls in 2016 were not far off from the vote totals, and to the extent they were, the more likely explanation is that Comey’s reopening of the Clinton email investigation gave Trump late momentum. The polls probably weren’t wrong at the moment they were taken; but a small shift in public opinion at the last minute put Trump over the top.

Nationally, the final 2016 RCP polling average had Clinton up by 3.3%. Her actual margin in the national popular vote was 2.1%. In Pennsylvania and Michigan the polls were off by a bit more — but still not that much. And in both cases, Trump had been gaining in the final week. The only real surprise was Wisconsin, where Clinton led by 6.5% in the final polls and lost by 0.7%.

But in 2018, the reverse happened: The final general congressional ballot polls had the Democrats up by 7.3%, and their margin in the vote totals was larger: 8.4%.

So if there were “hidden Trump voters” in 2016, were their “hidden Democrats” in 2018? Or is there always a small shift in the final days and hours of a campaign?

For what my opinion is worth, I expect the 2020 last-minute shift to be in Biden’s favor. Late in a campaign, a certain number of voters are just sick of all the noise. This year in particular, those voters will be sick of four years of noise; the thought that the loud, obnoxious Trump Era could be over will just be irresistible.

Assessment: Don’t worry about this. Things could change before Election Day, but Biden really is ahead right now.

Worry #2. Trump will stage a remarkable comeback.

In the Trump Era, when every day brings a a few week’s worth of news, three months is a very long time. A month ago, who was predicting that Portland would be invaded by DHS secret police? So all kinds of things can happen before Election Day, and you can expect Trump to push all the buttons and turn all the knobs as he tries to change the public’s opinion of him.

However, nothing he’s trying right now is working at all, or is likely to work if he just keeps at it and pushes harder. Unleashing his goons on Portland was supposed to produce a wave of support for the “law-and-order President” (who is strangely indifferent when people in his administration break the law). But in the latest Ipsos poll, 52% of Americans say the federal response to protests made things worse, with only 30% saying it made them better.

The not-all-that-veiled racism of his “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” tweet doesn’t seem to be going over all that well either. Suburbs aren’t what they were in the 1950s. Blacks already live there (though still not in proportionate numbers), so they aren’t as easy to demonize. And a suburb anywhere near high-tech industries (like Bedford, Massachusetts, where I live) is going to include lots of residents of East Asian or South Asian ancestry. If you’re looking for the lily-white experience, you have to go to ex-urbs or rural small towns.

A second factor: His ability to change tactics is limited by his inability to admit mistakes or take responsibility for bad outcomes. So he has to keep doubling down on points that the public already knows are false. Like: the virus really is spreading, it’s not just that we’re testing more. That stopped fooling anyone other than Trump diehards weeks ago, but he can’t stop saying it.

And it’s not just him. The Trumpists who picture a comeback have to engage in such flights of fancy that reading their scenarios makes me more confident, not less. For example, Grady Means published an op-ed Wednesday in The Hill: “Buy the Dip: Bet on Trump“. In Means’ fantasy world, Trump has done a great job and had a great strategy going into this year, but after Covid-19 got rolling “the president has been a complete failure at playing his winning hand.”

The mainstream media and social networks stepped up their withering and relentless Trump-attacks. Statistically meaningless (increased testing and obvious selection bias) COVID-19 “cases” data were weaponized into a strategy of continued lockdowns and sustained school closures.

That’s Trump’s problem — not that America on his watch has objectively screwed up its pandemic response worse than any other rich country, or that people are genuinely hurting economically with no relief in sight. No, it’s that the media has made something out of nothing, and convinced the public to shut down businesses and schools when the virus isn’t really out of control at all. As soon as Americans realize the virus is already beaten, learn to ignore the hundreds of thousands of bodies piling up in the corner, and recognize what a great job Trump has done on the pandemic and everything else, he’ll surge again.

I just can’t picture that plan succeeding.

If Trump is going to stage a comeback, it’s going to have to be through an October surprise: either foreign help (like he got from Russia in 2016 and tried to extort from Ukraine this time around) or some headline-making indictments from the Barr/Durham investigation of the investigators. In either case, whatever anti-Biden “scandal” Trump manages to puff up will probably have little substance, and the public will have been well warned.

Assessment: Worry a little. In particular, worry enough to keep doing whatever you can to ensure a Biden victory. (If we overshoot and wind up with a landslide, that might teach Republicans to give up not just on Trump, but on Trumpist fascism in general — no Tucker Carlson or Tom Cotton in 2024.) But if anxiety about a Trump comeback is causing you to loose sleep or plunge into depression, feel free to put it out of your mind.

3. Trump might lose the election, but refuse to leave office.

It’s important to keep two things in mind:

• The power of the president functions almost entirely through other people.
• The White House is a symbolic place, but has no legal or institutional significance.

So while it’s very easy to imagine Trump barricading himself in the Oval Office on January 20 and tweeting endlessly about voter fraud and how he’s still president, if the people who make up the government stop taking his orders, he’s not president any more. Removing him from the White House would become a problem for the Secret Service, aided by mental health professionals.

The transition-of-power process defined by the Constitution and implemented in various state and federal laws goes like this:

• On November 3, an election is held — or rather 51 separate elections are held in the states and the District of Columbia. This date could be changed, but only by Congress. The Constitution says: “The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors”. Votes are counted by local officials, until at some point a state official verifies the names of the electors who will represent that state in the Electoral College.
• On December 14 (the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December), the electors cast their votes. Like Election Day, this date was set by Congress and can only be changed by Congress. (The same sentence in the Constitution continues: “The Congress may determine … the Day on which [the Electors] shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.”) The electors meet in their own states, vote, and send the vote totals to Congress.
• On January 6, a joint session of Congress meets and the electoral votes are officially counted. (This is the new Congress, with the new representatives and senators elected in November. The new terms start on January 3.) Whatever disputes there might be — rival slates of electors and so on — Congress has the authority to resolve them. The new president will be who the new Congress says it is.
• On January 20, the new president is inaugurated, swearing an oath specified in the Constitution. There are lots of traditions around the inauguration — it happens just outside the Capitol, the Chief Justice administers the oath, the oath is sworn on a Bible or whatever book the new president holds sacred — but none of that is required.

Here’s something I have great faith in: If the joint session of Congress on January 6 recognizes that Joe Biden has received the majority of electoral votes, he will become president at noon on January 20 and the government will obey his orders. Where Donald Trump is at the time, and whatever he is claiming or tweeting, will be of no consequence.

If Trump’s tweets bring a bunch of right-wing militiamen into the streets with their AR-15s, they can cause a lot of bloodshed, but they can’t keep Trump in office. They are no match for the Army, whose Commander-in-Chief will be Joe Biden.

So if Trump wants to stay on as president, he has to screw the process up sooner; by January 6, it’s all in the bag, and probably it’s all in the bag by December 14. Even stretching out the process with legal proceedings won’t help him: The Constitution specifies that his term ends on January 20. If at that time there is no new president or vice president to take over, the job devolves to the Speaker of the House, who I believe will be Nancy Pelosi.

Assessment: Worry about the ways that Trump might screw with the electoral process (which we’ll get to), but not that he will just refuse to leave the White House.

4. Republican state legislators will overrule the voters and give their state’s electoral votes to Trump.

Awarding a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who wins that state’s popular vote is so traditional that most people think it must be in the Constitution, but it isn’t. The sum total of the Constitution‘s instructions are:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress

So, at least in theory, a legislature could ignore the popular vote and appoint anybody it wants to the Electoral College. However, states have codified their current processes in law, and a new law would have to be passed to circumvent that process. The swing states people are most worried about — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — have been gerrymandered to lock in Republican majorities in the legislatures, but they have Democratic governors who would veto a law to hand Trump the state’s electoral votes. Republicans don’t have enough votes to override a veto.

Assuming Trump wins at least one of those states legitimately, though — or manages to suppress enough Democratic votes to get a majority — Biden could still win if he carries Florida, Arizona, or North Carolina. North Carolina, like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, has a Democratic governor and enough Democrats in the legislature to sustain a veto. So Trump needs to win the popular vote there, too.

That leaves Florida and Arizona, where Republicans have unified control of state government. (You could also talk about Texas and Georgia, but if Biden wins the popular vote in either of those states, he’ll have such a landslide that no amount of backroom finagling could undo it.) Would they dare reverse the decision of their state’s voters? This would be a truly outrageous thing to do — even some people who vote for Trump aren’t going to like the idea that their votes don’t count — and the people who do it would risk being villainized for life. So I can only imagine it happening under two conditions:

• They’re sure it will work. This scheme only makes sense if it gives Trump a second term, where he can reward the people who put him in office. So they need to be sure their law will pass and their electoral votes will make Trump president again.
• Something taints the vote-count that says Biden won. You could imagine a legislature legitimately awarding its electoral votes by special law, if it were clear that the popular vote was fraudulent in some way. (Imagine a surprise win by the previously unknown owner of the company that makes vote-counting machines. Wouldn’t you want your legislature to stop that?) Republicans would need to be able to argue that they were following the real will of the voters, which had been undone by fraud.

That, I think, is the point of Trump’s bogus assertions that voting-by-mail-is-unsafe and the polls are skewed. He’s setting up the argument Republican legislators will need if they want to throw the election his way.

There are a bunch of scenarios where Biden is safe from this:

• He wins the popular vote in enough states that no single state flipping to Trump would reverse the outcome.
• He wins three of these four states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
• He wins Florida and/or Arizona by enough votes that the fraud-made-the-difference argument loses credibility.

There’s also a wild card: If Democrats control both houses of the new Congress, they might decide to not to count the switched electoral votes. It would be an illegitimate, unconstitutional move, but hardball begets hardball. Trump might try to get the Supreme Court to rule against Congress, but it’s not clear they have jurisdiction. And if Congress simply refuses to declare a winner, Pelosi becomes president. (All this would do horrible damage to our political system, but if Republicans don’t care about that, why should Democrats?)

Assessment: Worry moderately. Probably we won’t wind up in a scenario where this is a possibility, and even if we did, it would only take a handful of Republicans with consciences to save democracy. Who knows? There might actually be enough of them.

4. A majority of Americans try to vote Trump out, but between voter suppression and the Electoral College, we fail.

During the impeachment process, Republicans liked to orate on the awesome standards necessary to reverse the choice of the American voters. But of course, the voters did not choose Trump — the Electoral College did. Trump got only 46% of the vote: 66 million votes to Hillary Clinton’s 69 million. His approval has never gone much above that 46% — largely because he has governed as if the other 54% doesn’t count — and is now hovering somewhere around 41%. Quite possibly, there has never been a moment when a majority of the American people supported Trump.

It’s easy to imagine the same thing happening again: Biden piling up millions more votes than Trump in California and New York, while losing by a few thousand in Florida and Wisconsin. With the usual Republican margin in Texas shrinking, the effect could be even more extreme in 2020 than it was in 2016: Biden might get as many as 5 million more votes than Trump, and still not become president.

What’s more, Republican voter suppression efforts are in high gear, and have already shown some success: By a wide margin, the voters of Florida voted in 2018 to re-enfranchise felons who have served their time — nearly 1.4 million Floridians. But yielding to the will of the people is not what the Republican Party is about.

The GOP-controlled Legislature, however, sought to limit the effects of the amendment by passing a law that conditioned the right to vote on payment of all fees, fines and restitution that were part of the sentence in each felon’s case. The state, however, had no central listing of this information, and the Legislature created no system to help felons ascertain how much, if anything, they owed. Even the state ultimately agreed that it would take six years to create such a system. … The estimated 85,000 who are already registered could be prosecuted if they vote and it turns out they have not paid the fees or fines owed.

The Supreme Court, which has consistently favored Republican voter-suppression efforts sincre John Roberts’ evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, thought this was a fine law.

Covid-19 has created new opportunities for mischief, as we saw in Wisconsin in April. The Republican-through-gerrymandering legislature insisted on few polling places and long lines, and resisted the Democratic governor’s attempt to institute vote-by-mail, or even to extend the deadline for submitting an absentee ballot to allow for the fact that many ballots were not mailed out on time. Research indicates that the brave Wisconsinites who came out to vote anyway could not fully avoid spreading the virus.

Nationally, Republicans are doubling down on this yield-or-die strategy for the fall. They are fighting vote-by-mail in states all over the country, trying to force people to brave the virus-spreading crowds if they want to vote. Worse, Trump is intentionally slowing down the mail, which could well result in a Wisconsin-like situation for the whole country: People can’t receive their mail-in ballots and return them soon enough to count. Some of the more obvious suppression tactics include not counting Michigan ballots that arrive late, even if they were postmarked before Election Day (“inherent variations in mail delivery schedules could result in one person having the ballot counted and another not, even if they send them back on the same day”), and trying to stop Pennsylvania from providing drop-off boxes for people who are afraid their mail-in ballots won’t arrive in time. These attempts come wrapped in rhetoric about “election security”, but they’re transparent attempts to keep legal voters from successfully submitting their votes.

I think there’s reason to hope that these efforts will boomerang, and that the more Trump tries to keep Americans from voting, the more determined we will be. In Wisconsin, the people who did risk their lives to vote were pretty pissed off by the time they got to the booth. The Republican Supreme Court candidate this tactic was supposed to save got defeated anyway.

All over the country, people have to be asking themselves: “Why don’t Republicans want me to vote?” Trump is giving Democrats an issue, and we need to run with it. He wants to paint liberals as people who hate America, but this part of Barack Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis sounds pretty fundamental to what America is supposed to mean:

Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better by making sure every American is automatically registered to vote, including former inmates who’ve earned their second chance. By adding polling places and expanding early voting and making Election Day a national holiday, so if you are somebody who’s working in a factory or you’re a single mom, who’s got to go to her job and doesn’t get time off, you can still cast your ballot. By guaranteeing that every American citizen has equal representation in our government, including the American citizens who live in Washington, D.C., and in Puerto Rico. They’re Americans. By ending some of the partisan gerrymandering, so that all voters have the power to choose their politicians, not the other way around. And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.

Who hates America now, Mr. Trump? Not LeBron James, who together with other NBA stars is donating $100K to pay the fees of Florida felons, so that they can vote. We all need to be looking for ways that we can help our fellow Americans vote, and for ways to call out the anti-American politicians who are trying to stop them.

The ultimate voter suppression would be for Trump to deploy his storm troopers Portland-style in swing-state Democratic strongholds like Philadelphia and Milwaukee, harassing people in front of polling places. We can hope that mayors and governors will not stand for that, and that the police will obey their local orders rather than side with the feds. It could get ugly, and again, could boomerang against Trump. Hopefully his advisors will convince him that it will.

Assessment: Trump can put his thumb on the scale, but only up to a point. It shouldn’t have to be this hard to get rid of him, but it is. I think we’re up to the challenge. So worry enough to take action, but not so much that you paralyze yourself.

5. Trump will lose and leave office, but he’ll trash the country on his way out the door.

Of course he will. This isn’t even something to worry about, just start getting ready for it. It’s going to happen.

Look for a flurry of pardons for all his henchmen (and probably himself, leading to an interesting legal battle), abrupt closures of American bases in any country that hasn’t treated him as well as he thinks he deserves, and at least one more big favor to pay off his debt to Vladimir Putin. (Putin would be crazy not to invade Estonia or something as soon as Trump loses.) And what’s more important: Taiwan’s independence, or a new Trump Tower in Shanghai?

Biden is going to have a historic mess to clean up when he takes office. But I believe he will take office.

We get the worst quarterly GDP report ever, Trump continues to trail Biden in the polls, and suddenly he wants to delay the election. Or move it up. Or something. Whenever the election is, it won’t be legitimate, because he’ll be defeated by fraud — the only conceivable way Trump could ever lose, or admit losing.

Anyway, this gives me a current event to hang the featured post on, even though it’s one I’ve been thinking about for a while. When the polls first turned decisively towards Biden, Democrats — who are absolutely terrified of feeling confident — kept telling each other “It’s too early to pay attention to polls.” It’s still a little early, but it’s getting later, and Trump’s attempts to find an issue to capitalize on keep falling flat. The storm troopers in Portland didn’t do it. Demonizing China or Fauci isn’t doing it. Insisting that people worried about a plague send their kids back to school didn’t do it. What’s going to do it?

But instead of expressions of Democratic confidence, I’m seeing articles about all the bad things that could still happen: The polls could just be totally wrong, maybe Trump will refuse to leave the White House, and stuff like that. And while those things are definitely worth thinking about — I don’t expect everything to go smoothly and Trump to suddenly become a gracious loser — it’s more like we’re trying to justify our own inner panic than that we’re checking democracy’s doors and windows.

So I decided to do a doors-and-windows check myself, to see where the bad things might get in. (If we’re going to worry, let’s at least worry about the right things.) The result is “The Election: Worry or Don’t Worry?” That should be out maybe 10 or 11 EDT.

The weekly summary has that horrible GDP report to cover, along with Senate Republicans’ failure to come to grips with the continuing economic distress being felt around the country. The time-lag between Covid-19 cases and deaths is continuing to play out; now cases are topping out, but deaths are increasing, reflecting the upward slope of the case numbers three weeks ago. Herman Cain died, causing me to reflect on how hard-hearted this whole crisis is making me. (Maybe I was never really as compassionate a person as I thought I was.) Basketball has restarted more-or-less successfully, while baseball is still wondering if it will have to pull the plug. And I’ll close with that wonderful bit of photo-editing Nike has put together. That should be out maybe noon or 1.

We get the worst quarterly GDP report ever, Trump continues to trail Biden in the polls, and suddenly he wants to delay the election. Or move it up. Or something. Whenever the election is, it won’t be legitimate, because he’ll be defeated by fraud — the only conceivable way Trump could ever lose, or admit losing.

Anyway, this gives me a current event to hang the featured post on, even though it’s one I’ve been thinking about for a while. When the polls first turned decisively towards Biden, Democrats — who are absolutely terrified of feeling confident — kept telling each other “It’s too early to pay attention to polls.” It’s still a little early, but it’s getting later, and Trump’s attempts to find an issue to capitalize on keep falling flat. The storm troopers in Portland didn’t do it. Demonizing China or Fauci isn’t doing it. Insisting that people worried about a plague send their kids back to school didn’t do it. What’s going to do it?

But instead of expressions of Democratic confidence, I’m seeing articles about all the bad things that could still happen: The polls could just be totally wrong, maybe Trump will refuse to leave the White House, and stuff like that. And while those things are definitely worth thinking about — I don’t expect everything to go smoothly and Trump to suddenly become a gracious loser — it’s more like we’re trying to justify our own inner panic than that we’re checking democracy’s doors and windows.

So I decided to do a doors-and-windows check myself, to see where the bad things might get in. (If we’re going to worry, let’s at least worry about the right things.) The result is “The Election: Worry or Don’t Worry?” That should be out maybe 10 or 11 EDT.

The weekly summary has that horrible GDP report to cover, along with Senate Republicans’ failure to come to grips with the continuing economic distress being felt around the country. The time-lag between Covid-19 cases and deaths is continuing to play out; now cases are topping out, but deaths are increasing, reflecting the upward slope of the case numbers three weeks ago. Herman Cain died, causing me to reflect on how hard-hearted this whole crisis is making me. (Maybe I was never really as compassionate a person as I thought I was.) Basketball has restarted more-or-less successfully, while baseball is still wondering if it will have to pull the plug. And I’ll close with that wonderful bit of photo-editing Nike has put together. That should be out maybe noon or 1.

I am sleeping on a time bomb,
And I am waiting for the light to come.

– Vertical Horizon “We Are“

This week’s featured post is “The Cancel Culture Debate“.

This week everybody was talking about Portland’s resistance to Trump’s secret police

It’s hard to be sure until we get actual polls on the subject, but I don’t think Trump’s invasion of Portland is turning into the vote-getting stunt he’d hoped for. The plan was to create riveting scenes of heroic police clashing with “violent anarchists” from Black Lives Matter, crush the protests and restore “law and order” to a city whose Democratic officials were too weak-willed to handle these America-haters.

Instead Trump got the Wall of Moms, Dads with leaf-blowers, a wall of veterans, and another one of nurses. Portland grandmothers have adopted the hashtag #Grantifa and joined the protests. The goons from Homeland Security have man-handled all comers.

Paramilitary thugs dragging away terrified women who resemble somebody’s Mom from across the street — maybe that’s not the best optics for a federal police action. (Many of the Moms are annoyingly white, which wasn’t in the script at all.) So Trump has been driven to his ultimate defense against reality: declaring it all to be Fake News.

The “protesters” are actually anarchists who hate our Country. The line of innocent “mothers” were a scam that Lamestream refuses to acknowledge, just like they don’t report the violence of these demonstrations!

Reporters on the ground — those from The Oregonian/OregonLive, for example — tell a different story.

Thousands of Portland moms have come together over the past week to join nightly demonstrations in downtown.

They stand arm-in-arm at protests, placing themselves between federal officers and younger protesters in an act of protection. As the number of moms turning out in Portland grew with each protest, mom protest groups began to spring up across the nation in places like New York City, St. Louis and Philadelphia.

I’m a little skeptical of the “thousands” claim, but I have friends here in the suburbs who are searching their closets for yellow t-shirts (the Wall of Moms’ uniform of choice) in case Boston is next on Trump’s list. They’re real moms, and I don’t recall any of them ever mentioning their hatred of America.

The Guardian’s take:

If Trump’s intent was to calm things down, he has failed. But if, as some suspect, the president wanted to ratchet up confrontation for political gain, then it is not clear that it has been a success either.

“It’s a power play by Trump. He thinks he’s going to get his base all riled up by pitting the forces of law and order against the anarchists,” said Josh O’Brien, who travelled from Seattle to join the protests. “But he’s fucked it up like he fucks everything up. Look who’s here with us. Grandmothers. Doctors. Because like most Americans they don’t think people should be abducted from the streets by the president’s secret police.”

Acting Deputy DHS Secretary Ken Cuccinelli tried to push the violent-anarchists narrative by tweeting a picture with this comment:

Here is a shield and a couple of gas masks from a rioter arrested in Portland. Not a sign with a slogan that someone expressing their first amendment rights might carry, but preparations for violence. Peaceful protester? I don’t think so.

Cooch clearly didn’t think this out (or is trying to appeal to people who don’t think clearly): You carry a shield and gas mask when you expect to be a victim of violence, not a perpetrator.

Former Celebrity Apprentice staffer turned stand-up comedian Noel Casler paints a different picture:

If you’re dressed up like a soldier and you’re tear-gassing a mom wearing a bicycle helmet to protect her from your batons, you are not an American soldier or a Patriot. You are the kind of person American soldiers killed to protect us from. Stop it now @DHS_Wolf.

If you wonder what the Portland attack is for, Trump campaign advisor Boris Epshteyn gives a hint: It’s for scary campaign messages aimed at voters far away from Portland. He tweeted video of a violent clash between police and demonstrators with the message “This would be @JoeBiden’s America. It’s a very scary place.”

As many other tweeters pointed out, the video is quite literally Donald Trump’s America. His three years of presidential race-baiting exacerbated the racial tensions that exploded in the George Floyd protests, and the brutality of his secret police increased the violence in Portland.

And if you don’t find all that disturbing enough here’s Thomas Friedman’s take:

when I heard Trump suggest, as he did in the Oval Office on Monday, that he was going to send federal forces into U.S. cities, where the local mayors have not invited him, the first word that popped into my head was “Syria.”

and what might happen in other cities

Over the weekend, protests broke out in several other cities, some of which had been quiet for weeks.

It’s hard to know whether provoking those protests was part of Trump’s plan or not. Certainly, he has talked about sending his DHS police to other cities. More than 200 federal agents have already been in Kansas City long enough for Attorney General Barr to lie about their accomplishments.

Barr said Wednesday that Operation Legend had netted 200 arrests in two weeks as the Department of Justice announced plans to deploy additional federal law enforcement agents in Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

So far, federal authorities have announced one arrest — a 20-year-old KCMO man wanted for warrants and allegedly spotted in a stolen vehicle, where two stolen handguns were found — though it has not been connected to a homicide or shooting investigation.

Similar numbers of agents are supposed to be heading to Chicago, Albuquerque, Cleveland, and possibly Philadelphia and Baltimore, but what they’ll do there is not at all clear. What problem are the agents trying to solve, and what will they do about that problem that local police aren’t already doing?

Operation Legend is named for LeGend Taliferro, a 4-year-old boy shot and killed in his bed in Kansas City on June 29. How exactly federal agents would prevent similar crimes has never been spelled out.

Of all those cities, Chicago is the one that I know best, so I’ll focus there.

It’s worth remembering that policing was a serious issue in the 2019 Chicago mayoral campaign. So if the federal government changes the way Chicago is policed, or stops Chicago from making its own changes, that raises a democracy issue: Do the people of Chicago get to decide how their city will be policed, or is that up to Trump?

Channel 5 asked all the candidates for mayor the same seven questions; the second one was about policing and the consent decree the city had recently negotiated with the State of Illinois to reform the Chicago Police Department. Lori Lightfoot answered:

I am the only candidate in this race that has a broad depth of experience in dealing with issues related to police excessive force and abuse, accountability and reform. My perspective on these issues stems from my roles as a federal prosecutor and the head of the former Office of Professional Standards, in which I made countless recommendations to terminate police officers who failed to properly perform their duties, including in police-involved shootings. More recently, I led the Police Accountability Task Force (PATF), whose report served as the underpinnings for both the Obama DOJ report and recommendations on the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the consent decree. There would be no consent decree without the PATF. I also served as the president of Chicago Police Board, where I held officers accountable for misconduct. Before resigning from the police board to run for mayor, I significantly increased the number of officers that were terminated for serious misconduct or received lengthy suspensions.

In the first round of the multi-candidate race, Lightfoot was the leader with 17.5% of the vote. In the runoff between the top two candidates, she got 73.7%. I think it’s fair to say that the voters of Chicago want a policing approach like Lightfoot’s, and not a tear-gassing baton-swinging approach like Trump’s goons have implemented in Portland.

It’s not clear how Lightfoot’s approach will affect the frequency of violent crime in Chicago over the long term. But doesn’t the city have a right to find out?

Really American describes itself by “We believe it is our duty as patriotic Americans to stand up against fascism in all of its forms.” They’ve been making some really biting anti-Trump videos. Like this one.

A number of voices are expressing disappointment that the militia-Right or libertarian-Right, after decades of warning us about the threat of government tyranny, has so totally failed to notice the rise of real authoritarianism, and at times has even applauded it. But if you’ve been paying attention, you shouldn’t be surprised. Anti-government rhetoric has long been applied only in very particular ways: If the government is using its power to counter either white supremacy or the dominance of the super-rich, that’s tyranny. But if it’s using its power to keep the lower orders in their places, that’s OK.

Jonathan Korman has altered the Gadsden flag to capture what it really means these days.

and the next stimulus package

Back in May, Democrats foresaw that the virus would not be gone by summer, and that the economy would not have a V-shaped recovery. So they passed the next stimulus bill, the $3 trillion HEROES Act. Mitch McConnell reacted by denouncing it as a “liberal wish list”. He predicted that if more stimulus was needed “the President and Senate Republicans are going to be in the same place. We’ll let you know when we think the time is right to begin to move again.”

But as so often happens in this post-policy era of the Republican Party, the time has come and the President and Senate Republicans are not in the same place. That’s the problem when a party focuses on marketing to the exclusion of policy. When they do realize they need to do something, it’s hard to figure out specifically what, because up until that moment they have only been thinking about how to spin an issue, not how to resolve it. The White House in particular has been completely focused on the spin of the V-shaped recovery. (On June 5, Trump responded to a positive jobs report by saying that the economy is “not on a V-shaped recovery, it’s a rocket ship.”)

But there is no V-shaped recovery. Like so many Trump policies, reopening the country produced only a short-term effect. He got his good jobs report in June, but the subsequent surge in Covid-19 cases has states shutting down again, and layoffs are rising. So we’re back to the same problem as in March and April: People need to eat and pay the rent, but there are few jobs, and no jobs at all that many people with Covid risk factors can do safely.

