Congressional Republicans Move To Destroy State And Local Governments

Yesterday, the Washington Post's Josh Dawsey reported on another major Trumpanzee flip-out, journalism's easiest beat. To get him to stop his psychotic daily coronavirus briefings, his advisers-- Kushner-in-law, Ronna Romney, Brad Parscale and others-- presented him, over the course of 3 days, with the results of internal polling last week that show him losing to Biden.

One call on Wednesday-- with Parscale patched in from his home in Florida and McDaniel from her home in Michigan-- was designed to present grim polling data to the president to encourage him to reduce the frequency of coronavirus briefings or to stop taking questions, after seeing his numbers slip for several weeks, officials said.

Trump resisted the pleas, saying people “love” the briefings and think he is “fighting for them,” a person with knowledge of the Wednesday conversation said. Trump has long been distrustful of polling data presented to him when the numbers are not positive, aides say.

The two polls given to Trump-- one from the Republican National Committee and another from the Trump campaign-- both showed Trump trailing Biden in key swing states amid the coronavirus crisis, officials said. His political team has grown more concerned in recent weeks, as the briefings had become more combative while the economy has cratered and coronavirus deaths have continued to rise.

On Thursday, Trump set off a new uproar with his suggestion that people should inject bleach or other disinfectants-- prompting a scramble by the administration to contain the damage.

...Aides described Trump as in a particularly foul mood last week over the polling data and news coverage of his administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to two of the people familiar with the discussions. In one call he berated Parscale over the polling data, the two people said.

At one point in that call, Trump said he might sue Parscale, though one of the people with knowledge of the comments said he made the remark in jest.

“I'm not losing to Joe Biden,” he said at one point, both of these people said, adding that Trump used profanities throughout the call.

After the call, Parscale described it to others as a Trump venting session, these people said.

Trump ranted to other aides for several days about a story in the New York Times that described him as spending much of his day watching television and calling people on the phone.

He was also angry about testing-- telling advisers that he was unfairly getting crushed for testing woes in the United States. Trump earlier this week announced a new set of testing guidelines that continued to leave the onus on states to develop their own plans.

“He was just in a terrible mood with everyone late last week,” a fourth official said.

CNN presented the bit about Trump threatening to sue his campaign manager slightly differently: As he huddled with advisers on Friday evening, Señor Trumpanzee "was still fuming over his sliding poll numbers and the onslaught of criticism he was facing for suggesting a day earlier that ingesting disinfectant might prove effective against coronavirus. Within moments, the President was shouting-- not at the aides in the room, but into the phone-- at his campaign manager Brad Parscale, three people familiar with the matter told CNN. Shifting the blame away from himself, Trump berated Parscale for a recent spate of damaging poll numbers, even at one point threatening to sue Parscale. It's not clear how serious the President's threat of a lawsuit was."

Republican incumbents-- as well as their sad cast of ridiculous challengers-- are worried that Trump will bring them to the bottom with him, just as he did in 2018, when dozens of GOP incumbents lost their seats. But instead of worrying about Trump, what they should be worrying about are things they can control, like the mass layoffs they're forcing on city, state and county governments by holding aid hostage to more corporate bailouts (in the form of immunity for killing workers).

Tony Romm covered the Republican-forced mass layoffs yesterday for the Washington Post. "In Michigan," he began, "some unstaffed highway rest stops are shuttered. In Santa Barbara, California, local librarians are out of a job. Dayton, Ohio, has ordered furloughs at nearly every agency, and in Arlington, Texas, police officers and firefighters may soon see painful cuts." Local governments can't overstep their budgets and McConnell and Republican members of Congress have thwarted Democrats' attempts to rush them emergency funds, forcing possible "dramatic reductions to their workforces, threatening critical public-sector employees and first responders at a time when many Americans may need their local governments’ help the most...Some local governments have already started laying off or furloughing thousands of their workers, and the numbers are likely to grow markedly in the absence of federal aid."

Among municipalities, the new budget cuts could be profound: Between 300,000 and 1 million public-sector workers could soon be out of a job or sent home without pay, according to a new estimate from the National League of Cities. The steep reductions in staffing levels could affect education, sanitation, safety and health, local leaders warn, potentially leaving critical public services in utter disarray.

