Republicans Are Far From Ready To Give Up On Trump-- Or Trumpism-- Yet

 

We didn't do much coverage of the manufactured Hunter Biden scandal here, not even when we were pushing Bernie in the primaries. As disgusting as it has always been that Biden has so many sleazy lobbyists in his family and that DC functions like that, the whole "scandal" generally reeked of bullshit. On the other hand, we consistently warned that if Biden was handed the nomination, the general election would devolve into-- among other things-- a discussion of whose family is more repulsively corrupt... and that's a battle in which no one could ever top the Trumps.

Earlier today, London's Times published a piece by Manveen Rana about how a Kremlin-linked Ukrainian oligarch and Giuliani "associate," Dmytro Firtash, was involved in a Trump campaign conspiracy to manufacture "evidence" against the Bidens.

Assorted Dildoes by Chip Proser

According to Lev Parnas, one of Mr Giuliani’s associates, they had sought help in their quest for a scandal that would damage Joe Biden’s run for the presidency from Dmytro Firtash, a Kremlin-linked Ukrainian oligarch.

Mr Firtash, who has faced extradition to America since 2014, had cut a deal, Mr Parnas claimed, that would quash his extradition order in return for any evidence of scandal surrounding the Bidens. Mr Firtash, who was shown to have extended a $1 million loan to Mr Parnas during this period, has always denied any involvement in the smear campaign directed at the Bidens.

The allegations come from Hares Youssef, a Ukrainian businessman and close friend of Mr Firtash. An adviser to Viktor Yushchenko, the former president of Ukraine, Mr Youssef said that he was asked to invent links between Hunter Biden and a business deal with one of his former associates that had gone wrong.

“The deal was to lie,” Mr Youssef claimed. “I had never even met him. But the hunting dogs were out for Hunter Biden.”

Mr Youssef, who was born in Syria and is a dual national, invested just under $3 million in mbloom, a tech start-up fund backed by Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner.

The details of mbloom’s investments were always obscure. Mr Youssef claimed that he believed his investment would be used to create a gold-backed virtual currency named Golden Hearts, a project he has long wanted to get off the ground. The managers of mbloom, however, used the fund to invest in their own start-ups.

Mr Youssef lost the bulk of his investment when the fund was shut down in 2016 after Mr Archer was accused of fraud in a separate and unrelated case.

Hunter, the youngest son of Mr Biden, now the president-elect, had previously been on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, with Mr Archer and had become involved in his investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, one of the main funders behind mbloom.

Hunter had ceased any association with the company before Mr Youssef made his investment in mbloom.

Yet last year, Mr Youssef briefly courted journalists with a story about Hunter’s links to the now-defunct mbloom fund and claims that he had promised businessmen access to his father in 2015, when Mr Biden was vice-president under Barack Obama. Mr Youssef had no evidence at the time to support his assertions and now he has admitted that it was all untrue.

...Youssef claimed a member of Mr Firtash’s team approached him, saying: “We can solve this relationship with America if you can help us.” He said that he was told his friend’s extradition order could be rescinded if he could find enough evidence against Hunter Biden.

He claimed that knowing that Mr Youssef had been involved with mbloom, the Firtash team asked him to create a story about Hunter Biden being linked to the doomed fund.

“But I told them Hunter Biden wasn’t linked to mbloom,” Mr Youssef insisted. “I said it was absolutely impossible because the documents I signed with this investment could appear anywhere and they would show Hunter Biden was not involved. It would break the story because it’s not true.”

...“Somebody from Firtash’s team asked me if I wanted to get my visa back and to be able to travel to the United States again,” Mr Youssef claimed. “They said if we solved the problem in the United States, we can solve the problem of your visa, you can even get immunity, if we can use your investment in mbloom in this Hunter Biden case.”

...Firtash, a billionaire who is closely linked to the Kremlin, made his fortune acting as a middleman for the Russian government’s gas interests in Ukraine.

The US Justice Department has alleged that Mr Firtash was also heavily involved with “Russian organised crime.”

...Firtash has been a frequent presence in the controversies surrounding Mr Trump. Paul Manafort, the Republican strategist who was Mr Trump’s campaign chairman during the last election before he was convicted of fraud, had also worked for Mr Firtash, who hired him to help with the campaign for Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president. Mr Yanukovych was overthrown in 2014 and has since lived in Russia. He has links to President Putin.

Mr Firtash also hired two lawyers with links to Mr Trump to present his case to William Barr, the US attorney-general.

That process was halted when the Ukraine inquiry began and Mr Trump was impeached.

The attacks on Hunter Biden’s business dealings took centre stage in Mr Trump’s re-election campaign. However, Mr Youssef said that the election had no bearing on his decision to talk about his own experience of how evidence against Hunter was collected in Ukraine.

Instead it was a report published by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project this week that carried evidence from leaked bank records showing Mr Youssef’s investment in mbloom, he said.

Not having learned their lesson yet about involving themselves and their party in the Trump crime operation, Republican aspirants for the 2024 Republican nomination are backing Trump's election fraud lies. In his New York Magazine column this afternoon, Jonathan Chait noted that "watching the Republican Party absorb Trump’s ludicrous accusations has been depressingly instructive. It replicates the process by which Republicans accepted Trump in the first place. It also reflects, in miniature, the process by which the party has surrendered to kookery over several generations... The most revealing responses came from the pool of prospective 2024 presidential nominees. Hopefuls like Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Ron DeSantis, and Josh Hawley endorsed various groundless charges of mass voter fraud gloated by Trump. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem forcefully rejected the premise that Republican secretaries of State have testified to the legitimacy of their election processes. 'The media can project an election winner, but they don’t get to decide if claims of broken election laws & irregularities are true,' tweeted Marco Rubio. Lindsey Graham proclaimed, 'Philadelphia elections are crooked as a snake,' and went so far as to suggest legislators in states won by Biden nullify the vote and appoint pro-Trump electors. 'This is a contested election,' Graham announced on Fox News, adding, 'President Trump should not concede.' 'Every time they close the doors and shut out the lights, they always find more Democratic votes,' declared Cruz-- even though the doors were in fact open to Republican observers and the lights in fact on."

Will Replacing RBG Become The Top Issue In The 2020 Elections?

 

Currently there are 53 Republicans in the Senate and all they need to confirmed a replacement for RBG is a simple majority-- 50 (+ Pence to break a tie). 4 consistently unreliable Republicans have said they would not vote to confirmed a new justice this close to the election: Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Susan Collins (R-ME), Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA). And then there's Mitt Romney, who's become the conscience of the Senate GOP-- the anti-McConnell, so to speak.

Trump says he will nominate someone immediately. Arch hypocrite-- and deceitful closet queen who lies as an everyday reflex-- Mitch McConnell has already said that Senate Republicans will vote on a nominee despite all he said-- and didn't do-- after Scalia's death. The Republicans can either try to confirm a nominee before the election or in the lame duck session after the election assuming Trump loses (and they lose the Senate majority, both of which are likely). At the very least, a Supreme Court fight will be a mega-MAGA-mobilization exercise for the GOP.

Jonathan Chait pointed out in an interview yesterday that "It’s not in the interest of Republicans facing election in 2020 to resolve this. Vulnerable Republicans are much better off having the court seat hinge on the outcome of the election. Trump himself might also be better off this way, though I doubt he will be cunning enough to see this. (Social conservatives will push him to fill the seat and he will go along, picking the course of maximal partisan aggression, as he always does.) Roberts himself also stands to lose power. He would no longer be the decisive vote. His only power would be to say something against filling the seat, and I doubt he says anything like that, but it is conceivable... [T]he lame duck period is another possibility. The dynamic is different. Any defeated Republican senators would have an incentive to vote for the nominee. However, that might seem like a more severe norm violation that could conceivably spark opposition..."

