Month: October 2020

Monday evening Trump left the hospital and returned to the White House. He staged dramatic video where he ripped his mask off when he stood on the portico.

This by Tim Miller for The Bulwark sums up the moment: That heave gave him the stamina to move into a dramatic extended salute lasting 23 interminable seconds. He salutes with D-list caudillo energy, channeling an aging Pinochet or Trujillo in their last gasps of power. Throughout the salute he holds an aggressive glare. Then he steps back and looks deep into the distance. Fully embracing his posture as the leader of a death cult, Trump turns and enters the White House. Without a mask.

The New York Times webpage on Tuesday night shows why there is simply too much news to be covered here. Future historians reading this blog will need to do some digging in the actual newspapers and official records for this week.

Suffice to say, 14 people now have COVID in Trump’s orbit: The disarray was at the same time spreading across Washington. Almost the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, including its chairman, Gen. Mark A. Milley, went into quarantine on Tuesday after coming in contact with Adm. Charles W. Ray, the vice commandant of the Coast Guard, who tested positive for the coronavirus. Late in the day, the stock market took a dive when Mr. Trump abruptly called off talks for a congressional coronavirus relief bill after the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, said such a stimulus was badly needed.

Election 2020

President Trump berated his own cabinet officers on Thursday for not prosecuting or implicating his political enemies, lashing out even as he announced that he hoped to return to the campaign trail on Saturday just nine days after he tested positive for the coronavirus.

Barr and Pompeo are using their offices to support Trump’s reelection. Pompeo promised this week to release Clinton state department emails: “We’ve got the emails,” Mr. Pompeo said. “We’re getting them out. We’re going to get all this information out so the American people can see it.”

He made no effort to suggest that releasing them was unconnected to the political campaign. “We’re doing it as fast as we can,” he added. “I certainly think there’ll be more to see before the election.”

Polls show Biden’s lead increasing, including in the sun belt states: f Mr. Biden wins by simply flipping back the Democratic-leaning Great Lakes states, Mr. Trump and his allies can pin the blame on the virus. But if Mr. Trump loses across the South and West, it would force a much deeper introspection on the right about Trump and Trumpism — and their electoral future in the fastest-growing and most diverse part of the country.

The Trump campaign is also pushing hardball tactics: The campaign is trying to shape the voting process in many ways. Following the president’s lead, it has undertaken a legal and rhetorical assault on mail-in balloting, claiming with no evidence that it is rife with fraud. It is also pushing the boundaries of traditional poll monitoring in ways that many Democrats believe amount to voter intimidation. And it has put legal pressure on states to aggressively purge their voter rolls. …campaign officials have said they will put 50,000 poll watchers and electoral observers on the ground, including at least 1,600 in Philadelphia alone.

Claire Malone of 530 explains how the 36 point partisan divide in American politics make the reality bubbles of post-election inevitable: During the first debate, the president waffled on whether he would concede defeat, falling back on his go-to line about the fraudulent — and unfounded — dangers of mail voting. If he actually does this post-Election Day, media organizations will be forced to grapple with reporting on the news of the day — the president’s words — and battling misinformation and mistrust. It’s more than the press had to contend with in 2000, and it’s an unwinnable scenario. But it’s the reality of our 36-point world.

Another New York Times tax expose was released Friday night: the president’s long-hidden tax records, obtained by The New York Times, also reveal this: how he engineered a sudden financial windfall — more than $21 million in what experts describe as highly unusual one-off payments from the Las Vegas hotel he owns with his friend the casino mogul Phil Ruffin…. Unless the payments were for actual business expenses, he said, claiming a tax deduction for them would be illegal. If they were not legitimate and were also used to fund Mr. Trump’s presidential run, they could be considered illegal campaign contributions.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 43.3%

COVID-19 Cases/Deaths: 7,641,502 / 213,037

Sunday evening the investigative reporters for the New York Times who have been studying Trump’s taxes released a major story after receiving access to Trump’s tax returns: “The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office.”
There are many key findings, starting with the fact he paid no income tax for 10 years, and only $750 in 2016 and 2017. He is also financially insecure with a lot of debt: Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

Some caveats: They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

-his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.
-within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans — obligations for which he is personally responsible — will come due.

His properties have become bazaars for collecting money directly from lobbyists, foreign officials and others seeking face time, access or favor; the records for the first time put precise dollar figures on those transactions.
When he took office, Mr. Trump said he would pursue no new foreign deals as president. Even so, in his first two years in the White House, his revenue from abroad totaled $73 million.

