We're America-- This Virus Cannot Beat Us... Right?

Reopening by Nancy Ohanian

On Friday, America's most consistent Prophet of Wrong, coke-freak Larry Kudlow, told the Fox & Friends crew that "There is no emergency. There is no second wave. I don’t know where that got started on Wall Street."

Although Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, acknowledged he is “not the health expert," he said he had spoken with the administration’s top public health officials “at some length” Thursday evening. “They are saying there is no second spike. Let me repeat that. There is no second spike,” he said.

Second Spike by Nancy Ohanian

“What you do have is certain spots are seeing a little bit of a jump up. Some small metropolitan areas are seeing it. The CDC and the health people are all over it. They’ve sent some task forces out to deal with it,” Kudlow added, partly attributing increases in Covid-19 cases to more widespread testing availability.

Kevin Hassett, another top economic adviser to the White House, told Fox News he had spoken to Dr. Deborah Birx, the administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, earlier Wednesday morning, and conceded “there are some embers flaring up in a few places.”

Hassett specifically cited incoming data from Arizona and South Carolina as showing “some cause for concern,” but remained largely dismissive of the notion of a second wave of the coronavirus.

“For sure, the battle is not over,” he said. “But the trends that have been so positive in recent weeks, we’ve not deviated sharply from them-- although there are some hotspots around the country.”

The remarks from the two top aides come as new coronavirus hotspots continue to emerge across the United States, with 18 states reporting an increase in Covid-19 case counts, including spikes in Arizona, Florida and Texas. Additionally, hospitalizations have been rising rapidly in at least nine states since Memorial Day.

As we've been saying, early states like New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan and Connecticut has cut their new daily case loads down dramatically, states that have followed Trumpian advice to pretend there is no pandemic are paying dearly now. With New York at 893 new cases Saturday and New Jersey at 642, some of the worst spiking situations in the country are in states with Trumpist governors:

• Texas +2,012
• Florida +1,902
• Arizona +1,654
• Georgia +810
• Alabama +865

And most of the states with the big increases in cases per million in their populations are also states with Trumpist governors who ignored scientists' warnings and based pandemic response on Trump Regime happy-talk instead:

• Nebraska- 8,536 cases per million
• Iowa- 7,401
• South Dakota- 6,491
• Mississippi- 6,415
• Georgia- 5,254
• Alabama- 4,836
• Arizona- 4,523
• Tennessee- 4,265
• Utah- 4,235
• North Dakota- 3,958
• New Hampshire- 3,862
• Florida- 3,304
• Texas- 2,948

Relatively speaking, neither blue state Oregon (total cases-- 5,377 (1,275 cases per million) nor red state Utah (total cases-- 13,577 (4,235 cases per million) has had a bad first round pandemic and in the last couple of weeks, both started the process of reopening. Unlike much worse off states, both have now paused the reopening process, despite howls of protest from deranged Trumpists.

"This is essentially a statewide ‘yellow light.’ It is time to press pause for one week before any further reopening,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) said in a statement Thursday evening.

“I will work with doctors and public health experts to determine whether to lift this pause or extend it or make other adjustments,” she added.

...In Utah, Gov. Gary Herbert (R) said during a Thursday night press conference most of the state would remain in the “yellow” phase of the reopening plan for the time being, which allows all businesses to open, including for in-door dining services.

While those measures are generally less restrictive than what other states have done to slow the spread of COVID-19, Herbert pointed out, he added Utah needs to pause further reopening efforts as it investigates the rise in new cases.

Most of the state had already moved past the red and orange phases of reopenings, which had more restrictive measures in place. The state has confirmed more than 13,000 cases since the pandemic began, including 131 deaths.

“I don’t want to go forward and then take a step backward,” Herbert said.

Governors in other states seeing increases in COVID-19 cases-- including Florida and Arizona-- have indicated they will continue with their reopening efforts.

North Carolina has a Democratic governor and a lunatic fringe Republican legislature always looking to infringe on his constitutional prerogatives. The legislators have been opposed to all of his efforts to protect the state and have encouraged their followers to disregard safety measures. On Friday, Newsweek reported that the sate might "re-implement a stay-at-home orders if coronaviruses cases continue to increase, according to the head of the state's health department. 'If we need to go back to stay-at-home [orders], we will,' Department of Health Secretary Mandy Cohen told NPR's Morning Edition. "I hope we don't have to. I think there are things we can do before we have to get there, but yes, we are concerned.' Cohen's comments come as the state is in the second phase of its reopening plan, which began on May 22 after the state lifted its stay-at-home order. But data from the health department show coronavirus cases are on the rise. North Carolina saw its largest increase in cases just a day after the order was lifted, 1,107 on May 23, the health department reported. But this number has since been surpassed on five different occasions. There were over 1,100 newly confirmed cases on May 30, June 4, June 5 and June 11, with a new record number for a single day, 1,370, on June 6.