The extra $600 per week of unemployment insurance, which was part of the previous Covid-response package, the CARES Act, expires Friday. In practice, that means that many people have already gotten their last increased unemployment check. This extra money has been key, not just to keeping those 20 million households afloat, but the entire economy. For example, August rent or mortgage payments might be hard to scrape together for many families — a problem that will cascade to real estate companies and banks.

McConnell is still predicting a new bill, but now says it will take “weeks“, and began his statement with “hopefully”. He wants a $1 trillion bill, with maybe $200 a week in additional unemployment, rather than $600.

and the rising Covid-19 death rate

After not having a thousand-death day since June 4, the US had four this week, not counting the 993 on Saturday. By WorldoMeter’s count, which runs a little higher than some others, the US had its 150,000th death today. Other counts are lower, but in all versions of the stats we’ll probably pass 150,000 this week.

If you squint at the graph just right, it looks like the US Covid-19 case count might have peaked this week. I wouldn’t count on that, but that’s the appearance at the moment.

Trump’s cancellation of the Republican Convention’s events in Jacksonville led to a series of sarcastic ” … but it’s safe to send your kids to school” social media posts. In addition to the convention,

• Barron Trump’s school won’t be fully opening, and won’t decide whether to offer any in-person classes at all until August 10, but you should be planning to send your kids to school five days a week.
• Florida Senator Rick Scott’s grandchildren will be “focused on distance learning right now” to “make sure they’re safe”, but schools should be open for your kids, especially if you’re poor and looking to cash in on “a subsidized meal”.

and AOC

I had been resisting paying attention the the AOC/Ted Yoho flap, because it looked like one of those somebody-said-a-bad-word kerfuffles that get people upset but never go anywhere.

But it eventually got my attention, because AOC gave a truly epic speech on the floor of the House. The provocation was not just Yoho arguing with her rudely on the steps of the House, and then walking away saying “fucking bitch” (as overheard by a reporter). But when his remark came out in the press, Yoho took to the floor of the House to offer one of those I’m-didn’t-really-do-anything-but apologies. His was particularly self-righteous, concluding that “I cannot apologize for … loving my God”, as if the Ancient of Days Himself had whispered “fucking bitch” into Yoho’s ear.

AOC’s response was masterful. She avoided all the usual ways such complaints are type-cast and pushed aside: It wasn’t that Yoho said a bad word or that her feelings were hurt. She spoke not with the attitude of someone pleading helplessly for justice, but as a person wielding moral authority. The question is not what Yoho’s judgment has done to her, but what hers does to him.

Mr. Yoho mentioned that he has a wife and two daughters. I am two years younger than Mr. Yoho’s youngest daughter. I am someone’s daughter too. … What I am here to say is that this harm that Mr. Yoho levied, tried to levy against me, was not just an incident directed at me, but when you do that to any woman, what Mr. Yoho did was give permission to other men to do that to his daughters.

He — in using that language, in front of the press, he gave permission to use that language against his wife, his daughters, women in his community, and I am here to stand up to say that is not acceptable.

… What I believe is that having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man. And when a decent man messes up, as we all are bound to do, he tries his best and does apologize. Not to save face, not to win a vote. He apologizes genuinely to repair and acknowledge the harm done so that we can all move on.

Lastly, what I want to express to Mr. Yoho is gratitude. I want to thank him for showing the world that you can be a powerful man and accost women. You can have daughters and accost women without remorse. You can be married and accost women. You can take photos and project an image to the world of being a family man and accost women without remorse and with a sense of impunity. It happens every day in this country. It happened here on the steps of our nation’s Capitol. It happens when individuals who hold the highest offices in this land admit, admit to hurting women, and using this language against all of us.

More and more I’m coming to believe that AOC is a once-in-a-generation political talent. Whether you agree with her positions on particular issues or not, her abilities are on a par with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. Whether she’ll achieve what they did is still up in the air at this point in her life. But she has the talent.

and you also might be interested in …

It can’t be complete week without a Trump corruption story. Tuesday, the NYT reported:

The American ambassador to Britain, Robert Wood Johnson IV, told multiple colleagues in February 2018 that President Trump had asked him to see if the British government could help steer the world-famous and lucrative British Open golf tournament to the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland, according to three people with knowledge of the episode.

NPR adds:

Lewis Lukens, the embassy’s former second-in-command, confirmed in a text to NPR that Johnson told him about the president’s request. “I advised him that doing so would violate federal ethics rules and be generally inappropriate,” Lukens wrote.

But Johnson apparently went ahead and raised the matter with David Mundell, then secretary of state for Scotland, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

The State Department inspector general — presumably the one Trump fired in May — investigated and wrote a report, which has not been released.

538 has a fascinating breakdown of why Florida was a bellwether in 2008, 2012, and 2016, but resisted the blue wave in 2018. Some factors that helped Republicans in 2018 won’t be there this year. Meanwhile, CNN observes that Trump hasn’t led in a Florida poll since March. The RCP polling average has Biden up in Florida by 7.8%.

The best explanation of defund-the-police I’ve seen so far:

The baseball season launched (finally) on Thursday, with the Yankees beating the Nationals 4-1 in a stadium with no fans. An interesting compromise: Both teams knelt on the field prior to the national anthem, but no one knelt during the anthem.

It’s a 60-game season. If anybody is going to hit .400 in our lifetimes, this is the year to do it. And then we can all argue about whether it should count.

The Miami Marlins have postponed their home opener because 11 players and two coaches have tested positive for coronavirus. That this has happened already raises doubts about the plans for the whole season.

and let’s close with something realistic

People are having fun with photo-realism software.

Dutch photographer and digital artist Bas Uterwijk shines a light on what iconic figures from history might have looked like in real life. By using various digital manipulation tools, he is able to create photorealistic portraits of famous artists, leaders, mummies, philosophical thinkers, and even the models of paintings.

I’m not sure exactly what he bases this on, but this is his Jesus of Nazareth:

Doesn’t he look like he would forgive your sins?

And somebody else has used Roman statues to produce photorealistic images of the Roman emperors.

Expressing views out of step with the common sense of your era has always been risky. But now, as cultural power shifts and common sense changes, it’s harder to know what’s safe.

It has long been a staple of conservative thought that good people should have nothing to do with bad people. The very first verse in the Book of Psalms says: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.” And in 2 Corinthians 6:14 the New Testament echoes: “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?”

This conservative idealization of purity is currently playing out in the treatment of the Never-Trump Republicans, who are seen as heretics rather than wayward brethren. Justin Amash had to leave the Republican Party. Mitt Romney was dis-invited from CPAC. Even Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz is under fire for her occasional criticisms of the Great Leader.

But those incidents are dogs biting men. What really has drawn public attention is the man-bites-dog phenomenon of liberals casting people out. Liberals define themselves as open-minded and tolerant, and yet now they are often the ones who get people expelled from social media or dis-invited from speaking engagements or even fired from their jobs.

Such incidents have led to much bad-faith criticism from conservatives, and the popularization of the label “cancel culture”. But it has also resulted in introspection among liberals, most recently and publicly in “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” signed by around 150 intellectual heavyweights and published in Harper’s.

The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

This intolerant-climate rhetoric has predictably played into the both-sides-do-it narrative that mainstream media uses to establish its objectivity. But what exactly is the “it” that both sides do? The Harper’s letter is vague and sloppy about this, and the coverage the letter generated has often talked about “free speech”, when that is not the issue at all.

So let’s start at the beginning and try to get this right: What exactly is “cancellation”, and why might people of good faith want to do it?

When cancellation is merited. Judy Mikovits has a theory: She thinks Covid-19 was created in the United States by public health officials led by Dr. Anthony Fauci. They shipped it to Wuhan where it was either released or escaped, starting the current pandemic. Mikovits also holds Fauci personally responsible for destroying her career in science; she says he distributed millions of dollars to cover up the conspiracy that persecuted her. She has also made several other bizarre claims about Covid-19 in the video Plandemic, which went viral in right-wing circles until it was removed from most social media platforms: Flu vaccines have distributed coronavirus, which is activated when you wear a mask. Bill Gates was part of the plan to spread Covid-19, so that he can profit off the eventual vaccine. And so on.

Actual evidence for these claims is virtually non-existent.

So what should happen to Mikovits and her theories? In my ideal world, not much. She would be free to run around making whatever claims she believes, but no one would take her seriously, either. Groups would not invite her to speak. People who stumbled across her video online would say “Really?” and do some checking before deciding not to pass it on to anyone else. If Facebook, Twitter, et al. discovered “Plandemic” gaining popularity on their platforms, they would remove it, exactly as they did in the real world, but maybe sooner. And of course, being a distributor of wild misinformation about science would make Mikovits unemployable by legitimate scientific institutions.

In short, I think Mikovits deserves to be canceled — not imprisoned, not fined, not punished in any discernible way, just removed from the national conversation — not by government edict, but by the shared standards and good judgment of society in general.

Instead, Sinclair Broadcasting, the Trumpist network of local TV stations, decided to give her a platform. [1] Eric Bolling (who you may remember from his time as a Fox News host, until he left under a cloud of sexual harassment accusations) has a TV show America This Week, which Sinclair distributes to its stations. This week’s episode includes interviews with Mikovits and with her lawyer Larry Klayman.

For balance, Bolling also interviewed a Fox News medical contributor who describes Mikovits’ claims about Covid and Fauci as “unlikely”. But for much of the episode, the chyron asks the question: “DID DR. FAUCI CREATE COVID-19?” Many of Bolling’s viewers — especially the ones who might be cooking dinner or paying bills and only looking up at the TV occasionally — will probably come away thinking that “yes” is a plausible opinion, one that reasonable people should consider.

Is Sinclair’s decision to air Mikovits’ views a defense of free speech? I don’t think so. I believe it’s irresponsible and does a disservice to viewers who trust their local news stations.

Legal vs. acceptable. I bring Mikovits up not because I want to spend significant time debunking her, but for the sake of her example: Widespread rhetoric about “cancel culture” professes to be about “free speech” or censorship, but it really isn’t. [2] We’re not discussing what speech should be legal. We’re discussing what speech should be acceptable in various forums. And the answer to that question should not be “whatever anyone wants to say”. Failing to cancel someone can be irresponsible management of an information forum. [3]

The acceptability question is not absolute; it is forum-dependent. Suppose I agree with Mikovits and say so. What should happen depends on where I say it or try to say it.

• If I’m talking to my friends at a bar (assuming it’s ever safe to go back to bars), they should scoff at me, but the conversation should move on with no further consequence.
• If I submit an article to a general-interest newspaper or magazine, they should reject it; but maybe I could get away with raising the question of whether the virus was created in a lab, and suggesting that maybe it was.
• If I’m writing for Scientific American or some other popular magazine with scientific respectability, I should only be able to make claims that I can support with significant scientific evidence. The created-in-a-lab theory probably couldn’t pass muster.
• A scientific journal like Nature should require not just evidence, but proof. Otherwise, my opinion should not be heard.

If I am employed by Scientific American or a scientific journal, and I develop a reputation as a promoter of the Fauci-created-Covid conspiracy theory, they should fire me, because my reputation would conflict with the reputation the magazine wants to maintain.

None of this would constitute a violation of my free speech. I can say whatever I want, but other people are also free to react to what I say. No one has to offer me a platform or lend me their respectability.

Zack Beauchamp makes this point in more detail.

Contrary to the original letter signers’ claims, what’s actually happening here is more subtle than a war between free speech’s defenders and its opponents. It is, as the University of Illinois’s Nicholas Grossman writes, an argument over “drawing the lines of socially acceptable expression and determining appropriate responses to transgressing those norms.” That’s not a conflict over the principles of a free society but the rules that govern its operation in practice.

Before we called it “canceling”. If there ever was a moment in American history when all speech was acceptable and any idea could be advocated in any forum, it hasn’t been in my lifetime. I grew up during the Cold War, an era when it went without saying that no major newspaper or magazine would have an openly Communist columnist. [4] Slightly before my time, the Hollywood blacklist banned movie people suspected of Communist sympathies. One famous victim was the black singer/actor Paul Robeson, who you may have heard sing “Ol’ Man River“.

The range of opinions acceptable on major-network TV may have expanded somewhat in the 21st century, but is still quite narrow. Bill Maher ran into the limits shortly after 9-11. At the time, he hosted ABC’s Politically Incorrect, a comic-but-serious discussion of the news similar to his current Real Time show on HBO. But Maher made the mistake of responding to President Bush’s characterization of the 9-11 hijackers as cowards by saying something fairly obvious:

We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.

Soon, local ABC affiliates were refusing to air Maher’s show and sponsors were dropping it. It was not renewed for another season, after having been on ABC for five years.

In 2003, the Dixie Chicks (now just “The Chicks”) faced retribution after singer Natalie Maines told a London audience that the band opposed the upcoming invasion of Iraq: “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” In response

The Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by thousands of country radio stations. On May 6, Colorado radio station KKCS suspended two DJs for playing their music.

So “cancel culture” may be a relatively recent term, but the phenomenon is not at all new.

Moving the boundaries. If cancel culture isn’t new, why is it suddenly getting so much attention? It’s hard to argue with the assertion that something feels different now. But what and why?

For one thing, more and more people are unsure about where the boundaries are, and so they withhold opinions they might previously have expressed. In a poll by Cato Institute — not an unbiased source, but faking a poll is not their style — 62% of Americans agree with the statement: “The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe, because others might find them offensive.” That’s up slightly from 58% in 2017.

The question is why. I think Beauchamp has this right: It’s not that the bounds of acceptable speech are getting narrower, it’s that the range is shifting. Activists on the left are succeeding in moving the range leftward, and some would like to shift it further.

That may sound partisan and even nefarious in the abstract, but there is justification for it: The range of acceptable speech has never been natural or God-given; it arises out of a society’s power dynamics. [5] We are emerging from a centuries-long era when power belonged exclusively to upper-class straight white Christian men. So the bounds we are used to — ones that seem “normal” to us — unfairly favor upper-class straight white Christian men.

Social justice advocates think the bands of acceptable opinion and arguments shouldn’t be narrowed, precisely, but rather pushed to the left — shifted to include formerly excluded voices from oppressed communities and to sideline voices that seek to continue their exclusion. Their critics think the traditional bands of debate are, broadly speaking, correct, and that we’d all be worse off if the social justice advocates succeed in moving speech norms in their direction.

Consider, for example, the Me-Too movement. Abusive men like Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby used to be confident that their female victims would not be listened to or taken seriously, but now at least some of those voices are being heard. And if uncertainty about the new boundaries prevents men “from saying things I believe, because others might find them offensive”, that isn’t always a bad thing. I don’t doubt for a minute that Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida was saying what he believes when he called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes a “fucking bitch”. But if he restrains himself in the future (because he doesn’t want to be eviscerated again on the floor of the House), I don’t see the loss.

As a professional-class straight white brought-up-Christian man myself, I have often been corrected for running afoul of the new boundaries — by  commenters on this blog, for example. I have been called out for using the verb “bitch” for a certain style of complaining (done by men and women alike), or for referring to someone as “transgendered” (as if it were something that happened to them) rather than “transgender” (something they are). Occasionally someone observes that my attempts to write about privilege are themselves tainted by a privileged viewpoint. Of course it stings to be criticized for something I did without conscious malice, and that no one would have mentioned ten or twenty years ago. But I also recognize that a world where people like me get criticized for giving offense is better than one where the people we offend are not heard.

Who decides? A glance at the list of signers of the Harper’s letter reveals that they aren’t all upper-class straight white Christian men: Margaret Atwood, Atul Gawande, Michelle Goldberg, Khaled Khalifa, Dahlia Lithwick, John McWhorter, Gloria Steinem, Fahreed Zakaria, and many others. So why is this their issue?

For some, the motivation is obvious: Salman Rushdie had to spend years in hiding because his writings offended a powerful Muslim cleric. J. K. Rowling has faced a huge backlash to her opinion that transwomen are not “real” women. But not all the signers have some clear personal ax to grind. What’s up with them?

Let’s go back to Beauchamp:

What’s new in the modern era, according to [York University philosopher Regina] Rini, is that the mass public has gained an unprecedented ability to influence and reshape those rules [defining acceptable speech] — a process that used to be the province of the elite. … [Intellectual elites] believe that social media, and Twitter in particular, is starting to exercise a kind of veto over editorial judgment — running roughshod over editors and forcing journalists to be subject to the new activist rules of political discourse. The objection here is not just that activist speech norms are bad, but that those speech norms are being imposed on the intellectual elite by the loudest voices on social media — that a silent majority of conventionally liberal journalists are being silenced by radicals.

Here’s what the Harper’s letter says:

We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

A response letter from a collection of generally less famous intellectuals points out that the examples vaguely alluded to in the paragraph above are both less unjust and less representative than they appear.

The content of the letter also does not deal with the problem of power: who has it and who does not. Harper’s is a prestigious institution, backed by money and influence. Harper’s has decided to bestow its platform not to marginalized people but to people who already have large followings and plenty of opportunities to make their views heard. Ironically, these influential people then use that platform to complain that they’re being silenced. … Their words reflect a stubbornness to let go of the elitism that still pervades the media industry, an unwillingness to dismantle systems that keep people like them in and the rest of us out.

For years, the people at the top of the intellectual pyramid have been insulated from the disapproval of the lower orders. [6] Now they are less insulated. Some problems may result from that trend, but it’s not obvious that the trend itself is a problem.

What is common sense? In David Graeber’s The Democracy Project, he defined the success of revolutions not by the the new governments they establish, but by “planetwide transformations of political common sense”. [7] We seem to be in such a revolutionary period now. Just a few months ago, for example, defunding or abolishing the police were ideas outside the bounds of acceptable discussion in most popular forums. Now the idea is openly discussed in The New York Times and other establishment forums. On the other side of the spectrum, the President is floating the possibility that he might refuse to accept an election that he loses.

No one can really say what “political common sense” means right now; it’s in flux. Similarly, “acceptable speech” is in flux. That is not the fault of anybody in particular. It’s just an uncomfortable feature of this historical moment.

In this situation, mistakes are going to be made. We’re all going to say things that we’ll regret after standards settle down. And some of our responses to other people’s transgressions will turn out to be inappropriate — sometimes too harsh, sometimes too lenient. It will be so obvious in hindsight.

What can we say? Recognizing that our current sight suffers fog-of-war-type limitations, how much can we say? Here are a few incomplete conclusions I’ve come to.

Disagreement is not censorship. Back on May 26, when Twitter attached a fact-check link to one of Trump’s lying tweets, the President tweeted back:

Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!

Trump was so stifled that a week or so later (June 5) he tweeted 200 times. But this complaint has a long pedigree in conservative circles. When she was John McCain’s running mate in 2008, Sarah Palin claimed that her rights had been violated by media accounts labeling her paling-round-with-terrorists rhetoric as “negative campaigning”.

If (the media) convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.

The same observation holds for liberals, moderates, or anybody else: If you say something and somebody disagrees with you, your rights have not been violated. If they label what you say as racist or sexist or some other ist-word, that’s their opinion and they have as much right to it as you have to your opinion.

Reserve your sympathy for people suffering real consequences. Someone surprised to be criticized for what he says or does should never be lumped together with others who have lost something real, like a job. If your house is getting vandalized and your inbox is full of death threats, that’s different that just “somebody called me a homophobe”. Hannah Giorgis made the point like this:

Facing widespread criticism on Twitter, undergoing an internal workplace review, or having one’s book panned does not, in fact, erode one’s constitutional rights or endanger a liberal society.

Michelle Goldberg objected:

This sentence brought me up short; one of these things is not like the others. Anyone venturing ideas in public should be prepared to endure negative reviews and pushback on social media. Internal workplace reviews are something else. If people fear for their livelihoods for relatively minor ideological transgressions, it may not violate the Constitution — the workplace is not the state — but it does create a climate of self-censorship and grudging conformity.

However, a review is not a firing. And that leads to the next point.

Responsibility belongs to the decision-makers. If you say something innocent that unfairly provokes (in the words of the Harper’s letter) “calls for swift and severe retribution” on Twitter, and then your boss fires you, the problem is with your boss, not with Twitter or the people who complained. Storms of public opinion are going to be a regular feature of public life, and institutions are going to have to learn how to weather them. People in positions of responsibility are going to need to have the courage of their convictions.

Universities are a good example: Students can ask for whatever they want; the university doesn’t have to give it to them. If some student group calls for the scalp of a professor who offended them by doing something that is well within the terms of ordinary academic freedom, and the university gives in, that’s on the university. Universities who make a habit of this kind of cowardice should be shunned by the kind of intellectuals they would otherwise try to recruit.

Saying anything substantive requires courage. This much has always and everywhere been true: It’s risky to express opinions that are out of step with the common sense of your time and place. [8] The problem now is that, since common sense itself is in flux, nobody can be sure what opinions are safe, or will continue to be safe when people a few years hence look back with new eyes.

This situation is regrettable. But at the same time, I have limited sympathy for intellectuals who are trying to be inoffensive and failing. The point of intellectual life should be to state your truth. If your truth turns out to be popular and make everybody happy, how fortunate for you. But nobody should go into intellectual life expecting that.

What goes around comes around. Everybody needs to remember that revolutions eat their young. Robespierre died on the same guillotine that he had sent many other people to. The more harsh judgment we build into the system, the more likely we are to be judged harshly when our time comes.

We need to always keep in mind the point of shifting the boundaries of acceptable thought: to bring in new voices, ones that the old distribution of power had shut out. Bringing in those new voices sometimes requires squelching old voices who are telling the new voices to shut up, or intimidating them out of speaking at all. Making new space on the platform may require asking some people to step aside. Creating a safe workplace or discussion space for a wider group of people may require that previously acceptable speech become unacceptable. [9]

But squelching old voices should never become an end in itself, even if they are obnoxious voices.

It would be nice to have a big finish for this post, but for all the reasons explained above, I don’t have one. As I said, someday (in hindsight) how we should have handled this will all be obvious. But right now, it isn’t.

[1] This description is based on the version of the episode that was posted online. After it caused an uproar, Sinclair decided to pull the episode back for re-editing to give it more “context. Presumably, however, its distribution to Sinclair’s stations has only been delayed.

[2] In the current news, I know of only one example of actual censorship: When Michael Cohen was furloughed from prison due to the risk of coronavirus, the Federal Bureau of Prisons conditioned the continuation of his furlough on an agreement not to write a book critical of President Trump. Cohen refused to sign and was sent back to prison, but was soon released by a federal judge. The judge said, “Why would the Bureau of Prisons ask for something like this … unless there was a retaliatory purpose?”

Telling someone: “If you write a book you’ll go to jail” — that’s censorship.

[3] Another good example of a viewpoint deservedly canceled is Q-Anon.

[4] That’s still true today. For all the charges of “socialism” that get flung at pundits and politicians these days, when was the last time you heard somebody advocate public ownership of the means of production? That idea hasn’t gone away; you just don’t hear it.

[5] That’s the 21st-century version of Karl Marx’ dictum: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”

[6] However, even world-famous philosophers have occasionally lost jobs because they were too liberal. In 1940, City College of New York tried to hire Bertrand Russell to teach classes on logic, mathematics, and the metaphysics of science — three areas in which he was among the world’s foremost authorities at the time. That appointment was challenged in court because of his criticism of religion and advocacy of unpopular sexual practices. (Wikipedia lists “sex before marriage, homosexuality, temporary marriages, and the privatization of marriage”.) Ultimately the New York Supreme Court ruled against his appointment, claiming that Russell was morally unfit to teach at CCNY.

[7] The French Revolution is a good example. The government it established was a disaster, but afterwards monarchy became hard to justify.

[8] Even if you were white, being an abolitionist in the Old South could get you horsewhipped.

[9] Sara Robinson pushed back against Cato’s implication that it was political bigotry to be skeptical of hiring Trump supporters.

As an employer, I have a legal obligation to provide my workers with a safe workplace where they can do their jobs free of harassment and bigotry. If I fail, I can be sued, so there’s serious liability attached here.

If I hire a Trump follower, that liability goes straight to 11. How can I convince my female employees that they’ll be safe if I hire someone who thinks it’s fine for a man to grab a woman by the pussy? How do I look my Iranian clients in the eye after I bring in an employee who approved of the Muslim ban? What can I say to reassure my Jewish staffers when I’ve put their futures in the hands of a supervisor who agrees that the Charlottesville mob included “some very fine people”? What do I tell our Mexican-American vendors when they have to deal with someone who’s cool with seizing their nieces and nephews and sticking them in baby cages? … You don’t need to be a bigot to steer clear of these people.

Weeks like this raise a difficult question for anybody trying to summarize the news: Is Trump’s fascism supposed to distract us from his incompetence and corruption, or is it the other way around? Whatever I lead with, I wonder if I’ve taken the bait and missed the more important story.

The most eye-catching thing this week has been Portland’s resistance to the tear-gassing, stick-wielding secret police Trump has sent to crush dissent. The protests continue to grow, as Moms, Dads, veterans, nurses, and even grandmothers flip the script on our would-be strongman: It is the protesters who now look like America, and Trump’s goons who look like the violent America-haters.

But as the number of Americans dead from coronavirus closes in on 150,000 and Trump’s insistence that the schools have to open collides with his lack of any plan for opening them safely, it’s hard to ignore the incompetence theme. All of the countries we usually compare ourselves to are handling this pandemic, and we’re not.

And it’s hard to go a week without a major corruption story. This week we found out that Trump pushed our ambassador to the United Kingdom to try to get the British Open moved to a golf course Trump owns in Scotland. Supposedly there’s an inspector general’s report on this incident, which is conveniently classified.

But instead, the featured post is something more broadly cultural: After raising the subject of “cancel culture” in the weekly summary two weeks ago — and getting a lot of thoughtful objections from my commenters — I’m back with a longer article, which I haven’t titled yet. That should be out around 11 EDT. This week’s summary will address the fascism/incompetence/corruption trifecta, as well as Senate Republicans’ inability to put together a new stimulus package, the rising Covid-19 death rate, and a few other things, like AOC’s epic evisceration of Ted Yoho on the floor of the House. That should be out around 1.

Listen, I don’t mean to be partisan and all,
but I think that unidentifiable federal agents yanking people off the streets
and throwing them into unmarked vans is bad.

– Jared Holt, Right Wing Watch

“Our whole reason for lobbying for looser gun laws and amassing huge personal arsenals of weapons these past years was so that we could ensure the security of a free state and protect the people from an oppressive government. And then it actually happened, and the whole rising up against a tyrannical government thing just totally slipped our minds, which is a little embarrassing,” a sheepish NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said.

– “NRA Accidentally Forgets to Rise Up Against Tyrannical Government”
The Shovel (a satire site)

This week’s featured post is “Who Are Those Guys?“

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s secret police

Unidentifiable federal agents working for no agency in particular have been jumping out of unmarked vans and abducting people off the streets in Portland. I’ve gotten used to a lot of things since Trump became president, but this seems like a big deal to me.

I’m fairly proud of the featured post. It’s way long, but it tells the complete story, from the Pentagon’s reluctance to suppress protesters in DC in early June through the creation of federal law enforcement units that are willing to do just that. And for those of you who worry about Trump refusing to leave office after he loses in November, this is a key component of that scenario: I don’t believe the Army would support a coup, but what about these Little Green Men?

and the virus

Things keep getting worse. Last week it was debatable whether or not we had 70,000 new cases in a single day. This week we did it more than once. Deaths continue to rise, peaking at 963 on Friday. I will be surprised if we don’t break 1,000 deaths in a day this week, something that hasn’t happened since June 4.

One model has us hitting 224K deaths by November 1.

When you sort the world coronavirus data by “deaths per million population” the US is currently #10 at 433. We’ll probably eventually pass most of the European countries ahead of us (France, Sweden, Italy Spain, United Kingdom, Belgium), all of whom have done a much better job controlling the virus recently after initially being overwhelmed by it. But Latin American countries behind us (Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, Panama) are gaining, and Chile is already #9. So even as things get worse for us, we could move down the list.

A big study from South Korea has answered a number of questions about children’s role in the potential spread of Covid-19. Children under 10 are less likely than adults to spread the virus, but they do spread it. And older children may be even more likely to spread the virus than adults.

Both results should make communities think twice about reopening schools. If you’re somewhere with very few cases — Vermont, say — it might make sense to open schools full-time (with some new rules), test frequently, and see what happens. But in a hotspot like Florida or Texas, it’s crazy.

