How Many Americans Will Needlessly Die Of COVID Because Of Trump's Incompetence And Sociopathic Nature?

Bret Stephens has a long career as a conservative opinion writer, formerly at the Wall Street Journal and Jerusalem Post (as editor-in-chief) and currently at the NY Times. He's also a crackpot Zionist, a racist, a neo-con, a Climate Change denier, a Pulitzer winner and a prominent #NeverTrump Republicano. In yesterday's column, Donald Trump Is Our National Catastrophe, Stephens wrote about a class he taught about heart of political persuasion, using as examples of practitioners Abraham Lincoln, Pericles, Martin Luther King, George Orwell, Václav Havel, Winston Churchill and Señor Trumpanzee-- or at least the Twitter account of Señor T's. "We are, he wrote, "in the midst of an unprecedented national catastrophe. The catastrophe is not the pandemic, or an economic depression, or killer cops, or looted cities, or racial inequities. These are all too precedented. What’s unprecedented is that never before have we been led by a man who so completely inverts the spirit of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. With malice toward all; with charity for none: eight words that encapsulate everything this president is, does and stands for... [G]reat political writing aims to elevate. What, by contrast, does one learn by studying Trump’s utterances?"

The purpose of Trump’s presidency is to debase, first by debasing the currency of speech. It’s why he refuses to hire reasonably competent speechwriters to craft reasonably competent speeches. It’s why his communication team has been filled by people like Dan Scavino and Stephanie Grisham and Sarah Sanders.

And it’s why Twitter is his preferred medium of communication. It is speech designed for provocations and put-downs; for making supporters feel smug; for making opponents seethe; for reducing national discourse to the level of grunts and counter-grunts.

That’s a level that suits Trump because it’s the level at which he excels. Anyone who studies Trump’s tweets carefully must come away impressed by the way he has mastered the demagogic arts. He doesn’t lead his base, as most politicians do. He personifies it. He speaks to his followers as if he were them. He cultivates their resentments, demonizes their opponents, validates their hatreds. He glorifies himself so they may bask in the reflection.

Whatever this has achieved for him, or them, it’s a calamity for us. At a moment when disease has left more than 100,000 American families bereft, we have a president incapable of expressing the nation’s heartbreak. At a moment of the most bitter racial grief since the 1960s, we have a president who has bankrupted the moral capital of the office he holds.

...Trump is responsible for the nation’s wounds. It’s that he is the reason some of those wounds have festered and why none of them can heal, at least for as long as he remains in office. Until we have a president who can say, as Lincoln did in his first inaugural, “We are not enemies, but friends”-- and be believed in the bargain-- our national agony will only grow worse.

And it isn't just Trump's words that are making literally everything worse. His dysfunctional, chaotic and incompetent, venal regime is a colossal failure. The nightmarish coronavirus pandemic is global and wasn't started by Trump. The fact that it is far worse in the U.S. than anywhere else on earth is the fault of Trump, his regime and his Republican Party lickspittles.

I Can't Breathe by Nancy Ohanian

This afternoon we crossed the two million confirmed cases mark in our country. It didn't have to be this way. Even as new case rates start to slow down in states that were hit hard early on-- New York, Washington, New Jersey, Michigan, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, other states-- particularly states with governors who emulate Trump, like Greg Abbott (Texas), Ron DeSantis (Florida), Brian Kemp (Georgia), Henry McMaster (South Carolina), Kim Reynolds (Iowa), Doug Ducey (Arizona), Pete Ricketts (Nebraska), Chris Sununu (New Hampshire), Mike Parson (Missouri)-- are watching their own cases numbers accelerate dangerously. States that we're part of the early first wave but where bad policy decisions are fueling severe outbreaks see rapidly growing cases per million today:

• Nebraska- 8,082 cases per million
• Iowa- 6,867
• South Dakota- 6,147
• Virginia- 5,938
• Mississippi- 5,803
• Colorado- 4,862
• Georgia- 4,888
• New Mexico- 4,264
• Alabama- 4,181
• Tennessee- 3,863
• New Hampshire- 3,691
• North Dakota- 3,754
• Utah- 3,764
• Arizona- 3,694
• California- 3,331
• Nevada- 3,133
• Arkansas- 3,123
• Florida- 2,977
• South Carolina- 2,775
• Texas- 2,613
• Missouri- 2,455

Friday, Guardian writer Michael Safi looked into what the contours of Wave II are likely to look like-- warning ominously that "the pandemic’s future will be decided by human action and several unanswered questions about the nature of the virus." Some countries see their curves flatten significantly-- Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, South Korea, Holland, Iceland, Switzerland, Israel, Japan, Austria, Denmark, Czechia, Australia, Finland, Cuba, New Zealand, Hong Kong-- while others, notably the U.S., India, the UK, Russia, Peru, Mexico, the Gulf states, Pakistan, south Africa and Egypt, are still going in the wrong direction. "The future shape of the pandemic," Safi wrote, will be decided both by human action, in the form of social distancing, testing and other traditional methods of disease control, but also several unanswered questions about the nature of the virus itself. Experts say there are several possibilities."

One is that the virus breaks out and is suppressed in peaks and troughs, until enough of the population is vaccinated or potentially develops immunity.

Antibody tests in most places indicate that quarantine measures were very effective in slowing down the virus. Fewer than 10% of populations in France, Spain and Sweden have developed the antibodies that would be evidence of having caught the virus and, in theory, becoming immune, for at least a short time.

But that also means the vast majority of populations remain susceptible.

If societies reopen before the virus is sufficiently eradicated, it may be that this first wave does not completely go away, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University.

“In the US, we are lifting lockdowns when there are still increasing numbers of cases in a bunch of states … We may just have peaks and valleys of transmission occurring over and over again as people’s behaviour changes,” she says.

The scale of these peaks could be reduced by making changes such as wearing masks, using public transport in a staggered way and avoiding overcrowded social events-- which are increasingly being blamed for being “super-spreaders” of the first wave of the coronavirus.

If outbreaks grow too large, some governments might choose to reimplement quarantines. “If we’re reopening and we start to see case numbers growing rapidly in a few weeks, we may see rolling lockdowns or shutdowns to try to control the virus in those areas,” Rasmussen says.

...Social distancing and robust testing-- or a lack of it-- will be critical in deciding the future of the pandemic. But its shape will also be influenced by factors outside our control.

The first is whether we can become immune to the virus, and if so, how long that protection endures for.

Sometimes immunity can last for decades. During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, public health authorities were initially confused as to why many older people seemed to be immune. Later, they discovered the virus was structurally similar to one that circulated during the 1918 pandemic. The immune systems of many older people had dealt with a similar virus 92 years ago.

Resistance to some earlier discovered coronaviruses has been thought to fade within a year. If immunity to Sars-CoV-2 is not permanent, a report from Harvard epidemiologists says it is likely to enter into regular circulation, coming in annual or biennial waves or sporadic outbursts.

The frequency of significant outbreaks may also be influenced by the weather. Most influenzas spread more easily in the winter because the virus is thought to prefer dry air over humidity, and because people in cold environments spend more time indoors and close to each other.

Existing coronaviruses also follow seasonal patterns. If this coronavirus behaves in the same way-- and there is not yet strong evidence that it does-- we could see regular wintertime surges of Covid-19.

But with so many people still apparently not immune to the virus, that summer relief may not arrive this year, says James Hay, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health.

“The factor that most contributes towards transmission is how many people are still susceptible,” he says. “And with so many still susceptible, that’s going to swamp out any climate effect.”

Significant mutations in the virus might also lead to a wave of new infections down the track. So far, scientists say that isn’t a huge concern.

“Even though there are different genomes out there that have changes compared to each other … there’s no evidence any of those changes are in spots that are critical for the immune system to recognise,” Rasmussen says.

But that doesn’t mean we won’t see a significant mutation later. “We’ve only known about this for six months, so it’s possible different strains could emerge in the future, because it does have a higher mutation rate,” she says. “But right now there’s no evidence that that’s happening.”

For countries that are able to implement highly effective interventions such as testing and contact tracing, this first wave of coronavirus cases may be the last they experience, at least for some time.

In New Zealand, which has managed to virtually eradicate the virus and installed robust systems to monitor new outbreaks, there may be no significant new outbreaks or future waves at all, says Nick Wilson, a professor of public health at the University of Otago.

“New Zealand is about to eliminate this virus,” Wilson says. “Even if there are border control failures, I expect that the contact tracing system is now good enough to control an occasional outbreak. So this country should be able to avoid future waves until a vaccine arrives.”

