"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Wednesday, November 04, 2020
Two Countries-- Lots Of Antipathy-- Falling Apart
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The U.S. reported 108,389 new cases of COVID today-- and another 1,201 deaths. Early tomorrow the U.S. will cross the 240,000 deaths mark, a memorial to the worst president in history, soon to be the ex-president. You know how sometimes the living presidents all get together for something or other? Do you think Carter, Clinton, Bush and Obama would ever invite Trump to one of those?
Now, can you guess which backward hellholes were Trump's strongest bastions yesterday? These were the states where he has the biggest percentage of votes-- along with the number of COVID cases per million residents:
• Wyoming- 69.9% (25,994 cases per million residents) • West Virginia- 68.6% (14,500 cases per million residents) • Oklahoma- 65.4% (32,290 cases per million residents) • North Dakota- 65.0% (63,382 cases per million residents) • South Dakota- 64% (56,283 cases per million residents) • Idaho- 63.1% (38,227 cases per million residents) • Kentucky- 62.7% (25,295 cases per million residents) • Arkansas- 62.7% (38,376 cases per million residents) • Alabama- 62.3% (40,336 cases per million residents) • Tennessee- 60.7% (39,507 cases per million residents)
And what about the enlightened states? These are the 5 where Trump got the fewest votes:
• Massachusetts- 31.1% (23,692 cases per million residents) • Vermont- 31.7% (3,633 cases per million residents) • California- 32.9% (24,112 cases per million residents) • Hawaii- 34.3% (10,928 cases per million residents) • Maryland- 35.1% (24,607 cases per million residents)
George Packer's Atlantic essay talked to something many of us are thinking-- "We are two countries, and neither of them is going to be conquered or disappear anytime soon." Don't you wish we weren't part of the same country they are? Last night I was so despondent-- not about Trump but about the assholes and morons who voted for him that I was considering moving back to Europe.
Packer wrote that the election outcome is "a pretty accurate reflection of the American electorate. The much-discussed Democratic majority that’s been emerging since the turn of the millennium is still in a state of emergence and probably will keep on emerging for years to come. The will of the majority is indeed blocked by undemocratic rules and unscrupulous politicians, but it’s a bare majority without enough numbers to govern. When America finally becomes the promised land dominated by tech-savvy Millennials, its political values will be far from certain."
And this is why I felt like leaving America again: "Tens of millions of Americans love MAGA more than they love democracy. After four years of lawbreaking and norm-busting, there can be no illusions about President Donald Trump. His first term culminated in an open effort to sabotage the legitimacy of the election and prevent Americans from voting. His rallies in the final week of the campaign were red-drenched festivals of mass hate, autocratic self-absorption, and boredom, without a glimmer of a better future on offer-- and they might have put Trump over the top in Florida and elsewhere. Even as 'freedom-loving people' came out in unprecedented millions to vote, their readiness to throw away their republican institutions along with their dignity and grasp of facts suggests that many Americans have lost the basic qualities that the Founders believed essential to self-government. There is no obvious way to reverse this decline, which shows signs of infecting elements of the other side as well."
There’s no escaping who we Americans have become: This is the election’s meaning. We are stuck with one another, seeing no way out and no apparent way through, sinking deeper into a state of mutual incomprehension and loathing. The possible exits-- gradual de-escalation, majority breakthrough, clean separation, civil war-- are either unlikely or unthinkable. We have to live and govern ourselves together, but we still don’t know how. Winning in this state becomes a chimera. Whoever takes the presidency, all Americans will remain the losers.
How Many Americans Have To Die From COVID Before The Country Unites Behind Science And Expertise And Casts Out The Devil's Sowers Of Doubt?
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CNN fact checker Dale told the L.A. Times that Trump lies so much that he can't keep up with them and that he's decided to stop counting each individual lie and "just focus on the big stuff." Although Trump claims that doctors are being paid to exaggerate the numbers of COVID cases and COVID deaths, those stats are a lot easier to keep up with that the lies Trump spouts-- by one count, a lie every 75 seconds at his super-spreader rallies. Friday in Green Bay, for example, he told the morons in attendance that without him it would be illegal to say "Merry Christmas" and that if Biden is elected "There will be no heating in the winter, no air conditioning in the summer, and no electricity." As for the pandemic, the U.S. is worse off than any other developed country-- and most undeveloped country by every metric conceivable. Trump's inability to lead has lead to 86,293 new cases yesterday, bringing our national total to 9,401,590 cases and 236,072 deaths.
A key metric to judge how each country, regardless of size, is handling the pandemic is to look at the number of cases reported per million residents. Here's the U.S. compared to 2 dozen other developed countries. (keep in mind that anything over 20,000 cases per million is pretty much the definition of an out-of-control pandemic)
The prime minister of Belgium announced yesterday his country is shutting down again, calling it a "last chance" to keep the country’s health care system from collapse. France and Germany have already done so and the UK is about to do likewise. But, back in Trumpistan where there isn't even a national mask mandate, the 17 worst hit states-- those with the most cases per million residents-- are all states where majorities (or pluralities) voted for Trump in 2016 and where many people-- including those in government-- listen to Trump's gaslighting rather than to public health experts when it comes to dealing with the pandemic. States you want to avoid going to for now:
• North Dakota- 57,628 cases per million residents • South Dakota- 51,988
Wall Street Journal reporter Elizabeth Findell reported that "The percentage of tests for Covid-19 coming back positive in South Dakota has soared to 46%. That’s more than eight times the World Health Organization’s recommended 5% threshold for businesses to be open. As Covid cases surge across the U.S. and in Europe, South Dakota and North Dakota hold a distinct position: Each has more new virus cases per capita than any other states have seen since the pandemic began. South Dakota has the most and North Dakota the second-most."
Recently, Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, who very much needs to be tried for negligent homicide, penned an OpEd about her abject failure to protect her state, although she congratulated herself for doing a great job and worked once again to mislead Dakotans about the effectiveness of wearing masks, concluding that "if folks want to wear a mask, they should be free to do so. Similarly, those who don’t want to wear a mask shouldn’t be shamed into wearing one. And government should not mandate it. We need to respect each other’s decisions-- in South Dakota, we know a little common courtesy can go a long way."
No one is more guilty of spreading COVID across America-- other than President Super-Spreader and Vice President Super-Spreader-- than Noem. Her motorcycle rally and state fair have caused tens of thousands of cases across the Midwest and cost the U.S. taxpayer an estimated $60 billion in medical treatment. Friday's much-discussed Stanford report-- The Effects of Large Group Meetings on the Spread of COVID-19: The Case Of Trump Rallies can and should be applied to Noem's events as well and no doubt will be if she is ever indicted and tried. The report focused on the spread of contagion and death for 10 weeks after 18 of Trump's super-spreader rallies across the country. They concluded that these 18 rallies have-- so far-- "resulted in more than 30,000 incremental confirmed cases of COVID-19" and more than 700 deaths.
And in case you missed it the first time I ran it...
How Is It Possible? 40% Want This Shit Stain On History To Get Another 4 Years In The White House
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Sociopath by Chip Proser
The U.S. is finishing up it's worst week-- in terms of new cases-- since the pandemic began... while the Trumpist regime is screaming from the rooftops that it's over, over, over, cured by Señor T. On Wednesday the U.S. reported a total of 81,811 new cases. On Thursday there were 91,834 new cases reported. Yesterday it was another 101,461 new cases, bringing the total to 9,316,297 cases. This was accompanied by 1,030 new deaths on Wednesday, 1,041 new deaths on Thursday and 988 new deaths Friday, bringing the total of Americans killed by Trump and his enablers to 235,159.
