Category Archives: Off the Rails

2020 General Election, Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Donald Trump speculates: “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely, and safely vote?”

“He gets new information. He likes to talk that through out loud. And really have that dialogue. And so that’s what dialogue he was having.“ — Dr. Deborah Birx on Donald Trump’s suggestion at a public health briefing that injecting bleach could be a cure for COVID-19.

Yesterday:

▪ Donald Trump boohooed that he had lower approval ratings among Americans than Dr. Anthony Fauci:

He’s working with our administration. And for the most part we’ve done pretty much what he and others — Dr. Birx and others, who are terrific — recommended. And he’s got this high approval rating. So, why don’t I have a high approval rating with respect — and the administration — with respect to the virus?

▪ He downplayed the coronavirus and touted hydroxychloroquine as remedy, though the FDA revoked authorization for use of the drug for COVID-19 treatment “reports of serious heart rhythm problems and other safety issues, including blood and lymph system disorders, kidney injuries, and liver problems and failure.”

▪ And the President retweeted a video (since removed by Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, but not before 14 million viewings) with discredited claims from a Houston doctor/religious minister that she has successfully treated hundreds of coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine and that face masks are not necessary to stop the spread of the virus. Stella Immanuel has also claimed that gynecological problems are caused by having sex in ones dreams with demons and witches; that DNA from alien beings is being used in medicine today; and that “reptilions” and other aliens are embedded in our government.

▪ Donald Trump is still a fan: “There was a woman who was spectacular in her statements about it: that she’s had tremendous success with it.”

Just another day in the Trump presidency. So, when he tweets about delaying the election, is Trump simply riffing? Merely talking out loud about something he’s seen online or on cable TV? Is this nothing more than more idle talk from an uninformed, credulous individual?

Neither the Constitution, nor federal law grant this man, even though he sits in the Oval Office, the authority to change the date of the 2020 election. But it is well within his power to signal his view that something isn’t on the up and up. Something about the November 3 election is rotten. The Democrats are trying to cheat.

The President of the United States has sought for many months to delegitimize the 2020 election, much as he did in the run-up to the 2016 election, before winning it — and even afterwards.

Donald Trump has presided over a disastrous 2020. His failures — resulting in an unfolding tragedy that grows greater by the day — are unmistakable. Surveys of public opinion suggest a steeply uphill climb to reelection for the President.

As the prospect of losing has become more likely, Trump has waged a campaign against mail-in voting, insisting that “it doesn’t work out well for Republicans,” and even more dire that it will “lead to the end of our great Republican Party.”

He has continued to strike this theme throughout the year:

He has endorsed the unsubstantiated claim of Bill Barr that foreign governments might corrupt the election by printing and mailing counterfeit ballots

Election officials have discounted the President’s claims (“Trump claims without evidence that mail voting leads to cheating: A guide to facts on absentee ballots.”):

“We are not aware of any evidence supporting the claims made by President Trump,” the National Assn. of Secretaries of State said in a statement. “As always, we are open to learning more about the Administration’s concerns.”

So what’s Trump up to? Well, he’s revving up his base. For another thing, if Republican state legislatures and secretaries of state follow his lead, they will curtail, or refuse to expand, vote by mail options. That serves the venerable Republican strategy of voter suppression. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach are past all-stars in this game.

Even if vote by mail options exist, Trump’s campaign may serve to suppress the Democratic vote. An NBC report (“A Trump trap? He’s the one who could get a boost from mail voting glitches”) explains why:

The real danger is a perfect catastrophe of administrative overload, postal delays and voter error that could lead to millions of absentee ballots not counting. And this year, unlike the past, those ballots are likely to be overwhelmingly Democratic.

Mail-in ballots are much more likely to be rejected than ballots cast in person. If Trump’s base votes in person on election day, those votes are more likely to be counted than Democratic votes cast by mail-in ballots. Some estimates suggest that up to 4-percent of mail ballots were rejected in 2016 with no opportunity to remedy any problems (as one might do at a polling place). Furthermore, studies suggest that younger voters and people of color — predominantly Democratic — are more likely to have their ballots disqualified.

