Trump's Season of Discontent, Part II: Even More Discontented (July 1, 2020 - September 10, 2020)

   

THE TRUMP ARCHIVE

UPDATED 3/6/23

July 1, 2020: President Trump attacked former Vice President Joe Biden today, accusing him of speaking coherently. 

After Mr. Biden appeared for a press conference yesterday, his first in three months, and spoke in complete sentences, the president exploded. Trump claimed without evidence, that Biden had been fed questions and was reading prepared answers off a teleprompter. Trump was upset because Biden used big words like “rigorous” and “exhorted,” pronounced them correctly, and knew what they meant. 

Biden blasted Trump for his bumbling effort to address the COVID-19 outbreak. He said the self-styled “wartime” president had “surrendered” and had no plan to address a renewed spread.

The Centers for Disease Control reported that for the day, the U.S. set a record for most cases in a 24-hour period: 

54,357 fresh infections. 

*

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If we all wore masks, we could avoid an additional five percent reduction in GDP.  

Goldman Sachs analysis

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WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, Mr. Trump turned up on Fox Business for a fluff interview with Blake Burman. Burman started off by noting that Goldman Sachs estimated a national mandate that we all wear masks would slow the spread of the virus. If we all wore masks, we could avoid an additional five percent reduction in GDP.  If, Burman wondered, such a mandate would be a “net positive” for the economy, and save thousands of lives, why didn’t Trump call for a mandate? 

The president claimed he was “all for masks” in the fight against the virus. He said he had worn one himself. People had even seen him! (Melania, Barron?) Burman let Trump get by with saying he liked the way he looked in a mask. Trump said he thought he resembled the Lone Ranger, assuming the Lone Ranger had been a doughy, orange septuagenarian with bad hair. 

And wore a mask over his mouth and nose, not his eyes.

___

7/2/20: A ray or two of light have penetrated clouds of gloom hovering over the U.S. economy. 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that the U.S. economy “added” 4.8 million jobs in June. 

You don’t have to be a Trump fan to be happy to hear that news, nor to be relieved that the figure for May was revised upward to show that 2.7 million jobs were “added” the previous month. 

The broader picture is grim. The unemployment rate stands at 11.1%. Only a massive infusion of federal Monopoly money has kept the economy from sinking like a Trump-shaped chunk of granite to the bottom of the sea. In another sign of trouble, the labor participation rate remains depressed, at 61.5%. That’s 1.2 percentage points lower than the day Trump took office. We’ll need to add 1.9 million jobs next month, and avoid further layoffs, just to get back to the level where we were when President Obama left the White House.

 

* 

IF YOU WANT unalloyed good news, we have some. Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion and alleged accomplice in a decades-long sex abuse operation, was arrested by F.B.I agents in Bradford, New Hampshire. Maxwell’s indictment charges her with “helping Epstein to recruit, groom, and ultimately abuse” more than a hundred girls, some as young as 14. She is said to have been an enthusiastic participant in the abuse, as well. 

Expect prosecutors to slap her with as many felonies as they can think of, in hopes Maxwell will sing about the rich and famous who took part in the debauchery at Epstein’s mansions, apartments and island homes round the world. England’s Prince Andrew has been accused of involvement. A victim has claimed that Alan Dershowitz, staunch defender of President Trump during his impeachment “trial,” took part in the debauchery. Even more depressing, Donald Trump is known to have hung out with Epstein. 

Bill Clinton also hitched a ride to Africa on Epstein’s private plane, nicknamed by observers “The Lolita Express.” 

Donald, Melania, Epstein, Maxwell. 

*

THE NEWS concerning the coronavirus is not good. For a second day the U.S. surpassed the fifty-thousand mark with,

 

52,730 new cases.

___

7/3/20: Sometimes I like to check in with Fox News, just to see what the other side is saying. Today the topic is statues. 

According to Fox, if we let people knock over statues of assorted Confederate generals, slave owners and slaughterers of Native Americans, we won’t be the country Fox viewers love. According to Fox anchor Carley Shimkus, an attractive young blonde, if we allow the statues to be toppled, democracy is doomed. Capitalism is finished. 

Hey? Where’s Ed Henry? 

Oh yeah. He got fired for sexual harassment, joining Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Eric Bolling and James Rosen on the Fox News sidelines.

 

* 

Round table discussions at Hooters! 

ANYWAY, statues, Ms. Shimkus says, are the real issue and we have to save capitalism. Someone should explain to the Fox News host that slave trading was considered a good business model under the capitalist system. Today, Big Pharma displays the same level of ethics. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has announced that Novartis, the Swiss drug manufacturer, has admitted to an illegal kickback scheme to boost sales of its fine products. Doctors were treated to meals at the world’s finest restaurants, with “top-shelf alcohol” to wash down viands, to golf outings, and to round-table discussions at less impressive eateries. Such as Hooters. 

Nothing says, “We are here for serious discussion,” like holding a round-table at Hooters. Doctors who pushed enough of Novartis’s drugs could be awarded “honorariums” for speaking at seminars, worth as much as $300,000.

According to prosecutors, Novartis spent hundreds of millions over the course of a decade to perpetuate this scheme. It worked well and doctors prescribed billions of dollars’ worth of Novartis drugs, at exorbitant prices. Fraudulent prescriptions were filed with Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans Affairs. 

After fighting a lawsuit, touched off by a whistleblower complaint, Novartis has agreed to pay a fine of $678 million.

 

* 

AT FOX NEWS, they’ve been working hard to scare viewers with talk of socialism on the march across America. Team Trump has already started marching. (See, for example, billions in payouts to farmers, to make up for damage done during Trump’s tariff war with China.) Now the federal government is taking a 30% stake in YRC Worldwide, a struggling trucking company. 

In return, “We the People,” will hand over $700 million. YRC Worldwide caught a break because it hauls military equipment for the Department of Defense. That means the company is considered a “critical vendor.” 

Interestingly enough, YRC is also being sued – by the U.S. government – for ripping off taxpayers. 

It’s like “We the People” are suing ourselves.

 

* 

IN OTHER FOX NEWS, we learned Thursday that Andy Puzder is excited. He says we’re in a “V-shaped” economic recovery. This is exactly what President Donald Trump has been predicting! 

Unfortunately, worrisome signs abound. Macy’s reported this week that it suffered a second quarter loss of $3.58 billion. The company will cut 3,900 corporate and management level positions. General Motors reported a 34% decline in sales. Fiat Chrysler sales slumped 38.6%. McDonald’s announced it will pause a planned reopening for dine-in service. Even more troubling, while the U.S. economy was “adding” millions of jobs in June, in the last weekly reporting period an additional 1.4 million Americans filed for unemployment. That was the fifteenth week in a row with more than a million needing help. In other words: not a V-shaped recovery.

 

* 

THE CORONAVIRUS continues to sweep the country. For a third day in succession, the number of new cases tops 50,000: 

57,718. 

Those infected this week include Herman Cain, former Republican presidential candidate, last seen at a Trump campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Kimberly Guilfoyle, main squeeze of Donald Trump Jr.; and eight members of Vice President Pence’s Secret Service detail. 

In a ripple effect, Greg Gianforte, GOP candidate for governor of Montana, and Kristen Juras, his running mate, are self-quarantining, after Juras and Gianforte’s wife attended a fund-raiser with Guilfoyle.

___

 

7/4/20: Happy birthday, America! You still look sexy at 244! True, your boyfriend, is an oaf, with authoritarian instincts. 

Still, election in November!

 

____________________ 

“Their goal is not a better America. Their goal is to end America.” 

President Trump

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Speaking of President Trump, he gave a big speech last night in front of a crowd at Mt. Rushmore. It was a pro-Trump crowd. That meant almost no one wore masks or made any attempt to social distance. 

First, the audience was treated to video of Trump bragging about what once had been. Just short weeks ago, we were doing “better than any country had ever done in history,” he said on film. “Film Donald” touted his own greatness while In-the-Flesh Donald gazed at “Film Donald” with rapt admiration. The coronavirus had sent the economy into a tailspin. Now, said “Film Donald,” we were “close to fighting our way out of it.” “We have a country that’s really making a comeback.” 

In-the-Flesh Donald smiled broadly as he watched himself brag about himself. “We had the best unemployment numbers, we had the best employment numbers, we had the best stock market numbers that we ever had, we were doing better than any country had ever done in history.” 

Other than that, Trump’s speech was “American Carnage Revisited.” The radical left, he said, was a “growing danger,” killing off many of our bronze statues. R.I.P.: Don Juan de Oñate. No one really cared who you were, even when your statute stood there on that pedestal in Albuquerque for decades.   

Trump’s political foes didn’t just want to expand Obamacare, raise the minimum wage, and allow LGBTQ individuals to have jobs. They didn’t just believe cops should stop kneeling on people’s necks until breathing stopped. “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children,” Trump glowered. “Their goal is not a better America. Their goal is to end America,” he cautioned. 

What about all those people marching for justice? Who were they? Trump wanted his almost entirely-white audience to know, and to know he would defeat them. “We will not be terrorized, we will not be demeaned, and we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people,” the President of the United States promised, denigrating a large percentage of the citizens he was elected to serve. “It will not happen.” 

The people protesting the death of George Floyd and other African Americans, weren’t interested in justice, he said. They formed “angry mobs.” They wanted to “deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.” Trump foes wanted to “attack our liberty, our magnificent liberty,” he told fans. They “must be stopped.” 

They “will be stopped very quickly,” he promised. 

The president said it was his job (with the aid of his followers) to “protect our nation’s children, end this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life.” 

Who were the enemies – besides protesters? They were legion. “In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.” Trump blamed liberal Democrats who run most of our cities, for “the violent mayhem we have seen.” Protesters weren’t mad because police kept killing black people for little or no reason. Trump claimed that the mayhem was “the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions.” 

If I caught his meaning right, he was going to save American culture from…cultural institutions. 

In any case, we had to save the children from America’s teachers! “Our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains,” the president said. He was stirring his base, as only an individual with hateful instincts can stir a base. His opponents, that large part of the U.S. population who felt we could do better in the battle against racism, were dangerous radicals. Their “view of American history is a web of lies,” Trump shouted. 

He turned to defending the four men whose stone visages appeared behind him on the mountain. As a former history teacher, I could do the same. Since I know the history, I could do it better, because when it comes to history, our current president is a dolt. 

It’s not a “web of lies” to point out that a pronounced vein of hypocrisy ran through the writings of Thomas Jefferson. Trump called him “an architect, an inventor, a diplomat, a scholar, a founder of one of the world’s great universities, and an ardent defender of liberty.” 

In my class, I used to have students memorize the key 84-word passage that is the soul of the Declaration of Independence. I wanted them to answer six questions about the ideals set forth therein. Those ideals are at the heart of what makes this nation unique. Still, it’s not a “lie” to point out that Jefferson had time to dabble in architecture because slaves performed the drudgery at Monticello. Jefferson could study and invent because others tilled his fields without pay. He was “an ardent defender of liberty,” but only for some Americans. He fathered several children by one of his slaves and could have sold them, had he so desired. 

Ah, but the ideals laid down in the Declaration, those are truly great; and the battle since has been to live up to them. 

Not down, as under Donald J. Trump. 

 

There’s your fascism, right there. 

I doubt our current president knows much about any of the four figures immortalized in Mt. Rushmore granite. I could tell him that George Washington was an admirable leader in almost all respects. Unlike Trump, our first chief executive lived by a code of conduct that stressed honor, duty, and respect for others. 

I could also explain to Mr. Trump (and his fans) that when British warships sailed up the Potomac River in 1781, a number of General Washington’s slaves grabbed their personal belongings and rushed to the waterside, to be taken aboard. This country is supposed to be about liberty –  and at its best it is, or tries to be. Washington understood the virtues of freedom. 

Those escaping slaves did too. 

I could wax eloquent about Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln. No bone spurs for Teddy, and off he went, a volunteer, to fight in the Spanish-American War. Lincoln? “With malice toward none,” he said. That’s a sentiment you’d never hear escaping from Donald Trump’s intolerant lips. 

I may be a liberal. But I don’t have any desire to “end America.” Neither do any of the people I know, most of whom are liberals of varying shades. We just don’t think Trump is a good president or even a good human being. 

In his speech at Mt. Rushmore, Trump promised to save the nation’s statues and establish a “National Garden of American Heroes.” It would be a vast outdoor park, he said, filled with statues of “the greatest Americans to ever live.” 

You know he envisioned himself, at least ten times larger than life, looming over that garden. 

With a final flourish, the President of the United States assured all Trump-loving Americans that they had nothing to fear but fear itself. And other Americans. He cried out against those who might dare to vote him out of office. “They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive,” he said. “But no, the American people are strong and proud, and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history and culture to be taken from them [emphasis added].” 

Yes, the American people would not allow the American people to…what? Exercise the right to protest? Use the vote in November to “take” America from Trump-loving Americans? 

There’s your fascism, right there.

* 

REMEMBER when Trump called himself a “wartime president?” We seem to be in full retreat. 

Florida set a record on the Fourth of July, with 11,458 new COVID cases. That broke the record set on July 2, when the state had 10,109. 

France, which aided us with troops, supplies and ships, and did so much to help Washington and his men achieve our independence, had 480 cases on July 3 and 448 on July 4. 

Across the U.S., new cases of coronavirus piled up again, with, 

52,228 on Independence Day. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Some years ago, fireworks at Mt. Rushmore were banned, after bark beetle infestations killed much of the pine forest surrounding the mountain. Climate change had allowed beetles to survive winters that used to be cold enough to kill their larvae. 

Trump helped overturn the fireworks ban at the monument, explaining in his typical, clueless style: “What can burn? It’s stone.” 

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (7/15/21): Governor Kristi Noem, who invited Trump to speak at Mt. Rushmore, and gave him the bust, went on to become one of the leading suck ups in the GOP. For a time, there were even rumors that she might replace Mike Pence on the 2020 ticket. At one point, she scored points with anti-maskers by riding mask-less into an indoor rodeo show on her horse (named “Hydroxychloroquine?”). Naturally, she had an American flag in one hand, the other on the reins. As for the danger of the coronavirus, Rolling Stone reports, 

“I choose to rely on science and data and facts,” said Noem, despite disregarding the actual science and data.

 

Then she pushed in all her chips. In August, she urged Americans to ride into Sturgis for the annual motorcycle rally. “We hope people come,” Noem told Fox’s Laura Ingraham. She lambasted the left’s negativity. “We’re in a good spot.” So the Harleys came and their riders drank beer and shot pool in crowded bars. They stood shoulder to shoulder, all 366,000 of them, as Smash Mouth’s singer screamed, “Fuck that Covid shit!”

 

In January 2021, Gov. Noem campaigned against two Democratic candidates in a special Georgia senate election. She called them “communists,” which would be about as accurate as insisting that Noem was a member of the Nazi Party. She isn’t. She’s just an imbecile. Or, as a writer for Rolling Stone describes her, “Trumpism with a cowgirl face.” 

Gov. Noem also plays fast and loose with facts. In 2010 she won a seat in Congress, as her political star began to rise. 

Noem was added to the House committee dealing with estate-tax issues, and in 2015 took to the floor and spoke about how the federal government made her family’s situation ever more desperate.

 

“It wasn’t very long after [her father] was killed that we got a bill in the mail from the IRS that said we owed them money because we had a tragedy happen to our family. … I chose to take out a loan, but it took us 10 years to pay off that loan to pay the federal government those death taxes. It is one of the main reasons I got involved in government and politics, because I didn’t understand how bureaucrats and politicians in Washington, D.C., could make a law that says when a tragedy hits a family, they somehow are owed something from that family business.”

 

The only problem was that her story is, charitably, a tall tale. The IRS doesn’t send a tax bill after a death; it waits for you to file a tax return first. Both USA Today and Huffington Post pointed out that while Noem’s family did pay roughly $169,000 in estate taxes over a decade, it was at the hardly onerous rate of four percent interest. In addition, the entire tax could have been avoided if Arnold [her father] had simply updated his will, something he hadn’t done for more than a decade. That small act would have allowed for a tax-free transfer. The media also noted that during the time Noem’s family was paying off their low-interest debt, they received $3.7 million in farm subsidies. Arnold also had left his wife a $1 million insurance policy that easily could have paid off the tax, but a smart accountant probably figured carrying a loan at four percent was a good deal.

 

Noem alternated between saying the law was still a bad law and keeping her mouth closed when confronted by Capitol Hill reporters. Mostly she just kept walking.

 

Next step was a successful run for governor of her state – and what at least one critic has called “arguably the worst response” to the coronavirus threat of any governor in the nation. 

As far as her commitment to science, on the day she took office “she held a prayer service that included a minister who called for all the demons in Pierre [the state capital] to be vanquished.” 

Other than galloping around on her horse, Noem seemed not to do much of anything about the health crisis, except to hope it went away, and make the situation worse with her rhetoric. 

 Something often misunderstood about masking in South Dakota — and perhaps a reason for the initially low infection rate — is that many of South Dakota’s towns and cities invoked their own policies during the outbreak’s early days. But when the plague didn’t come immediately, South Dakotans rebelled against their more conscientious political leaders. Noem offered no support, and a masking mandate crumbled in Sioux Falls when the Republican mayor voted against it. Across the state, in Rapid City, Common City Council President Laura Armstrong created a Facebook page promoting local businesses complying with CDC guidelines as well as mask-required businesses for those worried about contracting the virus. Conservative activists likened her to a Nazi and brought pictures of yellow Stars of David to council meetings. They threatened her on social media and trespassed on her isolated property (multiple times), and a colleague of hers had the lug nuts loosened on a family car. Noem said nothing.

 

Or said something stupid, actually. In October 2020, she traveled to Naples, Florida to give a speech. With her went Corey Lewandowski, of Trump 2016 campaign fame. Rolling Stone sets the scene: 

Noem and Lewandowski headlined their own event on October 9th, 2020. Trump was still in quarantine after his Covid sickness, but that didn’t stop a maskless Noem and Lewandowski from speaking to 250 people in a Naples, Florida, VFW Hall.

 

“At some point we have to let Americans live,” shouted Lewandowski. Noem added, “If someone is concerned about these events they can stay home.”

 

It was just more of the simplistic kind of garbage that Trump and people like Noem had been peddling for months. You could, as Lewandowski so cluelessly suggested, stay home from such events. What you couldn’t do was avoid contact with fools who attended, who might talk to you later at the supermarket, or if you were a clerk at the grocery, might sneeze on you while they checked you out. If your daughter dated the son of a father who went to hear Noem speak, and that father got infected, his boy might pass the virus on to your daughter, and then to you… 

That’s the dilemma Noem refused to face. 

At the same time Noem and Lewandowski spoke, Donald J. Trump was still in quarantine, himself, after a very close call and a trip to the hospital by helicopter, after he caught COVID-19. 

___

7/5/20: Deep in the bowels of the Trump administration, someone realizes we can’t have an economic rebound till we control the coronavirus.

With another big rally scheduled for July 11, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, there’s a change in messaging. In a news release, campaign press secretary Hogan Gidley announces attendees will be provided with face masks. This time, they will be “strongly encouraged” to wear them.

 

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Educated people also have a low opinion of the president. Because they’re educated.

____________________ 

 

It could be that recent poll numbers are rattling Team Trump. The president spent most of today golfing. (Round #275 since he took office.) With no public events scheduled and nothing better to do with his time, when he returned to the White House, he flipped on the TV. 

Fox News was reporting on a recent CNBC poll. Former Vice President Joe Biden had healthy leads in six battleground states. Trump exploded. He snatched up his iPhone and began whacking at keys, like a chimp hurling feces. 

Out popped this Twitter gem: “@FoxNews weekend afternoons is the worst! Getting into @CNN and MSDNC territory. Watch @OANN & @newsmax instead. Much better!” 

The president wouldn’t feel any better if he checked the latest Gallup numbers. According to their most recent survey, Trump has a 91% approval rating with Republicans. That’s fine. You expect numbers with Democrats to be poor, but 2%!?! More importantly, only 33% of independents approve of the job he’s doing. His rating among women is an abominable 32%. Educated people also have a low opinion. Because they’re educated! Only 30% approve. 

Trump aims for his base.

On the other hand, Trump is working hard to solidify his standing with racists, some fraction, however large or small, of his base. (I’m conservative, estimating 10%. It could be higher; I doubt it’s lower.) Among other baffling moves, he promises to veto a defense spending bill if it includes language requiring the Department of Defense to drop names of bases honoring Confederate generals. 

* 

ON JULY 5, CDC reported that the U.S. had another 

44,361 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

___

 

7/6/20: Deep into the gravest health crisis our nation has faced in a century, Donald Trump still hasn’t figured out the basics. Faced with a mountain of evidence to the contrary, ignoring logic and math, he continues to insist that he has done a fantastic job of handling the virus. We have the best testing in the world, he brags. “Now we have tested over 40 million people,” he says. “But by so doing, we show cases, 99% of which are totally harmless.” 

On July 6, we had 

46,329 new cases.

 

Let us now turn to computation. As of this morning, (posting on July 8), Johns Hopkins University reports that 131,480 Americans have been killed by COVID-19. For starters, to argue that 99% of cases are “totally harmless,” you would have to believe 13,148,000 Americans have been infected. Then you would have to pretend the Centers for Disease Control was run by “Deep State” scientists and they were lying about the number of Americans who have been or are currently laid up in hospitals. 

Then you would have to ignore the numbers coming from the states. A check this morning shows Texas has had 211,000 cases of the virus, including 10,028 on July 7, the worst day yet. According to the Texas Tribune, working from state health department figures, more than 9% of those infected are spending time in hospital beds.

So, if 99% of the cases are totally harmless, and in Texas, we have 9,286 individuals in hospitals, that would have to mean 928,600 Texans were currently infected. And then we’d have to multiply all the dead by 100… 

…And did I mention, Trump is terrible with math? 

Also, scientists believe that a gene sequence inherited from Neanderthal ancestors may increase our likelihood of catching the COVID-19 virus. 

So, there’s that.

 

FUN FACT: On a rare positive note, Peyton Manker, an 18-year-old high school senior, was denied by the spreading virus a chance to attend her senior prom. Undaunted, she came up with a creative way to memorialize her lost opportunity. She fashioned a “prom dress” out of duct tape. 

It has a lovely COVID-19 theme.

___ 

 

7/7/20: Seven days into July, and what is the president’s focus? He’s mad about polls. He’s mad about Bubba Wallace, the only African American driver on the NASCAR circuit. He wants Wallace to apologize for thinking a noose found in his garage was a racist symbol. He’s mad at NASCAR and wants them to allow the Confederate flag to fly again at races. He’s mad because the Washington Redskins might change their name. He’s mad because he says “anarchists” tore down a statue of Frederick Douglass, the great African American abolitionist. (At least he has finally figured out that Douglass, dead since 1895, is not alive.) Trump says that proves the radical left doesn’t know what it’s doing. But the man responsible for putting up the statue fears it may be “retaliation” by right-wing nut jobs. Police have made no arrests. So, Trump could (in theory) be right. More than likely, he has a ventriloquist butt. 

With the United States set to pass the three million-mark for confirmed cases of the virus, the president has had to start slinging some serious bull. He’s reduced to claiming that the “Mortality Rate for the China Virus in the U.S. is just about the LOWEST IN THE WORLD!” 

We have said this before. The president dabbles in facts. Here are some mortality rates for other countries. According to Worldometers, as of July 7, 405 Americans per million have died from COVID-19.

 

Deaths per million: 

Argentina:                 36

Austria:                     78

Australia:                    4

Brazil:                     315

Canada:                   231

Costa Rica:                 5

Denmark:                105

Ethiopia:                   51

Finland:                     59

Germany:                 109

Greece:                     29

Haiti:                         10

Iceland:                     29

Ireland:                   353

Israel:                        37

Japan:                          8

Jordan:                        1

Mexico:                   241

Netherlands:           358

New Zealand:              4

Nigeria:                       3

Norway:                    46

Peru:                       332

Poland:                      40

Portugal:                 160

Singapore:                      4

South Korea;                  6

Switzerland:               227

Thailand:                        1

Ukraine:                       29

 

*

 

NETFLIX has a miniseries out on Jeffrey Epstein, and it might make you ponder a few important questions. First, how did such a sleaze get away with molesting so many young girls?

 

 

F.B.I. agent breaks down in tears.

 

If you think his behavior was terrible, the series makes clear it was worse than you imagine. This blogger already knew Epstein got a sweet deal from a federal prosecutor named Alexander Acosta (last seen serving in President Trump’s cabinet). He did not know that a female F.B.I. agent broke down in tears when an investigation she was helping run was suddenly shut down. Nor had the blogger ever heard of Epstein’s work with Steven Hoffenberg. In the documentary, Hoffenberg describes Epstein as a “criminal mastermind,” and says he helped Hoffenberg devise and run a massive Ponzi scheme. Hoffenberg eventually admitted bilking investors out of $475 million. He spent 18 years in jail and had to pay $463 million in restitution.

 

Epstein managed to skate.

 

(It made this blogger think again about George Floyd, who died because he tried to pass a counterfeit $20.)

 

Then this blogger picked up a newspaper and saw a story about Deutsche Bank. That bank has agreed to pay $150 million in penalties for green-lighting questionable money transfers, initiated by Epstein. According to spokesman Daniel Hunter, the bank is sorry it did a lousy job of keeping tabs on a man with a well-known criminal history.

 

“Our reputation is our most valuable asset and we deeply regret our association with Epstein,” Hunter said Tuesday.

 

*

 

ANYTHING ELSE to worry about? Fires are burning across Siberia, a region where, as National Geographic notes, “landscapes that are typically too cold, wet, and icy to burn” have ignited. 

The problem? Climate change has been thawing layers of permafrost that have been frozen for thousands of years. 

Thus the name: permafrost. 

Till now.

 

* 

WE ALSO learn that Team Trump can’t get the simplest tasks done right. Paycheck Protection Program loans, intended to save struggling small businesses, went to TB12, a lifestyle-brand company owned by Tom Brady, former star New England Patriots quarterback. Apparently, Brady couldn’t keep workers on without a bailout, because his latest contract, with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is worth a piddling $50 million. His wife Gisele Bündchen, the super model, is worth a paltry $400 million.

 

They needed help.

 

A boxing promotion firm run by Floyd Mayweather also snagged a PPP loan. Mr. Mayweather, who earned an estimated $1 billion in prize money in the ring, somehow needed help. The poor gentleman could hardly get by, what with paying a personal chef to prepare every meal, at a cost of $1,000 per, his $1,000 per haircut grooming habits, his penchant for wearing new underwear daily, rather than wash old (a $6,500-per-year habit), his $20,000 gold-painted Bentley golf cart, his $50,000 diamond iPod phone case, his $4.8 million race car, his $18 million watch, and his $25 million dollar mansion.

 

Also receiving PPP loans: rock groups whose tours were canceled, including the Eagles, Guns N’ Roses, and Green Day. According to Forbes, the Eagles took in $100 million in 2019.

 

So, bail those dudes out.

 

That might not be the worst. In a rush to revive a moribund economy, and get those “Economic Impact Payment” checks out (and maybe win more votes for Trump come November), the federal government handed out a total of $1.4 billion to people who were – frankly – dead.

 

 

FUN FACT – RELATIVES: We should note that the president’s niece, Mary Trump, has a new book out.

 

 

“His ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment.”

 

Among her most shocking revelations, she says Uncle Donald paid to have someone else take his SAT test, so he could get into an elite college. She says the president “embraces” cheating “as a way of life.”

 

She describes Fred Trump Sr., the president’s father, and her grandfather, as a “high-functioning sociopath.” Her father, Fred Jr., and her Uncle Donald were “scarred” for life under his hand.

 

Ms. Trump, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology, says that her uncle is more than a garden-variety narcissist. “Donald is not simply weak,” she writes, “his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.”

 

She also quotes the president’s sister, Maryanne (and has her on tape), assessing her brother’s run for president. “He’s a clown – this will never happen,” her aunt assured her not long after Donald announced his candidacy. Aunt Maryanne was amazed to see evangelical Christians warm to her brother. “The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there,” Mary writes, quoting her aunt. “It’s mind boggling. But that’s all about his base. He has no principles. None!”

___

 

 

7/8/20: The federal deficit hit $2.7 trillion for the first nine months of Fiscal Year 2020. 

During President Obama’s eight years in office – and he inherited a mess – the deficits for FY’s 2010-2017 totaled $6.528 trillion. Republicans were furious. Now Trump – who didn’t inherit a mess – will likely top that total in one term. The estimated deficit for all of FY 2020 is $3.8 trillion, meaning Trump will have racked up $5.563 trillion in FY’s 2018-2020.

 

The deficit in FY 2021 will almost surely be a trillion plus and could easily top twice that.

 

*

NOT TO MENTION, Trump has managed to get travelers from the U.S. banned in many countries! 

He brags about banning travel from China, to stop the spread of COVID-19. Now, under his guiding hand, we’re the hot spot. Five Americans who landed in Sardinia, hoping for a relaxing vacation, were told to get back on their private jet and fly back home. Canada fined two young American visitors for “flouting tougher entry restrictions.” Even governors of Mexican states are trying to block American tourists. Germany, like the other members of the European Union, has also banned U.S. visitors.

U.S. travelers banned.

___

7/9/20: President Trump wakes in a sour frame of mind. He can’t get a grip on the coronavirus. The Supreme Court is about to render two important decisions in cases involving subpoenas against him. The first regards a state request to see his tax and business records. The second involves his bid to refuse compliance to a congressional subpoena.

 

___________________

 

“The public has a right to every man’s evidence.”

 

Chief Justice John Roberts

___________________

 

 

Mr. Trump starts his day, as he awaits the news of the Court decisions, by doing some serious tweeting. First, he defends his handling of the COVID crisis. “For the 1/100th time, the reason we show so many Cases, compared to other countries that haven’t done nearly as well as we have, is that our TESTING is much bigger and better.”

 

The virus keeps spreading, no matter how fast and furiously the poor fool tweets. By day’s end, we have an additional:

 

59,260 cases.

 

*

 

THE U.S. SUPREME COURT renders its decision in the case of Trump v. Vance. The president’s legal team had argued that his “duties as chief magistrate demand his whole time for national objects.” 

 

For that reason, his attorneys claimed, Donald could not legally be served a subpoena to produce his tax returns.

 

That is, a president who has time to tweet 50,000 times, cannot manage to put together requested documents, despite the assistance of multiple accountants. A man who has spent 29% percent of his days in office at private golf resorts cannot be distracted from putting and driving and cheating on his score, to deal with a subpoena. A man who devotes endless hours to watching TV, and ranting about “Fake News,” is too busy to deal with a court challenge involving potential tax evasion and breach of campaign finance law.

 

In the end, the Court makes quick work in blowing Trump’s defenses to bits. The decision is 7-2, with dissenters in actual agreement with the majority on several key points. Chief Justice Roberts, in writing for the majority, notes that previous chief executives, from James Monroe to Jimmy Carter, accepted that they were “subject to subpoena and have uniformly agreed to testify when called in criminal proceedings.” In all previous cases, however, presidents had been involved in cases involving federal crimes and investigations.

 

 

He lies “like most of us brush our teeth.”

 

Trump’s lawyers claimed that this case, involving a subpoena from a New York State prosecutor, was different. If presidents could be forced to answer subpoenas from the nation’s 2,300 locally elected prosecutors, their ability to perform their duties would be impaired. They would be subject to “diversion, stigma, and harassment.” Trump’s lawyers, backed by political appointees at the Department of Justice, who filed briefs in support, argued that a “heightened standard of need” should apply. A president should only be asked to respond to subpoenas in cases of…

 

Well, in Trump’s cases, never.

 

After all, the president had already dodged a subpoena from Robert Mueller for more than two years. 

Chief Justice Roberts blew up Trump’s first, second and third lines of defense in the first sentence of his opinion. In our system of government, he wrote, “the public has a right to every man’s evidence.” Since the earliest days of the Republic, he wrote, “every man” has included the President of the United States. 

Yes, Roberts noted, a president’s communications as president are “privileged” and rarely subject to exposure. In this case, the information being subpoenaed related solely to Trump “in his private capacity and disconnected from the discharge of his constitutional obligations.” 

In common law, Roberts explained, the only exception involving a duty to testify in response to subpoena had been in “the case of the king,” whose “dignity” was seen as “incompatible” with appearing “under the process of the court.” But, as Chief Justice John Marshall explained in 1807, “a king is born to power and can ‘do no wrong.’ The president, by contrast, is ‘of the people’ and subject to the law.” The case of Richard M. Nixon is cited repeatedly in the Vance opinion, as is the case of Clinton v. Jones, involving a matter of civil liability. The Court had previously ruled, “unequivocally and emphatically” that “Presidents are subject to subpoena.”

 

The court did rule that the president’s legal team could go back to the lower courts and file motions to have the document requests narrowed. But we can now be sure that Trump is going to have to cough up a stash of tax records. Given his long battle to keep them secret, it’s highly likely that what they reveal will not be flattering. As former U.S. senator Claire McCaskill put it recently, this is a president who lies “like most of us brush our teeth.” The chances that he didn’t cheat on his taxes are somewhere between zero and nil.

 

* 

The justices rightly sniffed out authoritarianism down. 

THE DECISION in the second case, Trump v. Mazars, went against the president in much the same way. In this case, Trump’s lawyers were suing his accounting firm, to keep them from compiling with a congressional subpoena for his tax records. This time, Trump’s defense rested on the argument that Congress lacked a “legitimate legislative purpose” in seeking his financial documents. 

Once again, Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion. First, Roberts dismissed the idea that “executive privilege” could shield a president’s tax records, prior to the time he was elected (or since). Trump’s lawyers were arguing for what would amount to blanket protection from congressional subpoena. The justices rightly sniffed out authoritarianism and shot the argument down. 

The idea that any chief executive could thumb his or (someday) her nose at the legislative branch would, Roberts wrote, give “short shrift to Congress’s important interests in conducting inquiries to obtain the information it needs to legislate effectively.” The Court did hold that Congress might abuse its subpoena powers, and that federal courts must be mindful of such danger. Therefore, the courts should permit subpoenas that were “no broader than necessary.” 

The Court further noted a number of other possibilities – where the legislative branch might overstep its bounds – but remanded the case to the lower courts for review, where the president’s legal team has met a series of defeats. Roberts agreed that the president and his lawyers “could raise additional constitutional and legal questions in the lower courts.” 

So, not all hope for Trump was gone. 

His team immediately made it clear. They would be raising every question they could think of, including whether or not liberal justices on the Supreme Court were part of a satanic cult, and practiced child sacrifice and pedophilia in their spare time. Okay, I’m kind of joking there (but see, my post for 8/20/20, and you’ll realize it’s not entirely a humorous situation.) 

In reality, the only consolation for the president is that his attorneys have a real hope of stalling Congress and making sure lawmakers don’t glimpse the president’s tax records until after the November election. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Adding insult to injury for the day, German Chancellor Angela Merkel clearly has Trump in mind when she compares her approach to handling the COVID-19 crisis to his. “As we are experiencing firsthand, you cannot fight the pandemic with lies and disinformation any more than you can fight it with hate or incitement to hatred,” she tells reporters.

 

“The limits of populism and denial of basic truths are being laid bare.”

___

 

 

7/10/20: Two men testify before Congress. Which witness will be punished? Which will be rewarded by Team Trump?

 

You be the judge!

 

____________________

 

“The grand jury is designed to help the state proceed with a fair accusation against a person, while protecting that person from being charged when there is insufficient evidence.”

 

The Ohio Supreme Court

____________________

 

 

Witness A vs. Witness B

 

Witness A: This man tells the truth as far as he can see it.

 

Witness B: This man lies to the congressional committee hearing his testimony.

 

Witness A: His testimony is later backed up by former National Security Advisor John Bolton.

 

Witness B: With investigators hot on his trail, this man earns an extra felony count for threatening Witness C.

 

Witness A: This man does not get charged with any felonies.

 

Witness B: Counting that extra charge, this man is charged with seven felonies, after a grand jury decides there is ample evidence to pursue a case against him.

 

This is how grand juries work, as explained by the Ohio Supreme Court:

 

The grand jury is an accusatory body. It does not determine guilt or innocence. The grand jury’s duty is simply to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to make a person face criminal charges. The grand jury is designed to help the state proceed with a fair accusation against a person, while protecting that person from being charged when there is insufficient evidence.

 

At his criminal trial, Witness B is represented by high-priced lawyers. He is still convicted on all seven counts by a jury of his peers. His legal team couldn’t convince a single juror that there was reasonable doubt about a single one of the crimes Witness B was accused of committing. He might as well have hired Mr. Blogger to be his lawyer, for all the good it did.

 

Witness A: He is a decorated combat veteran. He was awarded a Purple Heart for service in Iraq.

 

Witness B: He used to work for a lobbying firm that burnished the reputations of scumbag dictators and world leaders. That firm became known in Washington D.C.  as part of the “Torturers’ Lobby.”

 

Witness A: This man was recommended by superiors for promotion to the next highest rank in the U.S. Army. His record was clean, his service meritorious.

 

Witness B: This man was called in by the judge, while out on bail, after he seemed to threaten her life.

 

 

“Significant national security implications for our country.”

 

If you haven’t already guessed, Witness A, is Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman. He testified truthfully in front of the House Intelligence Committee.

 

While under oath he made it clear he believed President Trump had held up critical military aid to Ukraine to force the president of that country to help gather dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden.

 

At the time, Lt. Col. Vindman explained his decision to come before Congress and give testimony:

 

I want to emphasize to the committee that when I reported my concerns on July 10 [2019] relating to Ambassador Sondland and on July 25 relating to the president, I did so out of a sense of duty. I privately reported my concerns in official channels to the proper authority in the chain of command. My intent was to raise these concerns because they had significant national security implications for our country. I never thought that I’d be sitting here testifying in front of this committee and the American public about my actions. When I reported my concerns, my only thought was to act properly and to carry out my duty.

 

Witness B is, of course, Roger Stone, man of zero integrity. At his trial, the prosecutor pointed out that all the lies that Stone told served to protect the president.

 

To give you some idea of who Stone is, he has a tattoo of disgraced former President Richard M. Nixon on his back.

 

So, which man would you reward? And which would you punish?