Countries with small populations and isolated geography such as New Zealand and Australia may be able to pull this off. South Korea is another country whose virus detection and suppression systems may be advanced enough to smother any future outbreaks. But it will be extremely difficult for most countries, especially those with large populations and porous borders.

Should We Think Of Trump As An Illiterate Buffoon Or As Someone With A Disability?

One of the reasons why I don't like using RealClearPolitics' polling averages is because they include Rasmussen, a company known for delivering polling numbers their clients pay for. But even with a ridiculous Rasmussen poll included, the RealClearPolitics polling average for Trump's job approval shows that just 45.2% of the electorate approves of the job he's doing, as opposed to 52.3% who don't. A more accurate poll, by Morning Consult in mid-December, shows that just 41% of registered voters approve and 56% disapprove. That 41% approve of the job Trump is doing is mortifying, not about Trump but about our countrymen.

David Graham's essay in Monday's Atlantic, The President Who Doesn't Read, might confirm your decision to oppose Trump. The the ignoramuses who approve of the job Trump is doing-- whether 41% or 45.2%-- actually like him more precisely because he is allergic "to the written word" and to them his reliance on oral communication is anything but a liability in office. He's just like they are, just like the moron they used to watch on that TV sitcom he presided over that caused them too aspire to be just like him-- and to vote for him.

In Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff wrote that Trump’s indifference to the printed word has been apparent for some time. Wolf: "He didn't process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate." Wolff quoted Gary Cohen: "It’s worse than you can imagine... Trump won’t read anything-- not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored." Trump himself: "I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you."




Graham: "In March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as possible so as to attract his fickle attention. In September, the Associated Press reported that top aides had decided the president needed a crash course on America’s role in the world and arranged a 90-minute, map-and-chart heavy lecture at the Pentagon." Trump prefers to absorb his information on TV-- especially on TV that talks admirably about him. Wolf painted an ugly picture: "If he was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls-- the phone was his true contact point with the world-- to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another."

Trump has always loved the telephone: Stories of him calling business associates and friends, or reporters, whether under his own name or pseudonyms, litter his business career. (There are limitations, Wolff suggests: Aides found that Trump “could not really converse, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation.”) His conversations with friends are a crucial source of information and pressure release. Shortly after taking office, per The Times Trump told a friend, “I can invite anyone for dinner, and they will come!” The ability to invite-- and one presumes call-- anyone and have them reply flatters Trump’s ego and seems to be one of the few parts of his position that he enjoys.

In view of this oral fixation, Trump’s affection for Twitter is not as paradoxical as it seems. It requires only 140, and now 280, characters at a time, is often fed by what he’s watching on TV, and it is only outgoing: The president need not read himself to tweet effectively. The conversationality of Twitter fits his M.O., too. While Trump is billed as the author of many books, it’s clear he didn’t actually write them. Art of the Deal ghostwriter Tony Schwartz savaged him during the campaign, while Trump has blamed errors in other books on mysterious speechwriter Meredith McIver. It’s not like these books are great literary achievements, anyway. What Trump imparts to them is his conversational shtick. Unlike past presidents, there’s little evidence of a written record of letters or other correspondence, either. The paradigmatic Trump epistle is a cease-and-desist letter from counsel.

Trump’s particular affection for television is notable. As a Baby Boomer, he is a member of a generation raised on television and still especially fond of it. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, people in Trump’s age cohort watch an average of four hours of television a day, meaning his reported four-to-eight-hour habit is only somewhat greater than the norm. But that demographic also spends the most leisure time reading-- almost an hour a day, per the BLS, by far the greatest of any age group.

There’s a reason so many 65-to-74-year-olds read a lot: Many of them are retired, and don’t have to do work. Trump, by contrast, has one of the most demanding jobs in the world. One reason that it’s demanding, however, is that the holder is expected to consume, digest, and absorb prodigious amounts of information via reading, and there’s little to suggest that Trump is doing that. Instead, he has taken that time up with phone conversations, television, and golf, another forum for oral communication. (Per Philip Bump, Trump played golf every 4.7 days in 2017, good for 10 full 24-hour days and far higher than Obama’s rate as president.)

Trump denies this, of course. “All my life I've heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office-- in other words, when you're president of the United States,” he said earlier this year. “So I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle.”

The president's actions show little such sign of preparation and study, while displaying faulty understandings of many things. After visiting Saudi Arabia and hitting it off with the country’s leaders, he forcefully backed Riyadh in its dispute with Qatar and many other issues, over the objections of some of his staff-- even publicly contradicting Tillerson. In December, however, he suddenly became concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The minimal thought put into several of Trump’s core views on China became clear when President Xi Jinping was able to change his entire view of the Korean incident in 10 minutes-- 10 minutes of oral conversation, of course.

Then there was his more recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as capital of Israel and move the U.S. Embassy there. That decision was controversial but not without defenders, and the U.S. insisted the move did not settle the final status of Jerusalem in peace talks with the Palestinians. Apparently Trump did not get (or perhaps did not read) the memo, because in a tweet earlier this week he said that the U.S. had “taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table,” rattling both Israelis and Palestinians.

The refusal to read, and the resulting limits of Trump’s understanding of complicated issues, doesn’t mean that every decision he makes is bad. Indeed, it can be liberating-- allowing him to act on instinct, even in the face of expert reservations. My colleague Krishnadev Calamur, for example, writes that the anger that led the White House to freeze aid to Pakistan this week is understandable. But the shaky grasp of the underlying currents means Trump is more likely to blunder on any given case, and Trump’s misstatements and missteps earn him mockery and undermine his stature around the world.

Perhaps no single area better summarizes Trump’s strange tendency than his press shop. He was reportedly driven to distraction by Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s ill-fitting suits and bumbling demeanor, and eventually Spicer was pushed out in favor of Sarah Sanders, a calmer and more commanding force in the Brady Room. But in its written work, the White House press team continues to commit errors and gaffes and issue typo-flecked statements.

While most problems faced by presidential administrations are incredibly complex, the solution to problems caused by a president who does not read is fairly simple: He ought to start reading. Simple and easy are very different matters, though, and expecting a man who has always preferred chatting and watching television to the printed word to become a reader at 71 would be foolish. There’s no Trump pivot, especially not to the bookshelf.

Since we're talking about words, you can't imagine how excited I was the other day to see RJ Eskow did a Progressive's Guid To Corporate Dem-Speak. Unless is the first week you're reading DWT, you likely already know how insane it makes me to see people misuse words like "moderate" and "centrist." Eskow tackled the latter but not the former, presumably because it's the corporate media more than corporate Dems who are the culprits in the misuse of "moderate." Eskow introduced his piece by nothing that "Certain words and phrases are routinely used by 'centrist' political candidates. By design, these terms are imprecise, emotionally charged, and often self-contradicting. In fact, the word 'centrist' is just such a term, since polling shows that the economic viewpoint of these candidates-- especially regarding health care, Social Security, education and other social programs-- is often well to the right of the general public. In his guide to centrist terminology I had an initial impression that he was mostly thinking about Mayo Pete, until I read it a few times and realized it was primarily a critique of Status Quo Joe.

• Centrist: Someone who presents a corporate-friendly agenda with less fervor than the typical Republican, with a modest measure of regulation as demanded by circumstances and with a patina of social liberalism.

• Choice (when applied to a public good): A word used as an attempt to distract people from the flawed state of the American social contract by forcing them to choose from an array of semi-functional, overpriced private-sector products. This allows policymakers to subsidize private corporations at public expense, while at the same time providing the public with something that loosely resembles-- but is not-- a functioning social safety net.

• Compete (as in, “prepare workers of the future to compete”): A word used to describe what workers will be required to do to survive in the new, Randian economy. For example, to become competitive, workers are sometimes expected to run through a gauntlet of poorly conceived and insufficiently funded educational programs to re-train them for the “new economy” (defined below), often under the assumption that there is a secret app designer hiding inside every laid-off manufacturing employee. To “compete” after training, workers should be prepared to fight like crabs in a barrel for low-paying jobs that provide no employment security or benefits. (See also: “Jobs of the future,” defined below.)

• Free stuff: A term of contemptuous dismissal for public services that are commonly available in other developed countries, and which any decent society would make available to all human beings.

• Friend of mine (as in, “John McCain was a friend of mine”): A declaration of sentimental attachment not only to an individual across the aisle, but also to a long-passed era of comity between powerful individuals from both political parties. The term reflects an unwillingness to accept the cynicism and depravity of today’s GOP. It may also indicate a willingness to use “bipartisanship” as a cover for offering conservative policies by pretending they are needed to attract Republican votes (which they will not do).