If a higher proportion of Democrats than Republicans vote by mail, Democrats will be disadvantaged because of procedural glitches that are apt to multiply this year as the number of mail-in ballots increase — overwhelming some jurisdictions. Add to this a multi-million dollar GOP donor just appointed as Postmaster General, who is imposing changes on the Postal Service that have created backlogs and late deliveries. As a result, there will likely be delays in sending ballots to voters and in receiving voters’ completed ballots in a timely way that ensures that votes are cast and counted.

But there’s more to it than that. Republicans probably can’t suppress enough votes to win in 2020. These tactics, even with an assist from the U.S. Supreme Court, failed in Wisconsin. These cries of fraud and rigged elections serve another purpose, as Richard Hasen has explained:

If most Republicans vote in person and most Democrats vote by mail, Hasen said, that could create a scenario well suited to Trump’s tendency to make unfounded accusations of wrongdoing.  

“As Trump drives more and more of his supporters to vote in person and away from vote-by-mail, it’s quite likely that we’ll see Trump getting many more votes on election night, the votes that are counted on Election Day,” Hasen said in an interview on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast.

“Then, four or five days later, [if] Biden becomes the winner as the absentee ballots are counted in Philadelphia or Detroit, that’s a recipe, if it’s close, for a really ugly election scenario,” he said.

Election results for Philadelphia’s June 2 primary were not certified for nearly three weeks. The outcome of the June 23 primary in New York’s 6th CD, a victory by challenger Jamaal Bowman over Congressman Eliot Engel, was not clear for more than four weeks. It takes a long time to verify and count ballots received by mail. There will be tens of millions more votes cast in November than have been cast in primaries earlier this year.

The Brooks Brothers riot — in 2000 when Republican operatives from across the country created a mob scene in Miami-Dade County to stop officials from counting votes (after George W. Bush had established a small lead in the state) — is the template for creating chaos in November 2020 in any state where Trump has a slim lead and there are still thousands of ballots to be counted. Only this time the rioters (most of whom were not actually dressed in expensive suits) might be replaced by armed militias in camo. And multiply the rioting across a number of states.

Even if Trump trails in same day voting, if there are tens of thousands of uncounted votes in key states, he could still cry fraud.

Trump’s eruptions about voting by mail all serve as a setup for challenging his defeat in November. Whatever happens on November 3 and after, things have already become ugly.

This scenario is beyond abnormal. But rest assured this will not be Trump’s last off the rails maneuver between now and November 3.

There are 97 days to go.

(Image: from Five Thirty Eight’s average presidential approval July 30.

Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Donald Trump, with help from John Yoo, finds “powers that nobody thought the president had”

We’re signing a health care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health care plan that the Supreme Court decision on DACA gave me the right to do. So we’re going to solve — we’re going to sign an immigration plan, a health care plan, and various other plans. And nobody will have done what I’m doing in the next four weeks. The Supreme Court gave the president of the United States powers that nobody thought the president had, by approving, by doing what they did — their decision on DACA. And DACA’s going to be taken care of also. But we’re getting rid of it because we’re going to replace it with something much better. What we got rid of already, which was most of Obamacare, the individual mandate. And that I’ve already won on. And we won also on the Supreme Court. But the decision by the Supreme Court on DACA allows me to do things on immigration, on health care, on other things that we’ve never done before. And you’re going to find it to be a very exciting two weeks. — Donald Trump in an interview with Chris Wallace

When I listened to this interview today, I was baffled by the claim of “powers that nobody thought the president had.” Wallace apparently didn’t know what to make of it either, since he jumped to a question about Mary Trump’s book.

Today, a report by Axios (“Scoop: Trump’s license to skirt the law”) provides the context, an article by John Yoo (the man who defended waterboarding as a national policy, even if it violated federal statutes) in National Review (“How the Supreme Court’s DACA Decision Harms the Constitution, the Presidency, Congress, and the Country”).

