Midnight Meme Of The Day!

 

by Noah

It's not shocking but it's both sobering and depressing to now have confirmation that, for half of the voting public, the following are not deal breakers when they decide who and what to vote for. In fact, 80,000,000 of our fellow citizens and neighbors voted for the candidate whose platform is listed below:

1. a candidate that was convicted for bilking people out of their hard-earned money with a fake university that gave them nothing in return. I'll just let this one stand in for all of Donnie Godfather's criminal activities, known and as yet unknown. To list it all would take a book.

2. a candidate who has a history of racist acts and statements of encouragement to white supremacist groups (found guilty of racist rental policies, Central Park 5, "very fine people," re-tweets of white supremacist propaganda, etc., etc., etc.),

3. a candidate who is proud to be a practicing misogynist, making no effort to change or evolve in any way,

4. a candidate who is fighting in the courts to take away healthcare for 30,000,000 Americans even during a pandemic,

5. a candidate who deliberately made that pandemic even worse and suggested homicidal cures,

6. a candidate that publicly mocks the disabled to the cheering of his supporters,

7. a candidate who is a serial child abuser and surrounds himself with the same (Miller, Mnuchin, DeVos, his "I don't care" wife...)

8. a candidate who incites violence and turns Americans against Americans with his rhetoric,

9. a candidate who "misuses" charity donations entrusted to him,

10. a candidate who nominates homophobic judges,

11. a candidate who owns casinos so he treats every citizen of the country as a mark,

12. a candidate who supports dumping carcinogens into our water supplies (his environmental policies will kill more babies in their wombs than all "abortion clinics" combined),

13. a candidate who sides with Putin and our other adversaries over us for his own personal financial gain,

14. and, a candidate who has never even made an attempt to address his personal issues and failures of character because he doesn't see them as such or think they matter.

15. a candidate who got himself impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and should have been impeached for much, much more, including being a Manchurian President and traitor to the United States Of America.

Sure, there could be more items on the above list but who has time to read it all? Whether taken individually or together, the above characteristics indicate a candidate who is a sociopath on his "be best" days and a psychopath on his normal days. Apparently, 80,000,000 people who walk among us see the above as perfectly A-OK. As I indicated at #1 on my list, I haven't even included the extensive list of things Trump is being investigated for and will be investigated for, not the least of which is tax fraud.

None of us are perfect but it used to be that most people tried to be better and do their best to make at least some little part of the world better. Instead, way too many have hatefully and nihilistically set out to do the opposite and endorsed Trump's massive bad character with their votes. Thus, it rubs off on themselves and they like it. Some, for instance, will tell you that they aren't racists even though they voted to encourage a racist and his racism. That's like going to watch and applaud a lynching while saying you had nothing to do with tying the rope to the tree limb.

Max Boot-- A Conservative Republican-- Explains Why He's Voting The Straight Party Line... For Democrats Up And Down The Ballot

 

Celebrated artist Nancy Ohanian portrays the worst president in history

From what I can recall from a high school course in European history, the terms "right" and "left" were first applied to politics in the early stages of the French Revolution when the representatives of the parties that represented the noble families and Church hierarchy (less than 5% of the population but a majority of the representatives) were seated on the right of the National Assembly (formerly the Estates-General), while the Third Estate, the representatives of about 95% of the population, sat on the left. Those on the left represented the legitimate interests of the working class. Those on the right... eventually got what was coming to them. Reactionary political parties never needed to be "saved," which has what conservative Republican Max Boot was advocating in his Washington Post column yesterday; they always needed and need to be destroyed. "We have to destroy the party in order to save it," he wrote. He admits his party had always had "long-standing problems-- conspiracy-mongering, racism, hostility toward science," but it apparently didn't really matter much to him until Trump was able to "exploit [and] exacerbate all of those maladies, just as he made the coronavirus outbreak much worse than it needed to be." He wrote that he "watched with incredulity the GOP’s descent into collective madness." The madness, though, just exposed what was almost motivation for Republicanism and its the heart of the nature of American conservatism.

Many Republicans I know began by holding their noses and voting for Trump because of judges and taxes and their hatred of Hillary Clinton. Now the whole Republican Party seems to inhabit the Fox News Cinematic Universe, an alternative reality where President Barack Obama spied on Trump and Joe Biden is a socialist who will let “anarchists” and “arsonists” run riot.





The party has even become infected by the lunatic QAnon cult, whose followers believe Trump’s opponents are blood-drinking, Satan-worshipping pedophiles. In one recent poll, half of Trump supporters said top Democrats are involved in child sex trafficking. Georgia’s Senate primary offers a disturbing snapshot of the state of the party: Rep. Douglas A. Collins promotes his endorsement from two convicted felons (former Trump advisers Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos) while Sen. Kelly Loeffler touts her support from Marjorie Taylor Greene, a soon-to-be House member who questioned whether the Pentagon was really attacked on 9/11.

The same trickle-down craziness is evident in Republican mishandling of the coronavirus. Trump has given up trying to control the pandemic, mocks masks and promotes conspiracy theories such as his claim that death counts are inflated because “doctors get more money and hospitals get more money” if they say people died of covid-19. This specious allegation is faithfully echoed by Republicans such as Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa. Red states are paying a devastating price for pandemic denialism: North Dakota has the lowest rate of mask-wearing in the country and the highest covid-19 death rate per capita in the world. [As of yesterday North Dakota had 52,367 cases per million residents, the worst rate of COVID in the entire world outside of Andorra, a tiny principality in the Pyrenees ruled by France and Spain and subsisiting entirely on tourism and smuggling.]

