Trump enters the stage

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Coronavirus outbreak

As virus cases rise in states where Trump won, Republican attitudes may shift

Covid-19 cases are now growing quickly in some rural and exurban areas with strong Trump support

Mon 15 Jun 2020 06.00 EDT

Skepticism among some Republicans about the real threat of the coronavirus pandemic, that may have been influenced by racial attitudes, could shift as positive cases of infection are now climbing in areas with strong support for Donald Trump, research suggests.

Vulnerable populations in rural, conservative-leaning areas of the country, meanwhile, where health infrastructure is poor and public spending on health is low, could face increasing risks from Covid-19 at a time when job losses have led millions to lose health insurance.

A well-documented partisan split in attitudes about coronavirus emerged in the early months of the pandemic. Republican men were less likely to wear protective masks than other groups, and Republicans were more likely to say their states were moving too slowly to reopen their economies.

The discrepancy was attributed to factors including support for Trump, who downplayed the coronavirus threat, and even to gender differences in health-related conduct.

But research suggests that racial attitudes, which strongly correlate with party affiliation in the United States, might also have reinforced an empathy gap for the early victims of Covid-19, who were disproportionately African American.

A white Republican state senator from Ohio recently expressed that gap in shocking terms at an official hearing this week. “Could it just be that African Americans, the colored population, do not wash their hands as well as other groups?” the official, Steve Huffman, said in remarks captured on video.

Jody Armour, a University of Southern California law professor and author of the forthcoming N*gga Theory: Race, Language, Unequal Justice, and the Law, said: “One of the dominant kinds of discrimination today is actually unconscious indifference toward people who don’t look like you, who are outside your in-group.”

“When people are looking at out-group members, at an unconscious level, they don’t have the same level of care and concern for them, they don’t have a panic of empathy for them when they see them in distress.”

Leonie Huddy, a professor of political science at Stony Brook University in New York, said that Trump’s message to supporters downplaying coronavirus had a racial subtext.

“Very much under the surface is a sort of winking and nodding about the fact that the African American community has been more heavily affected,” Huddy said. “And so there’s a bit of, you know, ‘Maybe we’re OK’, because Trump’s supporters are largely white.”

“Trump’s not going to say that out loud, that’s a little too much even for him, but he’s good at alluding to that kind of thing.”

In the early stages of the pandemic, African Americans died of Covid-19 at three times the rate of white people, according to figures compiled by the non-partisan APM Research Lab. Only 21% of Covid-19 deaths by late May were recorded in counties won by Trump in 2016, according to a New York Times analysis.

But coronavirus cases are now growing quickly in some rural and exurban areas with strong Trump support. Covid-19 cases are climbing in Arizona, Florida, South Carolina and Arkansas, and in Texas hospitalizations for Covid-19 are up 42% since Memorial Day.

A relative lack of health infrastructure in parts of rural America and economic devastation from the Covid-19 closures mean that already vulnerable communities could be overwhelmed. Older, rural voters in Republican-led states that declined to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act are more likely to lack health insurance than the urban poor, according to a 2018 study.

Residents of rural areas tend to be older and sicker than their urban counterparts, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and they have longer travel distances to specialty and emergency care. The intensive care unit beds needed to ventilate critical Covid-19 patients are unequally distributed across the country.

Public attitudes can confound predictions based on race and income level. White non-college grads, a group that broke 64-28 for Trump in the 2016 election, think that protests about the police killing of George Floyd are “mostly legitimate” by a 51-39 margin, according to Marist polling.

But conservative political beliefs have been found to correlate with reliance on federal aid in states such as Kentucky, where residents counted on the federal government for at least 40% of their personal income in 28 out of 120 counties, as of 2014.

Conservatives can both disproportionately rely on social welfare programs and oppose such programs owing to inaccurate perceptions about whom the programs benefit – perceptions once again informed by race, Huddy said.

“I think that people that live in some of these areas would be surprised to find that in fact their area is a major recipient of federal transfer from more Democratic states to more Republican states,” said Huddy. “I think it would be surprising information to them. But that is the reality.”

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

POLITICO

2020 ELECTIONS

‘We’re thinking landslide’: Beyond D.C., GOP officials see Trump on glide path to reelection

Conventional indicators suggest the president’s bid for a second term is in jeopardy. But state and local GOP officials see a different election unfolding.

By most conventional indicators, Donald Trump is in danger of becoming a one-term president. The economy is a wreck, the coronavirus persists, and his poll numbers have deteriorated.

But throughout the Republican Party’s vast organization in the states, the operational approach to Trump’s re-election campaign is hardening around a fundamentally different view.

Interviews with more than 50 state, district and county Republican Party chairs depict a version of the electoral landscape that is no worse for Trump than six months ago — and possibly even slightly better. According to this view, the coronavirus is on its way out and the economy is coming back. Polls are unreliable, Joe Biden is too frail to last, and the media still doesn’t get it.

“The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump,” said Phillip Stephens, GOP chairman in Robeson County, N.C., one of several rural counties in that swing state that shifted from supporting Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. “We’re calling him ‘Teflon Trump.’ Nothing’s going to stick, because if anything, it’s getting more exciting than it was in 2016.”

This year, Stephens said, “We’re thinking landslide.”

Five months before the election, many state and county Republican Party chairs predict a close election. Yet from the Eastern seaboard to the West Coast and the battlegrounds in between, there is an overriding belief that, just as Trump defied political gravity four years ago, there’s no reason he won’t do it again.

Andrew Hitt, the state party chairman in Wisconsin, said that during the height of public attention on the coronavirus, in late March and early April, internal polling suggested “some sagging off where we wanted to be.”

But now, he said, “Things are coming right back where we want them … That focus on the economy and on re-opening and bringing America back is resonating with people.”

In Ohio, Jane Timken, the state party chair, said she sees no evidence of support for Trump slipping. Jennifer Carnahan, the chairwoman of the Minnesota Republican Party, said the same. And Lawrence Tabas, the chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, went so far as to predict that Trump would not only carry his state, but beat Biden by more than 100,000 votes — more than twice the margin he mustered in 2016.

“Contrary to what may be portrayed in the media, there’s still a high level of support out there,” said Kyle Hupfer, chairman of the Indiana Republican Party. He described himself as “way more” optimistic than he was at this point in 2016.

The Republican Party apparatus that Trump heads in 2020 is considerably different than the one that looked at him warily in 2016. At the state level, many chairs who were considered insufficiently committed to the president were ousted and replaced with loyalists. But their assessments would be easier to dismiss as spin if the perception of Trump’s durability did not reach so far beyond GOP officialdom.

When pollsters ask Americans who they think will win the election — not who they are voting for themselves — Trump performs relatively well. And if anything, Trump’s field officers appear more bullish than Trump and some of his advisers. Even the president, while lamenting what he views as unfair treatment by his adversaries, has privately expressed concerns about his poll numbers and publicly seemed to acknowledge he is down.

“If I wasn’t constantly harassed for three years by fake and illegal investigations, Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Hoax, I’d be up by 25 points on Sleepy Joe and the Do Nothing Democrats,” he said on Twitter last week. “Very unfair, but it is what it is!!!”

Yet in the states, the Republican Party’s rank-and-file are largely unconvinced that the president is precariously positioned in his reelection bid.

“The narrative from the Beltway is not accurate,” said Joe Bush, chairman of the Republican Party in Muskegon County, Mich., which Trump lost narrowly in 2016. “Here in the heartland, everybody is still very confident, more than ever.”

At the center of the disconnect between Trump loyalists’ assessment of the state of the race and the one based on public opinion polls is a distrust of polling itself. Republicans see an industry that maliciously oversamples Democrats or under-samples the white, non-college educated voters who are most likely to support Trump. They say it is hard to know who likely voters are this far from the election. And like many Democrats, they suspect Trump supporters disproportionately hang up on pollsters, under-counting his level of support.

Ted Lovdahl, chairman of the Republican Party in Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District, said he has friends who will tell pollsters “just exactly the opposite of what they feel.”

When he asked one of them why, his friend told him, “I don’t like some of their questions. It’s none of their business what I do.”

Recalling that polls four years ago failed to predict the outcome, Jack Brill, acting chairman of the local Republican Party in Sarasota County, Fla., said, “I used to be an avid poll watcher until 2016 … Guess what? I’m not watching polls.”

Instead, as they prepare for a post-lockdown summer of party picnics and parades, Republican Party organizers sense the beginnings of an economic recovery that, if sustained, is likely to power Trump to a second term. They also see a more immediate opening in the civil unrest surrounding the death of George Floyd.

“The other side is overplaying its hand, going down roads like defunding the police and nonsense like that."

Michael Burke, chairman of the Republican Party in Pinal County, Arizona

“The further and further the Democrats tack left, and the further you get to where it’s the defunding the police,” said Scott Frostman, GOP chairman in Wisconsin’s Sauk County, which Obama won easily in 2012 but flipped to Trump four years later. “I think we have the opportunity as Republicans to talk to people a little bit more about some common sense things.”

Biden has rejected a national movement to defund police departments. But elections are often painted in broad strokes, and local party officials expect Trump — with his law and order rhetoric — will be the beneficiary of what they see as Democratic overreach.

“The other side is overplaying its hand, going down roads like defunding the police and nonsense like that,” said Michael Burke, chairman of the Republican Party in Pinal County, Arizona, a Trump stronghold in 2016.” “Most of the American people are looking like that saying, ‘Really?’”