For governors, mayors and other top local officials, their economic troubles stem from the precipitous drops in revenue that have come as a result of shuttered businesses and sharp decreases in shopping and travel. The extent of the disruptions are poised to reach a level not seen since the Great Recession more than a decade ago, a reality that has prompted many city and state leaders to plead with Washington for help.

But their public quest for federal cash has been met with staunch political resistance from Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who at one point suggested states should have the option of falling into bankruptcy. Top Trump administration officials have echoed that skepticism and signaled that any aid would come with conditions: On Tuesday, for example, the president said he would only approve money if states cracked down on immigration policies in “sanctuary cities.”

The recalcitrance on Capitol Hill and at the White House has sparked a lobbying blitz on the part of local governments, which have had no choice but to make painful cuts as they await action in Washington.

In Dayton, for example, Democratic Mayor Nan Whaley said the city has already furloughed 470 of its 1,900 employees, about a 25 percent reduction in staff that has affected public services including the city’s water department. Whaley said officials may have to institute an additional 18 percent across-the-board reduction in the next fiscal year if they don’t see federal support soon-- a move she said would affect police officers and threaten residents with “slow response time.”

“It will fundamentally change how we do business long term,” Whaley said.

For many cities and states, their public push for federal aid reflects the urgency of their need: Many have argued that Washington’s intransigence threatens to exacerbate the deadly coronavirus, which has already killed more than 58,000 Americans nationwide. That’s because tax revenue typically helps fund first responders, and there’s only so much governments can do amid the downturn to shield public safety from withering cuts.

In doing so, many mayors and governors have sought to argue that they are economic engines in their own right, employing more than 19 million municipal employees in the United States, or about one-tenth of the country’s workforce, according to federal data from March. Local leaders say they are just as deserving of federal support as major businesses, which have captured the lion’s share of coronavirus aid dollars authorized by Congress in March and April.

“They understand and know this would be a disaster if they didn’t get the kind of aid from the federal government they need,” said Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO, whose union represents public-sector employees. “They need to be a priority just as the corporations and small businesses were.”

Last month, Congress extended $150 billion to cities and states as part of the $2 trillion coronavirus aid package signed by Trump. Quickly, though, local leaders discovered the funds came with significant caveats. Only large cities, for example, received direct payments under the legislation, known as the Cares Act. The money also was limited to coronavirus-related expenses that governments did not anticipate in their most recent budgets, according to the Treasury Department, narrowing its use considerably.

In practice, cities and states could not tap their federal allotments to close revenue gaps, even though some of their shortfalls are the result of the coronavirus pandemic. The limitations greatly frustrated officials in states such as New Jersey, where Gov. Phil Murphy (D) on Thursday wagered that he might have no choice but to return some of the money.

Democratic and Republican governors say they realistically need $500 billion to help close the enormous budget holes they face-- or else they risk debilitating cuts. Already, the bleak financial picture has led Pennsylvania to furlough thousands of state workers. Ohio has implemented a hiring freeze. Scores of additional states are anticipating revenue gaps that may leave them no choice but to reduce their labor forces, either temporarily or for longer.

Michigan this month laid off 2,900 municipal employees, a giant, early cut that reflects the dangers of its looming $7 billion shortfall. More than half of its Department of State, which handles driver and vehicle transactions, is out of work for at least the next two weeks, though local officials insist the staff reductions won’t affect operations.

The National League of Cities, meanwhile, has sought $250 billion on behalf of municipalities around the country, nearly all of which anticipate slashing spending and staff to deal with unexpected shortfalls. The NLC came to its dour prediction-- perhaps 1 million layoffs or furloughs in cities and towns nationwide-- in part by extrapolating data from jurisdictions that have announced major reductions in their workforces.

Los Angeles has eyed furloughing 15,000 workers, according to NLC, and Tulsa has sent home 1,000 people without pay, representing a third of the city’s labor force. Other cities including Allentown, Pa., and Boulder, Colo., are starting with cuts to temporary or seasonal employees, joining many communities that have targeted staff at parks and other public staples closed because of stay-at-home orders.

