THE TRUMP ARCHIVE
Trump’s “Selma March,” in reverse.
June 1, 2020: This may go down in history as the day Donald Trump
destroyed his presidency.
Black Lives Protests already convulsed the nation. Hundreds
of thousands were marching in the streets. There was looting, too, an
unfortunate offshoot of legitimate grievance throughout history. On Friday, May
29, protesters rattled barriers around the White House. A breach seemed imminent.
Secret Service agents decided to move Trump, the First Lady, and son Barron, to
a safe room beneath the Presidential Mansion. Someone tried to start a fire to St. John’s Episcopal Church,
within view of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Protesters in Lafayette Square,
directly across from the White House, had thrown bricks and rocks at police.
Chants of, “Fuck Trump,” filled the air.
Donald Trump was rattled.
The story leaked in the press about the First Family
retreating to the bunker. The president fumed. He felt it made him sound weak.
After stewing all weekend, on this Monday in June, he decides to act.
That afternoon he takes a call with governors and mayors
around the country. The New York Times quickly acquires audio. At a time when a calming voice is needed,
President Trump is agitated. What he wants to do is target and silence
protesters. “You can’t do the deal where they get one week in jail,” he tells the
others. “These are terrorists. These are terrorists…it shouldn’t be hard to
take care of, and we’re going to take care of it.” It sounds like a promise—or
a threat.
“Terrorists.” Make note.
Trump tells everyone that Gen. Mark A. Miley, Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff is listening to the call on the White House end. Milley is
“a fighter, a warrior, had a lot of victories, and no losses. And he hates to
see the way it’s being handled, and the various things, and I just put him in
charge.”
This comes as a surprise to everyone. That includes Gen.
Milley. In times of unrest, governors have the power to call out the National
Guard. If they need additional help, they can ask for federal assistance. None
of the governors have.
“We’re strongly looking for arrests, we do have to get much
tougher,” Trump reminds everyone. “You have to dominate, if you don’t dominate,
you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run over you, and you’ll look like a
bunch of jerks. You have to dominate. You have to arrest people and try people,
and they have to go to jail for long periods of time.”
If the President of the United States has ever heard of “due
process,” it doesn’t show. Or he may have. He just doesn’t care.
The president seems to be watching TV during the call. He expresses
shock at what happened in Dallas—where he says a man was kicked to death. Then
he admits he’s not sure the man died. His contempt for the protesters is clear.
And he knows just what’s going on. “It’s coming from the radical left,” he
insists. “You know it. Everybody knows it.” He sees film of a black kid who
grabs a bunch of stuff, a new TV, and puts it in the back of a new car. “The
harder you are, the tougher you are, the less likely it is you’re going to be
hit,” the president explains.
He blames all the trouble on Antifa. He says it’s “like a
movement. If you don’t put it down, it will get worse and worse. This is like
Occupy Wall Street. It was a disaster, until one day somebody said, ‘That’s
enough,’ and they just went in and wiped them out.” Trump’s anger has taken
over. He wants American citizens wiped out. He says the Occupy folks weren’t
worried about the law. They were camped out, “ordering pizzas.” Finally, the police
cleared out the protesters. It was “bedlam for an hour. And after that it was
beautiful,” he says. “But these are the same people. They’re anarchists.”
He ignores the fact that protests have spread to hundreds of
cities, towns and neighborhoods across the nation.
He tells the mayors and governors, “I’m for everybody, I’m
representing everybody. I’m not representing radical right, radical left, I’m
representing everybody.” You can’t be weak, he says again, “but most of you are
weak.”
Mr. Trump makes clear his admiration for tactics deployed by
the National Guard, offering a play-by-play commentary. He’s excited to see protesters
on TV, being knocked down “like bowling pins.” He sees a rioter throw a brick,
winding up like a baseball player. Apparently, he watches a slow motion replay.
These people have to get “five years, ten years” in jail, he growls. There has to be
“retribution.” He promises, in D.C. “we’re going to do something that people
haven’t seen before.”
He’s hatching a plan.
*
Not long after, the President marches out to the Rose Garden
and addresses the nation. At this point, on Monday, the protesters in Lafayette Square are peaceful. The crowd is no
more friendly to the president. But these are ordinary citizens exercising
their First Amendment rights. Trump? Trump wants to sound tough. He promises to
be the “law and order” president. More ominously, he threatens to use active duty troops to clear the nation’s streets,
if state governors and mayors “refuse” to do so. He says he will do it quickly,
too, and might invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807. Trump is later rumored to
have asked about bringing in 10,000 U.S. soldiers to drive away the protesters
from in front of the White House.
Meanwhile a plan has been hatched. Someone (supposedly
Ivanka Trump) convinces the president to take a stroll. The president—or someone in his administration—orders law
enforcement officers from an alphabet soup of federal agencies, bolstered by
active duty military police, to drive the peaceful protesters from Lafayette
Park. Shortly after 6:30 p.m., authorities begin firing tear gas, and using
flash-bang devices and bludgeons to clear the area.
Once the air clears, Trump and
an entourage of top White House aides, emerge from the White House. Ivanka is
there, sporting a protective black COVID-19 mask, and carrying a $1,500
designer handbag. Inside is a Bible. White House aide and son-in-law Jared
Kushner is by her side. The usual assortment of sycophants, including Press
Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, flank the president. Unfortunately, Gen. Milley accompanies
the president. So does Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Both men seem to give a
military stamp of approval to the attack on protesters.
Trump bravely walks the thousand feet—out the
front door of the White House—across Pennsylvania Avenue—cutting through
Lafayette Park—and crossing another wide boulevard—to stand in front of St.
John’s Episcopal Church. There, he takes the Bible handed to him by Ivanka,
hoists it over his head, glowers, and intones, “Greatest country in the world.
And we’re going to keep it safe.”
Having offered a dozen words of “inspiration,”
he pivots on his heels (ignoring the pain he feels from his old bone spurs) and
hoofs it back—another thousand feet—to his West Wing bunker. Then the president
gets back to the business of dividing the country. Soon after completing his
pathetic “Selma March” in reverse, he tweets out fresh insult. He calls the African
American mayor of Washington D.C. “incompetent.” She is not fit, he says, to
lead a great city.
Like most Americans, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is aghast. The
fact that Esper and Milley accompanied Trump, strikes her and many others as having
watched the seeds of a future dictatorship planted. “I imposed a curfew at 7
pm.,” Mayor Bowser explains. “A full 25 minutes before the curfew & w/o
provocation, federal police used munitions on peaceful protestors in front of
the White House.”
This, she warns, will only antagonize
demonstrators. It will make the job of D.C. police “more difficult.” “Shameful!”
she calls the decision. “DC residents—Go home. Be safe,” she suggests.
MAGA fans, of course, applaud the president’s
stunt.
In days to follow, however, more than two dozen
important former U.S. military leaders pillory the man in the White House. They
make their concern clear. They label Donald Trump a threat to the U.S.
Constitution.
(Due
to their importance, their comments are collected in a separate post.)
Postscript: Press Secretary McEnany later calls Trump’s appearance before
St. Johns a great moment for the American people.
She compares Trump to Winston Churchill bucking
up the spirits of his people during the London Blitz. But as Maureen Dowd writes
, this comparison is too much for most Americans to swallow.
“We shall fight them on the
golf courses,” she writes, quoting a friend. “We shall fight them on Twitter.
We shall fight them at Mar-a-Lago.”
___
The
President is a hater. We need a healer
6/2/20: The deaths of 106,000 Americans from
the coronavirus are bad enough. The toll on jobs, as our economy grinds to a
halt, with more than 40 million Americans suddenly out of work, is bad enough.
Now, on top of that we see scores of American cities riven by
angry protests and even rioting.
____________________
This is a president who has no more moral authority than the
cop who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he was dead.
____________________
And who do we look to in vain for a calming voice in a time
of growing fury? Donald J. Trump?
This is a president who has no more moral authority than the
cop who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he was dead.
Trump is what Trump is. He’s an adept hater. That makes him the
wrong man, in the wrong job, at the wrong time. We all remember how he got a start
in politics. He rose to the pinnacle of the right-wing pantheon on the strength
of birtherism. Racism
with a new name. Trump claimed that Barack Obama wasn’t an American. He said he
could prove it. He never did.
Nor should his attacks on Obama have been a surprise. Donald had
made race-baiting headlines before. In 1989 he came out with a full-page ad in
the papers, demanding that the “Central Park Five” be executed for the crimes
he had no doubt they committed. He never apologized when the five young African
American men, who had spent years in jail, were exonerated. More recently, he
gave a birther radio personality the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. He employs a birther press secretary today.
Trump is who he is. He can’t help heal a nation because his power
rests on division. He kicked off his run for the highest office by vilifying
all Mexicans. As president, he kept his base in terror, painting all immigrants
as recruits for the MS-13 gang. He’s the leader who wanted to ban all Muslims
from entering this country. That included those who had served alongside U.S. forces
Afghanistan and Iraq. During his run for the White House, Trump appealed to fans
like the West Virginia woman who called Michelle Obama “an ape in heels.” He employed a
campaign co-chair in New York who joked that Mrs. Obama should go back to
Africa, “live in a cave,” and maybe have sex with gorillas.
Trump is a toxic communicator. Since
entering politics he’s managed to pluck the heartstrings of neo-Nazi luminaries
like Richard Spencer, David Duke and
Rocky Suhayda. It
was Suhayda who pointed out that Trump’s victory represented “a real
opportunity for people like white nationalists.” As a candidate, Trump said he might pay the legal fees for a white fan who sucker punched a
black protester, who was being led out of one of his rallies. Matthew Heimbach,
an avowed white supremacist, assaulted an African American woman at another rally in March 2016. His
lawyer later claimed that Heimbach could not be held to account, because his
client had “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump
and Donald J. Trump for President.” If his client was found liable for damages,
the attorney told the court, “any liability must be shifted to one or both of
them.”
The man who sits in the White House gives
haters cover to say what they think. Trump gave the Holocaust denier, Arthur
Jones, hope enough to
run for Congress. He hired Carl Higbie, who
joked about having people bring guns to the border and perform target practice
on illegals. Higbie suggested that black women think “breeding is a form of
government employment.” Later, while visiting Great Britain, the president retweeted
posts from Katie Hopkins. Hopkins, a racist with a British accent, once compared
dark-skinned immigrants coming into Europe to “cockroaches.”
____________________
Trump’s true skill set includes his ability to stir anger and
fear and fuel hate.
____________________
Twisted individuals often band together. It’s
no surprise to find that one of Trump’s top aides is Stephen Miller. Miller is a
soulless fellow who subscribes to the “Great Replacement” myth. That is: Dark
people are plotting to replace the white
race in Europe and America.
Miller was the diabolical genius behind
the decision to lock up children in cages after they and their families tried to
sneak cross our border. And Trump was in sympathy, all the way.
Trump, the Great Divider, himself, referred
to Haiti and a variety of African
countries as “shitholes.” We didn’t want people from those coming
here to live. Trump said we’d be better off—wink, wink—if we had more
immigrants from Norway.
Then he denied having said it.
He’s a liar, too.
Trump’s true skill set includes his ability to stir anger and
fear, and fuel hate. In the fall of 2016, the man who wished to be president fired
up his base by attacking NFL players who knelt in peaceful protest against police
brutality. After he was elected, he claimed that protesting players, predominantly
African American, were disrespecting our military, and our flag, and should lose their jobs. He
suggested that if they didn’t like it, they should leave this country. When Jemele
Hill, an African American sportscaster, labeled him a racist, Trump said she should be fired. He
called kneeling players like Colin Kaepernick, sons-of-bitches. So
police kept kneeling on the necks of others.
Trump has had almost a full term to learn to unite rather
than divide. Instead, he has regressed. Last summer he suggested that four
female members of Congress, all individuals of color who had criticized his
policies, should go back to countries where
they came from if they didn’t like it here. One of the four, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, was born in the Bronx. Another, Ayanna Presley, was born in
Cincinnati. Presley’s ancestors arrived in America, via slave ship, long before
the first Trump set foot on free soil in 1885.
Now, with the nation torn by protest, we need a leader who can
display empathy. But the Great Divider can’t do it. When he gazes admiringly in
the mirror, he is looking at all the people he cares about most.
Trump has never governed with all Americans in mind. His
default setting is to appeal to the base instincts of his base. It’s them
against the rest of us—and if he can stir anger against “treasonous” Democrats,
“flag-hating” liberals, “Enemies of the People” in the free press, and his dark-skinned
predecessor, he’s not only ready to do so, he’s in his element. If you care to
look, the word
“hate” litters the president’s Twitter feed, like bodies during a plague. The
Democrats “hate” our military, he says. His critics “hate” our country. His
political opponents “hate” the Second Amendment. Trump hates anyone who
criticizes or doubts him and works hard to get his base to hate them, too.
We know Trump might claim to care about George Floyd. We know
he doesn’t. We know he won’t. He won’t be concerned, no matter how many African
Americans are killed by police, because most would never vote for him in the
first place. Trump might tweet a hundred times a day. He won’t tweet sympathy
for Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old ER-tech, shot eight times by
police. And shot by mistake. Or Botham Jean,
shot and killed by mistake, while in his apartment. Or Greg Gunn, shot in the
back by a police officer, while Gunn was walking home
from a card game. Or Sean Reed, a
21-year-old veteran, shot while live-streaming the incident on Facebook, so
that you could hear the cops (who didn’t know his camera was on) laughing over
his corpse. He’s going to need a “closed casket” funeral, one joked. You won’t hear
the Great Divider speak with feeling about Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger,
gunned down by neighbors (watch the video), at any of his rallies. Because many who
attend those rallies love their AR-15’s more than they love their neighbors
with darker skins.
If you were to ask President Trump, after three-and-a-half
years in office, who these people are—Frederick Douglass, Trayvon Martin, or
Eric Garner, who died because he was selling cigarettes illegally (more video)—he wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t know
about Philando Castile (watch even more video if
you’d like to see another senseless killing), Jordan Davis, William Green, Tamir Rice,
killed at age 12, while wielding a toy pistol, Atatiana Jefferson
(shot and killed by police in her own home) or Heather Heyer, a young white
woman (run down and killed in 20127, by a white supremacist at
the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.).
Trump has continued, even to this day, to stoke the anger, as
cities he is supposed to care about explode. When protesters gathered outside
the White House on a night in late May, Trump boasted that if they had breached
the main fence, they would have been met with “vicious dogs” and the “most
ominous weapons” he had ever seen.
He intimated that his critics, in this case the protesters, were
fake. Their anger was a hoax. They had no grievances worthy of respect. Trump,
of course, was one of many right-wing nuts who
gave credence to the idea that survivors of the Parkland High School massacre
were “crisis actors,” not real kids shocked by the carnage they had witnessed. We
had seen this before. The president said the crowd at the White House gate was
“professionally organized,” not comprised of Americans expressing heartfelt outrage
and dismay. He commended the Secret Service in a series of tweets, saying
agents “let the
‘protesters’ scream & rant as much as they wanted, but whenever someone....
....got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, hard -
didn’t know what hit them.”
George Floyd never knew what hit him, either, but for Trump,
the simpler the message, the better it is when it comes to riling up his fans.
Postscript: Reporters asked Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau what he thought of President . Trump’s threat to use the
military to stamp out protests.
For 21 long seconds he paused. “We all watch in horror and
consternation what’s going on in the United States,” he finally managed to say.
Even Canada’s leading conservative newspapers are concerned with what’s happening to the south. “There
couldn’t be a scarier person inhabiting the White House at this very moment,” Gary
Mason, a writer for The Globe and Mail writes.
“My view is one of profound
sadness—sadness at watching communities we respect being so torn apart, and
sadness at watching the loss of life in the pandemic,” said Frank McKenna,
former Canadian ambassador to the United States. “The United States is so polarized, the
question of wearing a mask or not is fraught with political overtones. It’s
excruciating to watch.”
___
Crooks
and a Congressman meet their doom.
6/3/20: A few positive notes in a bleak
time: Despite all the protests, and the unfortunate looting, these aren’t like
the riots we saw in 1992. Those eruptions, after the Rodney King jury found
police officers innocent in his brutal beating, often involved black vs. white
violence. Nor are these current explosions in any respect as bad as those in
1967 and 1968. As one African American commented on Twitter last week (I forgot
to note his exact wording), the issue this time isn’t, “White vs. black people.
It’s everybody else against racists.”
It’s encouraging today to see all kinds of people protesting.
Also, kind of cool: Prime Minister Boris Johnson has offered
to allow three million Hong Kong residents, all those holding British
passports, and all others eligible, to immigrate to the United Kingdom. You can
tell it’s an excellent idea because Chinese communist authorities hate it.
*
We also have good news on the legal front. And I’m not even
counting the indictment of the four officers involved in the death of George
Floyd.
We’re talking Gary Jones—former head of the United Auto
Workers. Jones has plead guilty to stealing from his union, and working out
sweetheart deals with top executives of Fiat-Chrysler. In return for
cooperation, prosecutors have recommended a sentence of 57 months in prison. Jones
is expected to name a number of co-conspirators, both top union men and company
executives.
As the Detroit News noted, the union boss spent $750,000 in union money on
“private villas, cigars, golf equipment and apparel, meals and liquor, including $400
bottles of Louis Roederer Cristal Champagne and Canadian vodka served in a
crystal skull.” To be more precise, prosecutors charged Jones with spending $60,000 in union money on cigars, over a five year
period.
That man did love to smoke.
And eat. Jones and a few pals also charged the union for a $6,500
steak dinner at a high-class restaurant.
*
One crook down. Several more to go. Federal prosecutors have indicted Jayson Penn, CEO of
Pilgrim’s Pride, America’s second largest chicken producer. Also indicted were
three top executives, including former Pilgrim’s Pride vice president Roger
Austin. Mikell Fries, the president of Claxton Poultry Farms, and Scott
Brady, a vice president, were also hauled before the judge.
Charge: price fixing. Maximum penalty possible: 10 years in
prison and a fine of $1 million. But you figure no cop will be kneeling of
Penn’s neck until he’s dead.
After all, priorities.
George Floyd? He passed a counterfeit $20. These guys
allegedly cheated customers out of millions.
Plus, Mr. Penn made $4.42 million in 2019. He’ll be able to
afford a really, really good lawyer.
(If you missed it, as I did, Chris Lischewski, the former CEO
of Bumble Bee Foods, was convicted last December in a case involving price fixing
of tuna. He also faces up to ten years in prison.)
*
There’s even more good news, this time involving idiots,
rather than crooks. It’s official. We can report that Congressman Steven King
of Iowa was defeated in the Republican Party yesterday.
King is gone at the end of his current term. Besides being a
racist, King once said he was against allowing exceptions for rape in laws
banning abortion. Here’s his explanation, as reported by the Des Moines Register:
What if we went back through all the family trees and just
pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest? Would
there be any population of the world left if we did that?
Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages taken
place and whatever happened to culture after society? I know I can’t
certify that I’m not a part of a product of that.
Yeah, that guy. He served multiple terms in the U.S. House of
Representatives. People voted for him.
___
Trump
and Obama: Nothing in common.
