Trump enters the stage

Why aren’t editorial boards screaming: Trump has to go?

By Joe Lockhart

Updated 8:18 PM EDT, Sun May 10, 2020

Editor’s Note: (Joe Lockhart is a CNN political analyst. He was the White House press secretary from 1998-2000 in President Bill Clinton’s administration. He co-hosts the podcast “Words Matter.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.)

(CNN)By the height of the Watergate scandal in 1974, virtually every major newspaper in America had called for President Richard Nixon’s resignation. During the investigation and impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, more than 100 newspapers called for him to resign.

Joe Lockhart

But President Donald J. Trump? He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody… and not a single major daily newspaper would call for his resignation. I admit that – just like the original Trump quote it references – that Fifth Avenue statement is a bit hyperbolic, but think about it:

After three years of political and actual carnage under Trump, including Robert Mueller’s description of acts that amounted to, he told Congress, obstruction of justice; Trump’s “fine people on both sides” reaction to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville where a counter-protester was killed; his rampant conflicts of interest and credible accusations of his violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution; his close to 17,000 false statements; a travel ban that primarily targets mostly Muslim-majority countries; impeachment for alleged extortion of a foreign government (he was acquitted in the Republican Senate), and the gross mishandling of a deadly pandemic, you’d think somebody on an editorial board might say it’s time for the President to leave.

But this has not happened. Why not?

Not knowing the answer, I set out to talk to a lot of smart people to find out why.

I did this because history would lead you to believe that most of the editorial boards of America’s newspapers/digital sites would have stepped up to that plate already. To be clear, editorial boards are the group of writers and editors behind the daily editorials on the news – appearing in the editorial pages – that reflect the newspaper’s values. These are separate from the “op-eds” commissioned by opinion editors from outside writers that reflect a range of views – often at odds with those of the editorial board.

Pulling no punches on Nixon and Clinton

According to United Press International, by August of 1974, almost every major daily newspaper had called for President Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal. The most prominent exception was the New York Times, which argued that it was the impeachment process that should determine the fate of the President.

The Wall Street Journal wrote “resignation to insure the orderly transfer of power is fitting, we emphasize only because impeachment and conviction would otherwise be certain.” The Chicago Tribune argued, “We are appalled. We saw the public man in his first Administration and we were impressed. We now see a man who, in the words of his old friend and defender, Senator Hugh Scott, is ‘shabby, immoral and disgusting.’ The key word here is immoral.”

The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment for Nixon and sent them to the House; he resigned before they could vote on them.

Twenty-four years later, in 1998, more than 100 newspapers called for the resignation of President Bill Clinton, both during the Kenneth Starr investigation and the subsequent impeachment trial for obstruction of justice and perjury, over his affair with a White House intern.

The editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jane Eisner, told the New York Times that her paper debated the issue fiercely: "Ms. Eisner said she was not expecting the feelings of profound exhaustion and ‘nausea’ she experienced when finally, after two and a half hours of anguished arguments, Chris Satullo, the deputy editorial page editor, went to write the Sunday editorial that began with the words ‘Bill Clinton should resign.’ "

Peter R. Bronson, then-editorial page editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, told the Times, "‘As soon as we saw the Starr report and got knee deep, we said, ‘This really smells, we’ve seen enough, the evidence is compelling and damning,’’’ Mr. Bronson said.

The ground shifts

So, what changed between 1998 and 2020? Both John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel and Carl Bernstein, the famed reporter who with Bob Woodward broke news in the Washington Post of the Watergate coverup, have called Trump’s Ukraine scandal far worse than anything in Watergate.

And Trump’s offenses were much more far reaching than Clinton’s: he used American foreign policy to leverage a political favor, and he’s also certainly had a fair share of tawdry scandals

What has changed?

Just about everything, it seems, beginning with the media: the explosion of 24/7 news networks and the endless horizon of internet-on-demand caused some newspapers to fold or shrink and lose relevance. The lucky few left standing wobbled through a decade trying to claw their way back into news dominance. Papers lost advertisers, lost readers and increasingly lost influence with the public, particularly the editorial pages: so much opinion journalism was readily available from so many other new online sources.

And there also was a shifting of standards post-Clinton that held politicians to a different moral standing than in the past. Even given the multitude of Trump’s scandals and failings, only two mid-sized dailies, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Connecticut Post have been willing to call for President Donald Trump’s resignation (as far as I could find in an exhaustive search).

And while a handful of large-newspaper editorial boards called for his impeachment, I could find only one – the LA Times – that called for his removal (and with a headline that covered all the bases: “Convict and remove President Trump – and disqualify him from ever holding office again”).

Why have so many editorial pages railed – over and over – against Trump’s behavior in the most vehement terms, through scandal, impeachment, botched pandemic response and much more, and yet they won’t call for him to go?

Editorial boards’ new reluctance

I put this question to more than a dozen experts, media columnists, editorial writers, academics and White House reporters. What emerged was not one simple explanation, as journalism professor Jay Rosen of New York University explained it, but a number of factors that have discouraged editorial pages around the country from taking this bold step.

Central to these, according to John Avlon, a senior political analyst at CNN and the former editor in chief of the Daily Beast, is that “the reality of the hardened partisanship is beyond reason. We’ve become really unmoored from our best civic traditions.” And one of our best civic traditions used to be holding political leaders to account – demanding, in extreme situations, that they resign.

Almost everyone I talked to mentioned timing: editorial boards’ reluctance to urge Trump to resign so close to the election. One editor (who preferred to remain anonymous) at a major daily said his editorial board came close to calling for Trump’s ouster during his impeachment, but added “my question is why now, when the election will be decided in six months.”

On one level that argument makes sense: the voters should have the final say on the President’s future. But it misses the mark, given that many editorial pages have already excoriated, for example, the President’s handling of the pandemic, a tragedy that has cost more than 78,000 American lives so far, without addressing his fitness to continue to serve. Any CEO who was deemed responsible for allowing a massive tragedy to unfold would be immediately called upon to resign or be fired, even if he or she were six months from retirement.

When I asked my question of Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist for the Washington Post and former public editor of the New York Times, she responded by speculating, or spit-balling, as she called it: “It may have something to do with the knowledge that such a call would not be effective but would also deepen the rampant polarizations among citizens. And for some, it would exacerbate the resentment of the traditional press, if that’s even possible at this point.”

Loss of relevance in new media landscape?

Indeed, Sullivan’s speculation captured the consensus of everyone I talked to. Jonathan Karl, the chief White House correspondent for ABC News, was one of them. He told me “perhaps it’s the fact that there is zero percent [chance] he (Trump) would do it [resign] or that any in his party would ask him to do it.” He compared the situation to Clinton, where many in the press thought he might resign and many editorial pages chimed in with their own calls.

Karl makes an important point: although there was no chance Clinton was going to resign (I know that because I was there), there was a chance that members of his own party might demand it, something I also know from my personal experience then.

Trump’s support for Michigan protesters sends a dangerous message

Karl’s futility argument resonates, in part due to the polarization Sullivan referenced above. The only problem with his theory is that editorial pages take positions every day knowing that they will fail to persuade politicians – or the public – most of the time.

In defense of editorial pages’ recent reticence, many believe their editorials have less impact anyway in the diffuse new-media environment of today and may want to avoid highlighting that by taking a public stand – and being shown as ineffectual or out of touch. In the 2016 campaign, the overwhelming majority of newspapers endorsed Hillary Clinton, or chose not to endorse at all. We know how that turned out. That has led, in part, to a trend among many newspapers to discontinue endorsing candidates in elections.

The changing nature and business models of local papers also play a role. Jay Rosen from NYU again: “Local newspapers are weaker institutions, they have declined a lot in quality, reach and authority. This gives some of them less confidence in their voice, especially in regions where they know they will get push-back.” Both Rosen and Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, pointed to the budget cuts often hitting editorial pages even before they hit reporters. What’s more, the internet, which if nothing else is full of opinion, has diluted the impact of major news organizations’ editorial pages, making them less relevant.

But the answer to my questions goes beyond the news media’s effectiveness or its business models. It has a lot to do with Trump himself – and the tactics of the right wing of American politics.

The power of the right

Kurt Bardella, a former Republican who served as the spokesman for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, put it this way: “Donald Trump and his right wing allies have invested so much time in creating the false narrative that the mainstream media is fake and the enemy of the people. I think the media falls into their trap of not wanting to go down a certain path because they’re worried about being labeled biased or partisan.”

Jay Rosen has a similar take, saying the right wing’s “working the refs” strategy works. But he goes further: “You cannot overlook the level of flak, push-back and general hatred that newspaper editors get from Trump supporters for anything like this… editors defy these attacks every day, but it can make you think twice.”

Nearly all the editors and columnists I talked to echoed a certain empathy for editorial page editors and a resignation that nothing was likely to change soon.

But Brian Karem, columnist for Playboy, was less charitable. “Major newspapers are shaky – not on the solid financial ground they were even 10 years ago,” he told me in an email. “They are fearful of losing any more advertisers or readers… they see no need to buck the tide or even join it… We are unlikely to find a Katharine Graham in the age of Donald Trump – though we desperately need one.”

He was referring to the Washington Post publisher who weathered tremendous blow-back when she presided over the paper during the reporting on Watergate that led to Nixon’s resignation.

So, where does this leave us? Have the nation’s editorial boards – with so many of them clearly and frequently expressing no confidence in this President’s ability to do his job – abdicated their duty?

I agree with Professor Rosen’s admonition that there is no simple explanation… and I think my friend Brian Karem is being a bit harsh.

In my view, there is a simple solution to this problem. They should go down fighting. If the President is unfit to lead the country, then say it. And if lives are at risk and our Constitution is being attacked on a regular basis, then it is the duty of our great editorial pages to seek the ultimate remedy – a call for resignation.

Yes, the election is only six months away and voters usually should have the last word. But if the President’s policies are a clear and present danger to Americans, or his behavior – like Clinton’s and Nixon’s – so outside of the agreed upon norms, why aren’t the guardians of truth at the nation’s top editorial pages screaming: He has to go?

© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

{As a postscript, just summarizing the lack of philosophical idealism, that the Foundation was settled very early after the Revolutionary War, the parties were in much more agreement , the synthetic middle much more literally understood as trusted truths.

Within these realms of trustworthiness, rested the accepted rules of law, and it’s sacrosant absolute need, that has not yet been compromised.

There were still possibilities for great compromises, like that of Henry Clay, and the synthesis, and great turbulances whittled down, and hystory smoothed out the fabric of dissent.

Now, there is something real critical in the air, certainly , partisanship and media meddling are merely topical aspects of very basic re-emerging signs with ideas, which better left be covered, if to avoid cataclysmic dangers of universal significance.

It has been pointed out a great difference between knowledge and lead ing, where the latter appears to be consistent with rigorous applications of mostly subliminal repetition of disinformative rote.

The reasons behind them are the usual but forgotten poignant repetitive phrases that we have learned to associate with propaganda: communism, capital , imperialism , but these terms have become vacuous, due to disuse , going back about two generations. But disuse causes the laps of association between the elements which can reconstruct the larger picture that went down, and there is no media which can reconstruct it in terms of black and white, in terms of the basic understanding of the people. The scene of reality just became too complex.

One opinion can negate an opposing one, in such a way, that opposition create a necessary conclusion, even if being unnecessary. The lack of cohesion between necessary and contingent facts accomodates charges of conspiracy, and thus the charge applied produces it by fallacious necessity.

Reality will be constructed out of necessary propaganda , that will set the stage
to construct that reality to confirm it.

This is tantamount to the kind of identifiable truth, which is based on necessary tautology. The deception may be promoted as necessary , for reasons known only to those who actually see and understand the big picture.

That Trump is reading a well scripted narrative, there is little to doubt. All his antics are pure theater, and the critical moment has arrived, to admit, that we are at this juncture witnessing the life and death struggle not merely a ideological fight , but the substantial life force which can support Capital.

For this end, no amount of hedging will suffice, for partisanship can not avoid drawing a line that extends from the late 1800’s to the present in continuum. The mechanics, the machinery is in dire straights, and it is the workings of the whole world, in respect within the contexts of all it’s perimeters that is showing the enormous challenges ahead to enable a favorable succession of powers.

Compromise is out of question now, where criticality has reached an unprecedented level of brevity. At the very basic level, only a dictatorial and simplified application of power can survive a tumult. of such magnitude that can be anticipated, as when the pent up pathos of the past two hundred years of accommodation become transparently dangerous.
All, in furtherance of something as vague as ‘Democracy’

Editorial Boards may surmise the danger hidden there.}

Close:
In terms of successful compromise, a Manifest Destiny as a strong positive motive for finding unity, has whittled down to merely a foregone conclusion.

There is a diminished sense if confidence, trust and the applications of the power of the will in the latter, more a recognition of the automatic effects of recognized clues.

The Guardian - Back to home

Trump-Russia investigation

Trump charges Obama with ‘biggest political crime in American history’

Retweet storm after justice department drops Flynn case

Obama: US ‘rule of law’ is at risk under Trump

Opinion: Under Trump, American exceptionalism means misery

For God and Country: Christian case for Trump is a thin read

Donald Trump continued to fume over the Russia investigation on Sunday, more than a year after special counsel Robert Mueller filed his report without recommending charges against the president but only three days after the justice department said it would drop its case against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.

Kayleigh McEnany - the ‘acceptable’ face of Trumpism who infuriates liberals

“The biggest political crime in American history, by far!” the president wrote in a tweet accompanying a conservative talk show host’s claim that Barack Obama “used his last weeks in office to target incoming officials and sabotage the new administration”.

The tweet echoed previous messages retweeted by Trump, which earned rebukes for relaying conspiracy theories. On Sunday afternoon the president continued to send out a stream of tweets of memes and rightwing talking heads claiming an anti-Trump conspiracy. One tweet by Trump simply read: “OBAMAGATE!”

Trump fired Flynn, a retired general, in early 2017, for lying to Vice-President Mike Pence about conversations with the Russian ambassador regarding sanctions levied by the Obama administration in retaliation for interference in the 2016 election.

The US intelligence community has long held that such efforts were meant to tip the election towards Trump and away from Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.

Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI – which Trump has acknowledged – and co-operated with Mueller, who was appointed to take over the investigation of Russian interference after Trump fired FBI director James Comey.

Mueller did not establish a criminal conspiracy but did lay out extensive links between Trump and Moscow and instances of possible obstruction of justice by the president.

Flynn sought to change his plea while awaiting sentencing and the president championed his case, floating a possible pardon. On Thursday, in an act that stunned the US media, attorney general William Barr said the justice department would drop the case entirel

Trump and his supporters have loudly trumpeted the decision and across Saturday and Sunday the president unleashed a storm of retweets of supporters and conservative commentators attacking targets including Obama, Mueller, Comey and House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff.

The talkshow host retweeted by the president, Buck Sexton, is a former CIA analyst who now hosts a show which he says “speaks truth to power, and cuts through the liberal nonsense coming from the mainstream media”.

In another message retweeted by the president, Sexton called former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe – who Trump fired just short of retirement – “a dishonorable partisan scumbag who has done incalculable damage to the reputation of the FBI and should be sitting in a cell for lying under oath”.

In February, the US justice department said it would not charge McCabe over claims he lied to investigators about a media leak.

Like Comey, McCabe released a book in which he was highly critical of Trump, who he said acted like a mob boss. McCabe also wrote that Trump had unleashed a “strain of insanity” in American public life.

In his own tweets, Trump did not directly address comments by Obama himself which were reported by Yahoo News. The former president told associates the Flynn decision was “the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic – not just institutional norms – but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk”.

But Trump’s anger was evident.

“When are the Fake Journalists,” he wrote on Sunday, “who received unwarranted Pulitzer Prizes for Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Scam, going to turn in their tarnished awards so they can be given to the real journalists who got it right. I’ll give you the names, there are plenty of them!”

The president did not immediately name anyone.

But in 2018 the Pulitzer committee did, awarding its prize for national reporting jointly to the Washington Post and the New York Times for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

Trump has further reason to resent the Pulitzer committee and question its choices.

In 2019, for example, a New York Times team won a Pulitzer for an “exhaustive 18-month investigation of President Donald Trump’s finances that debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges”.

Biden sexual assault claim divides Democrats as Republicans pounce

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, was rewarded for “uncovering President Trump’s secret payoffs to two women during his campaign who claimed to have had affairs with him, and the web of supporters who facilitated the transactions, triggering criminal inquiries and calls for impeachment”.

Trump’s actual impeachment, which he survived at trial in the Senate in February, concerned his attempts to have Ukraine investigate his political rivals. No reporter or news outlet won a 2020 Pulitzer, announced this week, for its coverage of that affair.

Trump’s focus on Sunday remained largely on the Russia investigation despite continuing developments in the coronavirus outbreak, which has infected more than 1.3m Americans and killed nearly 80,000.

With cases confirmed among White House aides close to the president, top public health experts including Dr Anthony Fauci in quarantine and Trump reported by the New York Times to be “spooked”, the president claimed in a rare non-Russia-related tweet: “We are getting great marks for the handling of the CoronaVirus pandemic.”

He also attacked Obama and his vice-president, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president this year, over their response to the “disaster known as H1N1 Swine Flu” in 2009.

© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

POLITICO

Magazine

OPINION | 2020

Why It Doesn’t Matter That Trump Is Beating Biden Online

Biden got the nomination because he won the argument. And better gadgetry didn’t save the candidates who lost it.

6

If Donald Trump’s digital media operation is, as his campaign manager Brad Parscale described it this week, a “Death Star,” the consensus seems to be that Joe Biden’s digital presence more closely resembles Jar Jar Binks.

Trump has 80 million Twitter followers; Biden has 5 million. Trump’s Facebook page has 27.5 million likes; Biden’s has less than than 2 million. “From mid-March to mid-April,” Karl Rove noted in his Wall Street Journal column this week, “Mr. Trump had seven times the social-media interactions, 620 million to Mr. Biden’s 87 million.” Biden’s live-streamed events, such as his first “virtual rally” on Thursday, are often hampered by technical glitches. It’s bad enough that David Axelrod and David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign gurus, took to the New York Times to vent that Biden must “transform a campaign that lagged behind many of his Democratic competitors during the primary in its use of digital media.” To put it succinctly, as a New York Times headline declared last month, “Biden Is Losing The Internet.”

Biden won the presidential primary with an analog campaign while being outmatched online by his rivals’ much more sophisticated efforts. That should not be dismissed as a fluke event.

Political operatives and journalists have a tendency to size up campaigns based on the size of their campaign apparatuses. Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign looked indestructible because his digital footprint was so enormous, he could generate a huge crowd almost anywhere he went. Mike Bloomberg seemed unstoppable because he had hired thousands of field staff, stuffed mailboxes and flooded the airwaves. Now Trump looms large because of his massive war chest and his campaign’s digital savvy, and Biden’s campaign has responded in recent days by hiring several prominent digital strategists from the campaigns of former rivals Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke.

But piles of money and social media engagements don’t matter if your fundamental argument falls flat.

The path Biden blazed to the nomination — culminating in his Super Tuesday blowout — provided a real-time political science experiment, testing whether grassroots online organizing, paid media or free media is most important for a successful campaign. Sanders was the organizing champ, having built a massive digital operation that cultivated nearly 12 million Twitter followers, almost 2 million small donors and a grassroots army that knocked on 2 million doors. Bloomberg literally owned paid media, drowning out all competitors with more than a half-billion spent on TV, radio and digital ads. (This included paying online influencers to produce ironic memes.)