 

Lt. Colonel Vindman is leaving the U.S. Army after saying that he has faced retaliation for testifying. His promotion, which the Army said he earned, was blocked.

 

Roger Stone, the seven-time felon, has had his prison sentence commuted by President Trump, without ever spending a day in jail.

 

 

POSTSCRIPT: You have to follow matters closely to grasp the full extent of how sleazy this president is, and how sleazy so many of the men and women Trump attracts to his service are. Stone, you may remember, lied about ever meeting with any Russians during the 2016 campaign. A second gentleman, who helped set up Stone’s parlay with the Russian, and said he forgot about it too, who then amended his testimony to avoid a perjury count, still has a job deep in the large intestine of the Trump administration.

 

That would be Michael Caputo.

 

He was quietly posted to serve as assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services in April. Tweets immediately surfaced, with Caputo showing his chops for public affairs, by calling multiple women “dogface,” and making racist comments. Call the spreading virus what you want. Caputo decided to “focus” on HHS matters by denigrating Chinese people. “Millions of Chinese suck the blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters,” he tweeted. In Caputo’s mind eating anteater ass completely explains the spread of COVID-19.

 

When other Twitter users questioned his comments, he responded with….more racism. “Don’t you have a bat to eat?” he asked one Asian American. “You’re very convincing, Wang,” he replied to another.

 

A person not named “Wang.”

 

What happened to Vindman and what happened to Stone, with Michael Caputo for dessert, tells you everything you need to know about Trump and his scuzz bag crew.

___

 

 

7/11-12/20: Time to catch up on a few of the failures and threats to the rule of law perpetrated by Trump and his team of miscreants.

 

____________________

 

A $1.3 billion contract to build more than 40 additional miles of border protection.

____________________

 

 

First, unemployment is rising rapidly. If you need work, however, you may be able to get it, repairing a section of Trump’s border wall. This section was completed in January by Fisher Industries, a company out of North Dakota.

 

Cost: $42 million.

 

Due to erosion, this spanking new section is in danger of toppling into the Rio Grande. That means Mr. Trump has to start blaming his “enemies.” In a Sunday tweet he claims, “this very small (tiny) section of wall” was built by a private group and “only done to make me look bad.”

 

This would make sense if you were high on powerful narcotics and too lazy to check for information readily available thanks to the free press doing its basic job. (Or you could read my blog for 12/13/19.) First, the “tiny” section is three miles long. It was built not by “enemies” of the president, but with help from a group that raised $25 million online. Their sales pitch: they supported Mr. Trump.

 

Called “We Build the Wall,” the group attracted powerful friends of the man in the White House. Steve Bannon joined the board. Kris Kobach, once tasked by Trump with finding those 3-5 million illegal voters who pulled the lever for Hillary, became general counsel. Trump endorsed him in his 2018 bid for the governorship of Kansas. Kobach didn’t win, and never did find those imaginary illegal voters.

 

Tommy Fisher, owner of Fisher Industries, isn’t an “enemy” of the president. He appeared repeatedly on Fox News, where he praised the president effusively. This no doubt helps explain how his company got a $1.3 billion contract to build more than 40 additional miles of wall. You can read all about it in that bible of builders, Construction Dive, if you’re not a lazy ignoramus, like President Twitter Thumbs. Senator Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, was stoked about the contract when it was announced in May 2019. He pointed out that the wall would be painted black for aesthetic reasons, and also to make it too hot to climb.

 

Unless, of course, climbers waited until nightfall. Or waited a few months until the barrier toppled over.

 

*

 

“An ex-telemarketer repeatedly accused of fraudulent practices.”

 

AT LEAST THE WALL that Fisher built stood for several months. That’s a better record that a company called Fillakit can boast. Team Trump paid $7.3 million to that company, a fledgling Texas operation, which promised to supply tubes used for coronavirus testing.

 

As ProPublica explains, FEMA “signed its first deal with Fillakit on May 7, just six days after the company was formed by an ex-telemarketer repeatedly accused of fraudulent practices over the past two decades.” Officials in several states quickly learned that when the federal government is contracting for critically needed healthcare supplies, inking contracts with former telemarketers might not be the optimum strategy.

 

The containers weren’t what the doctors ordered:

 

[Officials] say that these “preforms,” which are designed to be expanded with heat and pressure into 2-liter soda bottles, don’t fit the racks used in laboratory analysis of test samples. Even if the bottles were the right size, experts say, the company’s process likely contaminated the tubes and could yield false test results. Fillakit employees, some not wearing masks, gathered the miniature soda bottles with snow shovels and dumped them into plastic bins before squirting saline into them, all in the open air, according to former employees and ProPublica’s observation of the company’s operations.

 

“It wasn’t even clean, let alone sterile,” said Teresa Green, a retired science teacher who worked at Fillakit’s makeshift warehouse outside of Houston for two weeks before leaving out of frustration.

 

*

 

THE BIG NEWS continues to be the spreading virus and the question of what must be done to blunt the damage. Saturday, President Trump finally wore a mask in public. Of course, he was visiting injured servicemen and women at Walter Reed Hospital. Masks were required.

 

White House aides were quick to trumpet his bold mask-wearing leadership. One even tweeted, “Joe Biden is finished,” as if Trump had ended the crisis by doing what sensible Americans had been doing for weeks.

 

We don’t usually quote Democrats. But this is too good to pass up. “Trump finally puts on a mask,” strategist Jesse Lehrich responded, “and his campaign applauds him like he’s a child who just tied his own shoes for the first time....It would be comical if it weren’t all so tragic.”

 

 

“He’s made a lot of mistakes.”

 

Sunday, the State of Florida set a grim record: Most cases of virus by any one state in one day:

 

15,300.

 

The disastrous spread in states like Florida, Texas and Arizona has left the White House scrambling for someone new to blame. The current scapegoat is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases. “He’s made a lot of mistakes,” the president said of his adviser last week, as if to say he, Donald, had made none.  

 

A split seems to be developing. Fauci has said that he doesn’t know where Trump gets some of his ideas – for example, that 99% of COVID-19 cases are totally harmless. The president has said we’re “doing great” in handling the crisis. “As a country,” Fauci said four days ago, “when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.” Top Trump aides have been complaining that Fauci doesn’t have the president’s back.

 

He’s not supposed to have the president’s back or anyone else’s. He’s a scientist. He’s supposed to explain science. Trump is an idiot and hasn’t talked to his leading expert in weeks.

 

Admiral Brett Giroir, the man in charge of the U.S. coronavirus testing program, could get the orange cold shoulder next. He admitted Sunday that “stringent lockdowns” may be necessary again in states where disease is exploding. Giroir said that all Americans should wear masks when they go out in public. In areas where cases are skyrocketing, he warned that restaurants and bars should close immediately. He said hospitalizations and deaths were likely to rise. At a peak, in April, we had 85,000 people hospitalized. Giroir said we were now at 63,000. “But we do expect those [numbers] to go up.”

 

We’re not doing great. According to the CDC, the numbers for July 11 were:

 

62,918 new cases.

 

On July 12, we racked up another,

 

60,469.

 

(This is getting really depressing.)

___

 

 

7/13/20: The rising death toll and rising number of Americans hospitalized with COVID-19 are bad enough.

 

 

High unemployment expected to persist until 2022.

 

Even if you don’t get sick, the pressing question is what kind of economic damage you and your family might suffer. In the last reporting period another 1.3 million workers applied for unemployment.

 

Damage can be found on every hand. Brooks Brothers, founded in 1818, and famous for dressing every president since Abraham Lincoln, has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Barring some miracle, United Airlines will lay off 36,000 workers in October. AMC, the largest theater chain in the country, is trying to restructure debt, as fear of catching COVID-19 in a dark theater strangles business. The company lost $2.2 billion in the first quarter of this year. The college football season is in jeopardy, with each lost game meaning lost revenue from TV rights, ticket sales and concessions. The Ivy League has canceled all games. The Big Ten is eliminating all but contests against conference opponents. In other pandemic-related news, 2.3 million pounds of peanuts, usually consumed by fans during baseball season, are sitting, unnibbled in warehouses.

 

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned this week that high unemployment will likely persist in the U.S. and among its other 37 members, until 2022. If the United States has a second wave of cases (and, so far, we can’t even swim back from the first) we could be looking at an unemployment rate of 12% at the end of this year.

 

 

 

*

 

AT LEAST one American is happy today. Roger Stone is relaxing at home, having a commutation in his pocket. He served exactly zero days in jail, with only seven felony counts to mar his resumé.

 

____________________

 

“Unprecedented, historic corruption.”

 

Sen. Mitt Romney

____________________

 

 

Sen. Mitt Romney has been one of the few Republicans to have the courage to call Trump’s pardon for Stone what it is. “An American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president,’ he tweeted. He described Trump’s decision to keep his pal out of the slammer as “unprecedented, historic corruption.”

 

Robert Mueller, whose investigation helped bring Stone to justice, broke his silence in an editorial, explaining,

 

I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office.

 

[When a witness lies repeatedly]…it strikes at the core of the government’s efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable [emphasis added].

 

Attorney General Bill Barr, who has carried water for the president through thick and thin, decided even he didn’t want to take credit for this move. He let it be known that he had recommended the president not step in for Stone, and Stone should go to jail. (See: 7/10/20.)

 

* 

THE DAMAGE from the spread of the coronavirus continues to show in a multiplicity of ways. A new report finds that 5.4 million Americans have lost healthcare coverage in the last four months. 

That’s more than the 3.9 million who lost coverage during the entire 2008-2009 Great Recession. 

Assuming he were capable of introspection, you’d expect Trump to be feeling foolish about now. In reality, he’s incapable of anything remotely like honest self-examination. Back in June he got mad because he wanted to hold the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Trump was angry because the Democratic governor refused to assure him that he could have the huge, mask-less, non-social-distancing crowds he hankered after – just because the governor wasn’t sure that the coronavirus would be under control in August, when the convention was scheduled. 

Trump kicked over the game board, like a sulky child. He’d go play in Florida, he grumbled. 

Now Florida is one of the hottest hotspots in the world for disease. Suddenly, plans to hold the GOP convention in Jacksonville aren’t looking so good. 

Whose fault is it that the coronavirus is running rampant? According to anonymous White House aides, Dr. Anthony Fauci! 

A little free press digging reveals the truth. The anonymous source is Press Secretary “Birther” McEnany, who compiled a list of Fauci’s “mistakes” and supplied it to the Washington Post. 

Even her list was botched. Dr. Fauci was quoted as downplaying the threat of the disease. On February 29, in an interview, she had him saying: “At this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.” 

He did say that. 

Only, those words were taken out of context, making it seem the doctor had led poor “Drink Bleach” Don astray. “Right now, the risk is still low, but this could change,” Dr. Fauci went on to add in an NBC News interview. “When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become much more attentive [emphasis added] to doing things that would protect you from spread.” 

Apparently, the president stoppered his ears when Fauci said that. 

McEnany denied that there was a rift between the president and the expert. Then she tried to play dumb. (She’s had a lot of practice.) She told reporters the Post had asked a specific question, and all she did was provide “a direct answer to what was a direct question.” And if that answer made Dr. Fauci look bad? 

Go figure. 

If you want to know how screwed up this White House and this administration and this president are, consider who now decides if Dr. Fauci can give an interview on TV. If any network should ask him to appear, requests are handled by Michael Caputo, a top spokesman at the Department of Health and Human Services. Caputo is the guy who helped Roger Stone set up a meeting with some Russian dude in May 2016, at which the dude said he had dirt on Hillary Clinton. 

Yeah. Caputo. Guardian of truth. (See: 7/10/20.)

 

* 

REPORTED CASES of COVID-19, July 13:

 

58,858.

___ 

 

His top writer was a flaming racist.

7/14/20: In case you missed it, because you’d rather go out and catch COVID-19 than watch Fox News, Tucker Carlson is headed for vacation. This hiatus for the popular nighttime host is likely related to the firing of Blake Neff, top writer for his #1 primetime telecast, Tucker Carlson Tonight.

 

____________________ 

“Would u let a JET BLACK congo n****r do lasik eye surgery on u for 50% off?”

____________________ 

 

Even worse, if you love Tucker and Trump and racist bums, CNN was responsible for Neff’s demise. Or, more accurately, Neff was responsible for Neff’s demise. All CNN did was expose him as the author of misogynistic and racist posts on a secretive internet site called AutoAdmit. 

CNN found, for example, that Neff had responded to a thread started by another user in 2018 with the subject line, “Would u let a JET BLACK congo n****r do lasik eye surgery on u for 50% off?” 

Of course, the n-word (not edited in any of the following cases on AutoAdmit) didn’t bother Mr. Neff in the least. “I wouldn’t get LASIK from an Asian for free, so no,” he replied. 

On June 5 – this year – he wrote: “Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down.” 

Neff, who has never married (and now we understand why) started several threads mocking women, after seeing posts they put up on social media. He urged others to make fun of one who had written about her unsuccessful dating life. This past March, he started a thread mocking an older woman “with whom he was connected on social media. The woman had posted about freezing her eggs.” Neff titled his thread: “Disaster: WuFlu outbreak endangers aging shrew’s quest to freeze eggs.” Neff posted on this thread himself, and “racked up dozens of comments as users ridicule[d] the woman, as recently as June 28.” 

On what he thought was an anonymous forum, Neff revealed his heart. When not insulting African Americans, or trolling women, he joked about “foodie faggots” in a 2014 post. In August 2019, he jumped on a thread titled, “We should just buy Canada and kick the Canadians out.” Ever the wit, albeit the racist wit, Neff commented, “Okay but what do we do with the millions of Chinese people.” 

(Canada has had a wave of Chinese immigrants in the last few years. In a 2019 survey, 20% of the population of Vancouver identified as “ethnic Chinese.”) 

Neff was always looking for new groups to insult. This past February, he decided to insult Mormons. He called their faith “an inherently cucky religion.” If you’re like me, you’d have to look up the definition for the slang “cucky.” According to the internet, it derives from cuckhold: “The shortened form ‘cuck’ arose in this manner as an Internet insult, and it also refers to a genre of interracial pornography in which a white married woman spurns her white husband for sex with a black man. The white husband is thus cuckolded or ‘cucked.’” 

On May 27, Neff warned fans that Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, four Democratic lawmakers of color, want to “MAKE YOUR COUNTRY A DUMPING GROUND FOR PEOPLE FROM THIRD WORLD SHITHOLES.” 

In terms of gainful employ, Mr. Neff found the perfect home on Fox, writing for their #1 show. As CNN noted, on June 27, Neff jumped in on an internet discussion about whether “whites fear what’s going to happen to them in 10-20 yrs.” 

Neff wrote that he had “no plans to stay” in the country that long. In December 2019, he said that “once Democrats have the majorities to go full FUCK WHITEY, things are going to get really wacky really quickly.” He argued at the time that there is a “large minority of whites who are fully supportive of a Fuck Whitey agenda” and that “there’s a suicidal impulse to Western peoples that honestly feels almost biological in origin.”

 

The racism of others never daunted Neff. CNN found that he had replied to a thread with the title, “Mary Poppins getting raped by a pack of wild n*****s at the park; kids watching.” He also commented on a thread titled, “DIKES get wrong CUM at CUMBANK. N*****R pops out.” 

 

“Literally our greatest ally on air.”

 This is who Neff is. And he wrote extensively for Tucker Carlson’s show. Language that flowed, on-air, from Carlson’s lips, mirrored comments made by Neff, using a pseudonym, on AutoAdmit. Only Carlson’s racism was more subtle, and in many ways more dangerous for that reason. 

Not everyone was fooled by Carlson’s clever wording. The founder of Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi publication, caught the hidden meaning in many of his shows. Tucker Carlson Tonight, he told his neo-Nazi buds, is “basically Daily Stormer: The Show.” Carlson, he added, is “literally our greatest ally” on air. 

* 

IN OTHER NEWS, a Kansas gentleman (and we assume a fan of President Trump) made it clear he wasn’t going to be forced to wear a mask. Also, you could pry his cold dead hands off his BBQ ribs because he knew his Second Amendment rights. When an employee at the Bob-Be-Que Shack in Mission, Kansas told the customer he’d have to mask up if he wanted to pick up a carry-out order, he raised his shirt and flashed a gun. This proves that the more guns Americans carry, the safer we all are. 

Unless the gun-toting nut starts to sneeze.

 

* 

COVID-19 cases in the U.S.A., on July 14: 

60,971.

___

 

7/15/20: Grab your AR-15’s Trump fans – but not your masks, because masks are for sissies. (See: 7/21/20.) 

Joe Biden is coming for your windows. 

In a baffling, stream-of-consciousness press conference yesterday, the president gave voice for more than an hour to whatever random fragments of thought percolated to the surface of his consciousness and spilled from his lips.

 If you missed it, or plowed through and read a transcript, you had to feel sorry for reporters stuck listening in the Rose Garden, tasked with deciphering the message. It was a sticky day in Washington and Trump started by apologizing. He said there might be time for questions, “maybe at the end,” if ‘it’s not too hot.’” 

You might imagine the U.S. is facing a health crisis. Not so, said Trump. “So, we’ve had a big day in the stock market,” he noted. 

“Things are coming back, and they’re coming back very rapidly,” he added, “a lot sooner than people thought. People are feeling good about our country. People are feeling good about therapeutics and possible vaccines.” If you’ve never noticed, Trump often substitutes the words “thing” or “things” for facts when he speaks. But Americans were “feeling good” he claimed. 

 

He cared about protesters in faraway cities. 

Trump’s rambling discourse started off almost normal. He said he would be punishing China for “its oppressive actions against the people of Hong Kong.” He said the Chinese government was “extinguishing Hong Kong’s freedom.” 

“We’ve all watched what happened,” Trump continued. “Not a good situation. Their freedom has been taken away. Their rights have been taken away.” He wanted the world to know he cared about protesters in faraway cities. He just wasn’t a fan of protesters in front of the White House.  

After that, it was off to the races, except that Trump had no idea which way he was running or why. He bragged about how he was making China pay “massive tariffs” and how he was using billions of dollars raised by tariffs to help America’s farmers. “I’ve given quite a bit to the farmers and ranchers of our country because they were targeted,” by retaliatory Chinese tariffs.  

The president still didn’t understand how tariffs work, or how importers pass costs on to consumers. He said he’d given the farmers and ranchers $12 billion. Then he gave them $16 billion more. 

Trump didn’t give them a dime. Consumers footed the bill.

 Had he mentioned Joe Biden? He thought he should. “Joe Biden’s entire career,” Trump explained, “has been a gift to the Chinese Communist Party and to the calamity of – of errors that they’ve made.”  

Did he mean “comedy” of errors? There’s no way of knowing when this president speaks. He might have meant “cornflakes.” 

Why was he elected? Trump said, it had to do with “a lot of bad things; things related to trade.” No telling what things he meant. He didn’t like the World Trade Organization. That was for sure. And China had been ripping us off for years. 

Whose fault was that? 

Biden! 

 

He’s coming for your windows and your eyeballs. 

Trump wanted us to know. Biden was bad. He was in favor of the Paris Climate Accord. “No good,” Trump grimaced. Okay. Sure. Two hundred other countries signed the Accord. Trump said he saved us. He got us out of a bad deal. A terrible deal. “I’ve been given a lot of credit for what I did there,” Trump insisted. “It took a certain amount of courage, I guess, because it sounds so nice – the Paris Climate Accord – but it wasn’t good for us at all.” (See: 7/16/20.) 

If Joe Biden got elected, we’d all be screwed. That would be it for the windows we used to love. 

Also. Our eyeballs! Our eyeballs would be wrecked. Trump explained. Biden and the Democrats wanted to: 

….mandate net-zero carbon emissions for homes, offices, and all new buildings by 2030. That basically means no windows, no nothing. It’s very hard to do. I tell people when they want to go into some of these buildings, “How are your eyes?” Because they won’t be good in five years. And I hope you don’t mind cold office space in the winter and warm office space in the summer, because your air conditioning is not the same as the good old days.

 

Trump’s aides must have told him he was polling poorly with white suburban women. Trump wanted them to know that Joe Biden had a dastardly plan. He wanted suburbs to allow low income housing to be built outside of cities. Trump hates American cities. Too many Democrats! 

He explained the threat: 

Abolish – in the suburbs, you’re going to abolish the suburbs with this [emphasis added]. Enforce Obama-Biden’s radical AFFH – that’s the AFFH regulation that threatens to strip localities of federal affordable housing funds unless they change their zoning laws to fit the federal government’s demands. So what you have – I mean, I’ve been watching this for years in Westchester, coming from New York. They want low-income housing built in a neighborhood. 

 

Biden! Biden wanted poor families to have better lives. He wanted their kids to go to school with yours. 

He wanted to abolish the suburbs.

 Well, I’m ending that rule. I’m taking it out, so – I spoke with Ben Carson the other day. We’re going to be taking it out. I’ve watched that whole thing go, and now they want to make it twice as bad in the suburbs – in the suburbs. 

Mothers aren’t happy about that. Fathers aren’t happy about that. They worked hard to buy a house, and now they’re going to watch the housing values drop like a rock, and that has happened. It dropped like a rock. So we’re not going to do that; we’re going to do the exact opposite.

 

According to Trump, Biden wanted “to defund our military.” Not Trump. He wanted to spend more money. Because China is “building a massive military.” 

Trump did not call China’s president Xi Jinping his friend, as he so often has before. That’s not working out so well, lately. 

As for the coronavirus, Trump bragged that he took care of it himself, with the China travel ban. “And I was a crowd of one, because even experts didn’t want to do it. They thought it was a mistake.” It came at us, the disease. It wasn’t his fault it spread. “But we did what we had to do, and now we’ll put out the flames as it – as it happens. We have to get the schools open. We have to get everything open. A lot of people don’t want to do that for political reasons, not for other reasons.” 

That is why, in one recent poll, nearly 70% of parents said they worried about sending kids back to school. 

 

“He’s really bizarre.” 

For most of an hour Trump babbled on about Joe Biden, and what a terrible person he was. Biden, he insisted, “He’s really bizarre.” 

The president riffed about face masks. He didn’t like them. “I see people now, friends of mine – they walk up, they want to say hello, and they have to keep their distance, and they’re all covered up, like you’re all covered up, with facemasks,” he said, motioning at reporters, cooking in the sun. 

Trump eventually pulled out a list his aides had prepared, and ticked off all the mortal sins of the former vice president. Biden is all for letting MS-13 gang members come to the U.S., commit heinous crimes, and avoid deportation. “So, in other words, we’ll take all of these people – many of whom are in prison for rape, murder, lots of other things.” It wasn’t clear how, but Trump insisted Biden wanted to “incentivize illegal-alien child smuggling.” By comparison, he claimed he had built “259 miles…of great, powerful wall.” Not counting the part that fell down earlier in the week. (See: 7/11-12/20.) 

Trump said that we had great asylum agreements with other nations in the Western Hemisphere. Trump named three: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Rather than people coming here as refugees, he said those incredibly poor countries had shouldered the load. 

Who wants refugees, anyway? I think that’s what Trump meant. At that point you had to listen carefully to get what the president was trying to say, and even then, you probably couldn’t. 

In fact, we might as well let the comedian Sarah Cooper take over for this quote: 

 

Trump wanted everyone to know, he had a “great meeting last week with the President of Mexico. Great guy. Friend of mine – become a friend of mine.” The two had never met before. This claim reminded me, when I read through the speech, of other friends Trump has said he has. 

Kim Jong-un. 

Xi Jinping. 

Jeffrey Epstein. (Okay, that one is kind of a joke.) 

The wall with Mexico. It was genius, Trump said, “because it stopped people coming in from heavily infected areas of Mexico.”  

What about that infection? That COVID-19? “But it’s still – we’ve done a great job; get no credit for it,” Trump complained. “And I don’t want the credit.” 

(You know he did.)

 

He said he had kept people out of this country “that are going to come in and blow up our cities, do things.” Maybe the “liberal Democrats running the cities” wouldn’t mind if people came in and blew them up. “But I would mind,” Trump said, “and the people of this country mind.” 

That’s how Trump’s press conference went. He didn’t think the people in the cities would mind if they got blown up. 

But he would mind – even though he hated Democrats in the cities. 

 

Joe Biden hates statues. 

Also, Joe Biden hates statues. Trump? He loves statues. Really, he loves Confederate statues almost as much as grabbing women’s…. 

Where were we? Yeah. Terrible people wanted to destroy our best statues. Terrible people. Like African Americans. 

And liberals. 

But this has been going on, and I found an act that we’ve used. And we have many, many people in jail right now – many, many people in jail, all over the country – because they tried to destroy or, in some cases, got – got it down, a federal statue or monument.

 

I signed an executive order a couple of weeks ago, and it says very simply, “Ten years in jail.” You do it, 10 years in jail. The amazing part is we’re able to catch everybody because, thanks to all of you on television – we appreciate it – but we have their pictures. We have the man standing on Andrew Jackson’s horse.  

 

Roger Stone? Seven-time convicted felon? No. No jail time for him. 

Eventually, the president took a few questions. Was he down in the polls, a reporter asked? “Do you see yourself as an underdog in this race?” 

Trump said no. “I think we have a really good poll numbers.” His good poll numbers were not fake. How could he be so sure? “You look at the Intracostal in Florida. You look at the lakes. You see thousands of boats with Trump signs, American signs. You’ve got the Trump-Pence sign all over,” he explained. “You look at what’s going on. You look at bikers, for miles and miles, riding up highways proudly with their signs.” 

Bikers with signs had nothing to do with actual polls, but you figure reporters were nicely browned after an hour in the sun, and only hoped to get away before Trump bragged about himself for another hour.

 

* 

TRUMP ALSO FOUND TIME in his schedule the same day to pose with an array of Goya food products, while sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. The company owner had praised Trump’s bold leadership. Latinos, who love Goya foods more than they love Trump, called for a boycott. 

Trump stepped in and pitched some beans. 

* 

NEW COVID-19 cases for the day: 

67,404.

___ 

 

7/16/20:  Many Trump supporters believe that the COVID numbers they are seeing have been faked. Scientists are lying. Doctors and nurses and healthcare professionals are lying. Democratic governors and mayors are lying. But would the NCAA lie when the college football season is endangered? 

The N.C.A.A. on Thursday updated its guidelines for bringing back college sports this fall, and they included universal masking on all sidelines, daily coronavirus symptom checks and social distancing on and off the field.

 

But if there are going to be sports this fall, the pandemic has to be more under control. And it’s not looking good right now.

 

“Today, sadly, the data point in the wrong direction,” Mark Emmert, the president of the N.C.A.A., said in a statement. “If there is to be college sports in the fall, we need to get a much better handle on the pandemic.” 

 

College sports now at risk. 

The Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, made up of 11 historically black colleges, had already joined the Patriot and Ivy Leagues in suspending fall sports. The Big East had announced that “its schools would exclusively play in conference for men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s cross-country, volleyball and field hockey, following in the footsteps of the Big Ten and the Pac-12.” 

Even the mighty SEC is unsure. Sports like volleyball, soccer and cross-country would be postponed until at least September. 

Football? No one knows. 

Sports Illustrated was blunt, noting that pessimism had taken root in NCAA circles, with the nation “speeding in the wrong direction in terms of combating the coronavirus pandemic.” One casualty this fall might well be “an endeavor millions of us want and every college athletic department needs.” That is: college football. 

“If the season dies, we know who had the biggest hand in killing any chance of it happening: Donald Trump.” 

When he inevitably gets around to Twitter-ranting about what has happened to the sport, Trump should instead do what he never does – accept some accountability for the state of affairs. By blowing the summer he’s jeopardized the fall, doing more to endanger the college football season than anyone in America.

 

* 

Gutting  the “Bill of Rights” for the environment. 

STILL, it could be worse. You could live in low-lying areas along the U.S. coast. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has just released a detailed study of coastal flooding, noting that sea levels have risen thirteen inches since 1920. 

That doesn’t mean people along the coast need to walk around in waders. It does mean scientists have plentiful evidence of climate change – and the real problem isn’t Joe Biden and his threat to America’s windows (see: 7/15/20). Thirteen inches might not sound like much. Small differences can be problematic. Corpus Christi, Texas had only three days of tidal flooding in 2000. Charleston, South Carolina had two. In 2019, they suffered 18 and 13 days of flooding, respectively. According to NOAA, Charleston had only 13 days, total, in the first fifty years records were kept. Eagle Point, Texas reported 64 high-tide flooding days last year. 

Coast flooding in Newport Beach, California.

 

Nor was that the only bad news when it came to climate change. Even Fox News felt bound to report: “The World Meteorological Organization said it expects global temperatures will rise ‘at least’ 1 degree Celsius (1.64 degrees Fahrenheit) in each year of the next five years, far above levels not seen since the Second Industrial Revolution.” 

That’s a poorly worded sentence, if my retired-teacher-self ever spotted one and circled it in red. If true, we’d all be cooking our brains in the next twenty years. What WMO really said was that we could expect an increase of 1 degree Celsius in the next five years, not every year. There’s also a 20% chance that global temperatures will rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius in that period. 

There’s a 100% chance that President Trump won’t do anything about the problem, except make it worse.

 

* 

IN OTHER BAD NEWS, methane emissions hit a record high in 2017. Methane can be up to 86 times more harmful in the atmosphere than CO₂. Nevertheless, Trump appointees at the Environmental No-Protection Agency have worked hard to roll back rules passed by the Obama administration to curtail methane emissions. 

Scientists are increasingly worried. “Terrified” might be a better word, except scientists don’t use words like “terrified,” and try to stick to science: 

Emissions of methane, a potent ingredient in global warming, have hit an all-time record high equivalent to putting 350 million more cars on the world’s roads, according to new research.

 

Left unabated, that level of methane emissions could help heat the earth to dangerous temperatures before the end of the century.

 

…The results of the study, conducted by scientists from several institutions including NASA, Yale and Stanford, were published Tuesday…. Methane emissions are largely driven by coal mining, oil production, natural gas production, landfills and cattle and sheep ranching.

 

As soon as Trump fans see the words “cattle and sheep,” they revert to talking about liberals who want to take away guns and farting cows. 

And now gaseous sheep! 

Leading environmental groups have accused the president and his fossil fuel buds of gutting a core rule, meant to protect the nation’s air, water and resources. For half a century, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has required the government to consider “environmental and community concerns before approving pipelines, highways, drilling permits, new factories, or any major action on federal lands.” Now protections will be relaxed. Polluters will be able to skirt the rules and Trump’s E-no-PA administrators will turn a blind eye. 

The Sierra Club is opposed to the changes. So are the Wilderness Society, the League of Conservation Voters, Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Colorado Wild Public Lands and Independence Pass Foundation, and just about every other environmental group you might name. The Wilderness Society compares NEPA to a “Bill of Rights” for the environment.

 

* 

S.O.S.: Save Our Showers. 

SPEAKING from the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday, the president explained his decision to roll back almost every regulation designed to protect the environmental that he could think of. 

“Shower heads,” he said. 

“We’re bringing back consumer choice in home appliances so that you can buy washers and dryers, shower heads and faucets,” he said. “So, shower heads,” he continued. “You take a shower, the water doesn’t come out. You want to wash your hands, the water doesn’t come out. So, what do you do? You just stand there longer or you take a shower longer? Because my hair – I don’t know about you – but it has to be perfect. Perfect.” 

Dishwashers, too. 

“Dishwashers,” Trump said. “You didn’t have any water, so you – the people that do the dishes – you press it, and it goes again, and you do it again and again. So, you might as well give them the water because you’ll end up using less water. So, we made it so dishwashers now have a lot more water. And in many places – in most places of the country – water is not a problem. They don’t know what to do with it. It’s called ‘rain.’ They don’t have a problem.” 

Yes! It’s called rain! Who knew! 

Trump also bragged about bringing back the old incandescent lightbulbs – because Trump isn’t worried about the environment. 

Just his hair.

 

* 

NEW CASES of coronavirus hit a bleak new milestone: 

72,045.

___ 

7/17/20: As a retired teacher, Mr. Blogger hopes schools can open safely in a few weeks. The children would benefit. Parents would breathe a sigh of relief. Many could go back to work. That doesn’t mean it won’t be dangerous for older teachers, janitors, cafeteria workers and others. You also have the grave risk of children passing around infection and carrying it home to families and causing collateral damage.

 

____________________ 

This was the president trying to warp the narrative to suit his twisted intent.

____________________

 

There’s no easy answer. Yet some of the fools who work for Trump claim there is. See, for example: comments by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Or watch the clueless Larry Kudlow, below. 

What I don’t understand – and no rational human being should accept – was a decision by Team Trump to block experts from the Centers for Disease Control from testifying before Congress about plans to reopen schools safely. As always, this was the president trying to warp the narrative to suit his intent. He wants schools open because he wants parents back to work. He wants parents back to work because he doesn’t want to be running for reelection with an unemployment rate in double digits. Trump wants to win in November.

He doesn’t care about kids, or school staff, or parents, or how many people die or get sick if reopening goes badly. 

Trump is always in it for himself.

More and more Americans have come to realize this. In a new poll 64% of us say we don’t believe what he says when he talks about the virus. Still, 1 in 3 do believe when he talks about scientists “rigging” numbers of deaths and hospitalizations. The president’s problem, and therefor ours, is that he can’t BS his way out of the corner he painted himself into in the early days of the COVID crisis. He can’t call for the kind of controls we need because he mocked those controls. If he changed now, his stark failure would be clear even to his followers. 

That means we’re going to have to ride it out. It won’t be easy. The State of Texas has decided to continue with online school classes until November. Hard hit by a wave of infection, the state has seen 543 people die from the coronavirus in five days. Another 10,632 Texans are hospitalized with COVID-19. 

As long as the virus continues to spread, the country will continue to suffer economic dislocation. Colleges, employees of colleges, and college towns are suffering cascading financial losses. The University of Akron voted last week to lay off one fifth of its unionized work force. The school reorganized 11 academic departments and merged them into five. The University of Michigan cut 40% of the 300 lecturers who carry most of the campus teaching load. Ohio University has had three rounds of layoffs. Experts warn we could see a 15% drop in college enrollments in the fall. That would represent a $23 billion loss of revenue. 

Towns near national parks face similar damage. Reservations for visitors to Yosemite have been capped. This has led to a major drop in business at nearby towns and inside the park. Twelve thousand workers in Coconino County, home to Grand Canyon National Park, have jobs reliant on tourist flow. The park has 3,500 employees in the summer and 2,500 year-round. Any decline in travel spells trouble. And any visitor from a state where infections are spreading could bring the virus inside the park, resulting in catastrophic economic loss.

 

* 

ON A LIGHTER NOTE, Kanye West says he’s running for president. (I, for one, hope he will make Taylor Swift his running mate.) 

Mr. West may be a bit of a loose musical cannon; but he’d still be a better president than the one we have. 

West says, if elected, he will offer all Americans “free weed” and if anyone has a baby, they will get $1 million.

 * 

ON JULY 17, a grim record for the spread of the coronavirus is set with 

74,710 new cases.

___

7/18/20: You can’t say President Trump isn’t up to making crucial decisions in time of crisis! 

He has decided to remove the pictures of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush from the entrance hall of the White House. They will hang in a little-used dining area where no one will see them, especially Trump. Clinton’s picture reminded our thin-skinned chief executive that Hillary won the popular vote. Bush’s picture reminded Trump that none of the former presidents like him. 

Having made the tough decision, Donald knocked off work on Saturday and went golfing again at his Potomac Falls, Virginia resort.

 

* 

IF YOU THINK BACK to 2016, when President Obama was still running the country, you may remember he had a chance – with nine months left in office – to fill a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Senate Leader Mitch McConnell refused to give his nominee a hearing and said it was up to the “people” to decide who filled the opening. If they voted for Clinton, she could fill the vacancy. If Trump won, Trump could. 

Now, Team Trump and his enablers are not only playing a different tune. They are going to toss the musicians off a cliff. 

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows made clear this week. On hearing that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was ill, he told ABC News, “I can’t imagine that if [President Trump] had a vacancy on the Supreme Court that he would not very quickly make the appointment and look for the Senate to take quick action.” 

Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, agreed that it would be a brilliant concept to ignore the people in this case, with four months to go until the next election. “Merrick Garland was a different situation,” he said. “You had the president of one party nominating, and you had the Senate in the hands of the other party. A situation where you’ve got them both would be different.” 

Sen. McConnell was even more blunt. “Yeah, we’d fill it,” he said in a February interview.

(See: 6/17/19.)

*

NEW CASES of COVID-19, on July 18: 

67,574.

___

7/19/20: In an interview with Chris Wallace today, President Trump insisted that he was “a believer in masks,” but wanted “people to have a certain freedom.” 

What? To cough snot on one another?

 

____________________  

“His failure to understand this simple public health measure, his reluctance to accept the advice of all his public health experts, makes me wonder whether he really is qualified to manage this.” 

Dr. Jonathan Reiner

____________________ 

 

He said he wasn’t convinced masks did all that much good in the fight against the virus. Trump went on to cite Dr. Anthony Fauci, who said, back on February 29, that Americans didn’t need masks. 

It was as if, the President of the United States had learned nothing since that moment. 

(Probably because he hasn’t.)

 

On that final day in February, the U.S. had just reported its first death from the coronavirus. Dr. Fauci was worried because ordinary citizens might hoard masks that could be needed for healthcare workers. So, he did say, at the time, that ordinary citizens didn’t need masks. He has long since changed his position. 

After watching a clip of Trump’s interview with Wallace, Dr. Jonathan Reiner told CNN that there was “no downside” to wearing masks. If all of us did, we would have a much better chance of reopening schools safely. We could revive a stalled economy and even save fall sports, like NFL football. “He’s unteachable,” Dr. Reiner grimaced, when asked about Trump, 

and I can’t understand it. His failure to understand this simple public health measure, his reluctance to accept the advice of all his public health experts, makes me wonder whether he really is qualified to manage this [emphasis added]. This is not a sophisticated question where experts differ.

 

Dr. Reiner said Trump’s failure in regard to such a simple matter “raises serious doubts about his competence.”

 

* 

WE DO HAVE some evidence that the U.S. economy may be stabilizing and may recover. I don’t like this president any more than I like stewed beets. But I hope I’m wrong because I can’t see it. 

