This right here is one of the most important things that Heather Cox Richardson is doing for history 
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Right? And some day, an AI is going to comb through her daily posts and put an awesome book together, about The Nadir that Is Trump Times.
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FYI, HCR is doing a live Fbook chat now.
Great to see a valuable academic do this with an audience of 3500!
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Yeah well, I hope she does it instead of course. But she has said in some of these posts that she’s partly getting all this down each day so it’s just out there as one detailed record of our times. That’s made me imagine a (probably very distant) future where non-fiction books get written by AIs, and we can pick and choose the AIs on the basis of how they do it.
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I dunno… sounds dystopian to me… Maybe I’m just old fashioned about books and writing… 
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Yeah, I didn’t say it’s an ideal future!
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Dystopia, here we come! 
I guess at the very least, this might kill the whole idea of teleology, but I doubt it… You know there is still some white male philosophy undergrad waxing poetic about the positivitistic march of history bullshit right now as we speak…
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A project I’m working on is sort of an annotated timeline display. It was inspired by Trump’s six page letter to Pelosi, which is such a ‘great’ example of fractal wrongness that I felt compelled to create a way to not only debunk bullshit at such stupefying densities, but also to allow multiple, composite/crowdsourced, or alternate debunkings (sort of like your choice of AI) overlaid on the same base data set, be it a document, a timeline of events, etc. Think ArcGIS meets Twitter, except it’s a side scroller built in Javascript.
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April 23, 2020 (Thursday)
Today the House of Representatives passed a new $484 billion coronavirus relief bill by a vote of 388-5. The Senate passed it Tuesday. $381 billion is for small businesses left out in the cold when the money from the previous coronavirus relief package quickly ran dry. Republicans wanted to stop there, but Democrats demanded $75 billion for hospitals, and $25 billion for coronavirus testing, as well as a requirement that the administration figure out a strategy to get tests to states.
The relief bill comes as more than 26 million Americans are out of work and almost 50,000 Americans have died of Covid-19. The representatives had to drive to Washington, D.C., or fly unusual routes because regular flights are canceled. They arrived for the vote in the Capitol building in alphabetical groups of 50 to 60 so they could keep their distance from each other. A number of Republicans refused to wear masks during the vote, while all but one Democrat wore one.
Democrats inserted into the bill a new committee to oversee the administration’s “preparedness for and response to the coronavirus crisis,” chaired by Jim Clyburn (D-SC). The committee has the power to subpoena witnesses and documents. Republicans and Trump objected.
But the Democrats did not get any more aid to states, crippled by the crisis, than the $150 billion previously provided. The bipartisan National Governors Association, headed by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, has asked for $500 billion to help the states replace lost tax revenues. Democrats wanted such aid, but Republicans refused.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) went on talk radio host Hugh Hewitt’s show on Wednesday and tried to make the question of state aid partisan. He said that he opposed granting money to states whose problems, he said, stemmed from their underfunded state pension plans. Instead, the states should consider bankruptcy. A document put out by McConnell’s office called aid to the states a “blue state bailout.”
In fact, Michael Leachman, the senior director of state fiscal research at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that McConnell has it wrong. States have not been overspending; their expenses for education and infrastructure are actually significantly below what they were in 2008, despite more inhabitants, and they have put about 7.6% of their budgets into rainy day funds, a historic high, up from the previous high of 5% they held in reserve in 2006 before the Great Recession.
The problem is that states have to balance their budgets annually, and they depend on sales and income taxes for 70% of their revenue. The shutdowns have decimated tax revenues as shopping ends and people lose their jobs. At the same time, unemployment claims are climbing dramatically. States are looking at a $500 billion loss between now and 2022.
States need money to avoid massive layoffs and deep spending cuts, actions that would make the economic crisis continue much longer than it would if they do not have to make them. They would not use bailout money on pensions, Leachman writes, but put it in state general funds, which are collapsing. Pensions come out of a separate trust fund (although the general fund does put money toward future pensions, that’s less than 5% spending from the general fund). Federal bankruptcy law currently does not allow states to declare bankruptcy, but in any case, Leachman writes, there is no need for it. Bankruptcy relieves high debt levels, but state debt is not high, and once the pandemic passes, the states should be financially sound again.