Some of the cuts directly threaten police officers and firefighters. Baltimore has considered about $11 million in total reductions that could affect first responders, which could result in wage freezes or furloughs. The idea has sparked concern among labor unions, which fear it would harm response times.

Oklahoma City anticipates its broader austerity measures won’t be enough to spare public safety agencies in the end, either. “We’ll do the best we can to limit the impact on services we provide as we prepare for a new economic reality,” the city’s budget director said in a statement last week.

In Arlington, Texas, one of the state’s largest metropolitan areas, Republican Mayor Jeff Williams said it is bracing for budget trouble, too. In a normal year, professional sports, local amusement parks and an influx of college students help round out the city’s finances, infusing much needed revenue derived from shopping and tourism. But such spending has ground to a halt, imperiling the city’s balance sheet-- and potentially its workforce.

Arlington’s leaders already have asked local government agencies to plan for reductions in spending between 10 to 25 percent, according to Williams, who described the potential for layoffs or furloughs as a worst-case scenario that residents would feel immediately.

“That would reduce our trash pickup to less than what it is,” he said. “We would have to reduce the maintenance and reconstruction of some of our streets.” And public safety wouldn’t be spared, either. “We couldn’t help but affect our police and firefighters because of the deep cuts,” he said.

This month, Williams joined about 100 Texas mayors from both parties to issue a public plea to Congress, urging lawmakers to adopt “direct and flexible fiscal assistance” in their next coronavirus aid bill. Some officials have found a receptive ear among Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, who joined union leaders on a call Tuesday pledging they would work aggressively to secure such federal aid.

...In fact, the calls for federal aid have been bipartisan, And many states entered the latest economic downturn in a far better financial position than they did the 2008 recession, thanks in part to healthier cash reserves. The data has not assuaged Republicans, including McConnell, who told Politico in an interview that the Senate would not “finance mistakes they’ve made unrelated to the coronavirus.” His office declined to comment for this story.

Other Republicans led by Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) similarly have mobilized in opposition to open-ended aid to struggling city and state governments, breaking with local officials even in the states they represent. “We believe additional money sent to the states for ‘lost revenue’ or without appropriate safeguards will be used to bail out unfunded pensions, reward decades of state mismanagement, and incentivize states to become more reliant on federal taxpayers,” Scott wrote in a draft letter to the president, which he has circulated among his colleagues for signatures. His office confirmed the letter, which attacks New York and Illinois for their financial decisions.

The political gamesmanship has left some city and state leaders anticipating significant delays before federal officials pay them a dime, if it ever comes through at all, leaving many municipal workers out of a job or without pay, while harming their families and those their governments serve.

“This is not about bailing out local governments that have done something wrong, because we’ve not, we’ve stepped up,” said Clarence Anthony, the leader of the National League of Cities. He added, “Playing with the lives of people over a narrative that is not accurate is just not right.”

Eva Putzova is a progressive Democrat running to represent a working families in a vast Arizona congressional district held by a lifelong conservative Republican, Tom O'Halleran, pretending to be a Blue Dog. He was a GOP state legislator while she was fighting for a livable wage as a Flagstaff city council member. She understands the importance of local governance. This morning she told us that "Republican opposition to bailing out states and cities is a disaster in the making. States and cities provide essential services to the U.S. population. It is unconscionable that these services will be cut and more layoffs will occur if aid is not provided promptly. These reductions will adversely impact the poor, women and people of color who work for the public sector as well as those who rely on these essential services. My opponent is nowhere to be seen or heard from on this issue. If he supports the aid to cities and states no one would know it because he is not out-front demanding that it happen. We need members of Congress who are uncompromising in their demands that people matter, not corporations, banks, drug companies, insurance companies and other profit making entities who contribute to their campaigns."

Is It Fair To Point Out That Pelosi Is An Accessory To Trump's Crimes?

