The Pandemic Is Powerful Enough To Swing An Election-- But How Will It Impact Partisan Realignment?

 

"... And I Won't Lose One Voter" by Nancy Ohanian

Many people wonder if, aside from Herman Cain (RIP), Trump rallies have been killing off his followers? And now we know. In a report from USA Today late Friday night, Erin Mansfield, Josh Salman and Dinah Pulver wrote that coronavirus cases surged in the wake of President Super Spreader's visits. New cases in the U.S. are spiking like crazy. Friday there were a record-setting 81,210 new cases-- many in rural, Trump-worshipping areas. And deaths are way back up again-- especially in Texas, Florida and Tennessee. Over 20,000 cases per million in any locale is considered an out of control pandemic. There are now 18 states with over 30,000 cases per million and two-- North and South Dakota-- with over 40,000 cases per million. There are no places on earth-- other than postage stamp sized quasi-countries like Qatar and Aruba-- that are worse COVID hellholes than the Trumpistani states of North nd South Dakota.

Mansfield, Salman and Pulver reported that as Trump "jetted across the country holding campaign rallies during the past two months, he didn’t just defy state orders and federal health guidelines. He left a trail of coronavirus outbreaks in his wake. The president has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA Today analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minnesota; Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Marathon, Wisconsin; Dauphin, Pennsylvania; and Beltrami, Minnesota. Together, those counties saw 1,500 more new cases in the two weeks following Trump’s rallies than the two weeks before-- 9,647 cases, up from 8,069." Now, those three states are COVID-disaster areas. Friday's new cases (and the number of cases per million residents):

• Minnesota +1,711 (23,027 cases per million residents)-- 13 new deaths on Friday
• Wisconsin +4,378 (32,714 cases per million residents)-- 42 new deaths on Friday
• Pennsylvania +2,258 (15,283 cases per million residents)-- 34 new deaths on Friday

"Although there’s no way to determine definitively if cases originated at Trump’s rallies," the trio of reporters wrote, "public health experts say the gatherings fly in the face of all recommendations to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

The earliest post-rally spikes occurred even as the nation’s overall case counts were in decline from a peak in mid-July. When U.S. cases started climbing in mid-September, Trump did not alter his campaign schedule but continued holding an average of four rallies a week.

He stopped first in Minnesota, where Blue Earth County’s coronavirus growth rate was 15% before Trump’s rally, but grew to 25% afterward. Three days later, he was in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, where the coronavirus growth rate jumped from less than 3% before his visit to more than 7% afterward.

Even in states where cases were already rising, the spikes in at least four counties that hosted Trump rallies far surpassed their state’s overall growth rates.

In two counties, it was more than double: Marathon County’s case count surged by 67% after Trump’s visit compared to Wisconsin’s overall growth rate of 29% during the same time. In Beltrami County, Minnesota, it swelled by 35% compared to the state’s 14%.

...[E]xperts all agreed that holding large rallies during a pandemic interferes with efforts to contain the virus and can make things worse. This is why officials in at least five states, including two with Republican governors, voiced concerns or issued warnings in advance of the president’s rallies.

“I would ask the president, for once, to put the health of his constituents ahead of his own political fortunes,” Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, said on Sept. 25. Trump has held three rallies in the state since then.

Campaign events where people gather together cheering and screaming can carry the virus far through the crowd, said Shelley Payne, director of the LaMontagne Center for Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas. Then those infected will take the virus back to their families, friends and coworkers-- fanning an outbreak in the community.

“This is true of any respiratory virus; when you’re near people in close contact, you’re going to spread the virus,” Payne said. “And rallies are particularly problematic.”

Campaign rallies fall within a category the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labels “highest risk” for the potential to spread the virus that already has claimed the lives of more than 222,000 Americans.

...Political experts say the guideline-defying events are part of a strategy by the Trump administration to downplay the seriousness of the virus ahead of the election. It has divided the nation over wearing masks and taking the necessary precautions to contain the virus.

“It’s a trade-off between doing what’s right for public health or what benefits re-election,” said Todd Belt, professor and director of the Political Management Program at The George Washington University. “And over and over, the greater concern for this White House is re-election.”

From conservative Christians with tucked shirts and dress shoes to bikers with long beards and leather, hundreds of Trump supporters waved flags, held signs and donned the red caps as they descended on the small town of Bemidji, located in Beltrami County, Minnesota.

Despite the 250-person limit for gatherings in the state, throngs stood shoulder-to-shoulder as they waited in long lines, cheering on the commander in chief and greeting others as if the global pandemic did not exist. A mix of locals and those who traveled hundreds of miles, the scene at the September rally has played out in small towns across America where Trump has a stronghold.

Charter buses packed full, merchandise vendors lining the streets and counter protests nearby, the spectacles have marked Trump’s campaigns and presidency.

But many of these towns don’t typically draw these types of crowds-- and the aftermath is now evident in their COVID-19 cases.

Between mid-August and mid-October, Trump has visited small and mid-sized communities in major swing states with county populations ranging from 47,000 to 310,000.

They also have largely been in conservative communities that in many cases have resisted mask-wearing and social distancing efforts.

...The campaign includes a disclaimer on rally ticket requests stating that guests “assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19.”

...Following Trump’s COVID-19 infection, 57% or registered voters say they are very or somewhat confident in Biden to handle the public health impact of the coronavirus, while 40% express that level of confidence in Trump, according to the Pew Research Center. Biden held a narrower lead on his support over the outbreak in June.