If Leachman’s explanation was scholarly, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was blunt. “New York puts into that federal pot $116B more than we take out. Kentucky takes out $148B more than they put in,” he said at a press conference. “Senator McConnell, who’s getting bailed out here? It’s your state that’s living on the money that we generate.” A recent study by the Rockefeller Institute of Government shows that New Yorkers as a group pay in to the federal government $1,792 per capita more than they take out, while for every dollar Kentucky puts in, it gets $2.61 back.
Cuomo called McConnell out for trying to turn the crisis into a political fight: “That’s not what this country is all about,” Cuomo said. “It’s not red and blue, it’s red, white and blue.”
Today’s other big news was Trump’s suggestion at his coronavirus briefing that it would be worth studying whether injecting disinfectant into patients would kill the novel coronavirus. “And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?” he said. “Because, you see, it gets on the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it’d be interesting to check that. So that you’re going to have to use medical doctors, but it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.” He also suggested using heat and light to kill the virus.
Doctors were horrified at his comment, calling it irresponsible and dangerous. Disinfectants are poisonous and are deadly if they are used inappropriately. “To be clear:” emergency medicine physician Dara Kass tweeted, “Intracavitary UV light and swallowing bleach or isopropyl alcohol can kill you. Don’t do it.”
Trump’s emphasis on dramatic cures for Covid-19 reinforces his disagreement with health experts that we must dramatically increase our testing for the disease so we can identify hot spots and isolate them before they spread. At today’s briefing, Trump disagreed with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the administration’s top medical advisors about the pandemic, who recently said "We absolutely need to significantly ramp up, not only the number of tests but the capacity to actually perform them.” Today, Trump said: "I don’t agree with him on that, no, I think we’re doing a great job on testing.”
In fact, the U.S. lags behind other nations in per capita tests, and Trump’s continuing reluctance to support getting them seems to me mystifying. It is this odd gap Congress is trying to address with its requirement in the new coronavirus package that the administration must figure out a strategy to get tests to states. The bill now heads to the Oval Office for Trump’s signature.
For all the dark nitty-gritty of politics today, it is also a day that begins a joyous month, and that seems to me a far better way to leave you all tonight than with the day’s troubles. For those who celebrate, Ramadan Mubarak.
–
Also available as a free newsletter at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
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Well, at least bleach or isopropyl alcohol will kill you quickly. Internal UV light of the wavelength and intensity needed to disinfect viruses wouldn’t kill you right away. It would probably give you multi-organ cancer instead. The same effect that inactivated viruses would scramble the human cells’ DNA, causing mutation and cellular dysfunction.
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April 24, 2020 (Friday)
Today’s news was consumed by Trump’s suggestion at yesterday’s coronavirus briefing that doctors should look into the value of disinfectants or sunlight taken internally to kill the novel coronavirus. Since that comment, he has been skewered by medical professionals and made fun of on social media. The makers of Lysol released a statement warning that “under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion, or any other route),” and the Centers for Disease Control warned that “household cleaners and disinfectants can cause health problems when not used properly.” When asked about the comment, Trump said: “I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen,” then went on to mischaracterize his earlier statements.
It was notable that Daniel Dale’s article in CNN discussing today’s about-face was titled, “Fact check: Trump lies that he was being ‘sarcastic’ when he talked about injecting disinfectant.” Media outlets have been uncomfortable calling out Trump’s lies, instead using words like “untruths,” but Dale has fact-checked every Trump rally and speech in real time and regularly uses the word “lie” on Twitter. That the word is showing up more in news media suggests editors are rethinking how best to cover this president.
Their problem is that everything a president does and says is newsworthy, but reporting what a lying politician says without identifying it as false puts the media in the position of amplifying the skewed message, rather than delivering accurate information. This tactic was pioneered by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. He would accuse people of being communists and spread lies about them in press releases—which got covered by newspaper reporters—then move onto another story as reporters, trudging in his wake, discovered he was lying. But the fact-checking never got the headlines McCarthy’s extraordinary accusations did, and the accusations stuck.
