I have so many questions. But I fear the answers.
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Remember the conversation we had a while ago about whether Turmp is tracking to the Nazi takeover of Germany?
On a scale of zero to Nazi, where would you place his progress? I’d give him a 7.5. He’s disappearing opponents and setting up his Reichstag Fire, but he hasn’t turned on the SA just yet.
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his whole platform right now is: look at how much resistance there is to my policies, if you elect joe biden the resistance wins.
so yeah, stoking the fire is exactly what he wants. anything to destroy the legitimacy of the “left”
fox news and the gop is working hand in hand with this to play up the “violence” and… i presume… deligitimize the votes coming out of the cities
you already see this with his order to exclude undocumented residents from the census ( probably part od what he meant as the “big stuff” coming ) - presumably i think he ( and fox news ) will use that same “data” to claim x percentage of the vote is illegal.
i remember when fox called the vote early for bush v gore which set the stage for the supreme court’s decision. expecting more of that
( though still hoping the guy with the mace breaks down the door of the white house and carries trump senior and junior, one over each shoulder, off to the nearest prison. )
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Or has he? ICE / BPS / DHS. Not in the same uniform, and somewhat uncoordinated, but still.
7.5 seems too high, though - but then again I tend to be too optimistic.
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Meanwhile: Who is this guy, and what have they done to the real Donnie?
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July 21, 2020 (Tuesday)
One of the day’s biggest stories came from Ohio, where the House speaker, Republican Larry Householder, and four other political operatives, were arrested by federal officials for racketeering. U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio David DeVillers said the case was “likely the largest bribery money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio.”
Householder and his accomplices allegedly accepted more than $60 million in exchange for a public bailout for an ailing company. The bailout was worth more than $1 billion.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine ® immediately demanded Householder resign. So did Ohio Republican Party Chairwoman Jane Timken, who tried to spread the blame by saying "Greed, lust for power, and disdain for ethical boundaries are not unique to any particular political party.”
Her words were, perhaps, unfortunate, because her description was one that many people would use for the president. That Trump is right now trying to argue that the Republican Party stands for “LAW & ORDER,” when a Republican leader in Ohio is arrested for a “pay-to-play” scheme is a coincidence that undercuts his message. ("This was pay-to-play,” said DeVillers in a new conference. “I use the term pay-to-play because that’s the term they’ve used as alleged in the affidavit.”)
It was a moment that seemed to crystalize today’s politics: an elected official accepted a huge bribe in exchange for using taxpayer money to bail out a crony’s failing business. It reminds me of the Teapot Dome scandal of 1922, when the Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, leased the oil production rights from naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming and Elk Hills, California to oil companies in exchange for large financial gifts. When the story came out, Fall became the first U.S. Cabinet official to go to prison.
The Teapot Dome scandal seemed to epitomize the administration of the president at the time, Warren G. Harding, although Harding himself was not implicated in that particular scandal. He had created an atmosphere in which the point of government was not to help ordinary Americans, but to see how much leaders could get out of it.
This same attitude is crippling today’s government as it tries to deal with the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. Part of the reason that Trump and Republican leaders are hastening people back to work despite the spiking infections is that many Republican-led states do not have social welfare systems in place to support people through more weeks of lockdown, and Republican leaders do not want to develop them.
We are approaching a new crisis. At the end of July, the emergency unemployment benefits put into place in an early coronavirus bill will expire, leaving more than 20 million Americans unable to make ends meet and thus vulnerable to eviction, which would trigger another wrench in the already-ailing economy. At the same time, local and state governments, badly hit by falling tax revenues, will need to make cuts, as well, which will further stress the economy.
In May, Democrats used their majority in the House of Representatives to pass a $3 trillion spending package to provide another round of stimulus checks to individuals, give money to hospitals, and support state and local governments. Led by Republicans, the Senate refused to take the bill up.
Now, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to write a Republican bill, but is running into the specific problem that Trump refuses to admit the coronavirus is a problem and the more general problem of a Republican ideology that opposes government funding for a basic social safety net.
Trump continues to maintain that the only reason we have so many coronavirus infections is because we are testing for them. He wants to block funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as money for testing and contact tracing. At the same time, he wants a payroll tax cut to stimulate the economy, and funding in the bill for a new FBI building.