• Health care consumers: People who are forced to choose from a bewildering array of inadequate private health options, based on future needs they can’t anticipate, as offered by private corporations that benefit financially by confusing them now and denying them medical care later. The word “consumers” allows policymakers to accuse individuals of not being “smart shoppers” when things go wrong, thereby deflecting blame away from both themselves and the corporations.

• “I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on bold ideas”: I don’t have any bold ideas.

• “I know how to get things done”: I intend to keep using a political approach that hasn’t gotten anything done for years.

• “I will not raise taxes one penny on the middle class”: I’ll let corporations keep ripping the nearly-vanished “middle class” off instead, charging people more than they’d pay in taxes while providing less in services-- and without public oversight or accountability.

• “I’m pragmatic”: I don’t believe that a country that won two world wars, rebuilt its economy with the New Deal after the Great Depression, created Medicare and Social Security, developed the internet at public expense, and sent several manned missions to the moon can do big things.

• “Ideology” (as in, “I don’t believe in rigid adherence to any political ideology”)" A pejorative term for principles and/or core values.

• “Jobs of the future”: Menial piecework tasks, parceled out through apps that force workers into 12-hour days in the hopes they can eke out a living through a lifetime of endless servility.

• “Managed competition”: Managed confusion. (See “Choice,” above.)

• “New economy”: Same as the old economy (circa 19th century), but the boss wears a turtleneck or a hoodie.

• “Our country needs to balance its budget like a family sitting around the kitchen table”:

Definition 1: I don’t understand how finance works.
Definition 2: I don’t want you to understand how finance works.

• “Pipe dream”: Any bold idea I don’t support.

• “Privatization”: Theft of public resources.

• “Public/private partnership”: See above; the exploitation of public resources for private profit.

• “Purity test”: Any belief or policy I won’t espouse because it would alienate my funders, but that I won’t openly oppose because it’s popular with voters. It implies that people who support it are rigid and unreasonable, rather than principled and thoughtful.

• “Reaching across the aisle”: A coded message to big-money donors that you will not fight for the policies you claim to believe in.

• “Realistic” (as in, “Your proposal (backed by a large majority of voters) isn’t realistic”): We don’t live in a functioning democracy and I don’t plan to do anything about it.

• “Rich kids/Trump’s kids” (as in, “I don’t want to give free college to Donald Trump’s kids”): 1) I believe that social program X is a commodity, not a public good; 2) if I really cared about economic inequality, I’d raise taxes on the Trumps of this world to pay for it, and 3) my logic could be applied to elementary schools, too, so I hope you don’t think about what I’m saying too much.

• “Something we can get done” (as in, “The public option is something we can get done”): A cautious proposal that can’t get passed as long as Republicans control the Senate, but will not inspire voters to turn the Senate Democratic. In other words, something that can’t get done.

• “Universal coverage”: The stated goal of providing every American with inadequate health insurance that ensures neither financial security nor decent medical care.

• “You can be progressive and practical at the same time”: I am neither progressive nor practical.

Yesterday the New York Times published their Of Course Bernie Can Win editorial-- and by Bret Stephens, no less. If you missed it, it's worth reading the whole thing. I'm sure the Biden and Trump campaigns did, carefully. It begins with a quote from Richard Feynman, an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. What's he got to do with feeling the Bern? "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-- and you are the easiest person to fool." The Times made that relevant to the 2020 election by revising it slightly: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself that Bernie Sanders can’t win-- not just the Democratic nomination, but also the presidency itself."

The warning applies to me as much as to anyone else who has spent the past months, or years, insisting that the senator from Vermont doesn’t have a chance. What it comes down to is this: We don’t want Sanders to be elected, so we tell ourselves he can’t.

According to the theory, Sanders’s support has a hard ceiling: It may be intense, but it’s also cultlike and off-putting. Too many Americans know enough about socialism to want a president who wears the term proudly (even if he insists it’s of a more benign variety). He embraces nearly all of the same policies, like Medicare for all, that raised Elizabeth Warren high in the polls but are now dragging her down.

And then there are those clips of him saying nice things about the Soviet Union, or defending the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, or finding the silver lining in the Castro dictatorship in Cuba. Didn’t Jeremy Corbyn, whose ideological affinities run in the same direction, just lead Britain’s Labour Party to disaster?

It all sounds superficially convincing-- and eerily familiar. It’s what many conservatives kept saying about Donald Trump around this time four years ago.

As with Sanders, Trump was seen as being way outside his party’s mainstream: a protectionist in a party of free traders; an isolationist in a party of interventionists; a libertine in a party of moralists. As with Sanders, Trump barely belonged to the party whose nomination he sought. As with Sanders, Trump’s message was that he was fighting a “rigged system.”

And as with Sanders, the ideological distaste for Trump among conservatives was matched to the conviction that he couldn’t possibly win. Let’s Elect Hillary Now, was the title of one conservative lament about the popularity of supposedly unelectable Republicans, written toward the end of 2015. I know the article well because I wrote it.

Trump won because he was willing to say loudly what his supporters believed deeply; because, in his disdain for what politicians are supposed to be and do, he exuded authenticity; because he was hated by the people his base found hateful; because he had an opponent who, in the minds of his supporters, epitomized corruption and self-dealing; and because he offered radical cures for a country he diagnosed as desperately ill. Despite being the oldest man ever elected president, he seemed (to his voters) fresh, true, bold, and sorely needed.

So it is, and would be, with Sanders. Depth of conviction? Check. Contempt for conventional norms? Check. Opposed by all the right people? Check. Running against a “crooked” opponent? Check. Commitment to drastic change? Check. Like Trump, too, he isn’t so much campaigning for office as he is leading a movement. People who join movements aren’t persuaded. They’re converted. Their depth of belief is motivating and infectious.

The strength of Sanders’s movement is reflected in his blowout fund-raising numbers-- nearly $100 million for 2019-- which only rose in the wake of his heart attack. If Sanders wins Iowa (where polls have him in a dead heat for first), and New Hampshire (where he has a slight lead), then the argument about his supposed non-electability will begin to crumble-- including among older black voters, who have so far been among Joe Biden’s most important pillars of support.

But even if Sanders won the nomination, how would he win the election? Perhaps more easily than people suspect.

Intensity among Democratic-leaning voters will never be greater. There will likely be no third-party challenger like Ralph Nader to shave his margin, or an influential “NeverSanders” wing among liberal pundits. He will find crossover support from former Trump voters in places like Ohio and Michigan, just as Trump found it from former Obama voters. To energize African-American support, he could choose Eric Holder or Stacey Abrams as his running mate.

Nor will scare tactics work any better against Sanders than they did against Trump. Overwrought comparisons with Hugo Chávez will wear thin, just as comparisons between Trump and Benito Mussolini did. The easiest move in American politics is to show yourself to be less scary than your caricature. Ronald Reagan’s devastating “There you go again” line against Jimmy Carter can be a Sanders quip, too.

Stephens concludes with some conservative nonsensical palaver but admits in the end, despite his own ideological preferences, that "To say Sanders is unelectable is indefensible." He's not quite ready-- nor will he ever be-- to agree that Bernie will be America's greatest leader-- only great leader-- since Franklin Roosevelt.

Rebecca Traister: Pundits Haven't Been Able To Keep Up

Two rich hereditary Donnies from Queens-- both hate Bernie

Let's call this Part II of this morning's post on Sydney Ember's dishonest, biased journalism. Because, well... there is Donny Deutsch and other like him, self-appointed pundits. Unlike Ember, most of them don't pretend to be reporters, just a rodeo clowns. And, alas, MSNBC turned into what it has turned into. As Rebecca Traister opined for New York Magazine yesterday, our political pundits aren't able to keep up and are "totally ill-equipped for the historic task ahead of them."

She noted that "Beyond their representational expansion, many of the candidates are offering up compelling, progressive policy ideas: pushing the party into fights for single-payer health care, subsidized child care, free college, a Green New Deal, a stronger commitment to reproductive justice and a push for more humane immigration policies. But we’re also getting our first real taste of the punditry that will frame this next year and a half, and so far, it is the opposite of fresh, diverse, or forward-thinking. Rather, the analysis coughed up by some of the nation’s loudest and most prominent talking heads sounds familiar and stale. The dispiriting truth is that many of those tasked with interpreting our politics are-- in addition to being extremely freaked out by the race they’re covering-- totally ill-equipped for the historic task ahead of them." It's a different problem than the Times' problem of foisting a monstrosity like Ember on us as though she were a professional reporter instead of Satin's spawn.