McCarthy’s right-hand man, New York City attorney Roy Cohn, was Trump’s mentor, and it is perhaps no accident that Trump has always used this tactic to great effect. Essentially, he has made the media his accomplice in spreading disinformation.
Aware that this tactic gave Trump more than $5 billion of free airtime in the 2016 election cycle, media figures have tried to figure out how to cover Trump in 2020 without making the same mistake. This is especially important now that his coronavirus briefings have taken the place of his political rallies, making it hard to cover them without amplifying his political message.
As reporters have tried to fact-check him, he insists they are illegitimate. Yesterday, when Washington Post reporter Philip Rucker asked him to clarify his suggestions about alternative treatments for coronavirus, Trump responded: “I’m the president and you’re fake news.” After Trump won the 2016 election, CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl asked him why he continued to bash the media. He replied, "You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”
Trump needs that mistrust of the media now, as American deaths from Covid-19 exceed 50,000. The United States has now suffered one quarter of the world’s 190,000 deaths from the virus. It appears the White House latched onto an unrealistically optimistic model in early April when it suggested we could keep our deaths at 60,000.
Trump is fighting back against news stories that detail the administration’s botched response to the crisis. Administration officials speaking to NBC News say that Trump’s disinfectant suggestion showed his irritation at his health advisers’ continuing warnings that the disease is not going away anytime soon, and that we must be prepared for a second wave in the fall. (In a sign that we are in this for the long haul, the editors of the New York Times announced today that, for the duration of the pandemic, they are replacing the “Travel” section of the Sunday newspaper with one entitled “At Home.”)
Suspicions that Trump is using the pandemic to consolidate power were confirmed in a report from NBC News today establishing that the administration has a secret “adjudication” process that enables Trump’s people to override the formulas designed to apportion medical supplies according to need, sending them instead to Republican supporters. “There’s a lot of politics involved,” one person told reporters. “Senior leadership from [Capitol] Hill can call up and say ‘ship 500 ventilators’ and 500 ventilators go out.”
While a White House spokesman said “It’s outrageous that the media would ask or even speculate that the resources being delivered by the federal government to the states is somehow based on politics,” reporters Jonathan Allen, Phil McCausland, and Cyrus Farivar establish that it sure looks like federal agents are seizing supplies acquired by Democratic states and redistributing them along partisan lines. And Trump appears to have said so. Last week, he warned that he would withhold supplies from governors who didn’t open up their economies when he wanted. “They need the federal government not only for funding — and I’m not saying take it away — but they need it for advice," he said. “They’ll need, maybe, equipment that we have. We have a tremendous stockpile that we’re in the process of completing. We’re in a very good position.”
In more news about the misuse of political power, a digital technology firm working for the Trump campaign, Phunware, got a $2.85 million loan from the Paycheck Protection Program. The loan was legal, but it was nearly 14 times larger than the average award under the program, and it got the loan two days after it applied while other companies that applied earlier for what was supposed to be a first-come, first-served program are still waiting.
Trump also announced today he would block the $10 billion of credit Congress approved this month for the United States Postal Service unless it quadrupled the cost of shipping a package. His hatred of the USPS is rooted in his hatred of Amazon, owned by Jeff Bezos. Bezos also owns the Washington Post.
Trump has his own financing issues: a 30% stake in a building that was refinanced in 2012 in part by the state-owned Bank of China. That debt $211 million comes due in 2022, raising questions about Trump’s conflicts of interest.
The president also needs to control the media as he faces increasing resistance over the amount of power he has claimed for the executive branch in other ways, too. At Politico, reporter David Rogers is chasing the complicated story of how Trump has moved $3.6 billion allotted for military construction overseas to building a wall on the country’s southern border. Since Congress decides on appropriations, this transfer looks dicey.
Also today, news broke that Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice has appealed to the Supreme Court to block Congress from seeing the secret grand jury material collected during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Last month, the appeals court agreed by a vote of 2-1 that the House Judiciary Committee has a “compelling need” to see the material so it can investigate the president for obstruction of justice during the investigation. The Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court for a stay.