Trump isn't holding these rallies in deep red states that he considers "in the bag"-- like West Virginia, Idaho, Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota, Arkansas, Wyoming and Tennessee. No, he's holding them in swing states where he thinks he needs to motivate his base to turn out on election day. Let's go back to the three states where he should be charged with negligent homicide and look at the polling average in each:

• Minnesota- Trump down by 6.0 points
• Wisconsin- Trump down by 4.6 points
• Pennsylvania- Trump down by 5.1 points

And that brings us to Nicholas Lemann's much-discussed essay in Friday's New Yorker, The Republican Identity Crisis After Trump. Lemann explores if, post-Trump, "economic insecurity and inequality [are] powerful enough to blow apart the boundaries of conventional politics... An ambitious Republican can’t ignore Trumpism. Nor can an ambitious Democrat: the Democratic Party has also failed to address the deep economic discontent in this country. But is it possible to address it without opening a Pandora’s box of virulent rage and racism?"

The Republican Party has long had a significant nativist, isolationist element. In the Party’s collective memory, this faction was kept in check by “fusionism,” a grand entente between this element and the Party’s business establishment. The best-known promoter of fusionism is the late William F. Buckley, Jr., the theatrically patrician founder of National Review and an all-around conservative celebrity. Buckley tried to keep anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists out of the conservative movement, but he was not a standard Chamber of Commerce Republican. His first book attacked liberal universities, his second defended Joseph McCarthy, and in 1957, when Dwight Eisenhower was sending federal troops to integrate Little Rock Central High School, he wrote an article titled “WHY THE SOUTH MUST PREVAIL.” Buckley helped define American conservatism as a movement that supported free-market economics and internationalism and welcomed serious intellectuals, including former Communists such as James Burnham, Frank Meyer, and Whittaker Chambers.

Fusionism brought these views together into what seemed for a long time, at least from the outside, to be a relatively workable political coalition. Philip Zelikow, a veteran Republican foreign-policy official and one of hundreds of prominent members of the Party who vigorously opposed Trump in 2016, said, “World War II, followed by nearly World War III, brought the United States into an unprecedented world role. And a vocal minority didn’t accept it. They don’t like foreigners. They think they’re playing us for suckers. There were a lot of Pearl Harbor and Yalta conspiracy theories that we’ve forgotten about. This group concentrates overwhelmingly in the Republican Party.” For a long time, it was kept in check. Now, in Zelikow’s view, it has grown in prominence and become less deferential to the business wing of the Republican establishment, and is “close to being the most influential element in the Party.”

...In American politics, white nativism and racism tend to rise in conjunction with economic distress. Quite often, liberal economic reforms have been achieved at the price of compromises with politicians who were anything but liberal on race. The greatest triumph of liberalism in American history, the New Deal, entailed a bargain with the segregationist South in which the Jim Crow system remained firmly in place. In the twenty-first century, rising economic discontent among working-class whites has often caused them to lash out at people from other groups. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, and a leader of the religious wing of the conservative movement, told me, “There’s an anxiety. A world is being demolished before your eyes. It’s an instinct that things aren’t going as they should. The world is coming apart. Somebody has to say no.”

Trump’s Republican opponents in 2016, who had been living in a world created by the Republican donor class, didn’t see that the Republican coalition had been shattered. After Obama defeated Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, Reince Priebus, then the head of the Republican National Committee (who later followed the familiar trajectory from Never Trumper to Trump enabler to Trump exile), commissioned an inquiry to find out what had gone wrong. The resulting report, known in Republican circles as “the autopsy,” noted a significant decline in the Latino vote for Republican Presidential candidates since the George W. Bush high-water mark, in 2004, and urgently called on the Party to reaffirm its identity as pro-market, government-skeptical, and ethnically and culturally inclusive. Romney would have carried Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada if he had replicated Bush’s share of the Latino vote. The Republican establishment, and most of the 2016 Republican Presidential field, accepted the autopsy as revealed truth.

This left an opening for Trump to ignore a series of supposedly inviolable Republican bromides. He didn’t talk about the need for limited government or for balancing the federal budget. He didn’t talk about the United States as the guarantor of freedom worldwide. He didn’t extoll free trade. He didn’t court the Koch brothers. He did not sign the no-new-tax pledge that the conservative organizer Grover Norquist has been imposing on Republican Presidential aspirants for decades. A new book, Never Trump, by two political scientists, Robert Saldin and Steven Teles, asserts that Trump was opposed by more officials in his own Party (the Never Trumpers of their title) than any Presidential nominee in recent American history. Nonetheless, he got more votes in the Republican primary than any Presidential candidate ever has. Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, who in the nineties laid some of the groundwork for Trump’s rise by establishing hot-blooded attack as the dominant Republican leadership style, told me, “He won because he’s a dramatically better politician than anybody believed. A substantial part of the country felt demeaned. Talked down to.” Gingrich, who was among the first prominent Republican politicians to endorse Trump, has written two glowing books about the “great comeback” that the President’s agenda represents.

...Trump’s key insight in 2016 was that the Republican establishment could be ignored, and his primary campaign pitched only to the Republican base, which no longer believed in the free-market gospel, if it ever had. There would be no penalty for violating any ironclad rule of traditional Republicanism. Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican consultant who was affiliated with Jeb Bush in 2016, said, “Trump was a perfect grievance candidate, at a time when Republican voters wanted to blow up the system. I did Arnold Schwarzenegger-- he was what Hollywood people call a ‘pre-awareness title.’ People thought Trump was all over the place on Republican-base issues like guns and abortion, and that would do him in. But he hit this note of resentment. He was ‘politically incorrect’-- critical of Obama in crude terms. There was definitely a racial subtext.” He went on, “He was very George Wallace. And then there was the strongman thing: Juan Perón in an orange fright wig. He spoke to a fifty-two-year-old shoe salesman in a dying mall in Parma, Ohio. He has those voters in his head.” Charles Kesler, a conservative political scientist and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books, one of a small number of Trump-sympathetic intellectual journals, said much the same thing: “It’s a confession of the disrepair of the Republican Party that he won that race. He shouldn’t have won that race. It revealed the inner hollowness of the Party.”