By most objective measures, Trump will need something to drag Biden down. He has fallen behind Biden in most swing state polls, and he lags the former vice president nationally by more than 8 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. A Gallup poll last week put Trump’s approval rating at just 39 percent, down 10 percentage points from a month ago. Democrats appear competitive not only in expected swing states, but in places such as Iowa and Ohio, which Trump won easily in 2016.

Little of that data is registering, however. State and local officials point to Trump’s financial and organizational advantages and see Biden as a weak opponent. They’re eager for Trump to eviscerate him in debates. “While the Democrats have been spending their time playing Paper Rock Scissors on who their nominee is going to be, we’ve been building an army,” said Terry Lathan, chair of the Alabama Republican Party.

James Dickey, chairman of the Texas Republican Party, said it took Biden “days to figure out how to even successfully operate, or communicate out of a bunker” and that he “has clearly not been able to deal with any real challenging interview.”

Local officials brush off criticism of Trump by Republican fixtures such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who said last week that Trump “lies all the time.” They dismiss press accounts of the race. Dennis Coxwell, the chairman of Georgia’s Warren County Republican Party, said: “It’s gotten to a point where I cannot believe anything that the news media says.”

Many admire Trump’s bluntest instincts — the same ones that have cost him among women and independent voters, according to polls. “The left called George Bush all kinds of names and just savaged him all the time … and Bush never said a word,” said Burke, who worked for Trump in the late 1980s and early 1990s overseeing his fleet of helicopters. “It was frustrating for those of us on the right. Now a guy comes along, you attack him, you’re getting it back double barrel. And everybody’s sitting around saying, ‘Yeah, that’s right, give it to ‘em.’”

And most of all, they put their confidence in an expectation that the economy will improve by fall.

Doyle Webb, chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party and general counsel to the Republican National Committee, said the only concern that he would have about Trump’s reelection prospects is “if the economy had another downturn.”

“But I don’t see that happening,” Webb said.

Instead, he predicted an improving job outlook and a return to “the old Clinton mantra: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’”

“I think that people will be happy,” Webb said, “and [Trump] will be re-elected.”

It’s a widely-held view. In Pennsylvania last week, Veral Salmon, the Republican Party chairman of the state’s bellwether Erie County, measured enthusiasm for Trump by the large number of requests he has received for Trump yard signs. In Maine, Melvin Williams, chairman of the Lincoln County Republican Committee, saw it in a population he said is “getting sick of this bullshit,” blaming coronavirus-related shutdowns on Democrats. And across the country, in heavily Democratic San Francisco, John Dennis, the chairman of the local GOP, was encouraged by the decreasing number of emails from the “Never Trump” crowd.

Not in his city, but nationally, Dennis said, “I’m pretty confident that [Trump] is going to pull it off.”

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

<<>>>>>><<<>>><><><>>><<><{

{ How will he pull it off?
Herd immunity in conjunction with racial politics, may be an unstoppable train, leveraged by the effective use of increasing socio-economic social distancing. Any partial derivation and reintegration of those elements, can assure that about 30% conceivable need not be infected for stability to be achieved and sustained.

70 percent immunity on account of predictable total infection may need to be achieved to make herd immunity workable, if a vaccine is not developed in the foreseeable future.}

People around the President say he remains intent on reopening the country, and has said he will not allow another shutdown that might hamper an economic recovery. Trump’s thinking is being driven in large part by the message he has gotten from his political advisers, which is that strong signs of a recovering economy are his surest ticket to reelection.

The President and his political strategists were buoyed by the positive jobs numbers earlier this month, which served to reinforce Trump’s belief that his focus should be on continuing to encourage a national reopening rather than heed warnings about surging cases of coronavirus in a slew of states.

He has also pressed his team to work more quickly on a vaccine, hoping to have something ready even before the end of the year.

"In his first rally in months, President Trump bragged about his response to the pandemic, despite widespread criticism of his administration’s faltering management of the crisis.

Addressing a mostly maskless crowd on Saturday night in a sparsely filled 19,000-seat indoor arena in Tulsa, Okla., Mr. Trump mocked the coronavirus, which has killed 121,000 Americans, and claimed that he wanted to slow down testing.

“Here’s the bad part,” Mr. Trump said, after boasting that the U.S. had tested millions more people than any other country. “When you do testing to that extent, you will find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please.” He also insisted that schools needed to open in the fall.

On Sunday, Peter Navarro, the White House director of trade and manufacturing policy, said in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the president’s comment about slowing testing was “tongue in cheek.”

At the rally, Mr. Trump said the low turnout had resulted from news media reports on local officials’ health concerns about the indoor rally, and campaign advisers claimed that their supporters had trouble entering the arena because of protesters.

In reality, there were few protests across the city, and black leaders in Tulsa had made calls earlier for people to stay away. TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank.

Concerns that the event could spread the virus were amplified hours before Mr. Trump took the stage, when his campaign acknowledged that six staff members working on the rally had tested positive.

The campaign stressed that all rally attendees were receiving temperature checks before going through security and were then given wristbands, face masks and hand sanitizer.

Yet Trump supporters gathered in Tulsa appeared less worried about the virus and more exuberant over the president’s return to the campaign trail.

“If it is God’s will that I get coronavirus, that is the will of the Almighty,” said Robert Montanelli, a resident of a Tulsa suburb. “I will not live in fear.”

From the New York Times editorial , Sunday, June 21, 2020

{How can a non-partisan, average voter feel, by the rationalization that a worse ing economy can devolve hymen misery fad below that occurred during the Great Depression?

For then, mass starvation and huge increases in homelessness would be added to the ravages caused by the pandemic, especially looking forward with increased probability of a new resurgence and a second wave?

How awful could that be?}

You decide:

The Guardian -

William Barr

Trump AG Barr will escape impeachment thanks to ‘corrupt’ Republicans – Nadler

Attorney General fires New York attorney after bizarre standoff

Judiciary chair says he will cut $50m from ‘personal budget’

Opinion: SDNY disaster suggests Barr is not so smart after all

Sun 21 Jun 2020 13.24 EDT

Attorney general William Barr “certainly deserves” to be impeached and removed but will escape that fate because Republicans who control the Senate are “corrupt against the interests of the country”, the chairman of the House judiciary committee said on Sunday.

Geoffrey Berman, US attorney behind inquiries into Trump allies, resigns after Barr announces firing

Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat, told CNN’s State of the Union he would instead take $50m from the attorney general’s “own personal budget”.

On Saturday evening, after a near-24-hour standoff, Barr secured the exit of Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the southern district of New York.

The prestigious district has pursued investigations and prosecutions of allies of Donald Trump including two of his personal lawyers, Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani.

It also oversees the investigation of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a Trump friend, and a case involving a Turkish bank which former national security adviser John Bolton has said Trump tried to influence as a favour to the Turkish president.

Barr said on Friday night Berman, a Republican who donated to Trump in 2016, had agreed to step down. Berman said he had not.

On Saturday, Barr invoked Trump’s authority to fire Berman, who accepted his fate. His deputy Audrey Strauss, a career prosecutor and donor to Democrats, will assume the role until the Senate confirms a replacement.

Barr and Trump want that replacement to be Jay Clayton, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission who has never worked as a federal prosecutor. Barr had said the US attorney in New Jersey, a Trump ally, would fill the role in an acting capacity.

On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, House intelligence chair Adam Schiff was asked if he accepted the reported explanation that Trump’s move to replace Berman with Clayton was “simply the president wanting to do a favor for a golfing buddy”.

“I can’t accept that explanation,” Schiff said, “given the pattern and practice of both the president in seeking to use the justice system to reward friends, punish enemies, protect people he likes, and Bill Barr’s willingness to carry that water for the president.

“Also, if you look at Berman’s statement, Berman apparently has the same skepticism. There’s a reason … he was saying ‘I’m not stepping down,’ that he wanted to ensure that these investigations continued … Berman clearly had a concern about why he was being pushed out.”

Clayton’s firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, has represented Deutsche Bank, one of Trump’s largest creditors which is itself under investigation by the DoJ. On Sunday Republican senator Tim Scott told ABC’s This Week: “There is no indication that those investigations will stop.”

Democrats have long claimed Barr acts more as a personal lawyer for Trump than the impartial chief of federal law enforcement. The attorney general, they say, has misrepresented the Mueller report and interfered in criminal cases involving Trump aides Michael Flynn and Roger Stone.

Schiff also referred to recent removals of a number of independent government watchdogs.

“Given the firings of these inspector generals,” he said, “given the way that Barr has sought to intervene in cases to help out people like Michael Flynn or Roger Stone, and to seek additional punishment for people like Michael Cohen” – who has turned against the president – “… you really have to question what’s really at the basis of this Friday night attempted massacre, and now, completed one.”

That was a reference to the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when Richard Nixon sought to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox and successive officials quit rather than do so. Nixon soon resigned, rather than be removed.

Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren has led calls for Barr to be impeached but Nadler said: “He certainly deserves impeachment but that would be a waste of time.

“We know that we have a corrupt Republican majority in the Senate which will not consider an impeachment no matter what the evidence and no matter what the facts,” Nadler said, saying such senators were “corrupt against the interests of the country”.

Measures against Barr would include the budget cut, he said.

When Trump was impeached, over attempts to get from Ukraine dirt on political rivals, he was acquitted in the Senate, which refused to call witnesses including Bolton, who is now publishing a book which includes allegations of more impeachable behaviour.

One Republican senator, Mitt Romney, voted for new witnesses and to impeach Trump. Susan Collins of Maine voted for witnesses.

Nadler, like other Democrats, has suggested Barr is seeking to impede investigations close to Trump. Asked which, he said: “I think it’s obvious that a number of investigations the southern district has been doing with reference to the president’s associates, Giuliani, the Turkish investigation, we’ve seen a pattern of Barr corruptly impeding all these investigations. So this is just more of the same.”

