I’m with @dfaris on this. I want those barricades to remain in place for the remainder of ⊥rump’s term of office. I want him to feel trapped, assailed, and helpless. I want for him to feel like he needs a military escort every time he sets foot outside of the White House.
June 10th? Unless the Secret Service knows something we don’t about an impending change in the presidency, that sounds quite optimistic.
this really seems to be the defining characteristic. white men for sure, but definitely men.
im not going to go grab statistics, it’s just my impression. teachers: mostly women. social workers: mostly women. nurses: mostly women. doctors: yes, mostly men, but a decent number of women.
infantry and combat soldiers: until very recently, entirely men and now it’s just overwhelmingly men
given america’s predilection for dividing jobs by gender, we have divided the “care giving” jobs for women, and the “fighting jobs” for men.
and all the cops are men.
Another 5 that they are still up on November 1st (assuming Trump hasn’t been removed by then).
June 5, 2020 (Friday)
Today marks the end of a momentous week in American history.
The president has not changed over the course of the week: he is still dismantling checks and balances in favor of his own power. With the help of Attorney General William Barr, he has taken control of the law enforcement teams that make up about 132,000 federal law enforcement officers and, taking advantage of the fact that Washington, D. C., is not a state, has turned nearly 3000 members of those forces loose on the protesters in the capital to join the 4000 others there from different forces. About half of the federal officers come from the FBI, ATF, Secret Service, DEA, and CBP; others come from 80 other, smaller, forces, and answer to the executive branch of the government.
While we have all been paying attention to the crisis in the streets of Washington, D.C., Trump yesterday signed an executive order permitting government agencies to waive environmental laws in order to speed up approval for development, citing an economic “emergency” caused by the pandemic. This follows an executive order from two weeks ago, telling agencies they can simply ignore regulations they believe burden the economy. His executive orders override Congressional legislation, and will likely not stand in court, but for now, anyway, reinforce his emphasis on turning the country over to businessmen. “This is a huge win for pro-growth policies,” said David McIntosh, president of the anti-regulation Club for Growth.
That focus on the economy showed as well today in Trump’s triumphant focus on a better jobs report for May than economists had expected. The report showed an unemployment rate of 13.3%, although it had been expected to come in about six points higher. Even with those gains, the US has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, according to Josh Lipsky of the Atlantic Council. And there is a problem with the report’s numbers, noted on the report itself. Because there was a “misclassification error”—people furloughed because of the pandemic did not get counted as unemployed-- the numbers are about 3 percentage points low, putting the real unemployment rate at about 16.3%.
Still, in his meandering speech about the numbers, Trump reiterated that a strong economy was key to equality in America. He then talked about the protests and said that Black Americans must get fair treatment from law enforcement. He said, “Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying, “This is a great thing that’s happening for our country.” This is a great day for him. It’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day in terms of equality. It’s really what our Constitution requires and it’s what our country is all about.”
Trump’s key supporters in Congress haven’t changed: they are still using governmental machinery to smear Trump’s opponents. The Senate Judiciary Committee has launched a probe into the origins of the Russia investigation, and yesterday, Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sought to get authorization for subpoenas for more than 50 individuals. Graham is up for election and, with challenger Jaime Harrison collecting more campaign money than Graham, is looking to solidify his standing with Trump’s base.
Graham was forced to postpone the vote, though, after a fight broke out. Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb) called out the hearings for the campaign propaganda they are. "Can we get a sense of how long we’re going to be here? … With all due respect, I don’t think anybody in private ever disagrees with me when I say that it’s bullshit the way people grandstand for cameras in here. The reality is if we didn’t have cameras in this room, the discussion would be different,” he said.
The Chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Ron Johnson (R-WI) had better luck: he got the subpoena power he wanted for his version of the same investigation. (Johnson is one of the Republican lawmakers who spent July 4, 2018 in Russia.)