Trump has given permission for Republican bigots to come out into the open-- to replace dog whistles with wolf whistles. Sen. David Perdue (R.-GA) mocked Sen. Kamala Harris’s Indian first name. Madison Cawthorn, a House nominee in North Carolina, proudly visited Hitler’s lair and created a website attacking a journalist for having worked “for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.” Laura Loomer, a Republican candidate for a House seat from Florida, calls herself “a proud Islamophobe” and cheered the deaths of 2,000 refugees crossing the Mediterranean (“Good. 👏 Here’s to 2,000 more”).

The longer Trump stays in office, the more damage he does-- and the more loyal Republicans become. “Axios on HBO” found that, among 178 congressional Republicans who have been in office since Trump began his run for president, 42 percent criticized him after the Access Hollywood tape was released in 2016. Only 12 percent criticized him for the attack on peaceful demonstrators and Bible photo-op this year.

Republicans flatter Trump the way Trump flatters Kim Jong Un. Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary of homeland security, just tweeted that Trump is the “greatest SCOTUS [Supreme Court] President since the founding era (at least), and possibly of all time,” and that his “Nobel Peace Prize for Mideast peace” is a “sure thing.” Internet memes depict the portly president as a superhero.

Trump has no second-term agenda, and the party has no platform other than supporting him. Even the editor of National Review-- supposedly the intellectual leader of conservatism-- suggests that the primary reason to vote for Trump is to extend a middle finger to his critics. This is sheer nihilism-- and it will get worse if Trump wins reelection. By next year, fewer than 1 in 6 House Republicans will have been in office during George W. Bush’s presidency. Trumpism is their reality now.

The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden just released a study showing that in four years the GOP has been transformed into an autocratic party that has much in common with the Fidesz Party in Hungary, the Law and Justice party in Poland and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey.

America needs a sane center-right party. It doesn’t need an extremist party that undermines democracy, caters to White grievances, and rejects science and reason. The only way Republicans will come to their senses is if they see that the path they are on leads to electoral oblivion. That’s why, even though I’m not a Democrat, I’m voting straight-ticket Democratic on Nov. 3-- and for as long as necessary to make Republicans come to their senses. The GOP needs to be detoxified and de-Trumpified.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

 

by Noah


He's allied himself with a North Korean nuke nut madman. He's allied himself with anti-US Russian Intelligence operations. He's allied himself with home grown, U.S. domestic terrorists who make plans to kidnap and kill governors and mayors in their woodland hideouts; governors and mayors that are guilty, in republican eyes, of trying to protect their fellow citizens from a plague and save lives. Every day now, he incites these crackpot republican militia groups to commit acts of mayhem and violence. He's got media corporations like FOX and One America, and Sinclair who back him up and encourage more. And, now, he's stepping up his ongoing efforts to exponentially grow the number of COVID-19 illnesses and death, as if he hasn't done enough. He does it all right out front because no one has the courage and decency to stop him before it's too late. Imagine what he'll do if he gets a second term or even if he loses and he's told he has to leave the White House compound. Would it shock you at this point if he pulled out a gun and acted out his fantasy of shooting people on Fifth Avenue, or perhaps at one of his rallies or on TV? Of course, the reaction will be "Who could have seen this coming?" "Who could have guessed?" It's all right there to see, folks, right there in front of your eyes!

Donnie Super Spreader knows his rallies are dangerous to those who attend, but, for the gratification of his psychopathy, he packs his delirious and delusional supplicants in like cattle in a kill pen and tells them not to wear masks. Days later, we see the spikes in the numbers of cases, but Donnie Coronaseed has gone on to the next town to catapult the COVID. I can just see the west wing itinerary planning meetings helmed by Eric the Cokehead and Kimberly Meth Queen. We got a glimpse of that during the RNC Convention. I can see mounds of powder on meeting room tables with Ronna Romney McDaniel handing out red MAGA straws and Lindsey Graham snorting Trump's crushed up Adderall out of the cellulite pits in Moscow Mitch's bare ass while Stephen Miller and Kayleigh McEnema cheer him on.

A lot of Trump's hypnotized followers are not in the best physical shape. They will be very sick and they live in places where the hospitals don't have the ICU beds they will need. This is how Donald Trump treats his supporters. Imagine what he will do to those who oppose him if he gets that second term and wants to seize a third. Nightly now, he screams that Biden, Obama, Hillary, and so many others should be arrested and locked up. He's showing what he is and wants to be more boldly than ever before. Republicans used to go on about the threat of unmarked black helicopters and unidentified military occupants. Now. Republicans foam at the mouth and say all protesters should be swept up off the street; the black ones first, of course. You wanna make some money? Form an office pool and pick the date that he and Bill Barr officially pardon and deputize those militia goons. They'll even have names for them: The Rittenhouse Brigades, McVeigh Squads, maybe an Eric Rudolph-Amy Barrett Brigade, too.

What's The Worst Thing Trump Has Done?

 

The Trump Brand by Nancy Ohanian

Virtually everything Trump does is against the interests of the American people. It would be a Herculean effort, akin to cleaning out the Augean Stables, to even list the worst things he's done since occupying the White House. Perhaps the most consequential, though, is his mishandling of the pandemic. Over 223,000 Americans are dead because of him and more than eight and a quarter million Americans have been infected with COVID-19, more than in any other country. Even today the the most active cases in the world are in the U.S.-- more than the next worst-hit four countries (India, France, Brazil and Russia) combined. Same for critical cases-- U.S. is number one, with 15,274 cases, many if whom will die or be debilitated for life.

With daily cases spiking out of control again, our country truly is experiencing the Trump Pandemic. Yesterday, new cases surged beyond 70,000 for the first time in months. Texas, Illinois. Wisconsin and Florida are all experiencing extremely dangerous new numbers. And nationally, the U.S. crossed a new threshold-- over 25,000 cases per million residents. There are no large countries with those kinds of numbers. Trump keeps saying the pandemic will just go away. He'll certainly go away long before the pandemic, thank in large part to himself.