When Obama tried, unsuccessfully, replacing Scalia, he bolstered his case by nominating a very conservative, Republican-friendly Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Merrick Garland. Progressive support for Garland was grudging. That's how Democrats play. Trump will do the opposite-- find someone as polarizing as possible. These six neo-fascists are all on his short list. First and foremost is Amy Coney Barrett, an anti-choice sociopath. The other 5 include 3 senators (traditionally easiest to confirm among their colleagues): Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton-- although each has presidential ambitions. Two others on Trump's short list are two former solicitor generals-- Noel Francisco and Paul Clement. Others Trump is said to say considering include Britt Grant, Barbara Lagoa, Joan Larsen, Allison Eid, Amul Thapar and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT).

In a letter this morning, Bernie reminded his supporters of what Republicans have said on the topic, when they were tanking the Merrick Garland:

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

"I want you to use my words against me. 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."

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX)

"It has been 80 years since a Supreme Court vacancy was nominated and confirmed in an election year. There is a long tradition that you don't do this in an election year."

Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO)

"I think we’re too close to the election. The president who is elected in November should be the one who makes this decision."

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)

"I don’t think we should be moving on a nominee in the last year of this president’s term--  I would say that if it was a Republican president."

Senator Rob Portman (R-OH)

"It is common practice for the Senate to stop acting on lifetime appointments during the last year of a presidential term, and it’s been nearly 80 years since any president was permitted to immediately fill a vacancy that arose in a presidential election year."

Please Stop And Let Me Finish, Sir by Nancy Ohanian

If Trump pushes through one of his extremists and McConnell confirms them in a lame duck session after Trump has lost the White House and the Senate, the appropriate response for the Democrats-- one that runs against their cowardly instincts-- would be to increase the size of the Court to 11 and confirm two liberal justices. But... Biden? NEVER!

Yesterday, Ben Jacobs, writing for New York, warned of a constitutional crisis in the making, even before Trump tries stealing the election. Jacobs predicted that "The appointment of a Supreme Court justice under these circumstances would transform ending the filibuster and expanding the size of the Supreme Court from a niche issue on the left to a fundamental litmus test... [I]f Joe Biden is elected and Democrats take control of the Senate, there could be a constitutional clash of a magnitude not seen since the New Deal when a right-wing Supreme Court took on Franklin Delano Roosevelt before eventually buckling under the threat of courtpacking."

Jail To The Chief? Will Ex-President Trump Be Tried?

I'm not a supporter of Joe Biden's and have detested him since I first read about him in 1972 when he ran for the Senate. Although I'd never vote for him, I certainly hope Trump loses the election or dies trying. The U.S. has never had a loathsome criminal as president before. We've had some really bad presidents-- Nixon in my time (and I moved overseas for 7 years to avoid his presidency), Republican royalists Herbert Hoover and Warren G. Harding in the Roaring 20s and Civil War era disasters James Buchanan, John Tyler and Millard Fillmore. But none came close to Trump in terms of disregard of-- if not contempt for-- the country and sheer criminality. The one thing I heard Joe Biden say that I liked this year was that he would not pardon Trump. But not pardoning is not the same as prosecuting. My Twitter followers are split-- between those who want to see Trump tried as a criminal and those who want to see Trump tried as a traitor. He certainly better hope no DWT readers are on the jury.

Yesterday, New York Magazine carried a click-bait piece by Jonathan Chait about the need to try Trump after he's out of office. I think most Americans at this point would agree with Chait's assertion that "the most salient fact about Donald Trump may simply be that he is a crook. He has been defying the law since at least the early 1970s, when he battled the Department of Justice over his flagrant refusal to allow Black [and Puerto Rican] tenants into his father’s buildings. He has surrounded himself with mafiosi, money launderers, and assorted lowlifes. His former attorney, national security adviser, and adviser, and two of his campaign managers, have been arrested on or convicted of an array of federal crimes ranging from tax fraud to perjury to threatening witnesses. He employs the lingo of the underworld: People who cooperate with law enforcement are 'flippers' and 'rats'; investigators pursuing his misconduct are 'dirty cops.' To him, the distinction between legal and illegal activity is merely an artificial construct enforced by sanctimonious hypocrites."

The prospect of an electorally defeated Trump, though glorious, would immediately set off a conflict between two fundamental democratic values: the rule of law and mutual toleration. The rule of law is a banal yet utterly foundational concept that the law is a set of rights and obligations, established in advance, that apply equally to everybody. It is an ideal rather than a lived reality. Black America, to take one obvious example, has never experienced equal treatment from institutions like the police and the courts. But this serves only to illustrate its essential value. The civil-rights movement has consisted in large part of fighting to extend the protection of the rule of law to Black people.

The experience of Black racial oppression shows that the absence of the rule of law is a pervasive, terrifying insecurity. A society without the rule of law is one in which the strong prey upon the weak. The small-scale version is a town where you need the local warlord or mafia boss to solve any problem or dispute; the nation-state version is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where the mafia is the government and bribery is endemic.

Mutual toleration means that political opponents must accept the legitimacy and legality of their opponents. If elected leaders can send their opponents to prison and otherwise discredit them, then leaders are afraid to relinquish power lest they be imprisoned themselves. The criminalization of politics is a kind of toxin that breaks down the cooperation required to sustain a democracy. This, along with the misogyny, was what made Trump’s embrace of “Lock her up!” so terrifying in 2016. He was already using the threat of imprisoning opponents as a political-campaign tool.

If the government is run by lawbreakers, though, the state faces a dilemma: Either the principle of equal treatment under the law or the tradition of a peaceful transition of power will be sacrificed. It’s hard to imagine any outcome under which the rule of law survives Trump unscathed.

One of the most corrosive effects of Trumpism upon the political culture has been to detach the law from any behavioral definition and to attach it to political identity. As Trump likes to say, “The other side is where there are crimes.” He has trained his supporters to understand this statement as a syllogism: If Trump’s opponents are doing something, it’s a crime; if Trump and his allies are doing it, it isn’t. The chants, which applied enough pressure to force James Comey to announce a reinvestigation of Hillary Clinton in October 2016, simply to protect the FBI from being delegitimized by Republicans after an expected Clinton victory, showed how the field had been sown for Trump even before he took office.

It is because Trump views the law as a morally empty category, a weapon for the powerful to use against their enemies, that he has spent his presidency calling for the prosecution and/or imprisonment of a constantly growing list of adversaries: Joe Biden and Barack Obama (for “spying” and “treason”), House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (for paraphrasing Trump’s Ukraine phone call in a speech), John Kerry (for allegedly violating the Logan Act), John Bolton (for writing a tell-all book), Joe Scarborough (for the death of a former staffer), Nancy Pelosi (for tearing up his State of the Union Address), and social-media firms (for having too many liberals). Trump has alleged a variety of crimes against at least four former FBI officials and three Obama-era national-security officials.

...That Trump made it to 2017 without being personally convicted of a crime is itself a testament to the ineffectiveness of white-collar-criminal-law enforcement. That Trump has not been charged since taking office is owed to the privileges of being president of the United States. Because the Justice Department has a policy against charging the president with crimes, it did not indict him for the same crime Cohen went to jail for-- even though Trump had ordered Cohen to commit it. The same protection held back Robert Mueller from officially describing the many actions Trump had taken to obstruct the FBI’s investigation as “obstruction of justice.” And his standing as president has allowed him to keep his tax returns out of the hands of New York prosecutors.

But at some point, the impunity will end. The law is coming.

At the moment, Trump is reportedly the subject of three investigations. Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., New York State attorney general Letitia James, and Southern District of New York acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss are all probing reported crimes by the Trump administration, ranging from tax fraud to embezzling funds at his suspiciously expensive inauguration, a large proportion of which was spent at his own properties. (Strauss took over after William Barr clumsily attempted to remove her boss, who had clashed with Barr over his investigations into Trump’s misconduct, but is reputed to be independent.)

Even beyond these ongoing probes, the potential for criminal liability is vast. Trump was impeached for leveraging support from Ukraine for an announcement of an investigation of Joe Biden. But the plot reportedly involved Rudy Giuliani and his clients hitting up Ukrainians for business deals, even as Giuliani was representing Trump’s agenda-- which is to say, they were apparently seeking a personal payoff in addition to a political one. The Washington Post has pried loose from the Secret Service just a portion of the records of its spending at Trump properties, giving evidence of, at minimum, severe conflicts of interest.

