Category: Politics

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.

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.

2020 Election

On Tuesday DeJoy walked back changes to the postal service: To avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail, I am suspending these initiatives until after the election is concluded.”

DeJoy testified before the Senate on Friday: He assured that the USPS would process every ballot and changes were only made for budgetary reasons: “if DeJoy managed to assuage concerns about the intent of the changes he has brought to the Postal Service, he was less effective in salving worries about their implementation or consequences. And that’s why Democrats emerged from today’s two-hour hearing with scarcely more confidence in DeJoy’s leadership than when the hearing started.”

Also on Tuesday Biden was officially nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate at the 2020 Democratic Convention.

In Russia News

The Senate Intelligence committee released its final report on the 2016 election interference. It confirmed and in some cases went farther than the Mueller Report on how the Trump campaign colluded with Russian GRU.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.8%

COVID-19 Cases / Deaths: 5,598,547 / 174,645

2020 Election

Biden picked Kamala Harris as his running mate this week. By Thursday Trump was questioning her citizenship and her right to stand as vice president.

On Thursday Trump said about voting by mail: “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Mr. Trump said Thursday morning in an interview on Fox Business, referring to Democratic demands. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”

On Wednesday Trump continued to push a campaign theme of protecting “suburban housewives” from Democrat policies: “They’re going to destroy suburbia. And just so you understand, 30+% of people living in suburbia are minorities — African American, Asian American, Hispanic American,” Trump said during the press conference. “The number’s even higher; they say 35, but I like to cut it a little lower.”

On Thursday this was the reporting: Officials have repeatedly said that the agency is equipped to handle a surge in mail-in voting, with Mr. DeJoy telling a board meeting last Friday that the Postal Service “has ample capacity to deliver all election mail securely and on time in accordance with our delivery standards.”

Yet by Friday the New York Times reported: In letters sent in July to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Thomas J. Marshall, the general counsel for the Postal Service, told most of them that “certain deadlines for requesting and casting mail-in ballots are incongruous with the Postal Service’s delivery standards.”… Mr. Marshall urged those with tight schedules to require that residents request ballots at least 15 days before an election — rather than the shorter periods currently allowed under the laws of many states.

“This mismatch creates a risk that ballots requested near the deadline under state law will not be returned by mail in time to be counted,” Mr. Marshall wrote.
…Mail operations in several battleground states were hit hard by the cuts. On the list for removal were 24 delivery bar code sorters in Ohio, 11 in Detroit, 11 in Florida, nine in Wisconsin, eight in Philadelphia and five in Arizona.

In Russia News

On Wednesday Pompeo revealed: “If the Russians are offering money to kill Americans or, for that matter, other Westerners as well, there will be an enormous price to pay. That’s what I shared with Foreign Minister Lavrov,”

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.7%

COVID-19 Cases / Deaths: 5,285,546 / 167,546

After congressional talks broke down, Trump issued executive orders designed to provide some financial relief.

It’s reported this week that Pompeo spoke with Lavrov about Russia bounties to the Taliban.

This is the same week that Trump said in the Axios interview that he was never told about the bounties and never talked to Putin about it. Among other highlights from the Trump interview: “They are dying. That’s true. It is what it is. … It’s under control as much as you can control it.”

More on Trump-appointed USPS leader, Louis DeJoy: On Friday, he shifted top personnel, including some decades-long veterans of the Postal Service, and made changes to its organizational structure.

According to the New York Times:  Russia is using a range of techniques to denigrate Joseph R. Biden Jr., American intelligence officials said Friday in their first public assessment that Moscow continues to try to interfere in the 2020 campaign to help President Trump.

The Washington Post reported on Trump’s early summer response: Under mounting pressure to improve the president’s reelection chances as his poll numbers declined, the White House had what was described as a stand-down order on engaging publicly on the virus through the month of June, part of a deliberate strategy to spotlight other issues even as the contagion spread wildly across the country. A senior administration official said there was a desire to focus on the economy in June.
…
One reason for Trump’s long-standing reluctance to wear a mask — although he sported one Thursday during a factory visit in Ohio — is the concern that his prized political base, which has held steady in its approval of him, is not enthusiastic about wearing them.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.4%

COVID-19 Cases / Deaths: 4,920,369 / 160,220

Border Patrol and US Marshals are sending more reinforcements to Portland.

The New York Times got its hands on a memo prepared by the FBI Counterterrorism Mission Center shows that officials were overreacting to the protests early on: A memo from the deputy director of the F.B.I., dated June 2, demanded an immediate mobilization as protests gathered after George Floyd’s death while in police custody a week earlier. David L. Bowdich, the F.B.I.’s No. 2, declared the situation “a national crisis,” and wrote that in addition to investigating “violent protesters, instigators” and “inciters,” bureau leaders should collect information with “robust social media exploitation teams” and examine what appeared to be “highly organized behavior.”

As for expansion of this effort the Times piece has this detail: The department also sent a tactical team to stand by in Seattle last week, hours after department officials told the mayor there no such deployment would occur. After pushback from those local officials, the administration told the Seattle government on Tuesday the team had left the city.

The Washington Post reports on this questions: “Trump’s shortcomings have perplexed even some of his most loyal allies, who increasingly have wondered why the president has not at least pantomimed a sense of command over the crisis or conveyed compassion for the millions of Americans hurt by it.”
The answer: “People close to Trump, many speaking on the condition of anonymity to share candid discussions and impressions, say the president’s inability to wholly address the crisis is due to his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error; a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News; and a penchant for magical thinking that prevented him from fully engaging with the pandemic.”

One strategy advisors are deploying against Trump’s inaction: senior advisers began presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases among “our people” in Republican states, a senior administration official said. They also shared projections predicting that virus surges could soon hit politically important states in the Midwest — including Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, the official said.

Barr testified before the House this week.

DHS and Oregon reached a deal to remove the unmarked federal troops by Thursday: While Mr. Trump has used images of tactical agents cracking down on protesters in his campaign videos, there was an increasing sense in the administration that the violent scenes of unrest linked to federal agents in Portland could risk becoming a liability, an administration official said.

Trump has been targeting suburban voters in recent days. He tweeted this week to stoke fears about low income people moving in due to Democratic housing policy: Mr. Trump said on Twitter that “people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream” would “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.” The president was referring to the administration’s decision last week to roll back an Obama-era program intended to combat racial segregation in suburban housing. The program expanded provisions in the Fair Housing Act to encourage diversification and “foster inclusive communities.”

On Thursday Trump tweeted: With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

On Trump’s contribution to the stimulus bill: Rather than push for a comprehensive plan that could win support from both Democrats and Republicans, Mr. Trump first embraced big-ticket items that Senate Republicans did not want and that would do little to help millions of struggling workers and businesses. That included a payroll tax cut and an expanded tax break for business lunches, along with $1.75 billion to rebuild the F.B.I.’s headquarters in Washington.

There is growing concern about the postal service and the election: President Trump’s years long assault on the Postal Service and his increasingly dire warnings about the dangers of voting by mail are colliding as the presidential campaign enters its final months.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.2%

COVID-19 Cases / Deaths: 4,542,579 / 152,870