Trump's latest terrible, dysfunctional and deadly decision was to install two political operatives to ride roughshod over the scientists at the CDC. According to a team of AP reporters, their function is "to try to control the information it releases about the coronavirus pandemic as the administration seeks to paint a positive outlook, sometimes at odds with the scientific evidence." Neither has any public health experience.

I feel certain that it came as a surprise to no one that the NY Times advised its readers to vote against Trump, clearly stating that "Trump's re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II" and noting that his "ruinous tenure already has gravely damaged the United States at home and around the world. He has abused the power of his office and denied the legitimacy of his political opponents, shattering the norms that have bound the nation together for generations. He has subsumed the public interest to the profitability of his business and political interests. He has shown a breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of Americans. He is a man unworthy of the office he holds." And they were just getting started

The editorial board does not lightly indict a duly elected president. During Mr. Trump’s term, we have called out his racism and his xenophobia. We have critiqued his vandalism of the postwar consensus, a system of alliances and relationships around the globe that cost a great many lives to establish and maintain. We have, again and again, deplored his divisive rhetoric and his malicious attacks on fellow Americans. Yet when the Senate refused to convict the president for obvious abuses of power and obstruction, we counseled his political opponents to focus their outrage on defeating him at the ballot box.

Nov. 3 can be a turning point. This is an election about the country’s future, and what path its citizens wish to choose.

The resilience of American democracy has been sorely tested by Mr. Trump’s first term. Four more years would be worse.

But even as Americans wait to vote in lines that stretch for blocks through their towns and cities, Mr. Trump is engaged in a full-throated assault on the integrity of that essential democratic process. Breaking with all of his modern predecessors, he has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, suggesting that his victory is the only legitimate outcome, and that if he does not win, he is ready to contest the judgment of the American people in the courts or even on the streets.

The enormity and variety of Mr.Trump’s misdeeds can feel overwhelming. Repetition has dulled the sense of outrage, and the accumulation of new outrages leaves little time to dwell on the particulars. This is the moment when Americans must recover that sense of outrage.

...The repudiation of Mr. Trump is the first step in repairing the damage he has done. But even as we write these words, Mr. Trump is salting the field-- and even if he loses, reconstruction will require many years and tears.

Mr. Trump stands without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern history. In 2016, his bitter account of the nation’s ailments struck a chord with many voters. But the lesson of the last four years is that he cannot solve the nation’s pressing problems because he is the nation’s most pressing problem.

He is a racist demagogue presiding over an increasingly diverse country; an isolationist in an interconnected world; a showman forever boasting about things he has never done, and promising to do things he never will.

He has shown no aptitude for building, but he has managed to do a great deal of damage. He is just the man for knocking things down.

As the world runs out of time to confront climate change, Mr. Trump has denied the need for action, abandoned international cooperation and attacked efforts to limit emissions.

He has mounted a cruel crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration without proposing a sensible policy for determining who should be allowed to come to the United States.

Obsessed with reversing the achievements of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, he has sought to persuade both Congress and the courts to get rid of the Affordable Care Act without proposing any substitute policy to provide Americans with access to affordable health care. During the first three years of his administration, the number of Americans without health insurance increased by 2.3 million-- a number that has surely grown again as millions of Americans have lost their jobs this year.

He campaigned as a champion of ordinary workers, but he has governed on behalf of the wealthy. He promised an increase in the federal minimum wage and fresh investment in infrastructure; he delivered a round of tax cuts that mostly benefited rich people. He has indiscriminately erased regulations, and answered the prayers of corporations by suspending enforcement of rules he could not easily erase. Under his leadership, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has stopped trying to protect consumers and the Environmental Protection Agency has stopped trying to protect the environment.

He has strained longstanding alliances while embracing dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whom Mr. Trump treats with a degree of warmth and deference that defies explanation. He walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a strategic agreement among China’s neighbors intended to pressure China to conform to international standards. In its place, Mr. Trump has conducted a tit-for-tat trade war, imposing billions of dollars in tariffs-- taxes that are actually paid by Americans-- without extracting significant concessions from China.

Mr. Trump’s inadequacies as a leader have been on particularly painful display during the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of working to save lives, Mr. Trump has treated the pandemic as a public relations problem. He lied about the danger, challenged the expertise of public health officials and resisted the implementation of necessary precautions; he is still trying to force the resumption of economic activity without bringing the virus under control.

As the economy pancaked, he signed an initial round of aid for Americans who lost their jobs. Then the stock market rebounded and, even though millions remained out of work, Mr. Trump lost interest in their plight.

In September, he declared that the virus “affects virtually nobody” the day before the death toll from the disease in the United States topped 200,000.

Nine days later, Mr. Trump fell ill.

The foundations of American civil society were crumbling before Mr. Trump rode down the escalator of Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his presidential campaign. But he has intensified the worst tendencies in American politics: Under his leadership, the nation has grown more polarized, more paranoid and meaner.

He has pitted Americans against each other, mastering new broadcast media like Twitter and Facebook to rally his supporters around a virtual bonfire of grievances and to flood the public square with lies, disinformation and propaganda. He is relentless in his denigration of opponents and reluctant to condemn violence by those he regards as allies. At the first presidential debate in September, Mr. Trump was asked to condemn white supremacists. He responded by instructing one violent gang, the Proud Boys, to “stand back and stand by.”

He has undermined faith in government as a vehicle for mediating differences and arriving at compromises. He demands absolute loyalty from government officials, without regard to the public interest. He is openly contemptuous of expertise.

