Pence's Fly Won Last Night's Debate

 

I know, I know... Pence didn't bring the fly to the debate. It's not like it's his pet or something. In fact, the only fly he gets excited about is Nick Ayers', when it's unzipped.

This morning, when Biden was asked what he plans to do about Trump's on-again-off-again debate threats, he told reporters that "We don’t know what the president’s going to do. He changes his mind every second." But Biden wasn't just talking about how the drugs have deranged him to the point where he can't decide if he's willing to debate or when. And he wasn't just talking about the DC open secret that Trump plans to fire FBI director Christopher Wray, who he hired but who, in Trump's warped mind, failed the loyalty test. Trump called Wray "disappointing," and is furious that Wray hasn't done more to investigate "voter fraud," after Wray said there is no evidence of any coordinated fraud ahead of the election. "He doesn’t see the voting ballots as a problem." (Maybe Wray to bother with Trump's voter fraud fantasies because he was too busy arresting half a dozen Trump supporters who plotted the kidnapping of the Michigan governor Trump has repeatedly and viciously denounced.)

No, what I think was really on Biden's mind was Trump's flip-flop on his psychotic order 2 days ago that his GOP allies in Congress cease negotiating with the Democrats to craft a pandemic relief package. He tried a little typical Trumpish gaslighting to coverup the drug-induced fatal error. "Well I shut down talks two days ago because they weren’t working out. Now they are starting to work out, we’re starting to have some very productive talks." Oh? How were they starting to work out if the Republicans had ended the discussions. That white flag you see going up, isn't from Pelosi. In fact, Señor Trumpanzee add that he thinks Pelosi "wants it to happen, because it’s so good for our country, we really need it."

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, Pink Eye Pence shows up at the debate with a herpetic lip, loses-- according to every poll, but not according to Señor T-- to a pathetically mediocre Kamala Harris, and then disappears off the radar, cancelling all events and zeroing out his schedule (without admitting he tested positive). Trump also refuses to allow the results of his tests to be seen by the public. Also-- if Pence doesn't have conjunctivitis in his left eye, who punched him? Mother? Was she pissed off because he has herpes again?

I'm disappointed that David Frum won't tell us who punched out Pence, because all he wants to write about is The Fly.

We saw a vice president with a pale face, his mouth cankered by a cold sore, his eyes pink. He looked unwell, which evoked the pandemic that has gripped America-- a pandemic through which the Trump White House has modeled the most irresponsible and unsafe behavior. That irresponsible and unsafe behavior has sickened the president and the first lady, forced the Joint Chiefs of Staff into quarantine, and spread infection though the West Wing. This White House is notorious for non-transparency and untruthfulness. The president evaded a COVID-19 test before the September 29 debate in Cleveland-- a date by which he very probably knew he was infected and infectious. Everybody watching tonight’s debate had to wonder: What’s going on with the vice president? At one point, Pence was at least the titular head of the White House COVID-19 response. He defied safety protocols too. He notably refused to wear a mask on a visit to the Mayo Clinic in April, despite the hospital’s clear rule that he must.

We saw a vice president who had internalized the Trump White House’s culture of disrespect, and especially disrespect to women. He talked over Kamala Harris and the moderator, Susan Page; he ignored the rules of the debate to which he agreed. At the core of the Trump political project is the reassertion of dominance over the historically dominated by the historically dominant. That reassertion of dominance was Pence’s supreme project at this debate too. Pence did not imitate his boss’s manic and undisciplined-- and ultimately catastrophically unsuccessful-- style of dominance. Instead, he brought to this debate the more measured and controlled disdain of a man who had considered the matter carefully-- and decided that the woman in front of him had no right to control him and that the woman to his right did not deserve to be onstage with him. With the sound on, you heard Page trying and failing to summon Pence to order with a repeated, “Mr. Vice President, Mr. Vice President.” With the sound off, you saw Harris-- a vice-presidential nominee, a U.S. senator, a former attorney general of the largest state in the nation-- obliged to smile and smile in an effort to assert herself without seeming… well, you know, without seeming something that might offend somebody. Pence never worried about offending anybody. And he did not feel the need to smile when asserting himself.

We saw a weird moment when a fly landed on Pence’s snow-white hair-- and the vice president did not react at all. No doubt, it’s a conundrum, what to do in such a situation. If Pence had shooed the fly and the fly had refused to shoo, that would have been bad. So he did nothing. And that doing nothing somehow in one powerful visual moment concentrated everything. It symbolized the whole Pence vice presidency, the determined, willful refusal to acknowledge the most blaring and glaring negative realities. Through all of the scandals and the crimes and the disasters of the past four years, Mike Pence was the man who pretended not to notice. And now there was a fly on his head, and he pretended not to notice that too.

Last Night Was Hard To Watch For Normal Americans-- But A Great Night For The Neo-Nazi Proud Boys

 

Trump/Biden Debate by Nancy Ohanian

Trump was a national embarrassment. That's what you get when you practice debating with Rudy Giuliani. And Biden was, at best... a weak foil. Instant polls and focus groups, though, showed Trump decisively losing the first-- and hopefully-- last debate of 2020. Republican focus group-meister asked his panel of 15 swing state undecided voters, "You just saw 90 minutes; how can you still be undecided?" 11 are still undecided; 4 are voting for Biden and two made up their lizard-minds to vote for Trump. One of the Biden converts described the debate as "trying to win an argument with a crackhead." Trump didn't grow his support. Politico:

Despite their indecisiveness, most described Trump in a negative light, including one of the participants who was leaning toward voting for the president. The voters characterized Trump as “unhinged,” “arrogant,” “forceful," a “bully,” “chaotic” and “un-American.”

When asked to describe Biden they offered: “better than expected,” “politician,” “compassion,” “coherent,” and a “nice guy lacking vision.”

John Harris termed the whole mess as an epic moment of national shame, "a new low in presidential politics," and "an embarrassment for the ages" that caused many viewers "at frequent intervals... [to] lower the sound, wince and look away." Maybe that's what Trump wanted, although I doubt it. He thinks he won. No one else does though. "Trump," wrote Harris, "plainly arrived to shred the official debate rules, and shed any pretense of decorum. At numerous points, his honking interruptions blared without interruption. So did his putdowns, including mocking Biden’s performance in college 56 years ago-- “You graduated either the lowest or almost the lowest in your class,” before adding, “There’s nothing smart about you, Joe.” He also brought up Hunter Biden’s drug problems and inaccurately said he received a dishonorable discharge from the Navy." Biden's best moments were when he called Trump a "clown."

Writing for the New Republic, Walter Shapiro noted that Donald's unhinged performance is a sign he knows he's losing. He concluded his column by writing that watching caused him to grieve for American democracy. "And I am frightened by the specter of two more presidential debates as moderators insist on playing by rules of civil discourse in the face of Trump the Termagant." NBC's Jonathan Allen agreed with Shapiro that Trump's performance was a sign that he fears Biden and knows he's losing. "In the end," he wrote, "what voters saw was a president who was deeply fearful of the result of a fair election determined on the actual positions and records of the two candidates. And yet, his desire to dominate the debate stage-- to talk over both his opponent and the moderator, Chris Wallace-- made it more likely that the race will be a referendum on him than a choice between him and Biden." BINGO! A referendum on Trump is exactly what's brewing... which is why as unsatisfactory a candidate as Joe Biden is going to win in a landslide and why Republicans are going to lose control of the Senate and lose dozens of House seats.





In her Washington Post OpEd, Karen Tumulty noted that "the nightmare that played out Tuesday evening on a debate stage in Cleveland served at least one useful purpose. It encapsulated, in a single 98-minute span, the entire presidency of Donald... All of the impulses that drive Trump were unleashed: The lying. The rage. The bluster. The incoherence. It is hard to imagine that anyone but the most obdurate of partisans could have watched the spectacle and thought, Gee, wouldn’t it be great to have four more years of this?"

Joe Biden spoke for the rest of us when he at one point blurted out: “Will you shut up, man? This is so unpresidential.”