More generally, Republican senators are mortified at the spending involved in a bill that focuses not on shoring up businesses, but rather on supporting ordinary Americans. “What in the hell are we doing?” Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked his colleagues. He warned that a large relief package would anger Republican voters in the November elections. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) disagreed about the means, but not the end. He told his colleagues that if the Republicans don’t do enough to save the economy, Democrats will win in November and put in place policies that will cost even more money. A rescue bill now could save money in the long run by keeping Republicans in power.
As they calculate, the national unemployment rate is over 11%. The unemployment rate in cities closer to 20% as the coronavirus has shut down restaurants, theaters, gyms, and so on. And our vulnerability to Covid-19 increases. Almost 4 million Americans have been infected with coronavirus, and more than 140,000 have died of it.
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Yeah, this is a brief summary of the entire shitshow response of this administration to the whole crisis.
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I’d agree with @FGD135 in that I would rate lower, and not because I am optimistic but because I am very cautious of comparing anything to the Nazis.
I said it before in maybe other words, but I want everybody to be careful with their comparison because we must not diminish the suffering of millions of victims of the Nazis. There are other problems with direct comparisons, too, but I don’t need to spell this out right now.
Learning from that history to prevent such things from happening again is important. Drawing direct comparisons, OTH, is dangerous.
I know that on this BBS, I irked some people because I vocalised my concerns, e.g. whenever someone compared something to Nazi concentration camps. I’m more reluctant to raise my concerns nowadays, and the actions of the current US administration really are bad enough to raise all alarms.
So, if you would press me to make a comparison, I would say on an authoritarian scale (to avoid the direct Nazi comparison), it seems from my comfortable central western European armchair the current admin is about a 4.5. But deteriorating, obviously.
My reasoning, among some other points, is that there is still no consolidated authoritarian power. While the Senate is screwing things up with the Republican majority, it still is an elected part of parliament which is supposed to put checks and balances on the executive. Also, while the executive is pushing hard to undermine the judiciary, it is not (yet) able to control it.
But hell, is this timeline giving me the creeps. I might wake up tomorrow and regret that I didn’t take this all serious enough.
Not that I can do anything.
But still.
This needs to be stopped. The current president is damaging the US in a way I never thought possible.
To be clear: I do no longer rule out a civil war. And if you look at your history, you will see that the last civil war was the deadliest conflict of its time. Not only for America, as the English Wikipedia states: of its time. Years to come, and years before.
I also do not rule out a Nazi-style power grab. But right now, I still have hope that Trump gets kicked out of the WH by a vote, and the US can rebuild a stable democracy.
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I admire your optimism and will kinda cling to it for now.
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I largely agree with you.
I think we honor the tens of millions of victims of the Nazis best by doing our utmost to prevent it from happening again, regardless of the labels evil wears.
I would very much like that to be a practical approach, but most people are unaware of the important details of history. That necessitates a direct comparison in order to get through to them. They can’t see the danger of unidentified federal troops being placed in cities or extrajudicial detainment of people off the street when they look at it in isolation, so we have to draw the direct historical comparison to make it relevant to them.
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as I wrote in another thread here today, my fears of just that very thing are mounting. we cannot let it come to pass, but I don’t know how to stop it. I foolishly placate myself with thoughts of my relative isolation on this small island in a chain of hard coral rock, barely above sea level, being ‘safe’ but how can I be safe when my country is at war with itself? will the trumpers up the street take up their guns against me, knowing full well how very leftist I am? look, this island came together as a community after Irma left so many out of their homes and the damage it left behind is still being fixed, but this type of neighbor v. neighbor bullshit is running hot and it frightens me deeply.
I do take heart in what @Melizmatic says often: we have to survive this, and we shall (well, something like that)
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Folks, there is a post going around under my name that I DID NOT WRITE. It sounds like my tone, and even takes lines from at least one of my letters, but it is NOT MINE. I have never compared Trump’s tactics to Hitler’s, or spoken of the Night of the Long Knives.
This is classic disinformation. It takes your trust in my word-- a trust I have built very carefully for ten months-- and uses it against you, pushing you to a conclusion that I do not endorse.
Unless you see a post here, on my [FBOOK] page, ASSUME IT IS NOT FROM ME. You can search old posts either here on on the substack page, which is at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com , if something doesn’t quite sound like me.
Please, please, please be suspicious as we approach this election. We know bad actors are at work. Please don’t help them.
Heather (the real one).
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While I agree with the sentiment, there are real fine people out there who did not renounce their beliefs after charlotesville. We know how they feel about unaccountable kidnappings in Portland.