And he has mounted an assault on the rule of law, wielding his authority as an instrument to secure his own power and to punish political opponents. In June, his administration tear-gassed and cleared peaceful protesters from a street in front of the White House so Mr. Trump could pose with a book he does not read in front of a church he does not attend.

The full scope of his misconduct may take decades to come to light. But what is already known is sufficiently shocking:

He has resisted lawful oversight by the other branches of the federal government. The administration routinely defies court orders, and Mr. Trump has repeatedly directed administration officials not to testify before Congress or to provide documents, notably including Mr. Trump’s tax returns.

With the help of Attorney General William Barr, he has shielded loyal aides from justice. In May, the Justice Department said it would drop the prosecution of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn even though Mr. Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. In July, Mr. Trump commuted the sentence of another former aide, Roger Stone, who was convicted of obstructing a federal investigation of Mr. Trump’s 2016 election campaign. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, rightly condemned the commutation as an act of “unprecedented, historic corruption.”

Last year, Mr. Trump pressured the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation of his main political rival, Joe Biden, and then directed administration officials to obstruct a congressional inquiry of his actions. In December 2019, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Mr. Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors. But Senate Republicans, excepting Mr. Romney, voted to acquit the president, ignoring Mr. Trump’s corruption to press ahead with the project of filling the benches of the federal judiciary with young, conservative lawyers as a firewall against majority rule.

Now, with other Republican leaders, Mr. Trump is mounting an aggressive campaign to reduce the number of Americans who vote and the number of ballots that are counted.

The president, who has long spread baseless charges of widespread voter fraud, has intensified his rhetorical attacks in recent months, especially on ballots submitted by mail. “The Nov 3rd Election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED,” he tweeted. The president himself has voted by mail, and there is no evidence to support his claims. But the disinformation campaign serves as a rationale for purging voter rolls, closing polling places, tossing absentee ballots and otherwise impeding Americans from exercising the right to vote.

It is an intolerable assault on the very foundations of the American experiment in government by the people.

Other modern presidents have behaved illegally or made catastrophic decisions. Richard Nixon used the power of the state against his political opponents. Ronald Reagan ignored the spread of AIDS. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying and obstruction of justice. George W. Bush took the nation to war under false pretenses.

Mr. Trump has outstripped decades of presidential wrongdoing in a single term.

Frederick Douglass lamented during another of the nation’s dark hours, the presidency of Andrew Johnson, “We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man, we shall be safe.” But that is not the nature of our democracy. The implicit optimism of American democracy is that the health of the Republic rests on the judgment of the electorate and the integrity of those voters choose.

Mr. Trump is a man of no integrity. He has repeatedly violated his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Now, in this moment of peril, it falls to the American people-- even those who would prefer a Republican president-- to preserve, protect and defend the United States by voting.

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

Slimeball by Nancy Ohanian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

I can only tell a lie.

Mission Accomplished.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask where you can bury it.

The Chris Wallace Interview-- Fox Viewers Finally See What A Lying, Incompetent Boob They Support

Trump lied repeatedly during his interview with Chris Wallace on Fox yesterday. It amazed me that Wallace let him get away with his oft repeated distortion of how the U.S. tests more people than any other country in the world. Forget for a moment that Trump opposes testing and that it is done by states and that Trump is trying to defund those state programs. Instead let's just look at the number of tests that have been done per million residents:

• Iceland- 327,387 tests per million Vikings
• Denmark- 225,564 tests per million Danes
• U.K.- 193,109 tests per million Brits
• Russia- 169,092 tests per million Russians
• Israel- 153,507 tests per million Israelis
• U.S.- 143,759 tests per million Americans

It's important to note that many of the states with the worst upticks in new cases are the states with the least testing. These states are all having dangerous one day case increases and none of their testing rises to the level of that being done in most developed countries with case increases:

• Ohio- 97,039 tests per million Buckeyes
• Missouri- 98,386 tests per million Missourans
• Wyoming- 108,152 tests per million Trumpist fanatics
• Texas- 108,761 tests per million Texans
• South Dakota- 109,927 tests per million Dakotans
• Alabama- 116,953 tests per million Alabamans
• South Carolina- 118,560 tests per million South Carolinians
• Oklahoma- 121,190 tests per million Oklahomans

Talking Points Memo chose their 5 worst moments to focus on-- and they all were doozies! No doubt this will result in Trump going on the attack against Wallace and against Fox for "making him look bad."

Doubling down on his claim of coronavirus “disappearing” someday

When Wallace confronted Trump regarding his predictions about the coronavirus “disappearing” someday, Trump replied that he’ll be “right eventually.”

When asked about his administration’s recent efforts to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci-- which include an unnamed White House official sending a memo to news outlets last week criticizing Fauci’s past comments on the coronavirus that later turned out to be inaccurate-- Trump first replied that “we’re not” before repeating his line that although the nation’s top infectious disease expert has “made some mistakes,” he has a “very good relationship” with Fauci.

After Trump went on to call Fauci “a little bit of an alarmist,” the President argued that he will be “right eventually” about his previous claim that the coronavirus will “disappear.”

Defending the Confederate flag

Pressed on whether the Confederate flag is offensive,” Trump said “it depends.”

“It depends on who you’re talking about, when you’re talking about,” Trump said. “When people proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism. They love their flag, it represents the South, they like the South. People right now like the South. I’d say it’s freedom of, of, of many things, but it’s freedom of speech.”

Wallace then asked if he’s offended by the Confederate flag.

“Well, I’m not offended either by Black Lives Matter,” Trump said. “That’s freedom of speech.”

Piling on more attacks against Biden

Upon being shown a Fox News poll that indicates Biden leading him by eight points, Trump denied that he’s losing because “those are fake polls.”

“They were fake in 2016 and now they’re even more fake,” Trump said. “The polls were much worse in 2016.”