Many Americans imagine that when Trump leaves the White House we'll rarely hear from him again or that he'll spend the rest of his life being tried and in prison. But no American president has ever gone to prison and it is a stretch to imagine someone as inherently conservative as Biden will allow anything like that. writing for Politico Magazine, Garrett Graff, an author and historian, put together a realistic look at what Trump night actually do after he's ousted. The definition of Trump Graff uses to help construct his case is simple and straightforward: "A restless figure with few interests outside his own business and political career, no hobbies besides playing golf at his own properties and few traditional friends, Trump thrives on public attention and disruption; this, after all, is a man who couldn’t even spend an entire weekend cooped up inside a hospital while ill with Covid-19 earlier this month and had to take a joyride around Walter Reed Medical Center to wave to supporters." He concludes that "the Trump Era is unlikely to end when the Trump presidency ends [but with a] post-presidency as disruptive and norm-busting as his presidency has been-- one that could make his successor’s job much harder." The historians, government legal experts, national security leaders and people close to the administration consulted by Graff for his piece "outline a picture of a man who might formally leave office only to establish himself as the president-for-life amid his own bubble of admirers-- controlling Republican politics and sowing chaos in the U.S. and around the world long after he’s officially left office."
“Can he continue to make people not trust our institutions? Can he throw monkey wrenches into delicate negotiations? Absolutely,” one former Trump administration official says. “He can be a tool. He’ll be somewhere between dangerous and devastating on that extent.”
A president unwilling to respect boundaries in office is almost certain to cross them out of office. Experts envision some likely scenarios-- a much-rumored TV show and plans to use his properties to profit off his lifetime Secret Service protection, perhaps even continuing to troll the Biden administration from his hotel down Pennsylvania Avenue-- and some troubling if less certain ones, like literally selling U.S. secrets or influence to foreign governments.
Trump has already mused that maybe he’ll leave the country if he loses, but few expect him to willingly depart the American public stage. He would leave the White House with one of the largest social media platforms in the world-- including 87 million Twitter followers-- and a large campaign email list with a demonstrated small-dollar fundraising capability that could be used to aid other MAGA-friendly politicians-- or, just as likely, to sell Trump’s own wares. And he’s presumably going to need every dollar he can squeeze from his businesses and the office he will have just left. As the New York Times has been documenting, Trump has $421 million in debt coming due in the years ahead. If he leaves office, he’ll have to be busy raising the cash to pay it off.
...“He’s still the leader of a movement,” says Nancy Gibbs, a journalist and historian who co-wrote The Presidents Club about the lives of former presidents. “I’m hard pressed to recall a past president who left office with a movement intact that wasn’t transferred to someone else. I don’t see him giving it up.”
Which means, from even those first minutes, Trump’s post-presidency would almost certainly be unlike anything America-- or the world-- has ever experienced. Assuming he’s able to settle any legal challenges arising from the presidency and doesn’t spend the rest of his days in tax court in New York state, Trump as a 74-year-old man has a normal life expectancy of around 11 years, and most former presidents actually far outlive the average American, so he might have a couple decades to disrupt the world’s most exclusive club of ex-presidents.
“It’s a safe bet that many of the rules and patterns of past presidents will not apply to him,” says Gibbs. “I long ago stopped putting limits on what he might do or sell. There are no boundaries.”
A career salesman will find himself with more connections around the world than he’s ever had before-- and also with more grievances against people he feels mistreated him and forced him from office prematurely. “I put two years as the over-under on groundbreaking for Trump Tower Moscow,” says one former national security official. “It’ll be a huge F.U. to all the Russia coup plotters.”
...As he leaves office, Trump would have the chance to decide how and where to set up his post-presidential life—and where to direct a spigot of taxpayer dollars that will continue to flow to him for the rest of his life. Former presidents are eligible for a range of taxpayer-paid benefits, including a roughly $200,000-a-year pension for life, about a million-dollars-a-year for travel and office expenses, and so-called “franking privileges,” the ability to send mail postage-free. The law does stipulate that such offices have to be inside the U.S., so that would prohibit Trump from using the funds to set up his office in, say, a non-extradition country.
Trump would even have the right to use a special government-owned townhouse on Lafayette Square, across from the White House, reserved exclusively for former presidents visiting Washington, although it seems hard to imagine Trump foregoing the chance to stay in his own hotel just down Pennsylvania Avenue.
...Where Trump will set up “home” is an open question: He moved his voting residence from New York to Florida last year-- so it seems unlikely he’ll return to set down roots in Manhattan-- but in converting the 17-acre Mar-a-Lago into a private club, he agreed years ago that he couldn’t live there year-round and the club closes for the unpleasant Florida summer, so he’ll have to find a second home elsewhere. If he declares that he’ll be living permanently at some combination of Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, Trump Tower in New York, and the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., the Secret Service might well be paying millions of dollars to the Trump Organization for years to come.
Then there's the possibility of a Donald J. Trump Presidential Library (and garish theme park), which you'll need go to the link to read about.
It’s possible that, if he loses reelection, Trump may wake up January 21 in Mar-a-Lago and find himself exiled and forgotten by a Republican Party eager to move past him. It’s possible too that Trump will decide to forget about Twitter, bury @realDonaldTrump and live out his days quietly golfing with his friends and admirers and holding court at the Mar-a-Lago buffet in the evenings, before settling in to watch Sean Hannity’s show in peace and silence.
Possible, but unlikely. Trump, unloved by his father, has spent his entire life craving public adulation and attention and possesses a unique-- almost algorithmic-- understanding of how to maximize the spotlight shining on himself. Almost everyone agrees he seems likely to want to remain in the public eye-- setting up a novel circumstance where a new president might assume office while being critiqued publicly minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour by his predecessor.
Ex-presidents of both parties usually go out of their way to stay quiet, at least for some period of time after leaving office. In March 2009, in his first speech as a former president, George W. Bush said he wouldn’t critique Obama at all. “He deserves my silence,” Bush said. Eight years later, in their first meeting post-election, Obama told Trump, “We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, then the country succeeds.” Later, explaining why he’d stayed almost silent even as the Trump administration unraveled so much of his legacy, Obama said in 2018 as he eased back onto the public stage, “Truth was, I was also intent on following a wise American tradition of ex-presidents gracefully exiting the political stage and making room for new voices and new ideas. We have our first president, George Washington, to thank for setting that example.”
It’s nearly impossible to imagine Trump’s abiding by any of those sentiments—it’s hard to even imagine Trump’s Twitter fingers staying still all the way through a Joe Biden inaugural address.
Meanwhile, there’s reason to believe the Republican Party may not be quick to turn on Trump, even if he’s badly defeated on Tuesday.
In fact, ironically, the bigger the GOP wipeout that accompanies a Trump defeat, the more Trump would likely continue to control the remnants of the party. Trump’s ascendency since 2016 has dramatically rearranged the ranks of the Republican Party in Washington and nationally; roughly half of the 241 Republicans who were in office in January 2017 at the start of his term are already gone or retiring. Any sort of broad loss on Tuesday would further wash away the very swing districts and candidates most inclined to move beyond Trump, leaving just the most solidly Republican districts-- GOP areas where Trump’s approval ratings remain sky-high and whose representatives would conceivably be the last to risk abandoning him. Republican candidates even far down the ballot are competing over who loves Trump more, and Trump’s scattershot approach to policy-making and betrayal of long-held conservative beliefs means the only ideology that unifies his party today is adulation of him (and, perhaps, the QAnon conspiracy theory). The intellectual inconsistency of the current party was made all too clear by the summer decision at the Republican National Convention to forego a traditional party platform and simply offer a blanket endorsement of whatever Trump wanted to do in a second term.
