Heather Cox Richardson

[milliefink]

August 27, 2020 (Thursday)

Tonight was the final night of the Republican National Convention.

Having moved the RNC from Charlotte, North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida, and then having been forced to cancel his plans for a huge rally due to coronavirus, Trump decided to hold tonight’s major speeches on the South Lawn of the White House. It was a flagrantly illegal move, designed to do two things: to turn the majesty of the White House into the trappings of a dictator, and to spark fury from opponents. With luck, the dramatic setting behind Trump would woo his base, while the fury of his opponents would grab attention from the ongoing crisis of the coronavirus and the economic disaster of the past few months.

It was a thoroughly Trumpian move, and to some degree, it worked. The entire convention drew on imagery from dictatorships. A parade of family members assured us Trump is wonderful, subordinates offered generic over-the-top praise, and every speaker demonized anyone who doesn’t support Trump’s continued rule. The convention had demonstrations of mercy from the president as he both pardoned a criminal and granted citizenship to five immigrants (who were apparently not told they would be part of the convention), a standard trope in the authoritarian’s handbook. And it had the trappings of dictators, from First Lady Melania Trump’s dress that evoked a Nazi uniform— almost certainly to provoke a response while appealing to the alt-right—to the cathedral ceilings of our hallowed civic temple, to the wall of flags, all evoking tradition, majesty, and might.

It was desperately sad to see the White House, the people’s house, turned into the background for a political rally, emblazoned with flags and sporting jumbotrons that spelled out “Trump/Pence.” It looked like a Biff Tannen fantasy.

The men who founded our government based it not on hereditary leadership, or on religion, or on race, because they recognized that such governments would inevitably lead to bloodshed. They knew well the history of European countries torn asunder by warring families or religious sects. Instead, they took the radical step of founding a nation on the idea that all men are created equal, that no man is any better or any worse than another, and that all must be equal before the law. They were blind to things they should have seen, of course—their “all men” excluded men of color and women—but the principle of equality before the law was a radical new idea in western history.

A government of laws, not of men, meant that no one should be able to leverage his political office to retain power, and when officials began to violate that principle, Congress in 1939 passed the Hatch Act, forbidding all federal employees except the president and vice president “from using federal property for political activities or for engaging in anything that is a partisan political act,” as political scientist Norm Ornstein, from the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, put it.

“People have been fired for sending flyers around for a municipal election that was partisan,” Ornstein says. “Every time Kellyanne Conway in her official capacity made a statement that was partisan, it was a violation of the Hatch Act. Every cabinet member, every border patrol member, every federal employee participating in the activities at the White House tonight violated the Hatch Act. This was the most blatant abuse of power and legal authority for partisan purposes by far than anything we have ever seen by a president or an executive branch.” Violations of the Hatch Act are supposed to result in removal from office, but punishment for the numerous violations in this administration has been minimal.

Indeed, disregarding the Hatch Act this week has been a demonstration of Trump’s move toward a dictatorship. In 1997, then-Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat, had to defend making fund-raising phone calls from the White House despite the vice president’s exemption from the Hatch Act, but Trump is running roughshod over the law with impunity. This morning White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said that “nobody outside the Beltway really cares” about the Hatch Act, and this evening, Fox News Channel personality Dana Perino said that “it doesn’t matter” that Trump is breaking the law because “by the time they have an investigation, this election is going to be over.”

During Trump’s speech he seemed to revel in his use of the White house for partisan ends, asking rhetorically “What’s the name of that building?” referring to the White House, and going on: “We’re here and they’re not.”

But will his version of America win? Will we really replace the idea of equality before the law with a world in which a leader can declare that he and his family and friends have the right to rule over the rest of us?

I looked at the hundreds of people at Trump’s rally tonight, unmasked and older, and almost all so very white, and saw a group of people so afraid of the future they are willing to say yes, willing to throw in their lot with a malignant narcissist because he tells them they can recover a world in which they felt more relevant, a world they control.

We have been here before. In the 1850s, when the nation had to grapple with the idea of westward expansion across a continent, many reactionary Americans thought the solution to keeping an expanding nation stable was to spread human enslavement along with the American flag so that a small group of wealthy slaveowners maintained control over the government.

But Americans who believed that society worked best if every man had a right to his own labor organized under Abraham Lincoln and, rejecting their neighbors’ hierarchical view of society, restored the idea of human equality and pushed America into the future.

In the 1890s, when the nation had to grapple with the idea of industrialization, many reactionary Americans thought the solution to the growing divide between labor and capital was to create a world in which a few wealthy industrialists directed the labor of the masses.

But Americans who believed in the founding principle of human equality before the law organized under Theodore Roosevelt and rejected the idea that workers belonged to a permanent underclass. They pushed America into the future.

In the 1930s, when the nation had to grapple with a worldwide depression, reactionary Americans thought the solution was fascism, in which a few strong men organized and directed the labor of their countrymen.

But most Americans rejected the idea that some men were better than others, and they organized under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to restore the idea of equality before the law and return the government to the hands of ordinary Americans. They pushed America into the future.

Tonight’s event at the White House demonstrated that we are in another great crisis in American history. A reactionary group of older white men look at a global future in which questions of clean energy, climate change, economic fairness, and human equality are uppermost, and their reaction is to cling to a world they control.

But that world is passing, whether they like it or not. Even if Trump wins in 2020, he cannot stop the future from coming. And while the United States will not meet that future with the power we had even four years ago, we will have to meet it nonetheless. It will be no less exciting and offer no fewer opportunities than the dramatic changes of the 1850s, 1890s, and 1930s, and at some point, Americans will want to meet those challenges.