Where many Americans have seen the emergence of compelling and charismatic candidates who don’t look like those who’ve preceded them (but do look more like the country they want to lead), some prominent pundits seem to be looking at a field of people they simply can’t recognize as presidential. Where many hear Democratic politicians arguing vigorously on behalf of more justice and access to resources for people who have historically been kept at the margins of power, some prominent columnists are hearing a scary call to destabilization and chaos, imagining themselves on the outside of politics they’ve long assumed should be centered around them.

Altogether, what’s emerging is a view of a presidential commentariat that-- in terms of both ideas and diversity-- is embarrassingly outpaced by the candidates, many of whom appear smarter, more thoughtful, and to have a nimbler grasp of American history and structural inequities than the television journalists being paid to cover them.

The day after the first pair of debates, Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough declared them “a disaster for the Democratic Party,” and hoped that no one had been watching (in fact, they had been watching; ratings were startlingly robust). Scarborough particularly bemoaned candidates’ opinions on immigration-- namely that crossing the border should be reclassified as a federal misdemeanor, not a crime; and that immigrants should be entitled to health care-- chiding that these ideas “may make Democrats feel really good about themselves,” but would lose them the election. This week, Scarborough went on a Twitter tear, venting against “woke Democrats” and their drive left, later deleting his thread.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson asserted that the Democratic candidates resemble “a gaggle of graduate students.” At the debates, all of them, he conceded, “seemed articulate and intelligent … None, however, seemed ‘presidential.’” At the New York Times, Never Trump conservative Bret Stephens was worse, arguing that if Democrats continue to do things like speak Spanish and argue for universal health care, they’ll not only “lose the elections,” they’ll “deserve it,” and suggesting that the candidates’ fights on behalf of immigrants, workers, the uninsured, and the economically struggling shows that Democrats are more invested “in them instead of us,” a formulation in which “us” seems clearly to stand for the white and the well-off, and “them” is … everyone else.

In particular, Stephens criticized Kamala Harris’s “scurrilous attack” on Joe Biden during the second debate, in which she confronted the former vice-president over his praise for segregationists he’d boasted of working alongside in his Senate career and pointed out that the very busing measures he’d sided with Republicans to oppose had been what enabled her to attend an integrated elementary school. Stephens compared Harris critically to Barack Obama, writing of the former president’s ability to “[make] you feel comfortable no matter the color of your skin,” and argued that Harris, by contrast, made “white Americans feel racially on trial.”

Of course, newspaper columnists-- especially conservative ones like Stephens-- are going to columnize, and increasingly, they do so in company that is slightly more diverse, ideologically and in other ways, than it was even a few short years ago. But Stephens’s troubling assertion that a black person’s description of her experience of discrimination is tantamount to a prosecution of white people found a broader foothold in television commentary. During post-debate coverage, MSNBC host Chris Matthews-- who is still tasked with interviewing presidential candidates, despite having been revealed to have joked before a 2016 interview with Hillary Clinton about putting a “Bill Cosby pill” in her water-- was questioning Harris about the stories she’d told about friends not being allowed to play with her because she was black. Prefacing his question about race with the assertion that he did not “like the word ‘race,’” Matthews asked her, “How did you come out of that and not have hate toward white people generally?” Matthews was surely trying to side with Harris in some way, but did so by framing her challenge of segregationist policies, rooted in her personal experience, as logically akin to a hatred of white people-- precisely the specter of punitive racial resentment that Stephens had been trying to rouse.

Cable news analysis hit another low when Donny Deutsch, an advertising and branding executive who for years had his own CNBC show and was recently hired by MSNBC to host a weekly political talk show, said of Elizabeth Warren, whom he has predicted will lose 48 states should she become the nominee: “I think she’s delightful, I think she’s wonderful, I’m a big fan, I just don’t think she has what it takes to beat this president the same way... an idealized version of Joe Biden [does].” When challenged by MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, Deutsch got defensive: “I am understanding Donald Trump, the way he connects with this country, and the strength he exudes. We need to exude a stronger strength.” Deutsch exuded his own stronger strength by affirming that he is “a guy who’s done this for 30 years and watched human behavior.”

In this, if nothing else, Deutsch was correct: He has been doling out weird gender essentialism for eons. In his 2005 book Often Wrong, Never in Doubt, Deutsch wrote, “I cannot remember a time in my career when I was not having either a flirtation with a woman in the office, or a friendship, a fantasy, or all of the above. I am at my best when women are there to energize and excite me.” More recently, he told Nicolle Wallace of Joe Biden: “I love him onstage next to Trump. I love his height. I love that he threatened to get into a fistfight with Trump.” Back in 2008, Deutsch loved vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin in a different way, as a “new feminist ideal:” “I want her watching my kids … I want her laying in bed next to me,” Deutsch said at the time, arguing that “women want to be her, men want to mate with her.”

The problem here is not simply that Matthews and Deutsch still have their high-paid media jobs, despite lengthy records of mediocre analysis, grotesque speech about women, and relative cluelessness about race. It’s that their jobs are crucial to how the story of the presidential race will be told to the millions of people who watch them.

This is the suffocatingly grim reality: Even after the peeling off of a layer of the political media’s most prominent interlocutors during #MeToo-- including Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin, Bill O’Reilly and Matt Lauer-- television coverage of the 2020 election is still being led by men who have sketchy histories around gender and power. Even after a midterm season in which women-- many of them women of color, some of them very progressive-- won elections in historic numbers; even in the midst of a presidential crisis during which poor, black, brown, and immigrant communities have been made more vulnerable than ever, and have been brought closer to the center-- finally-- of left political engagement and activism; even given all of this, so many of the voices interpreting the events around us still belong to the guys who’ve been clumsily telling us what to think about politics for ages.

Of course, it’s the swiftness of the political current that is making so many long-entrenched pundits so uncomfortable. They feel left behind and are convinced that the electorate reflects their own perspectives-- as Donny Deutsch said last week to O’Donnell, “I guarantee you 90 percent of our audience agrees with me.” These analysts feel that a Democratic Party that’s moving left is ditching not just them, but their platonic ideal of a Democratic voter--concocted in the same spirit that Deutsch may imagine an “idealized version of Joe Biden”: a white centrist they are sure not only represents the average American, but the Democratic base. But in all of their hand-wringing, they seem not to have noticed that, in fact, assumptions about a safe center are crumbling in the hands of a new generation of political leaders willing to make a stirring case for radical ideas.

Support for the Green New Deal, a policy proposal which was treated as a joke not just by Republicans but by many in the Democratic Party and the press upon its inception, appears to have risen precipitously; a majority of voters support Medicare for All (even as many don’t totally understand what it entails). The majority of Americans support the kind of wealth tax that Elizabeth Warren is proposing, even as some economists criticize it as unrealistic. In fact, in this period during which mainstream political analysts talk so much about the perils of Democrats getting ever more progressive, a study released by the University of North Carolina last month showed American support for left-wing policy to be at a 60-year high, suggesting that perhaps the prescription being offered by these men-- which if I’m piecing it all together correctly would be a moderate show of masculine prowess and deficit-wary conservatism that makes white people feel good about themselves-- might be the very thing that has kept many voters from investing energetically in the Democratic Party until now. And the thing they fear most-- these women and nonwhite guys with their angry voices and memories of being discriminated against who are not tall enough to debate Trump-- may be what galvanizes the party.

The disconnect between the candidates and how the candidates are being received by many in the political media also tells us something about how politics, even presidential politics, remains much more susceptible to speedy alteration than institutional journalism.

After all, 11 years ago, when Deutsch was on television holding forth on Sarah Palin’s maternal hotness, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-- who’s not running for president but is clearly one of the transformational figures who’s bugging the hell out of many of these same men (Deutsch has predicted that she is “going to hand the presidency back to Donald Trump”; Stephens described her form of democratic socialism as “political hemlock”) was a college freshman. Elizabeth Warren was a law professor; Kamala Harris was the district attorney of San Francisco; Julián Castro was a former San Antonio city council member who’d lost his first campaign for mayor and was about to embark on his second. If you’d told many of the men covering 2020 that these would be the energetic leaders of a Democratic Party in 2019, they might have laughed. But they would have done their laughing on television or in newspapers because many of them … were doing the same, or similar, jobs as they are today.

We’re regularly told-- sometimes by these very same guys!-- that powerful white men are frightened, under attack by a mob of politically correct bullies who lack nuance. Yet in reality, these men’s own missteps-- joking about slipping a roofie to a presidential candidate, bragging about flirting with women at work, having lied about their own journalism careers, as current MSNBC anchor Brian Williams did-- have not resulted in permanent expulsion from their jobs. In fact, many of these men have been paid handsomely to continue telling their authoritative version of the story of American politics, over a period of decades during which those politics have been transformed, ideologically and representationally.