Instead, Trump-- and his all-powerful Twitter feed and fundraising list-- might become the party’s most reliable megaphone and kingmaker, akin to the role Sarah Palin played in 2010 amid the rise of the Tea Party after her 2008 defeat as John McCain’s running mate. In that sense, it’s possible that the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential race would actually be the most MAGA-friendly GOP primaries yet, conducted almost entirely on a stage designed by Trump himself, with supplicants parading through Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and an entire generation of GOP stars molded in his image. And that’s even before considering the Trump family’s direct influence-- say a titanic Ivanka vs. AOC campaign in New York for Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat in 2022 or Donald Jr.’s campaign for Congress (or even the presidency) in 2024, as he becomes the next-generation MAGA standard-bearer.
This path of influence might prove one of the most stable visions ahead, assuming a relative level of normalcy from a man who has time and again demonstrated anything but. In fact, this entire piece and its imagined premise of a Trump post-presidency assumes that Trump and those around him at least superficially, if not graciously, accept a loss and that he is content to just grumble loudly from the political balcony à la Statler and Waldorf in The Muppets.
There are darker visions and scenarios in which Trump never does accept a 2020 defeat, is pushed reluctantly from the White House in January, and moves to assume some more explicit mantle of a wronged leader-in-exile. Al Gore, after his acrimonious defeat, traveled across Europe and grew a beard, rather than setting up an opposition government in the lobby of the Willard Hotel across from the White House. But imagine if he had wanted to contest the election long past inauguration day?
...Almost no matter his approach to his successor-- merely disgruntled or actively hostile-- Trump will surely want to be listened to, which is why he might look for a platform to keep himself in steady communication with the national movement of the disaffected he's fostered over the last two years as he seized and remade the Republican Party.
...Rumors have long circulated that the Trump family would try to build its own media empire. Some have speculated that in 2016 Trump had been planning to launch “Trump TV” if, as even he expected, he lost the presidency to Hillary Clinton; one reporter even swore to me he saw a sign on the camera riser at Trump’s election night victory celebration reserving a spot for “Trump TV.” Earlier this year, there was conjecture that the Trump family and its backers might be interested in boosting and formally partnering with One America News (OAN), the upstart Fox challenger that has become an all-but unofficial Trump TV.
The scenarios go on forever. Keep reading if you can stomach more of this. And if you can't... remember this: Trump is the Typhoid Mary of the Covid pandemic. A CNN investigation of 17 Trump campaign rallies between August 17 and September 26 found that 14 of the host counties had an increased rate of new Covid-19 cases one month after the rally.
The Wealthy Have Made Billions Since The Pandemic Began-- Should There Be A Special Pandemic Profit Tax... Maybe 99%?
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Nationally the problem is Trump; in Florida he has 3 main henchmen
Secure in the knowledge that some folks are stupid enough to believe his gaslighting, Trump has been congratulating himself on having defeated the pandemic, even as the coronavirus spikes out of control across the country. On Wednesday there were another 81,581 new cases reported, bringing the U.S. total to the 10 million it is expected to reach right around election day. The 17 states with the worst number of cases per million residents are all states that voted Trump in 2016 and all states where state government has been unreceptive to advice on social distancing and mask mandates from public health officials. (The states I've bolded have learned nothing since then and will deliver their electoral voted to Trump again. Voters in the non-bolded states are considering making up for the tragic mistake they made in 2016:
•North Dakota- 53,972 cases per million residents •South Dakota- 48,606 cases per million residents •Mississippi- 39,846 cases per million residents •Louisiana- 39,115 cases per million residents • Iowa- 38,768 cases per million residents •Alabama- 38,577 cases per million residents •Tennessee- 37,615 cases per million residents • Florida- 36,998 cases per million residents • Wisconsin- 36,925 cases per million residents •Arkansas- 36,355 cases per million residents •Idaho- 34,573 cases per million residents • Nebraska- 34,401 cases per million residents •Utah- 34,511 cases per million residents •South Carolina- 33,910 cases per million residents • Georgia- 33,610 cases per million residents • Arizona- 33,314 cases per million residents • Texas- 32,240 cases per million residents
Anything over 20,000 cases per million residents is generally considered an out of control, catastrophic pandemic. Yesterday, Germany instituted a second national lockdown with just 5,895 cases per million residents!
About a week or so ago a BBC business reporter based in NYC, Natalie Sherman, wrote a piece for the BBC audience worldwide, Coronavirus: US poverty rises as aid winds down. She wrote that university researchers have concluded that "nearly 8 million Americans-- many of them children and minorities-- have fallen into poverty since May. Last week, nearly 900,000 people filed new claims for jobless benefits-- the highest number since August. Analysts have called for aid to prevent the economic recovery from stalling." Mitch McConnell has prevented that and quickly adjourned the Senate until after the election, fearful that Trump might make him compromise with the Democrats, who have already passed a pandemic rescue package.
Last spring's $3 trillion aid package-- which mostly bailed out businesses but did include $1,200 aid checks (+ $600/week in temporary supplemental unemployment payments for people thrown out of work)-- "initially blunted the economic upheaval caused by the virus, prompting poverty rates to decline. But those figures began to tick up again this summer, as the one-time financial boost from the cheques wore off and the expansion to unemployment benefits expired at the end of July. As of September, the poverty rate stood at 16.7%, up from 15.3% in February and 14.3% in May, with higher rates among children and minorities.
Trump has celebrated that the economy has so far rebounded faster than many analysts initially expected.
But while the US has regained about half the jobs lost in March and April, many economists do not expect the labour market to fully recover before the end of 2023-- and they warn that momentum appears to be slowing.
Thursday's Labor Department report showed an unexpected 53,000 increase in unemployment filings from the week before, sending new claims to a two-month high.
More than 25 million people continued to collect some form of unemployment payment as of 26 September, the Labor Department said.
Wells Fargo economist Sarah House said the report showed "the risk of the labour market's recovery going into reverse."
The Republican Party has refused to authorize any more aid to the country, almost comic that this is the one and only time they have stood up to Trump!
When the Republicans talk about how the economic threat of the pandemic is overblown, they're talking about how well the wealthy have weathered the national disaster-- like the 47 billionaires who have gotten richer during the pandemic. Gabrielle Olya wrote that the pandemic "has disrupted the financial well-being of millions of people around the world, with many losing jobs, shuttering their businesses or losing a large portion of their retirement savings due to market volatility. Yet somehow, the world’s richest seem to be coming out of the crisis unscathed-- and in many cases, even richer. Here are some familiar names and the amount their fortunes have increased since March 18:
• Jeff Bezos of Amazon +$72.6 billion • Elon Musk of Tesla +$63.3 billion • Jeff Zuckerberg of Facebook +$42.1 billion • Jim, Rob and Alice Walton of Walmart- total +$35.7 billion • MacKenzie Scott of Amazon (Jeff Bezo's ex) +$23.6 billion • Larry Ellison of Oracle- $19.9 billion • Phil Knight of Nikes- $19.8 billion • Bill Gates- $17.8 billion • Michael Dell of Dell Technologies +$15.6 billion • Sergey Brin of Google +$15.1 billion • Larry Page of Google +$15 billion • Warren Buffett +$12.6 billion • Gerard Wertheimer and his bro Alain Wetheimer of Chanel +$7.5 billion each • Michael Bloomberg +$6.9 billion • Charles Koch and sister-in-law Julia Koch +$6.7 billion each • Sheldon Adelson of the Mafia +$4.3 billion • John Mars and sister Jacqueline Mars of Mars candy +$4.2 billion each • Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies +$1.9 billion
Many radicals are suggesting that these billionaires should be guillotined but-- with some exceptions-- that is too harsh. How about a much fairer proposition? An excess income tax for anything any individual made over $500,000 during the pandemic? The details would have to be worked out in Congress but if 100% is considered too high (I don't consider it too high, but you know the Blue Dogs and New Dems)... how about just 99%? (and don't sneer; 1 percent of a billion is $10 million dollars. AND they still have their heads!)