New data indicates that at least four million Americans who have kept their jobs during the pandemic agreed to pay cuts. Some experts believe the figure may be closer to seven million. An additional ten million have seen hours reduced. Buying power for roughly 1 in every 8 employed persons has been curtailed, which would represent a serious drag on any economic rebound. 

Jamie Vagedes, an accountant for a travel rewards company, is typical. He took a 20% cut in April. That pay reduction could last for another six months if more Americans don’t start traveling. He was luckier than many co-workers. A quarter of his peers were laid off or furloughed. Fortunately, under the CARES Act, Vagedes was able to delay mortgage payments. Eventually, however, he’ll have to come up with the difference. “Doing everything on 20 percent less – it’s challenging,” he told a reporter. “It’s a real kick in the shins.” 

If the president still isn’t sure masks do any good, and if he still believes the Bill of Rights grants Americans freedom to sneeze on innocent bystanders, multiple major retailers are instituting mask requirements. Starting Monday, Walmart will require customers at its 5,000 stores to don masks. Walmart joins Apple, Best Buy, Costco, CVS Pharmacy, Kroger, Starbucks, and Target, among others. It will be a sad day, then, for the unmasked man who recently pulled a gun and threatened to kill a masked customer who criticized him in a Florida Walmart.

 

*  

NEW CASES of coronavirus, July 19:

 

63,201.

 

* 

A campaign ad for Biden. 

TO SAY that Mr. Trump’s interview with Chris Wallace did not go well would be an understatement. Critics described the president’s performance as “wild,” “shocking,” and an “unmitigated disaster.” Anthony Scaramucci, his former communications director, said the interview was so bad, it could have been a “campaign ad” for Biden. A reviewer for the Washington Post said Wallace reduced the president to “a sputtering, sweating mess.” (It was held outside on a White House terrace, and Trump was visibly dripping sweat, in a coat and tie). 

A journalism professor told ABC it was like watching a well-prepared prosecutor cross-examine a guilty witness. Megan McCain said, “it was the first time I’ve really seen President Trump squirm.” Under Wallace’s grilling, a reporter for The Hill said Trump looked “flustered, confused, angry, baffled and unable to substantiate any one of his standard big lies.” 

If you didn’t watch, and you had any doubt about how it went, you knew Wallace had revealed the emperor in all his nakedness. On Twitter, Trump fans were furious. Someone called “Catturd” posted: “Retweet if think Chris Wallace belongs on Fake News CNN – and you’re sick and damn tired of hearing his lying mouth on Fox News.” 

Rob G., another fan of the president, and a true patriot (I guess) by virtue of his six flag emojis, had this to say:

POSTSCRIPT: Trump spent the next few days trying to spin the interview as if he gave an Oscar-winning performance. 

The comics disagreed. Here was Trevor Noah’s take:

___

  

7/20/20: Daily deaths from the coronavirus are trending upward across the U.S., even though on Sunday, the president told reporter Chris Wallace, that we had the lowest mortality rate in the world. The current toll, using Johns Hopkins University’s tally, stands at 140,536.

 

____________________ 

“Many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask.” 

President Trump

____________________ 

 

Meanwhile, pandemic-related damage continues to rattle the economy. From February to May, the number of Americans signed up for food stamps rose 17%, to roughly 43 million. Hardest hit states include Florida, Georgia, and Michigan (all with increases of 30% or more). If the spread of the virus cannot be contained, it’s a cinch that on Election Day more Americans will be receiving food assistance than the 42.7 million on the rolls when President Obama left office. Congress may be forced to offer a second massive aid package to keep the economy afloat. 

On Sunday, for example, Mr. Trump told Wallace he absolutely expected a payroll tax cut to be included in any new stimulus bill. And why not! With just a little more oomph, Don can get us to a federal deficit of $4 trillion in Fiscal Year 2020!

 

* 

THE BIG NEWS for the day? The Slow-Learner-in-Chief finally figured it out. Wearing a mask helps blunt the spread of disease. Today, Trump tweeted, “We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!” 

And there he was:

* 

CONFIRMED new cases of coronavirus for the United States, on July 20 – and this is relatively good news: 

57,777.

___

7/21/20: Tuesday afternoon Mr. Blogger listened to an entire press briefing delivered by Mr. Trump. Mr. Blogger rarely makes it through these talks because the president’s propensity for lying and grating style of speech are more than he can stand. Still, Mr. Blogger wanted to see who would be there and hear what Trump would have to say about masks. 

Right away, you noticed, none of the health officials who used to flank him during such extravaganzas were present. The only disease “expert” in evidence was White House Press Secretary “Birther” McEnany.

 

____________________ 

“I wish her well, frankly. I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach.” 

President Trump

____________________ 

 

Most of the “briefing” involved Trump reading a statement chock full of cherry-picked facts and figures. His message boiled down to this: 

First, his administration was doing a fantastic job in this crisis; but it would “probably unfortunately get worse before it gets better.” 

Second, lots of countries were doing worse than we were. So, if you thought about it that way, Trump was doing great!

 – and, astonishingly –  

He said he wished Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged accomplice in a child sex trafficking ring, well!

Trump with Ghislaine Maxwell.

Let’s start with that stunning comment. After the president finished prepared remarks, he took questions. 

A reporter wondered if he had any thoughts on Maxwell’s arrest. She had been hiding out on a farm in New Hampshire (which she purchased secretly for $1 million in cash this past spring) until the F.B.I. tracked her down and arrested her July 2. She had disguised the fact she was the purchaser and hired ex-British military for protection, rarely leaving the property herself. Maxwell has tens of millions stashed in bank accounts around the globe, so she could afford protection. That assumes you don’t mind guarding a woman accused of molesting young girls and making it easier for Epstein and an ever-changing array of perverted high rollers to bed teenagers as young as 14. 

Now that Maxwell has been apprehended, even her high-priced legal team can’t spring her from jail. During a bail hearing, two alleged victims spoke out. One told the court that “without Ghislaine, Jeffrey [Epstein] could not have done what he did.” A second warned that Maxwell was herself “a sexual predator.” Maxwell’s lawyer offered to post a $5 million bond. He said his client wasn’t the “monster” portrayed in the news. And she was suffering, having gone 72 hours without a shower while in custody! 

The judge was unmoved by her bathing problems, and, deeming her a serious flight risk, ordered her remanded to custody. Maxwell faces up to 35 years in prison and a few thousand years in hell (if there is a hell). 

When the reporter asked Trump about Maxwell, you would never have expected the answer he supplied. He didn’t mention the alleged victims, and there were reportedly scores. 

Many suffered sustained abuse. 

“I wish her well, frankly,” Trump replied. “I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they [Epstein and Maxwell] lived in Palm Beach.” 

“I wish her well,” he said again, and then moved to the next question.

 

* 

MOST OF THE BRIEFING was devoted to Trump trying to make Trump sound like less of a chump. He said (after months of saying the opposite) that he really liked masks. He’d worn a mask “many times,” he claimed. He was all in on social distancing. No one was a bigger fan of social distancing than him. He always tried to distance, himself, and hoped his MAGA fans did too. 

Trump was lying. In March he had labeled himself a “wartime president,” but since then had been ordering his troops to charge up the wrong hills. He was no advocate for masks. As late as Memorial Day, he mocked Joe Biden for wearing one. Earlier this month, his fans crammed together at Mt. Rushmore to watch fireworks and spray tiny droplets on each other when they talked. 

 

His bedrock principle is to deceive rather than admit mistake. 

As expected, Trump twisted facts out of all resemblance to reality. He said we were testing more than any other nation on earth. That was the reason we had so many cases. He was right when he said we had done fifty million tests. He was wrong when he said, “India was next, with twelve million,” then “seven, six, and four” for the third, fourth and fifth nations doing the most. 

I knew he was wrong because I’m not a lazy ignoramus. I check facts. For Trump, his bedrock principle is to deceive rather than to admit mistake. According to Worldometers, the U.S. has conducted 49,876,031 coronavirus tests. 

So, he got that right! 

India has done 14.4 million tests. I think that number was posted right before Trump gave his briefing – so not actually wrong. 

Russia was second, however, with 25.4 million tests. The United Kingdom was fourth with 13.6 million. Germany had done 6.9 million tests, so call that the “seven” in the president’s telling. Spain and Italy had both done more than six million. So, the “four” in Trump’s listing was nonsense. 

You can’t get around certain bedrock truths, no matter how devious you are. That means, if you’re Trump, or his disingenuous press secretary, you have to hope supporters don’t check out what you say. Germany hasn’t tested as much as we have, even adjusted for population. 

But that’s because they haven’t needed to. 

They bent the curve long ago. Germany has 110 deaths per million in population. We have 438. 

Anyone who tries to tell you our mortality rate is the best, or even one of the best, is lying, or delusional.

 

* 

NEW CASES of COVID-19 for the United States, on July 21: 

63,028.

___  

7/22/20: I have a simple way of telling which politicians I like and which ones I don’t. 

I don’t like crooks. 

Stick a “D” after their name. Don’t like ‘em. “R,” “KN,” whatever. I don’t like ‘em if they’re Know Nothings.

 

____________________ 

Don’t be stupid. Not all politicians are alike.

____________________ 

 

Our example for today is Larry Householder (R), Speaker of the Ohio General Assembly. The Speaker has just been busted by the F.B.I. and charged for his alleged role in a $60 million bribery scheme. Householder, former Ohio Republican Party chairman Matt Borges, and a variety of lobbyists and aides were taken into custody. What did FirstEnergy, an Akron-based company, get for its supposed $60 million bribe? The company convinced lawmakers to provide a $1.3 billion bailout for two failing nuclear powerplants. 

That’s an excellent business model, you might say, with a return of $22.67 per bribe dollar spent. At least it was an excellent model until F.B.I. agents showed up. “This is likely the largest bribery, money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio,” said U.S. Attorney David DeVillers, whose office will prosecute. More arrests are likely. “We’re not done with this case,” DeVillers added. “There are a lot of federal agents knocking on a lot of doors.” 

FirstEnergy executives might want to ask Ghislaine Maxwell for tips about how to evade capture. (See: 7/21/20.)

 

* 

SO, HERE’S HOW IT GOES. If you don’t understand the importance of the free press in ferreting out crooks in government (or in this case, spreading the news), you need to get out of your house more often. That’s one reason this blogger fears Trump and his attacks on “Fake News.” Better “Fake News,” than politicians doing crooked deals in the dark. 

Look, no one likes paying taxes. But taxes to bail out companies that are bribing elected officials? 

Again, not all politicians are alike. If you find yourself saying that, or thinking that, slap yourself. When four members of the Toledo city council were arrested and charged in a bribery and extortion scheme in June, those four, all Democrats, were crooks. Eight council members were not. 

In 2014 Illinois State Representative Keith Farnham (D) was convicted of distributing child pornography. Most men, of all political persuasions, are absolutely not into child pornography. 

Not all politicians are alike. Some have sticky fingers. That same year, Kansas State Rep. Trent K. LeDoux (R), pled guilty to one count of bank fraud. He got 18 months in prison for ripping off Farmers and Merchants Bank to the tune of $460,000. Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives Mike Hubbard (R), was convicted on 12 of 23 felony charges in 2016. In 2019, Alabama State Senator Zeb Little (D), was convicted of stealing money from client funds.

 

Not all politicians are alike. You would not want Bill Clinton around your 26-year-old daughter, if she interned in the White House. No one accused Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush of sexual improprieties. 

Congressman John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, who died last week, was known as the “conscience of Congress.” 

John Lewis and James Zwerg, after a mob bloodied them both,
in a battle over civil rights.

Congressman Jim Traficant, an Ohio Democrat, was found guilty on ten felony counts of financial corruption, sentenced to eight years in prison, and expelled from the House of Representatives in 2002. 

Traficant, who had ties to the mob, was no John Lewis; and John Lewis who had the courage to stand up to racists mobs in the 1960s, even after being badly beaten, was no Jim Traficant. 

Different mobs. 

Politicians aren’t all the same, and you have to do due diligence and sort out those you like from those you don’t. Some politicians want to end abortions, even in cases of incest or rape. Some politicians think women have the right to choose. Some want to raise taxes on the top 1%. Some think the top 1% worked hard and should be able to keep more of their money. President Obama expanded healthcare under the Affordable Care Act. President Trump said the ACA was a badly flawed plan and promised to repeal it. Some politicians would raise the federal minimum wage to $15. Others would not, saying it would hurt small business. Some are “friends of the environment” and push for increased funding for national parks. Others think environmental rules and regulations hamstring business and want rules and regulations curtailed. 

Some politicians think climate change is a serious threat. Some think it’s a hoax. (It’s not a hoax. Don’t be stupid!) 

Me? I like national parks. I like clean air. I’m for raising the minimum wage. I approve of Obamacare, even though it’s expensive and even though I have good health insurance through the State Teachers Retirement System. I’m conflicted when it comes to abortion, but I don’t believe women should be told what to do in the first trimester, or (scratching my head) the second. 

I subscribe to the idea that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That goes for “money power,” too. I’d raise taxes on the 1%. 

It’s too easy to shrug our shoulders, or wash our hands and say, “All politicians are alike.” Because they’re not.

 

* 

She can take a scarf and do 15 things with it. 

PROOF ENOUGH that not all politicians are alike: President Trump. He might not listen to healthcare experts when they explain the value of mask wearing. He did make it clear today that he has been really impressed with Dr. Deborah Birx. “An unbelievable woman. A woman of tremendous substance. And style, frankly. She has an amazing style. She walks into the room and she can take a scarf and do 15 things with it,” he explained in a talk on Fox News. 

Yes, indeed. Scarves were his focus. It would be sad, if it weren’t indicative of the danger Trump’s cluelessness represents for all Americans. Confirmed new cases of COVID-19 for July 22: 

70,106. 

 

* 

IF WE TUNE IN to Fox News, we find commentators and guests trying to scare viewers into forgetting all about the pandemic. What about this “Black Lives Matter” movement? What does Fox want its audience to think? 

Ben Shapiro, the young conservative pundit appears on Martha MacCallum’s show to talk about a poll that shows 56% of Americans believe American society overall is racist. That horrifies Shapiro, who posits two possible explanations. “Either the majority of Americans believe that their family, friends and neighbors are actually racist,” he says. 

Here, viewers at home are supposed to shake their heads, and say, “Naw, not me and Maw. We ain’t no racists.” 

Or, Shapiro continues, “they believe that the institutions of American society are so deeply corrupt and systematically racist that they have to be razed to the ground. The only solution if you believe that society, at this moment in 2020, is systematically racist or inherently racist is complete destruction of the system from within.” 

Now, viewers are supposed to rush out and buy more guns, and hammer “Trump 2020” signs into their lawns. Maybe using the butts of their semi- automatic rifles. 

Because, if they don’t, Shapiro says, “complete destruction” lies ahead. 

 

SAD FACT: A nurse’s union places 164 pairs of white shoes on the Capitol Hill lawn, to mark the death of 164 nurses, infected and killed, while trying to help repeated waves of coronavirus sufferers. 

Conservatives respond by bitching about having to wear masks, because it’s all a plot so the government can control us.___

 

7/23/20: Today, we learned that in the last reporting period another 1.4 million Americans filed for unemployment. That’s eighteen weeks in a row with more than a million people losing jobs.

 

____________________ 

31,802,715 claiming unemployment benefits

____________________ 

 

According to the Department of Labor, “The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending July 4 was 31,802,715, a decrease of 200,615 from the previous week.” 

The unemployment rate in June was 11.1%.

 

* 

UNFORTUNATELY, the coronavirus is not going away, even as time to reopen school approaches. In one recent poll only 8% of Americans think schools should reopen like normal. Another 14% support reopening with minor adjustments. Even Barron Trump’s school will not fully reopen for in-person instruction. Today, the U.S. passed the four million-mark in total confirmed cases. 

At the same time, the White House has placed Dr. Anthony Fauci in timeout, after he told reporters it would be unsafe to send everyone back to school unless strict guidelines were followed. 

Dr. Deborah Birx, the one health expert Trump is not trying to muzzle (yet), says children with “underlying conditions” should remain home. Teachers with a variety of risk factors would also be unsafe. Older teachers, for example, would be endangered, in much the same way doctors and nurses have been. 

As for getting the spread under control, we aren’t. On Tuesday, more than a thousand Americans died from coronavirus, the first time the daily toll had risen above that number since June 10. On Wednesday 1,135 Americans died. California reported a new high of 12,800 cases in one day. Texas hit new highs with 197 deaths and 10,893 patients hospitalized. Hidalgo County had so many dead, local officials were forced to use refrigerated trucks to store bodies. Thursday, at least 1,014 Americans died. The Florida Department of Health announced its highest one-day death toll, 173, and another 10,249 confirmed cases. 

You figure tens of thousands of our fellow Americans are getting hit with huge doctor bills, even if they recover. 

* 

WE HAD another truth-teller this week. The president has been boasting about acing an “intelligence test.” Joe Biden, he has insisted, couldn’t pass it. Neither could Chris Wallace, Trump said. 

On Wednesday, the president was still touting his cognitive skills. “Person, women, man, camera, TV,” Trump repeated several times during a press conference. He wanted all Americans to know, he was asked to listen to those five words, and repeat them, in order, during his test in 2018. 

And he nailed it! 

Later, he said doctors asked him to repeat those words again. And he nailed it again! It was a great moment in American history. 

“And you go: ‘Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.’ If you get it in order, you get extra points,” Trump claimed. “They said nobody gets it in order. It’s actually not that easy, but for me, it was easy.” Trump also wanted us to know, he got all 35 questions right. Doctors were amazed! No one had ever shown such mental acuity. He scored, like 105%, what with bonus points. 

Only, he was lying, or exaggerating, as is his wont. The Canadian doctor who designed the test weighed in: 

Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, who developed the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) in the early 1990s, told CTVNews.ca that the 30-question test is used as a screening tool to identify cognitive dysfunction [emphasis added], including early signs of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

 

“The average score for normal individuals is 27, the cut off for normal is 26 so anything above 26 is considered normal. When [Trump] got 30 out of 30 on the test, it’s still considered to be normal performance,” Nasreddine said in a phone interview on Thursday.

 

It’s a bad sign if you’re taking the test; because it means someone is worried you might be showing signs of dementia. 

(This would be the logical explanation for the last three years of the Trump presidency.)

“Some problems that’ll all work out.” 

THEN AGAIN, in terms of what matters, the president is as clueless as ever. A German shepherd puppy has a better handle on the pandemic crisis than the dope in the Oval Office. At a press briefing today, he stood in front of the map shown below and told reporters, if you ignored the red, where the virus was rampant, the United States was doing great fighting the coronavirus. 

“You can see from that it’s in great shape, lots of it,” Trump said, turning to point at the map. “The northeast has become very clean. The country is in good shape, other than if you look south and west — some problems that’ll all work out.” 

Trump was probably the only fool in America that believed the country was in “great shape, lot’s of it.”

* 

SPEAKING OF TRUMPIAN CLUELESSNESS, a new study, published in the Reviews of Geophysics journal warns that current rates of deforestation and burning of fossil fuels will have devastating ramifications. 

A team of twenty-five researchers, working for four years, warns that unless we wake up, global temperatures will rise anywhere from 4.1° to 8.1°F in the next fifty years. 

And we’re stuck with a dunderpate who thinks windmills cause cancer and says climate “changes both ways.” 

 

FUN FACT: Mattel announces it beat sales estimates for the second quarter of the year. Kids stuck at home have been buying more Barbie dolls and families have been purchasing decks of UNO cards. Baby Yoda plush toys are popular. So, at least one company was thriving during the pandemic.

 

FUN FACT – FINES: The argument that we can always trust business leaders, and we never want more government regulation takes another in a lengthy list of hits. 

Taro Pharmaceutical agrees to pay a $205.7 million fine and admit to conspiring to fix the price of generic drugs. A spokesperson for the Department of Justice notes that the company will “continue to fully cooperate with the government on its ongoing investigation into the generic pharmaceutical industry.”

___ 

 

7/24-25/20: We have a few positive stories to report. On Friday every player and coach on the New York Yankees and Washington Nationals took a knee before their opening game of the much-delayed season. It was their way of showing support for the “Black Lives Matter” movement. 

Then again: The president has said he will not watch any game where kneeling occurs. Not baseball. Not chess. Not Scrabble.

 

____________________ 

The Department of Homeland Security “was not established to be the president’s personal militia. 

Former Secretary of DHS, Tom Ridge

____________________ 

 

Kneeling is bad! But obstructing justice? That’s cool. Trump also announces that he would consider pardoning anyone implicated in the Mueller investigation. In another one of his near-nightly call-ins to Sean Hannity’s show, he says, “I’ve looked at a lot of different people. They’ve been treated extremely unfairly, and I think I probably would, yes,” Trump says. He would pardon them. 

Fortunately, we can also report there are some Republicans who have spines and understand the reason the U.S. Constitution is replete with checks and balances. Former Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, made it clear this week that he believes Trump has leaped over the constitutional line by sending federal paramilitary forces to cities and states where mayors and governors have not requested them. As first head of Homeland Security, Ridge noted that his department was established to protect America from “global terrorism.” In a radio interview he explained, “It was not established to be the president’s personal militia.” 

Ridge would have been happy to work with state and local leaders if asked. Otherwise, “it would be a cold day in hell before I would consent to an uninvited, unilateral intervention” into any American city. 

Michael Chertoff, another former head of Homeland Security, and another Republican, similarly faulted the president for tone and tactics. Trump wasn’t helping with his “very belligerent, aggressive tone,” Mr. Chertoff cautioned. “You can protect federal property, but that doesn’t mean it’s an unlimited license to roam around the streets [emphasis added] and pick up people based on some suspicion that maybe they’re involved or gonna be involved in something.” 

Neither Ridge nor Chertoff were condoning violence. Nevertheless, there are reasons the U.S. Constitution limits situations in which a president can call out troops and send them into states without governors asking. This new tactic, sending in Immigrations and Custom Enforcement officers and heavily-armed tactical teams from a variety of federal agencies (not technically U.S. military forces) sets a dangerous precedent. Think Hong Kong 2020, or Tahrir Square 2013. 

Or Boston Massacre, 1770. 

“Whatever the statutory authority is, we still have a Constitution and that requires reasonable suspicion to stop somebody,” Chertoff added. We require, “probable cause to arrest them. And it’s not clear to me that that is being applied in this case.” 

Chertoff told ABC News he wished Team Trump would do more to safeguard the next election and quit focusing on mail-in balloting as a problem. “There is zero evidence that mail-in voting creates widespread problems in an election,” he said. “It’s not of the scale that could possibly impact on a national election. So, there is zero evidence for this.” 

Chertoff later spoke to a reporter from the Washington Post, and said sending in forces to cities where they were not wanted would damage DHS. “It undermines the credibility of the department’s principal mission,” he warned. “While it’s appropriate for DHS to protect federal property, that is not an excuse to range more widely in a city and to conduct police operations, particularly if local authorities have not requested federal assistance. That’s our constitutional system.” 

Chertoff also had concerns because Trump had singled out Democratic cities. “Essentially, he’s suggesting this is a political maneuver. As someone who’s spent four years at the department, the idea that people would be suggesting that it’s going to be a tool of political activity is very unsettling.” 

“It’s very problematic legally as well as morally.” 

Retired three-star Gen. Russell Honoré has not forgotten the oath he took to defend the U.S. Constitution, either. 

In an interview last week he too blasted Team Trump for sending men in uniform to crush protests in American cities. That uniform, he said, “represents the cloth of our nation” and “it’s not to be used as an instrument of protest suppression.” Real soldiers, he added, “don’t just walk up to people and start beating them…with batons.” 

Watch this, he said. A film clip ran, and a uniformed man beat a U.S. Navy veteran. “What kind of bullshit is this?” Gen. Honoré fumed.

 

* 

IN OTHER GOOD NEWS, the judicial branch continues to rebuke the man in the White House. 

We know Trump has a soft spot for felons, accused (Ghislaine Maxwell) and convicted (Gen. Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort), just not felons who lied for him, but later decided to cooperate with investigators. Flynn, who admitted perjury – in return for dodging a variety of additional charges – got his case thrown out entirely, thanks to Trump. Stone, with seven felonies, never spent a day behind bars. Paul Manafort, with ten felonies, has been released from the slammer due to age and health concerns in a time of coronavirus. Yet, Team Trump, working through the Department of Quasi-Justice decided one felon, Michael Cohen, with eight counts against him, should definitely remain in jail. 

A judge has ruled that the DOJ sent Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer, back to jail in “retaliation for his plans to publish a book about the president [emphasis added].” The judge noted that Cohen’s First Amendment rights had been violated. 

Cohen hopes to have his book done before the election, but was offered a chance to remain free if he promised not to talk to the media about his plans or work on his story. He decided to fight his case. And lest we forget, Cohen went to jail for committing felonies involving a co-conspirator, labeled “Individual 1,” in his indictment. That unnamed accomplice? His initials are DJT. 

Nor is this the first time Team Trump has tried to ban a book that might be damaging. They tried to block publication of John Bolton’s book, and Mary Trump’s book, too. (See also: Fire and Fury, 1/3/18.)

 

* 

On Saturday, the first anniversary of President Trump’s call to the President of Ukraine, Lt. Colonel  Alexander Vindman posts a tweet. “One year since The Call. Much has changed for me and so much more has changed for our country,” he says. “I rest well knowing I did my duty.” 

 

* 

COVID-19 cases on July 24: 

74,818.

 

Cases on July 25: 

64,582.

___

7/26/20: I swear, I’m going to keep this short. Short sentences. 

Short!

 

____________________ 

“From my observation, those demonstrators – our fellow American citizens – were engaged in the peaceful expression of their First Amendment rights.” 

Maj. Adam DeMarco

____________________ 

 

If you missed the story, Sen. Tom Cotton offered up an interesting take on American history Sunday. He’s against the 1619 Project. That initiative, backed by The New York Times, is a free teaching resource. The emphasis is on the impact of slavery and racism in our nation’s history. 

Sen. Cotton is against it. He explained his opposition: 

We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.

 

See, African Americans! Stop protesting! The suffering of your ancestors was a “necessary evil.” 

Get over the fact that slaves labored without pay for 246 years. The Founding Fathers were working hard for the “ultimate extinction” of their bondage. Also, don’t be mad, just because the Founding Fathers counted five of you as three white people, when determining state population. 

Don’t be mad about another century of Jim Crow laws. Don’t be mad because white people used to lynch your ancestors with impunity. Don’t be mad because many states figured out ways to keep you from voting until the 1960s. Don’t be mad because some states still try to keep you from voting today. 

Maybe pretend George Floyd is sleeping. 

Also, if you don’t like it here, you can leave. No kneeling allowed! So says former Chicago Bears coach, Mike Ditka. “If you can’t respect our national anthem, get the hell out of the country,” he grumbled last week.

 

* 

SPEAKING OF ASSHOLES, last week the president mocked the mayor of Portland after he was tear-gassed during a protest. That is how you support local government. Send in quasi-military forces. Don’t ask mayors if they want help. 

Also gas a wall of mothers. 

Trump described the glorious scene to Sean Hannity, another asshole in our story. Mayor Ted Wheeler, said the president, “made a fool out of himself. He wanted to be among the people, so he went into the crowd and they knocked the hell out of him. That was the end of him. So that was pretty pathetic.” 

Helpful words from the Asshole-in-Chief. 

As for those mothers, they had linked arms across a Portland street. They hoped to keep Trump’s paramilitary forces and protesters apart. Trump’s boys unleashed the gas. Well, you couldn’t put anything past this president! “The ‘protesters’ are actually anarchists who hate our Country,” he tweeted Sunday. “The line of innocent ‘mothers’ were a scam that Lamestream refuses to acknowledge, just like they don’t report the violence of these demonstrations!” 

Scam mothers! 

* 

One does not testify against this president and thrive. 

ALSO, WE HAVE scam majors! Maj. Adam DeMarco has braved fire before, during a combat tour in Iraq. Tuesday, he plans to testify before Congress. Expect him to take “friendly fire” from the president. 

As a top commander of the Washington D.C. National Guard, he issued a statement Monday. It relates to the events of June 1. This was the day President Trump made his thousand-foot “Selma March” in reverse. That evening, peaceful protesters were driven away from the White House. Trump and a party of toadies walked one-fifth of a mile – so brave – so brave. Then Donald stood before a nearby church and hoisted his favorite book to not read in triumph. 

DeMarco’s statement makes clear. He plans to testify in keeping with his “oath to support and defend the Constitution.” He will describe the scene that night. Park Police, he noted, were armed with tear gas. He was told it was not to be used. “From what I could observe,” he plans to say, “the demonstrators were behaving peacefully, exercising their First Amendment rights.” 

He saw Attorney General Bill Barr trundle out from the White House at 6:05 p.m. and confer with law enforcement officials. Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was there. He told DeMarco to be sure National Guard troops remained calm. Milley said “that we were there to respect the demonstrators’ First Amendment rights.” A curfew was set to go into force at 7 p.m. Barr (or someone else) ordered Lafayette Park cleared.

DeMarco will testify that tear gas was used. After the mayhem subsided, he found “spent tear gas cannisters” on the street. 

Team Trump has denied that gas was deployed. 

Maj. DeMarco will cite the example of the late Congressman John Lewis in testifying. Lewis lay in state Monday in the U.S. Capitol. 

(President Trump, petty as ever, was a “no show.”)

 

…the events I witnessed at Lafayette Square on the evening of June 1 were deeply disturbing to me [DeMarco will say], and to fellow National Guardsmen. Having served in a combat zone, and understanding how to assess threat environments, at no time did I feel threatened by the protestors [emphasis added] or assess them to be violent…

 

From my observation, those demonstrators – our fellow American citizens – were engaged in the peaceful expression of their First Amendment rights. Yet they were subjected to an unprovoked escalation and excessive use of force.

 

As the late Representative John Lewis said, “When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something.”

 

The oath I swore as a military officer, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, is a bedrock guiding principle and, for me, constitutes an individual moral commitment and ethical instruction. It is the foundation of the trust safely placed in the Armed Forces by the American people. And it compels me to say something – and do something – about what I witnessed on June 1 at Lafayette Square.

 

Like Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified in regard to Trump’s problematic phone call with the president of Ukraine, we must assume DeMarco is going to ruin his career. One does not testify against this president and thrive.

___

7/27/20: Even the Reagan Foundation poked the current president in the eye this weekend. The Trump 2020 Campaign has been informed it may not use President Reagan’s image to sell products or raise funds. 

This made the man in the White House mad. Fox News polls made him madder. Those polls showed him trailing Joe Biden. In a testy tweet, Trump blasted Fox News. He also labeled former U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan a “RINO.” 

According to the president, the Fox News poll was fake. So are all the other polls that show him behind. 

Which is all of them.

 

* 

AS FOR THE PRESIDENT, he spent the weekend at his resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. On Saturday he went golfing. It was so much fun he went golfing again Sunday. His partner for that round was former NFL star Brett Favre. 

That man just loves to play golf. Trump has now shot 282 rounds since taking office, or a round every 4.6 days. 

* 

HOW ARE WE DOING on the COVID-19 front? According to the CDC 1 in 3 persons infected suffer from “prolonged illness,” including younger adults. 

Not good. 

We know 146,546 Americans have died from the disease. Not good. 

We know the toll is rising. Last week more than 1,000 Americans died from the coronavirus, five days in a row. Not good at all. 

Call it the equivalent of four commercial airliners crashing per day, with all onboard perishing. 

The recently infected include Trump’s National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien. Major League baseball’s Miami Marlins are canceling their home opener – which will disappoint all the fans not allowed to attend. An even dozen players and a pair of Marlins coaches have tested positive. New cases of coronavirus in the United States, July 27: 

54,448.

FUN FACT: As ESPN will explain in October 2022, 

Favre has become embroiled in the largest case of public fraud in Mississippi history, involved in a scandal that, according to a state audit, has seen at least $77 million of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds line the pockets of rich and powerful Mississippians. Six people have been arrested, five of whom have pleaded guilty for their involvement. Favre has denied wrongdoing and has not been criminally charged.

Favre is accused of steering $8 million in TANF funds to his old alma mater, to build a new gym – which definitely does not put food on needy families’ plates. As for his share, Favre was accused of taking $1.1 million for speeches he didn’t (technically) give. He did repay the loot. 

I mean “return” the funds.

Or another way to put it: Favre would be the perfect guy to play golf with a grifting president, and enjoy the time.

___

7/28/20: If you wished to capture one moment that encapsulated the flawed and fumbling response of Donald Trump to the coronavirus crisis, you had it yesterday. On Tuesday, the president was forced to defend his decision to retweet a video featuring Dr. Stella Immanuel.

 

____________________ 

When having demon sex be sure to use a condom.

____________________ 

 

Dr. Immanuel first gained the president’s attention when she claimed hydroxychloroquine is a “cure” for COVID-19. The president had been criticized for touting the drug himself. Now he saw her claim as validation. 

Even Don Jr. got carried away by the news. He retweeted the same video, labeling it “a must watch.” 

There was joy in Trumpistan. 

Sad to say, the free press started digging. It was revealed that Dr. Immanuel had once claimed alien DNA was being used in medicines. Also, women can develop gynecological problems after dreaming about sex with demons. Which we can all agree proves – when having dream sex – be sure the demon wears a condom. 

The good doctor, who doubles as a pastor at a church she founded, has a whole year’s worth of weird claims to flesh out her sermons. Scientists, she says, are developing a vaccine to prevent people from becoming religious. (And you thought people were losing faith because of quacks like Dr. Immanuel!) According to the Daily Beast, she has also claimed that the government is partly run by “reptilian spirits.” These people are “half human and half ET [emphasis added],” she believes. 

If you’re wondering how the demons manage to get into your dream pants, she can explain that too. “They turn into a woman and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm,” she has said. 

If you’d like to know how to get rid of any demon sperm you might be carrying, you can go to Dr. Immanuel’s website. Be sure to DONATE (that word is in capital letters at the top) while you’re there. Then read her 72 easy steps for stopping Satan’s sperm from working. We should also point out that if you do get pregnant by a demon, too bad. Dr. Immanuel opposes abortion. 

As you might expect, the doctor is also a mask-denier. We don’t need masks to stop the spread. 

We don’t need social distancing. 

We don’t need shutdowns of bars and restaurants and sporting events. All we need is a slug of the magic elixir. 

In any case, we should know soon whether or not Immanuel has a direct line to God. She warned yesterday that if Facebook, which had blocked her videos, refused to put them up again, her celestial friends would destroy the platform. “You are not bigger than God. I promise you,” she said. “If my page is not back up face book will be down in Jesus [sic] name” 

When asked yesterday to explain why he posted a video featuring the woman, Trump said he didn’t know much about her. He also mused about his low popularity, compared to Dr. Anthony Fauci. 

For some reason, many more Americans trust Dr. Fauci to tell the truth about the virus than “Demon Sex” Donald. 

According to Reuters, 1,300 Americans died on Tuesday from the coronavirus. Six states, including California, Florida, and Texas, set one-day records for fatal cases. New virus cases, July 28: 

59,862.

 

* 

AMERICANS MIGHT BE DYING by the thousands, but what really makes Trump sad is the fact that most of us still breathing think he’s doing a lousy job of handling the pandemic. A new Morning Consult poll released Monday finds that 59% of voters do not approve of his handling of the pandemic. Only 36% do.

 

During a White House briefing today, the hurt-feelings president addressed this matter directly. (Another poll finds that only 30% of Americans trust Trump to give them good information on the coronavirus. And that includes, we assume, the Demon Sperm Lady. By comparison, 65% trust Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.)

 

“It’s interesting, he’s got a very good approval rating and I like that,” Trump says. Although you know he’s jealous. “It’s good. Because remember, he’s working for this administration. He’s working with us. We could’ve gotten other people. We could’ve gotten somebody else. It didn’t have to be Dr. Fauci. He’s working with our administration. And for the most part, we’ve done pretty much what he and others ... recommended. And he’s got this high approval rating, so why don’t I have a high approval rating ... with respect to the virus?”

 

In other words, Trump is a great leader because he picked Dr. Fauci to help him. And he’s doing what Dr. Fauci says. “Why don’t I have a high approval rating, and the administration, with respect to the virus?” he continues, with a spritz of self-pity.

 

At any rate, Americans should vote for him in droves in November, assuming they have not been wiped out by this “flu,” as he has called it.

 

* 

IF YOU EVER WONDER why liberals think maybe you can’t trust everyone in business, and so government regulations are often necessary, remember David T. Hines. (Okay, and the Sackler family. And Trump University.) 

Hines recently scored a $3.9 million COVID-19 relief loan to support his South Florida moving business. 

And what better way to move more furniture than to purchase a super-luxury Lamborghini Huracan Evo. For $318,497 dollars. 

Hines also spent thousands on dating websites, jewelry, and clothes, and paid for stays at high-end hotels on Miami Beach. 

He was arrested recently.

___

 

7/29/20: The U.S. has passed the 150,000-mark for deaths from COVID-19. 

Let’s stop and remember when President Trump said we were headed to zero cases soon. That was February 26.

 

____________________ 

“Well, it will go down to zero, ultimately.” 

President Trump

____________________ 

 

Two months later a reporter asked the president, and here I am paraphrasing,  “Sir, do you regret that idiotic prediction?” 

Trump being Trump, never batted an eye. “Well, it will go down to zero, ultimately,” he said, indicating that he had been right all along. 

Another three months passed. According to Johns Hopkins University, the U.S. has logged 4.4 million confirmed cases. We just passed France, hard hit in the first wave, in deaths per millions in population: 465 vs. 463. France, which had 1,392 new cases today, has done a good job of flattening the curve. Under Trump’s guiding hand, we haven’t flattened the curve a bit. According to Worldometers, the U.S.A. had 66,921 new cases and 1,485 new deaths today. 

Only fifteen French died of COVID-19 during the same 24 hours.

___

 

 

SPECIAL POST 

Rep. John Lewis, who spent his life fighting for justice, passed away on July 17. He had been beaten badly, more than once, for standing up for human dignity. He had seen the worst of Jim Crow justice and helped destroy it at the foundation. He had been elected to high office, after growing up in an era when most African Americans in the Deep South were denied the right to vote. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, he penned the following tribute to those millions who had stood up to protest.  

It was released on the morning of July 30, a few hours before his funeral service began: 

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

 

____________________ 

“Good trouble, necessary trouble.”

