Trump Is The Worst President In History-- And The GOP Deserves To Die With Him... But That Doesn't Automatically Make The Democratic Party Worth Anything

 

This morning, the NY Times editorial board asserted that Trump destroyed the Republican Party. They're wrong. The craven, spineless politicians who represent the party destroyed it. Then they claim "'Destroyed' is perhaps too simplistic, [and] Trump accelerated his party’s demise, exposing the rot that has been eating at its core for decades and leaving it a hollowed-out shell devoid of ideas, values or integrity, committed solely to preserving its own power even at the expense of democratic norms, institutions and ideals." OK, now they're talking. Pity they didn't throw the Democratic Party under the same bus; it would be just as accurate.

The Times bemoans the passing-- it really hasn't passed and it won't-- of the GOP because we won't have a "strong center right [party that] can co-opt more palatable aspects of the far right, isolating and draining energy from the more radical elements that threaten to destabilize the system." And yet that is precisely what the Democratic Party has turned into-- a center right party co-opting aspects of the far right (i.e., the GOP). These editors define the Republican Party that we see today as having an "ideology [that] has been reduced to a slurry of paranoia, white grievance and authoritarian populism. Its governing vision is reactionary, a cross between obstructionism and owning the libs. Its policy agenda, as defined by the party platform, is whatever President Trump wants."

With his dark gospel, the president has enthralled the Republican base, rendering other party leaders too afraid to stand up to him. But to stand with Mr. Trump requires a constant betrayal of one’s own integrity and values. This goes beyond the usual policy flip-flops-- what happened to fiscal hawks anyway?-- and political hypocrisy, though there have been plenty of both. Witness the scramble to fill a Supreme Court seat just weeks before Election Day by many of the same Senate Republicans who denied President Barack Obama his high court pick in 2016, claiming it would be wrong to fill a vacancy eight months out from that election.

Mr. Trump demands that his interests be placed above those of the nation. His presidency has been an extended exercise in defining deviancy down-- and dragging the rest of his party down with him.

Having long preached “character” and “family values,” Republicans have given a pass to Mr. Trump’s personal degeneracy. The affairs, the hush money, the multiple accusations of assault and harassment, the gross boasts of grabbing unsuspecting women-- none of it matters. White evangelicals remain especially faithful adherents, in large part because Mr. Trump has appointed around 200 judges to the federal bench.

For all their talk about revering the Constitution, Republicans have stood by, slack-jawed, in the face of the president’s assault on checks and balances. Mr. Trump has spurned the concept of congressional oversight of his office. After losing a budget fight and shutting down the government in 2018-19, he declared a phony national emergency at the southern border so he could siphon money from the Pentagon for his border wall. He put a hold on nearly $400 million in Senate-approved aid to Ukraine-- a move that played a central role in his impeachment.

So much for Republicans’ Obama-era nattering about “executive overreach.”

Despite fetishizing “law and order,” Republicans have shrugged as Mr. Trump has maligned and politicized federal law enforcement, occasionally lending a hand. Impeachment offered the most searing example. Parroting the White House line that the entire process was illegitimate, the president’s enablers made clear they had his back no matter what. As Pete Wehner, who served as a speechwriter to the three previous Republican presidents, observed in The Atlantic: “Republicans, from beginning to end, sought not to ensure that justice be done or truth be revealed. Instead, they sought to ensure that Trump not be removed from office under any circumstances, defending him at all costs.”

The debasement goes beyond passive indulgence. Congressional bootlickers, channeling Mr. Trump’s rantings about the Deep State, have used their power to target those who dared to investigate him. Committee chairmen like Representative Devin Nunes and Senator Ron Johnson have conducted hearings aimed at smearing Mr. Trump’s political opponents and delegitimizing the special counsel’s Russia inquiry.

As head of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Mr. Johnson pushed a corruption investigation of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter that he bragged would expose the former vice president’s “unfitness for office.” Instead, he wasted taxpayer money producing an 87-page rehash of unsubstantiated claims reeking of a Russian disinformation campaign. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, another Republican on the committee, criticized the inquiry as “a political exercise,” noting, “It’s not the legitimate role of government or Congress, or for taxpayer expense to be used in an effort to damage political opponents.”

Undeterred, last Sunday Mr. Johnson popped up on Fox News, engaging with the host over baseless rumors that the F.B.I. was investigating child pornography on a computer that allegedly had belonged to Hunter Biden. These vile claims are being peddled online by right-wing conspiracymongers, including QAnon.

Not that congressional toadies are the only offenders. A parade of administration officials-- some of whom were well respected before their Trumpian tour-- have stood by, or pitched in, as the president has denigrated the F.B.I., federal prosecutors, intelligence agencies and the courts. They have failed to prioritize election security because the topic makes Mr. Trump insecure about his win in 2016. They have pushed the limits of the law and human decency to advance Mr. Trump’s draconian immigration agenda.

Most horrifically, Republican leaders have stood by as the president has lied to the public about a pandemic that has already killed more than 220,000 Americans. They have watched him politicize masks, testing, the distribution of emergency equipment and pretty much everything else. Some echo his incendiary talk, fueling violence in their own communities. In the campaign’s closing weeks, as case numbers and hospitalizations climb and health officials warn of a rough winter, Mr. Trump is stepping up the attacks on his scientific advisers, deriding them as “idiots” and declaring Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top expert in infectious diseases, a “disaster.” Only a smattering of Republican officials has managed even a tepid defense of Dr. Fauci. Whether out of fear, fealty or willful ignorance, these so-called leaders are complicit in this national tragedy.

As Republican lawmakers grow increasingly panicked that Mr. Trump will lose re-election-- possibly damaging their fortunes as well-- some are scrambling to salvage their reputations by pretending they haven’t spent the past four years letting him run amok. In an Oct. 14 call with constituents, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska gave a blistering assessment of the president’s failures and “deficient” values, from his misogyny to his calamitous handling of the pandemic to “the way he kisses dictators’ butts.” Mr. Sasse was less clear about why, the occasional targeted criticismnotwithstanding, he has enabled these deficiencies for so long.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, locked in his own tight re-election race, recently told the local media that he, too, has disagreed with Mr. Trump on numerous issues, including deficit spending, trade policy and his raiding of the defense budget. Mr. Cornyn said he opted to keep his opposition private rather than get into a public tiff with Mr. Trump “because, as I’ve observed, those usually don’t end too well.”

Profiles in courage these are not.

Mr. Trump’s corrosive influence on his party would fill a book. It has, in fact, filled several, as well as a slew of articles, social media posts and op-eds, written by conservatives both heartbroken and incensed over what has become of their party.

But many of these disillusioned Republicans also acknowledge that their team has been descending into white grievance, revanchism and know-nothing populism for decades. Mr. Trump just greased the slide. “He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party has become in the last 50 or so years,” the longtime party strategist Stuart Stevens asserts in his new book, It Was All a Lie.

The scars of Mr. Trump’s presidency will linger long after he leaves office. Some Republicans believe that, if those scars run only four years deep, rather than eight, their party can be nursed back to health. Others question whether there is anything left worth saving. Mr. Stevens’s prescription: “Burn it to the ground, and start over.”

Sick of this? But don't buy into the concept of backing the lesser of two evils in politics? The Democratic Party sucks-- not as bad as the GOP-- but too much to support? Well, until the morning, Blue America hadn't opened our anti-DCCC page, which helps support progressive candidates that the DCCC is starving for resources while they support their Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- the Democraps. Access it by clicking on the Cheri Bustos thermometer on the right. Every two years the crooks among the Democratic Party establishment elites persuade you toehold your nose and vote for their shit candidates because they're better than the Republicans even shittier candidates. How you going to ever break out of that cycle? If you're in a New York district offering you Anthony Brindisi, Max Rose or Sean Patrick Maloney, support candidates from other districts in your state-- say Jamaal Bowman, Dana Balter, AOC for example. The DCCC wants you to back Jackie Gordon on Long Island but she's been endorsed by both the Blue Dogs and the New Dems and that tells you exactly what kind of a member of Congress she's going to make. He may live an hour away but, put your energy behind Mondaire Jones instead. But you live in Oklahoma and there are no good Democrats-- just reactionary quasi-Republican Blue Dog Kendra Horn? Texas isn't that far away-- and you can do the country-- the Democratic Party-- a lot of good by backing progressive stalwarts like Julie Oliver and Mike Siegel. Trade in Kendra Horn for Julie and Mike-- deal of the cycle!