Sunday morning, Trumpist chief of staff Mark Meadows, a former neo-fascist congressman from North Carolina (whose district is about to be flipped by Moe Davis), was on State of the Union fighting with Jake Tapper about the pandemic. As U.S. daily cases have spiked into the 80 thousands on both Friday and Saturday and as the death toll hurtles towards a quarter million, Meadows admitted the Regime isn't really trying to defeat the pandemic the way countries like China, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan have.
Trump seems so passive about anything that isn't related to lining his own pockets. And all his cronies, like Meadows, are just along for the ride-- "following orders." Especially that putrid excuse for a vice president. He's running around like Trump, criss-crossing the country, spreading COVID, which his whole staff is infected with. CNN reported that at least 5 of Pence's top aides-- including chief of staff Marc Short and outside adviser Marty Obst-- have tested positive. Pence's whole office is freaking out. Pence says he and mother have tested negative. "Despite contact with multiple people who recently tested positive," reported CNN, "Pence is refusing to quarantine in defiance of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines... Pence-- who is the head of the White House's coronavirus task force-- plans to continue traveling and campaigning every day in the final stretch to Election Day, an official told CNN."
Places where Pence is bringing more coronavirus this week: North Carolina, South Carolina, Minnesota. Last week, he was spreading sickness in Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. These are the number of cases per million residents in states Pence visited last week and is going to this week-- along with each state's polling average:
• North Carolina- 24,627 cases per million residents (Biden +1.2%) • South Carolina- 32,890 cases per million residents (Trump +6.2%) • Minnesota- 23,427 cases per million residents (Biden +6.0%) • Florida- 36,142 cases per million residents (Biden +1.5%) • Indiana- 23,824 cases per million residents (Trump +11.3%) • Ohio- 16,759 cases per million residents (Trump +0.6%) • Pennsylvania- 15,417 cases per million residents (Biden +5.1%) • New Hampshire- 7,530 cases per million residents (Biden +11.0%)
Pence was in Kinston (Lenoir County), North Carolina yesterday and is spreading COVID in Hibbing (Saint Louis County), Minnesota today. Both counties are spiking badly-- Lenoir County:
The Pandemic Is Powerful Enough To Swing An Election-- But How Will It Impact Partisan Realignment?
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"... And I Won't Lose One Voter" by Nancy Ohanian
Many people wonder if, aside from Herman Cain (RIP), Trump rallies have been killing off his followers? And now we know. In a report from USA Today late Friday night, Erin Mansfield, Josh Salman and Dinah Pulver wrote that coronavirus cases surged in the wake of President Super Spreader's visits. New cases in the U.S. are spiking like crazy. Friday there were a record-setting 81,210 new cases-- many in rural, Trump-worshipping areas. And deaths are way back up again-- especially in Texas, Florida and Tennessee. Over 20,000 cases per million in any locale is considered an out of control pandemic. There are now 18 states with over 30,000 cases per million and two-- North and South Dakota-- with over 40,000 cases per million. There are no places on earth-- other than postage stamp sized quasi-countries like Qatar and Aruba-- that are worse COVID hellholes than the Trumpistani states of North nd South Dakota.
Mansfield, Salman and Pulver reported that as Trump "jetted across the country holding campaign rallies during the past two months, he didn’t just defy state orders and federal health guidelines. He left a trail of coronavirus outbreaks in his wake. The president has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA Today analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minnesota; Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Marathon, Wisconsin; Dauphin, Pennsylvania; and Beltrami, Minnesota. Together, those counties saw 1,500 more new cases in the two weeks following Trump’s rallies than the two weeks before-- 9,647 cases, up from 8,069." Now, those three states are COVID-disaster areas. Friday's new cases (and the number of cases per million residents):
• Minnesota +1,711 (23,027 cases per million residents)-- 13 new deaths on Friday • Wisconsin +4,378 (32,714 cases per million residents)-- 42 new deaths on Friday • Pennsylvania +2,258 (15,283 cases per million residents)-- 34 new deaths on Friday
"Although there’s no way to determine definitively if cases originated at Trump’s rallies," the trio of reporters wrote, "public health experts say the gatherings fly in the face of all recommendations to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
The earliest post-rally spikes occurred even as the nation’s overall case counts were in decline from a peak in mid-July. When U.S. cases started climbing in mid-September, Trump did not alter his campaign schedule but continued holding an average of four rallies a week.
He stopped first in Minnesota, where Blue Earth County’s coronavirus growth rate was 15% before Trump’s rally, but grew to 25% afterward. Three days later, he was in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, where the coronavirus growth rate jumped from less than 3% before his visit to more than 7% afterward.
Even in states where cases were already rising, the spikes in at least four counties that hosted Trump rallies far surpassed their state’s overall growth rates.
In two counties, it was more than double: Marathon County’s case count surged by 67% after Trump’s visit compared to Wisconsin’s overall growth rate of 29% during the same time. In Beltrami County, Minnesota, it swelled by 35% compared to the state’s 14%.
...[E]xperts all agreed that holding large rallies during a pandemic interferes with efforts to contain the virus and can make things worse. This is why officials in at least five states, including two with Republican governors, voiced concerns or issued warnings in advance of the president’s rallies.
“I would ask the president, for once, to put the health of his constituents ahead of his own political fortunes,” Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, said on Sept. 25. Trump has held three rallies in the state since then.
Campaign events where people gather together cheering and screaming can carry the virus far through the crowd, said Shelley Payne, director of the LaMontagne Center for Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas. Then those infected will take the virus back to their families, friends and coworkers-- fanning an outbreak in the community.
“This is true of any respiratory virus; when you’re near people in close contact, you’re going to spread the virus,” Payne said. “And rallies are particularly problematic.”
Campaign rallies fall within a category the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labels “highest risk” for the potential to spread the virus that already has claimed the lives of more than 222,000 Americans.
...Political experts say the guideline-defying events are part of a strategy by the Trump administration to downplay the seriousness of the virus ahead of the election. It has divided the nation over wearing masks and taking the necessary precautions to contain the virus.
“It’s a trade-off between doing what’s right for public health or what benefits re-election,” said Todd Belt, professor and director of the Political Management Program at The George Washington University. “And over and over, the greater concern for this White House is re-election.”
From conservative Christians with tucked shirts and dress shoes to bikers with long beards and leather, hundreds of Trump supporters waved flags, held signs and donned the red caps as they descended on the small town of Bemidji, located in Beltrami County, Minnesota.
Despite the 250-person limit for gatherings in the state, throngs stood shoulder-to-shoulder as they waited in long lines, cheering on the commander in chief and greeting others as if the global pandemic did not exist. A mix of locals and those who traveled hundreds of miles, the scene at the September rally has played out in small towns across America where Trump has a stronghold.
Charter buses packed full, merchandise vendors lining the streets and counter protests nearby, the spectacles have marked Trump’s campaigns and presidency.
But many of these towns don’t typically draw these types of crowds-- and the aftermath is now evident in their COVID-19 cases.
Between mid-August and mid-October, Trump has visited small and mid-sized communities in major swing states with county populations ranging from 47,000 to 310,000.
They also have largely been in conservative communities that in many cases have resisted mask-wearing and social distancing efforts.
...The campaign includes a disclaimer on rally ticket requests stating that guests “assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19.”
...Following Trump’s COVID-19 infection, 57% or registered voters say they are very or somewhat confident in Biden to handle the public health impact of the coronavirus, while 40% express that level of confidence in Trump, according to the Pew Research Center. Biden held a narrower lead on his support over the outbreak in June.