With Trump threatening to come to North Carolina to hold his campaign hate rallies, Cohen said that "the data and science tells us that mass gatherings are one of the most concerning kinds of activities related to viral spread-- right?-- when lots of people close together can spread this virus. And we have seen that happen here in our state where there have been gatherings that have spread the virus. So right now, we are asking our folks in North Carolina: If you've been to a mass gathering like a protest or going back to church, we want you to get tested. We think that that is exposure. We think that that's a risk. And we want folks to get tested. So am worried about mass gatherings. For us in North Carolina, our rules still are that we do not want to have any mass gatherings. [W]e want to make sure that we are particularly focused on getting people to wear face coverings, wait 6 feet apart and wash their hands. There are individual actions that people can take right now, and I think they're so important. We really need to get our testing up. And then we need to trace folks. And folks need to stay isolated and stay home if they're sick."

Yesterday, in an ominously titled essay-- The Virus Will Win-- for The Atlantic Yascha Mounk addressed the lack of political will tragically being demonstrated by America's bankrupt political elites. Contradicting the clueless Kudlow, he wrote that "A second wave of the coronavirus is on the way. When it arrives, we will lack the will to deal with it. Despite all the sacrifices of the past months, the virus is likely to win-- or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it already has. In absolute terms, the United States has been hit harder than any other country. About a quarter of worldwide deaths have been recorded on these shores. And while the virus is no longer growing at an exponential rate, the threat it poses remains significant: According to a forecasting model by Morgan Stanley, the number of American cases will, if current trends hold, roughly double over the next two months."

But neither the impact of mass protests over police brutality nor the effect of the recent reopening of much of the country-- including the casinos in Las Vegas-- is reflected in the latest numbers. It can take at least 10 days for people to develop symptoms and seek out a test, and for the results to be aggregated and disseminated by public-health authorities.

Even so, the disease is slowly starting to recede from the public’s attention. After months of dominating media coverage, COVID-19 has largely disappeared from the front pages of most national newspapers. In recent polls, the number of people who favor “reopening the economy as soon as possible” over “staying home as long as necessary” has increased. And so it is perhaps no surprise that even states where the number of new infections stands at an all-time high are pressing ahead with plans to lift many restrictions on businesses and mass gatherings.

When the first wave of COVID-19 was threatening to overwhelm the medical system, back in March, the public’s fear and uncertainty were far more intense than they are now. So was the reason to hope that some magic bullet might rescue us from the worst ravages of the disease.

At this point, such hopes look unrealistic. After months of intense research, an effective treatment for COVID-19 still does not exist. A vaccine is, even if we get lucky, many months away from deployment. Because the virus is spreading especially rapidly in parts of the Southern Hemisphere, from Latin America to Africa, heat is clearly no impediment to its dissemination.

Perhaps most important, it is now difficult to imagine that anybody could muster the political will to impose a full-scale lockdown for a second time. As one poll in Pennsylvania found, nearly nine out of 10 Republicans trusted “the information you hear about coronavirus from medical experts” back in April. Now just about one in three does. With public opinion more polarized than it was a few months ago, and the presidential election looming, any attempt to deal with a resurgence of the virus is likely to be even more haphazard, contentious, and ineffective than it was the first time around.

In the fullness of time, many books will be written about why a country as rich, powerful, and scientifically advanced as the United States failed quite so badly at coping with a public-health emergency that experts had predicted for many years. As is always the case, competing explanations will quickly emerge. Some will focus on the incompetence of the Trump administration, while others will draw attention to the country’s loss of state capacity; some will argue that the United States is an outlier, while others will put its failure in the context of other countries, such as Brazil and Russia, that are also faring poorly.

...If the virus wins, it is because Donald Trump was more interested in hushing up bad news that might hurt the economy than in saving American lives.

If the virus wins, it is because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, created to deal with just this kind of emergency, has proved to be too bureaucratic and incompetent to do its job.

If the virus wins, it is because the White House did not even attempt to put a test-and-trace regime into place at the federal level.

...If the virus does win, then, it is because American elites, experts, and institutions have fallen short-- and continue to fall short-- of the grave responsibility with which they are entrusted in ways too innumerable to list.

...Scientists have desperately searched for a vaccine. Despite the real risks to their health, doctors, nurses, cooks, cleaners, and clerical staff have reported for duty in their hospitals. Suddenly declared “essential,” workers who have long enjoyed little respect and low wages helped to keep society afloat.