Next 4 Years' Lesser-Evil Impact on Global Climate Cooperation?

Kamala and Joe by Nancy Ohanian

-by Emorej

Long-term, many have analysed how a Biden-Harris win in 2020 could cement Harris’s dominance of the Democratic Presidential nominating process, likely until 2032 (after 1 Biden term and 2 Harris terms). Similarly, one could argue that a Trump loss in 2020 would accelerate the Republican transition to a new Presidential nominee who would pursue most of Trump’s ugliest policies with more consistency, diligence and governing knowhow, and who could easily win in 2024 if Biden-Harris stick to their telegraphed track of too-little-too-late economic stimulus and healthcare reform while blaming "pantry emptied out by Trump’s [Pelosi-supported] bailouts of Wall Street!"

But the following shorter-term analysis also requires consideration:

• Global action against climate change can only start with cooperation between USA, China, Russia, etc.
• Such cooperation cannot start until the USA’s militaristic (& finance-weaponizing) hegemonism is downgraded to merely “first among equals” in a new balance of power.
• This downgrading is unlikely to happen until Germany leads much of Western Europe into terminating their 75 years of mainly deferring to the USA.
• Germany has been mainly waiting out Trump’s first term, but Trump’s re-election would probably catalyze that termination (facilitated by Trump’s absurd obsession with Germany’s failure to raise its military spending to 2% of GDP, although the biggest catalyst will probably be USA sanctions on the nearly completed Russia-German gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea).
• In contrast, the Biden-Harris foreign policy team:


(a) will put top priority on restoring Germany’s prior trend-line of very slow erosion of deference to the USA,

(b) will put much lower priority on de-escalating the confrontations that Trump has initiated with China and (under pressure from Russiagaters) with Russia, and

(c) will put medium priority on de-escalating with Iran, which will not be easy when constrained by the political mentality behind Harris’s recent pledge that USA aide to Israel will be “unconditional.”

Meanwhile, domestically:

• Serious action against climate change can only start when the federal government allocates massive new resources towards the poor people who are dependent on the fossil fuel economy, and away from the politically dominant industries who are enriched by fossil fuels and weapons manufacturing (and usage).
• The unlikeliness of Biden-Harris making these politically difficult changes is dramatized by their refusal to even pretend to make the popular (with voters) and pandemic-justified (to many donors) change of supporting Medicare-For-All.

A re-elected Trump, in contrast, would be unpredictable. At worst, he would start a shooting war with China, and, when an aircraft carrier or two gets sunk, he would start firing nuclear weapons, which could easily trigger an uncontrollable cycle of retaliatory escalations. But the military command structure knows that Trump is impetuous, so they are more likely to delay and/or sabotage his impulsive military orders than they would if the same orders were generated by a more professional process of the more diplomatic Biden-Harris team. Trump is likely to find governing as a lame-duck second termer to be even less fun than what has happened so far, and it would be logical form him to be tempted to declare victory and resign (for health reasons, of course) in return for pardons from Pence. Europe would doubtless find anybody more tolerable than Trump, but Europe also hosted centuries of religious wars, and is unlikely to be wooed back, into deference, by a USA President with Pence’s profile of religious extremism.

Strong People Can Vote Against Trump Without Forcing Themselves To Wear Blinders About Who Joe Biden Is

Slimeball by Nancy Ohanian

In the early days of DWT, Paul Lakasiak occasionally graced this blog with guest posts. They were always among my favorite contributions. Paul was back yesterday with a response to a post-- Is The Tent So Big That The Party Has Become Meaningless As Anything MoreThan A Vehicle To Save The Country From Trump?. "The answer to your question is 'yes'," he wrote in the comment section. "And the Democratic Party is getting worse, not better."

Watching the convention over the first three days, I was actually working up some enthusiasm for helping the Dems win big in November. Then I saw the news that Pelosi had endorsed Joey With the Good Hair over reliable, principled progressive (and INCUMBENT) Ed Markey. And now I'm outraged.

I'll still crawl through broken glass laced with tetanus laden rusty tacks and fire ants to vote against Donald Trump in November. But don't ask me to tell anyone that things will get better with Democrats like Nancy Pelosi in charge of the House -- because all I can say is that, under Biden, things won't be as bad as under Trump.

And I suspect that this viewpoint will be shared extensively among real progressives. They know that the democratic party is completely corrupt-- and that Pelosi is thoroughly worthless. And we're most likely to see repeat of 2010 in another two years, as Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer betray the American people in favor of their corporate sponsors.

Biden's acceptance speech Thursday night was excellent. Whoever wrote it with him deserves a lot of praise. Biden delivered it very, very well too. I'm a big admirer of John Pavlovitz and share his thoughts here at DWT frequently. I've never disagreed with him-- until his post yesterday: Joe Biden Is Not The Lesser of Two Evils. Obviously, anyone could agree with his observation that "The only people still defending [Trump] are brainwashed Evangelicals, looney conspiracy theorists, and abject racists. The raking light of history is recording all of it, whether these people like it or not. The human rights violations and the assaults on our Constitution and the attacks on our institutions and the rampant criminality cannot be denied or explained away or buried in fake Fox News headlines." It's his next line, though, that merits some debate: "Joe Biden is not the lesser of two evils, because he is not evil by any measure."

For someone like myself, who doesn't vote for evil, whether it is lesser or not, that's an important assertion, and one I entirely disagree with. Politically-speaking, Biden is profoundly evil. Unlike Paul Lukasiac, let alone John Pavlovitz, I'm not even going to vote for him. On a relative basis of evil, he pales next to Trump. Trump's evil isn't normal political evil... Trump's evil comes from the bowels of hell and I pray that selfless and courageous Secret Service agents spend time meditating on a Satwant Singh and Beant Singh solution to what plagues our country and is bringing it to its knees.




I respect people who look at Trump and Biden and conclude that Trump is so much worse that they will... "crawl through broken glass laced with tetanus laden rusty tacks and fire ants to vote" against Trump in November. I haven interest in trying to persuade anyone to not vote against Trump and do what I can to remind everyone I know-- and readers of this blog-- that Satan has a servant in the White House.

But that doesn't change how I see the Joe Biden I've gotten to know since the mid-1970s, when he only had one issue he ran on as a newly-minted Democrat: racism. His campaign was based on dog-whistles vowing to protect white suburban voters from the horrors of integration. And once he got to the Senate, he was in a constant battle for the position of that body's worst Democrat, consciously-- no, literally, consciously-- fighting to present himself as a conservative. Like I said, I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from voting against Trump and I spent the last year talking about Biden's shortcomings. That said, this kind of drivel is not something I'm buying into, no matter the source:

He is a profoundly decent man: a man of faith, a man of compassion; a man who is willing to listen to different viewpoints, capable of evolving, and able to admit his mistakes. He is a man who loves deeply, mourns greatly, and gives fully. He is a man with actual meaningful, healthy relationships with other human beings. He is a humble man who sees others as more important than himself.

Biden is a corrupt conservative and he will head a corrupt conservative administration. Mainstream Republicans love him and they will love him more. He may even achieve their biggest goal-- and his own-- wrecking Social Security with some kind of bogus Grand Compromise he's been working on for his whole miserable career. Is he still better than Trump. Of course. One would be hard-pressed to see Trump as anything less than demonic. Biden is, admittedly, a "flawed human," as Pavlovitz put it. The Democratic Party is also very flawed, very, very, very flawed. There are no Republicans in Congress worth re-electing, not even one. The Democrats have many decent members of Congress-- certainly not a majority-- most congressional Democrats should be defeated-- but there are dozens and dozens of good ones too. Something to build on. The GOP? Needs to start over from scratch.

Pavlovitz is no dummy and only an imbecile would dismiss his thoughts. "It’s one thing to be a good-hearted but flawed human being who sometimes says something stupid or occasionally has an error in judgment or simply gets it wrong," he wrote. "Most of us fall under that category. We’re not any kind of evil, we’re just imperfect , emotional people, and so we fail and fall-- sometimes slightly and sometimes spectacularly. That’s who Joe Biden is. He is one of us. He is human. We need more human these days." How can anyone disagree with that? Especially when he offers the contrast: "It’s something else entirely to be an inherently malevolent creature: to be incapable of empathy, defiantly unwilling to admit mistakes; to wake up every day intending to do harm and feeling no remorse for it. If the word evil can apply to anyone, it’s the current President. He lacks a single noble impulse. Even his supporters know that."