Trump’s key supporters on the ground haven’t changed: they continue to support the president and the use of force against protesters. After two Buffalo, New York police officers on the force’s emergency response team were suspended for pushing a 75-year-old man backward onto a sidewalk, where he hit his head and lay bleeding and unconscious as they walked on by, 57 of their colleagues resigned from the team (although not from the force, where they remain employed). They resigned “in disgust because of the treatment of two of their members, who were simply executing orders,” said John Evans, the president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association.
The National Guard troops in Washington appear all to have been sent by Republican governors: Utah, South Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, and Florida. Governors in New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia—all Democrats-- have refused to send troops.
What has changed this week is that there are critical numbers of Americans, including those who control the military, publicly rejecting Trump and his version of America.
Crucially, the week saw military leaders taking a firm stand that they would not permit military personnel to be used against Americans. This is a huge deal, putting to rest any thought that Trump could rally the military to his standard. Over the course of the week, more and more former officers declared their support for equal rights and the Constitution, to which they swore an oath, and opposed Trump’s suggestion that he would call soldiers to put down protesters. Today, 89 former defense officials added their voices with an op-ed in the Washington Post echoing their colleagues, but going further to note: “We are alarmed at how the president is betraying” his oath to the Constitution.
Without consulting the president, the Pentagon today disarmed the federalized National Guard troops in Washington and sent back to their bases the regular troops that had been moved to the city.
Today, the Marines directed their corps commanders to “identify, and remove the display of the Confederate battle flag or its depiction within work places, common-access areas, and public areas on their installations.” The order is to “support our core values, ensure unit cohesion and security, and preserve good order and discipline.”
Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser ended the state of emergency in the city and formally asked Trump to withdraw all extraordinary federal law enforcement and military presence from Washington, D.C.
In Denver, a federal court issued a restraining order against Denver Police prohibiting them from using chemicals and projectiles against peaceful protesters.
A poll from early this week found that 64% of American adults were “sympathetic to people who are out protesting right now,” while 27% said they disapproved, and 9% said they weren’t sure what they thought.
For ten days, now, Americans have filled the streets of cities and towns across the country, their anger over the death of George Floyd under the knee of a casual murderer in a blue uniform growing into a larger rejection of an America where white and might make right.
Today, Trump visited the state of Maine, where he was greeted with a message from the editorial board of the Portland Press Herald. The headline read: “To President Trump: You should resign now.”
So say we all!!
Hi Folks:
I have some announcements to make… all good, I hope.
First of all, the Letters I post here every night will stay exactly the same, so if that’s why you’re here, you can relax and stop reading right now. If you have subscribed to the Letters from an American on Substack with a free subscription, that, too, will remain unchanged.
Also, I will continue to do the Tuesday and Thursday videos here, as I have been doing since the pandemic hit us. I’ll keep doing those as long as there is interest.
And now, some changes: For those of you looking for the weekly videos as a series, they are currently going up on my new youtube channel, linked at the bottom of this message.
And here’s the big news: I am expanding my Substack webpage. There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary reason is that it is clear that you all have built a strong community, and you have asked again and again for me not only to talk about the past, but rather to talk about how to move forward to a more just and equal and prosperous society.
That’s a discussion I feel would thrive best with a lot of back and forth, with all of us contributing new ideas. Facebook doesn’t really allow much of give and take, not least because it is swarmed with trolls that are pretty disheartening, even though my Very Efficient Moderator zaps them constantly. I’m hoping we can build a community on Substack that does not suffer from the poison of trolls and bots. To that end, I am instituting a $5 a month subscription fee for access to those discussions.
The Letters themselves have always been free, and will always stay free. Paid subscriptions will help them, too, though: the money we raise will help me pay for the assistance I so clearly need to keep all this going. And, of course, it will help the Substack folks, who provide the platform there without the support of advertising.
I will quietly add that I am also hoping to have a place to share more speculative thoughts about our country and its politics than I feel comfortable putting into public here. Frequently, there are things I’d like to comment on, sometimes in a personal way, but don’t dare do it here because I don’t have the time to turn those thoughts into a well-researched essay and, if they are more personal, don’t want to deal with hateful strangers spewing right-wing talking points to attack principles or people I care about. So, with luck, I can use that space to develop real debate and discussion… and maybe even a little art… apart from the daily Letters.