Nadler said he expected Berman to testify, if not at a hearing this week which will feature DoJ whistleblowers.

Preet Bharara, US attorney for the SDNY before Berman, whom Trump also fired, told CNN, for whom he now works, he did not think Berman would discuss ongoing investigations. He also condemned Barr’s conduct.

“The attorney general of the United States made a public misrepresentation about whether or not Geoff Berman was stepping down from office,” he said.

“It was clearly not the case, it was clearly a falsehood, and he tried to cover that up with a letter that spent time calling names against Geoff Berman and also retreated a little bit, allowing Berman to decide that the office was going to be left in good hands.”

Barr accused Berman of having “chosen public spectacle over public service”.

“Your statement also wrongly implies that your continued tenure in the office is necessary to ensure that cases now pending in the southern district of New York are handled appropriately,” the attorney general wrote. “This is obviously false. I fully expect that the office will continue to handle all cases in the normal course.”

Bharara said he thought Barr’s conduct “shows there is an unfitness for The job"

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

----‘’‘“”“”"’‘----’‘’“”“”“”“----'”‘“”“”’“”----‘’‘“,”“”"–’‘-’“----‘’'”,"‘’

And latest paranoid politics at Oklahoma:

Trump is losing it

The incumbent US president launched psychological warfare in Tulsa.

The stage is set, the lines are drawn, the stakes are high and Donald Trump is losing it.

His mismanagement of the pandemic and the civil unrest gripping the United States have cost him dearly. He is trailing behind his Democratic rival Joe Biden in the polls by a double-digit margin. If the US elections were held today, he would lose “bigly”, and that is just driving him crazy.

Trump is down but not out. He is nearing the tipping point but not there yet.

He has lost the economic and political gains which he hoped to use to launch his campaign. And it would be improbable if not impossible for him to overcome the recession and public anger before the November elections.

So he has resorted to psychology, embarking on a public relations offensive to deflect criticism and alter public perception in his favour, focusing on a small segment of the electorate in the swing states, which he hopes will help him repeat his 2016 victory.

Back then Trump had a number of perceived psychological advantages in the electorate over Hillary Clinton, some quite silly considering the stakes.

According to some psychologists, being the taller candidate and being seen as an “alpha male” may have given Trump some advantage over Clinton.

Indeed, some 80 million people watched as the 6-foot-3 (1.9m) celebrity towered over Clinton during the 2016 debates and threatened to lock her up. His name appearing first on the ballots in the key swing states may have also helped.

But today, these instinctive psychological “advantages” are neither relevant nor sufficient, and Trump must come up with a new strategy to restore public confidence in him in a time of crisis.

Restoring confidence

In an attempt to appear in control during a national health disaster, Trump has tried to change the public’s psychology by anointing himself a “war president” to fight the pandemic.

He has also referred to himself as the “law and order” president during the civil unrest, advocating military intervention and putting Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of the US armed forces “in charge”.

He even played God’s special messenger during the early days of the civil unrest, brandishing a copy of the Bible he had not read in front of a church he had not attended to defend a faith which was not under threat.

To no avail.

Public anger continues to simmer. The pandemic has taken the lives of 120,000 Americans and rising. The economy is in the deepest recession since World War I, and society is in turmoil. Even religious leaders are not buying into his insecure machismo.

So what began as a bleeding of support a few months ago has now turned into serious haemorrhaging.

That is why Trump has been so eager to get back on the campaign trail. He feels he has a connection with the crowd which can help him pull his presidency from the jaws of disaster.

He has had a unique understanding of power and its psychology since before he went in to politics. He is ready to “go to the mat” to get what he wants.

So he set off on a crusade to break the Democrats’ fighting spirit and to win back “hearts and minds”, the hearts of conservatives and the minds of independents.

First stop, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Psychological warfare

Trump began his first rally since the pandemic by serving red meat to the Red state, which voted overwhelmingly Republican in 2016.

He started with a perilous populist appeal, calling his supporters “warriors” and warning of “some very bad people outside … doing bad things”.

With no economic or political case to make, he ignored the civil unrest, joked about the deadly pandemic, and denied the deep recession, as AJ+'s Tony Karon aptly remarked.

Trump slammed the “shameless hypocrite”, “sleepy Joe” Biden, warning if he is elected president, “our country would be destroyed”.

And he dissed the “radical left” Democrats, especially “hate-filled, America-bashing” Ilhan Omar and “socialist” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

He also demonised the “negative”, “radical”, “fake news” media, and the subversive radical left that holds Biden hostage.

Trump aims to go as far as it takes to shock and awe until he overwhelms his detractors and beats them into submission.

But in Tulsa, the reality proved more complicated.

The promised large crowds did not materialise and the relatively poor attendance of his much-publicised rally turned the hype into humiliation.

Contrary to Trump’s assertions, fewer than 200 protesters were seen in Tulsa that day and they by far were not the main deterrent for prospective attendees.

Clearly, many of his supporters are not dying to hear his grievances and falsehoods during the pandemic.

Clearly, his tireless repetition of smears and satire is no longer as entertaining to his core supporters.

Clearly, he is losing control over his emotions and his tone, and the more he loses it, the more he loses support.

As people lose confidence in the president, so do the antsy and opportunistic political elites.

An increasing number of Republicans, including former generals and aides, are deserting his sinking ship; some out of fear for the party, not to mention the country’s future in case of a Trump second term. Some reckon he poses a “danger to the Republic”.

This leaves the incumbent president no choice but to double down on incitement against his opponents, before defections snowball.

The question is, what will Trump do if he loses the psychological warfare? Or, rather how far will he go to get re-elected?

For psychology goes in both directions, and Trump sounds increasingly paranoid about liberal institutions conspiring against him, about the media, the courts, and the “deep state” bureaucracy besieging him.

He has even asked his followers if they also had the impression “the Supreme Court doesn’t like [him]”.

Objectively speaking, being paranoid does not mean no one is actually colluding or conspiring against Trump or clamouring for his downfall.

That is why those celebrating his defeat prematurely should beware of his determination to do anything to win.

A desperate and humiliated Trump may do just about anything.

The stage is indeed set and the fault lines are drawn, for national elections and for a national showdown.

Al Jazeera Media Network

DONALD TRUMP

‘As bad as it gets’: Pelosi, Democrats take aim at Trump over Russian bounty intelligence

“And yet the president will not confront the Russians on this score, denies being briefed,” Pelosi said on ABC’s “This Week.”

June 28, 2020, 1:51 PM EDT

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday that President Donald Trump “wants to ignore any allegation against Russia” as he and his administration deny ever having been briefed about intelligence that Russians have offered to pay bounties to Taliban fighters who kill Americans.

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said, “This is as bad as it gets.”

“And yet the president will not confront the Russians on this score, denies being briefed,” Pelosi said. “Whether he is or not, his administration knows, and our allies — some of our allies who work with us in Afghanistan — had been briefed and accept this report.”

Referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Pelosi added: “Just as I have said to the president: With him all roads lead to Putin. I don’t know what the Russians have on the president, politically, personally, financially or whatever it is, but he wants to ignore, he wants to bring them back to the G8 despite the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, despite what they yielded to him in Syria, despite his intervention into our election, which is well documented by our intelligence community, and despite now possibly this allegation, which we should have been briefed on.”

The U.S. gathered intelligence on the Russian bounty offers, three people briefed on the matter told NBC News. The New York Times was first to report on the intelligence, which other news outlets have also confirmed.

The intelligence has been shared with congressional leaders and the British government, the sources said. Meanwhile, a senior defense official said there was no evidence that any bounty was actually paid. An intelligence official said the report is not surprising given the history between the U.S. and Russia; the U.S. armed Afghan fighters taking on the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

The Times report quoted officials as saying Trump was briefed on the intelligence. He and multiple administration officials have denied having been briefed.

Trump called for The Times to “reveal” its sourcing Sunday. He tweeted that “nobody briefed or told me,” Vice President Mike Pence or White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about the intelligence.

“Everybody is denying it & there have not been many attacks on us,” he wrote, adding that “nobody” has been tougher on Russia than his administration.

In a statement Saturday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the president and other top officials were not “briefed on the alleged Russian bounty intelligence.”

“This does not speak to the merit of the alleged intelligence but to the inaccuracy of the New York Times story erroneously suggesting that President Trump was briefed on this matter,” she said.

Pointing to McEnany’s statement, Susan Rice, who was national security adviser in the administration of President Barack Obama, tweeted that she does not “believe this for a minute, but if it were true, it means that Trump is not even pretending to serve as commander in chief.”

“And no one around him has the guts to ask him to,” she said. “More evidence of their deadly incompetence.”

Pelosi pointed Sunday to Russia’s longstanding disdain over the U.S.'s 1980s war efforts in Afghanistan and said it is now seeking to take “it out on us, our troops.”

“This is totally outrageous,” she said. "You would think that the minute the president heard of it he would want to know more instead of denying that he knew anything.

“Now, if, in fact — we’ll find out he has briefed and it was in his daily brief — but if it were not, what does that say about the concern that those who briefed the president have about not going anywhere near the Russia issue with this president?” she added.

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Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services military personnel subcommittee, called for a congressional investigation.

“I believe that when we ask our service members and their families to take risks and make sacrifices for the United States, it is with the understanding that we will do anything we can to mitigate those risks and honor those sacrifices,” she said in a statement. “President Trump appears to have utterly failed to uphold his end of the bargain. Through thorough investigation, oversight, and accountability measures, we can still keep ours.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., tweeted: "If reports are true that Russia offered a bounty on U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Trump wasn’t briefed, that’s a problem.