If history is any guide, when that happens, we will restore the principle of equality before the law, and push America into the future.

[milliefink]

August 28, 2020 (Friday)

Hi folks:

Four nights of the Republican National Convention combined with prepping for the start of next week’s classes have just about done me in. I actually want to write about the question of who gets to commit violence in our society, but if I start now it’ll be another 4:00 morning, and I just can’t do it.

Tomorrow, okay?

H.

[milliefink]

August 29, 2020 (Saturday)

With the end of the Republican National Convention on Thursday, the race to the November election is in high gear.

Trump has made it clear he will run on the idea that he has defeated the coronavirus and rebooted the economy, while rioters from the “radical left” are destroying American cities, aided and abetted by Democrats. But the convention’s picture of the president and the nation America were so wildly untrue that fact-checkers have stayed busy ever since.

Vice President Mike Pence rewrote history to argue that Trump managed the pandemic wonderfully. “President Trump marshaled the full resources of our federal government from the outset,” Pence said. “He directed us to forge a seamless partnership with governors across America in both political parties.”

In fact, there is really no debate over the reality that Trump did not acknowledge the magnitude of the crisis for six to eight crucial weeks, despite warnings. He refused to invoke the Defense Production Act to speed up the production of critical medical supplies and instead told states they were on their own. When states then tried to buy their own supplies, the federal government often intercepted the shipments and handed them to private distribution systems to send to places the administration determined needed them most, redistributions that were often attributed to political favoritism.

Most attendees at the president’s speech did not wear masks, and speakers at the convention referred to the pandemic in the past tense. But coronavirus has not gone away. Although the overall number of new cases is declining, hot spots remain, especially as schools and universities have reopened over the past two weeks. At the University of Alabama, 1200 students have tested positive for Covid-19 since classes resumed less than two weeks ago; Florida has seen nearly 900 students testing positive in the same period. America is still suffering close to 1000 deaths a day from Covid-19, bringing our numbers over 180,000 people.

Pence also boasted that we have gained back 9.3 million jobs in the last three months… with no acknowledgement that it is Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic that devastated the economy in the first place, or that we are still 13 million jobs down from where we were before the coronavirus.

Trump’s narrative that cities are in crisis, and the violence is caused by the “radical left,” is not supported by the evidence, either.

First of all, there is less violence than he suggests. Crime has actually been dropping in the U.S. for a decade, and protests are isolated. American cities are not in flames. On Twitter, a user claimed that: “There’s this creepy vibe in DC right now where it’s obvious how bad the city’s been destroyed by rioters, and yet people are almost afraid to point it out or oppose it. You almost have to whistle past the boarded up windows as if it’s all just normal.” Other users ridiculed him by posting photographs of peaceful city scenes, noting that a number of places closed early in the summer because of Covid, but that the only “creepy vibe” was the new fortified wall around the White House.

But Trump is likely aware that white Americans tend to associate Black Americans with crime, so he is hitting the idea that the Black Lives Matter protesters are violent. In fact, most of the violence occurring appears to be associated either with the police who, according to a new report published in The Guardian, have been infiltrated by white supremacists, or with far-right activists.

In June, ABC News obtained an intelligence bulletin from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center warning that “anarchist extremists continue to pose the most significant threat of targeted assaults against police.” They singled out violent extremists such as members of the boogaloo anarchist movement. Indeed, the police officer Pence spoke of at the convention who was killed in Oakland, California, was allegedly killed by a boogaloo supporter, not by protesters, as Pence implied. And, of course, the two people murdered and one injured in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 23 were allegedly killed by Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old white man who came to town to face down the protesters.

To the extent there is unrest in the country, Trump has no interest in quelling it. He has refused to condemn the right-wing thugs, and his supporters have championed Rittenhouse as a hero. Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson said that Rittenhouse “had to maintain order when no one else would.”

In Portland, Oregon, today, a pro-Trump caravan that included the neo-fascist Proud Boys went into the city to face down protesters there. After tensions between them and the assembled protesters escalated, caravan members began shooting people with pepper spray and paintballs, and driving into crowds. Tonight, someone was shot and killed, although who and why is unclear; the details are still sketchy.

The narrative that dangerous Black people are causing violence that white men must suppress for the good of the community serves Trump’s election narrative, but it is a trope right out of Reconstruction. In 1873, for example, in Colfax, Louisiana, white southerners murdered as many as 150 of their Black neighbors, while 3 white men died, one likely shot by his own compatriots. Despite those shocking numbers, newspapers reported the events at Colfax as a riot of Black men, put down by law-abiding whites who were restoring law and order.

There is another worrisome development today. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) announced that it will no longer brief Congress in person about election security and the interference of foreign entities in our democracy. It will still provide written intelligence reports, but Congress will no longer be able to question officials about what they know.

There is a long backstory to this development. Despite all evidence—including that of the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee—Trump has maintained that Russia did not interfere on his behalf in 2016. Now, despite the conclusions of our Intelligence Community that they are doing it again, he maintains they are not.

Back in February 2020, a senior career intelligence officer who worked for Joseph Maguire, then the acting DNI, warned Congress that Russia is once again targeting our election to aid Trump. The president was so angry that he fired Maguire, and replaced him first with Richard Grenell, a staunch loyalist, and then with Texas Representative John Ratcliffe, whose earlier appointment to the position had been quashed by Republican Senators because he lacked the necessary qualifications for the post. Ratcliffe made it clear he did not believe Russia was attacking our elections, no matter what the Intelligence Community said.