Thursday evening, Washington Post reporter's Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey wrote that the Trumpist Regime is "considering a plan to again divert billions of dollars in military funding to pay for border barrier construction next year, a way to circumvent congressional opposition to putting more taxpayer money toward the president’s signature project." The criminal fake "president" needs $18.4 billion to finish 500 miles of photogenic wall before the 2020 election.

Planning documents obtained by the Washington Post show the cost of building 509 miles of barriers averages out to more than $36 million per mile. The documents also show that the government would need to obtain-- either by eminent-domain claims or purchases-- land that lies under nearly 200 miles of proposed barrier.

At a Sept. 11 meeting at the White House led by adviser Jared Kushner, senior officials discussed a plan that would press lawmakers to backfill-- or reimburse-- $3.6 billion of Pentagon funds that the administration diverted this year to pay for fence construction, the officials said.

Trump is forcing the Army Corps of Engineers to bypass regular contracting processes in order to steer all work to North Dakota-based Fisher Industries, a company whose top executive, Tommy Fisher, is a GOP donor and frequent guest on Fox News. North Dakota's crooked senator, Kevin Cramer-- who has received over $10,000 in bribes from the Fisher family-- is the bag-man on the project and has been "deputized" by Trumpanzee to make sure Fisher builds the wall and Republicans and the Trump campaign get appropriate kicks backs.

In short, Trump forces the Pentagon to hand over money appropriated by Congress for specific projects so he can build his vanity project expressly prohibited by Congress, and then the Pentagon goes crying to Congress that they have to have the money for those projects or it will be a disaster.

House on Fire

Apparently, Pelosi finds this aberrant behavior less distasteful than impeaching Trump, making her an accessory to his crimes, from concentration camp funding to the building of this useless monument to his disgusting xenophobia. Yesterday, in his Bloomberg column, Jonathan Bernstein let Pelosi off easy, claiming there's only so much Democrats can do about Señor Trumpanzee's increasingly bold misconduct, by asking How Long Will Republicans Tolerate Trump’s Lawlessness?. The answer is obvious: for as long as their constituents allow them to. He claims it isn't Pelosi, but the Republicans "who have the real decision to make." Bernstein's bullshit line in 3 short sentences: "Because the truth at this point is pretty obvious: If they could be assured of even a smattering of Republican votes, Democrats would almost certainly impeach the president. If they had enough votes to ensure his removal in the Senate, you could remove that 'almost'-- Trump would be gone very rapidly. It’s all up to the Republicans."

What utter bullshit. Pelosi-- who has given up all pretense of governing on behalf of the people rather than on behalf of a tiny, electorally vulnerable Blue Dog fringe within her caucus-- could easily pass David Cicilline's assault weapons sales ban. There are 210 Democratic co-sponors to the bill, one Republican co-sponsor (to give her bipartisan cover if she wants it-- which she doesn't) and at least a dozen members on both sides of the aisle who say they will vote for it on the floor but not co-sponsor it. Pelosi needs 218 to pass it. She has at least 225 votes now. She's full of shit-- and so is Bernstein. He wants to dwell on Trump's criminal behavior-- which is fine-- but excuse Pelosi for allowing it.

We still have only limited information about the emerging whistleblower scandal. But we do know (from what Rudy Giuliani has bragged about) that the president’s lawyer has pressed another country to investigate a Democratic candidate for alleged corruption. That’s on top of the original Trump campaign’s dozens of contacts with a nation attacking U.S. democracy; several documented instances of the president obstructing the investigation of that attack; violations of the emoluments clauses of the Constitution and regular use of government resources to enrich the president’s businesses; and assertions of invented presidential privileges to prevent congressional oversight.

Republicans have been okay with all this, presumably because they’re getting what they want on policy. Or perhaps out of pure partisanship. Or maybe because they’re so deep in the conservative information-feedback loop that they’ve convinced themselves none of it is real. But they should be taking stock now of just how much lawlessness they’re willing to tolerate. At this point, it looks like the whistleblower’s story involves Trump attempting to offer U.S. policy favors to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.