“If he was briefed and still wanted Russia back in the G-8, it’s even worse,” he added. “What will it take to get Trump to abandon the fiction that Putin is our friend?”

Democrats were not alone in raising alarms. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, chair of the House Republican Conference, tweeted that if “reporting about Russian bounties on US forces is true, the White House must explain” who knew what and when.

Speaking Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton said the U.S. “should be cautious” about the intelligence, adding, however, that he could never recall “a circumstance where the president himself goes out of his way to say he wasn’t briefed on something.”

Bolton, who recently released a highly critical book about the president and his time in the White House titled “The Room Where It Happened,” said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that, if the bounty reports are true, it is “one of the most serious matters, I think, that has arisen in the Trump administration.”

“So what is the presidential reaction?” Bolton asked of Trump’s tweets. "It’s to say, ‘It’s not my responsibility, no one told me about it,’ and therefore to duck any complaints that he hasn’t acted effectively.

“This is part of the problem with President Trump’s decision-making in the national security space,” Bolton added. “It’s just unconnected to the reality he’s dealing with. It’s about his personal position.”

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[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgSI-iPZ9cQ[/youtube]

Dare you watch this?

You’d think that people would see objective sense, but they don’t… they are blinded by emotion and the historical past, of civil wars and subjugation.

Even when presented with the truth, most deny the facts… which has been evident even here on these boards, by those whom want and wish those facts to be otherwise.

CORONAVIRUS

Behind the Trump team’s U-turn, mounting fears about a mission-accomplished message

After weeks of celebrating states that reopened, the vice president and others on Monday changed course — commending governors who slowed their plans.

06/29/2020 07:39 PM EDT

Mike Pence couldn’t bear to stay quiet much longer.

The vice president worried that a weeks-long public hiatus by his coronavirus task force had created an information void that contributed to a sharp rise in confirmed cases across the southern and western United States.

With a televised briefing on Friday, organized at Pence’s direction on a day’s notice, the group revealed an undercurrent of fear behind the scenes of the federal government as the virus mounted its resurgence.

Over the weekend, Pence stepped up his urgency. Other Trump officials and allies issued stark new warnings as case counts soared in some of the nation’s largest states. And the machinery that had lined up behind President Donald Trump’s mission-accomplished message suddenly started to fade away.

The striking shift in the vice president’s tone — from zealously defending Trump’s push to reopen the U.S. economy to complimenting governors on Monday for halting their states’ reopenings — underscores Pence’s thorny position as he works to balance his and Trump’s political futures, which largely rely on convincing voters an economic rebound is on the horizon, with ensuring an appropriate response to an unwieldy new phase in the coronavirus pandemic.

Inside the Department of Health and Human Services, officials have agonized over Pence’s recent messages on coronavirus, saying that his ever-sunny tone could confuse Americans about the actual risks of the outbreak.

“We are winning the fight against the invisible enemy,” Pence contended in a June 16 op-ed that blamed the media for creating an “overblown” sense of panic about increased coronavirus infections during America’s phased economic reopening.

Pence spent Friday’s press conference touting the nation’s progress in fighting the coronavirus and defending the “constitutional rights” of people to participate in large gatherings, such as the Tulsa, Okla., Trump rally that Pence attended earlier this month, where a very small percentage of the crowd could be seen wearing protective coverings.

But the briefing foreshadowed a change in Pence’s own relaxed response to the novel coronavirus — a shift that intensified during his visit to a Texas mega-church, where he affirmed the importance of protective face coverings as a way to prevent transmission. It’s “just a good idea,” he said Sunday.

Pence praised Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who had proudly pushed to reopen his state quickly, for taking steps “to limit the kind of gatherings and meetings in certain places in communities that may well be contributing to the community spread that we’re seeing…

The president needs evangelical voters. But he also needs to prevent churchers from serving as super-spreaders.

Confirmed U.S. Cases: 2,564,163 | U.S. Deaths: 125,928

How coronavirus will change the world permanently

TOP DEVELOPMENTS

Mike Pence said new spikes may be due to young people ‘disregarding’ guidelines.

A nationwide mandate to wear a mask is ‘long overdue,’ according to Nancy Pelosi.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar said outbreaks across Southern states threaten to spiral out of control.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called Trump and his administration ‘in denial’ about the virus.

Read all coronavirus coverage »

Pence’s pro-mask endorsement drew praise from corners of the administration on Monday. One senior administration official said it was “a step in the right direction that President Trump should also take.”

Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, commented that “we need to get everybody on board at this point,” during a Monday webinar hosted by the Journal of the American Medical Association. (Schuchat did not cite Pence specifically, but spoke after the journal’s editor-in-chief praised the vice president for coming out in favor of masks over the weekend.)

But other recent comments by Pence — including his victory lap during Friday’s news conference about the amount of medical supplies and equipment procured by the administration — marked a jarring contrast against the alarm bells top health officials sounded last week.

“There are more cases. There are more hospitalizations in some of those places and soon you’ll be seeing more deaths,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the health experts on the White House coronavirus task force, said during the task force briefing as Pence quietly looked on.

“The window is closing,” added HHS Secretary Alex Azar during a Sunday morning appearance on NBC. “We have to act, and people as individuals have to act responsibly.”

Azar’s comments previewed the sharper tone that both he and Pence have adopted in the past 48 hours, as more than a dozen states confront alarming surges in confirmed Covid-19 cases that could overwhelm hospitals and plunge some communities back into lockdowns that residents and business owners anxiously hope to avoid.

Six states — Texas, Florida, Idaho, Tennessee, Utah and Georgia — all reported their highest single-day totals of new coronavirus cases on Saturday, a development Abbott described as “a very dangerous turn” in his state.

Top White House officials remain divided over the best course of action as the rate of new infections spikes in states across the U.S. Some officials, including health aides, believe the government needs to offer Americans more information on a regular basis about the best practices to keep Americans safe in the age of Covid-19 as well as continuing updates on new infections. Other aides firmly believe the White House should charge ahead with its economic message, regardless of the virus. That faction inside the White House does not want regular briefings on the state of Covid-19 or too many public appearances from officials like Fauci that could sour the nation’s mood in the coming months.

The steep rise in infections led a number of Republicans in the last 48 hours to start promoting the idea of wearing masks in public, or donning face coverings themselves.

Pence wore a mask on Sunday as he stepped off the government plane in Texas to greet the governor, as did Sen. John Cornyn, White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, all of whom joined the vice president on his Sunday trip to Texas.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor on Monday to say there should be “no stigma — none — about wearing masks when we leave our homes and come near other people.”

“Wearing simple face coverings is not about protecting ourselves. It is about protecting everyone we encounter,” McConnell said, weeks after Trump mocked his 2020 Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, for wearing a mask outdoors on Memorial Day.

During Pence’s call with governors on Monday, Abbott cited festivities over Memorial Day weekend, as well as his decision to permit bars to reopen, as two reasons Texas has witnessed skyrocketing cases and hospitalizations in the past three weeks. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey similarly said coronavirus cases in his state had slowed to a crawl before the latest surge, which began after restaurants, gyms and non-essential industries were given the greenlight to resume business in May and early June.

The surges in the south are leading other states, such as New Jersey, to halt their plans to open indoor dining at restaurants — a sign of mounting worries hitting state leaders across the nation just as they hoped to be putting the crisis behind them.

At a coronavirus task force meeting on Friday, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway — who managed the president’s 2016 campaign — told aides the administration needed to make its priorities clear to the American public — including ideas about whether it was more important for bars in Texas and Florida to re-open this summer, or for schools to start on time in the fall, said a person familiar with the meeting.

White House coronavirus task force members spent much of Monday’s call with governors focusing on the drivers behind the precipitous rise in cases, according to two people familiar with the discussion. Notably absent from the conversation were previous dismissals by Pence and others that the increase in cases was largely the result of expanded testing.

Though Trump has continued to cling to increased testing as the primary explanation for new Covid-19 outbreaks, Pence has come to terms with the reality that testing alone cannot account for the surge of cases in the last week, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

In another striking departure from Trump, who sidelined the federal government’s task force last month to ensure his reopening message was front and center, Pence specifically commended governors on Monday for issuing new guidance or halting their plans to reopen. It was a significant break from his previous approval of states that had raced to start their economies back up.

Fauci, an expert in infectious diseases who established a ubiquitous on-screen presence during the early days of the pandemic, pointed to the resurgence of Covid-19 as a harsh reminder that it can often take two to three weeks for new coronavirus clusters to appear in data.

One senior administration official said the Trump campaign has been nervously monitoring data out of Oklahoma to determine whether the president’s June 22 rally, which the local fire department estimated 6,200 people attended, leads to apparent surge in surrounding counties over the next two weeks.

POLITICO Pulse

“There is definitely an acknowledgement that a surge is happening,” said one of the people familiar with Monday’s call with governors, which this person said was “the first time” administration officials admitted that a slow-speed reopening is likely safer than the rapid approach Trump has embraced.

Still, Pence and other top officials offered a mostly optimistic perspective of the coronavirus crisis, emphasizing that the nation is better-prepared to manage new outbreaks and encouraging governors to focus specifically on reminding younger Americans of the risk they could pose to older relatives if they become infected. Azar on the call avoided faulting the reopenings themselves for the upswing in cases, placing the blame instead on people failing to behave responsibly as states loosened their social distancing restrictions.