____________________ 

 

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

 

That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.

 

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison [emphasis added], and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.

 

Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best, shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain.

 

Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

 

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

 

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, though decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

 

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

 

When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.

___ 

 

7/30/20: What should scare us most today? Let’s begin with the fact the president has tweeted out his boldest, most brazen plan yet to circumvent the Constitution. 

He says he thinks we should delay the November election until it’s safe for everyone to vote, at least those of us not wiped out by the virus. “Ol’ Twitter Thumbs” has clearly been looking at the “fake polls.” With 95 days left to avoid a beatdown, Trump could use some extra time to turn voter opinions around. Maybe we could all vote on Christmas? Or New Year’s Eve? 

If enough Americans get wasted, Trump might corral the drunkard vote. 

We of a liberal persuasion, and those good Republicans, conservatives and libertarians who understand the fragility of the system of checks and balances, have long been worried about the authoritarian instincts of this president. Now we know. Trump would be happy to pull a Robert Mugabe. 

Back in March 2018, we of the liberal stripe paid attention when Trump said he thought it was cool that President Xi Jinping of China had cleared a path which would allow him to serve as long as he liked. “He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great,” Trump told an adoring dinner crowd. “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.” 

As shocking as it is that Trump is floating the half-baked idea of moving the election, there’s a second layer to this cake of proto-fascism. Mike Pompeo, his Secretary of State, as loyal a toady as ever hopped at his superior’s command, says he didn’t think it was a problem. When members of a congressional panel asked the secretary if he believed Trump had power to move the day, Pompeo said he didn’t want to offer “a legal judgement on the fly.” Lawmakers, no doubt bug-eyed in disbelief, pressed him for detail. Pompeo suggested that Attorney General Bill Barr might have final say. “In the end, the DOJ, others, will make that legal determination,” he said. 

Others? 

The president, perhaps?  

Asked to comment on the president’s latest democracy-killing idea, most Republicans showed as much spine as a dish of Jell-O.  

 

____________________ 

“I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist.” 

Professor Steven Calabresi

____________________ 

 

One leading conservative sounded a clarion warning. In an op-ed for The New York Times, Steven Calabresi, a co-founder of the Federalist Society, thundered disdain. 

Here, we turn to Fox News’s report on the op-ed –  since all good Trump fans’ eyes glaze over if they hear the words, “The New York Times.” As Fox explained, Calabresi’s organization helped craft the lists of judges with whom Team Trump and Mitch McConnell have been filling hundreds of seats on the federal bench. Many of those seats were open, of course, because McConnell blocked President Obama from filling them when he had a chance. 

(Fox didn’t say that. Mr. Blogger did.)

 

Dr. Calabresi, professor of law at Northwestern, wrote that he had defended Trump against what he called an “unconstitutional investigation” by Robert Mueller and his team. Now, even a staunch defender of the president was scared. And rightfully so. Here’s what he wrote: 

I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again ... and his removal from office by the Senate.

 

Calabresi called on “every Republican in Congress” to tell Trump that postponing the election would be “illegal, unconstitutional, and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says otherwise should never be elected to Congress again.”

 

* 

IF THE PRESIDENT hinting at an end-run around the Constitution wasn’t bad enough, we also learned today that unemployment claims for the last seven-day period ticked up again, to 1.43 million. Another 830,000 people filedfor help under a special program aimed at aiding gig workers and self-employed. 

The U.S. economy also declined precipitously in the second quarter. It’s official. We saw a drop in GDP of 32.9%. According to Fox News, unemployment may have surged again to 14.7%.

 

* 

“All over the world, they’re having tremendous problems.” 

During another free-wheeling, unedifying press conference at the White House, the president blamed pretty much every case and every death in this country due to COVID-19 on the Chinese. 

He also hastened to point out that it wasn’t just in this country that cases were skyrocketing again. 

“All over the world, they’re having tremendous problems,” he said. “A resurgence has taken place in many countries that people thought were doing well.” There had been “a wide range of approaches to the pandemic,” he said, by way of excuse, although we’re still the only country where our leader suggested injecting bleach as a cure. Trump wanted to be sure that everyone watching at home knew there had been a “resurgence in cases… throughout large portions of our planet.” 

He listed Japan, China, Australia, Belgium, Spain, France, Germany, and Hong Kong as “places where they thought it was – they had really done great. It came back. And in a couple of cases, it came back very strongly.” 

In other words, if we focused on how poorly other countries were doing, Trump wouldn’t look so bad. So, let’s add a little nuance to what the president was trying to say. A check for July 30 shows the U.S. had 

68,042 new cases. 

Japan, with a population slightly more than a third of the United States, had 1,323 new cases. 

Only 1,008 Japanese have died so far. 

If we check all the countries Trump listed, China is suspect. Government censors take care of anything they consider “fake news” (and they use the same standard for deciding what news is fake as Trump would apply if he could; that is, it’s “fake” if it makes the ruling party look bad). 

In any case, the Chinese reported 127 new cases on July 30. 

More reliably, Australia reported 721, Belgium 673, Spain 2,789, France 1,377, Germany 902, and Hong Kong 149. You can do the math yourself, but a rough estimate tells me, if Australia had the same population as the USA, they would have had 9,400 cases. Belgium would have the equivalent of 20,000, still a “bending the curve” level of new disease. Spain would have 20,000. France would be at 7,000. Germany would stand at 4,000. Hong Kong – about to have its freedoms crushed by Trump’s friend, Xi Jinping – would have the equivalent of 3,600. 

Total deaths so far for those same countries, using statistics compiled by Worldometers, which run slightly higher: 

Japan: 1,011 (8 deaths per million population)

China: 4,634 (3)

Australia: 201 (8)

Belgium: 9,845 (849)

Spain: 28,445 (608)

France: 30,265 (464)

Germany: 9,226 (110)

Hong Kong: 33 (4)

—and— 

United States: 157,898 deaths (474 per million). 

That means, even allowing President Trump to pick and choose the facts he shares, we’re worse than all but two of the countries he mentioned when it comes to deaths adjusted for population. As for the continued spread of the coronavirus, we’re doing worse than them all. 

 

He’s the Wizard of Oz, only without the kind heart. 

Trump wasn’t done trying to bamboozle the American people, or at least that portion that still hasn’t realized he’s the Wizard of Oz, only without the kind heart. It’s impossible any longer for Trump to pretend he’s doing a great job of handling the crisis. His new approach is to argue that everyone else is failing too. He seemed pleased to report that several states, where governors had been praised at first for handling the outbreak, weren’t doing so well either. States “like California, Washington State, Maryland, Virginia, Nevada, Illinois, Oregon, and many others.…And governors that were extremely popular are not so popular anymore.” 

It didn’t require sharp wits to realize that all the states he took the trouble to list were led by Democratic governors, save Maryland. And that state was led by Larry Hogan, a Republican Trump loathes. 

The president also wanted reporters, and people watching at home, to remember that nothing like this pandemic had been seen since 1917. 

It’s a minor point but Trump consistently gets the year of the Spanish Flu pandemic wrong. It erupted in 1918 and continued into the next year. Trump doesn’t do the homework needed to get even basics right. 

More importantly, Trump is incapable of showing empathy. More than half our deaths, he reminded everyone, “come from less than 1% of our population.” People in nursing homes, he said. People in assisted living. “Think of it,” he explained. “The average age of those who die from the illness is 78.” 

They were almost dead already, he meant. 

He also mentioned the great job some states were doing, bringing the numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths down. He thought they were doing great in Arizona. Florida, too. Also, Texas. 

Again, it didn’t take a physicist to notice that all three states he mentioned had Republican governors. 

As for me, I might not be the brightest blogger in the land, but I do understand day-to-day math. I thought it might be fun to check a state or two, to see how Trump’s choices stacked up against others. Oregon? My daughter lives there. On July 30, they had 410 new cases, one per every 10,287 residents. Illinois had one new case for every 7,151. Virginia had one for every 10,085. 

All blue states. 

How about those great red states? How were they doing by comparison? Arizona had 2,521 new cases on July 30. That would be one for every 2,887 Arizonans. Florida had one additional case for every 2,127 Floridians. Texas had one more for every 3,295 Texans. So, Trump's favorite states – states he still hoped he might win in November – weren’t really doing well. 

What the hell, I said to myself. I wondered how Maryland was doing, with a Republican governor Trump didn’t like. Hmm…892 cases…population 6,045,680…one new sick person for every 6,778. 

Trump wasn’t done slinging the BS. He talked about how his administration was responsible for record-setting “job creation” in May and June. If you squinted hard enough and then had a friend brain you in the back of the head with a shovel, you might have missed the reality of what he was trying to claim. 

Yes, in those two months, 7.5 million Americans had gone back to work. Almost every one of those jobs represented a person coming back from furlough, as the pandemic began to ebb. This wasn’t “job creation.” When you checked records, you saw that 22 million jobs disappeared at least temporarily in March and April. An additional check of Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers indicated that an additional 3 million Americans had dropped out of the workforce. 

Eventually, Trump stopped bragging and lying and took questions. We’ll save time and summarize his answers. 

Democrats and Joe Biden? 

Trump wanted us to know they hated America and wanted everyone to die from higher taxes, or from bad guys breaking into our homes, and the defunded police not answering 911 calls. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: If you’ve been worried about the coronavirus and the economy, you may be missing another critical story. Baghdad set an all-time record of 125.2°F on July 28, an almost unlivable level of heat. On July 30, Phoenix, Arizona broke a daily record high by three degrees, topping out at 118°. More worrisome is a fifteen-day streak, where the daily low never dropped below 90° even at night. That tied the record for most days in a year with lows above 90°. 

To get a better sense of the trend, the 15-day-straight stretch means 2020 is already tied with 2013 and 2003. There were fourteen such days in 2018 and 2007, thirteen in 2009-2011. Last year there were twelve. In 2012 and 2006, there were eleven. “Temperatures during this time of a year are rare and dangerous,” one weatherman warned. “You just have to really be on guard and respect the heat.” 

Rare, heretofore. Not so rare anymore. Climate change is not a hoax. Future generations will pay the price for our denials.

___ 

 

7/31/20: Trump spent the last day of the month complaining because the coming election was going to be rigged. It would be a hoax, a fraud, a calamity, a con, a debacle, a fiasco, and a five-alarm fire. 

He did not spend the day talking to health officials about how best to address the COVID-19 crisis. 

Because: Trump is an idiot. 

He did find time to fly to Florida and squeeze in a campaign fundraiser, and then fly back to Washington D.C. 

On this, the final day of a brutal month, the U.S. recorded 68,605 cases of COVID-19. That brought the July total to: 

1,916,706. 

Trump likes to say he has done more than any other president in his first three-and-a-half years in office. 

You could say he has singlehandedly rejuvenated the mortuary business. 

According to the CDC, on July 31, another 1,371 Americans succumbed from COVID-19. The death toll stood at: 

152,870.

 

One final bit of Trumpian imbecility. On this last day of July, the president tells the American people he has the coronavirus on the run, or soon will. “We’ll get rid of it, we’ll beat it, and it will be soon.”

 

* 

Unlike the President of the United States, this blogger has no trouble condemning lawmakers who are alleged to be crooks, no matter what side they’re on (see post for 9/1/20). When Fox News reports on a Tennessee state senator, Katrina Robinson, a Democrat, who has been charged with stealing $600,000 from a company she owns, Mr. Blogger does not start shouting that Robinson is being persecuting – as Trump always says when his pals get arrested and charged. 

The senator is accused of using the cash to pay for her own wedding, to buy  her daughter a Jeep Renegade, and to fund an extravagant lifestyle. 

So, if she gets convicted? Yeah. Lock her dumb ass up.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (3/18/22): Robinson is eventually convicted on two counts, but a judge sentences her to “time served,” and one year of probation. She had previously been expelled from her seat in the Tennessee Senate, but called the 27-5 vote a “procedural lynching.” 

Appeals and additional sentencing seem likely.

___

  

August 1, 2020: August begins the way July ended, with a dire warning from one who worked inside the White House. 

In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, now-retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman speaks out against the president. After 21 years, six months, and ten days, Vindman has left the U.S. Army. Vindman is a patriot and was scheduled for promotion to colonel. The Army review board said his service had been meritorious. 

He deserved to be advanced. 

President Trump had other plans. A campaign of retaliation commenced. The promotion was blocked. 

In what way had Vindman sinned? 

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, left, testified honorably.

He and his brother, Yevgeny, right, were both forced out of the U.S. Army.

____________________ 

“In America, right matters.” 

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman

____________________

 

He had testified under oath, something the president would never dare. He told lawmakers in Congress that he had heard Trump’s call to the President of Ukraine. It was, he said, a craven attempt to force the Ukrainians to help him win re-election in 2020. Lt. Col. Vindman, a national security expert, warned that by holding up military aid to Ukraine, until the Ukrainians  agreed to “play ball,” the president had put U.S. national security at risk. 

This was what Dr. Fiona Hill and other White House security experts also said in their testimony. 

Vindman promised that in retirement he would not flinch. He would speak out against any “attacks on our national security,” as he saw them. 

He would do all he could to “keep our nation safe and strong against internal and external threats.” 

External threats are a given with every nation on earth, across the recorded history of all the centuries. 

It was those “internal threats” that moved Lt. Col. Vindman to warn: 

At no point in my career or life have I felt our nation’s values under greater threat and in more peril than at this moment. Our national government during the past few years has been more reminiscent of the authoritarian regime [emphasis added] my family fled more than 40 years ago than the country I have devoted my life to serving.

 

An immigrant from the old Soviet Union, along with the rest of his family, Vindman’s career had been destroyed by “a mendacious president and his enablers.” He did not despair. He had bled for this country, something no member of the Trump clan has dared during 145 years on American soil. 

He continued: 

During my testimony in the House impeachment inquiry, I reassured my father, who experienced Soviet authoritarianism firsthand, saying, “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth.” Despite Trump’s retaliation, I stand by that conviction. Even as I experience the low of ending my military career, I have also experienced the loving support of tens of thousands of Americans. Theirs is a chorus of hope that drowns out the spurious attacks of a disreputable man and his sycophants.

 

When a member of the congressional committee asked how he had the confidence to reassure his father that way, Vindman was clear. “Congressman, he replied, “because this is America. This is the country I have served and defended, that all my brothers have served, and here, right matters.” 

He remained hopeful despite his own fate. He had earned a promotion. It had been denied. “To this day, despite everything that has happened, I continue to believe in the American Dream. I believe that in America, right matters. I want to help ensure that right matters for all Americans.”

 

* 

AS FOR PROOF that Republican lawmakers have their priorities straight, Oklahoma State Rep. Sean Roberts threatened this week to revoke tax privileges for the N.B.A.’s Oklahoma Thunder. 

Roberts was in a tizzy because N.B.A. players were taking a knee during the National Anthem. He wanted to ensure Thunder players didn’t get any commie ideas. As he explained, “By kneeling ... the NBA and its players are showing disrespect to the American flag and all it stands for.” This “anti-patriotic act makes clear the NBA’s support of the Black Lives Matter group ... its ties to Marxism and its efforts to destroy nuclear families.” 

And you thought the BLM protesters just didn’t want police to kneel on the necks of unarmed blacks until they expired, or shoot them dead while they were trying to sleep in their own apartments! 

Saturday, the entire Thunder team donned “Black Lives Matter” t-shirts and took a knee at the start of its game. 

The Utah Jazz team joined them in protest.

 

* 

New cases of COVID-19, for August 1: 

58,947. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: It should concern all Americans to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was compiling reports on both protesters in Portland, and journalists who covered those protests. 

Because what you really need in any authoritarian system is police who possess knowledge of “unfriendly” reporters. 

See: Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Muammar al-Gaddafi and Vladimir Putin, to name just a few. 

Brian Murphy, head of the intelligence branch at DHS, was reassigned after it was revealed he had disseminated such reports to law enforcement agencies. 

(He should have been fired.)

 

Benjamin Wittes, author of the blog Lawfare, was one target for retribution. He had stirred Murphy’s wrath after releasing an email Murphy wrote to all federal agents, ordering them to refer to all Portland protesters as “VIOLENT ANTIFA ANARCHISTS.” You could even hear an echo of the president’s rage in that memo, complete with Murphy’s use of all capital letters.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (4/5/22), while proofreading older posts: The claims of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill were eventually bolstered by Trump’s former National Security Advisor, the less-than-courageous John Bolton. Bolton saved his “testimony” and put it in a book for sale. He, too, insisted Trump put U.S. national security at risk, in service to his own selfish interests. Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman’s promotion to colonel was restored and Col. Vindman continues to serve this country proudly in uniform.

___

  

8/2/20: President Trump had a busy Sunday. He went golfing. Afterwards, he spent his day rage-tweeting. 

Two health experts on his Coronavirus Task Force continued to undercut his idiot claims. He may have to replace his team of experts – who he ignores anyway – with the Demon Sperm Lady. (See: 7/28/20.)

 

____________________ 

“Pathetic.” 

President Trump

____________________ 

 

Sunday, both Dr. Birx and Admiral Brett Giroir of the U.S. Public Health Service cut down some of Trump’s favorite ideas. The president, and even Don Jr., got excited last week when Dr. Stella Immanuel, the Demon Sperm Lady, claimed she had treated hundreds of people for COVID-19, using nothing more than hydroxychloroquine. 

Giroir said it was time to “move on” from that idea. On Meet the Press, he explained that “from a public health standpoint, at first, hydroxychloroquine looked very promising.” Now there have “been five randomized control, placebo-controlled trials that do not show any benefit to hydroxychloroquine.” 

So, was it working? 

“There’s no evidence to show that it is [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted],” he said. 

Essentially, what Adm. Giroir was saying, albeit in less blunt fashion, is that you would be just as well off mixing dried pine needles in your Budweiser as taking hydroxychloroquine and hoping for a cure. 

The admiral did have good news to report. Healthcare experts now realize that steroids and the drug Remdesivir (a “bargain” at only $3,100 for a course of treatment) can reduce the death rate. Chuck Todd, his host, wanted to be clear. What about hydroxychloroquine? he asked again. 

“I think most physicians and prescribers are evidence-based and they’re not influenced by whatever is on Twitter or anything else,” Giroir continued. 

In other words, he meant: DO NOT LISTEN TO THE DEMON SPERM LADY ON TWITTER. 

That left Dr. Birx, who had been criticized earlier in the week by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The Speaker accused the doctor of presenting too rosy a picture of how the nation was faring. Sunday, Birx stuck a knife in the balloon of hot air that is President Trump, whenever he talks about the virus. Trump had spent the previous week bragging about how great he was doing, handling this crisis. Kids could go back to school. Everything would be fine! 

Not necessarily, said Dr. Birx. In in an appearance on State of the Union, hosted by Dana Bash, she offered warning. Birx said she was watching twenty states, where cases were rising. “We are in a new phase,” she told Bash, “which is why I wanted to make it clear to the American people.” She said we were seeing some positive effects from “mitigation efforts” put in place by state governors. “What we are seeing today is different from March and April,” however. The virus “is extraordinarily widespread.” It was now in rural settings, as in urban areas. “To everybody who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus.” 

 

“It’s super spreading events and we need to stop those.” 

She reiterated. We should all wear masks. We should all be social distancing. We should all practice good hygiene. Not a syllable did she offer about the miraculous curative powers of hydroxychloroquine. 

Bash mentioned estimates that the death toll could rise to 173,000 by August 22. Another estimate suggested 300,000 Americans might die by year’s end, unless we changed what we were doing. 

The doctor was clear. The spread from one individual to another, that we could handle. “It’s not super spreading individuals, it’s super spreading events and we need to stop those. We definitely need to take more precautions.” 

Bash wondered if states with a positivity rate of 5% or higher on coronavirus tests should reopen or remain closed? 

“If you have high case load and active community spread, just like we are asking people not to go to bars, not to have household parties, not to create large spreading events,” she said, “we are asking people to distance learn at this moment so we can get this epidemic under control.” 

This was not what Trump wanted to hear. That meant more furious tweeting. He accused Dr. Birx of getting baited by Speaker Pelosi. “Pathetic,” Trump said, summing up Birx’s TV performance.

 

 
Trump used to like Dr. Birx's scarves.

* 

NEW COVID-19 cases for Sunday, August 2: 

47,576. 

And that’s what passes, in America, under President Donald J. Trump, for a “good day” in handling this crisis.

___

  

8/3/20: Monday turns out to be a terrible day for President Trump, but possibly a good day for America. 

The more his ineptitude is exposed, the greater chance there is he can be defeated in November. This past weekend, Dr. Deborah Birx admitted that we were not close to beating the coronavirus, as Trump claimed Friday. 

“What we are seeing today,” she warned, “is different from March and April.” COVID-19, she continued, “is extraordinarily widespread. It’s into the rural as equal urban areas.” 

Naturally, Trump blew up, in part because House Speaker Pelosi had recently accused Dr. Birx and the  president of offering up an unrealistically rosy picture of the situation (see: 7/31/20). 

The president didn’t blow up because a thousand Americans were dying every day, since he wasn’t one of them. He blew up because Dr. Birx had hinted that he wasn’t doing a good job of meeting this crisis. That meant it was time for another patented, petulant presidential tweet: “In order to counter Nancy,” he exploded, “Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!” 

Yes. Pathetic is the word, but applied to the wrong person. 

(It probably didn’t help Trump’s mood when Adm. Brett Giroir, contradicted his repeated claims that hydroxychloroquine would be a potential treatment for Covid-19. 

What Adm. Giroir said, in less blunt fashion, is that you be just as well off mixing dried pine needles in your Budweiser as taking hydroxychloroquine and hoping for a cure.

 

* 

IN OTHER STUPID NEWS, Mayor Barry Presgraves of Luray, Virginia garners widespread condemnation after he posts on social media: “Joe Biden has just announced Aunt Jemima as his VP pick.” 

In a similar vein, a second Virginia Republican, Loudoun County treasurer Roger Zurn, couldn’t resist commenting on Quaker Oats’ decision to retire the aunt’s name and image from advertising. It tickled Zurn’s funny  bone to suggest she be replaced with pictures of “Uncle Tom’s.”

 

* 

“They are dying. It is what it is.” 

TODAY, we had hints today from the Manhattan district attorney’s office that prosecutors may try to make a broad case against the president, possibly against some of his children, and the Trump Organization. 

Citing what they call “public reports of possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization,” investigators are asking the courts to compel Trump to give up his tax records. These records might support an indictment. They might even bring the probe to a close and clear the president’s “spotless” good name. 

This blogger is not one to count his chickens before they are found guilty and sent to prison. But if investigators suspect “tax and insurance fraud,” as reported, he can think of no man who would be more inclined to delve into all flavors of fraud than the current occupant of the White House.

 

* 

PERHAPS WORST OF ALL, if you enjoy having Trump in the White House, the full interview he gave to Jonathan Swan of Axios has finally aired. It will not bolster your support for the idea that Donald is a genius.

  

You can watch the entire 37 minutes if you like. Or Mr. Blogger can hit the high points – which are really lows – and save you the time and brain damage that results from listening to this president. 

When the video begins, we glimpse “Birther” McEnany lurking in the shadows. Her job will be to hand the president ridiculous charts to glance at and pass to Swan – who will view them skeptically. Because he’s not an imbecile. 

The interview begins pleasantly. At the 1:58 mark, Trump begins defending his handling of the health crisis. “I think we’ve done an incredible job, with the ventilators” and “putting the ban on China, which, frankly, no one wanted me to do, practically nobody.” Had he not put in place that travel ban, we “would have lost hundreds of thousands of lives more.” In other words, he’s not the bumbling fool he seems. He saved hundreds of thousands of lives. 

 

A subtle example of how ill-informed he is. 

He says “nobody knew” what this pandemic would be like, and notes that we haven’t seen anything like it since 1917. He repeats the date, twice. It’s a recurrent mistake, and a subtle example of how ill-informed he is. The Spanish Flu killed millions round the world, starting in 1918. 

As he often has of late, the president cites countries he thinks are doing worse than the U.S., as if to say, “See, I’m not so bad.” At the 3:40 mark he cites Spain, as having a big spike, and Brazil. Brazil is doing badly. He doesn’t mention that the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, is a virus-denier too. And if Spain is spiking, Italy, Germany, Japan, and South Korea are not. 

At the 4:30 mark Trump says that by shutting down the economy when he did, “we saved millions of lives.” In just minutes, his claim has gone from saving “hundreds of thousands” of lives to “millions.” 

We’ve seen this guy in action now for years. No one would be surprised if he claimed he saved “billions” before the interview ends. That’s how Trump Math works. What the president wants everyone to know is that he’s a hero. The people “who really understand it,” he tells Swan, say “it’s incredible the job we’ve done.” 

“Who’s they?” Swan interjects. 

Trump figures if he keeps gibbering, he can avoid answering any pointed questions. So, for another half hour we get a torrent of baloney spewed from his lips. Swan tries repeatedly to pin him down. In June he interviewed Trump, right before the president went to Tulsa for a rally. He tries to point out that experts knew then the disease was spreading far and wide. 

“Why have 6,000 people crowd together at that rally?” he wonders. 

Trump bristles and says the rally drew 12,000, but the “Fake News” people won’t report it. (Neither would the Tulsa fire marshal, who said 6,200 people were in the arena when the president spoke.) 

As far as COVID-19 goes, Trump says Oklahoma was doing great when he visited. Cases “spiked a month, a month-and-a-half, two months later.” He doesn’t really know. He says that no one wants to talk about it, but “Fox had the highest ratings” ever for a Saturday night speech when it broadcast his Tulsa rally. 

Americans may be dying by the thousands. Trump is boasting about ratings. “I’m talking about public health,” Swan says, voice rising. 

At the 7:00 minute mark, the journalist bores in. “Your people,” he says, “they love you. They listen to you.” He points at his own head. “They listen to every word you say, they hang on your words. They don’t listen to me, or the media, or [Dr.] Fauci. They think we’re fake news. They want to get their advice from you. And so, when you say, ‘everything is under control, don’t worry about wearing masks,’ these people…many of them are older.” 

 

“I think it’s under control.” 

“Right now, I think it’s under control,” the president says, defensively.

 “How?” asks Swan. “A thousand people are dying a day.” 

“They are dying. That’s true,” the president responds,” his voice also rising, along with his ire. “It is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague.” 

Swan asks, quite reasonably, if the president really believes this is the best we can do as a nation. 

Trump says that his administration has given the governors everything they need. Then he blames the governors for any problems. He says some have been “great” and others “not so great.” He cites Arizona, Texas, and Florida as states where case numbers are going down. On the day the interview is conducted, numbers in those states are not going down, at least not in Texas and Florida. 

Swan tries to point that out. 

Trump deflects. “It should have been stopped by China,” he says of the virus. “It should have been stopped by China.” 

That would be relevant if we were talking about the situation in January. Swan interjects, “But now it’s here.” 

Trump isn’t going to let facts stop him, or nuance slow him down. He says the U.S. has done more testing than all of Europe. That’s why we have so many reported cases. He says we’ve done more testing than all of Europe, “times two.” 

That’s a claim he makes around the 9:48 mark on the tape. It takes me 30 seconds to pause the interview, go to Worldometers, do some quick estimating…and…okay…Trump is full of guano. 

Actual testing numbers: USA 61.6 million tests administered (as of August 3). 

Russia 29.4 million

United Kingdom 16.9 million

Spain 7.1 million

Italy 7 million, etc.

 

And that doesn’t include France or Germany or Ukraine or Croatia, or most of the other countries of that continent. 

So Trump is lying again. 

 

“There are those who say you can test too much.” 

At the ten minute mark, the president makes the claim that stuns Swan and anyone watching. At least any viewers whose frontal lobes have not been irreparably damaged by whacks with a hammer. “You know, there are those who say you can test too much. You do know that?” the president asks. 

Swan’s pained expression says it all. 

“Who says that?” he responds. 

“Read the books, read the manuals,” Trump says. 

“Manuals?” 

“Read the books,” Trump says again. 

“What books?” asks Swan. 

The president doesn’t answer. He tries to explain how hard it was to deal with the virus because “we didn’t have a test” when it reached our shores. Swan isn’t buying. “Of course,” he responds. You can’t have a test for a disease no one has ever seen. 

Trump reverts to his more testing, more cases defense. Some kid gets sick, has “a little runny nose,” it’s a case, he whines. 

Swan’s not talking runny noses. “The figure I look at is deaths,” he says. “Deaths is going up now. It’s a thousand a day.” 

At this point the interview becomes embarrassing. Trump has some charts handy, thanks to McEnany. He offers to show them to Swan. Swan says he’d love to have a peek. Trump has trouble reading the first chart, clearly confused by what it shows. “The United States is lowest in numerous categories,” he offers. He squints at the chart like Mr. Magoo, only dumber, and says, “We’re lower than the world.” 

“The world?” Swan is incredulous. 

Watching, so am I, because the chart Trump has in his hands doesn’t show “numerous categories” with the U.S. lowest in all; it’s not even set up to show numerous categories. 

Trump hands the chart to Swan, who realizes it shows deaths as a proportion of reported cases. This is the essence of stupidity, and he knows it. “I’m talking about death as a proportion of population,” he says. He notes that deaths in this country are much higher than South Korea and Germany. 

Trump responds, “You can’t do that.” 

It’s an amazing moment for anyone watching who isn’t blind to reality. And it’s easy to check. Per million, the U.S. has one of the highest death rates of any nation on Earth. As of noon, on August 5, when I post, our country has suffered 485 deaths per million. South Korea: 6. Germany: 110. 

 

The “ice cream” chart. 

The next chart Trump waves around looks like something a third grade teacher would provide to students to help them learn to read simple graphs. The pink bar might be the percentage of students that said they like vanilla ice cream. The blue bar might be the percentage that liked strawberry. If this weren’t the president we were watching, we might pity the fool. 

Swan points out that South Korea has a population of 51 million and only 300 deaths from the coronavirus. 

“You don’t know that” Trump says. 

I check again. Yeah, we do. 

Trump waves around his ice cream chart for emphasis and says, “Look, we’re last. Which means we’re first.”

 Swan knows that talking to Trump is like trying to convince a three-year-old that he has to put on socks and shoes if he wants to go to McDonalds. Trump goes back to bragging about how we lead the world in testing. Which is also terrible. Swan says that would be great if deaths and hospitalizations were going down. But they’re not. “Sixty thousand Americans are in hospitals,” he exclaims. 

At the 16:30 mark Swan switches topics and asks about reports Russia paid bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Watching, my head is about to explode. I start taking fewer notes. 

I can’t take much more of this. 

This portion of the interview had already been released. It did not add luster to the Trump star. Swan notes that Trump talked to Putin in a call on July 23. Did he bring up the topic? Trump says he didn’t because “many people said it was fake news.” 

“What people,” Swan inquires. 

A president, one prepared, would respond with something like, “Secretary of Defense Esper.” Or cite the head of the C.I.A. Trump switches subjects. He says no one ever brings up China. It’s always, “Russia, Russia, Russia.” He says nuclear proliferation – and he says he hopes to get a deal done with Russia soon – is a bigger issue than “global warming, a much bigger problem than global warming, in terms of the real world.” 

(This, too, is wrong, since every person riding the globe around the sun is going to be or has been negatively affected by climate change.) 

Besides, the president insists, the intelligence on Russia and the bounties, “never reached my desk.” 

Swan can be heard protesting, “It was in your written brief.” 

“If it reached my desk, I would have done something about it,” the president says. This is odd, since he just argued that many people told him it was “fake news.” 

In other words: 

Step 1: Ignore the “fake news.” 

Step 2: Do something about it if it reaches your desk. 

 

“We supplied weapons when they were fighting Russia, too.” 

When Swan points out that our commander in Afghanistan warned in 2017 that the Russians were supplying the Taliban with weapons – and shouldn’t that have been enough to bring up the matter in a call with Putin – Trump gives an astonishing answer. “Well, we supplied weapons when they were fighting Russia, too.”   

It’s as if he doesn’t really care that American troops might be getting killed. He says he didn’t ask General John W. Nicholson Jr., our commander in Afghanistan, because he was there before Trump took office (and still there until September 2018) and “didn’t do a very good job.” 

In other words: 

Step 3: Blame the general.

 

* 

SWAN TURNS to the election in November and asks if the president will accept the results. It’s another stunning moment. 

Trump says he can’t be sure. He starts talking about the dangers of mail-in balloting, which he says is new. Swan points out that it’s been around since the Civil War, when Union soldiers mailed in hundreds of thousands of ballots from the front lines and helped ensure Lincoln had a second term. 

Trump claims a friend of his got a ballot for a son who died seven years ago. “Somebody got a ballot for a dog,” he adds. “Absentee balloting is fine. You have to apply.”

 Swan notes: “You have to apply for mail-in ballots.” 

I find myself hoping Swan will say, “Sir, you are a numbskull. Mail-in ballots must be signed. Signatures are compared against signatures on file. Fido won’t be making his mark with a paw print…” 

Trump grumbles about California sending out millions of ballots. 

“No, applications,” Swans interjects. 

He points out that the Trump campaign is urging supporters to vote by mail. Swan holds up an email. Lara Trump, he notes, has been making robocalls in the state, urging Republicans to request those ballots, get those ballots filled out, lick those stamps, and get them mailed in time. 

I might point out helpfully, that the president’s obsession with California is clearly not good for his mental health. In the most recent poll conducted, 67% of Californians said they planned to vote for Biden. 

Trump got 28%. 

 

“Well, he didn’t come to my inauguration.” 

The interview doesn’t get better before it gets worse. Trump defends his previous good wishes, extended to Ghislaine Maxwell. She’s the alleged accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein, and herself accused of abusing teen girls. The president says he does wish her well. He’s emphatic. “I’m not looking bad for anybody,” he claims. That’s a laugh in itself. Trump is the most skilled hater to sit in the White House since Andrew Johnson in 1867, if not since the birth of the republic. 

It never dawns on Trump to mention sympathy for Epstein’s victims, and there were hundreds. 

(This is the president’s second chance; he also failed to mention the victims on 7/21/20.) 

The last ten minutes or so, Swan tries to get him to answer a few questions about the protesters in Portland, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Trump will only talk about “Antifa,” “anarchists,” “terrorists,” and how the Antifa crowd wanted to kill the mayor of Portland. 

Trump hates the mayor, too.

 He claims again that he has done more for black Americans than “any other president, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.” 

“More than Lyndon Johnson, who passed the Civil Rights Act?” Swans inquires. 

Trump replies, “Civil Rights Act didn’t work out so well.” 

He’s right for once. Whether or not he realizes – and, of course, he doesn’t – he just admitted that systemic racism has long been a problem in this country. His fans won’t notice either. Swan doesn’t have a chance to ask about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Team Trump has done nothing to extend. 

Swan ends by asking the president about Rep. John Lewis, recently deceased. Why not attend his funeral? 

Trump says simply, “Well, he didn’t come to my inauguration.” His pettiness could not be clearer. 

Was Lewis an impressive figure? Swan tries again. 

Trump says he doesn’t know his story. He knows a lot of impressive people, some not so impressive. 

Here, I must point out that Lewis, as a young man, shed more blood fighting for justice than all the Trump clan combined, going back to 1885, when the first Trump landed on these shores. Lewis had his head bashed in 1961 during one of the “Freedom Rides.” Four years later he had his skull broken when he and others tried to cross the Edmund Pettis bridge into Selma, Alabama. There they hoped to register African Americans to vote. 

Finally, Swan wonders if Trump would approve of a move to rename the bridge. 

“I’d have no problem with that,” he says. He’s not enthusiastic, of course. Not like he gets all excited when people talk about taking down the statues of Confederate generals and/or slave owners. 

The two men smile at last. Swan thanks Trump for being “so generous” with his time. The camera pans the room, showing President Jefferson’s portrait. Then: John Adams. Jimmy Carter. John F. Kennedy. Truman. Teddy Roosevelt. Lincoln. Richard M. Nixon. FDR. George Washington. Mercifully, that’s the end of the tape, before my eyeballs melt out of my head.

 

* 

IN OTHER STUPID NEWS, Mayor Barry Presgraves of Luray, Virginia garners widespread condemnation after he posts on social media: “Joe Biden has just announced Aunt Jemima as his VP pick.”

___

8/4/20: A conservative friend told me this week that he intended to vote for Trump again. Trump, he said, had created a “roaring economy.” 

I told him I thought he was wrong, but promised to check my facts. I’ve been wrong plenty of times. In one post, I originally had Sen. Tammy Duckworth giving a speech from the floor of the House of Representatives, a careless error, and a stupid one. She did call the president “Cadet Bone Spurs,” though. 

I still love that. 

So, I’m as careful as can be on this blog. I’m also a super spreader when it comes to typos; so I often go back and edit.

* 

I immediately found this graph, showing quarterly GDP growth from 2011 to 2020, for the United States. 

Even if we ignore those last two bars, and try to play nice, Trump hasn’t done nearly as well as his fans imagine. He started off adequately in 2017, with two quarters of GDP growth of 2.3 and 2.2 percent. Then came four good quarters in a row: 3.2, 3.5, 3.8 and 2.7. Those results were fueled in part by massive tax cuts. Those cuts were supposed to juice growth to 4 percent and “pay for themselves.” That was the “sugar high.” The high wore off. Since then, we’ve had six quarters, when averaged out, of modest growth: 2.1, 1.3, 2.9, 1.5, 2.6 and 2.4. 

The “roaring economy” stopped roaring during the second half of 2018. The federal deficit ballooned. 

And that was before the coronavirus hit. 

Obama, of course, took over just as the bottom fell out and the Great Recession began. The U.S. economy stalled and shrank slightly in 2008, shedding more than 3.5 million jobs that year. That wasn’t Obama’s fault. The plunge continued in 2009. The economy shrank at an annual rate of 2.5%.

 Growth in 2010 was solid, at an annualized rate of 2.6%, weaker in 2011 at 1.6%, okay in 2012 at 2.2%. During Obama’s second term we had one good year (2.9% in 2015), one decent year (2.4% in 2014), and two weak years (1.8% in 2013 and 1.6% in 2016.) 

Trump took charge and, so far, we have had one good year (2.9% in 2018), and two decent years (2.4% in 2017 and 2.3 % in 2019). Unfortunately, during his watch, the bottom has fallen out of the economy again.