Then there was Biden. His campaign was nearly broke. His field offices were often desolate, sometimes nonexistent. But between his Saturday night victory in South Carolina and the morning of Super Tuesday, his free media was pure gold. He didn’t just win South Carolina and secure key endorsements from three former rivals; he amplified his core messages to deafening levels in mainstream media. Data had long showed Democratic voters wanted a candidate who could win and could govern in a pragmatic, bipartisan way. That was Biden’s longtime pitch, and the final days of the competitive primary showcased top Democrats embracing it.

Simply put, Biden won the argument. And he’s still winning it.

From mid-March to mid-April to today, despite Trump’s much-ballyhooed digital advantage, Biden has maintained a stable lead in nearly every national and swing state poll. In the past four national polls, Biden’s lead has ranged from 3 percentage points to 9 points. While in theory Trump can still win the Electoral College while losing the national popular vote, current swing-state polling suggests he won’t. The Electoral-Vote.com snapshot of the latest state polling gives Biden a whopping 352–148 Electoral College lead.

Biden is not a one-man content machine. His theme of restoring the “soul of America,” does not lend itself to shareable, snackable social media memes, or outrage-inducing Facebook debate threads. And while he can be a good theatrical performer with the right material (he was a solid straight man with Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a 2014 video skit), reaching online comic heights while social distancing is challenging. Watching Biden play “Go Fish” with Keegan-Michael Key was not as exciting as watching Key play Barack Obama’s “anger translator.”

Axelrod and Plouffe appear to understand this, and recommended that Biden lean on high-profile surrogates with more social media followers to “carry the load.” Nothing wrong with that advice. But voters will primarily be looking at Biden and comparing his persona and platform with the president’s.

To present a favorable contrast, he doesn’t need to make himself artificially edgy and juice his online engagement. He simply needs to be accessible to the media, at the local, state and national level. Pete Buttigieg’s media maven, Lis Smith, this week argued Biden’s “personal warmth … translates well on TV,” and so, “he should be willing to go everywhere.”

Biden can take that advice to the extreme, much as Buttigieg did. In addition to the usual diet of national, state and local news programs, go on Fox News (as he did two months ago). Go on Howard Stern, Joe Rogan, Ellen, The Breakfast Club. Hell, go on Chapo. Make news by having interesting conversations and civil debates, showing depth as well as empathy. By communicating with a wide range of media personalities, Biden would be true to his overarching message that he will be a uniter that listens to all Americans, and present a stark contrast with Trump’s chronic divisiveness. Will Biden have off-message moments as a result? Most likely. But Biden had plenty of off-message moments in the primary. Yet he still was able to successfully convey his main messages and engender good will in the process. As David Karpf, professor of media and public affairs at The George Washington University, told Wired, “for all the digital media tools out there, all the fundraising and organizing you can do, all of that matters—but the thing that matters more than we ever think is crafting, shaping, influencing, manipulating media narratives.”

Still, at this point in 2016, Hillary Clinton led in head-to-head matchups against Trump. And you might argue that today’s polls might lead to a false sense of comfort for Biden. But Clinton’s and Biden’s numbers are not the same.

By spring 2016, Clinton was already showing volatility. While she led Trump most of the way, she experienced several dips that shrunk her lead to less than 3 percentage points, and occasionally less than one or slightly behind. And between late April and late May 2016—when the FBI investigation into her email server ramped up—she suffered a 9-point drop, allowing Trump to edge ahead for the first time.

Biden, in contrast, going back to September 2019, has never held a national lead in the Real Clear Politics average over Trump of less than 4 points, and since January, his lead has generally remained somewhere from 5 to 7 points. Of course, things can always change: In the past five months, we have experienced an impeachment, a pandemic and now a sexual assault allegation against Biden, which he denies. And the needle still hasn’t moved much. Yes, there’s still time for the Tara Reade story to inflict political damage on Biden. In fact, Biden’s RCP average ticked down from 6.3 to 4.4 over the last two weeks—a period when Biden’s free media coverage because of the allegations was far from ideal. But the answer to preventing that number from sinking any lower is better free media coverage, not better tweets.

Should Biden run as if the race will come down to handful of votes? Of course. Should he build the best digital operation he can to help connect with hard-to-reach voters? Absolutely. But gutting out a narrow win should be a campaign’s Plan B. Plan A should be to win the argument, decisively. That’s how Biden won the primary. All available data strongly suggests he’s winning today.

Biden will probably always be an analog candidate in a digital world. But considering how exhausted many Americans are with a president who governs by tweet, an analog candidate may be exactly what the electorate is looking for.

The Forgotten Law That Could Compel Mnuchin to Hand Over Trump’s Tax Returns

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

&&&&&&& &&&& &&&

Trump’s Attorney General Barr called to resign for ‘assaults on the rule of law’

Nearly 2,000 former Department of Justice Officials are calling for Attorney General Bill Barr to resign, citing his “repeated assaults on the rule of law in doing Trump’s personal bidding.” MSNBC Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber reports on "unprecedented move” to drop Michael Flynn’s case even after a guilty plea.

    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Supreme Court coming attractions:

Donald Trump

Supreme court grills Trump lawyers over president’s unreleased tax returns

Trump has refused to release documents but Sonia Sotomayor says there is a tradition of Congress ‘seeking records and getting them’

As the supreme court heard arguments concerning Donald Trump’s tax returns on Tuesday, justice Sonia Sotomayor told a lawyer for the president “there is a long, long history of Congress seeking records and getting them” from occupants of the Oval Office.

McConnell tells Obama to ‘keep his mouth shut’ after Trump criticism

The other two liberals on the court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer, brought up requests for documents during the Watergate and Whitewater scandals, which occurred under Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton and were decided unanimously against the president concerned.

Elena Kagan, like Sotomayor an Obama appointee, told Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow a “fundamental precept of our constitutional order is that the president is not above the law”.

The court is in its second week of working remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic. Lawyers for Trump and attorneys for Democrats in Congress and prosecutors in New York presented their arguments by telephone. The world listened in.

Trump did not release his tax returns during the 2016 election and has not done so since, despite promising to do so.

“President Trump is the first one to refuse to do that,” Ginsburg said.

Every president since Nixon, who was elected in 1968, had released tax information. But there is no legal compunction to do so.

Democrats in Congress are attempting to establish whether Trump is breaking ethics laws and constitutional safeguards against profiting from the presidency.

The New York prosecutor Cyrus Vance Jr wants to find out if hush money payments to women who claimed affairs with Trump involved illegal business practices.

Trump is asking the justices to put an end to subpoenas for tax, bank and other financial records which seek information from Deutsche Bank, Capital One and the Mazars USA accounting firm.

Trump’s lawyers, supported by the justice department, contend that he should not be so constrained by Congress and cannot be prosecuted while in office.

Opponents of the president say he is simply not above the law.

Appellate courts in Washington and New York have ruled that the documents should be turned over. Those courts brushed aside the president’s broad arguments, focusing on the fact that the subpoenas were addressed to third parties asking for records of Trump’s business and financial dealings as a private citizen, not as president.

Rulings against Trump could result in the release of damaging information during his campaign for re-election.

According to practice, Chief Justice John Roberts spoke first. The other justices asked questions in order of seniority. Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s two appointees to the 5-4 conservative majority, went last.

Roberts asked Trump lawyer Patrick Strawbridge: “Do you concede any power in the House to subpoena personal papers of the president?”

The Trump attorney said it was “difficult to imagine” a situation in which that would be justified.

However, in 1974 the justices acted unanimously in requiring Nixon to turn over White House tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor. And in 1997, another unanimous decision allowed a sexual harassment lawsuit to proceed against Clinton.

In those cases, three Nixon appointees and two Clinton appointees, respectively, voted against the president who chose them. Ginsburg and Breyer were those Clinton appointees.

For the justice department, Jeffrey Wall said allowing the House subpoenas would lead to presidents being “harassed”.

“The potential to harass and undermine the president … is plain,” he said. “It is not much to ask that before the House delves into the president’s personal life it explains in some meaningful way what laws it is considering and why it needs the president’s documents in particular. The subpoenas here don’t even come close.”

Gorsuch expressed concern about lawmakers abusing the subpoena process and hunting for unlawful conduct by political rivals.

Speaking to congressional lawyer Douglas Letter, Samuel Alito said: “In your view, there’s no protection for the purpose of preventing harassment of a president.”

But the conservatives on the court were not in uniform sympathy with the arguments presented by Trump’s lawyers.

Kavanaugh asked: “The question … boils down to how can we both protect the House’s interest in obtaining information it needs to legislate but also protect the presidency. How can the court balance those interests?”

Gorsuch questioned why the court would give Trump immunity in a criminal investigation when it did not give Clinton immunity in a sexual harassment lawsuit. In the 1997 case, lawyers for the plaintiff wanted Clinton to be questioned, Gorsuch noted, while in the Trump case the information is sought from third parties.

What is ‘Obamagate’ and why is Trump so worked up about it?

Sekulow responded that criminal cases result in a loss of liberty and are very different from civil lawsuits that could lead to monetary damages.

Alito challenged Sekulow’s assertion that a grand jury subpoena cannot be enforced against a sitting president in a case in which waiting for a president to leave office would undermine a criminal prosecution.

Kagan, meanwhile, noted that where personal records are concerned, “the president is just a man”.

“What it seems to me you’re asking us to do,” she told Strawbridge, “is to put a kind of 10-ton weight on the scales between the president and Congress, and essentially to make it impossible for Congress to perform oversight and to carry out its functions.”

© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

The New York Times

Opinion

Trump Is Staking Out His Own Universe of ‘Alternative Facts’

The president’s re-election strategy isn’t based on reality. How could it be?

By Thomas B. Edsall

May 13, 2020

President Trump participated in a prayer before speaking at the Evangelicals for Trump kick-off rally at the King Jesus International Ministry in Miami in January.Credit…Eva Uzcategui/Reuters

In less than a year, from May 2019 to March 2020, the share of weekly church-attending white Protestants convinced that Donald Trump was anointed by God to be president grew from 29.6 percent to 49.5 percent.

This finding — based on direct responses to the question: “How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Donald Trump was anointed by God to become president of the United States” — comes from surveys conducted by Paul A. Djupe and Ryan Burge, political scientists at Denison and Eastern Illinois Universities. Their study illuminates the depth of quasi-religious devotion to Trump among key segments of the population.

Capitalizing on that devotion is integral to Trump’s re-election strategy and has led to the creation of an all-enveloping digital campaign website, Army for Trump, as well as the Trump-Pence Keep America Great campaign app.

The Trump campaign’s digital sites serve a dual purpose. His supporters are able to enter a self-contained, self-reinforcing arena where Trump reigns supreme, and the campaign gets detailed marketing information about those who go through the elaborate sign-up process — information subsequently used for voter mobilization, fund-raising and volunteer recruitment.

According to Stefan Smith, a Democratic tech strategist, you should think of the Trump campaign website as a casino. Writing in the Daily Beast, Smith argues that the Trump campaign’s website is designed on the Vegas principle, “purposefully built to keep gamblers inside and at the table.”

Trump’s digital infrastructure, Smith wrote,

is performing a similar function — it’s trapping people inside an ecosystem of dangerous misinformation, conspiracy theories, and grievance politics. And it’s doing so while making the experience as fun and exciting as possible.

It is clear that millions of voters willingly enter this arena.

The coronavirus lockdown has turned the internet into a central battleground of the 2020 presidential contest, even more indispensable than it would be under normal circumstances. Trump operatives, guided by his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, are trying to make the most of the situation.

Parscale, who is not given to understatement any more than his boss, tweeted on May 7:

For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star). It is firing on all cylinders. Data, Digital, TV, Political, Surrogates, Coalitions, etc. In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time.

“The new Trump campaign app uses gamification to drive voter outreach and valuable data collection,” CNN reported on April 23. “Share the campaign app with a friend, win 100 points. Earn 5,000 points and you can redeem a campaign store discount. Earn 100,000 points, and you can get a picture with President Donald Trump.”

Those who download the Trump app can “watch live ‘shows’ hosted by senior campaign aides and surrogates,” according to CNN, and receive

tutorial videos from top campaign aides and surrogates like Lara Trump, who explains how to become a “digital activist” on social media and host a “MAGA meet up.” Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr, explains how to become a fund-raising “bundler” and political director Chris Carr discusses how to be a grass roots “team leader.”

In nightly appearances, Trump loyalists are freed of the constraints of television or campaign rallies.

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s oldest son, joked, for example, that Joe Biden had “the coveted Osama bin Laden endorsement” since bin Laden knew “Biden would destroy America,” The Associated Press reported. Parscale himself told viewers that his favorite item at his Florida home is Hillary Clinton toilet paper: “I have boxes of it,” he said, “and I take it into the bathroom and it’s just enjoyable since she said so many mean things about me and our campaign and our president.”

The Trump app shows “create an echo chamber for true believers,” A.P. reporters Jonathan Lemire, Zeke Miller and Jill Colvin wrote:

Trump officials warmly speak in shorthand, trusting that their audience knows the plot and its characters and are tuning in to see programs that, at times, made the president’s infamously off-the-cuff rallies look tightly scripted.

All of this brings us to an intriguing question: why are so many voters willing to enter this echo chamber?

A series of recent research papers explore reasons for the appeal of the demagogue; the role of anger in Trump’s ascendance; and the political dark triad of psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism.

The official Trump 2020 app.

In “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy,” published in 2018 in the American Sociological Review by Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim and Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan, of the business schools at Yale, Northwestern and M.I.T., pose the question: “How can a constituency of voters find a candidate authentically appealing (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a ‘lying demagogue’ (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to nonnormative private prejudices)?”

They conclude that “for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal,” the crucial ingredient is “that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate.”

For such a besieged constituency, they write, the belief that “publicly-endorsed norms are imposed rather than freely chosen” is crucial.

In that case, the three authors continue, “the lying demagogue claims to be an authentic champion of those who are subject to social control by the established political leadership.”

At the same time, Trump and his critics in the liberal establishment enter into an intensifying conflict that serves to strengthen loyalists’ support for Trump:

The more Trump is willing “to antagonize the establishment by making himself persona non grata, the more credible is his claim to be his constituency’s leader.” In a push-me, pull-you process, the more

his flagrant violation of norms makes him odious to the establishment, someone from whom they must distance themselves lest they be tainted by scandal. But this very need by the establishment to distance itself from the lying demagogue lends credibility to his claim to be an authentic champion for those who feel disenfranchised by that establishment.

A crucial element of the sense of disenfranchisement described by Hahl and his colleagues is the anger and outrage of those who believe that their interests are not represented by the political establishment.

Steven Webster, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of the forthcoming book “American Rage,” wrote in an email that “Trump attracts and maintains the devotion of his supporters because he is angry at the ‘right’ people, institutions, organizations, etc.”

This anger has been present for years, if not decades, but, Webster argued,

it is not the case that Trump is merely a vehicle for voter anger. On the contrary, Trump is also a perpetuator of the anger that we see. The relationship between Trump, his supporters, and anger, is circular in nature.

The difference between anger and anxiety, in Webster’s view, helps explain why so many of Trump’s supporters simply disregard his many documented lies and distortions:

When people are anxious they tend to seek out new information. Anxiety rouses people from a sort of ‘autopilot’ mode and causes them to re-evaluate their beliefs.

Anger, in contrast,

has the opposite effect. When people are angry they tend to mentally retreat and dig in on the things that they know and believe to be true.

The result?

The psychological nature of anger essentially precludes any sort of attitudinal change against Trump. Anger causes Trump’s supporters to become more reliant on information they receive from him, the RNC, Fox News, etc.

In other words, they become ideal candidates to enter Trump’s digital universe, the realm of suspended belief, a place where supporters are fully insulated from mounting claims of administration failures and mismanagement.

Trump not only taps into his supporters’ anger but he does so with exceptional confidence and a lack of self-doubt, further enhancing his persuasiveness.

I spoke by phone with Cristina Bicchieri, a professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the January paper “It’s Not a Lie If You Believe the Norm Does Not Apply: Conditional Norm-Following with Strategic Beliefs.”

One of Trump’s strengths, Bicchieri said, grows out of the fact that “people hate ambiguity,” and if there is one thing Trump is not, it’s ambiguous. Trump’s ability to convey conviction, even when saying things that are demonstrably false, is critically important in persuading supporters to believe and vote for him.

“He is always sure of what he says, when he sends a message, he is always sure,” Bicchieri noted. He may change his mind and say “things are black one day and they are white” the next day, but on both days “he will have the same strength of conviction.”

In an email, Bicchieri cited research that shows “political conservatism being negatively correlated with tolerance to uncertainty.” This supports, she said, “the general notion that conservative voters would enjoy Trump’s simple and ‘certain’ declarations about the world.”

How can Trump maintain this certitude in the face of explicitly contrary facts?

Paul Chen, a political scientist at Beloit College is the lead author of “The Dark Side of Politics: Participation and the Dark Triad,” an April 2020 paper. I asked him about Trump’s political style.

Chen responded by email: “Narcissism predicts lower levels of knowledge but higher levels of engagement.”

In addition, narcissism is “a likely factor” in “Donald Trump’s personal ambition to run for office. We consistently find that people high in narcissism tend to overestimate their own abilities in politics.”

The Trump campaign’s drive to create an enclosed political universe where voters are sheltered from any criticism of the president is aided and abetted by political allies like Fox News and conservative talk radio.

One less-noticed source of essential support comes from the pulpits of the churches with predominately Republican parishioners.

The study by Paul Djupe and Ryan Burge I mentioned at the outset demonstrates how the belief that Trump was anointed by God to be president rises in direct proportion to the frequency with which ministers raise “political speech topics.” These topics include immigration, gun rights, impeachment, same-sex marriage and abortion.

For Republicans, the two authors write,

clergy speech is driving up the religious significance of Trump. There is no effect of clergy speech on anointment beliefs for Democrats and Independents. But there is quite a strong effect for Republicans.

At the same time, they continue,

more Republicans believe in Trump’s anointment when they attend a political church. Though some of this effect surely reflects the political engagement of the respondent, a fair bit of congregational experiences are beyond the control of the individual.

The results are shown in the accompanying chart.

While elite “right wing media are having a profound effect on public opinion, serving to insulate Trump supporters,” Djupe and Burge write, the process is also “built and sustained from the bottom up. That is, political churches, among Republicans especially, reinforce the argumentation that is also coming from above.”

While most acute among white evangelical Republicans, Djupe and Burge continue, belief in the divine sanction “of the presidency is swelling across the board for the religious” of all faiths.

David Kreiss, a professor of journalism and the media at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, suggested in an email that there has been a dramatic shift in the political environment over the past 12 years:

What has changed between 2008 and 2020 on the right is the emergence of a vast extended network of digital and other media that is designed to strengthen the collective identity of the right and its constituent groups and generate internally consistent narratives and ideas about politics.

The conservative media, he continued, is

designed to create that self-referential universe. It exists to not only deflect criticism but literally to create new narratives of Trump (such as transforming his handling of the virus into a success), and to strengthen political and social divisions, undermine opponents, and provide people with identity and ideational resources to refute counter-narratives.

The 2020 election, Kreiss predicted, will be “a big test of whether empirical reality will outweigh motivated partisan reasoning.”

If the test Kreiss anticipates does determine who our next president is, and if the digital world becomes a key battleground, as it certainly will, Democrats believe Joe Biden and his campaign need to be better prepared.

Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, warned in an April 9 appearance on David Plouffe’s podcast, that

the numbers are pretty stark. Joe Biden has 4.6 million Twitter followers. Donald Trump has 75 million. Joe Biden has 1.7 million Facebook fans. Donald Trump has 28 million.