6/4/20: Out of some twisted sense of
duty, I feel compelled to follow Donald J. Trump on Twitter.
This morning, I logged on and found this post from the
president:
First, let me apologize for my grammatical error, which I
assume you’ll notice. I will not insult your intelligence by pointing it out.
Second, Trump’s tweet got me thinking. What other differences
were there, related to Trump and Obama?
I made a
quick list:
A former member of Trump’s cabinet, Gen. James Mattis accused
him of being a threat to the U.S. Constitution. No one in Obama’s cabinet ever
said that.
Obama won the popular vote. Trump didn’t.
Obama inherited a mess when he took office. The U.S. economy
had shed 3.6 million jobs in 2008. Trump inherited an economy which had added
jobs for 76 consecutive months.
Obama didn’t whine about inheriting a mess—although he did.
Trump did whine about inheriting a mess—and didn’t.
Obama believed in science. Trump says windmills cause cancer.
Obama believed climate change was a real threat to humanity.
Trump? He doesn’t get science.
No one in the KKK ever said they approved of statements by
President Obama. President Trump has many fans in that organization.
Trump slept with a porn star. Obama never.
Trump paid off the porn star, to keep her quiet. Obama didn’t
have to.
Other former presidents like Obama. None of the surviving
former presidents has any love for Trump. (George H. W. Bush didn’t either.)
Trump’s son, Don Jr., and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met with
Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 election. President
Obama’s daughters are sweet young ladies who don’t make headlines.
Don Jr. and those other two kept the meeting secret for 13
months. Obama’s daughters never met with any Russians.
Trump got impeached. Obama didn’t.
Obama worked out a deal to keep Iran from getting nuclear
weapons. Trump tore it up. Now he can’t get a replacement.
Trump called Kim Jong-un (a homicidal maniac thought to have
murdered critics with anti-aircraft guns) his friend. Obama didn’t.
Trump said Obama played too much golf while he was president.
Obama hasn’t pointed out Trump’s hypocrisy.
Trump once claimed that when Obama left office 93 million Americans were looking for jobs. Okay, that
one was just stupid.
No member of Obama’s cabinet had to leave office in the face
of multiple investigations into ethics violations. Scott
Pruitt, Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, did.
No member of Obama’s cabinet had to leave office after
racking up $1 million in unnecessary expenses for personal travel. Tom Price, Trump’s first choice to head up Health and
Human Services, did.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson once called Trump a “fucking
moron.” No member of his cabinet ever called Obama a moron, let alone a
“fucking moron.”
Mr. Trump bragged about grabbing women by the pussy. Obama wouldn’t
do it; and wouldn’t brag about it.
Trump has been accused by multiple women of sexual
harassment. Obama wasn’t accused by any.
Obama passed the Affordable Care Act, which protected
millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions. Trump tried to repeal it.
Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, went to jail. In
Cohen’s indictment, Trump was named as “Individual 1,” i.e., a co-conspirator. By
comparison, Fox News commentators were outraged when Obama wore a tan suit.
Mr. Trump suffers from a Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Mr. Obama doesn’t.
___
The generals agree. Trump is a
menace.
6/4/20: You
could tell today that Donald Trump was having a tough stretch—but not because
the death toll from the coronavirus had just passed 100,000.
And not
because protests continued to spread across the nation in the wake of the
killing of George Floyd.
What
really shook Trump was a White House announcement that there had been a
schedule change. The president was canceling a weekend trip to what he calls his “summer White
House.” Trump would not be going to his resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, even
though he had a hankering to play golf.
Suddenly,
“tragedy” hit the president hard. He’d have to stick around the White House and
try to do his job.
*
First you had to wade through the cowards.
Since Trump
suggested he might use active duty military forces to clear the streets of
America, even of peaceful protesters, many retired U.S. military leaders, and
even a few GOP politicians with scruples, have felt honor bound to speak out
against a president with pronounced dictatorial inclinations.
On
Wednesday, June 3, NBC’s Kristen Welker tried to get Republican senators to
respond to the question, “Do you support the president’s decision to clear out
peaceful protestors near the White House?”
“Didn’t
really see it,” said Trump pal, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Give that man a
white cane!
“I’m
late for lunch,” a famished Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio explained. Then he buzzed
past like a man on a mission to purchase an order of French fries.
Asked
about the president’s actions, Senate Leader Mitch McConnell dodged the chance
to stand up for the rights of all Americans. He said he was “not going to
critique other’s performances.” If he had been dressed in a giant chicken
costume, it could not have been more appropriate.
Sen. Tim
Scott, the only African American GOP senator, was both correct in what he said
and cowardly. Asked that same question, during a morning gathering—was Trump
right to do what he did—Scott said, he wasn’t. “But obviously, if your question is should you use tear gas to
clear a path so the president can go have a photo op, the answer is
no.” But when NBC News asked him about the president’s response that
afternoon, Sen. Scott said he had already “said too much.”
When in fact, he had said too little.
*
_____________________
“Never
did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any
circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.”
Former Secretary of Defense and
Ret. Gen. James Mattis
_____________________
If courage was missing among the politicians, a
chorus of criticism was quickly heard from a welcome direction. First to raise the
battle cry, was Trump’s former Secretary of Defense and former Marine
commandant, Gen. James Mattis. Writing in The Atlantic, he offered
stark warning.
“I
have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled,” he began. “The
words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States
Supreme Court,” he noted. “This is precisely what protesters are rightly
demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be
able to get behind.”
Mattis
continued:
When I joined the military, some
50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did
I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any
circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much
less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with
military leadership standing alongside.
Donald Trump is the first
president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not
even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the
consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the
consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without
him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be
easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to
past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.
Alaska
Sen. Lisa Murkowski admitted what many Republicans had to be thinking but
lacked the fortitude to say. “I
thought General Mattis’ words were true and honest and necessary and overdue,”
she said. “Perhaps we’re
getting to the point where we can be more honest with the concerns that we
might hold internally, and have the courage of our own convictions to speak
up.”
Asked by a reporter is she could still support
Trump, she replied, “I am struggling with it. I have struggled with it for a
long time.”
Trump responded exactly as you might imagine.
He attacked Murkowski on Twitter, vowing revenge. “Few people know where they’ll be in two years
from now, but I do, in the Great State of Alaska (which I love) campaigning
against Senator Lisa Murkowski.” In fact, he made it clear that when he
retaliated, he wouldn’t care who ran against Murkowski. “Get any candidate
ready, good or bad, I don’t care, I’m endorsing. If you have a pulse, I’m with
you!”
So, for example, he’d endorse a cannibal? Or a
man accused of molesting teenage girls, so long as either had a
pulse?
*
“No
president ever is a dictator or a king.”
Trump wasted no time before bragging, again on
Twitter, about “firing” Mattis. He even talked about how much pleasure that
gave him.
But this time, the criticism did not abate. A
second retired Marine general joined the fight. This time it was Trump’s former
White House Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly. Mattis, he told reporters,
resigned. “The president did not fire
him. He did not ask for his resignation,” Kelly said.
“The president has clearly forgotten how it actually happened or is confused.”
A nice way of saying Trump was lying.
He’s quite a man, General Jim Mattis, and for him to do that
tells you where he is relative to the concern he has for our country.
I agree with him. I think we need to step back from the
politics. I think we need to reestablish, and I’m not a constitutional scholar
but boy do I read a lot and I’ve re-read an awful lot in the last three weeks
about the thinking that made our Constitution what it is, the men who made that
Constitution, who developed that Constitution. And the separation of powers is
very, very, very important. No president ever is a dictator or a king.
Trump erupted once more. He insisted that Kelly
was never part of his White House “inner circle.” The job was too tough for
him. Kelly “slinked away into obscurity,” the president sneered. As for that
elite inner circle, we can assume it included Jared and Ivanka, Kellyanne
Conway, and maybe a pecan pie.
In the
week that followed more and more former U.S. military men and women and leaders
in defense circles added their criticisms. Former Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, was equally appalled by Trump’s threat to call in active
duty troops. “The idea that the
military would be called in to dominate and to suppress what, for the most
part, were peaceful protests—admittedly, where some had opportunistically
turned them violent—and that the military would somehow come in and calm that
situation,” he said, “was very dangerous to me.”
A second
former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, expressed similar fears. He cautioned that the country was at an
“inflection point.” He said it was “impossible to remain silent.” The
president’s decision to clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Park was
“sickening.”
Whatever
Trump’s goal in conducting his visit, he laid bare his disdain for the rights
of peaceful protest in this country, gave succor to the leaders of other
countries who take comfort in our domestic strife, and risked further
politicizing the men and women of our armed forces.
Admiral
Mullin had confidence in current leaders of the U.S. military to obey lawful orders.
He was “less confident in the soundness of the orders they will be given by
this commander in chief.”
“I’m glad I don’t have to advise this President.”
Dire
warnings were accumulating. A third former Joint Chiefs chairman, Air Force
Gen. Richard Myers, registering his disgust. He described his reaction as he watched what
happened in Lafayette Park:
The
first thing was just absolute sadness that people aren’t allowed to protest and
that, as I understand it, that was a peaceful protest that was disturbed by
force, and that’s not right. That should not happen in America. And so I was
sad. I mean, we should all shed tears over that, that particular act. ...I’m
glad I don’t have to advise this President. I’m sure the senior military
leadership is finding it really difficult these days to provide good, sound
military advice.
*
If you’re a member of the Trump cult, perhaps
you found comfort in believing this was all “Fake News.”
It wasn’t. It was the free press doing the
primary job of the free press, gathering and disseminating important
information. Ret. Major General Paul D.
Eaton called the decision of Gen. Milley
to join Trump on his stroll “an
egregious display of bad judgment, at best.” A veteran of the Iraq war, Eaton
continued, “At worst, Milley appears confused about the oath he took to support
and defend the Constitution—not a president. I suggest the general get quickly
unconfused, or resign.”
Former
Marine four-star Gen. John Allen offered up biting criticism in an interview and in an essay in Foreign Policy magazine.
On CNN, he described Trump as “assaulting” the First Amendment rights of peaceful
demonstrators. “I’ve fought in overseas wars,” he told Jake Tapper, “and I
never believed that the Constitution was under threat until recently.”
That
threat was Trump. All Americans, Gen. Allen added, should be concerned about
“the rule of law.”
“The slide of the United States into illiberalism may well have
begun on June 1, 2020,” Gen. Allen also wrote. “Remember the date. It may well
signal the beginning of the end of the American experiment.”
The president of the
United States stood in the Rose Garden of the White House on Monday, railed
against weak governors and mayors who were not doing enough, in his mind, to
control the unrest and the rioters in their cities, and threatened to deploy
the U.S. military against American citizens.
Even more
horrifying, “Trump was clear he views those engaged in the unrest and criminal
acts in these riots as terrorists, an enemy.”
He
continued:
There is no precedent in modern
U.S. history for a president to wield federal troops in a state or municipality
over the objections of the respective governor. Right now, the last thing the
country needs—and, frankly, the U.S. military needs—is the appearance of U.S.
soldiers carrying out the president’s intent by descending on American
citizens.
The assault
on “peaceful demonstrators,” with police, “manhandling and beating many of
them, employing flash-bangs, riot-control agents, and pepper spray throughout,”
was unacceptable.
Trump
had “failed to show sympathy, empathy, compassion, or understanding—some of the
traits the nation now needs from its highest office.”
Allen called
the events of June 1 “awful for the United States and its democracy.” Then he
posed the question, “What is to be done?”
At nearly the same moment that
Americans were being beaten near the White House on behalf of their president,
George Floyd’s brother Terrence Floyd visited the site of George’s murder.
Overcome with grief and anger, he loudly upbraided the crowd for tarnishing his
brother’s memory with violence and looting. And then he told Americans what to
do: vote. “Educate yourselves,” he said, “there’s a lot of us.” So, while June
1 could easily be confused with a day of shame and peril if we listen to Donald
Trump, if instead we listen to Terrence Floyd, it is a day of hope. So mark
your calendars—this could be the beginning of the change of American democracy
not to illiberalism, but to enlightenment. But it will have to come from the
bottom up. For at the White House, there is no one home.
Again, this was not “Fake News.” Ret. Admiral
James Stavridis sounded a similar alarm in Time magazine:
[It] hurt to watch U.S. military personnel
used against peaceful protestors in Washington D.C. early this week. The
sweeping use of a combined civil-military force—D.C. police, Park Police,
National Guard, and active duty military police—against the protesters to
clear the way for a Presidential photo-op was beyond the pale of American
norms.
The U.S. military, he noted, had 1.2 million
members on active duty, all sworn to “protect and defend the constitution of
the United States.” The “vast majority” would “lay down their lives to do so.
But they are not meant to be turned against their fellow citizens.”
Stavridis called on “senior active duty
military leaders” to stand up to Trump, even “at the risk of their career[s].”
If they failed, he cautioned, “I fear for the soul of our military and all of
the attendant consequences. We cannot afford to have a future Lafayette Square
end up looking like Tiananmen Square.”
*
It was then, while putting this
post together, that this blogger stumbled upon what was said to be a Trump
quote from March 1990. It was reported to have come from a Playboy interview.
I’m not fan of this
president. Still, I had a hard time believing even someone so callous as he has
proven to be could have said what Trump purportedly said. And this was only
nine months after Chinese troops slaughtered thousands of peaceful
pro-democracy protesters, mostly young students and their supporters.
“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese
government almost blew it,” Trump was quoted as saying. “Then they were
vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you
the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”
I had to go to the source to be sure. It required wading through
half of a lengthy article to find that quote. And there it was, with an
additional clause. It came in the middle of a series of questions about the
need of leaders to take a forceful hand. Trump expressed disdain for Mikhail
Gorbachev, who was trying to create a more democratic society and break the
power of the Communist Party in Russia. Trump’s problem with Gorbachev? “Not a
firm enough hand,” he said.
“You mean firm hand as in China?” the interviewer wondered.
And here we saw hints of the authoritarian president many of us have rightly come to distrust. “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,” Citizen Trump did indeed say. “Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit on by the rest of the world…”
Better then, in Trump’s mind, to spill the blood of thousands of
protesters than to appear weak.
An absence of interest in human
rights.
Not once, did the future president evince interest in human rights
during that interview, the same absence we have seen since he took office. For
example: Trump claiming Vladimir Putin “isn’t such
a killer” and adding that the U.S. “isn’t so innocent,” either. And Trump congratulating Xi Jinping for
becoming “president for life.” Because who cares about elections!
Trump saying that he fell “in love”
with Kim Jong-un, the homicidal maniac and proprietor of the worst gulag on
earth.
Trump calling Prince Mohammed bin Salman “a friend,” despite the
fact the Prince had just ordered a journalist cut up into
pieces.
Finally, Trump, at the G7 summit in 2019, jokingly calling President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi of
Egypt, a man infamous for ordering the massacre of more than 800
protesters in 2013, his “favorite dictator.”
Trump being Trump.
 |
| A lone protester stops a line of Chinese tanks, near Tiananmen Square. |
*
If you
don’t pay close attention, U.S. military are historically reluctant to
criticize civilian leadership. We have traditionally cherished civilian control
of the troops. We don’t want the military arresting elected officials, as in
Nazi Germany in the 1930s. We don’t want “death squads” roaming the streets, as
in Argentina in the 80s, when generals ruled. We don’t want journalists being
assassinated, as in Russia or Saudi Arabia in 2020. We don’t want Trump or any
other president defiling the U.S. Constitution.
So, on June 6, Ret. Vice Admiral Joseph Maguire told The New York Times, “Jim Mattis, Mike Mullen and Marty Dempsey are
all good friends, and I respect them tremendously. I am in alignment with their
views.”
“Questionable partisan moves” may “become intolerable.”
So, too,
we had Ret. Army Gen. Tony Thomas questioning the use of the word “battlespace”
by the Secretary of Defense, to describe scenes of protest in scores of U.S.
cities. “Not what American needs to hear...ever, unless we are invaded by an
adversary or experience a constitutional failure...ie [sic] a Civil War...”
Even Defense
Secretary Esper realized that he had made a mistake in using that word. He
apologized and rolled it back. He also made it clear—in opposition to what
President Trump had been saying—that we had not reached a point where active
duty military personnel were needed to quell protests.
Not even
close.
Naturally,
this angered the thin-skinned president. When Press Secretary McEnany was asked
if Trump still had confidence in Esper, she refused to say. Sources told
the Wall Street Journal that the president had to be talked
out of firing Esper. Esper had to be talked out of resigning,
himself.
The free
press continued to give voice to the concerns of top military and defense
leaders. “There is a thin line between the military’s tolerance for
questionable partisan moves over the past three years and the point where these
become intolerable for an apolitical military,” retired three-star Army general
Douglas E. Lute told The New York Times. Lute, who worked
under both Bush 43 and Obama, was clear. “Relatively minor episodes have
accumulated imperceptibly, but we are now at a point of where real damage is
being done.”
The Military
Times chose to highlight the comments of Ret. Adm. William McRaven. “Trust
me, every man and woman in uniform recognizes that we are all Americans and
that the last thing they want to do as military men and women is to stand in
the way of a peaceful protest.”
“When
you are in the military, there are three criteria for every decision we make:
it has to be moral, legal and ethical,” McRaven continued. “Ethical, you have
to follow the rules, legal you have to follow the law, and then moral you have
to follow what you know to be right. And either way, that’s just not right.”
As a
serious blogger, I was suddenly curious. If I did a word search of Trump’s
nearly 50,000 tweets, how many times would he use the word “ethical” in a way
that showed ethics guided his conduct.
As
expected, it turned out to be never.
*
It wasn’t “Enemies of the People” at work when
the media continued gathering voices of protest. It was the free press, holding
powerful people to account. “We
have a military to fight our enemies, not our own people,” Admiral Mullen said on Fox
News Sunday last week.
Mullen also noted that 43 percent of active
duty soldiers, sailors, Marines, and air crews were men and women of color.
(And let’s not forget: No one in President
Donald J. Trump’s direct family line has ever served in the U.S. military.)
_____________________
“We have a Constitution. We have to follow that
Constitution. And the president’s drifted away from it.”
Former
Sec. of State Colin Powell
_____________________
Former Secretary of State and Gen. Colin
Powell also made headlines, telling CNN that the president’s actions were “dangerous for our democracy”
and “dangerous for our country.”
“We have a Constitution,” Gen. Powell
continued. “We have to follow that Constitution. And the president’s drifted
away from it.”
On ABC, Gen. Dempsey called the president’s
rhetoric “inflammatory.”
On NBC, Admiral Stavridis said Trump’s threat
to use the military “rang echoes” of 1776, when George III sent troops to
Boston to crush unrest.
“To protect the rights of Americans, not to
violate them.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Post published
a letter signed by 89 former
admirals, generals and defense leaders. Like so many others, they expressed
growing concern as they watched President Trump unravel.
They noted that while
several past
presidents have called on our armed services to provide additional aid to law
enforcement in times of national crisis—among them Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight D. Eisenhower,
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson—these presidents used the military to
protect the rights of Americans, not to violate them.