Meanwhile, Kellyanne Conway dodged a question about whether 14-year-old Baron Trump will attend classes in the fall. “That’s a personal decision,” she said.

Apparently Trump really wasn’t kidding when he said he wanted to “slow the testing down“. As the next stimulus bill is being written in the Senate (the House passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act back in May, but Mitch McConnell has been sitting on it), the White House is objecting to $25 billion to help the states do more testing, as well as an additional $10 billion for the CDC. Trump isn’t fighting with the Democrats here, he’s fighting with Republican senators.

The two political parties are far apart on a number of contentious issues, such as unemployment insurance, but the conflict between Trump administration officials and Senate Republicans on money for testing and other priorities is creating a major complication even before bipartisan negotiations get under way.

Trump’s attacks on testing — which every public-health expert says is basic to controlling the virus — have been getting more and more demented in recent weeks. A week ago he told a reporter: “When you test, you create cases. So we’ve created cases.” He has refused to acknowledge that the leap in the national case-count (from 20,000 a day in early June to 76,403 on Friday) means that the virus is spreading.

In addition to impeding testing, the administration is also seizing control of the data. The Department the Health and Human services sent a memo to hospitals and acute care facilities on July 10:

As of July 15, 2020, hospitals should no longer report the Covid-19 information in this document to the National Healthcare Safety Network site. Please select one of the above methods to use instead.

NHSN is run by the CDC. The replacement methods go directly to HHS. Various critics have claimed that NHSN needs to be improved, but it’s hard to come up with a motive for moving it to HHS, other than to sideline the “Deep State” civil servants at CDC and allow political appointees at HHS to play games with the data. The NYT:

Public health experts have long expressed concerns that the Trump administration is politicizing science and undermining its health experts, in particular the C.D.C.; four of the agency’s former directors, spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations, said as much in an opinion piece published Tuesday in The Washington Post. The data collection shift reinforced those fears.

MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace observed that it is “quite a coincidence” that Trump is trying to control the data at a moment when the data is publicly demonstrating his failure.

Josh Marshall provides a sobering graph: If you look at the daily new cases of Covid-19 in the 49 states other than New York, the curve flattens at about 20,000 per day from early April to mid-June, and then takes off. Without New York, national case-counts never did start going down.

Hundreds of people rallied at the Ohio statehouse Saturday to protest against mask mandates. Ohio doesn’t even have a statewide mandate, but some counties do.

and the economic consequences of the virus

The extended benefits in the CARES Act (that passed in March) will expire at the end of July, less that two weeks from now. Unless Congress acts, some people will lose benefits completely, while others will lose the extra $600 per week the CARES Act provided.

The House passed the next stimulus bill, the HEROES Act, back in May. But Republicans in the Senate have held on to the fantasy that the virus would go away and the economy would have a V-shaped recovery. By the end of July, they imagined, jobs would be plentiful and that extra $600 would just encourage lazy people to stay unemployed.

Now it’s getting down to the wire, and Mitch McConnell still has a lot to negotiate with his own caucus and the White House before he can start dealing with Nancy Pelosi. Paul Krugman comments:

My sense is that Republicans have a delusional view of their own bargaining position. They don’t seem to realize that they, not the Democrats, will be blamed if millions are plunged into penury because relief is delayed; to the extent that they’re willing to act at all, they still imagine that they can extract concessions like a blanket exemption of businesses from pandemic liability.

Maybe the prospect of catastrophe will concentrate Republican minds, but it seems more likely that we’re heading for weeks if not months of extreme financial distress for millions of Americans, distress that will hobble the economy as a whole. This disaster didn’t need to happen; but you can say the same thing about most of what has gone wrong in this country lately.

and John Lewis

Lewis died Friday at the age of 80. He had announced in December that he was suffering from pancreatic cancer. His NYT obituary is a good summary of his long career in the civil rights movement and in Congress.

Testimonials have poured in from all directions. Barack Obama’s ended like this:

It’s fitting that the last time John and I shared a public forum was at a virtual town hall with a gathering of young activists who were helping to lead this summer’s demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Afterwards, I spoke to him privately, and he could not have been prouder of their efforts — of a new generation standing up for freedom and equality, a new generation intent on voting and protecting the right to vote, a new generation running for political office. I told him that all those young people — of every race, from every background and gender and sexual orientation — they were his children. They had learned from his example, even if they didn’t know it. They had understood through him what American citizenship requires, even if they had heard of his courage only through history books.

Not many of us get to live to see our own legacy play out in such a meaningful, remarkable way. John Lewis did. And thanks to him, we now all have our marching orders — to keep believing in the possibility of remaking this country we love until it lives up to its full promise.

The most embarrassing testimonial came from Marco Rubio, who posted a picture of himself with Elijah Cummings. I guess old bald black guys all look alike to Marco. The tweet was taken down, but not before Rubio was roundly pilloried.

Truthfully, I’m not sure I could have correctly identified pictures of Lewis and Cummings. But I never met either man, and if I were going to post a photo of myself with one or the other, I’d stop and think about when that photo was taken and what we might have been talking about. Rubio clearly did not, and neither did his staff — which testifies to a certain sloppiness in thought and action.

Follow-up: Apparently Alaska’s Senator Dan Sullivan made the same mistake.

CNN lays out what happens next in Georgia’s 5th congressional district: Lewis had already won renomination, but the Democratic Party can replace his name on the ballot. It has to be done quickly or not at all, so there’s no time for a convention or primary. The state Democratic Party’s executive committee is meeting at noon today to pick a nominee. The district is solidly Democratic, so whomever they pick will probably go to Congress.

As for the remainder of Lewis’ current term, Republican Governor Kemp would have to declare a special election. That may or may not happen in time for Lewis’ replacement to be sworn in before the term ends.

and you also might be interested in …

The  home of a Latina federal judge in Newark was attacked yesterday afternoon. Her 20-year-old son was killed and her husband wounded, but Judge Esther Salas was not hurt. The shooter hasn’t been caught, and no one knows if Salas was the target or if so, why. But I have to wonder if the right-wing diatribes against “liberal judges” will eventually lead to more of this.

Mary Trump telling Rachel Maddow that she has heard Trump use the n-word and anti-semitic slurs got way more attention than I would have given it. It would be more amazing to me if she hadn’t heard him use that kind of language in private settings. I mean, we know he has referred to African nations and Haiti as “shit-hole countries” in front of members of Congress. And we know he has a long history of racism, which he appears to have inherited from his father.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson (a man sometimes pitched as the next leader of the Trumpist movement) took a previously unannounced fishing vacation after his top writer, Blake Neff, was caught making racist and sexist social-media posts under a pseudonym. (Apparently he’d been doing it for years.) Neff was the guy who wrote Carlson’s scripts, which Carlson only edited. I have to wonder how much input Neff had into rants like the one where Carlson claimed white supremacy is “not a real problem in America” and “a hoax”.

Carlson’s show, like a lot of Trump’s speeches, specializes in walking the line between deniable racism and undeniable racism. He has become the primary voice of white grievance on television, and white supremacist groups are among his biggest fans. That the guy writing Tucker’s scripts would take his bigotry off the leash anonymously on social media is about as shocking as Trump saying the n-word in private.

After they were exposed, Carlson acknowledged that Neff’s posts were “wrong”. The Bleeding Cool blog then assesses the rest of his statement:

Now for those of you who think Carlson then went on to further criticize Neff, followed by acknowledging that FOX News really wasn’t news and that his show profits from creating and stoking division along racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual orientation lines? Either check your respective prescriptions to make sure you’re taking the right dose or the back of your neck to make sure you’re not an alien pod person. Oh no, the brunt of Carlson’s attempt at “righteous anger” was aimed at this who (wait for it)… would actually take joy in someone who posts racist, sexist, and other offensive messages having to resign from a news program that has heavy, cult-like influence over others. Shocking, right? …

“We should also point out to the ghouls that are beating their chest in triumph at the destruction of a young man that self-righteousness also has its costs,” said Carlson, who clearly sees anyone who has issues with someone who posts racist, sexist, and other offensive messages as being “self-righteous.”

Like a lot of cancel-culture “victims”, Neff hasn’t been “destroyed”. He just lost a job he never should have had in the first place. Now that his name is out there as a white-racist martyr, I’m sure he has a big future on openly racist sites like VDare or American Renaissance.

Trump’s lie that “Biden wants to defund the police” was too much for Fox News’ Chris Wallace to let go by. Wallace in fact caught Trump in a number of lies.

The Trump campaign is a big moneymaker for Donald Trump personally. David Fahrenthold reports:

In just two days, @realdonaldtrump’s campaign pumped $380K into Trump’s private business, in 43 separate payments. Trump Org says this was for a weeklong “donor retreat,” held in early March at Mar-a-Lago. Campaign donations turned into private revenue for POTUS

The Open Secrets web site says that overall $4.1 million has been paid to the Trump Organization by Trump-related political committees, the Republican Party, and the campaigns and PACs of other Republican candidates.

and let’s close with something encouraging

Let’s take a moment to entertain an idea suggested by The Muppets and James Corden. Maybe, even during this pandemic, we really can get by with a little help from our friends.

Customs and Border Protection has finally claimed the anonymous federal law enforcement agents who have been abducting people off the streets in Portland. But it still won’t say who they are or exactly what they’re doing.

Often, when the Trump administration is described in totalitarian terms, it’s hyperbole, or at least debatable.

So, for example, describing ICE as a “Gestapo” is hyperbole. They violate civil rights and are out of control in a lot of ways, but comparisons to the Gestapo are overblown. Similarly, there has been debate (yes and no) about whether the detention facilities that hold legal asylum seekers and unauthorized border-crossers qualify as “concentration camps”. (My opinion: Yes, as long as we remember that concentration camps are not always death camps. Concentration camps isolate unpopular and dehumanized groups in harsh conditions outside of public view; death camps target them for extermination. Dachau was a concentration camp when it opened in 1933, but it didn’t become a death camp until much later.)

However, the federal law enforcement agents who have been roaming around Portland this last week are literally “secret police” — no hyperbole, no exaggeration. Their uniforms say POLICE, but do not identify what federal agency they are from or who the individual officers are. They cover their faces, drive unmarked vehicles, and grab people off the street without identifying themselves, their unit, the reason for the arrest, or where they are taking their victims. If right-wing militia groups start putting POLICE patches on their camo uniforms and kidnapping protest leaders, no one will know the difference; neither their appearance nor their behavior will give them away.

So that’s where we are: We’ve crossed one more bridge on the road to fascism, and it’s arguable that we’ve already arrived. Let’s think about how we got here.

Lafayette Square. On June 1, after the peaceful protests of George Floyd’s murder had also spawned looting and property damage in cities across the nation, President Trump called for law enforcement to “dominate the streets“. He urged governors to call in the National Guard, and made the following threat:

“If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” Trump said, referring to himself as “your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters.”

He said he was already dispatching “thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers” to Washington to stop the violence that has been a feature of the protests here.

While he was speaking, federal law enforcement agents of various stripes attacked peaceful protesters near the White House, pushing them out of Lafayette Square so that Trump could have his infamous hold-up-the-Bible photo op at historic St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Meanwhile, active-duty troops were being deployed to the DC area. Unnamed sources claimed Trump wanted to deploy 10,000 troops. Fortunately, generals and Pentagon civilians all the way up to Defense Secretary Esper pushed back, arguing that suppressing domestic dissent is not the military’s role. (I’m guessing the 10,000-troop story was leaked by a military person who wanted the plan stopped.) In the end, active-duty troops were never used against protesters and were withdrawn, but not before the incident “badly strained relations between Mr. Trump and the military”.

From Trump’s point of view, though, the week had one bright spot. The regular military might be reluctant to take the field against American protesters, but he did identify a force he could use: a motley assortment of armed federal law enforcement agents temporarily commanded by Attorney General Bill Barr.

Few sights from the nation’s protests in recent days have seemed more dystopian than the appearance of rows of heavily-armed riot police around Washington in drab military-style uniforms with no insignia, identifying emblems or name badges. Many of the apparently federal agents have refused to identify which agency they work for.

In the words of Butch Cassidy: “Who are those guys?”

It turns out that the federal government has something like 132,000 law enforcement officers spread out over dozens of agencies in multiple departments. Yahoo News called the roll:

The show of force outside the White House is a task force operation that includes U.S. Secret Service, National Guard, Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Park Police, … Federal Protective Service, … elite SWAT teams from the Border Patrol and sniper-trained units from ICE have also descended upon Washington. TSA’s air marshals arrived too, and three of the agency’s “VIPR teams,” which have previously faced criticism for not coordinating well with local law enforcement. Eight Coast Guard investigators were deputized by the Department of Justice upon arrival in Washington, though it remains unclear how they are being deployed.

Which raises an obvious question: What kind of rules apply to people from one agency deputized by another? The rules of their home agency? Their temporary commander’s? None? There are all kinds of restrictions, both legal and institutional, on what the President can or can’t do with the military inside our borders. But these guys, apparently, not so much. Through the years, whenever Congress increased the budgets of the Bureau of Prisons or ATF or one of the dozens of other armed law enforcement agencies, who realized they were helping build a 132,000-man Praetorian Guard?

As democracy-threatening as this seemed in June, though, comforting speculation held that DC’s special relationship with the federal government made it unique. (That even became an argument for DC statehood.) Surely these little green men could never be deployed in a state over the objection of its governor.

After all, this is America.

The Portland protests. The George Floyd protests have had remarkable longevity, challenging the conventional wisdom that the Powers That Be can always wait these things out. But nothing lasts forever, and by July 1, even Seattle’s famous CHOP autonomous zone had been reclaimed by local authorities.

In Portland, however, the spirit of resistance is still very much alive. Friday marked the 50th day of protest. OregonLive describes the situation like this:

Portland has experienced weeks of daily protests since the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minnesota police. The largest of them, involving thousands of people chanting and marching for racial justice and police non-violence, have been peaceful.

But almost like clockwork, tensions flare late at night between law enforcement officers stationed at the Justice Center and courthouse and a crowd of 20- and 30-something demonstrators, a small number of whom toss projectiles at police, shine lasers in their eyes or otherwise poke and prod officers to engage.

… Although the Justice Center and federal courthouse are covered with angry graffiti decrying police, evidence of other demonstrations in the city are scarce.

But you get a different sense from local journalist Robert Evans, who has been covering the nightly clashes, which he describes as “as close up to the line as you can get to actual war without live rounds”.

The craziest night so far was July 4, where kids stockpiled thousands of dollars in illegal fireworks. They were in the center of downtown where the bulk of the protests happened around the Justice Center.

It started as drunken party, more or less. At random, cops began shooting into the crowd. Protesters coalesced around the idea of firing commercial-grade fireworks into the Justice Center and Federal Courthouse. You had law enforcement firing rubber bullets, foam bullets, pepper balls and tear gas as crowds circled in around the courthouse firing rockets into the side of the building. That went on for a shocking length of time — there was this running three-hour street battle. I couldn’t tell whose explosions were whose.

Trumpist media and administration spokespeople have been desperate for something to talk about other than Trump’s failure to control the coronavirus pandemic, and so they have seized on “mob rule” as a theme, with Portland as a prime example of a city “under siege”. But OregonLive pushes back against that narrative: “A tour of the town shows otherwise.”

The images that populate national media feeds, however, come almost exclusively from a tiny point of the city: a 12-block area surrounding the Justice Center and federal courthouse. And they occur exclusively during late-night hours in which only a couple hundred or fewer protesters and scores of police officers are out in the city’s coronavirus-hollowed downtown.

Daily life in Portland is greatly restricted by the virus, but is barely affected by the demonstrations. Evans agrees:

One of the things I think people get wrong about this place, though, is that they see the protests and the right-wing coverage and the city is depicted as convulsed and collapsing. It’s just not true. You go three blocks from the center of downtown and life goes on as normal. Where I live, you could go every day and see no real signs of the protests.

Having totally given up on doing anything to combat the virus, though, Trump had to be seen doing something about something. And so he intervened in Portland.

DHS’ little green men. If you get your view of the world through Fox News, you understand that the biggest current threat to the United States and the American way of life is not the virus that has killed nearly 140,000 of us with no end in sight. No, it is the wanton destruction of our historical statues and monuments. Any time I have channel-scanned through the Fox News evening line-up in the last month, that’s what they’ve been talking about.

To combat this scourge, on June 26 President Trump heroically signed the “Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence“. If you read past the polemics all the way to the end, you’ll find this authorization:

Upon the request of the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Administrator of General Services, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall provide, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, personnel to assist with the protection of Federal monuments, memorials, statues, or property.

He’s talking about the 132,000 federal law enforcement agents, the Little Green Men. And unlike in a riot or a natural disaster where a governor might ask for the help of the National Guard, here one part of the federal government asks another part to send the Little Green Men. The Secretary of Homeland Security, you might notice, is authorized to ask himself for assistance.

As it happens, we don’t have a Secretary of Homeland Security, and haven’t since Trump forced Kirstjen Nielsen to resign in April, 2019 because she “pushed back on his demands to break the law“. Since then we’ve had acting DHS secretaries, because Trump says “I like acting. It gives me more flexibility.” (In fact, Josh Marshall observes that every DHS official who figures in this story is acting: “acting secretary, acting deputy secretary and acting head of CBP. Not one of these men has been confirmed by the Senate to act in this role.” Having avoided confirmation hearings where senators might demand promises or commitments, all three get their authority from and owe their allegiance to no one but Trump.)

So Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf responded to Trump’s executive order by creating the Protecting American Communities Task Force (PACT) “a special task force to coordinate Departmental law enforcement agency assets in protecting our nation’s historic monuments, memorials, statues, and federal facilities”. The PACT announcement quotes Wolf: “We won’t stand idly by while violent anarchists and rioters seek not only to vandalize and destroy the symbols of our nation, but to disrupt law and order and sow chaos in our communities.” (“Violent anarchist” is a phrase you’ll hear again. It is to the Trump administration what “terrorist” was to the Bush administration: a term stripped of all its original meanings until it is simply an insult, i.e., “someone we don’t like”.)

Notice the subtle shift: We’re not talking about statues of Andrew Jackson any more, as Trump was when he signed the executive order. We’re talking about “federal facilities” like the Mark Hatfield Courthouse in Portland, the courthouse mentioned above. PACT’s mission also extends beyond “protecting” those facilities to the much more nebulous goal of maintaining “law and order” and fighting “chaos in our communities”. But the Hatfield Courthouse is more than just a center of “chaos”, it is also the scene of a heinous crime: graffiti.

Maybe the Trump administration will stand idly by while American coronavirus deaths once again approach a thousand a day, and maybe it will do nothing when Putin puts bounties on the lives of our soldiers in Afghanistan, but graffiti on a federal courthouse is an affront up with which it will not put.

Send in the Little Green Men.

The federal invasion of Portland. Sometime after the Fourth of July — no one seems to know exactly when, because there wasn’t an announcement — unidentified federal law enforcement agents from no particular agency began battling protesters alongside the Portland police. And they did not just support the local officials, they significantly escalated the violence. Here’s Robert Evans again:

Since the feds got involved with police it’s gotten really brutal. I’d argue we’ve seen more police brutality in the last 50 days from Portland Police Department than anywhere else in the country. It’s brutal but it’s also predictable. There are rhythms to the way police work. It’s become an orchestrated dance with both sides.

There are warnings and kicking people out of the demonstration area. But the feds have deliberately defied the rhythms. Last Saturday [July 11], the crowd was 100 or so. It was very chill — nothing going on beyond the now-normal occupation of the Justice Center. And feds came out grabbing people seemingly at random and beating people with sticks. There was the kid who got shot in the head and his skull was fractured. The federal law enforcement violence is unpredictable violence.

The “kid shot in the head” was Donovan LaBella, and we have the shooting on video. The Oregonian summarized in a tweet:

Video shows nothing suggesting that La Bella, 26, who was standing across the street from the federal courthouse holding a speaker over his head, was a threat to anyone.

What appears to be a tear gas canister bounces in front of him. He kicks at it, bends down to toss it underhanded into the street, and lifts up his speaker again. Then he goes down, apparently struck by a sponge grenade or some other “less lethal” projectile that is never supposed to be aimed at someone’s head. (LaBella’s sister says he’s making a “remarkable recovery“, but the photo of his stitched-up forehead looks pretty gruesome.)

Who shot LaBella? Hard to say. Some unmarked federal agent in camo with a mask on, from some unnamed federal law enforcement agency.

How actions like this protect federal facilities is hard to figure. And then the abductions started.

Unmarked vans. NPR reports:

Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least Tuesday. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation about why they are being arrested, and driving off.

To the people being kidnapped arrested, it’s not obvious that their abductors the officers are police at all.

“I see guys in camo,” O’Shea said. “Four or five of them pop out, open the door and it was just like, ‘Oh s**t. I don’t know who you are or what you want with us.'”

See any identifying marks?

And again the question: Who are these guys? As this widely shared video shows, two agents in camo with no label other than POLICE grab somebody off an empty street and throw him into a van. They are repeatedly asked who they are and what they’re doing, but they do not respond.

For hours no one knew who the masked kidnappers were working for. But eventually, Customs and Border Protection took responsibility for that particular “arrest”. (In an interview, though, Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli identified Federal Protective Services as the lead agency; CBP is assisting them.) Their statement is a series of lies wildly inconsistent with the video, or with numerous accounts of similar abductions.

CBP agents had information indicating the person in the video was suspected of assaults against federal agents or destruction of federal property.  Once CBP agents approached the suspect, a large and violent mob moved towards their location.  For everyone’s safety, CBP agents quickly moved the suspect to a safer location for further questioning.  The CBP agents identified themselves and were wearing CBP insignia during the encounter. The names of the agents were not displayed due to recent doxing incidents against law enforcement personnel who serve and protect our country.

In fact, the street is virtually empty. The officers do not identify themselves, and if you can spot any insignia other than POLICE on their uniforms, you’re sharper than I am. I’m also struck by the “suspected of assaults against federal agents OR destruction of federal property”. The “or” suggests that this is a generic explanation rather than the specific reason for this particular arrest. Whoever wrote the statement probably has no more idea why the suspect was arrested than we do.

Robert Evans reports:

I’ve seen them rolling around in the vans and tackling people. My partner has watched them do a few snatch and grabs. The difference is they’re not cops. They go after people like soldiers, where the goal is to be unpredictable.

Acting Secretary Wolf’s justification of the entire operation, which didn’t appear until Thursday, is ridiculous. The phrase “violent anarchists” appears 72 times, along with a list of their “violent” crimes, which mostly consist of tagging the Hatfield Courthouse with graffiti. One “violent anarchist” was caught with a loaded weapon, but there is no report of the weapon being brandished or fired. (Compare to the AR-15 toting conservative protesters at the Michigan State House in May, whom Trump supported by tweeting “LIBERATE MICHIGAN”.)

OregonLive responded:

It’s telling that in Wolf’s extensive listing of incidents over the past several weeks, he neglects to mention the most violent act of these protests – a deputy U.S. marshal’s shooting of Donavan La Bella in the face with an impact munition. … That Wolf would fail to even acknowledge such a severe injury exposes how suspect his definition of “violence” is.

(OL appears to just be guessing who the shooter works for; I don’t believe the Marshals have claimed responsibility.) To repeat: “violent anarchist” has no meaning. It’s just an insult; it tags someone as an enemy.

Remember federalism? One hallmark of the Trump Era is that any principles conservatives used to claim — free trade, standing by allies, fiscal responsibility, the importance of character — have been exposed as hollow. One such relic of the age of principled conservatism is federalism: the doctrine that states share sovereignty with the federal government, and are not just subjects of federal rule.

Under federalism, policing is a state responsibility. In this case, it’s important to bear in mind that no local official asked for the federal government’s help in dealing with the protests. Acting Secretary Wolf did not even make a courtesy call to tell Oregon Governor Kate Brown or Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler what he was planning to do. This whole episode began not with an offer of help, but with Trump’s threat: “If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

That’s how this all came about: Trump and/or Wolf came to the conclusion that Portland was not treating protesters harshly enough, so Wolf asked himself to intervene.

Now that they have had a chance to see what DHS is doing, local officials at all levels have asked the federal agents to leave. Governor Brown tweeted:

This political theater from President Trump has nothing to do with public safety. The President is failing to lead this nation. Now he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government. I told Acting Secretary Wolf that the federal government should remove all federal officers from our streets. His response showed me he is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes. He is putting both Oregonians and local law enforcement officers in harm’s way.

And Mayor Wheeler acknowledged the government’s right to protect its buildings, but called for it to pull its agents off the streets:

I have no problem with the federal government and federal officers inside their facilities protecting their facilities. That’s what they do. That’s what they always do. What I have a problem with is them leaving the facilities and going out onto the streets of this community and then escalating an already tense situation like they did the other night.

Subsequently he made a stronger plea:

Their presence is neither wanted nor is it helpful and we’re asking them to leave. In fact, we’re demanding that they leave.

We don’t have any plans to do that. When the violence recedes, then that is when we would look at that. This isn’t intended to be a permanent arrangement, but it will last as long as the violence demands additional support to contend with.

Also:

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum filed a federal lawsuit against Homeland Security and its subagencies Friday alleging the federal government had violated Oregonians’ civil rights by seizing and detaining them without probable cause during protests against police brutality in the past week.

Oregon’s senior Senator Ron Wyden:

The Trump administration’s claim that DHS police are needed to enforce the president’s executive order to protect statues is laughable. Terrorizing peaceful protesters and arresting people for graffiti and other nonviolent offenses has nothing to do with securing federal property. My colleagues and I in the Oregon delegation have demanded that these occupying troops leave Portland, demanded answers from the administration and called for an independent investigation. And this week, my fellow senator from Oregon, Jeff Merkley, and I will introduce a measure to require Trump to remove these unwanted forces from our city.

Senator Merkley made his own comment:

Authoritarian governments, not democratic republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters. These Trump/Barr tactics designed to eliminate any accountability are absolutely unacceptable in America, and must end.

As Governor Brown’s tweet indicates, Acting Secretary Wolf has refused to withdraw his Little Green Men. Acting Deputy Secretary Cuccinelli also refused to pull the LGM back to the federal facilities whose protection is the pretext for their presence.

And I fully expect that as long as people continue to be violent and to destroy property that we will attempt to identify those folks. We will pick them up in front of the courthouse. If we spot them elsewhere, we will pick them up elsewhere. And if we have a question about somebody’s identity – like the first example I noted to you – after questioning determine it isn’t someone of interest, then they get released. And that’s standard law enforcement procedure, and it’s going to continue as long as the violence continues.

Results 1. Sometimes when you break the rules, the results will give you an after-the-fact justification: The problem is solved now, so who’s going to complain? But that’s not the case in Portland. Instead, DHS’ authoritarian overreach has drawn increased local attention to the protests and raised local sympathy for the protesters.

While President Trump on Sunday described the unrest in Portland as a national threat involving “anarchists and agitators,” the protests have featured a wide array of demonstrators, many now galvanized by federal officers exemplifying the militarized enforcement that protesters have long denounced. Gatherings over the weekend grew to upward of 1,000 people — the largest crowds in weeks.

Saturday, mothers (some wearing bicycle helmets in case federal agents would decide to club them) formed a human chain between police and demonstrators and chanted: “Feds stay clear. Moms are here.” Sunday night, a similar group of mothers was in fact dispersed with clubs and gas. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, one woman had a creative response to the threat of police violence.

In one extraordinary moment, a woman, completely naked except for a face mask and a hat, strode through the protests and squared up to federal agents and did a series of ballet and yoga moves. The striking moment was captured on social media and the unidentified woman has been dubbed “Naked Athena.”

Police apparently didn’t know what to do next. OregonLive reported:

About 10 minutes after she arrived, the officers left. The woman left soon after without any additional fanfare. “She was incredibly vulnerable,” [Oregonian/OregonLive photographer Dave] Killen said. “It would have been incredibly painful to be shot with any of those munitions with no clothes on.”

One good place to get a play-by-play of the weekend demonstrations is the Twitter feed of journalist Donovan Farley.

On the whole, it’s hard to argue with Governor Brown’s assessment:

It’s simply like adding gasoline to a fire. What’s needed is de-escalation and dialogue. That’s how we solve problems here in the state of Oregon.