Still not sure how all of this is going to work, or work out, and the truth is that I am more than a little apprehensive about such a big leap. But if there is one thing you all have taught me, it is to let this project grow wherever you all want it to go. What we are doing here has always been the very best kind of collaboration.
So, many thanks for the faith and the prodding, and here’s to the future!
P.S. This doesn’t count as today’s Letter. Sorry. 
P. P. S. Um… it has come to my attention that I should have posted a link to the Substack publication. It’s here: heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
June 6, 2020 (Saturday)
On June 5, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was preparing to send Allied troops across the English Channel to France, where he hoped they would push the German troops back across Europe. More than 5,000 ships waited to transport more than 150,000 soldiers to France before daybreak the following morning. The fighting to take Normandy would not be easy. The beaches the men would assault were tangled in barbed wire, booby trapped, and defended by German soldiers in concrete bunkers.
On the afternoon of June 5, as the Allied soldiers, their faces darkened with soot and cocoa, milled around waiting to board the ships, Eisenhower went to see the men he was almost certainly sending to their deaths. He joked with the troops, as apparently upbeat as his orders to them had been when he told them Operation Overlord had launched. “The tide has turned!” his letter had read. “The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!”
But after cheering his men on, he went back to his headquarters and wrote another letter. Designed to blame himself alone if Operation Overlord failed, it read:
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
The letter was, of course, never delivered. Operation Overlord was a success, launching the final assault in which western democracy, defended by ordinary men and women, would destroy European fascism.
A year later, General Eisenhower was welcomed home as the hero who had won World War Two. But for all those noisy accolades, it was the letter of June 5, written in secret, alone and unsure whether the future would find him right or wrong but willing to take both the risk and the blame if he failed, that proved his heroism.
Just FTR, this did not filter into any news I am following.
German media actually reports Trump withdrawing the National Guard.
https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/trump-abzug-nationalgarde-101.html
June 7, 2020 (Sunday)
In the past two weeks, everything has changed… and nothing has changed.
Two weeks ago tonight, 46-year-old Minneapolis man George Floyd was alive, going through his Sunday night as any one of us do, unaware—as we all are—of what the next day would bring.
Floyd’s casual murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on Monday, May 25, caught on video by a bystander, ignited protests across the world.
First, protesters of police brutality turned out onto the streets, then looters, who are as yet largely unidentified, started trashing city storefronts. Then, in a number of cities, police rioted against the protesters while Trump and Attorney General William Barr insisted without evidence that the trouble makers were the “radical left” and “Antifa,” an amorphous identity of those opposed to fascism, a group that Trump said he was going to designate as a terrorist organization (although it is illegal to dub a domestic group as a terrorist organization). Notably, the police tended to attack people of color and journalists, the latter being such a sign of authoritarianism it earned condemnation from Germany, Australia, and Turkey.
Monday, June 1, a week after Floyd’s murder, was the turning point. President Trump announced that he was ready to deploy the military to restore order to American cities, then walked across Lafayette Square for a photo op by historic St. John’s Episcopal Church. Before his walk, troops had cleared the square of peaceful protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets. Trump got his photo op, and then he and Barr increased the presence of unidentified troops on the D.C. streets—it later turned out many of them were riot squads from the Bureau of Prisons.
But Monday’s stunts were too much for military leaders, who felt obliged to speak out against the use of the military against American civilians and in defense of the Constitution. By Wednesday, one military leader after another had reinforced the military’s commitment to racial equality, called for the upholding of the Constitution, and implicitly or explicitly, condemned the president. And by Friday, June 5, the Pentagon had disarmed the National Guard troops stationed in Washington, D.C. and had sent the regular troops that had been moved to the city back to their home bases.