Granted, this was not Biden’s finest hour either. He failed to achieve the most fundamental mission for a challenger, which is to present a vision of the alternate direction in which he would take the country.

Then again, it is hard to blame the former vice president, who had assumed that he was showing up for a debate, not a shipwreck. For the most part, Biden retained his composure. He in no way resembled the doddering and feeble old man that Trump and his compatriots have sought to portray him as.

Biden also resisted Trump’s efforts to align him with the more liberal members of his party and positions that fall to the left of where most Americans are on issues such as health care. “I am the Democratic Party right now," Biden said. "The platform of the Democratic Party is what I, in fact, approved of.”

Trump lied his way through the debate but did anyone expect he even knew how to do otherwise? Lying is what he does-- always; it comes as naturally as it does to Lindsey Graham when someone asks him if he's gay. I love the response Mike Reese, sheriff of Multnomah County (Portland, Oregon) gave after Trump lied about being endorsed by him:

Even after his catastrophic performance last night, Donald is going through with his super-spreader events in Green Bay and La Crosse, Wisconsin on Saturday, two cities where coronavirus cases are surging... Trump’s rallies, which are known for their size and lack of social distancing, will be held in two cities with some of the highest rates of coronavirus infections in the country. La Crosse has the second-highest rate of infection...and Green Bay has the sixth-highest number of cases per capita. Coronavirus cases around the state are skyrocketing and hospitalizations are at a record high. As of Monday, every county in the state has high virus activity, according to the state Department of Health Services. The Green Bay area, especially, is seeing high numbers of coronavirus patients in their health care centers. At Bellin Hospital in Green Bay, coronavirus patients occupy three-quarters of the hospital's intensive care unit beds and two-thirds of medical unit beds-- roughly double the number from two weeks ago. Last week, the Bellin Hospital emergency room was so overwhelmed that hospital workers had to tend to patients on gurneys in the hallway. Meanwhile, 150 Bellin Hospital employees are quarantining at home."

Reporting for the Washington Post on Trump's plans to kill more Cheeseheads, Lena Sun noted that during the debate, "Trump defended his events as opportunities for his supporters to gather to hear him and claimed that there has been 'no negative effect' from his rallies, even though health officials in Tulsa said a spike in covid-19 cases was 'likely' sparked by an indoor Trump gathering in June." [Herman Cain started trending on Twitter.] Señor T, lying again, said "he was 'okay with masks' but falsely claimed that scientists are divided over their value. Health experts have said mask-wearing, hand-washing, social distancing and being careful about crowds currently make up the best defense against the virus. Biden, by contrast, said Trump has been 'totally irresponsible' in the way he has handled social distancing and masks, and in holding large rallies. 'Basically he has been a fool on this,' Biden said of Trump."

“If you could get the crowds, you would have done the same thing,” the president responded. “But you can’t. Nobody can.”

In addition to the White House task force’s guidance, local concern has been growing in Wisconsin about Trump’s planned events, which are scheduled for outdoor airplane hangars without universal mask mandates. Gov. Tony Evers (D) said Tuesday in a news briefing that Trump should either cancel the events or require mask-wearing by everyone who attends.

“This virus is real, and it is devastating our communities, and it will continue to do so until we all get on the same team,” Evers said in a press call about the recent spike in the state’s cases.

He told Wisconsin residents that wearing a mask is not a substitute for social distancing or staying at home, and he asked them to cancel family barbecues, play dates or dinner parties, and make all large gatherings virtual.

Ryan Westergaard, the state’s chief medical officer, said Tuesday that Wisconsin is “in a crisis right now,” given the rate of community spread.

While Biden has made a point of keeping his events small and attendees distant from one another, Trump has largely dismissed the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention against holding mass gatherings during the pandemic.

The president has crisscrossed the country to hold rallies, mostly in outdoor spaces but sometimes indoors, where mask-wearing is optional. At the events, he regularly mocks virus mitigation efforts, like social distancing, as little more than political ploys by Democratic state leaders bent on punishing him.

“We don’t call these ‘rallies’ anymore, because in Dem states like where you have a governor who’s a Democrat, you’re not allowed to go to church and not allowed to go to a restaurant. You’re not allowed to go to your friend’s house. You can’t move from your house unless you’re related to the governor,” he said at a rally in Newport News, Virginia, on Friday.

“You can’t do anything, unless of course it’s a peaceful protest. Okay?” he continued. “So what we do is we call these peaceful protests, and we’re getting big crowds.”

For Biden, the only good outcome is that watching Trump act like last night that certainly got Democrats-- and perhaps others-- reaching for their wallets. His campaign and that of other Democrats-- had huge fundraising booms during and after the debate. ActBlue brought in around $8 million between 9 and 11, almost half of which went to Biden. I asked Twitter followers to consider contributing $5 to their favorite Democratic congressional candidates here every time Trump lied. Please consider doing that today by clicking on the Blue America 2020 congressional thermometer on the right.

David Frum asserted in his Atlantic column that Donald was a dead duck before he set foot on the stage. He explained that Trumpanzee "arrived at the first debate with a theory and a plan. The theory was that American voters crave dominance, no matter how belligerent or offensive. The plan was to hector, interrupt, and insult in hope of establishing that dominance. His theory was wrong and his plan was counter-productive."

Trump walked onto that stage in Cleveland seven or eight points behind, because the traditional Republican advantage among upper-income and educated voters has dwindled; because non-college-educated white women have turned against him; because he is losing older voters to his mishandling of COVID-19; because the groups he needs to be demobilized—African Americans, the young—are up-mobilized. On the present trajectory, nearly 150 million votes are likely to be cast in 2020. If Trump wins 43 percent of them and Joe Biden 50 percent, not even the Electoral College can convert that negative margin into a second Trump term.

He needed to do something to change that reality.

Instead, he talked to Facebook conspiracists, to the angriest of ultra-Republican partisans, and to violent white supremacists. He urged the Proud Boys to 'stand by' because 'somebody’s got to do something' about 'antifa and the left.' He refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the (likely) event that he loses. He threatened months and months of chaos if the election does not go his way.

Trump yelled, threatened, interrupted-- and changed nothing. All he did was confirm the horror and revulsion of the large American majority that has already begun to cast its ballots against him.

Correction, Trump did one thing. On the Cleveland stage, Trump communicated that he will seize any opportunity to disrupt the vote, and resist the outcome. He communicated more forcefully than ever that the only security the country has for a constitutional future is that Biden win by the largest possible margin.

...Who and what Trump is, could not have been more vividly displayed in all the psychological reality. Debate one was not Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, or red versus blue. It was zookeepers versus poop-throwing primates.

Biden may be faded from what he was: perhaps less crisp, less sharp, less fast. But when Biden spoke, he spoke to and about America. Trump spoke only about his wounded ego. Biden communicated: I care about you. Trump communicated: I hate everybody. Biden succeeded in putting his most important messages on record: your healthcare, your job, your right to equal respect regardless of race or creed-- all against Trump’s disregard and disrespect. Trump may have imagined he projected himself as strong. The whole world witnessed instead the destructive rage of a bully confronting impending defeat. Trump disgraced the presidency on that stage. He may just have delivered the self-incapacitating wound that pushes the country toward self-salvation.

A Man Is Only As Good As His Word? So How Do Closet Cases, Like Lindsey Graham Survive In Electoral Politics?

 

I'm gay. When I realized it, I was living in Amsterdam. I went to a psychologist and told him. He looked at me oddly and said, basically, "So? You need me to give you the addresses of gay bars?" Then I flew to the U.S., for my first visit back home in 4 years, to tell my mother. Her response was to tell me I couldn't borrow her wigs. Years later my first corporate job was working for a gay man. My sexuality never held back my career and I rose to be president of the parent company. I'm glad I never went down the closet road. People in closets live a life reflexively and usually increasingly dishonest. They lie about who they are, what they are and, eventually, about everything and start living a life where serial dishonestly becomes the essence of being, more so than any semblance of honesty. It's the slipperiest of slopes to start down and so, so tragic for so many people.

