Max Boot-- A Conservative Republican-- Explains Why He's Voting The Straight Party Line... For Democrats Up And Down The Ballot

 

Celebrated artist Nancy Ohanian portrays the worst president in history

From what I can recall from a high school course in European history, the terms "right" and "left" were first applied to politics in the early stages of the French Revolution when the representatives of the parties that represented the noble families and Church hierarchy (less than 5% of the population but a majority of the representatives) were seated on the right of the National Assembly (formerly the Estates-General), while the Third Estate, the representatives of about 95% of the population, sat on the left. Those on the left represented the legitimate interests of the working class. Those on the right... eventually got what was coming to them. Reactionary political parties never needed to be "saved," which has what conservative Republican Max Boot was advocating in his Washington Post column yesterday; they always needed and need to be destroyed. "We have to destroy the party in order to save it," he wrote. He admits his party had always had "long-standing problems-- conspiracy-mongering, racism, hostility toward science," but it apparently didn't really matter much to him until Trump was able to "exploit [and] exacerbate all of those maladies, just as he made the coronavirus outbreak much worse than it needed to be." He wrote that he "watched with incredulity the GOP’s descent into collective madness." The madness, though, just exposed what was almost motivation for Republicanism and its the heart of the nature of American conservatism.

Many Republicans I know began by holding their noses and voting for Trump because of judges and taxes and their hatred of Hillary Clinton. Now the whole Republican Party seems to inhabit the Fox News Cinematic Universe, an alternative reality where President Barack Obama spied on Trump and Joe Biden is a socialist who will let “anarchists” and “arsonists” run riot.





The party has even become infected by the lunatic QAnon cult, whose followers believe Trump’s opponents are blood-drinking, Satan-worshipping pedophiles. In one recent poll, half of Trump supporters said top Democrats are involved in child sex trafficking. Georgia’s Senate primary offers a disturbing snapshot of the state of the party: Rep. Douglas A. Collins promotes his endorsement from two convicted felons (former Trump advisers Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos) while Sen. Kelly Loeffler touts her support from Marjorie Taylor Greene, a soon-to-be House member who questioned whether the Pentagon was really attacked on 9/11.

The same trickle-down craziness is evident in Republican mishandling of the coronavirus. Trump has given up trying to control the pandemic, mocks masks and promotes conspiracy theories such as his claim that death counts are inflated because “doctors get more money and hospitals get more money” if they say people died of covid-19. This specious allegation is faithfully echoed by Republicans such as Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa. Red states are paying a devastating price for pandemic denialism: North Dakota has the lowest rate of mask-wearing in the country and the highest covid-19 death rate per capita in the world. [As of yesterday North Dakota had 52,367 cases per million residents, the worst rate of COVID in the entire world outside of Andorra, a tiny principality in the Pyrenees ruled by France and Spain and subsisiting entirely on tourism and smuggling.]

Trump has given permission for Republican bigots to come out into the open-- to replace dog whistles with wolf whistles. Sen. David Perdue (R.-GA) mocked Sen. Kamala Harris’s Indian first name. Madison Cawthorn, a House nominee in North Carolina, proudly visited Hitler’s lair and created a website attacking a journalist for having worked “for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.” Laura Loomer, a Republican candidate for a House seat from Florida, calls herself “a proud Islamophobe” and cheered the deaths of 2,000 refugees crossing the Mediterranean (“Good. 👏 Here’s to 2,000 more”).

The longer Trump stays in office, the more damage he does-- and the more loyal Republicans become. “Axios on HBO” found that, among 178 congressional Republicans who have been in office since Trump began his run for president, 42 percent criticized him after the Access Hollywood tape was released in 2016. Only 12 percent criticized him for the attack on peaceful demonstrators and Bible photo-op this year.

Republicans flatter Trump the way Trump flatters Kim Jong Un. Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary of homeland security, just tweeted that Trump is the “greatest SCOTUS [Supreme Court] President since the founding era (at least), and possibly of all time,” and that his “Nobel Peace Prize for Mideast peace” is a “sure thing.” Internet memes depict the portly president as a superhero.

Trump has no second-term agenda, and the party has no platform other than supporting him. Even the editor of National Review-- supposedly the intellectual leader of conservatism-- suggests that the primary reason to vote for Trump is to extend a middle finger to his critics. This is sheer nihilism-- and it will get worse if Trump wins reelection. By next year, fewer than 1 in 6 House Republicans will have been in office during George W. Bush’s presidency. Trumpism is their reality now.

The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden just released a study showing that in four years the GOP has been transformed into an autocratic party that has much in common with the Fidesz Party in Hungary, the Law and Justice party in Poland and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey.

America needs a sane center-right party. It doesn’t need an extremist party that undermines democracy, caters to White grievances, and rejects science and reason. The only way Republicans will come to their senses is if they see that the path they are on leads to electoral oblivion. That’s why, even though I’m not a Democrat, I’m voting straight-ticket Democratic on Nov. 3-- and for as long as necessary to make Republicans come to their senses. The GOP needs to be detoxified and de-Trumpified.

A Question Too Ugly For Most Of Us To Contemplate-- Why Are Almost 40% Of American Voters Supporting This Orange Blot On Humanity?

 

Minnesota is a state Trump nearly won in 2016. Hillary took the usually dependably blue state, which had the highest percentage of voter participation in the country, by a very narrow 1.5%-- 1,367,716 (46.44%) to 1,322,951 (44.92%). The Democrats won two suburban congressional districts that had been held by Republicans-- and the Republicans won 2 rural congressional districts that had been held by the Democrats. Trump declared it a battleground state early last year and has been working the state heavily-- although to little avail. The Real Clear Politics polling average shows him losing Minnesota to Biden in a 9 point rout. A Langer poll for ABC News and the Washington Post has just 41% of likely voters casting their ballots for Trump (57% for Biden).

The 2016 electoral map by county looks very attractive to Trump and he isn't giving up in Minnesota yet-- but his efforts there could make the outcome even more lopsided against him. On Tuesday, the state reported 1,135 new COVID cases, bringing the state's badly spiking total to 114,574-- 20,316 cases per million residents. Over 2,200 Minnesotans have died from the disease-- and Trump super-spreader rallies in the state are making matters worse. At least two dozen of the new infections came directly out of Trump events. "Facing a steep surge in coronavirus cases," reported the NY Times, "health officials in Minnesota have connected two dozen virus cases to people who attended presidential campaign events in the past month, most of them attendees at airport rallies hosted by President Trump."

