Month: September 2020

Bod Woodward released audio from key moments in his 18 interviews with trump over the winter and spring.

New York Times: The audio recordings show that as Mr. Trump was absorbing in real time the information he was given by health and national security experts, he made a conscious choice not only to mislead the public but also to actively pressure governors to reopen states before his own government guidelines said they were ready.

Trump’s response: Bob Woodward had my quotes for many months. If he thought they were so bad or dangerous, why didn’t he immediately report them in an effort to save lives? Didn’t he have an obligation to do so? No, because he knew they were good and proper answers. Calm, no panic!

Top officials with the Department of Homeland Security directed agency analysts to downplay threats from violent white supremacy and Russian election interference, a Homeland Security official said in a whistle-blower complaint released on Wednesday… the department’s second-highest ranked official, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, ordered Mr. Murphy to modify intelligence assessments to make the threat of white supremacy “appear less severe” and include information on violent “left-wing” groups and antifa.

The whistleblower was fired in August is Brian Murphy: Murphy charged that in mid-May this year, DHS acting secretary Chad Wolf instructed him “to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran.” When Murphy protested to his superiors, Wolf reiterated on July 8 that the intelligence about Russia should be “held” because it “made the President look bad,” according to the complaint.

News of a call last week between Barr and US prosecutors leaked this week: Attorney General William P. Barr told federal prosecutors in a call last week that they should consider charging rioters and others who had committed violent crimes at protests in recent months with sedition, according to two people familiar with the call….Mr. Barr mentioned sedition as part of a list of possible federal statutes that prosecutors could use to bring charges, including assaulting a federal officer, rioting, use of explosives and racketeering, according to the people familiar with the call. Justice Department officials included sedition on a list of such charges in a follow-up email.

The attorney general has also asked prosecutors in the Justice Department’s civil rights division to explore whether they could bring criminal charges against Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle for allowing some residents to establish a police-free protest zone.

Barr also said this week: “You know, putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history,” Barr said as a round of applause came from the crowd.

It was reported this week that just prior to the June crackdown of protestors in Washington DC, the National Guard requested the use of heat rays: “A.D.S. can provide our troops a capability they currently do not have,” the officer wrote, according to Major DeMarco’s testimony, first reported by The Washington Post. “The A.D.S. can immediately compel an individual to cease threatening behavior or depart through application of a directed energy beam that provides a sensation of intense heat on the surface of the skin. The effect is overwhelming.” They also stockpiled “approximately 7,000 rounds” of live ammunition in the hours before the clash, transferring the munitions from as far as Missouri and Tennessee to the nation’s capital.

The Justice Department moved on Tuesday to replace President Trump’s private legal team with government lawyers to defend him against a defamation lawsuit by the author E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s.

Election 2020

In making the point that unlike 2000, Democrats are likely to flood the streets with protest if Trump contests his loss, he describes this scenario: the president could try to enlist Republican-controlled legislatures in key swing states to help him. They could send a slate of pro-Trump electors to vote in the Electoral College when it convenes on December 14; the rationale would be that even if the state’s official count had Biden ahead, the result was too riddled with fraud to trust. (The GOP-controlled legislature in Florida explored the option of designating its own pro-Bush electors during the recount there in 2000.) A worst-case scenario: A state with a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature could submit competing slates of electors for the final vote. That’s hypothetically possible in the three key Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as North Carolina. (Republicans control both the governorship and the state legislature in the other states considered most competitive, Arizona and Florida.)

The war game paper he cites was published August 3, 2020.

Conservatives on the Wisconsin Supreme Court tossed a wrench in the presidential election in that state on Thursday: absentee ballots should not be mailed for now so the justices can determine whether they should include the Green Party’s presidential ticket.
Adding candidates to the ballots after some have been sent would be complicated. Voters who have already been sent a ballot would need to get a second one and clerks would have to make sure no one voted twice.
“If Milwaukee County is forced to stop printing, and begin designing, testing, and printing a new ballot, we will not be able to meet the state and federal deadlines,” Milwaukee County reported.

Trump at a rally in North Carolina: “Gotta be careful with those ballots. Watch those ballots. I don’t like it. You know, you have a Democrat governor, you have all these Democrats watching that stuff. I don’t like it,” Trump said at a rally in Winston-Salem Tuesday evening.
“Watch it,” he continued. “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do. Because this is important. We win North Carolina, we win.”