 

* 

NEW CONFIRMED cases of coronavirus for today: 

49,998.

___

 

8/5/20: Trump proved once again this week that when his lips are moving, he’s either lying or super-spreading misinformation. The man needs to wear a mask to protect others. Or provide us with earmuffs.

 

____________________ 

That made the president’s misstatement dangerous, not just the latest example of how ill-informed he is.

____________________ 

 

On Tuesday, in the wake of a massive explosion in Beirut, he decided to open his mouth and let nonsense pour out. Knowing almost nothing about what had happened (because he has the intellectual depth of rutabaga), he described the blast as an “attack.” When reporters asked him, specifically, if he felt it was an attack, he said that he had met with “some of our great generals, and they just seem to feel” that the destruction was the result of “a bomb of some kind.” 

It didn’t take a demolitions expert to tell otherwise. The first pictures available indicated the blast area was massive, too large for any surgical air or missile strike, unless someone hit a vast military ammunition dump by mistake. 

Who then might have had reason to attack Lebanon? Terrorists? Unlikely. Israel? If it really was an attack, they might have been striking at a Hezbollah arms storage facility. But this was Trump talking. You wouldn’t have been surprised if he blamed Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. 

Unfortunately, across that region, people would assume the President of the United States knew what he was talking about. In the Muslim world, where suspicion runs hot, Trump’s words might sound like an admission that we played a role. Would jihadists seek revenge? Would they insist the catastrophe in Beirut was the work of a U.S. missile strike? Or an American super bomb? Muslims have their own conspiracy theorists. They have their Alex Joneses in turbans.

That made the president’s misstatement dangerous, not just the latest example of how obtuse he is.

Beirut in ruins.

 

* 

The blast involved 2,750 metric tons of ammonia nitrate. 

IT SOON PROVED not to be an attack, but rather a blast centered on a warehouse stuffed with ammonia nitrate. This was the material Timothy McVey used to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. In that attack, McVey, a right-wing conspiracy crazy, used two-and-a-half tons to fashion a bomb. McVey killed 168 people, including children at a daycare center on the first floor. 

As terrible as that crime had been, this was worse, Lebanon’s 9/11. The blast in Beirut involved the accidental explosion of 2,750 metric tons of ammonia nitrate. The material had been impounded in 2014, when a Russian cargo ship docked at port, but could no longer pay its crew or other bills. Hundreds are feared dead. At least 5,000 Lebanese are injured. Billions in damages resulted. The explosion left a giant crater where the warehouse had been. 

The problem is, Trump had informed the world this was an “attack.” He could have cleaned it up the next day and admitted error. Instead, he sent his toadies out to say that he was right from the start. (Secretary of Defense Mark Esper correctly said Wednesday that U.S. intelligence was gathering information, “but most believe it was an accident as reported.”) That meant it fell to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to march out, stand in front of cameras, and say the president was correct. 

“The initial reports looked at the explosion.” As for it having been an attack, he said, “We still have not totally ruled that out.” 

Meadows ignored the fact U.S. intelligence was ruling out an attack. 

“Obviously,” he continued, “there’s no group that has claimed any responsibility.” That would make sense, since evidence was piling up that a catastrophic accident had occurred. What “the president shared with the American people is what he was briefed on,” Meadows claimed. “And as we look at that, we’ll continue to evaluate it. Hopefully, it was just a tragic accident and not an act of terror.” 

It was a tragic accident. Within hours everyone knew it. Trump just couldn’t admit he was wrong. This afternoon, he doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down. Asked during a press conference about his earlier statement – which some officials feared might spark an international crisis – you knew Trump was going to have to make sh*t up. The president did not disappoint.

 

“How can you say ‘accident’ if somebody left some terrible explosive-type devices and things around perhaps – perhaps it was that. Perhaps it was an attack,” Trump explained lamely. “I don’t think anybody can say right now. We’re looking into it very strongly right now.”

 

Just about every man, woman and child in Lebanon realized that the blast was a horrific accident and that 2,750 metric tons of ammonia nitrate had been left “around.”

 

Not “explosive-type devices.” 

Trump couldn’t let go. He couldn’t admit error. He couldn’t cite which “great generals” had told him it had been an attack, because none had. “Some people think it was an attack and some people think it wasn’t,” he continued, repeating himself, as is his habit. “In any event, it was a terrible event and a lot of people were killed and a tremendous number of people were badly wounded, injured. And we’re standing with that country.” 

He had a memo in his hands, and, as usual, read that last statement in a monotone, as if completing a task reluctantly, like a child eating lima beans. You knew the president didn’t have a humanitarian bone in his body. If Lebanon had been wiped from the face of the earth, he wouldn’t have shed a tear. It’s doubtful he could even find the country on a map. 

Multiple sources, however, contradicted the president’s claim that an attack had occurred. Lebanese authorities said no. Multiple U.S. officials told Fox News there was no evidence of an attack. CNN said three Defense Department officials told them there was no evidence. Two officials told the Associated Press the same. Secretary Esper was already on record. 

The best the Pentagon could do in “support” of the fool in the White House, was to decline comment and tell reporters to go find Kellyanne Conway or “Birther” McEnany. You could always count on them to back what Trump had said, even if he claimed his cheeseburgers sometimes talked to him when he was alone in his private quarters.

 

You talkin' to me?

* 

ARE WE BEATING COVID-19 yet? No. We are not. New cases in the United States, August 5:

53,685.

___

8/6/20: I pray that Mr. Trump goes down to defeat in November; but that doesn’t mean I don’t hope for good news for the country.

 

____________________ 

We’re all in the same boat together. It’s not leaking. We’re not about to sink. But the guy rowing next to us has the disease.

____________________ 

 

Recently, the daily reports from the Centers for Disease Control showed a decline in new cases of coronavirus. I was hopeful on August 2, when we dropped to 47,576. That was down more than 21,000 compared to the last day in July. Then I was disappointed to see that we had nearly 50,000 cases on both August 3 and August 4. Then, on August 5, we had 53,685. 

Today: we hit 55,836. 

CDC also reported an additional 1,037 dead for August 4, 1,320 on August 5, and 1,340 on August 6. 

Even worse, you never know from which direction the virus might be coming. In Ohio, where numbers have been rising despite a successful shutdown in the spring, a man who attended church infected at least 53 members of his congregation. They went home and infected 37 relatives, friends, and neighbors. “It spread like wildfire, wildfire,” Gov. Mike DeWine explained. 

We’re all in the same boat together. It’s not leaking. We’re not about to sink. But the guy rowing next to us has the disease. 

So wear a mask.

 

* 

HAVE WE MENTIONED climate change lately? Of course we have. NASA, relying on satellite imagery, announces that two ice caps in Canada, formed during the Little Ice Age, or 5,000 years ago, have melted away. 

Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), told CBS that he first visited the ice caps in 1982. At that time, “they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape.”   

Now: “To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away,” he says.  

Have you ever heard of NSIDC, Trump fans? Has Trump? Unlikely, because he’s clueless on the topic of climate change. 

It’s here. It’s going to get worse.

 

* 

AS FOR THE PRESIDENT, he’s not worried about climate change, because he’s a dimwit. He is, however, worried about getting beat by Joe Biden. Today he warned supporters that if Biden were elected, he would eat all their children. 

Well, okay, not quite. 

He did say this of his challenger, a practicing Catholic (who you know has seen the inside of a church more often that Trump ever has): “Take away your guns, take away your Second Amendment. No religion, no anything,” Trump predicted, if he went down to defeat. Biden would, “Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy.” 

You have to wonder why Trump didn’t just keep going. Why not claim, “Biden will take away your kittens and puppies. He’s against ice cream and cake on birthdays. He’s against underwear.” 

It would have made equal sense.

 

* 

THE PRESIDENT also finds time to do a 40-minute radio interview with Geraldo Rivera. He tells his radio host that he thinks he’s done a “fantastic” job of handling the pandemic. 

(As of this moment, more than 150,000 Americans have died and almost 5,000,000 have been infected.) 

As for other countries – they’re lying about their pandemic figures. “We see what’s happening by satellite,” he tells Rivera, which seems an odd way to describe it. “They don’t report.” 

As always, the Liar-in-Chief is projecting.

 

* 

IF YOU DON’T KNOW already that Trump is a giant hypocrite you need look at only two stories combined, reported in tandem, by CBS News. First, we learn that Team Trump is suing the State of Nevada in an attempt to stop officials from expanding a vote-by-mail program. Under the plan all active registered voters in Nevada would be sent mail-in ballots for the November 3 election. The Trump campaign claims the measure “makes voter fraud and other ineligible voting inevitable.” 

If the state’s decision stands, Nevada will join seven other states that have plans to send ballots to all active, registered voters. 

Now, consider Florida, where Trump himself is registered to vote. Trump tweeted on Tuesday that he was encouraging mail-in balloting in the “Sunshine State.” His reasoning, such as it was: 

Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True. Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats attempts at change), so in Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail!

 

See if you can guess what the key word in that tweet really is? If you can’t guess, Trump soon makes it clear. Florida, he says in a press conference, has “a great Republican governor.”  

Nevada: Democratic governor. 

Different story.

___ 

 

8/7/20: The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced today that 1,783,000 jobs were “added” to the U.S. economy in July. That marked the third month in a row, jobs “added” since the pandemic caused the economy to implode. 

In Trumpian circles this was cause for joyous celebration – followed by presidential bragging. A deeper dive, however, would put an end to self-congratulation. The unemployment rate remains at 10.2%. The last time the rate was higher was March 1983, when it stood at 10.3%. 

Despite those “added” jobs, the Labor Participation Rate ticked down, from 61.5 percent in June to 61.4 percent in July. When an individual stops searching for work the Bureau of Labor Statistics drops them from the ranks of the unemployed. A lower percentage of Americans are working now than on the day Trump took office. 

That didn’t stop the president from heading for his private golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey for the weekend. Safe among his superrich pals, there would be no need to worry about ordinary folk out of work.

 

* 

TRUMP ALSO FOUND TIME to gather several dozen rich buds at his resort, and invite them to a hastily-arranged press conference. There they had an opportunity to boo members of the free press for asking questions. Both Trump’s friends and the long-suffering reporters who follow him were treated to another one of the president’s rambling discourses, though he did manage to say that he was all for social distancing, mask-wearing, and regular washing of one’s hands. 

The problem, as reporters noted, was that Trump’s pals, including children, were clustered together like grapes on the vine. 

Not till the free press started tweeting out photos did Trump aides decide to pass out masks, and only then did a few of Trump’s fat cat friends put them on. 

Meanwhile, the president said again that the coronavirus “would disappear” and don’t you worry!

 

* 

THE CDC REPORTED that while the president played golf and his friends booed practitioners of the First Amendment, the nation piled up another 

62,042 cases of COVID-19.

___ 

 

8/8/20: On Saturday, Trump played his 287^th round of golf since taking office. Next to tweeting constantly, the Big Orange Buffoon most lusts for hitting the links.

 

____________________ 

President Trump has spent nearly 30% of his time in office at his own resorts.

____________________ 

 

Also, he loves to hang out with MAGA friends, at least those who can afford to pay fat fees to join his private clubs. As president, Donald has spent 382 days away from the White House at places he owns. That’s just a shade under 30% of his time since taking charge of the nation. 

As a bonus –  for the president, anyway – the Secret Service pays premium prices for agents guarding him, when they bed down at his clubs for the weekend.

 

* 

WHILE TRUMP was zooming around the course in his presidential golf cart, another 

54,590 Americans 

were diagnosed with COVID-19 on Saturday. Another 1,064 went to the Big Nineteenth Hole in the Sky.

 

* 

ALSO HAPPENING while the Duffer-in-Chief was out on the links, ignoring his job as president: Canada’s last Arctic ice shelf collapsed. Two icebergs broke off, including one chunk of floating ice the size of Manhattan. 

According to Canadian scientists, the shelf was 4,000 years old, and at least 260 feet thick in places. Temperatures in the Arctic this summer are nine degrees higher than the 1980-2010 average.

___

 

 

8/9/20: President Trump is spending the weekend at his resort in Bedminster, N.J. There’s nothing on his schedule till afternoon.

 

____________________ 

“Money affairs were to be confined to the immediate representatives of the people.”

 

Benjamin Franklin

____________________ 

 

Meanwhile, what fresh assaults has he been plotting against the U.S. Constitution? Saturday (and this is a big one), he signed an executive order to extend extra unemployment relief to American workers, only choosing to reduce the amount from $600 per week to $400. This came after Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives argued for keeping the figure at $600. 

On the other side of Capitol Hill, Senate Leader Milksop Mitch couldn’t get his GOP band to go along, even with $400. Many favored a less generous amount. As in $0. Despite the fact McConnell and his party control the Senate, Trump blamed Democrats for blocking relief to hard-pressed working folks. 

That’s where the president’s most recent and brazen attempt to usurp the U.S. Constitution commences. If you haven’t read the founding document (and there’s no evidence that Trump ever has), the House of Representatives alone can pass bills to raise revenue. The Senate may only “propose” amendments to spending bills, or “concur” with revenue proposals the House sends its way. Then they can vote approval or vote appropriations bills down. 

If you believe the Constitution matters, Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 is unequivocal. The president can’t spend money unless Congress grants it. This has much to do with the era of kings, when, for example, one fourth of the budget of France went to support the lavish lifestyles of Louis XIV and Louis XV, and all their royal hangers-on. That was before French reformers cut off Louis XVI’s head. 

This is an extreme method to employ to curtail excess government spending; but it has its merits. 

 

The “power of the purse” rests not in the president’s hands. 

The U.S. Constitution is clear. “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury,” the Founding Fathers wrote, “but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law, and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” 

There was a simple reason the Founders put the “power of the purse” in the hands of the House, not the Senate or the president. Members of the House are up for reelection every two years. If voters are unhappy, they can vote the rascals out. To cite Elbridge Gerry, speaking in 1787, members of the House of Representatives would be “more immediately the representatives of the people, and it was a maxim that the people ought to hold the purse-strings.” 

Ben Franklin spoke to the wisdom of this provision. Under the Constitution, senators were not elected by the people, but chosen by state legislatures. Direct election came only in 1913, with ratification of the XVII Amendment. The president was chosen by the Electoral College. Only members of the House were voted on by ordinary citizens (white males only). For that reason, Franklin said, “money affairs were to be confined to the immediate representatives of the people.” 

Milksop Mitch, however, has decided that he doesn’t care about trivial details, such as the powers vested in Congress. If Trump wants to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more, in hopes of getting himself re-elected, and that helps Milksop get a seventh term in office, who is Mitch to block his path! “Struggling Americans need action now,” McConnell said in a recent statement, while taking no action himself. “Since Democrats have sabotaged backroom talks with absurd demands that would not help working people, I support President Trump exploring his options to get unemployed benefits and other relief to the people who need them the most.” 

Yes, “other options,” such as ignoring the U.S. Constitution, because Mitch and his crew can’t devise a compromise. 

This blogger is not averse to seeing the unemployed get the extra money, even the full $600. That doesn’t mean we want a president who can “buy” votes for himself, when the U.S. Constitution does not give him the power to allocate any amounts of money he might like. 

Or, really, any money. 

We should also note, there was one man with courage to attack President Trump for this blatant overreach. 

That was Donald Trump, who said, while running for office four years ago: “We don’t want to continue to watch people signing executive orders because that was not what the Constitution and the brilliant designers of this incredible document had in mind. We need people that can make deals.”

 

* 

WHILE TRUMP wielded his putter this weekend, the country passed another grim milestone. Sunday morning we hit the five million-mark for confirmed cases of a virus that he promised long ago was going away. 

5,002,523.

* 

LET’S GIVE the final word for today to Phil Heimlich, a lifelong Republican from Cincinnati, writing for a group of like-minded members of his party. In an opinion piece in USA Today, he sums up the threat posed by Donald J. Trump perfectly: 

In 2016, many of us who wanted change in the White House took a chance on Donald Trump. We thought he’d lead as a conservative Republican. Instead, he has imperiled our republic.

 

We are alarmed by the anti-democratic tactics and flagrant abuse of power committed daily by Donald Trump. 

 

Heimlich continues: 

He has created a culture of fear within the Republican Party as well as across the country, demonizing anyone with differing opinions. He belittles, berates, and ruins the careers of all who oppose him — including his own appointed government agency heads, respected military leaders and war heroes.

 

He has undermined the rule of law, obstructed justice, and issued pardons and commutations to personal cronies who helped cover up his misdeeds.

The Founding Fathers trusted no man.

___

 

8/10/20: The Big Ten conference, a pillar of college football, announces that there will be no games this fall. 

No one would have been surprised if President Trump had announced that this was a “hoax” and insisted that all football players should immediately report to practice and sneeze on each other. 

In other bad news – indicating that the coronavirus is not going away – the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that 97,000 children tested positive for COVID-19 in the last two weeks of July. At least 25 died, proving for the hundredth time that when Trump talks about the spread of this disease, he’s as clueless as a corncob.   

Children are not, as he said recently, “virtually immune.” So, good luck educators, as you reopen schools this month.

 

* 

AS FOR OUR DEAR PRESIDENT, you know he was delving deep into the details of the school reopening this weekend…. 

Okay, not. He got in another round of golf on Sunday, his 288^th tour of the links since taking office. I swear, I think he’s trying to play as many rounds in one term as President Obama did in two – perhaps realizing that polls indicate (as of now) that a second term isn’t in the cards.

 

*

____________________ 

“If 160,000 people had died on President Obama’s watch, do you think you would have called for his resignation?” 

Reporter’s query for President Trump

____________________ 

 

AFTER A BUSY WEEKEND, Trump was back, “hard at work” on Monday. At a press conference he talked about the challenge we faced in turning back a killer virus. By way of excuse, he said it was a challenge unlike any seen in over a century. “The closest thing is in 1917, they say, the great pandemic was a terrible thing where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people.” Then he added, “Probably ended the Second World War. All the soldiers were sick.” 

The White House later insisted that Trump had suffered a slip of the tongue. He meant to say, “World War I.” 

We all make slips of the tongue, of course. So we might shrug off the date Trump provides for the Spanish flu pandemic. That pandemic occurred in 1918, and dragged deep into the following year. But he also gets the First World War (1914-1918) mixed up with the Second (1939-1945), and doesn’t know enough to know that what he just said couldn’t possibly be right. 

The Second World War ended the year before the poor dunce was born. He could have listened to his dad tell stories about the war…and how he dodged service, himself. You know. The family tradition. 

As an added imbecile bonus: No historian of the First World War has ever said the Spanish flu ended fighting because “all the soldiers were getting sick.” The war ended on November 11, 1918, because the Allies had bled the German military dry during four years of trench warfare. Once the U.S. joined the war, and fresh American reinforcements began arriving in France, Germany had no hope of winning. Over two million German soldiers already filled the cemeteries and millions more had been maimed by wounds or disabled by lung-searing gassings. 

Trump’s wrong-turn into history was prompted by a reporter asking a “Fake News” kind of question. Here’s the exchange, per Axios:

 

REPORTER: If 160,000 people had died on President Obama’s watch, do you think you would have called for his resignation?

 

TRUMP: No, I wouldn’t have done that. I think it’s been amazing what we’ve been able to do. If we didn’t close up our country, we would have had 1.5 or 2 million people already dead. We’ve called it right, now we don’t have to close it. We understand the disease.

 

The president’s answer had several major flaws, not limited to blundering history. He was both clueless and classless – and a liar. First, he did say Obama should resign when he “mishandled” a previous health crisis. And he didn’t wait until 160,000 died. When President  Obama allowed seven infected Americans, suffering with Ebola, to return to this country and go into quarantine, Trump was livid. He predicted “bedlam.” He called Obama a “psycho.” He said his predecessor didn’t care about the American people. He boiled with anger, insisting Obama should have to “embrace” anyone who became infected as a result of his decisions.

He said all of that and more when a total of four more Americans were infected in this country. He howled and ranted when two Americans died. You’d think he’d remember and be humbler today. 

Two, Trump fans. A pair of Americans died, and then-Citizen Trump went wild with fury and hatred.

 

* 

NEW COVID-19 cases for the day: 

40,522.

 ___

  

8/11/20: The big news today: Former Vice President Joe Biden has selected Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate. No sooner was Harris tabbed than Trump was out with his first insult.

 

He immediately tagged Sen. Harris as “nasty,” which is interesting, if you ponder his words a moment. This is a man who cheated on his third wife and current First Lady, so he could boink a porn star. This is the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief talking about someone else being nasty.

 

It can be revelatory to consider who is “nasty” in the eyes of Trump and who is not. The president has never called any of his authoritarian pals “nasty.” Putin’s not such a killer, if you think about it, Trump said. Putin’s was “a leader far more than our president,” he said back in 2016. Sure: Putin had critics thrown off fifth floor balconies. But, hey, was Obama even born in America?

 

*

 

AS FAR AS Biden’s running mate was concerned, Trump wanted his loyal but fact-averse followers to be clear. Harris was a bad woman. Speaking to reporters, the president said she was “extraordinarily nasty” in her questioning of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Kavanaugh? He wasn’t “nasty,” even though he had been accused of attempting to rape a classmate in high school. Yet his questioner was somehow nasty! She was “nasty to a level that was just a horrible thing,” Trump said. Harris was “the meanest” and “the most horrible” member of the committee pressing Kavanaugh to explain.

 

In fact, sounding a note of hypocritical concern, Trump said no one was as mean to Biden, during the Democratic debates, as Harris. She was – lest we miss his point – “very, very nasty.”

 

Here’s a simple list to explain the Trumpian worldview:

 

NASTY:

 

Sen. Kamala Harris

Sec. of State Hillary Clinton

Megan Markle (Trump denies this one)

 

NOT NASTY:

                                                         

Trump, his pussy-grabbing self

Vladimir Putin

Mohammed bin Salman

 

NASTY:

 

Democrats (“RUDE and NASTY”)

Chris Wallace (“nasty & obnoxious”)

Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker, reporters

Juan Williams (“always nasty and wrong”)

Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan

Special Counsel Robert Mueller

Omarosa, after she turned against him

 

NOT NASTY:

 

Omarosa, when hired as White House aide

Ghislaine Maxwell (Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged accomplice)

Judge Roy Moore, accused pedophile

Kim Jong-un

White supremacists

Alex Jones (says Sandy Hook was a hoax!)

Roger Stone (seven-time felon)

 

NASTY:

 

Mette Frederiksen, Danish Prime Minister

Nancy Pelosi

Elizabeth Warren (a.k.a. “Pocahontas”)

Cher (“bad plastic surgery and nasty”)

 

 

NOT NASTY:

 

Roger Ailes, sexually harassed multiple women

Bill O’Reilly, sexual harasser

Ted Nugent (told Obama to suck his gun)

Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, Carl Higbie, Carl Paladino, Marjorie Taylor Greene and many more.

 

So, there you have it, a quick listing of people Trump considers terrible, and others he has defended, hired, or hung around with in recent years. Greene is anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic both. Price and Pruitt had to resign from the cabinet after wasting millions in taxpayer dollars. Paladino made racist comments about Michelle Obama, while Higbie suggested going down to the border and using AR-15’s to do target practice on illegal immigrants.

 

Nasty?

 

In the eye of the beholder.

 

 

ADDENDUM

 

Red state politicians, and Republicans, generally, like to howl about socialism and insist blue states don’t deserve to be bailed out when they run out of money. Today, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said he really, really hoped the feds would send his state some more dough, to pay the tab for increased Medicaid outlays, and to afford the mandated $400 weekly unemployment aid.

 

That aid was ordered by President Trump. In other words: socialism, mandated by Trump (the employed paying taxes to help the unemployed).

 

And increased spending on Medicaid (socialized medicine).

 

Speaking of socialism: This week it was revealed that Kodak dramatically increased spending on lobbying in the months leading up to the Trump administration providing the photographic equipment maker with a $765 million loan.

 

This liberal blogger might approve of saving jobs at Kodak. Since this liberal blogger has zero financial interests in Kodak, and neither do most of you, it’s still a plain example of socialism.

 

(Kodak had spent only $5,000 on lobbying since the first three months of 2019. Now, from April through June, they jacked it up to $870,000.)

___

8/12/20: Vice President Mike Pence, took time out from leading the Coronavirus Task Force to comment on the new Democratic ticket.

 

____________________ 

More magic math, this time from Mike Pence.

____________________ 

 

Naturally, he showed up on Sean Hannity’s show, where he knew it would be safe to throw out magic math figures without challenge. His host is a practitioner of magic math himself. So, if V.P. Pence had said Trump had saved 500 million American lives with his leadership during the coronavirus crisis, Hannity wouldn’t have blinked. 

What Pence did say was nearly as absurd. He claimed that in the last three months, Team Trump had created more jobs than Obama and Biden did in eight years. 

Let’s go to the source. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, provides job numbers every month, both gains and losses: 

If we start adding jobs created in February 2017, when Pence and Trump took over, we have, 

            1,924,000 jobs added (February-December 2017)

            2,178,000 jobs added (2018)

            2,133,000 jobs added (2019)

               465,000 (January-February 2020)

__________________________________

            6,700,000 jobs added

         22,160,000 jobs lost (March-April 2020)

__________________________________

        -15,460,000 net job loss

 

Then we have: 

9,279,000 jobs added (May-July 2020)

__________________________________

 

That leaves Team Trump (and, Trump fans, feel free to check my math) with a net loss of: 

           -6,181,000 JOBS.

 

As of this moment, in other words, V.P. Pence and “Drink Disinfectant Donald” have created zero jobs.

 0.                                                             

 

And that’s being generous.

 

Mr. Pence must have tried counting on fingers and toes, and gotten lost around the time he ran out of toes.

 

* 

BUT WAIT, we’re saved! President Trump has added a new face to the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Mainly because he didn’t like listening to the faces he already had, because they kept telling him the pandemic was getting out of hand. 

Now he has Dr. Scott Atlas by his side. Dr. Atlas’ job will be to tell the president what he really wants to hear. Rush Limbaugh correctly noted that Atlas was there “to counter [Dr.] Fauci.” 

Or, as Bill Gates puts it, “The administration has now hired this Stanford guy who has no background at all just because he agrees with their crackpot theories.” 

One of Dr. Atlas’ first efforts is to go on camera with BBC News, and insist the U.S. had done a better job of handling the virus than Europe. And to prove his point he cited statistics that no one else could verify. 

___

8/13/20: We know Vice President Pence and his boss are consistently baffled by basic math. Yesterday, Mr. Pence annulled (see: 8/12/20) the rules of addition and subtraction while bragging about all the jobs Team Trump has created. 

Meanwhile, his boss was telling anyone who would listen that the country was doing great, and the coronavirus was almost disappearing.   

Geography also tends to confuse the president. Which means, he was out with his latest “birther” conspiracy. Someone in the know, Trump explained during a press conference, was saying that Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris was not eligible to run for that high office. 

De ja vu! 

She wasn’t an American citizen!

 

____________________ 

“Under the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent, she is unequivocally an American citizen.” 

Sen. Lindsey Graham

____________________ 

 

A reporter asked Trump about the story, put forward in an op-ed piece in Newsweek. The president replied: 

So I just heard that, I heard it today, that she doesn’t meet the requirements....I have no idea if that’s right, I would have assumed the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president. But that’s very serious, they’re saying that she wasn’t qualified because she wasn’t born in this country [emphasis added].

 

Got it? “Very serious.” 

Even though, “I have no idea if that’s right.” 

It was easy enough to check the story – and you might think some of his aides would – but they were busy trying to spread the story, themselves. Harris was born in…California …in 1964. 

Trump’s latest birther ploy was too stupid even for some of his stalwart sycophants to swallow. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a prolific kisser of presidential booty, was clear. There “is no issue as to whether or not she is an American citizen. She was born in the United States in 1964 to parents who were legally present. Under the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent, she is unequivocally an American citizen.” 

Trump’s defenders will say it’s a mere coincidence that the two people he said weren’t American enough to serve in our highest offices (first, Obama, now Harris) just happened to have dark skin. 

White House aide and pale white guy, Jared Kushner (qualified to comment on all matters related to government, by virtue of marriage to Trump daughter Ivanka), said, no, no, no! Trump was not being racist! The president “just said that he had no idea whether that’s right or wrong,” Kushner told a reporter. “I don’t see that as promoting it. But look, at the end of the day, that’s something that’s out there. ... I personally have no reason to believe she’s not.” 

Yes. We see. It’s “out there.” No idea whether that’s right or not. Who knows! Personally, Jared has “no reason to believe she’s not” a citizen. But maybe we had better get a look at her birth certificate.

 

* 

FINALLY, since we’re talking about Trump and his latest birther tricks, we should highlight the work of one reporter. 

During a White House press conference Thursday, S.V. Dáte, a reporter for HuffPost, put a question to the president. 

As might be expected, Donald J. Trump had no good answer:

* 

MEANWHILE, Dr. Robert Redfield warns that unless Americans take greater precautions, we may be in for the “worst fall” ever, with coronavirus rampant. 

On August 13, another 1,120 Americans die from the disease.

___ 

 

8/14/20: I’m not going to deny that President Trump sometimes gets policies right. It’s mostly dumb luck. 

But he does.

 

____________________ 

Trump in line for second Nobel Peace Prize!

____________________ 

 

The decision to stop a shipment of Iranian oil headed for Venezuela this week was a good one. The four tankers halted by the U.S. Navy were carrying 1.1 million barrels of oil. That sanctioned oil will be forfeit and sold, with proceeds earmarked to go to victims of Iranian terror attacks. 

At first glance, it also looked like a good deal when Israel and the United Arab Emirates, with U.S. diplomats pushing for an agreement, moved to normalize relations. The UAE would recognize Israel’s right to exist. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “I Am Not Corrupt Up to My Eyeballs” Netanyahu would pause annexations in the West Bank, keeping a two-state solution alive. 

Team Trump was so excited by developments that talk began of Donald Trump getting a second Nobel Peace Prize. 

National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien appeared on Sean Hannity’s show to make the case. The president “brought forth the...vision for Middle East peace to get an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan back in play and he’s brought peace to Afghanistan, at least between the U.S. and the Taliban,” O’Brien said. “We haven’t lost a soldier in Afghanistan since February 29 in combat and we’re going to be down to 5,000 troops in Afghanistan. And now he’s brought peace to Israel and the UAE.” 

Alas, this award may prove as ephemeral as the one Trump “won” in 2018, when he convinced North Korea to give up all its nukes. 

(The North has since given up exactly 0 nuclear weapons. Rather, they built a few more for fun.) 

As always, diplomacy in the real world can be a bitch. Mr. O’Brien seems to forget. For starters, the U.S. might be getting out of Afghanistan. Our Afghan allies are stuck. The bloodshed is unabated. You don’t win a Nobel Peace Prize for quitting a war you can’t figure out how to win. 

Trump’s “vision for Middle East peace” also lacks an essential component: Palestinians. They took one look at the new agreement and accused the UAE of “betrayal.” To make that point clear, they recalled their ambassador to the Emirates and asked for an emergency meeting of the full Arab League. 

Netanyahu then cast a pall over the deal, saying that he had not agreed to end annexations in the West Bank – only to suspend them.

 

* 

IN OTHER NEWS, the president did manage to squeeze in a visit at the hospital, with his ailing younger brother. Then it was off to Bedminster, N.J. again. A round of golf, and a hard day as president was ended. 

The CDC reported another 56,397 new cases of coronavirus for the day. Friday, another 1,229 Americans died. Since the start of the pandemic, 134,397 healthcare professionals have been infected and 628 have perished. The national tally of dead, according to CDC has reached: 

167,546.

*

 

THE GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE announces that the two top officials at the Department of Homeland Security are not serving legally in their posts. Neither Chad Wolf, the acting head of DHS, nor Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy head, has been confirmed by the U.S. Senate, as required by the U.S. Constitution.

 

Cuccinelli is actually serving in two positions, without being confirmed for either. He’s also acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

 

The virtue of ignoring the Senate and sticking whomever you like in top roles in government (if you can get away with it) is you could put suck-ups and sycophants in places of power and … oh … maybe break a few laws while they ignored what you were doing. You could reward toadies by giving them important positions and you could just say, f**k it, and appoint your son, Don Jr., as Secretary of Defense and appoint a banana crème pie to be the next Attorney General.

 

(Actually, a crème pie might not be as bad as Bill Barr, the current occupant of that position.)

 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Sen. Mitt Romney offered biting assessment of President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis this week. “Short term, I think it’s fair to say we really have not distinguished ourselves in a positive way by how we responded to the crisis when it was upon us,” he said in an interview Friday. “And the proof of the pudding of that is simply that we have 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s deaths due to covid-19.”

 

“And there’s no way to spin that in a positive light,” he added. (See: 8/16/20.)

___

 

 

8/15/20: Trump spends another day as President of the United States at his private resort in Bedminster, N.J. 

He plays another round of golf. 

He does make time to tell reporters he disagrees with Dr. Robert Redfield, the man he chose to head the CDC. Wednesday, Dr. Redfield warned that we could face “the worst fall [season], from a public health perspective, we’ve ever had.” Trump pushed back on that assessment. “If you look at these numbers,” he said, displaying a few deceptive charts, “they’re coming down, very substantially [emphasis added].” He noted that many Americans are now wearing masks. He said that was good. Then he reverted to blaming Dr. Fauci, who said, in February, that not everyone needed to wear a mask. “And so did Dr. Redfield,” the president added. 

In other words: Blame them for the spread. They forced him to scoff at mask-wearing in March. April. May. June and July. 

Trump repeated himself, saying that when you looked at the numbers, and considered how his administration has handled the crisis, “We’ve done it right.” Then he insisted, “It’s very impressive.”

 

____________________ 

Trump could be taking some kind of mood enhancer, which would explain his rosy view of our place in the world.

____________________ 

 

Suppose we fact check Mr. Trump. Japan is currently witnessing what, for them, is a serious spike in cases. Today they had 1,360. Their population is a third of ours. We had 55,348. Germany had 1,548, and with one fourth our population you can do the math. Belgium, with 11.6 million citizens, had 929 cases, a dangerous increase since early July, when they were under a hundred cases most days. The state of Georgia, with a million fewer people, had 3,273 infections. South Korea, with 51.3 million people, had a spike with 279 cases on August 15. Florida and Texas, with a combined 51.7 million people, had 6,352 and 8,245 cases. 

Combined, that works out to 52 times as many. 

We can check current death rates: most people killed by the virus, per million in population. The top ten countries in the world, including two tiny principalities you never heard of: 

San Marino: 1,237 deaths per million (42 dead)

Belgium: 857

Peru: 789

Andorra: 686 (53 dead)

Spain: 612

United Kingdom: 609

Italy: 586

Sweden: 572

Chile: 543

USA: 522 (we’re #1 in total deaths, with more than 167,000)

 

Trump could be taking some kind of mood enhancer, which would explain his rosy view of our happy place in the world. A realistic look at the numbers shows his handling of the crisis is not “very impressive.”

 ___

 

8/16/20: Sunday, President Trump spent his 387^th day, since taking office, at one of the private resorts or clubs he owns. That means more than a quarter of his entire term as president has been spent doing nothing, save for hobnobbing with rich pals and riding around the links and cheating on golf scores. He plays golf again: Round #291 since he became president.

 

* 

MEANWHILE, heavily armed right-wing groups are showing up to harass Black Lives Matters protesters. In Portland, members of the Proud Boys used mace on opponents and fired paint balls and, reportedly, a pellet gun. Since they were carrying AR-15s and wearing body armor, the potential for serious trouble was clear. In Kalamazoo, Michigan, Proud Boy forces clashed with anti-racism protesters. Several people were injured. White nationalists showed up at Stone Mountain to confront anti-racism crowds, but only “minor altercations” resulted. 

Bloodshed threatens. 

Trump does find time, once he comes off the links, to retweet a post by Brandon Straka. Straka, who claims to be a former liberal who has seen the light, said of Democratic-run cities, that people should leave those dens of crime. 

“Let them rot,” Straka writes. 

Trump endorsed the idea in a retweet. So, add city dwellers to a growing list of Americans the president doesn’t care about – and in most cases, actively hates.

BLOGGER’S NOTE (3/6/2023): Straka shows up for the January 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill – designed to gift Trump a second term in office. He gets arrested, pleads guilty to one misdemeanor charge and gets three months of home detention, 36 months on probation, and takes a $5,500 hit to the bank account.

___ 

 

8/17/20: We rarely quote Democrats to make a case against Mr. Trump. Republican voices normally suffice, including people Trump chose to work in his administration.

First, let’s quote the most damning voice of all, that of Donald Trump. At present (and we realize this can change), he trails badly in polls showing which candidate voters prefer in the coming election. 

____________________

“The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”

President Donald J. Trump

____________________

 

You can compare numbers with previous elections if you doubt the accuracy of such polls. Trump likes to say the numbers are rigged. 

Past polls weren’t rigged. Clinton had a lead of 3.2 points in 2016, in a final average of all polls. She won the popular vote by 2.1 points. 

The average of polls four years earlier had Obama ahead by .7 of a point. He prevailed by 3.9, the biggest polling miss since at least 1996. Obama was expected to win easily, by 7.6 points, in 2008, and did, by 7.3. 

Bush 43 had a 1.5 point lead in the final polling average in 2004, and won by 2.4 points. 

I am unable to find an aggregate of polls for 2000. Gallup, however, had Bush 43 with a 46% to 44% lead with two weeks to go before the election. 

In the end, Gore captured 48.4 percent of the popular vote, to Bush 43’s 47.9%; but Bush squeaked by in the electoral vote. 

None of the candidates in any of these elections, all but one of which was much closer than this election looks (as of now) to be, ever complained, and said the process in this country was “rigged.” 

Save one. Trump may be the only candidate in American history to complain ahead of time that an election was “rigged,” and then win (2016). Now with polls looking ugly, he seems bent on taking a dangerous turn. If he loses, he’s not going to accept defeat gracefully. He may not accept defeat at all. 

So it was, Monday, that we had Tin Pot Don railing against the system. At a campaign rally in Minnesota, he was clear. He was going to win. There was only one way he could lose. “We have to win the election. We can’t play games. Go out and vote,” he shouted. “the e [emphasis added], or just make sure your vote gets counted,” he told a red-hatted crowd. “Make sure because the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged. Remember that. It’s the only way we’re going to lose this election, so we have to be very careful.” 