I’ve said all along that there’s a middle ground where the evidence may justify impeachment and removal of the president, but not demand it. Well, the evidence has long since established that impeachment is justified. Now we’re tiptoeing up to the line where it demands removal. At some point, we may wind up clearly over that line by any reasonable definition. If Republicans choose to stick with Trump then, he’ll correctly conclude that he’s above the law.

Democrats can’t do much about this by themselves. Sure, they can attempt to convince the public that Trump’s actions demonstrate that he’s unfit for office, and it’s reasonable to consider every method of doing so, including a partisan impeachment ending in a party-line acquittal in the Senate. They should also continue their investigations, even though much of the case against Trump has been public from the beginning.

But we know how public opinion works. As long as Republicans choose to stay relatively united, either in denying evidence of Trump’s malfeasance or claiming that there’s nothing wrong with it, then Democrats will be unable to generate enough constituent pressure to change their minds. Whatever evidence is turned up, Republicans probably can brazen it out if that’s what they really want, regardless of the damage it does to U.S. democracy. So that leaves one question for them: Is this really what you want?  

"A president is sitting in the Oval Office, right now, who continues to commit crimes. He continues because he knows his Justice Department won’t act and believes Congress won’t either. Today’s news confirmed he thinks he’s above the law. If we do nothing, he’ll be right."- Elizabeth Warren

The Shutdown Has Been Further Damaging An Already Damaged EPA

Andrew Wheeler by Nancy Ohanian

Even before the outrageous Trump-McConnell shutdown began, Trump's America-- which is also, don't forget, our America-- was getting more polluted, dangerously polluted. It is, after all, what the Republican Party stands for more than almost anything else: Pollution For Profit. It's no coincidence that the EPA’s enforcement division has lost at least 80 people since Trump entered office.

On Thursday, Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis reported that "Civil penalties for polluters under the Trump administration plummeted during the past fiscal year to the lowest average level since 1994, according to a new analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data. In the two decades before President Trump took office, EPA civil fines averaged more than $500 million a year, when adjusted for inflation. Last year’s total was 85 percent below that amount-- $72 million."

Cynthia Giles, who headed the EPA’s enforcement office in the Obama administration and conducted the analysis, said the inflation-adjusted figures were the lowest since the agency’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance was established.

The decline in civil penalties could undermine the EPA’s ability to deter wrongdoing, some former agency officials said, because they help ensure it is more expensive to violate the law than to comply with it. But Trump administration officials have said they are focusing much of their effort on working with companies ahead of time so they don’t run afoul of the law, rather than punishing them after the fact. That approach, they say, will ensure business operations can thrive without harming the environment.

Giles, now a guest fellow at the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program, questioned whether the new approach can achieve what administration officials promise.

“The public expects EPA to protect them from the worst polluters,” she said. “The Trump EPA is not doing that. What worries me is how industry will respond to EPA’s abandonment of tough enforcement.”

During his confirmation hearing last week, EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler told lawmakers that there had been “a lot of misleading information” suggesting that the agency had gone easier on polluters under Trump. He cited recent reports from environmental and governance groups that said the EPA’s enforcement had sagged.

...Civil penalties, which the EPA applies for a range of violations, including water contamination and air pollution, aim to recover the financial benefit a company has reaped by breaking the law and to impose additional costs so that firms are deterred from doing it in the future.

The root of the problem is a conservative world view and how the market will fix everything. But Trump's singular ignorance and psychosis has fully weaponized that socially destructive GOP anti-regulatory perspective. At the very end of November, New York Magazine published a report by Adam Raymond, Trump Says He’s Too Intelligent to Believe Climate Change Report, that goes to the heart of the problem normal Americans are facing today when it comes to the environment and to Climate Change. The toxic, swampy Regime's own efforts to delegitimize its own climate change report culminated in Trump doing an interview with Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post. Raymond reprinted a piece of what he called a "rambling, hardly coherent digression." Below is that and more:

DAWSEY: You said yesterday when you were leaving that you were skeptical of a climate change report that the government had done. Can you just explain why you’re skeptical of that report?

TRUMP: One of the problems that a lot of people like myself-- we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including-- just many other places-- the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with.