Task force members were also noncommittal about taking a stronger stand on mask-wearing, in response to Utah Gov. Gary Herbert’s request on the call for Trump to join his vice president in publicly urging Americans to wear face masks.

The Trump administration is, however, reviewing a new round of public health guidance for how states can mitigate the risks of coronavirus, with a focus on warnings about gatherings and the need for face coverings, said three officials. That guidance could be released by the July 4th holiday weekend, when Trump is expected to be in South Dakota to participate in a fireworks show at Mount Rushmore.

Meanwhile, Pence has canceled campaign-related events in Florida and Arizona this week — two states where coronavirus cases are rising rapidly — but is still expected to meet with both governors.

Before traveling to Texas on Sunday, where he spoke at First Baptist Church of Dallas alongside pro-Trump pastor Robert Jeffress and later met with Abbott, Pence organized the press conference last week where he and task force officials updated Americans on the resurgent virus. A person familiar with the matter said Pence arrived at the decision to hold a public briefing — following weeks of behind-the-scenes task force meetings — after he and several health officials expressed concern that an information void may have contributed to the sharp rise in coronavirus cases. The task force had stopped its near-daily briefings in early May when Trump and other senior administration officials began pushing states to reopen their economies.

But unlike those briefings, where top economic officials often made appearances to promote lifting bans on non-essential business operations and to laud the president’s leadership, Friday’s update was almost singularly focused on addressing recent Covid-19 outbreaks and encouraging Americans to exercise restraint and social distancing. While Pence spun a rosy picture about progress in testing and dismissed concerns about the president’s campaign schedule, he never once interjected when the health officials standing beside him gave sober assessments about the status of the pandemic.

Senate Republicans squeeze Trump over Russian bounties

Republicans have been skipping House Intelligence meetings for months

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

POLITICO

2020 ELECTIONS

POLITICO’s Election Forecast: Trump, Senate GOP in trouble

Trump’s falling political fortunes have tilted the electoral map in Joe Biden’s favor and made battlegrounds out of more Senate states.

A series of crises over the past three months has seen the political environment deteriorate markedly for President Donald Trump and his party. | Patrick Semansky/AP Photo

President Donald Trump is now an underdog to win a second term, and Republicans’ Senate majority is in serious danger of being swept out with him, according to the latest edition of POLITICO’s Election Forecast.

A series of crises over the past three months has seen the political environment deteriorate markedly for Trump and his party. The percentage of voters who think the country is headed in the wrong direction is hitting new highs — a record 75 percent in the latest POLITICO/Morning Consult poll — and Trump’s approval rating is settling near his all-time lows.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s lead over Trump is swelling to roughly 10 points nationally — and for the first time, our forecast classifies Biden as the clear favorite in the race.

The national atmosphere is toxic enough that Senate Republicans, who currently hold a three-seat majority, no longer have a significant edge in their quest to retain control of the chamber next year. Democrats have both built leads in states that were previously considered up-for-grabs and put new states firmly on the map, expanding their path to a majority and potential unified control of government in 2021.

POLITICO’s Election Forecast is a long-term, qualitative examination of the political landscape, from the presidential campaign down to the congressional-district level. It is based on continual interviews with strategists and operatives, polling and other data streams and the electoral and demographic trends driving the 2020 campaign. It is a more deliberative approach than a statistical model, which can be helpful in cutting through polls and other data sources but can also shift from day-to-day with little rationale for the changes.

“Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.”

Mueller, special prosecutor
6:06 AM · Jul 11, 2020

But a president doing such a thing isnt illegal, so why do we call it ‘corrupt’. See you think I’m defending trumpf here but I ain’t. I’m saying this is the kind of stuff that draws attention to the structural flaws of western constitutional three-branch government.

A president’s power to commute a sentence is one of those little things that really didn’t need to be included, and in fact could become something abused by a president. Which we just saw. So now people are like ‘wait why can he do that’ and since they cant reconcile the fact that it is simultaneously legal and obviously corrupt, they start questioning the very foundation of the concept of the ‘president’, and in that investigation they discover alternative governing systems that dont have ‘presidents’.

So all this is good news, in fact. That trumpf did that obviously knuckleheaded shit. Conservatism takes a major hit here.

Sure. This point is correct and well taken. An essential loophole through which any President can crawl through in order to sustain the powers of executive power.

However…

The executive, thereby, can overcome any challenge by the other constitutional parts of governing, to delimit the balances between execution, legislation, and adjudication of programs which cal lawfully curb any one of the constitutional powers.

In this set up, the parts are not exclusively were formed to function, but the variously interact, by associating with each other to degrees of possibility, toward probable integrated levels, whereby , with the objective that use compromise and setting structural frameworks that allow planning to proceed, that do correspond to some measure of cooperation .

The problem here is limits of power which do expedite an easier way that an executive can find crawlspace, through which he can legitimize the essential space that the limits of power between checking and balancing those powers can be manipulated.

Under normal times, yeah5, sure, not much harm can be done to the original principles, however, in these tested times, when those very principles are challenged, the questions of remarking what the limits of power are, defy definitions.

What is the ultimate problem? Is a crisis of foreboding political chaos, that may even abridge the rule of executive rule as it applies to term limits become a qualifiable process, whereupon corruption is ok’d, as long as the party line , is upheld until the leading party is satisfied that status of motive to planning was a hieved, to guarantee the succession of their firm of it?

That is it, and I bet, that if Trump’s agenda still has not achieved Republican politi cal aims, it is not inconceivable for the Republicans to cause any imminent reason to suspend any limits that block them to sustain those won parts of their agenda which stop shirt of those guarantees.

Shumer pointed this out during the impeachment process quite well, and truth is not hidden in a formal declarative process of bully pulpits.

However in these extraordinary times, where the very constitutional framework is being internally challenged, questions like these becoming tweetfully repetitive, the sense if public understanding is being side swiped, and much Madison ave style opinions can interfere and change the process.

It is apropos that a very vested and wealthy man has been elected, as self representation overcomes that of the public.

That ultimately, power here curropts by necessity, is no surprise to anyone, but them what can account for the ideal transition which may undermine itself in the process?

Trump is right in the support of conserving something that which is universal in its scope right now, and so. are those who have to pay for it, the emerging underclass, but does this n it return society to the most foundemental questions facing mankind. that pit self interested moral questions against the ethical ones that need to concern the union as a whole?

Finally the role of intelligence. Colonialism caused the Union (US) to break away from Regal positions of power, and ultimately, a return becomes necessary. Finally to contain the vestiges of self controlled interest, over that of levels of laissez faire equlateral social control

The “free world” becomes burdened by the very firms if de facto economic colonialism that faces the new economic aristicracy. The firms as Ecmandu talks about have set a fixed universal image of power distribution a long time ago.

So You are right of course, but the playing field has changed entirely from the old singularly complex interplay in strategy, even intelligence, as a purveyor of distribution is be coming controlled for political purposes, and even the final ultimate weapons could be used in an ultimate showdown that seemingly every one wants to avoid at all cost.

The return to a singular power struggle can incite a madness if unforeeable proportions,and that is the question that everyone should share equally opportunity for, at the least.

The stage has been set, but the sets have formidable faults lines of demarcation.

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

President Donald Trump on Monday shared a handful of social media posts questioning the expertise of his own public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, and suggesting their scientific counsel was intended to thwart his political standing ahead of November’s general election.

In a burst of early morning online activity, Trump retweeted messages from the politically conservative former game show personality Chuck Woolery — who served stints hosting “Wheel of Fortune” and “Love Connection” — which lamented the “most outrageous lies” being spread about the coronavirus pandemic.

“Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust. I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I’m sick of it,” Woolery wrote in a tweet shared by the president.

In another post Trump retweeted, Woolery claimed there exists “so much evidence, yes scientific evidence, that schools should open this fall. It’s worldwide and it’s overwhelming. BUT NO.”

Trump also retweeted a message from Mark Young, Woolery’s co-host on his “Blunt Force Truth” podcast, which asked: “So based on Dr. Fauci and the Democrats, I will need an ID card to go shopping but not to vote?”

As the United States has posted peak numbers of daily Covid-19 infections in the past few weeks, the president’s relationship with Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, plummeted to a new nadir over the weekend.

The White House reportedly told various news outlets Saturday and Sunday that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things,” and furnished a lengthy list of statements the widely respected immunologist made in the early days of the outbreak.

The type of smear effort directed by the Trump administration against one of its most public-facing, trusted members is traditionally reserved for political rivals, and came after the president expressed public dissatisfaction with Fauci for his dire assessments of the outbreak in congressional testimony and media interviews.

Fauci, who told the Financial Times last Friday that he had not briefed Trump for at least two months, warned at a Senate health committee hearing in late June that the U.S. could register as many as 100,000 additional cases per day if further safeguards were not put in place.

In a livestreamed conversation last Monday with his boss, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, Fauci said the U.S. was still “knee-deep” in its first wave of coronavirus infections, describing the outbreak as “serious situation that we have to address immediately.”

But Trump was dismissive of Fauci in an interview last Tuesday with Gray Television’s Greta Van Susteren, saying: “I think we are in a good place. I disagree with him.” And speaking with Fox News’ Sean Hannity last Thursday, Trump remarked that “Dr. Fauci is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.”

Top administration officials have begun to follow the president’s lead in piling on Fauci, including White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who memorably sparred with the doctor in April over the efficacy of the controversial antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment.

CORONAVIRUS: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
The pandemic is upending Trump’s plans to shrink the health care safety net.