It would be hard to imagine Trump doing as well as he did in 2016-- or Biden doing as badly as Hillary did. But in small, rural counties like Morrison, Todd, Pipestone, McLeod, Clearwater, Sibley, Roseau, Isanti, Wadena, Ramsey, Lake of the Woods, Jackson, Pennington, Meeker, Redwood, Martin and Marshall Trump scored over 65% of the vote-- and many of those people are sticking with him, some with great enthusiasm and every expectation in the world that we're about to get another 4 years of his rule.

Reporting yesterday from another Upper Midwest state, Michigan, Politico's Tim Alberta noted that Michigan is looking less competitive by the day, and there’s a growing likelihood that Trump will be buried statewide November 3. In 2016, Trump narrowly won the state's 16 electoral votes by beating Hillary 2,279,543 (47.50%) to 2,268,839 (47.27%), one of the closest calls in the nation. Right now, it doesn't look so close. The Real Clear Politics polling average shows Trump down 7.2%. The most recent poll was released last week by Ipsos for Reuters showed Trump with just 43% to Biden's 51% (and with 22% of ballots already cast).

Alberta pointed out that although all 3 Rust Belt states that Trump improbably won in 2016 "are problematic," Señor T this year, Michigan looks bleakest of all. "His support has diminished among the white working-class. Black turnout appears certain to rebound after a dismal showing in 2016. New laws that allow for early voting and no-excuse-absentee balloting are expected to push voter participation to historic levels, with Democrats the expected beneficiary of low-propensity Michiganders flooding the ballot box. But the simplest explanation for the president’s trouble here is that he’s continuing to hemorrhage support from white, college-educated women in the suburbs of Detroit. It’s hard to overstate just how badly Trump is performing with this crucial demographic. Over the past several weeks, a raft of internal polls have produced numbers that political professionals here are struggling to comprehend. In Oakland County, the second-biggest voting area in the state, Gongwer reported that Democratic polling shows Biden leading Trump by 27 points; Republicans pushed back with a survey showing Trump down only 18 points. (For reference, Trump lost Oakland County by 8 points in 2016.)"

Yep, suburban women are over this goon, but in Michigan-- like in Minnesota-- there were counties where Trump did better than 65% in 2016 and those people are not abandoning him-- small rural counties like Missaukee, Kalkaska, Ogemaw, Hillsdale, Montmorency, Dickinson, Tuscola, Oscoda, Alcona, Lapeer, Newaygo, Gladwin, Otsego, Sanilac, Branch, Wexford, Luce, Huron and Osceola. Why? What the hell is wrong with the people in these places?

Yesterday, conservative columnist Max Boot-- long a right-wing Republican-- asked the same question in his Washington Post column, How can 42 percent of Americans still support the worst president in our history? Boot has an endless list of indictments against Trump that we've all internalized already: "Trump is on track to be the first president since World War II to see a net loss of jobs during his term. Even worse, he has presided over the loss of 214,000 lives 221,000 lives and counting from covid-19. That’s already nearly four times the U.S. fatalities in the Vietnam War, previously the nadir of presidential bungling. Even now, after having contracted covid-19 himself, Trump refuses to take the pandemic seriously. He keeps promising it will magically disappear of its own accord while holding rallies practically guaranteed to spread the disease. As if that weren’t reason enough to vote for Biden, there is also the fact that Trump has abused his power; he was even impeached for doing so. He has trafficked in racism and xenophobia. He has incited violence. He has kowtowed to dictators and trashed our alliances. He has welcomed Russian attacks on our elections. He has locked children in cages. He has called for his opponents to be locked up. In sum, Trump has made a strong case that he is the worst president in our history."

And then the nub: "Yet tens of millions of voters still support him. What are they thinking? I get that there are single-issue voters to whom Trump has a strong appeal-- people who feel passionately about tax cuts, judges, abortion or Israel. There are also people for whom Trump’s boorishness, racism and xenophobia are not a turnoff but a selling point... There are also, of course, many Trump voters who are convinced that he is the lesser evil, because Biden is supposedly plotting to turn the United States into a 'large scale version of Venezuela,' even while suffering from 'dementia.' They claim Biden is a 'puppet' of the far left, even though he opposes Medicare-for-all, the Green New Deal, a ban on fracking, defunding the police, expanding the Supreme Court and other progressive ideas."

Here's what's painful to think about our fellow Americans in places like Tuscola and Oscoda counties in Michigan, Pipestone and McLeod counties in Minnesota-- as well as Modoc County in California (71.8% Trump), Allegany County in New York (68.4% Trump) and even Wocester, Bristol, Plymouth and Barnstable counties in Massachusetts where Trump lost in 2016 but still managed to get over 40% of the vote in each. Boot blames Fox News:

A Pew Research Center survey makes clear the extent of the problem. Among those who get their election news primarily from Fox “News,” 86 percent say Trump is delivering the “completely right” or “mostly right” message about the pandemic, 78 percent that “the U.S. has controlled the outbreak as much as it could have” and 61 percent that Trump and his administration get the facts right about the coronavirus “almost all” or “most of the time.” Perhaps the most disturbing finding of all: 39 percent of Fox News viewers say that QAnon-- an insane conspiracy theory that posits that Trump’s opponents are satanic child-molesters-- is “somewhat good” or “very good” for the country.

 

I’m sorry, these are not issues on which rational people can legitimately disagree. Trump’s covid-19 message-- that, as he said Saturday, “it is disappearing”-- is objectively false. In the past week, daily confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States have increased by 13.3 percent and hospitalizations by 9.8 percent. Trump’s claims to the contrary, we have done far worse during the pandemic than most wealthy countries. If we had the same death rate as Canada, 132,000 victims of covid-19 would still be alive. And it should go without saying that QAnon, whose adherents have been linked to numerous acts of violence, is a bane, not a boon.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) used to say: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” That’s no longer true.

...[T]he rise of Fox News and Facebook allows “fake news” to spread much more readily-- and Trump gives it the imprimatur of the Oval Office. It’s bad enough that the president lies so much; what’s worse is that so many think he is telling the truth.

Unfortunately, even if Trump is defeated, a large portion of the country will continue to believe a lot of things that simply are not so-- and a small but significant number could be led into violence by their lunatic beliefs. The disturbing plot by members of a right-wing militia to kidnap the governor of Michigan may be a taste of what is to come. As Francisco Goya warned, “the sleep of reason produces monsters.”