Finally, the U.S. Navy today formally recommended that Captain Brett Crozier be reinstated as the commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Crozier was removed from his post after writing a letter calling attention to the spread of coronavirus on the ship, but the profane diatribe of the acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly about Crozier after his removal led to an outcry that made Modly resign. To the surprise of Navy officials, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a Trump loyalist, is holding up Crozier’s reinstatement.
Also available as a free newsletter at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
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I KNEW that’s why he does it. I just didn’t realize that he’s actually come right out and said that’s why he does it. Wow.
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an off camera quote unfortunately
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April 25, 2020 (Saturday)
Although in the early days of his administration Trump dominated news cycles, it is rare these days for him to do so unless there is a single, blockbuster story. There are a lot of players in today’s politics, they are more visible now than they were three years ago, and they get ink. Today was different, though. There were a number of smaller stories about the president, none of them blockbusters, but which added up to a surprisingly clear portrait of the man and how his fight for reelection might affect the nation.
The first story of the day came this morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump issued a joint statement commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Meeting on the Elbe, where on April 25, 1945, American and Soviet forces met during WWII, cutting Germany in two and approaching victory in their drive to defeat fascism. "The ‘Spirit of the Elbe’ is an example of how our countries can put aside differences, build trust, and cooperate in pursuit of a greater cause,” they said.
The statement was Putin’s idea, former U.S. intelligence analyst Angela Stent told the Wall Street Journal, an attempt to illustrate that today’s Russia is as great a power as the former Soviet Union. But there is more: the statement comes on the heels of Russia’s shipment of medical supplies to the U.S. and Putin’s continuing bid to get U.S. sanctions against Russian businesses and oligarchs lifted. But just this week, the Senate Intelligence Committee reiterated that Russia attacked the 2016 election, and lawmakers are concerned that this unusual and overly-friendly statement will encourage him to continue his efforts to meddle in American affairs.
In another story, Trump’s suggestion at Thursday’s coronavirus briefing that doctors should look into whether disinfectant or sunlight taken internally somehow might kill the virus seems to many political observers to be a game changer. Nothing has worked to quell the outrage and mockery that followed the statement.
The new White House press secretary tried to blame the media for the statement—“Leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President Trump out of context and run with negative headlines,” Kayleigh McEnany said—only to have the president undercut her by claiming his words were a trick to bait reporters.
This was obviously untrue, and caused more trouble. The idea that he thought it was acceptable to bait reporters on a day when American deaths from the coronavirus were approaching 50,000, while expressing no empathy for those deaths, brought even more outrage. Some White House officials told the New York Times that Thursday was “one of the worst days in one of the worst weeks of his presidency.”
Still, Trump continues to try to rewrite what happened. Today he tweeted that the media had misrepresented the statement, although of course the entire exchange was televised and is widely available for everyone to see for themselves. “Was just informed that the Fake News from the Thursday White House Press Conference had me speaking & asking question of Dr. Deborah Birx. Wrong, I was speaking to our Laboratory expert, not Deborah, about sunlight etc. & the CoronaVirus. The Lamestream Media is corrupt & sick!”
Trump has increasingly been treating the daily coronavirus briefings as replacements for his rallies, where he holds forth settling political scores, attacking the media, and launching his own theories about the crisis. Even before Thursday, advisors had been concerned that Trump’s performances at the briefings were hurting his public standing, and the fallout from Thursday seems to have cemented those concerns. He did not appear at a coronavirus briefing today. “What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!” he tweeted.
Also today, a spokesman for the U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Geneva, Switzerland, said the United States would not collaborate with the World Health Organization and other world leaders to speed up coronavirus testing, drugs, and vaccines and to make sure both rich and poor nations have equal access to them. The stated reasons for the absence echoed Trump’s attempts to shift the blame for America’s coronavirus crisis onto the WHO, although the WHO declared the novel coronavirus a global health emergency on January 31, and continued to sound the alarm over it while U.S. government attention was elsewhere.
Although Trump supported WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in his bid for the position and has been friendly with him, including on calls in March, Trump is eager to blame the WHO for his own woeful response to the crisis, claiming that the WHO was too ready to believe China’s initial statement that the virus could not be transmitted person-to-person. Trump has withheld funding for the WHO and is now trying to undercut the organization by rerouting money formerly sent to the WHO to other organizations, although the State Department, in charge of this initiative, did not name any other specific alternative organization.