Nobody pretends that President Trump pores over detailed policy briefs. By all accounts from reporters and from Administration defectors, what you see (tweets, rallies, enmities, palace intrigue) is what you get. Even though Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House for two years, Trump failed to achieve his most loudly voiced campaign promises from 2016, such as building that big, beautiful wall and making Mexico pay for it, getting Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and undertaking a major infrastructure-building program. He is running for a second term without having produced any formal platform. What he did accomplish is a surprisingly conventional Republican program: substantial tax cuts, a vast rollback of federal regulations, large increases in military spending, and the elevation to the federal bench of more than two hundred judges with lifetime tenure, including, most likely, three avowedly conservative Supreme Court Justices.

Trump signed into law a cut in the corporate tax rate from thirty-five per cent to twenty-one per cent-- far lower than what Reagan was able to get. Glenn Hubbard said, “Jeb would have given you the tax cut. I know because I wrote it. Trump just doubled it.” In 2017, Julius Krein, an up-and-coming conservative intellectual and a former Trump supporter, founded a magazine called American Affairs. He told me, regarding Trump’s economic accomplishments, “Laugh if you want, but he ran on an ambitious agenda, which ran counter to the entire consensus. And in office he did almost nothing for anyone aligned with the 2016 campaign. The donors are driving the bus.” Trump’s racially charged rhetoric has remained constant from his first campaign through his time in office, but, in policy, foreign affairs is the one area where the Trump of the campaign and the Trump of the White House are truly aligned. His hostility toward alliances and treaties has led him to withdraw from the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal. He has enacted punitive restrictions on immigration. He constantly attacks NATO and other international organizations.

The best explanation I’ve heard for the difference between Trump as a candidate and Trump as the President goes back to fusionism. Governing requires filling thousands of jobs at the highest levels of the federal government with people who know what they’re doing, and also having shovel-ready policies in dozens of specific areas. Trump and most of his closest aides had no government experience and no developed policies. Reagan was elected sixteen years after Barry Goldwater’s forty-four-state defeat, in 1964. The conservative movement had used that time to develop a governing infrastructure. As Reagan took office, the Heritage Foundation (established in 1973) released the thousand-page Mandate for Leadership, which included hundreds of detailed suggestions for conservative policies that Reagan could enact.

There was no manual like that detailing the program Trump ran on, and no economic-policy experts ready to enact it. “This was a case where the dog caught the car,” Oren Cass, a young conservative activist and thinker who dislikes both Trump and the Republican establishment, told me. Trump’s motley crew included people like Stephen Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, and Paul Manafort, who hadn’t previously worked in government, or even had leading roles in prominent Republican campaigns. Stuart Stevens, Romney’s senior strategist in 2012 and a Never Trumper, told me, “These are evil people. They don’t have a sense of right and wrong. The people Trump attracts—these are damaged people. These are weird, damaged people. They are using Trump to work out their personal issues.”

Yet the establishment’s governing machinery was still running apace, so there were plenty of appointees and policies available from congressional staffs, think tanks, and lobbying organizations—all funded by the Republican donor class. The establishment is set up to supply the Presidential officials who supervise the career civil servants (also known by Trumpists as “the deep state”) in federal agencies. A few distinctively Trump appointees-- Stephen Miller, on immigration, and Jared Kushner, on the Middle East-- pushed through policies that no traditional Republican would have put into place. Otherwise, appointees without previous connections to Trump but with deep connections to the Party’s libertarian wing have put in place an enhanced version of the standard Republican program.

The result has been an odd mix of traditional Republican policies and Trumpian rhetorical flourishes. It’s hard to tell whether Trump believed in what his Administration was doing or if he was merely focussed on how to square it with his personal branding strategy. Cliff Sims, a White House aide who left in 2018, is the author of Team of Vipers, arguably the most revealing of the half-dozen tell-all Administration memoirs. In the book, Sims describes a scene from 2017, in which Trump is on the phone with Paul Ryan and Kevin Brady, the Republican members of Congress who were primarily responsible for the tax-cut plan. Trump says, “I think I’ve got a great name for this bill-- it’s going to be really cool. We need to call it ‘The Cut Cut Cut Act,’ because this is a tax cut. When people hear the name, that’s what we want people to know.” (The bill became law under the name Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.)

It’s also hard to tell whether Trump is truly an economic nationalist or merely a crony capitalist. He railed against TikTok, a Chinese-owned company, demanding that it sell its U.S. division, but then approved a deal that would permit Chinese control to continue and would also benefit two American companies, Walmart and Oracle, the latter of which has a major Trump contributor as a top executive. The Administration’s misadventures in Ukraine appear to have involved attempts to get the head of Naftogaz, the national gas company there, replaced by someone who would agree to import liquefied natural gas from the United States. Whatever is really going on, it’s clear that Trump in office is far less economically populist than he claimed to be while he was campaigning for his first term.

...As Trump has outsourced economic policy to the establishment, he has outsourced social policy to the evangelicals. Years before he launched his Presidential campaign, some instinct led him to create an alliance with the religious wing of the Republican Party. Nearly twenty years ago, he formed a public relationship with Paula White, a popular televangelist who preaches the "prosperity Gospel," and who has said that she guided Trump toward active Christianity. Since at least 2011, Trump has been appearing at the American Conservative Union's annual Conservative Political Action Conference, a large gathering of activists from the Party base. In 2016 and 2017, Trump released lists of potential Supreme Court Justices, all of them demonstrably acceptable to both wings of the Republican Party, the evangelicals and the libertarians, and then made appointments only from those lists. (He released a second-term list this year.) He selected Mike Pence, an evangelical Christian who had strong support from the Koch brothers and from other major Republican donors, as his Vice-President. As President, Trump has issued a number of executive orders that evangelicals approve of, such as one that rescinded a provision of the Affordable Care Act which required health-care providers to offer birth control. "He actually did what he said he'd do," Albert Mohler told me. "It's the oddest thing."