Results 2. How you judge results depends on what your goal is. If the goal is to end the nightly conflicts between police and protesters, and to restore “law and order”, then the federal intervention has been an abject failure.

But when has Trump ever tried to end conflict? Trump thrives on conflict. Arguably, it’s in his political interest to make things worse. The violent federal escalation and abuse of civil rights may annoy Oregonians, but Trump was never going to carry Oregon in November anyway. The more interesting question to him is: How is this playing in swing states? Governor Brown has it right:

Trump is looking for a confrontation in Oregon in the hopes of winning political points in Ohio or Iowa.

If Fox News can spin this as the President taking strong action to preserve law and order in a city where Democratic officials are unwilling to get tough with the violent anarchists, that’s all he wants. Even better if his “toughness” takes headlines away from his Covid-19 failure. And the more violence, the more headlines.

In short, he’s doing on the ground what he often does on Twitter: provoking a conflict with somebody his base doesn’t like in order to change the narrative from a story where he’s failing. Violent anarchists and feckless Democratic officials are playing the role usually reserved for black athletes like Colin Kaepernick or LeBron James, or charismatic women of color like AOC or Ilhan Omar.

Judged by that standard, Trump may think his intervention in Portland is going quite well.

Where it goes from here. PACT was not created to be a one-off, so Portland can be thought of as a test, a “dress rehearsal” (as Esquire’s Charles Pierce puts it) for a show that might be taken on the road all over the country. The groundwork is being laid to intervene in Chicago, whose black lesbian mayor has already been tagged a “derelict” by press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. A famously liberal city like San Francisco would also make a good target for Trumpist media. A Reichstag fire won’t be necessary; a few lines of graffiti on some federal building will suffice.

Three things are being tested in Portland:

• Will the PACT agents do whatever they’re told, heedless of the rights of American citizens?
• Will Trump get away with this legally, or will federal courts put his secret police under injunction? Will Congress intervene in some way?
• Will Trump pay a political price, either in the media or by losing the support of the congressional Republicans who kept him in office in spite of the crimes he was impeached for?

The first test is clearly a success: Federal agents are acting like secret police in a classic banana republic, and there have been no signs of defections. No leaks, no scandalous stories attributed to anonymous sources.

Remarkably, Portland is a second-layer headline in both the New York Times and Washington Post this morning. You’ll find a Portland story if you scroll down, but they’re not calling your attention to it. I’ve also looked for a biting editorial cartoon on the subject and haven’t found one yet. So at the moment Trump is not paying a price in the mainstream media.

Elected Republicans are also ignoring the story, in spite of the traditional conservative principles being violated. (A satire article published after the first appearance of the Little Green Men in DC is being recirculated: “NRA Accidentally Forgets to Rise Up Against Tyrannical Government“.) It remains to be seen whether Democrats in Congress will insert some anti-LGM language into some must-pass appropriations bill, and whether Mitch McConnell will allow it.

Our best hope at the moment is the courts, where I don’t know what to expect. Neither do the folks at the LawFare blog, which is where I’m hoping to find insight before long. LF’s Steve Vladeck closes that article by wondering which would be worse: that the PACT agents are abusing their authority, or that all this is actually legal somehow?

The ultimate threat. As Trump continues to sink in the polls, more and more pundits raise the question: How will he try to cheat in the election? (The question “Will he try to cheat?” has already been answered. That’s what he was impeached for.) Various voter suppression schemes are brewing, and some are already working. Many of us are hard at work imagining scenarios where some combination of Covid-19 and voting by mail create new vote-stealing or vote-suppressing opportunities.

The true nightmare scenario is if he loses the election but refuses to leave office. Or perhaps he constructs some elaborate conspiracy theory in which the outcome of the election is doubtful, and decides to hang on until the doubt can be resolved to his satisfaction, which it never will be. Obviously, he can’t succeed in that plan entirely on his own, and different scenarios require different accomplices: Republicans in Congress, the Supreme Court, and so on.

If any of those play out (and I’m far from convinced they would) we could find ourselves in a true third-world-country situation, where the last line of defense is that the People refuse to accept a stolen election and take to the streets. In a typical third-world situation, the next question is: What does the Army do? An election-stealing President can often survive if the Army is willing to sweep into the major cities and put down protests.

One reason I have not worried too much about these scenarios is that I don’t think our Army would do that. The traditions of non-interference in the political process go all the way back to George Washington, and are very strong.

But Portland raises an additional question: What do the Little Green Men do? Could Trump really call his Praetorian Guard into the streets against the American people?

That too is being tested in Portland.

There will be a Sift this morning. (My wife’s surgery did happen on Thursday. It went well, and her recovery has been faster than we expected. As a result, the physical and psychological demands the situation places on me have been manageable without cancelling the Sift. Thanks to everyone who has expressed concern and wished us well.)

I think there’s even a pretty good Sift this morning. Like most of you (or at least the “you” I imagine), I’ve been wondering what the heck is going on in Portland. Unidentified feds in camo pulling US citizens into unmarked vans and driving off with them — what’s that about? How can they do that? What happens next?

There’s a story to tell here, and I think I’ve pieced it together. It starts with the military’s reluctance to suppress the protests in DC in early June, and the “success” (from Trump’s point of view) of deploying a motley assortment of armed federal agents with no insignia or other ID. At the time, many legal observers thought DC was special; the same thing couldn’t be done in a state without the consent of its governor. But now it is being done.

Based on Trump’s subsequent executive order protecting federal statues and monuments, DHS has put together the Protecting American Communities Task Force (PACT), an inter-agency umbrella for assembling motley assortments of armed federal agents who operate under no particular rules. That’s who’s in Portland. If this works — where “works” means getting away with actions in a blue state that Fox News can make look good to Trump’s base in swing states — we can expect to see PACT’s little green men in the major cities of blue states all over the country. (Chicago or San Francisco, maybe.) And if Trump ultimately does respond to a lost or contested election with force, it won’t be the Army he calls in, because they won’t come. It will be some motley assortment of armed federal agents operating under no particular rules. (There are, believe it or not, 132,000 of them.)

Telling that story has turned into a long article, which I haven’t quite finished yet. But I think it’s worth your time. I should have it out around 10 or 11 EDT.

The weekly summary hasn’t commanded nearly so much of my effort. The virus continues to spread and Trump continues to ignore it. John Lewis died. And a few other things happened, none of which grabbed my attention like video of federal secret police abducting people off the street. The summary should be out by 1.

I conceive that the President ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic.

– George Mason, at the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788

There is one security in this case to which gentlemen may not have adverted: if the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.

– James Madison, responding to Mason

This week’s featured post is “Back to School“. I have an unpredictable week ahead of me, so I’m not sure whether there will be a Sift next week or not.

This week everybody was talking about the Trump Crime Family

I decided not to do a featured post on this, because all the points I would make are already being widely discussed. In all of American history, I can’t come up with a presidential action as blatantly corrupt as Trump commuting Roger Stone’s sentence. (Leave a comment if you want to suggest a rival.) It’s like he’s saying: “Sure, I’m obstructing justice. What are you going to do about it?”

Benjamin Wittes lays it out:

Roger Stone isn’t just Trump’s confidante or friend. According to newly unsealed material in the Mueller Report, he’s also a person who had the power to reveal to investigators that Trump likely lied to Mueller—and to whom Trump publicly dangled rewards if Stone refused to provide Mueller with that information. Now, it seems, the president is making good on that promise.

As Judge Amy Berman put it when she sentenced Stone:

He was not prosecuted, as some have complained, for standing up for the President. He was prosecuted for covering up for the President.

Stone hasn’t exactly been subtle. He talked to Howard Fineman Friday, and Fineman recounted the conversation in Saturday’s New York Times:

“I had 29 or 30 conversations with Trump during the campaign period,” he reminded me. “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t. They wanted me to play Judas. I refused.”

And so, in the fullness of time — which is to say, about an hour later — the White House made official what Stone already knew: Trump was commuting Stone’s felony convictions for lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses. At 67, Stone would not have to report to a federal pen to serve his allotted 40 months.

Stone’s statement is not hard to interpret: He can testify to something Trump did that a prosecutor would make a deal to learn about — crimes, in other words. Stone deserves his commutation because he didn’t rat out his criminal boss.

Recall the larger plot Stone was part of: Russia hacked Democratic emails, and then sent them to WikiLeaks to be released in a fashion designed to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign and help Trump’s. Stone was the connection between WikiLeaks and Trump — not just the Trump campaign, Trump himself. In written testimony to the Mueller investigation, Trump claimed to remember no conversations with Stone about WikiLeaks. If Stone had testified, the President could have been charged with perjury. That’s when Trump began tweeting about how “brave” Stone was and raising speculation about a pardon.

Wittes again:

[T]he commutation means that the story Mueller tells about potential obstruction vis a vis Stone did not end with the activity described by the Mueller Report. It is a continuing pattern of conduct up until the present day.

That’s not all that happened this week on the ending-the-rule-of-law front. On the same day (Friday, of course) that Trump was giving Stone his pay-off for respecting the Trump Family omerta, Consigliere Bill Barr was shutting down another possible source of legal jeopardy: He replaced the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

This is the third time Barr has pulled this trick: He previously installed a lackey at the US Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia (who promptly rewrote the Roger Stone sentencing memo and is trying to walk away from the conviction of Mike Flynn), and tried to do the same thing at SDNY. Each time, he started by making the incumbent US attorneys offers they couldn’t refuse: some cushy job elsewhere in the Trump administration. SDNY’s Berman did refuse, and got fired (but did manage to get his deputy to replace him rather than a Barr-bot).

EDNY is not as famous as its neighboring district SDNY, but it does have its finger in the Trump-corruption pie as well. Newsday reports:

Why Barr has been busily ousting U.S. Attorneys in New York City has been a subject of intense debate and speculation. Several criminal probes and prosecutions in Manhattan have rankled as a thorn in the side of the Trump administration, from the campaign-finance crimes of the president’s former fixer Michael Cohen to the impeachment-related allegations against Rudy Giuliani’s former associate Lev Parnas.

As Trump’s Senate trial played out in February, Politico reported that Donoghue had been in charge of vetting and managing all Ukraine-related efforts. His district reportedly had been heading an investigation into Tom Barrack, a Trump confidant who headed the president’s inauguration committee and whose fundraising for that event allegedly caught the scrutiny of federal prosecutors.

Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman violated omerta by testifying during the impeachment hearings in February. He and his twin brother (who had no connection to the impeachment hearings) were then fired from their jobs at the National Security Council. Wednesday, Vindman announced he is retiring from the military after 21 years, due to what his lawyer called “a campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation” by President Trump.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court gave Trump a split decision on his tax cases: They rejected his argument that he was completely beyond the reach of the law, but allowed him to run out the clock. It’s extremely unlikely that anyone will get to see his tax returns or other business records until after the election.

Last week I mentioned the Commerce Department’s attempt to delay its inspector general’s report on SharpieGate. Now it’s out, and it makes infuriating reading. To make a long story short: Trump couldn’t admit even a trivial mistake, so Mulvaney pressured Ross who pressured NOAA to put out a statement rebuking National Weather Service forecasters for being right and doing their jobs. The process of putting out that cowardly statement consumed NOAA management’s attention while a actual hurricane was still raging.

Ross delegated the problem to Commerce Dept. Chief of Staff Mike Walsh, who denies he ever told anybody at NOAA their jobs were on the line. However, some of the phone conversations with him happened at 2:30 in the morning, so you might understand how the NOAA folks got that impression.

Reading the report, I kept wishing somebody would defend the NWS forecasters and tell the sycophants in the White House to go fuck themselves. (You want to fire me? If you think this looks bad in the media now, wait until you start firing people over it.) But it never happened.

It’s a small incident, but it explains so much about how the last three years have gone: Defending the President’s fragile ego absorbs so much of the government’s attention that there’s not much left to devote to governing. And precious few people (like Colonel Vindman) are willing to risk their careers to stop it.

and schools

It’s time to decide what school-age children are going to do in the fall. It would be nice if communities could make those decisions based on local conditions, using the best scientific insight available, but this is the Trump Era. If you’re for him, you want schools 100% back to normal, and if you don’t, it must be because you hate him. More in the featured post.

Colleges and universities are a different subject, which I didn’t get to this week. I noticed some developments in the college-sports world, though.

The Ivy League won’t have a football season this year. No Harvard vs. Yale game. A University of Indiana sports blogger thinks this won’t start a trend.

The Big Ten and the others will do everything in their power to play football this season, simply because there is so much money involved. They can do what the Ivy League can’t — play games without fans and still make a ton of money because of their television contracts — so that will happen if it’s at all possible.

The Big Ten subsequently announced that it will play only conference games, and has not yet committed even to them.

By limiting competition to other Big Ten institutions, the conference will have the greatest flexibility to adjust its own operations throughout the season and make quick decisions in real-time based on the most current evolving medical advice and the fluid nature of the pandemic.

The main problem right now is getting the teams together for practice when players keep testing positive for Covid-19. Makes you wonder what’s going to happen when all the students show up for fall term.

and the virus surge

Since the surge in Covid-19 cases began around June 8 or so, we’ve experienced the mystery of how cases could surge while deaths kept going down. Two obvious explanations were (1) The newly infected people are younger and so less likely to suffer dire consequences. (2) Hospital treatments, particularly of the most serious cases, are getting better.

Those are probably both factors, but there was a third explanation: the time lag between infection and death. As I heard Chris Hayes put it: “We’re between the lightning and the thunder.”

This week the thunder arrived. The low point in deaths appears to have been 217 on July 5. Two weeks ago I predicted:

[N]ationwide, the new-case curve started rising around June 10. That would suggest deaths will begin rising about July 4.

There have been 4980 deaths in the last seven days, compared to 3334 the seven days before that.

The surge in cases is continuing. Depending on when you start the clock on a day, we either did or didn’t break the 70,000-new-case mark on Friday. That number was around 20,000-per-day in early June.

The Trump administration is now treating Dr. Fauci as if he were a political rival. Anonymous sources at the White House distributed a list of supposedly inaccurate statements Fauci has made, “laid out in the style of a campaign’s opposition research document”. CBS’ Face the Nation has been trying to interview Fauci for three months, but the White House has refused permission for that as well as many other interviews. He no longer briefs Trump or appears in White House briefings for the public.

Fauci has committed the unforgivable sin of refusing to let Trump dictate reality. He has directly contradicted Trump’s ridiculous claim that the recent spike in cases is simply a reflection of more testing, and told 538 “As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.”

Fauci is a civil servant rather than a political appointee, so firing him would be difficult. He could quit, but people close to him say he wants to keep overseeing vaccine development.

There has been a virus outbreak in the Mississippi legislature, leading this embarrassing result:

Gov. Tate Reeves is warning the public to get tested for coronavirus if they have been in contact with a state lawmaker.

Here in Massachusetts, we’re currently doing well, but I worry about complacency. I think the Northeast in general is imagining that we had our outbreak, so the area is immune now. We’ve opened restaurants for indoor dining, which has to be a mistake.

Pittsburgh is a cautionary tale. Allegheny County had zero new cases on June 17, but was back over 200 by July 2.

An economic consequence of the surge is that it has stalled the recovery of the economy. Jobs will come back much more slowly, unemployment is running out, and so far Republicans in Congress are resisting any further stimulus. One expert projects that 20 to 28 million Americans face eviction by September.

and the Supreme Court’s contraception decision

As usual, there was a flurry of end-of-term decisions. In addition to the Trump tax cases mentioned above, the Court issued a 7-2 opinion upholding the Trump administration’s reworking of the religious exemption to ObamaCare contraception mandate. An exemption that the Obama administration originally crafted so that religious organizations that object to birth control wouldn’t have to provide it to their employees has now been stretched to cover any organization — even publicly traded corporations — that claim either a religious or moral objection. What’s more, the Obama administration had a work-around so that the employees would continue to get their birth control covered. The Trump people have thrown that out, with the result that some number of women will now not have contraceptive coverage.

This was just one more step down a wrong path, so I have a hard time criticizing the liberal justices (Kagan and Breyer) who sided with the conservatives. Like Roberts in the Louisiana abortion case last week, Kagan and Breyer had precedents to consider.

The case goes back to a lower court, so it’s still possible that the Trump rule will be thrown out ultimately. But it will be allowed to take effect in the meantime.

Longtime readers know that I am deeply skeptical of all these “conscience” provisions. I think employer-supported health insurance should be like a paycheck: What the employee does with it is none of the employer’s business. Whether somebody works for Little Sisters of the Poor or the Taliban or whoever, their health insurance should cover contraception, and the employer’s moral or religious beliefs should have no bearing on the subject. Again, it’s like a paycheck. If a woman can use her paycheck to buy contraceptives, she should be able to use her health insurance just as freely.

Once you let the employer’s religious or moral values into the picture, though, you’ll never find a place to draw the line. That’s why these cases keep going to the Supreme Court: There’s no clean rule that lower courts can apply unambiguously.

and cancel culture

A large number of well-known people signed “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” that will appear in Harper’s. Some of the names are quite famous, like Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, and Salman Rushdie, while others are people you will frequently see me quoting in this blog, like Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Vox’s Matt Yglesias.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.

While I continue to respect a lot of the signers, I have to say I don’t get it. Maybe I’m just not in plugged into the academic community and don’t appreciate the pressures on campus today. But none of the cases I hear about impress me. For example, NYT opinion-page editor James Bennett resigned (presumably under pressure) after the outcry surrounding his publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s call to use the military to suppress the rioting/protesting after George Floyd’s murder. That seemed like a serious act of bad judgment to me, and was one of a series. (See David Roberts’ article.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think, offers some appropriate perspective:

any sober assessment of this history must conclude that the present objections to cancel culture are not so much concerned with the weapon, as the kind of people who now seek to wield it.

Until recently, cancellation flowed exclusively downward, from the powerful to the powerless. But now, in this era of fallen gatekeepers, where anyone with a Twitter handle or Facebook account can be a publisher, banishment has been ostensibly democratized.

He reminds us of the more serious cancellations that are just part of business-as-usual: Colin Kaepernick got drummed out of the NFL for his views; Christian Blasey Ford got death threats for telling her story. It would be nice to live in a more forgiving world, Coates says, but we would need to construct it from scratch. Just going back to the day when the powerful could be forgiven for whatever they say or do, but the powerless could not, is not that world.

and you also might be interested in …

At long last, the Washington Redskins are going to change their name. The new name hasn’t been announced yet. I’m hoping they pick a name unrelated to Native Americans, rather than just dialing back to something like Warriors or Braves and keeping a Redskin-like logo.

It’s funny what does and doesn’t fly as an athletic team name. Only certain breeds of dogs work (bulldogs or wolves). Insects are OK if they sting (hornets or yellowjackets, but not ants or crickets). The Washington Spies would have an appropriate local flavor, but violates some sort of taboo I can’t put my finger on. The Washington Generals ordinarily would work, but that’s the name of the hapless team the Harlem Globetrotters have been beating up on for decades. I could go for Agents or G-Men. If it were up to me, though, I’d play off the Capitol area’s neo-classical architecture and name the team the Centurions.

Peter Wehner of The Atlantic talks to an unnamed Christian minister about the price Christians have paid for supporting Trump:

“Yes, Hollywood and the media created a decidedly unattractive stereotype of Christians. And Donald Trump fits it perfectly. Made it all seem true. And sadly, I now realize that stereotype is more true than I ever knew. It breaks my heart. In volleyball terms, Hollywood did the set, but Trump was the spike that drove the ball home. He’s everything I’ve been trying to say isn’t what the church is all about. But sadly, maybe it is.”

The only thing worth mentioning about Tucker Carlson’s claim that Tammy Duckworth “hates America” is Duckworth’s response:

They’re doing it because they’re desperate for America’s attention to be on anything other than Donald Trump’s failure to lead our nation, and because they think that Mr. Trump’s electoral prospects will be better if they can turn us against one another. Their goal isn’t to make — or keep — America great. It’s to keep Mr. Trump in power, whatever the cost.

It’s better for Mr. Trump to have you focused on whether an Asian-American woman is sufficiently American than to have you mourning the 130,000 Americans killed by a virus he claimed would disappear in February. It’s better for his campaign to distract Americans with whether a combat veteran is sufficiently patriotic than for people to recall that this failed commander in chief has still apparently done nothing about reports of Russia putting bounties on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan.

The Lincoln Project doesn’t mess around.

When my nephew gave me the insider’s tour of the Tennessee State Capitol a few years ago, we had to pass a bust of KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest to get into one of the two chambers of the legislature. It looks like that bust is finally leaving the capitol. The war criminal behind the Fort Pillow massacre will no longer guard that chamber, warning African American legislators that Tennessee will never really be their state.

If you want to understand why the fact-checking model doesn’t work any more, consider this Reuters fact-check: “Metal Strip in Medical Masks is Not a 5G Antenna“.

Fact-checking is based on the idea that the information environment is basically clean, so when there’s a disinformation spill, we can go clean it up. But now the insanity has gotten too dense. There’s no way to play whack-a-mole with this stuff any more.

and let’s close with something violent

Jan Hakon Erichsen destroys things on YouTube. Mostly he destroys silly inanimate things, like balloons or pasta, and does it in ways that are either creative or stupid, depending on your mood at the time you watch. But on days when the world has pissed you off and something needs to pay, an Erichsen video may be just the thing.

When schools began closing in March, everyone said it was just for a few weeks. The logic was simple: The virus’ incubation time was two weeks or so; if we all just stayed home through one incubation cycle, everyone already infected would show symptoms, they’d go into quarantine, and the rest of us could get back to our normal lives. When things didn’t go that way, schools were closed for a little longer, and then for the rest of the year. Still, few imagined that it wouldn’t be safe to go back in the fall.

Now it’s mid-July, time (or maybe past time) to start making commitments for the 2020-2021 school year. The virus’ widely anticipated summer lull never arrived. And although the world’s well-governed countries have been getting their epidemics under control, the United States has not been well governed for some while. The experts at the CDC established sensible standards for restarting normal life in stages, but our president pushed the states to ignore them, encouraging lawsuits and even armed protests against governors who tried to follow them. As a result, Covid-19 is still spreading like wildfire in all but a handful of states.

So what do we do with schools in the fall? Several fundamental facts about schools, children, and the virus point in different directions.

• As a group, compared to the general population, children are less vulnerable to the most serious consequences of Covid-19. The odds that your child will die from catching it at school may not be zero, but they are very low. At the same time, the long-term consequences of a “mild” case are still not well understood.
• Leaving schools closed also has risks and costs, especially for children whose home life is stressed in some way. Some children live in homes with large indoor and outdoor play spaces, robust internet connections, and extensive book collections; their parents may also work at home and may be well equipped to supervise online learning. Some other children not only lack those advantages, but live in dangerous or abusive homes; before Covid, school was the safest part of their day.
• Traditional classrooms share a feature that has made meat-processing plants and prisons such fertile ground for Covid-19 to spread: “prolonged close proximity to other[s]”. Worse, strict protocols of masking and social distancing will be hard to enforce in schools; violating them provides an easy way for difficult students to disrupt the classroom.
• Schools link households that would otherwise have little contact. With schools open, the community becomes a denser network that is easier for the virus to traverse. (For some reason, elementary schools have not been implicated in major outbreaks, but schools for older children have.)
• Children are not the only ones in the classroom. Many teachers are near retirement age, or have other Covid-19 risk factors. Is it age discrimination, or a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, to require teachers in high-risk categories to either endanger themselves or quit? Will teachers unions agree to open schools under conditions that are unsafe for many of their members?

And we are once again going through the familiar pattern: The CDC has established guidelines for opening schools safely, but the president and his education secretary are pushing communities not to follow them, to the point of threatening their federal funding. [1]

we’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools, to get them open. And it’s very important. It’s very important for our country. It’s very important for the well-being of the student and the parents. So we’re going to be putting a lot of pressure on: Open your schools in the fall.

The CDC’s advice includes closing schools for extended periods if there is “substantial community transmission” of the virus, and making major adjustments (no field trips, desks six feet apart, students wear masks, staggered scheduling, …) when there is “minimal to moderate community transmission”. The President has pronounced those measures “impractical“, but has offered no alternative plan beyond just opening the school doors and letting the epidemic run its course.

Worse, he has turned school reopening into a test of loyalty. If you’re on his side, you support his alternate reality, where the virus surge is just an artifact of overtesting, 99% of cases are “totally harmless“, and there’s no reason not to fully open all parts of the economy, including the schools — unless, of course, you’re a Democrat trying to hurt his re-election chances.

Corrupt Joe Biden and the Democrats don’t want to open schools in the Fall for political reasons, not for health reasons! They think it will help them in November. Wrong, the people get it! [2]

New York City. A number of school districts have already announced their own plans for the fall. New York City, for example, intends to have students physically present only two or three days a week, cutting the number present on any given day in half. The school-system chancellor said:

We know that we cannot maintain proper physical distancing and have 100% of our students in school buildings five days a week. It’s just geographically, physically not possible. Health and safety requires us to have fewer students in the building at the same time.

This is not nearly good enough for the Trump administration, which wants five full days a week. NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg offers a liberal parent’s view: She agrees, up to a point.

I want schools to open full-time at least as much as Trump does. On Wednesday, New York City announced its plan to send kids back to school part time, and it is a calamity. To accommodate C.D.C. guidelines calling for six feet of distance between desks, students will be able to go to school only one to three days a week. It is not yet clear if schools will be able to ensure that siblings will attend on the same days. Working parents could end up needing full-time child care indefinitely, and there are, as yet, no plans to provide it publicly. …

So far, the results of so-called “remote learning” — a term I dislike, since it presumes that learning is happening — have been terrible for students, especially disadvantaged ones. The fallout for many parents’ financial prospects and mental health is catastrophic. And part-time schooling is likely to significantly amplify educational inequalities that are already enormous. As those who can afford it hire private teachers and tutors, we are rapidly heading toward a system of neo-governesses in which basic schooling becomes a luxury good unattainable for many people outside the 1 percent.

But she also recognizes that Trump’s politicization of the argument has made any rational discussion of reopening plans much harder:

Trump’s interference means that now no departure from the current C.D.C. guidelines will be seen as credible outside of MAGAland. “The recklessness has made people distrust anything that they say because they have downplayed the virus from the beginning,” said [American Federation of Teachers President Randi] Weingarten. … This is a president with negative credibility. The more Trump demands that schools open, the more people who’ve paid close attention to him will fear they all must remain closed.

Florida. As if to prove the point that we should do the opposite of whatever Trump urges, there’s Florida. New York was once the worst-hit state in the nation, but has been doing comparatively well lately. Florida is one of the states currently experiencing the worst outbreaks, but Education Commissioner Richard Corcora is insisting on a full reopening of the state’s schools.

Under the emergency order, all public schools will be required to reopen in August for at least five days a week and to provide the full array of services required by law, including in-person instruction and services for students with special needs.

Governor Ron DeSantis, who got the state into its current mess by following Trump’s advice on early reopening of businesses and bars, compares schools to big box stores.

I’m confident if you can do Home Depot, if you can do Walmart, if you can do these things, we absolutely can do the schools.

This silly pronouncement has received the widespread disrespect it so richly deserves. California Congressman Ted Lieu’s response was one of many:

Did I somehow miss the true Home Depot experience? I didn’t realize Home Depot packed 35 people together in a room for 6 hours a day.

Similarly silly was this Trump tweet:

In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!

Yes, let’s compare Florida and Denmark. Florida has a little less than four times the population of Denmark. But in Covid-19’s entire history, Denmark has had 13,000 cases. Florida found 15,000 new cases yesterday. Denmark had 159 new cases in the last week; Florida over 69,000. Safely opening schools in Denmark is a completely different problem than opening them in Florida.

It is absolutely insane for Florida schools to be planning to open five days a week. If this hadn’t become a Trump-loyalty issue, no one would support doing it.