“Although the United States was not in attendance at the meeting in question, there should be no doubt about our continuing determination to lead on global health matters, including the current COVID crisis,” the spokesman for the U.S. Mission to Geneva said by email. “We remain deeply concerned about the WHO’s effectiveness, given that its gross failures helped fuel the current pandemic.”
The attempt to offload blame for the crisis reflects Trump’s focus on the upcoming election. His campaign today issued a fundraising email it claims Trump wrote. The email takes on the attempts of congressional Democrats to combat fraud and corruption in the enormous expenditures used to combat the economic crisis sparked by the pandemic. Such oversight seems both standard and wise for the handling of almost $3 trillion, but the president appears to be taking the attempt to safeguard against corruption personally.
Trump’s email says that Congress’s oversight of expenditures in the $2.2 trillion coronavirus bill are a “WITCH HUNT.” “First, the Democrat’s Russian Collusion Delusion FAILED because WE fought back,” it said. “Then, their Impeachment Hoax FAILED because WE fought back even harder…. NOW, they are trying to weaponize a new coronavirus committee against me, and if we’re going to withstand this attack, we’ll need to fight back even harder than ever before. This is the third WITCH HUNT in THREE YEARS.”
The email asked for money for a “presidential defense fund” to fight “this nasty battle against the Left.”
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Daniel Dale trained up on Rob Ford. He’s the guy Rob Ford tried to smear and failed. It’s not surprising that he sees Trump for what he is and is willing to call a lie a lie.
The rest of the US news media is running around like Trump is a unique phenomenon never encountered before. Dale is like “I’m from Toronto.”
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April 26, 2020 (Sunday)
Thinking of my mother today, on what would have been her 98th birthday. Catherine Cox was born in 1922, during the Warren G. Harding administration. Her arrival in the two-and-a-half-year window of his administration is the only thing that makes that administration, so profoundly juvenile, so profoundly corrupt, and so profoundly troubled, seem to me real.
I thought of Mother’s stories of her father’s World War One service and the pandemic that shaped her town today as I shopped, in my mask and gloves, during our own pandemic, which has now taken more than 55,000 American lives.
Mother was a smart, sensible, highly principled woman who cared deeply about American democracy, and I was glad she was not here to watch today as Trump’s frustration at the drumbeat of condemnation for his botched response to the pandemic and at his cancelled coronavirus briefings boiled over on Twitter.
He began his tweets with a tribute to his wife, Melania, who turned 50 today. Two hours later, he began a grievance campaign. He wrote “The people that know me and know the history of our Country say that I am the hardest working President in history. I don’t know about that, but I am a hard worker and have probably gotten more done in the first 3 ½ years than any President in history. The Fake News hates it!” And then, “I work from early in the morning until late at night, haven’t left the White House in many months (except to launch Hospital Ship Comfort) in order to take care of Trade Deals, Military Rebuilding etc. and then a read a phony story in the failing [New York Times] about my work schedule and eating habits, written by a third rate reporter who knows nothing about me. I will often be in the Oval Office late into the night & read and see that I am angrily eating a hamberger [sic; he later corrected the spelling] & Diet Coke in my bedroom. People with me are always stunned. Anything to demean.”
He went on to complain about Fake News, the Russia investigation, the awarding of “Noble” prizes (he meant Pulitzers, not Nobel Prizes) to hostile journalists, the “Do Nothing Democrats,” and to retweet a heavily doctored and offensive gif of former Vice President Joe Biden, his chief rival for the presidency in the 2020 election.
Many of these tweets disappeared as the day wore on.
I sometimes wish desperately that I were not living through this terrible assault on our democracy.
But when I am feeling sorry for myself, I always stop and remember that Mother lived through her own, similar crisis. In the 1930s, as a teenager, she caught diphtheria and spent months in bed in a dark room in a quarantined house while life outside among her friends went on without her. With little else to do, she listened to the radio. And so she heard Adolf Hitler harangue crowds as he consolidated power. She spoke no German, but later said she didn’t need to: she could hear the power in his speeches and in the way the people at his rallies roared their approval.