Trump has fired and intimidated the inspectors general who monitor the executive branch for misconduct and has virtually halted all cooperation with congressional oversight. It stands to reason that turning over more rocks will reveal even more crimes. Upholding the rule of law is going to lead straight to the kind of grisly spectacle Americans associate with banana republics: the former president leaving office and going on trial.

“Usually, these kleptocracies are the ones that hang on to power most bitterly,” says Daniel Ziblatt, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of How Democracies Die. Trump is particularly dependent on his incumbency. His various legal appeals to keep his financial information from prosecutors have relied on his status as president, and he has used campaign funds to finance his legal defenses. Most important, he has bluntly wielded his power either to pardon his allies or to get the Justice Department to withdraw its charges as a signal of the benefit of remaining loyal.

The political climate will not easily permit a peaceful, straightforward prosecution. The maniacal Republican response to the past two Democratic administrations shows that the prospect of any real Republican cooperation is a fantasy. The fever is not going to break. So what is a post-Trump administration to do?

Biden’s position on this problem is easy enough: He will leave it up to the prosecutors. But what will the prosecutors do? The prospect of fitting the orange man for an orange jumpsuit, delicious as it may seem for MSNBC viewers (or readers of this magazine), would create new problems of its own. To begin with, it would be essential that any prosecution of Trump not only be fair and free of any political interference but be seen as fair. A prosecution that appears vindictive would serve only to confirm the politicization of the law that Trump has done so much to advance. Prosecutors in New York and the Justice Department can make every effort to apply the law neutrally, not singling out Trump for punishment, but it will be difficult to avoid the impression of banana-republicanism formed by the sequence of a Trump criminal trial following an election defeat-- especially when his supporters have been primed to fight “witch hunts” for years. Want to lock up the “Lock her up!” guy? Good luck avoiding the appearance of turnabout, however legally legitimate the process.

An incoming Biden administration is going to need a peaceful transition-- not least because the federal government will probably be either distributing or in the final stages of approving vaccines and treatments for a pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 Americans and is crippling the economy. Biden will require months of some form of broad social cooperation with measures like mask wearing and vaccine uptake, all of which could easily and legally be sabotaged by a cornered Trump.

Biden has emphasized some measure of social peace as a campaign message and will be tempted to offer a pardon as a gesture of magnanimity-- why not use all his partisan chits on substantive policy goals?

To think about a society in which Trump’s gangster-state logic prevails, consider Russia. Putin is one of the richest people in the world, having amassed a net worth believed to range up to $200 billion. Obviously, one doesn’t make that kind of money honestly while spending decades in public service. Putin’s political network is honeycombed with criminals, whose impunity is a direct function of their ties to him. The way you can tell whether wealthy Russians have fallen out of favor with the regime is that they’re charged with crimes. While Americans tend to think of Putin as an autocrat, it’s more accurate to see him as the boss of a criminal syndicate that gained control of a failing state. Even in a second Trump term, America would be many steps removed from an oligarchy like Russia’s but still several steps closer than it had been a short while before.

...In a series of letters, Trump’s lawyers have argued that he enjoys almost complete immunity from investigation by law enforcement or Congress. “The President not only has unfettered statutory and Constitutional authority to terminate the FBI Director, he also has Constitutional authority to direct the Justice Department to open or close an investigation, and, of course, the power to pardon any person before, during, or after an investigation and/or conviction,” they wrote in 2017. Last year, the president and his lawyers described impeachment as “illegal,” “unconstitutional efforts to overturn the democratic process,” and “no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power.” One of his lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, wrote that Trump could not be impeached even if he handed over Alaska to Russia.

Trump’s incredible claim to be both the sole arbiter of the law and beyond its reach was on vivid display at his nominating convention, a festival of televised lawbreaking. The Hatch Act, passed in 1939, prohibits using government property to promote any candidate for office. It has been observed continuously, often in exacting detail. Political scientist Matt Glassman recalled working as a staffer at the lowly Congressional Research Service, where he had to remove old political memorabilia, like a 1960 Kennedy poster and an 1884 Blaine-Logan handkerchief, lest those items be mistaken by passersby as endorsements for a living candidate.

Trump has smashed the Hatch Act to bits, to the point where he turned the White House into a stage for his party convention. It isn’t that he was simply willing to pay the price of breaking the law in order to get the best backdrop. Trump’s aides told the New York Times he “enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics-law violations,” and “relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him.” Unashamed legal impunity was itself the message.

A democracy is not only a collection of laws, and norms of behavior by political elites. It is a set of beliefs by the people. The conviction that crime pays, and that the law is a weapon of the powerful, is a poison endemic to states that have struggled to establish or to maintain democracies. If the post-election period descends into a political crisis, having all the relevant prosecutors promise immunity for Trump would be the most tempting escape valve. Yet the price of escaping the November crisis, and simply moving past Trump’s criminality by allowing him to ease off to Mar-a-Lago, is simply too high for our country to bear.

Gulag, Anne Applebaum’s 2003 history of Soviet concentration camps, argues in its conclusion that the failure to come fully to terms with the crimes of the old regime had “consequences for the formation of Russian civil society, and for the development of the rule of law... To most Russians, it now seems as if the more you collaborated in the past, the wiser you were.” This observation, written in the early years of Putin’s regime, captures a cynicism that pervades Putin’s now-almost-unchallenged autarky.

Ziblatt likewise suggested to me that Spain’s handling of the post-Franco era has soured in retrospect. In the immediate wake of Spanish democratization, letting many of Franco’s fascist collaborators walk away scot-free seemed like a masterstroke. But over time, a “growing resentment of a collusive bargain between elites” discredited the system and fueled the growth of extremism.

Before 1945, the international norm held that deposed rulers, however crooked or abusive, should be allowed exile. Kathryn Sikkink’s The Justice Cascade: How Human-Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics captures the modern norm, which emphasizes the social value of transparent and fair prosecutions as a deterrent. These cases apply most often, though, to states transitioning from dictatorship to democracy. There is less precedent for what to do when a reasonably healthy democracy elevates a career criminal to the presidency.

Trump’s unique contribution to the decay of the rule of law has been to define criminality in political terms, but he has also joined a very old project in which the political right has long been engaged: associating criminality with a category of people, so that knocking over a 7-Eleven makes you a “criminal” but looting a pension fund does not. Trump’s unusual level of personal crookedness dovetails with a familiar reactionary agenda of combining permissive enforcement of white-collar crime with a crackdown on street crime-- or, as Trump calls it, simply “crime.” The implicit meaning of “Law and Order” is that order is distinct from lawfulness and that some crimes create disorder while others do not.

Trump’s reversals of Obama-era police reforms and his open contempt for the law send a signal about whom the law constrains and whom it protects. The fashioning of a more equal society means sending a different message: The rule of law must bind everyone, just as it protects everyone. A world where the power of the state can be brought to bear against a person who was once its most famous symbol of wealth is one where every American will more easily imagine a future in which we are all truly equal before the law.

None Dare Call It Fascism... Except Jamie Raskin

I Can't Breath by Nancy Ohanian

Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin is widely considered the top constitutional scholar in Congress. He began an e-mail to his supporters yesterday with a quote from Benito Mussolini, a fascist dictator who dragged Italy into the sewer and was eventually brutally murdered and hung upside down in a Milan square while the whole city cheered: "If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, no one will notice." It isn't unrelated to this quote by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels:

Referencing Madeleine Albright's new book, Fascism: A Warning, which he described as "chilling," Raskin wrote that "fascism is not a political ideology but a strategy for taking and abusing power. The active ingredient in the strategy is the relentless and casual dismantling of the rule of law and the rights of the people." He then enumerated how we're seeing that from the Trumpist Regime: "the formation of a secret police force by President Trump and Attorney General Barr to crush civil rights protesters; unidentified agents sweeping people off the street and detaining them without due process; overt illegal use of the White House and other federal property for campaign purposes; the endless promotion of hate, propaganda and dangerous lies; corruption and vandalization of government for private moneymaking purposes; massive assault on the Post Office to sabotage the election; and provocative presidential rhetoric encouraging civil violence and disorder."