What at least one teacher thinks. If there’s one blog you ought to be reading right now that you’re probably not, I’d say it’s Teacher Life, written by Mrs. Teacher Life. Start with “Nobody Asked Me: A Teacher’s Opinion on School Reopening“, where you’ll find this kind of insight:

Let’s discuss hand washing. If an average class size of kindergartners is 25, then it would take 8.3 minutes for them each to wash their hands for 20 seconds- not too bad you might think. That’s doable- let’s reopen! Unfortunately that does not account for transition time between students at the sink, the student who plays in the bubbles, or splashes another student, or cuts in line, or has to be provided moral support to flush the toilet, because they are scared. It doesn’t account for the fact that only a few students will be allowed in the bathroom at a time and the teacher must monitor whose turn it is to enter and exit the bathroom, and control the hallway behavior, and send the student who just coughed to the “quarantine room” that doesn’t exist BECAUSE THERE ARE NO EXTRA ROOMS. Where are the students in hallway waiting? In line? All together? Six feet apart? No wait, three feet is okay now. Either way, 25 children standing three feet apart is a line over 75 feet long. Who is monitoring this line? Keeping them quiet, reminding them to keep their hands to themselves?

When you take a classroom-level view, you start to see a strange disconnect: Getting schools open is somehow both a top priority and barely an afterthought. On the one hand, it’s absolutely essential, because the economy can’t get back to normal (and the President can’t get re-elected) until parents can go back to work without leaving unsupervised children at home. But on the other hand, if it were actually that important, you’d think some roomful of geniuses would have been convened long ago to work out

• exactly what conditions need to hold in our communities for it to be safe to reopen schools
• how we’re going to achieve those conditions (i.e., do we really need to re-open the bars?)
• how schools are going to function when they do reopen
• what additional resources they need to function that way.

So, for example, what about that quarantine room Mrs. Teacher Life doesn’t have? Or the bigger classrooms that allow socially distanced desks? Or the extra assistants who supervise those 75-foot lines at the bathroom? Or new desks to replace the tables where children can no longer sit together? Or the extra crayons and scissors and whatnot, now that it’s unsafe for kids to share? Who is going to sub for all the teachers who are quarantined, or who ordinarily would come to work even when they feel sick, but shouldn’t do that now?

If we do find a sub- what germs are they bringing in? Where have they been? If they test positive do all schools they have been subbing at have to quarantine?

If school reopening were really a priority, there would be a plan and there would be money to implement that plan. There isn’t. That’s got to tell you something.

[1] For what it’s worth: I would not take these threats seriously. Trump does not understand how the government works, so he often makes threats he has no idea how to carry out. In this case, attempts to redirect funding approved by Congress would be blocked by the courts, at least until the next presidential term begins in January. If we can vote Trump out, those cuts will never happen.

What he and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos seem to be hinting at is turning federal aid into a voucher that students can use for private schools in areas where public schools are not physically open. (This is what DeVos wanted to do even before the pandemic.) But neither DeVos nor the White House press secretary have been able to explain what legal authority would allow them to do this.

And I know it’s petty, but comparisons between DeVos and Harry Potter’s Delores Umbridge never get old.

[2] I think Trump is the one who doesn’t get it here, probably because he doesn’t understand people who live for others. Parents will accept risks to themselves — going to an unsafe job, for example — if the family needs it. But they have a far lower tolerance for risks to their children. Statistics don’t help here. Once you’ve told parents that their child could die, they’re not going to pay much attention to the exact probabilities.

Back in March, when Ohio was the first state to cancel school, I don’t think a lot of people expected schools around the country to close for the rest of the year. And surely by fall we would have this whole coronavirus thing figured out, as the world’s well-governed countries more-or-less do. Well, now it’s time to make decisions about the next school year, and it’s not at all obvious what to do. And the process is made that much harder, because it can’t just be about the kids now. Trump has made reopening schools a loyalty issue for his cult, so it has to be about him too.

That’s the topic of this week’s featured post “Back to School”, which should be out around 9 EDT or so.

That’s far from all that happened this week. There were also some major new moves in the Trump Crime Family’s assault on the rule of law. Roger Stone got his payoff for not ratting out the Boss, and Consiglieri Bill Barr put out a hit on the Eastern District of New York, where Trump-related investigations might have been brewing, but now presumably are sleeping with the fishes. Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, who violated omerta during the impeachment hearings, has been forced out of the military. The Family’s allies on the Supreme Court showed mixed loyalties: They rejected Trump’s claim to be completely above the law, but still his taxes and business records will remain hidden until after the election. Complete victory over the law will have to be a second-term project.

Meanwhile, coronavirus continues to rage out of control. By some counts, the number of new cases surged over 70,000 on Friday, up from 20,000 a few weeks ago. And the months-long decline in deaths ended, as experts had been predicting. The official word in MAGAland is that there is nothing to see here: More testing is turning up more cases, and everyone should go back to normal life as fast as possible.

I feel an obligation to report some good news too: The Washington Redskins are finally changing their name, hopefully to something not racist this time.

Anyway, that’s all in the weekly summary, which should come out around noon or so.

BTW, I don’t know what to predict about next week. My wife is having surgery on Thursday. I could imagine either being completely absorbed in that, or sitting around the hospital with an internet connection and nothing to do but wait and watch her sleep. So the Sift might or might not happen at all next week, and if it does, I can’t guess how much effort will go into it.

The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

– Frederick Douglass “What, to the slave, is the 4th of July?“

This week’s featured post is “In the Land of ‘No We Can’t’“.

This week everybody was talking about the virus

The number of new Covid-19 infections surged to new heights this week, going over 57,000 on Friday. Deaths continued on a flat-to-downward path, running between 500-600 a day, but deaths lag infections, so it’s hard to see how that continues.

Tens of thousands of Americans are dead because of Trump’s denial and incompetence. I laid this out in some detail last week, but James Fallows has done it even better in The Atlantic. In addition to being a top-notch journalist and writer, Fallows is an amateur pilot. (The book Our Towns describes his and his wife Deborah’s tour of the kinds of American cities that are hard to get to by commercial flights.)

As an amateur pilot, I can’t help associating the words catastrophic failure with an accident report. The fact is, confronting a pandemic has surprising parallels with the careful coordination and organization that have saved large numbers of lives in air travel.

So he reviews the government’s handling of Covid-19 the way that the National Transportation Safety Board would review an airliner crash: starting way back at the beginning, with how the system was designed, and then looking at how those plans were implemented and what went wrong.

Making a long article short: The Bush administration left a sound pandemic plan after the H5N1 flu of 2005, and the Obama administration updated it after the Ebola outbreak. The early-detection system they put in place worked, but nobody in the Trump administration could be bothered to notice.

By at least late December, signs were beginning to show something seriously amiss—despite foot-dragging, lies, and apparent cover-up on the Chinese side. A different kind of Chinese government might have done a different job, calling for help from the rest of the world and increasing the chances that the coronavirus remained a regional rather than global threat. But other U.S. leaders had dealt with foreign cover-ups, including by China in the early stages of the SARS outbreak in 2002. Washington knew enough, soon enough, in this case to act while there still was time.

… During the Obama administration, the U.S. had negotiated to have its observers stationed in many cities across China, through a program called Predict. But the Trump administration did not fill those positions, including in Wuhan. This meant that no one was on site to learn about, for instance, the unexplained closure on January 1 of the city’s main downtown Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a so-called wet market where wild animals, live or already killed, were on sale along with fish and domesticated animals.

When the early warnings started, CDC tried to get observers in.

“CDC asked for access, and was denied it [by the Chinese government],” Ron Klain, who coordinated efforts against the Ebola pandemic during the Obama administration, told me. “In normal circumstances, that request would have gone up the chain, and you would have had senior-level people in the NSC pressing at senior levels. My guess is that it wasn’t pressed in this case because the senior people were Mnuchin and Kudlow, and they had other priorities. … The question isn’t what leverage we had. The point is that we gave up leverage with China to get the trade deal done. That meant that we didn’t put leverage on China’s government. We took their explanations at face value.”

Obama had left a plan, but Trump ignored it.

The Obama playbook, like the Bush report, is chillingly prescient. Its emphasis is on the step-by-step “how to” of the government’s response.

The worldwide pandemic response system was set up to rely on American logistics. But Trump never mobilized it.

When the new coronavirus threat suddenly materialized, American engagement was the signal all other participants were waiting for. But this time it did not come. It was as if air traffic controllers walked away from their stations and said, “The rest of you just work it out for yourselves.”

… The system was primed to act, but the person at the top of the system had to say “Go.” And that person was Donald Trump.

“Here is the way I would put it,” a person who has been involved with the President’s Daily Brief process told me, referring to Trump. “The person behind the desk is the same person you see on TV”—emotional, opinionated, fixed on his own few hobbyhorses and distorted views of reality, unwilling or unable to absorb new information. “In a normal administration, the president would have seen the warnings unfolding from January onward. But this president hadn’t absorbed any of it.” … In a resigned way, the people I spoke with summed up the situation this way: You have a head of government who doesn’t know anything, and doesn’t read anything, and is at the mercy of what he sees on TV.

… The United States still possesses the strongest economy in the world, its military is by far the most powerful, its culture is diverse, and, confronted with the vicissitudes of history, the country has proved resilient. But a veteran of the intelligence world emphasized that the coronavirus era has revealed a sobering reality. “Our system has a single point of failure: an irrational president.” At least in an airplane cockpit, the first officer can grab the controls from a captain who is steering the aircraft toward doom.

So Fallows imagines the conclusion of the NTSB report like this:

There was a flight plan. There was accurate information about what lay ahead. The controllers were ready. The checklists were complete. The aircraft was sound. But the person at the controls was tweeting. Even if the person at the controls had been able to give effective orders, he had laid off people who would carry them out. This was a preventable catastrophe.

Because they were hit hard early in the pandemic, a few EU countries — Belgium, Spain, Italy, Sweden, and France — still have more Covid deaths per capita than the US. (We’re gaining on them, though, and will probably pass France in another month or so.) But most of them — Germany and the other countries on the Baltic Sea stand out — have been doing far better from the beginning. The most valid comparison is the EU as a whole, so I decided to use the Worldometer numbers to do an EU spreadsheet of my own on Saturday morning. Totaling up across all 27 EU countries, they had almost exactly the same number of deaths we do: 133,651 to our 132,112. We’ll probably pass them sometime today, with only about 3/4 of their population.

Not all EU countries report their number of active cases — infected people who have neither died nor recovered — but my guess from the available numbers is that the US has 7 or 8 times as many.

The EU added insult to injury on Wednesday: It started admitting non-essential travelers from many countries, but not Americans. Because we have let the virus get so out of control, Europeans consider Americans to be disease vectors, lumping us in with other virus-ridden countries like Russia and Brazil.

One reason I don’t think Trump will stage a comeback in the polls is that every day it gets harder and harder to deny how totally he has botched the federal response to the pandemic. The well-governed countries are getting through this, while the poorly-governed ones are still floundering. Under Trump, the United States is poorly governed.

Imagine that things go as well as is reasonably possible for Trump between now and the election: The death rate doesn’t shoot up to match the case rate, so we get to November with “only” 200,000 or so dead. Vaccine research goes well, so that we have a viable formula ready, though it won’t go into mass production and wide distribution until spring. We avoided a second lockdown, so the unemployment rate is only 10% or so.

Even in that rosy scenario, it will be undeniable that the rest of the world’s governments handled this much better. So even if by November you think the end of this crisis is in sight, is this really the guy you want in charge for the NEXT crisis?

Controls on the southern border are tightening up — on the Mexican side.

As cases have increased in Southern California, Arizona and Texas, Mexican border states have increasingly come to see the outbreak in the United States as their biggest threat in controlling the epidemic.

Citing no evidence, President Trump has said that the border wall would keep infections from entering the United States from Mexico. But given the soaring U.S. caseload, it is Mexico that has more reason to fear the virus coming across the border.

Conservatives would like to blame the George Floyd protests for the surge in infections, but the data seems not to support that. Reason: Even as the protesters may have been infecting each other, they were also discouraging other people from going out. The net result looks like a wash.

Whether and how to open schools in the fall is a huge topic this summer. Many parents won’t return to work if they have nowhere to send their school-age children. (An NYT opinion piece argues that opening schools should have been the primary goal of every state’s reopening plan. Leaving bars and restaurants closed longer would have been a small price to pay, if the payoff was beating the virus back to a level that allowed schools to open.)

College students and their families may not be willing to take on massive debts for the sake of online classes, and colleges without big endowments may go under for good if they close for a semester. So there’s lots of motivation to open schools at all levels, even without a good plan for doing it safely.

One fly in the ointment: college professors. Many of them are in the endangered over-50 age group, so sending them into classrooms with undergraduates or expecting them to meet individual students in their small offices is a bad idea. They’re smart enough to know that, and they have more power within the system than your average kindergarten teacher.

Expecting college students to follow strict protocols in their dorms, or to stay out of crowded local bars, is foolish. Young adults feel invulnerable anyway, and in this case many of them are.

This week, Iowa health authorities reported case spikes among young adults in its two largest college towns, Ames and Iowa City, after the governor allowed bars to reopen. And on campuses across the country, attempts to bring back football teams for preseason practice have resulted in outbreaks.

More than 130 coronavirus cases have been linked to athletic departments at 28 Division I universities. At Clemson, at least 23 football players and two coaches have been infected. At Arkansas State University, seven athletes across three teams tested positive. And at the University of Houston, the athletic department stopped off-season workouts after an outbreak was discovered.

I know I’m repeating a link from last week, but it really fits here: “A Message from Your University’s Vice President for Magical Thinking“.

And Randy Rainbow has another great video.

and the bounties

The official response to reports that the Russians paid bounties to Taliban fighters for killing Americans is somewhere between “I don’t believe it” and “Nobody told me.” In any case, Trump isn’t going to do anything about it.

Neither explanation holds water. “Nobody told me” is particularly weak, given that Trump oversees the people who didn’t tell him. His excuse for being incompetent as a commander-in-chief is that he’s incompetent as a manager.

“I don’t believe it” is another example of taking Putin’s word for it. We saw this in Helsinki, and we’re seeing it again.

and jobs

The June jobs report came out, and the top line number was good: 4.8 million new jobs, and the unemployment rate dropping to 11.1%. However,  I agree with Slate:

The most important thing to keep in mind about Thursday’s monster jobs report is that it’s a backward-looking window into the moment right before much of the country’s reopening plans went completely to hell.

Probably this is the last piece of good news about the job market we’ll see for some while.

and Trump’s bizarre 4th of July

Because somebody has to keep an eye on them, I get the Trump campaign emails. Saturday this showed up:

We’ll get right to the point – Democrats HATE America.

They’re attacking President Trump for wanting to celebrate Independence Day at Mount Rushmore – an ICONIC monument that features George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln – as a symbol of white supremacy.

Can you believe it? They truly hate EVERYTHING our great Nation stands for.

I think they misjudged this one, and it’s typical of the way they’re misjudging the electorate in general. The Democrats’ tweet — and the Native American protesters the tweet supports — makes a good point.

What’s more, I think a large majority of Americans would agree that Mount Rushmore isn’t an appropriate spot for a partisan event, and that it’s an abuse of power for the President to order the Navy’s Blue Angels to be the warm-up act for his campaign speech. The mountain and the Navy belong to the nation, not to the President. An iconic national monument is not the place for aggressively divisive political rhetoric like this:

In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us. (Applause.)

Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.

To make this possible, they are determined to tear down every statue, symbol, and memory of our national heritage.

It’s Trump’s right to smear his enemies this way, if that’s what he wants to do, but at least when Hillary gave her “deplorables” speech, her campaign paid for it. And Obama didn’t order the Blue Angels to perform overhead.

It’s weird that Trump complains about being “censored” — giving no examples, because there are none — when he has very recently tried to prevent John Bolton from publishing his book, and is still trying to stop Mary Trump’s book.

Catherine Rampell itemizes all the ways Trump has tried to censor, bully, and otherwise control people who criticize him.

and the Supreme Court

Last week the decision throwing out the Louisiana abortion law had just come out, and I had no time to look at it. I read it this weekend.

It’s kind of a strange read all around: the plurality opinion of the four liberal justices, the concurrence by Chief Justice Roberts, and the various dissents by the other four conservatives. Everybody is dancing around the fact that everybody knows, but the Court doesn’t want to state openly: Louisiana passed this law in bad faith. The stated reason (protecting women’s health) was totally distinct from the real reason (harassing abortion clinics into closing).

So the question was whether the Court would let that go. The four liberal justices come up with reasons not to, without actually accusing the Louisiana legislature of bad faith. The four conservative justices come up with arguments that give the legislature cover — basically, that it’s too soon to make this decision; the Court should wait until the clinics actually close, and then look at things. And John Roberts says that the Louisiana law is identical to a Texas law the Court threw out four years ago (but then it waited for clinics to close), so the law needs to be applied the same way.

I can’t remember who was making this point, but I think it’s a good one: Roberts’ decision here resembles his decision against the citizenship question on the census: He’s willing to bend the law in a conservative direction, but he hates to look blatantly political and corrupt. So he needs conservatives to show him the respect of sending him better cases.

The Court, in my opinion, is ready to reverse Roe v Wade, or at least to chip it away to nothing. But they need a better excuse than this.

I speculated last week that Roberts had scheduled the more liberal decisions to come out first, to give cover to something outrageous later on. The first political decision came this week: the House won’t get access to documents from the Mueller grand jury.

We’re still waiting for a ruling on Trump’s tax returns.

and Biden’s VP choices

People are making a case for Kamala Harris, Stacy Abrams, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, Val Demings, Susan Rice, Keisha Lance Bottoms, and Michelle Lujan Grisham.

I’m not going to either make a prediction or pick a favorite from that list. Mainly, I’m struck by what a strong list it is.

Biden has said he’ll pick a woman, and there are many reasons for him to lean towards a woman of color. (The only white woman on the list, Elizabeth Warren, is there because she could raise enthusiasm among progressive Democrats who didn’t support Biden in the primaries.) Ordinarily, people worry that such prior restrictions limit the talent pool. But I don’t think that’s a valid complaint here.

Biden has described himself as “a transition candidate“, raising the possibility that he might only want a single term. In that scenario, his VP would be well positioned for a 2024 presidential run.

BTW, lately I’ve been responding to Facebook posts about Biden and the Democrats leading us into “socialism” by quoting Voodoo Pork:

You know how your parents used to call every console a “Nintendo”? That’s how conservatives use the word “socialist” to describe everything to the left of hunting the homeless for sport.

and you also might be interested in …

Caroline Randall Williams writes a powerful statement on the monuments of the Old South: “My Body is a Confederate Monument“.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

Among her white Confederate ancestors are Edmund Pettis, the general and KKK grand dragon whose name adorns the bridge where John Lewis and other civil rights demonstrators were beaten by police on Bloody Sunday in 1965.

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. …

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof.

SharpieGate is far from the most serious scandal of the Trump administration, but the very triviality of it speaks volumes.

When Hurricane Dorian was approaching Florida last September, Trump erroneously tweeted that the storm would hit Alabama “harder than anticipated”. In fact, it was not headed to Alabama at all, according to National Weather Service projections, which turned out to be right. The NWS, worried that Alabamans might panic unnecessarily, corrected Trump’s tweet within minutes:

Alabama will NOT see any impacts from Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane Dorian will be felt across Alabama.

That’s not a scandal; it’s just a mistake. (And who hasn’t gotten confused by a map or named the wrong state sometime?) But Trump lacks the strength of character to admit even trivial mistakes, and he could not let this subject drop. Ultimately he  “proved” he was right by showing reporters an NWS map that had been crudely doctored with a Sharpie.

That’s petty to an almost clinical degree, but still not a scandal. The true low point of SharpieGate, though, came when NOAA issued a false statement undercutting its own people and supporting the president.

The Birmingham National Weather Service’s Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.

How did that happen? The White House put pressure on Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who reportedly threatened to fire people at NOAA if they didn’t support the president’s false claim. (Ross has denied this.)

So why bring it up now? Well, the Commerce Department inspector general looked into this incident and has written a report. That report has been awaiting release since June 26, when the Commerce Department had 48 hours to mark it up.  But Wednesday, a memo to Secretary Ross from the IG complained that something else is happening:

The final publication of our evaluation has been delayed, thwarted, and effectively estopped by the Department’s refusal to identify specific areas of privilege. Additionally, your staff has refused to engage in any meaningful discussion to identify proposed privilege redactions, indicating that such discussions would not be fruitful. To allow the Department’s all-encompassing and opaque assertion of privilege to stand is to effectively grant the Department a pocket veto over the completion and issuance of final OIG work, which is clearly contrary to the IG Act, OIG independence, and good government.

All this, because Trump couldn’t simply thank the alert people at the NWS for catching his mistake before any harm came of it, as any responsible adult would do.

China has imposed more draconian laws against protest in Hong Kong, and the protesters haven’t figured out how to adjust yet.

A company hand-picked by Trump to build a $1.3 billion chunk of his border wall also built a 3-mile segment on private land as a demonstration project. That segment was built too close to the Rio Grande and only 2.5 feet deep. ProPublica and the Texas Tribune report:

But his showcase piece is showing signs of runoff erosion and, if it’s not fixed, could be in danger of falling into the Rio Grande, according to engineers and hydrologists who reviewed photos of the wall for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. It never should have been built so close to the river, they say.

Just months after going up, they said, photos reveal a series of gashes and gullies at various points along the structure where rainwater runoff has scoured the sandy loam beneath the foundation.

“When the river rises, it will likely attack those areas where the foundation is exposed, further weakening support of the fence and potentially causing portions … to fall into the Rio Grande,” said Alex Mayer, a civil engineer professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who has done research in the Rio Grande basin.

It’s like the old proverb: A thing that is not worth doing at all is not worth doing well.

I don’t know if this is true, but I hope it is.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is requiring everyone in Texas to wear a face covering. It’s illegal to carry a gun while wearing a face covering. Texas just unintentionally banned concealed and open carry.

and let’s close with a blast from the past

Recently lots of people have been making fun of Karen, and in particular her sense of entitlement and white privilege. But not many people remember that when she was a teen-ager she used to have her own TV show, and the Beach Boys sang her intro. Back then, she was an alarming, quite disarming, and a really somewhat charming modern girl. Maybe it was obvious then how she would grow up, but I didn’t see it coming.

The Trump administration’s surrender to Covid-19 is just a symptom of a larger dysfunction. Whenever a problem calls for collective action, whether that problem is a disease, mass shootings, climate change, economic inequality, out-of-control police, chaotic elections, or systemic racism, Republicans tell us nothing can be done; we just have to live with it. And until we can banish them from positions of power, we do.

In 2008, a young black senator with an odd-sounding name, facing a well-known and well-financed rival with the full backing of his party’s establishment, won the Democratic nomination for president. He went on to a landslide victory in the fall, with large majorities in both houses of Congress riding on his coattails. The slogan he ran on was “Yes We Can”.

Like most effective political slogans — “Make America Great Again” has the same quality — “Yes We Can” meant different things to different people. Most obviously, African Americans heard it as: “Yes we can elect one of our own. We don’t have to pick our leader from a list of white men drawn up by other white men.” But depending on what you were listening for, “Yes We Can” could also mean: “Yes we can reform our healthcare system” or “Yes we can rebuild our infrastructure” or “Yes we can overcome inequality” or “Yes we can do something about climate change” or “Yes we can offer all our children a 21st-century education” or “Yes we can create enough jobs for everybody” or “Yes we can get our troops out of Iraq”.

In all of its interpretations, “Yes We Can” meant that we weren’t stuck. We aren’t doomed to watch our country (or planet) decay — perhaps retaining the freedom to complain about it, but not the power to choose a new course. Instead, we can band together, elect a government that represents our real interests, and focus the power of America on shaping the future we want.

Obama himself put it like this:

When the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful, and told that it can’t be done, then it doesn’t. I’m running for president because I want to tell them: Yes We Can.

Yes vs. No. Opposing “Yes We Can” is the Republican belief that government is never the solution, it can only make problems worse. And so, if some nationwide problem keeps you up at night, all you can do is change your individual behavior or circumstances — assuming you can afford to.

If your town’s public schools are poorly funded and badly run, you can move somewhere richer with better schools, or find the money to send your kids to a private school, or quit your job and homeschool. Ditto for infrastructure and public services: If your town can’t afford to fix its potholes or keep the parks open, move somewhere that can. If you don’t want to die in some country you don’t care about, stay out of the Army. If climate change worries you, buy a Prius and recycle. If you can’t find a job, start your own business. Search out better health insurance and pay what it costs. Buy a gun to defend your family, and if you can’t stop imagining a mass shooting at your child’s school, pray.

It’s all up to you. You’re on your own. If you can’t solve it, don’t look at us, because No We Can’t.

Around the world. The dirty secret of “No We Can’t” is that lots of other countries do take collective action, and so they already enjoy the nice things Americans can’t have. Every other first-world country has universal health care; if you get sick, you get the care you need and your family doesn’t go bankrupt. And they provide that health security by spending less of their national wealth on it.

Thursday’s New York Times included a number of compelling graphs showing America’s unique dysfunction. Only in America does increased GDP not lead to increased life expectancy. A smaller share of our economy goes to worker pay. We imprison more people. Our “free market” system provides the most expensive cellphone service in the world.

Just about all the countries of Western Europe and Scandanavia have free college. Little Costa Rica can run itself on sustainable energy for months at a time. China, Japan, and Europe have extensive bullet-train networks. China is building enormous public-infrastructure projects. Finland is beating homelessness and has the best schools in the world. Fourteen other countries offer their residents faster internet than the US does; average download speed in Taiwan or Singapore is more than double ours.

And while we watch our public infrastructure and services decay, other countries give their citizens beautiful presents like the Hovenring bicycle interchange in the Netherlands,

or the Oodi Library in Helsinki, whose library director describes it as “book heaven”.

Imagine proposing marvelous things like that in an American city.

Covid. The most obvious current example of “No We Can’t” is the Trump administration’s surrender to Covid-19, which now we are told we just have to “live with” — unless we get unlucky and die of it. I often criticized George W. Bush’s response to 9-11, but at least he never told us we just had to live with mass terrorist attacks.

Public health is the original us problem. Throughout history, no matter how rich or powerful you might have been, you were in trouble if the people who prepared your feasts or changed your bed linens got the plague. At the margins, there were things you could do individually to try to save yourself, but ultimately the solutions had to come from the public sector: sanitation, pure water sources, untainted food supply chains, quarantines, and other treatment plans that contained diseases before they spread.

No matter how much medical technology advances, that aspect of it hasn’t changed: Public health is a public problem. Nothing you can do on your own is going to find a Covid-19 cure or vaccine. And you can try to be careful, but nobody is completely self-sufficient, so eventually you’re going to deal with other people. If they’re infected, you’ve got a problem. We’re all in this together.

Public-health problems are solved by government action, or they’re not solved at all. Early in the pandemic, we heard stories of governments that got ahead of the spread and took effective action to protect their populations. South Korea has gotten a lot of attention, partly because its first verified case of Covid-19 appeared on the same day ours did: January 20. The Koreans used the full public-health playbook: aggressive testing, quarantining, contact tracing, and public-information campaigns to encourage good hygiene.

It worked, and despite occasional flare-ups, it continues to work. As of yesterday, South Korea had 13,030 total cases of Covid-19 and 283 deaths. Adjusting for population, that would be like the US having around 85,000 cases and 1,800 deaths. Actually, we’ve had 2.9 million cases and 132,000 deaths.

Americans more-or-less sloughed that comparison off. Whatever the Koreans did couldn’t possibly have worked here, because No We Can’t. Through March and April, we ignored South Korea (and Taiwan and New Zealand and even Germany) and instead focused on what was happening in Italy and Spain. Looking down rather than up reassured us. We had it bad, but so did a lot of other places. We weren’t some special loser country.

But now we are.

Europe locked down harder than we did, and its people whined about it less. European political leaders united behind their public health officials, so basic hygiene measures like mask-wearing didn’t become political issues. It shows: Even including Italy and Spain, the EU as a whole, with about a third more people (446 million) than the US, now averages less than 4,000 new cases a day. This week, Arizona (population 7.5 million) has been averaging around 3,600 new cases each day, hitting a peak of 4,877 on Wednesday. The US as a whole hit 50,000 new cases for the first time on July 1, and stayed above that level for four days. (Yesterday was “down” to 43K, but I wonder how much of that was due to fewer tests being done over the holiday weekend.)