By yesterday, there were protests in London, Paris, Berlin, and Sydney, Australia, as well as in cities and towns all over America. In Washington, D.C. between 100,000 and 200,000 people turned out to defend the Black lives constantly susceptible to the systems that privilege white Americans. Today Colin Powell, President George W. Bush’s Secretary of State, announced that he will support Democrat Joe Biden for president. Even more dramatic, Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT), the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee, joined the protesters today with a group of about 1000 evangelicals, singing “This Little Light of Mine.”
The protests, and perhaps even more, the declarations of military leaders, have given anti-Trump Republicans room to buck the president. Tonight, news broke that former national security advisor John Bolton is planning to publish this month his tell-all book about his time in the White House. The book was supposed to come out in March, but the White House has delayed it for months, claiming to be checking whether it reveals classified information. Bolton has now decided to publish the book without White House clearance, claiming that he has been careful not to reveal classified information in it, and that the White House is holding it up for political reasons.
So everything has changed… but nothing has changed.
Trump is still president, tweeting anger and grievance today as his poll numbers slip. “If I wasn’t constantly harassed for three years by fake and illegal investigations, Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Hoax, I’d be up by 25 points on Sleepy Joe and the Do Nothing Democrats. Very unfair, but it is what it is!!!” he wrote.
Attorney General William Barr is still in office, and while he backed off today from claiming responsibility for ordering the troops to clear Lafayette Square, he still defended the administration’s approach to the protests. On CBS’s Face the Nation today, he told host Margaret Brennan that the pepper spray used against the protesters was “not a chemical irritant,” and therefore, presumably, not an unreasonable use of force. Its manufacturer advertises pepper spray to police officers as “the most effective chemical irritant available.”
Congress has passed no new legislation, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) continues to push his own agenda, confirming two more of Trump’s judges even as protests were raging in the streets outside the Capitol.
Tonight, we learned that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has given up its effort to get the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to testify at a budget hearing. Pompeo is under scrutiny for urging Trump to fire the State Department’s Inspector General, Steve Linick, who was looking into Pompeo’s $8.1 billion emergency arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and Pompeo clearly has no intention of putting himself in a place where lawmakers can ask him about the firing or the arms sales. The White House denies Congress’s duty or right to question members of the executive branch, and it appears the Senate Foreign Relations Committee doesn’t see the point of contesting that crucial issue.
The protests that were sparked by Mr. Floyd’s murder are about more than Mr. Floyd, or Breonna Taylor, killed in a botched police raid as she slept in her own bed, or the many other African Americans murdered by police. They are an outpouring of outrage against a government that privileges a few at the expense of the many. But while that outrage is clearly deep and powerful, it has yet to change the government itself. The November elections are five months away. What happens between now and then will determine whether the past two weeks are remembered as the breaking point that turned the course of American history.
There exists a very real possibility that we are living through a time that will be studied by historians and talked about by our children and grandchildren. Those times are stressful, terrifying and not much fun, but are where we find out who we are. I will endeavor to be the person I hope people think I am at my best. And will encourage those who listen to me to do the same. Not a time for hiding. Watching the courageous protesters turning out in their tens of thousands gives me hope that our democracy is not dead yet, and won’t go quietly. Right now that’s about the best I can do.
Hmm. She says again in yesterday’s summary that it was the Pentagon:
I don’t know just who ordered and did what here, but there’s this that seems to support HCR’s interpretation:
& @LutherBlisset those aren’t necessarily conflicting reports. If read narrowly, it is possible that the Pentagon ordered National Guard troops disarmed and regular troops home, and Trump ordered National Guard troops to withdraw.
The only issue I see is that it is unlikely that Trump would order the withdrawal. The only reason I could see that is if, once the Pentagon ordered them to disarm, Trump ordered them home in a fit. I could see him saying, “I wanted them to shoot people! If they aren’t going to do that, they might as well go home.”
The sitting president will claim it was him regardless of any other fact, opinion or impression.