He came right out and called what we're seeing, exactly what it is, though few members of Congress would dare: "We will have our hands full defending a November victory against every trick in the fascist playbook...These brutal times are trying to our souls."

Now, when it comes to Trump's systemic corruption of the federal government-- his "strategy for taking and abusing power"-- ProPublica's exposé on the way Trump makes it appear that he is sending relief packages of food paid for with taxpayer dollars and authorized by Congress is relatively small potatoes... one of Mussolini's single barely noticed or noted feathers. "Millions of Americans who are struggling to put food on the table," wrote Isaac Arnsdorf, "may discover a new item in government-funded relief packages of fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy and meat: a letter signed by President Donald Trump. The message, printed on White House letterhead in both English and Spanish, touts the administration’s response to the coronavirus, including aid provided through the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, a U.S. Department of Agriculture initiative to buy fresh food and ship it to needy families. The letter is reminiscent of Trump’s effort to put his signature on stimulus checks and send a signed letter to millions of recipients. It’s the latest example of the president blurring his official duties with his reelection campaign, most prominently by hosting Trump’s acceptance speech for the Republican nomination last week on the White House lawn. Democratic lawmakers have gone so far as to say the USDA letter violates the federal Hatch Act. The law prohibits government officials from using their positions or taxpayer resources to engage in electioneering. Though the president himself is exempt, the ban applies to White House staff and agencies such as the USDA."

Jonathan Chait made the relevant and overarching point at New York Magazine yesterday though: Trump’s Reelection Campaign Is Corrupting the Entire Federal Government. Trump's illegal activities in using the government for his own ends have caused what Chait called "a flurry of recent reports on new and unprecedented government activity. All of these developments follow the same theme." He mentioned right-wing nut and Trumpist DNI John Ratcliffe announcing his agencies would end the traditional briefings to Congress on election security, even as Russia continues trying cripple America by helping the Trump campaign win the election. He also mentioned the government will be sending out relief checks to coincide with voting, while Trump pressures a weak FDA bureaucracy to rush-release a vaccine before the election whether it kills people or not. Chait reported on an HHS quarter billion dollar campaign "slush fund" and reminded his readers that on Monday Trump announced a joint Justice Department–Homeland Security task force to "investigate violent left-wing civil unrest."

Chait wrote that "Trump’s unhinged rhetoric would just be a Trump problem, were it not for the fact that the government appears to be following his lead. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told Tucker Carlson last night he is 'working' on a plan to arrest leaders of Black Lives Matter, who he claims are instigating a violent plot. Trump’s Homeland Security officials have already ignored or downplayed threats involving right-wing terrorism, which has resulted in a number of deadly shootings... [T]here is a pattern in all these events: They describe recent actions by the federal government; they all serve the purpose of enabling Trump’s election; and they all conscript the power of the federal government in novel ways. It has the appearance of coordinated action-- as if Trump has ordered every arm of the government to generate whatever tools can be placed at the disposal of his reelection."

The Age Of Trump: Lawlessness And Disorder

American Fascism's Betsy Ross

Has there ever been a president less about either law or order than Trump? I though Nixon was so bad that I went to live overseas for nearly 7 years after he won the first time. And on Nixon's worst day, he was never as bad as Trump on his best day... not that I recall any Trump best days. You?

Ben Mathis-Lilley, writing for Slate yesterday, probably doesn't. He noted just before Trump went on that "One major theme of the Republican National Convention has been 'rioting' and alleged lawlessness in 'Democrat-run' cities across the Untied States. Anxious Democrats and media observers have wondered if this traditionally potent GOP 'law and order' message will be able to boost Donald Trump’s presidential election chances against Joe Biden, who he currently trails by eight-plus points in the FiveThirtyEight polling average. This discourse can be, in a limited sense, connected to events in reality. In recent days there has been notable protest-related violence and property damage in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon. These cities do have Democratic mayors. If Biden were to do literally nothing to respond to the Republican Party’s rhetoric, maybe he would lose votes. In the larger sense, however, what the hell are we talking about here?"

Mathis-Lilley wrote about the ugly Trumpist-era "context in which a police officer in Kenosha was videotaped shooting an unarmed Black man seven times in the back while, according to a family attorney, his three children watched from inside their car. This is the context in which property damage occurred during a protest against Kenosha law enforcement officers, whose sheriff said in 2018 that he wished he could put four black shoplifters in jail for the rest of their lives so they wouldn’t reproduce. This is the context in which a white 17-year-old Trump supporter from Illinois drove to Kenosha on Tuesday and shot two protesters to death with an assault rifle after the police appeared to give encouragement to the 'militia' group he was with. This is the context in which that armed white supremacists have appeared at civil rights protests in Portland and become involved in altercations. Some law and order would be pretty nice, wouldn’t it? What protesters are calling for, with public sentiment behind them, is for people to be able to live their lives in peace and safety. How much unrest is ongoing in the countries that have contained the coronavirus and reopened public spaces? How much political violence is there in the countries in which armed neo-Nazis aren’t ubiquitously present at political events? How much property damage would be taking place in a country whose national response to a widely acknowledged police brutality problem wasn’t 'nothing'?"

This morning, the Politico Playbook crew professed shock that the president used America’s monuments-- Fort McHenry, the Washington Monument and the White House-- for nakedly partisan political purposes. It’s clearly illegal... 'The South Lawn speech was the final demolition of the boundaries between governance and campaigning in a week full of such eroding'." Considering the criminal nature of the Trump regime for the last 3 plus years-- not to mention the existing threat to democracy we're living through today-- the South Lawn speech...? Really?

Jonathan Chait seems to have thought so. "The second night of the Republican convention was a festival of massive lawbreaking," he wrote. "In open violation of the Hatch Act, President Trump turned the White House into a convention stage. He even held an immigration ceremony on camera, and had his secretary of State deliver a speech in explicit violation of State Department regulations. The White House might as well have been surrounded by yellow police tape... [T]he blatant violation was met with resignation. 'Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares,' sneers Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. There is a controlling legal authority-- they just don’t care."

Does the Hatch Act matter? Everybody in government thought it did, at least a little, right until the Trump administration. Government officials used to take pains to avoid using their offices for campaign purposes. Two former officials wrote about the hassle they would go through to avoid a small breach. The purpose of this restriction is clear enough: Control of the federal government is not supposed to grant the in party advantages (or at least not excessive advantages) over the opposition. Joe Biden can’t hold campaign events in the East Wing, so why can Trump?

The Trump administration has effectively turned the law into a dead letter, in following its basic principle that any law that lacks an effective and immediate enforcement mechanism essentially does not exist. Trump has ignored the law for years, using his official events for campaigning, while previous presidents carefully avoided doing so, and even reimbursed the government for expenses incurred while traveling for campaign events. After the Office of Special Counsel recommended firing Kellyanne Conway for Hatch Act violations last year, nothing happened. “Some of Mr. Trump’s aides privately scoff at the Hatch Act and say they take pride in violating its regulations,” reported the New York Times last week.

Laws like the Hatch Act and prohibitions on using private emails for official purposes are in a category of laws that effectively bind one party but not the other. (Indeed, Trump’s administration is filled with private email users-- nobody cares.) Why is that?

One reason, particular to this administration, is that Trump violates so many norms so flagrantly that he shatters the scale. There’s only so much journalistic bandwidth. Covering Trump’s violations of laws and norms by the standard you would apply to a normal president would mean banner headlines every day and interrupting television programming with breaking news every night.

But another, more long-standing, reason is that the two parties operate in structurally different news environments. The Republican base largely follows partisan Republican news sources, like Fox News, which largely do not hold their officials accountable. Republicans don’t have to worry that their small legal violations will make their own voters raise questions, because their own voters either won’t hear about the story in the first place, or-- if it becomes too big to ignore-- will learn about it in the context of some kind of whatboutist defense emphasizing how the Democrats are worse.