Messina didn’t stop there: “Biden’s first virtual online chat got 5,000 people. Just one with Lara Trump gets 945,000.”

Biden did not ease the anxieties of his fellow Democrats when, on May 7, he attempted to hold a virtual campaign event for supporters in Tampa, Fla. The Tampa Bay Times headline and accompanying story captured the Biden campaign’s digital quandary: “Joe Biden hosted a virtual campaign rally in Tampa. It didn’t go great.”

There is some evidence that as innovative and efficient as Trump’s digital operation is, he will struggle to overcome the liabilities he has acquired over the past three and a half years.

In the 2016 election, Trump won in part because the 14 percent of voters who disliked both him and Hillary Clinton chose Trump 69 percent to 15 percent.

Going into the current election, the opposite is true. The April 10 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that among the 11 percent of voters who dislike both Biden and Trump, Biden had a 60-10 advantage — despite misgivings about Biden’s cognitive health, voiced by even such liberal outlets as Vox (“He’s always been gaffe-prone, to be sure, but something about it feels worse now to a lot of Democratic voters).”

It is difficult to calculate the vulnerabilities of Trump’s digital casino strategy: the number of voters willing to abandon their critical faculties is limited, even if it’s in the tens of millions. The majority of American voters may not yet be ready to take a second step into this nether world.

Still, the Covid-19 pandemic has created an aura of chaos; a certain amount of fear is pervasive; naturally there is a hunger for safety and shelter. In this climate, does Trump’s self-referential, illusory, confected, digital-marketing universe offer a solution to those hungry, anxious, angry voters predisposed to believe in a savior like Trump? Incredible as it may seem, it is an all-too-vivid possibility.

Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The Times Opinion section since 2011.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

{The price of democracy. is inordinately expensive, it has become unaffordable on principle. The fact is structurally it has become unworkable, and that structural mess has caused the freedoms by which it is supposed to operate, diverge from the social responsibility within which framework it can operate.

Social responsibility and the international corporate world simply don’t jive.}

&&&&&& &&&&&& &&&&&&

Here is a bit about the outcry which arose in connection to Mr. Barr’s violation of the rule of law :

Trump’s Attorney General Barr Called To Resign Fo…: youtu.be/EuackYylnaA

If the vaccine arrives by this year, or, the health or economy matrix comes to favor Trump by November, then he
is a sure bet!

If the vaccine arrives by this year, or, the health or economy matrix comes to favor Trump by November, then he
is a sure bet!

In spite of the gains made by the application of power through propaganda ! :

This viral video of Trump supporters screaming at a reporter is a Rorschach test of America right now

And this:

Jack Shafer wrote in Politico, "but that doesn’t bother Trump. His hardcore supporters are the target of the tweets, speeches, pressers and conspiracy theories. The more he does to make himself look persecuted and reviled by the ‘elites’ and the press, the more heroic he appears to his base… His goal is a permanent schism in American society, a cold civil war, with lots of finger-pointing and yelling and demagoguery. Even if he loses in November, his audience will endure, and he’ll do whatever he needs to make sure we never take our eyes off of him.

Trump’s team has accused Obama’s administration of using the intelligence community’s powers to cook up what Trump says was a bogus controversy over his campaign’s contacts with Russian officials. Attorney General William Barr lent support to Trump’s condemnation of Obama by orchestrating what he hoped would be the dismissal of criminal charges against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

(CNN)On Thursday, a local reporter named Kevin Vesey covered a rally of people on Long Island protesting the ongoing closures in New York due to the coronavirus. He recorded almost 2 minutes of video of people calling him “fake news,” cursing at him and refusing to allow him to do his job. He then posted it on Twitter with these words: “The level of anger directed at the media from these protestors was alarming. As always, I will tell a fair and unbiased story today.”

View this interactive content on CNN.com

Almost immediately the video became a viral sensation. (As of Saturday morning, it had been viewed more than 11 million times.) Why you watched the video – and what you thought about it – depends almost entirely on how you feel about President Donald Trump.

Speaking of Trump, he has now tweeted the video twice in the last 13 hours.

First, at 9:34 p.m., ET, on Friday night, he tweeted it – adding this quote from one of the protesters: “FAKE NEWS IS NOT ESSENTIAL!” Then, on Saturday morning, he tweeted it again, this time with these words: “People can’t get enough of this. Great people!”

For Trump – and those who support him, the video is a testament to the fact that “real” Americans have woken up to the fact that the media isn’t playing it straight. That the gig is up. And that, in this specific instance of the coronavirus, the media is somehow complicit with those who want to keep the economy closed indefinitely.

Just in case you missed that message, Trump tweeted this Saturday morning – shortly after, again, tweeting out the Vesey video:

“I’m not running against Sleepy Joe Biden. He is not even a factor. Never was, remember 1% Joe? I’m running against the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats & their partner, the real opposition party, the Lamestream Fake News Media! They are vicious & crazy, but we will WIN!”

For me – and I hope a lot of you – the Vesey video (and Trump’s framing of it) said something very different.

At the most basic level, Vesey was simply doing his job. He’s a local TV reporter. When there’s a protest – particularly one related to the coronavirus pandemic – he goes and covers it. That includes shooting video of the protesters as they assemble.

What he captured was people villainizing him for doing his job. Literally for documenting their decision to protest – and for ensuring that their voices on the subject were heard. And for that he was screamed at, cursed at and condemned.

Which, to my mind, is bad enough.

What’s worse is the way in which the President and his side have seized on the video as some sort of totem of their righteousness – proof that what they’ve been saying all along about the media is justified.

How so? Because a reporter covered an event? And documented the ways in which people are protesting the quarantine restrictions in New York as a result of the coronavirus? That he videoed them voicing their anger? How, exactly, was Vesey being “fake news” when he was just turning on a video camera and capturing the threats and taunts these people were directing his way?

It, of course, makes no logical sense. But Trump and his supporters seem entirely unconcerned with that fact. Trump knows that stoking rage – at the media, at Democrats, at anyone who doesn’t agree with him 100% of the time – is where his political power lies. And so, he does it. Because he can. Because he knows it works – facts be damned.

This is the America that Trump has created – and the one in which he hopes to win a second term. What America is that, you ask? An America where a video of a reporter being mocked and taunted for doing his job becomes fodder for Trump’s war on the media. An America where the President of the United States calls those jeering at a reporter for doing his job “great people.” An America where common decency is ignored in favor of rank, blind partisanship.

© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved

What if the whole Trump routine is nothing but a very new revision of fiscal conservatism and little anything else?
What if, the idea of gradually opening society up to the realities, cruel as they may be, to the idea that it is preferAble to create a dynamic society comprised of energetic people who won’t lapse into complacency and dependence on the econo/politics dynamis of social welfare?
How would closure for another 6 months or more effect morale, and lead to perhaps another greater depression, where the combined effects of political, economic and health concerns , would/could make things a lot worse?
How could this new formula effect the coming election?
Which side, relactively speaking would / could fare better?
Socialism in the areas of Northern Europe, including Sweden do not need to deal with the extremely complex concerns that originated with the aligned Democratic concerns of U.S. and French revolutionary politics, since in form, at least, those countries retained the monarchial rule.
The heart of Europe, so called, Hungary, adopted and coined the concept ’ goulash capitalism, and people there that have gone through all the ism’s from monarchy, through fascism to communism, know , that a synthesis of pronounced ideology is preferable to pretensions to a pragmatically dubious transition, for they have been jaded so many times, misappropriated of their rights, both patently implied , and blantently coerced.
Is the republicans, coming around to realize that within the various pickets of national interest, there are merely relative truths abiding those who sees grass roots expressions of relevance?

Is the Teump act merely using a near defeated old caricature in the brand of Teump, to profess their own fears of impending trouble to the pathos of the failure of the real meaning of democracy?

Should we hate Teump, feel sorry for him in very generam terms, laugh with or at him? Should we reserve judgement until the confusion of seeing , it understanding the intended place, where we could say, I get it?

CN private fortunes be allowed to snowball in excess of a trillion dollars, without applying the word plunder to such a happening? Could we?

Now more then ever, we as ordinary citizens must each, on his own , enable ourselves the opportunity to answer on our own, as if our very life depended on it.
As it does.

Economy & Politics

Sen. Sherrod Brown inquires of Treasury’s Steven Mnuchin: ‘How many workers should give their lives to increase the GDP or the Dow Jones by a thousand points?’

Published: May 19, 2020 2:01 pm ET

‘No workers should give their lives to do that, Mr. Senator, and I think your characterization is unfair,’ the Treasury secretary responds

Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin clashed Tuesday over reopening the U.S. economy amid the coronavirus pandemic.

‘How many workers should give their lives to increase the GDP or the Dow Jones by a thousand points?’

Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio

That line came from Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio in a tense exchange on Tuesday with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin over efforts to reopen the U.S. economy after lockdowns triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.

Brown said he was hearing from experts that it was not safe to reopen the economy until there were better worker protections, including more testing, contact tracing and protective equipment. The senator said President Donald Trump has failed to lead the country on these matters.

“No workers should give their lives to do that, Mr. Senator, and I think your characterization is unfair,” Mnuchin responded. “We have provided enormous amounts of equipment. We’ve worked with the governors. We’ve done a terrific job of getting …”

Brown then cut off Mnuchin, saying he wouldn’t let the Treasury boss “make a political speech.” Their exchange came during a virtual Senate hearing on relief programs.

Also: Coronavirus update — U.S. death toll tops 90,000

More broadly, Brown said he remains outraged that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has held the Senate in session for three weeks, requiring legislative staff, Capitol police and cafeteria and custodial workers and others to report for work, contrary to public health guidance, as he and his fellow Republicans pursue their own Senate priorities and not the needs of American families and communities.

The Kentucky Republican sees no urgency in responding to those latter exigencies brought on by the pandemic, Brown said — “those are his words: no urgency.”

Trump has said the economy has to get going again, and states continue to lift restrictions on business and personal activity imposed about two months ago to combat the spread of the coronavirus causing the disease COVID-19.

In Brown’s home state of Ohio, May 4 brought a reopening for offices, warehouses, manufacturers and construction companies. Retailers and service businesses were able to open on May 12, according to MarketWatch’s report on moves by various states.

Copyright ©2020 MarketWatch, Inc. All rights reserved.

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Trump’s rage at a Fox News anchor contains a key

President Trump watches Fox News obsessively and constantly tweets examples of Fox News personalities extolling his glorious greatness. But every now and then, Trump explodes with rage at the network — when it departs from its mission to function as his personal 24/7 propaganda channel and lapses into momentary truth-telling.

Trump’s rage at a Fox News anchor contains a key tell

It’s Trump’s party now — and will be even after he’s gone

‘This will kill you’: Fox’s Neil Cavuto at center of Trump’s hydroxychloroquine madness

Trump says if Pompeo’s ‘wife isn’t there’ a staffer should do dis…

Enough with the QAnon and ‘Liberate’ tweets, Mr. Trump. Coronavirus is lethal enough.

The deluded QAnon cult chugs on as an implicit threat on Donald Trump’s behalf. And the president has rewarded its fealty with at least 131 retweets.

President Trump’s top health advisers attended a White House event with protective masks, though the president himself did not wear a face covering.

USA TODAY

I have no hope that Donald Trump will ever behave like a president of all 50 United States. But I ask one simple thing from him and his son: Please stop trying to get my fellow Americans killed.

It’s impossible to keep track of all the norms Trump is petulantly stomping on as he runs for reelection amid the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression.

As the American death toll from COVID-19 has moved closer to 100,000, he has fired inspector general after inspector general, the only independent watchdogs inside the executive branch. His lawyers have argued before the Supreme Court that this president should essentially be immune from all prosecution and oversight, denying taxpayers the right to know whether he’s even a taxpayer. And @realdonaldtrump has gone into overdrive with his wild tweets and rhetoric, which he has to know could make his more unhinged supporters think he’s hoping they’ll get violent.

And some seem to be getting the message!

Trump’s troubling QAnon retweets

Detroit real estate agent Robert Sinclair Tesh has been arraigned on a terrorism charge after he made what authorities determined were credible death threats against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel. We can’t say for sure whether the man behind the alleged threats was a Trump fan. But he does appear to be a fan of the conspiracy theory known as QAnon, having used hashtags associated with the movement.

This arrest ties together two of the most dangerous threads of what rhetoric professor Jennifer Mercieca describes as Trump’s “argument ad baculum” in her forthcoming book, “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.” These “appeals to the stick,” or implicit threats of force or intimidation, are “used by a demagogue to attack and overwhelm opponents,” Mercieca writes.

Trump has literally incited Michiganders to rise up against their governor with a “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” tweet that former Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord called illegal. And he has cheered on the so-called protesters who’ve garnered national attention by flooding into Michigan’s Capitol brandishing firearms, something you’d never be allowed to do at an NRA convention when Vice President Mike Pence is speaking.

But it’s the connection to the QAnon movement that’s most troubling about this arrest.

Donald Trump supporters hold up phones referring to the QAnon conspiracy theory at a campaign rally in Las Vegas on Feb. 21, 2020.

While there are always oaky traces of a death cult inside the Republican Party — “pro-lifers” fulminating for unnecessary wars and executions — the calls to sacrifice American (especially older Americans) to “the economy” have become audible as the death toll from COVID-19 has risen.

But QAnon is a literal death cult. It imagines crimes, often cannibalism and pedophilia, that would justify the arrest and even execution of the president’s opponents and enemies. And it’s also a domestic terror threat, according to liberal fake news sources such as the FBI.

What Republicans don’t get: Donald Trump is our biggest obstacle to coronavirus recovery

Either violent people are attracted to this fantasy — which originally touted Trump as an all-powerful crusader bound to take down international child sex rings and now seems more interested in spreading COVID-19 misinformation to justify Trump’s panoply of failures — or individuals who are into Q just happen to enjoy making criminal threats or killing a family member with a sword.

Of course, the big joke of all this is that Trump is the guy who started a teen beauty pageant, and several former contestants said Trump walked in on them while they were in various states of undress. And the one big name child sex offender this administration has arrested — former Trump playmate Jeffrey Epstein — died mysteriously in the custody of Trump’s Department of Justice, an unresolved crime that stinks of a real conspiracy.

Still, the deluded QAnon cult chugs on as an implicit threat on Trump’s behalf. And the president has rewarded its fealty with at least 131 retweets.

Tickling death cult bone of dad’s fans

Anyone paying any attention knows that when Donald Trump Jr. makes a joke about former Vice President Joe Biden being a pedophile, he’s trying to tickle the death cult bone of his dad’s fan base. And when Don Jr. pretends to back off by then reiterating the charge, he’s showing that he has learned his daddy’s “I’m not saying; I’m just saying” rhetorical trick of paralipsis.

Mercieca says that’s what demagogues use "to circulate rumors and accusations, to ironically say two things at once, and to build a relationship with supporters.”

I get the desperation.

The Trumps’ best attempt at digging up foreign dirt on Biden resulted in impeachment and the revelation that Biden was actually leading the international community’s efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine.

They haven’t found any attack on Biden yet that tanks him the way they smeared a woman for using personal email. And older voters are telling pollsters that they may be abandoning Trump. (Maybe because they’ve heard that some Republicans think they should stop complaining about COVID-19 and start dying.)

Trump impeachment intimidation: Weaponized Twitter feed, die-hard fans who get the ‘code’

This is all bound to get more intense as Trump feels the risk of losing the one job in the United States that prevents him from being indicted. The question is how many people the Trumps are willing to take down with them.

The president’s steaming rhetoric may have influenced his superfan Cesar Sayoc, who was convicted of mailing bombs to 13 Trump opponents — including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The only thing that saved us from this Trump fan carrying out one of the worst terror attacks in American history was his incompetence.

But as Trump’s election proved, competence isn’t necessary for success.

So please, Mr. President, stop trying to get us killed. COVID-19 is bad enough on its own.

© Copyright Gannett 2020

2020 ELECTION

Trump’s trip to the Hill was all about campaign, not coronavirus

At a lunch with Republican senators, Trump focused on poll numbers, Joe Biden and telling senators they need to toughen up or they’ll lose in November

President Trump went to Capitol Hill Tuesday with the campaign on his mind, not coronavirus.

In a nearly hour long lunch with Republican senators, the president focused on poll numbers, Joe Biden, and telling senators they need to toughen up or they’ll lose in November, according to multiple senators leaving the lunch.

“He just said be tough, don’t get rolled over by them,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said.

“He was encouraging all of us to get in the fight and not get pushed around,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

The president’s latest campaign strategy involves pushing investigations into the Obama administration’s treatment of Michael Flynn, which Trump refers to as “Obamagate.” It’s an attempt to undermine the foundations of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and possible collusion with the Trump team.

It comes as the president is less than six months away from facing Biden in the general election — and with the Senate now in play, there is a very real possibility that Democrats could control all the elected levers of power in Washington for the first time since Republicans won back the House in 2010.

“I think the president thinks that on certain issues we act like a bunch of weenies, and I agree with him,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said.

Pressed to explain on which issues the president believed senators were “weenies,” Kennedy said: “On getting serious about finding out what happened with respect to Flynn and Carter Page. … You guys know what I’m talking about.”

Kennedy was referring to Flynn, Trump’s former national security who the Justice Department wants to drop harges of lying to the FBI of which he was convicted of, and Page, a Trump campaign adviser who the FBI conducted surveillance on in its investigation of whether the campaign was colluding with Russia.

A senior administration official put it this way: “Trump’s message to Republicans was that they will be successful if they stick together and are tough” — while a Republican Capitol Hill aide familiar with the remarks said the message “was 'We’re doing a great job on Corona and Pelosi is mean.’”

Trump’s focus on questioning Democrats’ campaign tactics comes as the country is still in the throes of the coronavirus crisis. While the president touched briefly on testing and vaccines, there was no mention of state and local aid that desperate states are waiting for, according to multiple sources.

There were brief discussions of future aid bills but it wasn’t the focus of the conversations, senators said.

© 2020 NBC UNIVERSAL

President calls negative hydroxychloroquine study ‘a Trump enemy statement’ – live

Trump falsely claims hydroxychloroquine ‘doesn’t harm you’

Vice-president says he is not taking anti-malaria drug

Trump says he’s taking hydroxychloroquine despite FDA warnings

Strikes erupt as US essential workers demand protection amid pandemic

“Trump’s latest order makes about as much sense as drinking bleach,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “He’s using the pandemic to slash life-saving protections for our air, water, and wildlife when these safeguards have never been more important. It’s astounding that Trump is so out of touch with the majority of people who understand that there can’t be economic recovery on a dying planet.”

Trump signs executive order to hasten rollback of regulations

Trump has signed an executive order encouraging agencies to cut regulations in the name of economic recovery.

“Agencies must continue to remove barriers to the greatest engine of economic prosperity the world has ever known: the innovation, initiative, and drive of the American people,” the order states.

President Trump signs Executive Order giving Cabinet members authority to cut regulations.

A new study suggests a connection between crowded polling places and the spread of Covid-19 in Wisconsin during the state’s April 7 election.

The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:

The study finds a “statistically and economically significant association between in-person voting and the spread of COVID-19 two to three weeks after the election.” By studying state election and Covid-19 data, researchers concluded that consolidating polling places and decreasing the number of absentee ballots led to an increase in positive Covid-19 tests weeks after the election. The research by economists at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, University of

Wisconsin-Madison and Ball State University was published as a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research.“Our results indicate that Wisconsin counties with higher levels of in-person voting per polling location led to increases in the weekly positive rate of COVID-19 tests,” they wrote.