This summer, there has been tension between congressional Democrats and the DNI because his office has suggested that China, Iran, and Russia are all equally responsible for assaults on our election when, in fact, it is clear Russia is far and away the prime culprit. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority leader Charles Schumer (D-NY), Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee Mark Warner (D-VA), all members of the so-called “Gang of Eight” which hears classified intelligence, have repeatedly called on the DNI to brief Congress on the actual intelligence.

Now, Ratcliffe is saying the Office of the DNI will not brief Congress at all in person, suggesting concern over leaks. The Democrats say he is deliberately withholding information from the American people that they need before they vote. Schumer wrote: “DNI Ratcliffe has made clear he’s in the job only to protect Trump from democracy, not democracy from Trump. Our intel officials have said there’s an … assault on our democratic process from Russia. Pres. Trump is simply using John Ratcliffe to hide the ugly truth.”

Trump tonight confirmed that the DNI decision was designed to stop information about Russian interference from reaching the American people. He tweeted: “Probably Shifty Schiff, but others also, LEAK information to the Fake News. No matter what or who it is about, including China, these deranged lowlifes like the Russia, Russia, Russia narrative. Plays better for them. @DNI_Ratcliffe doing a great job!” (There is no evidence that Schiff has ever leaked any information.)

Tonight Trump also retweeted an advertisement for an edition of a show on One America News (OAN) that regurgitates Russian propaganda. It is the story, instigated by Russian intelligence, that Biden was involved in a corrupt bargain in Ukraine, the very story he pressured Ukraine to produce last year.

[ChuckV]

@milliefink

boogaloo anarchist movement

Anarchist???

[milliefink]

Yeah, that jumped out at me too. I guess “anarchy = violent chaos” in the minds of most.

[FGD135]

(BTW, that cartoon is from last year or so.)

[ChuckV]

@milliefink

I guess “anarchy = violent chaos” in the minds of most.

And/Or an aversion to correctly labeling the violence as coming from the right?

[milliefink]

I wouldn’t be surprised.

[docosc]

This is more accurate. They cannot own their own terrorists, that would scare the white suburbanites they are trying to make scared of the Brown Menace®. But they certainly can cheer them on, can’t they?

[milliefink]

August 30, 2020 (Sunday)

Lots of folks are finally paying attention to the rise of authoritarianism here in the U.S. They are right to be concerned.

Scholars have seen worrisome signs all along. Trump has dismissed nonpartisan career officials and replaced them with loyalists. He has fired the independent inspectors general. He denies Congress’s right and duty to investigate members of the Executive Branch. He has used the Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement officers of the Executive Branch as a private army. He has packed the courts. He has used the government to advance the interests of himself and his family, which he has installed into government positions. He has solicited help from foreign governments to get reelected. And he and his cronies are trying to undermine our election by preemptively saying the Democrats are committing fraud and by slowing down mail service when voters need to be able to mail in their ballots.

Now, Trump is clearly trying to change the national narrative from his disastrous response to the coronavirus and the economic crash to the idea that he alone can protect white Americans from their dangerous Black neighbors.

Stoking violence is a key tool in the authoritarian’s toolkit. The idea is to increase civil disorder. As violence increases, people will turn to a leader who promises “LAW & ORDER,” as Trump keeps tweeting. Once firmly in power, an authoritarian can then put down his opponents with the argument that they are dangerous criminals.

Trump is advancing just such a strategy. He and members of his administration refuse to condemn violence, and insist that legitimate protesters are all “Antifa.” They are blaming Democrats and “liberal politicians and their incompetent policies” for violent protests, although most of the injuries at the protests have been caused by police or by rightwing thugs. They are stoking white people’s fear of their Black neighbors, with Trump going so far as to talk of how he will keep low-income housing from the suburbs to protect the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.”

And they are going on the offensive, demanding that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden condemn the violence that they insist comes from protesters, while Trump is actually inciting it from rioters on the right. It is gaslighting at its finest.

America has seen this pattern before. Secessionist leaders before the Civil War needed badly to distract southern white farmers, who were falling behind in an economic system that concentrated wealth at the top, and they howled that northerners were assaulting white southerners and wanted to stamp out their way of life, based in human enslavement. They refused to permit any alternative information to reach their voters. And in the end, they succeeded in rallying their supporters to war.

But that does not have to happen here, now. We can see exactly what Trump is doing, and refuse to embrace it. Democratic leadership is calling out Trump for “willfully fanning the flames of this violence,” as Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) put it today.

Today Biden released a statement saying “the deadly violence we saw overnight in Portland is unacceptable. Shooting in the streets of a great American city is unacceptable. I condemn this violence unequivocally. I condemn violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right. And I challenge Donald Trump to do the same…. We must not become a country at war with ourselves. A country that accepts the killing of fellow Americans who do not agree with you. A country that vows vengeance toward one another….”

“As a country,” he continued, “we must condemn the incitement of hate and resentment that led to this deadly clash…. What does President Trump think will happen when he continues to insist on fanning the flames of hate and division in our society and using the politics of fear to whip up his supporters? He is recklessly encouraging violence…. The job of a President is to lower the temperature. To bring people who disagree with one another together. To make life better for all Americans, not just those who agree with us, support us, or vote for us.”