It's the slope poor Lindsey Graham felt he had to go down if he was going to be a successful politician in South Carolina. And, his life has been one gigantic lie, both professionally and personally. "Everyone knows" and even colleagues and acquaintances who find him likable, simpatico and amusing, all tend to pity him. And now it may be catching up with him politically, as an unlikely Democratic opponent has him locked in a what should be an easy reelection campaign but is basically tied and too close to call.

On Saturday, Washington Post reporters Sean Sullivan and Seung Min Kim wrote that 4 and a half years ago Lindsey "sat across a conference table from his colleagues and issued them a dare. 'I want you to use my words against me,' said Graham, a South Carolina Republican with a flair for drama. Pointing with his index finger, Graham continued: 'If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.' On Saturday, Graham was singing a different tune, pledging support for President Trump in 'any effort to move forward regarding the recent vacancy created by the passing of Justice Ginsburg.' The stark turnabout from 2016 marked the latest chapter in Graham’s dramatic reinvention of himself during the Trump presidency, morphing from an old-school Senate institutionalist and bipartisan dealmaker into a stalwart soldier for the president’s agenda."

Democrats and other opponents of The Donald very much would like to take Graham up on his offer-- to hold his words against him. I don't know how effective this Lincoln Project ad will be with South Carolina voters, but I suspect someone will figure out exactly how to hold his words against him in a way that will cause him no end of political pain. After all, no one likes a liar... well, except for Republicans who apparently love liars:





"Graham," our Post duo reminded us, "is chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee charged with processing Supreme Court nominees, and he is in the midst of a competitive reelection campaign that could factor closely into the fight for control of the upper chamber. His comments Saturday, coming after less-decisive statements in the hours after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death Friday, amounted to the latest indication of how Republican leaders are rallying quickly around a strategy of seeking to fill her seat this year. That prospect has stoked widespread outrage among Senate Democrats, who are calling Republicans hypocrites for the move after blocking President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016 because they said the president chosen by voters that fall should make the pick.

“There’s no doubt everything will be sort of on the table if we’re thrown into a world where you can’t trust somebody’s word and precedents get changed at will to fit your priorities of the moment,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said in response to Graham’s decision to align behind Trump and go back on what he said in 2016.

During Saturday’s call, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) used similar language, saying that if Senate Republicans move forward with whoever Trump nominates, “nothing is off the table for next year” should Democrats win control of the chamber. That appeared to be a reference to structural changes to the court proposed by liberal activists such as expanding the number of justices-- a proposal that has sparked some disagreements among Democrats.

Republican leaders appeared determined to press ahead swiftly to fill the court vacancy with a conservative jurist. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) promised Trump during a Friday phone call that his nominee would get a vote in the Senate, according to people familiar with their conversation who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversation.

Trump told McConnell he liked Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit and Barbara Lagoa of the 11th Circuit, according to two people briefed on the discussion.

“We were put in this position of power and importance to make decisions for the people who so proudly elected us, the most important of which has long been considered to be the selection of United States Supreme Court Justices,” Trump wrote on Twitter Saturday. “We have this obligation, without delay!”

...Less clear is how rank-and-file Republican senators will respond, with many in tough reelection races in states where Trump is not popular. Republicans hold a 53-to-47 majority in the Senate, meaning they can afford to lose no more than three members in a confirmation vote, should the entire Democratic caucus unite against Trump's nominee.

They have already lost one.

“I do not believe that the Senate should vote on the nominee prior to the election,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who is in a tough reelection fight, said in a statement. “In fairness to the American people, who will either be re-electing the President or selecting a new one, the decision on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be made by the President who is elected on November 3rd.”

Collins’s reservations contrasted sharply with the comments from Graham, who is seeking a fourth term in the Senate. The contest has been tougher than many expected in a ruby-red state Trump won easily in 2016, with recent polls showing Democrat Jaime Harrison in close competition with Graham.

Now Graham will be at the center of what will likely be one of the most contentious confirmation battles in history, affording him an opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to Trump. But some Democrats say his position could help amplify the arguments against his reelection.

“A lot of folks miss the Lindsey of old-- and that’s why this race is so competitive,” said Steve Benjamin, the Democratic mayor of Columbia, S.C. “When it comes time to do what’s right and maybe not popular,” Benjamin said, “it can be difficult for some.”

Harrison, one of his party's fast-rising African American stars, sounded similar notes. “My grandpa always said that a man is only as good as his word. Senator Graham, you have proven your word is worthless,” he wrote on Twitter.

Writing for The Atlantic, Edward-Isaac Dovere offered a glimpse into what Republican senators are saying in private and off the record. "Whispering Republicans," as he termed them, talk about how they hate The Donald and then back him in public-- to the media and, of course, with their votes. The GOP is absolutely one of the country's two spineless, jellyfish parties. "The secretly apostate Republican senators," wrote Dovere, "have two choices: They can support a president they think is a threat to American democracy while also violating Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s invented 2016 rule about not confirming justices in an election year, or they can oppose Trump, enraging both him and their progressively cultish base while giving up what might be their last chance to secure a conservative majority for a generation."

Notice The Donald's Chamber of Commerce retweet from Sunday morning, signally he's ready for war with Alaska senior Senator Lisa Murkowski, who is not up for reelection in November and is not up for giving Trump a third Supreme Court pick.

For McConnell, this is principle versus power, and the golden rule is “Whoever has the gold makes the rules.” And it’s happening as the next generation of ambitious Republicans looks to a future in which Trumpism remains a dominant force within the party no matter what happens in November.

Don’t expect many Republicans-- even those who want to stick it to Trump-- to be direct with their commitments. “If they try to shove something through, I think you’re going to see some of these Republicans who hate Trump fall on the horrible sword of ‘This country is dangerously divided right now; the hypocrisy is horrible; if we do something like this, it will tear the country apart,’” says Joe Walsh, the former Republican representative from Illinois, who briefly ran a primary campaign against Trump that went nowhere earlier this year. Based on conversations he’s had, Walsh estimates that, of the current Republican senators, “if you put a gun to their head privately, I would say more than 40 of the 53 would like to see him lose.”

Walsh insists that Republicans didn’t want this vacancy-- not now. “This is political death for the Republicans,” he told me.

This is not the time for Republicans to insist that they haven’t “seen the latest tweet.” This is where they either will or will not give Trump the boost that he needs weeks before the election. Now, more than ever, they are either with him or against him. “This,” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat, said on CNN last night, “is my colleagues’ moment of reckoning.”

...Senator Joni Ernst, in a tight reelection race in Iowa, said in July that she would support a nomination process if an opening occurred. But that puts her at odds with her fellow Iowa senator, Chuck Grassley, who said in August that he couldn’t support a confirmation in an election year if he was going to be consistent with the position he took in 2016. He stood then with McConnell’s adamant refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing after Antonin Scalia’s sudden death in 2016, though Garland was nominated nine months before Election Day. Of course, the question becomes whether Grassley will hold to his position now that the question is no longer theoretical.

...Late yesterday, I asked a former Republican House member what an anti-Trump Republican senator would do when facing a choice that sounds more out of a novel than anything Goethe might have come up with if he’d ever wandered around Capitol Hill.

“The Republican senator,” said the person, who requested anonymity to speak directly about old colleagues, “will do what they must in the name of self-preservation.”

“Guess what?” the former House member said of Graham. “He’s going to do it. You know he is. He’s up for reelection in South Carolina. He needs his base. He’ll flip on this.”

McConnell, in his Rube Goldberg–machine statement explaining why Trump’s nominee will get a vote on the floor of the Senate but Obama’s didn’t, left the door open to having a vote in a potential lame-duck session after the election.

Maybe it’ll all come down to Senator Mitt Romney, who is publicly offended by pretty much everything Trump stands for but whose spokesperson shot down rumors last night that he would oppose a confirmation before the election. Or maybe, if Mark Kelly wins his Senate race in Arizona, it will all hinge on a legal dispute over whether he would get to immediately be sworn into the seat because his opponent was appointed to it. Or maybe by then we’ll be in a country where the November 3 votes are taking weeks to count, rioters and militias are out on the streets, and, as in 2000, the election will head to the Supreme Court, which now is without a tiebreaker vote.