What remains to be seen is what will happen during the months until November, while he has the power to retaliate. I think even those who just showed mild concerns will already be under attack, given his track record.
And if the GOP duo will win, I expect more historical analogies to the Night of the Long Knives. (Choose your appropriate time period of choice for the connotations.)
Yeah, I realise this. I hope some people are already on to it, and this is documented. Not just out of scholarly interest.
June 8, 2020 (Monday)
While protests continued around the world today, it felt like a pause for breath after the past two weeks. If you are overwhelmed with news and need a break, today’s letter is an excellent one to skip. Nothing happened today that you can’t live without knowing.
But for those still interested, there were a number of things today pointing to a change in the media. The day started with Trump melting down over political polls that showed him trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden by almost 15 points. A CNN poll begun the day after the teargassing of peaceful protesters in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square so Trump could walk through it for a photo op showed Trump’s approval rating at an abysmal 38%, and his disapproval rating at 57%. According to the poll, 55% of registered voters back Biden while only 41% support Trump. (The poll has a 3.4% margin of error.)
Aside from the significance of the polls themselves, the president’s reaction to them revealed that his control over the political narrative that has bolstered his presidency is slipping. “CNN Polls are as Fake as their Reporting,” the president tweeted this morning. “Same numbers, and worse, against Crooked Hillary. The Dems would destroy America.”
He announced he was hiring Republican pollster John McLaughlin, who made his career in the 2012 contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney when he claimed that political polls were deliberately skewed toward Democrats in order to discourage Republicans from voting. McLaughlin invented better numbers for Romney that were proven to be imaginary in November, but nonetheless his accusations of bias gained traction. “The latest skewed media polls must be intentional,” McLaughlin wrote in a recent memo to Trump. Media outlets “are consistently under-polling Republicans,” he wrote, “and therefore, reporting biased polls.”
Trump and the GOP are trying to change the poll numbers because they have lost control over the country’s narrative. The president rode to the White House on the argument that people of color and women were criminal socialists demanding a government handout, paid for by taxes on hardworking white men, but all of a sudden, with white police officers murdering a handcuffed Black man, and police riots during protests over that killing, it is clear that narrative has gone sour.
Suddenly, the White House is trying to pivot to unity and safety. There is talk of Trump giving a speech on race, and today, Trump’s people, including Jared Kushner, held a roundtable with law enforcement officials, where Kushner told reporters that officials had heard the cries of the community and had come together to back safety and national unity. (At the end of the video clip of Kushner’s speech, you can hear Trump saying of Kushner, “My star.”)
Even more indicative that the national narrative is changing was the announcement yesterday that James Bennet had resigned as the editorial page editor of the New York Times. Bennet ran an op-ed last Wednesday by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton titled (by the Times, not by Cotton) “Send in the Troops.” The inflammatory piece blamed “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa” for an “orgy of violence” during the recent protests and claimed that “outnumbered police officers… bore the brunt of the violence.” Neither of these statements is true, and they clothe a false Republican narrative in what appears to be fact. Cotton’s solution to the protests was to send in the military to restore “law and order,” and he misquoted the Constitution to defend that conclusion.
The kerfuffle over this op-ed seems like it’s more than a normal media skirmish. For more than a century, American media has tried to report facts impartially. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Federal Communications Commission enshrined this principle in the Fairness Doctrine, which established that public media must base its news in facts and must present both sides of an argument fairly, honestly, and equitably. Beginning in the 1950s, Republicans who were ideologically opposed to the New Deal state complained that this principle, embraced by the “liberal media,” discriminated against them. In 1987, after President Ronald Reagan had placed new members on the board of the FCC, it abandoned the Fairness Doctrine.
With that abandonment, talk radio took off, presenting an ideological narrative that showed white taxpayers under siege by godless women and people of color. The Fox News Channel was not far behind, calling itself “fair and balanced” until 2017, when it dropped the slogan, because it presented the ideological narrative that mainstream media rejected. Other media outlets tried to defend themselves against charges that they were biased against that narrative, so they opened up their pages and television shows to that ideological story. Increasingly, the extreme Republican narrative spread into the mainstream on the grounds that the media must show “both sides.”