Say What You Will About China... They Have A Gold Standard Way To Open Up Businesses

You don't need to watch this whole long video. I have it started at a spot that explains how China has been able to successfully reopen businesses. That's the part that's important to listen to. There is a difference between opening up willy-nilly (the Texas and Florida model) and opening up safely (the China model). I left in a short intro by Chris Martenson, but the stuff about the epidemic prevention measures by the guy in the red shirt with the British or Australian accent-- at around the 7 minute mark-- is what we need to hear. He discusses 6 categories of things that will protect workers as we reopen offices, factories, stores, etc. They are mandated by law in China-- what Martenson calls a "no b.s. sort of approach." Listen to what he says about masks; this is crucial and a major problem for Republicans.

• health checks
• social distancing
• personal cleanliness
• no touching of anything
• disinfection of facilities
• eating and smoking rules

Last week, Mike Davis, predicted at Jacobin that the way the U.S. is reopening will send us to hell. "People desperately need to go back to work and save what they can of their lives. But heeding the siren call of the MAGA demonstrators, puppets on strings manipulated by hedge funds and billionaire casino owners, to 'reopen the economy' would only result in tragedy." He then asks his readers to consider 4 points:

• Sending millions of people back to work without protection or testing would be a death sentence for thousands. Thirty-four million workers are over fifty-five; ten million of them over sixty-five. Millions more suffer from diabetes, chronic respiratory problems, and so on. Straight from home to work to ICU to morgue.
• Millions of our “essential workers” face intolerable hazards because of the shortage of protective equipment. It will be weeks, at best, before there will be an adequate supply for medical workers. Workers in warehouses, markets, and fast food have no guarantee of ever receiving masks, unless legislation compels it. If this is a war, Trump’s refusal to use existing laws to federalize the manufacture of masks and ventilators is a war crime.
• The proposal to test people’s blood and then issue back-to-work certificates if they have the right antibodies is mere fantasy at the moment. Washington has allowed more than a hundred different firms to sell serological kits without human trials or FDA certification. The results they give are all over the map, just a mess. It may be weeks or longer before public health workers have reliable diagnostics to use. Even then it would take months to test the workforce and it’s doubtful that enough people would have the antibodies to safely staff all the closed businesses.
• The most heroic assumption is that a vaccine could be available by spring 2021, although no one knows how long its conferred immunity would last. Meanwhile, hundreds of research teams and smaller biotech firms are working on medicines that will reduce the risk of respiratory failure and serious heart or kidney damage. But this sprawling scientific experiment lacks coordination and funding from Washington.

"Nothing," he concluded, "is as emblematic of the Trump administration’s total dereliction of duty than the fact that on the same day that the president was bragging of the United States’ 'unmatched scientific and technological superiority,' the New York Times was devoting a page to 'How to Sew a Mask at Home.'"

Yesterday, Max Boot explained why these crackpot Republican death cult conspiracy theories are more dangerous than ever. "Every great disaster of the past century has brought forth conspiracy-mongers," he explained "What’s different about this particular moment in conspiracy history? Three things, I think. First, conspiracy theories spread more efficiently by social media than by previous communications media. The online world is a post-truth space where there are no undisputed facts, only competing narratives, and even the most deranged claims (e.g., QAnon) can aggregate an audience. Second, the stakes are higher now. It doesn’t much matter if someone thinks that UFOs landed at Roswell, N.M., or that Elvis is still alive-- but it matters greatly if someone thinks that the coronavirus isn’t real or that a vaccine may be more dangerous than the disease. Such beliefs, if they become widespread, pose a danger to public health. Indeed, anti-vaccine activists are already a menace. Third, we now have an unhinged conspiracy-monger in the White House."

A couple of days ago, John Pavlovitz wrote about how badly the white evangelical church in America has failed us all-- "fully, grievously, irreparably... The irony in place, is that despite all their sanctimonious sermonizing and finger-wagging condemnation and sky-is-falling histrionics, the white Evangelical Church has enabled, nurtured, and championed more inequity and more misery in these days than any other entity-- and there is no close second. For the disparate masses of the world, the Church has become a barrier to belonging, a sanctuary for supremacy, and a hostile presence for the least of these... But more than anyone-- the white Evangelical Church has failed Jesus."

He's talking about Trump's people-- his last remaining base of support other than Big Money. He wrote that they've misappropriated Jesus' likeness, hijacked Jesus' name, and weaponized Jesus' message into something grotesque and oppressive-- and it is rightfully repelling good people. If not for the white Evangelical Church, people might see the peacemaking, wound-healing, leper-embracing, crowd-feeding Jesus that deserves to be seen-- and run toward it. If not for them, religion might not be a trigger of the worst abuse and the greatest harm and the worst violence that has visited them. If not for the White Evangelical Church, Christianity might be the refuge for the hurting and the hopeless that it was intended to be-- and it can be again." I thought what followed would be the perfect way to start a Sunday in the Age of the Pandemic:

Followers of Jesus can be the healers and lovers of people that we were called to be if we have the courage to be, if we have the strength to oppose this bitterness, to reject it, and to leave it.

So cue the exodus, throw open the doors, and let the good people stream out of the pews and into the streets. May that thing become a deserving dead relic of the distant past; a dusty museum of another fully fallen empire.

Let us set a table big enough for everyone who has been failed by this Frankensteined freak show claiming to be of God, and let us remind people that where Jesus is, there is good news for the poor, embrace for the unloved, rest for the weary, and a belly-busting meal that demands no prerequisite but hunger. Let us make sure love gets the last, loudest word.

Yes, the white Evangelical Church has failed us, but followers of Jesus will not fail him-- and we will not fail one another.

Want to know why the U.S. is going to have hundreds of thousands more cases and more deaths than need be? Here's why:

How many masks do you see in that demonstration? Or in this one below? Not even the cops are wearing masks! No wonder Minnesota has been spiking like mad! There were 840 new cases yesterday, bringing the total to 19,845-- not because of the governor, but because of the idiots like the ones in this clip. Minnesota has a frightening 3,519 cases per million and, unfortunately, is headed for a horrible Wave II. Tragic!

Trump-- Incompetent And Unfit By Nature

How many times have you seen columns called The Worst President Ever? A conservative historian, Max Boot did a good one yesterday, noting that he's been reluctant to label Señor Trumpanzee the worst president in U.S. history. "Some presidents who seemed awful to contemporaries (Harry S. Truman) or simply lackluster (Dwight D. Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush) look much better in retrospect," he wrote. "Others, such as Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, don’t look as good as they once did. So I have written, as I did on March 12, that Trump is the worst president in modern times-- not of all time. That left open the possibility that James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding or some other nonentity would be judged more harshly. But in the past month, we have seen enough to take away the qualifier 'in modern times.' With his catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus, Trump has established himself as the worst president in U.S. history."