All those who serve in the military and government take an oath
to support the U.S. Constitution. By contrast, they warned, “We are alarmed at
how the president is betraying this oath by threatening to order members of the
U.S. military to violate the rights of their fellow Americans.”
A quick check of signatories turned up the
following Republicans and/or American military leaders:
Former Republican senator, Secretary of Defense, and decorated
combat veteran, Chuck Hagel.
William S. Cohen, former Secretary of Defense.
Donna Barbisch, retired major general in the U.S. Army.
Dan Christman, retired lieutenant general in the U.S. Army,
former assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Peter S. Cooke, retired major general of the U.S. Army Reserve.
Michael B. Donley, former secretary of the U.S. Air Force.
John W. Douglass, retired brigadier general in the U.S. Air
Force and former assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy.
Michael V. Hayden, retired U.S. Air Force general; former
director of the National Security Agency and CIA.
Mark Hertling, retired three-star general in the U.S. Army,
former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe.
John P. Jumper, retired general of the U.S. Air Force and former
chief of staff of the Air Force.
Steven J. Lepper, retired major general of the U.S. Air Force.
Former secretary of the U.S. Navy Sean O’Keefe.
Paula Thornhill, retired brigadier general of the Air Force.
Daniel P. Woodward, retired brigadier general of the U.S. Air
Force.
Margaret H. Woodward, retired major general of the U.S. Air
Force.
*
Eventually, another group of American military men and
women joined in warning against the
use of the U.S. military to suppress peaceful dissent. At last check, more than
1,000 members of a group called “Concerned Members of the Long Gray Line,” representing
every class from 1966 to 2019, had signed an open letter to the Class of 2020.
(The responses from dozens of other former West Point grads and
other military men and women are also worth the time to read.)
Their letter read, in part:
[Your class, like others before you,
represents] the country’s diversity of race, ethnicity, identity and beliefs.
Your West Point journey has led you to this moment when, with right hands
raised, you take an oath “to
support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies,
foreign and domestic.” This oath has no expiration date.
…The oath taken by those who choose to
serve in America’s military is aspirational. We pledge service to no monarch;
no government; no political party; no tyrant. Your oath is to a set of
principles and an ideal expressed in the Constitution and its amendments. Our
Constitution establishes freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of
religion, of equal protection under the law regardless of race, color, or
creed—we cannot take for granted these freedoms that are but dreams in too many
nations around the world.
…The abhorrent murder of George Floyd has
inspired millions to protest police brutality and the persistence of racism.
Sadly, the government has threatened to use the Army in which you serve as a
weapon against fellow Americans engaging in these legitimate protests….
On the eve of your graduation and joining
the Long Gray Line and the Army officer corps, we, the undersigned…pledge to
stand for the sacred democratic principle that all are treated equally, and
each person has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness….
…As your lifetime journey of service
begins, we pray that your class motto, “With Vision We Lead,” will prove
prophetic. America needs your leadership.
*
In other words, if you have concluded that the President of the
United States is a menace, you are not alone.
You are not someone who hates America, hates the flag, or
disrespects veterans. You are right. Trump is a threat.
So, on Flag Day 2020, remember the words of I.F. Stone, who once
wrote, “The
fight for liberty is not waged on the battlefields alone, nor does it consist
only in war against a foreign foe. It is also a war against ignorance and
prejudice and trouble-makers in high office.”
Remember,
too, the words of President John Adams. “There is danger from all men,” he once
wrote. “The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living
with power to endanger the public liberty.”
 |
| Trump doesn't own the flag. Neither do his supporters. |
Postscript: On the same day the letter
quoted above was released, Gen. Milley apologized for accompanying Trump on his
stunt hike.
“I should not have been there. My presence in
that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military
involved in domestic politics,” he said. “As a commissioned uniformed officer,
it was a mistake that I have learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can
learn from it.”
The “senseless and brutal killing of George Floyd” was an
outrage, he added. He supported the demonstrators:
His death amplified the pain, the frustration, and the fear that
so many of our fellow Americans live with day in, day out.
The protests that have ensued not only speak to his killing, but
also to the centuries of injustice toward African Americans…[and] we should all
be proud that the vast majority of protests have been peaceful.
Retired Rear Admiral John Kirby, a military
analyst for CNN, added another voice of warning to the discussion. Kirby
applauded Gen. Milley’s admission of a mistake. That admission, he said, “will serve as a powerful example to junior officers and troops
that no one is immune from screwing up and that no one’s credibility is
enhanced by refusing to admit it.”
Finally, Kirby said, “Gen. Milley’s comments about the need to
keep the military out of politics were timely and—all too sadly these
days—appropriate to the pressures under which our troops labor.”
___
Trump spends
an entire day tweeting.
6/5/20: At 12:21 a.m. President Trump gets a busy day as leader
of the Free World off to a rousing but odd start. He notes his happiness that
Iran has released Mike White, a Navy veteran, held hostage for two years. “So
great to have Michael home. Just arrived. Very exciting. Thank you to Iran.
Don’t wait until after U.S. Election to make the Big deal. I’m going to win.
You’ll make a better deal now!”
Why a
good deal before the next election?
So, good news to have Mr. White back.
But why was Trump offering a country he considers a sworn
enemy a good deal before the next election? Kind of like asking Ukraine for
help? Or listening to Russian offers in 2016? Trump should be trying to get the
best deal with Iran possible, before the election, or after. Timing wouldn’t
matter.
*
It was off to bed soon after. And then Trump rose again and
began tweeting like a man who couldn’t stop watching porno. There were 55 retweets
during the six a.m. hour, almost one per minute.
That included Trump quoting Sen. Deb Fischer announcing: “I
cannot think of a better way to celebrate Beef Month than by eating a burger
today for #NationalBeefBurgerDay and sending a thank you to all
our NE cattle producers who are working hard to put beef on our tables.”
You could perhaps commend the president for his stamina and lightning
quick thumbs, because in the seven a.m. hour he posted 74 times. He was, for
example, excited to learn that the U.S. recovered 2.5 million jobs in May. So,
he retweeted the White House, which reported, “With 2.5 MILLION jobs added in
May, we’re on the way to an incredible period of growth!”
Trump laid off at 8:01 and didn’t log back on to Twitter until
10:43. The onslaught recommenced. Naturally, Trump went with the utter
simplicity of retweeting a rabid Fox News host and Trump fan:
The president tweeted in the eleven a.m. hour, the twelve
p.m., the one p.m., the two p.m. and the three p.m. hours. At 3:08 p.m., with a
nation still torn by protests, Trump spent his time as leader of a great nation,
critiquing NFL quarterback Drew Brees. Brees had first said he did not believe
players should kneel in protest when the 2020 season begins. Then he thought it
over and apologized for being insensitive. In Trump’s world you never apologize
and sensitivity is weakness.
He tap-tapped:
I am a big fan of Drew
Brees. I think he’s truly one of the greatest quarterbacks, but he should not
have taken back his original stance on honoring our magnificent American Flag.
OLD GLORY is to be revered, cherished, and flown high...
...We should be standing
up straight and tall, ideally with a salute, or a hand on heart. There are
other things you can protest, but not our Great American Flag - NO KNEELING!
The job of being president distracted him until after
dinner. But in the six p.m. hour he was doing what he does best—lashing out at
other Americans, who, in theory he represents. He called the mayor of
Washington D.C. “grossly incompetent,” which is a great way to help keep order
in any city.
In the next hour he retweeted the founder and co-chair of
TrumpStudents, Ryan Fournier, who offered up another quick burst of simplicity:
“Barack Obama put a target on the back of every cop in
this country.” Because, sure. Criticizing what the only African American
president we’ve ever had supposedly did four years ago, will help sooth frayed
nerves at a time like this.
Then we had Trump talking about Gov. John Hickenlooper,
“who got caught big time with his hand in the cookie jar.” And Trump outraged
to find Portland, Oregon had paid a “violent Antifa leader for getting hit with
a rubber bullet.” And the president retweeting some dude, retweeting some other
dude, who was criticizing The New York Times, with the basic message: “Can we stop
pretending they’re a serious newspaper now?”
In the eight p.m. hour, an apparently rejuvenated President
of the United States began tweeting vehemently again: another 36 posts,
including a revisit to his first tweet of the day,
welcoming Michael White home. Not long before bedtime, Trump
got in a formulaic shot at the free press: “The Lamestream Media is out of
control. It would be impossible to fully explain how dishonest they are!”
At 10:19, Trump signed off with a plug for a book you figure
he’s never going to read (and, no, I don’t mean the Bible). Then after a busy
day of tweeting—more than 200 times—he tucked himself into bed.
___
Siberia baking. “Game
changer” not working.
6/6/20: Today, with the economy stumbling, with the
coronavirus rampant, with protests against police brutality and systemic racism
crowding the news, let’s not forget another massive failing on the part of this
president. When it comes to addressing the threat of climate change, Trump hasn’t.
He’s in denial.
According to scientists, this past May was the hottest on
record. Making it even worse, the vast Siberian region was 10° Celsius
hotter, on average, or 18° Fahrenheit. Sea ice retreated in dramatic
fashion. Permafrost, ground frozen in places for thousands of years, thawed.
The region has been experiencing unusually warm temperatures since January. “It’s
undoubtedly an alarming sign,” said Freja Vamborg, a scientist with the
Copernicus Climate Change Service.
*
This week the results of a randomized study done by the University of Minnesota were
released. The study enrolled 821 non-hospitalized persons who had been exposed
to someone with COVID-19, either in their own homes, or as healthcare workers.
Half received placebos. The other half received hydroxychloroquine, Trump’s
favorite “game changer” drug.
Results were dismal. Researchers determined
that hydroxychloroquine was not able to prevent the
development of COVID-19 any better than a placebo. Further, 40% of trial
participants taking hydroxychloroquine developed non-serious side effects—predominantly
nausea, upset stomach or diarrhea.
The image
of Trump on hydroxychloroquine, which he tried out himself, suffering from
diarrhea.
Priceless.
___
Merkel
makes Trump mad. Trump feeling sad.
6/7/20: President Trump is mad because German Chancellor
Angela Merkel made it clear recently she isn’t coming to a G-7 summit in the U.S. during a
pandemic. Other world leaders quickly; and Trump, who had hoped to include pal
Vladimir Putin in an expanded summit, had his feelings hurt.
Trump then postponed the meeting until September. But his
feelings still hurt. So he decided to announce he would reduce U.S. troop
levels in Germany by a third, because he was tired of paying to protect other
countries, such as our allies. This announcement did not sit well, even with
many Republicans. Rep. Liz Cheney, the number three GOP leader in the House of
Representatives, promptly labeled Trump’s decision “dangerously misguided.”
“If
the United States abandons allies, withdraws our forces, and retreats within
our borders,” Cheney warned, “the cause of freedom—on which our nation was
founded & our security depends—will be in peril.”
We
rarely quote Democrats on this blog, but Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member of
the Senate Armed Services Committee, was equally appalled. “This order is
petty and preposterous,” he said.
*
Donald Trump loves to tweet about his record-setting support
with Republicans. He first tweeted a variation of this phrase on April 10: “Wow,
Approval Rating in the Republican Party - 96%. Thank you!”
Perhaps it made him feel warm inside, to know so many in his
party loved him, since not once during his time in office has he managed an average
approval rating of 50%. So he tweeted a similar message twice more in April. He
couldn’t resist reminding his Twitter fans, he was still loved by 96% three
times in May. He seemed so happy with the fact that almost all Republicans loved
him, he tweeted it again, yesterday, and today.
(Since this is an edited post, I can also tell you he tweeted
it on June 8, June 16, and June 19.)
But I am not a guppy. I do not fall for Trump’s many, varied,
and transparent tricks. I go to the Gallup poll to check. In April, they have him at 93%.
Quite good. In May: 92%. Still fine. In June: 85%.
Not so good, if you want to win reelection. His approval rate
with independents has fallen to 39%, with Democrats to 5%, and his overall
approval rate is a miserable 39% in a Gallup poll ending on June 4.
It won’t help poor Donald, if he picks up a copy of The
New York Times from Saturday. According to a report by Jonathan Martin, there’s increasing rumbling
at the top of the party.
Martin
says he has been told that former President George W. Bush won’t support Trump’s
re-election. Jeb Bush isn’t sure how he’ll vote. Senator Mitt Romney won’t back
Trump and is deliberating whether to write in his wife, Ann, or cast another
ballot in November. Cindy McCain, the widow of Senator John McCain, “is almost
certain to support Mr. Biden but is unsure how public to be about it because
one of her sons is eying a run for office.” Two former GOP Speakers of the
House, Paul Ryan and John Boehner, “won’t say how they will vote”
You can
pencil in the names of former Secretary of State and Gen. Colin Powell and
former Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice: “No,” on Trump 2020. (I think we can assume Rex Tillerson, Trump’s own
former Secretary of State, and James Mattis, his former Secretary of Defense,
will also vote for an egg and cheese omelet before they vote for their old
boss.)
Rep.
Francis Rooney is retiring from Congress at the end of this term. He told
Martin he hasn’t voted for a Democrat in decades, “But
Mr. Rooney said he is considering supporting Mr. Biden in part because Mr.
Trump is ‘driving us all crazy’ and his handling of the virus led to a death
toll that ‘didn’t have to happen.’”
I don’t
quote Democrats often, but Sen. Chris Coons told Martin that he had “had five
conversations with senators who tell me they are really struggling with
supporting Trump.” Sen. Coons declined to name them.
Martin couldn’t
get one Republican senator on the record. He did report, however, that while the
senator was “publicly supporting the
president,” he admitted in an interview
that he might prefer a Biden victory if the G.O.P. managed to
preserve its Senate majority. This lawmaker, like a number of Republicans, is
uneasy with Mr. Trump’s behavior and weary from the near-weekly barrage of
questions from reporters about the latest presidential eruption.
“There
is an organized effort about how to make our voices useful in 2020,” said Kori
Schake, another “No Thanks, Donald” Republican.
___
COVID-19
toll still rising. Trump still loves police.
6/8/20: Protests continue to roil the land and the toll from the
coronavirus rises steadily. According to Johns Hopkins University’s latest tally, 111,751 Americans have died.
June 1: 14,790
June 2: 24,955
June 3: 14,676
June 4: 20,555
June 5: 29,034
June 6: 29,214
June 7: 17,919
June 8: 17,598
______________________________________________________
Total: 168,741 new cases
As it stands, the United States is likely to
pass the two million mark tomorrow or Thursday.
By comparison, countries whose leaders actually
faced up to a difficult situation have come much closer to taming the spread.
Germany had only 311 new cases and 48 deaths yesterday.
Italy had 283 and 79, France 403 and 87. Across the border, in Canada, another
372 persons were confirmed to have the disease. Sixty died. Japan stopped the
spread early, and tallies only 17,174 cases. South Korea, which had its
first confirmed case on the same day as the U.S., moved swiftly. Donald J.
Trump kept tweeting. Total cases in South Korea: 11,852. Total dead: 274.
New cases yesterday: 38.
New deaths: 1.
*
Trump did make time to talk with law
enforcement officials Monday. As one
might have expected—because this is Trump—in the wake of nationwide protests,
he was 99.9 percent in
favor of the police.
Okay,
sure, he admitted. Once in a while, a cop isn’t so nice.
“We
want to make sure we don’t have any bad actors in there and sometimes you’ll
see some horrible things, like we witnessed recently,” he told the gathering.
“But 99, I say 99.9, but let’s go with 99 percent of them are great, great
people and they’ve done jobs that are record setting—record setting—so our
crime statistics are at a level that they haven’t been at.”
Total
crimes in this country have been falling
steadily since
1990, a trend unrelated to anything Donald J. Trump has ever done. Murders,
rapes, and aggravated assaults are up in recent years.
And
need we point out? You can cut crime without kneeling on people’s necks until
they’re dead?
___
Trump says protester faked skull-fracturing fall.
6/9/20: Yesterday, the president floated another one of his nutty
theories. If you don’t have the stomach to check, trust me. The man’s Twitter
feed, now approaching 50,000 tweets and retweets, is a cornucopia of idiocy.
Look, being a cop—a good one—must be really hard.
We saw what happened to George Floyd, however. That was an outrage.
You don’t have to be a liberal or a
conservative to figure out most of these cases. In a similar, but less fatal way,
when Charlie Chase, an 82-year-old Trump supporter from Fall River,
Massachusetts, was attacked by a 27-year-old man, you
can’t justify that. Donald Trump Jr., himself, heard about the attack, called
the victim, and then tweeted righteous indignation.
For once, the smarmy scion of the president got
it right.
Yet, with a nation convulsed by protests over
what millions see as a police murder, with Mr. Chase nursing his bruises, Don
Sr. continued to shrivel as a leader and as a human being. Yesterday, the
president binged on too much right-wing news. Then he floated a bizarre
conspiracy theory. If you missed the tape of another egregious incident in
Buffalo, New York, two police officers were seen knocking Martin Gugino, a
75-year-old protester, over backwards.
I’m a rational kind of person. I doubt their
intent was to injure the man. Still, Gugino stumbled badly, tripped on his own
feet, and toppled like a Jefferson Davis statue knocked from its pedestal,
striking his head on the sidewalk. He lay there, blood pooling on the sidewalk.
He twitched a little. His phone, which he may have been using to film officers,
slid from his hand.
The President of the United States watched that tape. He
tuned in to listen to the explanation offered by the nuttiest of nutty
right-wing news outlets, and decided it was all a “hoax.” Naturally, if a
stupid idea formed in his head, Trump was going to let it come spilling out in
a tweet. “Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA
provocateur,” he theorized. “75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after
appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment.
@OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a
set up?”
That faker.
Press Secretary McEnany tries to cover for her boss.
He is an idiot.
She is, too.
___
Red ink tsunami!
6/10/20: Several states, including Georgia, held primary
elections yesterday. Let’s just say in Georgia, voting did not go smoothly.
Or maybe you could say, if you still
wanted to test new ways to suppress minority voting, it went great! In Fulton
and DeKalb counties, where half the population is black, some people waited in
line five hours to
cast ballots.
If this were to happen in
November, and a good percentage of the 1.8 million Georgians in those two counties
decided to stay home—well—that would be great for Donald J. Trump & Crew.
On the topic of voting, White
House Banshee Kellyanne Conway was asked recently why the president opposed
mail-in balloting. She said, if people wanted to vote, it was like waiting
in line for cupcakes. You wait for what
you want.
The only difference? Cupcakes
are delicious. Voting is arguably your most important right. And no one waits
in line five hours for cupcakes.
*
In other news, sometime Wednesday, the U.S. passed the
2,000,000 mark
on confirmed cases of COVID-19. Trump was just a little off when
he predicted in February that we would soon be headed for zero cases.
*
How about Trump’s promise that he would bring fiscal sanity
to Washington D.C. and the federal deficit would shrink to nothingness once he
took charge. He said if he had eight years (god help us) he would bring his business
magic to government. Presto. There would be NO DEFICIT LEFT! He promised he would
clean up all the trillions run up by all the other 44 presidents.