In the face of that horrifying comparison, the Trump administration has just decided to move on. His televised daily briefings ended in April, not long after his inject-bleach embarrassment. Since then Trump has talked about the virus only to minimize it, mock Joe Biden for wearing a mask, urge states to ignore the recommendations of his own CDC, and assemble his own supporters In rallies that have all the earmarks of super-spreader events. In highly promoted speeches on Friday and Saturday, Trump neither acknowledged our national failure to contain the virus, nor proposed any plan for the future beyond waiting for a vaccine — which we can’t even be sure is coming at all.

Other nations can beat this virus, but No We Can’t.

The post-policy GOP. The Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell noticed the pattern, and connected its dots like this:

Much as they gave up on coronavirus containment, U.S. political leaders previously gave up on solving our epidemic of gun violence. And on our high numbers of police-perpetrated killings. Also our high rates of child poverty, uninsurance and carbon emissions. On these and other metrics, the United States fares worse than most if not all other industrialized countries. Yet U.S. officials — from one party in particular — treat these crises as imaginary or unsolvable.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had a similar epiphany:

Covid-19 is like climate change: It isn’t the kind of menace the [Republican] party wants to acknowledge.

It’s not that the right is averse to fearmongering. But it doesn’t want you to fear impersonal threats that require an effective policy response, not to mention inconveniences like wearing face masks; it wants you to be afraid of people you can hate — people of a different race or supercilious liberals.

So instead of dealing with Covid-19, Republican leaders and right-wing media figures have tried to make the pandemic into the kind of threat they want to talk about. It’s “kung flu,” foisted on us by villainous Chinese. Or it’s a hoax perpetrated by the “medical deep state,” which is just looking for a way to hurt Trump.

Steve Benen, who writes the companion blog to the Rachel Maddow Show, elaborated on this theme at book length in The Imposters: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics. Benen coined the label “post-policy party” to describe the current GOP. His book goes issue by issue, and shows how Republicans have systematically ditched their policy-making apparatus in favor of marketing, with the result that they have plenty of good one-liners, but no programs they’re ready to implement once they take power.

The most obvious example is health care. Republicans have been running against ObamaCare since Obama proposed it in 2009, and Trump has been claiming since 2015 that ObamaCare “can be replaced with something much better for everybody. Let it be for everybody. But much better and much less expensive for people and for the government.” What would that “much better” replacement look like? We still have no idea. “Repeal and Replace” was a nice slogan, but once you’ve heard the slogan, you’ve heard all they have.

That’s true across the board. There are no Republican policies, just slogans.

You can see that in Congress, where the Democratic House passes bills that the Republican Senate never debates. Nothing comes back in the other direction. If the Democratic solutions seemed to liberal to Mitch McConnell, his Senate could amend those bills with Republican solutions and send them back. But there are no Republican solutions, so the bills just sit in Mitch’s in-box.

You can see it in the presidential campaign. Ordinarily, candidates for president are dying to tell you what they want to do in office. (For comparison, here’s the Biden policy page.) But here’s how Trump answered Sean Hannity’s question about the “top priority items” for his second term.

One of the things that will be really great — the word experience is still good, I always say talent is more important than experience, I’ve always said that — but the word experience is a very important word, a very important meaning.

I never did this before, never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington maybe 17 times and all of a sudden I’m the president of the United States, you know the story, riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our first lady and I say this is great but I didn’t know very many people in Washington, it wasn’t my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York, and now I know everybody. And I have great people in the administration. You make some mistakes, like an idiot like Bolton, you don’t have to drop bombs on everybody.

What American problems does he hope to address in the second term? None. He’ll grapple with imaginary enemies like Antifa, and “far-left fascism“. He’ll protect our endangered statues of Confederate generals, but not our soldiers in the field. He’ll continue tweeting and preening in front of crowds and playing at being president. But he won’t actually lead us in accomplishing anything, because No We Can’t.

The Republican Party must be removed from all positions of power. Much ink has been spilled lamenting the loss of bipartisanship, and waxing nostalgic about the deals cooked up by Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, or Tip O’Neil and Ronald Reagan. Usually this is presented in a pox-on-both-houses tone, as if the two sides were equally intransigent.

Here’s the point that is often lost: You can’t compromise with people who aren’t trying to do anything. If you and I both recognize a problem and each have our own approaches to solving it, chances are good we can work something out. But if I care about climate change and systemic racism but you claim both are hoaxes, or if I want universal health care and you don’t care about healthcare at all, or if you fake concern for the budget deficit when my party is in power, then forget about it the moment you take office, or if I want DACA dreamers to have a path to citizenship, and you won’t say what you want for them … where can we go from there? What can I offer you in exchange for your help with my agenda?

Steven Benen is right: Our two-party system only works when we have two governing parties, two parties that have directions they want to go and policies they think will take us there, two parties that have plans for dealing with the nation’s problems. At the moment we only have one such party, the Democrats. Our political system will be broken until Republicans get serious about governing again.

And they won’t until the electorate forces them to. That means voting them out, up and down the ballot. You don’t have to believe that the Democratic direction is ideal, just recognize that they have a direction. You may wish they would go much farther or faster, but at least they want to move. If we enter 2021 with Biden as president and two Democratic houses of Congress, we can at least try to address our national problems.

But if Republicans are left holding any lever of power at all, we’ll be stuck in the Land of No We Can’t.

So this week the US started finding 50,000 new cases of Covid-19 a day, and on Wednesday Arizona had more new cases than the entire European Union. Meanwhile, our President responded to this deepening crisis by using our tax dollars and military bands to put on two big campaign rallies — one at Mouth Rushmore and the other at the White House. Reading those speeches, I learned that I (and probably most of my readers) are “far-left fascists” who are trying to “overthrow the American Revolution”. And here I thought I was just trying to finally make good on the Declaration of Independence’s unfulfilled promises of equality and government based on the consent of the governed.

I stand corrected. But I still don’t see why I had to pay for him to insult me. I mean, when Hillary gave her “deplorables” speech, at least her campaign rented the space and Obama didn’t order the Blue Angels to fly overhead.

Anyway, this week the featured post will be “In the Land of No We Can’t”. It puts Trump’s surrender to the virus in the larger context of Republican fatalism, which holds that nothing can be done about school shootings, climate change, economic inequality, systemic racism, or most of the other problems Americans face. Either we’re supposed to deny the problems exist, cope with them through our individual actions, or just live with them, because collective action to solve them is off the table.

No we can’t.

That should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary has the virus surge to cover. Also: the jobs report, Biden’s VP options, Trump’s bizarre 4th of July celebrations, the Supreme Court, a new chapter of SharpieGate, and a number of other things, before ending with a bit of nostalgia about Karen when she was just a girl.

At every crucial moment, American officials were weeks or months behind the reality of the outbreak. Those delays likely cost tens of thousands of lives.

– “How the Virus Won”
The New York Times (6-25-2020)

The president thinks so much about what he’s doing in terms of the show he’s putting on that there’s been very little attention paid to how the government is functioning. … What does the dog do when it catches the car? Turns out the dog just keeps running and barking. I had this thought in the Lafayette Square madness. Trump puts on this show. And then he gets there and has nothing to do. He’s just standing there. His whole presidency is like that.

– Yuval Levin

This week’s featured post is “Back to Square One“. The reason there was no Sift last week was that I was virtually talking to churches in Illinois and Wisconsin (which answers the Firesign Theater question: “How can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all?”). The topic was “Hope and Realism in Difficult Times”. You can read the text and watch my dress rehearsal.

This week everybody was talking about the virus breaking loose again

That’s the topic of the featured post. Here are some extras that didn’t make it into that post.

A reporter at Oklahoma Watch tested positive for Covid-19 after covering Trump’s Tulsa rally. Ever the objective observer, the reporter says, “I can’t say definitively that I got it at the rally.”

McSweeney’s provides “A Message from Your University’s Vice President for Magical Thinking“.

Our university will proceed as if everything will be okay because we really, really want it to be.

It goes on from there.

Wednesday night was an interesting lesson in the divergence of American news bubbles. If you watched any of the major evening news shows on CNN or MSNBC, the main story was that the number of new Covid-19 cases in the United States had hit a new high that day, with new state records in the biggest states: California, Florida, and Texas. The second major story was that whistleblowers had testified to the House Judiciary Committee about political interference in Bill Barr’s Justice Department. (See below.) Those two stories dominated the conversation.

Throughout the evening, though, I would occasionally jump over to Fox News to see what stories Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham thought were most important. I didn’t watch any of those shows end-to-end, so I can’t definitely say they never mentioned the two stories that were dominating the other news networks. But I never caught them talking about either one. Instead, they wanted to talk about the excesses of the protests that were still going on in many major cities: statues being pulled down, the CHOP autonomous zone in Seattle, and so on. These were presented as very scary developments; our cities are dissolving into chaos.

To see if I was hearing this right, I bopped over to FoxNews.com. And yes, there was a story about the rising coronavirus case numbers — down in the third level of headlines. The impression I got was that, if you really must know about the spread of the virus, they would tell you; but they weren’t going to insist that you pay attention.

The image below was FoxNews.com Thursday morning. There are no stories about either the virus-case spikes or the Justice Department whistleblowers in the top two rows of headlines, or near the top of the two sidebars. The sidebar headlines you can’t make out are “Iraq War vet on destroying statues: ‘We don’t solve problems via mob rule'”, “Trump touts powerful alliance and relationship with Poland”, “Dr. Nesheiwat: ‘Exciting’ experimental COVID vaccine proved ‘robust immunity'”, and “Ari Fleischer: ‘We’re having the summer of violence’, you’re seeing one-sided lawlessness”.

In the main column, you had to go down to the 13th headline to find “L.A. mayor reveals ‘troubling trend’ after uptick in coronavirus cases“. (I’ve noticed this since: If Fox does talk about the rising case numbers, it focuses on blue California rather than red Texas or purple Florida.) And your reward for going that far was a 2fer in the 14th story. You could vicariously indulge both your virus-denial and your racism by reading: “Arizona councilman chants ‘I can’t breathe’ before ripping off face mask“.

FoxNews.com Thursday morning

and Russia offering bounties to kill American troops

The New York Times broke the story Friday:

American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter. …

Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

Several other news organizations have independently corroborated parts of this scoop. CNN was told a similar story by “a European intelligence official”. ABC got it from “a military official”, The Wall Street Journal from “people familiar with” a “classified American intelligence assessment”, The Washington Post from “officials”, and so on. So nobody is willing to identify a source, but it’s pretty clear the NYT didn’t just make this up; other news organizations looked for a source and found one.

The Post added this important detail: actual American deaths.

Russian bounties offered to Taliban-linked militants to kill coalition forces in Afghanistan are believed to have resulted in the deaths of several U.S. service members, according to intelligence gleaned from U.S. military interrogations of captured militants in recent months.

Trump and various other top officials spent the weekend using a Sergeant Schultz I-know-nothing defense. Sunday morning — what took him so long? — Trump tweeted:

Nobody briefed or told me, @VP Pence, or Chief of Staff @Mark Meadows about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians, as reported by an “anonymous source” by the fake-news @nytimes. Everybody is denying it and there have not been many attacks on us.

Marcy Wheeler points out that Mark Meadows wasn’t Chief of Staff at the time, which “makes it clear that whoever wrote this tweet didn’t actually refer to any records.”

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe tweeted:

I have confirmed that neither the President nor the Vice President were ever briefed on any intelligence alleged by the New York Times in its reporting yesterday.

Ratcliffe himself was took office at the end of May.

The Times insisted otherwise on Saturday:

But one American official had told The Times that the intelligence finding that the Russians had offered and paid bounties to Afghan militants and criminals had been briefed at the highest levels of the White House. Another said it was included in the President’s Daily Brief.

John Bolton happened to be on Jake Tapper’s Sunday show anyway to promote his book, so he got to comment:

The fact that the President feels compelled to tweet about the news story here shows that what his fundamental focus is, is not the security of our forces, but whether he looks like he wasn’t paying attention. So he’s saying well nobody told me therefore you can’t blame me

CNN national security analyst Samantha Vinograd described this as “gross incompetence any way you cut it”.

It would be disastrous not to get to the bottom of this. Either someone sat on this intelligence, or the President didn’t pay attention, or he decided to do nothing about it. Worse than doing nothing, Trump has continued to carry water for Putin internationally: At the beginning of this month, Trump was still pushing to get Russia invited to the G7 meetings. And regardless of who knew what when, Trump has heard about it now. Is he going to once again take Putin’s word over US intelligence and say it’s not true? Is he going to do anything about it?

and Justice Department corruption

An appeals court ruled 2-1 that the judge must accept the Justice Department’s decision to drop the Michael Flynn case, in spite of all the reasons to think that undue political influence was at work. So: obstruction of justice works.

In addition, Attorney General Barr got rid of the US attorney heading SDNY, which has been investigating several Trump-related cases. Rudy Giuliani is rumored to be under investigation, and the trial of his former friends Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman  is supposed to begin in February. Barr had previously gotten rid of the US attorney in DC, which is how Roger Stone’s sentencing memorandum got rewritten.

Congress heard testimony from two Justice Department whistleblowers. Prosecutor  Aaron Zelinsky testified that “What I saw was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from every other defendant. … This leniency was happening because of Stone’s relationship with the president.” And John Elias alleged political interference in antitrust cases.

and Biden’s huge lead

Biden has held a lead over Trump in head-to-head national polls more-or-less from the beginning of this race, but those leads almost always came with two caveats:

• It’s way too early to take polls seriously.
• Even if he wins the national popular vote by as much as 5%, he might still lose in the Electoral College.

But in recent weeks Biden’s lead has extended to 9.4% in 538’s polling average and 9.2% in Real Clear Politics’ differently weighted average. The most recent NYT/Siena poll has him ahead of Trump 50%-36%. That’s enough to put the Electoral College out of reach. 538’s state-by-state analysis now has Florida as the “tipping point”, the state that puts Biden over the top. He leads there by 7.4%.

In addition to the polls, there are anecdotes, like 2016 Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina supporting Biden over Trump.

Democrats are constantly reminding each other not to be complacent, so I’ve been seeing references to Mike Dukakis’ 17-point lead over George Bush in July of 1988, a race Bush ultimately won by nearly 8%. That’s not a compelling parallel, though: Dukakis was relatively unknown compared to Biden, so his public image was easier to tar with negative ads. Also, Bush’s approval had been near 90% during the First Gulf War, so most voters could at least remember a time when they thought he was a good president. Trump, conversely, has never had majority approval.

The real reason to maintain focus, though, is that Trump bound to try to cheat. His claim that mail-in ballots are inherently unreliable is false, but it justifies his followers in whatever shenanigans they can come up with. The bigger Biden’s margin is, the harder it will be for fraud to take it away.

The failure of Trump’s Tulsa rally made me think of the entertainment term “jump the shark”. Trump is trying to run his old playbook in a different world, and when confronted with that fact he just tries to push it harder.

In 2016, the country was facing no immediate crises, so culture-war messaging and identity politics could carry the day for Trump. But in 2020, the world looks grim, and the public wants to know that the next president has some idea what to do about it. Trump clearly does not. Witness the word salad Sean Hannity evoked by asking the softball question: “What are your top priorities for a second term?”

As Yuval Levin put it in the quote at the top: Trump is the dog who caught the car, and all he knows to do now is keep running and barking.

and abortion

Just this morning, the Supreme Court blocked a Louisiana law that would have had the effect of closing every abortion clinic in the state. John Roberts crossed over to vote with the Court’s four liberals.

Legally, the case should have been a slam-dunk, because a nearly identical Texas law was thrown out four years ago. The only thing that has changed since then is the composition of the Court, particularly Justice Kavanaugh replacing Justice Kennedy. So this should have been a 9-0 decision: Quote the precedent and move on.

This is the third recent victory for the Court’s liberals, joining the LGBTQ-rights case and the DACA case.

This may sound paranoid, but I have the feeling John Roberts is setting up something awful in the remaining big case concerning Trump’s taxes. Roberts has some control over the order in which decisions come out, and it would fit his pattern to buffer the pain of a horrible decision by releasing more popular decisions first.

Meanwhile an appeals court held that Trump’s emergency seizure of otherwise allocated funds to build his border wall is invalid.

The panel held that the Executive Branch lacked independent constitutional authority to authorize the transfer of funds. The panel noted that the Appropriations Clause of the U.S. Constitution exclusively grants the power of the purse to Congress. The panel held that the transfer of funds violated the Appropriations Clause, and, therefore, was unlawful.

… The Federal Defendants cite drug trafficking statistics, but fail to address how the construction of additional physical barriers would further the interdiction of drugs. The Executive Branch’s failure to show, in concrete terms, that the public interest favors a border wall is particularly significant given that Congress determined fencing to be a lower budgetary priority and the Department of Justice’s own data points to a contrary conclusion.

and Trump’s push to invalidate ObamaCare

The Justice Department has filed a brief in a case about ObamaCare that the Supreme Court will decide in its next term. It argues that the whole law is unconstitutional, and would have the immediate effect of throwing tens of millions of people off of their health insurance, as well as making tens of millions of other people worry about their pre-existing conditions.

Naturally, Trump claims these horrible outcomes would never really come to pass, because once ObamaCare has been tossed aside he will finally reveal the magic replacement plan he has been talking about for five years without revealing any details.

In his entire first term, we have seen no sign of the “beautiful” health plan that Trump promised would replace ObamaCare, the one that would “cover everybody” and leave nobody worse off financially.

By now it should be obvious that Trump never had a plan; he was just stringing words together. Republicans in general have no plan. That became obvious when they tried to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare in 2017. “Replace” was just a word that polled well; it meant nothing.

If Trump gets his wish and the Supreme Court invalidates ObamaCare, no fairy godmother will tap a pumpkin and turn it into a Republican healthcare plan. ObamaCare will just be gone and nothing will replace it until Democrats get back in power.

BTW: If you’re a young person who has recovered from Covid-19, or who imagines that recovering from it would be no big deal: Decades from now, you would still have a pre-existing condition. Your insurance company might point to any subtle scarring on your lungs or other long-term organ damage as a reason not to cover whatever health problem you might have then.

Biden responded to Trump’s attack on ObamaCare with a good speech on health care.

and DC statehood

The House voted to make Washington D. C. a state. The bill is expected to go nowhere in the Senate and Trump has promised to veto it.

This is a voter suppression issue. The District of Columbia has a population over 700K, which makes it bigger than Wyoming or Vermont, and not far behind Alaska and North Dakota. But DC is 49% black and only 44% white. It would be a reliably blue state with two Democratic senators and a congressperson. (Let’s not even get into Puerto Rico, which would be the 31st-largest state, between Utah and Iowa. But, I mean, they’re Puerto Ricans! Can’t give them a say in how the national government is run.)

It doesn’t take much interpretation to see that the Republican opponents are saying those people shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Here’s Mitch McConnell:

They plan to make the District of Columbia a state—that’d give them two new Democratic senators—Puerto Rico a state, that would give them two more new Democratic senators. […] So this is full bore socialism on the march in the House. And yeah, as long as I’m the majority leader of the Senate, none of that stuff is going anywhere.

Socialism on the march … yeah, it must have been Karl Marx who described governments as “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed“.

And Tom Cotton:

Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging and construction, and ten times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state.

So people in Wyoming work for a living, unlike all those bureaucrats and welfare mothers in DC. The WaPo’s Karen Tumulty responds.

Wyoming is an interesting example. Nearly half of Wyoming’s territory is federal acreage — a much higher proportion than in the District (less than one-third). And among states, Wyoming ranks top in the nation when it comes to the percentage of its workforce employed by federal or local governments.

Which makes you wonder what, precisely, is the senator’s criterion for deeming a group of people “well-rounded.”

Cotton also raised the argument that the kind of people who live in DC are just not ready for self-government.

Would you trust Mayor Bowser to keep Washington safe if she were given the powers of a governor? Would you trust Marion Barry?

Why not just go ahead and use the N-word, Tom? You know you want to.

you also might be interested in …

The New York Times does a great job of annotating video to show how police over-reaction in Seattle turned a peaceful demonstration into a violent encounter.

It looks like Mississippi is going to remove the Confederate stars-and-bars from the state flag.

#ByeIvanka is a bit harsh, but you have to wonder at the administration’s decision to make her the face of skills-based hiring. The implication seems clear: The federal government is doing away with “outdated career or licensure requirements” so that it can hire more relatives of well-connected people.

I’ve written before about defunding the police: It makes sense to divert some large portion of local police-department budgets to fund other kinds of first-responders, who can answer 911 calls that don’t require guns or handcuffs, like marital disputes or mental health problems. Those incidents might get handled better, and fewer people will wind up dead.

However, we need to watch out for a trap: The Covid-19 crisis and the ensuing economic collapse have made a shambles of local budgets; expenses are up and revenues are down. There’s going to be pressure to cut across the board, including laying off teachers and not fixing potholes.

In this environment, the path of least resistance is to substantially cut the police budget, as protesters have been demanding, but not to fund any alternative first-responders. That scenario looks like the nightmare painted by right-wing critics of police defunding — you call 911 and no one answers. When that turns out badly, as is bound to happen somewhere, it will be easy to convince the public that the defund-the-police approach has been tried and discredited.

and let’s close with a marching tune

“March, March” from the trio formerly known as The Dixie Chicks. Here are the lyrics.

This week the number of new Covid-19 infections spiked up to even higher levels than before the shutdown. Other governments have avoided this scenario, but ours has no plan for dealing with it.

What if we have a crisis? In one of the less-noticed parts of John Bolton’s new book, Chief of Staff John Kelly complains that he is frustrated to the point of quitting. “What if we have a real crisis like 9/11,” Kelly asks Bolton, “with the way he makes decisions?”

As Bolton — like so many other former Trump insiders before him — demonstrates with numerous examples, “the way he makes decisions” is to start from a place of complete ignorance. (Prior to his ill-fated Helsinki meeting with Putin, he asked aides whether Finland was part of Russia. He also seemed not to know that the United Kingdom has nuclear weapons.) Then he ignores the briefings that come from the intelligence community or other government experts, and doesn’t ask for any studies or position papers from people the government employs to do research like that. Instead, he spends hours each day talking to friends on the phone and listening to the pundits on Fox News. If he hears something he likes, maybe that becomes government policy immediately, or maybe it turns into a line he uses at rallies. If the rally-goers cheer, then that’s what the world’s greatest superpower will do.

If you think there ought to be a more rigorous process than that, you must be part of the Deep State.

This is how we got the border wall project. No one who studies border security for a living ever concluded that a wall between the US and Mexico was the most efficient way to accomplish some desirable goal. But Trump’s 2016 campaign advisers decided he needed a “mnemonic device” to get him to focus on immigration. Any realistic plan to deal with unwanted border-crossings is full of the kind of legal, diplomatic, environmental, and other details Trump hates, but “Build a Wall” was simple enough to hold in his head, and the crowds loved it — especially when he added the fantasy that Mexico would pay for it.

Those cheering crowds are why some adviser’s mnemonic device is turning into a physical wall that takes years to build, costs billions of dollars, and doesn’t solve any identifiable problems. We just lucked out that Trump wasn’t still holding rallies when the inject-yourself-with-bleach idea got into his head.

Own-goal crises. The reason Bolton and Kelly were having a what-if conversation rather than recalling an actual disaster is that until that point the United States had been having an extraordinary run of good luck. You may remember these last three-plus years as a high-wire state of constant national anxiety, but in fact the real world was unusually tame. Barack Obama had handed Trump a country in pretty good shape, particularly compared to the one Obama had received from George W. Bush. All the major economic trends were in the right direction, Obama’s light-footprint strategy to defeat the ISIS caliphate was working, and so on. Obama did leave behind a number of worrisome long-term challenges, like climate change, the ascension of China, nuclear proliferation, the decades-long decline of America’s middle class, and so on. But no one really expected Trump to make progress on any of that, and on any given day all those problems have been pretty easy to ignore.

Instead, what made the pre-Covid Trump years feel so tense were the crises Trump created himself: He ratcheted up his “fire and fury” rhetoric against North Korea to the point that war seemed inevitable, and then arranged a marvelous reality-show resolution when he “fell in love” with Kim Jong Un, a performance so compelling that Trump wanted a Nobel Peace Prize for it. Of course, nothing was actually accomplished by the whole up-and-down cycle (other than some great propaganda for the Kim regime), but didn’t it look grand on TV?

The low points in his approval rating were similarly self-inflicted: when he described the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville as “fine people” or sided with Putin against the US intelligence agencies or couldn’t let go of a spat with a military widow. His China trade war spooked the markets and slowed the economy, but that was also something he brought on himself, so he could create good news whenever he wanted by tweeting about “progress” in the negotiations or delaying some tariff he had threatened to impose unilaterally.

Since those were all holes he dug himself, he could just stop digging, divert the public’s attention elsewhere, and wait for it all to blow over. Easy-peasy.

And then there was the ever-rising budget deficit, which would have been framed as an existential crisis for Obama, but became acceptable once a Republican was in the White House.

Before Covid, Trump only had to face two truly external problems: impeachment and his complete botch of the federal response to the Puerto Rican hurricane. Impeachment was never a big worry for two reasons: First, no matter how guilty he was, the Republican Senate was never going to convict him. (In the end, they decided that the House’s evidence wasn’t good enough to remove a president chosen by 46% of the people, and that if there was better evidence, they didn’t want to see it.) And second, the underlying offense (the extortion of Ukraine) didn’t really matter to Trump’s base. As for the Puerto Rican hurricane, well, that mainly affected Spanish-speaking people of color that the Trump base also didn’t care about. (Yeah, thousands of them are dead, but it’s not like they were ever “real Americans”, right?)

The virus is real. But Covid is different. There’s a real virus out there killing people. It can’t be intimidated by tweets or derogatory nicknames like “Wuhan virus” or “kung flu”. Even though it has been killing people of color at a rate disproportionate to their numbers, it kills white people too. And now it’s even spreading in red states (Texas) or purple states (Florida) that Trump needs to carry if he wants to be re-elected.

Trump has no plan to defeat the virus, but that’s par for the course. He doesn’t have a plan to deal with any of America’s problems. For example, he’s still promising a “FAR BETTER AND MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE ALTERNATIVE” to ObamaCare, and to “ALWAYS PROTECT PEOPLE WITH PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS,ALWAYS!!!” But in the five years since he came down the escalator, he has not produced so much as a back-of-the-envelope sketch of a program to deliver on such promises. I’m sure the words in those capitalized phrases sound good to him and his fans, but as soon as the sound waves fade out the air is empty again.

Like his bromance with the North Korean dictator, Trump’s coronavirus briefings also made good TV for a while, but eventually they became embarrassing and he got bored with them. So he applied his usual crisis-control tactic: He congratulated himself for defeating the virus, which is “dying out“; flattered or browbeat Republican governors to reopen their states too early; stopped talking about the whole crisis, even as additional thousands of Americans continued to die each week; tried to divert our attention elsewhere; and waited for it all to blow over.

But here’s the thing: Reality doesn’t blow over. Covid-19 isn’t a PR flap or a misstep he can back away from, it’s a pandemic. For a short time, he may be able to get large segments of the public to “ignore that pile of dead bodies over in the corner” (as Bill Gates put it), but people keep dying even when everyone’s looking the other way, and eventually we start to notice again.

Comparisons. Covid-19 started out in China in December, and from there spread around the world, taking different courses in different countries. Some small countries with good leadership and a strong public spirit — New Zealand, Iceland, and South Korea pop to mind — reacted quickly, got the epidemic under control, and continue to hold it in check through a combination of testing, contact tracing, quarantine, and public cooperation in preventive measures like mask-wearing, hand-washing, and social distancing.

A number of EU countries, beginning with Italy, had really bad outbreaks, but then shut down just about all activities other than food distribution and medical care, using their national wealth and strong social-welfare systems to keep individual and family budgets above water. After a month or two of extreme sacrifice, the number of new infections began to collapse, to the point that they can now make use of the tactics that the fast-reacting countries used.

And then there’s the United States, where Covid-19 became the kind of crisis Kelly had been worrying about. Here’s how our daily reported new infections compared with the EU and South Korea as of Saturday.

South Korea’s infections stayed down. The EU’s went up and came down. But in the United States infections went up, started to creep down a little, and then shot back up.

What did we do wrong? A lot of things. Thursday The New York Times presented an illuminating series of graphics describing about how the virus spread in the US.