Trump isn't holding these rallies in deep red states that he considers "in the bag"-- like West Virginia, Idaho, Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota, Arkansas, Wyoming and Tennessee. No, he's holding them in swing states where he thinks he needs to motivate his base to turn out on election day. Let's go back to the three states where he should be charged with negligent homicide and look at the polling average in each:
• Minnesota- Trump down by 6.0 points • Wisconsin- Trump down by 4.6 points • Pennsylvania- Trump down by 5.1 points
And that brings us to Nicholas Lemann's much-discussed essay in Friday's New Yorker, The Republican Identity Crisis After Trump. Lemann explores if, post-Trump, "economic insecurity and inequality [are] powerful enough to blow apart the boundaries of conventional politics... An ambitious Republican can’t ignore Trumpism. Nor can an ambitious Democrat: the Democratic Party has also failed to address the deep economic discontent in this country. But is it possible to address it without opening a Pandora’s box of virulent rage and racism?"
The Republican Party has long had a significant nativist, isolationist element. In the Party’s collective memory, this faction was kept in check by “fusionism,” a grand entente between this element and the Party’s business establishment. The best-known promoter of fusionism is the late William F. Buckley, Jr., the theatrically patrician founder of National Review and an all-around conservative celebrity. Buckley tried to keep anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists out of the conservative movement, but he was not a standard Chamber of Commerce Republican. His first book attacked liberal universities, his second defended Joseph McCarthy, and in 1957, when Dwight Eisenhower was sending federal troops to integrate Little Rock Central High School, he wrote an article titled “WHY THE SOUTH MUST PREVAIL.” Buckley helped define American conservatism as a movement that supported free-market economics and internationalism and welcomed serious intellectuals, including former Communists such as James Burnham, Frank Meyer, and Whittaker Chambers.
Fusionism brought these views together into what seemed for a long time, at least from the outside, to be a relatively workable political coalition. Philip Zelikow, a veteran Republican foreign-policy official and one of hundreds of prominent members of the Party who vigorously opposed Trump in 2016, said, “World War II, followed by nearly World War III, brought the United States into an unprecedented world role. And a vocal minority didn’t accept it. They don’t like foreigners. They think they’re playing us for suckers. There were a lot of Pearl Harbor and Yalta conspiracy theories that we’ve forgotten about. This group concentrates overwhelmingly in the Republican Party.” For a long time, it was kept in check. Now, in Zelikow’s view, it has grown in prominence and become less deferential to the business wing of the Republican establishment, and is “close to being the most influential element in the Party.”
...In American politics, white nativism and racism tend to rise in conjunction with economic distress. Quite often, liberal economic reforms have been achieved at the price of compromises with politicians who were anything but liberal on race. The greatest triumph of liberalism in American history, the New Deal, entailed a bargain with the segregationist South in which the Jim Crow system remained firmly in place. In the twenty-first century, rising economic discontent among working-class whites has often caused them to lash out at people from other groups. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, and a leader of the religious wing of the conservative movement, told me, “There’s an anxiety. A world is being demolished before your eyes. It’s an instinct that things aren’t going as they should. The world is coming apart. Somebody has to say no.”
Trump’s Republican opponents in 2016, who had been living in a world created by the Republican donor class, didn’t see that the Republican coalition had been shattered. After Obama defeated Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, Reince Priebus, then the head of the Republican National Committee (who later followed the familiar trajectory from Never Trumper to Trump enabler to Trump exile), commissioned an inquiry to find out what had gone wrong. The resulting report, known in Republican circles as “the autopsy,” noted a significant decline in the Latino vote for Republican Presidential candidates since the George W. Bush high-water mark, in 2004, and urgently called on the Party to reaffirm its identity as pro-market, government-skeptical, and ethnically and culturally inclusive. Romney would have carried Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada if he had replicated Bush’s share of the Latino vote. The Republican establishment, and most of the 2016 Republican Presidential field, accepted the autopsy as revealed truth.
This left an opening for Trump to ignore a series of supposedly inviolable Republican bromides. He didn’t talk about the need for limited government or for balancing the federal budget. He didn’t talk about the United States as the guarantor of freedom worldwide. He didn’t extoll free trade. He didn’t court the Koch brothers. He did not sign the no-new-tax pledge that the conservative organizer Grover Norquist has been imposing on Republican Presidential aspirants for decades. A new book, Never Trump, by two political scientists, Robert Saldin and Steven Teles, asserts that Trump was opposed by more officials in his own Party (the Never Trumpers of their title) than any Presidential nominee in recent American history. Nonetheless, he got more votes in the Republican primary than any Presidential candidate ever has. Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, who in the nineties laid some of the groundwork for Trump’s rise by establishing hot-blooded attack as the dominant Republican leadership style, told me, “He won because he’s a dramatically better politician than anybody believed. A substantial part of the country felt demeaned. Talked down to.” Gingrich, who was among the first prominent Republican politicians to endorse Trump, has written two glowing books about the “great comeback” that the President’s agenda represents.
...Trump’s key insight in 2016 was that the Republican establishment could be ignored, and his primary campaign pitched only to the Republican base, which no longer believed in the free-market gospel, if it ever had. There would be no penalty for violating any ironclad rule of traditional Republicanism. Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican consultant who was affiliated with Jeb Bush in 2016, said, “Trump was a perfect grievance candidate, at a time when Republican voters wanted to blow up the system. I did Arnold Schwarzenegger-- he was what Hollywood people call a ‘pre-awareness title.’ People thought Trump was all over the place on Republican-base issues like guns and abortion, and that would do him in. But he hit this note of resentment. He was ‘politically incorrect’-- critical of Obama in crude terms. There was definitely a racial subtext.” He went on, “He was very George Wallace. And then there was the strongman thing: Juan Perón in an orange fright wig. He spoke to a fifty-two-year-old shoe salesman in a dying mall in Parma, Ohio. He has those voters in his head.” Charles Kesler, a conservative political scientist and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books, one of a small number of Trump-sympathetic intellectual journals, said much the same thing: “It’s a confession of the disrepair of the Republican Party that he won that race. He shouldn’t have won that race. It revealed the inner hollowness of the Party.”
Nobody pretends that President Trump pores over detailed policy briefs. By all accounts from reporters and from Administration defectors, what you see (tweets, rallies, enmities, palace intrigue) is what you get. Even though Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House for two years, Trump failed to achieve his most loudly voiced campaign promises from 2016, such as building that big, beautiful wall and making Mexico pay for it, getting Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and undertaking a major infrastructure-building program. He is running for a second term without having produced any formal platform. What he did accomplish is a surprisingly conventional Republican program: substantial tax cuts, a vast rollback of federal regulations, large increases in military spending, and the elevation to the federal bench of more than two hundred judges with lifetime tenure, including, most likely, three avowedly conservative Supreme Court Justices.
Trump signed into law a cut in the corporate tax rate from thirty-five per cent to twenty-one per cent-- far lower than what Reagan was able to get. Glenn Hubbard said, “Jeb would have given you the tax cut. I know because I wrote it. Trump just doubled it.” In 2017, Julius Krein, an up-and-coming conservative intellectual and a former Trump supporter, founded a magazine called American Affairs. He told me, regarding Trump’s economic accomplishments, “Laugh if you want, but he ran on an ambitious agenda, which ran counter to the entire consensus. And in office he did almost nothing for anyone aligned with the 2016 campaign. The donors are driving the bus.” Trump’s racially charged rhetoric has remained constant from his first campaign through his time in office, but, in policy, foreign affairs is the one area where the Trump of the campaign and the Trump of the White House are truly aligned. His hostility toward alliances and treaties has led him to withdraw from the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal. He has enacted punitive restrictions on immigration. He constantly attacks NATO and other international organizations.