There are new details about his audit, which stem from a tax windfall he orchestrated when he declared a loss from the Atlantic City casino: If the auditors ultimately disallow Mr. Trump’s $72.9 million federal refund, he will be forced to return that money with interest, and possibly penalties, a total that could exceed $100 million.

Election 2020

In the first Biden-Trump debate Tuesday night, Trump was asked to condemn white supremacists and right wing militias. First he asked the moderator to be specific, and when the Proud Boys were named he said “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by!”

Frum on the debate: Trump yelled, threatened, interrupted—and changed nothing. All he did was confirm the horror and the revulsion of the large American majority that has already begun to cast its ballots against him.

Correction: Trump did one thing. On the Cleveland stage, Trump communicated that he will seize any opportunity to disrupt the vote, and resist the outcome. He communicated more forcefully than ever that the only security the country has for a constitutional future is that Biden wins by the largest possible margin.

GOP leaders distanced themselves from Trump’s remarks: Tim Scott: “White supremacy should be denounced at every turn. I think he misspoke, I think he should correct it. If he doesn’t correct it I guess he didn’t misspeak.”
McConnell: “With regard to the white supremacy issue, I want to associate myself with the remarks of Tim Scott,” Mr. McConnell said. “He said it was unacceptable not to condemn white supremacists and so I do so in the strongest possible way.”

COVID-19

New York Times reports: Top White House officials pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer to play down the risk of sending children back to school… also tried to circumvent the C.D.C. in a search for alternate data showing that the pandemic was weakening and posed little danger to children.

Thursday night news broke that Hope Hicks tested positive for COVID-19. Early Friday morning, at 12:54am, Trump tweeted: Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!

Jonathan Swan in Politico Saturday late afternoon: What is the actual state of President Trump’s health — now and over the past 24 hours?

Why it matters: It’s one of the most high-stakes questions in the world, and I cannot answer it, despite having spent since 5 a.m. on Friday on my phone with sources inside and close to the White House.

On Friday night, we chose not to publish information we’d learned from well-placed sources who told us the president had experienced a fever and was worse than the White House was letting on.
minutes after the doctors’ press conference, something extraordinary happened that crystallized this White House’s credibility gap, and made a mockery of any reporter trying to responsibly cover this president’s condition.

The White House reporter on pool duty — traveling with the president and delivering official dispatches to reporters at numerous outlets — sent this dispatch, quoting “a source familiar with the president’s health”:
The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.
That was a much more worrisome portrait. The source, identified by AP, was White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was shown on camera asking the pool to “go off the record with some of y’all.”

I have tried to get a straight answer from the White House since then about what is going on, and why we are being fed official contradictions.

Here is how the Washington Post described it: The statement from Meadows was originally distributed to the media through a White House pool report and was attributed to “a source familiar with the president’s health.” Two White House officials familiar with the statement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue, later said it was Meadows who spoke with reporters. Meadows was also seen on camera pulling reporters aside to talk after the news conference ended. The Associated Press, which had a reporter at the event, also later identified Meadows as the source of the comment.
…
Several White House aides also said they also did not have confidence in what they were being told by other officials.

“I can tell you what I am hearing, but I honestly have no idea if it’s right,” said one senior administration official close to the president. “A lot of people aren’t even telling other people in the building the truth.”

Saturday night the White House released staged photos of Trump working — signing blank sheets of paper in two different rooms taken 10 minutes apart. There was also a video of Trump speaking to the camera that was edited to remove his coughs.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 44%

COVID-19 Cases / Deaths: 7,310,625 / 208,118

America hit 200,000 COVID deaths this week.

By Tuesday, when Romney said he would not block the Supreme Court nomination, Republicans were lined up behind Trump on the effort to replace Ginsburg this year.

Brownstein on how the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court represents an electoral minority and will continue to into 2030s: That could be a recipe for explosive conflict through the coming decade between the priorities of rising generations that compose a growing majority of the population and a court chosen and confirmed by a Republican political coalition that no longer can regularly command majority support from voters. Those confrontations could unfold across a wide array of issues, with a conservative court rejecting or constraining legislation or executive branch actions popular with the emerging generations on questions ranging from climate change and racial equity to women’s rights, gay rights, access to voting — and perhaps most immediately, access to legal abortion.

Election 2020

Edsel on why Biden could lose.

Wednesday morning the Atlantic published this piece by Bart Gellman:

• The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

• We have no precedent or procedure to end this election if Biden seems to carry the Electoral College but Trump refuses to concede. We will have to invent one.