Pavlovitz says he "would much rather be led by a well-intentioned human who sometimes misses the mark, than a purposefully cruel sociopath who has no concern for other people’s pain. False equivalencies are irresponsible here. These are fundamentally different people in every important way one can measure such things."

He should vote for Biden. He's going to. Most voters are going to. Nearly everyone I know and respect is going to. All my relatives-- except one seriously deranged one-- are voting for Biden. All my friends are voting for Biden. I am fairly certain that even my partners at Blue America are voting for Biden. I hope that on November 4th, I'll be thanking God for having defeated Satan the day before. And when Biden starts being Biden, I'll be interested to see how long it takes Pavlovitz to rethink his thoughts on relativity. For example, is Austerity evil? Not as evil as Trumpism, but... well, maybe I'm wrong and that nearly 50 years of Bidenism is suddenly going to change. But I doubt it.

One man pulls us toward unity, the other stokes division. 
One man speaks to our collective better angels, the other to the worst of who we are.
One man is burdened to inspire, the other compelled to engender fear.
One man is continually turned outward and the other is fully self-absorbed.
One man expresses his love for America, the other vilifies over half of it.

Stop telling me the choice isn’t clear.

I’m not voting for Joe Biden begrudgingly.

I’m not holding my nose or halfheartedly standing behind his campaign, and I’m not supporting him simply because he’s opposing Donald Trump.
I'm voting for Joe Biden because I know that he won’t deny the existence of a pandemic.
He won’t blame viruses on Republicans.
He won’t silence medical experts.
He won’t reject Science.
He won’t allow tens of thousands of Americans to die in order to protect his ego.
He won’t tweet demeaning nicknames for his opponents.
He won’t validate nonsensical conspiracies.
He won’t shout over female reporters.
He won’t shut down social media apps when teenagers hurt his feelings.
He won’t dismantle the Postal Service in order to deny Americans their essential liberties.
He won’t make fun of people with disabilities.
He won’t call racists fine people.
And on and on and on.

Republicans for Biden feel a lot like Pavlovitz. Below, on the Bulwark podcast-- a #NeverTrump outlet for conservatives-- two staunch conservative Republicans, Charlie Sykes and Tim Miller, had a discussion of the Democratic Convention. Tim Miller, a former RNC spokesman and Jeb Bush Communications Director, said "I wanted to share one thing that we discussed after the show was over. Both of us we were caught off guard by how emotionally attached we were last night to this candidacy. We had sort of expected to feel this reluctant, begrudging support for the Democratic nominee, to have been left in a tough spot between one normal bad choice and one existentially bad one. But that isn’t what happened. Joe Biden has me energized. And frankly, that he has both Charlie and I reflecting on whether maybe in the past we were just…in the wrong…"


In his wrap-up of the Democratic Convention for Politico yesterday, Ryan Lizza wrote that "Much of the week was spent by Democrats balancing praising Biden for his empathy and character and attacking Trump for-- well, just about everything. What was missing from the big speeches-- with the notable exception of Bernie Sanders-- was a clear articulation of the specific policies Biden would pursue to combat the pandemic and recession. Biden filled in those gaps clearly. He discussed, with some specificity, infrastructure, education, health care, climate change, and tax policy. He gave a detailed list of actions he would take to stop the spread of Covid-19. Overall this was a nimble speech that responded to the dramatically changed circumstances of the last few months, when Biden transformed from being the leader of a faction within his party to the leader of the most diverse electoral coalition in modern politics. In that span, the pre-existing crises he knew he would face as president-- climate change, the diminished standing of America in the world-- were shoved aside by three additional and equally urgent crises."

This morning, a trusted progressive leader in Congress suggested that if I could try to "take it easy on Joe until after the election that would be great-- have to beat the Nazis before we can worry about USSR (to torture an imperfect analogy)." I get it... and believe it or not, I have been "taking it easy" on Joe... relatively speaking.

Let's All Shake Hands And Be Friends And Defeat the Real Enemy, Donald Trump And His Enablers-- Ummm... Just A Minute There

My political enemies are conservatives and reactionaries, and in Trump's case, mentally deranged fascists. The Democratic establishment will never hesitate for a moment to say "All you Bernie (and, to whatever small extent is needed) Elizabeth Warren supporters get on board the Biden for President train now." I'm not going to try to dissuade anyone from doing so-- and I wish people who discovered electoral politics 2 weeks ago would stop frothing at the mouth about me refusing to personally vote for Biden-- but Biden has a long and repulsive record going back 5 decades that has helped me form a hatred for him that's not going away. I know Trump is worse. I don't like racists and Biden only ran on one issue in his first election: racism. I don't like corporatists and he has always tried-- even harder than some Republicans-- to fellate Wall Street and the banksters and to wreck Social Security and Medicare in the name of Austerity... Yeah, yeah, you're heard it all before. But locking arms with a bunch of corrupt status quo Democrats to help elect Status Quo Joe Biden and other establishment candidates is not something I have any intention of doing. As you already know, the lesser of two evils is still evil.

Who's better? Who's worse?

My grandfather, a socialist and a devoted FDR fan, once told me, when I was very young, that there's only one thing in American politics worse than the Democratic Party-- the Republican Party. As I've written many time, Chuck Schumer went to James Madison High School in Brooklyn at the same time I did (a few years after Bernie graduated). He was as much "Little Schucky Schmucky" back then as he is now.



Writing for Too Much Information yesterday, Andrew Perez revealed that Schumer spent $15 million destroying progressive primary candidates. And now they expect us to vote for putrid conservatives like Frackenlooper (Colorado) or somewhat less putrid nothing candidates like Sara Gideon (Maine), Amy McGrath (Kentucky), Jon Ossoff (Georgia), Theresa Greenfield (Iowa), Ben Ray Luján (New Mexico), Barbara Bollier (a Kanas Republican pretending to be a Democrat), Jaime Harrison (South Carolina), and Cal Cunningham (North Carolina). I wouldn't vote for any of them. I vote for someone, not against someone who is worse. "With the help of the party, its major donors, and the Senate Majority PAC (SMP)-- a super PAC funded by labor unions, corporate interests and Wall Street billionaires-- candidates endorsed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have won contested primaries in four battleground states," wrote Perez.

Colorado was the most emblematic example of the party putting its thumb on the scale against progressives: There, former Gov. John Hickenlooper cruised to a primary victory over former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. In the final weeks of the race, SMP spent $1 million to boost Hickenlooper, after he spent his failed presidential campaign attacking key tenets of progressives’ legislative agenda, including Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

At the time of the cash infusion, Hickenlooper was losing ground in the polls and engulfed in scandals: He had just been fined by Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission for violating state ethics law as governor, the local CBS station uncovered evidence of his gubernatorial office raking in cash from oil companies, and a video circulated showed Hickenlooper comparing his job as a politician to a slave on a slave ship, being whipped by a scheduler.

With the help of SMP and the endorsement of the DSCC, Hickenlooper held off the more progressive Romanoff to win a 17 point primary victory.

SMP is led byformer top staffers at the DSCC. The super PAC has raised a staggering $118 million this cycle, pooling cash from both organized labor and business titans to promote corporate-aligned candidates over more progressive primary challengers.

Working for Working Americans, a super PAC funded by the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, has donated $5 million. The Laborers' International Union of North America’s super PAC has given $1.5 million. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’s political action committee has chipped in $1.3 million. SMP has received also big donations from groups affiliated with labor unions like the Service Employees International Union ($1 million), the National Association of Letter Carriers ($750,000), and Communications Workers of America ($500,000).

Overall, the top donor to SMP so far this cycle has been Democracy PAC-- a super PAC that’s bankrolled by billionaire George Soros and the Fund for Policy Reform, a nonprofit funded by Soros. Democracy PAC has contributed $8.5 million to SMP.

Other donors from the financial industry include: Renaissance Technologies founder and billionaire Jim Simons and his wife Deborah ($5.5 million) and billionaire D. E. Shaw & Co. founder David Shaw ($1 million).

Some major donors have financial stakes in current and future legislation.

For instance: SMP received a $1 million donation from billionaire Jonathan Gray, an executive at Blackstone, which owns the hospital staffing chain, TeamHealth. SMP also received $2 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association.

In late 2019, Schumer helped stall Senate legislation that would have kept patients from receiving “surprise medical bills,” the hefty charges that occur when they visit hospitals that are in their insurance network but are unknowingly treated by providers who are considered out-of-network.