Confirmed U.S. Cases: 3,332,685 | U.S. Deaths: 135,400
How coronavirus will change the world permanently
Coronavirus cases, tracked state by state
Do you work for a hospital? Tell us what you’re seeing
< TOP DEVELOPMENTS
Trump is questioning the expertise of his own public health officials.
New York City is seeing coronavirus cases spike in young adults.
Trump’s former chief of staff called U.S. coronavirus testing abilities inexcusable.
Italy has turned things around. Can the good news last?
Read all coronavirus coverage »
“Dr. Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public but he has been wrong about everything I have ever interacted with him on,” Navarro told The Washington Post in a story published Saturday, adding: “So when you ask me if I listen to Dr. Fauci’s advice, my answer is only with caution.”

Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Adm. Brett Giroir, the administration’s coronavirus testing czar, said that while “I respect Dr. Facui a lot,” he is “not 100 percent right, and he also doesn’t necessarily … have the whole national interest in mind. He looks at it from a very narrow public health point of view.”

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany addressed the friction between Fauci and his colleagues Monday on “Fox & Friends,” echoing Giroir and arguing that Fauci considers the pandemic response only through the lens of a “public health standpoint.”

“Dr. Fauci’s one member of a team. But rest assured, his viewpoint is represented, and the information gets to the president through” the White House coronavirus task force, McEnany said.

Increasingly ostracized within Trump’s federal government, Fauci did elicit declarations of support Monday from his peers in the medical community, who forcefully defended the veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

David Skorton, president and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges, and Ross McKinney, the association’s chief scientific officer, said in a statement that the AAMC “is extremely concerned and alarmed by efforts to discredit” Fauci, who “has been an independent and outspoken voice for truth as the nation has struggled to fight” the pandemic.

“Taking quotes from Dr. Fauci out of context to discredit his scientific knowledge and judgment will do tremendous harm to our nation’s efforts to get the virus under control, restore our economy, and return us to a more normal way of life,” Skorton and McKinney said. “America should be applauding Dr. Fauci for his service and following his advice, not undermining his credibility at this critical time.”

Fauci is not the administration’s only senior health official to have drawn the president’s ire in recent weeks. Trump similarly targeted CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield in a tweet last week that accused the public health agency’s guidelines for reopening schools of being “very tough & expensive.”

The president’s push to return students to classrooms in the fall represents the latest front in his pressure campaign for a broad-based economic reopening, in spite of surging Covid-19 caseloads.

The U.S. has notched records for new infections in late June and early July, with daily cases reaching 60,000 for the first time. On Sunday, Florida logged 15,000 new cases, surpassing the daily record reported by any single state since the start of the outbreak.

Although Trump ceded to bipartisan calls to wear a mask in public for the first time Saturday, during a visit to Walter Reed National Medical Center, he has remained reluctant to acknowledge the coronavirus’ threat as hot spots continue to emerge across in communities across the South and West.

He claimed in an interview with Fox Business earlier this month that the highly contagious disease is “at some point … going to sort of just disappear,” and asserted during an address at the White House marking Independence Day celebrations that “99 percent” of cases are “totally harmless.”

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

Election projections as of 07/13/2020


Forecast: The race between Biden and Trump is within the true margin of error

Analysis by Harry Enten, CNN

Updated 6:29 PM EDT, Mon July 13, 2020



(CNN)There is little doubt that former Vice President Joe Biden is ahead in the polls right now. He regularly posts double-digit advantages nationally and is ahead in the key swing states. If the election were held today, Biden would almost certainly be elected president.

But the election is not being held today. It's being held in a little less than four months. That's a lot of time.

And given the size of Biden's lead (clear, but not a blowout), the race can definitely shift enough to characterize this race to be within the true margin of error.

To be clear, I don't mean that Biden and Trump have similar chances of winning -- far from it. Biden is clearly the favorite.

What I mean is that people often don't realize what odds actually mean. Something may not have a likely chance of occurring, but it's quite conceivable that it does happen.

Whenever you see a poll published, you'll see the result comes with a margin of error. The margin of error essentially means that for a given population, 95% of the time a poll's result will come within the margin of error of the true value. There's a 2.5% (1 out of 40) chance a result will fall outside the margin of error on the low side, and a 2.5% (1 out of 40) chance a result will fall outside the margin of error on the high side.

It's not shocking at all to receive a poll result back that's outside the margin of error. It's even less surprising when a poll comes in within the margin of error of the other results, though at the high or low end of the polling results published.

Borrowing from this margin-of-error concept, there's literally no reputable forecast I know of that suggests that Biden's advantage is outside that 95% confidence interval when projecting forward to November.

You can see how a race can change from this point forward by looking at history.

Earlier this month, I examined the 13 elections featuring incumbent presidents since 1940. I noted that in two of the 13 presidential contests, the difference between where the national polls were at this point and the eventual margin was greater than 10 points.

That's more than the current margin between Biden and Trump. Two out of 13 times is well more than 2.5%. One of 13 times is plenty more than that.

If you were to expand to contests without incumbents, you will find even more examples of big swings. I wrote about the 1988 election a few weeks ago. The difference between the polls at this point and the election result (Republican George H.W. Bush by 8 points) and the polls in mid-July (Democrat Michael Dukakis by 5 points) was double digits.

This historical study doesn't even take into account that Trump likely has a better shot of winning the Electoral College than the popular vote.

Importantly, you can look at a lot of different odds makers and reach conclusions similar to mine.

The betting markets, which I believe are overestimating Trump's chances, give him about a 2-out-of-5 (40%) chance of winning a second term. (It should be noted that betting markets gave Bob Dole a similar chance of winning in 1996, when he faced a deficit similar to Trump's now. Dole lost.)

Jack Kersting's forecast, which I've cited before, puts Trump's chance of winning at about 1-in-6 (just north of 15%).

There's also the Economist forecast, which gives Trump about a 1-in-10 (around 10%) chance of winning.

There are clearly differences among these odds. The similarity across all of them is that Biden is ahead, though not by enough to have a lead that can be considered anywhere close to being outside the true margin of error.

The worst result for Trump is having about a 1-in-10 chance. His shot would need to be below 1-in-40 to be considered outside the true margin of error.

Indeed, we still have a lot of events and potential game changers ahead of us.

There are the conventions, which sometimes (though not recently) have really shaken things up historically.

We have an economy that seems to be more prone to shocks than usual, which could shift voter opinions.

Additionally, the coronavirus pandemic is bad right now, but there's no real way of knowing how things will be when voters are casting their ballots. Perhaps the case rate will be lower. Maybe there will be better treatments. We just don't know.

Speaking of the coronavirus, it feels like this campaign isn't even really underway. Usually, a presidential campaign is the main news story by this point. But with the pandemic and the protests against police brutality, it's been the number three story over the last month.

The campaign will eventually become the number one story. With a compressed time frame, we may see bigger jumps later in the campaign than we're used to in modern campaigns.

The bottom line is that unless the economy totally falls apart or Biden starts leading by closer to 20 points than 10 points, this election will never be anywhere close to being safely in his corner at this early juncture.



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The plot thickens:




Trump offers denial and delusion as pandemic crisis overtakes his presidency



Updated 10:04 AM EDT, Wed July 15, 2020



(CNN)Rarely has a president shown himself to be so unequal to a tragic national emergency.

Hundreds of Americans are dying daily and tens of thousands are getting infected from a once-in-a-century virus. States and cities are closing down again, threatening to trigger a ruinous new economic slump. Doctors and nurses lack sufficient protective gear as they battle the deadly pathogen. And with testing swamped by waves of disease, one top official is warning of the "the most difficult time" ever for US public health this winter.

Yet this is what is on Donald Trump's mind: Joe Biden didn't fix the country's roads and bridges, crowds of bikers and boaters in MAGA hats prove that election polls are wrong, and the border wall is almost finished (except it isn't). Oh, and by the way, where is Hunter Biden?

Trump struck all the wrong notes on Tuesday, as the US set yet another single day record for new coronavirus infections with 67,417. Florida, now the world's coronavirus epicenter, recorded its highest-ever Covid-19 death toll, and Texas broke its record for new daily cases. Another 900 deaths were reported on Tuesday according to a Johns Hopkins University tally, but the President offered denial and delusion at a White House appearance that even by his standards was a rambling, grievance-fueled mess.



Trump's directionless White House on full display

What is needed from Trump and his administration is a plan to tackle the most relentless national challenge since World War II, consoling words to memorialize the 136,000 Americans who are already dead and the thousands destined to follow, and the rhetoric to summon the will to triumph over this invisible enemy.

All Trump could offer on Tuesday was self-pity, incoherence and indifference. He came across as a leader living in a different dimension from his people and their fear and suffering and uncertainty about what the coming months will bring.

This is a President who has demonstrably failed to beat back the virus and has long since stopped trying to lead the country out of the darkness. He resorts to boasting about inconclusive steps he took months ago -- like limiting travel from China -- that have no relevance to the current moment, and he complains he's not getting enough credit for his performance.

He's also mining divisive political seams he thinks helped him in the past. In a CBS interview on Tuesday, he insisted that more White people than Black people are killed in police violence, dealing an insult to the national soul searching about race following the death of George Floyd.

"We could go on for days," Trump said at one point in his Tuesday tirade, and for a while it seemed that he might in the blasting July heat of the Rose Garden, where journalists sat wearing masks, socially distanced and in bemused silence.

Trump veers off his China script

The ostensible point of Trump's Rose Garden appearance was to unveil a barrage of new measures to punish China for its suppression of freedoms in Hong Kong -- which gave the President a new chance to fulminate against Beijing for sending a "plague" to the US despite his earlier fawning praise for how President Xi Jinping had handled the pandemic.