You could almost image his supporters fingering the triggers on their guns. And they have a lot of guns. The polls are rigged. He can’t lose. Unless. Unless the vote is rigged. “The only way they’re going to win,” he says of Biden and the Democrats, “is that way. And we can’t let that happen.” 

The man is nuts. 

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (1/19/21): I always thought Trump was nuts. I still didn’t realize how nuts he was till he got thumped in November. 

He lost the popular vote by more than 7,000,000 but spent the next 77 days, not counting days since he left office, claiming he won by 10,000,000. 

It was the wildest example of Trump Math ever.

 

* 

ANOTHER former member of the Trump administration turns on his old boss. This time, it’s Miles Taylor, a lifelong Republican, albeit a young one. Taylor served in the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, and rose to chief of staff under Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. 

 

“What we saw week in and week out…was terrifying.” 

In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Taylor offers withering assessment of the man he was at first glad to serve. The “frequent follies” of Trumpian behavior, Taylor warns, put “the safety of Americans at risk.” 

“I can attest that the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions,” he adds. 

If the broad strokes Taylor paints are depressing, the details reveal Trump in all his petty ugliness. In a separate video, Taylor tells the story of a meeting DHS officials had with the president after California suffered through a devastating summer of forest fires. “He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down [emphasis added] from a wildfire because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him and that politically it wasn’t a base for him.” 

Even when Trump wasn’t plotting revenge against segments of the American people, all of whom he was elected to serve, it was hard to keep him focused on important issues. Taylor explains: 

Top DHS officials were regularly diverted from dealing with genuine security threats by the chore of responding to…inappropriate and often absurd executive requests, at all hours of the day and night. One morning it might be a demand to shut off congressionally appropriated funds to a foreign ally that had angered him, and that evening it might be a request to sharpen the spikes atop the border wall so they’d be more damaging to human flesh. (“How much would that cost us?”).

 

Meanwhile, Trump showed vanishingly little interest in subjects of vital national security interest, including cybersecurity, domestic terrorism and malicious foreign interference in U.S. affairs.

 

Finally, he notes: 

The president’s bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic is the ultimate example. In his cavalier disregard for the seriousness of the threat, Trump failed to make effective use of the federal crisis response system painstakingly built after 9/11. Years of DHS planning for a pandemic threat have been largely wasted.

 

“What we saw week in and week out, for me, after two and a half years in that administration, was terrifying,” Taylor recalls in the video out this week. That video is the work of a group of Republicans who support Joe Biden in the coming election. For Miles Taylor, the choice is clear: 

Given what I have experienced in the administration, I have to support Joe Biden for president and even though I am not a Democrat, even though I disagree on key issues, I’m confident that Joe Biden will protect the country and I’m confident that he won’t make the same mistakes as this President.

 

* 

IN RELATED NEWS, we learn that in July 2019 both the Republican and Democratic heads of the Senate Intelligence Committee notified the Department of Justice that it was believed several witnesses may have provided misleading testimony during the Russian investigation.

 

Those witnesses: 

Donald Trump Jr.

Jared Kushner

Hope Hicks

Steve Bannon (see also: 8/20/20)

 

We do know, beyond all doubt that Jr. and Jared met with Russians in June 2016. They did not disclose that meeting until July 2017, and only after it became clear the free press was going to blow their cover. 

We also know what Hope Hicks said on November 10, 2016, two days after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. “We are not aware of any campaign representatives that were in touch with any foreign entities before yesterday, when Mr. Trump spoke with many world leaders,” she claimed. 

She was lying. 

Blatantly.

 

* 

WITH CAMPAIGN SEASON in full swing, the president tells an adoring crowd in Mankato, Minnesota, on Monday that he’s been talking to God. Naturally, God has been answering. 

“We built the greatest economy in the history of the world, and now I have to do it again,” he tells worshippers. 

COVID-19 has set him back, he admits. He eHe    will need a second term (maybe a third!) to work his magic once more..

“You know what that is?” Trump asked, referring to a disease that has killed tens of thousands of the people he was elected to serve. “That’s God testing me. He said, ‘You know, you did it once.’ And I said, ‘Did I do a great job, God? I’m the only one that could do it.’” 

Well, that didn’t sit well with the Lord. Trump continued, “[God] said, ‘That, you shouldn’t say. Now we’re going to have you do it again.’” The crowd broke out in laughter and worshipped the Golden Calf.

 

* 

“That’s for the evangelicals.” 

SPEAKING OF: Every so often, Trump tells the truth by mistake. Today, he told another crowd, at another campaign rally, “We moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. That’s for the evangelicals.” 

You would think that in foreign policy, Trump would be taking actions to benefit U.S. security and interests. What Trump really had in mind with this move was shoring up his religious base. “You know it’s amazing with that, the evangelicals are more excited about that than Jewish people. It’s really – right? It’s incredible,” Mr. Trump continued. This has something to do, of course, with the fact many evangelicals believe that when the Jews regain the Holy Land it will fulfill biblical prophecy and indicate that the Second Coming of Jesus is at hand.

 

* 

WHEN NOT TALKING TO GOD, the president has a new advisor telling him everything is going great, as far as COVID-19 is concerned. Dr. Scott Atlas has been added to the White House team. 

His main qualification for the post? He will tell Trump what Trump wants to hear, including the idea that Americans should resume normal life, get the economy going full blast again, and not worry about dying. For example, Dr. Atlas, has insisted we can get all the kids back in school, and they don’t even need masks, because children rarely get sick from the coronavirus. 

Teachers? Bus drivers? Cafeteria workers? School administrators? Dr. Atlas wants them to take their chances. Take a few germs for the team! We know Trump won’t care how many educators – or even children – die, so long as he gets a second term in the White House. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking at the Democratic National Convention, Kristin Urquiza talks about losing her father to the coronavirus.

 

“His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump.”

 

"After five agonizing days,” she explained, “he died alone in the ICU with a nurse holding his hand. My dad was a healthy 65-year-old. His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump and for that, he paid with his life.”

 

When the president told America this disease was going away soon – that it was no worse than the flu – her father believed her, caught COVID-19, and paid with his life for trusting a con artist.

___

 

 

8/18/20: If you’re not watching the Democratic Convention, Joe Biden is now the official candidate of the party and will try to defeat Donald J. Trump.

 

____________________ 

“I never thought I would have a president who is a danger to national security.” 

Lt. Gen. Jack Weinstein

____________________ 

 

You’ve also missed seeing former Republican governor of Ohio, John Kasich, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, come out in favor of Mr. Biden. Powell, a lifelong Republican, was joined by former GOP senator Chuck Hagel, who accused the president of “dereliction of duty.” Trump, warned Hagel, “has degraded and debased the presidency and our country in the eyes of the world.” Retired Lt. Gen. Jack Weinstein added his voice to the chorus. Citing his 36 years in uniform, he said, “I never thought I would have a president who is a danger to national security.” 

We have, Powell said, a nation divided, and “a president doing everything in his power to keep it that way.”

 

* 

Connections with Russian intelligence assets. 

IN OTHER NEWS, the final volume of the Senate report on Russian interference in the 2016 election is released. 

Most Americans are too busy trying not to get sneezed on to consider the findings. We will briefly note: 

The bipartisan committee uncovered the same kind of evidence found by Robert Mueller and his investigators. There were multiple contacts between Russians and members of the Trump campaign. Some were more problematic than previously known. For instance, Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer, who met with top campaign officials in a secret meeting in June 2016 (a meeting which included Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort), had connections with Russian intelligence assets that were “far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known.”

 

(As we at this blog have previously noted, Ms. Veselnitskaya fled this country, one step ahead of arrest.) 

As The Hill notes, the Senate panel also found that, hostile foreign powers looked upon the Trump transition team as an easy mark: 

“Russia and other countries took advantage of the Transition Team’s inexperience, transparent opposition to Obama Administration policies, and Trump’s desire to deepen ties with Russia, to pursue unofficial channels through which Russia could conduct diplomacy,” the report reads, noting that this made the “transition open to influence and manipulation.” 

 

Senate investigators also went further than the Mueller Report had, tagging Konstantin Kilimnik, the business partner of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, as “a Russian intelligence officer [emphasis added].” The committee labeled Manafort “a grave counterintelligence risk” in its report. 

Kilimnik also fled to Russia before the feds could slap on the cuffs. And Manafort went to prison. 

Evidence indicated that at least two members of Team Trump, Don Jr., and Felix Sater, may have lied to Congress about Candidate Trump’s efforts to get a hotel deal closed in Moscow, during the campaign. (Again, as we have previously noted, Sater was a convicted felon with he went to work for Trump.) 

Further, the committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally behind the hack and leak operation that published stolen Democratic Party emails, which did serious damage to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 

Trump fans might find some comfort in knowing that the committee faulted the F.B.I. for giving too much credence to the Steele dossier. 

Also, six of the eight Republicans on the committee happily announced that after three years of investigations, “we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion.” 

This is an interesting assessment, since we know Veselnitskaya and Kilimnik are safe in Russia and will never testify. 

And because Trump has always said he won’t take a pardon for Manafort “off the table” – so Manafort has no reason to cooperate with any investigations. 

And because Don Jr. refused to return to Congress and clear up his earlier testimony until he got a sweetheart deal, including limited hours he’d have to stay on the stand, limits to topics he’d have to address, and a promise he would never be called again to testify about any contacts with Russians. 

Top Trump allies in both the House and Senate argued absurdly that Don Jr. shouldn’t have to come again, in the first place, because so far no one had been able to prove he had been lying. 

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (12/24/20): Paul Manafort gets an early Christmas present when the president indeed pardons him. You could say for “services rendered.” 

That is: Not ratting on Donald Sr.

___

 

 

8/19/20: President Trump might not understand the science of climate change, or even grade school level science. He does, however, have a bold plan to defeat the coronavirus once and for all. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, says he and Donald have talked about a new cure for COVID-19. 

Mr. Pillow has pointed the president to oleandrin, an extract from the flowering oleander plant, which has been shown in one non-peer reviewed study to have antiviral properties when tested in vitro. 

That is: in a test tube. 

True. Lindell is not a scientist, per se. But if there’s a miracle cure out there, Trump is going to hunt it down. 

Real medical experts are of the opinion that Lindell should stick to peddling fluffy cushions. “This is really just nonsense and a distraction,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, says. “I can tell you,” he assures Anderson Cooper on CNN, “there are millions of compounds that, when tested in vitro, in a test tube, appear to have some antiviral activity but that are worthless in vivo, in humans.”

Trump's new science advisor.

 

* 

IN OTHER NEWS, the president claimed again that the U.S. was doing great handling the coronavirus crisis. 

As always, he garbled or ignored the facts. 

Trump decided to compare the situation in our country with the situation in New Zealand. He said that country was having real problems. Cases were exploding! Speaking at a rally in Mankato, Minnesota, he told adoring fans, “The places they were using to hold up, now they’re having a big surge…they were holding up names of countries and now they’re saying ‘whoops!’”

 

“Do you see what’s happening in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it [the virus], it was like front-page news because they [his media enemies] wanted to show me something.” Well, you couldn’t show Trump anything! Not even math. He was handling the problem with fantastic skill. The prime minister of New Zealand was watching her people drop dead in uncounted numbers.

 

Maybe Trump could send flowers.

 

Oleander?

 

A quick fact check showed that on the day Trump compared his skills favorably with New Zealand leadership the island nation had nine new COVID-19 cases.

 

Here in the United States, we were averaging something like 50,000 cases per day for the week.

 

New Zealand has only 4.9 million people. So, if we adjust for population, we’d have to multiply 9 x 66…

 

Okay. New Zealand is doing much, much better, regardless of what Donald J. Trump might claim.

 

 

 

FUN FACT: Goodyear tells employees at a Kansas manufacturing facility that they may not wear “Make America Great Again” hats or other political gear at work.

 

Dictator Don attacks the company on Twitter, and calls for his fans to boycott the company. “Don’t buy GOODYEAR TIRES - They announced a BAN ON MAGA HATS. Get better tires for far less!” This is definitely not the preferred way to help American business during a pandemic.

 

Founded in 1898, the Akron, Ohio company is one of the few companies in this country still making tires.

 

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (4/3/22) A check of Worldometers, can give us some perspective on which nations have done well, combating the spread of the coronavirus. As of today, nearly half-a-billion known cases of the disease have been registered. Number 1, in the world, for most infections?

 

The U.S.A.

 

Number 1 in total deaths?

 

The U.S.A., with 1,008,159.

 

Adjusted for population, we fall (thankfully) to thirteenth place, with 3,015 deaths per million population.

 

So far, New Zealand has suffered 70 deaths per million.

___

 

8/20/20: You probably missed the story, but scientists announced that the Greenland ice sheet lost 532 billion metric tons of ice in 2019. That was more than twice as much as has been lost in an average year, since 2003, when NASA satellites began taking precise. measurements.

 

Alex Gardner, a NASA ice scientist, called the loss “huge” and “astounding.”

 

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­____________________

 

Tin Pot Don and QAnon save the anchovies.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­____________________

 

Greenland is melting.

This is a warning to the world; but Donald Trump isn’t listening. Or, he is, and doesn’t care.

 

His solution is to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for more drilling, because in Trumpistan, the more coal, oil and gas we burn, the better Tin Pot Don likes it. All respect to coal miners, worried about jobs. All respect to drillers in Texas and fracking crews in Ohio. We all want a good wage or to profit from a good business, be it opening up new oil fields, or building windmill farms in Iowa. 

 

But we all live on the same globe; and the globe we live on must remain livable for future generations.

 

Another problem with dirty energy is oil spills – which could ruin the environment in the ANWR.

 

Look no further than Mauritania, where a Japanese ship has run aground, spilling oil into pristine waters.

 

* 

IF IT SEEMS to you that paranoia has a foothold in the Oval Office, you are not in error. With Trump’s poll numbers looking dismal, and with sensible conservatives and longtime members of the GOP coming out against him, Trump is focused on holding his base. That includes a depressing swath of racist and nuts. 

Wednesday, reporters asked the president about his growing support for people who believe in QAnon. If you’ve never heard of this movement because you’re not a crackpot, adherents believe the world is controlled by a “Deep State” cabal of satanic pedophiles. And go figure: They’re liberals! Members of this cabal are said to sexually torture children and harvest their adrenochrome. According to QAnon, this substance can have hallucinogenic effects at high doses. It’s also “a life-extending elixir.” Cannibalism is practiced and various forms of “mind control” are involved. Hollywood elites are behind the mind control portion of the scheme. 

Jews, of course, play an outsize role, an idea your garden variety anti-Semite is happy to get behind. George Soros is supposedly the money man backing the child-molesting crew. Barack Obama was a leader of the nefarious ring, and Hillary Clinton too. In 2016 rumors circulated about a child sex slave ring, operating out of the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza joint. This lead one well-armed fool to barge in on people tossing dough and spreading sauce. He shot the lock off a freezer, and freed … zero children. Because there were none. All he rescued were a few anchovies – and for his troubles he got his dumb ass sent to prison. 

The FBI has labeled QAnon a domestic terrorist threat.  

 

Still, a growing number of people calling themselves Republicans and running for office believe in the mysterious “Q.”  He or she, or they, is/are the anonymous, online voice/s out to reveal the truth. Thus “Q anonymous.” 

Trump has congratulated several of these candidates on Election Day wins. When Marjorie Taylor Greene triumphed in a congressional primary in Georgia, Trump tweeted congratulations to a “future Republican Star.” He called her “strong on everything,” which is kind of vague –  but no doubt includes her stand against Hollywood mind control in all its permutations. He said Greene, an avid QAnon fan, was the type who “never gives up – a real WINNER!” 

All this talk led reporters to inquire Wednesday, whether or not the president believed this bunkum. Was he helping save children – and the world – from Satanists, cannibals, and pedophiles? 

Trump played coy. “I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand that they like me very much, which I appreciate,” he said. (Neo-Nazis and Klan members like him, too; but that’s a story for another day.)

  

“I’ve heard these are people that love our country.” 

Then it was off to the races, with Tin Pot Don whipping the same nag he loves to ride. “I have heard that it [QAnon] is gaining in popularity, and from what I hear, these are people that when they watch the streets of Portland, when they watch what happened in New York City,” Trump explained, “these are people that don’t like seeing what’s going on.” 

“I’ve heard these are people that love our country and they just don’t like seeing it.” The protests, he meant. “So I don’t know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me and they also would like to see problems in these areas, like especially the areas that we’re talking about, go away.” 

A reporter spelled out some of the group’s beliefs and waited for the President of the United States to comment. 

“I haven’t heard that,” he shrugged. “But is that supposed to be a bad thing or good thing? If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there.”

 

* 

The crooks were already here. 

ONE FORMER TRUMP AIDE may not have a chance to help him with the saving or the winning of a second term. 

It was announced this morning that Steve Bannon, once a valued campaign advisor, White House aide, and proud member of Trump’s National Security Council, has been indicted for fraud. 

Bannon and several co-defendants allegedly funneled at least a million dollars from a fund called “Build the Wall” into their own pockets. 

The irony, of course, is thick. Bannon was a leading voice in the “law and order” movement, a key to the Trump 2016 run for the White House. People who donated to the fund thought their dollars would go to help build Trump’s big, beautiful border wall, to keep out all the rapists and murderers and MS-13 gang members, crossing from Mexico. Now, it seems, the crooks were already here, using people’s contributions to pay for their own lavish lifestyles. 

Asked about Bannon’s arrest, the president called it “a sad day.”

 

* 

Can Vlad come out and play? 

IT WAS A SAD DAY, too, for Alexei Navalny. U.S. News & World Report reports: “Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a leading critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was rushed to a hospital and was in a coma…due to what his spokeswoman said was a deliberate poisoning.” 

Fingers immediately pointed at Putin, who has long history of bumping off any persistent critic.

Still pals!

 

Unfortunately, Trump cares as much about poisoned critics as he does the Greenland ice sheet. (See: 8/27/20.) He’s hoping to invite Putin to the next G-7 meeting, scheduled to be held in this country, but currently postponed due to the pandemic. The G-7 used to be the G-8 until the Russians invaded Crimea and started shooting up Ukraine. 

Trump doesn’t care about Ukraine, or corruption in Ukraine either, no matter what he says. 

At least four of the other six members of the G-7, all close allies of the United States, oppose an invite to the murderous autocrat. Those four: France, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Donald still ♥’s Vlad.

 

* 

LAST BUT NOT LEAST, White House Press Secretary “Birther” McEnany is asked if her boss is prepared to accept the results of the coming election. 

“The president has always said he’ll see what happens,” she explains, “and make a determination in the aftermath. It’s the same thing he said last November [last election, she means]. He wants a free election, a fair election, and he wants confidence in the results of the election.” 

In other words, he will be confident in the results if he wins. And you know, if he could pull a Putin, he would. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: The president might believe that QAnon types love America, if not quite all the people who inhabit America, such as Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and people of dark skin. Several Republican voices, however, are raised in protest. 

 

“Real leaders call conspiracy theories conspiracy theories.” 

Rep. Liz Cheney describes the QAnon movement as a “dangerous lunacy that should have no place in American politics.” 

Rep. Adam Kinzinger sums up the secretive musings of “Q” this way, tweeting: “Could be Russian propaganda or a basement dweller. Regardless, no place in Congress for these conspiracies.” 

Sen. Ben Sasse slams Trump, without naming the fool. “QAnon is nuts,” he tweets, “and real leaders call conspiracy theories conspiracy theories.” 

Gov. Jeb Bush tweets, derisively, “Why in the world would the President not kick Q’anon supporters’ butts? Nut jobs, rascists [sic], haters have no place in either Party.” 

Vice President Pence, the most loyal ass-kisser ever to hold the second highest office in the land, is put on the spot Friday and asked, does he believe in a secret cabal of cannibals and pedophiles, who happen to be Democrats, working against his boss and hoping to destroy America? 

Pence does his very best to change the subject before finally admitting, “I dismiss it out of hand.” 

Even Sen. Lindsey Graham weighs in. “Well,” he tells an interviewer, “QAnon is batshit crazy. Crazy stuff. Inspiring people to violence. I think it is a platform that plays off people’s fears, that compels them to do things they normally wouldn’t do. And it’s very much a threat.” 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: Navalny survives the poisoning attempt, barely. He does, however, keep a sense of humor. 

He pokes fun at Putin again, noting that in Russian history: “There was Alexander the Liberator and Yaroslav the Wise. Now we have Vladimir the Poisoner of Underpants.” 

Sadly, this is still Putin we’re talking about. In February 2021 Navalny is sent to a Russian penal camp in Siberia. 

  

8/21/20: No matter how hard you try you cannot keep up with all the craziness that click clacks from the Twitter thumbs and blah blahs from the lips of Tin Pot Don. Nor is it possible to delineate the multifaceted ways in which the current President of the United States threatens fundamental American values, while simultaneously undermining our standing in the world.

 

____________________ 

Trump is bad at math, bad at geography and really bad at his job. More and more Republicans know it and are starting to say so, too.

____________________ 

 

He’s not even good at the basics of his job. This week we had another 1.1 million Americans file for unemployment. That kept alive a disastrous streak of 22 weeks with at least a million new claims. COVID-19 cases did fall on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, a hopeful trend for all Americans. Then they spiked again: 46,500 new cases on August 19, 44,864 on August 20, and 46,754 today. 

Meanwhile, the president has been trying to make it sound like other countries are doing just as badly – if not worse – than we are. This week he cited New Zealand as an example. On August 19, the island nation had six new cases. Six!!!! On August 20, they had five. Today, they reported 11. Adjusted for population that would be the equivalent of the U.S. having a combined 1,452 cases those three days. 

Trump sucks at math.

 

* 

IF MATH IS A PROBLEM for Tin Pot Don, geography is definitely not his strongest subject. According to a former Trump appointee at the Department of Homeland Security, after Hurricane Maria smashed the island of Puerto Rico, the President of the United States floated the idea of selling the island, and justified his plan, saying Puerto Ricans were “dirty” and “poor.” Later he suggested a possible trade for Greenland, which would be hard to believe. 

Except this is Tin Pot Don, a most ill-informed man. 

We should remind Trump fans – and their fearless, clueless, lawless leader – that the people of Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens. 

You can’t just sell them or trade them like slaves.

 

* 

FIRES ARE BLAZING across California, as climate change continues to heat up and dry out the Golden State. Tens of thousands of Californians have been displaced from homes, and 771,000 acres have burned. Trump displays his usual level of empathy – which is none. “I see again the forest fires are starting,” he said on Thursday. “They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests – there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.” 

“Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us,” he added. 

Someone should probably explain to Trump. Eight of California’s ten worst fires have ignited this decade. Colorado is currently fighting its second biggest fire ever. The worst came in 2002. Arizona has a dozen active fires going, tied with Oregon. Scientists have long warned that a hotter, drier planet would suffer more and more destructive forest fires. See, for example: Siberia in July; “zombie fires” in Alaska in May; massive fires in Australia in January. 

Climate changes is not a “hoax,” and neither are these results. (See: NASA comments on Greenland, 8/20/20.)

 

* 

IF YOU SKIPPED the Democratic National Convention, you missed several touching moments. Brayden Harrington, a 13-year-old stutterer talked about how Vice President Biden took him aside when they met, and told him to have confidence, and said he could overcome his problem, as Biden did as a young man.

  

“Fundamentally good people.” 

Not so touching, but still of note: Ed Good, 95, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, a lifelong Republican and Trump voter in 2016, said he would not make the same mistake again. 

Trump, he said, was the “worst president we have ever had.” 

S.E. Cupp, a conservative commentator, watched the DNC show and came away impressed. Having viewed a video that focused on Jill Biden and the tragedies that have shaped her husband, Cupp had a sudden realization. These were “fundamentally good people.” It was clear, she said, that Joe loved this country. He loved its people. She compared him to Trump, who she found wanting. 

Our current president loves only himself, she said. Cupp decided that was reason enough to vote Democratic for a change. 

She was not alone. Cindy McCain, wife of the late Sen. John McCain, announced that she, too, would cast a vote for Biden. “Joe Biden,” she said, “is a wonderful man and a friend of the McCain family.” 

Daughter Megan, a conservative like her late father, said she would also vote for Joe, one of an increasing number of GOP regulars to have had enough of Trump. Republican mega-donor Meg Whitman made it clear she was voting Biden. Governor Phil Scott of Vermont said he would not vote for Trump. He “would consider” supporting the Democratic ticket, but not his own party’s leader. Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich is a “no” and will vote the Democratic ticket. 

Kasich’s announcement prompted Mr. Maturity in the White House to erupt. “He was a loser as a Republican, and he’ll be a loser as a Democrat,” the president fumed, even though Kasich has no plans to turn Democrat. “Major loser as a Republican,” Trump added. “I guess you can quote me on that,” he told reporters. “John was a loser as a Republican. … And as a Democrat he’ll be an even greater loser.” 

Trump repeats himself a lot. 

A group of top Republican intelligence officials, 73 in number, have announced that they will vote for the challenger, not for the incumbent. This group (which is likely to grow), includes 

…retired General Michael Hayden, who served as national security director and head of the CIA; William Webster, the only man to serve as both head of the CIA and FBI; John Negroponte, the first director of National Intelligence; Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center; and Mike Donley, former Air Force secretary.

 

In a full-page ad, in the Wall Street Journal, they explain their choice: 

Trump has demonstrated that he lacks the character and competence to lead this nation and has engaged in corrupt behavior that renders him unfit to serve as president [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted]. … We have concluded that Donald Trump has failed our country and that Vice President Joe Biden should be elected the next President of the United States.

 

Former Republican congressman Charlie Dent is voting Biden/Harris in November. He set forth his reasons, in an interview on CNN. 

For me, it’s about right or wrong. Stability vs. instability, security vs. insecurity, normal vs. abnormal. That’s why I’m doing this because I feel that we need to return some sense of normalcy to the function of government. We simply don’t have that now. And that’s why I’m going to be voting for Joe Biden for president.

 

There are greater principles involved like the rule of law. We have to defend democratic values. And I say democratic with a small “d.” A free press, an independent judiciary. These are things that are very important.

 

And the president has been trying to undermine those things. And I think that, again, we have to talk about broader principles here rather than just an immediate policy victory.

 

Dent said there were “many Republicans” who agreed with him. Those who have already made it clear they plan to vote for Biden, write in a vote for someone else, or remain on the fence continue to multiply. They include retired Gen. Colin Powell (for Biden), former GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina (Biden), George W. Bush (unlikely to support Trump), former Florida governor Jeb Bush (unsure) and Sen. Mitt Romney (plans to write in some other name). John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor is a hard “no” on his former boss. Sen. Lisa Murkowski  is “struggling” with the idea of a second term for Tin Pot Don. Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security and once a member of Team Trump, will not vote for the man who gave him a job. Rep. Francis Rooney of Florida is also leaning toward Biden, explaining that our current president is “driving us all crazy.” Ret. Admiral William McRaven will vote against his party leader. 

 

“A conspiracy of cowardice.” 

Stuart Stevens, who spent four decades helping GOP candidates craft campaigns and win, has soured on Trump and his party, generally. He describes what he sees from leadership in todays’ GOP as a “conspiracy of cowardice.” 

Even Dan Coats, Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence is wavering in support for his old boss. Like those six dozen other Republican intelligence experts who have made their opposition clear, Coats is said to believe the current administration has damaged our national security apparatus. Ultimately, Coats, a loyal Republican, may not jump ship. 

Still, there has probably never been an election like this in all of U.S. history, where so many members of a president’s party think their erstwhile leader is a threat to the country they love. 

Ms. Fiorina is typical of the best of what remains of the Grand Old Party. She calls Biden “a person of humility and empathy and character.” 

None of which, Trump is.

 

* 

LAST BUT NOT LEAST, an unexpected note of warning regarding the man in the Oval Office. Sources at Fox News have reportedly revealed to CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter what Sean Hannity says about the president behind closed doors. 

Stelter writes that some in the White House refer to Hannity as Trump’s “shadow chief of staff.” It’s a position of power, but comes at cost. Trump calls Hannity at all hours, day and night. One of Hannity’s confidants described it to Stelter as the president treating, “Hannity like Melania, a wife in a sexless marriage.” 

A sexless marriage might explain why Trump is always so on edge, so short on temper, so prone to lash out. 

He’s horny. 

One of Hannity’s associates says that “off-off-off the record,” the Fox News host would tell people the president is “batshit crazy.” A second source confirmed, “Hannity has said to me more than once, ‘He’s crazy.’” 

 

FUN FACT: Speaking of Fox News, according to Miles Taylor, former DHS chief of staff, Trump told top officials at Homeland Security to watch Lou Dobbs’ show on Fox “every night.” 

“The president would call us and ... he would say, ‘Why the hell didn’t you watch Lou Dobbs last night? You need to listen to Lou. What Lou says is what I want to do,’” Taylor said. 

And that is the history of the lame-ass Trump administration in a nutshell – filled with nuts. Trump was too lazy even to come up with policy positions of his own.

___

 

8/22/20: Some presidents have a moral compass. Some don’t. Harry Truman memorized the following prayer when he was a boy, and would repeat it often the rest of his life, and do his best to live by these precepts: 

Oh! Almighty and Everlasting God, Creator of Heaven, Earth and the Universe:

 

Help me to be, to think, to act what is right, because it is right; make me truthful, honest and honorable in all things; make me intellectually honest for the sake of right and honor and without thought of reward to me. Give me the ability to be charitable, forgiving and patient with my fellowmen—help me to understand their motives and their short-comings—even as Thou understandest mine!

 

Amen, Amen, Amen. 

We know Tin Pot Don wouldn’t.

 

____________________ 

Pay the porn lady, Tin Pot Don.

____________________ 

 

Case in point, a judge has now ordered the President of the United States to pay the court costs for Stormy Daniels, the porn queen he paid off not to tell her story during his first run for office. 

Daniels sued in 2018 to be able to tell her tale; Trump and his lawyers sued to stop her, and ultimately lost. 

A California Superior Court judge, where the case was heard, has ruled that Trump must pay $44,100.

___ 

 

8/23/20: A new critic of the president emerges. This time it’s his sister and federal judge, Maryanne Trump Barry, 82. In secret tapes of conversations with her niece, Mary, who wrote a book about her uncle, we hear what a family insider thinks. “He has no principles,” his sister tells the author. “You can’t trust him [emphasis added].” she adds, her comments based on intimate knowledge gained over decades observing her brother. She tells Mary that Donald had someone take his SAT test for him. “He doesn’t read,” she notes. As for his performance in office, the president’s sister has this to say. “The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy sh*t.”  

HOLY SHIT, indeed. Even the president’s relatives think he’s a conniving, lying, ill-informed bum.

 

* 

ALSO TODAY, Trump gets loose on Twitter and calls the Food and Drug Administration part of “the deep state.” He says scientists are holding up the vaccine process until after the November election. (See: 10/6/20.)

___ 

 

8/24/20: Miles Taylor and Elizabeth Neumann, both of whom served in the Department of Homeland Security, as gears in the machine of the Trump administration, have started a new group. The Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform (REPAIR) “will include people who work or have worked for Trump but want to elect Biden and reform the Republican Party.” How much traction they can gain remains to be seen; but at least two other veterans of this dysfunctional administration are signed on, anonymously, including one still working inside, and who expects to be fired as soon as he or she reveals support for REPAIR. 

Taylor and Neumann hope to get 20 to 40 others to join.

 

____________________ 

“The chair behind the Resolute Desk has always been bigger than any political party.” 

Michael Steele, former chair of the RNC

____________________ 

 

A group of 27 former GOP members of Congress, of similar mind, has announced plans to fight reelection of the president. They cite Trump’s “corruption, destruction of democracy, blatant disregard for moral decency, and [an] urgent need to get the country back on course.” 

Members of the Lincoln Project, another renegade Republican group, have a similar goal. Former RNC chair Michael Steele joined today. Steele explained his decision in words that echo Taylor and others. “The chair behind the Resolute Desk has always been bigger than any political party,” he said. “Sadly, we have witnessed its occupant devolve into preying upon fears and resentments with narcissism that nurtures only chaos and confusion.” 

Trump, of course, will play these protesters off as supporters of some “Deep State.” If we use our judgment, we might see them more accurately as men and women of integrity, still guided by love of country, rooted in principled conservatism and respect for the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution.

 

* 

IN ANOTHER SAD DEVELOPMENT, for the president, another staunch supporter went down in flames this week. Jerry Falwell Jr., head of Liberty University, a most excellent Christian school, was caught in a salacious sex scandal. It was revealed that Falwell’s wife, Becki, had been having an affair with a much younger pool boy, and that while they engaged in coitus, Jerry liked to watch. 

Not a good look for the leader of a university based on faith.

 

Mr. and Mrs. Falwell in happier times.

 

 

* 

IN OTHER NEWS, the Republican National Convention is off to a rousing start. Speaking on the first night – and planning to speak four nights in a row – President Trump kicked off the celebration exactly the way you might have expected. “If you really want to drive them crazy, you say ‘12 more years,’” Trump began, as the audience chanted “12 more years!” in response. “Because we caught them doing some really bad things in 2016. Let’s see what happens.” 

He also made it clear to his rabid supporters that they had nothing to fear but the icy touch of reality. The Democrats couldn’t possibly beat him. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election. We’re gonna win this election,” Trump claimed. He added that he had never seen such record levels of enthusiasm for his presidency. 

On August 23, according to RealClearPolitics, the president had an average approval rating in all polls of 43.9%.

 

* 

LAWYERS for Eric Trump are fighting a subpoena from the New York State attorney general, involving questions about the valuation of four Trump-owned properties. Like any Trump, facing investigation, Eric has called this demand for testimony a witch hunt. “This,” he whined, “is the highest level of prosecutorial misconduct – purposely dropped on the eve of the Republican convention for political points.” 

The attorney general’s office begs to differ. What investigators want to know, is did Businessman Trump, now President Trump, cheat the state on taxes, or did he cheat the banks? Maybe, both! In 1995 he bought a property called Seven Springs, north of New York City. Trump paid $7.5 million. By 2014, when seeking a bank loan with which he hoped to buy the Buffalo Bills, his company placed a value on Seven Springs of $291 million. Four years later, on an ethics form required of the president under federal law, the property was valued at $50 million. 

Lower value, lower taxes. 

___ 

 

8/25/20: It didn’t take a genius to see this coming, and it won’t take a genius to tell you President Trump won’t take the blame. Tuesday night, a 17-year-old from Illinois, armed with an AR-15, shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and wounded a third.

 

According to sources, Kyle Rittenhouse, the alleged shooter, was “obsessed” with the Blue Lives Matter movement. What better way to show support for “law and order” than to join like-minded vigilantes, travel to another state, and gun down protesters? According to one report, Rittenhouse was one of a group of heavily-armed men who described themselves as “armed citizens [come] to protect our lives and property.”  

Look, we of the liberal persuasion get it. People burning down stores are a species of idiot; but unleashing people like Rittenhouse, is not the solution. 

(There’s also no evidence the people he shot were burning down anything.) 

The young man has been charged with fleeing across state lines as well as murder. Look for President Trump to take one of two courses. First, he ignores the story. More likely, he offers “calming words” and attacks “Democratic mayors” for letting criminals run amok in city streets.

 

* 

AT LEAST Donald J. Trump’s businesses are doing better. Federal Election Commission filings show $2.3 million in donations to the president’s reelection campaign have been transferred to companies he owns, to pay for rent, food, and lodging. Since taking office, for example, Orange Leader has accepted $1.5 million in rent from his own campaign on just one property in New York City, his skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. The Republican National Committee has paid $225,000. The Trump campaign has also paid the Trump Organization $281,000.

 

* 

IN OTHER NEWS, the Republican National Convention has had a few snags. For example, there are only so many Trump family members available to speak. And we know his older sister is out (see: 8/23/20). So, the lineup of guests can seem thin. You can’t get former GOP nominees for president, successful or otherwise, to talk, because with one exception (Bob Dole) those still living (Bush 43 and Romney), and at least two deceased (Bush 41 and John McCain), considered Trump a cancer. 

That meant you had Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend filling a speaker’s slot, shouting into an empty arena, as if she were talking to an audience of the deaf, and believed volume would cure their impairment. Kimberly Guilfoyle – who probably caused deafness in a few listeners with good ears in the process – whose parents were born in Puerto Rico, yelled about how her parents immigrated to this country, and how if Joe Biden won in November, America would no longer be the haven of freedom it has always been for people like her mother and father. 

Critics were quick to point out that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory. That means Guilfoyle’s mom and dad were citizens the moment they were born, which somehow, she didn’t realize. 

 

Another speaker was Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion activist. That’s fine. People of good conscience can disagree about that topic. 

More of a surprise are her views on voting. It turns out, back in May, she tweeted support for “head of household voting.” She explained that “in a Godly household, the husband would get the final say.” 

That would mean, if she and her husband disagreed, her husband would vote for the candidate he liked. Mrs. Johnson could stay home and make him a bologna sandwich upon his return. 

This must be the Republican Party’s idea of making it up to women for running a Pussy Grabber for president. 

 

____________________ 

The same sympathy is due to any family who loses a son or daughter in the line of duty, as an officer of the law or otherwise.

____________________ 

 

You can and should sympathize with anyone who loses a loved one, or who sees a loved one badly injured. For example, the family of Jacob Blake, who was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Or the families of two men allegedly killed by Kyle Rittenhouse. The same sympathy is due to any family who loses a son or daughter in the line of duty, as an officer of the law, or otherwise. 

When the RNC invited Mary Ann Mendoza, an “Angel Mom,” to speak about her son’s death in 2014, you could understand she might have something important to say. Her son, a Mesa, Arizona police officer, was killed in a head-on collision in 2014, involving a drunk driver. That driver was in this country illegally. 

No one story proves a point involving millions of human beings, but you can surely feel the mother’s overarching, unending pain. The same for the other 30 families, on average, who lose loved ones to drunk drivers every day, and the 10,500 stories that could be told in the United States every year. 

Then again if you are Team Trump, and you are trying to stir hatred and fear against illegal immigrants, yeah. Pick this one example. 