By 2014, though, cell phones and Twitter offered images and reports from the ground in places like Ferguson, Missouri, that showed up the police version of events, echoed by Fox News Channel personalities and talk radio hosts, as dishonest… and dangerous. Young Black journalists called out the reigning narrative that people of color were “thugs” and “criminals,” but their protests did not change the basic media pattern of “both sides-ism.”
Until now. The backlash over Cotton’s op-ed was so great that the day after Bennet published it, he tried to explain his decision to publish the incendiary piece by saying that it was important to provide both sides of a debate, “to help you think for yourself.” But this didn’t fly. Journalists objected that the piece endangered them.
The next day, June 5, the New York Times blamed the editing process for letting a “rushed and flawed” essay through, and said that a review of the piece led the editors to conclude “that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.” Two days later, Bennet left the editorial page desk.
It appears that the both-sides principle of the past generation is falling to what younger progressive journalists call moral clarity. But also at stake is the Enlightenment principle of fact-based argument. The Cotton piece was not rooted in reality; it was a narrative based in falsehoods and thus was fatally flawed. It could not contribute to public debate.
For his part, Cotton used the fight to advance the old Republican narrative. He told the Fox News Channel: “Within a day it turned into something like a struggle session from the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, where the adults had to prostrate themselves and apologize in front of the woke children that apparently now run the New York Times newsroom.” Republicans have applauded Cotton for exciting the Republican base by angering their opponents. He has raised $200,000 from the issue.
But it feels like Bennet’s resignation marks a shift in the media that has been building for months as newspapers and television chyrons increasingly check political falsehoods in favor of fact-based argument.
The right has always been better than its opponents at driving a clear narrative. That discrepancy showed today, as protesters have begun to call for Americans to “defund the police,” a phrasing that already has Republican opponents talking about keeping constituents safe. What most reformers mean by that phrase reflects that, as we have defunded education, housing, mental health facilities, and so on, our towns and cities increasingly have turned the functions of those institutions over to police. Reformers want to shrink police responsibilities and decrease funding from police budgets, investing instead in the other community resources that have lost money as police departments have gained it. Most are not calling for abolishing police departments altogether. They are using “defund” in the same way Republicans have called for defunding social programs.
But those who want police reforms are fighting over the phrase as they disagree about what, exactly, it means.
June 9, 2020 (Tuesday)
The day started with Trump tweeting that the 75-year-old Buffalo, New York, man shoved to the ground by police and left bleeding and unconscious “could be an ANTIFA provocateur” who might have been part of a “set up.”
Trump drew his suspicions from a story on One America News Network, a small cable television network whose constant support for the president has drawn his attention away from the Fox News Channel, whose support is less fervent. The Buffalo man (whose name I am not using in the vain hope that he may retain some anonymity) was a retired computer programmer and longtime Catholic peace activist who is affiliated with human-rights organizations.
The story came to OANN from a right-wing fringe site famous for conspiracy theories. It was narrated on OANN by correspondent Kristian Rouz, a Russian native who has also worked for Sputnik, a news outlet controlled by the Kremlin.
When the injured man’s friends dismissed the accusations as ludicrous, OANN followed up its original story with one that showed the victim as a left-wing extremist and said he was “far from the kindly old man that many in the media are describing.” For his part, the victim’s lawyer noted that the police had made no such accusations against his client, and wrote: “We are at a loss to understand why the President of the United States would make such dark, dangerous, and untrue accusations against him.”
With the victim still in the hospital, the president’s embrace of the theory that he was a provocateur embarrassed even Republican leaders, who uniformly tried to avoid comment on the issue for reporters. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said “I didn’t see it… I don’t read Twitter, I only write on it.” Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) said he hadn’t seen the tweet. “You know a lot of this stuff just goes over my head.”