The Trump Regime has managed to screw up the massive $2 trillion bailout bill Congress passed last month. Americans without savings and small businesses are in hot water. Jeff Stein wrote Sunday that "Small-business owners have reported delays in getting approved for loans without which they will close their doors, while others say they have been denied altogether by their lenders and do not understand why. The law’s provision to boost unemployment benefits has become tangled in dated and overwhelmed state bureaucracies, as an unprecedented avalanche of jobless Americans seeks aid." Republicans ideologically hate government. Expecting them to be able to handle an emergency in unrealistic, especially when jobs are filled based on ideology and personal loyalty to the leader-- and never based on competence.

Stein continued that "Officials at the Internal Revenue Service have warned that $1,200 relief checks may not reach many Americans until August or September if they haven’t already given their direct-deposit information to the government. Taxpayers in need of answers from the IRS amid a rapidly changing job market are encountering dysfunctional government websites and unresponsive call centers that have become understaffed as federal workers stay home."

Dan Balz also focused on Trumpist incompetence and dysfunction and their inability to adequaltely respond to the pandemic. He pointed out that Trump "downplayed the coronavirus threat, was slow to move and has delivered mixed messages to the nation. The federal bureaucracy bungled rapid production of tests for the virus. Stockpiles of crucial medical materials were limited and supply lines cumbersome. States and hospitals were plunged into life-and-death competition with one another. When the public looked to government for help, government sometimes looked helpless or frozen or contradictory-- and not for the first time." Republicans, as I said, are incapable of making government work. They hate government and have put all their efforts into... drowning it in a bathtub.

Drown Him In A Bathtub by Chip Proser

The country and its [Republican] leaders were caught off guard when terrorists on hijacked airplanes attacked the homeland on Sept. 11, 2001. The financial crisis of 2008, which turned into a deep recession, forced drastic, unprecedented action by a government struggling to keep pace with the economic wreckage. The devastation from Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992 and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 exposed serious gaps in the government’s disaster response and emergency management systems.

“We always wait for the crisis to happen,” said Leon Panetta, who served in government as secretary of defense, director of the CIA, White House chief of staff, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the House. “I know the human failings we’re dealing with, but the responsibility of people elected to these jobs is to make sure we are not caught unawares.”

...Repeated crises have shown that government is rarely, if ever, fully prepared. Nor is government as flexible as it needs to be to respond as quickly or creatively as conditions often demand. Many factors contribute to what appear to be chronic weaknesses that can compound problems and reduce public confidence. Lessons learned after the fact solve past problems without necessarily anticipating future ones.

Leadership is important, and President Trump will have on his record what he did and didn’t do in the early stages of this particular crisis. But the problems go far broader and deeper than what a president does. Lack of planning and preparation contribute, but so too does bureaucratic inertia as well as fear among career officials of taking risks. Turnover in personnel robs government of historical knowledge and expertise. The process of policymaking-on-the-fly is less robust than it once was. Politics, too, gets in the way.

Mike Pence, Coronavirus Czar by Nancy Ohanian

Long ago, this was far less the case, a time when the United States projected competence and confidence around the globe, said Philip Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia who served in five administrations and was executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

“America had the reputation of being non-ideological, super pragmatic, problem solvers, par excellence,” he said. “This image of the United States was an earned image, of people seeing America do almost a wondrous series of things... We became known as the can-do country. If you contrast that with the image of the U.S. today, it’s kind of depressing.”

Government officials have worried about the threat of a pandemic like the coronavirus for many years. In the fall of 2005, President George W. Bush tasked Fran Townsend, his homeland security adviser, to develop a national pandemic strategy. What prompted the directive was not an imminent threat to which he had been alerted by advisers; it was because he had read John Barry’s book, The Great Influenza, about the flu pandemic of 1918.

Townsend recalled that when she convened an interagency meeting to launch the project, she met significant resistance from Cabinet officials who said they had far more urgent problems to deal with. Only with prodding and presidential insistence did the pandemic strategy get put together, and it was part of the Bush team’s handoff to the administration of Barack Obama during that transition.

The Obama administration ended up dealing with a series of virus threats, and that experience shaped the transition handoff to the Trump administration three years ago.

On Jan. 13, 2017, Lisa Monaco, who was White House homeland security and counterterrorism adviser in the Obama administration, convened a meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The session brought together the members of the outgoing Obama Cabinet with the Cabinet designees in the incoming Trump administration.

Attendees included the outgoing and incoming secretaries of homeland security, Jeh Johnson and John Kelly, who later became White House chief of staff. Tom Bossert, who was to be Monaco’s successor as White House homeland security adviser and who has since left the Trump administration, acted as co-chair.

The session dealt with terrorism and cyber and various other threats, but because the Obama administration had been through H1N1, the Ebola crisis and the Zika virus, Monaco included a discussion of what she regarded as the nightmare scenario: a new strain of flu that was a respiratory illness for which there was no vaccine and that because of globalization and travel patterns would be nearly impossible to contain.

“I don’t want to give an impression that we bestowed the answer key for dealing with such a challenging and unprecedented crisis,” Monaco said. “But the idea was to identify issues that would say these are the kinds of things you need to be planning for and thinking about now.”

What does it mean for the federal government to be prepared? “Oftentimes, the gauge is no mistakes, no criticism, just complete smooth sailing,” Monaco said. “That to me is not the definition of what it means to be prepared.”

She argued that preparation means planning ahead of a crisis, and having structures and organizations that can move quickly and principles that guide decision-making. “I think it’s about trying as best to minimize the chaos, particularly at the beginning,” she said.

Almost by definition, a crisis is something no one has or can prepare for fully. As Zelikow put it, what government is least prepared for is to do things “different from what it did yesterday.” Then the question becomes whether government is agile enough to figure out what to do next. On that measure, the record is not encouraging either.

Joshua Bolten, who served as White House chief of staff in the administration of George W. Bush, said, “It’s especially hard for government to be prepared for the unexpected or the unpredicted. That was certainly true in 9/11. When you think back to 2001, if you had said that, while it looks like there’s enhanced risk of terrorist activity in the United States, I don’t know that you necessarily would have checked on who was enrolling in flight schools.”