Mendoza would still get a pass in my liberal book because pain is pain. But her speaking slot was revoked when it was revealed she had posted a link on her Twitter feed, and suggested her 40,000 followers read a story rife with anti-Semitic tropes and horrible comments. Included in the story were selections from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic “classic” and a favorite of Adolf Hitler. 

Fans of QAnon jumped in on the thread, with comments like these, suggesting that “malevolent Jewish forces in the banking industry are out to enslave non-Jews and promote world wars.” It was said the Titanic had been sunk to protect the Federal Reserve, and that every president between John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump “was a ‘slave president’ in the thrall of a global cabal.” 

My sympathy for Mrs. Mendoza, in regards to her loss, remains. I would think, however, that a mother who knew great pain might not be trafficking in the same kind of hate that led to the death of 6,000,000 Jews. 

Not that it matters much, but Mendoza also lost points in my book when I learned she was listed as a consultant on the “We Build the Wall” project. 

That is the project, we now know, which allegedly involved a significant degree of self-dealing and fraud. 

(Not by her.) 

A check of Wikipedia reveals her son, Brandon, was 32 at the time of his death. He was driving home from a shift in his own car, when the drunk driver, a man with a lengthy criminal history, and without a driver’s license, crossed the center line. Both men were killed. The drunk had a blood alcohol level of 0.24%, three times the legal limit. R.I.P. Officer Mendoza. 

Blue Lives Matter. 

And so do Jewish lives, Mrs. Mendoza. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: This blogger has a number of excellent Republican and conservative friends. None, as far as he knows, are racists or bigots. They would not be his friends if he knew they were. 

 

“All of the conservative, none of the embarrassment.” 

Nevertheless, racists and bigots are clearly fond of Mr. Trump. Case in point: Marjorie Taylor Greene, running for a seat in Congress in November, and a big fan of crazy conspiracy theories. 

From the outset, Ms. Greene has had detractors even within the Republican Party. The slogan adopted by Dr. John Cowan, the Republican who lost to her in a primary contest, was, “All of the conservative, none of the embarrassment.” 

“She is not conservative,” he told Politico before the runoff. “She’s crazy.” 

A check of web archives done by NBC News revealed that Greene, running in a safely Republican district, should win a seat, despite having promoted all manner of dangerous absurdities. She believed the “Pizzagate” tale, which led some other dope to shoot up a Washington D.C. pizza parlor. She posted about a “Clinton Kill List,” which theorized that Mrs. Clinton had ordered a string of assassinations, but the “Deep State” covered for her. In another post she questioned whether or not a plane really crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. 

When violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, Ms. Greene did President Trump one better, when he said there were “good people on both sides.” Greene claimed that the white supremacists weren’t involved in the killing of Heather Heyer and the injury to 19 other anti-hate protesters. The attack was an “inside job,” carried out to “further the agenda of the elites.” 

James Fields, who drove the car that killed Heyer and injured the others, was involved in an “accident,” she maintained. 

Greene also suggested recently that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was guilty of treason, noting that the punishment is execution. Previously, she had suggested that a good way to remove Pelosi from power would be – no, not voting her out – but “a bullet to the head.” 

So, one must wonder. Do Greene and poor deluded individuals like Rittenhouse and Fields all drink from the same toxic fountain of neo-fascist hate? 

This blogger would argue that they do. 

 

Greene fills her card for Racist Bingo.  

Candidate Greene came in for fresh criticism after Politico uncovered inflammatory videos she posted online. Not entirely a fan of religious freedom, she suggested in one rant that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in the U.S. government, and that there was an “Islamic invasion” going on. She noted that a Muslim woman elected to Congress wanted to put her hand on the Quran to be sworn in. “No,” Greene said (clearly never having read the Constitution.) Her description of sexual practices in the Muslim world was textbook bigotry. I found myself surprised, as I listened, to a tape she made, that she hadn’t claimed Muslim men had sex with camels. Wait…I am typing and listening to her screed…She just mentioned “goats and sheep.” Greene has suggested in the past that George Soros, a Democratic megadonor, was a Nazi in his youth, even though Soros is a Jew. And if this was Racist Bingo, she filled her card by saying that blacks should be proud to walk past statues of Confederate generals, because those statues show how far we’ve come in overcoming racism. 

A story in The New York Times added depth to what should be Greene’s shame – save for the fact the Trump base clearly loves her. 

A clear indication that Greene was more than a dabbler in QAnon was her 2018 endorsement of “Frazzledrip,” one of the most grotesque tendrils of the movement’s mythology. You “have to go down a number of rabbit holes to get that far,” said Mike Rothschild, whose book about QAnon, The Storm Is Upon Us, comes out later this year.

 

The lurid fantasy of Frazzledrip refers to an imaginary video said to show Hillary Clinton and her former aide, Huma Abedin, assaulting and disfiguring a young girl, and drinking her blood. It holds that several cops saw the video, and Clinton had them killed.

 

When Greene posted a picture of Donald Trump with the mother of the slain N.Y.P.D. officer Miosotis Familia on Facebook, one of her commenters described Frazzledrip and wrote, “This was another Hillary hit.” Greene replied, “Yes Familia,” then continued, “I post things sometimes to see who knows things. Most the time people don’t. I’m glad to see your comment.”

 

Michelle Goldberg, whose last name alone should send QAnon believers into a tizzy, describes the whole “Q” movement as “a repurposed version of the old anti-Semitic blood libel, which accused Jews of using the blood of Christian children in their rituals, and a cult lusting for mass public executions. According to the F.B.I., it’s a domestic terror threat.” 

Of course, Greene is not the first nutjob on the right to demonize Mrs. Clinton, but more in a “proud” line of nutjob thinkers. 

Goldberg notes: 

An attendee at the 1996 Republican National Convention told the feminist writer Susan Faludi, “It’s well-established that Hillary Clinton belonged to a satanic cult, still does.” Running for Congress in 2014, Ryan Zinke, who would later become Trump’s secretary of the interior, described her as “the Antichrist.” (He later said he was joking.) Trump himself called Clinton “the Devil.”

 

In any case, when this blogger tunes in again to listen to Greene’s old tape, he hears her say “the most mistreated group of people in these United States today, are white males…they are blamed for everything…they’re the scapegoats…” 

At that point he can’t take any more. 

Greene insists that her old posts no longer represent her views. You can watch her story here if you have the stomach.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: Greene goes on to win a seat in Congress. By February 2021, she has become such an embarrassment, that the U.S. House of Representatives votes, 230-199, to strip her of all committee assignments. That includes one on the Education and Labor Committee. In her own defense, Greene claims she no longer believes in QAnon. She blames her earlier positions – that leading Democrats deserve to die for their role in a diabolic pedophile ring – on her inability to trust the mainstream media. 

“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she says. 

Only 11 Republicans join in the vote against her, which would seem to be an indictment of the GOP, more generally.

___ 

 

8/26/20: While Trump supporters were worrying about Joe Biden’s plans to “abolish the suburbs,” scientists were worrying about multiplying signs of climate change. In a newly released study, experts warn that 60 percent of Antarctic ice shelves may be subject to “hydrofracturing.” Cracking in the ice will be accelerated by melt water from the surface  flowing into crevasses and enlarging them. These ice shelves currently serve like dams to “buttress” inland ice. If shelves collapse, inland ice flows to the sea, crumbles and melts, and oceans rise.

 

____________________ 

The goddam Antarctic is melting. It’s more evidence of climate change. Don’t be stupid. Do something!

____________________ 

 

These “hoaxsters,” as President Trump might call them, published their report in the latest issue of the journal Nature. You can catch their drift if you read nothing more than the first paragraph. “Atmospheric warming,” is the cause. 

If you dive deeper, you will…okay…you won’t get most of what they’re saying (unless you’re smarter than this blogger). 

A typical sentence: 

We therefore used a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), the U-Net29, to identify the fracture-like features in the relatively low-resolution, but continent-wide, MOA imagery. We trained the DCNN with a subset of MOA imagery in which fracture features were manually labelled (Extended Data Fig.1c).

 

So, let’s put it in English we can all understand. They used sophisticated satellite images to measure melting. 

The goddam Antarctic is melting. It’s more evidence of climate change. Don’t be stupid! Do something!** 

The End. 

 

** Scientists don’t really call readers stupid. What they really said: “If warming allows meltwater to enter the vulnerable buttressing regions we have identified, hydrofracture-driven ice-shelf collapse is possible, which could have major consequences for Antarctic mass [ice] loss and global sea-level rise.”

 

* 

SCIENTISTS aren’t the only ones worrying about climate change and its results. A hotter, drier California is going up in flames. Trump doesn’t care if a blue state burns. Florida is a different matter. 

Floridians might vote for him. 

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, a 42-year-old Republican, doesn’t need sophisticated satellite imagery to see what’s happening to his city. (Miami is six-and-a-half feet above sea level – or less.) He warns that it is time for his party “to stop ceding ground on issues that are important issues to my generation [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted].” One is immigration. The other is “the environment.” Suarez can see with the naked eye, what is happening. “Sea level rise,” he warns, “which is something we are seeing in our city and the environmental impacts we are seeing … have a huge economic impact.” He says the Republican Party “shouldn’t abandon an issue” like that. 

A little more digging, and we find a story from 2017, in the Miami Herald. Trump fans will ignore a story like this and argue that scientists – for example at NASA – are liars, and we should listen to Tin Pot Don. The story focuses on the threat from more powerful hurricanes, fueled, as scientists have long predicted, by higher water temperatures which turbocharge storms. 

“Given what we know now about how the ocean expands as it warms and how ice sheets and glaciers are adding water to the seas, it’s pretty certain we are locked into at least 3 feet of sea level rise, and probably more,” said Steve Nerem of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lead of the Sea Level Change Team, a NASA collaboration. “But we don’t know whether it will happen within a century or somewhat longer.”

 

Trump won’t be around to find out the answer. Future generations will. I suspect they will rue his name. 

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service is warning residents along the Louisiana and Texas coasts to evacuate in the face of Hurricane Laura. Expected to make landfall today, the Category 4 storm may bring an “unsurvivable” storm surge with it, with waves 20 feet high, and waters flowing 30 miles inland. Experts warn that “large and destructive waves will cause catastrophic damage from Sea Rim State Park, Texas, to Intracoastal City, Louisiana.”

 

* 

PRESIDENT TRUMP is already laying the groundwork to contest the outcome of the coming election, telling supporters that foreign nations plan to manipulate the mail-in vote. He hints darkly that it will be “the scandal of our times.” 

“RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS,” Trump tweeted in June. “IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” 

The Office of the Director on National Intelligence responds with this statement: “We have no information or intelligence that any nation-state threat actor is engaging in any activity to undermine the mail-in vote or ballots.”  

The F.B.I. is also dubious: “We have not seen to date a coordinated national voter fraud effort during a major election,” an official said. “It’s extraordinarily difficult to change a federal election outcome through this type of fraud alone.” 

 

* 

IN OTHER NEWS, the Trump administration stops and starts and stops and starts new rules on COVID-19 testing. When it comes to important policy, President Trump has a turnstile mind. 

First, CDC issues guidelines for opening schools safely. Then those guidelines are scrapped in the face of White House pressure. Then CDC says we need more testing to get a grip on the virus spread. Someone in the administration puts pressure on the scientists and, lo, CDC announces Monday that people who are asymptomatic need not bother with tests. 

You know, as Trump says, if we didn’t have so many tests, we wouldn’t know how many cases of COVID-19 we have. 

The same logic applies to tests for breast cancer, tuberculosis, and smallpox, one would suppose. 

When medical experts began protesting, and reporters began asking questions, no one seemed to want to own the new policy. The people at CDC said, hey, it wasn’t us. Contact HHS. The people at HHS said CDC did it, not them. Adm. Brett Giroir claimed that everyone had discussed the change, and they loved it, including Dr. Anthony Fauci. 

Fauci immediately cast doubt on that statement, saying that at the time the decision was made, he “was under general anesthesia in the operating room [for removal of vocal nodules] and was not part of any discussion or deliberation regarding the new testing recommendations.” 

Experts of all kinds were baffled by the change in position. Most responded with scientific warnings. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, was more pointed in a tweet. 

“Now what the hell kind of CDC recommendation is this? We need to be doing MORE testing, not less,” she wrote. 

The Hill noted that, “According to multiple reports, top political officials forced the CDC to make the change.” 

Krys Johnson, an assistant professor of instruction in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Temple University in Pennsylvania, was blunt in response. “It is unconscionable that recommendations, which should follow only the science, are being modified to enable [maybe even ensure] underreporting of COVID-19 cases at this critical juncture.” 

Nor was Ms. Johnson some liberal college professor hating on Team Trump. The American Medical Association, representing hundreds of thousands of professionals was quick to say, in politer fashion: “HOLY SHIT! WHOSE BONEHEAD IDEA IS THIS?” 

Or to be more exact, Susan Bailey, president of the AMA, put her group on record against the change: 

Months into this pandemic, we know COVID-19 is spread by asymptomatic people. Suggesting that people without symptoms, who have known exposure to COVID-positive individuals, do not need testing is a recipe for community spread and more spikes in coronavirus.

 

The AMA was quickly supported by The Infectious Diseases Society, whose members called for an “immediate reversal” of CDC’s changed position. 

At least one insider, described as “a person who works with the White House Coronavirus Task Force,” told ABC News, “The people in the trenches are horrified by this. It gives the impression that asymptomatic people cannot transmit the disease, which is not true. Community spread is driven by asymptomatic people”

___ 

 

8/27/20: The big story for today will be disaster along the Gulf Coast, knocking COVID-19, a new round of protests over a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and even Donald J. Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention out of the headlines.

 

____________________ 

“There’s many more steps to go down into the pit.” 

Professor Ian Howat, Ohio State

____________________ 

 

Meanwhile, a second hurricane is brewing, as more and more Republican voices are raised in alarm, against their own party’s standard bearer, a man with no standards, save for, “Me, Myself, and I.” 

First, Laura. Thursday night the Category 4 monster, made landfall, slamming into Texas and Louisiana. Experts say it was the strongest storm to hit the coast in over a century, with winds in excess of 150 mph. 

(At 157, you have a Category 5 storm.) 

Fortunately, a predicted storm surge of twenty feet did not materialize; but wind damage was “catastrophic.” 

Live coverage from the area is compelling. It’s clear people along the coast and far inland need help. CNN describes buildings as “obliterated,” and “chunks of the beach missing” in Creole, La. Roads along the coast are destroyed or blocked by debris. I-10 is closed, after a ship was ripped from its moorings and wedged under a bridge. Volunteers were trying to protect what they could at First United Methodist Church in Lake Charles, but with almost no roof left, and rain coming down, it was a thankless task. Damage along the Texas coast was extensive, but not as bad as expected, which would still mean “terrible.” Residents along the coast are being warned that if they return to their homes, they may face weeks without power. In Louisiana, hundreds of thousands are without power and tens of thousands have no water, after city and local water plants were badly damaged. 

Thankfully, only a handful of deaths have been reported. 

Hurricane Laura, of course, is a harbinger of worse disasters to come. Yet, we can expect the president in days ahead to avoid the slightest hint that scientists have been right for years. Climate change, they have warned repeatedly, will lead to more hurricanes, and more powerful ones. 

As always, we are aware at this blog that one data point proves nothing. The fact this was the strongest storm to hit the region ever, tied with a storm in 1856, proves nothing. A single data point proves nothing. 

Yesterday, of course, we covered a plethora of data points, all pointing to the same scary conclusion (see: 8/26/20). 

Today, the Insurance Information Institute, supplies us with fresh and compelling evidence. Analysis from 1851 to 2015, shows that during that period no hurricane ever struck the U.S. before June. This year is the sixth in a row during which hurricanes have formed outside of the normal season. 

Simply put, Atlantic waters are warming significantly, and warming faster than scientists feared. (You have to be almost willfully ignorant to miss this, as, for example, the president himself.) Waters in the Gulf of Mexico are also warmer, “freakishly” so, allowing storms to pick up force as they approach landfall. 

Six years in succession – that’s significant evidence. Yet, the best we can say for the current, clueless occupant of the White House is that he has stopped calling climate change a “hoax,” at least on Twitter.

 

* 

Ice that took thousands of years to form is melting. 

THE EVIDENCE continues to build, even if the “See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil” crowd in the White House refuses to admit it. Scientists reported this week that the Greenland ice sheet is endangered and ice that took thousands of years to form is melting. 

“We’ve passed the point of no return but there’s obviously more to come,” Ian Howat, a professor at Ohio State, explained. “Rather than being a single tipping point in which we’ve gone from a happy ice sheet to a rapidly collapsing ice sheet, it’s more of a staircase where we’ve fallen off the first step but there’s many more steps to go down into the pit.” 

Sea levels are sure to rise, the only question being, how fast and how far in the next hundred years? Only our grandchildren and their grandchildren will be around to find out the result. 

Some people believe in climate change. For example: NASA scientists. Some don’t. Such as: Tin Pot Don and the poor sods who follow his pronouncements like he’s preaching some anti-science gospel. Still, the data points continue to accumulate. Phoenix just set a record for most days in a year, eight so far in 2020, with temperatures hitting 115°, and plenty of summer left. The average daily high of 107.9 degrees, so far this summer, is another record. So is the average low of 84.2 degrees. July went into the record books as the hottest month in Phoenix history. Death Valley, California hit a high of 130° Sunday. Scientists believe that may be the hottest temperature ever recorded on earth. (Two higher readings in the 1930s are suspect.)

 

You can find all the evidence you need to explain why the Greenland ice sheet is melting, assuming you’re not too lazy to look. January 2020 was the hottest January, globally, ever. June 2020 was the third hottest June. You can ask the scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration if you don’t believe what a small potatoes blogger says. The first three months of this year were the second hottest ever, trailing only January-March 2016.

 

The data accumulates.

 

*

 

ALSO: Don’t be a knucklehead. The science is crystal clear: Wear a mask for your own safety and out of respect for the safety of those around you. (See also: 7/30/20; 8/26/20.)

More than a thousand Americans have died on sixteen of the first twenty-seven days of the month.

 

* 

“Hurricane Bone Spurs” is a threat to democracy. 

IN OTHER NEWS of great import, growing numbers of Republicans and conservatives continue to warn about the dangers of Hurricane Donald, a destructive force unlike any in our nation’s history. 

His hate-filled, hate-fueled first term in office is a harbinger of what to expect if he secures a second. 

For the first time in U.S. history, Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been forced to come out and say, that the military will take no role in settling a disputed election. “I foresee no role for the U.S. armed forces in this process,” he told members of Congress. “We will not turn our backs on the Constitution of the United States.” 

As in – we all have to worry about a certain orange fool refusing to vacate the White House if he doesn’t win. 

Hurricane Laura may have pulverized the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Donald, sometimes called “Hurricane Bone Spurs” is a threat to drown out democracy. We have covered this story extensively if you’d care to look. We have compiled a lengthy list of retired U.S. generals and admirals, as well as other voices from the military, outlining the dangers Trump poses to democratic norms. We have put together the many warnings of members of Trump’s own party. But now the chorus of alarm is growing louder, more insistent. Today, 34 Republicans who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign issued a letter, in support of Joe Biden. 

They write: 

What unites us now is a deep conviction that four more years of a Trump presidency will morally bankrupt this country, irreparably damage our democracy, and permanently transform the Republican Party into a toxic personality cult [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted]. We can’t sit by and allow that to happen.

 

Jennifer Horn, former chairwoman of the Republican Party for New Hampshire, also weighed in today. A founding member of the Lincoln Project, another organized GOP effort to defeat Trump, she explained her group’s support for Biden. 

I mean, I’m not trying to tell people that Joe Biden is going to be a conservative president, but what I think is…generally true about Joe Biden, I think he’s a decent person. And I think that he cares about the country more than he cares about himself. And I think that those two things alone put him light years ahead of Donald Trump for being qualified to be president, the United States.

 

Even several billionaires and their wives have signed on with the Lincoln Project because no tax cut, no amount of money you can ever make, can make up for desecration of the U.S. Constitution. 

The warnings keep coming. “Country first,” John McCain used to say, putting partisan politics aside to work for the common good. Now more than a hundred former McCain staffers have signed a letter saying, they too will put, “Country first.” They will work to elect Biden. 

This effort is led by Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s former chief aide and speechwriter. “We have different views of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party platform – most of us will disagree with a fair amount of it – but we all agree that getting Donald Trump out of office is clearly in the national interest,” says Salter. 

 

“Character matters in our leaders.” 

Finally, a group called 43 Alumni for Biden issues a letter, signed by 21 staffers, so far, who worked for George W. Bush. They, too, focus on personal characteristics more than policy, writing: 

We are a group who served in George W. Bush’s administration. We have seen the importance of leadership up close and we know Joe Biden is the choice we need to make in November.

 

Character matters in our leaders. Joe Biden has proven himself over years of public service. We have seen him respectfully reach across the aisle, consider a different point of view and make a thoughtful decision to benefit the nation. Joe Biden is courageous and will tell the American people what we are facing, but will also have a plan to guide us through this difficult time. He is someone who has endured tragedy and can empathize with the pain of losing a loved one too soon. Joe has also experienced parental job loss and has lived with its consequences. Joe has faced adversity and come through it with his dignity intact. He will help us do the same during these trying times.

 

Over the past four years we, as a nation, have struggled with truth. Conspiracy theories have been legitimized and facts have been dismissed [emphasis added]. The expertise of world-renowned scientists and physicians have been sidelined while the opinions of pundits have been embraced. Meanwhile, more than 170,000 Americans are dead due to this mismanaged crisis. As a nation, we have lost our moral compass. Children should never be separated from their parents and caged for seeking asylum in the US. It is cruel and inhumane. We need to get back to basics: facts matter, there is right and wrong. We can do that with Joe Biden in the Oval Office. He will listen to and work with experts to craft and execute plans to solve problems and ease suffering. Joe will act with integrity, he knows no other way to lead. We can trust him.

 

The onslaught of insults and vulgarity we have witnessed in recent years must stop. Our children are watching us. If we explain away misogyny and racism as political tactics we are complicit in normalizing completely inappropriate behavior. This is not who we are as a nation. Americans want a successful country, but how is that possible if what we see modeled from the White House is disrespect and outright hate?

 

Joe’s kindness is sorely needed right now.

 

* 

DID SOMEONE MENTION GOOD CHARACTER? Jerry Falwell Jr. has been having a really bad month. And his wife Becki’s month hasn’t been any better. The purportedly Christian couple, big fans of President Trump, continue to see their reputations battered. 

First, there were stories about Mrs. Falwell’s affair with a pool boy, and salacious stories about Mr. Falwell watching them from the corner. 

Next, a young Liberty University student alleged that Mrs. Falwell assaulted him one night, when he slept over at the Falwell home. He was a friend of their son; and she treated him to a bit of oral sex. 

“She was the aggressor,” he says. 

 

* 

IN OTHER GRIM NEWS, another week of jobless claims and we top one million again. Throw in people filing for relief under a special pandemic program and the total rises to 1.6 million. 

President Trump is still predicting a “V-shaped” recovery. In a recent survey, however, economists warn that we will not regain all our lost ground until 2022. The Economic Conference predicts a decline in GDP of 4.9 percent for 2020. This will be followed by anemic 2.0 percent growth in 2021. 

In a second poll conducted by the National Association for Business Economics, more than 60% of respondents agree that the U.S. economy will not recover, and reach the same level as Quarter 4 in 2019, until at least 2022. 

 

 

STOP HURRICANE DONALD BEFORE IT BECOMES A CATEGORY 5.

___

8/28/20: The pandemic continues to rattle the economy. Fears grow that a second wave of layoffs may be coming. MGM Resorts plans to lay off 18,000 furloughed workers, a quarter of its U.S. workforce. American Airlines is letting 17,500 workers go. Another 4,000 workers at Booking.com will be cut in September. State and local governments have slashed payroll, eliminating 1.2 million jobs. Moody’s Analytics warns that falling tax receipts and rising costs for unemployment relief may force an even larger, additional round of cuts, as many as 2.8 million.

 

*

____________________ 

“If our collective future were a movie, this week would be the trailer.” 

Camilo Mora, climate scientist

____________________ 

 

AS AUGUST winds down, we find two storms brewing in the Atlantic, as another year of hotter waters make for ripe conditions for hurricanes. 

As for Trump, he continues to ignore climate change – when we’re lucky – and to denigrate the experts when we’re not. With California going up in smoke, Iowa recovering from freakish 100 mph straight-line winds, and the Gulf Coast smashed, evidence of trouble piles up. As NPR reports: 

Climate scientist Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii says if our collective future were a movie, this week would be the trailer.

 

“There is not a single ending that is good,” he says. “There’s not going to be a happy ending to this movie.”

 

Welcome to a hotter world, humanity. It’s not going to be any fun.

 

* 

ALSO TAKING A HIT: Ivanka Trump. And that hit is delivered by her aunt, on her father’s side. The president’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, had already been quoted saying her brother – Ivanka’s dad – has absolutely no principles. Now tapes surface in which she says, like father, like daughter. “She’s all about her,” the aunt says of Ivanka. “She’s a mini-Donald, but yet he’s besotted with her.” 

In a previous tape, she said of the president, “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.”

 

* 

MORE FAMILY FUN: The president hits back at his niece, Mary Trump, whose taped conversations with Judge Barry, have ended up in her book, and now in public view. “Unstable,” he calls the author. He takes glee in saying she was “rightfully shunned, scorned and mocked her entire life” by the rest of the family. Because who doesn’t believe a person deserves to be mocked all their life! 

While he’s at it, the President of the United States decides to trash his former National Security Advisor, John Bolton – a man he put in that position, and who held the post for seventeen months. 

Now, Trump says, he’s a “dumb warmonger.” And only a complete idiot would hire him for advice.

___ 

 

8/29/20: In Portland, Oregon gunfire erupts Saturday night. One person is killed, this time an individual wearing a “Patriot Prayer” hat, marking him as a member of a far-right group that has clashed repeatedly with protesters. 

A truck caravan, stretching for miles, carrying hundreds of Trump supporters, had entered the city earlier, and clashes spread. 

Almost as if the president wanted it that way…

 

* 

ELIZABETH NEUMANN, who stepped down in April as assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), recently faulted the president for attacks on “Democratic-led cities” and his talk of lawlessness, supposedly tolerated and even encouraged by his political foes. Neumann, a Republican, says Trump’s words are helping fuel a potential race war. “It is completely a sideshow to distract from the real threat and it’s extremely dangerous.” 

Neumann notes that the F.B.I. has made multiple arrests at peaceful protests in recent months, with right-wing extremists coming in to try to stir trouble. More Americans have been killed in the last five years, by white supremacists, she says, than by all other terrorist groups combined. 

The greatest domestic threat we face today, she insists is “right-wing extremism,” not Antifa.

___ 

 

8/30/20: Sunday morning, the president is up early and tweeting, his first post coming at 4:49 a.m. In the five a.m. hour, he fires off fifty tweets and retweets. In one he quotes a like-minded user who says a patriot was assassinated in Portland on Saturday, that Antifa was responsible, and that the mayor and police commissioner have “blood” on their hands. Trump decides to “calm” the situation by calling the mayor, Ted Wheeler, “incompetent,” like “Sleepy Joe Biden.” 

The president loses his focus at one point, and posts a football clip, with a tweet, “Play Football Big Ten!”

 

____________________ 

“Contemplate the meaning of freedom in their own lives.”

____________________ 

 

Then, it’s back to bashing Democrats and protesters of all kinds, unless they’re pro-Trump folks. A video of the truck caravan prompts him to respond, “GREAT PATRIOTS!”  in a typical all-caps Twitter shout. 

As always, in Tin Pot Don’s eyes, only those who support him in unthinking fashion are patriots. 

His thumbs start throbbing and he loses steam in the six a.m. hour, with only 36 more posts. Then, at 7:04 we get: “LAW & ORDER!!!” the simplistic tweet of a simple-minded man. 

As for protesters – white guys in trucks, are considered patriots in Trumpistan. Black guys in sports, or their white teammates and friends are no good. Team Trump has made it clear that NBA players boycotting games should be ashamed of themselves. “Silly,” one White House aide called their protests, just because a black man in Wisconsin was shot seven times in the back by police. “Absurd,” the aide added. Jared Kushner said the players should feel lucky, that they had so much money, that they could afford to sit out games. Tin Pot Don says the players are ruining the league. 

(Jared, the rich white guy, stirring up the Trump base against rich, African American guys. Amazing hypocrisy.) 

The protests continue to spread. Players in a number of sports join the N.B.A. guys in support. The W.N.B.A. players refuse to play. Major League baseball teams postpone seven games. The National Hockey League cancels two days of playoffs, and promises to fight racism within the sport. Tennis player Naomi Osaka sits out a semifinal match at the Western & Southern Open. Out of respect, all other matches are paused and rescheduled. Nine NFL teams cancel practice. The New York Giants discuss sitting out a game once the season commences. The Cincinnati Bengals, as a team, visit the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a short walk  from their stadium. The Center is billed as a place where visitors can gain “insight into the struggle for freedom in the past, in the present, and for the future” and “contemplate the meaning of freedom in their own lives.” One recent exhibit, “Legacy of Justice Deferred,” told the story of Ida Wells, the black journalist who battled for decades to expose the horrors of lynching, and end a savage practice that stained the nation’s flag. 

You know President Trump has never heard of Ida Wells, and doesn’t know anything about the history of lynching, or even why Colin Kaepernick and other players chose to kneel in protest, during the 2016 NFL season. 

You absolutely know he’s not going to be “contemplating the meaning of freedom” in his own life, nor in the lives of 330 million Americans. All of them – all of them – he was elected to serve. His focus should rightly be on ensuring the freedom of all of us, not just stirring the anger of his “patriot” pals in pickup trucks. 

Yes. They had every right to wave the flag from the back of their vehicles and parade through Portland. 

Kaepernick had the same right to kneel under the flag four years ago. That’s how the Bill of Rights works. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Lara Kollab, an Ohio doctor, could stand to visit the Freedom Center and do a little contemplating. She recently lost her license to practice osteopathic medicine and surgery after a number of anti-Semitic social media posts came to light. In one, Kollab promised to give Jewish patients the wrong medicine, to make them die. In another, she wrote, “People who support Israel should have their immune cells killed so they can see how it feels to not be able to defend yourself from foreign invaders.” Kollab is apparently a left-wing hater and nut. 

On the right-wing side, we have Sheriff Todd Wright, who gets axed from his job after a racist rant surfaces. The Arkansas County, Arkansas officer can be heard shouting about African Americans, and calling them “n-----s,” nine times. 

Which is precisely ten times too many.

___ 

 

8/31/20: With the coronavirus spreading unabated the President of the United States decides to focus on finding…what…a cure? 

Nope. He has to find a scapegoat, because saying the virus would “magically go away” didn’t work. Claiming injecting bleach would help was stupid. Taking advice from the MyPillow guy regarding flowers, and the Demon Sperm Lady on hydroxychloroquine didn’t alleviate the problem. 

Trump needs a scapegoat, and Dr. Anthony Fauci is it. Once the face of the president’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, Trump has soured on his help. In an interview with Laura Ingraham, the president makes it clear who he thinks deserves the blame. Would he put Dr. Fauci “front and center” in his administration’s response to the pandemic, she asks, if he had a chance to do it all again? 

“I disagree with a lot of what he said,” the president says. “I get along with him, but every once in a while, he’ll come up with one [idea] that I say, ‘Where did that come from?’” Trump wants it to be clear. He didn’t pick Dr. Fauci for the job. “I inherited him. He was here. He was part of this huge piece of machine.” 

So, was Trump hinting that Dr. Fauci, who has served every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan, who helped end the scourge of H.I.V., and successfully battled to control the Ebola outbreak … was he part of the “Deep State?” 

Ingraham didn’t ask, because her job at Fox News was to set Trump up to look as good as possible. 

On the final day of August, with Donald J. Trump in charge of the whole “huge machine” of the federal government, with Fauci merely offering advice, the U.S. hits a grim new milestone: 

6,000,000 cases of COVID-19.

 

* 

IN A NEW BOOK, Donald Trump v. The United States, by Michael Schmidt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The New York Times, we learn that the president once asked Gen. John Kelly to be Director of the F.B.I. There was an opening, by chance, after the previous director, James Comey, refused to pledge his loyalty. Comey insisted on continuing an investigation into the actions of Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s first pick for National Security Advisor. 

Trump fired Comey when he refused to give the pledge. Then he called Comey a liar and swore he never asked him for a pledge. 

Schmidt now writes that Kelly turned down the offer and the pledge. “Kelly said that he would be loyal to the Constitution and the rule of law, but he refused to pledge his loyalty to Trump.” 

(If you can find any evidence that Gen. Kelly has denied this story let me know, by emailing me at vilejjv@yahoo.com.)

 

* 

IN A POLL taken by Military Times magazine, even before this story exploded, it was clear Trump was losing support among active duty troops. Asked in late July and early August, 49.9 percent of respondents said they disapproved of his job performance, including 42 percent of all those polled who “strongly disapproved.” Only 38 percent approved. If the election had been held then, 41 percent said they would vote for Joe Biden, 37 percent for Trump. (Another 13 percent planned to vote third party; and nine percent said they’d sit out the election.)

___

 

 September 1, 2020: Let’s not delude ourselves. Donald J. Trump is the worst “LAW & ORDER” president ever. 

Today, he  traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he basically talked about how much he loved cops. 

Cops, in Trumpistan, according to this president, are essentially incapable of breaking any laws. 

 

____________________ 

The worst “LAW & ORDER” president we’ve ever had.

____________________ 

 

Not only is Trump the worst “law and order” president we’ve ever had, he puts Warren G. Harding to shame. Why should we be surprised? This is the guy who bragged about grabbing women’s pussies – because he could. That would be considered sexual assault in a court of law. 

Trump isn’t interested in law or order. Not even common decency. He’s the man who has two pending suits against him, filed by women, one by  Summer Zervos, for defamation and sexual assault. The other was filed by E. Jean Carroll, alleging rape. This is the guy who was accused of rape by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, a 13-year-old virgin at the time of the alleged attack, and listed as “Jane Doe” in court documents. Her claim was supported by “Tiffany Doe,” who said she witnessed four incidents of assault by our now president, with Tiffany also admitting she helped recruit underage girls for Epstein’s sex-abuse ring. That case was dropped in April 2017, when Jane’s lawyer said her client “was fearful for her life.” 

So, for Donald, innocent until proven guilty, at least. 

Still, you get some sense of why the president went out of his way recently to say that he wished Ghislaine Maxwell well. She is, of course, Epstein’s alleged accomplice and main procurer of teen girls. 

Trump can talk “LAW & ORDER” all he wants. To use his favorite word, it’s a “scam.” This is the gentleman who defrauded students at his university and had to pay $25 million in restitution. This is the man who stiffed undocumented immigrant workers in the 1980s, and lost a $1.4 million judgment to pay them, too. 

 

Trump and his talented “Team of Felons.” 

President Lincoln is famous for assembling what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin calls a talented “Team of Rivals” to serve in his cabinet. Trump will be remembered for assembling a talented “Team of Felons.” As Citizen Trump, he had already revealed his preferences by hiring Felix Sater, a convicted felon when Trump put him on the payroll. It was Sater who later suggested that if they hoped to close the Trump Tower Moscow deal in 2016, that they gift Vladimir Putin a suite in the proposed building. It was a perk worth $50 million. There’s your “law and order.” 

Putin is a man guilty of a wide array of crimes, including bilking the Russian people out of tens of billions of dollars. If anyone dares complain, he has them arrested, if they’re lucky, poisoned if they persist. 

On an international front, since taking office, and even before, Trump has cozied up to some of the bloodiest killers on the planet, people for whom “law and order” means the authoritarian state dominates the lives of citizens, starting in the cradle, continuing to the grave. At a campaign rally in Raleigh, N.C., in July 2016, Donald revealed his colors. He admitted that Saddam Hussein was a “bad guy.”   

“But you know what he did well?” Trump asked the crowd. “He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. It was over.” 

It was. 

It was over for more than 5,000 Kurds, mostly women and children, when the Iraqi dictator ordered his air force to gas their town. It was over for all the brave Iraqis who protested against every kind of human rights abuse. They were beaten, raped, and tortured, and finally murdered in their cells. 

“LAW & ORDER,” Saddam style. 

Since rising to the highest office in the land, Trump has continued to buddy up to the world’s worst dictators. When Bill O’Reilly warned a newly-elected president that Putin was a “killer,” Trump showed disdain for simple justice and the rule of law. “What?” he replied. “You think we’re so innocent?” 

And it was telling, too, that the president had agreed to sit down for an interview with a journalist he knew as an ally, working for a network run by Roger Ailes, Trump’s good friend. 

 

A bizarre affinity for monsters. 

Both men would eventually be ousted, after women who worked at Fox came forward and made it clear O’Reilly and Ailes had long abused their power and been guilty of all manner of sexual harassment. 

Trump is the guy who said later that O’Reilly, who had already paid several multi-million-dollar settlements, shouldn’t have settled. 

And, while still a candidate, Trump said that he had always found Ailes to be “a very, very good person.” 

Whereas many of the women who worked at Fox News soon made clear: Ailes was a predator. 

Since taking office, Trump has shown a bizarre affinity for monsters. He has called the murderous Kim Jong-un a “friend,” and talked about the “very beautiful letters” Kim has sent him. Meanwhile, the North Korean dictator has continued to slaughter his critics and starve his people. Trump commended Rodrigo Duterte, the President of the Philippines, for the “unbelievable job” he was doing on the “drug problem” in his country. Duterte’s secret, according to multiple human rights watchdogs? He had his police summarily execute alleged dealers, their clients, innocent bystanders, and political opponents who complain about his tactics. Later, Trump defended Mohammed bin Salman, after the Saudi leader ordered a journalist assassinated and sliced into pieces. President Trump called him a friend, too; and he called Xi Jinping, China’s president, as corrupt a communist kleptocrat as ever walked the planet, both a “friend” and “an incredible guy.” Xi recently brought “LAW & ORDER” to Hong Kong. 

That is: If you are a really big fan of stifling the free press, and sending in the military to crush dissent. 