The article offers Yoo’s reasoning in the first three sentences:

Suppose President Donald Trump decided to create a nationwide right to carry guns openly. He could declare that he would not enforce federal firearms laws, and that a new “Trump permit” would free any holder of state and local gun-control restrictions.

Even if Trump knew that his scheme lacked legal authority, he could get away with it for the length of his presidency. And, moreover, even if courts declared the permit illegal, his successor would have to keep enforcing the program for another year or two. [Emphasis added.]

Yoo finds justification for this interpretation within the 5-4 opinion written by the Chief Justice (with the 4 liberals concurring). As Yoo puts it (quoting from the text of the opinion):

“Even if it is illegal for DHS to extend work authorization and other benefits to DACA recipients,” Roberts found, DACA “could not be rescinded in full without any consideration whatsoever of a” non-deportation policy other than on the ground of its illegality.

According to Chief Justice Roberts, the Constitution makes it easy for presidents to violate the law, but reversing such violations difficult — especially for their successors.

Yoo criticizes this decision in National Review, because he believes it allows a president to unduly tie the hands of his successors. (I’m not an attorney, so I may be missing something in thinking that Yoo finds torture at the hands of the federal government more acceptable than deferring deportations of immigrants whose parents brought them into the country as children without legal documentation.)

Regardless of Yoo’s objections, the White House sees a green light for expanding presidential power beyond even the creative imagination (prior to Roberts’ DACA decision) of Bill Barr’s justice department.

This is scary stuff for anyone who has had occasion to fear Trump’s authoritarian impulses.

I’ve concluded a couple of posts recently with warnings (regarding a raging COVID-19) that things will get worse. With Trump in a rage about his polling, the economy, and an out of control epidemic he has tried his best to ignore, we can count on this: Things will get worse — much worse — before January 20, 2021.

(Image: King George III via wikipedia.)

Democracy, Off the Rails

Memo to governors: Are you analyzing risks & benefits? or just winging it when you make policy choices?

Michael Hiltzik writes about the lack of progress, months after the country shut down, in battling the coronavirus. He quotes a physician on the faculty of UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health:

We shut down the country for months, and didn’t do anything during that time to build the infrastructure and processes we needed. . . .

We didn’t use that time to build up our testing capacity, we didn’t think about schools in advance … — Dr. David Eisenman

In short we squandered the time, failing to take advantage of the pause in infections, and in many respects we are back to where we were in April — with shortages of PPE and inadequate testing and tracing — but the number of infections, the rate of infections, and the death toll have all risen, and the fall school term is only weeks away.

In an ideal world, there would be a national strategy in place, but because of an absence of leadership in the White House, responsibility for defeating the coronavirus has fallen to 50 state governors (plus leaders in D.C., Puerto Rico …).

At this stage, leadership at the state level has not served the country well. Watching the various states embrace (and reject) a hodgepodge of policies, and watching individual governors pivot first this way, then that, has hardly inspired confidence. In fact, policies have often been confounding and, if a coherent rationale for specific decisions exists, it has not always been visible.

Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University’s Watson Institute, suggests (“Risks & Benefits Matrix”) that governors could clarify their decisions — and I’ll add, make better decisions — if they compared (and revealed to us) risks and benefits of various activities to be permitted or restricted by their policy choices.

There is room for disagreement about social value, so it’s possible to decide that, say, opening bars and sporting events is more important than opening schools. But, let’s hear that choice articulated, so we know that at least the governor has thought things through and is willing to cop to his/her preferences.

Professor Oster offers this graph of her personal policy preferences. Parks (in the upper left quadrant) provide high benefit at low risk. In contrast, gyms and bars find their places in the lower right quadrant (high risk and, on her evaluation, low reward) activities. Opening schools is risky, but may be regarded as providing large rewards (top, right).

Graph from “Risks & Benefits” by Emily Oster.

In practice, of course, many governors appear to have valued bars and gyms more highly than K-12 schools. Other policy anomalies abound across the country.