The absolute security and steadiness of their powerful perches has meant that many of these pundits have never been truly forced to think seriously about how they’ve benefited from racial and gendered bias, how colleagues and subjects who are smarter and more talented than they are don’t have their reach, their pulpits, their platforms.

And in this small but serious way, some of these pundits do reflect one angle of what’s been happening in the primary field: the front-runner status of Joe Biden, a man who has flamed out of two previous presidential primary campaigns-- one in which he was caught plagiarizing, one in which he spoke in affably racist terms about his competitor, Barack Obama, then won less than one percent of the Iowa caucus vote-- yet has nonetheless continued to wield political power, and to lead this year’s presidential pack in terms of fundraising, polling, and press coverage.

Biden, like many of the most prominent men covering him, was born into a world in which every system was set up to help him build and preserve his own power, even-- in fact by definition-- at the expense of others. These guys are on some level unprepared for a universe in which others, people whose childhoods were shaped by the busing policies they were creating, might one day stand up and challenge them; in which a woman whose family once teetered on the brink of home foreclosure might fight them tooth and nail on bankruptcy reform, or in which they would be forced to reckon with a debate stage filled with those who felt it important to speak Spanish.

These pundits may turn out to be right that these dynamics will make some voters feel as uncomfortable as they are being made to feel, and that those voters will ultimately prefer people who, like Trump, call back to a more comfortingly hierarchical past.

But the argument that many of the presidential candidates they’re covering are forcefully advancing is something I’ve rarely heard as clearly from potential front-runners before: that this comfortable path backward, even in service of electing a Democrat, is unacceptable and a reflection of the very inequities that have left the nation broken and perilous for so many. They are insisting on a different, faster, smarter, lefter turn toward the future.

If only our pundits could catch up to them in class.

When Size Matters: The Tiny Impotent Republican God

Republican Values by Nancy Ohanian

Bret Stephens is one of the New York Times' neoconservative #NeverTrump on-staff Republicans. Yesterday's column, Trump and the Annihilation of Shame, is another public yearn for the good ole days. "The contrast between then and now," he wrote, "is worth pondering in the Age of Trump-- an age whose signature feature isn’t populism or nationalism or any other –ism widely attached to the president. It’s the attempted annihilation of shame. Shame is neither sin nor folly. It’s what people are supposed to feel in the commission, recollection or exposure of sin and folly. In days bygone, the prescribed method for avoiding shame was behaving well. Or, if it couldn’t be avoided, feeling deep remorse and performing some sort of penance." Stephens could have as easily been writing this column about Joe Biden, but it fits Trump like a glove.

By contrast, the Trumpian method for avoiding shame is not giving a damn. Spurious bone-spur draft deferment? Shrug. Fraudulent business and charitable practices? Snigger. Outrageous personal invective? Sneer. Inhumane treatment of children at the border? Snarl.

Hush-money payoffs to a porn-star and centerfold mistresses? Stud!

The annihilation of shame requires two things. First, nerve: Whatever else might be said about Trump, it takes immense brass to lie as frequently and flagrantly as he does without apparently triggering any kind of internal emotional crisis. Ordinary mortals tend to blush when caught out in some kind of mischief. Trump smirks.

...It was once the useful role of conservatives to resist these sorts of trends-- to stand athwart declining moral standards, yelling Stop. They lost whatever right they had to play that role when they got behind Trump, not only acquiescing in the culture of shamelessness but also savoring its fruits. Among them: Never being beholden to what they said or wrote yesterday. Never holding themselves to the standards they demand of others. Never having to say they are sorry.

Trump-supporting conservatives-- the self-aware ones, at least-- justify this bargain as a price worth paying in order to wage ideological combat against the hypostatized evil left. In fact it only makes them enablers in the degraded culture they once deplored. What Chicago prosecutor Kim Foxx is to Smollett, they are to Trump.

Funny how Stephens and normal people view the history of the amoral nature of conservativism so differently. As though Reagan and his regime were so very different from Trump and his intros regard. Poor guy; binded by the light right. The was a far better and more relevant moral lesson over the weekend than Stephens' from John Pavlovitz over at Stuff That Needs To Be Said: The Terribly Tiny God of MAGA Christians. Pavlovitz feels sorry for professed Christians who support Señor Trumpanzee. "They have a profound and fundamental spiritual problem," he wrote. "[T]heir God is too small. They passionately worship a deity made in their own image: white, American, Republican, male-- and perpetually terrified of just about everything: Muslims, immigrants, gay children, Special Counsel reports, mandalas, Harry Potter, Starbuck holiday cups, yoga, wind turbines, Science-- everything. Their God is so laughably minuscule, so fully neutered of power, so completely devoid of functioning vertebrae that 'He' cannot protect them from the encroaching monsters they are certain lurk around every corner to overwhelm them."

MAGA Christians sure put up a brave face, I’ll give them that. They shower this God with effusive praise on Sunday mornings, they sing with reckless abandon in church services about Him, they brazenly pump out their chests on social media regarding His infinite wisdom, they defiantly declare this God’s staggering might at every opportunity-- but their lives tell the truth: They believe He is impotent and scared and ineffectual. You can tell this because they insist on doing all the things that a God-sized God would simply do as part of the gig.

They need to be armed to the teeth at all times because they don’t really believe God will come through to defend them in a pinch-- and will always be outgunned.

They want to change gay couples and transgender teenagers themselves, because they don’t trust God to work within people as He desires. (Apparently God keeps making LGBTQ people, which really pisses them off.)


They want to stockpile and horde wealth, health insurance, and opportunity-- because this is a zero sum game; because the God they claim turned water into wine, and fed thousands with a few fish and some leftover bread-- can’t make enough for everyone.

They are obsessed with building a wall and defending a border and turning way refugees-- because their God isn’t generous or smart or creative enough to help them figure out how to welcome and care for everyone who requires it. 
They want no other religious traditions to have a voice, because their insecure and terribly tiny God is mortally threatened by such things.

MAGA Christians’ daily existence testifies that their God is a microscopic, myopic coward, who has appointed them to morally police a world He cannot handle or is not equipped to direct and renovate. That’s pretty sad.

In short, their God isn’t a God worth believing in or worshiping-- which is why they have to play God while they’re alive. It’s why they are furrowed-browed and white-nuckling their journey here-- not content to let Jesus take the wheel for fear he’d drive them outside their gated community and into the hood and ask them to get out and care for the people they’re so used to condemning.

If you’re going to have a God, it may as well be right-sized. The world deserves this... Their God is small and terrified-- and it suspiciously resembles them.

People deserve a God who so loves the world, not a God who thinks America First; whose creation begin without divides and borders and walls, because there is only a single, interdependent community.


People deserve a God who touched the leper and healed the sick and fed the starving and parted the seas and raised the dead-- not a quivering idol who drafts bathroom bills and social media crusades against migrant families.

People deserve a God who is neither white nor male nor cisgender-heterosexual, nor Republican-- because any other God isn’t big enough to bear the title or merit any reverence.

MAGA Christians believe in God earnestly, pray to God passionately, serve God with unflinching fervor. The problem is their God is too small, and as long as they are oriented toward such a tiny, useless deity-- they will continue to be compelled to do for God what they believe God should be doing, but can’t or won’t.

I feel sorry for them and for the world that has to be subjected to their pocket-sized theology when there is an expansive space waiting.

I hope and pray that these people soon find a God who is big enough so that they stop living so small.

For their sake-- and for ours.

Fascism Comes To America by Nancy Ohanian

Does Anyone Ever Win When They Make A Deal With The Devil?

I got stuck in some kind of a traffic jam in the Valley yesterday. The freeway just stopped. It wasn't moving slowly; it wasn't moving at all. And it was humid and around 90 degrees and I hate A/C. The one redeeming part of this little adventure was that Terry Gross had Joshua Green as her guest on Fresh Air and I could concentrate on that. Green's book, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, And The Storming Of The Presidency had just come out and you can probably imagine what Gross and he talked about. But you don't have to. NPR posted the transcript online. "[L]ife in Trump's inner circle is a constant roller coaster," he told her. "You're either going up or you're going down. Earlier, Bannon fell out of favor when Trump decided that he was getting too much attention. And Jared Kushner kind of rose in his place. But now with the Russia scandal that's embroiled so many members of the Trump family and inner circle, Bannon, almost by default, is kind of back in good standing.

And, in fact, Trump sent him back from Saudi Arabia on the foreign trip that he took in May to go and set up the outside legal organization that was meant to hive off the Russia scandal and try and keep Trump himself as separated from that as possible." Gross asked him to describe Bannon's nationalist vision.