Disdain for democracy starts here

Democrats, on the other hand, have to communicate to their base through mainstream news outlets that follow traditional norms of journalistic independence. Of course you can critique the media for its implicit liberal biases. Even conceding for the sake of argument that the mainstream media has a strong social liberal bias, though, it is evidently true that they take Democratic violations seriously. The Times might go easy on any number of liberal shibboleths, but it was extremely tough on Clinton email protocol.

The media asymmetry is compounded by a structural bias in political representation. The House, Senate, and Electoral College all have Republican biases to various degrees. Republicans have the luxury of winning through pure polarized base appeals that Democrats do not enjoy. (This is one reason why, if you want Republicans to moderate, reforming the Senate would be a good start.)

And then there’s the additional problem that arises when reporters treat these asymmetrical conditions as unalterable and unremarkable features of the political landscape. From that standpoint, it’s obvious that minor Republican legal violations will not matter, and minor Democratic violations will. “Of course, much of this is improper, and, according to most every straight-faced expert, it’s a violation of the Hatch Act…” concedes Politico’s Playbook. “But do you think a single person outside the Beltway gives a hoot about the president politicking from the White House or using the federal government to his political advantage? Do you think any persuadable voter even notices?”

As analysis and prediction, this is correct. But it also has a self-fulfilling quality. Reporters assume small Democratic scandals “matter” much more than small Republican scandals, because Democratic voters follow news coverage that treats those violations seriously and Republican voters don’t. This is how you get to a world where Al Gore’s fundraising calls are still raising questions about his ethics three years later, while Trump’s latest obliteration of a law will be forgotten within days.

Will The Señor Trumpanzee #CocaineConvention Manage To Generate A Reverse Bounce?

I'm still hoping lots and lots of people watch the Republican #CocaineConvention. That's because I think it will turn off independent voters and may even persuade some mainstream-- as in non-fascist-- Republicans to stay home on November 3rd. Unfortunately, according to Nielsen, just 15.9 million people watched, a 28% drop from 2016. The first night of the Democratic Convention last week, drew 18.7 million viewers, also a 28% drop from 2016.

The former chief of staff of Trump's Department of Homeland Security, Miles Taylor, joined Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast on a Daily Beast podcast to continue his fun new job of denouncing and exposing Trump. "You thought what happened on screen on night one of the convention was crazy? It’s nothing compared to Trump behind the scenes, where national security officials couldn’t get through a meeting 'without him doing 20 tangents, becoming irascible, turning red in the face, demanding a diet Coke, spewing spit,' Taylor explained. 'Literally out of goddamn nowhere, he'd be like, You know, who’s just my favorite guy? The MyPillow guy. Do any of you have those pillows? When it came to the issue of the border wall, Trump would be dreaming up 'sickenin' medieval plots 'to pierce the flesh' of migrants, rip all the families apart, 'maim,' and gas them. 'This was a man with no humanity whatsoever,' Taylor says. 'He says, we got to do this, this, this, and this, all of which are probably impossible, illegal unethical,' Taylor recalls, but he was writing them down as the president spoke. 'And he looks over me and he goes, you fucking taken notes?'"



That leaves some people wondering if the Republican Party will survive Trumpism and some wondering if the party needs to be burned down to the ground an started all over again-- something many progressives also wonder about the Democratic Party. "Conservative intellectuals," wrote Jonathan Chait, "have spent most of the past four decades claiming-- especially during periods of Republican ascent-- to be winning the 'war of ideas.' Hardly any of them bother to make such a boast now. Now that the Republican convention has given itself over to four straight nights starring Donald Trump-- also featuring other unaccomplished members of his family along with some teens who were victimized by social media for wearing Trump gear-- and abandoned its platform altogether for the platform equivalent of a MAGA hat, all the fun has been drained out of the exercise.

In place of the usual gloating, the right has been engaged in a furious intramural debate over whether to burn down the Republican Party in the wake of Trump’s expected (but hardly assured) defeat. Advocates for burning it down include Max Boot, George Will, Stuart Stevens, Charlie Sykes, Mona Charen, and Jonathan V. Last. Critics include David French, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan. Somewhat in the middle lie Ross Douthat, David Brooks,  Jonah Goldberg, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Kevin D. Williamson. In yesterday’s New York Times, former George W. Bush adviser Peter Wehner treats the burning as a (metaphorical) given and urges, “Any attempt to rescue conservatism from the ashes, then, has to begin with the defeat of Donald Trump in November.”

All parties to the dispute agree that Trump is deeply unfit for the presidency. They disagree about how broadly to define the moral and practical implications of that fact.

The anti-burners take a narrow view. The problem, as they see it, is Trump, and therefore his departure solves it. And it is certainly true that the current president has unique liabilities that no other Republican leader who succeeds him will share. However awful the next Republican leader may be, he or she will probably not use the office for personal profit, will tell lies numbering in fewer than five figures, will listen to their advisers, will spend the bulk of their waking hours working rather than obsessively watching television, and will be trained as a public servant rather than as a professional swindler and money launderer.

If Republicans’ goal is to replace Trump with a normal, noncriminal politician, they can achieve it without any systemic change. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, or possibly even one of the Trump children would be capable of showing up every day, doing eight hours or so of actual work a day, and staffing the administration with people who do not secretly believe their boss is deranged.





However, the pro-burners believe the Trump experience has exposed some deeper rot... If you take the broader view of the party’s problem, you quickly realize the problem is not just Trump himself but a party that would not merely cooperate with but actually idolize a grotesquely bigoted authoritarian. Once Trump disappears, Fox News will begin pummeling the next Democratic president with absurd lies and then building a new cult of personality around the next Republican who emerges as a leader, and that leader will pursue a more competent version of an essentially similar program: upper-class tax cuts, allowing business to self-regulate, ignoring large swaths of scientific expertise, and entrenching minority rule.

And if any Republicans wish to alter their fate from that trajectory, the solution is both simpler and more radical than anything they have acknowledged: They must sever the party from the ideological movement that has controlled it for a generation and driven it into its present dysfunctional state.

To the modern ear, the very idea of a Republican Party that operates independently of the conservative movement sounds preposterous, even oxymoronic. The movement’s association with the GOP is now so deep that almost everybody uses the terms Republican and conservative synonymously. But it was only about 60 years ago that the two had very different meanings.

A right-of-center leader in Britain, France, Germany, or Japan would not deny the need to do anything about climate change, oppose universal health insurance, or insist cutting taxes on the rich will pay for itself. For a period of time, the Republican Party seemed to be following the same course as right-of-center parties in other industrialized democracies today. Dwight Eisenhower accepted the contours and legitimacy of the New Deal while fighting many of the particulars. The conservative movement’s purpose was to oppose and reverse Eisenhower’s political vision for the Republican Party.

As detailed by books like Rule and Ruin, by Geoffrey Kabaservice, or Before the Storm, by Rick Perlstein, the conservative movement was once a minority faction within the GOP. It regarded the party’s leadership with about as much hostility as the Democratic Socialists of America today view the likes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden-- lesser evils at best, outright traitors at worst.

The movement loathed Republican leaders for having accepted as a settled fact Franklin Roosevelt’s extension of the welfare and regulatory states-- Barry Goldwater excoriated Eisenhower’s “dime-store New Deal”-- and Harry Truman’s Cold War containment. It demanded an apocalyptic confrontation that would roll back big government at home and communism abroad.

Modern conservatives have created a mythical story of how they took over the party, sustained through endless repetition. The myth holds that they gained control of the party because they were thoughtful and responsible. William F. Buckley, their intellectual leader, “expelled the Birchers”-- the far-right, conspiratorial John Birch Society-- and thus, having purged the movement of its kooks, prepared it for governance.

The truth is very nearly the opposite. A former Buckley colleague, Alvin Felzenberg, has detailed that Buckley tread very carefully with the Birchers. Grasping that the movement was far too important to the right to alienate, he tried to placate its leader, Joseph Welch, ultimately breaking with him while still endorsing the John Birch Society itself.