It isn’t that government doesn’t do planning. The Pentagon has contingency plans for wars, conflicts and disasters-- “for anything everywhere... for everything,” as Panetta put it. But federal domestic agencies don’t have the same culture as the Pentagon.

“The Pentagon bureaucracy has the resources to do that. There’s a deputy secretary for everything,” said Johnson, who served as general counsel at the Pentagon before going to DHS. “Homeland security is a relatively new concept. The headquarters bureaucracy at DHS is still a work in progress.”

But plans by themselves are not a measure of preparedness. When Stephen Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, was deputy mayor of New York, his portfolio included emergency management. When he would ask about potential disasters, “They’d take out a black three-ring notebook and they’d say, ‘We have a three-ring notebook for that.’ ” That was only partially reassuring, he added, “because the chances of something happening not in a three-ring notebook is really high.”

Goldsmith assesses the situation this way: “I think we’ve gotten relatively good as a country-- local, state and federal government-- at the professional performance of routines. Our ability to accomplish the important routines of government on a daily basis is very high.”

But there are limitations, he said. “One is, are they conducive to imagination? Second, do they value the exercise of discretion throughout the system? And third, are they good at calculating the risk across agencies? What are the trade-offs of closing a country?”

The culture of plans on shelves can carry government officials only so far when disaster strikes. What then becomes more important are the systems in place that allow for quick action, improvisation and the rapid creation of systems to deal with the unexpected.

...Lack of integration-- public health with emergency management with economic assistance-- across the government creates other obstacles. So too does turnover in personnel or vacancies in key positions, which has been a continuing problem particularly in this administration.

“If you do not have people who do not remember the lessons learned and you don’t have people who have navigated these enough to have relationships across the government, you can be hampered,” said Mark Harvey, former senior director for resilience policy at the National Security Council. “You never want to be exchanging business cards at a disaster scene.”

...The Trump administration has been particularly weak in that regard, with scores of long-standing vacancies in critical positions, hostility toward career officials who are vitally important in times like these and with an indifference to the importance of selecting competent political appointees, rather than presidential favorites, that began during the transition and has plagued the government ever since.

Success goes beyond a president’s capacity to engage and move the bureaucracy. A top-down system inhibits quick action when needed. Experts in disaster management suggest that a functional system empowers officials farther down in the government to act without having been ordered to do so. Coordination must be at higher levels of government; response should be at a much lower level.

...Zelikow pointed to an earlier era when the world looked at the United States as being capable of almost anything. He cited the Marshall Plan that helped save Europe after World War II and creation of the Berlin Airlift in 1948 when the Soviet Union shut off ground access to Berlin, which threatened the well-being of residents there. In that case, improvisation quickly turned into a system that eventually forced the Soviets to relent and reopen the city.





...The Obama administration earned generally good marks for the way officials dealt with the Ebola crisis in 2014, consolidating decision-making under one person, Ron Klain, who had previously served as vice presidential chief of staff. He later recommended that he be the last disease-specific czar, that government needed a permanent expertise within the White House.

Improvisation in the midst of a crisis requires one set of skills, both in terms of leadership and the capacity for creative policymaking. “It’s really hard for government to understand every different collateral consequence that will occur until you start to experience it,” said former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, whose state was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

...The absence of capacity for real planning could be especially damaging in the context of a threat farther out on the horizon. Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, looks at what has happened with the coronavirus pandemic to speculate about how the government might deal with threats from climate change.

“In the United States, as you know, we had a solid two months’ warning and did nothing. And even now, in terms of getting testing and masks set up and the like, there are incredible delays,” he said. “So we might finally overcome those problems. But, you know, with climate change, you need a 20-to-30-year ramping up for it to work.”

Cowen said it’s inexplicable why the federal government, given all the warnings and evidence from China of a spreading pandemic, did not move more rapidly.

“You know, Trump was terrible, but you can’t just pin it on him. It’s far more systemic than that. The NBA [which suspended its season on March 11] really gets so much credit. I would put the NBA in charge of fighting climate change at this point.”

“The question for me is, does government retain a certain baseline level of preparedness... and then whether government is nimble and agile enough to take a baseline and put it on steroids when something occurs,” said Janet Napolitano, former secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration.

The performance by the Trump administration and the government as a whole in responding to the coronavirus pandemic will be thoroughly examined. The president’s handling already is a focus of criticism, and his reelection could hinge on how the public assesses his leadership next November. A national commission similar to that which was created after 9/11 could follow with a thorough exploration of what has happened.

Lessons will be learned and changes will be made, as they have after other disasters. Anyone looking for a few simple fixes-- a fuller stockpile of material, more funding for public health, a designated agency to deal with the next new virus-- will quickly find themselves disappointed. Those changes alone, however needed, will not have solved the underlying problems of a governing and political culture that, for all the good they can do when called upon, have limits, especially when officials are caught unawares and forced to act in new and unfamiliar ways.

“I’ve often wondered if democracy writ large is designed to be responsive rather than preemptive,” said Tom Ridge, the nation’s first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. “One of the lessons perhaps as a result of this is we’ll be a little more inclined to be preemptive. With election cycles every two years, there is not a lot of credence given to people who take a longer view.”

Die For Me by Nancy Ohanian

Instead we get a severely sick narcissist. Yesterday he decided to spend his time on the national stage attacking Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker for "allegedly 'complaining all the time' during Sunday's coronavirus White House press briefing, adding that he "hasn't performed well" amid the COVID-19 pandemic. 'There is a governor, I hear him complaining all the time, Pritzker. He is always complaining,' Trump said during Sunday's White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing. 'I just said, Give me a list of a couple of the things we've done in Illinois. We're building a 2,500-bed hospital in McCormick Place, that's a big convention center in Chicago. We're helping to staff it and probably will end up staffing it because he's not able to do what he's supposed to be able to do as the governor. He has not performed well,' the president added."

Would You Vote For Anyone-No-Matter-Who Against Trump? What About Republican-Pretending-To-Be-A-Democrat Michael Bloomberg?

Did you get inundated with requests for contributions on Friday? The DCCC and DSCC-- and the lame consultants they work with-- encourage their candidates to flood everyone's mailboxes with desperate, hollow pleas for donations for the bullshit "end of the month deadline." It used to be all about the end of the quarter deadline. Soon it will be about the end of the week deadline and eventually the end of the day deadline.