Furthermore, counties with higher absentee voting participation had lower rates of detecting COVID-19 two to three weeks after the election.”State and local officials scrambled in the weeks ahead of the election to prepare amid the Covid-19 pandemic. In Milwaukee, election officials were forced to close 175 of 180 polling places, but other places, such as the city of Madison, were able to keep 66 of 99 polling places open.

State health officials said that 52 people who tested positive for Covid-19 participated in in-person voting, but have cautioned they don’t know if people contracted the virus at the polls.

Here’s some more on that VA study that the president has described as “a Trump enemy statement”:

The study by VA and academic researchers reviewed the cases of 368 male patients treated at government hospitals — 97 treated with hydroxychloroquine, 113 with hydroxychloroquine, and the antibiotic azithromycin, and 158 without any hydroxychloroquine.

The study found that those who were treated with the antimalarial drug had a higher risk of death. But the research comes with several big caveats.

Most significantly, the study is retrospective. Rather than randomly assigning some patients to be treated with hydroxychloroquine and others without, researchers looked back on how patients who had and had not taken the drug fared. It’s unclear why doctors gave some patients the drug and not others, and it’s possible that physicians treated the most severe cases with hydroxychloroquine, which could at least partly explain why those patients fared worse.

The research was published as a pre-print — it has not yet gone through a rigorous process of peer review.

But there is absolutely no evidence that the researchers behind the study were biased, against the administration or against the use of the drug.

In response to growing criticism, the VA said last week that while it wouldn’t halt the use of hydroxychloroquine as a Covid-19 treatment, it would offer the unproven drug to fewer patients


And now this:

A number of commentators noted that several Republican-led states, including West Virginia, Georgia and Nebraska, have also pushed to expand vote by mail, yet Trump has not threatened to withhold funding from them.

A former senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign suggested the president would be much better served by developing effective strategies for vote by mail, which is supported by most Americans.

A Gallup poll released last week showed 64% of Americans, including 40% of Republicans, support allowing all voters to vote by mail or absentee ballot.

The issue will likely become increasingly important as the November general election approaches, considering many public health experts are expecting a second wave of coronavirus cases later this year.

Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a member of the progressive group known as “the Squad,” mocked Trump for incorrectly saying her state was sending absentee ballots to all registered voters.

Tlaib applauded her state for promoting democracy “without jeopardizing people’s health” and accused Trump of “endangering people’s lives” through his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

The president is visiting a Ford Motors plant in Michigan today, and he will almost certainly be asked about his (likely unconstitutional) threat to withhold funding funding from Michigan over the state’s vote by mail policy.

A number of legal experts pointed out in reaction to Trump’s tweets about Michigan and Nevada that withholding federal funding from states over opposition to a specific policy would almost certainly be unconstitutional.

From a former federal prosecutor:

From a University of Alabama law professor:

States run their own elections. Congress voted the funds to support voting in Covid relief bills. Trump, who has already publicly conceded Republicans can’t win if too many people vote, seems to think his power is limitless & includes controlling elections. https://t.co/uoncNjBHpt

Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson corrected Trump’s tweet about her state’s vote by mail policies, noting her office only sent ballot applications (not actual ballots) to registered voters.

Hi! I also have a name, it’s Jocelyn Benson. And we sent applications, not ballots. Just like my GOP colleagues in Iowa, Georgia, Nebraska and West Virginia. https://t.co/kBsu4nHvOy

Benson said yesterday that the move would ensure that “no Michigander has to choose between their health and their right to vote.”

“We know from the elections that took place this month that during the pandemic Michiganders want to safely vote,” Benson said.

It will be interesting to see how Nevada’s secretary of state reacts to Trump’s threat, considering she is a Republican.

Just to take a break between the revolutionary and reactive substance of these convoluted times, I bring up a factual narrative to a lesson that should be learned on the repetitious signs that are prevalent .

Those who can not learn from the leaaons of history, are condemned to to repeat them , says Santayana.

The parallels between the time of the -‘phony’ war and now, (the period between Chamberlain and the outbreak of hostilities prior to the second world war.)
The economic downturn nearing the indexes leading to indications approaching levels near those of the Great Depression, low levels of cooperation between the nations of the world, huge compensatory efforts
to save Capital, indicating very grave concerns about the viability of funding
not only the measurable indexes of Interest, (both literally and figuratively)

The almost certain mechanics of predictable defenses, that will recur, if
the usual expectations are not met.

Literally, the Federal Reserve support of the economy is blatant on even an interest plunging beneath 0.
Such would indicate more then merely keep the value of purchasing power in line with the diminished returns of a highly overpriced market.

The market has reached maximum tolerance to the automated mechanics by which values can be adjusted , in fact , the inverse is happening as noted reactions to social tolerance appears to exhibit.

At the stage of limits, the predictable is happening - the deflationary appearance of the functional derivitive
displayed by standard models, are held in bay increasingly through systematic search for weaknesses that are out of the bounds of the inherent structural efficacy.

That Chinese are really responsible for the virus, is an example of this. Not to even mention that the conspiratorial voices raised are beginning to ring to the familiar pattern of using this pre/provocative form of reifying the familiar defense.

Things really are at some sort of a breaking point, and the ideological measure has brought about, preemptively the need for the inversive effects of what has become recognized as neo-fascist sub-strata.

Social distancing , echoes the social psychological dissociation between the devolved inversive reduction into the confound regions of society.

The convolusive weight of a countered paradigmn can be linked with the present administration’s lack of a viable platform in the early days of the 2016 campaign.

Such lack is inversely proportional to the ideological vacuum that the collapse of the Soviet Union manifested.

Hopefully such dire parallels can alleviate the next logical step mirroring the ‘phony war’ of yesteyear.

{Vampires are narcissists, who presume on their victims by elevating their own stature by inflating differences rather then deflating them.

Such contra-figurative dynamic, of pseudo constitutive behavior, then, is rationalized as a demand on the structural complexity - too difficult without a simplified version of a material dialectical phenomenon.
The last refuge of though sinks to the primal synthesis of conscious manifestation : the pseudo Kantianism which can successfully unite with pure, ideal dialectics.

But is this not wishful thinking at best? Is it not a repetition of the trickle down of conscious reality as a modified version of Reagan’s more literal distributive attempts of sharing ?

But times have changed, and factions grew increasingly bellicose on account of repressive attempts to control monetary inflation, as a way to distract from the actual inflation of minds and hearts.
Here are two antithetical opinions relating to the current state of opinions, and how extremely contradictory the appear in print} :

POLITICO

ALTITUDE

Once Again, Democrats Are Caught in the Trump Trap

Obama explains why his successor is bad. That reminds Trump supporters why they think he’s good.

Former President Barack Obama since leaving office rarely wades into debates about his successor, but President Donald Trump’s performance during the pandemic compelled him to raise his voice.

He was sharp by his standards, though hardly by Trump’s, in a rapidly leaked conference call with former employees in which he credited the incumbent with “an absolute chaotic disaster.” He was a bit more understated in a video commencement address in which he didn’t mention Trump by name but said selfish and shortsighted values are “why things are so screwed up.” Trump responded with customary overstatement, alleging a murky “Obamagate” conspiracy and saying his predecessor was “grossly incompetent.”

And so in highlighting what he sees as Trump’s obvious failures, Obama also illuminated a less obvious Trump success: The incumbent president has managed to make American politics the first arena of national life to return to something recognizable as normal.

Campuses are still closed, and may yet be for months to come. Most people still don’t feel it’s safe to visit aging relatives. Baseball has yet to have opening day.

But political culture has returned to something close to its pre-pandemic state. People are filled with resentment and malice toward their fellow citizens. They are arguing over eccentric or ephemeral controversies. They are sanctimoniously and often hypocritically denouncing the sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy of their opponents. Above all, many influential voices across the ideological spectrum are united in the assumption that the most important subjectconstant and all-consuming—to be thinking and talking about is Trump.

Here is the essence of the Trump Trap. For critics, not speaking out against his provocations could be reasonably interpreted as complicity or cowardice. Speaking out, however, gives those provocations the centrality upon which the Trump movement depends. It’s an old phenomenon. What’s new is the pandemic, which looked for a while like it might make Trump’s brand of politics obsolete. Instead, it has proven the adaptability and durability of Trumpism. His immediate predecessor, like many other Democrats and much of the media, has ratified the achievement.

At first glance, this looks like two powerful political leaders with large followings expressing their disdain for each other on more or less equal terms. But the nature of Obama’s command of the loyalty and affection of his supporters is far different than the nature of Trump’s command of his supporters. This difference is critical to the most important question of 2020 politics: Can Trump survive the pandemic and the astounding disruption it has caused in the economy and the routines of everyday life?

Most people who admire Obama, it’s clear, do so in absolute terms. To these people, his character and style represent virtues that approximate the ideal of how they might wish all presidents at all times should act. He’s progressive, even if not quite as much as some admirers want. He values rationality and restraint, a bit more so than many partisans would wish—an elegant and inspirational figure in an inelegant and cynical age. These virtues, by these lights, do not depend primarily on context—on who his opponents are, or what external circumstances he is facing.

Most people who admire Trump, in my conversations, do so in a relative way. Context is everything. Yes, they say, Trump is coarse and combative, often outrageous, with a wandering attention span. No, this does not represent their ideal of how a president should act. But these aren’t ideal times—they are infused with double standards and cynicism—and this makes Trump a great leader for these particular times. He calls out institutions (political parties, Congress, the media) who his partisans don’t believe deserve their respect or influence. He gratuitously offends liberal pieties. He is not boring, and he’s not afraid.

It’s often said that Trump’s brand of politics requires him to identify enemies—people want to see who he’s against. What’s overlooked is Trump’s brand of politics requires other people to identify him as the enemy. There’s never a shortage of volunteers, and none more prestigious than a former Democratic president widely respected by his party. Democrats were pleased to hear Obama’s words of condemnation. But Trump was even more pleased. No one could doubt that Obama sincerely believed his comparatively mild rebuke of Trump. No one really doubts that whether Trump believes his broadsides against Obama is secondary to his true objective of drawing lines and creating the kind of chaos in which he has previously thrived.

The rejoinder to all this is obvious: Who cares? What relevance do Trump’s grievances and posturing and conspiracy theories have in the middle of a pandemic? Surely there is only one question that matters: Is Trump doing a good job responding to the crisis?

But that question immediately leads to the next: Good job, according to who?

Trump knows that the likelihood that a sufficient number of people will say he’s doing at least an acceptable job during the pandemic increases the more that certain types of people say he’s a terrible person doing a terrible job.

Democrats believe the pandemic and Trump’s belated and erratic response to it will be his undoing. There is polling to bolster this hope. A Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday showed Joe Biden leading Trump by 50 percent to 39 percent in a head-to-head matchup—an 11-point national lead that, if it held, likely would put several battleground states out of reach for Trump.

But weighing against hope is experience. Democrats have yet to be validated, not after the Billy Bush tape in 2016, not after the Ukraine revelations of 2019, that there is a “this time he’s gone too far” moment that will cause Trump backers to mournfully turn their support away from him.

So far, there is no evidence that a galvanizing rhetorical moment—such as Joseph Welch in 1954 challenging Joe McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”—will derail Trump. There is plenty of evidence, on the other hand, that being told Trump is bad causes some people to think he is good.

Even so, the eternal belief in some precincts is that American politics will finally pivot when just the right person finds just the right words to pierce the Trump Movement.

Obama surely understands the Trump Trap. Likely he also believes that at some point political leaders risk losing their moral authority and claim on public attention if they don’t say what they think. Nancy Pelosi also understands the Trump Trap. Democrats won the 2018 elections by stressing new reforms for health care over denunciations of Trump. But she also knows the trap is hard to resist, as when she explained this week that she called Trump morbidly obese because she wanted to give him “a dose of his own medicine.” Democratic nominee Joe Biden on Wednesday mocked Trump as “President Tweety,” but generally has resisted trying to match his much more theatrical opponent insult for insult.

Most partisans don’t have or aspire to that restraint, and accept a role as essential supporting actors in his show.

The latest example is this week’s uproar over Trump supposedly taking hydroxychloroquine, medically unsupported for use as treatment or prophylaxis against Covid-19. If Trump really is taking the stuff, which some critics doubt, one can see why that might be a bad idea from his perspective. Logically, however, it’s not clear why people who dislike Trump should be outraged. “Oh, no, he might get sick and we need his leadership.” I haven’t heard anyone sincerely say that. “I’m mad because when I first heard him prattling on about the stuff I really got my hopes up but it turns out he didn’t know what he was talking about.” I don’t think there are very many such people. Probably there are some people who genuinely are worried on behalf of Trump supporters. “I’ve got friends and relatives who I like even though we disagree about politics and I could imagine some of them actually following Trump’s lead.”

But let’s be honest: People outraged by Trump and hydroxychloroquine are mostly offended on their own behalf, not other people’s. He utterly shocks their sensibilities about how a president is supposed to act, with caution and deference to the counsel of experts. Which is precisely the reason Trump takes, or claims to take, the drug.

In just the past several days, Trump has suggested that Biden is suffering from senility, lashed out at governors who he says aren’t opening up their states fast enough, and called MSNBC news host Joe Scarborough “Psycho Joe” and implied that the former member of Congress may be connected to a “cold case” 20 years ago involving the death of a woman who worked in his office, even though the medical examiner said this isn’t a “cold case” at all but was long ago ruled an accident.

The barrage of allegations does not reflect a president confident about his political standing. But it doesn’t necessarily reflect a president who has lost self-control and has no idea what he’s doing. He’s trying to get American politics back to normal, as he understands the word. At least in some narrow ways he knows it’s working.

Warren pivots on ‘Medicare for All’ in bid to become Biden’s VP

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

OPINION

Trump didn’t drain the swamp. Now Biden may drown him in it.

Money that should be going to needy Americans is going to Trump’s friends and cronies. If anything, the swamp is bigger than ever.

KURT BARDELLA | OPINION COLUMNIST | 10 hours ago

Whatever happened to “drain the swamp” — one of the original promises from then-candidate Donald J. Trump? At the time, it was a powerful rhetorical refrain that harnessed a widespread sentiment that Washington had sold out the American people in favor of special interest influence. It was an effective rallying cry that created a tangible contrast between the outsider insurgency that was Donald Trump juxtaposed with the ultimate insider that was Hillary Clinton. And yet four years later, Trump has become the swampiest of swamp creatures, giving the Joe Biden campaign a very real opening to do to Trump what Trump did to Clinton.

If you’re among the 36.5 million Americans who have filed for unemployment insurance since mid-March, you might be asking yourself, “What happened to all of that money Congress passed to shore up the economy and keep small businesses afloat?” The answer: Too often, it went to donors, supporters, allies and former aides of President Donald J. Trump, aka The Swamp.

The friends of Trump that hit the jackpot

Clay Lacy Aviation, a private jet company founded by a Trump campaign and Republican National Committee donor, received $27 million in government funding through the $2 trillion coronavirus package known as the CARES Act.

Phunware, a data firm that is doing work for the Trump re-election campaign, received $2.85 million from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) — the average loan distributed through this program is $206,000.

CloudCommerce, a company whose largest shareholder is Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, received nearly a million dollars through the PPP.

Ronald Gidwitz is the president’s ambassador to Belgium and was the Trump campaign finance chair for Illinois. Gidwitz’s family is the largest shareholder in a company called Continental Materials Corp. They were approved for a $5.5 million PPP loan.

It is worth noting that Congress gave a much-needed “booster shot” to unemployment benefits by allowing some to receive an additional $600 a week, however, the influx of unemployment claims has created a massive backlog, delaying support from reaching millions of Americans. On top of that, emergency relief dollars intended to support small businesses are instead going to publicly traded companies with more than 500 workers. All the while, dozens of lobbyists with direct ties to the Trump administration and Trump campaign are cashing in, receiving tens of thousands of dollars from private companies to leverage their relationships and access to deliver a piece of those taxpayer dollars.

Flynn is the test case: Will Trump and Barr force justice system to aid and abet corruption?

You might remember that in April, Trump removed the inspector general who had been tasked with conducting oversight of the $2 trillion CARES Act relief package. That IG was replaced with White House lawyer Brian Miller, whose nomination was advanced last week by the Republican-controlled Senate Banking Committee. Trump clearly wants a loyalist in this position who will look the other way while taxpayer-funded handouts are delivered to his allies.

Republicans said they cared about corruption when Obama was president

In 2010, my former boss Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), was the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Appearing on The Rush Limbaugh Show, Issa declared that President Barack Obama was “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.” A month later, Issa added context to his remarks on CNN’s Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer saying, “When you hand a president nearly a trillion dollars in walking around money, he uses it for political paybacks, that’s corrupt.”

Donald Trump’s bank-heist in broad daylight of coronavirus funding is the manifestation of everything working-class Americans believe is corrupt about Washington. The idea that the elite and privileged get a life boat, while the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves. That access to support and relief is bought and paid for with political contributions, while millions of Americans are being laid off and furloughed. That pay-for-play is the only currency that Donald Trump accepts, and the rest of us are dispensable and disposable.

110 bipartisan leaders: Congress needs to reform itself in wake of coronavirus

It’s a campaign narrative that practically writes itself and can put Biden on the right side of the middle/working class voters that Trump and the Republicans are taking for granted with their flagrant corruption. Donald Trump may have won the presidency on the promise to “drain the swamp.” Joe Biden should end it by drowning him in it.

© Copyright Gannett 2020

: Analyst: New poll shows Biden way ahead with key deciding group of voters

{An interesting take: a while ago I posted that a capital accumulation of 1 trillion will not happen, and here is where it has come up again :}

"In the Midst of Covid-19, Elites Have Begun to Prepare For the Uprising.

Maybe it’s time we do, too.

Lauren Martinchek

In the wake of a global pandemic that has left ninety thousand people dead and brought tens of millions of people to their knees financially here in the United States, it should go without saying that in the richest nation on earth, the citizens should be able to look to the government for some relief during these unprecedented and traumatic times.

One need only look at the HEROES Act that recently passed the Democratic Majority House of Representatives for the latest example of how our government has failed to take wellbeing of the American people in to consideration. No paycheck guarantee act, no recurring $2000 checks for the duration of the crisis, no automatic stabilizers, and no improvements to ensure people get the relief they need more quickly and efficiently.

With a record 30 million people filing for unemployment over the past couple of months and losing health insurance along with their jobs, at a time when 78 percent of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck before this crisis even began, desperation is growing with each passing day. Government inaction makes it increasingly clear that we will be starved in to submission. The people who have made this the richest, most profitable country on the planet will be sent back to work, risking not only our lives and health but that of our family and friends as well while the government hands the taxpayer money that our labor generated to big banks and corporations. At the same time that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is reportedly projected to become the world’s first trillionaire, his company has cut the measly two dollar an hour hazard pay for his workers.

The American government and the elites who they work for are playing with fire, so no wonder they’ve begun to prepare for the uprising that’s coming.

Lee Fang at The Intercept writes:

“The Federal government has ramped up security and police-related spending in response to the coronavirus pandemic, including issuing contracts for riot gear, disclosures show.

The purchase orders include requests for disposable cuffs, gas masks, ballistic helmets, and riot gloves, along with law enforcement protective equipment for federal police assigned to protect Veterans Affairs facilities. The orders were expedited under a special authorization “in response to Covid-19 outbreak.”