This small and seemingly esoteric point of historical interpretation is the root of the intellectual right’s systemic inability to face up to its problems. Conservatives have treated Buckley’s gentle and very partial break with the leader of the Birchers as his central legacy while dismissing many of his other positions as unimportant details. But those “details” are, in fact, the conservative movement’s DNA.

Buckley and the conservative movement defended Joe McCarthy, whose depiction of a vast secret Communist conspiracy and demands for aggressive rollback of existing communism closely tracked their own beliefs. They supported racial apartheid, first in the American South and then, after it was defeated there, in South Africa. They were supportive of right-wing authoritarianism both abroad and at home. Conservatives were skeptical of Richard Nixon because of his moderate policy agenda, but they closed ranks with him over Watergate. Nixon’s pragmatism repelled the right, but his authoritarianism attracted conservatives to him.

Center-right parties abroad are able to defeat left-wing appeals by co-opting popular elements. American conservatism is too rigid to do that. It regards democracy itself as a form of oppression-- a system that enables the majority to oppress the wealthy minority by redistributing income via the ballot box. One of the predictable features of any American debate over tax levels is that conservative politicians or business leaders will compare the latest Democratic plan to something out of Hitler’s Germany.

Conservatives famously created a vast network of think tanks, media, and activist institutions, which they used to slowly take over the GOP. The takeover took decades to complete. Even by the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, conservatives only had a large foothold but had to share power with Establishmentarians. And so, while Reagan would sometimes follow the conservative line, at other times his moderate advisers would steer him toward course corrections. Reagan repeatedly violated conservative orthodoxy by supporting a series of tax hikes, cap-and-trade environmental regulations, a tax reform that raised effective rates on the rich, liberalized immigration, and détente with the Soviets.

Conservatives were able to swallow their anger over these betrayals because, at the time, Reagan offered them the closest opening to real power they had enjoyed since the Hoover administration. But as they consolidated their party takeover, they would eventually demand far more complete fealty. Even the pragmatism permitted under Reagan would become unacceptable.

The key break point in the history of the party came under George H.W. Bush. In 1990, Bush cut a deal with congressional Democrats to reduce the deficit. In return for (rather deep) spending cuts, Democrats prevailed on Bush to accept a small increase in the top income-tax rate. Conservative Republicans led by Newt Gingrich revolted against Bush and later credited their opposition with causing his defeat. After the Gingrich revolt-- which later styled itself as a “Republican revolution” against Bill Clinton-- conservatives drove out Bush’s remaining moderate advisers and consolidated full right-wing control over the party.

It would be an overstatement to paint Trump as representing nothing but the triumph of the conservative movement. In his personal defects, Trump is indeed sui generis. But the broad outlines of his agenda and his style do closely follow the trajectory of the American right: racism, authoritarianism, and disdain for expertise. The movement attracts disordered personalities like McCarthy, Sarah Palin, and Trump and paranoid cults like the John Birch Society and QAnon.

Above all, Trump follows the American right’s Manichaean approach to political conflict. Every new extension of government, however limited or necessary, is a secret plot to extend government control over every aspect of American life. Conservatives met both Clinton and Obama’s agenda with absolute hysteria, whipping themselves into a terror that rendered them unable to negotiate.

The right has thought this way all along. Reagan, in his ’60s-era incarnation as conservative insurgent spokesman, warned that unless Medicare was stopped, “You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” Conservatives are usually unable to roll back existing government programs and instead treat every new proposed extension as the final stand for freedom against socialist tyranny.

...[T]he American conservative movement lacks the analytic tools to acknowledge what acceptable social programs look like. An inability to distinguish reasonable, well-designed government programs that address real market failures from Soviet-style oppression is a congenital defect in conservative thought.

The most libertarian-minded conservatives laugh bitterly at the idea that the modern party reflects their ideology. In a sense, they are right: The last two Republican presidents both attempted to roll back a major entitlement (Bush sought to privatize Social Security, Trump to repeal Obamacare) and were defeated and instead presided over an expanded government. But they have also clung as tightly as ever to the actual governing priorities of the movement’s power centers: low taxes for the rich, placing business lobbyists in charge of federal regulations, and appointing jurists who believe in rolling back the regulatory state. For all his supposed populism, Trump’s plan to revive the economy is just more tax cuts.

Trumpism is a natural by-product of the dissonance between the conservative movement’s ambitions and the limitations of democratic politics. Totalitarian plots lie around every corner: the New Deal, the civil-rights movement, peaceniks, the Clintons, Obamacare, and Black Lives Matter. Every policy matter, from Bill Clinton’s modest aim of reducing the deficit to Obama’s goal of a national version of Romneycare, becomes a culture war. Since the right is unable to engage with any of these issues in a practical manner, conservative politics is forced to operate entirely on a symbolic level.

Because the stakes of even the most mundane policy disagreement are existential, and because the right keeps losing, there is no release for the tension that keeps building. All the accumulated terror is simply off-loaded from the last Armageddon to the next. Trump is not even pretending to have a positive second-term program. His only goal is to stop the next Democratic administration because the next liberal program is always the one that will usher in the final triumph of socialism.

The most likely near-term outcome for a post-Trump GOP would look something like this: The party reconstitutes itself in opposition to everything the next Democratic president proposes, “rediscovers” its existential terror of deficit spending, throws itself into vote suppression and minority rule, and eventually returns to power for another round of upper-class tax cuts and a large-scale managerial debacle. I suspect many of the Republicans who privately or publicly loathe Trump would be satisfied with such an outcome.

This is so incredibly illegal; not even consiglieri William Barr could explain this away:





This morning, Bernie reminded his followers that, alas-- and despite the hysterical carryings on at the #CocaineConvention-- Biden is no socialist and he and Kamala will not be carrying out the his or AOC's or Ilhan Omar's agenda. "If only that were true," wrote Bernie wistfully. "But while they scream 'socialist' as an epithet in their videos and from the stage, what everyone needs to know is that Trump and the Republican Party just LOVE socialism-- a corporate socialism for the rich and the powerful. And let's be clear. Their brand of socialism has resulted in more income and wealth inequality than at any time since the 1920s, with three multi-billionaires now owning more wealth than the bottom half of our nation. Their socialism has allowed, during this pandemic, the very, very rich to become much richer while tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs, their health care and face eviction. While Trump denounces socialism let us never forget the $885 million in government subsidies and tax breaks the Trump family received for a real estate empire built on racial discrimination. But Trump is not alone."

The high priest of unfettered capitalism, Trump’s National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, spoke in a video last night.

And who could ever forget when Larry was on television begging for the largest federal bailout in American history for his friends on Wall Street-- some $700 billion from the Treasury and trillions in support from the Federal Reserve-- after their greed, recklessness and illegal behavior created the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression.

But it is not just Trump and Larry Kudlow.

If you are a fossil fuel company, whose carbon emissions are destroying the planet, you get billions in government subsidies including special tax breaks, royalty relief, funding for research and development and numerous tax loopholes.

If you are a pharmaceutical company, you make huge profits on patent rights for medicines that were developed with taxpayer-funded research.

If you are a monopoly like Amazon, owned by the wealthiest person in America, you get hundreds of millions of dollars in economic incentives from taxpayers to build warehouses and you end up paying not one penny in federal income taxes.

If you are the Walton family, the wealthiest family in America, you get massive government subsidies because your low-wage workers are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and public housing in order to survive-- all paid for by taxpayers.

This is what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. meant when he said that “This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor.”

And that is the difference between Donald Trump and us.

Trump believes in corporate socialism for the rich and powerful.

We believe in a democratic socialism that works for the working families of this country. We believe that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights.

So yes, progressives and even moderate Democrats will face attacks from people who attempt to use the word "socialism" as a slur.

There is nothing new of that.

Like President Harry Truman said, "Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years... Socialism is what they called Social Security … Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people."

Our job in this moment is to stay focused.

First priority: defeat Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history-- and defeat him badly.

Then on Day 1 of the Biden administration, we will mobilize the working families of this country to demand a government that represents all of us and not just the few. We will fight to ensure that every American has a right to a decent job that pays a living wage, to health care, to a complete education, to affordable housing, to a clean environment, and to a secure retirement-- and no more tax breaks for billionaires and large corporations.