Coincidentally, the final reports have come in with the end of the quarter FEC filings. Let's talk a look at the FEC reports filed for each candidate vying for the Democratic presidential nomination filed for the quarter ending December 31. Tom Steyer raised $205,380,488 and spent $199,989,748. 98.58% of his money raised was self-funded ($202,496,602).

Bloomberg raised $200,359,618.56 and spent $188,385,951.94. He self-funded virtually all of it-- $200,114,049 (00.88%).

Among the candidates not trying to buy the White House, these are the raised/spent numbers so far for the cycle:

• Bernie- raised $107,916,369, spent $89,743,329
• Elizabeth- raised $81,291,563, spent $67,576,254
• Mayo- raised $75,427,078, spent $60,908,002
• Status Quo Joe- raised $59,545,050, spent $50,601,488
• Yang- raised $31,331,251, spent $27,158,259
• Klobuchar- raised $28,736,113, spent $23,762,532
• Tulsi- raised $12,447,703, spent $9,689,816
• Michael Bennet- raised $6,831,685, spent $6,314,126

Writing for Open Secrets, Karl Evers-Hillstrom of the Center for Responsive Politics reported that Bloomberg has already shattered all self-funding records in history-- and just two months after announcing.

By generously funding his own campaign, Bloomberg has already surpassed his 2020 rival Presidential Donald Trump in the record books. Not adjusted for inflation, Trump held the self-financing title for his 2016 campaign, pouring over $66 million of his own money into it. But Trump relied on contributions in the general election and is not personally bankrolling his reelection campaign.

Bloomberg’s figure dwarfs even that of billionaire Ross Perot, who spent $63.5 million of his own money on his 1992 presidential bid. That’s about $115 million when adjusted for inflation.

Bloomberg, who has already accumulated $33 million in debt to his own committee, stuck by his promise to reject all campaign contributions. He argues in his campaign ads that he is the only candidate not beholden to “special interests.”

The former New York City mayor spent $180 million through the end of the year, twice as much as the next top spender in the Demcoratic primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Bloomberg has already spent $300 million on TV and digital ads through the end of January, according to an estimate from Advertising Analytics.

Sanders campaign aides have expressed concern about Bloomberg’s massive spending, but so have aides to former Vice President Joe Biden. The two moderates are headed for a clash on Super Tuesday, where Bloomberg has concentrated almost all of his ad spending. Biden aides are reportedly concerned that Bloomberg’s rise could hand Sanders the nomination.

A recent survey from the Los Angeles Times and University of California found that Sanders has a strong lead in California, which holds roughly 40 percent of Super Tuesday’s convention delegates. Sanders is polling at 26 percent, compared to Biden’s 15 percent and Bloomberg’s 6 percent, according to the poll.

The Democratic National Committee handed Bloomberg a win Friday when it changed its qualification rules for its Feb. 19 debate in Nevada. Candidates no longer need to hit a donor threshold, only needing to reach 10 percent in four relevant polls.

If he doesn’t win the nomination, Bloomberg has said he will convert his campaign into an independent effort to support the Democratic nominee in November. He is reportedly willing to spend $1 billion on the election, which would be an unprecedented amount of spending by a single person.

A reliable source inside and high up in Team Bloomie contradicts what Bloomberg-- a notorious liar-- has said about supporting whichever Democrat wins the primary. According to the source, who has never steered me wrong, if Bernie wins-- as appears likely-- Bloomberg will try to mount an independent campaign, reportedly with Stacey Abrams as his running mate, to throw the election to Trump and keep Bernie out of the White House. Fake right-wing Democrats like Bloomberg have tried to do the same thing in the past, successfully against William Jennings Bryan and unsuccessfully against FDR.




In his Washington Post column yesterday, ex-Republican Max Boot wrote that the GOP doesn't deserve to survive the debacle they created. Boot began by claiming he would never rejoin the GOP, which he left the day after Trump won the 2016 election. [NOTE: It's important to remember that Boot and other #NeverTrumpers are conservative Republicans at heart, not Democrats, and while we welcome their hatred of Trump, the Democratic Party actually stands for things they despise. They should have no role in picking our candidates.] Boot noted that when Trump leaves the White House "he will leave behind a quasi-authoritarian party that is as corrupt as he is. The failure to call witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial revealed the GOP’s moral failure."

He Can Do It by Nancy Ohanian

The most significant of the “nay” votes was Lamar Alexander (TN), a 79-year-old political warhorse who is retiring this year. He admitted what the most purblind Trump partisans will not: that “it was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent.” The reason he did not need to hear any witnesses, Alexander explained, was because “there is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven.” So far, so good. But then he pivoted to argue that for some reason Trump’s misconduct doesn’t meet the “high bar for an impeachable offense.” He concluded that the verdict on Trump should be left to “the presidential election”-- you know, the election Trump just tried to fix.

Alexander’s statement raises more questions than it answers: If Trump’s attempt to blackmail Ukraine into helping him politically does not rise to the level of impeachable conduct, what does? Does Alexander subscribe to Alan Dershowitz’s doctrine of presidential infallibility? And, even if he doesn’t want to keep Trump off the ballot, why doesn’t he advocate Trump’s censure or political defeat? But instead of advocating any punishment for Trump’s “inappropriate” conduct, Alexander wants him rewarded by being reelected.

Sen. Marco Rubio (FL) at least made clear that he rejects the argument-- raised by the president’s lawyers but rejected by almost all scholars-- "that ‘Abuse of Power’ can never constitute grounds for removal unless a crime or a crime-like action is alleged.” He, too, seems to assume that Trump is guilty, although he doesn’t quite say so. But Rubio argued “against removal in the context of the bitter divisions and deep polarization our country currently faces.”

Of course, if Trump were removed, it would require the support of 20 Republican senators, so it would hardly be partisan. But lest anyone think that Rubio is refusing to call witnesses for purely partisan reasons, he patted himself on the back for rejecting “calls to pursue [the] impeachment of President Obama,” without specifying what Obama could have been impeached for. You can bet that if Obama had done what Trump did, Rubio would be in favor of impeachment.

But wait. It gets worse. The prize for the most illogical statement must go to Sen. Lisa Murkowksi (AK). She wrote: “Given the partisan nature of this impeachment from the very beginning and throughout, I have come to the conclusion that there will be no fair trial in the Senate.” She then announced her opposition to calling witnesses-- a move that could have made the trial a lot fairer. Huh?