GREEN: So Bannon's nationalism is something, I think, that grew out of both his Catholic upbringing, his blue-collar background but especially the financial crisis, the rise of the Tea Party. That is when he went from being a Goldman Sachs banker, a Hollywood guy to really moving over into the political sphere. He was one of Sarah Palin's early champions.

When I met him in 2011, he was already espousing this kind of populist-nationalist politics that was different from anything you were hearing back then on the left or the right. It was not quite a third way, but it was a different sort of Republicanism than we in Washington were accustomed to hearing about.

GROSS: During the campaign, Donald Trump hammered Hillary Clinton for having connections to Goldman Sachs. Bannon used to work for Goldman Sachs. He specialized in mergers and acquisitions. He started doing that in their Hollywood office, then started his own boutique bank dealing with TV and movies. And then he took over an internet gaming company.

And you write about how that gaming company helped shape his vision of how to create a base of support for his vision. He saw people there, disaffected young men, who he wanted to mobilize for his cause. Would you describe this untapped group that he came across-- politically untapped group that he came across through internet gaming?

GREEN: Yeah, this is a fascinating story about what is the rise of what's known today as the alt-right. And Bannon, who has a fascinating and varied career after Goldman Sachs, wound up as the CEO of a video game company in Hong Kong that didn't actually produce video games. But what it did was to try and formalize a process called gold farming.

And what that is is, literally, they would hire people to play video games and win gold and prizes in the game that they would then turn around and sell to people in the real world so they could be more powerful, more successful in these what were called massive multiplayer online games, like "World Of Warcraft."

This was a serious business. It had backing from Goldman Sachs. And right out of the gate, it made a lot of money. But what happened next was interesting. The players in the actual games, who tended to be young males, bridled at the idea that people were essentially cheating, that they were buying these weapons and things to get ahead in the game. And the players themselves tended to congregate on these message boards that were devoted to MMO games, to the massive multiplayer games.

And they organized themselves, and they basically went after the videogame companies and said, you know, you need to stop this. You need to push out these gold farmers. And they had enough power that they basically ruined Bannon's business. But the lesson he took away from that was that these rootless white males who spend all their time online actually had what he told me was, quote, "monster power," to go out there and affect change and that they operated at a kind of sub rosa level that most people didn't see.

So when he moved over to Breitbart News a couple of years later, one of his goals, he told me, was to try and attract these people and radicalize them in a political sense, which is basically what wound up happening.

GROSS: So did Bannon see Breitbart News as his connection to those disaffected white men that he'd discovered through the gaming industry and that he wanted to mobilize?

GREEN: In a word, yes. He thought when he took over Breitbart News that one of the things they wanted to do was kind of grow this audience and really become a kind of locus for the populist nationalism, that's what Bannon calls it, that he thought was so important and needed to be injected into the American political debate.

And one of the ways he did that was by hiring a very controversial figure named Milo Yiannopoulos, a British provocateur who Bannon hired as his tech editor. And as he explains to me in the book, essentially, he thought that Milo could be the bridge between these rootless, disaffected white gamers and the Breitbart world of populist politics that he was trying to build up. Milo came into Breitbart News and began to publish the kind of screaming offensive headlines that have gotten so much attention over the last year or two.

He was part of this gamergate scandal that attacked females in the gaming industry and did all sorts of things to attract this crowd from the world of gaming and message boards like Reddit and 4chan over into the Breitbart universe where a lot of them became enamored with Trump, I think some of them in an ironic, nonpolitical way.

But this sort of gave rise to what we know of as the alt-right, this very active, aggressive group of online people who attacked journalists, who attacked other politicians, who attacked Trump's adversaries during the campaign and have kind of become a fixture of our digital political life ever since.

GROSS: So how did Steve Bannon first get connected to Donald Trump? You said they were introduced through David Bossie?

GREEN: They were introduced by David Bossie, who as some listeners may know, is a longtime Republican operative whose specialty really is taking on the Clintons. Bossie first came on the scenes as an investigator for Dan Burton, the chairman of the Government Oversight Committee in the '90s, who was the main figure trying to take down Bill Clinton at the time.

Bossie was fired from his job for doctoring tapes that were meant to incriminate Bill and Hillary Clinton. But he wound up becoming the head of a group called Citizens United, which is probably most famous today for having sued the FEC and won the Citizens United Supreme Court case that was built around a movie that Bossie and Citizens United had produced, an anti-Hillary Clinton movie that was supposed to run on the eve of the 2008 election.

So Trump met Bossie through Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino mogul. And they were at a fundraiser. He brought the two of them together. Trump was thinking about getting more seriously involved in politics, started turning to Bossie for advice. And one day in 2010, Bossie asked his friend Steve Bannon to come along. And that's how they all met.

...GROSS: So one of the key things behind Steve Bannon becoming Donald Trump's chief strategist during the campaign was the Mercer family-- Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer, who were big funders on the right.

You call them the kind of alt-Koch brothers. So they'd already been funding Breitbart News. So they already knew Steve Bannon through Breitbart. What was Rebekah Mercer's role in getting Trump to hire Bannon as his chief campaign strategist?

GREEN: Well, I think Rebekah Mercer, who is Robert Mercer's daughter, is really the more politically active of the two. But Mercer himself is a fascinating guy, a self-made hedge fund billionaire, famous recluse, very conservative. And the Mercers are essentially the merchant bankers for Bannon and a lot of his political organizations, not only Breitbart News but also the Government Accountability Institute, which is the outfit that produced the Clinton Cash book.

They fund Cambridge Analytica, which is a data analysis firm that helped Trump get elected. And they were also big donors to Trump, both directly and in terms of funding various super PAC efforts that were meant to help his candidacy, including the Stop Crooked Hillary PAC that Bannon and Bossie briefly worked on before they joined the campaign.

Rebekah Mercer is, you know, very aggressive, very involved in politics and has clear ideas about what she wants to do. And so I describe a scene in the book in early August where she flies out to visit Trump at a fundraiser in East Hampton and essentially says, you need to make a change now in your campaign or you're going to lose badly.

And Trump says, well, what do you think I should do? And she says, I think you ought to hire Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. I know them. They'll do it. And within a couple of days, that's exactly what happened.

GROSS: So she basically tells Trump, you have to fire Paul Manafort. But it's Jared Kushner who actually tells Manafort that Manafort has to resign. Donald Trump is known as Mr. You're-fired. Like, that's his catchphrase. But he's not the one who tells Manafort he's fired. He gets Jared Kushner to do it.

GREEN: I think he had long since lost faith in Paul Manafort as a campaign manager. When Manafort came in, it was after the tumultuous reign of Corey Lewandowski, Trump's first campaign manager. And what Manafort was trying to do was to essentially sand the rough edges off Trump and make him a little more palatable to the Republican donor class because it was clear, you know, now he's the nominee, we need to kind of put our best foot forward.

And Trump is going to need to raise a lot of money from rich conservatives who are very skeptical of him and what he stands for. But that never really clicked. Manafort never clicked with Trump. Trump would tell his advisers that he thought Manafort was low-energy. And we all know that's the mark of death when Trump calls you low-energy.

But it was a New York Times story that really did Manafort in. And they reported in mid-August that Manafort's name appeared on a Ukrainian ledger as having been the recipient of cash payments from a pro-Russia political party, which caused a real firestorm, which upset Trump. He decided that Manafort needed to go.

And as the story was told to me, Kushner at breakfast said very politely to Manafort, listen, you know, you're really coming under a lot of heat. I don't think this is good for the campaign and we'd like to have your resignation. And Manafort protested and said, well, look, I don't - you know, I'll look guilty if I resign.

I don't want to do this. And Kushner looks at him and says, well, listen, we're sending out a press release in about 30 seconds that says you resigned from the campaign. And that was that. Manafort was out and Bannon was really the guy in charge for the homestretch of the campaign.

GROSS: So when Bannon took over the Trump campaign, was he still affiliated with Breitbart? And was he using Breitbart News to campaign for Trump?

GREEN: Formally, Bannon separated from Breitbart News when he joined the Trump campaign. But Breitbart, in a lot of ways, had really been the locus of pro-Trump Republican energy all through the primaries, both before and after Steve Bannon took over the campaign. One of the themes I get at in the book is the division in conservative media. We forget now because Fox lavishes so much positive attention on Donald Trump.

But in the beginning, Fox was not uniformly pro-Trump. There was Sean Hannity, who has always been a Trump fan. But there were also people like Megyn Kelly, who held Trump to account, who were very skeptical. And if you remember the first Republican debate, Kelly went after Trump. It caused a huge ruckus.