• On the idea that the vote tally will shift after election day, he quotes an unnamed Trump campaign official: “There will be a count on Election Night, that count will shift over time, and the results when the final count is given will be challenged as being inaccurate, fraudulent—pick your word.”
• The worst case for an orderly count is also considered by some election modelers the likeliest: that Trump will jump ahead on Election Night, based on in-person returns, but his lead will slowly give way to a Biden victory as mail-in votes are tabulated. Josh Mendelsohn, the CEO of the Democratic data-modeling firm Hawkfish, calls this scenario “the red mirage.” The turbulence of that interval, fed by street protests, social media, and Trump’s desperate struggles to lock in his lead, can only be imagined. “Any scenario that you come up with will not be as weird as the reality of it,” the Trump legal adviser said.

• Another Trump advisor: “The state legislatures will say, ‘All right, we’ve been given this constitutional power. We don’t think the results of our own state are accurate, so here’s our slate of electors that we think properly reflect the results of our state,’ ”
  Lawrence Tabas, the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s chairman went on the record to say: “I’ve mentioned it to [the national Trump campaign], and I hope they’re thinking about it too,” I just don’t think this is the right time for me to be discussing those strategies and approaches, but [direct appointment of electors] is one of the options. It is one of the available legal options set forth in the Constitution. If the process, though, is flawed, and has significant flaws, our public may lose faith and confidence” in the election’s integrity.

Richard Hasen writing in Slate puts the concern this way: The idea is to throw so much muck into the process and cast so much doubt on who is the actual winner in one of those swing states because of supposed massive voter fraud and uncertainty about the rules for absentee ballots that some other actor besides the voter will decide the winner of the election. … The president has been laying the groundwork for these claims for months, and just Tuesday his son, Donald Trump Jr., baselessly suggested that Democrats will “add millions of fraudulent ballots that can cancel your vote and overturn the election.”

As if on cue, Trump said at a Wednesday afternoon press conference, when asked if he would concede the election: “We’re going to have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster. Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”

Trumps refrain about voter fraud is motivating his supporters: The head of the party in Philadelphia said Wednesday that there would be multiple poll watchers at every site in the city, which would mean at least 1,600 Republican watchers in Philadelphia alone.
poll watchers are being instructed in specific detail. In Michigan, for instance, they are being told to record when any paper jams occur, while those in Arizona are being given a detailed breakdown of the state’s voter identification requirements.

The New York Times ran a story about the Pentagon’s uneasiness about being thrust into the election: “senior leaders at the Pentagon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that they were talking among themselves about what to do if Mr. Trump, who will still be president from Election Day to Inauguration Day, invokes the Insurrection Act and tries to send troops into the streets, as he threatened to do during the protests against police brutality and systemic racism.”

Personal Log: our mail in ballots were delivered by the mail man Saturday afternoon, September 26. New Jersey is one of a few states that are mailing ballots to all voters.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 43.2%

COVID Cases / Deaths: 7,009,216 / 203,180

Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday September 18.

McConnell vowed to hold a vote on Trump’s replacement of Ginsburg but would not say if that would happen before or after the election, six weeks away.

By Saturday, Trump called for the Senate to confirm his nomination, and Lindsay Graham reversed his earlier promise to not support a new nominee during an election. Only two GOP senators–Collins and Murkowski–said they will not support a nominee until after the next president takes office: Collins: “In fairness to the American people, who will either be re-electing the president or selecting a new one, the decision on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be made by the president who is elected on Nov. 3.”

Trump held his first indoor rally since Tulsa in June on Sunday night. The city threatened to fine the venue for breaking COIVD restrictions.

Trump said this week of US COVID numbers: “If you take the blue states out,” he said, “we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level.”

Election 2020

In North Carolina, about 3-4% of mail in ballots are being rejected every day due to inconsistencies. In North Carolina: As of September 17, Black voters’ ballots are being rejected at more than four times the rate of white voters

On Monday the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided to block the Green Party from being on the November ballot. It was a 4-3 decision, with the chief justice siding with the liberals.

Many Florida ex-felons cannot vote in this election thanks for a judges panel were five of the six who voted to block them are Trump appointees.

Courts on both sides of the United States issued rulings on Thursday that could expand mail-in voting in the election in November, as the postmaster general privately apologized to state officials for missteps in his agency’s efforts to educate voters on mail-in ballots.

Michael R. Caputo, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, posted a video live on his personal Facebook page in which he said: government scientists were engaging in “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election.
“And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.”
“If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get,”
“There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president.”

Even Barr got in on the doomsaying this week: Attorney General William P. Barr said in a recent interview that the United States would be “irrevocably committed to the socialist path” if President Trump was not re-elected… “I think we were getting into position where we were going to find ourselves irrevocably committed to the socialist path,” Mr. Barr said. “I think if Trump loses this election that that will be the case.”“There’s now a clear fork in the road for our country,”

Bouie: Instead of making a conventional appeal to voters to give him another term in office, Trump is issuing a threat, of sorts: I cannot lose. If I do lose, the election was stolen. Anyone protesting my effort to hold onto power is an insurrectionist. And sometimes, “there has to be retribution.”