The President then claimed, without evidence, that he has “other polls” showing that he’s leading, before going on to slamming Biden because he “can’t put two sentences together.”

‘They wheeled him out, he goes up, he repeats, they ask him questions, he reads the teleprompter and then he goes back into his basement,” Trump said. “You tell me the American people want to have that in an age where we are in trouble with other nations that are looking to do numbers on us.”

Griping about his inability to hold rallies amid the COVID-19 pandemic

After railing against Democrats for “purposely keeping their schools closed,” Trump displayed his dissatisfaction over being unable to hold rallies in states led by Democratic governors.

“I called Michigan. I want to have a big rally in Michigan. You know we are not allowed to have a rally in Michigan?” Trump said. “Do you know we are not allowed to have a rally in Minnesota? Do you know we’re not allowed to have a rally in Nevada? We’re not allowed to have rallies in these Democrat-run states.”

Refusing to guarantee he will accept the results of the November election

After Trump doubled down on his baseless claim that mail-in voting will “rig the election,” Wallace asked if he’s suggesting that he might not accept the election in November.

“I have to see,” Trump said, before repeating his assertion when pressed on the question again.

The NY Times also published an article on 5 take-aways, although not in regard to the Fox interview-- Inside the Failure: 5 Takeaways on Trump’s Effort to Shift Responsibility. Believe me, it's related. Michael Shear reported that Señor Trumpanzee and his cronies "decided to shift primary responsibility for the coronavirus response to the states during a critical period of weeks in mid-April, eagerly seizing on overly optimistic predictions that the pandemic was fading so the president could reopen the economy and focus on his re-election... [C]ritical decisions about the handling of the virus during that crucial period were made not by the better known coronavirus task force, but by a small group of White House aides who convened each morning in the office of Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff. One of their goals: to justify declaring victory in the fight against the virus. In that effort they frequently sought validation from Dr. Deborah L. Birx, a highly regarded infectious disease expert, who was the chief evangelist in the West Wing for the idea that infections had peaked and the virus was fading quickly."

Shear reminds his readers that "despite warnings from state officials and other public health experts," the murderous Orange Menace "stuck to a deliberate strategy by pushing responsibility onto the states almost immediately after introducing reopening guidelines. Then he quickly undermined the guidelines by urging Democratic governors to 'liberate' their states from those very restrictions." Here are two of the take-aways Shear included:

Trump’s handoff of responsibility had consequences

The president’s bizarre public statements, his refusal to wear a mask and his pressure on states to get their economies going again left governors and state officials scrambling to address a leadership vacuum that complicated their efforts to deal with the virus.

In one case, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California was told that if he wanted the federal government to help obtain the swabs needed to test for the virus, he would have to ask Mr. Trump himself-- and thank him.

After offering to help acquire 350,000 testing swabs during an early morning conversation with one of Mr. Newsom’s advisers, Mr. Kushner made it clear that the federal help would hinge on the governor doing him a favor.

“The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, had to call Donald Trump, and ask him for the swabs,” recalled the adviser, Bob Kocher, an Obama-era White House health care official.

Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami, a Republican, said that the White House approach had only one focus: reopening businesses, instead of anticipating how cities and states should respond if cases surged again.

“It was all predicated on reduction, open, reduction, open more, reduction, open,” he said. “There was never what happens if there is an increase after you reopen?

The White House was slow to recognize it had been wrong

Not until early June did White House officials even begin to recognize that their assumptions about the course of the pandemic had proved wrong.

In task force meetings, officials discussed whether the spike in cases across the South was related to crowded protests over the killing of George Floyd or perhaps a fleeting side effect of Memorial Day gatherings.

Digging into new data from Dr. Birx, they soon concluded that the virus was in fact spreading with invisible ferocity during the weeks in May when states were opening up with Mr. Trump’s encouragement and many were all but declaring victory.

Even now, there are internal divisions over how far to go in having officials publicly acknowledge the reality of the situation.

Trump vs Fauci-- He's Not Shooting People On Fifth Avenue, But Trump Is Killing Thousands Of Americans, Including His Own Supporters

Re-Opening by Nancy Ohanian

It's always been just a matter of time for Trump to fire Fauci. Last week we noticed Trump was signaling to his base by attacking him directly, seeking to discredit him and his pronouncements to-- at least-- any part of the Trumpist base that hasn't already caught on.

Over the weekend, the story started breaking into mainstream media. CNBC.com: White House seeks to discredit Fauci amid coronavirus surge. "The White House, wrote Josh Lederman and Kelly O’Donnell, "is seeking to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, as it works to marginalize him and his dire warnings about the shortcomings in the U.S. coronavirus response."

Fauci's not perfect and he's pulled some punches in his appearances, although, ironically, most of them have been to cooperate with President Mad-Chimp-On-Crack. He always seemed to be willing to put his credibility on the line-- or close to the line-- to avoid making it clear that the only way to stop the pandemic was to have Trump institutionalized.

A White House official told NBC News that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things.” The official provided NBC News with a lengthy list of past comments by Fauci earlier in the pandemic, including Fauci saying in January that coronavirus was “not a major threat” and “not driven by asymptomatic carriers” and Fauci’s comment in March that “people should not be walking around with masks.”

Many of the past statements the White House is criticizing Fauci for are ones that were based on the best available data at the time and were widely echoed by Trump, other members of the task force and senior White House officials. As Surgeon General Jerome Adams told CBS News on Sunday, “When you learn more, you change those recommendations. Our recommendations have changed.”

...The list circulated by the White House bears striking resemblance to the opposition research that political candidates often circulate to the media about their opponents.

...The attempt to discredit Fauci comes amid signs of growing tensions between Fauci and the president. Fauci said last week he hadn’t seen Trump in person since June 2 and hadn’t briefed him in person in at least two months. Trump told Gray Television’s Greta Van Susteren last week that Fauci has made mistakes and added, “I disagree with him.”