...The one percent in this country may have enormous wealth and power, and they will use it to try and stop our agenda. But they are just the one percent. And if the 99 percent in this country stand together, defeat Trump, and go on to fight for the values we share, we can transform this country.

Bannon's Wall-- The Final Installation by Nancy Ohanian

It's Going To Get Worse, But Despair Is Not The Answer

Portland? Who's next?

My first trip to Turkey was in 1969-- and it was love at first sight. I drove a VW camper van from London to Istanbul, stayed a few weeks and then drove the entire width of the country-- to Ankara and Kirikkale (then a small village, now a sprawling city) in the middle of the country, along the Black Sea to Samsun and Tabzon, down into the "wild east" city of Ezurum and then to Iran. I've been back a dozen times and Turkey has never failed to fascinate me-- the food, the music, the architecture, the people, the history... I love Turkish history and you see it everywhere you go in the country-- from the Greek and Roman and Christian days through the rise and decline of the Ottoman Empire, the rebirth under Ataturk and the dark anti-secular reaction taking place now under Recip Erdoğan, a Trump-like authoritarian.

Yesterday, Jonathan Chait brushed across a fascinating and sad chapter in Turkish history-- "the Sick Man of Europe," the disintegration of the Empire from the 1850s (Crimean War) to the 1910s (World War I). Chait's interest though, is not Turkey-- at least not beyond the resemblance to Trump's America. We have to hope that, as we peer into the future, we see Trump as an anomaly who can be wiped away with an election and a political reformation. The bleaker picture is that Trump is exactly what Russia had hoped for when Putin invested in his election-- a harbinger of the end of the American glory days.

It's unlikely Putin could have predicted any specific category of catastrophe Trump would stumble over, but he knew that putting a man of Trump's quality in charge would eventually lead to America falling hard and fast. Many little things were adding up since 2017 but Trump's approach to the pandemic and then his instinctual fascist/exploitative handling of the Black Lives Matter protests, has put the U.S. into the "sick man" category, where Americans-- us, not just Trump-- are shunned by every other democratic country in the world.

5 Watt Bulb by Nancy Ohanian

Chait noted that "last October, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security compiled a ranking system to assess the preparedness of 195 countries for the next global pandemic. Twenty-one panel experts across the globe graded each country in 34 categories composed of 140 subindices. At the top of the rankings, peering down at 194 countries supposedly less equipped to withstand a pandemic, stood the United States of America. It has since become horrifyingly clear that the experts missed something. The supposed world leader is in fact a viral petri dish of uncontained infection. By June, after most of the world had beaten back the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S., with 4 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 25 percent of its cases. Florida alone was seeing more new infections a week than China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and the European Union combined. During its long period of decline, the Ottoman Empire was called 'the sick man of Europe.' The United States is now the sick man of the world, pitied by the same countries that once envied its pandemic preparedness-- and, as recently as the 2014 Ebola outbreak, relied on its expertise to organize the global response."

The distrust and open dismissal of expertise and authority may seem uniquely contemporary-- a phenomenon of the Trump era, or the rise of online misinformation. But the president and his party are the products of a decades-long war against the functioning of good government, a collapse of trust in experts and empiricism, and the spread of a kind of magical thinking that flourishes in a hothouse atmosphere that can seal out reality. While it’s not exactly shocking to see a Republican administration be destroyed by incompetent management-- it happened to the last one, after all-- the willfulness of it is still mind-boggling and has led to the unnecessary sickness and death of hundreds of thousands of people and the torpedoing of the reelection prospects of the president himself. Like Stalin’s purge of 30,000 Red Army members right before World War II, the central government has perversely chosen to disable the very asset that was intended to carry it through the crisis. Only this failure of leadership and management took place in a supposedly advanced democracy whose leadership succumbed to a debilitating and ultimately deadly ideological pathology.

...When the coronavirus began spreading in American cities, the Republican Party turned to a trained store of experts whose judgment conservatives trusted implicitly. Unfortunately, their expertise and training lay not in epidemiology but in concocting pseudoscientific rationales to allow conservatives to disregard legitimate scientific conclusions.

The cadres who leapt forth to supply Trump and his allies with answers disproportionately came from the science-skeptic wing of the conservative-think-tank world. Steven Milloy, a climate-science skeptic who runs a think tank funded by tobacco and oil companies and who served on Trump’s environmental transition team, dismissed the virus as less deadly than the flu. Libertarian philosopher Richard Epstein, who had once insisted, “The evidence in favor of the close linkage between carbon dioxide and global warming has not been clearly established,” turned his analytical powers to projected pandemic death tolls. He estimated just 500 American deaths, an analysis that was circulated within the Trump White House before Epstein issued a correction.

It was like watching factories mobilize for war, only instead of automakers refitting their assembly lines to churn out tanks, these were professional manufacturers of scientific doubt scrambling to invent a new form of pedantry. Some skeptics took note of the connection, though they seem to have drawn the wrong conclusion. “While they are occurring on vastly different time scales, the COVID-19 panic and the climate-change panic are remarkably similar,” wrote one of the climate-skeptical Heartland Institute’s pseudo-experts.

The fact that the conservative movement’s finest minds endorsed these paranoid claims attests to the movement’s sincerity. Unlike critiquing climate-science models, which allows skeptics decades to obscure their analytic failures, by denying the coronavirus, “you’re at risk of being shown to be a crackpot in real time,” Jerry Taylor, a former climate-science skeptic in the libertarian-think-tank world, tells me. These people are genuine adherents of their own conspiracy theories. The simplest explanation for the actions Trump and many of his top officials have taken is that they believe that scientific authorities are, at best, grossly negligent and, at worst, scheming to extend government control of the economy by perpetrating hoaxes. His responses follow from that supposition. He has warily treated his scientific advisers as potential saboteurs.

When the first warning signs of the virus appeared, Trump-- rather than take advantage of the expertise at his disposal-- set out to marginalize and contort it. Before the outbreak, Trump’s administration had reduced the number of CDC officials monitoring virus outbreaks in China by two-thirds. After the pandemic, he cut funding for a lab studying the origins of the outbreak in China. Trump’s repeated public statements that he wants less testing-- because less testing means fewer cases!-- encapsulates his earnest belief that the accurate measuring of the pandemic is itself the problem. After all, the scientists were advising him to shut down the economy, the prized asset of his reelection campaign. Wasn’t that a little suspicious?

...It was as if Trump thought he could bend reality to his will by forcing his advisers to endorse it. “I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools,” he tweeted in July. “I will be meeting with them!!!” It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to predict that such a “meeting” would be unlikely to involve Trump prevailing upon the CDC to alter its guidelines through sheer force of reason and data. The only outcome of such a public threat is the undermining of his own government’s credibility.

Republicans goaded Trump to ramp up his attacks. “Dr. Fauci remains steadfast in his bureaucracy. Dr. Fauci’s a conformist,” announced Rush Limbaugh. “Here’s the difference between a health-professional bureaucrat-expert and Donald Trump.” This line reflects the view of science closest to Trump’s own perspective. He does not dismiss science wholesale as a field of study; he is not the medieval Church persecuting Galileo. Rather, he understands science as a kind of revelation accessible to a lucky genetic elite (naturally including himself, as evidenced by the genius MIT-professor uncle he often cites).

“I really get it,” he boasted during one visit to the CDC. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.” That conviction is what gave Trump the confidence to deliver his on-camera brainstorming session, in which he suggested his science experts research the injection of light or disinfectant into the human body. If you don’t understand science as a discipline, you expect some genius will dream up a breakthrough cure. Why couldn’t Trump be that genius?

...By midsummer, as the coronavirus receded throughout most of the world, Trump’s supporters were engaging in cultlike displays of devotion. Republicans were pointedly holding mask-optional gatherings. “When the good Lord calls you home,” one Republican Senate candidate explained, “a mask ain’t going to stop it.” As masks became symbols of subservience to public health (“COVID burkas,” as former Trump official Sebastian Gorka called them), these people even held rallies to protest them. A county Republican Party chairman in Kansas who owns a weekly newspaper published a cartoon depicting face masks as yellow stars and the people bearing them as Jews forced into cattle cars.