...Trump is far too bizarre to be precisely replicable as a model for the generic Republican of the future. That raises the question of where the Republican Party will go after he leaves office. The jockeying for the 2024 Republican nomination is already well under way. Did Trump's ascension represent a significant change in the Party's orientation, and, if so, will the change be temporary or lasting?

Among the Republicans I spoke to, some of whom will vote for Trump and some of whom won't, there are three competing predictions about the future of the Party over the coming years. Let's call them the Remnant, Restoration, and Reversal scenarios.





Most of the 2016 Republican Presidential candidates accepted the post-2012-autopsy argument that the Party, with its overwhelming lack of appeal to nonwhite voters, was in a demographic death spiral. Trump ran a campaign that seemed designed to appeal only to whites-- indeed, only to whites who didn't like nonwhites. That worked well in the Republican primaries, and well enough in the general election for Trump to eke out a victory that would have been impossible without the Electoral College system. He also did slightly better with minority voters than Romney had, though minority turnout was significantly lower than it had been in the two elections when Barack Obama was the Democratic nominee.

Could somebody else use the Trump playbook to win a Presidential election? Those who believe in the Remnant scenario think so. It would require extremely high motivation among Trump's base-- mainly exurban or rural, actively religious, and not highly educated-- along with a strong appeal to affluent whites, continued modest inroads with minority voters, and a low turnout among Democrats. If a politician were able to tap into the deep antipathy toward élites in the Trump heartland, he could compensate, at least in part, for the demographic decline of white voters. In the years between the elections of 1996 and 2016, the Democratic Party lost its voting majority in about a thousand of the three thousand counties in the United States-- none in major population centers. Trump carried eighty-four per cent of the counties.

...The Remnant strategy entails relentless attacks. It rests on the idea of an outpowered cohort of traditional Americans who see themselves as courageously defending their values. The obvious candidate to carry out a high Trumpist strategy in 2024 would be Donald Trump, Jr., who is an active speaker in Trump-admiring circles and in the past two years has published two books that excoriate liberals. Several other potential Republican candidates, most notably Senators Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, and Josh Hawley, of Missouri, have demonstrated that they see Trump's success as instructive. Between them, Cotton and Hawley have two degrees from Harvard, one from Yale, and one from Stanford, but both have been steadily propounding populist and nationalist themes. The forty-year-old Hawley, who is only two years into his first term and is the youngest member of the Senate, is a relentless Twitter user, frequently targeting China, Silicon Valley, and liberals who are hostile to religion. Like Trump in 2016, he almost never argues for less government, and often calls for programs to help working people. In the summer of 2019, he gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference denouncing "a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities" which, he implied, had gained control of both parties. There is also Tucker Carlson, of Fox News, who, like Trump in 2016, has no political experience and a large television audience. He offers up ferocious attacks on élites almost nightly. Charles Kesler told me that, no matter who wins, the Claremont Institute, which publishes the Claremont Review of Books, is going to start a Washington branch after the election, to devise Trumpian policies: socially conservative, economically nationalist.

Under the Restoration scenario, if Trump loses, Republicans, as if waking from a bad dream, could recapture their essential identity for the past hundred years as the party of business. They could revive a Reagan-like optimistic rhetoric of freedom and enterprise; resume an internationalist, alliance-oriented foreign policy; and embrace, at least notionally, diversity and immigration. One veteran Republican campaigner with Restorationist leanings says that, if Trump wins,"it'll blow up the Republican Party. In the 2022 election, we'll have an epic disaster-- a wipeout of epic proportions" Instead of Trumpism, "economic growth with an emphasis on character, and treating the Democrats as opponents and not as the enemy, is a way forward for the Party." Many Never Trumpers would feel comfortable again in a Restorationist Republican Party. Restoration could entail a conventionally positioned Presidential candidate, such as Mike Pence or Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, if it's possible for them to shake off their close association with Trump. But the most discussed Restorationist candidate is Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a former U.N. ambassador. Haley is the child of immigrants from India (one a professor at Voorhees College, a historically Black college, the other a schoolteacher who started a successful business selling clothing and accessories from around the world) and the sister of a military veteran. She achieved the rare feat of serving in the Trump Administration without either going full Trumpist or falling out with the President. She left, evidently on good terms with Trump, shortly after it emerged that she had accepted rides on private planes from businessmen in South Carolina. She was given a starring role at Trump's renomination convention, this past August.

...The Reversal scenario, though perhaps the least plausible, is the most threatening to the Democratic Party. The parties would essentially switch the roles they have had for the past century: the Republicans would replace the Democrats as the party of the people, the one with a greater emphasis on progressive economic policies for ordinary families. Some Reversalists have praised Elizabeth Warren; criticizing Wall Street and free trade is pretty much a membership requirement. Michael Podhorzer, who works at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., sent me a chart he had made that showed the vote in congressional districts, ranked by median income, from 1960 to today. For most of that time, districts in the bottom forty per cent of income were far more likely to vote Democratic. But by 2010 the lines had crossed-- perhaps because of the financial crisis and the Great Recession, perhaps because of the Presidency of Barack Obama-- and today poorer districts are far more likely to vote Republican and richer districts are far more likely to vote Democratic. The ten richest congressional districts in the country, and forty-four of the richest fifty, are represented by Democrats. The French economist Thomas Piketty has produced a chart showing that for highly educated voters, who were once mainly Republican, the lines started crossing back in 1968. In 2016, Trump carried non-college-educated whites by thirty-six points, and Hillary Clinton carried college-educated whites by seventeen points. Could Republicans become the working-class party, and Democrats the party of the prosperous? That would bode well for Republicans because, especially in a time of rising inequality, there aren't enough prosperous people to make up a reliable voting majority.