For the rest of us, the order of the day was simply to stay at home and slow the spread. It was a modest task, which made it all the more galling that some people fell short. But this nitpick obscures how many people did do what they could to get us all through the crisis: They checked in with their relatives and cooked for the elderly. They took to their balconies to thank health-care workers or sang songs to cheer up the neighbors. By and large, they stayed at home and slowed the spread.

Thanks to the effort of millions of people, we were close to a great success story. But because of the failures of Trump and Chauvin, of the CDC and the WHO, of public-health experts and Fox News hosts, we are, instead, likely to give up—and tolerate that hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens will die needless deaths.

Pandemics reveal the true state of a society. Ours has come up badly wanting.

U.S. Doing Worse Responding To COVID-19 Than Any Other Country

I bet you don't think much about Andorra, do you? Moldava? Bhutan? Liechtenstein? Togo? Burkina Faso? But like Vatican City, each of these countries has a confirmed case of COVID-19. Cambodia has 2. Afghanistan 4. Albania 6. Russian 20. But do these numbers mean anything? Iran reports 7,161 cases, but a more accurate number might be 2,000,000. The U.S. reports 708 but the U.S. doesn't test so it could be many times more than than-- 10 times more? 100 times more? Who knows. But we do know that the Trump Regime determined that testing isn't necessary-- until it was too late and the coronavirus was no longer containable.

The U.S. ranks last in the world among countries sharing information on testing in terms of how many people have been tested per million:

• South Korea- 2,138 tests per million (109,591 tests performed)
• Italy- 386 (23,345 tests performed)
• Israel- 383 (3,551 tests performed)
• Austria- 235 (2,120 tests performed)
• Switzerland- 214 (1,859 tests performed)
• U.K.- 199 (13,525 tests performed)
• Finland- 23 (130 tests performed)
• Vietnam- 18 (1,737 tests performed)
• Turkey- 11 (940 tests performed)
• U.S.- 1 (472 tests performed)

The other day, some fool mentioned COVID-19 is Bush's Hurricane Katrina. Washington Post reporter was a lot closer: Trump's Chernobyl. "On Saturday, April 26, 1986," he wrote, "the No. 4 reactor at Chernobyl power station exploded just outside the town of Pripyat in the Soviet Union. During the crucial early hours of the disaster, a cascading series of mistakes exacerbated the emergency. Subordinates who feared their superiors kept quiet. Superiors who feared contradicting the prevailing mythology of the state-- and its leader-- bent and broke reality. They made a series of smaller lies to protect the big lie: that the Soviet Union had everything under control. During crises, ideology kills. Protecting myths, rather than people, is deadly. The rapidly worsening coronavirus outbreak is President Trump’s Chernobyl. By putting dangerous myths above objective facts, Trump has turned the crucial early phases of government response into a disaster. Some public health experts in government have undoubtedly kept quiet, having seen repeatedly what happens to those who publicly contradict this president. And Trump himself, along with those who surround him, has tried to construct a reality that simply does not exist."

As the regime prepares for the Great Trump Recession of 2020, Johns Hopkins professor and author (The People vs Democracy) Yascha Mounk, penned a frightening piece about the urgency of social distancing for The Atlantic: Stop Everything. He believes that 3 crucial facts have already become clear and "what they add up to is not an invocation to stay calm, as so many politicians around the globe are incessantly suggesting; it is, on the contrary, the case for changing our behavior in radical ways-- right now."

The first fact is that, at least in the initial stages, documented cases of COVID-19 seem to increase in exponential fashion. On the 23rd of January, China’s Hubei province, which contains the city of Wuhan, had 444 confirmed COVID-19 cases. A week later, by the 30th of January, it had 4,903 cases. Another week later, by the 6th of February, it had 22,112.

The same story is now playing out in other countries around the world. Italy had 62 identified cases of COVID-19 on the 22nd of February. It had 888 cases by the 29th of February, and 4,636 by the 6th of March.

Because the United States has been extremely sluggish in testing patients for the coronavirus, the official tally of 604 likely represents a fraction of the real case load. But even if we take this number at face value, it suggests that we should prepare to have up to 10 times as many cases a week from today, and up to 100 times as many cases two weeks from today.

The second fact is that this disease is deadlier than the flu, to which the honestly ill-informed and the wantonly irresponsible insist on comparing it. Early guesstimates, made before data were widely available, suggested that the fatality rate for the coronavirus might wind up being around 1 percent. If that guess proves true, the coronavirus is 10 times more deadly than the flu.

But there is reason to fear the fatality rate could be much higher. According to the World Health Organization, the current case fatality rate-- a common measure of what portion of confirmed patients die from a particular disease-- stands at 3.4 percent. This figure could be an overstatement, because mild cases of the disease are less likely to be diagnosed. Or it could be an understatement, because many patients have already been diagnosed with the virus but have not yet recovered (and may still die).