I’m with Oster (and just as angry): “In my wildest dreams, I’d like to see each of our Governors give a press conference with a picture like this behind them which reflects their policies. It’s not that these policies aren’t defensible, but I would like to see people say: bars have a sufficiently high benefit that I’m prioritizing that over in-person schooling.“

(Emily Oster provides the link to “COVID-19 Be Informed” image from the Texas Medical Association.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails

No surprise, and mostly GOP silence, as Donald Trump commutes Roger Stone’s prison sentence

Mitt Romney is the GOP exception, of course, as he has been in the past.

In a normal time (at least pre-Newt Gingrich), with a pair of normal political parties (back in the day when the GOP was committed to governing), and a normal president (anyone from FDR through Obama), Senator Romney’s statement would not make him an extreme outlier.

Those were the days.

Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Donald Trump is impatient for schools to open — but he doesn’t give a fig about children and Families

“In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden … SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS.”

Compare the number of new cases of coronavirus in the following countries. The totals for the first four countries are from Johns Hopkins’ Coronavirus Resource Center for July 8 (yesterday); the total for the U.S. for July 9 (today, just posted) is from the New York Times.

  • Germany – 356
  • Denmark – 12
  • Norway – 11
  • Sweden – 514
  • United States – 59,460

The CDC (along with Drs. Fauci and Birx, et al.) may recognize a difference in the rates of infection in the countries Trump says have opened schools with NO PROBLEMS and the country that he leads — or rather, has failed to lead.

Does anyone think — even in the red states and regions — that Donald Trump is concerned with the health and well-being of the nation’s children, or the teachers who lead our classrooms, or the families that the children go home to each evening?

Until the U.S. has gotten the upper hand on the coronavirus, it makes no sense to rush to reopen. And, sadly, tragically, this may not begin to happen until Donald Trump has left the White House.

Things are still getting worse. On his watch.

(Image: one room schoolhouse in Lincoln’s New Salem. [“Great president. Most people don’t even know he was a Republican.”])

Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Learn to live with it. Or die with it. Whatever. — Trump White House to Americans regarding out of control epidemic

“The virus is with us, but we need to live with it.”

After months of communicating mixed messages about the coronavirus, of making promises that weren’t kept and pronouncements that were plainly false, the Trump White House has belatedly recognized that “the virus is not going away any time soon — and will be around through the November election.”

NBC’s Carol Lee, Kristen Welker, and Monica Alba report that the administration and Trump’s reelection campaign has landed on a new message: Learn to live with it.

Predictions dating back nearly six months include: “the problem goes away in April”; on Easter Sunday there will be “packed churches all over our country”; “by Memorial Day weekend we will have this coronavirus behind us”; and by July the country will be “really rocking again.”

Trump has never made a genuine effort to squelch the virus (though he briefly posed as “a wartime president,” nothing came of that). The evidence suggests that Donald Trump is not much interested in governing. He has certainly been disinclined to craft a plan, marshal resources, and coordinate a national effort to defeat the coronavirus.

Trump has no plan to defeat the coronavirus and declines to make a plan. It is no wonder that none of the rosy predictions about the epidemic resolving itself have come to pass.

Throughout the first half of 2020, Trump has evaded accountability, while insisting that the nation’s governors are responsible for combating the coronavirus. And wishful thinking is still the order of the day. On Wednesday the President said:

I think we’re going to be very good with the coronavirus. I think that at some point that’s going to sort of just disappear, I hope.

But now — White House advisers tell NBC — they are ready to turn a corner, as they watch the economy reopen: “the White House is now pushing acceptance.”

As of July 4, 2020 (3 a.m.), the United States has had 2,794,153 cases of coronavirus and 129,434 deaths.

This graph from Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center shows what that looks like (in comparison with other hotspots in the world):

The United States leads the world in coronavirus cases.

As Donald Trump made the case in Tulsa for pushing aside concern with the coronavirus: “We have to get back to business. We have to get back to living our lives. Can’t do this any longer.” 

These infections, at this level, were not inevitable. The number of people who have died from coronavirus did not have to total more than one hundred twenty-nine thousand. Yet the spread of coronavirus and the number of deaths continue to increase — because Donald Trump has proved incapable and uninterested in leading a national effort to end this catastrophe.