At some point, we do the victims a disservice by not learning from history.
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July 22, 2020 (Wednesday)
Today Trump announced that he will send federal agents to Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico, as part of his push to advance the idea that he is a “LAW & ORDER” president. Trump insists that “violent anarchists” allied with “radical left” Democrats have launched “a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and heinous crimes of violence.” “This bloodshed must end,” he said. “This bloodshed will end.”
To hear the president tell it, the country is at war against a leftist enemy that is destroying us from within.
But his dark vision is simply not true.
While crime is indeed up in some cities in the last month or so since the stay-at-home orders lifted, crime is nonetheless down overall for 2020. Indeed, violent crime has trended downward now for decades. And more crime in the short term is not exactly a surprise, as we are in an unprecedented time of social upheaval, with a pandemic locking us in our homes, the economy falling apart, and police violence—particularly against Black people—in the news day after day.
What has changed in the last few months, though, is Trump’s strategy for the 2020 election. It is notable how desperate he appears to be to win reelection. While all presidents running for a second term want to win, most of them are also willing to lose if that’s what voters decide. Trump, though, has withheld military funding from an ally to try to rig the election—that was what the Ukraine scandal was about—and, according to John Bolton, begged Chinese leader Xi Jinping to make a trade deal to help get Trump reelected. The insistence that he absolutely must win sets the stage for the federal troops in our cities.
Trump had planned to run on what he believed to be a strong economy, for which he took the credit (although he inherited a growing economy from his predecessor, President Barack Obama). But then the coronavirus hit.
Determined to keep the economy humming along, Trump downplayed the dangers of the virus, convincing his supporters that it was not as serious as Democrats insisted it was; they were, he said, hoping to sabotage his reelection. Then, when it was clear the disease was not a hoax, he was unwilling to use the federal government to address the crisis, and his administration botched early testing and isolation. Death rates spiked as we locked down, but then, as it seemed that infections were leveling off, states reopened quickly, despite warnings from experts that they were opening too soon.
Now, of course, cases are skyrocketing. While the rest of the developed world has corralled the virus, we have had close to 4 million infections and more than 140,000 dead. Today more than 1000 people died of the disease. After weeks of refusing to wear a mask, Trump was finally forced to acknowledge that it is imperative for us to slow the spread of the coronavirus after prominent supporter and former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain apparently contracted Covid-19 at Trump’s Tulsa rally. Cain has been hospitalized since early July.
And yet, Trump is desperate to get children back into school and their parents back to work, in part because Republicans object to government social welfare programs like unemployment insurance, and in part because he wants the economy to rebound before the election. But on this, too, he has been stymied, as most parents are worried about exposing their children to the disease. More and more school districts are opting to start the school year online.
So, Trump’s campaign is trying to rally voters with the idea that American cities run by Democrats are seething with violence. And to create that violence, the administration is sending in law enforcement officers that belong to departments within the executive branch of the government.
Trump included the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, in his photo-op on June 1, after officers cleared peaceful protesters out of Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Square with tear gas and flash-bangs. But military officers and defense officials past and present pushed back strongly against the attempt to politicize the military, and made it clear they would not permit soldiers to be used in ways they considered unconstitutional.
So Trump is turning the officers of the executive branch into the president’s private army.
On June 26, Trump issued an “Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence.” That is the document supporting the deployment of officers from what appears to be Custom and Border Protection, wearing military uniforms, in Portland, Oregon. Their original mission was to defend the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse, which had sustained vandalism and thrown fireworks.
The Executive Order blames the protests in Portland on “rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists who… have explicitly identified themselves with ideologies — such as Marxism — that call for the destruction of the United States system of government.” It says that those calling out racial bias in America are seeking “to advance a fringe ideology that paints the United States of America as fundamentally unjust and have sought to impose that ideology on Americans through violence and mob intimidation.” It claims: “These radicals shamelessly attack the legitimacy of our institutions and the very rule of law itself.”
The administration justifies the operations in Chicago and Albuquerque differently. On July 8, Attorney General William Barr announced a Department of Justice initiative called “Operation Legend,” named for a four-year-old victim of gun violence. Operation Legend began in Kansas City, Missouri, “to fight the sudden surge of violent crime.” Under the initiative, Barr is deploying federal agents from the FBI, U.S. Marshal Service, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) to “surge resources” first to Kansas City, and now to Chicago and Albuquerque. The DOJ also promised to move personnel to Kansas City—and now, presumably to the other cities— “to handle an anticipated increase in prosecutions.”