In Wisconsin, still reeling from the shooting of Jacob Blake in the back by law enforcement officers, the Lt. Governor cited Trump’s “incendiary remarks” and attempts to create division and said that Trump should not come to Kenosha on Tuesday as he currently plans. Governor Tony Evers (D) agreed, as did Kenosha’s mayor. Evers wrote: “I, along with other community leaders who have reached out, are concerned about what your presence will mean for Kenosha and our state. I am concerned your presence will only hinder our healing. I am concerned your presence will only delay our work to overcome division and move forward together.”

It is important to remember that Trump’s apparent power play is a desperate move.

More than 180,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 on his watch. We have far more deaths per capita than other advanced countries, and we still have no national testing program. The White House is now apparently taking the position that we will all just have to live with the disease and that schools and businesses should simply reopen, but Americans are not happy about Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. Today he tried to help his numbers by retweeting a thread from a far-right website saying that, in fact, only around 9000 people have died in the U.S. of Covid-19, because the rest had co-morbidities and were going to die anyway. The argument is so far off the mark that Twitter flagged it for violating rules.

Polls show Trump continuing to lag behind Biden by significant numbers. Fifty-nine percent of Americans disapproved of the programming at the Republican National Convention, and he saw no bounce from it. Trump’s overall approval rating is a dismal 31%.

And Trump remains dogged by tell-all books and lawsuits that threaten to reveal criminality. Today, the New York Times ran a story by Michael S. Schmidt, a reporter covering national security and federal elections for the New York Times. Schmidt has a book coming out on Tuesday. It reveals that in 2017 former deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein limited Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Rosenstein kept Mueller from exploring Trump’s own relationship with Russia while he was investigating Russia’s efforts to get Trump elected and Trump’s efforts to stop the inquiry. Rosenstein limited Mueller to conducting a criminal investigation and did not permit him to expand his inquiries.

Rosenstein did not tell the acting Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, that he had taken an investigation of Trump himself off the table, and McCabe did not realize it had happened. McCabe said that he was “surprised and disappointed” to hear this news, and had he known, he would have had the FBI do such an investigation “because we had information that indicated a national security threat might exist, specifically a counterintelligence threat involving the president and Russia. I expected that issue and issues related to it would be fully examined by the special counsel team.” McCabe noted that the issue at hand “was first and foremost a counterintelligence case…. Could the president actually be the point of coordination between the campaign and the Russian government? Could the president actually be maintaining some sort of inappropriate relationship with our most significant adversary in the world?”

Meanwhile, Senator Tammy Duckworth is keeping a tally of how many days it’s been since we learned that Russia offered bounties to Taliban-linked fighters for killing U.S. or allied soldiers in Afghanistan. Trump has refused to respond to that intelligence.

Russian troops appear to be trying to pick a fight with U.S. soldiers in northeastern Syria, the region from which the U.S. abruptly withdrew last fall. After smaller incidents, on Tuesday, a Russian convoy sideswiped a U.S. vehicle and a Russian helicopter buzzed the convoy. Seven U.S. soldiers were injured, none seriously. The Pentagon blamed Russian forces for “deliberately provocative and aggressive behavior.” A bipartisan group of lawmakers called on the White House to “clearly communicate to the highest levels of the Russian government and military that actions like this will not be tolerated,” but so far, Trump has said nothing.

[milliefink]

August 31, 2020 (Monday)

A bird’s eye view of the country today sees a president seeming to slide off the rails. Trump is exaggerating the violence in cities to the point of caricature, while his supporters outright lie to try to advance his candidacy. On Thursday, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway tipped the president’s hand on “Fox and Friends” when she said that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for” a candidate running on “law and order.”

In the wake of the Republican National Convention, which failed to boost his candidacy, Trump has been tweeting at an intense pace. Between 5:49 am and 8:04 am on Sunday, he tweeted or retweeted 89 messages, many of them inflaming the conflicts between protesters and his supporters. He retweeted a post from One America News claiming that “According to the mainstream media, the riots & extreme violence are completely unorganized. However, it appears this coup attempt is led by a well funded network of anarchists trying to take down the President.”

Yesterday, the president called the participants in the Portland “Trump cruise rally” “GREAT PATRIOTS!” and today called them “peaceful,” despite the fact they were shooting paintballs and pepper spray and driving vehicles into crowds. Today the president condemned what he called “the radical left,” but refused to condemn Trump supporter Kyle Rittenhouse, the seventeen-year-old who allegedly shot and killed two people and wounded a third with a friend’s AR-15 rifle (meaning Rittenhouse had it illegally) in Kenosha, Wisconsin last week. Trump suggested Rittenhouse, who has been charged with homicide, was “very violently attacked” by demonstrators (video does not indicate this). Trump supporters, including Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, have also defended Rittenhouse.

This afternoon, Trump claimed that Portland, Oregon “is ablaze.” Josh Campbell, a CNN law enforcement correspondent on the ground in Portland and a former FBI supervisory special agent, called this “a lie.”

Campbell told CNN: “Portland is not a city under siege. Today, I went to a Starbucks downtown, ate lunch at one of the city’s famous downtown food trucks, and bought a new pair of shoes at the mall. As I write this, I’m looking out of my hotel room at a bike tour riding by outside on the downtown street…. To be sure, there have been protests – peaceful during the daytime, and some turning violent at night – for over 90 days, but the rioting has largely been confined to one city block downtown near the federal courthouse. Last night, protesters showed up at a police precinct a few miles from downtown and were dispersed by police after some protesters started throwing eggs and rocks at police cars. There has been periodic, localized violence, but nothing widespread.”