At every crucial moment, American officials were weeks or months behind the reality of the outbreak. Those delays likely cost tens of thousands of lives.

A short list of early failings:

• The CDC’s initial set of test kits were faulty, and tests were not imported to fill the gap, resulting in what the NYT described as “the lost month“. This was both a CDC failure and a White House failure, because it’s the role of the White House to keep tabs on the workings of the government and intervene when something important is falling through the cracks in the system.
• As a result, the initial spread of the virus was grossly underestimated. The NYT article suggests that in mid-February, when the US had 15 known cases (that Trump said “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero“) there were actually around 2,000 cases spread across ten major cities.
• Unlike other countries, the US did not use its lead time to build its stockpile of masks and gowns for medical personnel, as detailed by HHS whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright.
• The federal government did not prepare the public for the sacrifices that would eventually be asked of it. Instead, officials from President Trump on down consistently reassured the public that the virus was “totally under control” and “the risk is low”.
• Trump began politicizing the virus response early, charging on March 9 that “The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant.”

By mid-March, states began to respond, with Republican Governor Mike DeWine shutting down schools in Ohio, Democrat Andrew Cuomo closing businesses in New York, and local health officials in six San Francisco Bay counties issuing a shelter-in-place order. A national campaign to “flatten the curve” began. Even Trump got on board for a month or so, rewriting history to claim: “I’ve always known this is a real, this is a pandemic. I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

Undermining the national will. The number of new cases reached an initial peak of 33,000-a-day in early-to-mid April and then began to slope downward. But unlike Europe, the United States lacked the national will to finish the job.

That failure came from the top. As soon as it was clear a peak had been reached, Trump began pressuring states to relax restrictions and reopen their economies without waiting to achieve the milestones listed in his administration’s own guidelines.

Trump encouraged armed demonstrators to intimidate state governments. When protesters with rifles came to the Michigan statehouse carrying signs saying “Tyrants get the rope”, Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”. He also encouraged “liberators” in Virginia and Minnesota. Without once calling for the protesters to disarm, he tweeted:

The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.

Michigan more-or-less held firm, but Republican governors in red states knew they could not survive a Trump tweet storm and could benefit from White House photo ops. Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona began to open their economies without achieving the statistical milestones laid out by the CDC. When the Republican members of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court invalidated the Governor Ever’s stay-at-home order and plunged the state’s gradual-reopening plan into chaos, Trump was jubilant.

The Great State of Wisconsin, home to Tom Tiffany’s big Congressional Victory on Tuesday, was just given another win. Its Democrat Governor was forced by the courts to let the State Open. The people want to get on with their lives. The place is bustling!

Meanwhile, he was campaigning against wearing masks, which nearly all public health officials recommend when people are unable to maintain social distance. He mocked Joe Biden for wearing a mask in public, and for “cowering in the basement” rather than holding face-to-face events. Trump refused to wear a mask while touring a mask factory in Arizona, even as “Live and Let Die” played on the sound system.

Long after it had become clear that the reopenings were premature and cases were spiking, Trump pushed to hold dangerous large-crowd events in Tulsa and Phoenix. (Fortunately for the nation, the crowd in Tulsa was not nearly so large as he had expected.) In Tulsa, he discounted the rising case numbers, arguing (falsely) that they just reflect increased testing, and offering a 10-year-old with “sniffles” as an example of a case. He said he had asked his administration to “slow down the testing”, and later contradicted aides who tried to downplay that suggestion as a joke. “I don’t kid,” he told reporters.

This anti-social leadership has had its effect: Around the country outraged people, many sporting MAGA hats or Trump shirts, are refusing to abide by rules that mandate mask-wearing or social distancing. Michelle Goldberg summarizes:

This is what American exceptionalism looks like under Donald Trump. It’s not just that the United States has the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths of any country in the world. Republican political dysfunction has made a coherent campaign to fight the pandemic impossible.

The viral resurgence. New infections have been rising sharply in precisely the southern and western states that have reopened quickly, refuting the theory (which Trump had long promoted) that the pandemic would fade in warm weather. Nationally, cases had flattened out at less than 20,000 per day in late May and early June. But they have been above 38,000 each of the last five days.

On the state level, the best measure for comparison is the 7-day-weighted-average of new cases per day per 100K people. Here are the most seriously affected states:

Arizona 44

Florida 30

South Carolina 25

Mississippi 23

Arkansas 20

Louisiana 20

Nevada 19

Texas 19

California also has an large number of cases, due partially to its size. Its daily-new-case-per-100K number is 12. New York, which was the center of the epidemic in April, is down to 3.

And as for Trump’s attempt to discount those numbers, 10-year-olds with “sniffles” don’t show up in the ICU. Hospitals are reportedly close to capacity in Arizona, Florida, and Texas, and perhaps other states getting less national attention.

The Washington Post assesses what went wrong in Arizona:

At critical junctures, blunders by top officials undermined faith in the data purportedly driving decision-making, according to experts monitoring Arizona’s response. And when forbearance was most required, as the state began to reopen despite continued community transmission, an abrupt and uniform approach — without transparent benchmarks or latitude for stricken areas to hold back — led large parts of the public to believe the pandemic was over.

And now, Arizona is facing more per capita cases than recorded by any country in Europe or even by hard-hit Brazil. Among states with at least 20 people hospitalized for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, no state has seen its rate of hospitalizations increase more rapidly since Memorial Day.

And Republican governors or not, Texas, Florida, and Arizona have all had to retreat on their reopening timetables.

Deaths haven’t turned back up yet, but they will. The one saving grace is that nationally, deaths are still declining. For weeks I’ve been commenting on the mystery of how the death rate could continue downward while the new-case rate flattened and then turned upward.

Med school Professor Florian Krammer points to the same three explanations I’ve given: more testing has raised the new-case rate (or more accurately, made it better match the actual spread of the infection); better care is keeping people alive; but most of all, that the age-distribution of the infected population is shifting to younger people who are more likely to survive.

But he then goes one step further: Something similar happened in Iran in May. The new-case curve had been dropping, but started going up again around May 1.

But deaths did not go up. People explained to me, that now mostly young people are getting infected so nothing bad would happen.

Deaths started going up May 25.

What happened? First, it takes time to die of COVID-19. Second, cases probably really built up in younger people. But they diffuse into older populations. And then the deaths rose.

Each state has its own version of the pandemic, and death rates might already have started upward in some of them, like Arkansas and Texas. (The curves are jittery enough that it’s hard to be sure.) But nationwide, the new-case curve started rising around June 10. That would suggest deaths will begin rising about July 4.

Similar ideas (with a similar timeline) show up on the COVID Tracking Project Blog.

New daily positive cases only began to exceed the plateau of the previous two weeks around June 18-19, which means that an increase in deaths as a result of the rise in new cases would not be expected to show up until July.

So where are we? In some ways, we’re back where we were in April, and in some ways we’re worse off. Except in the northeast, whatever we gained through the sacrifices of the shutdown has been frittered away by bad leadership.

So now John Kelly knows: What happens if we have a real crisis “with the way he makes decisions”? This.

What is needed at this point is another wave of restrictions, and every state that thinks it is about to reopen its bars or arenas needs to think again. The American people can’t be trusted in bars; that is now a proven fact, at least until we have a vaccine. But a second wave of stay-at-home orders is hard to feature given that most of the country has nothing to show for the first wave.

We also need the kind of public spirit we had in the early days of “flatten the curve”: We need to encourage each other to wear masks, avoid crowds, keep our distance, and in general use common sense. Unfortunately, this is very unlikely to happen now that flouting common sense is necessary to establish your identity as a Trump conservative.

As best I can tell, this hasn’t happened in any other country (except maybe Brazil, which is also in very bad shape). Things got bad in Italy and Spain, but taking stupid risks never became a political identity.

And that reminds me of another famous question, this one raised by Trump himself in the 2016 campaign. “What the hell do you have to lose?”

Now we know.

So I was off for a week. Did I miss anything?

Two weeks ago, the rise in Covid-19 cases nationally was still debatable, and even the outbreaks in states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas could be optimistically interpreted as blips that happened to coincide, but didn’t necessarily add up to a trend. Now it’s clear we’re back in the soup nationally, and it’s the Northeast, where cases are still flat or declining, that looks like the anomaly.

In some ways, we’re worse off now, because the President is AWOL, the federal government has no plan, and common-sense measures the public needs to take — like mask-wearing and avoiding crowds — have turned into culture-war issues. Instead of leading a patriotic response to the virus, the President is out there promoting anti-social anti-public-health activities like large-scale political rallies. All the expense and sacrifice of the lockdown seems to have been wasted, except in the Northeast and a few counties near San Francisco.

Lots of other stuff has been happening, but that’s the most serious development, which I’ll discuss in “Back to Square One”, which might not be out until 11 EDT. The weekly summary then somehow has to cover the revelation that Putin offered bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan (and Trump has done nothing about it), the ongoing story of the corruption of the Justice Department, the huge lead Joe Biden is building in the polls, Trump’s push to get the Supreme Court to invalidate ObamaCare, and DC statehood. I’ll try to find space to mention Mississippi changing its flag and an appeals court ruling against Trump’s border-wall emergency, which might have been lead stories in more normal times. And then I’ll close with a new video by The [formerly known as Dixie] Chicks.

Let’s predict that to appear around 1.

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on June 29.

Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America.  … Ignorance/hate → racist ideas → discrimination: this causal relationship is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship — racial discrimination led to racist ideas which led to ignorance and hate.

– Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning

This week’s featured post is “What’s in a Slogan?”

This week everybody was still talking about policing

The featured post discusses the “Abolish the Police” slogan.

With the George Floyd protests still continuing, there’s been a new police killing:

Rayshard Brooks, 27, was shot dead on Friday night after police were called to [a Wendy’s in Atlanta] over reports that he had fallen asleep in the drive-through lane.

Apparently Brooks failed a sobriety test and struggled with police. He grabbed a police taser and was running away with it when a policeman opened fire. The NYT reconstructs the incident in detail from video.

In addition to the question of why it was necessary to shoot a man who was running away, the case illustrates some of the issues that abolish-the-police activists have been raising: Yes, falling asleep in a drive-through lane is a violation of public order. But why is sending people with guns the right response?

Demonstrations in the US have inspired anti-racism demonstrations overseas. Thousands of Germans formed a ribbon-connected “socially distant human chain” in Berlin on Sunday. And here’s a quote that brings me shame: A German politician says the demonstrators have it wrong. “Germany is not the USA. We don’t have a racism problem in the police.” We’re the nation other nations don’t want to be compared to.

Charles Blow reviews the positive imagery we have seen since the death of George Floyd, images in which people of all colors and ethnicities seem united in their response to police brutality and racial injustice. But the police are not the cause of injustice, racial or otherwise. They are the enforcers of systemic injustices that continue.

This country has established a system of supreme inequity, with racial inequity being a primary form, and used the police to protect the wealth that the system generated for some and to control the outrages and outbursts of those opposed to it and oppressed by it.

It has used the police to make the hostile tranquil, to erase and remove from free society those who expressed sickness coming from a society which poisoned them with persecutions. …

But just remember: These are not necessarily rogue officers. They are instruments of the system and manifestations of society.

They are violent to black people because America is violent to black people. They oppress because America oppresses.

The police didn’t give birth to American violence and inhumanity. America’s violence and inhumanity gave birth to them.

The point of books like The New Jim Crow and Slavery by Another Name is that systems for controlling black people and expropriating the value of their labor don’t just morph from era to era, they morph cleverly. In Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi argues that new racist ideas don’t bubble up from the ignorant masses, they are constructed by some of the most brilliant and educated minds of the time.

Any system of inequality requires justification and enforcement. If you have more than someone else or enjoy privileges they are denied, you crave an explanation that exonerates you from their resentment and protects your advantages. Some intelligent person will soon satisfy that craving with the justification and enforcement mechanism required. Like junkies determined to kick our current habit, we must be careful not to just shift to a new drug.

and the virus

Death totals continue to decline, while the number of new cases is at best flat and possibly increasing. The total number of US deaths is up to 117.9K, up from 112.6 last week.

The contrast between cases and deaths is even more pronounced in certain states. Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Florida, and a few other states now have more proven new cases each day than ever before — more than double in Arizona — but they had more deaths per day in early May.

I can think of a few possible explanations:

• Even though there’s still no sure-fire treatment for Covid-19, doctors are getting better at keeping people alive long enough for their immune systems to beat the virus.
• Maybe we’re getting better at protecting the most vulnerable. Perhaps the new cases are mostly young otherwise-healthy people, so they’re dying at a lower rate.
• Because there was less testing in early May, maybe there were more infections then than anyone realized.

In any case, unless there’s some breakthrough in treatment, this pattern can’t go on forever. If cases keep increasing, eventually deaths will start increasing too.

In case you’re wondering how to stay safe when your office reopens, Mike Pence has provided us with a great don’t-do-this photo.

Thanks to Trump campaign staffers in Virginia, we can see all the major no-nos in one picture: enclosed spaces, large numbers of people in one room, and standing close to people not wearing masks.

Trump intends to give us another bad example: A big indoor rally in Tulsa on Saturday. Originally the rally was scheduled for Friday, which is Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating the end of slavery. Tulsa would be a particularly bad place to mark Juneteenth, given the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, where whites burned a prosperous black neighborhood to the ground and killed hundreds of African Americans.

Eventually, Trump backed off of the Juneteenth date. Instead, the rally will happen on Saturday, with crowds packed together indoors and probably very few masks. But the Trump campaign has thought about this and taken precautions to protect itself:

“By clicking register below, you are acknowledging that an inherent risk of exposure to COVID-19 exists in any public place where people are present,” the disclaimer reads at the bottom of the ticket page on the Trump website. “By attending the Rally, you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree not to hold Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.; BOK Center; ASM Global; or any of their affiliates, directors, officers, employees, agents, contractors, or volunteers liable for any illness or injury.”

and the Supreme Court

I haven’t had time to read the decision or even digest the news stories, but CNN is reporting this:

Federal civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender workers, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The landmark ruling will extend protections to millions of workers nationwide and is a defeat for the Trump administration, which argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination based on sex did not extend to claims of gender identity and sexual orientation.

The 6-3 opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s four liberal justices.

Gorsuch is the shocker here. I don’t know what to think.

and symbols of the Confederacy

160 years ago, the white aristocracy of 11 states led them into revolt to preserve their mastery over millions of enslaved Africans. That revolt led to a war in which more than 600,000 soldiers died. Today, those wealthy traitors are honored in numerous ways, such as flying their flag, honoring their statues, and immortalizing their names by attaching them to military bases, schools, and other civic institutions. Descendants of the enslaved people are constantly reminded of the slavers who expropriated their ancestors’ labor, and of the continuing legacy of white supremacy.

You’d think that changing all this would be uncontroversial, but you’d be wrong. Still, one result of the wave of protests that followed George Floyd’s murder has been a further erosion of the honors devoted to the Confederacy.

• Protesters in Richmond toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis. Governor Northam announced that a statue of Robert E. Lee owned by the state will also be removed.
• The mayor of Birmingham pledged to finish removing a statue of Confederate sailor Charles Linn that protesters attacked. Birmingham has tried to remove Confederate statues in the past, but the state legislature passed a law blocking the city. The mayor is daring the state to enforce its law.
• NASCAR announced: “The display of the confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties.” The policy came in response to a request from the racing circuit’s only African American full-time driver, Bubba Wallace. NASCAR has requested that fans not bring Confederate flags since 2015, but some have continued to do so.
• Wednesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved Elizabeth Warren’s amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. The amendment would give the Defense Department three years to rename the military bases that currently are named after Confederate officers. “The language, adopted by voice vote as President Donald Trump preemptively threatened to veto any defense bill that did just that, affects massive bases like Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Benning in Georgia. But it also goes further and includes everything from ships to streets on Defense Department property.”
• Democrats in Congress have introduced a bill to remove statues of 11 Confederate generals and officials from the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opposes the bill because the choice of statues belongs to the states. (Each state gets two.) Apparently no Georgian in history is a more appropriate choice than Alexander Hamilton Stephens, the Confederate Vice President who gave the famous Cornerstone speech: “Stephens said the Confederacy was founded ‘upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition’.”

I’m sure I missed some recent developments. The pro-Confederate (i.e., Republican) responses to these proposals has generally been that liberals are trying to “take away our history“, or that next we will have to remove monuments to all slave-owning or otherwise objectionable figures.

My answer to the “rewrite history” objection is that there’s a difference between marking history and making heroes out of the defenders of slavery. If “history” is the point of monuments, then there ought to be a gigantic monument to General Sherman in Atlanta: He was one of the Civil War’s greatest generals, and his victory in Atlanta was a decisive moment in the war. There isn’t such a monument because Atlanta’s white population hates Sherman for his role in burning the city. And yet, the South’s black population is supposed to tolerate monuments to men who fought to keep their ancestors enslaved.

Andrew Egger answers the next-they’ll-come-for-George-Washington objection.

There’s a world of difference between purging monuments to anyone with a complicated history (FDR, Wilson, Jefferson) and purging monuments to those who are *only deemed historical* for acts we now correctly deem shameful. What did Nathan Bedford Forrest ever do for America?

If, say, Robert E. Lee had never fought to preserve slavery, would anyone remember him today? Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. George Washington led the revolutionary forces and was a key figure in establishing a government that followed its constitution. But what accomplishment of Jefferson Davis is unrelated to slavery?

Vote Vets has this to say about military bases like Fort Bragg.

and Antifa

We’re getting a lesson in just how far Trumpists are willing to go to justify his paranoid rants. The local news site Columbus Alive tells the wild story of how a busload of traveling street performers got “outed” by Columbus Police as Antifa provocateurs.

The police reported finding knives (kitchen knives), a hatchet (for the wood stove), and clubs (juggling clubs). The police social media post — with a picture of the decorated bus — got shared thousands of times, and the performers are now constantly being hassled by Trumpists who think they’ve found Antifa.

Another set of paranoid rants concerns the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (formerly the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) in Seattle. It’s a six-block area that has been taken over by protesters, and which state and local officials have decided to tolerate. Thursday, Trump tweeted this threat:

Radical Left Governor @JayInslee and the Mayor of Seattle are being taunted and played at a level that our great Country has never seen before. Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game. These ugly Anarchists must be stooped IMMEDIATELY. MOVE FAST!

Trump’s propagandists have been working hard to demonize the CHOP ever since. The Seattle Times explains:

Fox News published digitally altered and misleading photos on stories about Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in what photojournalism experts called a clear violation of ethical standards for news organizations.

In one photo of a gateway to the CHOP, Fox digitally inserted an image of a guard armed with a military-style weapon. After the Times called them on it, Fox took down the faked image.

In addition, Fox’s site for a time on Friday ran a frightening image of a burning city, above a package of stories about Seattle’s protests, headlined “CRAZY TOWN.” The photo actually showed a scene from St. Paul, Minnesota, on May 30. That image also was later removed.

After Trump promoted the notion that the elderly man assaulted by Buffalo police was actually an Antifa provocateur, the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri assembled the warning signs that your grandparent is a secret Antifa agent. The most telling:

She belongs to a decentralized group with no leadership structure that claims to be discussing a “book,” but no one ever reads the book and all they seem to do is drink wine.

Is always talking on the phone with an “aunt” you have never actually met in person. Aunt TIFA????

Always walking into rooms and claiming not to know why he walked into the room. Likely.

Suddenly, for no reason, will appear or pretend to be asleep.

Remembers things from the past in incredible, exhausting detail, but recent ones only sporadically? Cover of some kind.

Antifa is everywhere and nowhere. (Well, mostly nowhere, but never mind.) We can’t be too careful.

but we should pay more attention to the International Criminal Court

The US has long had a problem with the International Criminal Court in The Hague. US officials don’t want to give the ICC jurisdiction to prosecute incidents that it might see as US war crimes in places like Afghanistan or Iraq.

The Trump administration has just escalated that conflict considerably.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday sanctioning members of the International Criminal Court, the global judicial body investigating American troops for possible war crimes during the Afghanistan war.

The provocative move targets court staff involved in the probe, as well as their families, blocking them from accessing assets held in US financial institutions and from visiting America. Top members of the Trump administration — including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper — made the announcement with surprisingly forceful language to make their point.

“We cannot allow ICC officials and their families to come to the United States to shop, travel, and otherwise enjoy American freedoms as these same officials seek to prosecute the defenders of those very freedoms,” Pompeo, a former Army officer, told reporters without taking questions.

and the Flynn case

Remember where we are and how we got here: Trump’s then-National-Security-Adviser, Michael Flynn, lied to the FBI about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador during the transition period. He pleaded guilty to that crime, but his sentencing was delayed until he had assisted the government in other cases.

Somewhere along the line, he stopped cooperating and moved to withdraw his guilty plea. Then the Justice Department tried to drop the indictment — after the prosecutors who had been on the case from the beginning withdrew.

The Justice Department has total discretion about who it decides to prosecute, but once a case goes to court, withdrawing the indictment requires “consent of the court”, i.e., of the judge. The judge in this case wasn’t inclined to rubber-stamp either the Justice Department’s motion or Flynn’s motion to withdraw his guilty plea. (It is highly unusual to withdraw a guilty plea after the sentencing process has started.) So Judge Emmet Sullivan appointed a retired judge, John Gleeson, to argue why the charges should not be dismissed. That report is now in, and it is truly damning.

Gleeson argues that the Justice Department’s explanations for wanting to dismiss the charges are just pretexts that are not credible. (For example, the Department now claims it doubts it can prove a charge that Flynn has already confessed to under oath.)

The reasons offered by the Government are so irregular, and so obviously pretextual, that they are deficient. Moreover, the facts surrounding the filing of the Government’s motion constitute clear evidence of gross prosecutorial abuse. They reveal an unconvincing effort to disguise as legitimate a decision to dismiss that is based solely on the fact that Flynn is a political ally of President Trump. …

The Executive Branch had the unreviewable discretion to never charge Flynn with a crime because he is a friend and political ally of President Trump. President Trump today has the unreviewable authority to issue a pardon, thus ensuring that Flynn is no longer prosecuted and never punished for his crimes because he is a friend and political ally. But the instant the Executive Branch filed a criminal charge against Flynn, it forfeited the right to implicate this Court in the dismissal of that charge simply because Flynn is a friend and political ally of the President. Avoiding precisely that unseemly outcome is why Rule 48(a) requires “leave of court.”

Flynn and the Justice Department have tried to get an appeals court to intervene and prevent Judge Sullivan from looking into the Justice Department’s motives. So far, it looks like the appeals court wants to see the lower-court process conclude before weighing in.

Flynn, meanwhile, published a head-scratching op-ed in The Western Journal on Thursday. His opening line says America is at a “seminal moment” that will “test every fiber of our nation’s soul”. He then has several paragraphs about God and prayer and freedom, and denounces the “tyranny and treachery” that are “in our midst”. But through it all he never says anything specific enough to allow me to figure out what he’s talking about. Then he concludes:

As long as we accept God in the lifeblood of our nation, we will be OK. If we don’t, we will face a hellish existence. I vote we accept God.

Digby pronounces it “batshit crazy“, and I can’t really argue. If you can make any sense out of it, leave a comment.

and you also might be interested in …

Trump gave his West Point graduation speech. It was a boiler-plate graduation speech: You’re great; your school’s great; your parents and teachers have done a great job; you’ll go on to do great things. Why this had to happen in person during a pandemic is still mysterious.

A couple of odd motions during his West Point appearance started speculation about Trump’s health.

The Atlantic’s David Graham reports on how much money — campaign money and tax money alike — is being spent just to make Trump feel better about his situation. For example, the campaign has been running ads on cable news shows in the D.C. area. This makes no political sense, since D. C. and Maryland are not swing states, and the northern suburbs of Virginia (which probably isn’t a swing state any more either) aren’t where Trump needs to turn out his voters. Obviously, the campaign is running those ads so that Trump himself will see them, and feel like his campaign is out there defending him.

If, like me, you’ve lost track of all the places the US has troops, it turns out that the President is supposed to keep Congress informed about that. Here’s the latest letter, sent Tuesday.

and let’s close with a Confederate general worth commemorating

The founder of Dogpatch: Jubilation T. Cornpone. If you want to know his legend, listen to this number from the 1959 musical Li’l Abner.

Democrats may reach consensus about the future of policing more easily than they reach consensus about what to call that vision.

If the demonstrations set off by the murder of George Floyd (and now possibly extended by the killing of Rayshard Brooks) are going to be more than just a way to blow off steam, they have to lead to substantive change in the ways America enforces its laws. As I laid out last week, some reforms are already happening. Cities and states across the nation are banning chokeholds, instituting new procedures for reporting incidents of excessive force, and making it easier to identify and prosecute police officers who step over the line.

Is that enough? While those reforms are welcome and overdue, it’s hard to be confident that they will solve the problem, which goes to the heart of how police function in America: They are heavily armed, are inclined to escalate conflicts rather than de-escalate them, and reflexively cover for each other when rules are broken. Making more rules may not help, as long as police are motivated to help other police get away with breaking those rules. The pseudonymous author Officer A. Cab of “Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop” testifies:

“All cops are bastards.” Even your uncle, even your cousin, even your mom, even your brother, even your best friend, even your spouse, even me. Because even if they wouldn’t Do The Thing themselves, they will almost never rat out another officer who Does The Thing, much less stop it from happening.

… I really want to hammer this home: every cop in your neighborhood is damaged by their training, emboldened by their immunity, and they have a gun and the ability to take your life with near-impunity. This does not make you safer, even if you’re white.

Police also cost a huge amount of money. Bloomberg estimates:

Over the past four decades, the cost of policing in the U.S. has almost tripled, from $42.3 billion in 1977 to $114.5 billion in 2017

The number of violent crimes peaked in 1993 and is down by more than 1/3 since then, but police budgets have continued to eat up about 3.7% of all state and local spending. That figure does not include the estimated $81 billion spent on prisons or the $29 billion spent processing people through the criminal courts. Some large cities spend considerably more than 3.7%: New York City budgets about $5.9 billion, which is more than 6% of its total spending.

Given all that, a surprisingly wide range of people are proposing a very simple idea: What if we just had fewer police?

The predictable backlash. That suggestion is easy to exaggerate and demonize.

Here’s an obvious attack ad to run against any politician who endorses it: Some white woman reenacts her totally true story of hiding in the closet with her toddler and calling 911 while strange men ravage her home. The invaders run away when they hear sirens approaching, and she and her boy emerge unharmed. She expresses her perfectly genuine gratitude to the helpful and reassuring officers who arrive on her doorstep. (I’d make one of the cops black, just to insulate against charges of race-baiting.)

Then a male narrator says: “Julie and Luke escaped their harrowing experience without a scratch, and the damage to their home was soon repaired. But if Senator Liberal Democrat had his way, no one would have answered her desperate call.” [A busy signal gets louder and louder as the camera slowly zooms in on the window the invaders broke to enter.] “Far-left politicians like Senator Democrat want to fire Officers Good and Noble, and slash the budgets of their departments. Let’s fire Senator Democrat instead, before the call that goes unanswered is yours.” [visual fade to the sound of an annoyingly loud busy signal]

It’s no wonder that people planning to have their names on ballots in the fall — people like Joe Biden and Jim Clyburn — have been running away from the “Abolish the Police” or “Defund the Police” slogans. A recent YouGov poll (scroll down to page 58) says that only 16% of the public favor cutting police budgets, while 65% oppose such cuts. So it’s also no wonder the Trump campaign is already running this ad:

But think about it. The fewer-police proposal isn’t just that we get rid of police and do nothing else. The point is that interrupting crimes in progress and arresting dangerous suspects is a very small part of what police do. If we let them concentrate on stuff like that, and didn’t load them down with every public problem that their cities don’t have covered some other way, we wouldn’t need nearly so many of them. Minneapolis Councilman Steve Fletcher explained the council’s pledge to “dismantle” the MPD.

What we’re trying to change is how we answer 911. So many of the calls that we currently send police officers with guns would actually be better served by mental health professionals, by social workers, by outreach workers, by conflict resolution specialists.