All the affected cities are run by Democratic mayors.
The Trump administration is hammering again and again on the idea that Democrats will bring chaos and violence to American streets. To illustrate that argument, it is instigating violent encounters. In Portland, officials said that the protests were calming down before the new federal force moved in. They asked for the officers to be removed, but Trump refused. His acting director of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, says: “I don’t need invitations by the state, state mayors, or state governors to do our job. We’re going to do that, whether they like us there or not.”
(Wolf is not Senate-confirmed, and there is question about whether or not he’s even legally in his job, since he has now been 251 days in a post that can only have an “acting” director for 210. With no experience in intelligence or security, it is unlikely the former lobbyist could make it through the Senate, but Trump likes his loyalty.)
Today, Tom Ridge, the country’s first Director of Homeland Security, who served under President George W. Bush, warned that the department “was not established to be the President’s personal militia.” “It would be a cold day in hell before I would give consent to a unilateral, uninvited intervention into one of my cities,” he said.
What is really at stake is the delegitimizing of Democrats altogether before the 2020 election. Today Jenna Ellis, senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign and one of Trump’s personal lawyers tweeted: “No Democrat should EVER AGAIN be elected in the United States in any capacity. The government’s constitutional obligation is to preserve and protect OUR rights, not to preserve and protect their own power. They are willing to sacrifice America and our freedom and liberty. NO!!!”
The Trump campaign has released an ad suggesting that the choice in 2020 is between “PUBLIC SAFETY” and “CHAOS AND VIOLENCE.” But observers quickly noted that the image of street violence in the ad was not from America, it was from Ukraine in 2014.
And the image was not of respectable police officers defending the rule of law. It was the opposite. It was a picture taken when democratic protesters were trying to oust corrupt oligarch Viktor Yanukovych from the Ukraine presidency. Yanukovych was an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and fled to Russia when he was thrown out of office in Ukraine. Yanukovych was in power thanks to the efforts of an American adviser: Paul Manafort, the same man who took over Trump’s ailing campaign in June 2016.
So to illustrate “chaos and violence,” the Trump campaign used an image of a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch’s specialized federal police wrestling a pro-democracy protester to the ground. And Donald Trump and that oligarch won power thanks to the same advisor.
Honestly, it’s hard to see the use of the image as a mistake.
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The only group seeking the destruction of the US right now is the trump administration.
That is not a choice the government gets to make. People can elect whomsoever they want. Also- more projection. The GOP and trump are the ones undermining democracy to preserve thier own power.
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All projection, all the time.
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July 23, 2020 (Thursday)
Today’s biggest breaking news came at the president’s briefing this evening. Allegedly about the coronavirus, the briefing began with Trump announcing he was cancelling the Republican National Convention, which was scheduled to be held in Jacksonville, Florida from August 24-27.
Just last month, on June 11, Trump moved the hoopla part of the convention from Charlotte, North Carolina, where Governor Roy Cooper refused to promise he could have a fully filled arena for his acceptance speech. Because the Republican National Committee was under contract with Charlotte, it maintained it would hold some business meetings in the city, but it cut from the convention in either place a meeting to create a 2020 platform. Trump decided to run on the 2016 platform, underscoring that, for him, the election is about the man in charge, not policies.
Trump said “the timing is not right” to hold the convention, referring to coronavirus, which is spiking in Florida. Today the state reported 173 deaths, the largest single day loss in the state so far. Florida has had a staggering 10,000 new infections almost every day for the last two weeks. As numbers spike there and elsewhere, primarily in the South and West, experts worry that we are approaching a point at which it will be impossible to stop the spread of Covid-19. We have had more than 4 million infections and more than 140,000 deaths, including 3,000 since Tuesday. We are on track to lose more than 200,000 Americans to coronavirus before November 1. Yesterday, more than 150 public health experts wrote an open letter to Trump, Congress, and the state governors begging them to “shut it down now, and start over.”
Nonetheless, Trump continues to demand that schools reopen, saying today that if they don’t, money should go from the public schools to parents to send their children elsewhere. This would divert money from public to private schools, a plan Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos advocates. Advisors noted that Trump was paying close attention to leading Republicans backing out of the convention, and was worried attendance would be thin. Cancelling because of the pandemic let him stake out a leadership position on an issue where polling shows Americans think he has failed.