Portland firefighter Lt. Rich Chatman agreed: “WE ARE NOT ABLAZE IN PORTLAND,” he texted to CNN reporter Daniel Dale. “There is a very isolated pocket of demonstrations that have involved fire… none of which have been substantial enough to need more than 1 fire engine.”

Trump’s vision of the world is getting more and more conspiratorial. Tonight in an interview with Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham, he claimed that “people that are in the dark shadows” are controlling Biden. He claimed this weekend there was an airplane full of “thugs” in “black uniforms,” out “to do big damage.” When Ingraham pressed for more information, he said: “I’ll tell you sometime but it’s under investigation.” Ingraham said: “That sounds like conspiracy theory.”

To push these ideas, Trump and his people are deliberately constructing a false narrative.

Trump’s YouTube channel is now home to a video featured at the Republican National Convention on Monday, showing rioting and a city in flames and implying those scenes are America in the past several months. In the film, one sister tells another that “This is a taste of Biden’s America,” as photos and videos of violence play. “The rioting, the crime. Freedom is at stake now and this is going to be the most important election of our lifetime.” In fact, the video is from Barcelona, Spain, in 2019.

Twitter has had to begin displaying warning labels on videos that have been “quote tweeted” (meaning users don’t simply retweet them, they add their own words, first), after leading Republican officials have circulated deceptively altered or edited videos, designed to hurt Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s candidacy.

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise tweeted a video that spliced together footage from an conversation between Biden and progressive activist Ady Barkan, who speaks with an artificial voice because he has ALS. The video added words to what Barkan actually said to make it sound as if the two were agreeing to defund police departments (in fact, Biden has proposed to increase police funding to include more money for “social workers, psychologists, people who in fact can handle those god-awful problems that a cop has to have four degrees to handle”). To the video, Scalise added “No police. Mob rule. Total chaos. That’s the result of the Democrat agenda.”

Barkan tweeted to Scalise: “These are not my words. I have lost my ability to speak, but not my agency or my thoughts. You and your team have doctored my words for your own political gain. Please remove this video immediately. You owe the entire disability community an apology.” Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo was angry on Barkan’s behalf: “[Steve Scalise] you’re a disgrace. Who even imagines the depravity of doctoring the words of a man robbed of his voice by ALS let alone stoops to do it” he tweeted.

Twitter labeled the tweet with a warning and, under pressure, Scalise took it down, but not before tweeting: “While Joe Biden clearly said ‘yes,’ twice, to the question of his support to redirect money away from police, we will honor the request of [Barkan] and remove the portion of his interview from our video."

Today, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications and Director of Social Media Dan Scavino also posted a manipulated video, this one supposedly showing Biden falling asleep during a live television interview. But it was a mix of an old video of singer Harry Belafonte, apparently napping before an interview while technical glitches were worked out, and Biden looking downward for a moment. Twitter had to break out another warning, and Belafonte simply said: “They keep stooping lower and lower. A technical glitch in an interview I did nine years ago now becomes another one of their lies, more of their fake news. I beg every sane American: please vote them out. I knew many who gave their life for the right to vote. Never has it been so vital to exercise that right.”

The Trump campaign wasn’t done yet, though: on Monday it also tweeted a clip of Biden saying “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.” But in fact, when he said that, Biden was quoting the president and vice president. The full quotation was: “Trump and Pence are running on this, and I find it fascinating: Quote, ‘You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.’ And what’s their proof? The violence we’re seeing in Donald Trump’s America.”

Apparently trying to link Biden to a radical left, Trump continues to demand that Biden must condemn “the Anarchists, Thugs & Agitators in ANTIFA,” and Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has tried to tie Biden to “the Marxist Left.” It would be a stretch to link the famously moderate Biden with any sort of far left in America in any case, but, in fact, Biden has repeatedly condemned violence across the board. “I condemn violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right,” he said Sunday. Today he added: “I want to make it absolutely clear…. Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. . . . It’s lawlessness, plain and simple, and those who do it should be prosecuted. Violence will not bring change, it’ll only bring destruction. It’s wrong in every way.”

Biden accused Trump of “fanning the flames of hate and division in our society and using the politics of fear to whip up his supporters.”

The message that Trump is responsible for the unrest in the country is resonating with voters. A Military Times poll showed that almost 74% of active duty military personnel opposed Trump’s desire to use them against civil unrest in urban areas, while only 22% supported that idea. That opposition seems to be translating to voting preferences: 41.3% of active duty military personnel support Biden in the upcoming election, while 37.4 support Trump.

[LutherBlisset]

@milliefink

37.4 support Trump.

[Narrator] How this comes to be is still beyond comprehension for at least 70.5 % of the population of Europe.

[milliefink]

September 1, 2020 (Tuesday)

The president went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, today, against the wishes of both the governor and the Kenosha mayor, ostensibly to express sympathy, but really to try to change the narrative from the almost 185,000 Americans dead from the coronavirus and more than 6 million infected.

I want to pause here for a second. I try to write these Letters as if they are sort of a flowing report on the news. But I just can’t flow over this number once again. We have lost almost 185,000 people to Covid-19. That number is a 9-11 attack every day for two months. It is flying a full 737 airplane into a mountain every single day for more than two years. I cannot fathom why combatting this disease is not an all-hands-on-deck national emergency.

Anyway, Trump was in Kenosha to change the subject from coronavirus and the stumbling economy to the idea that somehow the unrest in cities is the fault of Democrats, and to hammer home his message that he will be the candidate of “law and order.”