Anti-Fauci cartoon that Trump cronies sent around Sunday-- like 9 year olds

As of Sunday Trump's response to the pandemic-- primarily ignoring all of Fauci's advice-- has given Americans 3,413,995 cases and killed 137,782. Trump utterly failed the American people and they are seeing it play out in real time and turning on him. He's hoping to blame the crisis on Fauci. Frida Ghitis wrote an interesting OpEd for CNN.com: The two reasons Covid-19 is getting worse in the US. One of the reasons was Trump; the other one was not Fauci. "While many other developed countries gradually get back to normal," wrote Ghitis, "Americans are contracting Covid-19 in numbers that are hard to comprehend, breaking records every day. Most disturbingly, the number of daily deaths has started to climb again. Counties in Texas, where morgues are running out of space, are asking FEMA for refrigerated trucks to hold the dead. Dozens of states are stopping or rolling back reopening; Michigan has asked the National Guard to stay and continue to help. Texas, whose governor was an early cheerleader for reopening, has extended its disaster declaration. Why? Why are the European Union, Canada, New Zealand and others flattening the curve while American cannot?"

The answer is found in two factors. One is the most dangerous myth surrounding Covid-19: that there is a tradeoff between beating the pandemic and restoring the economy. The other factor is a President who not only appears to believe that fallacy but is prepared to do whatever it takes to conjure a sense of normalcy for the sake of winning re-election.

First, the myth. It may seem counterintuitive, but combating the contagion is not contrary to helping the economy. Public health and economic growth are not incompatible; they go hand in hand. Fighting the pandemic is an indispensable step in returning to growth. There is no tradeoff. We all want the economy to recover, but allowing the coronavirus to surge is not the way.

Without the necessary measures-- physical distancing, wearing face masks, etc.-- the virus spreads like flames on dry brush. It will burn the economy to the ground if we don't act. That is becoming achingly clear as we see cases spiking, fulfilling the prediction of epidemiologists who warned it was a deadly mistake to reopen too soon.

New York Times data shows that states like Florida, Texas and Arizona-- all of which reopened early and aggressively-- most aggressively, are becoming the new epicenters for Covid-19, with Florida reporting 15,299 new cases on Sunday-- the highest number reported in a single day by any state since the pandemic began.

President Donald Trump pushed relentlessly to reopen, on the mistaken belief that it would fire up the economy, and devoted Republican governors quickly obliged. Reopening creates a flicker of economic activity, a fleeting illusion of recovery, followed by an explosion of disease and death, which demands further shutdowns.

This should not come as a surprise. A study of the 1918 flu pandemic found that US cities that took the fastest, most aggressive actions to reduce the spread ultimately experienced the strongest economic growth.

Reopening may save some jobs, some income, for a short time. But then we have to hunker down. Even if authorities don't order the shutdowns, most people don't want to risk getting the potentially deadly Covid-19 virus, so they make personal decisions that limit economic activity. By contrast, strong safety measures create confidence, trust in authorities, lower infection rates, and a return to something closer to normalcy.

If the entire country had continued a strict lockdown beyond a few weeks in the spring tens of thousands of lives could have been saved. We wouldn't have close to 70,000 people diagnosed with Covid-19 in a single day, as we did on Friday. Americans would not be banned from entering Europe. The myth about reopening restoring the economy is killing people.

Among those who propagate the myth is Trump. But in his hands, the belief is weaponized and turbocharged by the electoral calendar.

The president acts and speaks as if he lives on a different planet. "I think we're in a good place," he said this week, as a top expert warned that we're on a path to "one of the most unstable times in the history of our country," with hospitals overwhelmed, their staff exhausted and becoming ill, and the pandemic raging out of control with deaths spiking again. Trump absurdly claimed that 99% of Covid-19 cases are "totally harmless."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, probably the most trusted man in the country on the topic, stated the obvious, "I don't think you can say we're doing great ... we're just not." Instead, Fauci noted, we have a "serious ongoing problem," a "perfect storm," he called it. Days earlier, he had warned Congress that we could see 100,000 new daily cases. It sounded a little far-fetched. But now we're barreling toward that horrifying marker.

At this point in the disaster, a fiendishly clever horror film screenwriter would throw a new plot twist: a leader who doesn't care; one who does all the wrong things as the deaths pile up.

The President went to war against the recommendations of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regarding schools. Epidemiologists there wrote that schools and universities pose the "highest risk," for the spread. But Trump didn't like that, so he and his top coronavirus accomplice, Vice President Mike Pence, tried to pressure the CDC to rewrite the guidelines, because they were too "tough." (CDC Director Robert Redfield refused to do so.)

Trump might as well order the virus to be less deadly. He appears to believe that he can somehow coax the country into ignoring the catastrophe and pretend happy days are here. But people are not buying it. That's why 67% of Americans disapprove of his handling of the pandemic.

Still, he persists. On Friday he went to Florida, a new epicenter of a raging disaster, to a place where about one out of every three coronavirus tests is positive, and he acted as if it was business as usual. (On Saturday, he briefly appeared in a mask on a visit to wounded service members at Walter Reed Hospital, saying he thought masks had "a time and a place.")

Trump is detached from reality on the virus, or at least he acts as if he is. For the rest of us, for individuals and public officials, it is crucial to understand that the only way to return to normal and to protect jobs and incomes, is to save lives. There is no tradeoff. Ignore the rantings of the man with the curious tan. The economy will not recover until the virus is brought under control.