SMP is affiliated with Majority Forward, a dark money group focused on attacking Republican Senate candidates. Majority Forward received $450,000 in 2018 from pharmacy giant CVS Health-- which also owns health insurer Aetna. The group also received $300,000 from the American Health Care Association (AHCA), a trade association that represents the nursing home industry.

The Democratic primary candidates backed by the DSCC have expressed reservations about Medicare for All, arguing they believe people should be allowed to keep their private health insurance if they want it. Many of the DSCC’s favored candidates do support creating a public health insurance option.

Meanwhile, the Real Estate Roundtable, a trade group for real estate investors, donated $50,000 to Majority Forward. Schumer and Senate Democrats recently helped Republicans unanimously pass pandemic relief legislation that included a special, little-noticed provision that amounted to $170 billion worth of new tax breaks for wealthy real estate investors.

Schumer has also derailed progressives in Maine, North Carolina, New Mexico, Kentucky, Texas, Georgia and Iowa. He and his cronies basically ignored West Virginia-- allowing Paula Jean Swearengin to win the primary and find herself as the only progressive challenging a Trumpist incumbent in the Senate this cycle. The 2020 Blue America Senate thermometer on the right makes it easy to contribute to her campaign. It's either that or an all-Schumer status quo Democratic caucus in the Senate next year-- doing nothing but disappointing people so badly that 2022 will see a replay of 2010, when progressives didn't even bother to vote, giving the Republicans massive wins in both houses of Congress and bringing on a decade of right-wing control.

And one more thing-- a question. Do the Democratic committees, like the DCCC and DSCC get behind progressives in the general election when they manage to win primaries? Sometimes, but rarely. They want progressives to help them after primaries... but they usually refuse to help progressives.

Who's Less Unfit To Be President? What A Terrible Way To Decide How To Cast Your Ballot--Shouldn't We Have A Neither Of The Above Option?

Normally, sitting presidents are reelected and one of the reasons is that voters view them as being experienced and prepared for the difficult job. Hilariously, a new poll published by USA Today shows that only 37% of voters say Trump "has the right experience to be president" while 67% say that Biden does.

All cycle long I've been warning that if Biden becomes the Democratic nominee-- and that, unfortunately for the country, looks like a fait accompli-- instead of a debate about ideas, voters would have to face a debate about whose family was more repulsive, about which candidate is more corrupt, about which candidate lies more and about which candidate is more senile. Both have disgusting families; both are corrupt and compulsive liars and each is way too senile and brain-impaired to be president. Well... the senility thing is starting to become a mainstream media thing.

Axios's Margaret Talev reputed that "Senility is becoming an overt line of attack for the first time in a modern U.S. presidential campaign. As Americans live longer and work later into life and there's more awareness about the science of aging, we're also seeing politicians test the boundaries of electability. Biden is 77; Trump, now 74, already is the oldest person to assume the U.S. presidency."

Trump, who has been increasingly mentally incapacitated in the last couple of years is ramping up his projections that Biden is also senile (which he appears to be). Now Biden is using the same line of attack against Trump, asserting that Trump "doesn’t seem to be cognitively aware of what’s going on" with his own briefings about Russia and U.S. service members. Inserting the word "cognitively" wasn't gratuitous by Biden's speech-writer. It implies that Trump is undergoing mental deterioration (which he is).

"At the same news conference where he took a swipe at Trump," Talev wrote, "Biden was asked by a reporter if he has been tested for cognitive decline. 'I've been tested and I'm constantly tested,' Biden responded, adding that 'I can hardly wait to compare my cognitive capability to the cognitive capability of the man I'm running against.' A Trump campaign Twitter feed played back the clip and asked, 'Did Biden take a cognitive test? What were the results? Why is he getting frequently tested?' Biden campaign advisers tell Axios' Alexi McCammond and Hans Nichols that the testing Biden was talking about is the past 15 months on the campaign trail and that they see Trump's attacks, in psychological terms, as 'projection.' They also said Biden wasn't previewing a new theme, just highlighting Trump's attempt to distract from his own vulnerabilities."

Historian Julian Zelizer told Zalev that she "thinks the Trump 'presidency has shown us that somebody's mental state really matters. 'With each of these candidates, the question has been raised-- Trump because of everything he's said and done' and remarks that often are 'just a mishmash of words. Biden, there's questions, more subtle I think, about he doesn't finish every sentence, or during the debates he'd pause and seem to have trouble thinking about what he wants to say. Those are the moments that then become questions.'... Though they have different personalities, both Trump and Biden are known for speaking off the cuff, opening themselves to verbal gaffes and criticisms of rambling."

So why are 40% of Americans still supporting Trump? Robert Reich had a good answer yesterday:

The Democrats Will Never Voluntarily Stop Force-Feeding Us Lesser Of Two Evils Elections

If U.S. politics were as binary as the average Joe thinks it is-- and everyone was either a Democrat or a Republican-- then any Democrat not voting for Status Quo Joe would be a traitor, just the way so many average Joes on Twitter seem to think #NeverTrump/#NeverBiden Americans are. Don't hate them for their simpleminds. Even the Simple Minds had a hit song. People who know nothing about Biden except that he was Obama's vice president-- if not why-- and is running for president, feel they can assail people who know a lot about why Biden is unfit for leadership because of their well-placed hatred for Trump. Some people, however, are committed to voting for a candidate, not against another candidate.

Likely many millions of Americans will be finding out exactly who Joe Biden is between now and November and the corporate entity known as The Democrats better hope that their anybody-but-Bernie jihad and their forever lesser-of-two-evils strategy, which has driven millions of Americans away from the party in disgust, works for them. They're so driven by both of these conditions that they're willing to risk inflicting Trump on the rest of us for another four years.

The Other #MeToo Movement

Last week Zak Cheney-Rice, in a New York Magazine essay noted that Tara Reade is making it harder to hide Joe Biden. He wrote that "Biden's most effective campaign strategy has been to lie low and let people vote for whatever imagined version of Joe Biden congealed inside their heads. On Friday, he went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss the Tara Reade allegations. It was not a good argument for changing this strategy.

For the most part, the interview with Mika Brzezinski held few surprises: Biden denied the allegations that he assaulted Reade in 1993, when she was on his Senate staff, while maintaining that women who make such allegations should be heard and have their claims investigated seriously. He declined to speculate as to Reade’s motives and called on the secretary of the Senate to search for her complaint in the National Archives-- the “only … place a complaint of this kind could be,” Biden said. Less surefooted than these broad strokes were their substance and delivery. Soon after Biden called for the search, a National Archives spokesperson told Business Insider that they do not hold the records to which he referred, which, if true, means the vice-president directed the inquiry toward an easily verifiable dead end. More predictably, Biden proved to be an uninspiring spokesperson for himself, fumbling his words at times and cutting himself off mid-sentence, unprompted.

It vividly distilled his party’s bigger plight. With the general election looming, Democrats have organized, rationalized, and voted themselves into the unenviable but richly earned position of having a presumptive nominee who’s at his best when he’s neither speaking nor appearing in public. While other campaigns busied themselves with big plans, stirring rhetoric, and disruptive ideological positions, Biden’s candidacy has been judged by one criterion to the exclusion of all others: whether it’s up to the task of beating President Trump. Poll after poll has shown that Democrats privileged this metric in an outsize manner when winnowing the primary field, which included contenders who diverged negligibly from Biden in both demographic and ideological terms. But what the other candidates lacked has proved to be determinative: a career long, resilient, and ideologically contortive enough to have produced allies and admirers at every level of American politics, and the imprimatur of serving under the party’s most mythologized figure, President Obama. The persuasive heft this combination gave Biden’s pitch as a proven winner and America’s best bet for a return to normalcy-- meaning the pre-Trump status quo that gave us Trump-- was such that being the prohibitive front-runner where some candidates had campaigned for months merely required him to show up.