Number two, if you go back and if you look at articles, they talked about global freezing, they talked about at some point the planets could have freeze to death, then it’s going to die of heat exhaustion. There is movement in the atmosphere. There’s no question. As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it-- not nearly like it is. Do we want clean water? Absolutely. Do we want clean air to breathe? Absolutely. The fire in California, where I was, if you looked at the floor, the floor of the fire, they have trees that were fallen, they did no forest management, no forest maintenance, and you can light-- you can take a match like this and light a tree trunk when that thing is laying there for more than 14 or 15 months. And it’s a massive problem in California.

DAWSEY: So you’re saying you don’t see the...

TRUMP: Josh, you go to other places where they have denser trees-- it’s more dense, where the trees are more flammable-- they don’t have forest fires like this, because they maintain. And it was very interesting, I was watching the firemen, and they’re raking brush-- you know the tumbleweed and brush, and all this stuff that’s growing underneath. It’s on fire, and they’re raking it, working so hard, and they’re raking all this stuff. If that was raked in the beginning, there’d be nothing to catch on fire. It’s very interesting to see. A lot of the trees, they took tremendous burn at the bottom, but they didn’t catch on fire. The bottom is all burned but they didn’t catch on fire because they sucked the water, they’re wet. You need forest management, and they don’t have it.

One of the first 2020 declared candidates, Audrey Denney, up in very rural northeast California, was incensed by Trump's comments which she said "make it clear that he does not have a grasp on the science of climate change, the complexities of forest ecosystems, or the basics of fire prevention. Last November we were experiencing weather patterns and dryness levels that mirrored peak fire season (July). High winds and these extraordinarily dry conditions led to a creating the most devastating fire in California’s history. Our changing climate will continue to threaten lives and property in Northern California and across our country. Many of California’s forests are overgrown and need to be restored to healthy forested ecosystems. It is complex and important work that must to be done. However, nearly 60% of the forests in California are under federal control-- it is the federal government who has chosen to divert resources away from forest management-- not California. As we look ahead to increased risks for people who live in urban-wildland interface areas, we need to devote resources to proper community planning, emergency preparedness, and innovative solutions for minimizing risks. We need leaders that understand the complexity, nuance, and science surrounding these issues."

Rudy Giuliani-- The Gift That Keeps On Giving-- Mueller Couldn't Have Imagined He Could Get This Lucky

No love lost, but late yesterday, Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey, wrote that Señor Trumpanzee's management of the shutdown, which they are kind enough to remind us is his first foray in divided government, has exposed as never before his shortcomings as a self-proclaimed great dealmaker. Fuckface "has been adamant about securing $5.7 billion in public money to construct" his vanity wall but has been incapable of winning congressional approval despite his shutdown antics and shameless hostage-taking. They wrote that "The 30-day shutdown-- the impacts of which have begun rippling beyond the federal workforce into everyday lives of millions of Americans-- is defining the second half of Trump’s term and has set a foundation for the nascent 2020 presidential campaign. The shutdown also has accentuated several fundamental traits of Trump’s presidency: His apparent shortage of empathy, in this case for furloughed workers; his difficulty accepting responsibility for a crisis he had said he would be proud to instigate; his tendency for revenge when it comes to one-upping political foes; and his seeming misunderstanding of Democrats’ motivations."

My favorite new neocon website, The Bullwark-- basically a new name for the Weekly Standard-- featured an essay by-- who else?-- William Kristol Sunday morning, Trump’s Slippage in Support is Real. Click bait? How about this: "The president is losing support-- not just among independents, but from his evangelical and white-male base, too." Nothing all that new here, just more about the Marist poll everyone else covered last week. There's slippage (anticipated) for Trump's standing due to the shutdown. "The slippage is the worst kind-- the slow erosion of support from key blocs: swing voters (independents and suburbanites) and those who put Trump over the top (blue collar white men and Republicans over 60). It’s been registering in a cross section of polling data, not just one poll. Trump’s job approval rating is down to 31 percent among independents in Gallup. His approval ratings in Rasmussen are down from the 48-49 percent range of late last year to the 43-44 percent level of the past week or so. The Marist data for PBS shows a drop of 10 percent in job approval among Republicans and a decline of 11 percent among white evangelicals and 17% among suburban men. And Trump continues to enrage the Dem base while this erosion in his base continues to progress. Blue collar white men being turned off from Trump shouldn’t surprise anyone, for they know the difficulty of living paycheck to paycheck. This, plus the skew of the tax cut package, spells political trouble for Trump long term, especially if a slow down, much less a recession, looms in 2020."