Trump also said that he spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin today, but did not discuss intelligence reports that say Putin has been paying Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan to kill U.S. and allied troops.
The RNC’s inability to pull off either a platform or a convention this year does not look good. One convention official told CNN the Jacksonville event was "a multimillion dollar debacle” and that the money it cost could have gone to fighting coronavirus.
The Republicans looked incompetent today in another way as they failed to reach an agreement on a new coronavirus package. They rejected the Democrats’ bill, passed two months ago, but have apparently been unable since then to come up with any deal within their own conference (they have not included any Democrats in the negotiations). They were supposed to roll out their bill today, but are now hoping to have something ready to show Democrats by Monday. Unemployment benefits for 30 million Americans, expanded by an early coronavirus bill, expire next week, so the Republicans are under pressure. But Senators up for reelection want a generous bill, while others hate the idea of spending money on social welfare programs.
Today the administration took some legal hits. A federal judge ruled that the government had sent Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen back to prison from home confinement to stop him from publishing a tell-all book in September; and the inspector general of the Justice Department, Michael Horowitz, announced he will investigate the federal use of force in Washington, D.C. and Portland, Oregon. At the request of congressional Democrats from Oregon, he will examine the orders the federal officers received, their use of chemical agents (tear gas), and reports that they were improperly detaining protesters.
Both the Cohen case and the federal deployment were overseen by Attorney General William Barr, who is apparently using the Justice Department to advance the president’s political interests. Barr is set to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on July 28 about his attempts both to reduce the sentencing guidelines for Trump’s friend Roger Stone and to dismiss the case against Trump adviser Michael Flynn. He will likely also be asked about his firing of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, as well as others. It is worth noting that Barr won confirmation in his position thanks to Republican Senators, who have not opposed his actions.
They have, though, voted to pass the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, including a provision in it to rename military bases that currently carry the names of Confederate generals. The bill authorizes almost $737 billion (yes, that’s a “B”) in military spending for the year. It passed by a veto-proof majority, which gives Trump an excuse not to try to kill the bill, but it is nonetheless a blow over one of his signature fights.
Trump lost another fight today, as Major League Baseball reopened with the Washington Nationals playing the New York Yankees on their home field. Before the game, every player and every coach in the playing area held up a black banner that stretched along the first base and third base lines, then took a knee on the grass in silence, in honor of Black Lives Matter. Then Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is the trusted face of coronavirus advice and thus has angered the not-so-trusted president, threw out the first pitch. (It was so far off base that one wit noted on Twitter: “He clearly doesn’t want anyone to catch anything.”)
And the sexism of today’s Republican Party also took a hit today, as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) rose to a point of personal privilege in the House and replied to the actions of Representative Ted Yoho (R-FL), who stopped her on the steps of the Capitol Monday to call her “disgusting,” “crazy,” “out of [her] mind,” and “dangerous,” for linking poverty and crime. She told him he was rude, and went inside to cast a vote. When she came back out, she said, "There were reporters in the front of the Capitol, and in front of reporters Rep. Yoho called me, and I quote, a 'f*****g bitch.’”
Ocasio-Cortez called out Yoho’s verbal abuse and his non-apology (he apologized for the “abrupt manner of the conversation,” but said he could not apologize for his “passion”). She indicted the sexism inherent in not only Congress but in society in general. “This issue is not about one incident,” she said. “It is cultural. It is a culture… of accepting of violence and violent language against women and an entire structure of power that supports that.” Silence on the issue, she said, “is a form of acceptance.” It was a powerful speech, putting the issue of sexism on the table in Congress along with the issue of racism.
While the Republicans bet on the idea of a full-fledged convention this year and lost, the Democratic National Committee decided back in June to make their convention both virtual and appropriate to the pandemic. It will be centered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from August 17-20, and will have live broadcasts from other cities, and a robust social media platform as well, while keeping participants safely distanced.
“Leadership means being able to adapt to any situation,” said DNC Chair Tom Perez.
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July 24, 2020 (Friday)
There are two big stories today.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell admitted today that Senate Republicans and the White House will not come up with a plan to shore up the economy for “a few weeks.” This is a huge problem, because enhanced unemployment benefits end in the next few days. At the same time, a four-month federal moratorium on rent collection and evictions is expiring.