When the coronavirus first spread to South Korea, many observers pointed to the comparatively low death rates in the country to justify undue optimism. In countries with highly developed medical systems, they claimed, a smaller portion of patients would die. But while more than half of all diagnosed patients in China have now been cured, most South Korean patients are still in the throes of the disease. Of 7,478 confirmed cases, only 118 have recovered; the low death rate may yet rise.

Meanwhile, the news from Italy, another country with a highly developed medical system, has so far been shockingly bad. In the affluent region of Lombardy, for example, there have been 7,375 confirmed cases of the virus as of Sunday. Of these patients, 622 had recovered, 366 had died, and the majority were still sick. Even under the highly implausible assumption that all of the still-sick make a full recovery, this would suggest a case fatality rate of 5 percent-- significantly higher, not lower, than in China.

The third fact is that so far only one measure has been effective against the coronavirus: extreme social distancing.

Before China canceled all public gatherings, asked most citizens to self-quarantine, and sealed off the most heavily affected region, the virus was spreading in exponential fashion. Once the government imposed social distancing, the number of new cases leveled off; now, at least according to official statistics, every day brings news of more existing patients who are healed than of patients who are newly infected.

A few other countries have taken energetic steps to increase social distancing before the epidemic reached devastating proportions. In Singapore, for example, the government quickly canceled public events and installed medical stations to measure the body temperature of passersby while private companies handed out free hand sanitizer. As a result, the number of cases has grown much more slowly than in nearby countries.

These three facts imply a simple conclusion. The coronavirus could spread with frightening rapidity, overburdening our health-care system and claiming lives, until we adopt serious forms of social distancing.

This suggests that anyone in a position of power or authority, instead of downplaying the dangers of the coronavirus, should ask people to stay away from public places, cancel big gatherings, and restrict most forms of nonessential travel.

Given that most forms of social distancing will be useless if sick people cannot get treated-- or afford to stay away from work when they are sick-- the federal government should also take some additional steps to improve public health. It should take on the costs of medical treatment for the coronavirus, grant paid sick leave to stricken workers, promise not to deport undocumented immigrants who seek medical help, and invest in a rapid expansion of ICU facilities.

The past days suggest that this administration is unlikely to do these things well or quickly (although the administration signaled on Monday that it will seek relief for hourly workers, among other measures). Hence, the responsibility for social distancing now falls on decision makers at every level of society.

Do you head a sports team? Play your games in front of an empty stadium.

Are you organizing a conference? Postpone it until the fall.

Do you run a business? Tell your employees to work from home.

Are you the principal of a school or the president of a university? Move classes online before your students get sick and infect their frail relatives.

Are you running a presidential campaign? Cancel all rallies right now.

All of these decisions have real costs. Shutting down public schools in New York City, for example, would deprive tens of thousands of kids of urgently needed school meals. But the job of institutions and authorities is to mitigate those costs insofar as humanly possible, not to use them as an excuse to put the public at risk of a deadly communicable disease.

Finally, the most important responsibility falls on each of us. It’s hard to change our own behavior while the administration and the leaders of other important institutions send the social cue that we should go on as normal. But we must change our behavior anyway. If you feel even a little sick, for the love of your neighbor and everyone’s grandpa, do not go to work.

When the influenza epidemic of 1918 infected a quarter of the U.S. population, killing tens of millions of people, seemingly small choices made the difference between life and death.

As the disease was spreading, Wilmer Krusen, Philadelphia’s health commissioner, allowed a huge parade to take place on September 28th; some 200,000 people marched. In the following days and weeks, the bodies piled up in the city’s morgues. By the end of the season, 12,000 residents had died.

In St. Louis, a public health commissioner named Max Starkloff decided to shut the city down. Ignoring the objections of influential businessmen, he closed the city’s schools, bars, cinemas, and sporting events. Thanks to his bold and unpopular actions, the per capita fatality rate in St. Louis was half that of Philadelphia. (In total roughly 1,700 people died from influenza in St Louis.)

In the coming days, thousands of people across the country will face the choice between becoming a Wilmer Krusen or a Max Starkloff.

In the moment, it will seem easier to follow Krusen’s example. For a few days, while none of your peers are taking the same steps, moving classes online or canceling campaign events will seem profoundly odd. People are going to get angry. You will be ridiculed as an extremist or an alarmist. But it is still the right thing to do.