Mother went off to college in 1939, the first in her family to do so, knowing that something bad was brewing in Europe, but not yet afraid it would affect her life. The Japanese bombed Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor on December 7 of her sophomore year, and by Christmas, America was at war with Japan and Germany. In July 1943, shortly after she graduated from college, Mother joined the Army to lend her weight to defeating fascism.
Joining the army was certainly not in her life plan, and it was not at all an easy thing for a woman to do in 1943.
Desperate for personnel, the Army had created the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942, but the idea of women in the army was too new for many Americans to stomach. People turned against the women who were taking desk jobs and thus seemed to be freeing up people’s sons and husbands to be killed on the battlefields. Rumors spread that WAACs were simply man-crazy; they were “khaki-wacky” and prone to getting pregnant. Recruiting fell off, but with a European invasion on the horizon, the country needed women in uniform more than ever. Army leaders recognized that they needed more WAACs than they could get, and also that the army could not use women in dangerous locations unless they received regular army benefits and protection in case they were captured.
So, in 1943, Congress created the Women’s Army Corps, and Mother joined up. Her decision to join the fight against Hitler infuriated and embarrassed her own mother, who refused to post the usual sign in the window indicating there was a service person in the family.
Mother passed more than thirty years ago, but I think of her often these days when I hear people say that democracy is lost and there is nothing we can do to reclaim it.
Mom was an anonymous twenty-one-year old when she decided to engage the fight against fascism. She had little to bring to the war effort except her time editing the college yearbook, so began as a recruiter, then quickly became a military writer. After her service, she went on to publish a hunting and fishing magazine and to write a newspaper column for a state politician. She also wrote copious letters to friends and family. In our house, it was utterly normal—even expected—for adult women to be constantly writing, especially to be writing letters.
Mom’s decision of July 1943, along with a similar decision by sixteen million other anonymous Americans-- including the 350,000 other American women who also joined one of the other service branches—helped to defeat fascism.
That decision, made by an anonymous but principled young woman determined to defend American democracy, still echoes.
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April 27, 2020 (Monday)
Each morning, aides produce for the president the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), a classified report that summarizes the most important developments in security threats. Today the Washington Post reported that, beginning in early January, US intelligence agencies produced more than a dozen classified briefings in the PDB warning Trump about the emerging threat of the coronavirus, a level of attention like that given to active terrorist threats or overseas wars. The president rarely reads the PDB and is impatient with the oral briefings he allows two or three times a week.
Throughout his administration, he has had a poor relationship with intelligence agencies because of their investigation of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election. He was especially unhappy with the intelligence community in February of this year because on February 13, Shelby Pierson, the head of the election security unit of the office of then-acting Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, told members of Congress that Russia was again meddling in the 2020 election to favor Trump. The president wanted Maguire out, and he resigned on February 21. Trump replaced him with Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, a fervent supporter, who insisted that Russia did not interfere in 2016 and is not interfering in 2020.
During February, the virus spread across the country unchecked. On March 30, Trump told Fox News Channel personality Brian Kilmeade about the pandemic, “Nobody could have predicted something like this.”
Today, America’s death toll topped 56,000, and Trump increased the numbers of projected dead to between 60,000 and 70,000. American fatal casualties in the Vietnam War were slightly more than 58,000.
Trump’s popularity has never been good, but there were signs today that his internal polling is frightening down-ballot candidates for the 2020 election. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) acknowledged that neither party has a lock on the Senate, and that Republicans are on the defensive. Twenty-three Republican Senate seats are in contention, while only 12 Democratic ones are. Democrats need to pick up four seats to take control of the Senate. “It’s going to be a dogfight,” McConnell told Fox News Radio. “It’s going to be a fight to the finish. Sort of like a knife fight in an alley.”
Conservative columnist Henry Olsen wrote a Washington Post op-ed today suggesting that the party should try to sell voters on Trump by arguing that he is “Not Perfect, Just Better.” Noting that Trump’s approval rating was at 45.6% this morning, Olsen suggested that ads should start by saying things like: “We all roll our eyes sometimes at something stupid that the president says,” before celebrating his tax cuts, for example. They would emphasize his team, rather than Trump himself. “This is admittedly a high-risk, unproven strategy,” Olsen wrote, “But the alternative is worse.”