The coronavirus bill that Congress passed in March attached an extra $600 weekly federal payment to state unemployment benefits. Those state benefits usually cover only about 45% of a worker’s wage. The extra federal money was designed to make up some of the difference between state unemployment benefits and people’s actual needs in the short term (the money is taxable, so some of it will have to be given back next April). There are different plans for extending this boost, but some Republicans worry that the extra money is more than people can make working, and it will discourage them from seeking work, although the coronavirus is making work hard to find. With mounting closures after the new spike in coronavirus cases, there were 1.4 million new unemployment claims last week.
Republicans in the Senate rejected the Democrats’ stimulus bill, passed by the House of Representatives in May, but in two months have not been able to agree on a way forward. Now McConnell says he hopes they’ll have a deal in a few weeks.
This timing is strikingly poor. The end to federal unemployment support hits just as the moratorium on evictions, also passed in March, ends. That moratorium meant renters could not be evicted for inability to pay their rent, but the rent continued to accumulate. Now, the moratorium is ending. There are 110 million Americans living in rented apartments, and the COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project estimates that between 19 and 23 million of them risk eviction before September.
The most vulnerable households are low-income and people of color, and eviction will, of course, cause extraordinary hardship. But there is another brutal calculation in this catastrophic timing: evicted adults will be far less likely to vote.
The upcoming election—100 days away-- was in another story more directly today, too. William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, issued a statement warning that foreign countries are trying to hack U.S. political campaigns, candidates and other political targets, as well as to “compromise our election infrastructure.”
Evanina also warned that “foreign nations continue to use influence measures in social and traditional media in an effort to sway U.S. voters’ preferences and perspectives, to shift U.S. policies, to increase discord and to undermine confidence in our democratic process.” He said that the DNI is “primarily concerned with China, Russia, and Iran.”
This prompted an outraged response from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-VA). These four are the Democrats on the Gang of Eight, the eight congressional leaders who must be briefed on classified intelligence. They claimed Evanina’s statement falsely placed China, Iran, and Russia on the same level, while in fact Russia remains by far our biggest threat.
There is a recent backstory to today’s fight. On Monday, July 20, the four Democrats released a letter they had written to FBI Director Chris Wray on July 13, asking him to deliver a briefing to all of Congress, not just to the Gang of Eight, on “specific” intelligence about a foreign operation. “We are gravely concerned, in particular, that Congress appears to be the target of a concerted foreign interference campaign, which seeks to launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity, public debate, and the presidential election in November,” the letter read.
They were apparently referring to investigations led by Ron Johnson (R-WI) chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. One investigation is digging into Hunter Biden’s connections to the Ukrainian company Burisma. (Ukrainian prosecutors have cleared Biden of any wrongdoing in his connections with the company.) The other is looking into how the Obama administration handled the investigation of Trump advisor Michael Flynn in 2016-2017. (Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about lifting sanctions during that time.)
These, of course, are investigations Trump has desperately wanted. Indeed, he pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Biden and Burisma by withholding money Ukraine badly needed to fight off Russian incursions. After the impeachment trial over that scandal, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani traveled around Ukraine digging up “witnesses” willing to testify to Biden’s alleged misdeeds, witnesses now informing the Senate committee.
These investigations are not intended to uncover wrongdoing—the evidence is overwhelming there was none—they are about manipulating our political narrative. They are designed to plant the idea among voters that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is corrupt—a scheme that worked brilliantly in 2016, as repeated investigations of Hillary Clinton’s emails undercut her campaign. But, as Russia expert Fiona Hill warned in her testimony before Congress this spring, the “evidence” in these investigations is disinformation coming directly from Russian intelligence agents who want to destabilize the U.S.
The Gang of Eight is sworn to secrecy, so Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, and Warner cannot say exactly what they have learned from intelligence reports. But they said enough:
“Almost exactly four years ago, we first observed the Russians engaging in covert actions designed to influence the presidential race in favor of Donald Trump and to sow discord in the United States. Now, the Russians are once again trying to influence the election and divide Americans, and these efforts must be deterred, disrupted and exposed.”
“The statement just released by NCSC Director William Evanina does not go nearly far enough in arming the American people with the knowledge they need about how foreign powers are seeking to influence our political process. The statement gives a false sense of equivalence to the actions of foreign adversaries by listing three countries of unequal intent, motivation and capability together. The statement, moreover, fails to fully delineate the goal, nature, scope and capacity to influence our election, information the American people must have as we go into November.”