In 2016, from the minute he learned of Scalia’s death, Obama knew that Republicans would try to prevent him from appointing a justice and flipping the balance to a 5–4 liberal majority. He nominated Garland anyway and threw himself into the fight, daring the GOP senators to oppose a middle-of-the-road, accomplished judge whom so many had voted for in his confirmation to a lower court. Working the phones for a few senators he dreamed might buck McConnell, he pleaded with them: Don’t do this.

I remember speaking with one of the Republican senators struggling with breaking the process then. The senator, though torn, ultimately did not say anything publicly, and didn’t invite Garland in for a meeting.

Last night, Obama closed his statement mourning Ginsburg with, “As votes are already being cast in this election, Republican senators are now called to apply that standard.” Don’t hold a confirmation hearing, he said. Always an institutionalist with his eye toward history, Obama was admitting that the process breakers had won.

Now the question is, what else will Trump, the ultimate process breaker, win?

David Frum offered up 4 reasons to doubt McConnell’s power. He asked himself 4 questions:

• Does McConnell really command a Senate majority?

The polls do not favor Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, or Thom Tillis--senators from Maine, Colorado, and North Carolina up for reelection this cycle. Yet these competitors may not be ready to attend their own funerals. They may regard voting against McConnell's Court grab as a heaven-sent chance to prove their independence from an unpopular president-- and to thereby save their own seats... (Martha McSally of Arizona, however, is likely a safe vote for McConnell. The deadest of the Senate's dead ducks surely must be focused on retaining national Republican support for her post-Senate career. Mitt Romney of Utah is a more open question: His strong sense of fairness will push him against confirmation; his consistent support for conservative judges will pull him in favor.)

• Does McConnell really have a nominee to advance?

Any last-minute Trump nominee will face a gantlet of opposition in the Senate, a firestorm of opposition in the country, and probably a lifetime of suspicion from the majority of the country.

Can McConnell and Trump find an appointee willing to risk all that for the chance-- but not the guarantee-- of a Supreme Court seat? Specifically, can they find a woman willing to do it? The optics of replacing Ginsburg with a man may be too ugly even for the Trump administration. And if they can find a woman, can they find a woman sufficiently moderate-seeming to provide cover to anxious senators? The task may prove harder than immediately assumed.

• Will Trump balk?

Until now, judicial-nomination fights have mobilized Republicans and conservatives more than Democrats and liberals. The fight McConnell proposes may upset that pattern. Trump's hopes for reelection depend on suppressing votes and discouraging participation. The last thing he needs is a highly dramatic battle that could mobilize Democrats in states including Arizona and North Carolina-- even Georgia and Texas.

The smart play for Trump is to postpone the nomination to reduce the risk of Democratic mobilization, and to warn Republicans of the risks should he lose. Trump’s people do not usually execute the smart play. They are often the victims of the hyper-ideological media they consume, which deceive them about what actually is the smart play. This time, though, they may just be desperate enough to break long-standing pattern and try something different.

• Will the conservative legal establishment play ball?

The judicial status quo enormously favors conservatives. Even should Democrats win big in November, it will take many years for them to catch up to the huge Republican lead in judicial appointments. By then, who knows, the GOP may have retaken the Senate, and of course it may well find a way to hold on in 2020.

But a last-minute overreach by McConnell could seem so illegitimate to Democrats as to justify radical countermoves should they win in November: increasing the number of appellate judges and Supreme Court justices; conceivably even opening impeachment hearings against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

McConnell may want the win badly enough to dismiss those risks. But many conservative-leaning lawyers in the country may be more cautious. And their voices will get a hearing in a contentious nomination fight-- not only by the national media, but by some of the less Trump-y Republican senators. This could be enough to slow down a process that has no time to spare.

Mitch McConnell has gotten his way so often that it’s hard to imagine he might ever lose. But the political balance of power is shifting this fall, and for once, McConnell may be on the wrong side of a power dynamic.

What Do Mainstream Republican Careerists Think Of The #CocaineConvention So Far?

Before the #CocaineConvention began yesterday, I passed a TV and noticed that Trump was doing a press gaggle of some kind. Briefly interested in the way you might be attracted to a pile-up on the inter-state shown on TV, I was soon wondering why the TV network didn't just label it "And now an uninterrupted hour of lies from your president." And that was just a precursor of what was coming-- Apocalypse Now, 2020.

CNN, which was thanked by Señor T, for covering his shit-show, noted this morning that it "started off with a parade of dishonesty, in stark contrast with last week's Democratic convention. While CNN also watched and fact-checked the Democrats, those four nights combined didn't have the number of misleading and false claims made on the first night of the Republicans' convention." CNN listed over a dozen of the most blatant and pre-approved lies that, in sum, are the substitute for a party platform.

Speaking of which, at The Atlantic this morning, David Frum ran down the unspoken GOP platform, which the party has decided not to publish. "This omission," he noted, "has led some to conclude that the GOP lacks ideas, that it stands for nothing, that it has shriveled to little more than a Trump cult. This conclusion is wrong. The Republican Party of 2020 has lots of ideas. He listed 13 ideas that "command almost universal assent within the Trump administration, within the Republican caucuses of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, among governors and state legislators, on Fox News, and among rank-and-file Republicans. Once you read the list, I think you’ll agree that these are authentic ideas with meaningful policy consequences, and that they are broadly shared. The question is not why Republicans lack a coherent platform; it’s why they’re so reluctant to publish the one on which they’re running." I'll summarize, using Frum's words:

• Adjusting the burden of taxation down on society’s richest citizens.
• Coronavirus is a much-overhyped problem. It’s not that dangerous and will soon burn itself out. States should reopen their economies as rapidly as possible, and accept the ensuing casualties as a cost worth paying-- and certainly a better trade-off than saving every last life by shutting down state economies. Masking is useless and theatrical, if not outright counterproductive.
• Climate change is a much-overhyped problem. It’s probably not happening. If it is happening, it’s not worth worrying about.
• China has become an economic and geopolitical adversary of the United States. Military spending should be invested with an eye to defeating China on the seas, in space, and in the cyber-realm.
• The trade and alliance structures built after World War II are outdated. America still needs partners of course, especially Israel and maybe Russia.
• Health care is a purchase like any other. Individuals should make their own best deals in the insurance market with minimal government supervision. Those who pay more should get more. Those who cannot pay must either rely on Medicaid, accept charity, or go without.
• Voting is a privilege. States should have wide latitude to regulate that privilege in such a way as to minimize voting fraud, which is rife among African Americans and new immigrant communities. The federal role in voting oversight should be limited to preventing Democrats from abusing the U.S. Postal Service to enable fraud by their voters.
• Anti-black racism has ceased to be an important problem in American life. At this point, the people most likely to be targets of adverse discrimination are whites, Christians, and Asian university applicants.
• The courts should move gradually and carefully toward eliminating the mistake made in 1965 when women’s sexual privacy was elevated into a constitutional right.
• The post-Watergate ethics reforms overreached. We should welcome the trend toward unrestricted and secret campaign donations. Overly strict conflict-of-interest rules will only bar wealthy and successful businesspeople from public service.
• Trump’s border wall is the right policy to slow illegal immigration; the task of enforcing immigration rules should not fall on business operators.
• The country is currently gripped by a surge of crime and lawlessness as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement and its criticism of police.
• Civility and respect are cherished ideals. But in the face of the overwhelming and unfair onslaught against President Trump by the media and the Deep State, his occasional excesses on Twitter and at his rallies should be understood as pardonable reactions to much more severe misconduct by others.