Instead, the immediate future we will see more of the same. More infections. More pain and suffering. More deaths. And, at this stage, we can lay responsibility for virtually everything yet to come at the feet of Donald Trump.

A consistent theme of this blog is that the leadership of the Republican Party is complicit in whatever Donald Trump says and does. They made a Faustian bargain to lock arms with Trump and they’re not disentangling themselves. The devastation being wrought on our country now — and for the forseeable future — from coronavirus is also at the feet of the GOP. So I’m on board with Josh Marshall’s sentiments:

I seldom think anything good about Donald Trump. I hate what he has done to the country. I hold his enablers even more responsible for what has happened on his watch. 

Marshall concludes:

None of this had to happen. It is a failure of cataclysmic proportions. It has many roots. It has revealed many insufficiencies and failures in our society and institutions. But the scale of it, the unifying force of it is a man who never should have been president, who has abandoned his responsibility to lead and protect the country, making it every state for itself, a chaos only organized by a shiftless and shambling effort to help himself at all costs at every point.

The worst is yet to come.

(Image: NBC News report on mass graves of coronavirus victims at New York’s Hart Island in April.)

Off the Rails

Why in the world is COVID-19 out of control in the United States, not the E.U., not China, not New Zealand, Not Canada, not South Korea, not . . . ?

Gavin Newsom’s impact during his eight years as Lieutenant Governor didn’t convince me to vote for him in California’s 2018 Democratic Primary. But, watching him in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic made a believer out of me. I was impressed by his timely, decisive actions in shutting down California before most of the country’s governors had any idea what was about to hit them.

More recently, as I suggested in my last post, the governor has stumbled.

Friday morning on NRP, Steve Inskeep interviewed Dr. Emily Landon, a University of Chicago epidemiologist, who has been advising the governor of Illinois. She offered an account of Illinois’ success in acting “early on” – with a March 21 stay-at-home order that prevented the situation that developed in New York and the Northeast. Because of this success, Illinois is about to enter phase four – with more reopenings, including restaurants for indoor dining, gyms, the lakefront path, and – soon – beaches. As she explained:

Certainly, these are still risky activities. There’s still more infection than we want to be having. But if people are following the rules, keeping distance, wearing their mask – if we can keep doing those things, then it should be safe enough for us to go back to doing some of these things that we used to enjoy before the pandemic.

 Inskeep responds that there are “some similarities between Illinois and California,” and notes that after California’s reopening, the virus has now returned with a vengeance, resulting in a second shutdown. Dr. Landon acknowledges that this is a cautionary tale. She says that “we need to understand better what’s happened in California,” but expresses confidence in the path Illinois is taking. She explains that

with respiratory viruses and with infection in general, there’s kind of a tipping point that happens where every case is able to spread to one or more other people on average. Then you have to do some very drastic things, like a stay-at-home order or really closing down a lot of public buildings and activities. So I don’t know exactly what’s putting California back into this situation. But I do know that if they do the same things that they did before, that it should be successful in curbing the spread of the virus.

Inskeep then turns to Dr. Ali Khan (at the University of Nebraska), who weighs in skeptically about the course Illinois is following. He points to data showing the number of cases in Illinois is increasing (from 550 in mid-June to 800) and suggests that the opening up is likely to bring further increases. (The Washington Post reported 912 cases in Illinois on July 3.) Dr. Khan continues:

But let me talk about what we’re seeing here – is this is now being shifted. And I’ve seen this now – multiple places are shifting the blame to individuals not doing what they’re supposed to be doing. I’ve not heard one person talk about test and trace. And so if you’re going to reopen, what are you doing to get cases down to zero? So no metrics. How much – you know, how soon does it take to isolate somebody? How many contacts are people following? How many cases are from contact list. So no, we cannot go back to what we did before successfully because we were not a success before because we had failed to do test and trace.