And, the envelope please:
The winner is……………not Donald J. Trump! It has been announced the federal deficit, in just the first eight
months of this fiscal year, hit:
$1.88 trillion
The red ink tsunami for FY 2021 is the largest ever recorded.
Trump has four more months to rack up a colossal debt.
___
Economy
in for slow recovery.
6/11/20: There’s more bad news for
President Trump, and more importantly, for the nation. Jay Powell, the Chairman
of the Federal Reserve, announced yesterday he expects a slow economic
recovery, with unemployment likely to remain at 9.3% by the end of the year.
You know we could be in for a long climb back to economic health
when coffee juggernaut Starbucks announces it will close 400 retail locations in the U.S. and Canada. Sales
losses this quarter are expected to reach $3.2 billion. Hertz laid off 16,000
employees, made sure to pay the CEO $9 million, and then filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcy protection. J. Crew is now defunct. So is J.C. Penny. Workouts at
Gold’s Gym are over forever. In fact, the idea that we are going to come out of
this recession quickly seems increasingly unlikely. The National Bureau of Economic Research says 3.3 million
businesses, mostly smaller operations, have been wiped out since the
coronavirus took hold, more than were lost during the entire Great Recession. During
that bleak two-year stretch a total of 730,000 U.S. businesses were snuffed out.
This past April, one in four U.S. renters, hit by job losses or loss of revenue, failed
to pay rent. In May that figure rose to 31%. Those bills don’t disappear. They
accumulate.
*
Still, Trump has plenty of fans! (See: June 7 and the 96%.)
Two, one waving a Trump flag, showed up recently at a peaceful Black Lives
Matter rally in Fallon, Nevada. Finally, people from different places on the
political spectrum coming together…
Um…the Trump fans were wearing KKK hoods. If you watch the video, one has a
regulation KKK hood. The other poor sap appears to have crafted his own. It looks
like a racist dunce cap.
*
Think COVID-19 is no more dangerous than ordinary flu? If
you’re a Trump fan, possibly you do. (Did we mention dunce caps?) Doctors at
Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago announced that they had performed a double lung transplant on a woman who contracted the
disease. The patient, in her 20s, spent six weeks in intensive care. A life support
machine did the work of heart and lungs. “By early June, the patient’s lungs
showed irreversible damage,” doctors explained.
“A lung transplant was her only chance for survival,” says Ankit Bharat, MD, chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the Northwestern Medicine Lung Transplant Program.
*
And the coronavirus isn’t going away! It was announced
Thursday that 287 workers at the JBS beef packing plant in Hyrum,
Utah, have tested positive for COVID-19. “It’s not safe to work right now,” an employee
told the Salt Lake Tribune. He or she asked to remain anonymous.
Ironically, two days earlier, Agriculture Secretary Sonny
Perdue issued the following statement.
I want to thank the patriotic
and heroic meatpacking facility workers [around the nation], the companies, and
the local authorities for quickly getting their operations back up and running,
and for providing a great meat selection once again to the millions of
Americans who depend on them for food.”
By the way, the nation’s 75,000 “patriotic and heroic
meatpacking facility workers” earn an average of
$13.68 per hour. That works out to $28,450 annually. Plus, they get the chance
to contract a disease, spread it to loved ones and local communities, and maybe
get double lung transplants.
*
Less likely to catch the disease? Three top African American
law enforcement officials in Dallas, Texas. The president was in town to give a
speech on police and race this week, but they went uninvited. Trump gave
his little talk, then headed over to billionaire Kelcy Warner’s place for a $10
million fund-raising dinner.
During his speech, Mr. Trump refused to address the elephant
with the badge in the room. “You always have a bad apple,” he said of police
officers who kneel on people’s necks until they die. “No matter where you go
you have bad apples, and there are not too many of them...in the police
department,” he argued.
Yeah, “bad apples.” Bad plumbers. Bad bus drivers. Bad furnace
repairmen. Bad presidents. But what can you do!
Trump explained that what he was advocating was “force with
compassion.” Such as: Send in the U.S. military to quash protests. Then he went
with his recipe for authoritarian success: We “have to dominate the streets.”
Trump finished his little talk and headed over to Mr.
Warner’s. Couples of all races were welcome, assuming they could afford to pay $580,600 to attend dinner. For that price, they got
all the alcohol they could drink. And desert! Even seconds!! Best of all, you
and your significant other got a photo taken with Donald J. Trump. Standing
next to him, at least you’d probably look thinner.
*
Since we’re talking “bad apples,” lets include the New Jersey
corrections officer who participated in a stunt as Black Lives Protesters
marched through his neighborhood. It isn’t clear from news stories yet, which
role the officer performed, as he and a buddy reenacted the death of George
Floyd. With a Trump campaign sign and an American flag as backdrop, one of two
white men knelt on the neck of the other, shook his fist, and shouted at
passing marchers.
The corrections officer was quickly suspended. The other
actor, a FedEx employee, has been fired.
Also representing the “bad apples” of humanity: Harry H. Rogers, 36, an “admitted leader of the Ku Klux Klan and a propagandist for
Confederate ideology.” Rogers is accused of driving his pickup truck into a
crowd of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters.
___
Boogaloo
bois and other racists.
6/12/20: With the nation convulsed by
protests, the U.S. military expressed willingness to consider the renaming of ten bases. Those bases are named for heroes
of the Confederacy. For example: Fort Bragg in North Carolina, named for the
totally inept General Braxton Bragg, who lost almost every battle in which he
became involved.
You also have Fort Hood in Texas, named after John Bell Hood,
who gave up a leg in the fight to defend slavery.
And Fort Gordon, named for John Brown Gordon, one of Robert
E. Lee’s most capable lieutenants, rumored after the Civil War to be the Grand
Dragon of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan.
Naturally, Trump who never served, whose father never served,
whose grandfather never served, and whose four oldest children have all, so
far, resisted the urge to don the uniform of the United States, reacted
angrily. In an appeal to the racist portion of his base, whatever fraction that
might be, he tweeted, “Our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not
be tampered with. Respect our Military!” This would make sense, of course, if
Bragg and Hood and Gordon hadn’t been leading forces actively involved in
trying to kill and maim members of “our Military.”
(In Louisiana, some wit started a petition, suggesting one of
the bases in question be named after Britney Spears, “the TRUE hero of the South.”
At last count 14,000 people had signed.)
 |
| No Confederate flag needed. |
In fact, more
than a few Trump fans are having trouble dealing with the fact that Robert E.
Lee had to surrender at Appomattox, signaling the death knell of slavery in
this country. For example, Mercedes Schlapp, a senior Trump campaign adviser, recently
boosted a tweet that “lauded a man in
Texas in a viral video as he yelled a racial slur and wielded a
chainsaw to chase away anti-racism demonstrators.”
When Politico reached
out, she retweeted a version of the video, but with the n-word muted.
Then she realized she still
looked like a racist. She deleted both tweets and apologized, one would assume,
for being an idiot.
As Politico noted, however,
other GOP leaders in Texas were under fire. One county chair posted a Martin
Luther King Jr. quote, next to a banana. Another commented on a third’s post,
“pandemic isn’t working. Start the racial wars.”
*
As a liberal in good standing, I don’t have much trouble
deciding in most cases what is right, and what is not. Kneeling on George
Floyd’s neck, till he was dead.
Not.
Ambushing two California sheriff’s deputies, killing one, and
seriously wounding another?
Not.
Blue lives matter.
Ironically, while the president has been trading insults with
Seattle’s mayor, and railing about Antifa, that ambush was carried out by an
Air Force veteran, and a white man, Steven Carrillo. Carrillo subscribes to the “Boogaloo bois” doctrine, which holds
that freedom-loving white Americans must foment civil war. You start first by
taking out civil authorities, and then launch a race war. Carrillo was armed
with—of course—an AR-15, the preferred weapon of mass murderers and nutjobs in
this country. He is also a suspect in an attack in Oakland, California, during
a Black Lives Matter protest, that left one federal protective services agent
dead, another wounded.
Other Boogaloo enthusiasts have been arrested in Ohio, Texas,
and Colorado, after posting plans on social media to assassinate
government agents and/or blow up members of current crowds of protesters.
___
Staying
safe, kind of, in America.
6/13/20: Two years ago, exactly,
President Trump returned home from an historic visit to North Korea.
The North, he tweeted grandly, “was no longer a Nuclear
Threat.” “Meeting with Kim Jong Un,” he said, “was an interesting and very
positive experience.” The two were pals, Donald said, and the American people could
sleep better in nights to come. Trump had worked his deal-making diplomatic
magic.
Two years later, Kim still has all the nukes he had in the
summer of 2018. Some believe he has enough new material to build an estimated twenty
additional new atomic bombs. And the North has been working hard to get a missile-carrying submarine
constructed and put to sea.
*
Of course, if we listen to President Trump, we know, if we want to be
safe, we can never carry enough guns.
Friday night an inebriated gentleman in Houston got angry
after he was denied entry to a popular bar. It struck him that a fine way to assert
his Second Amendment rights would be to return to his car and retrieve a long
gun. He then headed back to the bar and opened fire. Eight were wounded,
including five women.
No word yet on the suspect, who fled. But proof again,
ladies, that if you want to be safe, you should wear body armor when you go out
for an evening of fun. Also, carry your own rifles.
Or bring a chainsaw (see: 6/12/20).
*
President Trump is looking forward to holding his first big
campaign rally next week, with a crowd of up to 19,000 in attendance.
This could spread the disease; but Trump is keeping himself
safe, legally, at least. If you do choose to attend, you have to sign a disclaimer:
By attending the Rally, you and
any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and
agree not to hold Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.; BOK Center; ASM Global;
or any of their affiliates, directors, officers, employees, agents,
contractors, or volunteers liable for any illness or injury.
___
Don’t be
a dolt. Wear a mask.
6/14/20: No sign the spread of the
coronavirus is abating. As of today the U.S. has 2.1 million confirmed cases
and nearly 116,000 dead.
New cases since we checked last:
June 9: 17,376
June 10: 20,486
June 11: 21,744
June 12: 22,317
June 13: 25,468
June 14: 21,957
This brings the total for the month to 298,089. That averages out to 21,292
per day, not much better than what we suffered in May.
*
We also know that the decision to wear a mask or go naked is
now a partisan issue. Trump fans tend to be anti-mask. Trump foes believe masks
will help stop the spread of the virus. Now a review of 172 studies done in 16
countries and published in The Lancet, a respected medical
journal, finds that…okay, we could have guessed…Trump’s anti-mask fans don’t
get science.
People who have been infected and don’t wear masks have a 1
in 6 chance (17%) of infecting someone. For people with masks, the chance of
spread falls to 1 in 33 (3%). Social distancing, keeping three to six feet
apart, also reduces the chance of spread from 1 in 8 (13%) to 1 in 33 (3%).
That’s the science.
So, get a mask, wear it around others, and keep your distance
wherever possible. This isn’t politics. We will all be better off if we slow
the spread and can get our country back to normal.
 |
Yes, wear a mask.
|
___
Trump
clobbered by book, U.S. Supreme Court.
6/15/20: The big news for the day: The
Supreme Court, ruling 6-3, decides employers cannot discriminate against gays, lesbians,
and transgender individuals, on account of sexual orientation. The opinion is
written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s first pick to fill a seat on
the high court.
Neil Gorsuch has redefined the most fundamental aspect of our
nature from the bench of the highest court in the land. No ruling he might make
in the future could counteract that radicalism. Conservatives will count him
among the worst jurists in the history of the United States
My god, “the most fundamental aspect of our nature” has been
redefined!!! People in the L.G.B.T.Q. community can now have…jobs.
*
Meanwhile, the Narcissist-in-Chief is threatening former
National Security Adviser John Bolton if he publishes his book, due out June
23. Bolton, his old boss warned, would have a “very strong criminal problem” if
he goes ahead with the release of The Room Where It Happened.
“I will consider
every conversation with me as president to be highly classified,” a nervous
Trump has made clear. For example, did Trump say he was holding up aid to
Ukraine until they dug up dirt on Joe Biden? Classified.
Did Trump tell
Bolton he had Rice Krispies for breakfast? Classified.
In fact,
conversations about anything would be classified. Golf? Trump’s weight? Did
Trump say Kim Jong-un looked like a Munchkin? Or say he’d like to bang another
porn star? Or he didn’t care if the Saudis cut up Jamaal Khashoggi in little
pieces, so long as he got reelected in November?
All classified.
“If he wrote a
book and if the book gets out,” Trump said, “he’s broken the law and
I would think you would have criminal problems. I hope so. If this
guy is writing things about conversations or about anything—and maybe he is not
telling the truth. He’s been known not to tell the truth, a lot….”
Trump trailed
off.
According to early reports,
Bolton will claim that nothing mattered to this president, except “getting reelected.”
“I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision
during my tenure,” Bolton will say, “that wasn’t driven by reelection
calculations.”
Bolton will describe “chaos in the White House”
and focus on Trump’s “inconsistent, scattershot decision-making process.” In
fact, he will argue that Democrats botched the impeachment hearings by focusing
only on Trump’s questionable dealings regarding Ukraine.
He is prepared to argue that Trump’s foreign
policy decisions were always driven by questionable motivations.
*
If you missed this story, your U.S. government—which is now
recording piling up massive deficits—is now the proud owner of 63 million
doses of a drug normally used to fight malaria. (See: 6/10/20.)
Do we need to fight malaria in this country?
We do not.
Anyone
need some hydroxychloroquine? We’ve got some!
This drug, hydroxychloroquine, was touted by the president as
a “game changer” in the battle against Covid-19. (See: 6/5/20). Trump
started taking the drug, himself, touted its virtues, said he felt like a
champ, and federal agencies to start stockpiling it as part of his half-baked
plans to address a national health crisis he said was never coming. Taxpayer
dollars were flushed down the toilet.
The FDA has now revoked its emergency approval of the use of
hydroxychloroquine and a related variation, chloroquine, for treatment of the
coronavirus. Not only did Food and Drug Agency scientists determine that the
drug was ineffective. They warned, “Additionally, in light of ongoing serious cardiac adverse events and other serious
side effects, the known and potential benefits of CQ and HCQ no longer outweigh
the known and potential risks for the authorized use.”
France, Germany and Belgium had already halted use in May. Many
U.S. hospitals had excess supplies on hand, and doctors had no desire to
prescribe them. British scientists, earlier this month, ended a trial, calling
the drugs “useless” in treating the coronavirus. The Infectious Diseases
Society of America (who knew) also announced support for the FDA decision.
But Trump still believes in the magic properties of the drug.
Because he took it, and look at him.
If he needs another dose, he’s got 63 million close at hand.
___
A soulless beast.
6/16/20: Proof that capitalism has no
soul. You can now buy “George Floyd” running shoes. For $18, you can also purchase
three pairs of “George Floyd R.I.P.” underwear.
This is not meant as a knock on capitalism in totality. But we
need to remember that capitalism is a soulless beast. That’s why the slave
trade was legal for centuries. That’s why child labor was acceptable in this
country until 1908. That’s why coal miners used to die in accidents by the
thousands every year. It’s why thousands of U.S. companies claim their
headquarters are in the Cayman Islands, so they can dodge taxes.
Take, for example, the decision of Thermo Fisher, an American
tech company, to work with the Chinese communist government.
(I know. Communism is a fatally flawed economic model.)
In the last three years, Chinese authorities have been gathering DNA samples from all males in that country.
Thermo Fisher has supplied testing kits, to Chinese specifications, to make
creating a data base possible.
Could you catch criminals more surely, if you had blood,
saliva, hair, or other genetic materials? Yes.
Could you catch protesters and anonymous critics of the
government if you had the same? You could.
Communist leaders will abuse the system, without doubt.
___
Bogged down in the coronavirus battle.
6/17/20: I’m not just a small-time blogger.
I’m also a fan of NFL football, especially the Cincinnati Bengals. So, if for
no other reason, I’m hoping we get a grip on the coronavirus and my son and I
can use our season tickets.
I don’t like President Trump one bit. But I’m not crazy. I do
hope the U.S. economy rebounds quickly. So, when I see a day where new cases of
the coronavirus seem to be declining, I’m hopeful. For example, 18,577 cases on
June 15. Not great; but lower than most days lately.
Then I check today. “Holy f---ing s---,” I exclaim. We have
another 28,392. Add those numbers to the total for the first fourteen days this
month and we now have 345,058 new cases.
That’s 21,566 per day.
It’s starting to look like we’re bogged down in the fight
against the coronavirus, like we got bogged down in Vietnam.
On Monday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott chastised young people, in their 20s, for not
following guidelines to combat the spread of disease. “People of that age
group, they’re not following these appropriate, best health safety practices,”
he said. “They are not wearing face masks, they’re not sanitizing their hands, they’re
not maintaining social distancing. As a result, young Texans “are contracting
COVID-19 at a record pace.”
Abbott’s state has moved up to sixth place, for most
infections. More than 2,000 Texans have died. An additional 2,300 are currently
hospitalized.
___
Bolton
torches Trump, jobless claims jump.
6/18/20: Unemployment claims for the last
reporting period totaled 1.5 million. That means the economy is still suffering,
despite the end of coronavirus lockdowns across most of the nation.
This brings the total who have filed for unemployment in thirteen
weeks to 46 million, a staggering toll. It also makes Trump’s brag
about adding 2.5 million jobs in May seem ludicrous.
I’m hoping that we’ll find at least ten million Americans
headed back to work when June numbers are reported.
But, holy shit! We’re in a deep hole, with an idiot as our leader.
*
Meanwhile, Team Trump is desperately trying to block release
of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s new book. The cover story they’re
floating is that Bolton has included “classified information.”
Since advance copies have already gone out to news
organizations it may be too late to avoid the real damage. That is, damage to
the image of Donald J. Trump. According to The New York Times, Bolton is
said to have torched the president in his book. Start with the small idiocies.
Bolton said his boss had to ask if Finland was part of Russia. (Dear MAGA fans:
It’s not.) Trump also had to ask if Great Britain, one of our closest allies,
had nukes. (It has since 1952).
Then you have the serious issues—the threats to the rule of
law—and diplomacy shaped in service to the president’s personal interests, not
the nation. Bolton says he heard Trump offer “personal favors to dictators he
liked,” including the leaders of Turkey and China. It wasn’t just Trump asking
Ukraine to get the dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden, and Hillary Clinton, if they
wanted military aid. Trump did do that, Bolton says. It was worse than that,
though. “The pattern,” Bolton writes, in regard to Trump’s foreign policy-making
decisions, “looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life,” It was the president promising to “intervene in
investigations into
companies like Turkey’s Halkbank to curry favor with President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan of Turkey or China’s ZTE to favor Mr. Xi.”
According to Bolton, during
negotiations with North Korea even Sec. of State Mike Pompeo had had more of
Trump than he could stand. Bolton says Pompeo passed him a note, saying of
their boss, “He is so full of shit.”
Expect Pompeo to kiss Trump’s
ass and deny he passed said note. Expect Bolton to still have it?
One can only hope.