Here is a list of recent ways Trump has and is using the federal government to either distort or suppress information in ways that will aid his reelection.

Ignatius writes this week that U.S. Cyber Command is blocking Russian election interference free from political interference from the White House: Thanks to these efforts, it will be “virtually impossible” for the Russians or anyone else to penetrate voting systems in the roughly 8,000 jurisdictions around the country, the defense official said.

Dan Coates, Trump’s former DNI, called for a high level commission to assure Americans of the security of their vote this November: We must firmly, unambiguously reassure all Americans that their vote will be counted, that it will matter, that the people’s will expressed through their votes will not be questioned and will be respected and accepted.
The op-ed does not attack Trump specifically, but seems to motivated by concern about Trump’s behavior: Total destruction and sowing salt in the earth of American democracy is a catastrophe well beyond simple defeat and a poison for generations. An electoral victory on these terms would be no victory at all. The judgment of history, reflecting on the death of enlightened democracy, would be harsh.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 43%

COVID Cases / Deaths: 6,706,374 / 198,099

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

Polling Round Up

The gap in Trump approval-disapproval on COVID response shortened for the first time since April, from being -17.9 points underwater to 16.2 points. The same 39% approve, but his disapproval dropped to 56%.

According to a CBS News poll, 57% of Republicans and 10% of Democrats view the number of COVID deaths as acceptable.

There were no Pew or Gallup polls for Mid-September.

Political Weirding

In mid August, according to multiple news orgs this week: ‘The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was instructed by higher-ups in the Trump administration to modify its coronavirus testing guidelines this week to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19 — even if they have been recently exposed to the virus, according to two federal health officials.

We would learn in mid-September via the New York Times that the new testing recommendations placed on the CDC website in August were not written by CDC scientists and in fact were opposed internally.

Two American drug companies have a vaccine in third stage trials. The CDC released a memo that suggested it could be ready for use in humans by October, prompting some to worry it is being rushed to aid Trump’s reelection chances.

In early September, The New York Times published a story about how college campuses are becoming hotspots.

Then in the Week of September 12, CDC Director Redfield told the Senate: “If you are asking me when is it going to be generally available to the American public so we can begin to take advantage of vaccine to get back to our regular life, I think we are probably looking at third — late second quarter, third quarter 2021.”

He also called masks “the most important, powerful public health tool we have” in fighting the pandemic, adding that universal use of face coverings could bring the pandemic under control in months. “I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against Covid than when I take a Covid vaccine.”

In a press conference later that same day, Trump said Redfield’s information was incorrect.

Ed Yong published a clarifying piece in the Atlantic describing why Americans are stuck and unable to fight COVID effectively. He lists nine psychological factors:

• the public to view solutions in isolation, which means imperfections become conflated with uselessness.

• Stay at home orders “were also meant to buy time for the nation to ramp up its public-health defenses. Instead, the White House treated months of physical distancing as a pandemic-ending strategy in itself….Showiness is often mistaken for effectiveness. “

• Fixing systemic problems is more difficult than spewing moralism, and Americans gravitated toward the latter. … attributes this tendency to America’s puritanical roots, which conflate pleasure with irresponsibility, and which prize shame over support. “

• magical thinking, in which some factor naturally defuses the pandemic, has become a convenient excuse for inaction.

• Even when the virus began spreading within the U.S., places that weren’t initially pummeled seemed to forget that viruses spread.

• exponential growth is counterintuitive, so “we don’t understand that things look fine until right before they’re very not fine,”… the coronavirus spreads quickly but is slow to reveal itself: It can take a month for infections to lead to symptoms, for symptoms to warrant tests and hospitalizations, and for enough sick people to produce a noticeable spike.

• Trump embodied and amplified America’s intuition death spiral. Instead of rolling out a detailed, coordinated plan to control the pandemic, he ricocheted from one overhyped cure-all to another, while relying on theatrics such as travel bans. He ignored inequities and systemic failures in favor of blaming China, the WHO, governors, Anthony Fauci, and Barack Obama. He widened the false dichotomy between lockdowns and reopening by regularly tweeting in favor of the latter. He and his allies appealed to magical thinking and steered the U.S. straight into the normality trap by frequently lying that the virus would go away, that the pandemic was ending, that new waves weren’t happening, and that rising case numbers were solely due to increased testing. They have started talking about COVID-19 in the past tense as cases surge in the Midwest.