In Scottsdale, Arizona, a Republican city councilmember announced, “I can’t breathe!” before dramatically removing his face covering. A Republican sheriff in Ohio, despite a statewide facial-covering requirement, declared, “I’m not going to be the mask police. Period.” The first day that Oregon governor Kate Brown imposed a requirement that residents wear masks in public, four police officers walked into a coffee shop in Corvallis mask-free, and when asked to comply with the order, they yelled, “Fuck Kate Brown!” In recent weeks, more than 20 county health officials have left their jobs in the face of protests, harassment, and threats. Georgia governor Brian Kemp went so far as to ban local governments from mandating masks.

In late June, Trump staged an indoor rally in Tulsa. His staff removed stickers on seats intended to space out attendees. Announcing his presence, Cain wrote, “Masks will not be mandatory for the event, which will be attended by President Trump. PEOPLE ARE FED UP!” (A few days after the rally, Cain tested positive.)

That many Americans would view public-health instruction with skepticism was understandable. The authorities had hardly covered themselves in glory. In the initial stages of the pandemic, many officials worried more about panic than complacency and insisted the pandemic might not be worse than a normal flu.

Faced with an initial shortage of masks, and fears that hoarders would buy up the supply and deny it to the essential workers who needed it most, public-health officials solemnly instructed people not to bother.

Public-health officials scolded anti-lockdown protesters for risking new outbreaks with their maskless demonstrations, but when anti-racism demonstrators poured into the streets, they emphasized the paramount importance of the cause. Even though Black Lives Matter demonstrators seemed largely to be wearing masks and attempting to practice social distancing, the contradiction rankled conservatives. Public-health officials had one standard for marches against their policies and another for marches they agreed with.

But if these officials were struggling to communicate clearly, it was in large part because clarity was impossible. The conclusions scientists could propose about the novel coronavirus were often both subject to revision and less than absolute: The outdoors is safer than inside but not perfectly safe; masks reduce risk but don’t eliminate it. What’s more, the officials were operating under political pressure from a president who spent weeks insisting the virus would disappear or prove no worse than a normal flu and then attacked every countermeasure as a plot to undermine him.

Public-health officials found themselves in the terrifying position of simultaneously trying to get a handle on a pandemic and being the targets of a political smear. The hybrid role of Kate Winslet’s character in Contagion and Michael Dukakis’s character in the 1988 presidential campaign was as uncomfortable to pull off as it sounds.

Yet public-health officials in almost every economic-peer country managed to overcome scientific uncertainty and missteps. Both here and abroad, they are gazing with a mix of horror and confusion at the helpless, pitiful American scientific giant. One German expert told the Washington Post that Germany had used American studies to design an effective response, which the U.S. somehow couldn’t implement. American “scientists appeared to have reached an adequate assessment of the situation early on, but this didn’t translate into a political action plan,” observed another.

The limiting factor that has done the most to contort the domestic response to the coronavirus is the pathology of the American right. As of late May, only 40 percent of Republicans believed COVID-19 was deadlier than the flu, and half believed the death count was overstated. One research study found that viewers of Fox News, which echoed Trump’s early dismissal of the pandemic, were less likely than the audiences of other cable news channels to engage in social distancing or to purchase masks or sanitizing products.

There has always been some question about the depth of sincerity with which conservatives hold their professed convictions. Did they believe that the Clintons murdered witnesses to their crimes and that Barack Obama faked details of his birth? Or were these statements expressions of partisan enthusiasm not to be taken literally? The coronavirus revealed the deadly earnestness with which the Republican audience accepts the guidance of the conservative alternative-information structure. As early as this spring, tragic stories began to appear of people mourning the deaths of loved ones who had angrily rejected public-health advice as a big-government plot.

The playbook for handling a public-health crisis assumes some baseline level of rationality in the government. The administration is presumed to be working with, not against, its public-health experts; the news media to be informing the public, not actively disinforming it. The ranks of American government, academia, and the nonprofit sector are thick with experts in pandemic response, but very few of them ever trained to deal with a pandemic in Trump’s America.

But that isn't the end of the national downfall. Trump "will pass from the scene," even if Americans don't have the stomach for guillotines or even a cathartic trial and appropriate punishment for him and his cronies. Unfortunately, American right isn't going away-- and Biden is unlikely the strong, vigorous reformist leader this juncture in our history is calling for. Chait concludes that this strain of Americanism represented by the far right "will be tapping into a deep vein of paranoia. Polls have shown somewhere between a quarter and a third of the public already does not intend to take a vaccine when it becomes available. In a country with a cult of self-reliance so ingrained that every new mass shooting propels more panicked arms purchases, is an act of collective, mutual security like public vaccination even workable? The truly remarkable thing about the right-wing revolt against public health is that it has taken place under a president whom conservatives trust and adore. From the standpoint of running the government, these have been awful conditions for handling a pandemic. But from the standpoint of persuading citizens to cooperate, they have been almost optimal. When we look back a year from now at the frenzied, angry revolt against science, the spring and summer of 2020 may seem like halcyon days."

Lambchop by Nancy Ohanian

The halcyon days Emily Stewart described at Vox as America sleepwalking toward economic catastrophe while the Wall Street Journal was reporting that corporate America is losing hope/has lost hope for a quick rebound? Chip Cutter and Doug Cameron wrote that "Big U.S. companies are deciding March and April moves won’t cut it. The fierce resurgence of Covid-19 cases and related business shutdowns are dashing hopes of a quick recovery, prompting businesses from airlines to restaurant chains to again shift their strategies and staffing or ramp up previous plans to do so. They are turning furloughs into permanent layoffs, de-emphasizing their core businesses and downsizing production indefinitely." And Sarah Chaney and Kim Mackrael wrote in the same edition that "The U.S. labor-market recovery is losing momentum as a surge in coronavirus cases triggers heightened employer uncertainty and consumer caution. Job openings in July are down from last month across the U.S., and Google searches for 'file for unemployment' are creeping up. Growth in worker hours is waning at small businesses after several weeks of gains."

As for that economic cliff we're about to go over with our collective eyes closed, courtesy of a national leadership that has actually earned more than what the French revolutionaries did with their national leadership in the early 1790s, Emily Stewart wrote that millions of Americans’ lives and livelihoods are in danger all but ensuring a prolonged recession if not depression. "Things have not gone according to plan. Amid reopenings, coronavirus cases are spiking across the country, and many states and cities are reversing course. There are signs the recovery that was happening is dissipating. And now many of the measures that kept so many American households afloat in recent months are about to come to an abrupt end. It’s not clear what, if much of anything, Congress and the White House plan to do about it. 'It could be cataclysmic,' said Angela Hanks, deputy executive director of the progressive group Groundwork Collaborative. 'I don’t think there’s any way to overestimate what happens when you have a pandemic worsening, not improving, when we have an economic crisis that’s intensifying, and frankly, there’s no response.' At the end of the month, the extra $600 per week of unemployment insurance benefits put in place under the CARES Act is set to expire, which could affect some 33 million workers. In the coming weeks and months, eviction moratoriums and mortgage and student loan forbearance programs will wind down. Small businesses continue to struggle to stay afloat, and many of those that got loans have used them up already. State and local governments are still in dire need of financial assistance. These issues aren’t ones that only plague the parties that are directly affected; they also have knock-on effects across the economy. Not being able to pay rent isn’t just a problem for the tenant-- it’s also a problem for the landlord. It’s an urgent situation, but many people in government aren’t treating it that way. We’re sleepwalking toward catastrophe. 'The cliff is totally visible in front of us, and yet we’re not ready,' said Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist. 'It’s probably already too late to avoid enormous hardship.'"

Elect people like Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump and expect the worst-- because that's what you'll get. And you won't get a helluva lot better by electing people like Joe Biden and the cast of characters Chuck Schumer has lined up for Senate seats across the country. It's time for some peoples' action: a small proposal, or plan of action from Team DWT.