The Veterans Affairs department, which manages nearly 1,500 health care care facilities around the country, has also extended special contracts for coronavirus-related security services.While the pandemic has coincided with a historic drop in violent crime across the country, analysts have expressed concern that the rapid spread of the virus will fuel confrontations.

There have been multiple inmate riots in response to Covid-19 outbreaks in prisons and jails, which have become dangerous hotspots for the disease. The economic upheaval and disagreements over coronavirus-related policy have also fueled demonstrations across the country.

…The federal funding requests contrast sharply with the rosy rhetoric from President Donald Trump, who has lavished himself with praise for his response to the crisis and issued optimistic predictions that recovery is around the corner. Last month, the federal government secured a contract to purchase 100,000 body bags to dispose of deaths related to the Covid-19 outbreak.”

Every step along the way as this crisis has unfolded, the American people have been treated as nothing more than collateral damage. Whether it be the Trump administration turning down an offer for millions of masks back in January, Nancy Pelosi seeking to bail out health insurance companies after the bundled “donations” to the democratic party from their lobbyists, or Mitch McConnell saying he has not yet felt the “sense of urgency” for a new stimulus bill as countless people miss another rent or mortgage payment, at this point it’s certainly fair to say that our government’s actions or lack thereof have been nothing less than criminal.

If the elites are beginning to prepare for what they clearly know is coming in response to how this crisis has been handled, then perhaps it’s time for us to get ready as well.

For far too long, as a society we have been conditioned to shrug our shoulders and accept that there’s really nothing we can do. For far too long, we have bene conditioned to forget that when a government fails its citizens — as the declaration of independence stated — it is our right, it is our duty to throw off such government. With each passing day, it becomes more and more apparent that we may have no other choice but to do just that. As surreal as it feels to consider, I’m not sure we are in a political or economic situation we’ll ever be able to vote ourselves out of, especially knowing that the government is already preparing to defend it. For months I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that the powers that be have been daring the American people to bring on the pitchforks and guillotines.

With each escalation of the class warfare being waged against the American people, it’s as fascinating as it is frightening to think of what they so clearly see coming right around the corner"

Lauren Martinchek

Ouster of watchdog designed to protect Pompeo

OPINION

Trump’s latest ethical violation: Firing the State Department’s inspector general

Again and again, President Trump violates moral and ethical norms with corrupt decisions. This is only the latest example.

In March 2017, I was speaking to a group of government officials from Latin America about government anti-corruption tools. I have conducted dozens of these sessions over the years for foreign officials and have always proudly touted the strength of the U.S. anti-corruption regime.

This time, however, it was different. Donald Trump had just been elected president and had announced that he would not divest from his business interests. Indeed, several months prior to this training session, Trump had proudly claimed that "the president can’t have a conflict of interest.” I had just finished describing our federal ethics regime as “strong” when the entire group broke out in laughter. The officials laughing during this presentation were from a country with endemic, deep-rooted and well-known corruption issues. And yet here they were — laughing at the state of U.S. ethics laws.

Trump continues to degrade ethical norms

I thought the U.S. reputation for strong anti-corruption laws couldn’t sink lower than it had that day, but little did I know how much more the current administration would continue to degrade our anti-corruption institutions over the next three years.

The latest attack on oversight is Trump’s letter to Congress notifying them that he intends to fire the State Department’s Inspector General Steve Linick. This comes on the heels of Trump removing numerous other inspectors general who have attempted to do their jobs and provide oversight over the administration.

Then-State Department Inspector General Steve Linick leaves Capitol Hill after a briefing with lawmakers on May 16, 2020.

After nearly four years watching this administration diminish anti-corruption and oversight mechanisms, it is easy to become numb to the damage this is causing to the United States’ institutions and reputation. Lest anyone think this is merely a mundane personnel action, let me disabuse you of that notion. This is a big deal.

Linick was investigating Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for allegedly misusing a government employee to perform personal tasks for himself and his wife, Susan Pompeo. And let’s be clear — this is not an overzealous IG gone rogue. There have been allegations of Pompeo and his wife misusing government staff and resources for personal reasons since he joined the administration. As a government official, Pompeo is not permitted to treat civil servants like TaskRabbit.

Helen Thomas, a match for Trump: I wish she could quiz him on coronavirus.

Moreover, Linick was also purportedly looking into Pompeo’s decision to facilitate the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia without congressional approval. By investigating these allegations, Linick was doing exactly what his job requires him to do — root out fraud, waste and abuse within his agency. And when the target of his investigation learned what he was doing, he asked Trump to remove him. This is textbook retaliation and fundamentally undermines the independence and effectiveness of agency inspectors general.

Inspectors general are meant to provide oversight, not cover

The 1978 Inspector General Act created inspectors general to serve as independent watchdogs tasked with, among other things, uncovering corruption, misconduct, waste and abuse in the government. They have always received wide latitude in order to perform their jobs without fear of retaliation. The statute requires that at least 30 days before an IG’s removal or transfer, the president must notify Congress, in writing, of the reasons for this action.

Trump has made clear that he views legally-mandated oversight efforts as “scams,” “witch hunts” and “hoaxes.” So the chances of him voluntarily changing course in this matter are pretty close to nil. That leaves it to Congress to do something to stop this attempted removal of all accountability mechanisms. And it must be more than a tepid letter asking for a more detailed reasoning for removal of a Senate-confirmed IG. Although the democratic investigation into Linick’s firing is a start, unless Congress is willing to take concrete action — like refusing to confirm nominees — Trump will continue to remove any inspectors general who try to hold his administration accountable.

Flynn is a test case: Will Trump and Barr force justice system to aid and abet corruption?

There is another element to consider in Linick’s firing: Every inappropriate removal of an IG, failure to follow government ethics laws, comingling of government and personal interests, attack on federal anti-corruption laws and defunding of global anti-corruption initiatives chips away at the U.S. government’s long-standing reputation for following the rule of law and leading the fight against global corruption.

The United States, like every other country in the world, has never been free of corruption. But our strong anti-corruption laws, active anti-corruption enforcement and global commitment to combating corruption have long served as a model for countries around the world. Sadly, these days, instead of serving as a beacon in the global fight against corruption, we are now just the butt of a joke.

© Copyright Gannett 2020

At this point in the evolving saga of the peculiar behavior of Trumpism in the modern world, it’s implications, can be inverted, pyramid like, turned on its head, if, and only if, it can conclusively be shown, that the so called ‘Naturalistic Fallacy’ has outlived it’s usefulness.
In that case, the supposed reduction from a material to a pure ideological dialectics may be more relevant.

As if the proposition-‘An ellipse equation, in conics form, is always “=1”. Note that, in both equations above, the h always stayed with the x and the k always stayed with the y.’- be always true.

From Maureen Dawd-opinion :

WASHINGTON — My corona dreams are so crazy and vibrant, with star turns by politicians, celebrities, zombies and my late mother, that sometimes as I wake, I groggily think the virus that devoured the globe has to be a dystopian vision.

Then, still sliding into consciousness, I muse that Donald Trump lumbering around the White House must have been a dream, too. How is it possible that this man is actually president?

But the Trump carnival of dread, with its twin fixations on masks and unmasking, is all too real.

On Thursday, as China played King Kong with Hong Kong; as unemployment rose to 38.6 million; as broken dams unleashed a flood in Central Michigan; as the president continued to stubbornly and recklessly claim he was taking hydroxychloroquine, causing sales to soar; as the news sunk in that if the U.S. had acted even a week sooner on social distancing that 36,000 people might still be alive; as Senate Republicans finally cemented themselves to Trump and his crazy schemes; as Trump stuck to his threat of withholding federal funds to Michigan and Nevada if those states enabled voters to vote; as a partisan know-nothing was put in charge of all our intelligence; as Trump pulled out of another major arms control pact; as Mike Pompeo basked in getting Trump to fire another inspector general (this one looking into a backdoor deal to sell arms to Saudi Arabia and brazen grifting by the Pompeos), the cliffhanger president made sure the focus was on just one little thing: Would he or wouldn’t he wear a mask as he toured the Ford plant in Ypsilanti?

After donning it for a few private moments with Ford executives, Trump removed the mask for the public part of the tour, saying he “didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.”

While you know Barack Obama would have been all about the mask, showing the nation the proper example, Trump is afraid his followers will think he’s a wimp if he wears it, that he’s conceding the danger of a pandemic many in MAGA-land think is exaggerated or some sort of hoax.

The mask should be a medical signal, not a political one. But Trump rejects the mask because of a misbegotten image of masculinity and power. In denying the mask, he denies reality, science and the fact that the country is in a crouch. Trump has proved that people wearing a mask can present more truth than people not wearing a mask.

His latest con, something that he stupidly refers to as “Obamagate,” a scandal about unmasking, is also misbegotten. You can’t create a scandal about Obama out of nothing just because you hate the fact that he went by the book while you dwell in a murky world of transgressions, that he glides while you lurch.

Even as Trump tries to paint Joe Biden as gaga, he is doing something truly gaga: He is running the government that is responding to the worst pandemic in a century at the same time he is the leader of the resistance to his own government, urging people and states to open up whenever they see fit, recommending Clorox injections, stifling Dr. Fauci, refusing to wear the mask

The fact is that Donald Trump has been wearing a mask for a long time, like Eleanor Rigby “wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door.” He studied larger-than-life titans like George Steinbrenner and Lee Iacocca and invented a swaggering character called Donald Trump with a career marked by evasions, deceptions and disguises.

The young builder was intent, as T.S. Eliot wrote, to take the time “to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” Early on, Donald locked in his costume for the masquerade, the look of a C.E.O. in the ’80s. His body armor was a dark suit, white shirt and monochromatic silk tie. His hair was a blond helmet, his war paint was orange.

“He is the most vaudevillian performance artist who ever inhabited the White House,” says his biographer Tim O’Brien. “He has a consuming desire to always be center stage, yet he never wants to reveal who he really is. He masks his finances, his taxes, his friendships, his ongoing family conflicts of interest, his ignorance and his inadequacies. He’s constantly making up areas of expertise he doesn’t have.

“He doesn’t read the Bible and he doesn’t live as a Christian and love thy neighbor. But he is demanding that the churches be reopened because his evangelical base will love that. Everything he’s doing right now is to stave off a loss in November

<><<><><><><><><><><>>>><<<<><><>>><<>><<><><>><<>><<

POLITICO

WHITE HOUSE

Trump’s drive against watchdogs faces constitutional reckoning
The inspector general system is being tested like never before in the Trump era.

President Trump
President Donald Trump’s aggressive push to diminish the independence of inspectors general has alarmed Democrats and some Republicans who have long defended them as the last bulwark against administrative waste and misconduct. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo

President Donald Trump’s campaign against the watchdogs monitoring his administration could soon get a huge boost from the Supreme Court.

Trump’s drive to undermine inspectors general has outraged Democrats, who have offered a mountain of legislation to protect them from reprisal and removal. But there are deepening doubts about whether these efforts would survive constitutional scrutiny. And the high court could leave lawmakers powerless to combat Trump’s incursion against independent oversight, as it weighs a case that calls into question whether Congress can restrict the president from removing senior Executive Branch officials without cause.

Interviews with a dozen constitutional experts, former inspectors general, lawmakers and aides suggest that, even absent the upcoming Supreme Court ruling, any efforts to block Trump from ousting inspectors general would be on unsettled constitutional terrain. And lawmakers’ ambitious efforts could force a reckoning over the entire system of internal watchdogs.

Trump’s aggressive push to diminish the independence of inspectors general has alarmed Democrats and some Republicans who have long defended them as the last bulwark against administrative waste and misconduct. Previous presidents have bristled at internal watchdogs’ scrutiny but have rarely mounted such a broad-based, politically-driven campaign to chill their efforts.

In other words, a watchdog system that has operated largely on handshake agreements and tacit understandings of independence is — like many aspects of long-accepted U.S. governance — being tested like never before in the Trump era.

“For the president to stand up and say, ‘If I didn’t appoint this IG, he’s gone or she’s gone. If I don’t like what they’re saying, I’m going to stop them from saying it’ — that does not smack of an elected democracy,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in an interview. “It smacks of a different kind of government.”

John Tester
Sen. Jon Tester.

Trump has already engaged in extensive stonewalling of House investigations, which led to one of the impeachment articles against him. His Senate acquittal has left him unrestrained and eager for retribution.

Democrats’ pushback reached new decibels in recent days, as Trump claimed “absolute” power to remove inspectors general he dislikes, even if they’re investigating cabinet officials for potential abuses.

“Everybody agrees that I have the absolute right to fire the inspector generals,” Trump told reporters after facing questions about his decision to oust State Department IG Steve Linick, who has been reviewing an array of actions by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Trump indicated he didn’t know Linick but agreed to Pompeo’s request to remove him because he was appointed to the post by former President Barack Obama.

Other Republicans have picked up Trump’s mantle, arguing that he has unfettered power to oust inspectors general. “He has the full authority to hire and fire, under the Constitution, anybody in the executive branch,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Trump and McConnell’s comments came amid growing calls by Democrats for new measures to restrict Trump’s power to remove these IGs, some of whom have issued stinging reports about administration mismanagement and drawn the president’s fury.

As part of a sprawling, $3 trillion coronavirus response package, the House recently passed a proposal authored by nearly two dozen committee chairmen that would prohibit Trump from removing inspectors general without “good cause,“ such as incapacitation or malfeasance. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) offered a similar proposal that would also provide for congressional review of IG removals and limit who the president may install as acting replacements when there’s a vacancy.

CONGRESS

Trump’s attacks on inspectors general galvanize unusual coalition of critics

BY ANDREW DESIDERIO AND KYLE CHENEY

And on Friday, House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) offered a closely related measure that would require “documented” good cause reasons to oust an inspector general. Their efforts have been cheered by advocacy groups like the Project on Government Oversight, who say protecting IGs from political interference is a crucial aspect of modern checks and balances.

In fact, Congress has made a series of moves to protect inspectors general in the years since they were established after Watergate. The most recent push came in 2008, when Congress passed the IG Reform Act, enshrining new protections, such as a requirement that the president notify lawmakers 30 days before removing an inspector general.

But for the first time, the entire system is being challenged by a president who rejects the notion that these roving internal auditors, who straddle the bright line between Capitol Hill and the Executive Branch, should do anything but answer to him.

Trump has made that clear in ways large and small. In addition to his removal of Linick at the State Department, last month Trump abruptly ousted intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson over his handling of a whistleblower complaint that ignited the House’s impeachment effort.

Days before that, Trump issued a signing statement accompanying a massive coronavirus relief law asserting that he — not Congress — decides whether an inspector general even communicates with lawmakers.

In recent weeks, Trump has also demoted or sidelined a slew of other inspectors general and moved to appoint loyalists to fill some of the vacancies. At both the State Department and Department of Transportation, the aides picked to temporarily fill the top IG position are also continuing to report to their agency bosses, a split role that Democrats and some Republicans warned could chill new whistleblowers and expose existing ones. Trump also nominated a replacement for the Health and Human Services Department IG after her office issued a report critical of the administration’s pandemic response.

It’s quickly become the stiffest test of the inspector general system — a pillar of the post-Watergate reform effort — since Ronald Reagan fired them all upon taking office in 1981, only to rehire some amid a withering backlash from Congress.

In fact, Congress so closely guarded the independence of inspectors general that a move by Obama to abruptly oust the AmeriCorps IG in 2009 prompted a five-month investigation by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and then-Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) that resulted in a 62-page report sharply criticizing the decision.

Sen. Chuck Grassley.

“This isn’t the first time there’s been a tango or a contretemps between IGs and the president,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a University of Virginia constitutional scholar. He noted that IGs are somewhat “anomalous” and have been described as “moles for Congress” because of their unique obligations to sit within the Executive Branch but report their findings to lawmakers.

Today, Grassley is one of only a few Republicans raising alarms about Trump’s more broad-based push to remove inspectors general he dislikes.

Grassley mused just days ago that he may propose legislation to prohibit acting inspectors general who temporarily fill vacancies from continuing to report to agency leaders as well. And he’s written bipartisan letters to the Trump White House demanding more detail about Trump’s reasons for removing Linick and Atkinson, suggesting Trump’s initial rationale — a general loss of confidence — was insufficient.

Still, Grassley hasn’t signaled any move toward tying Trump’s hands with legislation, and such a proposal would be difficult to get passed in the GOP-controlled Senate let alone signed into law by Trump.

Whether Congress can bar Trump from removing any inspector general is likely to come into focus within weeks, as the Supreme Court rules on a case over whether the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is constitutional.

The agency, which was established after the 2008 financial crisis, is being challenged by a law firm that argues its structure violates the separation of powers because its director can only be removed for specific “good cause” reasons. How the court rules could determine whether other senior Executive Branch officials — such as inspectors general — can be protected from removal without violating the president’s power to manage his own branch of government.

Though IGs have less authority than other senior officials — they don’t have the power to prosecute or control large budgets — they also have no term limits. Congress expressly opted against including a seven-year term limit in the 2008 IG reform bill; lawmakers also rejected a call to protect IGs from removal without cause in favor of a provision requiring the president to notify Congress 30 days in advance before firing an inspector general.

Adding in removal protections without corresponding term limits could give the courts — now stocked with Trump-appointed judges who may be more amenable to his views on executive authority — reason to rule broadly against limiting the president’s power.

“There are certainly ways to make such provisions more likely to survive scrutiny (term limits would be an essential first step), but Congress needs to go in with its eyes open about the Court it’s now facing,” said Deborah Pearlstein, a Yeshiva University legal expert who advised the House on the constitutionality of its recent proxy voting decision.

POLITICO NEWSLETTERS

POLITICO Playbook
Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics.

By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Ter

Peter Shane, an Ohio State University constitutional scholar, added, “Typically, officers protected from at-will presidential removal also have statutory terms of office so they don’t serve forever.”

Instead, some experts think other forms of congressionally imposed limitations might survive legal scrutiny. One includes a new proposal from Tester that would automatically zero out the Department of Treasury’s budget if the newly created coronavirus response inspector general is blocked from accessing internal information.

“Congress can stop this bullshit from happening right now if the Republicans would step up,” Tester said.

Some legal scholars also argue that despite the lack of certainty, previous rulings suggest Congress can impose limits on Trump’s removal of inspectors general so long as they don’t impede his constitutional responsibility to execute the law faithfully. A 1935 Supreme Court decision allowed Congress to limit the removal of officers who lead independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission. The House Oversight Committee cited that ruling to support its new proposals to limit Trump’s ability to fire IGs.

Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general who has since become a vocal Trump critic, said he worries that “for cause” restrictions on IG removal could be unconstitutional but that proposals like Tester’s could be valuable.

“Until now, IGs operated in a world where they believed that standard existed as a matter of fact even though it did not exist in law,” Bromwich said. That’s no longer the case.

Key swing state warns of November election ‘nightmare’
Lavish Parties, Greedy Pols and Panic Rooms: How the ‘Apple of Pot’ Collapsed
The political neophyte Democrats are betting on to capture the Senate
Rick Scott says the Bill of Rights trumps all
U.S. ambassador to Germany reportedly stepping down

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

New York Times

The Guardian - Back to home

Coronavirus outbreak

Coronavirus: Trump aide claims China guilty of cover-up akin to Chernobyl

Trump spends second day on golf course as toll nears 100,000

China raises US trade tensions with warning of ‘new cold war’

Sun 24 May 2020 13.32 EDT

The White House on Sunday accused China of a cover-up that will “go down in history along with Chernobyl”, ramping up efforts to deflect attention from a Covid-19 death toll in the US fast closing on 100,000.