____________________
“John Bolton is a patriot and may know that I held back the
money from Ukraine because it is considered a corrupt country…”
President Donald J. Trump
____________________
On the topic of ass-smooching,
you may forget the sequence of events revolving around Bolton, the Trump
impeachment hearings, and, later, the no-witnesses-trial put on in the U.S.
Senate. First, the Democratic House committees investigating Trump’s dealings
with Ukraine subpoenaed Bolton. Next, the White House blocked his testimony and
Team Trump ignored all House subpoenas. When it was their turn to examine the
matter, Senate Republicans puckered up and decided not to invite Bolton to
testify, even though he said he was willing.
It’s kind of fun now to remind Trump fans what their
orange-tinted hero tweeted during the early stages of the impeachment
investigation:
The D.C. Wolves and Fake News
Media are reading far too much into people being forced by Courts to testify
before Congress. I am fighting for future presidents and the Office of the
President. Other than that, I would actually like people to testify. Don McGahn’s
respected lawyer has already stated that I did nothing wrong.
John Bolton is a patriot and may
know that I held back the money from Ukraine because it is considered a corrupt
country, & I wanted to know why nearby European countries weren’t putting
up money also.
Bolton now writes that he
suspected ulterior motives all along, in President Trump’s dealings with
Ukraine. As related
by the Times:
On
Aug. 20, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Trump “said he wasn’t in favor of sending them
anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and
Biden had been turned over.” Mr. Bolton writes that he, Mr. Pompeo and Defense
Secretary Mark T. Esper tried eight to 10 times to get Mr. Trump to release the
aid.
That, according to Bolton, is the famous “quid pro quo,”
which Republicans in both the House and Senate swore at great length never existed.
On another occasion, an angry president suggested that “these
people,” his critics in the free press, “should be executed.”
Think about that.
MAGA fans will surely ignore this blast from a man who worked
in the White House. But we’ve seen this exact kind of thinking revealed in public
by this president. Trump has shown repeatedly that violations of human rights—by
Putin, Erdogan, Kim Jong-un, Roderigo Duterte and Prince Mohammed bin Salman,
to name a few—don’t bother him. At one point, Bolton says, Trump decided to
read a letter publicly, in support of bin Salman, who had ordered a journalist
cut up with a bone saw. Aides advised against it. Trump told his National
Security Adviser he going to do it to take the heat off his daughter, Ivanka.
At the time, the press was bearing down on a story about her use of a private
email server to conduct government business. You know—pulling a Hillary.
Bolton also writes that his boss told President Xi of China that
if he wanted to lock up millions of citizens (in this case Muslims) in
concentration camps, “Xi should go
ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to
do.”
On another occasion, Bolton
says Trump talked to Xi on the sidelines at a Group of 20 summit. Xi mentioned
that certain political figures in the United States were trying to stir up
trouble between the countries.
According to the Times:
“Trump
immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats,” Mr. Bolton writes. “Trump said
approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats. He then,
stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election,
alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns,
pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.” (Mr. Bolton says he would have printed
Mr. Trump’s exact words, “but the government’s prepublication review process
has decided otherwise.”)
*
You could tell, early reports about what Bolton was saying
were getting to the president. He was up late tweeting Wednesday, firing off
this classic of Trumpian philosophy:
Wacko John Bolton’s “exceedingly
tedious” (New York Times) book is made up of lies & fake stories. Said all
good about me, in print, until the day I fired him. A disgruntled boring fool
who only wanted to go to war. Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily
dumped. What a dope!
Trump also noted that Bush 43 had fired Bolton—failing to
mention that he didn’t fire Bolton. Bolton resigned.
Secondly, are we noticing a trend? According to Trump, he hired terrible people
and he suspected they were terrible all along. (See also: Mattis, Tillerson, Kelly, Omarosa, Cohen, Sessions, et. al.)
Thursday morning, Trump was right back at it, attacking
Bolton, before he could even finish his first bowl of Sugar Pops. For starters,
he retweeted someone named Max Blumenthal:
John Bolton, a notoriously
mendacious enemy of all living beings on the planet, is discovering what every
other great Republican hope of the Resistance has: liberals will eagerly lap up
any piece of hysterical Cold War propaganda if they think it can be leveraged
against Trump.
Trump then tweeted his own assessment:
Bolton’s
book, which is getting terrible reviews, is a compilation of lies and made up
stories, all intended to make me look bad. Many of the ridiculous statements he
attributes to me were never made, pure fiction. Just trying to get even for
firing him like the sick puppy he is!
If you follow this delusional president on Twitter, as, for
some unfathomable reason, I do, you know he has referred to a rather large
number of human beings as “sick,” “sick puppies,” or some variation of that
theme.
For example, you have: CNN anchors: “sick losers.” Lamestream
media, “corrupt & sick.” Rep. Adam Schiff, “a very sick man,” “sick puppy,”
“he is sick.” Nancy Pelosi, “a very sick person.” Crooked Hillary, “sick.” The
New York Times, “a very sick joke,” “sick journalism.” Bette Midler, “a
sick scammer.”
And the list keeps growing: Democrats: “sick and disgusting.”
Chris Cuomo, “dumb and sick.” Sleepy Joe and Democrats, “sick & demented
ideas.” Reporters he doesn’t like: “very dangerous and sick.” Mueller and his
investigators, “very sick and dangerous.” Peter Strzok, “sick loser.” Sen. Jon
Tester, “very dishonest and sick.” James Comey, “very sick or very dumb.” Megyn
Kelly, “sick & the most overrated person on tv.” Karl Rove, “sick.”
My favorite, because Trump really loads up on some of his
favorite insults, would be his attack on Rosie O’Donnell, “a mentally sick woman,
a bully, a dummy and, above all, a loser.”
___
DACA
safe for now. Biden builds a lead. Trump depressed.
6/19/20: We had some much-needed welcome
news Thursday. In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court said that the Trump administration
could not overturn the DACA program. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for
the majority, called the reasons given for a proposed end to the program “arbitrary
and capricious.”
(Arbitrary and Capricious would be excellent names for twin strippers.)
For now, 700,000 young people, brought to the United States
illegally, when they were children, having grown up here, cannot be tossed into
the ocean, just so Trump can spite President Obama.
That’s it for good news.
*
We do have one “good news, bad news” story. A recent CNN poll
showed Trump trailing Joe Biden, 55%-41%, if the election were today.
That’s the good news.
____________________
Trump has every intention of muzzling the free press if he
can get away with it, and might in a second term.
____________________
Here’s the bad. Team Trump, always creeping in the direction
of authoritarianism, sent CNN a cease and desist order. They demanded that CNN stop doing polls, unless they could show Trump leading 100%-0%
I might have made up that figure. But Team Trump had to make
up the legal basis for their order. It was signed by Jenna Ellis and Michael Glassner,
top officials with the Trump campaign. Neither appears to have heard of the
First Amendment. “It’s a stunt and a phony poll to cause voter suppression,”
they complained to CNN, “stifle momentum and enthusiasm for the President, and
present a false view generally of the actual support across America for the
President.”
The
Trump campaign insisted CNN should publish a “full, fair, and conspicuous
retraction, apology, and clarification to correct its misleading conclusions.”
I think Ellis and Glassner might have been happy to see CNN go with a story
headlined something like this: TRUMP, LOVED BY ALL. NOVEMBER ELECTION CANCELED,
AS UNNECESSARY. CNN POLSTERS EXECUTED.
(Go
back to 6/19/20, for Trump’s thoughts on executing journalists.)
Say what you like about CNN’s coverage, whether
you believe it’s biased or not. If you don’t consider threats to the free press
a danger, you should read more about Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Chairman Mao.
Fortunately, the First Amendment still applies.
CNN executive vice president and
general counsel, David Vigilante, informed the Trump campaign that its “allegations
and demands are rejected in their entirety.”
“To my knowledge, this is the
first time in its 40-year history that CNN had been threatened with legal
action because an American politician or campaign did not like CNN’s polling
results,” Vigilante wrote in his response. “To the extent we have received
legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from
countries like Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect
for a free and independent media.”
So, the bad news?
Trump has every intention of muzzling the free press if he
can get away with it, and might in a second term.
Then, more good news. The CNN poll isn’t an outlier. If the
election were held today, Trump’s orange ass would be smoked. Here are the most
recent polls. It’s still too early to say the Trump family
should schedule a moving van. But we seem headed in the right direction.
*
After that, it’s just more bad news, including the fact that our
president is a moron. With the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus rising
once more, Trump told the Wall Street Journal he thinks testing
for the virus is “overrated,” even though he boasted about having “created the
greatest testing machine in history.” “I created,” he said. Not: “American
scientists created.”
If we stopped testing, though, he added, we’d be better off.
“In many ways, it makes us look bad.”
If we kept testing, and the number of confirmed cases in this
country (2.2 million as of Friday evening kept rising, and the number of dead (more
than 119,000) kept rising, yes. According to the president, it would make “us look
bad.”
In reality (a place the president rarely visits), Trump is
the man who looks bad. Not “us.” Because Trump said we were going to zero cases
back in February. Not “us.” We didn’t say that.
Trump also suggested in his Journal interview that he
believed some Americans wore masks, “not as a preventative
measure but as a way to signal disapproval of him.” I think he might be onto
something there:
___
Trump
rally a dud. Attorney General’s Trickery.
6/21/20: President Trump had his first
big 2020 campaign rally last night in Tulsa. If you’re a healthcare official
or, especially, the Narcissist-in-Chief, it turned out to be a bummer.
First, there were a lot of empty seats, even though, watching
the feed and offering fair and balanced commentary for Fox News, Trunmp-suck-up
Jesse Watters reported that the BOK Arena was “packed.”
Trump had spent the week bragging about how a million people
requested tickets to the event. He and VP Mike “Stuffed Suit Jesus” were so
excited they scheduled outdoor speeches to thrill the overflow crowd. The arena,
which holds 19,000, turned out to be more than spacious enough for the 6,200 fans the Tulsa fire marshal reported showed up. Outside,
that meant there was no overflow to address and Trump and Stuffed Suit Jesus
canceled their talks.
Trump blamed protesters outside, and the mean news media for
scaring away fans. On the streets outside, Black Lives Matter protesters and
Trump fans did argue. There were no significant incidents, although at least
one Boogaloo boi showed up armed with an assault rifle. For the president, who
cares about crowd size like insecure men care about penises, it had to be a
downer.
This is not to say that a future campaign rally won’t be
clogged with fans in MAGA uniform. The president has a loyal following. But the
problem of sparse attendance might not have to do so much with the “Fake News”
people, as the president’s botched handling of the COVID-19 crisis. From a
healthcare standpoint, the Tulsa rally was a colossal mess. For starters, six members of the advance team from the campaign tested
positive for the coronavirus, meaning they brought not only the President of
the United States to Tulsa, but also some germs.
If you were at the rally (which means you are the type who wouldn’t
be reading this blog), or watched on television, you know almost none of the
people attending wore masks. Social distancing was impossible, at least in
sections closes to the podium. Before the event kicked off, CNN did what I
thought was a fair interview with several Trump supporters waiting to gain
admission to the arena. One young woman, with pink-highlights in her hair,
spoke eloquently about why she loved this country and all its freedoms. “They
can’t make you wear a mask,” she noted, and it was “her choice” if she chose
not to. She was a grown woman, she said, and knew what she was doing. Freedom
of choice. She thought that was good.
This blogger generally agrees.
The problem was more complex. If she was already infected, or
if she gets infected at the rally, she is likely to infect others. People she
might infect didn’t have a “choice.” She just took a chance—and now she’s
coughing or sneezing around them. If she’s one of many Americans covered by the
Affordable Care Act (plenty of Trump fans are), any medical bills she might
rack up will cost taxpayers who do wear masks.
Also, “choice” is a good word, when talking about abortion
and gay marriage rights. But I digress.
____________________
“I have done FAR more than any President in first 3 1/2
years!”
Donald J. Trump
____________________
Beyond the friendly, if mostly-empty, confines of the BOK
Arena, the bad news for Donald J. Trump continues to build. The economy is
still being battered. The coronavirus isn’t abating. Nor are the Black Lives
Matter protests. John Bolton’s new book comes out on Tuesday and Trump’s poll
numbers are tanking.
We know the polls are starting to get to Trump, even though
he insists he’s the best president this country has ever had. Friday, the
neediest man ever to sit in the Oval Office tweeted, “Why are the Democrats
allowed to make fake and fraudulent ads. They should be called out. They did
nothing when they had the chance. I have done FAR more than any President
in first 3 1/2 years!”
Yes, FAR more. Like ten Obamas! Better than Lincoln,
Washington and those other guys on Mt. Rushmore, whoever they are.
You know Trump doesn’t know.
Sadly, for the president, even a delusional leader can’t run
from bad news forever. A poll in Iowa, a state Trump won by nine points in
2016, shows him leading Joe Biden by a single point, 44% to 43%. Currently, a majority of
Iowans, 52%, disapprove of the job the best president in history is doing.
Even more worrisome for Republicans, those polled favor
Democratic candidates in three of the state’s four congressional districts. Challenger
Theresa Greenfield also has a 46% to 43% lead in the race against incumbent U.S.
Sen. Joni Ernst. Ernst was not thought to have to worry. Now she does. Both
women have farm roots, which is good in a state like Iowa. Since they’re
politicians, don’t be surprised if they show up for campaign debates, dressed
in bib overalls and brandishing pitchforks.
*
Anything else we should be thinking about on this fine
Father’s Day? Indeed, there is. In the dark of night, so to speak, Friday,
Attorney General Bill Barr announced that the top federal prosecutor in the
Southern District of New York was “resigning.” That prosecutor, Geoffrey S.
Berman, a Trump choice for the job, a donor to the Trump 2016 campaign, and a
solid Republican, announced soon after that he was not resigning. Mr. Barr explained
next that the president was planning to fill the empty seat, which wasn’t empty—so
maybe the new guy would sit on Berman’s lap—with Jay Clayton, current chairman
of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Clayton, you will be happy to know, if you are a Trump fan,
has never served as a prosecutor.
Now, let’s see if we can guess why Barr and his boss might
want Berman gone. First, Berman’s office has been investigating two pals of
Rudy Giuliani, and Rudy himself.
Second, the move to oust Berman comes just days after
allegations lodged by former National Security Adviser John Bolton. Bolton says
in his new book—which the Trump administration absolutely tried to ban and burn
and have tossed into the deepest trench in the Pacific Ocean—that President
Trump promised to do the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a favor. In
2018, Bolton writes, Trump told Erdogan he would interfere in an investigation
into a Turkish company that may have violated trade sanctions against Iran.
Okay, guess which U.S. Attorney’s Office was investigating
that Turkish company. Yes! The Southern District of New York.
Third, it was Berman’s office that brought the case against
former Trump personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. You remember Cohen. Sent to jail
for three years, based on several felony convictions. If you recall, a certain
person was named as a “co-conspirator” involved in those felonies, identified
only as “Individual 1.”
Who was this unnamed person? Here is a helpful hint from the indictment
in United States v. Michael Cohen:
From in or around 2007 through
in or around January 2017, MICHAEL COHEN, the defendant, was an attorney and
employee of a Manhattan-based real estate company (the “Company”). COHEN held
the title of “Executive Vice President” and “Special Counsel” to the owner of
the Company (“Individual 1”).
A
federal prosecutor cut Epstein a sweetheart deal.
Last, but not least, Berman’s office moved to bring
sex-trafficking charges against Jeffrey Epstein, as reprehensible an individual
as ever managed to avoid a lengthy term in prison, such as life + 499 years.
Even after Epstein’s suicide in jail, where he was awaiting trial, Berman insisted
the case be pursued, out of respect for the “brave young women” who had
testified against Epstein during grand jury proceedings.
Again, you couldn’t make this up if you were writing a script
for a cheap Hollywood movie. Epstein had avoided serious jail time in 2008,
when a federal prosecutor named Alex Acosta cut him a sweetheart deal. I doubt
you remember, but Acosta was appointed to be Secretary of Labor in President
Trump’s first cabinet. Eventually, a federal judge accused Acosta of violating the rights of Epstein’s young
victims by cutting the great deal. And Acosta had to resign.
 |
| On Fox News, this was described as "packed." |
 |
| At least one Trump fan in Tulsa wore a mask and practiced social distancing. |
Postscript: Your favorite blogger is
reluctant to use dehumanizing terminology. (He taught history for decades and
knows how such language can be used, to the detriment of humanity. See, for
example, General Chivington, who justified the massacre of Native American
children at Sand Creek in 1864, saying simply, “Nits make lice.” Or, the
governor of Idaho, in 1942, defending the decision to lock up 110,000
Japanese Americans, 7 of every ten U.S. citizens, in relocation camps, but explaining
why he didn’t want any of the camps in his state.
“The Japs live
like rats,” he sneered, “breed like rats and act like rats.
“These animals taking over our cities…”
So, it was sad to see, during
the Tulsa rally, that Eric Trump has turned out to be just a less-jowly version
of his dehumanizing dad.
With his lovely wife, Lara,
standing by his side, Eric promised the crowd (sparse as it was) that his fine family would “keep the moral fabric of
this country” from being torn to shreds. What did Eric think about the Black Lives
Matters protesters?
He did not mince his words. “When you watch the nonsense on
TV, when you see these animals literally taking over our cities, burning down
churches, this isn’t America. That’s not what Americans do,” he said.
“Our” cities?
Interesting choice of wording. Protecting what is “ours” from animals? We know
Eric likes to go hunting.
At least three racist cops in North Carolina, would be happy to go along on any expedition
with Eric.
______
Revenge
of the Moustache.
6/22/20: If you missed John Bolton’s
interview on TV Sunday night, and don’t have plans to buy the book, I can do
you a favor and give you the highlights of what he told Martha Raddatz of ABC
News.
I can also save you the $32.50 it would cost to buy and the many hours of
tedious reading, since critics have been less than glowing in their praise of Mr.
Bolton’s writing style.
We do know that more than six million Americans tuned in to
watch, making the interview the highest rated program for the night. But that
means more than 320 million Americans were busy playing with their cats, watching
Korean baseball on EPSN, or wondering when in god’s name the coronavirus crisis
will end.
 |
| Bolton wondering why he ever took the job. |
*
You should know that Bolton’s portrayal of the president is truly
unnerving. And these are comments coming from a man who worked closely with the
president for 18 months and saw what he was like. (We know at least two former
cabinet members came away with similarly stark and negative views of the man
who hired them to help “drain the swamp.”) We’ve already highlighted some of
Bolton’s claims. (See: 6/15/20; 6/18/20.) My duty, as a blogger, is to shine
a light into all the darkest corners of Trump’s dishonest, dangerous
administration.
Martha Raddatz is a veteran journalist for ABC News. During the
hour-long show she elicits a number of startling
responses from Mr. Bolton. “I don’t think he’s fit for office,” Bolton says of President
Trump, near the start. “I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the
job.” As National Security Adviser, John Bolton’s job was to offer advice on
foreign policy and issues from around the world of importance to the nation. Trump’s
whole approach to such matters, Bolton said, was that there was no “guiding
principle” that he could discern. Trump’s only real focus: “What’s good for
Donald Trump’s reelection.”