So there’s four elements of getting this disease under control. So yes, one is the community component which, is, where you mask. Social distance. And wash your hands. That’s just one component. And it’s not the primary component. The primary component is the state and the localities and the national responsibility to get cases down. Test and trace. Add that to leadership. And then add that to dropping deaths with dexamethasone. Those are the four things we need to do to become a success, just like Europe and countries like New Zealand that have eliminated the disease. So they have zero cases. And China has two cases in 1.4 billion people. We can do this in America.

I was impressed, early on, not only by Gavin Newsom, but by Los Angeles city and county officials. When officials at all three levels moved to reopen, however, I wasn’t in the least tempted to eat indoors at a restaurant or visit a hair salon, much less to attend a film at a movie theater or drop by a neighborhood bar. Granted, at age 70, I have reason to be more conscientious about maintaining physical distance and wearing a mask, than younger people do; and unlike governors, mayors, and county supervisors, I have no leadership responsibility for the welfare of the community (not public health, not economic well-being). But (based on everything I’ve learned by reading about this virus), these reopenings seemed rushed to me. And, earlier this week, both city and county testing facilities had run out of appointments. While in California, as in much of the nation, there isn’t enough testing, this month the state has halted efforts to increase testing.

Dr. Landon’s emphasis on individual choices — “… if people are following the rules, keeping distance, wearing their mask – if we can keep doing those things …” and if people “do the same things that they did before …” – is a shaky foundation to rely on. We need to lean instead on safe, sound public policies (beyond injunctions concerning individual behavior). As Dr. Kahn notes, the other elements of a sound plan – including testing and tracing – have been neglected.

Color me highly skeptical that Illinois will escape the same flareups that most states are experiencing. Illinois, like other states before it, is reopening before gaining the upper hand on the coronavirus.

Until we gain the upper hand, reopening with the hope that the virus will somehow disappear is foolhardy.

Post Script: To put our individual choices in perspective, the Washington Post did a Q and A: “How Fauci and 5 other experts handle masking, haircuts, doctor’s appointments and more.” I’ll note that all six were in sync with me on two questions at the top of my list: All of them went grocery shopping (wearing masks and keeping their distance) and none of the six were willing to eat inside a restaurant.

(Image: Photo of Il Capriccio on Vermont, July 4.)

2020 General Election, Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

The Trump Roadshow pretends there is no raging pandemic and no rising death toll

Donald Trump is on the move. Tulsa. Phoenix. And coming soon to Mount Rushmore, where he will celebrate the 4th.

Meanwhile, the number of new coronavirus infections reported across the U.S. yesterday — 38,115 — was a record high since the start of the pandemic. The number of infections in this country totals more than 2.3 million and the death toll exceeds 119,000. I recommend the interactive feature in this morning’s New York Times, which illustrates in vivid animation the relentless spread of this virus.

“Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count,” June 25, 2020 New York Times.

In March, the President, failing to apprehend the reference to Nero fiddling while Rome burned, retweeted a cartoon image of himself playing the violin.

Ignoring the pandemic; willfully refusing to do anything to tame it (except for persistent wishing); pretending that if we just all go back to work and out to shop, all will be well — this is hardly a promising reelection strategy. But that seems to be Trump’s game plan. And, by all accounts, that — winning reelection, not defeating the coronavirus — is Trump’s fixation.

That’s a remarkable testament to Trump’s intellectual incapacity, moral depravity, and unfitness for the office he holds.

More significant than a stupid, self-defeating strategy is that people continue to die. Tens of thousands who didn’t have to die. This is a national tragedy as a result of a monumental failure of leadership. We can see this clearly in the contrast between the U.S. and the European Union. The EU has begun to tame this virus; we haven’t. It’s getting worse here.

Meet the Press, June 21, 2020.

Trump is incapable — relying on his gut and his small, threadbare bag of tricks — of defeating the coronavirus. So, having failed to wish it away, he ignores it.

Here’s what’s even more significant: The contemporary Republican Party is complicit in this ongoing catastrophe. Republican leaders have made a deal in getting behind Trump, and standing behind him come what may.