I know this is cruel-- even inhumane-- but, if Trump supporters chose to believe his nonsense about how the pandemic is just fake news and a plot to deprive him of a second term, they will refuse to follow social distancing guidelines. (I talked to one the other day who insists he's taking his family on a long-planned cruise because he feels reassured by the "president.") These people are going to soon be joining right-wing nuts like Trump's new chief-of-staff Mark Meadows, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and extremist Congressmen Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Doug Collins (R-GA) in quarantine. If the herd is destined to be thinned, these are the ones who will down first. A corollary to Mounk's social distancing rules: avoid all Trump fanatics at all costs.

Why It Is So Important To Make Sure Trump Does NOT Get A Second Term

Status Quo Joe has a lot of endorsements-- mostly from politicians who are intensely disliked by progressives, from Senators Dianne Feinstein (CA) and Doug Jones (AL) and Governor Andrew Cuomo (NY) to a pack of hated reactionary Blue Dogs and New Dems like Stephen Lynch (MA), Ami Bera (CA), Tony Cardenas (CA), Vicente Gonzalez (TX), Kurt Schrader (OR), Lou Correa (CA), Charlie Crist (FL), Al Lawson (FL) and Filemon Vela (TX). Every one of them has a shitty voting record and every one of them is more like Biden than like a normal FDR Democrat. They are what makes the Democratic Party almost as disliked as the Republican Party; they are what makes it-- at best-- the lesser of two evils. And they are the heart and soul of the Biden endorsement cadre. Bleccchhh.

How would you like to see an election campaign, tailor-made for Trump, that concentrates on who has a more disgusting family, who’s more corrupt, who lies more, who’s more likely to drift away into full-blown senility first? That’s the only kind of campaign Trump can win… and that’s what a Trump-Biden campaign would look like. Think about it and then talk with anyone who know-- grandparents, perhaps?-- who is considering voting for Biden in a primary or caucus. Professor Yascha Mounk, author of The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is In Danger And How To Save It, is predicting that if Trump is reelected, his second term will be worse, just like Modi’s has been in India. In fact, in an essay for The Atlantic yesterday, Mounk wrote that “In his first five years in office, Modi did considerable damage, both to the freedoms his critics enjoyed and to the security of the country’s religious minorities. Social-media mobs intimidated anybody who dared to criticize his government. Media outlets allied with Modi stoked fears about Muslim men waging ‘love jihad’ by marrying Hindu women. Mainstream newspapers that were once highly critical of Modi started to praise him with surprising regularity, and to criticize him with notable rarity. And in episodes of what Indians euphemistically call ‘communal violence,’ Muslims were lynched by angry mobs… After Modi won reelection with an even larger majority in the spring of this year, his government began to take radical action to unwind the secularism of India’s constitution, arguably doing more damage in the first months of its second term than it had in the previous five years. Some of the concerns about Modi that seemed exaggerated at the conclusion of his first term in office are now starting to look prescient.” (Be sure to listen to Mounk speaking in the video up top-- including his response to the question at the end.)

Many observers of India have been surprised that Modi has grown so much more extreme in his second term in office. But a comparison of populist governments around the world suggests that India is following a predictable pattern of what would-be authoritarians do when they win reelection.

As we’ve seen in countries including Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, populist leaders are at first hamstrung in their ability to concentrate power in their own hands. Many key institutions, including courts and electoral commissions, are still dominated by independent-minded professionals who do not owe their appointment to the new regime. Media outlets are still able and willing to report on scandals, forcing the government to tread somewhat carefully.

Once these governments win reelection, these constraints begin to fall away. As the independent-minded judges and civil servants depart, populist leaders feel emboldened to pursue their illiberal dreams.

…In his first term in office, Donald Trump has done plenty of damage to the rule of law. His firm control of the Republican Party has made it virtually impossible for Congress to act as a check on the executive. He has exercised enormous influence over institutions ranging from the FBI to the State Department. And it is now evident that he has abused the powers of his office to damage the electoral prospects of his most likely opponent in the 2020 election.

Even so, some of the most extreme predictions about Trump’s tenure in office have, so far, proved unfounded. Madeleine Albright’s warning about impending fascism in the United States, for example, seems a bit much: For all the tremendous damage Trump has inflicted on the institutions of the American republic, there are no stormtroopers in sight.

Perhaps that’s why the fear and anger that propelled such big protests in the first months of 2017 seem to have dissipated. Neither the spectacle of Trump’s impeachment trial nor the children still held in cages at America’s southern border have inspired anything resembling the levels of mobilization that marked his first months in office. Many may assume that Trump’s reelection will bring nothing worse than four more years of the same-- terrible, to be sure, but by now imaginably terrible.

Current events in India and Poland should shock Americans out of this complacency. Trump’s first term is at best an imperfect guide to the horrors that would await us if he manages to win a second one. When they are reelected, populists nearly always become more radical and more dangerous.