The best explanation I’ve heard for the difference between Trump as a candidate and Trump as the President goes back to fusionism. Governing requires filling thousands of jobs at the highest levels of the federal government with people who know what they’re doing, and also having shovel-ready policies in dozens of specific areas. Trump and most of his closest aides had no government experience and no developed policies. Reagan was elected sixteen years after Barry Goldwater’s forty-four-state defeat, in 1964. The conservative movement had used that time to develop a governing infrastructure. As Reagan took office, the Heritage Foundation (established in 1973) released the thousand-page Mandate for Leadership, which included hundreds of detailed suggestions for conservative policies that Reagan could enact.
There was no manual like that detailing the program Trump ran on, and no economic-policy experts ready to enact it. “This was a case where the dog caught the car,” Oren Cass, a young conservative activist and thinker who dislikes both Trump and the Republican establishment, told me. Trump’s motley crew included people like Stephen Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, and Paul Manafort, who hadn’t previously worked in government, or even had leading roles in prominent Republican campaigns. Stuart Stevens, Romney’s senior strategist in 2012 and a Never Trumper, told me, “These are evil people. They don’t have a sense of right and wrong. The people Trump attracts—these are damaged people. These are weird, damaged people. They are using Trump to work out their personal issues.”
Yet the establishment’s governing machinery was still running apace, so there were plenty of appointees and policies available from congressional staffs, think tanks, and lobbying organizations—all funded by the Republican donor class. The establishment is set up to supply the Presidential officials who supervise the career civil servants (also known by Trumpists as “the deep state”) in federal agencies. A few distinctively Trump appointees-- Stephen Miller, on immigration, and Jared Kushner, on the Middle East-- pushed through policies that no traditional Republican would have put into place. Otherwise, appointees without previous connections to Trump but with deep connections to the Party’s libertarian wing have put in place an enhanced version of the standard Republican program.
The result has been an odd mix of traditional Republican policies and Trumpian rhetorical flourishes. It’s hard to tell whether Trump believed in what his Administration was doing or if he was merely focussed on how to square it with his personal branding strategy. Cliff Sims, a White House aide who left in 2018, is the author of Team of Vipers, arguably the most revealing of the half-dozen tell-all Administration memoirs. In the book, Sims describes a scene from 2017, in which Trump is on the phone with Paul Ryan and Kevin Brady, the Republican members of Congress who were primarily responsible for the tax-cut plan. Trump says, “I think I’ve got a great name for this bill-- it’s going to be really cool. We need to call it ‘The Cut Cut Cut Act,’ because this is a tax cut. When people hear the name, that’s what we want people to know.” (The bill became law under the name Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.)
It’s also hard to tell whether Trump is truly an economic nationalist or merely a crony capitalist. He railed against TikTok, a Chinese-owned company, demanding that it sell its U.S. division, but then approved a deal that would permit Chinese control to continue and would also benefit two American companies, Walmart and Oracle, the latter of which has a major Trump contributor as a top executive. The Administration’s misadventures in Ukraine appear to have involved attempts to get the head of Naftogaz, the national gas company there, replaced by someone who would agree to import liquefied natural gas from the United States. Whatever is really going on, it’s clear that Trump in office is far less economically populist than he claimed to be while he was campaigning for his first term.
...As Trump has outsourced economic policy to the establishment, he has outsourced social policy to the evangelicals. Years before he launched his Presidential campaign, some instinct led him to create an alliance with the religious wing of the Republican Party. Nearly twenty years ago, he formed a public relationship with Paula White, a popular televangelist who preaches the "prosperity Gospel," and who has said that she guided Trump toward active Christianity. Since at least 2011, Trump has been appearing at the American Conservative Union's annual Conservative Political Action Conference, a large gathering of activists from the Party base. In 2016 and 2017, Trump released lists of potential Supreme Court Justices, all of them demonstrably acceptable to both wings of the Republican Party, the evangelicals and the libertarians, and then made appointments only from those lists. (He released a second-term list this year.) He selected Mike Pence, an evangelical Christian who had strong support from the Koch brothers and from other major Republican donors, as his Vice-President. As President, Trump has issued a number of executive orders that evangelicals approve of, such as one that rescinded a provision of the Affordable Care Act which required health-care providers to offer birth control. "He actually did what he said he'd do," Albert Mohler told me. "It's the oddest thing."
...Trump is far too bizarre to be precisely replicable as a model for the generic Republican of the future. That raises the question of where the Republican Party will go after he leaves office. The jockeying for the 2024 Republican nomination is already well under way. Did Trump's ascension represent a significant change in the Party's orientation, and, if so, will the change be temporary or lasting?
Among the Republicans I spoke to, some of whom will vote for Trump and some of whom won't, there are three competing predictions about the future of the Party over the coming years. Let's call them the Remnant, Restoration, and Reversal scenarios.
Most of the 2016 Republican Presidential candidates accepted the post-2012-autopsy argument that the Party, with its overwhelming lack of appeal to nonwhite voters, was in a demographic death spiral. Trump ran a campaign that seemed designed to appeal only to whites-- indeed, only to whites who didn't like nonwhites. That worked well in the Republican primaries, and well enough in the general election for Trump to eke out a victory that would have been impossible without the Electoral College system. He also did slightly better with minority voters than Romney had, though minority turnout was significantly lower than it had been in the two elections when Barack Obama was the Democratic nominee.
Could somebody else use the Trump playbook to win a Presidential election? Those who believe in the Remnant scenario think so. It would require extremely high motivation among Trump's base-- mainly exurban or rural, actively religious, and not highly educated-- along with a strong appeal to affluent whites, continued modest inroads with minority voters, and a low turnout among Democrats. If a politician were able to tap into the deep antipathy toward élites in the Trump heartland, he could compensate, at least in part, for the demographic decline of white voters. In the years between the elections of 1996 and 2016, the Democratic Party lost its voting majority in about a thousand of the three thousand counties in the United States-- none in major population centers. Trump carried eighty-four per cent of the counties.
...The Remnant strategy entails relentless attacks. It rests on the idea of an outpowered cohort of traditional Americans who see themselves as courageously defending their values. The obvious candidate to carry out a high Trumpist strategy in 2024 would be Donald Trump, Jr., who is an active speaker in Trump-admiring circles and in the past two years has published two books that excoriate liberals. Several other potential Republican candidates, most notably Senators Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, and Josh Hawley, of Missouri, have demonstrated that they see Trump's success as instructive. Between them, Cotton and Hawley have two degrees from Harvard, one from Yale, and one from Stanford, but both have been steadily propounding populist and nationalist themes. The forty-year-old Hawley, who is only two years into his first term and is the youngest member of the Senate, is a relentless Twitter user, frequently targeting China, Silicon Valley, and liberals who are hostile to religion. Like Trump in 2016, he almost never argues for less government, and often calls for programs to help working people. In the summer of 2019, he gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference denouncing "a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities" which, he implied, had gained control of both parties. There is also Tucker Carlson, of Fox News, who, like Trump in 2016, has no political experience and a large television audience. He offers up ferocious attacks on élites almost nightly. Charles Kesler told me that, no matter who wins, the Claremont Institute, which publishes the Claremont Review of Books, is going to start a Washington branch after the election, to devise Trumpian policies: socially conservative, economically nationalist.
Under the Restoration scenario, if Trump loses, Republicans, as if waking from a bad dream, could recapture their essential identity for the past hundred years as the party of business. They could revive a Reagan-like optimistic rhetoric of freedom and enterprise; resume an internationalist, alliance-oriented foreign policy; and embrace, at least notionally, diversity and immigration. One veteran Republican campaigner with Restorationist leanings says that, if Trump wins,"it'll blow up the Republican Party. In the 2022 election, we'll have an epic disaster-- a wipeout of epic proportions" Instead of Trumpism, "economic growth with an emphasis on character, and treating the Democrats as opponents and not as the enemy, is a way forward for the Party." Many Never Trumpers would feel comfortable again in a Restorationist Republican Party. Restoration could entail a conventionally positioned Presidential candidate, such as Mike Pence or Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, if it's possible for them to shake off their close association with Trump. But the most discussed Restorationist candidate is Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a former U.N. ambassador. Haley is the child of immigrants from India (one a professor at Voorhees College, a historically Black college, the other a schoolteacher who started a successful business selling clothing and accessories from around the world) and the sister of a military veteran. She achieved the rare feat of serving in the Trump Administration without either going full Trumpist or falling out with the President. She left, evidently on good terms with Trump, shortly after it emerged that she had accepted rides on private planes from businessmen in South Carolina. She was given a starring role at Trump's renomination convention, this past August.