"So, concluded Frum, "there’s the platform right there. Why not publish it? There are two answers to that question, one simple, one more complicated. The simple answer is that President Trump’s impulsive management style has cast his convention into chaos. The location, the speaking program, the arrangements-- all were decided at the last minute. Managing the rollout of a platform, as well, was just one task too many. The more complicated answer is that the platform I’ve just described, like so much of the Trump-Republican program, commands support only among a minority of the American people. The platform works (to the extent it does work) by exciting enthusiastic support among Trump supporters; but stated too explicitly, it invites a backlash among the American majority. This is a platform for a party that talks to itself, not to the rest of the country. And for those purposes, it will succeed most to the extent it is communicated only implicitly, to those receptive to its message. The challenge for Republicans in the week ahead is to hope that President Trump can remember, night after night, to speak only the things he’s supposed to speak-- not to blurt the things his party wants its supporters to absorb unspoken."

Frum just neglected to mention one big and rapidly growing part of the unwritten Republican Party Platform-- Q-Anon, the new Republican Party Religion, which is disrupting the GOP and the already crackpot religious right churches. "Once the fascination of far-right commentators and their followers, QAnon is no longer fringe," wrote Katelyn Beaty for ReligionNews. "With support from Trump and other elected officials, it has gained credibility both on the web and in the offline world: In Georgia, a candidate for Congress has praised Q as “a mythical hero,” and at least five other congressional hopefuls from Illinois to Oregon have voiced support. One scholar found a 71% increase in QAnon content on Twitter and a 651% increase on Facebook since March." 

Jon Thorngate is the pastor at LifeBridge, a nondenominational church of about 300 in a Milwaukee suburb. In recent months, he said, his members have shared “Plandemic,” a half-hour film that presents COVID-19 as a moneymaking scheme by government officials and others, on Facebook. Members have also passed around a now-banned Breitbart video that promotes hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus.

Thorngate, one of the few pastors who would go on the record among those who called QAnon a real problem in their churches, said that only five to 10 members are actually posting the videos online. But in conversations with other members, he’s realized many more are open to conspiracy theories than those who post.

  Thorngate attributes the phenomenon in part to the “death of expertise”-- a distrust of authority figures that leads some Americans to undervalue long-established measures of competency and wisdom. Among some church members, he said, the attitude is, “I’m going to use church for the things I like, ignore it for the things I don’t and find my own truth.

“That part for us is concerning, that nothing feels authoritative right now.”

For years in the 1980s and ’90s, U.S. evangelicals, above nearly any other group, warned what will happen when people abandon absolute truth (which they located in the Bible), saying the idea of relative truth would lead to people believing whatever confirms their own inward hunches. But suspicion of big government, questioning of scientific consensus (on evolution, for example) and a rejection of the morals of Hollywood and liberal elites took hold among millennial Christians, many of whom feel politically alienated and beat up by mainstream media. They are natural targets for QAnon.

Beware The #NeverTrump Conservatives-- They Are, First And Foremost, Conservatives

David Frum's new book, Trumpocalypse-- Restoring American Democracy, came out a few weeks ago. Who knew? I guess people who watch Morning Joe... plus #NeverTrump Republicans. Speaking of whom... The Bulwark's Brian Stewart reviewed it yesterday. Frum, of course, is eager to go back to the pre-Trump political normal, of two sick corporate parties-- which is how we wound up with Trump. Yes, getting rid of "the impostor president" is just the beginning... of not very much. The book, writes Stewart "predicts the imminent (though belated) end of the Trump era and sketches the contours of a decent Republican future on the ruins of the indecent present."

Trumpocalypse, along with Frum’s previous companion volume Trumpocracy, is part of a chorus of conservative dissent against Trump’s willful corruptions of party and principle. Although Frum exposes the malfeasance and creeping authoritarianism of the Trump presidency, what makes his contribution of special interest is that it upholds a vision of “one-nation conservatism” that used to prevail in Republican politics but is now dormant. The palpable hope of this work is that it is not yet extinct.

Trumpocalypse gives readers a guide to understanding the modern GOP in its various forms-- the good, the bad, and the ugly. Let’s take these in reverse order

The Ugly

It's unsurprising that a campaign that sought and received clandestine assistance from the Russian intelligence services has defiled the presidency and profaned American statecraft in novel ways, grave and petty. President Trump has refused to disclose his tax records, and has collected millions of dollars of payments since entering office, not only from party donors and professional grifters but from foreign governments and entities. A legislative branch that passingly attended to its constitutional duties would never have permitted the chief executive to use his office for his own and his family’s private gain in such disregard of the public interest.

Trump has exploited the awesome powers of the American presidency to conduct an off-the-books foreign policy, subverting the national interest to his own private political interest. It was Trump’s brazen betrayal of pledged allies in Ukraine for no higher purpose than to generate dirt on his political opponent that earned him what Frum dubs “the most emphatically justified impeachment in U.S. history.”

America today is more adrift in the world than at any time in living memory, diminished in the eyes of friend and foe alike. This is a depressing development, and a dangerous one. America’s encounter with the world has traditionally been met with as much weary resignation as heartfelt enthusiasm, but the broad international acceptance of American power has been a conspicuous feature of the postwar era. This invaluable jewel is now in jeopardy.

Admittedly, America’s stature has been fading since the collapse of the Soviet Union, as countries that share our values no longer share our fears or even our interests. But with the advent of the “America First” program of illiberal nationalism and xenophobia, American credibility has faded to the point of erasure. The reason is not far to seek. American power, historically a force for the world’s freedom and prosperity, has been increasingly removed from the vocation of maintaining liberal order. American power has seldom been wielded out of altruism, but foreign nations that once accepted (and often admired) America’s sense of enlightened self-interest have begun to doubt if Trump’s unenlightened hegemon is still superior to the alternatives.

Postwar presidents have understood that a substantial share of responsibility for world order came with the job-- until now. Trump never accepted this purpose of American power. Instead, he has openly shunned it, betraying erstwhile U.S. allies (who remembers the Syrian Kurds, the Ukrainians, or, soon, the Afghans?) who were engaged in ferocious power struggles against U.S. adversaries. Trump launched protectionist trade conflicts that undercut American consumers and the global economy on the risible notion that the European trading bloc represents a danger to U.S. national security. He shortchanged the country’s soft power by cutting foreign aid and depleting the senior diplomatic corps. If anyone didn’t recognize it before, many at home and abroad now recognize the peril of (or opportunities for plunder in) a world without American economic, diplomatic, and military leadership.

The Bad

The dereliction of America’s global role has been attended by an alarming conservative turn against democratic practices and institutions at home. Although Republicans used to console themselves that they represented America’s great “silent majority,” that ceased to be true decades ago. As Frum argues, well before Trump declared for president, the Republican party had “dwindled into an extremist faction that had ceased even to try to represent an American majority.” Beholden to the bitter resentments of a culture war and in thrall of libertarian doctrines on economics and immigration, the party had lost touch with the priorities and interests of the American nation.

As president, Trump has doubled down on the cultural chauvinism of the dwindling conservative base, expediting the flight away from the GOP by affluent and educated voters who not so long ago formed the backbone of the Republican party. Meanwhile, the populist economic and immigration agenda that Trump once gestured at-- and that won over many downscale voters, primarily non-college-educated independents and disgruntled Democrats, who seldom if ever cast a Republican vote-- never materialized. On this rickety foundation of a narrow electoral coalition and a nonexistent policy agenda, Trump managed to bend the Republican party to his will.

With the GOP in his pocket, and protecting his pocket, Trump has traduced the norms and subverted the ethos of republican government. He has castigated the press, even inciting violence against members of the fourth estate by referring to them as “the enemies of the people.” He has heaped contempt on the rule of law, repeatedly expressing his desire to tighten up libel laws. He has issued a rhetorical carte blanche to police departments to rough up suspects in their custody. He has inflamed racial divisions amid social crisis. He has indulged pernicious conspiracy theories that bring ill repute on the cause of liberal democracy.

But the wider Republican habit has itself been profligacy and egregious neglect of the nation’s financial health. The resulting deficits at a time (pre-pandemic) of vigorous economic growth have been an enormous breach of what Edmund Burke called the “partnership . . . between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Modern Republicans have lined up to cater relentlessly to the economic interests and cultural preferences of the baby boomers, even if it means depriving the emerging nation of the economic capital and bourgeois virtues that undergird aspiration and earned achievement.

