Does Anyone Think Trump Hasn't Been The Worst President In History? And The Most Dangerous?

Slimeball by Nancy Ohanian

Everyone I know is having psychological problems right now-- some very mildly and some... well, at least one person I know committed suicide. In the middle of an out-of-contril, deadly pandemic, we have enough to worry about without a narcissistic madman threatening to destroy our democracy and the nation itself. Could Putin have ever imagined that for an investment of just a few million dollars he would have laid America this low, helping elevate the ultimate anti-patriot to the Oval Office? Joshua Benton tweeted this yesterday. It's literally horrifying:

Trump's incompetence and dysfunction are horrific enough on their own. Saturday morning, in a letter to the Democratic conference, Nancy Pelosi wrote that progress on the negotiations for a pandemic relief bill are "complicated by the complete disarray on the Republican side-- as Trump contradicts his own negotiators and his own position." But, alas, there's more to the dire national dilemma than Trump's shortcomings as a party leader.

I think millions of us have been asking exactly the question Ron Brownstein posed in his Atlantic column this week: Just How Far Will Trump Go?. Is there another Civil War on the horizon if he feels his personal safety is in jeopardy if he loses? Would he actually steal the election and refuse to leave office even if he loses, even he loses-- as seems likely-- resoundingly?

Brownstein wrote that Trump’s open admission on Friday "that he’s sabotaging the Postal Service to improve his election prospects crystallizes a much larger dynamic: He’s waging an unprecedented campaign to weaponize virtually every component of the federal government to partisan advantage. Trump is systematically enlisting agencies, including the Postal Service, Census Bureau, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security, that traditionally have been considered at least somewhat insulated from political machinations to reward his allies and punish those he considers his enemies. He is razing barriers between his personal and political interests and the core operations of the federal government to an extent that no president has previously attempted, a wide range of public-administration experts have told me. 'There’s always been temptation... but no president in modern times has taken action so explicitly and obviously-- or transparently-- to influence and actually direct these agencies to favor the party in power,' Paul Light, a public-service professor at New York University, told me. 'None. None.'" Maybe when he chose that portrait of Andrew Jackson for the Oval Office we could have figured out where he was heading. J.M. Opal, a historian at McGill University and author of Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the American Nation: "Trump is the first president to so openly admire and point to Jackson as a model, and to borrow so clearly and explicitly from the language of Jacksonian 'democracy.'"

Trump’s seeming fondness for Jackson comes at something of a low reputational ebb-- a historical moment when many Americans have begun to focus on the darker side of Jackson’s record.

...High on this list are his personal history as a slaveholder and his implementation, as president, of a policy of "Indian removal" from eastern lands that culminated in the "Trail of Tears," which led to the deaths of an estimated 5,000 Cherokees.

In recent years, "Jackson's offenses against Indians and blacks and his propensity for personal gun violence have overshadowed his economic policies among liberals and progressives," [historian Harry] Watson said.

...[Historian H. Lee Cheek:] "The Trump endorsement of Jackson follows from his very limited understanding of Jackson as a man of action. He has no knowledge of the misdeeds of Jackson that are central to a complete understanding of his political career."

...Some historians also see an intriguing shared dichotomy: Both Jackson and Trump professed to care about the ordinary man, and both came from great wealth. They each railed against political elites, but were less outspoken in their criticism against other types of rich and powerful Americans.

"Jackson had been a large import-export merchant, a lawyer and judge, and was as of the 1820s one of the largest slave-owners in central Tennessee, a man of immense power over the days and hours and even the lives of about 100 enslaved blacks, not to mention dozens of white debtors," Opal said. "Yet in his idea of ‘the people,’ he was an ordinary fella, a regular Joe. That is a strange kind of populism."