And it really caused a split in the Republican Party between people who were pro-Trump and people who were pro-Fox. And Breitbart, led by Bannon, really went to war with Fox News over the issue of, you know, why are you attacking Donald Trump? This is the guy that represents our base. This is who our voters want.

And there was a very ugly scene between Roger Ailes and Steve Bannon where they're swearing at each other about whether Breitbart is being too negative to Megyn Kelly and so on. But eventually, Trump and Bannon seem to have won that side of the fight. And by the end of the campaign, you really do see the conservative media with a few never-Trumpers, but most of the media is more or less united behind Trump.

GROSS: It's interesting. You point out that Steve Bannon thought of Fox News as just being old-- that old people watched it, whereas Breitbart was like the young white men who were paying attention to that. So he saw Fox News for a while as just being like out of date.

GREEN: Bannon used to say that Fox News is the establishment wing of the conservative media. And establishment and Steve Bannon's mind is the great pejorative. He saw Fox viewers as, you know, an older, graying, doddering group of people who didn't really matter and that the readers of Breitbart were younger and more aggressive and more populist and represented a rising generation of conservative voters. And so he was never very interested in TV. He-- Bannon thought that everything, you know, was going to happen on the Internet, online, that that was the future of politics and that that was the way to affect the Republican primary and really get Trump elected.

GROSS: Jeff Sessions, who is now president Trump's attorney general, was the first senator to endorse candidate Donald Trump. And according to your book, it was Steve Bannon who was behind getting Sessions to endorse Trump. How did he do it?

GREEN: Well, Bannon and Sessions had been allied for a long time. Sessions was one of the rare right-wing populists elected to Congress whose views more or less over overlap with Steve Bannon's and Breitbart's. And, you know, we forget just what a pariah Donald Trump was at the outset of the Republican primaries. I mean, he was kind of considered, you know, a punchline, an offensive figure. No one in polite Republican company would endorse him. They were-- most of them were afraid to attack him, but nobody really wanted to endorse him. And I think Bannon understood how important it was to get just that one first endorsement in hopes that that would break a dam and that he could really bring in some institutional support for Trump. And so he talked to Sessions, who he had previously tried to talk into running for president three years earlier, simply to advance his ideas of trade and opposition to immigration. Sessions didn't want to do it, but Bannon basically talked him into coming out and endorsing Trump and said, look, this is the way to advance the issues we care about. This is the guy who will elevate them to the top of the list of issues that Republicans have to talk about. And even if Donald Trump doesn't win, this will advance our cause. And ultimately, Sessions was persuaded.

GROSS: And Bannon also thought it was really important to mobilize the South. And Sessions from the South. Why was he seeing the future being in the South?

GREEN: This is one fascinating aspect to me of Bannon's politics. For the last 20 or 30 years, it's been a belief among Republican strategists that the party's biggest problem is that it is captive to this Southern mindset. Christopher Caldwell wrote a wonderful series of articles in The Atlantic in the mid-'90s that was called "The Southern Captivity Of The GOP." And Caldwell's thesis, which I agreed with, was basically that the Republican Party is in danger of becoming a regional party that only represents the interests of white people in the South-- conservative white people in the South. And then in order to survive, it needs to broaden its appeal to other generations, to other demographics. It's the same idea that was at the heart of the 2013 GOP autopsy that the Republican National Committee came out with. But Bannon's belief was just the opposite, that the South was the motherland of American populism, that that was really what we needed, that the establishments in both parties had become captured by a Wall Street globalist elite that cared more about tax cuts for its high-end donors and free trade than it did about representing the interests of working people. And that turned out to be a very powerful message that was really the key, I think, to Trump's ability to defeat all the people that he did in the Republican primary because he was really the only person who espoused that kind of Southern populism.

...GROSS: Now, you describe how Steve Bannon brought on board a group that epitomized what Hillary Clinton in 1998 described as the vast right-wing conspiracy, the vast right-wing conspiracy that had mobilized against the Clintons when he was president. So let's talk about the people you're talking about there as actually epitomizing that vast right-wing conspiracy. We've talked about David Bossie, the person who is behind Citizens United. Kellyanne Conway and her husband, George Conway, what are their connections to early anti-Hillary work and anti-Bill Clinton work?

GREEN: Early on, Conway-- Kellyanne Conway was one of three women that were kind of known colloquially in Washington as the pundettes (ph). They were all blonde conservative outspoken anti-Clinton pundits who rose to fame during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. There was Kellyanne Conway. There was Laura Ingraham, who's now a conservative radio host. And there's Ann Coulter, who needs no introduction, was also a big Trump supporter. And what was so interesting to me about the fact that Bannon and this group wound up in charge of Trump's campaign come mid-August was that they had really spent the previous 20, 25 years as professional anti-Clinton operatives, which believe it or not is a distinct professional category within Republican politics.

There's no real analog on the left. You can't make a living anymore as an anti-Obama operative or as an anti-George W. Bush operative, but there's always an appetite among conservative donors, among conservative activists for anti-Clinton stuff. And so you literally had people who had spent 20, 25 years thinking and plotting about how to stop Hillary Clinton suddenly in charge of a half-billion-dollar presidential campaign led by a candidate who is more than willing to carry out those attacks.

GROSS: And I just want to mention that Kellyanne Conway's husband George worked on the Paula Jones lawsuit against Clinton and helped prepare the brief on her behalf before the Supreme Court. So he was very much involved in the anti-Bill Clinton effort. And continuing with the anti-Clinton theme here, Robert Mercer, the father of Rebekah Mercer-- and they're both very big funders on the right-- during the Clinton presidency-- I think it was then-- he had this theory or supported the theory that Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas had been involved in a CIA-backed drug-running scheme based out of an Arkansas airport.

GREEN: This was-- yes, this was a conspiracy theory that had some prominence on the far-right fringes. You don't encounter a lot of conservative donors, especially not successful businessmen, who are willing to believe things quite that extreme even if they intensely dislike the Clintons. But I think that gives a flavor of Mercer's animus and paranoia about the Clintons and helps explain why he was so determined to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming president.

GROSS: So you write that Steve Bannon's plan to stop Hillary Clinton-- once Bannon joined the Trump campaign-- the plan was built on four organizations funded by the Mercer family, organizations that they had a stake in in some way. One of them was Breitbart News. We've talked about that. One of them was the Government Accountability Institute. Would you describe what that is?

GREEN: Sure the Government Accountability Institute is formerly a nonprofit research organization. But what it did in this case was it became a research center to conduct a kind of forensic examination of the Clinton's finances especially as they pertain to the Clinton Foundation. And the research that this organization did became the best-selling book that was written by GAI's president, a guy named Peter Schweizer.

That book, Clinton Cash, came out just as Clinton was preparing to announce her presidential run and really did a lot to tarnish her image right out of the gate. All the stories about the Clinton Foundation kind of became interspersed with Clinton's email story and besmirched her in a way that I don't think she ever fully recovered from. And that was Bannon's goal from the outset.

GROSS: And it's interesting, like, although Steve Bannon had been the head of Breitbart News, which is famous for fake news, with the Government Accountability Institute, he wanted that Schweizer book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story Of How And Why Foreign Governments And Businesses Helped Make Bill And Hillary Rich, Bannon wanted that book to be fact-based in the hopes that the mainstream press would pick up on it and would publish facts from there and that that would work against Hillary. And that's in fact what happened.

GREEN: That's exactly right. In fact, that's what drew my interest in Bannon originally. He had what I thought was a very shrewd analysis of why conservatives in the 1990s had failed to stop Bill Clinton. And Bannon's analysis was that conservatives had become so wrapped up in their own rumors and silly scandals-- what today we would call fake news-- that they didn't realize that they had kind of lost the general public and did not have credibility. And so they went ahead and impeached Bill Clinton. And then they looked up and nobody really went along with them. It didn't hurt Clinton politically. It didn't hurt the Democrats politically.

And Bannon's analysis of that failure went as follows. He decided that in order to really stop the Clintons, you had to rely on facts and not rumors. And so what he wanted to do was to go in and dig into all the foreign contributors who'd given money to the Clinton Foundation. He wanted to try and get the speeches-- the private speeches I should call them - that Hillary Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs and others and really fan this idea that there was just something nefarious or disreputable going on at the heart of this.

And the idea was, look, investigative reporters are legitimately interested in this stuff. So if we can marshal a bunch of facts-- not rumors, but facts-- hand them over to reporters at places like the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg News, then I am confident that they will look into these stories themselves, and they will drive this narrative that I think is going to be harmful to the Clintons. And as you say, that's exactly what happened.