The failures of Trump’s tenure in the White House are clearly visible. The consequences can’t be hidden or wished away. And among the national Republican leadership, there are plenty of men and women who see well enough what is going on.

And they’re going along with this. They stick with Trump no matter what the consequences. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of Americans get infected needlessly, and no matter how many tens of thousands of Americans die as a result of Trump’s failures — they stick with him. They have freely entered into a pact that they are unwilling to break.

They made a cold, hard calculation to follow Trump because it kept them in power, gave them tax cuts, shredded regulations, and allowed them to stack the federal courts with right-wing ideologues. And the fact that their bargain has brought pain and suffering and death in numbers that are stomach turning — that, in their minds, doesn’t outweigh the political benefits of the deal.

There is so much that is indecent about this President. There’s so much to be distressed and angry about. Day after day, the cases of coronavirus increase and the death toll mounts. It’s disheartening and infuriating and disturbing to watch senators, members of Congress and the cabinet, advisors in the White House — the whole lot of defenders and apologists for Trump — accept the sickness, the pain and suffering, and the deaths of Americans because, in their minds, what they’ve gained outweighs the devastation that their political bargain has brought to the rest of the country.

(Image: Mount Rushmore in the fog, National Park Service.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

Attorney General Barr is all-in with the Trump/GOP strategy of flooding the zone with shit

From this morning’s New York Times (“William Barr’s State of Emergency”), an interview with the Attorney General of the United States:

Mail-in ballots are another domain where Trump had been staking out turf. He called the distribution of ballot applications in Michigan “illegal” and warned that voting by mail “doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” In a second interview on May 20, when I asked who was going to referee the 2020 election, Barr replied, “The voters.” He said his department’s role would be limited, as the power belongs to the states and their electors. But when I brought up Trump’s tweet about Michigan, which he posted that same morning, Barr quickly seized the opportunity to float a new theory: that foreign governments might conspire to mail in fake ballots.

“I haven’t looked into that,” he cautioned, offering no evidence to substantiate that this was a real possibility. But he called it “one of the issues that I’m real worried about,” and added: “We’ve been talking about how, in terms of foreign influence, there are a number of foreign countries that could easily make counterfeit ballots, put names on them, send them in. And it’d be very hard to sort out what’s happening.” 

Let’s be clear: Bill Barr is neither “an imbecile,” nor “an idiot” (Steve Schmidt’s assessment of Donald Trump). He is an astute political operative who knows precisely what he is doing. From the moment he succeeded Jeff Sessions, he has been all-in with Trump. All-in with Fox News Channel, Limbaugh, Breitbart, and every other star in the conservative media universe. He is (as Jay Rosen aptly characterized the White House strategy to dodge accountability at all costs) “flooding the zone with shit.”

(Image: Nice Shot – A Blow for Liberty by Bill Bramhall. )

Donald Trump, Off the Rails

No plan to defeat the coronavirus; Trump casts shade on testing; White House veers and cheers

“We don’t have a single point of leadership for this response, and we don’t have a master plan for this response.” — Rick Bright

“We have greatest testing in the world. We have the most cases than anybody in the world – but why? Because we do more testing. When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.” — Donald Trump

“We had left a playbook and it was easy to tell that’s what it was, because it said on the front in big red letters, Playbook, and then it had all those steps you needed to take. Sixty-nine pages of steps of what to do when a pandemic loomed.

…First everyone said no such document existed. Now today the White House press secretary came out and said: Well, there was this document, but it wasn’t really that good. And we had our own document … – which contradicts the fact that the Trump position till now has been: Well, no one saw this coming.

Now the position is: Well, we saw it coming. We rejected the Obama playbook. We had our own playbook. Our playbook was better.

… The only thing that’s consistent in the excuse making from the White House.” — Ron Klain

“There’s never been a vaccine project anywhere in history like this. And I just want to make something clear. It’s very important. Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back.” — Donald Trump

More than 88,000 Americans have died of COVID-19. And the dying hasn’t stopped.

(Image: Kayleigh McEney, holding the Obama administration’s Playbook, while celebrating the disastrous response of the Trump administration to the pandemic.)