The long-running populist division between “people” and “the people”-- or between “Democrats and Americans,” as the old saw had it-- has grown more prominent under Trump’s poisonous tribalism. The stark divergence between the popular vote and the Electoral College in 2016 confirmed the non-majoritarian nature of the Republican coalition, and has fueled ethnic chauvinism on the right. As Trumpists increasingly repel a larger portion of a diverse electorate, the party has maneuvered to retain its share of power by increasingly undemocratic means. Look no further than the pernicious practices of voter suppression and party-drawn districting, which combine to restrict the franchise (or the political weight of the ballot) among would-be voters disinclined to pull the lever for Republican candidates.

The Good

Since it emerged on the American political scene as the party of equal political liberty and of the Union, the Republican Party has stood for high and noble purposes even while promoting various causes. The consistent thread has been an unapologetic defense of American democratic nationhood, rooted in the universal ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the political principles enshrined in the Constitution. This adamant philosophical commitment, if it reasserts itself among Republicans, will continue to be a powerful ballast for America’s constitutional order while encouraging industry and enhancing opportunity for all. But if the old categories of left and right continue to dissolve, a civic nationalism, under whatever partisan guise, will be necessary to securing, preserving, and extending liberty’s blessings.

This constitutional conservatism is the theme stressed throughout Trumpocalypse, and for good reason: It has been jettisoned by almost every Republican in federal office in the process of acquiescing to Trump’s endless mischief. But the purpose of American conservatism, rightly understood, is to demonstrate that the philosophy of natural right that laid the groundwork for the American republic is only compatible with limited government. It is such a conception of the state serving society, and not the other way around, that would have forestalled official complicity with a crooked leader like Trump. It also allows for the characteristics that once defined the American system: “enterprise and individuality, markets and freedom, confidence in American moral purpose and American world leadership,” as Frum tersely puts it.

If today’s Republicans ever wish to be known, to others and to themselves, by their fidelity to those values, they will have their work cut out for them. Just as they will not be able to avoid awkward questions about how they abided Trump’s foul antics and cruelties, they will not be able to revert to business as usual. The flaccid consensus that reigned before Trump in favor of libertarian initiatives-- recall the GOP’s call to end the Medicare guarantee for people under the age of 55, its support for upper-income tax cuts, and opposition to universal health coverage-- was not responsive to contemporary challenges. It needs to be left behind.

In its place, a decent conservatism’s mandate in the years ahead will be to champion the cohesion and broad prosperity of the nation. A reformed GOP must vindicate the national interest by furnishing a healthy dose of relief to workers buffeted by the pincer forces of globalization and technological progress while helping to halt the advance of isolation and alienation in American life.

This won’t be easy. Thanks to a profusion of what social scientists call “deaths of despair,” the overall life expectancy of Americans has declined in recent years-- the first sustained drop since the period from 1915 to 1918, when the First World War and a global flu pandemic killed untold millions. Frum also emphasizes the growing separation (and concomitant mistrust) between the sexes. About 60 percent of Americans under age 35 live without a spouse or partner, and an individual in this cohort is more likely to live with a parent than a partner (an outcome not seen since the 19th century). Even one-third of middle-aged Americans, aged 35 to 54, live without a partner. The dwindling vitality of marriage and family life poses grave challenges to the stability of society. The growing American detachment from the forms of human flourishing and civic health-- beginning with the family, but sprawling outward to include civic associations, fraternal bodies, religious communities, commercial enterprises, activist groups and, yes, political parties-- must be rejuvenated.

There will also need to be a broader reckoning on the right with the America of tomorrow. Much has been written about the dangers of a Republican electoral strategy based on maximizing the turnout of older voters who happen to be predominantly nonurban and white. Frum handles this subject deftly, reminding readers that on current trends, by 2040, 70 percent of the American population will live in fifteen states while 30 percent of the population will live in thirty-five states. The political ramifications of this growing divide are enormous and ominous. The dispersed (and disproportionately white, nonurban, older) 30 percent will control a commanding 70 seats in the U.S. Senate, which will almost certainly be employed to harden economic trends that feature a lack of mobility from the bottom, stagnating working-class wages, and a growing plutocratic class.

To check and reverse this breakdown of democracy, Frum proposes a number of structural reforms, from abolishing the filibuster to granting statehood to the District of Columbia, that will restore some clout to majorities and ensure fairer competition in elections to decide those majorities. A more equitable system of representation would demand that Republicans become the kind of party Frum aspires to see: “an ethnically diverse, culturally modern post-Boomer generation party of markets and enterprise for the twenty-first century.” In these times of diminishing opportunity and hardening isolation, such a party cannot form too quickly.

For Republicans Trumpocalypse sounds a reveille: to man the ramparts facing inwards against an imposter who never had any business as a county chairman, much less the presidential nominee, of this gallant old party. For those who still need to hear it, it will probably be of no avail. But Frum dedicates the book to those Republicans who have already heard it, who for four miserable years have held fast to principle over power. He borrows a verse from an old Methodist hymn: “When all were false, I found thee true.” It’s a fitting compliment paid to those happy few conservatives who grasped the responsibility and obligation of a party whose “grandeur derived not from its antiquity, but from its association with equal rights and human freedom.” That association, as Frum observes, has unquestionably been “sullied and betrayed by the Trump presidency.”

The damage done-- both to the Republican party and to the republic at large-- by a single presidential term will undoubtedly take a long time to repair. But does the sheer scale and scope of damage render the Republican party beyond repair? If the president is nominated and elected to a second term, perhaps so. But with his prospects of re-election waning, what if he is repudiated by a decisive margin? After so long and hazardous a journey, is the old craft really going to be stranded now? Surely a party with such a noble mission has earned the benefit of some doubt.

Kansas Anymore?

You know what would be amazing? That Trump winds up being so toxic that he even manages to lose the Kansas Senate seat for the Republicans! I know, I know... it's impossible. Actually it is-- literally-- impossible since even if the Schumer candidate, Barbara Bollier, wins, it's still a Republican in the seat. (A few months ago, she switched parties, although certainly not her ideology, but... good enough for Schumer.) Pat Roberts is retiring and the seat is open and-- that aside-- Kansas has elected Democrats in the past-- although only one after senators started being elected by popular vote rather than by state legislatures. That one time Kansas elected a Democratic freshman was in 1930 when George McGill won after Charles Curtis resigned to become Herbert Hoover's vice president.

But a newly released poll of registered voters in Kansas by Civiqs, shows the Kansas Senate contest all tied up-- quasi-Democrat Barbara Bollier beating neo-fascist Kris Kobach 42-41%, losing to establishment Republican Roger Marshall 41-42% and beating establishment Republican Bob Hamilton 41-40%. The same poll, but of Republicans only, indicates that Bollier will probably get her wish to take on Kobach:

• Kobach- 35%
• Marshall- 26%
• Hamilton- 15%

In 1960 Kansas voted for Nixon over JFK, 561,474 (60.5%) to 363,213 (39.1%). In 1968, Kansas would have given Nixon an even bigger percentage but George Wallace was running so it was Nixon 54.8% to Humphrey 34.7% and Wallace 10.2%. Four years later, you can probably imagine the Kansas landslide to reelect Nixon, right? 67.7% to 29,5% for George McGovern. "Trump," wrote David Frum yesterday, "is no Richard Nixon." That's true, even Kansans know the difference. They only gave Trump 56.2% against Hillary. But's that's not exactly what Frum had mind. "As riots and looting have disordered cities across the United States, many have speculated," he wrote, "that the troubles could help reelect President Donald Trump. The speculation is based on analogy. American cities were swept by riots in the mid-1960s, and then, in 1968, Richard Nixon campaigned on a pledge of “law and order” and won the presidency. As it was then, so it will be now-- or so the punditry goes. The riots of 2020 may or may not help Donald Trump. The analogy to 1968, however, misunderstands both the politics of that traumatic year, and the success of Richard Nixon. One thing to remember about the presidential election of 1968 is that it was a three-way race. Nixon ran not only against the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, a liberal stalwart with a long civil-rights record, but also against the outright segregationist George Wallace, governor of Alabama. Wallace would ultimately collect 8.6 percent of the popular vote and win five states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Facing those two rivals allowed Nixon to run as the candidate of the middle way, committed both to civil rights and to public order." But, yeah, Wallace did better in Kansas... of course.