He proceeded to test voter goodwill at every turn. He reminisced fondly about working with segregationists, even as his record as a busing opponent, “tough on crime” zealot, and architect of punitive criminal-justice policy came under fire. He joked glibly about asking permission to touch his supporters, shortly after more than half a dozen women came forward with accounts of him touching them inappropriately. Perhaps most damning to the prospect of his running a presidential administration come January, to say nothing of four to eight years from now, the 77-year-old proved to be senescent, leaving thoughts unfinished in his public remarks, going off on tangents from which there was little hope of returning, and stumbling through debate appearances while his opponents ran roughshod over his stream of gaffes. It didn’t matter. His lead in the polls collapsed only briefly when Bernie Sanders’s momentum heading into the Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada primaries-- contests that Biden had largely dismissed as lost causes anyway-- suggested a general-election viability to rival his own. But a livelier-than-usual debate performance and endorsement from Representative Jim Clyburn cemented the vice-president’s South Carolina firewall and restored his winner’s sheen. He won that election in a landslide, prompting several challengers to drop out and endorse him. His victories on Super Tuesday and beyond left Sanders with little choice but to do the same.

This all happened despite Biden getting out-organized, out-debated, and out-spent by one or more of his opponents, sometimes several at a time, most glaringly in states like Alabama, Maine, and Minnesota, where the vice-president had no field offices but won anyway. That voters in these states could crib together their champion from fragments of a comparatively nonexistent effort to win them over suggests it hasn’t mattered much what Biden says, does, said, or did, as long as he can win — an endeavor aided immeasurably by the fact that everything else he does seems immaterial. The result is a national campaign to elect someone who exists largely in the minds of Biden’s supporters. Luckily for the real Biden, nobody to whom he’s inclined to listen is asking him to be anything more.

Nor, it seems, has his MSNBC appearance given them a good reason to. Quite the contrary: In the face of mounting evidence that Reade’s allegations are more than the baseless smear his campaign has dismissed them to be, Biden has mostly faded into the background while his surrogates, supporters, and some pundits went to bat for him, deploying timeworn canards about sexual assault victims and what circumstances justify disbelieving them, or dismissing Reade outright before a fuller picture sees daylight. When pressed on the latest developments-- that Reade told a neighbor and a former co-worker about her assault shortly after it’s alleged to have happened, according to Business Insider-- columnists from the New York Times to The Nation stepped up to discredit her, and politicos from Stacey Abrams to Nancy Pelosi reaffirmed their support of the vice-president. Even Kirsten Gillibrand, who drew ire from within the Democratic Party when she pushed for Al Franken to resign after evidence of his misconduct surfaced in 2017, doubled down on her support. (That it’s fallen mostly on women to speak for Biden when he’s hesitant to speak for himself-- and will likely continue to be-- indicts both his strategy and the sexist standards from which it profits.)

We’re now at the point where corroborating testimony supporting Reade’s allegations meets or exceeds the threshold established by those made against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and President Trump. Many of their defenses are now being deployed to protect a man whose efforts to nullify the former’s power and depose the latter are being framed by his supporters, and even some of his skeptics, as America’s best alternative to catastrophe, moral and otherwise. Opportunism guides political behavior as much as cynicism and hypocrisy shape it. That’s about as involved an explanation as this reversal merits, I think. More striking is that Biden hasn’t had to do much of the defending himself. Mounting evidence supporting Reade’s claim makes things harder, but he’s largely staying true to the strategy that’s guided his campaign since early on, which holds that the winningest Biden is one to be imagined, not seen, heard, or even thought about too hard. His staff recognizes that the less its candidate speaks, the less opportunity his supporters have to neglect evidence that undermines their faith-- in his competence, his election odds, and, increasingly, his innocence. If there’s one thing for which the Democrats have yet to punish Biden this cycle, it’s his silence in the face of lingering doubt. To change that now would be to change the very foundation of his campaign’s success.

I made up my mind about Biden when I was living abroad and reading about a young racist asshole running for the Senate in Delaware. Since then, he's never given me a moment to reconsider. In fact, he consistently got worse in the Senate and after that, Obama called all the shots for him. I believe Obama is doing that again today and whether Biden is ultimately the nominee or replaced with a younger, more palatable version will be Obama's call as well.

Bonnie Kristian attempted to figure out what many people want to know. Is it possible to get rid of Biden... if not elegantly at least not by some method that smacks of a coup? "Before the convention, which is currently rescheduled for August," she wrote, "the answer is probably no. Suspended primary elections have already raised concerns about abrogation of transparent, democratic processes... While Democratic delegates will understand the need to modify normal convention procedure to avoid spreading COVID-19, their understanding won't be unlimited. Sweeping changes to the nominating process would be suspect, and if the process continues as anticipated, Biden will very likely be selected as the nominee on the first ballot.

So far, Biden has 1,406 of 1,991 delegates needed to win that initial vote, and those are delegates pledged (by strong custom, though not law) to Biden by primary and caucus results. Between now and August, there will be 22 more primaries whose outcomes will pledge another 1,368 delegates. Biden has no remaining challengers campaigning against him and needs fewer than half those delegates to win the first ballot. Unless the Democratic Party, wildly improbably, tosses its entire rule book out the window, Biden will take the nomination at the convention in a single vote.

Ah, but what then? In the waning days of the Sanders campaign, I argued endorsements from superdelegates-- prominent Democratic leaders and elected officials-- showed party bosses had decided Biden was their guy. I don't expect to see those endorsements disappear, not publicly. But is the party leadership's commitment to Biden as solid as it once was?

Suppose, plausibly, it is not. Suppose they don't want to run a historically elderly candidate amid a pandemic that is deadliest for the elderly? Suppose Tara Reade's assault accusation and Biden's tendency to misspeak even from the low-pressure, high-preparation environment of his own basement further fuel the "two senile sex offenders" narrative of this election? Suppose enthusiasm continues to grow for running New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), whom one poll found 56 percent of Democrats would prefer to Biden as their nominee? (Cuomo says he won't do it, but that could be an obligatory performance of deference to a party elder.)

"The presidential debates are in effect already occurring daily between" Cuomo and Trump, Craig Snyder, a former Republican Senate chief of staff, argued in the Philadelphia Inquirer. We don't have to suppose Democratic Party leaders have noticed; they undoubtedly have.

So if they wanted to replace Biden (whether with Cuomo, the veep nominee, or some arrangement of both) Democratic leadership could wait until after the nomination to do so. Then, as they did with Democratic vice presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton in 1972, they could ask Biden to step aside, citing his health.

Biden's agreement is a long shot. Eagleton continued his Senate career after leaving the 1972 ticket over pressure about his mental health, but he was a much younger man. At Biden's age, stepping aside would end his political career for good. Relinquishing the nomination would therefore suggest he expects an embarrassing loss and ruined legacy if he stays.

With Biden out, the Democratic National Committee, a group of around 350 which is "composed of the chairs and vice-chairs of each state Democratic Party Committee and over 200 members elected by Democrats in all 57 states and the territories," would vote to select a new nominee.

Such a switch could be made any time between the convention nomination and Election Day. Because we technically vote for Electoral College members rather than presidential candidates, it may be, as Vox proposes, that Electors could simply transfer their vote from the old Democratic nominee to the new one regardless of what was printed on the ballot. But the legal situation is uncertain and varies from state to state. "For instance," notes FiveThirtyEight, "Michigan's law requires an Elector to vote for the ticket named on the ballot whereas Florida's rules say that an Elector is to 'vote for the candidates of the party that he or she was nominated to represent.'" That means a sooner swap, allowing more states to print the new name on the ballot, would be better. Yet court battles would be inevitable with the ever-litigious Trump involved.

The likeliest outcome remains the most straightforward: That Biden will be the Democratic nominee and will face Trump in November. But if Democratic leaders did want to change horses midstream, late August or September could well be when they make their move.

Obama will decide.

Big Test Of The Anti-Red Wave Theory Comes In 2 Weeks-- In A California Special Election

Did you know there's a big special election on May 12, two weeks from yesterday? Remember when Katie Hill resigned after a sex scandal. This is the special election to replace her until the November election decides who represents CA-25 (the Santa Clarita Valley, most of the Antelope Valley and most of Simi Valley) for the next two years. The winner of the special win face the loser of the special again in November.

This is the perfect opportunity for the GOP to steal back a blue seat-- no incumbent and a dreadful Democratic candidate in what is expected to be a super-low turnout election. Or will it be?

158,849 people voted in the jungle primary. 6 Democrats and 6 Republicans were on the ballot. The combined Democratic vote was 80,387 (50.5%) and the combined Republican vote was 78,462 (49.4%)-- very, very close. The two top vote getters will be in the run-off in 2 weeks:

• Christy Smith (D)- 57,423 (36.1%)
• Mike Garcia (R)- 40,311 (25.4%)

As of March 31, Smith had spent $1,512,159 and had $357,257 in her warchest and Garcia had spent $1,426,856 and had $446,743 in his warchest. The DCCC has spent $1,687,850 to hold onto the seat, while the NRCC and McCarthy's Congressional Leadership PAC have spent $886,767 + $439,291 ($1,326,058).