The Democratic Party appears confident that it has the abiding loyalty of minority voters at all income and education levels, and that it dominates the metropolitan areas where a growing majority of Americans live. The coming majority-minority, decreasingly rural country will be naturally Democratic over the long term. But there are holes in this argument. Because minorities are younger than whites and are also less likely to be U.S. citizens, the electorate could remain white-majority for decades. Richard Alba, a sociologist who has written a book called The Great Demographic Illusion, which challenges the idea of a rapidly arriving majority-minority America, estimates that in 2060, which is as far into the future as the Census Bureau projects, the electorate will still be fifty-five per cent white. (It was seventy-three per cent white in 2018). And minority voters-- especially Latinos, who will be the largest group of minority voters in the 2020 election-- may not remain as loyally Democratic as they have been in recent elections, especially if the Republican Party has a leader who doesn't race-bait. Black and Latino Democratic voters are substantially less likely to identify as liberal than white Democratic voters are. They are also more likely to be actively religious, and to pursue Republican-leaning careers such as military service and law enforcement.

...The Reversalists believe that the Democrats' embrace of market economics, and their establishment of a powerful business wing of the Democratic Party, especially in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, during the Clinton and Obama Administrations, has left them vulnerable to an attack from a new, socially conservative and economically liberal strain of Republicanism. Reversalists oppose the Republican donor class. Several have abandoned donor-funded libertarian and neoconservative think tanks like Cato and the American Enterprise Institute, disillusioned with the Party's indifference to the concerns of middle-class and working-class voters. Oren Cass, one of the leading Reversalists, has founded an organization called American Compass, which is trying to formulate policies that would appeal to members of the base of both parties. "What we're talking about is actual conservatism," he told me. "What we have called 'conservatism' just outsourced economic policy thinking away from conservatives to a small niche group of libertarians." Culturally, Reversalists present themselves as champions of provincialism, faith, and work, but they aim to promote these things through unusually interventionist (at least for Republicans, and for centrist Democrats since the nineties) economic policies. Steven Hayward, who calls himself a reluctant Trump supporter, said, "It's amazing to me the number of conservatives who are talking about, essentially, Walter Mondale's industrial policy from 1984. The right and the left suddenly agree. Reagan was very popular with younger voters. Younger people then had come of age seeing government failure. Now young people have come of age seeing market failure."

...Many Democrats will surely see this vision of the future of the Republican Party as fanciful. Isn't the Party controlled by ferociously right-wing billionaires? Aren't Republican-base voters irredeemable white supremacists who have been bamboozled by Fox News and televangelists? But the Democrats' coalition is no less unnatural than the Republicans'. A political system with only two parties produces parties with internal contradictions. The five most valuable corporations in America are all West Coast tech companies-- enemy territory, in today's Republican rhetoric. The head of the country's biggest bank, Jamie Dimon, of JPMorgan Chase, is a Democrat and a Trump critic. There was a stir in Republican circles in 2018, when a conservative journalist eavesdropped, on an Amtrak train, on a long phone conversation that Representative Jerry Nadler, of the Upper West Side, was having. Nadler complained that Democrats were attracting voters who were like the old Rockefeller Republicans-- liberal on social issues, conservative on economics. That's who lives in a lot of the wealthy older suburbs-- formerly Republican areas that are now Democratic. And the Democrats' minority voters differ enough on measures such as income, education, ideology, and religion that some of them could potentially be tempted to join a Republican Party that wasn't headed by Trump.

Trump has already changed the Republican Party. Its most hawkish element-- hawkish in the Iraq War sense-- has gone underground, if it still exists. The same goes for publicly stated Republican skepticism about Social Security and Medicare. One must be hostile to China, and skeptical, to some degree, of free trade. Especially since the arrival of the pandemic, it's hard to find a true libertarian in the Party-- at least among those who have to run for office. In the future, according to Donald Critchlow, a historian of conservatism who teaches at Arizona State University, "the advantage would go to a candidate who is Trump without the Trump caricature. An old-fashioned Chamber of Commerce candidate would not do well. We're in a new situation, in both parties. Everything's up for grabs." A senior Republican staffer who has Reversalist sympathies says, "Trump isn't good at a twenty-first-century policy agenda," but that work can go on without him. "If he loses, we'll have a massive argument in the Republican Party. Some will say, "He's a black swan." To me, the lesson is: he correctly diagnosed what was going on. Let's apply that to conservative economic policy. To me, what's up for grabs is the working-class vote. Not just working-class white-- working-class. Does what the President tapped into have to be racial? Can it be about what neoliberalism has done to the country?"

Trump's genius is to command attention, including the attention of people who dislike him. That makes it tempting to think that, when he's gone, everything he stands for will go with him. It probably won't; elements of Trumpism will likely be with us for a long time. Which elements, taking what form, in the possession of which party? Such questions will be just as pressing after Trump as they are now.

The Great Depression was electorally equated with the Republican Party for at least 20 years and the mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic is going to make Trump's Republican Party this generation's Herbert Hoover's Republican Party. So... Lemann is a really smart guy, but his frame may be cockeyed here.

Will The Movie About The Trump Campaign Be A Spy Thriller? A Tale Of A Crime Family? A Tragedy? A Comedy? All Of The Above?

 

2 bullshit artists the public is done with

Ultimately, Trump will lose in less than two weeks because most Americans are sick of him (some literally with COVID and some just of his rotten persona) and because we're in serious times and serious times call for... well, not a self-serving clown. His non-response to a pandemic that has sickened over eight-and-a-half million Americans and killed over 227,000 of us has made most voters sit up and take notice. But there are other factors that have played into what is shaping up to be the biggest repudiation of an incumbent president since Herbert Hoover.