Instead of dealing with the president’s tweet, Senators today created history by unanimously approving the first Black service chief in history. General Charles Brown, Jr., known as “CQ,” will be the next chief of staff of the Air Force.
Brown was the top Air Force general in the Middle East and a three-star deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, overseeing US. Military operations there. For the past two years, he has commanded the Pacific Air Forces, and now will oversee the service as it adjusts to the rise of China and artificial intelligence. Brown last week released a moving video in which he talked about what it had meant for him to rise through the ranks as a Black man, what he had suffered and how he had prevailed. He spoke to viewers about what he hoped for America.
Trump nominated Brown in March and today celebrated the confirmation even before it happened. “My decision to appoint [General Brown] as the USA’s first-ever African-American military service chief has now been approved by the Senate,” he tweeted. “A historic day for America! Excited to work even more closely with Gen. Brown, who is a Patriot and a Great Leader!”
The other big news today was chaos in Georgia’s voting. Five states held primaries today, and voting appeared to be unremarkable in Nevada, North Dakota, South Carolina, and West Virginia.
But things went badly wrong in Georgia. Mail-in ballots never arrived, sending voters to polls where machines were missing or malfunctioning. People waited in line for hours. The problems were worst in heavily minority counties.
Georgia’s voting system has been unworkable for years, either from incompetence or design, and a new system put in place before this election is clearly inadequate. Democrat Stacey Abrams, who lost the race for Georgia’s governor to Republican Brian Kemp, who was at the time Georgia’s secretary of state and thus responsible for overseeing his own election, called the 2018 election “rotten and rigged.” Of today’s election, she said Georgians “deserve better.” Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger blamed local officials for the problems, but Democrats say he owns this debacle, and must fix it before November.
He must fix it before November, but has little incentive to, because for the first time in decades, Georgia appears to be in play in this year’s presidential contest.
South Carolina had a 2nd primary? 
Whoopsi!
No, I’m the one who was wrong. SC had their Dem Presidential primary back in Feb, and the rest of their primary yesterday. Which is really weird. Why take on the extra expense of a second state-wide election in 4 months? I’ll go ahead and try to answer my own question: to co-opt the Dem primary process with an early primary, while doubling down on voter suppression by forcing working people to try to vote on weekdays in fairly close succession.
Ok. I guess I owe somebody $5.
June 10, 2020 (Wednesday)
“We’ve made every decision correctly,” the president said Friday about the coronavirus, “and now the trajectory is great.”
In fact, our Covid-19 numbers are up. They had begun to level off as hard-hit New York brought its infections under control, but now other hotspots are emerging. Arizona, Florida, and Texas, along with fifteen other states, are seeing increases in Covid-19 cases. Already, more than 112,000 Americans have died and more than 1.9 million are infected, and from now until July 4, epidemiologists predict 5,000 to 6,000 Americans a week will die from the disease.
The pandemic was not on the president’s mind today.
Today the Trump campaign delivered a cease and desist letter to CNN President Jeff Zucker demanding that CNN retract and apologize for its recent poll showing Trump 14 points behind presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The letter says the poll is “designed to mislead American voters through a biased questionnaire and skewed sampling.”
This is clearly the work of Republican pollster John McLaughlin, whom Trump hired on Monday. McLaughlin’s career is based in the (false) concept that political polls showing Democrats ahead of Republicans are deliberately skewed toward Democrats in order to discourage Republicans from voting.
CNN’s lawyer responded to the letter by noting that this was the first time in its history that CNN had been threatened with legal action over a political poll, and that “to the extent we have received legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect for a free and independent media.” He noted that McLaughlin had little credibility, and concluded: “Your letter is factually and legally baseless. It is yet another bad faith attempt by the campaign to threaten litigation to muzzle speech it does not want voters to read or hear. Your allegations and demands are rejected in their entirety.”