The keys for Smith to win is to consolidate all the Democratic support in the district, to win over the huge independent vote and to turn out the base. A couple of years ago, Democrats finally became the plurality party in the district:

• Democrats- 161,693 (38.41%)
• Republicans- 133,771 (31.78%)
• Others (including decline-to state)- 95,090 (29.81%)

The key to consolidating Democratic votes are the 10,391 progressives (6.5%) who backed Cenk Uygur in the primary. Smith is a classic lesser of two evils candidate. It would be hard for any progressive who knows anything about her to vote for her. The Democrats couldn't have found a worse candidate to run. In trying to say something in favor of her, Uygur told me that "Primaries are the most important part of our election system. Once you get to the general election in a U.S. election you have only two choices an overwhelming percentage of the time. This is also true in CA-25. I only endorse candidates who I know will not take corporate money. In terms of who to vote for in CA-25, that's relatively easy. Mike Garcia has all of the downsides of Christy Smith without any of the upsides. Garcia claimed Steve Knight wasn't pro-Trump enough-- Knight voted with Trump 99% of the time. Anyone who proudly claims that being with Trump 99% of the time isn't enough isn't fit for office. I wouldn't vote for Mike Garcia under penalty of law." He told me his guess is that his supporters will vote for Smith but added that he's "really guessing. Voters generally vote. I don't know how many non-regular voters I got to come out for me in such a short election. If anyone who voted for me got the idea that Mike Garcia would be better, then they didn't listen to a word I said."

The Cook Report and Sabato's Crystal Ball both rate the race a toss-up, while Inside Elections rates it as "likely Democrat." Yesterday, Rachel Bitecofer took a look at how the race has developed and wrote that she is "hesitant to say the CA-25 special election... will be a bellwether, but it’s the best chance Republicans have at reclaiming one of these seats this cycle. Democrats have been hesitant to spend heavily on the race whereas Republicans, increasingly bearish about their fall prospects under Trump, badly need any positive optics they can rustle up, and unlike other 2020 races where fundraising and candidate recruitment have reflected a hostile political atmosphere that still favors Democrats, their recruitment effort in California’s 25th district produced a top-notch nominee."

Bitecofer, who I generally think is a great prognosticator finds it easy to say that Garcia, a dangerous sociopath and walking freakshow who wants to spend his time in office licking Trump's ass, is "a top-notch nominee." She can't find it in her to describe what an utterly worthless catastrophe of a candidate Christie Smith is.

Ironically, outside of gender, Democrats struggle to embrace the electoral power of descriptive representation (i.e., identity politics) when it comes to candidate recruitment; however, Republicans have long understood the benefits of recruiting and running minority candidates in diverse districts. It is a strategy that has worked well for them in both Florida and Texas, and one they’re hoping might mitigate a massive demographic advantage for Democrats on the 25th. Their candidate, Mike Garcia, has an impressive background as a Navy fighter pilot, and perhaps more relevant for the GOP’s electoral purposes, Garcia’s Ballotpedia entry provided by his campaign notes he is a “first-generation American citizen whose family came to the United States legally.” Republicans hope he may be able to pull over some voters from the district’s 37-percent Latino population and potentially erode some of the Democrats’ advantage among this core voting bloc.

As my 2018 voter file analysis of the district reveals, a surge in turnout among Latino voters played a pivotal role in the district’s transition from red to blue. They doubled their 2014 turnout rate of 25 percent to 54 percent despite a massive uptick in registrations. As such, a strategy that offsets Democrats’ advantages among Latinos is critical for Republican efforts to reclaim these, and similarly situated, seats. So, CA-25 may be a beta test for the more expansive strategy the GOP plans to deploy in 2020 in similar districts and states such as Arizona, where the party is poised to lose a second Senate seat and see the longtime Republican stronghold flip to the Democrats in the Electoral College.

But it’s hard to predict what will happen because, although a special election normally has lower participation, and one that occurs during a pandemic may have even lower-than-normal turnout due to the inability of campaigns to engage in critical get-out-the-vote activities, as the pandemic emerged, the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, issued an executive order switching the election to an entirely vote-by-mail system, which could cause a turnout increase. Unlike most of the other California districts from 2018, the 25th has a modest registration advantage for Democrats and every voter in the district received a ballot. For now, I remain bullish on Democrats holding onto this seat.

As I discussed in my presidential forecast, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was anticipating something approaching-- perhaps even reaching-- 70 percent turnout in the 2020 general election, which is about 10 points higher than the 2016 turnout and would be history-making. This prediction was driven by the fact that 2018 midterm turnout increased just over 13 points over its 2014 levels (I was expecting about 10 points) and that based on my own calculation, in contests and cycles since Trump’s 2016 election, the average turnout increase has been about 10 points. The 2018 election overperformed my bold estimates because, unlike with Democrats during Obama’s tenure, turnout of Republicans in 2018 did not decline, it increased.

The image of a disaffected Republican Party, embarrassed by their “chaos” president, so far runs into an irrefutable data-reality that Republican voter turnout, even in the 40 suburban districts Democrats flipped, was robust — and it did not break in favor of Democrats in rates any higher than normal for the polarized era. Instead, the blue wave that washed through America’s suburbs in 2018 was powered by a massive turnout of Democrats and independents, who showed up in droves to toss Republican House incumbents out of office and send a message to Donald Trump. 

Personally, I will never cast a vote for an evil candidate-- even if it's a much lesser evil-- and Christie Smith has every intention of going to Congress and being one of the worst Democrats in the House. She's a corporate shill who will always disappoint, just as she has in her short, putrid time in Sacramento. But if I had to guess, I'd say she'll probably win in two weeks and again in November. I think she'll win for the same reason Biden will-- because most people are happy enough to vote against someone rather than for someone.

Party hack

The Onus Is On The Biden Campaign To Persuade Progressives He Deserves Their Votes-- So Far He Hasn't Done Much Persuading

End Of The Line by Nancy Ohanian

If you would vote for a pile of dog-shit in the street to get Trump out of the White House, Biden is your man and there's no real need to keep reading. Besides, if you read this blog much, you already know that there's nothing on earth that will get me to vote for Trump or Biden. I can barely think of two less fit individuals to be president. Well, my bother-in-law but he's delighted with Trump, so he's not going to run. If Trump decided to institute Medicare-for-All, I wouldn't vote for him because I don't trust him. If Biden were to start campaigning vigorously on it-- really vigorously-- and persuaded me he's for real, by explaining why he's changed his mind, I would reconsider voting for him. Not that he needs my vote. Trump lost California in 2016 by a landslide-- 8,753,788 (61.73%) to 4,483,810 (31.62%). He lost my county-- Los Angeles-- by an even greater landslide: 71.4% to 23.4%. He'll win L.A. by an even bigger margin this year and same with California. Biden will probably outpoll Hillary, at least percentage-wise in the Golden State. But I decided to turn to another voice, a trusted voice, Jeremy Scahill on the conundrum around a third of progressives find themselves in now, whether to vote for the lesser evil or not. Scahill's post Monday for The Intercept asks about the moral and strategic calculus of voting for Biden to defeat Trump.

Scahill agrees with the editorial position of DWT that Trump ran his campaign and runs his presidency on a foundation of hate, greed, xenophobia, misogyny and racism and that "literally everything this man does is a racket." But, as much as he agrees that Trump is a fascist be thinks the term gives him more credit than he deserves. "He has largely been an incompetent authoritarian, albeit one whose key policies have caused massive suffering and death. What we have seen throughout his career and his three and a half years in power is that Trump is primarily concerned with making money for himself, his family, and his cronies."

Like myself, Scahill wonders about the lesser evil when it comes to foreign policy. After all, Biden is a lifelong warmonger and Trump... well, he's just a deranged narcissist.

His foreign policy has been hawkish and reckless, but aside from his often insane rhetoric and public threats to annihilate various countries, it has not represented a radical departure from that of his predecessors. He acts like an unstable buffoon on the international stage, and he burns bridges with traditional U.S. allies, governments, and international bodies across the globe. Trump openly embraces vile authoritarians and mocks democratic leaders and institutions. All of this is certainly dangerous and unsettling, though some of it is disproportionately offensive to establishment foreign policy elites. Trump’s predecessor started his own share of wars, did some regime change, ratcheted up an existing war, downsized another, and greatly expanded the use of weaponized drones and so-called targeted killings. But Barack Obama delivered these policies with an intelligently crafted, though at times absurd, justification wrapped in the notion of inventing a “smarter” way to wage war. Liberals ate it up. Obama’s policies killed a lot of innocent people.