Trump would never permit such a scheme, of course. News broke today that, earlier this month, the National Republican Senatorial Committee circulated a memo with talking points for candidates to respond to questions about the novel coronavirus. “Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban,” it said. “Attack China.”
It also encouraged candidates to distance themselves from Trump’s response to the coronavirus by saying, “I wish that everyone acted earlier—that includes our elected officials, the World Health Organization, and the CDC [Centers for Disease Control].” Trump was furious, and today his political advisor Justin Clark told the director of the NRSC, Kevin McLaughlin, that Trump would not support any Republican candidate who followed the memo’s suggestions. “Candidates will listen to the bad advice in this memo at their own peril,” Clark said in a statement. McLaughlin quickly clarified that the memo was poorly worded and that “There is no daylight between the NRSC and President Trump.”
But while Republican candidates are proceeding as if this election will be fought on traditional political lines, the pandemic crisis has created what is, to my mind, one of the more interesting developments in American politics in a generation. The federal government pushed responsibility onto state governors to assume responsibility for responding to the crisis, but it might have gotten more than it bargained for.
There are now pacts of states in both the East and the West joined together to coordinate their eventual lifting of restrictions put in place to stop community spread of the disease. Today, Nevada and Colorado joined the West Coast alliance of California, Washington, and Oregon. All five of these states have Democratic governors, and all say they will follow science in their decision making.
The rise of the governors has prompted a long-overdue political conversation about the realities of government funding. Since the 1980s, Republicans have attracted voters by harping on the “takers” in Democratic areas. But when McConnell last Wednesday said he would never agree to a “blue state bailout,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo responded: “We’re one nation. We put into the pot what we need, you take what you need… but if you want to call for an accounting, you’re making a mistake because you lose.”
The exchange highlighted for the public what has been well-known among political scholars for ages: the federal government redistributes wealth from richer states to poorer ones. The four top “giver” states-- New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut—tend to vote Democratic, while three of the four biggest “taker” states—Kentucky, Mississippi, and West Virginia—lean Republican. For every dollar New York puts into the federal government in taxes, it gets back $0.91. For every dollar Kentucky puts in, it takes out $2.41.
The topic is not a good one for Republicans, but it has become such a fixture in Republican rhetoric that leaders keep trying to run with it. Today, Trump tweeted: “Why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states (like Illinois, as an example) and cities, in all cases Democrat run and managed, when most of the other states are not looking for bailout help?” (There are ten states that put more into the federal coffers than they take out; Illinois is one of them.) Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) agreed with Trump, telling reporters, “We sit here and live within our means, and then New York, Illinois, and California and other states don’t, and we’re supposed to go bail them out. That’s not right.”
This rhetoric that labels Democrats as fiscally irresponsible, eager to redistribute wealth from hardworking Republicans to their own lazy constituents, has been a staple of GOP politics since the 1970 midterm elections, when President Richard Nixon’s crumbling popularity after the Kent State shootings made him try to shore up his party by dividing the American people. (“Positive polarization,” his team called it.)
In the past this rhetoric got little public pushback. That has changed. On the Sunday talk shows, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, called McConnell’s suggestion that states like New York should declare bankruptcy “outrageous” and “incredibly dangerous,” pointing out that budget shortfalls were a result of the closures because of the pandemic. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, the Republican at the head of the National Governors Association, wasn’t happy either, saying that McConnell “probably would regret making that comment.” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, tweeted “If Florida would like to have a conversation about making sure no state gets more money from the federal government than they send to it, Connecticut is ready.”
Connecticut gets back just 84 cents for every dollar it sends to the federal government. Florida gets $1.12.
The coordination of state governors and their increasingly prominent platform suggests that we might finally be able to undercut the rhetoric of “makers” and “takers” that has poisoned our politics for a generation.
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hahaha. a bunch of unqualified, self-interested people in acting capacity. almost none of whom can hold the job for more than six-months. not to mention those who have gone to prison, or/and those who should.
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