Today, we know the Nixon of the secret tapes: crude, amoral, often bigoted. The public Nixon of 1968, however, behaved with the dignity and decorum Americans then expected in a president. Trump in 2020 occupies the place not of Nixon, but of Daley and George Wallace: Trump is the force of disorder that is frightening American voters into seeking a healing candidate-- not the candidate of healing who can restore a fair and just public order.





The irony, of course, is that at the same time that Trump tweets bloodthirsty threats, he has turned off the White House lights and cowered in the bunker below. He joins noisy bluster to visible weakness-- exactly the opposite of the Nixon formula in 1968. Trump will not repeat Nixon’s success in 1968, because he does not understand that success. Nixon joined his vow of order to a promise of peace at home and abroad. Trump offers only conflict, and he offers no way out of conflict, because-- unlike Nixon in 1968-- Trump is himself the cause of so much conflict.”

If Trump seeks historical parallels for his reelection campaign, here’s one that is much more apt. There was a campaign in which the party of the president presided over a deadly pandemic at the same time as a savage depression and a nationwide spasm of bloody urban racial violence. The year was 1920. The party in power through these troubles went on to suffer the worst defeat in U.S. presidential history, a loss by a margin of 26 points in the popular vote. The triumphant challenger, Warren Harding, was not some charismatic superhero of a candidate. He didn’t need to be. In 2020 as in 1920, the party of the president is running on the slogan Let us fix the mess we made. It didn’t work then. It’s unlikely to work now.

The L.A. Times published an editorial at 3AM yesterday about Trump poring oil on the flames. He's overtly calling himself "your president of law and order" and threatening to send the military into American cities. The Times labeled that another demonstration "that he has little understanding of why Americans have taken to the streets [and] reinforced the impression that he sees the current crisis as an opportunity for him to score political points in an election year with a new iteration of his 2016 claim that 'I alone can fix it.'... A different president would have been able to credibly lament that lawlessness, and call for measures to deal with it, with no one suspecting ulterior motives. Trump has forfeited any such benefit of the doubt. In his remarks on Monday, as in previous comments, he expressed sympathy for George Floyd, whose death led to a murder charge against the former Minneapolis police officer shown kneeling on Floyd’s neck in a video that went viral. But Trump consistently has failed to recognize that Floyd’s death was the latest example of a pattern of police violence against African American men that in turn is a manifestation of entrenched and pervasive racism."

There Was No Doomsday Plan For The Worst Catastrophe To Have Hit America In A Century

"Trump," wrote Harvey Wasserman, "is no accident. He is our Imperial Vulture come home to roost. Our Exceptional Karma. The ultimate incineration of a City on a Hill defined by arrogance, brutality, and greed. Trump’s willful negligence has killed more Americans in three months than did the Vietnam War in ten years. He’s saturated our lives with dictatorship, disease, dementia, depression. But we have no claim to self-pity."

Pinochet (Chile), Mobutu (Congo/Zaire), the Greek Junta, the Shah (Iran), Somoza (Nicaragua), Diem/Thieu/Ky (Vietnam), Yeltsin/Putin (Russia), Pol Pot (Cambodia), Lord Jeffrey Amherst (Indigenous America), Salazar (Portugal), Marcos (the Philippines), Alvarado (Honduras), the Duvaliers (Haiti) … murderers, thieves, despots, liars, bigots, buffoons, puppets, thugs, butchers, hypocrites, clowns, torturers, mobsters, devils incarnate … all installed to serve American corporate interests.

They are Trump and he is them.

The butchery we’ve imposed on humankind and the planet has at last come home to roost. Trump is Earth’s retaliatory demon, here to ravage the remnants of a cruel, hypocritical, dying empire.

China will soon eclipse America’s once insurmountable economic dominance. Our military is an ornate, obsolete, obscene husk. We’re a downbound #2, a failing state. Trump has left us gutted, poisoned, betrayed, mocked, abused, leveled, trashed, choking in the dust (we can’t breathe!!!).

He is history’s inevitable payback.

We can’t get him gone until we fully face our nation’s stake in his epic evil.

So let’s pick a moment before November 3rd. A Trump Exorcism Day, to excoriate the pain our empire has imposed. The arrogance of our “exceptionalism.” The burden of our slave-based misogyny. The injustices of our racism, sexism, ecological destruction, multi-layered bigotries. The wages of our greed. The uselessness of our wars. The absurdity of our military. The blood-sucking death grip of our global corporations.

Wrap them all in one big irreverence. Look deep into the ghastly mirror of our merciless inflictions … then face who we really have been, and what we must become.

The Donald is no random event. He demands we confront where he really came from and all he embodies.

Only then do we get truly woke. 

Trump and Elon Musk launched a rocket yesterday. I suppose the wealthy are going to want them operable after the rest of us are left behind on the sterile planet the Green New Deal was too expensive for. Is that the Doomsday Scenario planners are working on. The Atlantic commentator Marc Ambinder says it's time to listen to those doomsday planners. He had something else in mind though: "What’s the plan if the whole White House becomes infected?" After the worldwide celebrations end?

"The answer," he wrote, "typically lies with the government’s so-called doomsday planners-- the officials at every major agency who are tasked with preparing and rehearsing the nation’s classified continuity-of-government plans. For decades, doomsday planners’ presence has been tolerated, their recommendations have been stashed in policy documents, and their warnings about dark tidings have been for the most part unheeded. The Trump administration has taken an actively hostile approach, though, decimating the institutional engines of catastrophe planning, including at the National Security Council. As a consequence, the U.S. government was not only ill-prepared for the pandemic, but willfully blinded to its potential size and shape, leaving federal agencies in the position of having to confront a fast-moving hurricane without radar to determine where it was headed or a plan to quickly restore essential functions."

The coronavirus has pushed the country’s national-security bureaucracy to figure out how to adapt in a severely restricted work environment, and forced a reexamination of how the government prepares for crises. COVID-19 hasn’t brought the United States to the precipice of doomsday, per se, but it has exposed how much citizens and states rely on a functioning federal government. It’s also revealed the consequences of what happens when the government appears unprepared to reckon with a challenge as significant as the pandemic and hasn’t listened to the people whose jobs require them to churn through permutations and contingencies. Government agencies as crucial as the CIA have had to develop COVID-19 response plans on the fly. Telework practices are patchy and decided by each agency. And it is unclear, even to employees at the highest levels of the national-security bureaucracy, what they ought to be doing.

If you work in continuity planning, a lot of your time is spent ensuring that alternate facilities can function if needed. You try to exercise scenarios, begging senior policy officials to spend a day in a bunker or room and forcing them to make choices under pressure. Then you imagine the worst-case scenarios and try to write plans that adhere to complicated government rules. Year after year, resources for continuity planning tend not to be priorities. Executive-branch departments also have to consider near-term foreseeable challenges, such as infrastructure and technology upgrades. The apocalypse doesn’t rise to top of mind.

Vic Erevia, who served as the special agent in charge of Barack Obama’s protective detail for the Secret Service, was privy to the most developed and well-rehearsed continuity preparations-- those involving the presidency itself, and the preservation of communication among the three branches of government. He spent a lot of time in the weeds with the plans and their planners. “These guys, they were kind of treated like the crazy people in the corner doing their own thing,” he told me. “It’s time for them to be given their due.”