GROSS: So another company funded by the Mercer family that was very helpful in the Trump campaign was Cambridge Analytica. They're a data company. But what do they do? And they do-- do they do anything different from other data companies?

GREEN: Well, they do, and it's a little controversial. They do what's called psychographic modeling. They claim that they have deeper insight into voters' psyches than your run-of-the-mill political data firm. There's a lot of debate about whether or not they actually do. But the Mercers, and Robert Mercer in particular, who made his fortune as a hedge fund guy by obsessing and understanding data and patterns and algorithms better than anyone else, decided that the Republican Party wasn't doing a good enough job of leveraging, taking advantage of political data. So he was going to go buy a data firm and do a better job of it himself.

One of the things you saw happening is if Rebekah Mercer supported a political candidate or organization, there would be a lot of pressure sometimes from Steve Bannon to also hire Cambridge Analytica as a data vendor. And a lot of Republican-- mainstream Republican outlets felt very threatened by this. You have this company kind of elbowing their way in that controls this data that the party doesn't. But Cambridge Analytica has been a big part of the Trump story. And, in fact, they had their own data scientists embedded at the Trump campaign. They had very advanced models about who Trump was appealing to and who they needed to reach. It wasn't clear at the time that they really knew what they were doing, I think but in hindsight, it's clear that they did.

GROSS: So in terms of Cambridge Analytica's connection to Steve Bannon, Bannon had an ownership stake in the company and a seat on the board. What do you think Cambridge Analytica did to help Trump win?

GREEN: They went and spent a lot of time and money figuring out who Trump voters really are and how they differ from ordinary Republican voters. They're more rural. They're more populist. They care about different issues than your standard Republican does. And so the Trump campaign was able to go and find those voters in places like the Florida Panhandle and turn them out in numbers that nobody-- no mainstream political analyst expected. They figured out, you know, who these people are. And a lot of us-- and I include myself in this category-- thought Trump's promises in the closing weeks of the campaign that there was going to be this Brexit effect, that these hidden voters were going to come out of the woodwork was just absurd. And in the event, that's pretty much what happened.

GROSS: So do you think that the Hillary campaign and Cambridge Analytica were looking at swing voters in a totally different way?

GREEN: I do. Although what's so interesting to me is that they were really looking at the same group of voters. And the Cambridge-- or the Trump data scientists gave these voters a nickname that's wonderful. They call them double haters. And these were people who said that they didn't like Hillary Clinton and they didn't like Donald Trump. But their voting history suggested that they were going to turn up on Election Day and they were going to vote for one or the other. And so there was a real tug of war behind the scenes between Clinton's campaign and between Trump's campaign to try and win these voters over.

And what happened at the end of the race is that they broke to Trump. And one big debate which I cover in some detail is whether or not James Comey's announcement that he was reopening Hillary Clinton's email investigation tilted the race. What's clear from the data that I have-- I have some of the internal polling and some of the memos that were written in the Trump campaign around this time. It's clear that the Comey revelation had a deep, deep effect on these double haters and got them to come out not to support Trump but to essentially vote against Hillary, which in the end was the same thing.

...GROSS: Do you see Steve Bannon as a true believer?

GREEN: Absolutely. You know, early on when I first met him, I thought he was a typical Washington grifter who was kind of glomming on to the Tea Party-Palin thing as a way to make money. And it became clear pretty early on that, no, Bannon really believes this stuff to a degree that's almost scary. And he will keep fighting for this idea of an anti-immigrant nationalism come hell or high water.

GROSS: And what about President Trump? What drives him? Do you think he's a true believer?

GREEN: No, I don't. I think that Trump is driven mainly by opportunism, by a desire to pursue whatever is going to get Donald Trump positive coverage on cable news now. And during the campaign when nationalism-- when Bannon's nationalism seemed to work for him, that was what he would espouse. But when that stopped working for him in February after he became president, he was happy to bring in people who nationalists abhor, people like Gary Cohn from Goldman Sachs. He was willing to listen to Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka, who are the furthest you can get from nationalists. So I don't know that Trump really has any policy beliefs at all.

GROSS: I would love to know-- and I'm guessing you can't really answer this-- what Steve Bannon really thinks of Donald Trump.

GREEN: I can't imagine that Bannon really thinks all that much of Donald Trump. I mean the, you know, tragic, Shakespearean irony of the Donald Trump-Steve Bannon relationship is that Bannon finally did find a vessel for his ideas who'd get elected president, who had the kind of personal force to overcome all the other candidates, all the impediments, against all odds kind of got in there and now doesn't have the focus, the wherewithal, the self-control to even do the basic things that a president needs to do.

Bannon is a pretty self-aware guy and a pretty shrewd analyst. I'm sure he understands that no other president-- not Marco Rubio, not Jeb Bush, nobody-- would ever let anyone like Steve Bannon within 100 miles of his campaign or his White House. This is his one shot to institute his nationalist ideas. And the guy sitting in the White House doesn't seem capable of doing anything other than watching cable news and raging about it. And I think that would have to be very frustrating for a guy like Bannon who really does care about these ideas.

Conservative columnist Bret Stephens reviewed Green's book for the NY Times Tuesday. "If there’s a lesson to draw from Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s deeply reported and compulsively readable account of Bannon’s fateful political partnership with Trump, it is not to underestimate the honey badger. 'If I didn’t come along, the Republican Party had zero chance of winning the presidency,' Trump told Green, a senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, in May 2016, and he was probably right. Only someone with his and Bannon’s transgressive instincts, along with their seeming incapacity for moral and intellectual embarrassment, could have defeated the well-oiled if soulless machine that was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign."

[W]hatever the pair lacked in conventional political experience, they made up for with other gifts. Both understood showmanship: slogans, narrative, put-downs and especially conflict. They knew the value of rage and outrage alike-- the first as fuel for a movement; the second as the indispensable foil for that movement.

They also grasped that much that was supposed to matter in politics no longer did-- detailed policy papers, for instance, or personal decorum. Trump, Green writes, “figured out that the norms forbidding such behavior were not inviolable rules that carried a harsh penalty but rather sentiments of a nobler, bygone era, gossamer-thin and needlessly adhered to by politicians who lacked his willingness to defy them.”

That’s why Trump’s birtherism-- the support he gave to the lie that Barack Obama was born abroad-- never disqualified his candidacy, even as it helped him “forge a powerful connection with party activists.” It’s a tactic he would repeat straight through the end of the campaign, when he took to denouncing “international banks” in terms that shaded into anti-Semitism.

“Darkness is good,” was Bannon’s advice for dealing with criticism from groups such as the Anti-Defamation League. “Don’t let up.” At another moment, when the campaign feared House Speaker Paul Ryan would try to steal the G.O.P. nomination from Trump, Bannon threatened to rally Breitbart’s army. “Pepe’s gonna stomp their ass,” he said-- “Pepe the Frog” being the alt-right’s white-supremacist cartoon mascot on Twitter.

...Bannon seemed to intuit that this digital world could be recreated for his political purposes, by designing an apocalyptic narrative of righteous warriors waging an end-of-days battle by all necessary means against assorted enemies: jihadists, progressives, Acela-corridor Republicans, the Clintons. Republican political operatives had spent the Obama years wondering about the “missing” white voters who had failed to show up for John McCain and Mitt Romney. Turns out, they (or others like them) were online, and Bannon-- whose own fantasies were suggested by a portrait he had of himself in his office, dressed as Napoleon-- was proposing to supply this army with the necessary ammunition.

Much of it would come from the bile factory at Breitbart News. Another part would be supplied by the Government Accountability Institute, a Tallahassee, Fla.-based nonprofit that mined the “deep Web” and dug up the dirt on the Clinton Foundation for Peter Schweizer’s 2015 blockbuster “Clinton Cash.” There was also a data-analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of a British company “that advised foreign governments and militaries on influencing elections and public opinion using the tools of psychological warfare."

What all of this added up to was a kind of alt-G.O.P.-- agile and indifferent to norms and boundaries-- that could supply the Trump campaign with everything it needed to win. Bannon has described himself as a “Leninist” for wanting to “destroy the state.” Whether he will achieve that is doubtful, but he seems to share Lenin’s genius for building a secret party with radical designs, ready to pounce at the historically opportune time.

Now it has succeeded. To what end? As an electoral gambit, the honey badger approach was a good bet: Trump is president not in spite of the wretched things he said about Mexicans, women, John McCain, Megyn Kelly and so on, but because he said them. He sold his shamelessness as fearlessness and his charlatanism as charisma, and people believed. Lord save us when Democrats alight on a similar candidate.