Virtually every reputable poll shows Biden leading Trump by double digits, so why is the Trump campaign picking this fight? The cease and desist letter might be a way to calm down the president, who is apparently on edge these days. But it might also be a way to try to rally the Republican base around the idea that, as recent fundraising has said, the “Trump Army” must fight off “the Liberal MOB.”
The campaign seems to be embracing military language as opposition to the president intensifies. Today the retired federal judge who was asked to examine the Justice Department’s unusual request to abandon the case against Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn-- after Flynn had pleaded guilty-- filed his report. Judge John Gleeson accused Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department of “a gross abuse of prosecutorial power, attempting to provide special treatment to a favored friend and political ally of the President of the United States. It has treated the case like no other, and in doing so has undermined the public’s confidence in the rule of law.”
More than 1,250 former members of the Department of Justice also wrote today of the need to defend the rule of law. They asked the DOJ’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, to look into Barr’s involvement in last week’s attack by law enforcement on the peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square before Trump’s walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church.
A rift between the administration and the military became clear last week when prominent military leaders opposed Trump’s use of force against demonstrators, supported the protesters’ concerns, and pointedly defended the Constitution. Trump deliberately widened that rift today, siding with white reactionaries rather than with current military leaders.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper and General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both of whom had been caught in Trump’s walk across Lafayette Square, are eager to unify their troops, 43% of whom are people of color rapidly becoming disaffected. The idea of renaming Army bases named for Confederate generals has been on the table for awhile, and they talked of actually doing it in this tense moment, even as protesters and city officials are pulling down Confederate monuments.
To historians, this is a no-brainer. Confederate leaders tried to destroy the United States and succeeded in killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, so the idea that we have any federal recognition of them is wild. And they were fighting to enshrine human enslavement in the laws of a new nation, and from there to spread it across the world, so for a country founded on the idea of human equality to honor these men seems particularly self-defeating. As General David Petraeus, the retired Army commander in Iraq and Afghanistan said, “The irony of training at bases named for those who took up arms against the United States, and for the right to enslave others, is inescapable to anyone paying attention.”
Politico reported that the military leaders thought the idea was an obvious move, but Trump shocked them with a series of tweets saying “These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, and a… history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom. The United States of America trained and deployed our HEROES on these Hallowed Grounds, and won two World Wars. Therefore, my Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations… Our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not be tampered with. Respect our Military!”
Trump was clearly siding with his base, which is quite keen on Confederate imagery, rather than with those calling for equal justice. But that base is apparently getting smaller. Within hours of his tweets, NASCAR had banned the Confederate flag from its races and its venues because it “runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry,” NASCAR said.
The decision was announced before tonight’s race in Virginia, where Bubba Wallace, NASCAR’s only African American driver, was to compete in a Chevrolet with a #BlackLivesMatter paint job. Wallace, born in Alabama, had said there was no place for Confederate flags in the sport. Tonight he was wearing a black “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirt, and applauded the decision. “This is no doubt the biggest race of my career tonight,” he said. “There’s a lot of emotions on the race track.”
Not everyone approved. Helmet artist Jason Beam tweeted: “ignorance wins again, NASCAR you realize the North had slaves too, lol not just the South, you want to remove the American Flag as well, idiots.”
It seems that the lines of Trump’s election campaign are solidifying. Two days ago, the Washington Post reported that Trump was trying to figure out how to turn calls for racial justice into a fight over “LAW & ORDER”-- as he keeps tweeting-- but Republican Party leaders were trying to figure out how to keep that shift from turning into offensive race baiting. Trump’s announcement today that he is resuming his rallies makes that point now appear moot.
The first rally will take place in Tulsa, Oklahoma—where coronavirus cases are spiking—on June 19. This day is also known as “Juneteenth,” a day commemorating the end of slavery in America because it was that day in 1865 that African Americans in Texas finally learned they were free. Tulsa is also the site of the 1921 race massacre, in which white mobs destroyed the wealthy Black neighborhood of Greenwood (aided by firebombs dropped from private airplanes), murdered as many as 300 of their Black neighbors, injured hundreds more, and left 10,000 people homeless.