Personal Log: New Jersey opened indoor dining and bars at 25% capacity this week. After work on Friday I went to the bar in our neighborhood that I often went to after work and sat inside. Only a few people were spaces out at the bar and the indoor tables had dinners spread out. It was eerie, after nearly 6 months of not being able to be inside side a place, to be back here.

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Trump’s Approval Rating: 42.5%

COVID-19 Cases / Deaths: 6,427,058 / 192,388

Trump spoke about Rittenhouse at a Monday press conference: “He was trying to get rid of — away from them and he fell and then they very violently attacked him. It is something that we’re looking at right now, it is under investigation. I guess he was in very big trouble. He probably would have been killed.

DHS has blocked from publishing its own report on Russian election interference operations, specifically around disinformation about Biden’s health. Wold said the report was “poorly written”: The department appears to have inconsistent standards of caution for its intelligence briefings. Intelligence officers wrote that they had “high confidence” in their assessment of Russian election interference, yet its publication was blocked. But on July 16, the department’s intelligence office broadly disseminated a bulletin on “anarchist extremists” committing violence in the Pacific Northwest, although in that case, officials admitted they had “low confidence” in their historical assessment.

In an attempt to continue sowing confusion about mail-in voting, Trump repeatedly encouraged his supporters to vote twice in the 2020 election, first by mail and then in person.

The Atlantic reported on Thursday that Trump denigrated troops of prior wars, particularly in the WWI Centennial where he refused to visit the cemeteries. This was based on 4 anonymous sources, but confirmed by every major cable news network and the New York Times.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 43.5%

COVID-19 Cases/Deaths: 6,181,474 / 187,159

The Republican National Convention was held this week from Monday to Thursday. For the first time in the party’s history the GOP adopted no policy platform whatsoever.

Bouie: If there’s no platform for the Republican National Convention, if the party has agreed to simply support the president’s second-term agenda, it is because the basic arrangement between Trump and the Republican Party is still intact. Should he win a second term, we’ll see more of the same: an administration that pursues as much of the party’s agenda — redistribution to the wealthy, deep reductions in the state’s ability to solve problems for the general welfare — as possible, and a Republican Party that looks the other way as Trump turns the federal government into a patronage machine for himself, his family and his allies.

Frum: The question is not why Republicans lack a coherent platform; it’s why they’re so reluctant to publish the one on which they’re running.

Edsel, writing about the GOP’s apocalyptic vision on display this week, write’s about a tactic Trump has always employed called Costly Signals: How does it work? Joshua Greene writes: Making oneself irredeemably unacceptable to the other tribe is equivalent to permanently binding oneself to one’s own. These comments are like gang tattoos. And in Trump’s case, it’s tattoos all over his neck and face.
At the same time, Trump’s “costly signals” make his reliability as a protector of white privilege clear.

There was a police shooting of an unarmed black man in Wisconsin that sparked another round of protests. A white, vigilante shooter murdered two protestors Tuesday night. He was arrested Wednesday.

The New York Times used online videos to track his killing spree.

Saturday evening a Trump supporting caravan drove into downtown Portland, shooting paintballs into crowds. One of the right wing protestors was shot and killed.

A new book reveals that Trump offered John Kelly the FBI Director position after he fired Comey, but only if Kelly swore loyalty to Trump. He declined.

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Trump’s Approval Rating: 42%

COVID-19 Cases/ Deaths: 5,715,567 / 176,617

Below is a monthly update, marking key metrics and commentary in from mid-July to mid-August, the fifth month since lockdowns began.

Polling Round Up

For the second month, Gallup tracked an increase in the number of people who are worried about contracting the virus, now at an all time high of 59%, a 6% increase over last month. People worried about financial hardship also increased this month to a high of 54%.

Pew released a poll i the first week of August:

69% Greater concern that state governments are lifting restrictions too quickly

73%: More effective way to help economy is significantly reduce coronavirus infections

On August 15, only 39.4% of the country approved of Trump’s handling of the crisis. The approval spread stands at -17.9% underwater, a slight improvement from July.

Political Weirding

The CDC released a big study of antibodies this week. Key findings: The findings suggest that large numbers of people who did not have symptoms or did not seek medical care may have kept the virus circulating in their communities

New York Times: Gone is any sense that the country may soon gain control of the pandemic. Instead, the seven-day average for new infections hovered around 65,000 for two weeks. Progress in some states has been mostly offset by growing outbreaks in parts of the South and the Midwest.

New data shows how many deaths probably went unreported, meaning the number is already above 200,000.