Some of those reasons are big-- like the unemployment number and Trump's inability to force McConnell and the Republican Senate to agree to a pandemic relief bill. Or how Trump's own campaign attorneys have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the Biden campaign-- and just $50 to the Trump campaign. Others are, by themselves, barekly a blip on the radar-- like Trump's latest bankruptcy: his campaign.

Mike Murphy is a well-known GOP political operative who worked for John McCain, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lamar Alexander to name a few, In an interview with NBC News about how Trump wasted a billion dollars of his contributors' money yesterday, Murphy noted that the Trump campaign "spent their money on unnecessary overhead, lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous activity by the campaign staff and vanity ads way too early. You could literally have 10 monkeys with flamethrowers go after the money, and they wouldn’t have burned through it as stupidly.”

Then there's the whole "strategy" behind Trump's desperate super-spreader rallies. side from the fact that he should eventually be charged with negligent homicide, the whole endeavor is a tragic joke. Nancy Cook gave away the punchline at Politico yesterday. With the Orange Blob yearning for "the magic of his 2016 upstart campaign: the multi-rally days, crisscrossing the country in a Trump-branded plane, the screaming crowds... he’s designed a 2016 redux in 2020 to recapture that spirit, casting off the constraints of a pandemic, his own presidency and even the advice of some of his own advisers."

Trump views rallies in battleground states as the linchpin of his closing argument, a means to excite his supporters and ensure they vote on Nov. 3. But many Republicans close to the White House, former senior administration officials and political advisers say the rallies are largely a way to keep the unscripted and undisciplined president occupied, since they do little to persuade new Trump voters. Rallies, they note, do not woo senior citizens, independents or suburban women, many of whom have moved away from the Trump ticket this election cycle. Most of Trump’s rallies are no longer televised nationally as they once were.

And with coronavirus infection rates climbing, the Trump rallies often draw negative headlines in local news markets because the packed events defy public health guidelines, featuring few masks and almost no social distancing. After Trump’s recent rallies in Bemidji and Duluth, Minnesota-- both in counties the Trump campaign hopes to win-- local health authorities connected roughly 24 new Covid-19 cases to the rallies and protests outside of them.

...[T]he rallies offer the president his own form of soothing, along with a major ego boost in the middle of a tough campaign, said aides, advisers and allies. Trump feeds off the energy of a crowd regardless of whether the appearance makes the most political sense or can help him make gains against Biden in states like Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia.

“Trump thinks, ‘I have the rallies to prove that I am the greatest. No one can attract crowds like me,’” said Tony Schwartz, the author and Trump critic who ghost wrote The Art of the Deal and just published a memoir titled Dealing with the Devil: My Mother, Trump and Me. “It is like taking a shot of testosterone to pump himself up, particularly now.”

One of the funniest, though, is how the planned October surprise-- a Trump-Putin-Giuliani con-job of a Ukraine scandal that is the defining moment in American politics on the right-wing fringe, but not taken seriously by any normal people-- went awry. The cooked-up evidence is likely to wind up on a rap sheet when Giuliani is eventually prosecuted.





And it has already spun off an hilarious sub-plot: Giuliani the Trump-like pervert. Catherine Shoard exposed the latest Giuliani caper for Guardian readers. Borat is in the house-- and Rudy missed the chance to sneak out the back door! Giuliani's reputation of is already in tatters, to put it mildly, but Shoard contends that it "could be set for a further blow with the release of highly embarrassing footage in Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat." The film is being released Friday and in it, Rudy "is seen reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of the actor playing Borat’s daughter, who is posing as a TV journalist."

Following an obsequious interview for a fake conservative news programme, the pair retreat at her suggestion for a drink to the bedroom of a hotel suite, which is rigged with concealed cameras.

After she removes his microphone, Giuliani, 76, can be seen lying back on the bed, fiddling with his untucked shirt and reaching into his trousers. They are then interrupted by Borat who runs in and says: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”

...Word of the incident first emerged on 7 July, when Giuliani called New York police to report the intrusion of an unusually-dressed man.

“This guy comes running in, wearing a crazy, what I would say was a pink transgender outfit,” Giuliani told the New York Post. “It was a pink bikini, with lace, underneath a translucent mesh top, it looked absurd. He had the beard, bare legs, and wasn’t what I would call distractingly attractive.

“This person comes in yelling and screaming, and I thought this must be a scam or a shakedown, so I reported it to the police. He then ran away,” Giuliani said. The police found no crime had been committed.

Giuliani continued: “I only later realised it must have been Sacha Baron Cohen. I thought about all the people he previously fooled and I felt good about myself because he didn’t get me.”

Viewers may be less convinced that Baron Cohen, reprising his role as the bumbling reporter Borat Sagdiyev, and Maria Bakalova, who plays his daughter, Tutar, had no success.

In the film Borat is dispatched by the Kazakh government back to the US to present a bribe to an ally of Donald Trump in order to ingratiate his country with the administration. After the monkey earmarked for the gift is indisposed, Borat’s supposedly underage offspring becomes the replacement present.

Even before he reaches into his trousers, Giuliani does not appear to acquit himself especially impressively during the encounter. Flattered and flirtatious, he drinks scotch, coughs, fails to socially distance and claims Trump’s speedy actions in the spring saved a million Americans from dying of Covid. He also agrees-- in theory at least-- to eat a bat with his interviewer.

Giuliani has become a key figure in the late stages of the US presidential election after obtaining a laptop hard drive purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden and left at a repair shop in Delaware.