That message didn’t necessarily play well with people there. Trump wanted a photo-op in front of a burned-out camera shop, but the owner, Tom Gram, refused to participate because he said Trump was using his tragedy for his own political gain. “I think everything he does turns into a circus and I just didn’t want to be involved in it,” Gram said. He was surprised when Trump nonetheless showed up with the previous owner of the store, and implied it was still his. “I just appreciate President Trump coming today, everybody here does,” the former owner said. “We’re so thankful we got the federal troops here. Once they got here things did calm down quite a bit.” Gram’s response? “I think he needs to bring this country together rather than to divide it.”

The idea that the unrest in cities is the fault of Democrats is a hard sell, because of course Trump, not Joe Biden, is currently president, and it is terribly hard to show images of today’s America and warn that what someone is seeing is what will happen in the future if a different president takes office.

The visit did not garner the news attention it might otherwise have done, first because of the story from last night’s interview by Laura Ingraham of the president, in which he alleged that a plane full of “thugs” wearing “black uniforms” were secretly directing Biden. This is apparently a reworking of an online rumor from June that suggested “Antifa” was coming to rural towns.

Even more headline-grabbing today, though, was the story from a new book written by New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt saying that Vice President Mike Pence had been asked to stand by, possibly to assume presidential powers, when Trump was rushed to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last November. That story broke last night and it was not, it seemed to me, well enough sourced to mention it in these letters. And there it might have stood, except for the fact that Trump could not seem to help himself from tweeting about it repeatedly today, giving it far more credence than it would otherwise have had.

The initial story did not suggest a diagnosis for the president in that hasty visit, but Trump provided one himself: “It never ends! Now they are trying to say that your favorite President, me, went to Walter Reed Medical Center, having suffered a series of mini-strokes. Never happened to THIS candidate - FAKE NEWS. Perhaps they are referring to another candidate from another Party!”

Suddenly, mini-strokes, which in my layman’s understanding are brief interruptions of blood to the brain or spinal cord, were on the table. Midday, Trump tried to suggest that stories that he was trying to hide a mini-stroke were either fake or really about Biden. Then, tonight at 10:27, he tweeted: “Mike Pence was never put on standby, & there were no mini-strokes. This is just more Fake News by [CNN], a phony story. The reason for the visit to Walter Reed, together with the full press pool, was to complete my yearly physical. Short visit, then returned (with press) to W.H…”

When Bret Baier of the Fox News Channel asked Pence about the event, Pence said he didn’t “recall” if he had been asked to be on standby.

There was other news as well.

The White House has announced that the U.S. will not join a group of more than 170 countries who agree to develop, manufacture, and distribute fairly a coronavirus vaccine. Germany, Japan, and the European Union are all on board with the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax) Facility, but the U.S. is going it alone. The White House says it objects to partnering with the World Health Organization (WHO) on which it has tried to pin the blame for our government’s languid response to the coronavirus, saying WHO leaders were too ready to accept China’s reassurances about the dangers of the virus.

White House spokesman Judd Deere said, “The United States will continue to engage our international partners to ensure we defeat this virus, but we will not be constrained by multilateral organizations influenced by the corrupt World Health Organization and China.” This decision means that the U.S. will not have access to vaccines developed within the pool, but Trump is betting that the U.S. will come up with its own vaccine, first. Assistant Professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine told Emily Rauhala and Yasmeen Abutableb of the Washington Post that opting out of Covax was like opting out of an insurance policy. “Just from a simple risk-management perspective, this [decision] is shortsighted,” she said.

There are also legal decisions in the news. Yesterday, a federal appeals court turned down the request of Michael Flynn and the Department of Justice to shut down Flynn’s case. Trump’s former National Security Advisor, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak shortly before Trump took office. But between that plea and his sentencing, Trump loyalist William Barr took over as Attorney General, putting him in charge of the Justice Department.

In May, the Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss the case against Flynn, arguing that his lies had not been material to the inquiry in which he made them. That inquiry was about Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Faced with the unusual situation of the DOJ dropping a case when the defendant had already pleaded guilty, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan held the case to let others weigh in. He also appointed a retired judge, U.S. District Judge John Gleeson, to present arguments against the dismissal, and planned a hearing on the case. In June, Gleeson said the DOJ’s argument for dismissing the case was a pretext, and that “there is clear evidence of a gross abuse of prosecutorial power.” In June, the DOJ replied that even if Gleeson was right, the DOJ had the authority to drop the case anyway. In June an appellate court panel headed by a Trump appointee agreed to grant the DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case, but Sullivan filed a petition to have the entire court hear it.

It did, and on August 31, it ruled 8-2 to deny the request to dismiss the case. It also left Sullivan in charge of it, permitting him to conduct his hearing. According to constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, emeritus professor at Harvard Law School, Sullivan’s exploration of why Barr tried to get the case dismissed will be at least as important as what it uncovers in its examination of whether Flynn should be permitted to withdraw his two guilty pleas.

[LutherBlisset]

@milliefink

Germany, Japan, and the European Union

Weird way of putting it.

COVAX lists 172 countries, the list of countries involved in nine candidate vaccines mentions the US on four candidates, China on two, France, Germany, the UK, Austria and Australia on each one candidate. Only one US and one UK candidate vaccine are listed as in phase III.

92 economies will be supported by the COVAX Advance Market Committment.

The US pulling out means they are no longer willing to use a multilateral agreement to support those 92 economies.

Even if they try to help some of those economies using bilateral agreements, this is, in essence, America first so fuck all the rest of you poor people.

That was to be expected, but it still is mind-blowing.

