In 3 Weeks We Have The Chance To Get Even With Politicians Who Have Screwed Us Over-- Let's Use It

 

"Don't Let It Dominate Your Life" by Nancy Ohanian

Trump, possibly dying from COVID, cancelled his Ambridge, Pennsylvania (Beaver County, 16 miles northwest of Pittsburgh) rally early yesterday morning but promised he would be doing a rally in Florida today or tomorrow. He spent his time yesterday chit-chatting on the phone with Rush Limbaugh-- threatening his (internal) enemies-- and on Fox Business where he said he's "back because I’m a perfect physical specimen, and I’m extremely young. And so I am lucky that way." He then cancelled his Sunday rally in a Florida secret location that only ever existed in his fevered mind. Earlier, Ted Cruz, on CNBC's Squawk Box was bitterly facing up to the fact that the GOP is about to experience what he called "a bloodbath of Watergate proportions." (Pathetically, he blamed Schumer and Pelosi for the Republicans' problems.)

Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote yesterday that he's dreaming of a Biden landslide. Notice that Trump-hating Republicans like Sullivan seem far more excited about Biden than thoughtful Democrats do. I've had no doubt since 2018 that there would be a giant anti-Trump/anti-Republican tsunami. Poll after poll, though, has shown not a trace of a "Biden landslide." A Biden landslide is preposterous. He is clearly the lesser of two evils and my fear is that he'll interpret a landslide (against Trump) into some kind of validation for himself and proceed to be the worst Democratic president since James Buchanan. My biggest fear, of course, is that he'll fulfill his career-long dream of making a grand bargain with the GOP that will kill off Social Security and/or Medicare.

Sullivan, a #NeverTrumper, wrote he knows "it’s tempting fate to mention the idea, foolish to entertain it, mad to expect it, but the possibility of a landslide is now real." He should get out more. It's been baked into the cake for quite some time. "A Biden win," he wrote, "would be a reprieve for the country; a Biden landslide would be an American miracle. Unlike anything else, it would cauterize the wound of Trump, preventing further infection. It would say to posterity: we made this hideous mistake, for understandable reasons, but after four years, we saw what we did and decisively changed course. It would turn the Trump era of nihilism, tribalism and cruelty into a cautionary tale of extremism, illiberalism and, above all, failure. It would suggest, especially if older whites come round some more, that the future need not be one of spiraling racial polarization, but of multiracial support for liberal democracy, its norms, and practices. What you learn from studying the decline and collapse of republics is that illiberal precedents become the new baseline if they are not instantly repudiated and punished. A landslide loss for Trump would mitigate, if not remove, the deep damage he has done."

He's smoking dope or something. But Republicans want that big Biden win, probably because he knows Biden is the best route back to the status quo ante where conservatives have thrived and will thrive again. Biden sure ain't Bernie and, in his own words, nothing will fundamentally change.

A landslide would also do something important for an incoming Biden administration: it would present a real opportunity to pursue a policy of national reconciliation around Covid19 recovery and economic stimulus. It would buttress Biden’s hopes for bipartisan support, even if of a limited kind, in a genuine emergency. His Gettysburg speech last week reiterated his opposition to left-tribalism, as did Harris’ surprising brag about support from Republicans and Independents in the debate. As David Brooks noticed this morning, this has been a very centrist campaign from Biden-Harris. Biden is offering himself, in Noah Millman’s rough analogy, as a kind of Adenauer figure, a bridge from past to future rooted in a stable center. Here’s the money quote from Gettysburg:

Instead of treating each other’s party as the opposition, we treat them as the enemy. This must end. We need to revive the spirit of bipartisanship in this country. A spirit of being able to work with one another. When I say that, and I’ve been saying it for two years now, I’m accused of being naive. I’m told, “Maybe that’s the way things used to work, Joe, but they can’t work that way anymore.” Well, I’m here to tell you they can, and they must if we’re going to get anything done.

And such an atmosphere could help usher in an immediate stimulus package which, as Matt Yglesias explains here, is close to oven-ready. Using Reconciliation to pass a series of redistributive measures alongside Covid19 relief-- a new child allowance, green infrastructure investment, Obamacare expansion, phased-in tax hikes on the wealthy-- side-steps the filibuster question (you don’t need 60 Senate votes to pass a Reconciliation bill) and sets Biden up for a big initial win, with the momentum that provides.