His efforts to unearth political dirt on Trump’s rival for the White House mean that the film’s mortifying footage can be seen as an attempt to undermine Giuliani’s credibility. The film, released on Amazon Prime less than a fortnight before the election, ends with an instruction for viewers to vote.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

 

by Noah

This billboard has gone up in Colorado, North Carolina and Pennsylvania today. While I appreciate the message and I think it is helpful, it saddens me that it implies that President Super Spreader would even want to protect us or his family and staff. After all, he is an obvious psychopath who has repeatedly endangered the health of those he comes in contact with and wishes ill health upon us all. That is exemplified by his fighting health care in the courts at any time let alone in the midst of a deadly pandemic, his ridiculing of those who wear masks, and perhaps most of all, his push for a "herd immunity" policy (or has his demented brain calls it "Herd Mentality") that could easily result in 2,000,000 or more dead Americans while his buddy Putin applauds. On Thursday, he even went an extra mile to demonstrate his insanity at a nationally televised town hall when he told America that 85% of those who wear masks get COVID. He even did it twice for extra emphasis! The White House is clearly a group home for homicidal maniacs.

Meanwhile, the billboard seen below is available for viewing and applause in several locations in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, just south of Pittsburgh and bordering them hills o' West Virginny. This is Trumpland, folks. Might as well be Alabama or the White House compound at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. I can understand not liking Joe Biden but not knowing how to spell dementia, a thing a Republican should be so familiar with? Well, isn't that special! MAGA! MAGA! Just who's brain isn't working right?

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

 

by Noah

Did he really say that? No, at least not the second part. Well, at least not publicly, yet. God knows what this drug-addled monster is saying as he roams around the White House bumping into walls.

Would he think that? Yes, Of course. He's psychopathic enough and it sounds exactly like something he would think and be proud of. He is, after all, the Dear Leader of the Republican Death Cult.

Is it true? Yes. Absolutely. Hands down. He is a walking, talking Super-Spreader. No one has more COVID-19 cases and deaths on his bloody hands than him, not even FOX "News," although, to give them credit, they have tried mightily.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

 

by Noah

I get it. And I understand it... It's been a very interesting journey. I learned a lot about COVID. I learned it by really going to school.
- President Donald J. Biohazard, in a message to his batshit crazy supporters, shortly before taking his Sunday joyride.

Damn! Never give a psychopath steroids! But that's what they did at Walter Reed. It was Dexameth aka Dexamethasone. Look at those Hannibal Lecter eyes. Just look at them! The mask even adds to the effect. I see you've got your Halloween costume all set, Donnie! Or was your little Sunday ride around the block just a funeral procession rehearsal?

Keep all sharp objects, bottles of Chianti, and nuke codes away from Donnie Psycho. The latter was a horrific idea to begin with. He's really hyped up now. Now he's back at the 1600 compound. Here comes the Adderall! The first thing he did was whip off his mask so he could infect as many of the staff as possible. He's barricaded in the cult compound like he's the Jim Jones or David Koresh he's always wanted to be. He's not serving grape juice, he's serving COVID-19. Here come ol' orange top, you can feel his disease. He's the super spreader, but, hey Kayleigh, hey Stephen Miller! Watch your livers!

Shame on Walter Reed. No, not for saving his life or just delaying the inevitable oh happy day. No. Shame on Walter Reed for not insisting that our president be heavily chained to his bed. Instead, they let him out to shed his viral spores like cyanide to anyone within striking distance. They let him be put into a hermetically sealed, armored SUV to infect all those good, patriotic Secret Service people with him. No doubt one or all of the insane Trump family had a lot to do with it, or would have it even ever came down to that. A man that is so infected that he has to spend time at one of the most advanced hospitals in the known universe needed to be isolated in a kind of leper colony not be taken outside for a cheap publicity stunt. "Don't be afraid of COVID," he says. "Don't let it dominate your life," he says. He talks about new drugs and new knowledge "developed under the Trump Administration" as if he was responsible for that when he did everything he could to slow that down while he was telling us to drink bleach, inject Lysol and jam light bulbs up our ass. "Don't be afraid of COVID." Yeah, Donnie, like we all have access to the care you just got. Tell that to the 212,000 dead and counting. None of the 850 Americans who died the day you took your joyride got your special antibody cocktail. Tell them and their loved ones not to be afraid of COVID. Fuck you, Asshole!

Calling the ride around the block "insanity," Here's what Dr. James P. Phillips, one of Donnie Biohazard's Walter Reed doctors had to say about the president's ego-stroking joyride:

Every single person in that vehicle now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They might die. For political theater. That presidential SUV is not only bulletproof, but hermetically sealed against chemical attack. The risk of COVID-19 transmission inside is as high as it gets outside of medical procedures. The irresponsibility is astounding. My thoughts are with the Secret Service forced to play.

One of Donnie Psycho's guards was heard to say:

He's not even pretending to care now.

And still America tolerates this. Bring on the flatbed trucks! Park them around the Hot Spot White House; playing "Highway To Hell" at jet engine level around the clock.

Did President Super-Spreader Doom Anyone Before They Forced Him To Go To The Hospital?

 

We'll get to the Bedminster crime scene in a moment. First, though, on Sunday Trump or a stunt double got in an SUV and drove around the hospital waving at the Proud Boys and other fascists camped out there. He was locked up in the truck so unable to spread the disease to anyone. But let's go back a week, to Saturday, Sept 26, to what CNN reported was "a triumphant event unveiling the worst president in history's new Supreme Court nominee, dangerous right-wing lunatic Amy Coney Island. "Their first stop was a small room in the White House basement."

After providing their names, phone numbers and dates of birth, each was taken one-by-one by a staff member from the White House Medical Office to a smaller room nearby. The door was shut, and out came the swab.

One swirl in the right nostril, one swirl in the left. As their names were written on a paper sleeve to contain the sample, they were told: "No news is good news."