The Democrats want the full Congress briefed, they say, “But a far more concrete and specific statement needs to be made to the American people, consistent with the need to protect sources and methods. We can trust the American people with knowing what to do with the information they receive and making those decisions for themselves. But they cannot do so if they are kept in the dark about what our adversaries are doing, and how they are doing it.”
Amen. But I’m not holding my breath. The Director of National Intelligence overseeing all this is John Ratcliffe, a key Trump ally, formerly a congressman from Texas. He has been in the job only since May 26, and before he became DNI, he made it clear he does not believe that Russia is attacking our electoral system.
Johnson is promising to release his reports at the end of the summer, just in time for the election.
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July 25, 2020 (Saturday)
A year ago today, Trump had a phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and promised to deliver the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s protection against Russian military incursions. Then he added: “I would like you to do us a favor, though…”
While Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who was on the call, told his superiors what he had heard, someone else filed a whistleblower complaint. That complaint went to Trump’s own appointee at the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General’s office, Michael Atkinson. Atkinson agreed that the matter was both “credible” and “urgent” and that House and Senate Intelligence Committees must be informed, as required by law.
Atkinson followed the law, passing the information to the acting Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, on August 26. Maguire had only taken office ten days before, on August 16, after Trump’s first DNI, Dan Coats, and Coates’s second-in-command, Sue Gordon, both resigned. As an acting director, rather than a Senate-confirmed leader, Maguire served at the pleasure of the president.
Maguire was supposed to scour the whistleblower complaint of all classified information before forwarding to Congress by September 2, as the law required. But, instead, Maguire took the complaint to the Department of Justice, headed by Trump loyalist Attorney General William Barr. On his advice, Maguire decided not to turn over the information to Congress.
When that happened, Atkinson told the relevant congresspeople that the DNI was illegally withholding the complaint. On September 10, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff (D-CA) demanded that acting DNI Maguire produce it. Maguire refused, saying that the complaint was about someone not in the Intelligence Community, and therefore not covered by the whistleblower law. (The law does not give him the authority to refuse to deliver a complaint his IG considers credible and urgent. It says he MUST deliver it.)
On Friday, September 13, Schiff wrote a scathing letter to Maguire that brought this whole issue to public attention, noting that it sure seemed like Maguire might be protecting the president, and demanding Maguire follow the law and hand over the whistleblower complaint.
I happened to be scrolling through Twitter when Schiff’s letter dropped, and I recognized it for what it was: a powerful member of Congress accusing a specific member of the Executive Branch of breaking a specific law… the sort of moment on which American history turns.
And that, my friends, is how these Letters began.
Since then, the House impeached Trump but the Senate exonerated him; Vindman is gone; Atkinson is gone; Maguire is gone. But as Trump has increasingly consolidated his power, Americans have woken up and taken to heart that democracy is not a spectator sport.
It has been a year by the calendar, but an eternity in the history of this nation.
Still, for all that I yearn for a time when we can go for days without worrying about what’s going on in the White House, I am profoundly grateful to have discovered so many other people who care as deeply as I do about this country.
There is plenty of news today, but none of it breaking, so I am going to let it go for a night.
See you all tomorrow.
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July 26, 2020 (Sunday)
Reality is disrupting the ideology of today’s Republican Party.
For a generation, Republicans have tried to unravel the activist government under which Americans have lived since the 1930s, when Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and invested in infrastructure. From the beginning, that government was enormously popular. Both Republicans and Democrats believed that the principle behind it—that the country worked best when government protected and defended ordinary Americans—was permanent.
But the ideologues who now control the Republican Party have always wanted to get rid of this New Deal state and go back to the world of the 1920s, when businessmen ran the government. They believe that government regulation and taxation is an assault on their liberty, because it restricts their ability to make money.
They have won office not by convincing Americans to give up their own government benefits—most Americans actually like clean water and Social Security and safe bridges—but by selling a narrative in which “Liberals” are trying to undermine the country by stealing the tax dollars of hardworking Americans—quietly understood to be white men—and redistributing them to lazy people who want handouts, not-so-quietly understood to be people of color and feminist women. According to this narrative, legislation that protects ordinary Americans simply redistributes wealth. It is “socialism,” or “communism.”
Meanwhile, Republican policies have actually redistributed wealth upward. When voters began to turn against those policies, Republicans upped the ante, saying that “Liberals” were simply buying Black votes with handouts, or, as Carly Fiorina said in a 2016 debate, planning to butcher babies and sell their body parts. To make sure Republicans stayed in power, they suppressed voting by people likely to vote Democratic, and gerrymandered states so that even if Democrats won a majority of votes, they would have a minority of representatives.