But it wasn't long before the session turned into the kind of negative, rally-style performance that Trump pines for, with normal campaign events severely curtailed by the pandemic.

He slammed Biden for his record on crime, trade, China, infrastructure, the economy, the military, and at one point suggested that hundreds of thousands could be dead by now had the former vice president been in charge when the coronavirus struck. Bizarrely, Trump also slammed the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for his role in the Obama administration's mobilization against the H1N1 virus, which was far more efficient and cost tens of thousands fewer lives than Trump's missteps over the past few months

At event meant to announce China actions, Trump rambles into political attacks

Trump has been charging that Biden is mentally impaired and is not fit for the Oval Office. But at times, it was the President who appeared to be veering into confusion and incoherence. At one point he appeared to argue that his rival's vow to sign the Paris climate accord would lead to US office buildings being constructed without windows. And he suggested Biden wouldn't even know how to define the word "carbon."

In another extraordinary twist on Tuesday, the White House stepped up what is now a full frontal assault against the government's top infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been telling the truth about the dire turn taken by a pandemic that is now infecting twice as many people per day as it was several months ago. In a USA Today op-ed, Trump's top trade adviser and anti-China polemicist Peter Navarro wrote that the respected scientist "has a good bedside manner with the public, but he has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on."

If nothing else, the President's wild appearance gave a whole new meaning to the notion of incumbent presidents running for a second term on a Rose Garden strategy by staging a highly unusual campaign-style speech to rail against his opponent from the White House.

In recent days, whispers have emerged from inside Trump's camp that aides are worried he is yet to settle on a strong campaign message and that his reelection effort is meandering. If there was a second term manifesto hidden in Trump's digressions and bitterness on Tuesday, it was very well disguised.

The President had an uncanny feel for the resentment at the Washington establishment and the perceived indifference towards political elites and political correctness at a time of sometimes bewildering racial and social change in 2016. Perhaps that mix can carry him to a second term. But after Tuesday's showing, it will be impossible to argue he won a second term based on a reasoned and orderly road map out of the crisis.

The mystery of Trump's missing strategy

Trump's unwillingness to face up to the coronavirus nightmare that is staring the rest of the nation in the face leaves the impression that the man who vowed in his 2016 Republican National Convention speech "I alone can fix it" long ago ran out of ideas on the virus. That speech horrified Trump's critics because of its dystopian vision. But at least Trump looked strong, and was dictating the political winds. In his wandering monologue on Tuesday, he looked lost, a shadow of the man who burned down the Republican Party and the Washington political establishment.

He appeared to be what he is -- a president who is flailing after being cruelly overtaken by events. Such an image -- that beset President Jimmy Carter in the last summer before his reelection bid amid the Iran hostage crisis -- is a perilous one for first-term presidents.

The mystery of Trump's behavior in recent months is that it seems unlikely he can come from behind against Biden unless he can find a way to suppress the virus, or at least give Americans hope that some semblance of normal life can resume soon.



Trump leans into racist rhetoric and downplays police violence against Black Americans

But more and more, it seems like Trump has played his best card -- his demand several months ago for states to open up and revive the economy -- which has been exposed as a backfired gamble as the pandemic races across Southern and Western states. And his go-to strategies of inciting divisions, stirring cultural warfare and sowing confusion with misinformation don't seem to be working -- at least if the polls are right.

The President did his best to talk up his "transition to greatness," but the idea is so divorced from the awful reality of the last few weeks -- with the average daily rate of new infections hitting 60,000 -- that his words only served to display his own considerable remove from reality.

"I think you're going to have some good news very, very quickly having to do with the vaccines," Trump said, at about the same time that Fauci said that it could take a year-to-a-year-and-a-half for the world to get a Covid-19 vaccine, that even then may not be completely effective.

Despite the rolling shutdowns in cities across the country, certain to throw many Americans who work in the service, tourism and transit industries out of work again, the President stuck by his predictions of a riotous return to economic growth.

But absent any credible plans to stem Covid-19's march, all the President has to sell right now is hope.

"I think by Election Day you're going to see some incredible numbers. The third quarter is going to be really good, the fourth quarter is going to be great, but next year is going to be one of the best economic years," he insisted.

"So hopefully I'll be able to be the President where we say, 'Look at the great job I did.'"


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

WASHINGTON — One figure continually stands out for President Trump in our new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll: 50 percent.

And not in a good way for him.

Fifty percent of all registered voters in our poll “strongly” disapprove of the president.

Fifty percent say there is no chance at all they will vote for him.

Fifty-two percent — in a separate question — say they’re “very uncomfortable” about his candidacy.

Fifty-one percent are backing Joe Biden in the horserace, versus 40 percent for Trump.

One of the old maxims of American politics used to be that an incumbent (for any office) needs to be at 50 percent to be safe for re-election — otherwise there’s a majority of voters who exist that don’t support him or her.

But Trump has a different problem at hand: He’s got 50 percent (or more) of the national electorate saying they strongly oppose him.

And that’s something that a new campaign manager alone can’t fix.

Of course. The idiot has been sheltered all his life and couldn’t even change a car tire of the nation depended on it. Put a little real life pressure on the asshole and he’ll buckle. Money cant buy your way outta this one, haus.

Of course. The idiot has been sheltered all his life and couldn’t even change a car tire if the nation depended on it. Put a little real life pressure on the asshole and he’ll buckle. Money cant buy your way outta this one, haus.

Hope it doesen’r go hot!

Friday 17 July 2020 14:57

The new Cold War launched by the West against China and Russia is escalating by the day. In a single week, the Kremlin has been unmasked trying to discover the secrets of Britain’s pursuit of a vaccine against coronavirus and revelations are promised about covert Russian interference in British politics. Boris Johnson made a U-turn on Huawei, announcing that it is to be kicked out of participation in the 5G network because it poses a threat to British security, though a curiously slow-burning one since they will only be evicted over seven years.

The US may put the widely-used Chinese video app TikTok on a blacklist that would prevent Americans from using it. The administration is considering using the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act in order to penalise TikTok as “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US security. President Trump says he is considering banning the app in response to the way China handled the coronavirus epidemic.

This is a clue to the prime motive for Trump to ramp up the Cold War against China, which is his determination to win a second term in the White House by diverting voters’ attention from his catastrophic handling of the pandemic. “Don’t defend Trump – attack China,” is the advice of a leaked 57-page memo circulated among Republican Senatorial candidates in April. It suggested that Republican politicians should blame China for starting the epidemic by allowing the virus to escape from a laboratory in Wuhan, lying about it and hoarding medical equipment needed to treat the sick.

A striking feature of the US and British diplomatic offensive against China is how little criticism or even discussion it has provoked in any quarter in the US and Britain, even from those whose normal knee-jerk reaction is to denounce anything said or done by Trump or Johnson. This may be because these critics are genuinely horrified by undoubted Chinese oppression of the Uighurs, proposed imposition of dictatorial rule in Hong Kong, and assertions of military power in the South China Sea and on the Chinese-Indian frontier.

As during the original Cold War in the late 1940s and 1950s, critics can be conveniently dismissed as Communist sympathisers or dupes. Unsurprisingly, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is responding to the confrontation with China by demanding that the US should take an even tougher stance towards Beijing, while the Democratic Party establishment are ever hopeful that their prolonged campaign to portray Trump as the creature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia will take fire and do him serious damage at the polls.

AP

'The State Department has released an internal cable from 2018 detailing the concerns of U.S. Embassy officials in China about a lack of adequately trained personnel at a virology lab in Wuhan, the city that later became the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Leaked contents of the cable sparked unproven speculation from senior U.S. officials beginning in April that the outbreak occurred as a result of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In May, President Trump said he had seen evidence that gave him a “high degree of confidence” that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab. When asked why he was confident, Trump said, “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.” ’

Trump and his enablers will only get worse

By Michael D’Antonio

Updated 11:22 PM EDT, Mon July 20, 2020

Editor’s Note: (Michael D’Antonio is the author of the book “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success.” His forthcoming book, “The Hunting of Hillary: The Forty Year Campaign to Destroy Hillary Clinton” is out later this month. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.)

(CNN)Psychologist Mary L. Trump says her elderly uncle Donald is a “psychologically damaged man” who “without question is going to get worse.”

In another circumstance, someone might intervene to aid the old fellow and protect everyone else (think of family members who lovingly take the keys from a dangerous senior driver). But in this case, Uncle Donald happens to be President of the United States, and the people around him are “enablers,” per his niece, eager to allow him to act out his worst impulses. No one here is going to hide the keys.

“There are too many enablers who are – for whatever reason – continuing to enable him,” says Mary Trump. “Bill Barr has gutted the Justice Department. Mike Pompeo has gutted the State Department. We are in serious danger here.”

The danger was on display last week when video footage surfaced of officers in military gear swooping in to capture a Portland protester on a city sidewalk. They hustled the individual into an unmarked van and drove away. This incident, called “political theater” by Oregon’s governor, represented a new phase in the Trump administration’s heavy-handed response to demonstrations sparked by police killings of Black citizens, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and others.