Trump's World Is Crumbling In Real Time

Trump has taken to shrieking about a great silent majority backing him but he is utterly and hopelessly out of step with Americans-- and doesn't know it. Yep, he's the crazy old man sitting on his lawn chair on the front porch with a shotgun yelling at the kids getting out of school to not dare walk on his patchy half-dead old lawn strewn with weeks worth of dog shit.

You can tell by the mustard on her shirt that Karen is a big MAGA supporter

Yesterday, just as the new Gallup poll was showing how Americans, for the first time, want more not fewer immigrants (34-28%)-- and how 77% (versus 19%) say that immigration is good for the country-- Trump was sitting in his bedroom eating junk food and tweeting away his delusional racist screeds:

Meanwhile, a team of Wall Street Journal reporters wrote that "Biden has picked up support among young people as marches against racism and police violence prompt new activism, even though many protesters said they aren’t enthusiastic about the presumptive Democratic nominee’s campaign. A series of recent polls found the former vice president has expanded his lead over President Trump with younger voters, gaining among a demographic Mr. Biden lost to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary race." Old conservative mainline Republicans abandoning Trump seem more enthusiastic about Biden that Bernie fans resigned to voting for him as the lesser evil. Even a poll I ran on twitter yesterday-- and imagine who follows me on twitter-- showed less than 20% unwilling to vote for Biden.

Reporting for the NY Times, Claire Cain Miller, Kevin Quealy and Nate Cohn took an interesting look at random Trump supporters who have decided they can't vote for him again this year. "For some," wrote the trio of reporters, "the disenchantment started almost as soon as Donald J. Trump took office. For others, his handling of the coronavirus and social unrest turned them away. For all of them, it’s highly unlikely they will vote for him again. These voters, who backed Mr. Trump in 2016 but say there’s 'not really any chance' they will this year, represent just 2 percent of all registered voters in the six states most likely to decide the presidency, according to New York Times/Siena College polls. But they help explain why the president faces a significant deficit nationwide and in the battleground states. 'I think if he weren’t such an appalling human being, he would make a great president, because I think what this country needs is somebody who isn’t a politician,' said Judith Goines, 53, a finance executive at a home building company in Fayetteville, N.C. 'But obviously with the coronavirus and the social unrest we’re dealing with, that’s where you need a politician, somebody with a little bit more couth. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve voted for him,' said Ms. Goines, who described herself as a staunch Republican."

Trump defectors play an outsize role in the president’s challenge. He won by a narrow margin in 2016, and he has made limited efforts to broaden his appeal. Even a modest erosion in his support imperils his re-election chances. Another 6 percent of Trump voters in these states say they no longer support Mr. Trump, while allowing “some chance” that they’ll vote for him again.

A majority of the defectors disapprove of his performance on every major issue, except the economy, according to the Times/Siena polls. Somewhat surprisingly, they are demographically similar to the voters who continue to support him. They are only marginally likelier to be women or white college graduates.

In interviews, many said they initially backed Mr. Trump because he was a businessman, not a politician. In particular, he was not Hillary Clinton. But they have soured on his handling of the presidency. Several mentioned his divisive style and his firing of officials who disagreed with him, and especially his response to the coronavirus and to the unrest in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in police custody.

Not all of them are ready to back Joe Biden, but they no longer entertain the possibility of backing the president.

Over all, 78 percent of respondents in battleground states who said they wouldn’t vote for Mr. Trump again disapproved of his handling of the pandemic.

John Crilly, 55, a retired commercial diver in Reeders, Pa., said he voted for Mr. Trump “because the other option was Hillary Clinton.”

“What changed my mind? 120,000 deaths,” he said. “He refused to realize, ‘Oh my god, there’s a virus coming our way; shouldn’t we do something, guys?’ Covid was the turning point. It’s the thing that touches home with everybody.”

He plans to vote for a local write-in candidate instead of Mr. Biden, who he worries is too old.

Coronavirus also changed the mind of Ariel Oakley, 29, who works in human resources in Grand Rapids, Mich. “With coronavirus, even just watching the press conferences, having him come out and say it’s all fake,” she said. “I have family who have unfortunately passed away from it.”

It made her wonder how often he hadn’t told the truth before, she said. She plans to vote for Mr. Biden.

The president also lost voters because of his handling of the growing movement against police brutality and entrenched racism. More than 80 percent of those who won’t vote for him again say that Mr. Biden would do a better job on race relations or unifying America. Of the Trump voters who have not ruled out voting for him again, only around 10 percent said they trusted Mr. Biden to do a better job on race relations.

Kelvin Pittman II, 34, who is self-employed doing car detailing in Jacksonville, Fla., said he voted for Mr. Trump because “he was a great businessman.” As a Black man, he said he aligns with Democrats on many issues, but as a businessman, he favors certain Republican policies.

Then came the killing of Mr. Floyd. Mr. Pittman felt the president didn’t take it seriously: “It was kind of the last straw. It was like, this dude is just in it for himself. I thought he was supposed to be for the people.”

Cathleen Graham, 53, a nurse who lives in a mostly white suburb of Grand Rapids, Mich., has had very different life experiences, but came to the same conclusion. She said she had been shocked to learn how much racism still existed.

“I understand the movement and why it’s going on a lot better than I did than when the gentleman was kneeling at the football game,” she said, referring to Colin Kaepernick. “Even speaking up to support it, I’ve lost friends, friends that were crude, and I was like, ‘How can you even think that of another race?’”

Mr. Trump fits in that category, she said. She plans to vote for Mr. Biden.





Some former Trump voters said it was his personality more than any specific policy that turned them off. They observed his behavior as a candidate, but expected him to act with more decorum in office.

Robert Kaplan, 57, a supervisor at a water utility in Racine, Wis., voted for the president because he wanted to abolish Obamacare, and he didn’t trust Mrs. Clinton. But he was disappointed from the start.