This already happens in certain cases: If you call 911 and say your house is on fire, they don’t send police, they send a fire engine. If you say somebody is having a heart attack, they send an ambulance with EMTs. If a bear is rummaging through your garbage or a rabid raccoon is in your driveway, you might get connected to an animal-control department. There’s no reason cities couldn’t also have specialized emergency responders for many situations they currently handle by dispatching police: drug overdoses, domestic arguments, loud parties, homeless people camping out someplace they shouldn’t, and so on.

Friday night’s shooting of Rayshard Brooks is a case in point: The original problem was that he fell asleep while his car was parked, partially blocking a Wendy’s drive-through. Did someone with a gun need to handle that? If someone without a gun had been sent — the kind of plan San Francisco is rolling out, and a few smaller cities are already trying — Brooks would probably still be alive.

Even most criminal investigation doesn’t really need a policeman, or at least not an armed one. Typically, police show up in the aftermath of a crime: Your car has been stolen, or you came home to find your house had been burglarized. The perpetrators are long gone. Armed police come, but what the situation really calls for is someone with the skills of an insurance adjuster — someone who can take your statement, shoot some photos, collect some evidence, and write a report. Guns shouldn’t be necessary until it’s time to make an arrest, and maybe not even then.

The Washington Post assembled this graphic summary of what police do in a major American city:

In short, the fewer-police proposal is also a more-people-to-handle-stuff-the-police-should-never-have-been-asked-to-do proposal. And police departments’ funding gets cut, not to punish them, but because the money for those other specialists has to come from somewhere.

Some of that work would be preventive rather than responsive. For example, if a city put real resources behind finding each homeless person a home (like they do in Finland), police (or whoever) wouldn’t have to answer so many calls about them. (The homeless are probably a large chunk of that “suspicious person” block in the graphic.)

And one final point from Georgetown law professor Christy Lopez:

Once we begin to undertake this inquiry [of rethinking public safety], we quickly see that there are some things that police are doing that nobody should be doing, such as enforcing laws that criminalize poverty and addiction, arresting people instead of issuing citations, writing tickets to raise revenue rather than protect the public, and using armored vehicles to evict women and children from a home they have occupied to protest homelessness.

Political activism vs. electoral politics. “Abolish the Police” is probably a great slogan if you want to raise energy for a protest, but across most of the country it would be a suicidal slogan for a political campaign.

A good issue-activist slogan is provocative in much the same way that online clickbait is. It draws your attention, maybe shocks you a little, and pulls you into the discussion if only to argue against it. Once drawn in, you may consider ideas you had never thought of before, and the activists may elaborate their proposals in ways that make them more reasonable than they originally sounded.

To a large extent, that’s working. I have lost count of the number of articles I’ve read explaining that “Abolish the Police” and “Defund the Police” don’t really mean “abolish the police” or “cut their funding to zero”: Somebody would still answer 911 calls, and if the needed response was for armed warriors to show up — say, in an active shooter situation — the city would still have some on the payroll. As Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing told NPR:

I’m certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police.

(Then again, some people really do mean “Abolish the Police”.)

Would I have read those articles and considered those ideas if they had just been labeled “police reform” or something equally bland? Maybe not.

But while it makes sense for an issue activist to shock you with a slogan and then explain the nuances later, that’s an insane strategy for a politician trying to get elected. Ronald Reagan was right: If you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Issue-oriented activists tend to underestimate the importance of low-information voters in electoral politics. But those voters are why every campaign works hard to oversimplify its opponents’ positions to the point of absurdity, and then to get those simple absurdities into the minds of voters who can’t be bothered to consider the complicated details.

In 1988, for example, Mike Dukakis had a huge lead in the polls after the Democratic Convention. But George H. W. Bush caught up and won handily on the strength of two “issues”: Mike Dukakis hates the Pledge of Allegiance, and Mike Dukakis will let big black dudes rape your wife. Both were nonsense, but explaining why they were nonsense derailed Dukakis’ whole message. He had to keep explaining, and so he lost. Bush’s 53% of the vote is more than any presidential candidate has gotten since.

Trump and Biden. You can already see Trump pushing a similar oversimplification on immigration policy: Democrats want “open borders“. None of the Democrats running for president in this cycle endorsed “open borders”, and I can’t think of a single Democrat in Congress who has even said the phrase. But nonetheless it’s a staple of Trump rhetoric: If Democrats take over, the Mexican border will be left completely unmanned and unprotected.

He has been helped in this effort by liberal activists who pushed the slogan “Abolish ICE”. Now, “Abolish ICE” doesn’t mean “leave the border unprotected”, but it sounds like it does. If you tell low-information voters that Democrats want open borders, and illustrate with demonstrators waving “Abolish ICE” signs, they’ll be convinced.

Similarly here, “Abolish the Police” or “Defund the Police” doesn’t mean “You’re on your own if a criminal attacks you.” But it sounds like it does. If I tell a low-information voter that Joe Biden won’t protect him from criminals, and then cut to a video of Biden saying “Abolish the police”, he’ll be convinced.

And that’s why Biden will never say, “Abolish the police.”

Rep. Jim Clyburn elaborates:

If you’re talking about reallocating resources, say that. If you mean reimagining policing, say that. If you’re going to reform policing, say that. Don’t tell me you’re going to use a term that you know is charged — and tell me that it doesn’t mean what it says.

California Governor Gavin Newsom explored the limits of how far a mainstream politician can go:

California Governor Gavin Newsom [said] Wednesday that while he’s not interested in “eliminating police,” he’s open to considering how a police officer’s role in a community could change.

“If you’re talking about reimagining and taking the opportunity to look at the responsibility and role that we place on law enforcement to be social workers, mental health workers, get involved in disputes where a badge and a gun are unnecessary, then I think absolutely this is an opportunity to look at all of the above.”

Is there any good electoral slogan here? Personally, I’m frustrated that no simple English verb expresses the idea I want. No everyday verb means “Expand other things so that one particular thing gets crowded out.” I can’t even think of a good metaphor to express that notion.

I agree with the abolition supporters that “reform” is too tepid. We’ve been reforming police for a long time now, and yet we still have George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks. I can’t claim that nothing has changed, because Floyd’s killer is charged with murder when so many killer officers have previously gone uncharged. The Brooks incident has already pushed the Atlanta police chief to resign, and charges against the officer are expected soon. Stuff like that didn’t used to happen. But the unnecessary deaths continue, and (even assuming the reforms currently on the table become law) I can’t say when they’ll stop.

What is stronger than “reform”, but doesn’t have the unfortunate implications of “abolish”? I don’t have a good candidate. Some people are saying “dismantle”. “Reconstitute” might work. I’m tempted to steal a word from the business world, and talk about “downsizing” the police.

Another option might be to talk about “the police state” rather than just “the police”. Americans have ambivalent feelings about police, but nobody likes a police state. (Trump loves to defend the police, but defending the police state would be a gift to his enemies.) “Police state” would capture the idea that black neighborhoods are over-policed, and would also tie in to the idea of mass incarceration. It points to the observation that we currently deal with all kinds of social problems (like homelessness or addiction) through the police rather than through more appropriate institutions.

Downsize the police? Dismantle the police state? End policing as we know it? None of them strikes me as an election-winning slogan, but they’re the best I can do.

Do activists and politicians need to say the same words? Another way to look at this is to let activists advance issues and let politicians win elections. Activists could keep saying “Abolish the police”, and no electoral harm would be done as long as they understood that no national figure could say it with them. The redefinition of police and of public safety is going to have to happen locally anyway. Maybe the best thing the federal government can do is stay out of the way.

Maybe it could be enough for Biden and other major Democrats in the fall election to say things activists could interpret positively, while still holding back from “Abolish the police”, as Governor Newsom did. Maybe it would be enough if Biden could say something like “The beauty of our federal system is that cities and states are free to experiment and try new things. If some of them want to find creative ways to deliver public services, and if they want to develop a new vision of how to ensure public safety, then a Biden administration will try to work with them.”

But maybe it wouldn’t be enough. Trump won in 2016 by pounding two wedges: a “corruption” wedge between Hillary Clinton and the center-right, and a Bernie-was-robbed wedge between Clinton and left. He’s going to try the same thing again. “Abolish the Police” works for him either way: If Biden agrees with the slogan, that becomes a wedge separating him from the center. If he doesn’t, it’s a wedge separating him from the left.

So that’s the question activists will be left with: Is it enough for Biden to indicate a general sympathy with their movement (when Trump is steadfastly against it), or does he have to repeat their words?

Anti-racist and anti-police protests continued this week, and Atlanta police gave the protesters a new martyr: Rayshard Brooks, who drew police attention by falling asleep in his car, and was shot to death while running away. The national conversation about how to stop excessive police violence (particularly against people of color, but occasionally against whites also) continued to progress, ranging from simple reforms like banning chokeholds to more radical proposals that have gathered under the umbrella of the slogans “Abolish the police” and “Defund the police”.

Those slogans themselves are what drew my attention this week. Like many liberals, I support most of the proposals that the police-abolitionists put forward, but I shy away from endorsing the slogans themselves. I was happy to hear Joe Biden refuse to support abolishing or defunding the police, because I believe a Biden blunder like that is one of the few ways Trump could salvage his re-election. So I’ll discuss the divergent interests of issue activists and politicians trying to get elected in the featured post “What’s in a Slogan?” That should be out before 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the continued demonstrations, the Rayshard killing, Covid-19’s refusal to go away for the summer, the debate over Confederate monuments and memorials, developments in the Flynn case, and Trump’s moves against the International Criminal Court. Then I’ll close with a musical tribute to a great Confederate general. That should be out somewhere between noon and 1.

The police are the armed guardians of the social order. The blacks are the chief domestic victims of the social order. A conflict of interest exists, therefore, between the blacks and the police.

— Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968)

This week’s featured posts are “This Week, Democratic Protest Outlasted Riot and Repression” and “How Should American Policing Change?“.

This week everybody was talking about police and protest

The two featured posts are my attempt to cover that. I did want to add a response to those conservatives (like Tom Cotton) who think the presence of rioters is a reason to unleash the military on protesters:

Whenever there’s another mass shooting, and suddenly 20 first-graders are dead at Sandy Hook, or 58 concert-goers in Las Vegas, or 49 night-clubbers in Orlando — you tell us that nothing can be done about the weapons of mass killing the perpetrators use. All those people who use similar guns legally and responsibly, you say, have Second Amendment rights. We can’t take their rights away just because a few criminals misuse them.

Now we see protesters by the hundreds of thousands across this country exercising their First Amendment rights legally and responsibly. But because a few criminals use those demonstrations as cover to destroy or steal property, you want the the military to take away the rights of the law-abiding majority, and perhaps to kill them if they won’t cooperate.

We liberals sympathize with the property owners in the same way that you sympathize with the survivors of mass shootings. But there is an enormous hypocrisy in your position. If no drastic steps can be taken to solve the far more deadly problem of mass shootings, then surely they can’t be taken now. We have a Constitution, and you can’t pick and choose when to apply it.

While we’re talking about Cotton, his screed prompted some soul-searching at the New York Times. How, the internal critics wondered, are The Times’ readers edified by hearing window-breakers and looters described as an “insurrection” that requires a federal military intervention overruling local officials? Or that protesters (the vast majority of whom are nonviolently exercising their constitutional rights) should meet “an overwhelming show of force” that includes combat troops?

The official answer is that The Times’ opinion pages should provide a window into the policy debate the country is having, and not just reflect the liberal worldview of The Times’ editors or typical readers. But while that answer seems to make sense at first glance, two responses (picked out by James Fallows) call it into question.

Times columnist Michelle Goldberg notes that The Times has in the past provided space to enemies of liberal democracy like Vladimir Putin and Taliban leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, but that neither of them was “given space in this newspaper to advocate attacks on Americans during moments of national extremis.” If The Times’ opinion pages are attempting to define “the boundaries of legitimate debate”, some points of view need to be kept outside the pale.

I could be wrong, but I don’t believe The Times would have published a defense of family separation by former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during the height of that atrocity, or a piece by the senior Trump aide Stephen Miller about the necessity of curbing nonwhite immigration. In both cases, I’m pretty sure the liberal inclination to hear all sides would have smacked up against sheer moral abhorrence.

But Fallows’ second choice is even more insightful: David Roberts‘ charge that the NYT is promoting a false image of conservatism. The Times’ conservative voices — David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss — are “alienated from the animating force in US conservatism, which is Trumpism.” Publishing their words “might serve the purpose of challenging liberal thinking”, but they don’t expose Times readers to actual conservatism.

The signal feature of the 2016 election is that it settled the question of whether US conservatism — the actual movement, I mean, not the people in Washington think tanks who claim to be its spokespeople — is animated by a set of shared ideals and policies. It is not. …

[A]nyone who is devoted to the conservative intellectual tradition, anyone who thinks of themselves as a conservative through devotion to small government and traditional morality, has had to peel off. There is no way to pretend that Trump represents that tradition; he himself does not even try. So how many of these “true” conservatives did there turn out to be? Almost none!

What unites conservatives today, he says, are resentments, not ideas.

Not everyone involved is driven by tribal resentment, not every Trump voter indulges in misogyny or racism, but every member of the current conservative coalition has decided that those things are acceptable, or at the very least, not disqualifying — less important than lower taxes or immigration crackdowns.

Even if they do not share Trump’s ignorant, hateful impulses, even if they do not endorse his careening, incompetent governance, even if they do not countenance the grotesque corruption of his family and his administration, they support the coalition that enables those things. They are supporting a tribe with a strongman leader, not a set of ideas.

There’s no argument for that, nothing to plausibly fill an editorial page.

I think Trump’s total unfitness to be president requires Joe Biden to run a different kind of campaign. So many presidential roles are going unfilled that the country needs Biden to be a shadow president instead of a mere candidate. He does a pretty good job of that while discussing the George Floyd murder in this video.

I’d also like to see Biden start appointing a shadow government, so that his appointees could respond similarly when appropriate. Not just a vice president, but an attorney general, as well as secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury.

We’re in one of those weird moments where the big-corporation CEOs seem to be ahead of the conservative politicians who represent them.

I was fascinated to hear this CNBC interview with AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. In particular the part where he stands broken-windows policing theory on its head.

There’s a philosophy that Rudy Giuliani made prominent about “broken-windows policing”. And what’s the whole premise of this? You walk into a neighborhood and you see a lot of broken windows; it just sends a signal that we are tolerant of crime. And the question I have is: Do we have policies within law enforcement that send a signal that we are tolerant of discrimination?

And a classic example is racial profiling. If I were to use those kinds of policies within AT&T, I would rightly be terminated, fired, and probably sued. But we allow, we actually have systems, we have procedures that allow for racial profiling. And what does that say? That says — just like broken windows — we have a tolerance for racial discrimination in law enforcement.

and the virus

This week the total stands at 112.6K deaths, up from 106K last week. That increase of 6.6K compares to last week’s 7K increase. So the number of new deaths is still headed downward, but seems to be leveling off.

The number of new cases has at best leveled off and might be increasing. As I’ve pointed out before, that’s a battle between two trends: the sinking number of cases in the states hit early, like New York, and a rising number in states that were initially spared, like Texas.

All of that discussion happens before we see any effect of the crowds gathered to protest George Floyd’s death. Incubation time of the virus is usually 1-2 weeks, and it often takes another week before a person notices symptoms, gets tested, and appears in the statistics.

An NYT editorial on reopening public schools does a better job summarizing the problems than suggesting solutions.

Trump’s demand that his acceptance speech take place in a packed arena has sunk the plan to hold the Republican Convention in Charlotte. As you can see above, North Carolina is one of the states where the number of cases is on the rise, so Democratic Governor Roy Cooper was not willing to approve a big, contagion-spreading event. Florida is the leading contender to get the dubious prize of a thrown-together-at-the-last-minute convention, but speculation that Trump will hold it at one of his own properties seems off-base. Jacksonville is the current favorite, and a decision is needed soon.

and the jobs report

Unemployment went down in May, when many experts were expecting it to go up. It’s still at 13.3%, or maybe 16.3%, depending on how you handle a tricky data problem.

People who are on temporary layoff are supposed to be classified as unemployed. For reasons that we’re not really sure a lot of those people were, in fact, classified as employed.

But the same mistake happened last month, so the drop in unemployment seems real, even if the level is unclear.

and a few Republicans edge away from Trump

A number of military leaders criticized Trump this week, some in very stark terms. His former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis wrote:

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. … We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.

Former Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said he agreed with Mattis, and then added:

I think we need to look harder at who we elect. I think we should start, all of us, regardless of what our views are in politics, I think we should look at people that are running for office and put them through the filter. What is their character like? What are their ethics? Are they willing, if they’re elected, to represent all of their constituents, not just the base, but all of their constituents?

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell:

We have a Constitution. And we have to follow that Constitution. And the president has drifted away from it. … I think he has been not an effective president. He lies all the time. He began lying the day of inauguration, when we got into an argument about the size of the crowd that was there. People are writing books about his favorite thing of lying. And I don’t think that’s in our interest.

Senator Romney will not support Trump’s re-election. Senator Murkowski described General Mattis’ statement as “true and honest and necessary and overdue”. But then she said she was “struggling” with whether to support Trump in the fall election. That’s the fundamental Republican problem right now. It seems bizarre to think it’s “overdue” for someone to say that Trump has “made a mockery of our Constitution”, and yet to have any struggle at all about opposing him. Murkowski seemed to be saying that she knows what to think, and that many of her Republican colleagues think the same thing, but that she and they are still trying to gin up the courage to say publicly what they think and then act on it.

When I saw General Mattis’ comments yesterday I felt like perhaps we are getting to a point where we can be more honest with the concerns that we might hold internally and have the courage of our own convictions to speak up.

I can’t imagine admitting to that level of cowardice. But even that — hinting that you have criticisms, but can’t bring yourself to act on them — is an act of relative courage among the current crop of GOP senators. Many of them seem to be edging up to a line, and then looking around to see if anyone else is crossing it.

In a PBS interview, Senator Thune of South Dakota hinted at criticism, but did not actually voice it: Peaceful protesters should be allowed to speak. The country needs a “healing voice” that is not coming from the White House. Ben Sasse of Nebraska said

there is a fundamental — a Constitutional — right to protest, and I’m against clearing out a peaceful protest for a photo op that treats the Word of God as a political prop.

But he doesn’t go anywhere with that thinking.

Time is running out on them. If they let the election arrive without taking a clear stand, they might as well be gung-ho Trumpists. History won’t care that they had an inner voice of conscience, if they never listened to it. They are not dissidents; they are collaborators.

The American people seem to be shifting, even if GOP senators are not. A CNN poll out today has Trump’s approval rating dropping from 45% a month ago to 38% now. Biden’s lead over Trump is 14%, the highest it has ever been, up from 7% last month.

and you also might be interested in …

Rod Rosenstein testified at the show trial Lindsey Graham is running in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Rosenstein took a middle position that I’m sure satisfied no one. He defended the Mueller investigation, and the reasons for launching it. But he repeated the Bill Barr lie that Mueller proved their was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

What Mueller actually said was that he could not prove there was a criminal conspiracy. One reason he couldn’t prove it was summarized in Part II of his report: Trump obstructed justice.

Rep. Steve King, the white supremacist congressman from Iowa, lost the Republican primary Tuesday. Come January, he’ll be out of Congress.

King’s loss might make you think the Republican Party is returning to sanity, but that would be a mistake. In Oregon, a QAnon conspiracy theorist won the Republican primary for the Senate, and will challenge Jeff Merkley in the fall. In a field of four candidates, Jo Rae Perkins got 49% of the vote.

After the George Floyd protests started, she was live on Facebook for an hour and a half, which Right Wing Watch edited down to less than two minutes. In it, she prays:

Lord, these people have no sense of morality, of what is right and what is wrong, Lord God. Not the ones that are causing this mayhem, Lord God, this Antifa, Father God. Shut down George Soros, Lord God. End his reign of terror, Lord God. We know that he is funding this. Lord, we say. “Strip that money, strip that money strip that money.” If there is a way, Father God, that President Trump’s administration can block him from being able to spend any more money, Lord God, then allow that to happen.

Of course, we have the usual right-wing-nut-job ravings about Antifa conspiracies funded by Soros’ dirty Jewish money. But even beyond that, there’s the pervasive hypocrisy about federal power. She spends a bunch of her 90 minutes talking about the principle of limited government and all the federal laws and projects she doesn’t believe the Constitution allows. But Trump taking away Soros’ money or tightly controlling how he can spend it — that would be the answer to a prayer.

A constitutional republic for me, tyranny for thee. And remember: This is not just some crazy woman I picked off of Facebook. This is the Republican candidate for one of Oregon’s two seats in the U. S. Senate.

Trump’s scaremongering about Antifa has real consequences. A family who tried to go camping in rural Washington ran into a town anticipating Antifa “infiltrators”. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

and let’s close with something remastered

If you find it hard to listen to Trump, try letting Sarah Cooper provide the visuals.

“Actually, we’re just getting started.”

This week it’s been easy to assemble video collections of misbehaving police. The current crisis began with a Minneapolis policeman killing George Floyd — not instantaneously, by shooting him in a moment of confusion or fear, but slowly, by kneeling on his neck as his life ebbed away. In the two weeks since, we’ve seen phalanxes of militarized police attack angry but non-violent crowds of protesters on multiple occasions. Friday, the NYT’s Jamelle Bouie put together a list:

Rioting police have driven vehicles into crowds, reproducing the assault that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. They have surrounded a car, smashed the windows, tazed the occupants and dragged them out onto the ground. Clad in paramilitary gear, they have attacked elderly bystanders, pepper-sprayed cooperative protesters and shot “nonlethal” rounds directly at reporters, causing serious injuries. In Austin, Texas, a 20-year-old man is in critical condition after being shot in the head with a “less-lethal” round. Across the country, rioting police are using tear gas in quantities that threaten the health and safety of demonstrators, especially in the midst of a respiratory disease pandemic.

That list is sadly incomplete. For example, Bouie’s “elderly bystander” is not the one you’re thinking of. These bystanders are in Salt Lake City, not Buffalo. The video Bouie linked to also shows an old man being pushed to the ground, but he falls on his chest rather than striking the back of his head.

It is tempting to keeping throwing more and more videos at the dead-enders who refuse to see the widespread problem in American policing. But those who are not convinced by now will probably never be convinced, and in the meantime we have let them freeze the conversation. Something similar happens with climate change: A handful of stubborn denialists can freeze a conversation at the is-it-real stage, and prevent reality-based people from discussing what to do about it.

It’s time to ignore the dead-enders and move forward without them.

More than a few bad apples. It also time to start ignoring people who make the few-bad-apples argument, as White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien did recently. If there were no systemic problem, that handful of bad cops would be easy to identify and remove from the force. (Don’t tell me the other cops don’t know who they are.) But the problem is not just the occasional officer who violently abuses his power; it’s all the other cops who cover for him and resist any attempt to hold him accountable.

The initial police statement on George Floyd mentioned nothing about Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, but was titled “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” When Buffalo police shoved a 75-year-old protester — a white man, in this case — who hit his head on the pavement and soon had blood pooling around his ear, their initial statement said:

A 5th person was arrested during a skirmish with other protestors and also charged with disorderly conduct. During that skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell.

In both cases, that false account probably would have stood if not for bystander video, leaving us to wonder how many police assaults and murders are routinely covered up — not just by the “bad apples” who commit those crimes, but by the criminally complicit police around them.

The Buffalo situation demonstrates an even deeper rot. When bystander video showed that the police report was a lie, Buffalo’s police commissioner suspended without pay, pending investigation, the two officers who pushed the man down. (The officers who knowingly allowed a false report to be issued have not been punished.) But even this small move towards accountability was too much: All 57 fellow active members of the Buffalo Police emergency unit resigned from the squad (but not from the police).

“Fifty-seven resigned in disgust because of the treatment of two of their members, who were simply executing orders,” Buffalo Police Benevolent Association president John Evans told WGRZ on Friday.

Their orders were to clear the square of protesters, not to assault old men. (The two officers were charged with assault Saturday. Over 100 police and firefighters showed up at the courthouse to support them.) But not a single member of the emergency unit looked at that video and said, “Hey, we shouldn’t be doing things like that.” They have chosen their side. There aren’t two bad apples on that squad; there are 57 bad apples. There’s probably no bureaucratic mechanism that can bring about this outcome, but none of them should ever be police anywhere again. (According to the local ABC TV channel, though, two of the 57 claim the union manipulated this outcome by saying they could no longer defend members of the emergency unit under these conditions.)

What can be done? We need to be thinking on multiple time scales. Some significant changes need to be announced immediately, while the crowds are still in the streets. But problems this deep and old resist quick fixes. So the country needs a long-term plan, but that plan has to visibly begin right now.

In Minnesota. In the specific case of George Floyd’s murder, most of what the protesters want has already been achieved: All four officers involved have been arrested and charged. Derek Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder, and the other three face aiding-and-abetting charges. Unless we want to see the officers handed over for mob justice, that’s all that can be done right now. The legal process will play out over months, and ultimately a jury will have to decide what happens to them.

More broadly, the Minnesota Commissioner for Human Rights filed suit against the City of Minneapolis and its police department on Tuesday, claiming that

the City of Minneapolis Police Department has engaged in a pattern and practice of race-based policing in violation of the [Minnesota Human Rights Act]

Friday, the Commissioner and the City agreed to a plan that they have asked the Court to impose as an injunction. The plan has six provisions:

• Ban chokeholds and neck restraints of any kind.
• Police officers who witness another officer’s unauthorized use of force have an immediate duty to report the incident to their commanders.
• Police officers who witness another officer’s unauthorized use of force have a duty to intervene “by verbal and physical means“, or face the same punishment as the offending officer.
• Crowd control weapons (chemical agents and rubber bullets are specifically mentioned) can only be used after authorization by the Chief of Police.
• Pending disciplinary actions must be decided within 45 days. Future actions have to be decided within 30 days.
• The City’s Office of Police Conduct Review can audit body-camera footage “proactively and strategically”. (Human Rights Commissioner Rebecca Lucerno explains: “Right now, body cam footage exists. However, it’s only reviewed when there’s a complaint.”)

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his own proposal, which requires action from the legislature:

• Make police disciplinary records transparent
• Ban chokeholds
• Make false race-based 911 reports a hate crime
• Attorney General must act as independent prosecutor for any police murder case

Several other states and cities have announced plans to ban either chokeholds or tear gas or both.

8 Can’t Wait. Campaign Zero is an organization devoted to ending police violence. It put out the “8 Can’t Wait” agenda, of steps any city could take right away. (The “Data proves …” claim in the graphic below is theirs, not mine. I have not tried to evaluate it.)

Matt Yglesias explains the 8 in more detail, and looks at some of the supporting statistics. Some are easy to understand: banning chokeholds and the duty to intervene are already part of the Minneapolis agreement discussed above. The ban on shooting at moving vehicles and requirement to warn before shooting are self-explanatory.

A comprehensive reporting requirement means that officers need to report each time they use force or threaten to use force against a civilian. … The use of force continuum is a specific set of requirements governing what kinds of weapons can be used versus what levels of resistance. And a deescalation requirement mandates that officers try to secure their personal safety through distance and communication before resorting to force.

Medium-term proposals. A number of ideas are included in the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, which Democrats in the House and Senate are introducing this morning. It’s hard to imagine Mitch McConnell allowing any of these reforms to be passed in time to bring this season of protest to a successful conclusion, but the problem isn’t going away until we have reforms more significant than anything that can happen quickly.

• a national database of deaths in police custody. It’s hard to believe this doesn’t already exist, but apparently not.
• a national police misconduct registry. So that bad cops fired in one city can’t just get a new job somewhere else.
• ending or altering “qualified immunity”. Qualified immunity shelters government officials from civil lawsuits for violating someone’s rights, “unless the victims of those violations can show that the rights were ‘clearly established’.” In practice, this has made such suits almost impossible for plaintiffs to win.
• changing the standard for police use of force. “victims of excessive force or other violations need only show that officers ‘recklessly’ deprived them of their rights. The current statute requires victims to show that officers’ actions were ‘willful’.”
• formalize the Justice Department’s oversight of police departments with a history of bad practices. During the Obama administration, Justice took oversight of local police seriously, but when Jeff Sessions became attorney general, he abandoned those efforts.