For all his flaws, though, Jackson wasn't nearly as bad a president as Trump has turned out to be-- and, unlike Trump, no one could accuse Jackson of being a traitor. Unlike Trump, Jackson was a patriot. Certainly with him in mind, Brownstein wrote that "Presidents have always put their stamp on the federal government. It’s common for regulatory agencies, for instance, to dramatically shift direction in their attitude toward Big Business when partisan control of the White House changes. And presidents have always rewarded their political supporters, at times causing scandals because of questionable Cabinet appointments or procurement decisions. But no matter which individuals were appointed to lead them, some agencies have always been considered more protected from politics. It’s those barriers that Trump, with the tacit support of congressional Republicans, is steadily dismantling. Presidents have used the Postal Service to reward loyalists with jobs since the country’s earliest history. But they didn’t expect what Trump does from the agency. 'The whole spoils system goes back to having supporters who were appointed as postmasters,' says Kedric Payne, the general counsel of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center and a former top official at the Office of Congressional Ethics. 'But it wasn’t to disrupt the election.' The result of Trump’s moves: an executive branch whose full reach and power is being conscripted to serve the president’s immediate interests. 'All of it comes from a place that whatever is in his personal interest-- whether it’s financial, reputational, or political-- if it benefits him, the government is merely a tool for serving himself,' Walter Shaub, the director of the Office of Government Ethics under former President Barack Obama, told me. 'He has simply crossed lines that no one would even conceive of crossing in the past.' His determination to harness federal power to his personal advantage links his choices throughout his presidency, including funneling federal dollars into businesses he owns and withholding military aid for Ukraine in exchange for an election favor, the actions that led to his impeachment in the House last year."

Experts I spoke with said that Trump has dramatically accelerated the pace of his efforts to weaponize federal actions since his Senate acquittal, when every Republican, except Utah’s Mitt Romney, voted to dismiss the charges against him with no sanction and not even a full-scale trial to explore the evidence.

Beyond his recent efforts to impede mail delivery, Trump has:

• rapidly purged inspectors general across the federal government, replacing five of them within a short period, including the intelligence-community IG who forwarded to Congress the whistleblower complaint that triggered Trump’s impeachment.
• openly pressured the Justice Department to back off the prosecution of his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and to request more lenient sentencing for his ally Roger Stone. Trump later commuted Stone’s sentence outright.
• deployed federal law-enforcement officials from the Department of Homeland Security to confront protesters in Portland, Oregon, and other cities over the explicit objection of governors and mayors.
• enlisted the military into his campaign against protesters, drafting Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley to accompany him during his walk to St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C., after armed personnel forcibly cleared out peaceful protesters. The decision prompted so much concern in the military that Milley later apologized.
• taken repeated steps to manipulate the results of the decennial census in a manner that could undercount people of color and benefit the Republican Party. The Supreme Court stopped Trump from adding a citizenship question to the census, but the administration now says it intends to exclude undocumented immigrants from the population counts used to apportion congressional seats and Electoral College votes among the states. It also announced it will cut off efforts to contact households that haven’t responded to the census on September 30, despite the disruption caused by the coronavirus outbreak. Census experts and former Census Bureau directors have said that such a truncated schedule is guaranteed to undercount minorities.

The deployment of federal agents this summer may represent the most tangible manifestation of Trump’s determination to wield the federal government as a weapon against his political enemies. Light, who has studied the federal government’s operations for decades and is usually no alarmist, describes it as “shocking.” Sending those assets into cities over the objection of their mayors, he told me, “does resemble the early days of a police state, I’m sorry to say it.”

But if those deployments comprise the most visceral example, Trump’s attempts to manipulate the census may provide the most revealing measure of just how much he’s willing to distort federal operations to benefit himself and his party-- and how far congressional Republicans will go in abetting him.

In the past, the census has occasionally faced questions about its accuracy. But never before has there been evidence of a president deliberately trying to skew the results in a manner that helps one party. “I don’t think there’s ever been a charge that the census was systematically unfair,” says Donald Kettl, a longtime scholar of federal administration, now at the University of Texas at Austin.

Until now, the reason for avoiding census tampering has seemed obvious: It was thought that everyone benefits from an accurate count (just as everyone was thought to benefit from an apolitical military, among other institutions Trump has tried to manipulate). Billions of dollars in federal aid are tied to population, so presumably every state would want as many of its people counted as possible. “A complete count is important no matter what state you are in, because so many federal and state programs are tied to the numbers of people,” Steve Murdock, who served as the Census Bureau’s director under President George W. Bush, told me. “You don’t gain much by not counting the people you have to provide services for.”