What was Trump like, when it came to intelligence briefings,
Raddatz asked at one point? Most presidents take briefings almost every day.
Under this president, Bolton said, “The intelligence briefings
took place perhaps once or twice a week.”
Raddatz: Is that unusual?
Bolton: It’s very unusual. They
should take place every day. The president should read extensively the material
he’s given. It’s not clear to me that he read much of anything.
Bolton added that briefings
with Trump were different for another reason, one that shouldn’t surprise
anyone who has seen this president in action. Most presidents, Bolton says, listen
to the experts. During intelligence briefings with Trump, Donald talked
half the time.
(I am guessing here. But I
am guessing Trump’s favorite topic was the greatness and wisdom of Donald J.
Trump.)
Bolton
adds that he saw “an unwillingness on the part of the president, I think, to do
systematic learning so that he could make the most informed decisions.” In
terms of the day-to-day stuff” a president deals with, it might be okay “to be
erratic and impulsive and episodic and anecdotal,” which he says Trump was. In
times of crisis “it becomes not only important but potentially dangerous if
the president doesn’t maintain the focus on what’s in front of him.”
Raddatz: You
say that you were astonished by what you saw. [A] president for whom getting
reelected was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or
weakening the nation?
Bolton: Well,
I think he was so focused on the reelection that longer term considerations
fell by the wayside. So if he thought he could get a photo opportunity with Kim
Jong Un at the demilitarized zone in Korea, or he thought he could get a
meeting with the ayatollahs from Iran at the United Nations, that there was
considerable emphasis on the photo opportunity and the press reaction to it and
little or no focus on what such meetings did for the bargaining position of the
United States, the strength that our allies saw or didn't see in our position,
their confidence that we knew what we were doing. And I think it became very
clear to foreign leaders—that they were dealing with a president who just wasn’t
serious about many of these issues, to our detriment as a country.
Bolton brings up Trump’s focus on getting a trade deal done
with China. He wanted to be able to brag about the deal, but didn’t understand
all of the complexities. For Trump, it was all about getting reelected. And for
that to happen, he needed the continued support of American farmers. So, a deal
with China, for Trump, meant “how many more soybeans” were they willing to
purchase.
Trump seemed not to care about, nor understand the global nature
of the threat China posed to U.S. interests. “There’s the Chinese advance in nuclear weapons; their weapons
designed to counteract American presence in space, their effort to push us out
of the South China Sea, and make it a Chinese province,” Bolton tells Raddatz, “which
are issues that were very hard to get the president to focus on.”
If you’re a Republican, there’s almost
no reason to smile if you are watching the interview. Mr. Bolton does say, however, that there were
some successes for the Trump administration. He was happy, for example, to see that
“the Defense Department budget was significantly increased over wholly inadequate
defense spending levels in the Obama administration.”
(As a liberal, I keep checking the math on this matter. You
can find, for example, charts showing that the U.S. spends more for defense than the next
seven, or eight, or even ten next biggest spenders, combined. For Fiscal Year 2016,
President Obama sent a request to Congress, asking for $585.3 billion. which you would think would buy a
lot of planes and tanks and bombs. Then Trump came in and requested an “historic” increase, to $603 billion
for FY 2017. As is so often true, when Trump is juggling numbers, truth was no part
of his reckoning. He said he was calling on Congress to agree to a $54 billion
dollar increase, or an increase of 10 percent. His own budget director, Mick
Mulvaney, demurred, saying, the increase was only 3%.)
Now, back to the interview:
Raddatz: Describe to me, sum up
Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
Bolton: Well, I don’t think you
can do that. I don’t think there is a policy….
Bolton describes the way
policy was made in the Trump White House: “There’s
a decision, there’s a decision, there’s another decision.” There was no “coherence.”
Trump is a cook without a clue.
Or,
as this blogger might put it, Trump operates as a cook with no recipe, a cook
without a clue. You don’t know—and neither does he—if you’re going to end up
with cake or pie a loaf of bread. But none of them will taste particularly
good. The result in reality? “I think we’re in a weaker position around the
world. I think we have given up leadership in a wide variety of areas,” Mr. Bolton
says.
He
does say he’s happy Trump got us out of the Iran deal, crafted by President
Obama and several other big powers. So there are fig leaves for Republicans to
grab onto to cover their policy privates.
Raddatz
asks about the end results of such a scattershot approach. Bolton responds: “So
I think whether it’s after four years or eight years, whoever succeeds the
Trump administration is gonna have an enormous amount of repair work to do. To
me, as a lifelong conservative, this is extraordinarily disappointing. It’s a
huge missed opportunity.”
Again,
he offers a fig leaf, faulting Mr. Obama for “eight years, I think, of very
poorly designed foreign and defense policy.”
Then
Bolton snatches the leaf away. He describes Trump’s decision to curtail
military training exercises (what Trump called “war games”) involving U.S. and
South Korean forces, all in an effort to placate Kim Jong-un, as “an act of
folly.”
___________________
To be clear, I don’t think
North Korea is ever gonna voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons
program.
Former
National Security Adviser John Bolton
___________________
Again,
Bolton saw the president as a man in pursuit of a “big deal,” even if the
details of what that deal involved might not be good for the country. Raddatz
asked about Trump’s efforts to cut a deal with Kim Jong-un and the North
Koreans.
Raddatz: Why is this diplomatic
initiative so important to President Trump, approaching it this way?
Bolton: When we were in Singapore
for the first summit, one of the things he said over and over again—was to ask
how many press people were gonna be present for his final press conference. And
I think the final number, it was a very large number—as it should have been,
400, 500.
By the time we left Singapore, he was at 2,000. And I think that
number went up from there. That’s what he was focused on [emphasis
added]. That he had had this enormous photo opportunity—first time an American
president has met with the leader of North Korea.
And he got enormous attention from it. I thought it was a
strategic mistake. The U.S. itself got nothing from that. Donald Trump got a
lot. The United States gave much more legitimacy to this dictator. And didn’t
accomplish anything toward any meaningful discussion on the elimination of
their nuclear weapons program.
To be clear, I don’t think North Korea is ever gonna voluntarily
give up its nuclear weapons program.
Bolton was also surprised by
the way Trump dealt with autocratic world leaders. With Kim Jong-un, he lathered
on compliments. “Every president has
a style,” Bolton told Raddatz. “But the idea that—just this oleaginous—layer of
compliments to this brutal dictator would convince him that you could make a deal
with Donald Trump, I thought, was both strikingly naïve and dangerous.”
(Word for the day: oleaginous: oily,
greasy, obsequious.)
Raddatz: And when President Trump talks about Kim Jong Un, he talks about
these love letters, and these bromance. And—we love each other. Do you think he
really believes that Kim Jong Un loves him?
Bolton: I don’t know any other explanation. I think Kim Jong Un gets a
huge laugh out of this.
Raddatz asks Bolton about a story from his book. Did President
Trump ask Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to be sure to get a copy of an Elton
John CD, “Rocket Man,” to the North Korean dictator?
(Available at Walmart for
$13.28.)
Bolton: Well, he gave him an Elton John CD, I think. And he tried to
explain that calling him Rocketman was actually a compliment. And I don’t think
we’ve heard from Kim Jong Un what he thought of Elton John’s song. But that
would—that’ll be an interesting tidbit in history. But this is the kind of
focus that leads you to wonder whether there’s an ability to discern what’s
cosmetic here from what’s truly serious.
Raddatz: And you think what he did there is dangerous?
Bolton: I think when you’re dealing with the power of nuclear weapons in
the hands of an irrational regime, not taking that as seriously as he should
have was a big mistake.
(This blogger might suggest that since Kim’s regime is working
hard to float a submarine capable of carrying nuclear-armed missiles, that
Music Critic Don next send his pal a copy of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.”)
 |
| This guy still has all his nukes; and he's building more. |
“I
think Putin thinks he can play him like a fiddle.”
Bolton tells Raddatz he wrote the 500-page book because you can’t
get a complete picture of the issues from tweets, op-ed pieces in the
newspapers, or even TV interviews like this. He says that our worst enemies, China,
Russia, Iran and North Korea, have all taken the measure of the man in the Oval
Office: “But they see him as somebody who’s
fundamentally not aware of the trade-offs he’s making.”
Raddatz: So on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate Trump’s ability to
make a deal on North Korea?
Bolton: Well, I think it turned out, clearly at this point, to be
zero.
It’s possible that Bolton would rate Trump’s handling of threats
from Russia by assigning the president a negative number. Raddatz doesn’t pose
the question that way. She does ask about Trump’s relationship with Putin.
“I think Putin thinks he can play
him like a fiddle,” Bolton says. “And I think he sees that he’s not faced with
a serious adversary here. And he works on him, and he works on him, and he
works on him.”
Bolton adds that Putin “didn’t get everything he
wanted….But I don’t think he’s worried about Donald Trump.”
Raddatz asks, specifically, about Trump’s disastrous
performance at the Helsinki summit in 2018. Even most Republicans were appalled,
as was this blogger, who had to rub his eyes in disbelief. I mean, I wasn’t
surprised that Trump sounded like a fool.
But when he stood next to Vladimir Putin, and
said he believed the Russian dictator when he said Russian didn’t
interfere in the 2016 election, even though U.S. intelligence absolutely said
he did…
I mean, holy shit! For once, I agree with John
Bolton completely. He called it a “stunning moment.”
Raddatz: You said you were frozen
in your seat watching that.
Bolton: I…I…I…I….I thought I
wouldn’t get up. I didn’t know what to do. And it was…I describe in the book,
we went through a lot of gyrations. And I say…to try and explain it…I thought
Dan Coats, then the director of national intelligence, was close to
resignation.
Ultimately, he didn’t resign. And the president…found a way of…of
tryin’ to get out of it. But the fact is that the Russian threat to our
elections and the threat from China, Iran and North Korea in different forms of
cyber-attacks is very, very real.
And I viewed this before I joined the administration. I viewed it
while I was there, and I view it today. These are attacks on the Constitution
itself. These are acts of war against the United States.
All Trump cared about was
winning again in 2020.
In response to another question, Mr. Bolton said he thought
the Russians were still doing everything they could “to stir mistrust, to
undercut the legitimacy of our democratic institutions.” This, he explained, “helps
to paralyze America. And a weaker, more paralyzed, more divided America is in
Russia’s interests. They’re having great success at it.”
It might be nice to hear the president give similar warning.
He won’t of course. It serves his political interest to
divide his own citizens. Attack half, or a little more than half.
Win office again, with 46% of the vote.
Raddatz asks Bolton about something he wrote in his book, about
how other world leaders had “marked” the president.
Bolton: Yeah.
I think—I think many of these foreign leaders—mastered the art of ringing his
bells. And some were better at it than others. Chancellor Merkel of Germany had
no success. I don’t think she tried. I think she just tried to say what her
position was, like a normal leader would do, and expect a response. Didn’t get
it. But the dictators seem to be better at it than the leaders of the
democracy. And I just hope that pattern is not gonna persist if he’s reelected.
(Translation: Trump was easily duped. Our enemies, in
particular, were able to flatter the Orange Fool, and bend him in the direction
they wanted.)
Using national security to advance his own political
position.
Raddatz: You
wrote that Ukraine was a perfect example of Trump working for his own best
personal interests. Explain.
Bolton: [Trump
believed the previous government in Ukraine had been] part of a conspiracy to
take him down….
But he wanted a probe of Joe Biden in exchange
for delivering the security assistance that was part of the congressional legislation
that had been passed several years before. So that in his mind, he was
bargaining to get the investigation, using the resources of the federal
government, which I found very disturbing.
And I found it using national security to advance
his own political position. Now, in the course of the impeachment affair, the
defense of the president was he cares about the general corruption in the
Ukraine. And that was on his mind. That’s utter nonsense.
There’s corruption all over the world. The
corruption he was concerned about in Ukraine was that they tried to take him
down. And that, to me, was something that I found very disturbing. So did a lot
of other people in very senior levels in the government. I describe that
in the book. And our objective was to find a way to get the president to
approve the security assistance, the military aid, and get it delivered, and
not tie it to an investigation of his political opponents.
Bolton tells Ms. Raddatz that he “believes it was
widely understood at top levels of the U.S. government that a quid pro quo
was in the works.” If you remember the impeachment hearings in the U.S.
House of Representatives, and the sham “trial” in the U.S. Senate, you might
remember that Republican lawmakers like Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Ron Johnson,
Rep. Devin Nunes, and Rep. Jim Jordan were all on record. They all agreed there
was no quid pro quo. And Democrats were dastards for saying there was. But here
was Bolton, making it clear. There was.
Raddatz: Can you tell us who else
understood that?
Bolton: Well, I think Secretary
Pompeo understood. I think the Pentagon understood. I think the intelligence
community understood. I think people in the White House understood. He wasn’t—president
wasn’t shy in voicing the view of the Ukraine—that, that’s what he wanted.
“And it’s not the first time, either.”
Raddatz: I want to go to some
specifics on Ukraine. August 20 comes a key conversation you had with President
Trump about the security assistance. What exactly did the president say to you?
Bolton: Well, he directly linked
the provision of that assistance with the investigation. My objective here,
people in the aftermath, in light of the impeachment investigation thought that
those of us like Pompeo and [Mark] Esper and myself should have been sort of
junior woodchuck FBI agents looking for evidence of impeachable offenses.
What we were all tryin’ to do was get the assistance released to
the Ukraine. Because it was in America’s interests to do so. We’d worry about
the Biden thing later. And I told the White House counsel, I told the Justice
Department about these conversations. That’s what I thought I should do. Because
I was very concerned about them. But my objective as national security advisor
was to carry out the president’s own policy since he had agreed to the legislation
to get this assistance sent.
Raddatz: Back to the August 20
conversation. What exactly do you remember him saying?
Bolton: Well, I lay out in the
book my recollection of the sentence. But the linkage, the specificity of the
linkage, I think, was unmistakable.
Raddatz: He said in the book, he
said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia
investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over.
Bolton: Right.
Raddatz: So this was not the first
time you heard the president himself directly link the investigation and the
Ukraine aid? Or was it?
Bolton: No. There were other
conversations, some of which involved Rudy Giuliani, or references to Rudy
Giuliani or others—where this connection was becoming clear. The conversation
in August was the crispest indication of the linkage. But indirectly, and by
clear implication, it had been growing for quite some time.
Raddatz: The New York Times
reported on that August conversation. And the president denied it, tweeting, “I
never told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to
investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens.” Is the president lying?
Bolton: Yes, he is. And it’s not
the first time, either. This is why I think it’s important to get these kinds
of facts out on the table.
…There was no doubt this was political. And what
he was able to do during impeachment was convince people that somehow he only
had the issue of corruption in the Ukraine in mind. And that was the least
of his concerns.
*
Raddatz asks Mr. Bolton why he decided not to testify
before the House or Senate, since he has now made it clear he found the
president’s behavior “deeply disturbing, possibly criminal.” Didn’t he have an
obligation to “tell the American people about this,” she asks?
Bolton tells her he was “fully prepared” to testify, if he “got a
subpoena like everybody else who testified.”
And if you really care, he says he thinks
the Democrats in the House of Representatives badly mishandled the impeachment
proceedings. “I think it was impeachment malpractice,” Mr. Bolton says.
He says Democrats rushed the process, to fit their political
schedule. “Now, I find that conduct almost as bad and somewhat equivalent to
Trump,” he tells Raddatz. In his view, they failed in “one of the gravest
constitutional responsibilities the House of Representatives has, the power of
impeachment.”
That, comment about Democrats being “almost as bad and
somewhat equivalent to Trump” makes the Fox News headlines (below).
But it’s by no means Bolton’s main point.
Bolton isn’t pulling any punches. He tells Ms. Raddatz he’s fearful
if Trump should manage to secure a second term. Impeachment didn’t sober him. The
president, Bolton says, “didn’t learn lessons from it, other than that he could
get away with it, which leaves only the last guardrail…the election this
November.”
Raddatz: This
is what Michael Purpura said during the impeachment hearings, the president’s legal
counsel: “Not a single witness testified that the president himself said that
there was any connection between any investigations and security assistance, a
presidential meeting, or anything else.” You could have been that person
providing that testimony.
Bolton: Yeah.
And it would not have made any difference. The…
Raddatz: How
can you say that? How do you know…
Bolton:
Because minds—because minds were made up on Capitol Hill.
Raddatz: You
also use the phrase in the book that Trump’s pattern looked like obstruction
of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept. Obstruction of
justice as a way of life?
Bolton: Look,
these were things that I could see some evidence of. And they bothered me
greatly. I talked to the attorney general about them. I talked to the counsel
to the president about them. I’ve talked to other members of the cabinet about
them and relayed my concerns. And they were very much on my mind.
Raddatz: So you
were and still are concerned that some of these things were criminal,
impeachable, what?
Bolton: I
think the potential is there. I think it requires more investigation. It was
not my job to be a FBI investigator, or a [Capitol] Hill investigator. I had
plenty of other things to do. I referred the matters to the people whose responsibilities
they were. And it was their responsibility to go from there.
___________________
“The line here that was crossed was trying to use a foreign
government and to use the resources of the United States government to pressure
that foreign government to do something to help Donald Trump politically.”
John Bolton
___________________
Mr. Bolton reiterated points he had already made, regarding Vladimir
Putin. Unlike Trump, the Russian leader prepares rigorously for meetings. He
agreed, when Raddatz asked about the fiddle line, “And I can just see the smirk
when [Putin] knows he’s got [Trump] following his line. It’s almost
transparent.”
Raddatz asks about claims in the book, that Trump was
stunningly uninformed.
Bolton: Presidents
don’t come to the office—no president does, knowing everything. So it’s no rap
on anybody to say, “Well, they don’t know about strategic arms limitations
talks.” But when you’re dealing with somebody like Putin, who has made his life
understanding Russia’s strategic position in the world—against Donald Trump,
who doesn’t enjoy reading about these issues or learning about them—it’s a very
difficult position for America to be in[.]
Raddatz: And
you talk about other adversaries and dictators who looked at Donald Trump in
the same way and marked him. Who are they?
Bolton: Well,
I think Xi Jinping would be right up there with Putin in his ability to look at
Donald Trump and say, “This is somebody that we can move ultimately on our
side.”
Bolton talks again about the Ukraine debacle. He understands
that going after political opponents is not abnormal. “Politically, that’s
fine. That’s what politicians do,” he says. “The line here that was crossed was
trying to use a foreign government and to use the resources of the United
States government to pressure that foreign government to do something to help
Donald Trump politically.”
He compares what Trump was hoping to pull off—to frame the
Bidens in necessary—to prosecutions under Josef Stalin. He mentions, “Lavrentiy
Beria [head of the secret police during Soviet times, who] used to say to
Stalin, ‘You show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.’”
He talks about Rudy Giuliani in somewhat the same role. He tells
Raddatz, “There are more fairytales coming out of Ukraine than I think people
can imagine,” many pushed by the Russians.
Rudy believed them all.
Trump believed Rudy.
Bolton says that the United States—or to be more precise,
Trump—blew an opportunity. When the people of Ukraine elected a new president,
the “overwhelming feeling of the
Ukrainian people” was that they wanted corruption ended. They wanted to be “tied
more closely into the West.”