The President and his administration began setting conditions for a political theater road show many weeks ago. On June 1, federal officers commanded by Attorney General William Barr used tear gas, horses, and batons to clear Lafayette Square, a park across from the White House where protestors had gathered. Barr justified this display of federal force, including officers from the department of Homeland Security, by saying the officers had been deployed to protect federal property. (After Trump signed an executive order late last month to protect federal property, the same justification for an aggressive federal response to protests has been used in other parts of the country like Portland, as recently as last week.) The acting secretary of DHS, Chad Wolf, touched on themes that would likely please the President in his remarks, as he said, “DHS and its partners will not allow anarchists, disrupters and opportunists to exploit the ongoing civil unrest to loot and destroy our communities,”

Mary Trump’s disturbingly credible assessment of her ‘dangerous’ Uncle Donald

As federal forces were deployed in Buffalo, San Diego and Las Vegas, Barr and Wolf helped create images that matched Trump’s obvious desire to be perceived as, “Your President of law and order.” Anyone who didn’t notice that the President seemed bent on recreating the 1960s culture war over civil unrest missed Trump’s use of the phrase, “When the looting starts the shooting starts.” This threat was first used by Miami’s police chief in response to violence in the city in 1967, and was later echoed by Alabama’s racist Governor George Wallace on the campaign trail.

Today’s protests, which involve diverse groups of people rallying behind the Black Lives Matter banner, have been relatively peaceful compared to the sixties, when major cities suffered large scale rioting. However, the facts on the ground haven’t prevented Barr and Wolf from doing what they can to support the President’s fantasy. Why do they do it? They may be acting to please the boss who controls whatever power they wield and can yank it away on a whim. They may actually share Trump’s dystopian views of the country they are supposed to serve. Or they are, indeed, the enablers Mary Trump fears?

As used by Mary Trump’s profession, enablers amplify the dysfunction of a troubled person out of fear or perhaps because they think there’s something to be gained by going along. In Donald Trump’s case, his niece has written, family members and others “consistently normalized” his “aberrant behavior.” In his business he was surrounded by people “who propped him up and lied for him.”

President Donald Trump has fired or driven away many members of his administration who were known for expressing their honest opinions. Long gone are Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Chief of Staff John Kelly, economic advisor Gary Cohn, Secretary of State James Mattis, National Security Advisor John Bolton and many others who had the courage and character to speak truth to power. Their replacements have been notably more compliant. Many remain acting officials who don’t enjoy the respect that comes with Senate confirmation. The President seems to see value in keeping members of his team insecure. “I like acting,” he once said, “because I can move so quickly. It gives me more flexibility.”

Trump is facing the thing he dreads most

One top official who enjoys permanent status, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, happens to be among the more obsequious officials in the administration. Once a stern Trump critic who believed Russia attacked the 2016 election, he has become a staunch defender of the President who downplayed Russia’s election meddling. As Secretary of State, he has served the President’s cause with his conservative Evangelical base by neglecting the cause of equal rights for the LGBTQ community – a recent report he released spoke of same sex marriage rights as “divisive social and political controversies.”

Pompeo downgraded LGBTQ rights presumably because a good enabler knows what to do without being told. Count economic advisor Peter Navarro in this category too. When he penned an article in USA Today attacking the President’s top pandemic advisor Anthony Fauci, Navarro likely thought it would win him points with Trump. When Navarro’s attack failed, Trump disavowed it, but in meek terms that did no real damage.

Navarro is safe on the Trump team, thanks to his enabling of the President in his outbursts against China, even suggesting that a Chinese lab created the coronavirus now raging across the country. The pandemic, of course, is a leading cause for the President’s struggle in polls, which show his bid for reelection to be in trouble.

Faced with the prospect of defeat, Trump has suggested the upcoming election could be rigged and recently refused to say he would accept the outcome. Expect to see this position, which casts doubt on the validity of the American system for transferring power, to be echoed by his enablers. And when the president says or does the next outrageous thing, they’ll support that too. To do otherwise would require courage and character they just don’t seem to have.

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

"Trump pushes mask wearing, says he’ll resume COVID briefings

OPINION

As America tops 4 million COVID cases, the cult of Donald Trump has become a death cult

People who refuse to wear a mask are bolstering their sore egos. Their national motto is not ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ it’s ‘You’re not the boss of me.’

America has now passed the milestone of 4 million COVID cases, and we’re still arguing with doctors and epidemiologists about masks and school closures. I expected some of this, because I literally wrote the book over three years ago on why so many Americans think they’re smarter than experts. What I did not expect is that this resolute and childish opposition to expertise would be hijacked by the president of the United States and an entire American political party, and then turned into a suicide cult.

It did not take a lot of foresight to know, even before the coronavirus arrived, that the United States was leaving itself vulnerable to a crisis that would require the public to trust experts. We long ago became a narcissistic nation whose citizens believe they can become competent in almost any subject by watching enough television and spending enough time on the internet. But I was certain that a true national crisis — a war, a depression, or yes, a pandemic — would snap people back to reality.

I was wrong to be so optimistic.

Endangering others as empowerment

Some states (including Rhode Island, where I live) have had great success in asking their citizens to cooperate for the common good. Other communities, unfortunately, have had to endure shouting matches with bellowing ignoramuses who think it is intolerable that they be asked to wear a mask while shopping or ordering food — two things people in other countries would gladly do wrapped in aluminum foil and with prayers of thanks on their lips if they got to do it in the United States of America.

There is no one more responsible for this particular moment than President Donald Trump, but all he has done is play to a gallery whose seats were already full by the time he ran for office. Trump appealed to a powerful sense of narcissistic grievance among millions of Americans, nurturing it and feeding it. An entire claque of enablers joined in, knowing there was plenty of money to be made feeding this self-centered, anti-social nihilism.

When the pandemic arrived, these enablers in the conservative media and among the cowardly Republican political class took their cues — masks, no masks, closing, opening — from Trump, whose statements for months were a fusillade of nonsense that reflected only his own pouty anger that Mother Nature had the sheer brass to mess up his presidential grift.

Not all of those who have been reckless and irresponsible are Trump supporters. There are, as always, young people who believe they are invincible. And some experts inflicted a huge wound on themselves right in the middle of this crisis by blessing the Black Lives Matter protests rather than repeating stern warnings they gave to other Americans that such events are dangerous.

But the Americans who are now driving the pandemic are not sudden skeptics about masks or distancing or expert opinion because of street protests. Some of them reject expertise because of the previous “failures” of experts. This is always one of the reflexive explanations for the refusal to listen to the educated and experienced. Expert failures are real and happen every day, but the people who sullenly refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic are not doing so because the United States failed to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or because the housing market crashed in 2008.

Rather, they are doing so because they see endangering others as empowerment, a way of telling people whom they believe look down on them that no one, no matter how smart or accomplished, can tell them what to do. For these people, our national motto is not “In God We Trust” or “E Pluribus Unum,” but rather: “You’re Not the Boss of Me.”

Reject expertise and trust Trump

So committed are these Americans to assuaging their sore egos over their imagined lack of status that they are literally willing to die for it. Unfortunately, they seem all too willing to take many of us with them. This is not Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate, whose cult members fled society to go and die together. This is worse. This is an attempt to create a Jonestown in every American city and town and then invite the rest of us over for a cool drink.

The irony here is that the same people who reject expertise because they believe they are smart and clued in to the mistakes of experts will accept the word of Donald Trump — a man who has obliterated most of the projects he’s ever been involved with and who stands as the uncontested champion of American public liars — as the gospel truth.

A resolution: After appalling Roger Stone commutation, don’t let Donald Trump break us, America.

But that is how cults work, and woe to anyone who crosses them. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for over 35 years, has endured attacks from the White House and some members of Congress because some Republicans believe that he is somehow trying to use the pandemic against the president. Worse, Fauci now has to travel with security, as Americans treat the rest of the world to the shameful sight of one of the most accomplished scientists in one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world having to be guarded against unhinged cultists in his own country.

On the same day that America hit a grisly new record, President Trump went on television to explain both that he must cancel his cherished plans for a political convention while insisting that children be sent back to school in the coming weeks. Millions of Americans nodded along with him, secure in the knowledge that scientists are quacks and that no one understands viruses like Donald Trump. They will likely still believe that even as they lie in a hospital bed and are given last rites with a ventilator down their throats.

If only the rest of us did not have to risk being in the bed next to them."

© Copyright Gannett 2020

The double faceted political arena has never been more brazen and offensive, with political, and psychological reality
struggling for dominance in a field of thorns wrought with pain and mortality.
Where is truth found Nowedays, where claims and counterclaims clamor for attention and seeks relevance from every nook and cranny?

Jas all rationality been usurped for the sake of the loaded and expedient brazen call for for the lowest common denominator that intelligence could glean?

The sad fact is, that such utterly paradoxical absurd logic does speak out of two tongues,l.

The geopolitical certainty of capital splits national capitalism and national socialism , ( oops here goes that word again) - and so I am realism can not as yet support an internationally equivocal vale system, as yet.

The idea of extending marketability to the advantage either of particular national interests, OR toward the furtherance of a classless universal population-with equitable market and labor interchange, is truly, and literally a trumped up (forgive the slip) reason for it’s primal cause.

It would like that impression, but at least in the foreseeable future, it means to sustain and leverage international differences , that favor conglomerate economic behemoths , to the disadvantage of labor.

Further , labor in the advanced societies have to sustain in some measure the traditional socially adapted levels of accustomed standards, and this parallels somewhat the way international models need to be sustained.

Which model will attain superior models down the line, I believe has already been decided, regardless of the clever inter-party clamor for an attention that could signify substantial undertones with dynamic latencythat could actually turn things this way or that, toward national or international objectives.

The party unity or it’s negative is mostly rhetoric to advance the jobs of two camps of lawyers, who need such division to propel faux objectives, to fuel the political process.

The pipette masters hold Biden and Teump dangling in a show that need to describe a complex ground foreground interplay, that really has no depth, that Main Street can really understand.

And social unrest in the U.S. escalating:

youtu.be/iY9vP48oXIY

youtu.be/sLnjxXE0G24