But in a political environment defined by widening polarization along racial and geographic lines, that traditional restraint has apparently broken down. Hardly any congressional Republicans have raised concerns about Trump’s determination to curtail the census count. That includes Republicans from highly diverse states across the Sun Belt, which are likely to be among the biggest losers if minority populations are systematically undercounted, both in terms of federal aid and the apportionment of congressional seats and Electoral College votes. This week, I asked the offices of GOP senators from Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Georgia if they had any objection to Trump short-circuiting the census count. All refused to respond, except Florida’s Marco Rubio, whose staff referred me only to a comment he’d made on a related issue, Trump’s effort to exclude the undocumented from apportionment. (And even on that question, Rubio avoided taking a definitive position.) Republican governors in those states have not raised concerns publicly either.

“I am just dumbfounded,” said Murdock, who also served for many years as Texas’s state demographer. “I don’t know why Texas would let this happen. The elected officials should be screaming: ‘Count those people; we are providing services for them.’”

Although the House has approved legislation extending the deadline for reporting census results until next April, giving the bureau more time to reach unresponsive Americans, the Senate has refused to consider the measure. Instead, just as with Postal Service slowdowns that may disproportionately hurt rural communities, many Republicans appear to have concluded that they are willing to accept collateral damage to their own constituencies for the partisan gain Trump’s actions could provide. Counting fewer people of color in Texas or Florida might mean fewer federal dollars, and even less representation in Congress. But it also could benefit Republicans in next year’s redistricting, making it tougher for civil-rights groups to legally challenge gerrymandered lines for providing insufficient representation to minorities.

“Republicans are in on the deal,” says Simon Rosenberg, the founder of the Democratic research-and-advocacy group NDN, referring to the GOP’s effective approval of Trump’s actions concerning both the census and the Postal Service. “They want Trump to blunt the size of the Democratic victory this year at all costs... They want Trump to stick his finger in the demographic dam that could make them the minority party for a generation.”

This corrosive synergy binds other elements of Trump’s campaign to weaponize more federal functions. Payne says Trump’s offensive has proceeded in two stages. First, he systematically defied congressional oversight-- ignoring subpoenas and demands for testimony-- and fired inspectors general who were in his path. Congressional Republicans helped by supporting his defiance of oversight and voting almost unanimously not to punish his actions in Ukraine. With those potential sources of resistance blunted, Payne says, Trump has moved more openly than before to manipulate federal operations that will directly influence the outcome of this election (the Postal Service) and the distribution of political power for years to come (the census).

“Where now that you have no recourse that Congress can take to impeach or investigate the administration, and you don’t have the IGs, that lays the groundwork to then go after these positions that could influence the election,” Payne says.

By politicizing agencies so overtly, Trump is creating a situation in which the right will accuse Joe Biden, if he wins, of engaging in political manipulation simply by reverting them to their more traditional roles. Conservatives, for instance, will surely scream if a President Biden removes loyalists whom Trump has installed in inspector-general positions.

An even more dramatic outcome of Biden winning in November: Some experts believe that his administration could reopen the census before transmitting the data for reapportioning congressional seats. Under current federal law, Trump must transmit the results to Congress for reapportionment purposes by year’s end. But some believe a President Biden could order the bureau to spend several more months pursuing the households it has not yet reached. “The next president can say, ‘I decertify it,’” says Robert Shapiro, who helped oversee the 2000 census as the Commerce Department’s undersecretary for economic affairs under Bill Clinton. “You can say, ‘I’m not going to redo it, [but] we are going to carry out the operation that was truncated.’” (There’s no apparent precedent for reopening the census during a change of administrations, which means that the Supreme Court would likely decide whether doing so is legal if Biden takes that route.)

And if Trump wins? The public-administration experts universally told me that the accelerating pace of Trump’s excesses-- without meaningful complaint from congressional Republicans-- signals that in a second term, he is likely to push much further in refashioning the federal government for his own ends.

Rosenberg framed Trump’s actions in dramatic terms. Trump, in his combative speeches around the July 4 holiday, claimed that “far-left fascism” is trying to “overthrow” and “destroy” American “civilization”-- allegations that could justify almost any level of “authoritarian crackdown by the government of the United States against the president’s domestic political opponents,” Rosenberg argues. “We are watching an authoritarian in action before our eyes. And we haven’t woken up to the significance of what we are seeing, frankly.”

Those are accusations that have rarely been directed at an American president. But as students of democracy point out, the pattern of subordinating all government operations to the interests of one party, and even one individual, is a core characteristic of illiberal and authoritarian countries. Shaub, like Rosenberg, sees exactly that end point. “I think if he’s reelected, the republic may die-- and I’m having to force myself to say ‘may’ so I don’t sound like a complete alarmist,” Shaub, now a senior adviser to the government-watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said starkly. “But I don’t see how the government can survive four more years of this … Whatever your worst fears are for whatever comes next aren’t as bad as it will be, by a long shot.”