The US doctors taking Trump’s lead on hydroxychloroquine – despite mixed results

Robert O’Brien, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, made the claim on two political talk shows, saying Beijing gave “false information” to the World Health Organization (WHO) at the start of the year and alleging that stonewalling of an investigation into the origins of the pandemic has cost “many, many thousands of lives in America and around the world”.

On Saturday Mike Pence, the vice-president, told Breitbart News that China had “let the world down” and insisted the WHO was “their willing partner in withholding from the US and wider world vital information about the coronavirus”.

The Trump administration has become increasingly keen to move attention away from its handling of the pandemic, which has seen more deaths in the US than any other nation and a broken economy including soaring unemployment that another senior adviser told CNN would still be “in double digits” by the 3 November presidential election.

O’Brien dampened speculation that the administration might seek to delay that election. But as China warned that Washington’s “lies” were “pushing our two countries to the brink of a new cold war”, he went firmly on the attack.

Someday they’re going to do an HBO show like they did with Chernobyl

Speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation, he claimed Beijing knew of the looming crisis as early as November but chose to keep it quiet.

“We don’t know who in the Chinese government did it, but it doesn’t matter if it was the local Chinese government or the Communist party of China,” he said.

“Look, this was a virus that was unleashed by China. There was a cover up that someday they’re going to do an HBO show like they did with Chernobyl,” he added, likening the pandemic to the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine which Soviet authorities initially tried to hide.

O’Brien repeated the claim on NBC’s Meet the Press, accusing China of a “cover-up that … is going to go down in history along with Chernobyl”.

Most scientists say the pathogen that has infected 5.3 million people and killed more than 342,000 worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University, was passed from bats to humans via an intermediary species probably sold at a wet market in Wuhan, China, last year.

But Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other senior US figures have repeatedly said they suspect the coronavirus was somehow released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a claim China has strenuously denied.

O’Brien claimed China’s alleged skulduggery was continuing.

“There’s a chance, and it’s been reported, that the Chinese have been engaged in espionage to try and find the research and the technologies that we’re working on both for a vaccine and a therapy,” he told CBS.

“So look, they’ve got a many, many year history of stealing American intellectual property and knocking off American technology. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did that with vaccines.”

O’Brien also said the US would soon implement restrictions on travelers from Brazil.

After spending much of Saturday playing golf at his resort in Virginia, Trump had no public engagements on Sunday. He duly went back to Trump National in Sterling.

On Twitter the president, who criticized Barack Obama in 2014 for golfing when a second case of Ebola was confirmed in the US, preferred to concentrate on topics other than the pandemic.

Trump feuded with his former attorney general, Jeff Sessions; attacked Joe Biden, his likely opponent in November; retweeted abusive messages about female opponents; repeated unsubstantiated allegations that mail-in ballots lead to rigged elections; and repeated baseless insinuations that an MSNBC host might have murdered an aide.

He also tweeted falsely that coronavirus “cases, numbers and deaths are going down all over the Country!”

On Saturday, North Carolina reported its highest one-day spike in cases. Official statistics continue to show hotspots in other places including Washington DC – where O’Brien said the administration still hopes to hold an in-person G7 summit in July – and Florida, where the Miami Herald reported that the rate of new cases was not slowing.

On Friday Dr Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, encouraged the public to go outdoors over the Memorial Day weekend.

Donald Trump leaves the White House on Sunday. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

“We know being outside does help, we know the sun does help in killing the virus, but that doesn’t change the fact that people need to be responsible and maintain that distance,” she told Fox News Sunday, when presented with images of packed beaches and people in close proximity, not wearing masks.

“I was hoping to convey this very clear message to the American people,” she said, “… across the country there is a virus out there.”

Birx also said Trump himself did wear a mask when not able to maintain social distance. Trump was not pictured using a mask on his trips to play golf in Virginia.

On ABC’s This Week, Birx was asked if the nation would need an extended or second lockdown.

‘Incalculable loss’: New York Times covers front page with 1,000 Covid-19 death notices

“It’s difficult to tell and I really am data-driven, so I’m collecting data right now about whether governors and whether states and whether communities are able to open safely,” she said.

“All of this proactive testing needs to be in place and needs to continue to be in place because that will determine safely remaining open in the fall.”

One thing the Trump administration admits will not bounce back fully by fall is the US unemployment rate, which Kevin Hassett, a senior adviser, told CNN would still be in double figures by the time of the election.

“Unemployment will be something that moves back slower,” he said. “You’re going to be starting at a number in the 20s [per cent] and working your way down. And so, of course, you could still not be back to full employment by September

© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

youtu.be/3oByMiF4hPg

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The Plum Line

Opinion

Can we stop pretending Trump is fit to be president?

By Paul Waldman

Opinion writer

May 25, 2020 at 10:08 AM EDT

At various times over the past three and a half years, many of us have asked what would happen if President Trump truly went over the edge or if his behavior became so frightening that his unfitness for the most powerful position on Earth could no longer be denied.

But the human capacity for denial is apparently almost infinite. Let’s review what our president has been up to in the past few days:

With the death toll from covid-19 about to top 100,000, Trump has offered almost nothing in the way of tributes to the dead, sympathy for their families, or acknowledgement of our national mourning. By all accounts he is barely bothering to manage his administration’s response to the pandemic, preferring to focus on cheerleading for an economic recovery he says is on its way, even as he feeds conspiracy theories about the death toll being inflated. This weekend, he went golfing.

In a Twitter spasm on Saturday and Sunday, Trump retweeted mockery of former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s weight and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) looks, along with a tweet calling Hillary Clinton a “skank.”

Eager to start a new culture war flare-up, he urged churches to open and gather parishioners in a room to breathe the same air, threatening that he would “override” governors whose shutdown orders still forbade such gatherings. The president has no such power.

He all but accused talk show host Joe Scarborough of murdering a young woman who died in 2001 in the then-congressman’s district office, bringing untold torture to her family from the conspiracy theorists who will respond to his accusation.

He has repeatedly insisted that the upcoming election is being “rigged” because states run by both Republicans and Democrats are making it easier to vote by mail, seeking to delegitimize a vote that has yet to occur, despite the substantial evidence that mail voting advantages neither party.

(, and /The Washington Post)

The truth is that Trump is not much more despicable of a human being than he has always been; it’s just that standard Trumpian behavior becomes more horrifying when it occurs during an ongoing national crisis. It is reality that changed around him, and he was incapable of responding to it.

We all know this. In public, Republicans may say that the real villain in the pandemic is China, or that all those deaths — and the tens of thousands yet to come — were inevitable, or that it is essential to get the economy moving. But they know as well as the rest of us do what a catastrophic failure Trump has been.

They must own the moral choice they now make. In 2016, they said Trump would grow serious and sober once he was faced with the awesome responsibilities of the office. There was little reason at the time to think it would happen, but it was at least possible.

No one can say that now. Not only do we know who Trump is, we know who he will always be. And we know that reelecting him will be disastrous in a hundred ways.

If you gave many Republicans in Washington truth serum, they’d say, “Of course he’s unfit to be president. Of course he’s corrupt, of course he’s incompetent, of course he’s the most dishonest person ever to step into the Oval Office. But I can live with that, because him being reelected means Republicans keep power, we get more conservative judges and we get all the policies we favor.”

That is the choice they’re making. We all know it, even if they’ll never say it out loud.

I’m not sure how I’d feel or what I’d do if was faced with a similar choice as a liberal, because it’s impossible to imagine a liberal version of Trump becoming the nominee of the Democratic Party — or even what a liberal version of Trump would look like. But we can see how Democrats grappled recently with their own questions about former vice president Joe Biden and the compromises they might have to make about him.

When a woman named Tara Reade alleged that Biden had sexually assaulted her in the early 1990s when she worked in his Senate office, the response among those who wish to see Trump defeated in November was complicated, to say the least. Some criticized Biden, some questioned Reade’s story and some remained agnostic pending further information.

And some, showing a forthrightness Republicans have not been willing to muster, said that even if they came to believe Reade’s story was true, they’d still vote for Biden, not just because Trump has been credibly accused of sexual misconduct by no fewer than two dozen women, but also because even if Biden turned out to be guilty, it would still be unfortunate but necessary to choose him over the most dangerously unfit president in American history.

In the days since, so many questions have been raised about Reade’s story that she has few defenders left; her own lawyer dropped her as a client. That has left Democrats breathing a sigh of relief, as they seem to have been excused from making a painful but necessary choice. Nevertheless, they grappled, candidly and publicly, with what it would mean for them if Reade were telling the truth.

The Republicans who support Trump have seldom done that, perhaps because there is no way to do so without acknowledging how morally indefensible that support has been. And as we approach another election, they’ll tell themselves that Trump isn’t as bad as he looks, or that Joe Biden is a monster, or that all that matters is winning.

In the future, when we look back on this dark period, we should resist the temptation to focus solely on Trump himself. To do so would be to excuse those who know exactly what he is but pretend they can work to keep him in office and remain unsullied. They cannot, and their moral culpability becomes clearer every day.

Read more:

Paul Waldman: Trump can’t even convince his own party that mail voting is fraudulent

Greg Sargent: Trump’s latest campaign stunt is a bust. Stop granting him magical powers.

Jennifer Rubin: Trump does not wear well

Max Boot: Trump’s ‘I know you are, but what am I?’ campaign rolls on

Colbert I. King: Trump is using his lies to sway his reelection, and Democrats aren’t paying attention

Paul Waldman

© 1996-2020 The Washington Post

POLITICO

2020 ELECTIONS

Trump sees a ‘rigged election’ ahead. Democrats see a constitutional crisis in the making.

The president’s increasingly amped-up rhetoric surrounding the integrity of the November elections has many wondering how he might respond to a defeat.

The president has had a long preoccupation with voter fraud and “rigged” elections. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

First he lit into Michigan and Nevada, threatening to withhold federal funding because of his assertion that both states were preparing to commit voter fraud through mail-in ballot applications. Then President Donald Trump followed up Sunday with two more broadly-worded warnings that November would be “the greatest Rigged Election in history.”

“The Democrats are trying to Rig the 2020 Election, plain and simple!” the president claimed.

Trump’s increasingly amped-up rhetoric surrounding the integrity of the November election is beginning to bring to center stage a previously muted conversation. With the president lagging behind Joe Biden in public opinion polls six months before the general election, his opponents are becoming increasingly anxious that Trump may attempt to undermine the results of the election if he loses — or worse, might attempt to cling to power regardless of the outcome.

“He is planting the seeds for delegitimizing the election if he loses,” Vanita Gupta, a former head of DOJ’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama and now president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said on Twitter on Sunday in reaction to Trump’s “rigged election” claim. “It’s from the playbook. It’ll get more intense as he gets more freaked out.”

Trump’s rhetoric isn’t exactly new for him. Dating back even before his entry into electoral politics, the president has had a long preoccupation with voter fraud and “rigged” elections. As a primary candidate, he attributed his Iowa defeat to fraud committed by Sen. Ted Cruz. Even after his general election victory, Trump made unsubstantiated claims of “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California” — three states that he failed to carry — and told congressional leaders that millions of illegal votes were the reason he lost the popular vote.

In one of his first acts as president, Trump created an 11-member commission to study alleged voter fraud. Two years later, amid the GOP’s 2018 wipe-out, he was lodging complaints about “electoral corruption” in Arizona and “missing or forged” ballots in Florida.

“It’ll get more intense as he gets more freaked out.”

Vanita Gupta, president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

The concern that Trump might attempt to ignore the outcome of the election has persisted as an undercurrent in the Democratic Party since 2016, when Trump, during the year’s last presidential debate, refused to say if he would accept the election’s outcome that year if he lost. In the years since, Democrats saw innuendo in Trump’s jokes about extending his presidency beyond the constitutional limit of eight years and expressed admiration for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s limitless terms.

“It’s one of those things that I think has a very low probability, but a very high risk,” said David Skaggs, a former Democratic congressman who has discussed the potential for disruption in the November election with other lawmakers and former lawmakers in recent days. “So even though I don’t think it’s likely to eventuate into some kind of intervention at the state level by the president … there’s still some chance of that, and therefore it’s wise to take it seriously.”

Skaggs said there are people remaining in government who take their oaths of office seriously and “who are not going to be bowled over by a power grab.” However, he noted the presence of a “militia movement out there in the country that would probably rise to arms if the president said they should, and that would be awful.”

“I think the more there is reporting that takes the president’s innuendo seriously about this — the integrity, or the dis-integrity of the election — the more people will be on alert,” he said. “And that is some prophylactic, better than hydroxychloroquine.”

While the unique and uncertain atmospheric conditions this year — an election season rattled by the coronavirus crisis, which has postponed primaries and raised questions about voting procedures on Election Day in November — have served to put critics of the president on edge, it’s his recent threats to withhold funding from Michigan and Nevada that have raised alarms.

Especially significant is Michigan, which Trump won in 2016 but where he is polling behind Biden.

“He’s already set the stage to say it’s rigged,” said Pete Giangreco, a Democratic strategist who has worked on nine presidential campaigns. “This is part of the Trump autocrat playbook … There’s no way this guy’s going to win the popular vote, and it’s at least 50-50 he’s going to lose the electoral college. So, he’s got to come up with something else.”

The Biden campaign is signaling an awareness of the questions it raises. The former vice president told donors at a virtual fundraiser late last month that he is beginning a transition process, saying “the Bush administration worked very closely with Barack [Obama] and me, with our administration, in terms of handing over power in the transition,” according to a pool report.

“I hope it’s as smooth as it was then,” he said, adding, “I doubt it, but I hope so.”

Bob Bauer, Joe Biden’s personal lawyer, said in a prepared statement that Trump “may well resort to any kind of trick, ploy or scheme he can in order to hold onto his presidency.”

Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump’s reelection effort, called any discussion about the president’s unwillingness to leave office if defeated “baseless, ridiculous conspiracy talk and they should go see [Democrats] Hillary Clinton or Stacey Abrams because they actually have openly questioned their own election results.”

The Trump administration recently started the process of planning for a transition of power if Biden wins, creating a transition planning group to prepare for the possibility.

But Trump has rarely been encumbered by fidelity to tradition. And Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, once predicted in congressional testimony that there “will never be a peaceful transition of power” if Trump loses.

“Would I be surprised if he gets beat in November and makes noises about not going out the door? No, and then what kind of constitutional crisis would that create, and then what would you do?” said Mark Longabaugh, a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders during his 2016 campaign.

He likened the prospect facing Democrats to that of the 2000 presidential election, in which the Supreme Court prohibited further recounts of the Florida vote, awarding the presidency to George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore.

“If it’s narrow, that’s when Trump can really create a constitutional crisis,” Longabaugh said. “Think about the 2000 election, and if that was the election, what would Trump do? And you know, what would Trump do if the Supreme Court went against him? Would he do what Al Gore did and put the interests of the country above his own interests whether or not the Supreme Court was correct in its behavior or not? That’s where you get into, I think, scary territory.”

At a minimum, Democratic doubts about Trump’s willingness to accept the November results have increased the imperative to win by indisputable margins — a heavy lift in an election that is widely expected to be close.

"My job is to make sure he loses Wisconsin so badly that he doesn’t have an argument for sticking around that passes the smell test,” said Ben Wikler, chairman of the state Democratic Party in Wisconsin, a state that is critical to Trump’s path to reelection.

Noting that Trump has “filed a lot of lawsuits” in the past, he said, “The bigger the margin, the safer democracy becomes.”

But outside of a court challenge, Trump’s options to disregard the election’s outcome are extremely limited.

“There’s a lot of people that need to do something to hold and implement the results of an election,” said David A. Super, a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center who has analyzed scenarios in which Trump could attempt to hold onto power. “None of them is named Donald J. Trump … There’s absolutely no authority for cancelling or overriding an election in the Constitution or in the statutes. And it would require the president to get multiple people to fairly blatantly disregard their oaths to uphold the Constitution.”

The concerns about Trump’s intentions are reminiscent to some Democrats of the anxiety they felt in the 1970s, when the net was closing around Richard Nixon and some feared he may not go easily.

The difference, said Les Francis, a former deputy White House chief of staff in the Carter administration, is that Nixon made an “institutional decision” to resign, while “one thing we know about Trump, for sure, is he’s not an institutionalist by any stretch of the imagination.”

“I don’t think there’s any depth to which he will not go,” Francis said. “I don’t think there are any rules that he thinks apply to him. As his behavior grows worse, I think people become more alarmed at the possibilities.”

In tribute: Memorial Day 2020

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

Donald Trump has thrown everything but the kitchen sink at Joe Biden since the day he entered the race, using recycled nicknames, outright lies and even disinformation to try and brand him as something he’s not,” said TJ Ducklo, national press secretary for the Biden campaign. “It failed miserably — VP Biden saw record turnout during sweeping victories this spring and united the Democratic Party around a nominee faster than in 2016 or 2008. Why? Because voters know Joe Biden, they know his character, and it’s going to take more than cheap marketing tricks perfected at Trump University to bring down a true public servant who has fought for middle class families for over 45 years.”

New York Times

{The Democratization of Capital has come out of hibernation, and shown the anomaly of that synthesis to be a wish fulfilling fantasy that failed.

It is, as if all the principles on which the revolution never could bypass the ancien regime, at least on principle.

It’s only that the rules changed, and that is where the cover-up should ha e been exposed. Of course, de-jure and de-facto do operate on different levels of insournable difficulty. There never is a fracture, where the whitewash never occurs in public .}

BBC News

Trump threatens to shut down social media companies

President Trump has taken the extraordinary step of threatening to close down social media platforms.

The threat came after Twitter added fact-check links to his tweets for the first time.

The battle between the president and the social-media companies has been brewing for a time.

But now it feels as though an all-out war is looming between Donald Trump and Twitter ahead of the US presidential election, in November.

Last night, a couple of Trump tweets raging about “fraudulent” postal ballots in US elections featured - for some users but not all - a strapline linking to what Twitter called “facts about mail-in ballots.”

This then led to a page debunking the president’s claims but featuring articles from two organisations he regards as his sworn enemies, CNN and the Washington Post.

It took him no time to fight back, tweeting : “Twitter is completely stifling free speech, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen.”

Then, on Wednesday morning, the president woke up and raised the temperature even further with this two-part tweet :

"Republicans feel that social-media platforms totally silence conservatives voices.

"We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.

"We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016.

"We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that… happen again - just like we can’t let largescale mail-in ballots take root in our country.

"It would be a free-for-all on cheating, forgery and the theft of ballots.

"Whoever cheated the most would win.

"Likewise, social media.

“Clean up your act, now.”

Conspiracy theories

So does he mean any of this?

It is very hard to see Congress passing laws to strongly regulate or close down social-media platforms.

The president refers to free speech.

But as a private company, Twitter is free to police its platform as it sees fit.

Nevertheless, for Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, this is undoubtedly just the start of a clash that will continue right up until the November election.

In recent days, he has been under huge pressure to do something about President Trump’s tweets.

Now, he has acted but not in a way that might have been expected.

There has been a furore over the way the president has used Twitter seemingly to endorse a baseless conspiracy theory about one of his critics, the TV presenter and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough.

Image captionTwitter chief Jack Dorsey has resisted pressure to delete some of President Trump’s previous tweets

President Trump has repeatedly suggested the death in an accident, in 2001, of one of the Congressman’s aides, Lori Klausutis, is a “cold case” that deserves to be reopened by the police.

And that led the widower of Ms Klausutis to write to Jack Dorsey, pleading with him to remove the president’s tweets because of the pain they were causing her family.

So far, Mr Dorsey has refused, apparently convinced the president’s Twitter feed has protected status because it is part of the public record.