Instead, Trump placed Volodymyr Zelensky, the new Ukrainian
president, in an untenable position
Bolton throws out another fig leaf, at least. He says he
doesn’t think Vice President Pence knew there was a quid pro quo in the works.
He says Mr. Pence worked hard to get Ukraine the assistance. Later, he says he
thinks Pence has done “terrific work” in his role in the Trump administration.
Raddatz asks Bolton about other incidents that “raised red
flags” for Bolton. Let’s keep it (relatively) short, and simply say there were
others. Trump basically promised to do Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a
favor and kill an investigation into Halkbank, a Turkish financial institution.
“And the president said to
Erdogan at one point,” Bolton tells his host, “‘Look, those prosecutors in New
York are Obama people. Wait till I get my people in and then we’ll take care of
this.’ And I thought to myself—and I’m a Department of Justice alumnus myself—‘I’ve
never heard any president say anything like that. Ever.’” Bolton says Erdogan
and his family use that bank “like slush fund.” He couldn’t see any way that
going easy on Halkbank benefited the United States.
He had the same kind of reaction when Trump told President Xi
Jinping he’d do him a favor and “rescind the penalties” the Commerce Department
had imposed on ZTE, a Chinese company that was violating American laws
regarding Iran sanctions. You might cut the Chinese a deal for strategic
reasons, Bolton admitted. “It’s quite another just to do it off the cuff, on the
whim, give your buddy Xi Jinping a benefit.” Mr. Bolton said—again—that he
found this “very troubling.”
Raddatz: …When
you put all that together, how can anyone come away, after reading your book,
and make any conclusion other than that you don’t think he is fit for office?
Bolton: I don’t
think he’s fit for office. I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the
job….I’m not gonna vote for him in November….I don't think he should be president.
“The
empty chair behind the resolute desk in the Oval Office.”
Raddatz: I
wanna close with where the country is right now and a couple of things….We’re
in the middle of a pandemic. How do you think the president has handled that?
Bolton: I
think he’s handled it very poorly….The main problem the administration has had
with coronavirus is the empty chair behind the resolute desk in the Oval
Office. In early January, people, whether on the staff of the National Security
Council or the Centers for Disease Control and elsewhere were saying, “This is
a potential problem.”
Donald Trump didn’t wanna hear
about it. He didn’t wanna hear about it because he didn’t wanna hear bad things
about Xi Jinping. He didn’t wanna hear bad things about China covering up what
had happened with the outset of the disease. He didn’t wanna hear bad things
about the Chinese economy that could affect the fantastic trade deal he was
working on, No. 1.
And No. 2, he didn’t wanna hear
anything about an exogenous variable that could have a negative effect on the
American economy, which he saw as his ticket to reelection….
And I think we lost a lotta time
because of that. That is an example of making policy out of your hip pocket,
without systematic consideration of what needs to be done, despite being warned
by the people charged with making the warnings that it was coming.
Raddatz: And
his response to the killing of George Floyd?
Bolton: Well,
I think the issue of resolving racial tensions in America is one that’s not
gonna be solved overnight. I think the president’s reaction—from his own
political point of view, which again, is the only thing he thinks about—was very
misguided.
Raddatz: How do
you think history will remember Donald Trump?
Bolton: I hope
it will remember him as a one-term president who didn’t plunge the country
irretrievably into a downward spiral we can’t recover from. We can get over one
term. I have absolute confidence—even if it’s not the miracle of a conservative
Republican being elected in November.
Two terms, I’m more troubled
about…
Raddatz: You
say President Trump is unfit for office and you’re talking about the election,
do you worry about his commitment to the democratic process?
Bolton: I don’t
think he fully understands the democratic process. I don’t think he fully
understands the Constitution. I don’t necessarily view that as malevolent. But
I view it as very (laughs) concerning that he does not appreciate the
proper role of the presidency.
In other words, you can see why Team Trump did everything
they possibly could to delay or hopefully kill the release of John Bolton’s
book.
___
6/23/20: The bad news for the country
keeps piling up. GNC, the health and wellness retailer, announces it will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and close between 800
and 1,200 of its stores. There are estimates that as many as 25,000 U.S. stores will close this year. The International
Monetary Fund now predicts that the global economy will contract by 4.9% in 2020. The estimated recover in 2021 is
also expected to be weaker than predicted as recently as April. If there’s a
major new outbreak of the coronavirus, the recovery will shrivel to almost nothing.
Meanwhile, in a speech to a group called “Students for Trump,”
at the packed Dream City megachurch in Phoenix, Arizona, the 3,000 young people
in attendance were clearly counting on God to protect them from the
coronavirus. Masks were conspicuous by their near-total absence. Social
distancing was impossible. But Trump was happy because people were cheering him
again. He told his listeners that they were the defenders of our culture. He
said they would never “kneel to the radical left.” He warned, without actually
citing proof, that Democrats wanted to let everyone vote, “even if they’re not
citizens.” The way the virus is spreading lately—with Trump getting a large, well-earned
share of the blame—and the way the polls are running, the Democrats won’t need help from non-citizen voters, even if they did
want it.
And they don’t.
With five months left until the election, you never know what
will happen. But GOP leaders have to be sweating. A poll of Montana voters last
month showed Trump favored over Biden by five points (45%-40%), but
in a state he won by 20 in 2016. Even more ominously—if your name is Milksop
Mitch McConnell—former Governor Steve Bullock, a Democrat, had a seven-point
lead in the same poll, over incumbent U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, 46%-39%.
___
“Knowledge
comes from the most unusual places.”
6/24/20: The coronavirus continues to spread to
every corner of the land—and President Trump can’t seem to get out of his own
way. At his campaign rally in Tulsa, Saturday, he told adoring fans that Covid-19 testing was “a double-edged sword.” If you tested more,
you found more evidence that the disease was spreading.
If the disease was spreading, it
made us look bad, compared to other countries, “us” meaning: Trump.
“I said to my people, ‘Slow the
testing down please,’” the president announced. And the MAGA crowd cheered.
But reality is a harsh place to
spend your workdays if you’re a delusional fool, like President Trump.
First, he took criticism, even
from Republicans, for saying he told his people to slow down testing.
Then Trump told a reporter from the
Christian Broadcasting Network, that he wasn’t joking, because he doesn’t kid
around.
Then the New York City Marathon,
the largest in the world, was canceled for this year. The coronavirus,
you know.
Then there was talk among leaders of the European Union
nations of banning travelers
from the United States, until we get our act together. But we can’t get our act
together, because our president is more focused on saving the statues of
Confederate generals, than saving the lives of his own citizens from the virus.
Today, he tweeted stupidly:
Very sad to see States allowing
roving gangs of wise guys, anarchists & looters, many of them having no
idea what they are doing, indiscriminately ripping down our statues and
monuments to the past. Some are great works of art, but all represent our
History & Heritage, both...
....the good and the bad. It is
important for us to understand and remember, even in turbulent and difficult
times, and learn from them. Knowledge comes from the most unusual of places!
Books for example! Team Trump is now fighting
hard to block Mary Trump, the president’s niece, from publishing a tell-all
about Clan Narcissism. As People magazine explains, her book, Too Much and Never Enough, will be, “according to her publisher, a ‘revelatory,
authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him.’”
The subtitle of the book: “How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous
Man.” That gives you a sense of why the president might not want the book to
ever reach America’s library shelves. Today, Robert Trump, his brother, filed a
motion in court, claiming the book would violate a confidentiality agreement, signed
by Mary Trump in 2001. According to her lawyers, however, that agreement covers
only matters related to a fight over the president’s father’s will.
You have to imagine that
President Trump is wishing his niece would fall into a bed of quicksand along
with the original manuscript for her book. Mary Trump has already admitted that she was behind the leak of some of Uncle
Donald’s tax documents to The New York Times in May 2019.
It should be interesting
to find out what other documents she might want to share. Maybe we’ll finally
learn: Does Donald J. Trump pay any federal income taxes? You know—paying his
share so that we can all drive on good roads, so our air and water are protected
and our military supplied with all the bombs and bullets it needs.
___
God picks Trump! COVID-19 not going away.
6/25/20: With the coronavirus acting as a giant brake on the economy, we continue to inch toward recovery. Today we learned that another 1.5 million Americans filed for unemployment. This marks the fourteenth week in a row marred by more than a million claims for benefits.
To put that in perspective, I’m 71 years old. The worst month for job losses in my lifetime would be 838,000 in October 1949. We’ve topped that fourteen weeks in succession.
Now that the economy is opening back up, hopefully we will learn, once the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, that as many as 15 million men and women (that’s my guess, though) went back to work in June.
It is estimated that 19.5 million remain unemployed.
Mark Hamrick, a senior economic analyst at Bankrate, explained our national dilemma. “Three months into the unprecedented economic downturn ignited by the COVID-19 outbreak,” he said, “the nation’s job market is mired in uncharted and heartbreaking territory.”
He was hopeful that “the worst of the economic downturn” might already be behind us. “But,” he warned, “the ultimate cure for what ails the economy is linked to medical solutions such as vaccines which are progressing, but still apparently months away from widespread availability.”
*
Well, don’t you fret! Because—according to Fox News—we’re going to be saved! Maybe not the godless liberals, though.
President Trump this week that he was honored to be told that God put him “in office for such a time as this.” He said Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, told him back in 2016, he was going to win the election “because God put you here for this occasion.” Plus, who could forget—as reported by Fox News—that in May, two college professors reported findings of a study they conducted. It turned out “that 49 percent of those frequently attending worship services believed that Trump was anointed by God to be president.”
Unfortunately, God apparently anointed Trump to be president and then do a terrible job.
So how is the battle against the coronavirus going?
____________________
That means the U.S. is averaging 24,442 cases per day in June—which is worse than in May, when we averaged 23,394.
____________________
Not so great. And thanks for asking. A large part of the problem, currently, is that Trump and his fans have decided masks and social distancing are for sissy liberals. But the disease continues to spread—and so long as it spreads, so long does the economy continue to stagger. We learned on June 19, that CDC had registered 32,218 new cases of the virus that day. That was the worst single-day tally since April 25. But the next day was a little worse: 32,411 cases. Then we had 27,616 and 26,657 cases. On June 23, the number rose to 34,313.
June 24: 37,667.
That brought the total of confirmed cases for the month to 586,602, with CDC numbers always posted a day behind.
That means the U.S. is averaging 24,442 cases per day in June—which is worse than in May, when we averaged 23,394.
The death toll is, mercifully, slowing, but as of Thursday evening, 125,796 Americans have died of COVID-19.
*
A large part of the problem relates to the president, himself, who has provided no leadership in terms of reducing the spread. Rather, he has downplayed the threat of death (coronavirus is really like flu), claimed his administration had it under control (it didn’t), said it would go away in April (nope), said when it got warm the virus would be gone like a miracle (no miracle in sight) and, most recently, said testing is overrated and makes us look bad. So, his followers don’t think they need masks, or need to social distance, so long as they have bleach to drink.
Reality, however, can be cruel. COVID-19 has been brutal. Last weekend, WAFB, Channel 9 News, reported that Louisiana health authorities had discovered that three bars in Baton Rouge—JL’s Place, Reggie’s, and Fred’s—all popular hangouts for LSU students, were at the center of a fresh outbreak. More than 100 young patrons and employees had tested positive for the virus. Health authorities explained that anyone who had visited these bars over the weekend should consider themselves exposed and self-quarantine. The spread to girlfriends, boyfriends, roommates, parents, grandparents, and the community at large was all but guaranteed.
The Oxford Eagle reported that the University of Mississippi was banning all fraternity and sorority rush parties after 162 students tested positive for COVID-19. “The director of the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life, Dr. Arthur Doctor, stated in an email that his office has ‘instructed all fraternity chapters to refrain from hosting recruitment or social events in Oxford or any other cities.’”
Last week, South Carolina, health officials warned that young people could contract the disease and end up seriously ill.
As of today, 4,160 of the 22,608 confirmed cases in South Carolina are people ages 21 to 30. This accounts for 18.4% of all confirmed cases in the state. Additionally, people in their teens account for 7.0% of confirmed cases.
“The increases that we’re seeing serve as a warning that young adults and youth are not immune to COVID-19,” said Dr. Brannon Traxler, DHEC physician consultant. “They also tell us that younger South Carolinians are not taking social distancing seriously.”
According to WYFF, Channel 4, South Carolina set records for infections three days in a row, with 987 new cases last Thursday, 1,081 last Friday, and 1,155 last Saturday. Seven of every ten hospital beds in the state were filled, including 673 patients with COVID-19. The good news is that states are ramping up testing—and identifying more cases. But the bad news is that in South Carolina increasing numbers were coming back positive: 16.2% in the that state. Clemson University, among the favorites to win the NCAA football crown in 2020—if there’s even a season—had to drop back and punt after 28 players and staff tested positive.
In Oregon, we learned again, how packing people into tight spaces can lead to super-spreader events. After the Lighthouse Pentecostal Church ignored warnings and held services for several hundred on May 24, the coronavirus erupted in Union County, in the northeastern part of the state.
Until then, Union had been almost untouched by the virus. A month later, 236 cases had been traced back to that church.
Where did faith leaders at Lighthouse get the idea to go ahead and return to normal worship? In an Instagram post, on May 22, they announced that “in accordance” with President Trump’s demands that churches be allowed to reopen, they would be back in action by Memorial Day.
And…cough, cough…they were.
*
Meanwhile, Florida broke its one-day record for most confirmed infections last Saturday, breaking the old record set last Friday, which broke the old record, set last Thursday. Case numbers, to be exact: 3,207, 3,822, 4,049.
Then, the record was blown to bits, with 5,511 new cases confirmed on June 24. “We have to take this very seriously,” one health expert explained. “We have a much worse problem now than at any point since the outbreak started in Florida.” Today was equally grim, with 5,504 additional infections.
Like many GOP leaders, Gov. Ron DeSantis at first tried to claim his state was doing great. The numbers were going up because the Florida Health Department was doing more testing.
You know: Trumpspeak.
The Orlando Sentinel shot that idea down, noting that the daily positive rate was 12.5% last Thursday, compared to 5.7% for the year.
Since 20.5% of Floridians are 65 or older, you can understand why DeSantis has a growing problem on his hands.
And, if you’re young, you might not die if you get the virus—but you might end up hospitalized and get a nice bill from your doctor. The Miami Herald recently began a story this way,
Sixteen people walked into a Florida bar. And they think they walked out with coronavirus.
It’s no joke.
All sixteen attended a birthday party at a Jacksonville bar. Not only did they enjoy ice cream and cake, they hugged and kissed, and now they’re all infected. At least seven employees of the bar have tested positive.
And that is how you spread the coronavirus.
Erica Crisp, a 40-year-old healthcare worker and one of the partiers, admitted her mistake on Facebook: “Welp, Florida opened back up and my butt should’ve stayed home this past weekend cause I just tested positive for the damn COVID. #IKnowBetter #MyFault #WearYourMasksPeople.”
According to some health projections, Florida now “has all the makings of the next large epicenter.”
*
Texas offers additional proof—that it’s not just blue states that end up getting hammered. This is especially true when red state citizens decide they’re different and they’ll stay safe if they go ahead and do what they always do.
And can we just say that birthday parties might not be a good idea right about now. Eighteen relatives in one North Texas family attended a surprise party for a daughter-in-law. The real surprise came later, when it turned out one of the attendees brought both a gift and some coronavirus germs. All eighteen persons caught the disease and three ended up in the hospital.
Like Florida, Texas has seen a disastrous rise in cases recently, and even if our president does think testing should be reduced, this headline from Texas might sober even the White House fool:
BUSINESSES FEAR THE WORST AS COVID-19 CASES CONTINUE TO RISE.
From North Texas, where a birthday party went awry, down to the Rio Grande, the disease is spreading.
Health officials [in the Rio Grande Valley] urge people to wear masks and practice social distancing to lower the spread. Some business owners we spoke to fear people have become too comfortable and forgot we are still in a pandemic. Doctors urge people to take this matter seriously.
“Our deaths have doubled in three weeks. We have people that are 40-years-old, 50-years-old, 60-years-old dying. Our average age of a person turning positive is no longer 60 or 70’s now it’s in the 30’s,” said Dr. [Ivan] Melendez.
Governor Greg Abbott warned yesterday that the state was facing a “massive outbreak” of disease. Tuesday, state health officials reported 5,489 new cases, the worst day for Texas to that point. Then, Wednesday, there were 5,511 new cases; and the number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 also reached a new high: 4,389. As with several of the hardest hit states, it wasn’t just increased testing (as Trump claims) that made the numbers look bad.
On June 23, the rate of positive results in Texas was 10.4%, the highest since April, when the state shut down. (See chart, below.)
 |
Texas positivity rates ares rising again and the state has way more cases.
|
*
Here’s an oddity related to the spread of COVID-19. Whereas President Trump seems to think we shouldn’t bother testing, those entering his august presence are always tested.
Sheriff Mark Lamb, of Pinal County, Arizona, made headlines last month when he said he would not enforce a state-wide stay-at-home order. Last week, he flew to Washington D.C. to take part in a White House ceremony, where the president would sign a toothless “reform bill” on policing. When Lamb arrived at the White House, however, he told reporters “one of the first things” that Trump aides did was test him for COVID-19. White House protocol, he was told. Anyone coming within a football field of the Orange Buffoon has to be tested.
So, here’s how it goes:
1. President Buffoon is safe behind a wall of testing.
2. That man loves walls.
3. Lamb tested positive.
4. Arizona is one of several states currently experiencing an explosive new spread of the disease.
We now know, Arizona health authorities have seen huge increases in reported cases since Republican Gov. Doug Ducey threw open all the doors on May 15, and said the state was back in business. You can understand his dilemma, and the desire of all Arizonans, and all the rest of us, to return to normal. It would be nice, however, if our leaders at least faced facts.
Banner Health, Arizona’s largest hospital system, warned on June 8, that they were seeing a steady rise in COVID-19 cases. “Our ICUs are very busy caring for the sickest of the sick who are battling COVID-19. Since May 15, ventilated COVID-19 patients have quadrupled,” a spokesperson noted. The hospital chain offered up the usual list of suggestions for containing the spread—including “avoid gatherings of more than ten people.” And this was June 8.
Since then, Arizona’s problem has metastasized. On March 21, the state announced its first 41 cases. Only twice, before May 28, did the state record more than 500 in a single day. Since then: 501, 702, 790, 681, 187, 1,127, 973, 530, 1,579, 1,119, 1,438, 789, 618, 1,556, 1,412, 1,654, 1,233, 1,014, 2,392, 1,827, and on June 18, a record-shattering 2,519.
Then three more bad days: 3,109, 2,592, 2,196.
Naturally, the governor has been forced to say he’s not worried. The hospitals are ready; the state, he says, is just doing a better job of testing. It’s increased testing that seems to show infections are rising.
Before the stay-at-home order was lifted, we know 5% of Arizonans who were tested turned up positive. According to Johns Hopkins University, the positivity rate in the state is now 23%, “topping the charts,” as it were.