So those are the #NeverTrumpers. Then there are the actual fascists. They're mad at him too. Even the basest part of the base!

This erosion of support is coming at the worst possible moment for Trump-- unless you consider every moment the worst possible moment for Trump-- because of the Putin-Gate scandal. The video up top is Giuliani speaking with Jake Tapper on CNN and the video below is Giuliani on Meet The Press, both interviews yesterday. Does anyone understand how Trump keeps this clown on his team? He keeps giving more and more away. Today it was that the Trump Organization kept negotiating with Russia to build a Trump Tower Moscow right into November of 2016. Previous to that, all that had been dragged out of Trump was that there was some communication about the project until the spring but not beyond.

Chuck Todd had Mark Warner (D-VA), co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on afterwards. Warner seemed pretty surprised Giuliano spilled the beans. "That is news to me, and that is big news. Why, two years after the fact, are we just learning this fact now when there’s been this much inquiry? I would think most voters... that knowing that the Republican nominee was actively trying to do business in Moscow, that the Republican nominee at least at one point had offered, if he built this building, Vladimir Putin, a free-penthouse apartment, and if those negotiations were ongoing up until the election, I think that’s a relevant fact for voters to know. And I think it’s remarkable we are two years after the fact and just discovering it today." The CNN show with Tapper was much worse (for the Trumpists). When Tapper pushed him on whether or not Trump was instructing Cohen how to answer congressional questions about the deal, Giuliani, who seemed frazzled and defensive throughout the interview, said "I don't know if it happened or didn't happen. It may be attorney-client privilege if it happened, where I can't acknowledge it. But I have no knowledge that he spoke to him, but I'm telling you I wasn't there then... So what if he talked to him about it?"

Yeah! So what! Sounds "perfectly normal" to me! You? I'm assuming that Cohen secretly recorded this perfectly normal conversation (which is considered a no-no but isn't illegal unless Individual 1 suggested what Cohen should say. Then it's illegal... and impeachable.

Constitutionally Unfit

September 7 was another day in the life of a narcissistic sociopath. The Washington Post reported that Señor Trumpanzee "woke up in Billings, Montana, flew to Fargo, N.D., visited Sioux Falls and eventually returned to Washington. He spoke to reporters on Air Force One, held a pair of fundraisers and was interviewed by three local reporters. In that single day, he publicly made 125 false or misleading statements-- in a period of time that totaled only about 120 minutes. It was a new single-day high. The day before, the president made 74 false or misleading claims, many in a campaign rally in Montana. Trump’s tsunami of untruths helped push the count in the Fact Checker’s database past 5,000 on the 601st day of his presidency. That’s an average of 8.3 claims a day [he] averaged 32 claims a day."

Yesterday, Ben White reported that in an alternate universe, the fat fuck "would be heading into the midterms relentlessly touting his stewardship of a strong economy with results that include historically low unemployment, solid economic growth, sky-high enthusiasm among small businesses and shattered records for job openings." He'd be busy taking credit for all Obama's achievements from the time he woke top til the time he fell out. Instead, the uncontrollable loser "is repeatedly muddling that message with easily debunked falsehoods or hyperbole about the state of the economy while pressing on with unpopular trade wars that frustrate establishment Republicans and business groups worried about price increases. His undisciplined approach-- coupled with his obsessing about the Russia investigation, Hillary Clinton and the 2016 election-- is damaging what many Republicans say should have been a political slam dunk for the GOP heading into the fall."