A landslide matters because it gives Biden a much bigger mandate to govern from the center; it matters because it would add more non-leftist Democrats to the House, weakening the extreme left; it matters because if former Republicans and Independents give Biden a hefty margin of victory, Congressional Republicans might feel some small pressure, in the wake of their party’s collapse, to acquiesce for a while at least. That didn’t happen in 2009, of course. But the gyre has widened since then, and the full, terrifying consequences of a house so deeply divided are much clearer now.

And a landslide is the only thing that can possibly, finally break the far right fever that has destroyed the GOP as a legitimate right-of-center political party, and turned it into a paranoid, media-driven, fact-free festival of fear and animus. It does not and cannot mean a return to the Bush era. The Republican move toward defending the unskilled, protecting working families, guarding entitlements, resisting urban wokeness, checking free trade absolutism, restraining overseas intervention, and curtailing mass immigration is one that need not be abandoned. Its time has come. But what the GOP has to grasp is that although Trump rose to power on these currents, and brilliantly exploited them, he also proved to be far too narcissistic and confrontational to harness them.

In fact, Trump severely hurt the cause for stronger immigration controls, because of his racial crassness, jaw-dropping cruelty, and terrible skills at deal-making. He has given the critical race theorists a living breathing caricature of right-racism, discrediting and demoralizing a liberal defense of color-blindness and equality. He has tainted a sane, necessary entrenchment of America’s global reach with support for dictatorships and contempt for our allies. He has worsened social and economic inequality, when a reformist conservatism would seek to “level up” a society wracked by hyper-global capitalism. A thumping defeat of the president, a serious shellacking, could help remove the tarnished toxicity of Trump from an agenda that, under younger leadership, could spawn a new, multicultural right-of-center majority.

You can see the kindling for it: in the growing success of Latinos in America and their desire to join the mainstream as generations of immigrants have done before them; in the dogged defense of meritocracy and hard work among Asian-Americans, as they fight left-racism in the school and college system; in the concern about crime that separates many sane black voters from white, wealthy liberals; in the staggeringly successful integration of gays and lesbians, a community as diverse as any in America, who are open, if they are not shunned, to a dialogue that focuses on more than the “systemic oppression” of the past.

I didn’t expect this sudden hopeful twist of fate. Who could? And I don’t mean to deny the depth of tribalism in our culture, the remaining acute dangers of the election season, the huge gambles an unhinged president could make to save his skin, or yet another melodrama in this exhausting story. But the psychotic unraveling of Trump for all to see, the overwhelming fact of his failure on the core issue of the election, Covid19, and the appalling chaos and madness of a campaign in free-fall have given us something quite rare these past few years. There is an inkling of possibility on the horizon. After the worst of all possible worlds, we have a taste of a better one.

There is one aspect of an anti-Trump landslide I like. Depending on how big it is, we will see "safe" red congressional seats flip blue, including-- unlike Biden-- for real reformers, like Mike Siegel, Julie Oliver, Kara Eastman, Audrey Denney, Liam O'Mara, Adam Christensen, Nate McMurray, J.D. Scholten and other candidates the DCCC refused to take seriously but who could help balance the over-abundance of conservative recruits from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, worthless New Dems and Blue Dogs. None of them are worse than Republicans but none of them are worth supporting. But please do support the progressives running for House seats by clicking on the ActBlue 2020 congressional thermometer on the right. All of these candidates are working their asses off to finish strong with Get Out The Vote efforts in their districts, efforts that will pay off not just for themselves, but for Biden and in state legislative races to boot. Voters who Adam Christensen turns out could help flip the Florida state Senate. Voters who Mike Siegel and Julie Oliver turn out could help flip the Texas state House. Let's all do what we can to get this done.

All That Was Missing Was The Gilded Royal Carriage

 

No one needed to have any special powers to know what a Trump presidency was going to do to America. Putin, after all, is too savvy a player to have bet on a pig in a poke. Now me... since inauguration day I've hoped against hope that there were a pair of Secret Service agents like Satwant Singh and Beant Singh waiting to do their duty to protect our country. All day Sunday and when I woke this morning there were dozens of stories about Trump's condition. I only want to read one: that he's dead (well... or dying).