Given the flimsiness of the Republicans’ rationales, it’s hard not to conclude that something else accounts for their decision-making. It’s obvious what’s going on in Rubio’s case-- he thinks he has a future in politics and wants to stay on the good side of Trump supporters. His colleagues who are facing reelection this year, such as Cory Gardner (CO) and Thom Tillis (NC), are no doubt terrified Trump will endorse a primary challenger. Some other Republicans are no doubt deluded enough to imagine that Trump’s call was “perfect.” But what about Alexander and other senators who know better and will never face the voters again?

Tim Alberta of Politico makes a convincing case that even retiring lawmakers fear breaking with the president would hurt their future “earning power” and subject them to unwelcome “harassment” from Trump cultists. These concerns are understandable but should not be dispositive. Senators who shirk their constitutional duties are cowards who disgrace their oaths of office and betray the Constitution. Our troops risk their lives for this country; these senators won’t even risk some unpleasantness.

I want nothing to do with a party led by the deluded and the dishonest. I fervently hope our democracy survives this debacle. I fervently hope the Republican Party does not.

What's Better, An Incompetent Trump Or A Competent Trump?

Auschwitz Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

"Trump," wrote Philip Bump in his Washington Post column yesterday, "appears to simply be making the figure up." What figure? Does it matter? Trump makes everything up. (So does Biden, but not as much). Bump was talking about how Trump consistently lies about his approval numbers, "touting a 93% approval rating from Republicans. The first iteration of that figure that we found came from a straw poll conducted at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which is a bit like foxes claiming to be overwhelmingly popular after surveying people at a furry convention. It’s like asking about support for the Second Amendment at a gun show. In June, though, Trump tacked on a percentage point. He first claimed to have 94% support from Republicans during a news conference with then-British Prime Minister Theresa May. Our fact-checkers looked into it, determining that there was no public poll showing anything of the sort. If it was an internal campaign poll, it hasn’t been made public (our fact-checkers asked). Since then, though, 94% has supplanted 93% in Trump’s rhetoric, with his touting this purported number over and over and over again."

Lying is Trump's modus operandi. (Biden's too, but not as much.) As Max Boot wrote in his own Post column in the same edition, "Trump inherited more than $400 million from his father and invested in one failed business after another." New polling, he reports, "shows voters aren’t buying Trump's bullshit as much as they once did," not about anything.

Another Post reporter, Karen DeYoung, wrote on Sunday night that Trump's regime is in a shambles policy-wise. She wrote that the bumbling non-leader some call "president" had screwed up Afghanistan even more. "Plans for U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, in keeping with President Trump’s pledge to end the war there, were thrown into confusion Sunday, following Trump’s decision to call off a secret meeting he planned with Afghan and Taliban leaders to secure a peace deal. Competing versions of what led to the cancellation of the meeting and, at least temporarily, any further U.S.-Taliban negotiations, exposed internal administration tensions that have flared as a deal seemed near in recent weeks. Those tensions have pitted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whose chief negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, said a week ago that agreement 'in principle' had been reached after 10 months of talks with the militants, and Trump national security adviser John Bolton, who opposed the talks."

Trump, she reported, is "likely to move ahead with the planned initial withdrawal, regardless of the apparent collapse of negotiations." Trump had been the main person pushing for the Camp David meeting-- on the anniversary of the 9/11 debacle no less. "Trump," she wrote, "thinks his personal style can persuade anyone, and that he has seen the possibility of a substantial Afghan withdrawal as a major plus for his reelection campaign... The Taliban said that the decision to end the U.S.-Taliban peace process for now would 'lead to more losses for the United States,' spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said in a statement. 'Its credibility will be affected, its anti-peace stance will be exposed to the world, losses to lives and assets will increase.'"

Sounds like a real shit-show, right? And it most ways it is. Trump's colossal incompetence is one of the biggest scandals of the long list of scandals that has made this the worst presidency in American history. (There are new virtually no serious historians who disagree that Trump is the worst occupant of the White House ever, worse than Hoover, worse than Nixon, rose than Buchanan, worse than Taylor and Tyler, worse than Harding... just the worst. 

Mark Gamba, the progressive mayor of Milwaukie, Oregon who is running for a congressional seat held by right-wing Blue Dog Kurt Schrader confirmed what the historians are all saying: "Trump is the worst, most corrupt President, certainly in this century and arguably in the history of the country. The damage he’s done to our international relationships will take many years to repair. The damage he’s caused to civility, decency and public discourse is tearing the country apart. The damage he is doing to the future of the planet by avoiding strong climate action may be the crime of the millennia. I suspect that he is in deep with the Russian banks because no one else will loan him money after all the bankruptcies. That explains the pandering to Russia, and his dismissal of their intervention in our elections. The Republicans always paint themselves as more patriotic, but how patriotic is it to prop up a president this corrupt, who is likely in bed with one of our enemies? The shocking loss to Trump has made the democratic leadership gun shy and unwilling to begin formal impeachment inquiries. It’s time to put people into office that are not so twisted up by their own machinations and those of the opposition that they can’t even recognize their duty to their country. If I were in Congress right now, I would be calling for formal impeachment inquiries. There is far too much on the line for anything less."

But there is one way that Trump has proven to be a fast learner-- he's figured out how to corrupt the entire government, something that doesn't surprise any serious Trump-watchers. Jonathan Chait: "Trump came to the presidency a complete novice to government and often found his corrupt, authoritarian impulses frustrated by its bureaucracy. But he is slowly learning how to control the machine that has stymied him. This is the story of 2019, as Trump has replaced institutionalists attempting to curtail his grossest instincts with loyalists happy to indulge them. It is playing out across multiple dimensions. This is the through-line between several seemingly disconnected episodes from the last several days." And that isn't the worst of it!

Increasingly, Republicans are dispensing with the fig leaf and flaunting their complicity. Putting money in Trump’s pocket by booking his properties has become a symbol of partisan solidarity. It is a signal of support both to the president and to fellow Republicans or business clients that you are on the ins with the boss. “President Trump has really been on the side of the Evangelicals and we want to do everything we can to make him successful,” one Evangelical leader tells the Times. “And if that means having dinner or staying in his hotel, we are going to do so.” Aggressive lack of curiosity has given way to open boasting of the quid pro quo arrangement.

None of these stories by itself has the singular drama of a Teapot Dome or a Watergate. Indeed, the mere fact that there is so much corruption prevents any single episode from capturing the imagination of the media and the public. But it is the totality of dynamic that matters. A corrupt miasma has slowly enveloped Washington. For generations, both parties generally upheld an assumption that the government would abide rules and norms dividing its proper functioning from the president’s personal and political interests.