Still lying about his regime's disastrous and catastrophic response to Hurricane Maria, he's already claiming "We're getting tremendous accolades from politicians and the people" [for his action on Hurricane Florence]. This is the psychotic president-- illegitimate fake president-- of the United States: "We got A Pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (and did an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan). We are ready for the big one that is coming!" Mentally ill? Sure-- but it's part of his... style. And that's what Josh Dawsey explained so well for Washington Post readers this week.

An estimated 3,000 people died after the devastating Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico last year. Large swaths of the island were without power for months. FEMA was short thousands of workers and underestimated how much food and supplies were needed in the recovery, according to a federal government report.

But in the eyes of President Trump, the government’s response was a raging success-- and one he touted this week as a monstrous hurricane pinwheeled toward the Carolinas.

“We got A Pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (and did an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan),” he wrote Wednesday on Twitter.

It’s a frequent tactic of the president-- elevate a widely perceived failure or mistake and defend it as a great triumph while attacking his critics. His detractors say it is shameless and sometimes comical gaslighting; supporters say he is just a master marketer who uses hyperbole and always shows strength.

“You just never give an inch or admit any mistake in public,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide describing Trump’s mind-set.

Inside the administration, firing James B. Comey as FBI director in May 2017 is widely perceived as an original sin that spun a cascade of other problems for the White House-- including the creation of a special counsel’s investigation that has tormented the president and includes an obstruction-of-justice inquiry. He was repeatedly counseled against the firing by top aides such as former chief of staff Reince Priebus, White House counsel Donald McGahn and former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who have since faced hours of questioning over Trump’s actions as part of the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe.

But rather than show any signs of regret, the president has instead championed Comey’s firing, both publicly and privately, as a smart decision.

“I did a great service to the people in firing him!” Trump tweeted this summer.

Trump faced withering criticism, even from supporters, for standing on a podium in Helsinki in July and cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin while seeming to question U.S. intelligence agencies’ findings that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election and entertaining the idea of letting Russian law enforcement officials question American citizens.

But to hear Trump tell it these days, it was one of his finest hours.

“One of my best meetings ever was with Vladimir Putin,” he said earlier this month, before attacking the “fakers,” or his short-term for the “fake news media.”

This week, he has repeatedly brought up Bob Woodward’s book Feat-- continuously calling attention to a portrayal of his White House as incompetent and veering toward a breakdown. Trump says the book is a “scam” and that his White House is a “smooth running machine.”

Aides say that Trump’s tendency to focus on and defend his perceived failures is fueled by a mix of potent factors. He obsesses over negative news coverage sometimes long after the topic has changed. He often marvels that he can make the cable news chyrons change. And he is constantly selling himself-- regardless of who is in front of him and no matter the topic.

Sometimes, he is trying to preempt criticism that he knows is likely to revive itself, like before this week’s hurricane. And he tells senior aides that his supporters will believe his version of events.

It leads to awkward encounters and surreal situations for those around him. His comments this week on the administration’s handling of the recovery effort in Puerto Rico following last year’s hurricane quickly morphed from a defense of how a difficult situation was handled to a declaration that it couldn’t have gone better.

It was “one of the best jobs that’s ever been done with respect to what this is all about,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday.

It was a statement that drew immediate condemnations and questions about how Trump could characterize the recovery effort as such a success especially on the heels of a study that estimated there were nearly 3,000 excess deaths in Puerto Rico due to the hurricane.

“You know there are no A-pluses in disaster recovery. That letter doesn’t exist,” said Marc Ferzan, who led recovery in New Jersey after Superstorm Sandy and is now a consultant.

...Trump observers and critics said that the president’s refusal to admit mistakes and to go a step further and declare them smart moves has long been part of how he operates.

“One of his great strengths is that he lives in his own reality distortion field-- there is this narrative going on all the time in his head about how successful he is, how great he is-- one of the things that allows him to plow ahead after he makes mistakes,” said Timothy O’Brien, a longtime Trump biographer.

None of this is new. This is what was elected. Forget about Putin's contribution for a moment and forget about what a rotten candidate Clinton was-- a Trump election shows a glaring weakness of democracy. If we're going to stay with it, we'd better get serious about that opioid crisis and do something about the broadcasting of false right-wing propaganda.

Going Down by Nancy Ohanian