This system rewarded those who moved to the right, not to the middle. It gave them Donald Trump as a 2016 candidate, who talked of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists and treated women not as equals but as objects either for sex or derision.
And, although as a candidate Trump talked about making taxes fairer, improving health care, and helping those struggling economically, in fact as president he has done more to bring about the destruction of the New Deal state than most of his predecessors. He has slashed regulations, given a huge tax cut to the wealthy, and gutted the government.
If the end of the New Deal state is going to usher in a new era of peace and prosperity, it should be now.
Instead, the gutting of our government destroyed our carefully constructed pandemic response teams and plans, leaving America vulnerable to the coronavirus. Pressed to take the lead on combatting the virus, the administration refused to use federal power, and instead relied on “public-private partnerships” which meant states were largely on their own. When governors tried to take over, the Republican objection to government regulation, cultivated over a generation, had people refusing to wear masks or follow government instructions.
As the rest of the world watches in horror, we have suffered more than 4 million infections, and are approaching 150,000 deaths.
The pandemic also crashed the economy as businesses shut down to avoid infections. It threw more than 20 million Americans out of work. Republican ideology says the government has no business supporting ordinary Americans: they should work to survive, even if that means they have to take the risk of contracting Covid-19. Schools should open, businesses should get up and going, and the economy should rebuild. As Texas’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick said to Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson in March, grandparents should be willing to contract coronavirus for the U.S. to “get back to work.”
The coronavirus has brought the Republican narrative up against reality. Just 32% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, and only 38% of the country think the economy is good. Americans believe that the government should have done a better job managing the pandemic, and they do not believe they should risk their lives for the economy.
To try to deflect attention from the failure of his approach to the coronavirus, Trump is once, again, escalating the narrative. He has launched an offensive against Democratic cities, trying to convince voters he is protecting them from “violent anarchists” coddled by Democrats. He is using federal law enforcement officers in unprecedented ways, not to quell protests, but to escalate them. In Portland, Oregon, as officers have used tear gas, less-than-lethal munitions (which nonetheless fractured a man’s skull), and batons to attack protesters, the events, which had fallen to a few hundred attendees, grew again into the thousands. And now the administration is planning to send in more officers, to escalate further.
The Republicans’ ideology is also making it impossible for them to deal with the economy. We are on the verge of a catastrophe as the $600 weekly federal bonus attached to state unemployment benefits runs out this week just as the moratorium on evictions for an inability to pay rent ends. At the same time, state and local budgets, hammered by the pandemic, will mean more layoffs.
The House passed a $3 trillion bill in May to address these issues, along with providing more money to combat the coronavirus, but Republicans in the Senate rejected it out of hand. Today on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) went back to his ideological roots. “The only objective Democrats have is to defeat Donald Trump, and they’ve cynically decided the best way to defeat Donald Trump is shut down every business in America, shut down every school in America," he said. House Speaker “Nancy Pelosi talks about working men and women. What she’s proposing is keeping working men and women from working.” "Her objectives are shoveling cash at the problem and shutting America down.”
Instead, both Trump and Cruz want a payroll tax cut, which will do little to stimulate the economy since the tens of millions who have lost their jobs would not see any money, and this late in the year much of the tax has already been paid. But the payroll tax cut is popular among Republican ideologues because it funds Social Security and Medicare. Cut it, and those programs take a hit.
Today Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took to the Sunday talk shows to try to reassure people that the Republicans would, in fact, manage to cobble together a relief bill in the next few days (after not writing one in the last two months). They are talking about passing piecemeal measures, but, recognizing that this means Republicans will call all the shots, Pelosi says no.
Meadows and Mnuchin say they want liability protection for businesses and schools if they open and people get Covid-19. They were also clear they would not agree to extending the $600 federal addition to state unemployment benefits, arguing that it simply “paid people to stay home.” They say they want to guarantee people 70% of their wages, but the reason the earlier bill had a flat $600 payment was because it appeared impossible for states to administer a complicated program based on a percentage, so this might well just be a straw argument.
The Republican approach to handling the coronavirus and the economy is apparently not to turn to our government, but to put our heads down, go on as usual, and hope for a vaccine. What will end the pandemic is “not masks. It’s not shutting down the economy," Meadows said. “Hopefully it is American ingenuity that will allow for therapies and vaccines to ultimately conquer this.”
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