Are Those Alarms Ringing Alarms For America?

Make America Great Again by Chip Proser

According to numerous polls, most likely American voters-- obviously not Trumpists-- are seeing November as an opportunity the put a leash on Trump by giving congressional leadership back to the Democrats. Among Democratic voters enthusiasm in special elections has been high and Republican turnout has lagged. Will that last through November?n Republican turnout could spike at the thought of a fifth right-wing ideologue on the Supreme Court and Democratic turnout could fall off in Florida if Bill Nelson takes a gamble to try to save his own hide by making the mistake of his career and voting for confirmation. As we saw this morning, Democrats could also lose Senate seats in West Virginia Missouri, Montana, West Virginia, North Dakota and Indiana in this no-win trap.

On Thursday Yascha Mounk penned an essay for Slate about how Kennedy’s retirement proves we can’t count on elites to constrain Trump’s worst excesses. When Trump managed to grab power in 2016, Mounk wrote that "'serious' social scientists argued that the institutions of the American Republic would constrain his power... As we now know, it hasn’t quite turned out like that. Though Trump’s White House certainly faced a steep learning curve in its first months-- and remains deeply dysfunctional even now-- the administration has gradually grown to be surprisingly effective at turning the president’s instincts into public policy. From immigration to trade, and from foreign policy to health care, the past months have brought big and worrying changes. It is not just that the administration that is proving to be more effective than we might have hoped; it is also that the institutions meant to constrain it are proving far more pliant than we might have feared."

This is obviously true of the Republican Party. At the time of Trump’s election, smart observers debated whether party elites would continue to disdain and regularly oppose the president (as the optimists claimed) or whether Trump would prove capable of building a slate of his own candidates and gradually changing the nature of the party (as pessimists like me feared). The truth turned out to be much more radical than either the optimists or the pessimists predicted: Members of the conservative movement who had spent decades professing their commitment to balanced budgets and constitutional values proved willing to sell out their principles with astounding rapidity.

The knock-on effect in Congress has been as immediate as it has been frightening. Even a year ago, institutions like the House Intelligence Committee still seemed to be animated by a sense of bipartisan mission; it was imaginable that, if only Special Counsel Robert Mueller found sufficiently compelling evidence of wrong-doing by the president, a large number of Republican representatives and senators might vote to impeach Trump. Today, the House Intelligence Committee is openly running interference for Trump; it is very hard to believe that 67 Senators would ever vote to impeach him.

Though the overall cast of characters has not changed all that much, the Republican Party-- and the Congress it controls-- has essentially become an agent of full-blown Trumpism.

What this week has brought into focus is that this institutional rot now also seems to be spreading to the last bastion on which defenders of democracy thought they could count: the Supreme Court. This week, the court has taken two decisions that significantly and lastingly impede America’s standing as a liberal democracy. First, it green lit the administration’s travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries despite ample evidence that the policy  was motivated by religious animus. As Sonia Sotomayor argued in a scorching dissent:

Ultimately, what began as a policy explicitly “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” has since morphed into a “Proclamation” putatively based on national-security concerns. But this new window dressing cannot conceal an unassailable fact: the words of the President and his advisers create the strong perception that the Proclamation is contaminated by impermissible discriminatory animus against Islam and its followers.

Second, the Supreme Court held a Texan Congressional map to be constitutional despite ample evidence that it had been designed to dilute the voting power of the state’s minority residents-- and assure the Republican Party an unfair advantage. As a result, it is even more likely that Republicans might be able to hold the House of Representatives in the coming midterm elections despite losing the popular vote. When other states follow suit in the coming months and years, as they inevitably will, the playing field between the ruling party and the opposition will become even more uneven.

The most shocking thing about both decisions is by now so familiar that it is rarely remarked upon: Rather than being a truly independent institution that is able to transcend partisan politics, the Supreme Court increasingly acts as just another staging ground for the fight between Democrats and Republicans. In fact, both of these hugely consequential decisions were taken with the narrowest possible margin and with a clear partisan split: the five judges who had been appointed by Republican presidents voted in favor, the four judges who had been appointed by Democratic presidents against.

The second most shocking thing about these decisions is that they demonstrate just how much Trump’s election has changed the prevailing political winds-- and how much influence that has already had on the country’s highest court. Of all the current Supreme Court justices, Kennedy was the one who has, over the course of his tenure, proven most susceptible to the shifting tides of public opinion. Originally aligned with the court’s conservative wing, he slowly grew to be the court’s swing voter. With Barack Obama in the White House and a strong majority of Americans much more tolerant of homosexuality, he helped to legalize same-sex marriage. But now, with Donald Trump in the White House and respect for democratic institutions and the rights of minorities sinking ever lower, he has swung the other way-- and acceded to two highly partisan attacks on liberal democracy.