So began what is now believed by many White House officials to be a nexus for contagion that resulted Friday in the positive tests of at least seven attendees, including the President himself, who is hospitalized in Maryland.

It is not known how or when Trump caught the infection that resulted in a positive test unveiled after midnight on Friday. But the string of people who attended last Saturday's event-- where few guests wore masks and social distancing was absent-- was growing.

On Friday, Republican Sens. Mike Lee and Thom Tillis both said they had tested positive. They sat three seats apart in the second row during the ceremony, separated by other senators.

The President's former counselor Kellyanne Conway said she, too, had become infected. She was seated directly behind the first lady.

The president of Notre Dame, where Trump's nominee Amy Coney Barrett teaches, was also diagnosed with coronavirus. He sat three seats away from Conway-- right behind the nominees' young children.

That is in addition to the President, the first lady and senior adviser Hope Hicks, all of whom tested positive last week.

Others who are close to the White House but did not attend Saturday's event also announced positive tests, including Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who had spent time with the President at the end of last week, and Trump's campaign manager Bill Stepien, who participated in mask-less debate preparatory sessions at the White House last weekend. So did former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who also helped Trump prepare for the debate.

On Saturday, Sen. Ron Johnson became the third Republican senator after Lee and Tillis to test positive-- but he did not attend the ceremony on Saturday. Three members of the White House press corps also tested positive, according to the White House Correspondents Association.

The ceremony in the Rose Garden-- and Trump's Supreme Court nomination more broadly-- were once viewed as the President's best last chance to supplant coronavirus as this election's dominant theme. Instead, the tightly packed ceremony became the best illustration to date of the White House's own mismanagement of the crisis, including shrugging off best health practices and openly flouting the mitigation recommendations offered by his own government.

...The [testing] system the White House uses, the Abbott Laboratories rapid test, has a higher false negative rate than other diagnostic tools that sometimes take longer to produce results.

And even those who test negative still have the potential to spread the disease. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says asymptomatic contacts who test negative should still self-quarantine for 14 days from their last exposure to someone with Covid-19. People who are asymptomatic or who have not yet developed symptoms are able to transmit the virus.

Symptoms can appear within two to 14 days of exposure; symptoms most often develop with four to five days, and early mild symptoms can become more serious.

So when the White House advised Jenkins and other guests it was safe to remove their masks, it stood in direct opposition to public health advice that has been offered to Americans for months.

So, too, did the close quarters defy recommendations for social distancing. Before guests headed to the Rose Garden, some attended gatherings inside the White House reception rooms where social distancing was not practiced-- including with hugs and handshakes.

Seats for guests in the Rose Garden did not appear spaced apart the recommended six feet. And throughout the ceremony, only a very small number of attendees were seen wearing masks-- including a woman wearing a full plastic face shield.

...Top administration officials, including Attorney General William Barr and Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist who is the latest addition to the White House coronavirus task force, were also seen without masks, shaking hands and interacting closely with other attendees.

Lee, the Utah Republican who tested positive last week, was seen speaking to another guest with his mask in his hand.

...The Rose Garden ceremony was not unique in Trump's schedule. None of the events he attended in the days before or after required masks, and all relied on the testing plan the White House officials have repeatedly insisted would protect the President from catching coronavirus.

At events in Florida, Georgia, Washington and Virginia the Friday before the announcement, Trump interacted with mask-less officials and donors, most of whom had been tested but who nonetheless could still have been contagious.

The day after, Trump participated in debate preparatory sessions inside the White House Map Room with Stepien, Conway and others, including Christie and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

It remains unclear how many more guests from the Rose Garden might test positive, and a number-- including Barr and some other members of Trump's family-- said Friday they had negative results.

Yes, yes, most Americans would like to see McConnell catch COVID and die. Unfortunately, he wasn't at the infamous Bedminster super-spreader event after Trump already knew he was positive and spreading contagion. There about 200 paying customers-- rich Republicans-- and it will be interesting to see how many get sick. The White House is claiming Trump didn't know he was contagious when he was posing for pictures with the wealthy donors. That's probably false but what he did absolutely know is that Hope Hicks was infected and that he had been physically close to her. The White House cut the number of staffers going to Bedminster once they realized that it would be a disease-spreading event.

The Regime has now given the New Jersey Department of Health a list of 206 of the assholes (many from out of state) who paid to catch COVID from Trump. The White House is contacting the rich Republicans and the department is contacting staffers and other non-rich people who might have been there and recommending "that they self-monitor for symptoms and quarantine if they were in close contact with the president and his staff."

COVID Tour by Chip Proser

Ticket prices began at $2,800 a head, went to $35,000 to attend "a VIP round table," $50,000 to get a picture of yourself with Señor Trumpanzee and $250,000 to prove that you are criminally insane and a danger to America, hopefully soon residing in a cemetery.

Bedminster is in the northwest corner of Somerset County, bordering on Hunterdon and Morris counties. Yesterday, Somerset County reported 15 new cases bringing the county total to 5,981. Hunterdon reported 6 new cases (for a total of 1,442) and Morris reported 19 new cases bringing their total to 8,130.

Before Trump spent time raking in the big bucks and spreading COVID, New Jersey officials expressed alarm that he was setting up a super-spreader event in their state. Even Republican officials stayed away from the event-- except right-wing goon Joe Piscopo. Gov. Murphy warned that the fundraiser was a regional event and so it had the potential to spread the virus beyond New Jersey. Somerset County Democratic Chair Peg Schaffer: "This morning we wake up to learn that Trump was infected with COVID-19 while glad-handing his supporters in Bedminster. While this is completely irresponsible behavior for anyone, for the President of the United States to risk the health and lives of his own supporters, their families, their neighbors and the workers and wait staff at his club is unfathomably selfish."