I know it's politically incorrect, but I really don't want Trump to survive COVID. I mean it's up to God, not me, but if it were up me... He's an evil and dangerous cancer and he will keep poisoning the world until he's dead and rotting in the ground. The sooner the better-- and his inner circle along with him. A few hours ago, I asked my Twitter followers what they think. Most disagree; they'd rather see him in prison. I'm fine with that too-- as long as he never gets out.

First hour's results

But I was heartened yesterday to read about the anger Secret Service agents feel about his little stunt to entertain his Proud Boys and MAGA-monkey followers Sunday-- the SUV drive around Walter Reed so he could wave. Reporting for the Washington Post, Josh Dawsey, Carol Leonnig and Hannah Knowles wrote that current and former Secret Service agents and medical professionals were aghast Sunday night at Señor Trumpanzee's trip outside the hospital, saying the disgusting orange lummox endangered those inside his SUV for a publicity stunt. "As the backlash grew, multiple aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations also called Trump’s evening outing an unnecessary risk-- but said it was not surprising. Trump had said he was bored in the hospital, advisers said. He wanted to show strength after his chief of staff offered a grimmer assessment of his health than doctors, according to campaign and White House officials."

A growing number of Secret Service agents have been concerned about the president’s seeming indifference to the health risks they face when traveling with him in public, and a few reacted with outrage to the trip, asking how Trump’s desire to be seen outside his hospital suite justified the jeopardy to agents protecting him. Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis has already brought new scrutiny to his lax approach to social distancing, as public health officials scramble to trace those he may have exposed at large in-person events.

“He’s not even pretending to care now,” one agent said after the president’s jaunt outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to wave at supportive crowds.

“Where are the adults?” said a former Secret Service member.

...Trump wore a mask as he waved from the back of his vehicle, after announcing he would “pay a little surprise to some of the great patriots that we have out on the street.” But the face covering was little comfort to doctors, who took to Twitter to criticize the trip as irresponsible. Masks “help, but they are not an impenetrable force field,” tweeted Saad B. Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.

Among critics was a doctor affiliated with Walter Reed.

“Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days,” tweeted James P. Phillips, who is also a professor at George Washington University. “They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.”

Phillips said the risk of viral transmission inside the car is “as high as it gets outside of medical procedures.” Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, noted people inside a hospital wear extensive protective gear-- gowns, gloves, N95 masks and more-- when they will be in close contact with a coronavirus patient such as Trump.

“By taking a joy ride outside Walter Reed the president is placing his Secret Service detail at grave risk,” he tweeted.

Frank Schaeffer suggested that "It is time to liberate the Secret Service detail. Let Trump hire suicidal Proud Boys to guard him and catch COVID as he indulges in reckless ego-driven stunts." I like that idea too.

Also writing for The Post, Dr. Leana Wen asked "If the president was brought into the hospital for closer monitoring, what sense does it make to discharge him just before the time period that’s potentially the most fraught?" Her tweet Sundat afternoon was more enlightening:

Mary McNamara is a culture columnist for the L.A. Times. She may have reached the same conclusions about Trump's joy ride-- even if she never even considered the Satwant and Beant solution-- but her perspective... well, it comes from a different space: Trump’s dangerous Sunday drive-by recalls the madness of a monarch. But he’s not one. As Trump's mendacious doctors had the press scrambling with timelines, oxygen levels and the significance of certain drugs prescribed during his treatment for COVID-19, all she could think of was the scrutiny of the royal stool and urine in The Madness of King George: "I cannot inquire after His Majesty’s symptoms until he chooses to inform me of them." The Trumpian spectacle Sunday drove McNamara to re-watch the 1994 film, adapted by Alan Bennett from his award-winning 1991 play, The Madness of George III. "And you know what? The parallels are highly disturbing," she wrote.

Much of The Madness of King George deals with the difficulty of attempting to treat a ruler who is incapable of recognizing reality and his own relationship to same, a ruler known to punish ruthlessly those who dare presume even to look at him, much less attempt to advise or to heal him.