Nor was there any attempt to correct the inaccuracies in the tweets.

Adding a fact-check to the tweets about mail-in ballots appears to fit in with a new Twitter policy on protecting elections .

It warns users they may not post or share content that may interfere in elections or might suppress participation.

Last night, another baseless conspiracy theory - this time about a made-up crime involving Donald Trump in 2000 - was posted by an account called TheTweetofGod.

It too has neither been removed nor fact-checked, perhaps because Twitter realises it would be accused of inconsistency.

The president’s Facebook page also features his diatribes about mail-in ballots and Joe Scarborough, with no sign of any fact-checking or limits on sharing such material.

But that’s not to suggest it will escape his ire.

Last week, the president tweeted : “The radical left is in total command and control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google.”

And he intended to “remedy this illegal situation”.

There have since been reports the White House might set up a special commission to investigate the claim.

Whatever the social-media companies do about their most famous and controversial user is bound to cause anger on one side or another.

They can look forward to a long hot summer.

Copyright © 2020 BBC. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

{Very reductively, as ultimate rules/rulers are concerned, the Washington post asks how can Trump get away with it?

The only plausible answer lies in the simplest psychological answer: he can not yet internalize the difference between the substance and the tacit , parent understand in pursuance of the NWO, therefore in order to avoid international disarray and chaos, he has to invoke an inner directed struggle within national borders.

It appears that the reconstruction of the greater America is tantamount to a political psychological regression, almost a quasi Wilsonian attempt to an internally bordered intrinsic adherence to a neutral state, a formal productive duplication .
An example can be used from the stated intended withdrawal from areas of long held birders that contained a conflicting state between factions like Afghanistan. A withdrawal has been signaled, letting domino pieces fall where they will, assuring that the established local forces can control insurgency.
But does this note a world politic of pre-World War mentality?

The U.S. has a very short memory, in this manner less then a hundred years, whereas extended Continental memory relating to wars of succession abounded , with less noticeable duration.

In geopolitical sense, the last hundred years implies more continuous causative sequencing , as viewed through a more distant oobjective lens, so maybe the regression to less international associations should not evoke an unreasonable trek, backward into time.

Now that ideological hurdles are supposed to have been solved with anti-dialectical methods, maybe it is timely to suppress the material (substance ) of inferred ideas as well.

But that’s just the thing. The material thus suppressed may cause major problems in the near future.}

<<

POLITICO

WHITE HOUSE

Trump to sign executive order on social media amid Twitter furor

Kayleigh McEnany told reporters aboard Air Force One that the order is “pertaining to social media” but shared no additional details on what it will do.

President Donald Trump and his supporters have been hammering Twitter since the social network labeled a pair of his tweets with a fact-checking notice for the first time on Tuesday. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

Twitter

President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order aimed at social media companies on Thursday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters Wednesday evening, a move that comes as the president and his allies have escalated their allegations that companies like Twitter and Facebook stifle GOP voices.

McEnany told reporters aboard Air Force One that the order is “pertaining to social media” but shared no additional details on what it will do. But the announcement revived fears within the online industry that the Trump administration will target a 24-year-old statute that protects the companies from lawsuits — an avenue that a growing number of Republican lawmakers have advocated in their bias allegations about Silicon Valley.

Trump and his supporters have been hammering Twitter since the social network labeled a pair of his tweets with a fact-checking notice for the first time on Tuesday, and the president pledged Wednesday that “big action” will follow.

Twitter acted after Trump had alleged without evidence that mail-in ballots are likely to be “substantially fraudulent,” in tweets that the company said contained misleading information about the electoral process. The move triggered an array of rebukes from Republicans, including Trump.

@Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election,” Trump tweeted Wednesday, adding that “Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!”

Democrats, meanwhile, have complained that Twitter has been too slow to respond to a litany of abusive, inaccurate or inflammatory tweets from the president, including his recent baseless insinuations that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough may be guilty of murder.

POLITICO reported last year that the White House was circulating a draft executive order to address long-standing accusations from conservatives about bias by social media companies. CNN later reported that the order would task the Federal Communications Commission with developing regulations to clarify when social media companies qualify for crucial liability protections, and would have the Federal Trade Commission “take those new policies into account when it investigates or files lawsuits against misbehaving companies."

But the executive order was never unveiled, and even Trump’s appointees at those agencies have expressed little appetite for scrutinizing tweets and Facebook posts.

That proposal targeted the online industry’s prized liability shield over user-generated content, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The 1996 law broadly protects websites from lawsuits over what their users post, and for taking good-faith efforts to curb illicit material.

But those protections, which have been fiercely defended by the tech industry, have come under scrutiny from officials on both sides of the political spectrum. Republicans have charged that the shield has enabled social media platforms to crack down on their viewpoints with impunity. There’s no conclusive evidence of an anti-conservative bias on social media, and the companies have consistently denied the charges.

Trump’s dust-up with Twitter rekindled Republican calls for Congress to roll back the legal shield.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a Trump surrogate who has accused Silicon Valley firms of censorship, announced Wednesday that he’s drafting his own proposal to roll back those protections if companies engage in “editorializing” or “opine as to the truth or falsity” of statements online, like those made by Trump regarding mail-in ballots. Gaetz said he is “working with my Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee” on the legislation, but did not elaborate on the timing for its introduction.

In a similar vein, GOP tech critic Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) wrote in a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday that the company’s “decision to editorialize regarding the content of political speech raises questions about why Twitter should continue receiving special status and special immunity from publisher liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. "And he later teased on social media plans for a separate proposal to “end these special government giveaways.”

“If @Twitter wants to editorialize & comment on users’ posts, it should be divested of its special status under federal law (Section 230) & forced to play by same rules as all other publishers. Fair is fair,” Hawley tweeted.

Some Democratic lawmakers have also advocated restricting the industry’s Section 230 protections, but for very different seasons — such as failing to fact-check politicians like Trump.

The GOP calls got rhetorical support Wednesday night from FCC member Brendan Carr, a Republican who some see as a potential future chairman of the agency. Appearing on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” he singled out Twitter’s fact check of Trump’s tweets as imposing a “partisan political viewpoint” and slammed Facebook’s recent creation of an independent review board to review the company’s content decisions.

“I think going forward if these entities want to be political actors … like every other political actor, they have First Amendment rights, though they shouldn’t necessarily have these special bonus protections that only that set of political actors have in Section 230,” Carr said.

The Republican commissioner also blasted these social media companies for framing themselves as politically neutral before Congress and then engaging in what he deemed utterly partisan behavior. “That’s the type of unfair or deceptive business practice that would get a lot of other companies under a lot of federal scrutiny, including from the Federal Trade Commission,” Carr remarked.

The White House’s announcement of an incoming executive order Wednesday triggered fears in Washington tech circles that the Trump administration will revive its push to empower regulators to reconsider those liability protections — though major questions remain about how it would be executed.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, continued to portray the GOP’s bias allegations as political theater.

“Twitter’s milquetoast labeling of two Trump lies — out of thousands — prompts horrifying demagogic response: shut down the internet,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) tweeted after Trump’s Wednesday remarks. “His fear-mongering & conspiracy theory peddling is irresponsible, inexcusable, & authoritarian.”

The push to weaken Section 230 has also faced opposition from within Trump’s own party. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the top Republican on the House Energy & Commerce consumer protection subcommittee, cast such campaigns as ill-conceived.

“I want to be very clear: I’m not for gutting Section 230. It’s essential for consumers and entities in the internet ecosystem,” she said at a House hearing in October. “Misguided and hasty attempts to amend or even repeal Section 230 for bias or other reasons could have unintended consequences for free speech and the ability for small businesses to provide new and innovative services.”

The push to have the government step in on social media moderation practices even drew a rebuttal from Carr, who last year Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for suggesting public officials should assume a role in setting rules for vetting speech on social media. “Outsourcing censorship to the government is not just a bad idea, it would violate the First Amendment,” Carr tweeted then. “I’m a no.”

John Hendel contributed to this report.

© 2020 POLITICO LLC




GOP operatives worry Trump will lose both the presidency and Senate majority

By Michael Warren and Ryan Nobles, CNN





Washington(CNN)A little more than three months ago, as Democrats cast their ballots in the Nevada caucuses, Republicans felt confident about their chances in 2020. The coronavirus seemed a distant, far-off threat. Democrats appeared poised to nominate a self-described socialist for president. The stock market was near a record high. The economy was roaring. President Donald Trump looked well-positioned to win a second term, and perhaps pull enough incumbent Republicans along with him to hold the party's majority in the Senate.

Today, that view has drastically changed.

"Put it this way, I am very glad my boss isn't on the ballot this cycle," said one high-ranking GOP Senate aide.

Republican strategists are increasingly worried that Trump is headed for defeat in November and that he may drag other Republicans down with him.

Seven GOP operatives not directly associated with the President's reelection campaign told CNN that Trump's response to the pandemic and the subsequent economic fallout have significantly damaged his bid for a second term — and that the effects are starting to hurt Republicans more broadly. Some of these operatives asked not to be identified in order to speak more candidly.

Several say that public polls showing Trump trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden mirror what they are finding in their own private polls, and that the trend is bleeding into key Senate races. The GOP already had a difficult task of defending 23 Senate seats in 2020. The job of protecting its slim 3-seat majority has only gotten harder as the pandemic has unfolded. States like Arizona and North Carolina, once thought to be home to winnable Senate races now appear in jeopardy.


Trump himself is being alerted to the problems. Politico reported this week that two of Trump's own outside political advisers, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, warned the President last week that his support was falling in some swing states.

All of this demonstrates how difficult it is to run as a Republican incumbent almost anywhere in 2020. Strategists who spoke to CNN worry that Trump has become a liability for Republicans needing to expand their coalition beyond the President's core base of supporters.

Whereas a few months ago, they were confident of the party's chances across the board, many of the strategists who spoke to CNN have lowered their expectations, and now talk in terms of minimizing what they worry could be a wipeout for the GOP. This leaves them hoping for a minor rather than devastating defeat, something akin to Mitt Romney's narrow loss in 2012, when Republicans lost two Senate seats, rather than John McCain's performance four years earlier, when they lost eight.

"Republican candidates need something more like Romney in '12 and less like McCain in '08," said Liam Donovan, a GOP strategist in Washington.

The broader fear among Republicans is that the election becomes a referendum on Trump's performance during the pandemic. Coupled with a cratered economy, the effect could be devastating by both depressing the Republican faithful and turning off swing voters.

That one-two punch could knock the GOP out of power in Washington-- and it's what has strategists hoping the President's reelection team can successfully transform the race to a choice between Trump and an unpalatable Biden.

But that effort has become increasingly difficult against the backdrop of a pandemic that has destroyed many of the economic gains Republicans had hoped to make the foundation of their re-election argument.

"This is the one thing he (Trump) cannot change the subject on," said a Republican strategist. "This is not a political opponent, this is not going way and he has never had to deal with something like this."

There is some evidence Trump is not getting the bulk of the blame for the economic downturn. In the most recent CNN poll, from early May, Trump overall has a 45% approval rating. While only 42% approve of how he's handled the pandemic, 50% still said they approve of Trump's handling of the economy.

The Trump campaign has argued that Americans trust the President when it comes to handling the economy and they will choose him to be the person to lead the recovery.

"The economic message resonates strongly, particularly in a time like this," said Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. "President Trump is clearly the one to restore us to that position. He did it once, he will do it again."

Still, the worry for Republicans beyond the Trump orbit is that if there are no signs of the economy turning the corner by November that will be an impossible argument for the Trump campaign to make.

"Absent some sort of V-shaped recovery many people think he is dead in the water," said the Republican strategist.

The Party of Trump

In the four years since winning the GOP nomination, Trump has solidified his position within the party. That has made it harder for Republicans in Congress to distance themselves from him without antagonizing his base. That, say Republican operatives, risks keeping away voters who may consider the GOP but don't like the President.

"It's a very, very tough environment. If you have a college degree and you live in suburbia, you don't want to vote for us," said one long-time Republican congressional campaign consultant, who added there is a serious worry about bleeding support from both seniors and self-described independent men.

The party's chief concern, some of these Republicans say, should be holding onto its Senate majority. The task requires Senate candidates to make appeals to suburban voters who flipped to Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections as a reaction against Trump.

But that goal is complicated by how dependent Republican candidates are on maximal turnout for the President, even in states the Trump campaign does not expect to win. GOP Sens. Cory Gardner in Colorado and Susan Collins in Maine cannot afford a depressed Trump base in their states, even as they play up their independent identities to win swing voters.

And the concern for Republicans goes beyond endangered incumbents -- including Sens. Martha McSally of Arizona and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. There is even a chance, in a bad year for Trump, that GOP-held Senate seats in Georgia and Montana could be in trouble, said Donovan.

Distance from the President

In the meantime, the cratered economy has intensified the need for Republican senators to differentiate themselves in subtle ways from Trump and his record. Scott Reed, the political director at the US Chamber of Commerce and a veteran of Republican campaigns, said that a presidential reelection campaign is "always" a referendum on the incumbent and his party.

While that bodes poorly for Republicans if the economy fails to improve or another wave of the virus emerges this summer, Reed said the GOP isn't necessarily doomed. Congress, he noted is, having a relative boom in popularity -- 31% support in the latest Gallup poll, the highest in over a decade -- thanks in part to the passage of economic relief.

Reed says incumbents should also trumpet their personal, localized accomplishments and areas where they have been independent of Trump without expressly alienating pro-Trump Republicans in their states.

Gardner, for example, has claimed to be the "chief architect" for the plan to relocate the headquarters of the federal Bureau of Land Management to Colorado, which the Trump administration announced last year. The first-term GOP senator has framed the decision as a bipartisan win for Western states, where the vast majority of federally managed land is, and a victory for Gardner against the Washington bureaucracy. It also has the benefit of having little to do with Trump himself or the economic crisis.

And in her campaign for fifth term, Collins has leaned heavily on her established political identity as an independent centrist. Her most recent TV ad touts her being named "the most bipartisan US senator" for the seventh year in a row by Georgetown University's Lugar Center.

The line aims to combat the most consistent line of criticism from Democrats -- that Collins has voted in line with the Trump administration on everything from judicial appointments to health care to the President's acquittal on impeachment -- without having to disavow Trump himself.

Republicans point out that while Democrats and progressive interest groups have already spent millions in TV and digital ads against incumbents, the GOP and its own allied PACs have yet to engage fully in the air war against Democratic challengers.

"The truth is despite being massively outspent by liberal dark money groups, Republicans are still well-positioned to hold the Senate majority in the fall," said Jesse Hunt, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

The Trump campaign played down the worries of down-ballot Republicans, pointing out that a unified GOP offers the best chance of winning across the board in November.

"Any candidate that wants to win will run with the President," said Erin Perrine, the Trump campaign's deputy communications director. "He has the energy, the enthusiasm and the grass roots infrastructure. If you are a candidate you are going to want to be a part of that movement."

But what Republican professionals say would help immensely is if the President stuck to an encouraging message on bringing the country back from the pandemic.

"When he does it right three days in a row, it really bumps his numbers," said Reed. "We need command performance on message discipline."



© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.





¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿    ??? ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿   ????



{The Democratization of Capital has come out of hibernation, and shown the anomaly of that synthesis to be a wish fulfilling fantasy that failed.

It is, as if all the principles on which the revolution never could bypass the ancien regime, at least on principle, have ceased to function.

It's only that the rules changed, and that is where the cover-up should have been exposed. Of course, de-jure and de-facto 'principles' do operate on different levels of insurnable  difficulty. There never is a fracture, where the whitewash never occurs in public .}



De-facto- Socialism wins, albeit with population control corollary

De jure Capital wins minus historical analysis as a reminder to those who can not learn the lessons .

George Floyd killing: Trump calls protesters ‘thugs’ as fires erupt in Minneapolis on third night of unrest – live

Minnesota governor has called on the national guard and Minneapolis has declared a local emergency

Reports that Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey will hold a press conference shortly.

Here’s our updated video on fires that have erupted in Minneapolis, and the protests sweeping across the US in wake of George Floyd’s death.

Fires erupt in Minneapolis and protests sweep across the US in wake of George Floyd’s death – video

Chris McGreal, our reporter on the ground in Minneapolis, has just posted this footage to Twitter:

Andrea Jenkins, the vice president of Minneapolis City Council, has told MSNBC that George Floyd had previously worked with one of the police officers fired after his death.

AP reports that at least seven people were shot Thursday night in Louisville, Kentucky, as protesters turned out to demand justice for Breonna Taylor, a black woman fatally shot by police in her home in March.

It comes amid demonstrations across the country following the death of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis police custody.

Louisville Metro Police confirmed in a statement early Friday that there were at least seven shooting victims, at least one of whom is in critical condition. The statement said there were some arrests, but police didn’t provide a number. Police had initially confirmed reports of gunfire around 11:30 p.m.

Police spokesman Sgt. Lamont Washington told The Associated Press that all seven were civilians. Around 500 to 600 demonstrators marched through the Kentucky city’s downtown streets on Thursday night, the Courier Journal reported.

Understandably, emotions are high, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer tweeted just before midnight, sharing a Facebook post asking for peace that he said was written on behalf of Taylor’s mother.

Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical tech, was shot eight times on March 13 after Louisville narcotics detectives knocked down the front door. No drugs were found in the home.

Attention on Taylor’s death has intensified after her family sued the police department earlier this month. The case has attracted national headlines alongside the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in a Georgia neighborhood in February.

As the US grapples with a third night of protests over the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, here is what we know so far:

01:22 EDTUnrest continues over the death of George Floyd Photograph: Stephen Maturen/Getty ImagesProtesters look at a burning liquor store across the street from the Minneapolis Police Department 3rd Precinct during protests over the arrest of George Floyd Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPAProtesters gather around after setting fire to the entrance of a police station as demonstrations continue in Minneapolis Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey: “We all need to work together to ensure the safety of our friends, family, and Minneapolis residents. And right now working together means clearing the area.”

Donald Trump threatens to call in national guard

US president Donald Trump has tweeted about the protests, calling those involved “thugs” and threatening to send in the national guard.

St Paul police department reports over 170 businesses damaged or looted, and dozens of fires but no reports of serious injuries.

The 3rd precinct police station burns #GeorgeFloydprotest pic.twitter.com/VPAwspJLIz

The official city account has tweeted this. It is, however, important to note it is saying it is relying on unconfirmed reports.

We’re hearing unconfirmed reports that gas lines to the Third Precinct have been cut and other explosive materials are in the building.

If you are near the building, for your safety, PLEASE RETREAT in the event the building explodes.

— City of Minneapolis (@CityMinneapolis) May 29, 2020

“We’re burning our own neighborhood,” said a distraught Deona Brown, a 24-year-old woman standing with a friend outside the precinct station, where a small group of protesters were shouting at a dozen or so stone-faced police officers in riot gear.

“This is where we live, where we shop, and they destroyed it.” No officers could be seen beyond the station.

“What that cop did was wrong, but I’m scared now,” Brown said.

Others in the crowd saw something different in the wreckage.

Protesters destroyed property “because the system is broken,” said a young man who identified himself only by his nickname, Cash, and who said he had been in the streets during the violence. He dismissed the idea that the destruction would hurt residents of the largely black neighborhood.

“They’re making money off of us,” he said angrily of the owners of the destroyed stores.

He laughed when asked if he had joined in the looting or violence. “I didn’t break anything.”