Other states with the worst, current positivity rates:
South Carolina 16.2%
Mississippi 16.1%
Florida 14.4%
Utah 13.2%
Texas 11.4%
Nevada 10.2%
Georgia 10.1%
___
The innumerable crimes, follies and lies of Donald J. Trump.
6/26-30/20: No single individual can track the innumerable crimes, follies and lies of Donald J. Trump and his misfit crew of mediocrities. But it would appear, as June grinds to a sad end, that most Americans have had their fill of Trump’s divisive style of “leadership.” .
His approval ratings are dismal. His disapproval ratings are approaching a high for his presidency:
Typically, on Sunday, we had the president retweeting a video of fans in golf carts parading down a Florida street. Anti-Trump protesters were out in force and the profanity was flying. One Trump loyalist pumped his fist and shouted, “White power! White power!”
It was impossible to miss that howl, if you watched the video provided by CNN. Yet the White House claimed the president didn’t see it.
He just randomly retweeted it?
I wondered. If the clip were longer could it be that Trump missed that shout? Perhaps the anti-Trump forces drowned it out. Maybe the clip on CNN was doctored or the snippet might be taken out of context. I found a longer clip on Snopes, the fact-checking site. It was still impossible to miss. I checked again and found the original tweet. Yeah. Still impossible to miss, even though that one liberal granny is a real potty mouth.
*
Of course, June ended with the president seemingly in need of a visit an optometrist. A report surfaced this week that the Russians offered Taliban fighters a bounty if they killed American and British troops in Afghanistan. The New York Times claimed that Trump had been briefed on the matter weeks ago. Yet nothing had been done to challenge the Russians.
Trump’s current Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe (who earned his job by smooching the president’s fat posterior during the impeachment hearings) came to the president’s defense. He said neither Trump nor VP Pence had been briefed on the matter.
Didn’t see it. Didn’t hear about it. Didn’t read it.
Naturally, Trump attacked The New York Times for publishing the story. White House Press Secretary and taxpayer-funded liar Kayleigh McEnany also backed his play. Trump wasn’t briefed! “This does not speak to the merit of the alleged intelligence,” she admitted, “but to the inaccuracy of the New York Times story erroneously suggesting that President Trump was briefed on this matter.”
In other words, the report of Russian bounties existed. The President of the United States just didn’t see it. The Associated Press reported next that top White House officials were alerted in early 2019 about the plot. Somehow, Trump didn’t hear it. Next, the Times learned that the Brits had been notified of the threat. Trump didn’t know it. It didn’t help Trump’s case when officials said the bounty plot had been included in at least one of the president’s daily briefings “sometime this spring.” It didn’t help when the president’s former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, said, basically, “Yeah, I told him about this, a year ago.”
The president was forced to adopt a new line of defense. Maybe there was a warning in one of his briefings. Well, he didn’t read his briefings! He was always too busy. He liked people to tell him what was in those written briefings. Reading was hard! And no one told him about the Russians, except maybe Bolton, that “washed up Creepster” and “lowlife,” as Trump now described him.
It didn’t matter anyway. The information in the briefing wasn’t “actionable,” the president claimed, and even though he hadn’t heard about it or been told about it, nor had an angel come to him in the night to reveal it, he was convinced the information wasn’t accurate. McEnany told reporters that U.S. intelligence agencies didn’t agree on all the details of the plot. So, they decided not to bother a busy man, like President Trump, with such trivialities.
You know, American troops being killed for money.
Plus, Trump had other matters of import on his mind. Like saving the statues of Confederate generals—who used to work hard to kill U.S. troops—and did so with alarming regularity.
*
If Trump wasn’t briefed, what exactly was he doing with all his free time during the month of June?
The president’s state of mind is “fragile.”
Last Friday, he tweeted that he would be skipping a weekend trip to his private golf resort at Bedminster, New Jersey. He would be busy fighting off statue-breakers, hitting them with his putting iron.
I was going to go…this weekend, but wanted to stay in Washington, D.C. to make sure LAW & ORDER is enforced. The arsonists, anarchists, looters, and agitators have been largely stopped...I am doing what is necessary to keep our communities safe — and these people will be brought to Justice!
Sadly, Mr. Trump’s resolve fizzled within hours. Saturday morning, he headed over to his private resort in Virginia, where he played Round #272 of golf, since taking office. He had so much fun he went golfing again Sunday.
Round #273.
Golf tucker out Trump, and he decided to take it easy on Monday, too, with his only scheduled business: “Lunch with the Vice President.”
The good Lord knows, Trump is in need of R & R lately, because he’s having a miserable time being president. According to Fox News, GOP operatives say the president’s state of mind is “fragile.” He’s been feeling glum lately, as his approval ratings tank. According to Charles Gasparino, Republican insiders believe, if the numbers don’t improve, the president might pull a Sarah Palin. He might just drop out of the race.
Two weeks ago, Trump was talking about suing CNN (see: 6/19/20) because he didn’t like the poll numbers they were putting up, regarding the contest with Joe Biden.
Now, the polls agree. If the election were today, Trump would be ousted from the White House faster than you could say, “Donald J. Trump is a numbskull who should read his briefings.”
 |
| Trump could recover by November. Right now, the polls look grim for him. And he's incapable of admitting it. |
*
In other news, the Rolling Stones have threatened to sue the president’s campaign, after a cease and desist order to stop using their music at rallies was ignored.
At the rate Trump is going, he’s going to be reduced to piping in polka music. The estate of Tom Petty told Trump Campaign 2020 (Motto: “White Power!”) not to use his songs last week. The Stones join such luminaries as Rihanna, Pharrell Williams, Neil Young, Elton John and surviving members of Queen, who don’t want their songs played at his rallies.
Brendon Urie, frontman for Panic! At The Disco, might not be as famous as Mick Jagger. But he was blunt in opposition to the use of his band’s music. After the president waddled onstage in Phoenix last week, with “High Hopes” playing in the background, Urie tweeted, “Dear Trump Campaign, Fuck you. You’re not invited. Stop playing my song. No thanks, Brendon Urie.”
Like Trump or not, this is a great country, when an ordinary singer is free to tell the president to fuck off. In Putinworld, that singer would be heading for jail, or might just fall off a fifth floor balcony.
As he told Fox News, earlier this month, he thought Putin had “earned” a seat at the summit because he “helped us with the oil industry,” when prices plummeted in the spring. And, if the Russians had more money from oil sales...Hey, they could raise the bounty on the heads of American soldiers!
*
The big stories continue to be the twin spread of the coronavirus, which Trump refuses to admit, and sustained damage to the U.S. economy, a terrible secondary result.
Last Friday, after two months in the Witness Protection program, Vice President Mike Pence emerged from hiding. It was the first time the White House Coronavirus Task Force had held a public briefing in two months. For some reason, probably because we’re in the midst of a disastrous new wave of infections and the president didn’t want to be associated with that in the public mind, the meeting was not held at the White House. The Task Force met down the street at the headquarters of Health and Human Services. Trump has clearly given up entirely, in terms of leading in a time of crisis. He failed to make appearance.
Averaging 27,356 cases daily.
It was left to VP Pence to do most of the talking. It turned out that that good Christian gentleman had decided not to be hindered by the Ninth Commandment. “As we stand here today,” he told baffled reporters, “all 50 states and territories are opening up safely and responsibly.”
At that same moment, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas was ordering bars to close again, after a surge of infections.
“We flattened the curve,” Mr. Pence continued.
But my lyin’ eyeballs told me, when I looked at actual graphs, that the VP must be hallucinating. If I glanced at the numbers from the Centers for Disease Control, I did not see a flat curve.
I checked for June 25:
40,588 cases.
On June 26, the same day Pence was telling reporters we had flattened that nasty old curve, we had:
44,602 new cases.
That was a dismal new record.
I checked Saturday numbers and we had:
44,703 more cases.
That broke the “old” record.
Then Sunday, June 28:
41,075 additional cases.
Then Monday:
35,664 cases.
Finally, Tuesday, June 30:
43,644 additional infections.
That brought the total for the month to 836,978 cases. That was more than 100,000 cases worse in June than in May, when 23,394 Americans were infected every 24 hours.
June cases averaged 27,899 per day.
In fact, there are countries that have flattened the curve. But one of them is not the United States. You could check a story from National Geographic, if you wanted to see the difference.
*
It was obvious that Mr. Pence had been tasked with selling the latest line of Trump administration horse manure. He did the best he could. He was excited, he said, to note that fewer people were dying—even though the U.S. remains #1 in terms of an ability to ensure that large numbers of citizens pass to the Great Beyond in rapid order.
Ah, Brazil! Led by another virus denier, Jair Bolsonaro. At a time when Trump was insisting the U.S. was headed for “zero cases,” Bolsonaro was tweeting videos of himself visiting shopping districts, and telling everyone to take the unproven drug chloroquine, and they’d be fine.
In fact, the last world leader Trump met with before the virus began spreading unchecked in the U.S., was…Jair Bolsonaro, on March 7, at a lavish party at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump spent the last few days of June tweeting, golfing, and telling everyone that the COVID-19 picture was in fact rosy. In a call to Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, the president insisted his administration was doing a great job of controlling the spread, especially because of his great border wall with Mexico. If it weren’t for his big beautiful wall (which is mostly incomplete) the coronavirus “would be infecting lives like nobody’s ever seen before.” Trump bragged about the low mortality rate in this country. Like the best mortality rate in the world.
Hannity didn’t question his numbers.
“So, we have more cases, because we do the greatest testing. If we didn’t do testing, we’d have no cases. Other countries they don’t test millions,” the president continued. “If we didn’t do tests, we’d look great.”
That was the new strategy. Don’t test and you won’t know Grandma has the virus. And when she goes to the hospital, tell your kids, “Grandma didn’t die when she went to ICU. She’s living on a farm in upstate New York, with a new family. And they take great care of her there.”
Unfortunately, even if we adjust for population, the United States still looks terrible, coming in at #9, with 394 dead per million.
Here is the list of all the countries (including two postage-stamp size jurisdictions) with higher death tolls, adjusted for population:
Andorra
Belgium
France
Italy
San Marino
Spain
Sweden
United Kingdom
That’s it. That’s the entire list. And thank you, Donald J. Trump, for your fine leadership! We’re in the top ten, and we’re more widely infected than almost all the countries ahead of us on the list.
I did a little more checking, because I had read that countries like Germany and France, hit much harder at first than the United States, had been doing much better flattening the curve. Germany had 498 new cases on June 30. France had 584. Andorra hasn’t had a new case since June 21, and San Marino not since June 23. Plenty of countries have a handle on this mess. Australia had 86 cases—but a “spike” for them—on June 30. Belgium had 103 on the last day of the month. Canada had 286, Finland 15, Iceland 5, the most on any one day since April 21. Italy had 142; Japan 117; Netherlands 50; New Zealand 0; Spain 301; South Korea 50 and the United Kingdom 814.
Sweden, unlike those countries—and like us—had not yet flattened the curve. Their numbers were rising, with 1,302 cases on the final day in June.
*
____________________
“You have an individual responsibility to yourself, but you have a societal responsibility because if we want to end this outbreak, really end it and then hopefully when a vaccine comes and puts a nail in the coffin, we’ve got to realize that we are part of the process.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci
____________________
During last Friday’s press conference, Vice President Pence said it was “good news” that more young people, as a percentage of new cases, were being tested and showing up positive. This was good news, he explained, because young people were less likely to keel over dead after contracting the virus.
That is when you knew Mr. Pence was reaching for any “good news” he could find, or making it up.
Pence also echoed the latest Trumpian line: We’re looking bad because the numbers of cases are rising. But, really, we’re just doing a great job of testing. The fact that positivity rates—the percentage of people tested who are infected—are rising is another worrisome sign.
According to Johns Hopkins University, positivity rates are increasing in all but eight states (numbers checked on the evening of June 30), with these states currently being hit hardest:
Arizona 24.4%
Florida 15.6%
Alabama 15.2%
Nevada 15.1%
Mississippi 14.1%
Texas 14.1%
South Carolina 13.7%
Georgia 11.7%
Utah 10.9%
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who can offer up the unvarnished truth because he’s not running for reelection, was less sanguine. He said we could not take infections in young people for granted, since they then spread the disease. He added that we had to take mask-wearing and social distancing seriously if we hoped to get the nation back up and running. “You have an individual responsibility to yourself,” he explained, “but you have a societal responsibility because if we want to end this outbreak, really end it and then hopefully when a vaccine comes and puts a nail in the coffin, we’ve got to realize that we are part of the process.”
See, for comparison: President Trump addressing a Tulsa rally, or a Phoenix gathering of “Students for Trump,” where masks and social distancing were almost universally ignored.
 |
| How many masks do you see? |
Meanwhile, President Trump was tweeting out the great news: “Our Economy is roaring back and will NOT be shut down,” he promised. “‘Embers’ or flare ups will be put out, as necessary!”
Got it? We were roaring back!
Trump supporters and Trump foes, alike.
Or not. If Texas were a country, it would have the world’s tenth largest economy. That’s normally impressive, but bad news, currently. The state is getting hammered by a surge of infections. On June 23, Texas surpassed the 5,000 mark for a single day, then totaled more than 5,000 cases again on June 24, June 25, June 26, June 27, and June 28, dipped on June 29 slightly, and then set a record with 6,975 cases on June 30. Bars were ordered to close again. Restaurants were told to limit seating to 50% of capacity. Slowing national and world economies meant dropping oil prices. Drilling across the state was halted. Many wells were shut down. And if Texas is hurting (and as of now it is), the U.S. economy is hurting, and we’re all in a leaking boat together. That goes for Trump supporters and Trump foes, alike.
California would be the fifth largest economy in the world, if it were a sovereign nation.
But that state has also seen a resurgence of the disease; and the California economy is in “free fall.”
Thrown in Florida, which would be the world’s 17th largest economy, if it were a country. Florida, where tourism fuels the economy, is reeling. Last Friday, health officials in that state announced that 8,942 new cases had been confirmed in just 24 hours.
On Saturday, the state hit a new high, with 9,585 cases; and on Sunday, fell back only slightly, to 8,530.
The economic damage continues to spread in all directions. The Bonnaroo Music Festival, which brings 75,000 fans to a farm near Manchester, Tennessee every year, and pumps millions of dollars into local, state and national economies, has been canceled for this year. Chuck E. Cheese has filed for bankruptcy, putting a serious dent in the bad pizza-for-little-kids’-birthday-parties business. The NFL is operating under the assumption that attendance will be limited in significant ways once the season begins (if it does). The league is telling teams they can plan to sell advertisements, placed on front row seats, since fans will (at best) have to be kept away from players.
Signs we’re in for a long down stretch economically are multiplying. Homeowners protected by the CARES Act passed in March, can postpone mortgage payments for 180 days without penalty. Interest on loans continues to accrue. But they don’t lose their homes. A total of 4.7 million homeowners have now taken advantage of the moratorium. They’ve piled up $1 trillion in unpaid principle that they eventually have to pay.
For those who rent, July payments are now due. Millions won’t be able to come up with the cash. In June, 30% of apartment dwellers didn’t pay on time. That was up from 24% in May, down only slightly from 31% in April; but a wave of evictions is coming.
U.S. airlines and the entire U.S. travel industry are about to suffer a devastating hit with the European Union banning most travelers from the United States. The ban goes into effect July 1. Because…we’re now one of the world’s hot spots for COVID-19 infections.
In other bad news, a record low 23% of teenagers, many hoping to save money for college, or land summer jobs that might become permanent, will be lucky to find employment this year.
*
Team Trump finally seems to be waking to the fact that if we don’t control the virus, we’re all in this together and facing economic disaster. On Sunday, VP Pence finally said, during a visit to Dallas, that, yes, all Americans should wear masks when out in public, if social distancing isn’t possible. That message was blunted by the fact he had attended church earlier that day, where a choir of a hundred sang lustily, without masks in evidence.
Even more to the point, Secretary Alex Azar, head of Health and Human Services, warned Sunday that the “window was closing” on our chance to keep the disease under control. Azar did want to make it clear that none of this was Trump’s fault, even if the president does refuse to wear a mask, likes to make idiotic statements about the virus—like drink bleach—and likes to hold rallies where masks are about as rare as members of minorities.
The government has all kinds of weapons now to fight the spread, Azar assured Jake Tapper on “Meet the Press.” The problem was…Americans! It was our fault. Not Trump’s. Not Azar’s. If we “act irresponsibly, if we don’t socially distance, if we don’t use face coverings in settings where we can’t social distance, if we don’t practice appropriate personal hygiene, we’re going to see spread of disease,” Secretary Azar explained.
Monday, Anne Schuchat, CDC principal deputy director, sounded loud warning. She told editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association that the novel coronavirus was now spreading too widely and too quickly to contain.
“This is really the beginning, and what we hope is that we can take it seriously and slow the transmission.”
The president is a science denier and an ill-informed lout.
Without mentioning names, she said there was “a lot of wishful thinking around the country” that the pandemic would soon be over. “We are not even beginning to be over this,” she said. “We’re not in the situation of New Zealand or Singapore or Korea, where a new case is rapidly identified and all the contacts are traced and people are isolated who are sick and people who are exposed are quarantined and they can keep things under control.” No, we’re not. Because Donald J. Trump is a science denier and, generally speaking, an ill-informed lout.
On Tuesday, the four health heads of the White House Coronavirus Task Force testified before a U.S. Senate committee. Dr. Fauci said he found current trends, “very disturbing.” He warned it was possible, if people continued to refuse to follow health guidelines, that we could hit 100,000 new cases per day.
Asked by Sen. Elizabeth Warren if he thought—like Pence and Trump—that we were going in the right direction, he replied,
Well I think the numbers speak for themselves. I’m very concerned and I’m not satisfied with what’s going on because we’re going in the wrong direction if you look at the curves of the new cases, so we really have got to do something about that and we need to do it quickly.
Dr. Fauci, CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn and Admiral Brett Giroir, M.D. were asked if they thought all Americans should be wearing masks when out in public—should the federal government provide masks at no cost—and would this save thousands of lives?
Fauci: “Yes.”
Redfield: He said he was in favor of “universal masks.”
Hahn agreed.
Giroir: “Yes….When I’m not in uniform,” he said, “I wear them.” He held one up. “They’re white. They work very effective, and I think they’re a great investment for the American people.”
The gloomy predictions of the four experts clearly angered Sen. Rand Paul. He went on a rant about the “fatal conceit” of expert opinion, small groups of highly-educated people, who wanted to tell the rest of us how to live.
At one point he glared at Dr. Fauci and almost asked plaintively, why we couldn’t just have “a little more optimism” at times.
You know—like Vice President Pence.
And Trump.
*
In other health-related news, Team Trump has decided that the middle of a pandemic is a perfect time to push the U.S. Supreme Court to blow Obamacare to smithereens.
If the court rules with Trump, and overturns the entire law as he hopes, an estimated 20 million Americans could lose health insurance. If you have a pre-existing condition, the protections you enjoy under the Affordable Care Act will be eliminated. So, try not to get sick!
Wear that mask.
___
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