Census Report Predicts Losses And Gains For States-- But NOT For Political Parties

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal’s Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg reported that “new state population totals released Monday offer fresh signs that political power is poised to continue its shift from the North and Midwest to the South and Southwest in ways that could help states that have voted Republican in recent years.” The Census Bureau released estimates that indicate that California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and West Virginia are set to lose one seat each and that Texas will pick up two seats, while Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon will gain one seat each.

Other projections differ slightly, with Texas gaining three seats and Florida 2 while Alabama and Ohio make it into the losing column, minus one seat each. It’s hard to say which party will gain or lose seats. Some of the states have non-partisan commissions drawing boundaries, rather than legislatures. Other states with heavily partisan perspectives on drawing boundaries-- like Texas for the GOP and Illinois for the Democrats are already so grotesquely gerrymandered that it would be hard to make it favorable for their own parties. And several states with p;redatorily partisan legislatures, like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Montana and North Carolina, have Democratic governors as a check on their excesses. At this point no one can predict accurately what’s going to happen.

Meanwhile Hansi Lo Wang, reporting for NPR, noted that Latinos and Asians were uncomfortable with the now-blocked citizenship question in the census. She wrote that including the question (in an experiment) resulted in statistically significant dips in the self-response rates particularly in the Western states of Alaska, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. In areas of that region where at least a fifth of homes have a Spanish-speaking adult who does not speak English very well, the bureau found the citizenship question led to a difference as high as 2.4% in self-response rates.” Exactly what Trump wanted-- and thankfully, the courts blocked.

Who's Behind The Move To Wipe AOC's Congressional District Off The Map?

It came as no surprise that New York would be losing a congressional seat after the census. Speculation in Albany over a year ago was that NY-27, a large rural district in the western part of the state-- then held by crooked Trumpist Chris Collins--  would be divided up between NY-26 (Buffalo- D+11), NY-25 (Rochester- D+8) and NY-23 (Southern Tier- R+6). The move would make NY-26 and NY-25 slightly more competitive but still safely blue and make NY-23 much redder and much safer for a Republican. And it would get rid of Collins and a district with a shrinking population.

But Collins resigned and is going to prison and the New York Democratic Party bosses have switched their focus on another congress member they hate-- and fear-- even more than Collins: AOC. The scuttlebutt in Albany is that the dominant Republican-wing of the party, in a move to protect Schumer’s Senate reelection in 2022, wants to dismember NY-14. That'll teach 'em! And that will, the thinking goes, keep AOC, now old enough to run for the Senate (30), in her place! So wrong on so many levels!

There was a buried mention in Politico on Tuesday morning:

With New York likely to lose at least one congressional seat, the district held by Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be broken up, forcing her to find a new winning coalition. There’s little love for the disruptive young upstart in Albany, and many state lawmakers would like nothing more than to redraw her out of office. Ocasio-Cortez seems aware of the threat, as she’s been promoting Census sign-ups in her district to ensure that her constituents are fully counted.

I decided to run a quick Twitter poll to see if there is any kind of consensus around the importance of AOC’s political career. There is. The polling started strong for her:

And admiration for Ocasio-Cortez ended strong as well. 89 people participated in the poll-- one for each freshman!-- and 92% indicated they think AOC is the most consequential and most important new addition to Congress. Go Twitter! The New York (and DC) political establishments would be on the losing end of this battle, of that I'm certain.

As you know, AOC doesn’t take campaign contributions from any of the crooks who make the wheels turn in DC-- and Albany-- but she has still managed to raise $3,381,334.59 as of September 30, significantly more than any of the notorious New York whores who sit on the phone all day begging special interests for money:

• Max Rose - $2,139,582.51
• Antonio Delgado (D)- $2,063,246.39
• Hakeem Jeffries- $2,048,723.08
• Lee Zeldin (R)- $1,867,986.14
• Anthony Brindisi- $1,417,403.05
• Elise Stefanik (R)- $1,330,918.47
• Tom Reed (R)- $1,264,624.41
• John Katko (R)- $1,182,074.69
• Carolyn Maloney- $1,016,483.16
• Sean Patrick Maloney- $841,739.78
• Greg Meeks- $643,895.51
• Eliot Engel- $566,230.84
• Brian Higgins- $514,347.20
• Kathleen Rice- $334,379.20