The few times Trump has signaled his openness to pursue a less militaristic approach to long-existing crises, such as the war in Afghanistan or the conflict with North Korea, he has been ridiculed by leading Democrats and liberal pundits. In terms of Trump’s military pursuits, he has proven less murderous than George W. Bush and more of a war criminal than Jimmy Carter. So far. That can certainly change with a second term.

Perhaps the gravest threat posed by the unstable narcissist in the White House is that of the use of a first strike nuclear weapon. It has never been beyond the pale to imagine an apocalyptic nuclear scenario that begins with a tweet from a foreign leader Trump hates. The fact that we can even imagine this is nothing to wag a stick at.

...What would happen if Trump wins the election in November? In practical terms, it would be a nightmare. Trump would emerge emboldened beyond imagination. What minuscule restraints that currently exist would be wiped out entirely. He would almost certainly be in a position to replace Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with yet another atrocious extremist. An ability to further stack the court will have a multigenerational impact on a legion of issues; among them are voting rights, civil liberties, corporate power, workers’ rights, civil rights, women’s reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, executive power, and the climate. No one should minimize the dangers of Trump remaining in office. And his reign will hit the most vulnerable the hardest, much like the coronavirus, and the terrors will ricochet for many years to come. Trump encourages and emboldens racists and bigots and embraces far-right ideology and action. Four more years of this will be deadly.

It is in contemplating all of the above that the emergence of Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s presumptive choice to take on Trump is a deeply disturbing and risky response to the threats we face. It is easy to underestimate Biden’s chance of winning in November. Biden is a terrible candidate in many ways, but it is possible that “I’m not Trump” combined with Biden having been Obama’s vice president will appeal to enough of the population to win not only the popular vote (a virtual certainty) but the Electoral College-- especially if the party keeps him under wraps until the final stretch, as appears to be the strategy. Still, that seems to be a dangerous gamble given what is at stake.

Biden has an abominable public policy record on a wide range of issues. He has a penchant for lying-- about his role in the civil rights movement and about being arrested in apartheid South Africa. He continues to lie and mislead about his support for the war in Iraq, the most consequential foreign policy decision of the post-Vietnam era. He has been accused by eight women of misconduct, including one allegation of very serious sexual assault by his former Senate staffer Tara Reade. Biden’s cognitive health and mental acuity is, to say the least, questionable, particularly when you compare his current performance with videos from just a few years ago. He frequently rambles without a clear point, forgets what office he is running for, and has to rely on teleprompters and notes to make it through interviews and speeches without saying something embarrassing. In numerous interactions with voters, Biden has poked their chests in an aggressive manner; told an immigrant rights activist to “vote for Trump”; called voters childish names; and threatened a union worker in Detroit, telling the man to stop objecting to Biden pointing his finger in his face unless the worker “want[s] to go outside with me.” Let’s not even discuss the tale of his showdown with a rusty razor-wielding “Corn Pop” at the pool. Trump’s temperament is frightening, but Biden isn’t exactly a cool head who exudes competence or confidence.

Liberals may poo poo the whole Hunter Biden-Burisma-Ukraine-China attacks from Trump, but this is going to be a problem in the general election. On many of the key issues where Democrats could attack Trump, Biden is going to be virtually incapacitated by his own skeletons. What Sen. Elizabeth Warren did to Mike Bloomberg at a February debate would be impossible for Biden to do to Trump. “You have more allegations of sexual assault than I do, Donald,” is not a good line. “Your sons have profited off the presidency more than my son did off my vice presidency”-- also not a winning zinger. And don’t think for a moment that Trump won’t hammer away on Biden’s Iraq War vote and his trade policies. The Democratic primary is not the general election.

There is no point to going through and listing all of the terrible aspects of Biden’s career, his policy record, his mental stamina, or his substantial failures to make himself visible or consistently cogent since securing the presumptive nomination. All of this is going to be put on display for the next six months. The Democratic Party and the voters in the roughly 50 percent of primaries that were held have committed our fate to Biden’s candidacy. Obama and other senior party leaders, major news organizations, and a lot of money deployed to attack Sen. Bernie Sanders also played a role in manufacturing this reality. Sanders ending his campaign and vowing to support Biden leaves people with two viable candidates on the ballot. Barring a health crisis or death of one of these older men, the only two candidates with enough public support to win the presidency will be Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

What we get with Trump is as clear as it is terrifying. What we get with Biden, in his current form, is less apparent. Biden will have a team of competent (for better and worse) technocrats and, in all likelihood, an incredibly influential vice president and an unelected chief of staff running the show. Biden’s administration will also include appointments aimed at throwing some bones to progressives and likely other Cabinet appointments that recognize the growing influence of progressive ideas. It will, without a doubt, also be riddled with a disproportionate number of hawkish, corporatist Democratic apparatchiks. It will be an administration that does the bidding of Wall Street, believes in bloated war budgets, and will put a friendlier face on the worst excesses of empire. It’s always worth remembering that Biden was picked in 2008 to make Obama less threatening to moderates-- so we can’t even bank on a return to Obama’s brand of neoliberalism. But there will be policy areas where some victories may be possible for a well-organized and militant left willing to take Biden on. Such a dynamic wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world and would be better for more people than a second Trump term in virtually every tangible way.

Biden isn’t great on many issues that motivate young voters. His health care plan keeps the profit-driven system intact, and it will result in millions of Americans remaining uninsured. His policy to confront massive student and consumer debt is anemic. Biden’s climate plan is uninspiring and generally milquetoast when weighed against the severity of the crisis the planet faces, though this is an area in which he might be susceptible to pressure from activists. Some of his foreign policy positions are downright disturbing, if not explicitly right-wing. The latest Biden campaign ad is a fearmongering attack on China and an effort to outbid Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric. Biden’s long record indicates that he could prove more inclined to authorize military interventions than Trump, who has been quite belligerent himself, without following through on most of his threats. Biden is almost certainly going to start and continue wars, impose deadly economic sanctions, and support or enact regime change efforts.

There is an abundance of justification to oppose a Biden presidency. And principled people are right to ring loud alarms over Biden’s record, policies, and some of his personal conduct. At the same time, it is not honest to imply there would be no difference between a Biden and Trump administration.

The Obama-Biden administration’s immigration policy has now been dwarfed in awfulness by Trump, but in its own right it operated as a cruel, mass deportation machine that also separated families. During the campaign, Biden has responded to extraordinary activist pressure and eventually began to carefully distance himself from the record of the “deporter in chief,” as Obama was labeled by immigrant rights activists. When pressed on the mass deportations under Obama, Biden acknowledged that deporting people without criminal records was a “big mistake.” At a Democratic debate, Biden was asked whether he would resume Obama’s torrid pace of deportations. “Absolutely not,” he said, adding that he was vice president, not president, drawing a rebuke from Julián Castro, who observed accurately that Biden was content to bathe in the glow of his former Obama boss while looking to sidestep responsibility for his more unpopular policies. At the same time, Biden’s campaign has made a sweeping series of pledges that he could implement as president that would potentially protect millions of vulnerable people. On immigration, the alternative to that is four more years of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, an extremist nut who shouldn’t be allowed within 100 feet of a consequential decision-making process.

...Biden has a troubling record on Iran, including his support for deadly sanctions, but he has emphatically said he would reenter the Iran nuclear agreement, which is also no small matter. Similarly, Biden has been politically forced to denounce the genocidal Saudi war against Yemen, despite the fact that it was initiated under the Obama-Biden administration. He has also had to publicly accept that viewing Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as an unsavory murderer is now widely held by many Democrats, including centrist figures. Remarkably, Biden has vowed to turn Saudi Arabia into “a pariah.” That’s an incredible statement given the long bipartisan love affair with the kingdom’s despots and raises all sorts of questions about what that would mean if Biden is elected.