Doomsday planners can’t conjure up every possible future calamity. But their warnings can prompt the government to react quickly, to adapt to ambiguity, and to treat uncertainty as a feature of good social science, not an excuse to avoid prudent precautions. Nicholas Rasmussen, who participated in national-security continuity planning as a senior counterterrorism adviser to George W. Bush and Obama, told me that, at the moment, the U.S. government doesn’t “really have a plan for a scenario where we are down 50 percent of our workforce.” The national-security agencies, including the CIA, have predesignated employees as “essential” and cross-trained thousands to perform essential jobs should those employees become sick. But a pandemic doesn’t distinguish among people, and therefore doesn’t avoid those deemed essential, said Rasmussen, who was also the head of the National Counterterrorism Center until 2017.

The Trump administration has hollowed out the very bureaucracy that’s in charge of the planners. The president has cycled through five homeland-security secretaries and five homeland-security advisers (who also serve as national continuity coordinators) in three years, and has dismantled the apparatus that was expressly designed to inform his response and allow the government to function efficiently during emergencies. Through a succession of national security advisers, the NSC staff was dramatically reduced, culminating in John Bolton’s decision to close a dedicated pandemic-response cell inside the NSC’s global-health security and biodefense directorate. Bolton also pushed out a key official who had both the title and institutional knowledge to shape policy on contingency and continuity, Thomas Bossert, who was a senior member of Bush’s national-security staff and one of the few remaining links between the NSC and federal-preparedness officials. (Bossert did not return calls or emails asking for comment.) Soon after Bossert’s departure as homeland-security adviser, Trump downgraded the position, and it no longer reports directly to the president.

The current homeland-security adviser (and national continuity coordinator) is Julia Nesheiwat. She was appointed on February 21-- two full weeks after the previous occupant, Coast Guard Rear Admiral Peter Brown, left the post. During those two weeks, the pandemic spread rapidly in the United States, and the Trump administration temporized, vamped, and struggled to figure out how to respond.

Agencies are largely left to their own devices. Since its birth more than 70 years ago, the CIA has developed an intuitive flexibility for how to function in emergencies. What happens if multiple case officers get sick in a country where the CIA isn’t supposed to be operating? There’s a plan to evacuate them without the host country knowing. What happens if local food supplies become contaminated? There’s a plan to get food stores to the CIA base.

“A lot of our stations are in places where the food supply is insecure and where you can’t trust local doctors,” said a current agency officer who, like other sources cited in this story, spoke with me on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak with the media. “We’ve had cases where the entire station gets sick and we’ve had to get our own doctors into a country. It’s just something we know how to do.”

But even the CIA could not account for a scenario like the pandemic-- where almost no physical space on Earth is safe to gather in for months at a time. Four current and former agency officials, some of whom asked not to be identified, acknowledged that the coronavirus had not left the agency unscathed, with employees in the Langley, Virginia, headquarters and across the globe falling ill.

So the agency adapted its crisis planning on the fly. In this case, it did not activate its main continuity-of-operations site-- an enormous, anonymous, secure facility in the mid-Atlantic region where up to 10 percent of the headquarters’ staff could run the agency’s worldwide covert operations and communications system if Langley had to be closed or was destroyed, one former agency official and a current government official told me. Instead, the agency is rotating key staff into work in cadres and has implemented social-distancing measures, they said. (The CIA spokesperson Nicole de Haay declined to provide specifics but said that in response to the pandemic, “our officers are exercising tremendous creativity and flexibility.”) It works, for now. It can’t work forever. Will it work if a terrorist engineers a pathogen to be even more virulent and transmissible than the coronavirus?

...According to a Defense Department official, who declined to be identified in order to speak about a sensitive subject, the Defense Information Systems Agency is nearing the end of a pilot program that would allow employees to do limited, classified-level work from home. And some officials are rethinking their long-standing opposition to commercial end-to-end encryption. Of course, this debate could have been hashed out earlier, with guidelines at the ready, if the NSC had had the staff and sense to heed the lessons of doomsday planning.

Dab Kern, another longtime resilience and continuity planner, who was the director of the White House Military Office until the end of 2017, wants the executive branch to shift the focus of its continuity planning to secure communications and dynamic responses that would allow senior officials to work from almost anywhere. “We need to stop doing continuity the way we have done it,” he told me. “This is our opportunity to shift gears and leverage technology.” Kern noted that many private businesses, large and small, incorporating the advice of resilience experts, had plans to rapidly shift gears. “The rest of the industry does it this way. Why doesn’t the government?”

...According to conversations with more than a dozen people who have seen them, worked on them, or written them, virtually all government continuity plans since 9/11 have been centered around two plots: nuclear terrorism (either all-out war or an explosion in the Washington, D.C., region) or a bioweapons release (limited in scale and scope, with victims easily tested and identified). After the anthrax attacks of 2001, the U.S. focused on intelligence suggesting that al-Qaeda (and later Iraq, under the government of Saddam Hussein) had explored the most effective ways to disperse a biological agent. “That’s why we immediately turned to smallpox,” a current government official told me. “The R0”-- the rate of person-to-person transmission based on a pathogen’s contagiousness-- “was so high and smallpox was available, at least to some of the nation-state enemies.” Russia, for example, had an active bioweapons program, run by a network of labs called Biopreparat, into the 1990s, and it experimented with weaponizing smallpox. A former Russian intelligence officer, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue and who now lives in the United States, confirmed to me that the program was operational after 9/11. (Russia denies that it is experimenting with pathogenic weapons, but its recent use of chemical and radiological poisons to kill former agents is well documented.) The U.S. intelligence community worries that adversaries could weaponize COVID-19 before there’s a vaccine, taking advantage of the gaps in preparedness exposed by the current response.

After 9/11, Cheney spent many nights at the Raven Rock facility in the Blue Ridge Mountains. But bunkers like Raven Rock are not designed to accommodate an entire bureaucracy. Most of the government’s top-secret disaster plans, buttressed by tens of billions of dollars in “black budget” spending, call for officials to break into groups, with some retreating to a secure facility outside of D.C. where they could communicate with colleagues over classified government networks. In a pandemic, the bunkers would be all but useless if you couldn’t ensure that the workers were virus-free before entering. That would require rapid and reliable tests available at the beginning of the emergency, which is hard enough with a new pathogen, but which the U.S. government did not prioritize until too many people were infected this time around. The White House itself did not develop such testing capacity for COVID-19 until early April, months after being warned that the disease could be a major threat.

One of Ambinder's colleagues at The Atlantic, David Frum, noted that where Ambinder finds Trump "mercurial," what he really is is a looter. And we have no doomsday plan for that, do we? The bloated orangutan in the Oval Office doesn't just steal the odd banana now and again; he "has helped himself to money from the U.S. Treasury," wrote Frum, "using political power to direct public money to his personal businesses. It’s not as visual as a riot, but until 2017 it would have been regarded as equally criminal... The Trump years have confronted all Americans with stark contrasts in the treatment of crime depending on the status of the criminal. The day before the police killing of Floyd, the president and his supporters were voicing passionate concerns for the alleged maltreatment of Michael Flynn by the justice system. Then a helpless man is choked to death on a public street in full public view and-- well, he was no choirboy, the president’s supporters explain.

Threats of armed violence by pro-Trump demonstrators forced the shutdown of the Michigan legislature in mid-May. But about that militancy, Trump was indulgent. He tweeted May 1: “The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.”

An armed intruder is not a peaceful protester. If the targets yield before the intruder discharges his weapon at them, they have still been coerced. The threat of violence works only to the extent that the imminence of violence is credible. And it was imminent violence that pro-Trump protesters displayed in Minnesota, in Michigan, in the state of Washington. But no federalizing of the National Guard there, no threats of indiscriminate shooting, only gentle understanding of people who gridlocked state capitals in service of their abject lunatic theory that Bill Gates wanted to inject microchips into their bums.

The Trump presidency has shown America aspects of itself that few of us wished to see. Even having been forced to watch them up close through three shameful years of presidential corruption, those aspects are still hard for many of us to accept. But along with the monuments of law, along with the rhetoric of liberty, along with the proud achievements of American history, there also exists the realities that Trump daily exposes: impunity for some forms of looting, impunity for some forms of violence, impunity for some forms of lawbreaking.