Today’s announcement that Kennedy is retiring only consummates his abdication of responsibility. Instead of standing up for the values he so loudly professes, and staying on the Supreme Court to fight against executive overreach, Kennedy has chosen to let a deeply dangerous president and his allies steer a badly damaged ship out to sea.

...The question that will likely consume us over the coming days and weeks is how the Democrats should respond to this latest political twist. Should they follow the precedent set by Mitch McConnell, and refuse to grant Trump’s nominee a hearing? Or should they take the high road, and assess the nominee by the kinds of standards—basically, a high degree of professionalism and some degree of ideological moderation—that both parties have applied as recently as a decade ago?

Both options are terrible. If Democrats follow McConnell’s precedent, they give up their claim to being consistent defenders of constitutional norms, and pave the way to an even more dysfunctional Congress. Given that Republicans have an inbuilt geographical advantage in the Senate, they would also undermine their ability to wrest back control of the Supreme Court in years to come.

But if Democrats allow Trump’s nominee to take his or her seat on the Supreme Court, this too is likely to do grave damage to liberal democracy. A year ago, Neil Gorsuch looked like the kind of justice who might protect our institutions: though he was deeply conservative, little in his record indicated that he might have sympathies for a populist assault on the rule of law or the separation of powers. And yet, he has participated in the court’s most recent assaults on religious liberties and free elections. There is no reason to assume that Trump’s next nominee, even if he or she should look reasonably sensible on paper, wouldn’t prove equally willing to follow the prevailing winds.

The longer I think about it, the more I agree with my friend: Trump has been consolidating his power for many months. As of now, it is no longer clear that any single institution in the United States will consistently prove willing to stand up to his assault on democratic institutions. Even by the horrific standards of the past two years, today is a very dark day for our country.

Worse: are there any effective checks on Trump and his authoritarian nature? Any? He destroyed much of the media's credibility (at least for Republicans). They don't even care about truth. They have their own. That's why the midterms mean more this time than anytime in my life-- and I'm old. I hate lesser-of-two-evils politics... but November may be a time we just have to hold our noses and vote for anyone with a "D" next to his or her names, even the worse most disgusting Blue Dogs like Jeff Van Drew in New Jersey.

The Enablers by Chip Proser

America's Greatest Challenge Since... The Civil War

Does anyone doubt the news reports that Putin is about to "win" a landslide reelection? Of course not; he counts the votes and sets the rules. And Trump must be seething with jealousy. Last week, Annie Linskey, writing for the Boston Globe, reported that Señor Trumpanzee "would be able to dispatch Secret Service agents to polling places nationwide during a federal election, a vast expansion of executive authority, if a provision in a Homeland Security reauthorization bill remains intact. The rider has prompted outrage from more than a dozen top elections officials around the country, including Secretary of State William F. Galvin of Massachusetts, a Democrat, who says he is worried that it could be used to intimidate voters and said there is 'no basis' for providing Trump with this new authority. 'This is worthy of a Third World country,' said Galvin in an interview. 'I’m not going to tolerate people showing up to our polling places. I would not want to have federal agents showing up in largely Hispanic areas.'"

Trump is, in fact, as David Remnick wrote in the new issue of the New Yorker The Stress Test Of Liberal Democracy. Referencing a Regime obsessed with diversion and diversion from diversion, Remnick wrote that "Minute by minute the wheels are coming off the clown car that is the Trump Administration. The circus animals are deserting, wriggling through every available window and door. Last week, it was the chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, who had countenanced the President’s falsehoods and flights of bigotry but who finally took a stand on the question of steel and aluminum tariffs. Still others-- the Secretary of State, the national-security adviser, the chief of staff, the Chief Daughter, and the Feckless Son-in-Law-- are surely imagining either their own retirement from government service or multi-part indictments. Meanwhile, Robert Mueller’s investigation grows increasingly ominous for the President. Also, porn stars.

But the spectacle on Pennsylvania Avenue diverts attention from an arguably more consequential matter; namely, who now speaks for the values and the institutions of a liberal democratic country? Donald Trump did not ignite but merely joined a miserable, destabilizing trend of illiberalism that has been under way for years in Russia, Turkey, China, India, Southeast Asia, and Western, Eastern, and Central Europe. In France, Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, far-right parties and factions have not yet taken power, but they are contenders to do so, and they influence the debate on everything from immigration to foreign policy.