Among the wild cards of a Biden administration will be the issue of whether he has the actual mental stamina to govern, or if he is going to be frequently disoriented and infrequently seen or heard. Setting aside the protestations of people who pretend they don’t see exactly what everyone else does when Biden speaks in public, we are not actually being asked to vote for Biden as the candidate, because the Biden we see is a shell of his former self. We are being asked to vote for a spin-off of the Obama show, a cast of familiar characters and a few exciting new additions who would take charge of the executive branch, without the popular star of the original show among the visible cast. The fact that the Democrats have forced through a candidate that many people don’t believe is fully functional and will rely on the strength of “the team” assembled around him is a pretty grim statement about the state of democracy in the U.S. If Biden is the best the Democrats have to offer in the face of Trump, the system is rotten.

So what should people who want Trump gone but cannot stand Biden do? First of all, no one should be shamed for letting their conscience dictate their vote or decision not to vote. (Full disclosure: I always vote.) Our system is dominated by corporate influence, big money, and the skewed rules of a default duopoly, and it actively fights to prevent third parties from receiving federal matching funds, joining debates, or gaining ballot access. There is no mandatory voting in the U.S., roughly 40 percent of Americans do not belong to either major political party, and people have a right to register their dissatisfaction with the entire system by not voting. In an atmosphere where tens of millions of U.S. citizens choose not to vote, shaming the minuscule number of people who vote for the Green Party is a disgrace. There are hundreds of thousands of voters whose principled belief is that breaking the two-party stranglehold on U.S. democracy is the only path to meaningful systemic change. Votes for Jill Stein or Howie Hawkins are not being taken away from corporate Democrats. Those votes belong to the people who cast them and they have a right to vote however they choose, and the candidates they support have a right to run for office.

It is also an understandable and morally principled decision to say, “I believe Tara Reade was sexually assaulted by Joe Biden, and I will not vote for a rapist.” It is an understandable and morally principled position to say, “I will not vote for anyone who supported the war against Iraq.” None of these people’s votes belong to Biden or Hillary Clinton or the Democratic Party or Twitter mobs-- and they are not votes for Trump.

Ultimately, however, given the abomination of our two-party system, progressive voters are forced to make not just a moral but a strategic choice with their votes. Recognizing that Biden is a terrible candidate and being honest about that but voting for him in an effort to prevent Trump from further consolidating his agenda is a strategically sound position. This is ultimately what the majority of Sanders supporters will do, just as they did in 2016. It certainly has a better chance of improving the country and the world than enthusiastically pledging to vote for Biden while closing your ears to everything that is wrong about him and his record. Voters in swing states, where voting for a candidate other than Biden or not voting at all may help tip the balance to Trump, face a more consequential moral and strategic choice than people in New York or California. In 2004, the Green Party candidate told his supporters to vote their conscience in swing states, including if they believed they needed to hold their nose and vote for John Kerry to defeat Bush.

If you believe that progressives or leftists should be “bending the knee” for Biden by promising right this second that they will vote for him in six months and that they will never utter an inconvenient fact about him or express their anger with their meager Election Day options, please show them all of your work fighting for Medicare for All, for ending the carceral state, for serious radical action on climate change, your work opposing the most dangerous aspects of the Obama-Biden administration, including on issues of war, immigration, and, yes, health care.

Many of the social and political movements that backed Sanders were populated by people in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. It was an incredibly diverse coalition of supporters and drew millions of primary voters in 2016 and 2020. Its backbone was young voters, including young African Americans, Latinos, students, immigrants, and independents. These groups and many of Sanders’s supporters have spent nearly four years fighting Trump nonstop. Many of them organized against Obama’s troubling policies before that. That should be commended not scorned. You want to label these people Trump supporters because they are intensely disturbed by the corporatist candidate you have chosen to take on Trump? Show them your work on the issues they care about, explain what Biden’s policies are on those issues and make the most convincing case you can for why they should vote for him. Better yet, explain to them how you are fighting to make Biden’s platform one that even minimally pretends to want their votes.

In the bigger picture, Sanders organized the most significant challenge to the Democratic Party’s centrist and center-right establishment since Jesse Jackson ran twice for president in the 1980s. Unlike Ralph Nader’s independent runs for president, Sanders attempted to deliver sweeping change within the Democratic Party’s own framework. He fought against an extremely hostile corporate media environment and some pretty vile smear campaigns, where he was compared to the coronavirus, his supporters were called brown shirts, and his primary victories described as akin to the Nazi invasion of France on liberal TV networks. Despite the powerful chorus of red-baiting and lies, Sanders still came extremely close to pulling off a victory.

Biden was usually the frontrunner and always the favorite, even though he came close to being defeated by Sanders early on. The establishment fiercely defended its territory in an effort capped off by the last-minute secret diplomacy from Obama ahead of Super Tuesday to pressure other candidates and the party to coalesce around Biden. Ultimately, the party’s primary voters, at the crucial moment, threw their weight behind a name they know and who served as vice president of an administration they trusted. These voters should not be collectively shamed either. Most of them are not party cogs, but people genuinely scared of what four more years of Trump will mean for their survival, particularly older African American voters.

The traditional, moderate, and right-wing forces within the Democratic Party united and won the primary battle. Sanders may have surrendered too early, but there is little value to debating that right now or wasting energy attacking Sanders.

The war for the future of the Democratic Party is intensifying. There is a possibility of a fracture or at least more clearly defined factions within the party. There will be serious discussions around forming a new party that isn’t the Green Party, but rather an outgrowth of the “Not Me, Us” framework of the Sanders campaign and the growing popularity of groups like the Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement, prison abolitionists, immigrant rights groups, and Democratic Socialists of America. It would be a great thing for this country to have a democratic socialist party grow, one that runs serious political campaigns. We have already seen early stage efforts at this with mixed results. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez understands the need to engage in strategic partnerships with establishment Democrats to achieve meaningful policy change and strengthen the areas of common ground. But there will need to be a lot more like-minded politicians elected for the strategy to succeed. This primary has shaken the Democratic establishment to its core, and that is a good thing and should be built on.

But none of that is going to happen before November.

Some Sanders supporters who are deeply concerned by the candidacy of Biden have said he can have their vote but not their soul. For many people that will be their strategic rationale. For others, it will be a question of individual or collective morality in the face of Trump’s horrors. Leftist voters in swing states shoulder a greater moral burden than the rest of us, and many will decide to vote against Trump by pulling the lever for Biden.

There are also very vocal opponents of Biden who are fed up and are flat out going to refuse to vote for him. They recognize that the opposite of Trump is not Biden. They want a society where free health care is a right and wars are ended, where everyone has housing and work that pays livable wages, where you don’t amass a mountain of debt to get an education, and one that treats immigrants and workers with dignity and defends a woman’s absolute right to choose. They want the racist justice system dismantled and ICE to be abolished. They believe we are in a climate emergency and that Biden is a part of the problem. Mainstream Democrats tell them they want much of that too and electing Biden is a strategic step in that direction or that President Biden will be more susceptible to progressive pressure. They reject that. They don’t believe that forcing a choice between two bad candidates is right, even if one is admittedly worse. Electing Biden might solve some problems, but it also could result in a strengthening of the far right in the U.S. and could produce a worse threat than Trump in 2024. A Biden administration, they believe, will undoubtedly be a massive corporate-friendly juggernaut that wages military and economic wars and, for them, voting in the affirmative for that is a bridge too far. And many of these people hold the Democratic Party responsible for Trump because of the terrible campaign it ran in 2016, so trying to convince them to buy into the same strategy twice is a losing battle. They are tired of being Democrats’ cheap dates-- treated with contempt, offered few and paltry concessions, and expected to go along. As a strategic matter, at this juncture, they regard supporting Biden as tantamount to telling Democrats to continue to take them for granted.

If Democrats want to try to win them over, they should use the next six months to show them you take their concerns about 2016 seriously and map out the ways this campaign is different. Most people on the left who oppose Biden but also view Trump as the gravest danger are going to vote against Trump by voting for Biden. But those who disagree with that strategy do not support Trump. For them, “He’s not Trump” is not a gamble worth taking. The onus is on the Biden campaign and its supporters to make their case to every eligible voter in this country and earn their votes. No one should be taken for granted.

I don't believe Joe Biden has what it takes to win an election-- at this point, for anything. But luckily for him and the Democratic establishment this election is likely to be nothing more or less than a referendum on the worst president in American history-- Donald J. Trump. And even if Biden is likely to be a contender for second-worst president ever, no one will ever match Trump. Biden won't win but he could well wind up as president because Trump will lose. Most Americans hate him and hate what he's done to our country. Most will willingly and gratefully vote for the lesser evil.