“He’s an embarrassment,” he said. “He’s like a little kid with a temper tantrum when he doesn’t get things to go his way. He’s very punitive-- if you disagree, he fires you. He disrespects very good people in Washington trying to do some good. And I think it’s very disrespectful of the office to be tweeting all the time.”

More than 80 percent of the voters who won’t back Mr. Trump again agreed with the statement that he doesn’t behave the way a president ought to act. Their view is shared by 75 percent of registered voters across the battleground states.

“He said he was going to, quote unquote, drain the swamp, and all he’s done is splashed around and rolled around in it,” Mr. Kaplan said.

Mr. Biden wasn’t his first pick, but he believes he has a chance to “bring the people back together.” His choice of vice president is important, he said-- he hopes it’s someone younger, who can close the divide between the two parties.

John Chavez, 45, a manager at a car dealership in Queen Creek, Ariz., voted for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. His 2016 vote was not so much for Mr. Trump, he said, as against Mrs. Clinton-- he was “spooked” by things he’d heard about her potential involvement in scandals.

“I thought, obviously he’s going to step it up and he’s going to have to change, he’s going to have to become more presidential,” he said. “But little did I know, he’s not. He got worse.”

There was one moment, he said, when “he lost me forever”: when Mr. Trump did not wear a mask during his recent rally in Tulsa, Okla. He said that the president should not have made masks into a political symbol, and that if the public should wear masks, so should he.

Mr. Chavez will vote for Mr. Biden, mostly as a vote against Mr. Trump.

Though many voters similarly described Mr. Biden as the least objectionable choice, some were more enthusiastic.

Craig Smith, 64, a veteran in Big Rapids, Mich., said he planned to vote for Mr. Biden because “he’s got integrity, he tells the truth, he’s got compassion and empathy.”

“Donald Trump represents the past,” he said, “and I believe that the Democrats and Joe Biden and the young people of the world are looking at the future.

“I will never vote for another Republican in my life because of Donald Trump,” Mr. Smith added. “What changed? Well, three years.”

And it isn't just ordinary GOP voters who are starting to turn on Señor T. Elite Republicans were never all that thrilled, but look at this Reuters headline from yesterday: Hundreds of George W. Bush administration officials to back Biden. That shouldn't shock anyone. Biden has always been more like a mainstream conservative than Trump has been. He's the candidate of the status quo (rather than the candidate of extreme populist reactionary proto-fascism). Yesterday these Bush administration alumni launched a SuperPAC for Biden, not just against Trump. They haven't named their members yet but Reuters reported that the list includes "Cabinet secretaries and other senior people in the Bush administration."

The group is the latest of a number of Republican organizations opposing Trump’s re-election, yet another sign that he has alienated some in his own party, most recently with his response to the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide protests over racial injustice and police brutality against Black Americans.

“We know what is normal and what is abnormal, and what we are seeing is highly abnormal. The president is a danger,” said Jennifer Millikin, one of the 43 Alumni organizers, who worked on Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign and later in the General Services Administration.

The other two members who spoke to Reuters are Karen Kirksey and Kristopher Purcell. Purcell worked as a communication official in the Bush White House. Kirksey was on the Bush 2000 campaign, and later in the Agriculture and Labor Departments.

Millikin said the group was not yet ready to name all its members or its donors. It has to provide a list of initial donors to the Federal Election Commission by October.

...Despite policy differences with Biden, “hundreds” of former Bush officials believe the Democrat has the integrity to meet America’s challenges, the 43 Alumni members said.

“This November, we are choosing country over party,” said Purcell. “We believe that a Biden administration will adhere to the rule of law... and restore dignity and integrity to the White House.”

“We really have had overwhelming support for our efforts,” Kirksey said.

A friend of mine, on drugs and frustrated with isolation, jumped 27 27 stories from his apartment to his death last week. Yesterday, William Wan and Heather Long, reporting for the Washington Post, wrote that "Nationwide, federal and local officials are reporting alarming spikes in drug overdoses-- a hidden epidemic within the coronavirus pandemic. Emerging evidence suggests that the continued isolation, economic devastation and disruptions to the drug trade in recent months are fueling the surge." While Trump revs up for another destructive and divisive culture war few in America want, a new poll from Morning Consult shows a stunning 75% of Americans feel the country is on the wrong track and that 59% of voters disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president.

At the same time, CNBC reported that a poll they commissioned from Change Research shows that "Voters in six key 2020 election states have little good to say about how President Donald Trump is handling the coronavirus as the pandemic tears through the country, according to a new CNBC/Change Research poll. As cases spike in pockets of the South and West after states reopened their economies, likely voters in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin believe Trump shoulders much of the blame, the survey released Wednesday found. When asked to select two people or groups most responsible for the recent increase in hospitalizations, 35% said the president-- the largest share among the answers. Trump was followed by “people not wearing masks” at 34%, “states reopening their economies too soon” at 32% and “people not social distancing” at 29%.

The respondents also say that Trump is pushing the states to reopen too quickly, faster than public health experts say is safe for the country:

The state by state breakdown among swing states is terrible for any hopes that Trump still has some kind of a pathway-- even remotely-- to reelection. He's going to wind up with a much of Confederate states-- though by no means all of them-- plus West Virginia, Wyoming and the Dakotas.

• Arizona: Biden 51%, Trump 44% (11,553 COVID cases per million)
• Florida: Biden 50%, Trump 45% (7,403 COVID cases per million)
• Michigan: Biden 48%, Trump 43% (7,118 COVID cases per million)
• North Carolina: Biden 51%, Trump 44% (6,355 COVID cases per million)
• Pennsylvania: Biden 50%, Trump 44% (7,176 COVID cases per million)
• Wisconsin: Biden 51%, Trump 43% (5,015 COVID cases per million)