Trump is not the most extreme case. He may denounce his own Justice Department as disloyal and skeptics in the media as “enemies of the people.” But, at least for now, he operates within a constitutional order-- a still-standing system of laws, a separation of powers, and a civil society-- that has so far proved resilient. Yet the threat of Trumpism is unique in its scale and its influence. It is one thing for Viktor Orbán to shrink the nascent liberties of post-Communist Hungary, a nation of fewer than ten million people; it is another for Trump to assume the title of “leader of the free world,” when he has such casual disregard for democratic freedoms and assumes control of an unimaginably powerful arsenal with no sign of recognizing the gravity of his responsibility. As President, Trump is the putative guardian of a set of political values, and, no matter how often those values have been undermined, threatened, or betrayed in the course of American history, they have served for countless millions abroad as a democratic standard, an ideal.

Trump’s illiberalism-- his cockeyed expressions of admiration for such leaders as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Rodrigo Duterte, and his heedless detachment from American norms-- betrays that faith. It has also inspired a stream of books with titles like How Democracies Die, Can It Happen Here?, The Road to Unfreedom, Why Liberalism Failed, and It’s Even Worse Than You Think. Yascha Mounk, the author of the most recent addition to this library of anxiety, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger & How to Save It, offers a trenchant survey from 1989, with its democratic euphoria, to the current map of autocratic striving, “from Athens to Ankara.”

Mounk, who teaches government at Harvard, points out that one reason for the increasing indifference to democratic rule and the rising enthusiasm for authoritarian alternatives, particularly among young people, is the widening historical distance from any direct experience of the horrors of German Fascism or Soviet Communism. “Over two-thirds of older Americans believe that it is extremely important to live in a democracy; among millennials, less than one-third do,” Mounk writes. In 1995, “only one in sixteen believed that army rule is a good system of government; today, one in six do.” It’s easy to forget that we live in alarming times when you can just switch the channel to Vanderpump Rules.



Mounk emphasizes that history laughs at complacency and illusions of permanence. Athenian democracy lasted two centuries, the Republic of Venice a millennium, but both eventually faced decline and dissipation. The Trump era represents a test of sturdy-seeming American values, and the stakes are global. Just as a prosperous and self-confident American government helped rebuild Western Europe and Japan after the Second World War, and then helped protect them for decades-- through the establishment of various security, diplomatic, and economic alliances-- the Trump Administration’s disdain for that legacy has left our allies feeling exposed and vulnerable. European leaders routinely tell reporters and former American officials that the U.S. government is barely recognizable to them, in rhetoric or in action. The reductions in the diplomatic corps have often left them with no one to talk to; the Administration’s transactional relationships with authoritarian regimes give them the sense that the President is uninterested in any moral dimension in his foreign policy.

The next significant chapter in this stress test for liberal values will be the midterm elections of November, 2018. If the Democratic Party fails to win a majority in either the House of Representatives or the Senate, Trump will be further emboldened. His capacity for recklessness will multiply and go unrestrained. The Republican leadership, which has already proved shocking in its cowardice, will be even less inclined to challenge him.

Popular resistance to Trumpism began on the Mall the day after his Inauguration. The youthful uprising against the National Rifle Association in south Florida is the newest source of inspiration. But, for Trump and Trumpism to be rendered an unnerving but short-lived episode, history will require more than cogent critique. It will require that millions of men and women who do not ordinarily exercise their franchise-- some sixty per cent in off-year elections-- recognize the imperatives of citizenship. For those who aspire to office, it will require not merely renunciation of a President but an affirmation-- critical and thorough-- of the values and the institutions that the President has scorned and threatened. It will require an honest, complex, open-minded debate on immigration, income disparity, distrust of government, guns, race, gender, speech, social media, and the environment.

Such a debate will mean grappling with the many ways in which American values have yet to be fully realized. In the 2016 election, this territory was too often left to Trump’s demagoguery and his promise of simple solutions. But, whether or not the clown car is finally pulled over by the rule of law, the restoration and the renewal of America’s democratic traditions will be achieved only by democratic means.

Last night Alan Grayson, bemused, said, "I understand why people see parallels between Putin and Trump, but in Putin’s case it comes as no surprise that Head Spy would become Ruthless Dictator. In contrast, here there is a disconnect (or maybe a negative feedback) between campaigns and governance, and Donald Trump was elected on the theory that having no record of accomplishment in public life whatsoever was somehow a good thing. Would you choose your brain surgeon that way? (Leaving aside Ben Carson, of course.)" I got this quote (below) by Octavia Butler from Joy Reid's twitter account. Everyone in America should read it and read it again before they decide if they're going to the polls in November... and again in 2020. Trump-- and his enablers-- really are the biggest threat to this country since the same kind of people started the Civil War over a century ago.