Which sounds a tiny bit familiar; Mark Meadows reportedly faced the president’s wrath after he informed reporters that Trump was not sailing along as blithely as Conley had indicated.

But the most disturbing parallel came just as I finished watching the film’s climactic scene. The king-- realizing that his son is about to have himself named regent-- pulls it together enough to get in a carriage and appear before the cheering throngs, and I glanced at social media to find that President Trump was in the process of doing the very same thing.

For reasons known only to themselves and whatever gods they worship, doctors at Walter Reed allowed a man with full-blown COVID-19 to get into an SUV filled with the requisite sacrificial victims-- er, Secret Service agents-- so he could wave to his supporters (many of them maskless, few of them social-distancing) as they clamored to wish him well in fighting this highly infectious and deadly disease.

Honestly, all that was missing was the gilded royal carriage.

This prophetic juxtaposition between art and life left me freaked out in a way I hadn’t been since, well, Friday. Which is when we learned that the Rose Garden ceremony to announce Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, held a mere week after the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, had been a COVID-19 super-spreader event.

I may be a recovering Roman Catholic, but the “And then God said: ‘Nope’” overtones of that situation seem pretty darn clear.

To see a president rewarding supporters, in his own special way, for doing the same sort of things that put him in the hospital in the first place?

Who’s the mad king now?

Actually, the comparison isn’t fair. George III, now perhaps best known for providing the comic relief in Hamilton, had apparently returned to a state of wellness by the time he presented himself to his loyalists. Also-- and this is important-- he was at no point encouraging his subjects to make themselves vulnerable to the highly infectious disease from which he himself was suffering.

(And before you hit me with “But what about the risks involved in the Black Lives Matter protests?” Please. People take to the streets to protest only when other means of achieving justice have failed; that millions did so in the middle of a pandemic is simply a gauge of how complete and devastating those failures have been.)

I understand the desire of Trump supporters to show up for the ailing president, just as I understand the president wanting to thank them, as he said in a video he tweeted to tease his little journey. (Had he been feeling better, he could have just sung the Hamilton King George bit about “for your love, for your praise and I’ll love you ‘til my dying days...” which honestly would have been super fun).


 


But God Almighty, you would think he might have urged the people he claims to love so much to take steps to ensure their own safety. None of those folks are going to get airlifted to Walter Reed if they test positive and turn feverish. None of them are going to get all the COVID-19 drugs and treatments available in a 48-hour (or however long it has actually been) span.

If Trump suddenly felt that Twitter was no longer the best way to engage with his supporters, couldn’t he have just waved from the window like Ronald Reagan did? As far as I know, Vice President Mike Pence was not scheming to have the 25th Amendment invoked (although given the insanity of this particular Sunday drive, maybe he should).

No matter what Trump may think, this is not a monarchy. The president is not anointed by God to rule. He is elected to serve the American people with the understanding that if, for whatever reason, he is incapable of serving, the vice president will step in. That is why we have a vice president!

The demand for an accurate account of the state of Trump’s health is not about the man; it’s about the presidency. If nothing else, he should respect the office enough to put all his effort into getting well, not taking a smile ‘n wave lap.

One hopes that the president is indeed on the mend-- because there are still a hell of a lot of questions he needs to answer. Questions about his taxes and outstanding loans, about continued Russian interference with the election and about accusations against Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Not to mention the timeline of his diagnosis and his lack of basic social precautions.

Like whatever afflicted King George III, who continued to suffer from bouts of “madness,” COVID-19 is a tenacious disease; even on the way to health, there is a pretty good chance that Trump will continue to be affected by symptoms. Suffering from this disease can be debilitating and terrifying, which is why the Biden campaign suspended its negative ads and the press has put aside the many issues facing the Trump campaign in favor of a minute-by-minute focus on the president’s condition.

Still, it’s hard to see his heedless Sunday drive as anything but permission for the many questions and criticisms raised about his financial situation, his handling of the pandemic and the scandals affecting so many of his inner circle to resume.

As my mother used to say, if you’re well enough to go out and play, you’re well enough to go back to school. Though in this case, please do it remotely.