[fnordius]

Yeah, it’s a small thing, but listing Germany apart from the European Union is like “California, Japan and the United States”.

[LutherBlisset]

Seems like an apt comparison. Both are a bit at odds with the Union in some bits, both are rather influential in some domains - and both are rather helpless when the rest screws up.

[DukeTrout]

@milliefink

When Bret Baier of the Fox News Channel asked Pence about the event, Pence said he didn’t “recall” if he had been asked to be on standby.

So it was Pence who had the mini-strokes? /s

@milliefink

White House spokesman Judd Deere said

The White House hired a cartoon tractor from a bad Cars knockoff as spokesman? Actually, that makes more sense than most of the news about this administration.

[robertmckenna]

UK already said they don’t support an equitable distribution of any vaccine earlier in the summer so absolutely on brand.

[milliefink]

September 2, 2020 (Wednesday)

As I wade through the flood of news today, all of it trying to tilt the playing field toward Trump in the upcoming election, it strikes me there is an elephant in the room that we really need to identify: why is Trump so hell-bent on reelection? He has made it clear he doesn’t particularly like the job. He has no real goals for a second term. He feels victimized by the media and his opponents. He prefers Florida to Washington, D.C., and he really likes to golf. He claims to be wealthy enough to do whatever he wants. So why on earth is he apparently determined to bend our democracy to the point of breaking in order to win reelection to a job he doesn’t seem to want to do?

According to today’s news, Trump’s acting Director of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, recently buried the release of a bulletin from the Intelligence Community warning that Russians were trying to undermine Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden by saying he is deteriorating mentally. The bulletin was produced for federal, state, and local law enforcement, but DHS Chief of Staff John Gountanis stopped the distribution of the bulletin and referred it to Wolf. It disappeared. Congress will not be able to ask about what happened because on Saturday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced it would no longer brief Congress in person on election security.

A DHS spokesperson said the bulletin had been pulled because it had not met the agency’s standards, but analysts who produced it said they had determined with “high confidence” that the disinformation effort was taking place. Trump, of course, has tried repeatedly to establish the idea that Biden, who stutters, is slipping mentally.

Although the administration tried to bury this intelligence committee report about actual Russian interference in the election, today Attorney General William Barr told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer a fake story. He said that hostile foreign powers could send thousands of mail-in ballots to this year’s election, creating massive voter fraud. When pressed, Barr admitted there was no evidence for such a claim. The U.S. Intelligence Community has no evidence that foreign countries are trying to manipulate mail-in ballots.

Trump is also continuing his attacks on mail-in votes, insisting they will usher in voter fraud despite their widespread previous use that showed no evidence of fraud, and despite the fact that the president himself votes by mail. Today, in North Carolina, he urged people to vote twice in the November election, once by mail and once in person, to test the validity of the election. Voting twice is illegal under federal law. Under North Carolina state law, it is also illegal to induce someone to vote twice.

On Monday, we learned that Barr has recently replaced the head of the Office of Law and Policy, a Justice Department office that oversees the FBI’s intelligence-gathering activities. Barr has removed Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brad Wiegmann, a 23-year career public servant, and replaced him with 36-year-old Kellen Dwyer, a prosecutor who made headlines two years ago when he accidentally revealed that the U.S. government had indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The timing of this replacement, just before the election, might reflect Barr’s planned release of a report of his own on the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Barr has dispatched his own investigator to counter the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Senate established that the investigation was legitimate, and that Russia did, in fact, intervene in the 2016 election to bolster Trump.

Remember, that while world leaders are condemning Russia for the recent poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Trump has still not commented on it. Neither has he addressed the story that Russia offered bounties to Taliban-linked fighters to kill U.S. and allied soldiers in Afghanistan, nor the growing Russian aggression toward U.S. troops in Syria.

There is yet another possible attempt to skew the election on the horizon. Led by Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), federal health officials have told states to get ready to distribute a coronavirus vaccine by November. Vaccine-makers say this timing is impossible, and that they will not know by then if their vaccines, which are currently in development, are safe and effective. The chief of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Stephen Hahn, insists that the agency won’t approve a vaccine simply to help Trump get reelected, but the FDA’s recent authorization of emergency use of convalescent plasma despite concerns about its effectiveness has worried public health experts. In any case, Redfield’s letter suggests the CDC might authorize a vaccine itself through its emergency powers.

Trump is also pushing hard on the idea that Democrats have created a crisis of violence in the country and he is the one advocating “Law & Order,” as he keeps tweeting.

On CNN today, White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley blamed Democrats for the shooting a week ago in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that took two lives and wounded a third person. Seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly crossed state lines with an AR-15-style gun that was illegally in his possession and, after scuffling with some people, opened fire. Gidley insisted that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. He blamed Democrats for restraining the police, leading citizens to have to step in. “If you don’t allow police to do their job then the American people have to defend themselves in some way.” While Gidley said he was not defending vigilantes, it sure sounded like he was inciting violence. He noted that “we have a Second Amendment in this country” and warned that Democrats were stripping “cops” of their ability to protect us, leaving American families “in grave danger.”

Of course, protests against police have been driven not by a general disregard for law enforcement, but rather by such horrors as the murder of George Floyd by Milwaukee police officer Derek Chauvin, who casually knelt on Floyd’s neck until he died; the murder of Breonna Taylor of Louisville, Kentucky, shot in her bed by police looking for her ex-boyfriend; and, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by the shooting of Jacob Blake seven times in the back as he reached for his car door. Leading Democrats, including Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, have called not for getting rid of police departments, but rather for addressing what appears to be deadly racism within some of them. Biden has actually called for increasing funding to help law enforcement officers handle functions outside the normal expectations of a police force.