...The Reversal scenario, though perhaps the least plausible, is the most threatening to the Democratic Party. The parties would essentially switch the roles they have had for the past century: the Republicans would replace the Democrats as the party of the people, the one with a greater emphasis on progressive economic policies for ordinary families. Some Reversalists have praised Elizabeth Warren; criticizing Wall Street and free trade is pretty much a membership requirement. Michael Podhorzer, who works at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., sent me a chart he had made that showed the vote in congressional districts, ranked by median income, from 1960 to today. For most of that time, districts in the bottom forty per cent of income were far more likely to vote Democratic. But by 2010 the lines had crossed-- perhaps because of the financial crisis and the Great Recession, perhaps because of the Presidency of Barack Obama-- and today poorer districts are far more likely to vote Republican and richer districts are far more likely to vote Democratic. The ten richest congressional districts in the country, and forty-four of the richest fifty, are represented by Democrats. The French economist Thomas Piketty has produced a chart showing that for highly educated voters, who were once mainly Republican, the lines started crossing back in 1968. In 2016, Trump carried non-college-educated whites by thirty-six points, and Hillary Clinton carried college-educated whites by seventeen points. Could Republicans become the working-class party, and Democrats the party of the prosperous? That would bode well for Republicans because, especially in a time of rising inequality, there aren't enough prosperous people to make up a reliable voting majority.
The Democratic Party appears confident that it has the abiding loyalty of minority voters at all income and education levels, and that it dominates the metropolitan areas where a growing majority of Americans live. The coming majority-minority, decreasingly rural country will be naturally Democratic over the long term. But there are holes in this argument. Because minorities are younger than whites and are also less likely to be U.S. citizens, the electorate could remain white-majority for decades. Richard Alba, a sociologist who has written a book called The Great Demographic Illusion, which challenges the idea of a rapidly arriving majority-minority America, estimates that in 2060, which is as far into the future as the Census Bureau projects, the electorate will still be fifty-five per cent white. (It was seventy-three per cent white in 2018). And minority voters-- especially Latinos, who will be the largest group of minority voters in the 2020 election-- may not remain as loyally Democratic as they have been in recent elections, especially if the Republican Party has a leader who doesn't race-bait. Black and Latino Democratic voters are substantially less likely to identify as liberal than white Democratic voters are. They are also more likely to be actively religious, and to pursue Republican-leaning careers such as military service and law enforcement.
...The Reversalists believe that the Democrats' embrace of market economics, and their establishment of a powerful business wing of the Democratic Party, especially in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, during the Clinton and Obama Administrations, has left them vulnerable to an attack from a new, socially conservative and economically liberal strain of Republicanism. Reversalists oppose the Republican donor class. Several have abandoned donor-funded libertarian and neoconservative think tanks like Cato and the American Enterprise Institute, disillusioned with the Party's indifference to the concerns of middle-class and working-class voters. Oren Cass, one of the leading Reversalists, has founded an organization called American Compass, which is trying to formulate policies that would appeal to members of the base of both parties. "What we're talking about is actual conservatism," he told me. "What we have called 'conservatism' just outsourced economic policy thinking away from conservatives to a small niche group of libertarians." Culturally, Reversalists present themselves as champions of provincialism, faith, and work, but they aim to promote these things through unusually interventionist (at least for Republicans, and for centrist Democrats since the nineties) economic policies. Steven Hayward, who calls himself a reluctant Trump supporter, said, "It's amazing to me the number of conservatives who are talking about, essentially, Walter Mondale's industrial policy from 1984. The right and the left suddenly agree. Reagan was very popular with younger voters. Younger people then had come of age seeing government failure. Now young people have come of age seeing market failure."
...Many Democrats will surely see this vision of the future of the Republican Party as fanciful. Isn't the Party controlled by ferociously right-wing billionaires? Aren't Republican-base voters irredeemable white supremacists who have been bamboozled by Fox News and televangelists? But the Democrats' coalition is no less unnatural than the Republicans'. A political system with only two parties produces parties with internal contradictions. The five most valuable corporations in America are all West Coast tech companies-- enemy territory, in today's Republican rhetoric. The head of the country's biggest bank, Jamie Dimon, of JPMorgan Chase, is a Democrat and a Trump critic. There was a stir in Republican circles in 2018, when a conservative journalist eavesdropped, on an Amtrak train, on a long phone conversation that Representative Jerry Nadler, of the Upper West Side, was having. Nadler complained that Democrats were attracting voters who were like the old Rockefeller Republicans-- liberal on social issues, conservative on economics. That's who lives in a lot of the wealthy older suburbs-- formerly Republican areas that are now Democratic. And the Democrats' minority voters differ enough on measures such as income, education, ideology, and religion that some of them could potentially be tempted to join a Republican Party that wasn't headed by Trump.
Trump has already changed the Republican Party. Its most hawkish element-- hawkish in the Iraq War sense-- has gone underground, if it still exists. The same goes for publicly stated Republican skepticism about Social Security and Medicare. One must be hostile to China, and skeptical, to some degree, of free trade. Especially since the arrival of the pandemic, it's hard to find a true libertarian in the Party-- at least among those who have to run for office. In the future, according to Donald Critchlow, a historian of conservatism who teaches at Arizona State University, "the advantage would go to a candidate who is Trump without the Trump caricature. An old-fashioned Chamber of Commerce candidate would not do well. We're in a new situation, in both parties. Everything's up for grabs." A senior Republican staffer who has Reversalist sympathies says, "Trump isn't good at a twenty-first-century policy agenda," but that work can go on without him. "If he loses, we'll have a massive argument in the Republican Party. Some will say, "He's a black swan." To me, the lesson is: he correctly diagnosed what was going on. Let's apply that to conservative economic policy. To me, what's up for grabs is the working-class vote. Not just working-class white-- working-class. Does what the President tapped into have to be racial? Can it be about what neoliberalism has done to the country?"
Trump's genius is to command attention, including the attention of people who dislike him. That makes it tempting to think that, when he's gone, everything he stands for will go with him. It probably won't; elements of Trumpism will likely be with us for a long time. Which elements, taking what form, in the possession of which party? Such questions will be just as pressing after Trump as they are now.
The Great Depression was electorally equated with the Republican Party for at least 20 years and the mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic is going to make Trump's Republican Party this generation's Herbert Hoover's Republican Party. So... Lemann is a really smart guy, but his frame may be cockeyed here.
Republicans Continue Blocking A Pandemic Relief Bill, Even In The Face Of Massive Election Losses
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230,000 Deaths by Chip Proser
Despite Trump's protestations at the debate last night that the pandemic is going away, yesterday, according to NBC News, set a record as the number of new coronavirus cases rose to over 77,000, topping the previous record in July. "Nationwide, 77,640 new cases were reported for the day, up from the previous record of 75,723 on July 29. Dr. Jay Butler, deputy director for infectious diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Wednesday afternoon that the agency has noted a 'distressing trend' in which coronavirus case numbers are "increasing in nearly 75 percent of the country." And although Trump repeatedly bleated that it was all "Democrat governors" fault for closing down the economy, most of the increase is in states that voted for Trump. Hospitalizations are also spiking dangerously and deaths always follow increased case loads and hospitalizations. Yesterday's biggest new case loads were in Texas (+6,197) and Florida (+5,557), although Trump lied at the debate and said the pandemic was ending in Florida. Yesterday the U.S. had the most new cases-- by far-- than any other country in the world, even with Europe in a full-blown second wave. On a per capita basis, the 17 states hit hardest by the pandemic are all states that voted for Trump in 2016.