Where we stand

That’s all from me today, handing over to my colleague Josh Taylor in Australia. Here’s where we stand this evening:

Protests against police brutality have continued in cities across the US, including Minneapolis, Denver, New York and Oakland following the killing of George Floyd. Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, died in police custody after a white officer handcuffed hum kneeled on his neck for several minutes as Floyd pleaded that he could not breathe.

In Minneapolis, police abandoned the 3rd protest police station, which has been a major protest site. Crowds breached the station and set the entrance on fire. Elsewhere, businesses were looted and blazes set as the evening wore on.

The governor of Minnesota activated the National Guard to respond to the protests and declared a state of emergency in Minneapolis, St. Paul and surrounding areas. Governor Walz wrote in the proclamation that he supported peaceful protests but “unfortunately, some individuals have engaged in unlawful and dangerous activity, including arson, rioting, looting, and damaging public and private property”.

In Denver, shots were heard outside the state capitol. Protestors were ushered inside by state patrol and no one appears to have been hurt.

In New York, officers arrested at least 40 at the protests. Charges included civil disobedience. Officers pinned down several demonstrators and used tear gas and rubber bullets on the crowd.

Martin Luther King III, a human rights leader and son of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted his father, who said, “riot is the language of the unheard”. King is one of many human rights advocates who have condemned the police’s treatment of Floyd. UN Human Rights commissioner Michelle Bachelet said she was “dismayed” to add Floyd’s name to a long list of Black Americans who have been killed by the police.

00:07 EDTProtesters set fire to the entrance of the 3rd precinct police station as demonstrations continued in Minneapolis. Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

From The Guardian’s Chris McGreal:

As darkness fell the mood soured further and protesters again began burning buildings. They hit a liquor store, where exploding bottles sent people scurrying in fear, and a pawn shop.

But the primary target was the 3rd precinct police station, where a group of young men broke through the wire fence hastily erected before the police withdrew earlier in the day. As the fire grew they led chants of George Floyd’s name and “No justice, no peace” until flames engulfed the building. Protesters cheered and celebrated with fireworks.

Police officers watched from two blocks away but did not intervene. Fire crews attempted to put out other fires but did not go near the police station. As the fire spread, thousands more protesters poured into the area. Rumors were shouted amongst the crows that the national guard were on their way, and people began to run, but so far there is no evidence of any outside intervention by force.

Local businesses, including a wine shop are on fire.

Crowds have also lit fireworks.

The Minnesota National Guard has sent 500 soldiers to St. Paul, Minneapolis and surrounding areas.

We have activated more than 500 soldiers to St. Paul, Minneapolis and surrounding communities. Our mission is to protect life, preserve property and the right to peacefully demonstrate. A key objective is to ensure fire departments are able to respond to calls.

— MN National Guard (@MNNationalGuard) May 29, 2020

© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

<><><> ><><>< ><><><>

GEORGE FLOYD DEATH

Trump says military ‘ready, willing and able’ to deploy to Minneapolis amid protests

Active-duty forces are normally prohibited from taking part in domestic law enforcement, but the Insurrection Act of 1807 allows for a state legislature or governor to request assistance in the event of civil unrest.

May 30, 2020, 1:45 PM EDT / Updated May 30, 2020, 2:48 PM EDT

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced Saturday that the military police were ready to deploy to Minneapolis amid ongoing protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.

“We have our military ready, willing and able, if they ever want to call our military. We can have troops on the ground very quickly,” Trump said as he left the White House Saturday afternoon on his way to Florida for the second attempt at the SpaceX launch. “They’re using their National Guard right now, as you know.”

“They’ve got to be tough, they’ve got to be strong, they’ve got to be respected,” Trump said, speaking of Minnesota government officials, adding that there were protesters that needed to be “taught” that they “can’t do this.”

The move would take service members from around the country and prepare them to deploy to Minneapolis if the governor elects to use those resources.

Active-duty forces are normally prohibited from taking part in domestic law enforcement, but the Insurrection Act of 1807 allows for a state legislature or governor to request assistance in the event of civil unrest.

Jonathan Rath Hoffman, assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, said in a statement that the “Secretary of Defense and the Chairman have personally spoken with Governor Walz twice in the last 24-hours and expressed the department’s readiness to provide support to local and state authorities as requested.”

“At this time there is no request by the Governor of Minnesota for Title 10 forces to support the Minnesota National Guard or state law enforcement,” he continued, adding that the U.S. Northern Command was ordered to increase their alert status from a 48-hour recall to a 4-hour status in case the governor requested their assistance.

Protests erupted in Minneapolis and in several cities in the U.S. this week after Floyd, a black man, died when a white Minneapolis police officer used his knee to pin Floyd down on the ground for almost nine minutes after taking him into custody. The incident was caught on multiple cameras and Floyd could be heard pleading with the officer, saying, “I can’t breathe.”

Trump has been critical of Minnesota’s response, calling the Minneapolis mayor “radical” and unprepared to deal with the protests.

At a press conference Saturday afternoon, Attorney General William Barr said that the Department of Justice was prepared to “take all action necessary to enforce federal law” and reminded the public that it was a federal crime to cross state lines to participate in “violent rioting.”

Barr and others have suggested that some of the Minneapolis protestors have been from out of town.

Trump backed up Barr’s statement in a tweet, writing “Crossing State lines to incite violence is a FEDERAL CRIME!” and the federal government “will step in and do what has to be done, and that includes using the unlimited power of our Military and many arrests.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Saturday that he would fully mobilize the Minnesota National Guard for the first time since World War II to bring an end to the “wanton destruction” protests that he blamed on protesters from outside the state.

Maj. Gen. Jon Jensen, head of Minnesota’s National Guard, said that he was not consulted on Trump’s decision to active the Army but that he thought it was a “prudent move.”

“You may have seen or heard that this evening the president directed the Pentagon to put units of the Untied States Army on alter to possible operation in Minneapolis. While we were not consulted as it relates to that, I do believe it’s a prudent move to provide other options available to the governor if the governor elects to use those resources.”

© 2020 NBC UNIVERSAL

<<<<<<<<<<

    <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

In a sad week for America, Trump has fled from his duty

Opinion by David Gergen, CNN Senior Political Analyst

Editor’s Note: (David Gergen has been a White House adviser to four presidents and is a senior political analyst at CNN. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he is a professor of public service at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he founded the Center for Public Leadership. Tune in CNN Sunday at noon ET for WE REMEMBER, a memorial service for those lost during the Covid-19 pandemic, hosted by Jake Tapper. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.)

(CNN)This past week has brought tragedy upon tragedy to our nation: the death toll from Covid-19 passed a grim milestone of 100,000 deaths; the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited mass protests in Minneapolis and beyond, and seven were shot dead demanding justice in Louisville

But our President was mostly busy with other things: getting into a public fight with Twitter, condemning China over Hong Kong and terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization – an entity that once looked to the United States as the world’s leading institution in fighting pandemics.

President Donald Trump also took time, of course, to send out a stream of new, controversial tweets. He called protesters in Minneapolis “thugs” and repeated a racist line from a Miami police chief years ago, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” He even retweeted a video in which a supporter says, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

But other than a brief tweet in the midst of another storm, Trump remained silent on the most sensitive issue of his presidency: the pandemic that is killing so many older Americans and people of color living near the edge. Understandably, with the rash of other news, the press is moving on. But we should pause for one more moment to recognize how sad and sharp a departure his silence is from past traditions of the presidency.

Ex-prosecutor: Complaint against Minnesota cop in George Floyd case drops important clues

Since the early days of the Republic until now, Americans have looked to our presidents to provide protection, meaning and comfort, especially in moments of crisis. After George Washington was sworn as commander in chief of the Continental Army, Ethan Allen’s younger brother, Levi, wrote to Washington in 1776 that he had become “Our political Father and head of a Great People.” Shortly thereafter, Washington was frequently referred to as “Father of Our Country.” As he steered us through war, the constitutional convention, and two terms as President, the phrase caught on. He wasn’t much of a speaker – he thought his deeds spoke for him – but he was a leader of such strong character and rock-solid integrity that he became the gold standard of the presidency.

Lincoln began his presidency during great uncertainty about his leadership. He won the election of 1860 with the smallest plurality ever (39%), and his military experience was virtually nil. But over time, he kindled a special relationship with Union soldiers, many of whom called him “Father Abraham.” Historians say his homespun ways, common manner and kindly empathy converted them. In his re-election, soldiers were his greatest supporters.

Franklin Roosevelt was known to be self-involved in his early years, but his struggles with polio transformed him into a caring, compassionate leader. Working families and many people of color thought they had a friend in the White House. So attached did his followers become that when he gave a fireside chat on a summer evening, you could walk down the streets of Baltimore and hear every word as families sat in their living room by a radio.

It’s been five decades since 1968, and things are somehow worse

Historians generally agree that Washington, Lincoln and FDR were our greatest presidents. All three are remembered for their empathy and steadfastness in caring for the lives of average Americans. They continue to set the standard.

In contemporary times, it is harder for any president to sustain deep ties with a majority of Americans. We are too sharply divided as a people, and the internet often brings out the worst in us. Even so, several of our recent presidents have found moments when they can unify us and make us feel that at the end of the day, we are indeed one people. In many cases, these moments have come to define their presidencies: Ask any American adult and they can generally remember one, two or even three occasions in which recent presidents connected with us emotionally, stirring our hearts.

I remember with absolute clarity the Challenger disaster in 1986. One saw the plumes of the rising space craft against a bright blue sky – and then that horrific explosion as it instantly disappeared. Ronald Reagan was one of the few presidents in our history who expressed our emotions so well in a moment of shock and mourning. For hour upon hour, the networks had replayed the explosion, and it seemed so meaningless. But then Reagan used his speech to replace that picture in our minds with a different one: the astronauts waving goodbye. They became our heroes, especially as Reagan (drawing upon speechwriter Peggy Noonan) closed with lines from a World War II poem: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”

One thinks, too, of Bill Clinton traveling to Oklahoma City after the bombing there of a federal building in 1995. Clinton, like Reagan, was at his best when he captured tangled emotions and gave meaning to deaths of some of our finest citizens. He not only consoled families in private but moved the nation when he mourned them publicly. As I recall, that’s when presidents were first called “Mourners in Chief” – a phrase that has been applied repeatedly to presidents since. (Not coincidentally, Clinton’s speech of mourning in Oklahoma City is widely credited with resurrecting his presidency, then in the doldrums.)

One remembers, too, George W. Bush standing on the top of a crushed police car in the rubble of the World Trade Center bombing. When a first responder said he couldn’t hear the President, Bush responded through his bullhorn: “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

One also remembers Barack Obama flying again and again to speak at gravesites where young children or church parishioners were being buried, victims gunned down in a gun-obsessed nation. Thinking about the mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, one’s mind returns to the image of the President of the United States leading a memorial service, singing “Amazing Grace.”

Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama – two Republicans, two Democrats – served as our “Mourners in Chief.” All four bound us together for a few moments, and we remembered who we are and who we can be.

Why has our current “Mourner in Chief” gone AWOL? God knows. But his flight from responsibility is yet another sadness among this week’s tragic loses

© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

NEWS ANALYSIS

In Days of Discord, a President Fans the Flames

Mr. Trump has presented himself as someone who seeks conflict, not conciliation, a fighter, not a peacemaker. And he has lived up to his self-image at a perilous time.

Published May 30, 2020Updated May 31, 2020, 12:26 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — With a nation on edge, ravaged by disease, hammered by economic collapse, divided over lockdowns and even face masks and now convulsed once again by race, President Trump’s first instinct has been to look for someone to fight.

Over the last week, America reeled from 100,000 pandemic deaths, 40 million people out of work and cities in flames over a brutal police killing of a subdued black man. But Mr. Trump was on the attack against China, the World Health Organization, Big Tech, former President Barack Obama, a cable television host and the mayor of a riot-torn city.

While other presidents seek to cool the situation in tinderbox moments like this, Mr. Trump plays with matches. He roars into any melee he finds, encouraging street uprisings against public health measures advanced by his own government, hurling made-up murder charges against a critic, accusing his predecessor of unspecified crimes, vowing to crack down on a social media company that angered him and then seemingly threatening to meet violence with violence in Minneapolis.

As several cities erupted in street protests after the killing of George Floyd, some of them resulting in clashes with the police, Mr. Trump made no appeal for calm. Instead in a series of tweets and comments to reporters on Saturday, he blamed the unrest on Democrats, called on “Liberal Governors and Mayors” to get “MUCH tougher” on the crowds, threatened to intervene with “the unlimited power of our Military” and even suggested his own supporters mount a counterdemonstration.

The turmoil came right to Mr. Trump’s doorstep for the second night in a row on Saturday as hundreds of people protesting Mr. Floyd’s death and the president’s response surged in streets near the White House. While most were peaceful, chanting “black lives matter” and “no peace, no justice,” some spray painted scatological advice for Mr. Trump, ignited small fires, set off firecrackers and threw bricks, bottles and fruit at Secret Service and United States Park Police officers, who responded with pepper spray.

The police cordoned off several blocks around the Executive Mansion as a phalanx of camouflage-wearing National Guard troops marched across nearby Lafayette Square. A man strode through the streets yelling, “Time for a revolution!” The image of the White House surrounded by police in helmets and riot gear behind plastic shields fueled the sense of a nation torn apart.

Mr. Trump praised the Secret Service for being “very cool” and “very professional” but assailed the Democratic mayor of Washington for not providing city police officers to help on Friday night, which she denied. While governors and mayors have urged restraint, Mr. Trump seemed more intent on taunting the protesters, bragging about the violence that would have met them had they tried to get onto White House grounds.

“Big crowd, professionally organized, but nobody came close to breaching the fence,” the president wrote on Twitter on Saturday morning. “If they had they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. That’s when people would have been really badly hurt, at least. Many Secret Service agents just waiting for action.”

His suggestion that his own supporters should come to the White House on Saturday foreshadowed the possibility of a clash outside his own doors. “Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???” he wrote on Twitter, using the acronym for his first campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

Asked about the tweet later, he denied encouraging violence by his supporters. “They love African-American people,” he said. “They love black people. MAGA loves the black people.” By evening, however, Mr. Trump’s supporters were not in evidence among the crowds at the White House.

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser of Washington responded sharply on Saturday morning, saying her police department will protect anyone in Washington, including the president, and by Saturday evening her officers were out in force around the White House.

But she called the president a source of division. “While he hides behind his fence afraid/alone, I stand w/ people peacefully exercising their First Amendment Right after the murder of #GeorgeFloyd & hundreds of years of institutional racism,” she wrote. “There are no vicious dogs & ominous weapons. There is just a scared man. Afraid/alone …”

After his morning barrage, Mr. Trump tried to recalibrate later in the day, devoting the opening of a speech at the Kennedy Space Center following the SpaceX rocket launch to the unrest in the streets and clearly trying to temper his bellicose tone.

“I understand the pain that people are feeling,” he said. “We support the right of peaceful protesters and we hear their pleas. But what we are now seeing on the streets of our cities has nothing to do with justice or peace. The memory of George Floyd is being dishonored by rioters, looters and anarchists.”

The days of discord have put the president’s leadership style on vivid display. From the start of his ascension to power, Mr. Trump has presented himself as someone who seeks conflict, not conciliation, a fighter, not a peacemaker. That appeals to a substantial portion of the public that sees in him a president willing to take on an entrenched and entitled establishment.

But the confluence of perilous health, economic and now racial crises has tested his approach and left him struggling to find his footing just months before an election in which polls currently show him behind.

“The president seems more out-of-touch and detached from the difficult reality the country is living than ever before,” said Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman from Florida who has been critical of Mr. Trump. “At a moment when America desperately needs healing, the president is focused on petty personal battles with his perceived adversaries.”

Such a moment would challenge any president, of course. It has been a year of national trauma that started out feeling like another 1998 with impeachment, then another 1918 with a killer pandemic combined with another 1929 given the shattering economic fallout. Now add to that another 1968, a year of deep social unrest.

It is fair to say that 2020 has turned out to be a year that has frayed the fabric of American society with an accumulation of anguish that has whipsawed the country and its people. But in some ways, Mr. Trump has become a totem for the nation’s polarization rather than a mender of it.

“I am daily thinking about why and how a society unravels and what we can do to stop the process,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University. “The calamity these days is about more than Trump. He is just the malicious con man who lives to exploit our vulnerabilities.”

As the nation has confronted a coronavirus pandemic at the same time as the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, whatever unified resolve that existed at the beginning of the twin crises quickly evaporated into yet another cultural clash. And the president has made everything into just another partisan dispute rather than a source of consensus, from when and how to reopen to whether to wear a mask in public.

Mr. Trump led no national mourning as the death toll from the coronavirus passed 100,000 beyond lowering the flags at the White House, posting a single tweet and offering a passing comment on camera only when asked about it. Rather than seek agreement on the best and safest way to restore daily life, he threatened to “override” governors who prevented places of worship from resuming crowded services.

“Crisis leadership demands much more from the White House than irresponsible threats on social media,” said Meena Bose, director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency at Hofstra University.

Mr. Trump’s initial response to the rioting in Minneapolis, where a police officer has been charged with murder after kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes as he cried out that he could not breathe, underscored the president’s most instinctive response to national challenges. Threatening to send in troops, he wrote early Friday morning that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Only after a cascade of criticism did he try to walk it back, posting a new tweet 13 hours later, suggesting that all he had meant was that “looting leads to shooting” by people in the street.

“I don’t want this to happen, and that’s what the expression put out last night means,” he said, a reformulation that convinced few if any of his critics.

Even some of Mr. Trump’s usual allies were distressed at the original shooting tweet. Geraldo Rivera, the television and radio host who often spends time with Mr. Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, decried “the recklessness” of that message and called on the president “to self-censor himself.”

“Come on, what is this, sixth grade?” Mr. Rivera said on Fox News. “You don’t put gasoline on the fire. That’s not calming anybody.” He added: “All he does is diminish himself.”

But many of the president’s defenders rejected the idea that he had mishandled the crises, pressing the argument that Democrats and the news media were to blame for the turmoil in the streets, which spread from Minneapolis to New York, Atlanta, Washington, Louisville, Portland and other cities.

“Keep track of cities where hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and serious injuries and death will take place,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor who has served as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, wrote on Twitter on Friday night. “All Democrat dominated cities with criminal friendly policies. This is the future if you elect Democrats.”

Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who was pardoned by Mr. Trump for tax fraud earlier this year, amplified the point on Twitter. “It should be no surprise that every one of these cities that the anarchist have taken over, are the same cities run by leftist Democrats with the highest violence, murder and poverty rates,” he wrote on Twitter. “They can’t handle their cities normally, so how are they going to deal with this?”

Mr. Trump, who this past week retweeted a video of a supporter saying that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat” (though the supporter insisted he meant that in a political sense), picked up the theme on Saturday.

With crowds visible from his upstairs windows, Mr. Trump reached for his phone and again assailed the “Democrat Mayor” of Minneapolis for not responding more vigorously and called on New York to unleash its police against crowds. “Let New York’s Finest be New York’s Finest,” he wrote. “There is nobody better, but they must be allowed to do their job!

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the last four presidents for The Times and The Washington Post. He also is the author of five books, most recently “Impeachment: An American History.” @peterbakernyt • Facebook

Trump’s Looting and ‘Shooting’ Remarks Escalate Crisis in Minneapolis

© 2020 The New York Times Compay

Beth Cameron, a biologist and former senior official in the National Security Council said on Twitter: “There aren’t words for how much this decision will hurt the US, our global partners, and our ability to to impact the #COVID19 pandemic that is a threat to our national and global peace and security.”

{ on Trump withdrawing the U.S. from the WHO }