The suggestion that Democrats are responsible for a young man’s deadly decision to carry a friend’s weapon to a city in another state is a campaign ploy, and today the president made another such ploy when he signed a memo that sets out to restrict federal money from going to what the White House calls “anarchist jurisdictions.” It orders the Office of Management and Budget to examine what federal funding goes to cities where Trump insists—despite their adamant denials—that Democrats want to “defund” police. The memo leaves Trump loyalist Attorney General William Barr in charge of determining which cities fall into this category according to “any… factors the Attorney General deems appropriate.” The memo does spell out certain parameters. A so-called “anarchist jurisdiction” is defined as one that “disempowers or defunds police departments” or one that “unreasonably refuses to accept offers of law enforcement assistance from the Federal Government.” The memo specifically lists Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Washington, D.C.; and New York City as “anarchist jurisdictions.”

The memo says: “My Administration will not allow Federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones…. It is imperative that the Federal Government review the use of Federal funds by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities.” “This is a campaign document coming out of the White House,” said Sam Berger, a former OMB official. “Any actual restriction on funding in court will immediately be sued and almost certainly struck down.”

Trump’s effort to convince Americans that he is defending law and order does not appear to be working. In Politico, JR Ross, an expert on Wisconsin Politics, noted that Trump’s fearmongering isn’t working because “after such a tense, violent summer, the protesters might look bad, but Trump, and his law-and-order supporters, don’t look much better.”

According to pollster Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, when asked which candidate would “make you feel more safe or less safe,” 35% of those polled said Trump made them feel more safe, while 50% said less safe. Forty-two percent said Biden made them feel more safe while 40% said he made them feel less safe.

[milliefink]

September 3, 2020 (Thursday)

Tonight, The Atlantic published a story by Jeffrey Goldberg detailing Trump’s contempt for military service and the self-sacrifice of those killed in the line of duty. According to the story, sourced by interviews with military leaders and people close to Trump, “the president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and,” in 2018, asked that wounded veterans be kept out of a military parade “on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. ‘Nobody wants to see that,’ he said.”

Goldberg details Trump’s fixation on the late Arizona Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese after his plane was shot down in 1967, recounting the times in which Trump referred to McCain as a “loser,” which were captured both in tweets and in recordings. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain in 2015. “I like people who weren’t captured.” Trump received five deferments from service in Vietnam because a doctor stated he suffered from bone spurs in his feet. In 2016, Trump’s campaign said the medical issue was temporary.

Goldberg writes that Trump “finds the notion of military service difficult to understand, and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible.” He referred to those soldiers killed at Belleau Wood, where U.S. soldiers and their allies stopped the German advance toward Paris in 1918 during World War I, as “suckers” and “losers.”

In 2017, on Memorial Day, Trump and then-director of Homeland Security John Kelly (he would soon be named White House Chief of Staff) visited Arlington National Cemetery together. They went to the section of the cemetery where Kelly’s son Robert, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps who was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, lies buried. Trump turned to Kelly and said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

One of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told Goldberg: “He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself…. He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.” Further, he said, Trump “can’t imagine anyone else’s pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a fallen marine on Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.”

This story is short, well-written, and such a bombshell that the White House pushed back immediately. Shortly after The Atlantic posted the story, White House spokesperson Alyssa Farah emailed Goldberg a statement saying: “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard. He’s demonstrated his commitment to them at every turn: delivering on his promise to give our troops a much needed pay raise, increasing military spending, signing critical veterans reforms, and supporting military spouses. This has no basis in fact.” (Trump frequently boasts that he gave members of the military their first pay raise in ten years. This is untrue: military members have gotten a pay raise every year since 1961.)

Speaking to reporters after a campaign trip to Pennsylvania, Trump said the article was a “disgrace” and the people who spoke to Goldberg “lowlifes.” “I would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes,” he said. “There is nobody that respects them more. So, I just think it’s a horrible, horrible thing.”

Later, Trump tweeted of his respect for McCain. “I never called… John a loser,” —it is both on tape and on Twitter that he did— “and swear on whatever, or whoever, I was asked to swear on, that I never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES. This is more made up Fake News given by disgusting & jealous failures in a disgraceful attempt to influence the 2020 Election!”

Trump is reacting with such panic because this is indeed a story that will draw attention before the election. Americans care about respect for our troops. Other media outlets picked up the story almost instantly. It is spreading far and wide.

Trump’s contempt for the troops and inability to recognize their sacrifice, outlined in Goldberg’s story, almost exactly echoes one of Trump’s very first actions as president and commander in chief. On January 21, 2017, Trump went to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency and spoke in front of the Wall of Heroes, stars carved into marble, one for each of the 117 CIA agents who have died serving America. Two of those stars are for Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, both former Navy SEALs killed in the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

In front of that wall, considered hallowed ground by CIA employees, to an audience of hand-picked attendees, Trump launched one of his now-trademark speeches. He complained about the unfair media, lashed out at his critics, and boasted about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Former CIA Director John Brennan called that speech, in that location, “despicable.”

But that story faded quickly. Three and a half years ago, we did not yet know what it meant to be ruled by a man who does not understand the concept of, as Kelly’s friend put it, “doing something for someone other than himself… when there’s no direct personal gain to be had.” Now we do.

While the story from January 2017 did not last, this one seems to be catching fire.