• North Dakota- 45,996 cases per million residents • South Dakota- 40,713 cases per million residents • Louisiana- 38,325 cases per million residents • Mississippi- 37,996 cases per million residents • Alabama- 36,112 cases per million residents • Florida-35,762 cases per million residents • Iowa- 35,440 cases per million residents • Tennessee- 34,837 cases per million residents • Arkansas- 34,064 cases per million residents • Georgia- 32,544 cases per million residents • South Carolina- 32,529 cases per million residents • Arizona- 32,273 cases per million residents • Wisconsin- 31,963 cases per million residents • Nebraska- 31,682 cases per million residents • Idaho- 31,672 cases per million residents • Utah- 31,051 cases per million residents • Texas- 30,909 cases per million residents
Although the residents of most of these states haven't connected the dots between Trump and their suffering yet, some have. Florida, Iowa, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, NE-02, and even Texas are trending away from giving Trump a second term. According to a new poll by Change Research, Trump and his enablers in the Senate are losing in the battleground states polled:
• Arizona- Trump down by 6 points and Martha McSally down by 11 points • Florida- Trump down by 5 points • Michigan- Trump down by 7 points and the Trumpist challenger to Gary Peters losing by 5 points • North Carolina- Trump down by 3 points and Thom Tillis down by 6 points • Pennsylvania- Trump down by 2 points • Wisconsin- Trump down by 8 points
Change Research noted that "As COVID-19 cases spike across the country, voters continue to prefer Biden and Democrats to Trump and Republicans on COVID-19 by 6 points in the battleground and by 12 points nationally. 55% of battleground voters and 57% nationally disapprove of Trump's handling of the virus, with majorities strongly disapproving. We also showed voters a tweet from Trump and asked them if it is mostly helpful or harmful when it comes to handling COVID-19."
The large majority of voters in the battleground say that instead of filling the Supreme court vacancy, the top priority for the U.S. Senate right now should be providing more economic relief and funds for combatting COVID-19 (62% COVID relief, 38% SCOTUS). Only the white working class men-- the heart of Trump’s base-- are more likely to prioritize the vacancy (58% SCOTUS, 42% COVID relief).
Asked which comes closer to their point of view about the economy, battleground voters are twice as likely to say that “The economy is struggling and we need more financial relief from Washington” over “The economy is recovering and we do not need any more financial relief from Washington” (66% to 34%), up 3 points since we last surveyed.
Battleground voters are as likely to blame Trump and Republicans in Congress as they are to blame Nancy Pelosi and Democrat in Congress for failure to pass new COVID-19 relief, with 10% saying they are both equally to blame. This was also the reaction of voters when the expanded unemployment benefit expired.
When we look to those who are currently experience lost wages or a salary cut in their household, they are far more likely to say the economy is struggling and we need relief from Washington (77%), they are as likely to rank the economy, jobs, and cost of living as a top issue as are those who are experiencing lost jobs or wages currently, and they are more likely to say that Trump and Republican are more responsible for the failure to pass more relief (54% v. 34% Pelosi and Democrats, 11% both equally).
Voters continue to prefer Biden and Democrat to Trump and Republicans on COVID-19 by 6 points in the battleground and by 12 points nationally. But that understates the frustration with Trump’s handling of the virus. Fully 55% of battleground voters and 57% nationally disapprove of Trump’s handling of the virus, with majorities strongly disapproving. We also see Trump’s weakness on COVID-19 when we look at the 11 point intensity advantage that Democrats hold on COVID-19: 48% of battleground voters strongly prefer Biden compared to 37% who strongly prefer Trump.
Republicans in Congress seem willing to do anything it takes to prevent a pandemic relief and stimulus bill from passing. McConnell has sabotaged everything the Democrats have passed in the House and has warned the White House that he will not allow whatever Pelosi and Mnuchin comes up with the pass either. Reporting yesterday for the Washington Post, Jeff Stein wrote that Senate Republicans don't want Mnuchin to come up with a compromise despite Trump's orders to do so. "Mnuchin," wrote Stein, "has already committed to a top-line figure of around $1.9 trillion, much too high for many Senate Republicans to swallow. This includes at least $300 billion for state and local aid, also a non-starter for many in the GOP. The Treasury secretary is also giving ground on multiple specific policy issues, for example reducing payments that Republicans wanted to go to farmers so that some of the money would go for food boxes instead, according to two people involved in the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the developments. He has left open the possibility of allowing even more money to flow to states and localities via Community Development Block Grants sought by Democrats."
“He negotiates harder with his own side than he does with her. Folks over here are sick of it,” said one Senate GOP aide, who added that Republicans were “reaching boiling point with him” as Mnuchin “gives and gives and gives and gets nothing in return.”
Another Senate GOP aide said: “Fair to say the feeling is he’s giving away the store. No one is surprised, but yes frustrated. The idea that our conference is going to go along with whatever bad deal he cuts with Pelosi is completely unrealistic.”
...[Pelosi] said she and Mnuchin had just about come to terms on a national coronavirus testing strategy Democrats have been pushing. But Pelosi acknowledged that other major issues were still unsettled, including aid to state and local governments and liability protections for businesses sought by Republicans.
Pelosi has expressed the desire to pass a bill before the election, but made clear Thursday that she was not wedded to that timeline if she does not get what she wants.
“We wouldn’t take less of a bill to get it sooner," Pelosi said. "We want the best bill.”
Senate Republicans have already made their opposition to a big new spending bill abundantly clear-- and yet Mnuchin continues to negotiate and make concessions, giving rise to the new round of complaints. Mnuchin is caught between a president who’s demanded that he “bring home the bacon,” and Republican lawmakers who oppose more pork.
...Privately, multiple Senate GOP aides said getting 13 GOP votes for a big bill brokered by Pelosi and Mnuchin simply could not happen.
“There are not 13 votes for this pile of crap Mnuchin is capitulating on,” said a third Senate GOP aide familiar with the discussions.
McConnell has said that if Pelosi and Mnuchin get a deal and it passes the House with Trump’s support he would bring it up for a vote in the Senate-- but has not said when he would do so.
Senate Republicans have long been skeptical of Mnuchin’s approach in negotiations with Democrats, including in the spring when he helped negotiate four bills totaling an unprecedented $3 trillion that in retrospect some Republicans think went too far.
But Trump’s approach in the talks has been inconsistent, and it’s not at all clear that even if Pelosi and Mnuchin were to strike a deal, that Trump would or could bring Senate Republicans along. The president has said Republicans would fall in line, but he himself has veered between calling off talks and demanding more money than even Democrats proposed.
On Wednesday evening Trump seemed to write the whole effort off in a pair of Twitter posts where he lamented, “Just don’t see any way Nancy Pelosi and Cryin’ Chuck Schumer will be willing to do what is right.”
Conservatives off Capitol Hill are watching the process play out with something akin to horror.
...Even among conservatives, however, there is resignation that Mnuchin has been empowered by Trump and there is little to be done about the president’s bipartisan negotiator.
“There are concerns about the direction inside the White House but at the end of day Mnuchin takes direction from president,” said one GOP aide, granted anonymity to share internal thinking.
According to CNN, among the reactionary Republicans pushing hard for no help to working families are Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), who is up for reelection and has been trying to keep her hatred for working class people on the down low, and John Cornyn (R-TX), who is in an identical situation.