The norm of bureaucratic professionalism and fairness is a pillar of the political legitimacy and economic strength of the American system, the thing that separates countries like the U.S. from countries like Russia. The decay of that culture is difficult to quantify, but the signs are everywhere. Trump’s stench is slowly seeping into every corner of government.

Nobody But Bernie And Elizabeth-- Preferably On The Same Ticket

I live in California where Trump lost to Hillary in a massive landslide in 2016. She beat him 8,753,788 (61.73%) to 4,483,810 (31.62%)... without my vote. I'm not into lesser-of-two evils voting. I don't want to vote for evil... not even lesser evil. And in California, it didn't matter. I'd like to think I'd have stuck with that even if I lived in a swing state like Wisconsin or Florida or Pennsylvania. But, of course, there's no way to really know. Trump is certainly the worst thing that happened to this country since the Civil War-- and there's 14 months to go. California is very likely to give the 2020 Democratic nominee an even bigger landslide against Trump. As for me, I wouldn't have considered voting for the conservative racist scumbag Joe Biden in the '70s, '80s, '90s or anytime since-- and if he's the Democratic nominee, I'll go to the polls-- as I always do-- and just not vote for president... or maybe I can write in a name if I can figure out how to do it. I'm a never Biden guy. It has nothing to do with Trump; I knew who Biden was-- a complete sack of shit-- before I had ever even heard of Donald Trump.

It drives me crazy when I hear some conservative Democrat (or even NeverTrumper) saying they'd vote for any Democrat against Trump except for the two who would really change the country away from the roots causes of Trumpism, Bernie and Elizabeth. The very wealthy are usually the ones who say that... and clueless Hilary/Biden supporters. I bet #NeverBidenism is not something they want to hear about. I understand their pain; I really do.

The idea of refusing to vote for the agents of change against Trump is what compelled me to read Max Boot's Washington Post (a hot-bed of anti-Bernie mania) column: Here Are 14 Reasons I'll Vote For Any Democrat Over Trump. Boot admits he has "the utmost respect" for plutocrat Michael Bloomberg, who is one of the loudest and most shrill voices behind the "Anybody but Bernie" movement in NYC finance circles. But, says Boot, despite his slavish devotion to Bloomberg, he "will vote for any Democratic nominee, even Warren or Sanders, despite my profound disagreement with their far-left agendas." [By "far left," Boot means a set of policies that will help ordinary working class Americans.] "If I needed any further confirmation," he wrote, "it came during the second half of August. This was by no means the worst period of the Trump presidency, but it nevertheless offers a snapshot of why President Trump cannot under any circumstances be reelected." he then listed 14 examples that make it clear that anyone who does vote for Trump is literally mentally deranged and a danger to the country:

• Trump exulted when, at his urging, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to let two Democratic members of Congress visit Israel, making clear that he does not view himself as leader of the whole country. After Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D.-MI) refused Israel’s conditions to visit her grandmother in the West Bank, Trump even tweeted, “The only real winner here is Tlaib’s grandmother. She doesn’t have to see her now!” I can’t fathom the sadism that would lead Trump to drag a political opponent’s grandmother into the argument.

• Trump accused Jews of “great disloyalty” for not backing him despite his support for Israel, thereby perpetuating the anti-Semitic stereotype that American Jews owe their primary allegiance to Israel. He then quoted a discredited conspiracy-monger claiming Israelis “love him like he is the second coming of God.” (Note: Jews don’t think there was a first coming.)
• Trump proclaimed, “I am the chosen one.” He later said he was joking, but this was a perfect reflection of his real megalomania.
• Trump expressed interest in buying Greenland. When the prime minister of Denmark rightly dismissed this idea as “absurd,” Trump petulantly blasted her as “nasty” and canceled his visit to a staunch NATO ally that lost 43 soldiers in Afghanistan.
• Trump reversed his support for background checks for gun buyers-- supported by 93 percent of Americans-- under pressure from the gun lobby.
• Trump escalated his attacks on his own Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, whom he wants to scapegoat for an economic slowdown. In an unprecedented demonization of a U.S. official, the president demanded: “who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or [Chinese] Chairman Xi [Jinping]?”
• During the recent Group of Seven summit in France, Trump skipped a meeting on climate change and the fires in the Amazon, apparently because he doesn’t care about global warming. A few days later, his administration announced plans to roll back regulations on methane, a major greenhouse gas.
• Trump floundered for a way out of his catastrophic trade war with China. Sounding like a Soviet central planner, he tweeted on Aug. 23: “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China.” The same day, he called Xi an “enemy.” Within three days, he was calling Xi “a great leader” and a “brilliant man” and claiming he had received two phone calls from Beijing to restart talks. Chinese officials did not confirm any such calls, and two Trump aides told CNN he had lied to calm markets.

• Trump tried to get Vladimir Putin readmitted to the G-7 and blamed former president Barack Obama-- rather than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine-- for the Russian president’s exclusion. The administration is also slow-walking military aid to Ukraine, continuing Trump’s kowtowing to the Russian dictator who helped elect him.

• Trump suggested he might hold the next G-7 meeting at his troubled Doral resort. This would be a clear use of the president’s powers to enrich himself in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.
• Trump was reported to have asked subordinates about using nuclear bombs on hurricanes. Trump denied this Axios article as “fake news,” meaning it’s probably true.

• Trump promised to pardon subordinates who broke the law to build a border wall. This is another impeachable offense. The only defense that White House officials could muster was that Trump was joking. Are you laughing? I’m not.
• Trump continued his vendetta against former FBI director James B. Comey, who exposed Trump’s possible attempts to obstruct justice. A Justice Department inspector general’s report found that Comey violated FBI policies but absolved him of leaking classified information, as Trump has repeatedly charged.
• On Friday, Trump taunted Iran by tweeting what was almost certainly a classified image of an Iranian rocket that had exploded, thereby potentially compromising U.S. intelligence capabilities.

"This is by no means a comprehensive list of Trump’s erratic and unpresidential behavior recently," concluded Boot, "but it gives you the flavor of a presidency whose defining features are crassness, cruelty, incompetence and-- most of all-- sheer craziness. I may not agree with Warren or Sanders on most issues, but I am confident they would not do any of the offensive and even impeachable acts that Trump commits with mind-numbing regularity. That is reason enough to vote for them, even if I would prefer a more moderate alternative. Saving U.S. democracy from a mad king matters more than the specific policies of his successor."