Someone in Schumer’s operation denied that his boss-- who has raised $1,526,081.84 so far for his 2022 reelection campaign-- was behind the anti-AOC move and told me the impetus was from the Queens party machine. That is run by one of the most corrupt members of Congress, Gregory Meeks, a Wall Street-owned and operated slime ball New Dem (and Schumer ally). I spoke with Shan Chowdhury, the progressive Democrat challenging Meeks on his him turf and a former AOC campaign worker, what he though about this. "Would any of us be surprised if my opponent, the corrupt Gregory Meeks, is behind the anti-AOC movement? I sure am not! Meeks is only about himself and his special interest donors that keeps him in office. He’s anti-labor, anti-movement, and anti-people. As the Queens Democratic County Chair, he is doing everything in his power to keep the movement outside of the county democratic process. If he’s unwilling to make a system that’s fairer and just for all, is he a real Democrat at all? Working families deserve better. Our country deserves better. The movement deserves better. I will be his most competitive challenger he’s ever had. Let’s vote him out and vote me in because I will work for and with the people. We will make New York bluer. Happy New Year!

Republican Extremists And Obstructionists Defeated Over Census Bureau Confirmation

Even most Republican members of the House of Lords didn't have it in them to keep filibustering President Obama's nomination of Robert Groves as Director of the Census Bureau. Cloture passed yesterday 76-15 and the Senate's most bitter obstructionists and most vicious racists, led by Jeff Sessions (KKK-AL), David Diapers Vitter (R-LA), Jim Bunning (R-KY), John Cornyn (R-TX), Johnny Isakson (R-GA) and Dick Shelby (R-AL), were forced to back off from demands that basically seek to disenfranchise as many non-whites and Hispanics as possible by systematic under-counting. Even some of the Senate's most extreme fringe elements couldn't back the disgraceful filibuster and serial sociopaths like Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Richard Burr (R-NC), Miss McConnell (R-KY), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) found themselves on the other side of the aisle voting with the Democrats.

In the end Groves, a veteran survey researcher at the University of Michigan, was confirmed by voice vote. The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), a leading nonprofit organization that facilitates full Latino participation in the American political process, issued the following statement regarding Groves' confirmation:

With a new Director confirmed, it is time for the Census Bureau to move forward to ensure that the 2010 enumeration produces the most accurate count possible of the nation's population. It is critical that the Bureau implement a communications and outreach plan that takes into account the current economic and social realities confronting residents of the nation. The Bureau's advertising must connect with Americans who have been displaced or lost homes because of natural disasters or our economic crisis. It must assure residents of the confidentiality of the information provided during the enumeration.

The Census Bureau must also ensure that its Census 2010 workforce reflects the diversity of the nation's population, from its highest managerial positions to its field enumerators.

In addition, we urge Congress to do its part by providing sufficient funding in the FY 2010 budget to effectively implement the 2010 enumeration. The 2010 Census involves the largest peacetime mobilization of America's federal personnel and resources, and the Bureau must have the funding needed to meet this challenge.

Finally, we strongly condemn the efforts of a small group of organizations with extremist views, and even a member of Congress [primarily Vitter and Shelby in the Senate and Boehner and the crazed, delusional Bachmannin the House], calling for a boycott of the enumeration. A boycott would only exacerbate the undercount, which would hurt neighborhoods and communities. Encouraging anyone not to participate in the census is simply wrong.

Unfortunately, the Latino population has never been fully counted in the decennial enumeration, and Census Bureau estimates suggest that the 2000 Census may have missed as many as 1 million Latinos. Let us be clear: the only way to achieve a successful census is to count all Latinos.

We are committed to helping the Bureau eliminate the undercount through our participation in the ya es hora, HAGASE CONTAR! (It's Time, Make Yourself Count!) Campaign. The Campaign-- an unprecedented coalition of national Spanish-language media and Latino organizations-- will promote the importance of the census, educate members of the community about filling out their census forms and encourage households to mail back their responses once they complete their forms.

We congratulate Dr. Groves on his confirmation and look forward to working with him and the Bureau to ensure a successful 2010 enumeration.

I'll bet Lou Dobbs must have had a shit-fit on CNN yesterday!