This president doesn’t care about law and order, except when he thinks he can scare his base, and guarantee he wins reelection. He’s the guy who has one son fighting a subpoena, demanding he appear in court and testify in a fraud investigation. Three of his children (Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, again) were banned from doing charitable work, after a pattern of questionable spending was revealed at the Trump Foundation. My favorite example would be the decision to spend $10,000 in charitable donations on a massive painting of … Donald J. Trump. 

 

Crookery introduced like a virus. 

Having made crookery a staple of his business career, Trump brought crookery to his campaign, and introduced it like a virus to the White House. This particular germ tended to kill honest public servants. Felons, including those who were already felons when they were hired, those convicted since, and alleged felons, include Roger Stone, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Gen. Michael T. Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and George Nader. Nader was already a felon when he went to work for the campaign, having been convicted of child sex-trafficking in 1991. He has since been indicted on additional child-pornography-related offenses. He pled guilty and was sentenced to ten years in prison. Steve Bannon, a mastermind of the 2016 campaign, was indicted in August, as part of an alleged fraud scheme. To add insult to legal injury, that scheme is said to have involved stealing money from the poor MAGA-hatted crowd who elected Trump, and thought Mexico would pay for the wall. 

Innocent until proven guilty, again, in Bannon’s case, but good Lord, do we see a pattern yet? 

Felons stick together, like the proverbial birds, and do what felons do. Trump and Nader helped win a massive contract for Elliott Broidy, to perform security work for the United Arab Emirates. That contract was worth as much as $200 million. And who wouldn’t be tempted to break a few laws for that kind of money? Breaking the law was kind of a habit for Broidy. He had already committed a few felonies, a decade earlier. To be fair, Broidy copped to one, that felony involving bribing four New York State officials, at a cost of $1 million. In return they granted him investment control over a huge slice of the state employees’ pension funds. 

The crimes Trump’s campaign crew committed were many and varied. There is no record that anyone, behind the scenes, ever talked seriously about “law and order.” Manafort earned most of his felonies for work he performed for shady Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska, this work having been done before he joined Team Trump. Fittingly, Deripaska, a Russian businessman, had been banned from travel to the United States over his role in an international money-laundering scheme. Manafort would then earn a “bonus” felony, one of ten he piled up in court, for witness tampering during the Russia investigation. 

In fact, he was so inclined to continue waltzing down a rewarding criminal path that the judge in his case refused to grant bail. 

Roger Stone also piled up the felonies, seven in all, including one for lying to Congress during the Russian investigation. Then he added a cherry felony to his six scoop-sundae by trying to intimidate a witness. 

Trump’s personal lawyer for more than a decade, Michael Cohen, racked up eight felonies. Most were earned in service to Donald, himself. Those counts included tax evasion and campaign finance violations, including payoffs to a porn queen, one Playboy bunny, a Trump Tower doorman – and good god – a second Playboy bunny. The first three were meant to protect Trump’s reputation, such as it was, during the run-up to the 2016 election. The last payoff, a $1.6 million whopper, went to silence a Playmate who alleged she had been impregnated by Mr. Broidy, and keep her from talking about their affair and a subsequent abortion.   

And lest we forget: the indictment filed in Cohen’s case mentioned a co-conspirator, labeled “Individual 1.” 

Trump. 

Before moving on, we should mention two more indicted individuals: Konstantin Kilimnik and Natalia Veselnitskaya. Kilimnik worked closely with Manafort during the time the latter ran Trump’s 2016 campaign. In a recently-released, bi-partisan report from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnik is referred to as a Russian secret agent, and Manafort as “a grave counterintelligence threat.” 

Veselnitskaya famously met with Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in June that year. The meeting was arranged after she claimed she could offer dirt on Hillary Clinton. 

Sadly, both Kilimnik and Veselnitskaya are currently beyond the reach of U.S. law, having absconded to Russia. 

 

I’m sorry this post can’t be read in Braille. 

If there has ever been a more criminally-inclined, anti-law-and-order bunch to lead this nation, I am not aware. And I taught American history for decades. Trump is the first president, to my knowledge, to step in repeatedly and overturn punishments justly ordered by U.S. military courts. He’s the only president ever to call the military justice system a “disgrace.” Trump has repeatedly put a thumb on the scales and tried to tip it one way or the other, something normal presidents try not to do. He suggested two different U.S. soldiers, Chelsea Manning, and Bowe Bergdahl, were guilty of treason, the fit punishment being execution. 

He has called for swift and harsh punishment for criminals facing trial in civilian courts, too, and called a jury verdict he considered too lenient a “travesty of justice.” Even before he ran for office, his “law and order” instincts were warped and dangerous. He liked to refer to people accused of crimes as “animals,” even though the “animals” often prove innocent. Proving they aren’t animals. 

He once demanded death for the Central Park Five. Those young African American men were, indeed, convicted for their part in a brutal rape and the near-fatal beating of a white female jogger. It took years to clear their names; but cleared they were. If Trump had had his way, five innocent men would have been dead. 

Donald J. Trump is to “law and order” as Al Capone is to “paying taxes.” Trump has been battling doggedly to keep his own tax records hidden from prying eyes. He and his legal team battled all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to fight a request for documents. That request is part of – yes – another fraud investigation, filed by the State of New York. The Supreme Court swatted away his arguments in one case and gave only temporary relief in the other. 

Who is this guy? Trump is the guy who pardoned one felon (Stone), because that felon never ratted him out. 

Trump is the guy who tried to stop another felon who served him (Cohen) from writing a book about his experiences. When that felon was released from prison, as part of an effort to clear inmates out of cells in the face of spreading COVID-19 infection, the Trump administration ordered him back to prison, unless he agreed to take a deal. That deal? Stop talking about the book and stop working on it and you can remain free. Cohen refused. He filed suit. A federal judge ruled in his favor, saying his First Amendment rights had been violated. 

Look. If you still don’t see the trend, I’m sorry my post can’t be read in Braille. Trump showed his stripes again, when two congressman, Duncan Hunter (and his wife) and Chris Collins, early supporters of Trump’s run for office, were indicted in separate cases. Hunter and his wife were nailed for stealing campaign funds. Collins got arrested and charged with insider trading. 

This prompted the president to fire off an angry tweet: 

Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff......

 

In other words, Trump wasn’t interested in law and order so much as protecting his pals. He called Sessions, his original pick for Attorney General, “weak” for ignoring his wishes. Duncan Hunter has since been sentenced to eleven months in prison, while his wife got off with eight months of home confinement, largely because she flipped on her sticky-fingered hubby. Collins pled guilty, as did his co-defendants, Cameron Collins, his son, and Steven Zarsky, father of Cameron Collins’ fiancée. 

And if you’re keeping track, those cases would represent five wins for true law and order, and zero for Trump. 

Law & Order:      5 

Trump:               0

 

The list of examples to prove the central point could be continued for as long as a diligent reader could stand, that central point being that this president cares no more about “law and order,” or even the rule of law, than guys like Kim Jong-un and Putin and the bone-sawing types. We just happen to be fortunate that we live in a country where the rule of law applies, and where even a president’s worst instincts (so far) have been checked. And those instincts are starkly manifest. 

Trump has called the U.S. system of justice itself “a disgrace.” When the lower courts go against him, he attacks judges. He called one judge who ruled against him “a hater.” He said the judge was biased because he was “Mexican.” That judge was born in Indiana and went to law school in Indiana too.

 The president has insisted that an array of political foes and even critics should be jailed, despite the fact none have ever been: 

1. Charged with actual crimes.

2. Been granted trial, with a real judge, jury, lawyers for and against, witnesses – you know, the works.

3. Convicted by a jury or plead guilty.

 

These individuals would include, but not be limited to, Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, a Clinton aide, financier George Soros, former F.B.I. Director James Comey, Comey’s deputy, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok (an F.B.I. agent guilty of “treason,” according to Trump), Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, flag burners, Steve Rattner, a critic, and the rapper Snoop Dogg. 

Trump has even suggested that The New York Times could be guilty of treason for printing articles he doesn’t like. 

“LAW & ORDER,” Hitler style. 

 

In fact, a perfect measure of Trump’s lawless instincts would be the fact that he wanted flag burners thrown into prison. This, despite the fact the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Texas v. Johnson, a 1989 case, that flag burning, just like flag waving (which President Trump loves almost as much as he loves banging porn stars) is just one different form of First Amendment free speech. 

 

A closeted authoritarian, ready to come out. 

This is who and what Trump is. He’s a closeted authoritarian, ready if re-elected to “come out,” in all his flaming glory. 

This is a president who dispatched Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to drum up any dirt he could find related to Hunter and Joe Biden. Rudy is the toady who quickly lined up two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to help. Last October, both were charged with violating straw and foreign donor bans in U.S. political campaigns. And again, we should see patterns. We know Sam Patten, a well-connected Republican fund raiser, pled guilty to arranging for a Ukrainian oligarch and another foreigner to buy $50,000 worth of tickets to one of the Trump inaugural events. To do it they used an American straw purchaser. We know Imaad Zuberi, who donated $900,000 to the inauguration fund, was later indicted and admitted to his own series of felonies. Among other questionable actions, which led to a charge of obstruction of justice, Mr. Zuberi covered up the fact that at least $50,000 “he” donated came from a foreign individual. 

According to CNN, Zuberi also deleted emails related to a number of illegal transactions. Those included “a $5.8 million transfer from a foreign national that came in around the time of his [$900,000] political donation.” 

So it goes, in the fun-house mirrors world of Donald J. Trump. You have a president who praises a member of Congress for body-slamming a British reporter. That lawmaker, Greg Gianforte, first claimed he didn’t slam anyone. Then witnesses said he did. Gianforte pled guilty eventually, got slapped with a misdemeanor, and had to pay several thousand dollars in restitution. This was reminiscent of Candidate Trump offering to pay the legal fees for a supporter who sucker-punched a demonstrator at one of his rallies. That man was also charged with assault – which is perilously close to the exact opposite of being for “law and order.” 

Look, this isn’t “Fake News,” just because, if you like Trump, you don’t like what you’re reading. 

This blogger simply keeps track. 

So, here’s a little more of what I know, and the average Trump voter should, but doesn’t. After Matthew Heimbach, an avowed white supremacist, assaulted an African American woman at yet another Trump rally, his lawyer claimed Heimbach should not be held to account. His client had “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump,” who had been working hard to stoke hate. When Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr. sent bombs to Joe Biden, Barack Obama and CNN, his lawyer asked the judge for leniency. His client, he said, saw President Trump as a “father figure.” When three Kansas men were convicted of plotting to blow up the homes of Somali immigrants, who happened to be Muslim, and attack a mosque, their lawyers also blamed the President of the United States. As one defendant’s attorney explained, 

As long as the Executive Branch condemns Islam and commends and encourages violence against would-be enemies, then a sentence imposed by the Judicial Branch does little to deter people generally from engaging in such conduct if they believe they are protecting their countries from enemies identified by their own Commander-in-Chief.

 

I don’t make this up. I keep track. Who was the federal prosecutor, for example, who let Jeffrey Epstein off on a single count of soliciting prostitution in 2008? That sweetheart plea deal, when dozens of young women had already come forward to complain, allowed Epstein to abuse girls for another decade. That prosecutor would be Alex Acosta, chosen by Trump to serve as his first Secretary of Labor. 

This is no “law and order” crew. Can you remember which Trump cabinet official had to resign after racking up more than $1 million in unauthorized travel expenses and sticking taxpayers for the tab? What other cabinet member resigned in the face of at least a dozen investigations into abuse of power, including for financial gain? Which cabinet official still has hundreds of millions of dollars stashed in banks on the island of Cyprus, where money-laundering is a sport? Finally, what former cabinet member called Donald J. Trump a threat to the U.S. Constitution, and accused him of ignoring the fundamental concept of “Equal Justice Under the Law?” 

Those cabinet members would be, in order, Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, Wilbur Ross and Gen. James Mattis, the latter the only one honest enough to quit in disgust. 

This is exactly who Donald J. Trump is. He’s not about “LAW & ORDER” and never will be. He might scare his base into believing that he’s the only person who can stop the rioting in places like Portland and Kenosha – and crush legal protesting too. He won’t even admit the difference, and doesn’t care that there is. 

Just this week the president defended the actions of a young 17-year-old man, Kyle Rittenhouse, who has been charged with murder. Rittenhouse is alleged to have killed two Black Lives Matter protesters, and wounded a third. None, as far as we know, were armed. But Trump has already made up his mind, which means he pressed his thumb down hard on the scales of justice. Trump said on TV that Rittenhouse was “violently attacked,” basing his opinion solely on a bit of tape he had watched. Had the young man not fired, Trump suggested, “he probably would have been killed.” So, now we know. If a teen with an AR-15, a weapon he’s not legally allowed to own, opens fire on people without weapons, then, sure. Call it self-defense.

 

And watch out for imaginary thugs on imaginary planes. 

In the end, the most dangerous thug in the United States today is the President of the United States. 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: Given Trump’s warped sense of what “law and order” really means, we should hot have been surprised when his fans rioted on January 6, and tried to stop the certification of the final electoral vote count. 

BLOGGER’S NOTE #2: In fairness, we should note that Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty by a jury in November 2021. 

In fact, it turned out one of the three men he shot did have a pistol. 

Yet he never fired it.___

 

 

9/2/20: The stock market is on a roll – which Mr. Trump will be happy to report. We’re racking up COVID-19 cases, too, which he’d prefer not to mention. 

According to the CDC, we’re still averaging 42,000 plus new cases per day, in the last week. 

There are countries that are doing much better. Germany had 1,218 cases on September 1. Adjusted for population, that would be about a tenth of what the U.S. is trying to cope with daily. 

Italy had 975, equivalent to one seventh of the caseload we see. 

South Korea had 267, a terrible day by Korean standards. Our caseload is roughly 28 times worse. 

*

 

APPARENTLY, the American people still aren’t too happy with the President of the United States. 

With 63 days left until the election, the polls – for Don and the Republicans, more generally – look grim. 

* 

IF POLL NUMBERS look bleak, Tin Pot Don has a plan to sweep to victory in November. At a campaign stop in North Carolina, he explains that the Democrats are plotting to steal the election. To make sure they don’t get away with their plot, he tells his MAGA crew to be sure to get their mail-in ballots, fill them out, and send them in in a timely fashion. Then, if “they” don’t tabulate those votes – Trump doesn’t say exactly who the “they” are – the MAGA crew should protect their “precious right to vote” by going to the polls in person and voting twice. 

What could possibly go wrong with this brilliant plan? 

For instance, suppose you mailed in your ballot with little time to spare. On Election Day it’s still sitting in a pile to be counted. Clerks will catch up in a few days. But you haul your dumb MAGA ass down to the polls. It appears your mail-in vote has not been counted. Duh. You vote again. 

And when “they” do tabulate the mail-in ballots later? Well, voting twice happens to be a felony in North Carolina.

 x’s  2.

MAKE AMERICA FELONIOUS AGAIN. 

 

FUN FACT – RUSSIANS: We know Trump may get a boost again, in 2020, with a little help from Russians. U.S. intelligence agencies warned against interference designed to harm the Biden campaign in a report ready in July. 

FUN FACT – MORE RUSSIANS: Trump’s political pals, in charge of overseeing U.S. intelligence, blocked release of that report until the free press pried the truth out of their mouths two months later.

___ 

 

9/3/20: Trump had so much fun on Wednesday, telling North Carolina supporters to go vote twice, he thought he’d suggest it again Thursday, in Pennsylvania. At a stopover for a rally – rallies being the only part of the job he’s good at – the president delivered the same message. Get a mail-in ballot. Fill it out. Send it in. On Election Day, go to the polls. Check to see if your vote has been registered. 

Then vote again, just to be safe. (See: 9/2/20.)

 

*

____________________ 

It was the kind of fawning praise any sycophant serving any dictator in history might have used.

____________________ 

 

IN A MINOR, yet telling story, Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro defended himself in an interview with CNN. Allegations of verbal abuse of staffers, particularly young females, had surfaced. That would be bad enough. It was his own defense that added a level of extra creepiness to the tale. 

“My mission in this administration,” Navarro said, “ is to serve as a soldier for the greatest commander in chief ever.”  It was the kind of fawning praise any sycophant serving any dictator in history might have used. It was the verbal equivalent of North Koreans clapping wildly, in unison, when Kim Jong-un spoke. 

And need I point out, Trump isn’t a “commander” in any sense of the word, nor is Navarro a “soldier.” Trump dodged service entirely, when he had a chance to lead and fight, getting a doctor to say he had bone spurs. 

In checking on Navarro, I noticed he’s the same age as me, born in July 1949. He never served in the U.S. military, at a time when finding soldiers to send to Vietnam got harder every year. 

“Patriots of the tongue,” you could say.

 

*

 

MEANWHILE, the coronavirus rages. Hospitals continue to overflow. Business operations are badly hampered. School openings are complicated, even where openings get off to a good start. Temple University, facing an outbreak of COVID-19, decided to send all students home. The University of Alabama is hoping to squeeze in a football season, but 1,200 students are infected. Amtrak has announced plans to furlough 2,000 workers, as ridership evaporates. Lego sales, at least, are up 14%, with families stuck at home. The federal government continues to spill red ink. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the accumulated deficit will, by the end of FY 2020, equal 98% of GDP. By the end of FY 2021, we will have a pile of debt greater than our entire annual economic output as a nation. By 2023, the CBO warns, our debt-to-GDP ratio will be higher than it was in 1946, when we had just gone through the Great Depression and fought one of the greatest wars in history. 

More bad news: The CBO predicts the Medicare hospital trust fund will go dry in 2024. 

The Social Security Trust Fund will be depleted by 2031.

 

* 

LAST, BUT NOT LEAST, former Republican governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder pens an editorial in USA Today. President Trump, he warns, “lacks a moral compass” and “ignores the truth.” Trump, he adds, is a “bully,” and Snyder calls it “a tragedy watching our world suffer from one.” 

He won’t vote for the man.

___ 

 

9/4/20: Great news for President Donald J. Trump! He finally has a new Coronavirus Task Force member who will tell him exactly what he wants to hear. 

According to Dr. Scott W. Atlas, we’re almost out of the woods and into the sunshine of a beautiful meadow, filled with flowers and singing birds. And a win for his boss is coming in the next election. Dr. Atlas is telling the president that the science of wearing masks is unclear. Children, he says, don’t pass on the virus. 

And watch out for demon sex. 

No, wait, that was the other doctor Trump touted for a time. (See: 7/28/20.) 

____________________ 

Dr. Atlas can tell you how to fix a broken skull.

____________________ 

 

Dr. Atlas is a radiologist, who believes the government should let the virus take its course, only focusing on protecting the most vulnerable parts of our population. If only he will come out in favor of injecting bleach, Trump will have found the perfect advisor to serve his needs. 

Unfortunately, Dr. Atlas is not an epidemiologist. Nor is he an expert on infectious diseases. His skill is reading X-rays and telling you how to fix a broken skull. 

All indications are that Trump’s old experts are on the outs with their mercurial boss. Dr. Carlos del Rio is an actual expert in infectious diseases and close to Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. He told The New York Times that the president didn’t like the advice he was getting from Birx,  or Dr. Anthony Fauci. So he dug up someone – who he watched on Fox News – who would tell him what he wanted to hear. 

 

“And he thinks what we’ve done is really good.” 

That is: the coronavirus is going away! And you, Mr. Trump, are doing a fantastic job in every way. 

(For the perfect suck up model, please refer to Peter Navarro, in the post for September 3, 2020.) 

Sure, you might think Dr. Fauci is way more believable than Donald J. Trump. Sure, he’s considered the nation’s leading expert in infectious diseases. Sure, Fauci has served six presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan, without incident. But can he tell you if you broke your wrist? 

Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams also appears to have gone into hiding, perhaps appalled by what he has seen. 

And if you wonder why Trump likes Dr. Atlas so much, the president made that clear at a White House press briefing. “He has many great ideas,” the president said. “And he thinks what we’ve done is really good, and now we’ll take it to a new level.” 

Earlier this week, the president sat down for a talk with that other infectious disease expert, Laura Ingraham, on Fox News. “Once you get to a certain number [of cases] – we use the word ‘herd’ – once you get to a certain number,” he told her, “it’s going to go away.” Trump said he thought we’d have a vaccine soon. Ingraham noted that many people said they wouldn’t take it. Trump said, well, he’d never had the flu vaccine, until he became president. But the stock market was at a new all-time high, he pointed out, with stunning irrelevance. 

On Tuesday, Dr. Atlas wanted to make it clear. He had never suggested that the U.S. work toward herd immunity. “There’s never been any advocacy of a herd immunity strategy coming from me to the president, to anyone in the administration, to the task force, to anyone I’ve spoken to.”  

So, where did our fearless president get that idea? Maybe, Mr. Trump is getting advice from an imaginary friend. 

(Even his imaginary friend is stupid.)

 

* 

WHAT WE KNOW, factually, is this: the August jobs report is out, with some good news, and some bad. Another 1.4 million Americans went back to work, as we rebound from the pandemic plunge. That’s the good. Unemployment, however, remains at 8.4%, and nearly 30 million workers are receiving some kind of assistance, roughly one in five. That’s the bad. 

As for the coronavirus, it’s still kicking red, white, and blue butt. The Centers for Disease Control reports that there have been 185,092 deaths from COVID-19 in this country. 

We’re a sad #1, worldwide, when it comes to loss of life. 

There have been faint glimmers of hope, although Trump was wrong again when he told Laura Ingraham the virus was going away. CDC reports that we are still averaging nearly 41,000 new cases per day, although that rate is in decline. Americans still find themselves in a deep hole, and unable to stop some of their more stubborn, mask-averse neighbors from continuing to shovel.

 

* 

FACEBOOK decides to remove a post by congressional candidate and Georgia Peach nutjob Marjorie Taylor Greene. On Thursday, she posted a picture of herself holding a rifle next to images of  three Democratic members of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, collectively known as “The Squad.” 

Green labeled the photo, “SQUAD’S WORST NIGHTMARE.” In her post, she went on to attack “leftists” who “want to take this country down,” adding, American needs “strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart.” 

Yeah. Save America. With guns! Facebook declared her post an incitement to violence and took it down. 

On this same day, Politico reports on three draft reports from the Department of Homeland Security. All three, reporters explain, “describe the threat from white supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S., listed above the immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups.” 

Oh, yeah, all three of the congresswomen mentioned are people of color. So you might say Candidate Green knows her base.

___

   

THIS POST IS PART OF A SERIES, 9/5/20, 9/6/20 AND 9/7/20, BEST READ IN SEQUENCE.

 

9/5/20: Friday dawns. The nation readies for a long, relaxing weekend, except for all the germs. It’s a new day, which means we have fresh indications that the President of the United States is a dick. 

Jeffrey Goldberg, a reporter for The Atlantic, citing multiple sources, has exploded a land mine under Trump’s feet. Behind the scenes, sources told him, the president has often disparaged American soldiers, including those who died for this country. No one knows for sure how Goldberg’s tale will hold up; but the president is forced to play defense. Part of his problem is that allegations in the article sound exactly like the Trump we know and don’t love.

 

____________________ 

“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”

 

President Trump

____________________ 

 

Goldberg focused first in his article on a presidential visit to France in November 2018. Trump was there to recognize the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. The outlines of a similar story were discussed around that time. Trump reportedly decided not to go through with a visit to a cemetery outside of Paris, to honor America’s dead. It was raining, and it was said that he didn’t want to get his hair wet. 

Now the article in The Atlantic added damning detail. According to four sources, Goldberg wrote, 

In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

 

The grinding Battle of Belleau Wood (June 1-26, 1918) is still a part of Marine Corps lore. Fresh American troops, having just entered the war, battered weary, dug-in German defenders. The Marines had to attack six times before they could shatter the enemy line. Fighting was hand-to-hand, with bayonets and rifle butts. It was there in that forest that Marines earned the nickname “Devil Dogs” from their impressed foes.

Belleau Wood.

 

According to Goldberg, Trump not only had no idea what had happened at Belleau Wood, he had no idea why he was in France. Sources told the author that at one point, the president inquired, “Who were the good guys in this war?”   

That would be the United States, for one. 

In another blow to the president, Goldberg added depth to the story of Trump’s well-known feud with Sen. John McCain, a war hero if ever there was one. Again, new details were damning: 

When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides. 

 

McCain wasn’t the only combat veteran Trump attacked when he thought the public would never know. This story was entirely new: 

On at least two occasions since becoming president, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his views, Trump referred to former President George H.W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II. (Bush escaped capture, but eight other men shot down during the same mission were caught, tortured, and executed by Japanese soldiers.)

 

Doing my duty as a blogger, to both inform and entertain, I should add that the future 41^st President of the United States had to bail out over the Pacific, where he was rescued a few hours later by an American submarine. 

An experience like that, floating for hours, hoping no sharks found you, and hoping rescuers did? That could change a man. 

 

“There’s no money in serving the nation.” 

Another new story involved a trip Trump took to Arlington National Cemetery in 2017, accompanied by White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly. Kelly’s son, Robert, 29, had been killed in combat in Afghanistan seven years before. The intent of the visit, on Memorial Day, was for the president to pay respects to the fallen dead of America’s most recent wars. 

At best, Trump fumbled the opportunity: 

But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.

 

When the best interpretation is that you were responding in a “ham-handed” way, at a cemetery, you have problems. 

While Goldberg does not cite Gen. Kelly as a source, several people told him President Trump is incapable of understanding why anyone would die for this country, since there’s no financial gain. 

He writes: 

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

 

Goldberg goes to some trouble to bolster his claim that the president has little respect for the military, for its traditions and norms, and for the sacrifices our servicemen and women and their families make. He closes with discussion of Trump’s own fear of death or disfigurement. At one point, the president tells aides to make sure veterans who have lost arms and legs or been disfigured in war do not take part in a July 4, 2019, parade he wants to hold in Washington D.C. 

“Nobody wants to see that,” a squeamish Trump says.

World War I casualty.

 

 * 

TO SAY the revelations in The Atlantic article were a shock would be an understatement. And the free press began digging. 

Trump and all his usual enablers were forced to rush out, stand bravely before cameras, and deny anything like what had been reported had ever been said by Donald Trump. Why, who would think it! 

Before I became a “famous” blogger, I taught American history for three decades. I know you have to get all sides of a story. Even then, you won’t be able to uncover the whole truth. But support for Goldberg’s claims began building. Trump, himself, added credence when he stepped in front of cameras Friday and proceeded to trash Gen. Kelly, who served as his White House chief of staff for a year-and-a-half. 

At a hastily-arranged press conference, Trump insisted that Kelly – who wasn’t even cited as a source in The Atlantic – couldn’t handle his job: 

I know John Kelly, he was with me, didn’t do a good job, had no temperament and ultimately he was petered out.

 

He got – was exhausted. This man was totally exhausted, he wasn’t even able to function in the last number of months. He was not able to function. He was sort of a tough-guy. By the time he got eaten up in this world – it’s a different world than he was used to, he was unable to function.

 

Trump? In his mind, in his world, he’s a “tough guy.” Bone spurs don’t hurt in his world, of course.

 

* 

SUPPORTING EVIDENCE continued to accumulate. James LaPorta, a reporter for the Associated Press, and a former Marine himself, said sources confirmed several of Goldberg’s claims. During a visit to Arlington Cemetery, the president did ask why the dead had served. “A senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” LaPorta said, “including the 2018 cemetery comments.”

LaPorta.

 

They performed poorly and deserved what they got. 

On the other hand, the Washington Post noted that Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, an adviser to Vice President Pence, tweeted that The Atlantic report was completely false. “I’ve been by the president’s side. He has always shown the highest respect to our active duty troops and veterans with utmost respect paid to those who have given the ultimate sacrifice and those wounded in battle.” 

That helped a little, but the Post had other sources: 

A former senior administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, confirmed to The Washington Post that the president frequently made disparaging comments about veterans and soldiers missing in action, referring to them at times as “losers.”

 

In one account, the president told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action because they had performed poorly and gotten caught and deserved what they got, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

 

CNN was next to confirm portions of the original article in The Atlantic. After Trump denied the entire story, including all the punctuation marks, a former senior administration official confirmed that Trump “referred to fallen U.S. service members at the Aisne-Marne cemetery [in France] in crude and derogatory terms” during the November 2018 trip to France. 

Jennifer Griffin, the longtime Fox News Pentagon reporter, was also able to confirm key claims in Goldberg’s article. “Two senior officials” who were on the trip to France, she said, supported his assessment. Then she exploded another land mine under the president. Trump, she was told, had called the Vietnam War “stupid,” a statement with which this liberal blogger (and former Marine) might agree. But Trump went too far by 7,600 miles, the distance from San Francisco to Ho Chi Minh City. “Anyone who went,” Trump told others, “was a sucker.” He wondered why anyone served. They couldn’t make any money. “It was a character flaw of the president: he could not understand why anyone would die for their country, not worth it,” one former Trump administration official told Griffin. 

It looked bad for President Trump – and that meant President Trump had to respond as President Trump always responds. Ms. Griffin, he said, “should be fired for this kind of reporting,” adding, “Fox News is gone.”

 

* 

TRUMP THEN SPENT a good part of his day, playing another round of golf, #295 since taking office, at his private club in Potomac Falls, Virginia.

___  

 

9/6/20: The blogger was up early on Saturday, still disgusted – but frankly amazed – to have heard that the President of the United States made a habit of insulting veterans and the sacrifices they make.   

Could Trump be innocent? I don’t like the man in the least. Still. This was hard to believe. I started looking for information.

 

____________________ 

“Teach us to distrust and despise those clamorous patriots whose courage dwells but in the tongue.” 

 

Washington Irving

____________________ 

 

Let’s be honest, though, even if we like Trump. If he called those who served in Vietnam “suckers,” as my older brother served, and as I volunteered to do as a Marine, it would be perfectly in character with who he was then and remains today . In my case, in the summer of 1969, I asked twice to be sent, but didn’t get sent. 

White privilege, I guess. My racist platoon sergeant sent a black guy the first time, instead. 

The second time, I changed my mind, after joining our battalion football team. So, off another African American went. I’m no hero; but I was willing to do my part. I’d even argue (as liberal as I am), that I’m ten times the patriot President Trump has ever been or ever will be. 

I even pay taxes. 

At any rate, I quickly located an article about the president’s comments in Newsweek. There was a one-question poll at the end: Do you believe the president called U.S. soldiers “losers?” When I clicked, “Yes,” the percentages popped up. 

Yes:     66%. 

No:     29%. 

Don’t know:   5%.

 

* 

Trump is the limbo king when it comes to going low. 

AS I NOTED in Friday’s post, I’m a former history teacher. I would argue that history shows Trump is perfectly capable of stooping low enough to insult the World War I dead. He’s the limbo king of presidents. I also admit I don’t know for sure what was said. I wasn’t in the room to hear him speak. But we’ve all heard him talk, almost daily, for four years. We know he never hesitates to demean and dehumanize others, whether speaking of individuals or groups. 

I know his family history, which doesn’t help. 

It should not surprise anyone to know that no one in Donald’s direct line has ever served in uniform, not since Grandfather Friedrich came here from Germany in 1885. Grandpa never enlisted. The president’s father scorned service during World War II and never lent a hand in the fight. Young Donald proved, during the Vietnam War, that you can’t draft a Trump, no matter how hard you try.

 

Trump, of course, had already marched out for a press conference Friday afternoon. That’s the only kind of marching he’s ever done. As I puzzled over details Saturday, I realized he had done himself no favors when he spoke. In an effort to prove that he would never trash the troops, he had trashed Gen. John Kelly, a man who had served the nation for 43 years, and who reluctantly agreed to serve as Trump’s White House chief of staff in the summer of 2017. 

Kelly didn’t want that job. Who would? He agreed because he thought he could bring order to chaos in the White House. According to friends, he agreed to serve out of a sense of soldierly duty. 

I kept checking for information. I learned that no one had to draft Kelly to convince him to put on a uniform. In 1970, when he was 20, he enlisted in the Marines. He got lucky, as I did, and was released from active duty early, under a special program for Marines who wanted to go to college. 

Kelly was never shot at in Vietnam. 

He went back to school, graduated, and in 1975 rejoined the Marines, as a young second lieutenant. He rose steadily in the ranks, and was promoted to brigadier general while in Iraq. In April 2003 he led Task Force Tripoli north for an attack on Baghdad, and got shot at for real.

 

* 

“They were not anonymous to her.” 

I STILL didn’t know, with military precision, what Trump had said about veterans behind closed doors. I do know he didn’t help his position Saturday, when he started howling about Jennifer Griffin, Fox News national security correspondent. Griffin defended her original reporting, which backed up the Goldberg story. Now she insisted she had “impeccable” sources. She noted that while her sources were “anonymous” for publication, they were not anonymous to her. She knew these men or women. They were credible witnesses who said they had heard what Trump said. Trump screamed even louder. He demanded, again, that she be fired. 

For good measure, he went two levels lower, referring to Goldberg as a “slimeball.” 

Later, he went lower still, calling reporters who were pursuing the story, and backing up Goldberg, “animals.” 

(Trump is no fan of the free press, repeatedly insisting that his critics should be fired. See, for example, Jemele Hill.) 

I kept checking. At least seven Fox News journalists defended Griffin, citing her careful reporting in the past. “Jennifer Griffin is the kind of reporter we all strive to be like,” said one colleague. “She’s courageous, smart, ethical, fair and a class act. She’s earned the trust of viewers throughout a distinguished career and is credible.” 

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who served with the Air Force in Afghanistan and Iraq, made it clear where he stood. “She’s one of my favorite reporters. Fair and unafraid,” he said of Griffin. 

I still didn’t “know” what Trump said in a room where I wasn’t present. And to be honest, I discounted most of what his defenders said. I’d argue that they are, generally speaking, as sorry a crew of bootlickers as ever graced the White House. Mick Mulvaney? Sarah Sanders? “Birther” McEnany? 

Please. 

By far, the best defense of the president I saw on Saturday came from a veteran named Joe Kent. He’s a former U.S. Army officer, and a Gold Star husband. His wife Shannon was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria last year, while helping in the fight against ISIS. His pain, if you read his story, is palpable. The sacrifices his wife made – that he made – that their children made – are immense. 

I’d recommend a read. 

For a nearly mirror-opposite response, the story of Kelly Martin, a former Marine, and her partner Gunnery Sgt. Diego Ponga – also killed in combat – is equally good. 

I can’t image ever calling a man like Kent, or his deceased wife, a “sucker” for serving. But my problem is that I can imagine Trump. 

 

That’s exactly who the f**k Donald Trump is. 

I know, recently, what Trump did to a decorated combat veteran, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. He blocked a promotion the U.S. Army said Vindman had earned, because he could not forgive a hero, whose testimony under oath, called his behavior as president into question. Vindman had told a congressional panel he came forth to testify, out of a sense of duty. He warned that Trump had put U.S. security at risk by refusing timely military assistance to Ukraine. 

Vindman was never accused of perjury. But he was soon out, resigning from the army after 21 years. 

Roger Stone, who perjured himself to protect Trump, and earned seven felony convictions in the process, never put on the uniform. He still got a pardon from his pal. 

That’s who Trump is. That’s exactly who the f**k Donald Trump is. In any situation, if it’s to his benefit, he will go low. 

What else led me to believe Trump could go as low as Goldberg and Griffin and others had reported? I also knew that in the fight against ISIS, in which Shannon Kent was killed, almost all the dead on our side were Kurds. We armed and trained them and backed them with air and artillery support. The Kurds did virtually all of the fighting on the ground, and lost an estimated 11,000 dead. Each lost warrior was no doubt as loved by their families as Shannon Kent by hers. When ISIS was crushed, President Trump bragged about what he had accomplished. 

Then he pulled U.S. forces out of Syria, almost on a whim. 

He allowed the Turks – historic and bitter enemies of the Kurds – to storm into Syria. He betrayed, by far, our most loyal allies in the region. Then he showed who he was and what he truly valued. He left 800 American soldiers behind, because, as he made repeatedly clear, he wanted some Syrian oil. “We’re keeping the oil,” Trump told an audience of police chiefs last October. “I’ve always said that – keep the oil. We want to keep the oil, $45 million a month. Keep the oil. We’ve secured the oil.” If he had the oil, a lake of spilled Kurdish blood wouldn’t bother him a bit. 

Of course, he’d have no idea why Marines died in 1918. He’d never understand why pilots flew into danger in 1944 or 1967. He’d have no earthly idea why Gen. Kelly’s son was willing to fight and die in Afghanistan in 2010. All he will ever really understand is piling up cash.

 

*

 

A fourth generation of no service to country. 

CAN I SAY, without a scintilla of doubt, that Trump did call Marines, buried in France, “losers?” I cannot, until anonymous sources come forth. I do know he screwed the Kurds and never looked back. I know what he has said about our closest allies, who have fought by our side. When he thought other NATO countries weren’t paying their fair share for defense, he denigrated their contributions. Never once did he salute the thousands of British, French, German, Italian, Canadian, and others, who were killed or wounded in Afghanistan after we were attacked on 9/11. Allied dead, alone, numbered 1,147. A total of 130,000 soldiers from fifty partner nations served there, so no Trump ever had to get bloody. 

Not Don Jr. 

Not Eric. 

Not Ivanka. 

And not Tiffany, the nicest Trump. 

A fourth generation of no service to country, at all. 

Do I believe in my soul that Trump called dead U.S. troops “losers,” and referred to those who served in Vietnam as “suckers?” I do. I know he once suggested that avoiding STD’s was his “personal Vietnam.” Vaginas, he told radio Howard Stern, were “potential landmines” he might step on with bone spur feet. 

Having bragged about the many women he bedded, he added, “I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” 

Sadly, he probably did. 

I think I know exactly who Trump is – a terrible human being – not just a really terrible president. In the past, I listened to him torch Special Counsel Robert Mueller again and again, and question his love of country. Mueller, too, was a decorated combat veteran, who fought in Vietnam. He shed blood while Trump was limping around the ski slopes at Aspen, with sore feet. 

Like most Americans, I was shocked when Trump trashed John McCain, and said a man who had been held prisoner for five years and tortured was no hero. At one point, he called McCain a “loser” because enemy gunners shot his jet out of the sky and said he liked people who “didn’t get shot down.” 

Then, this weekend, he denied he ever called McCain a “loser,” although the tapes showed he did. 

I was shocked again when he attacked the Gold Star mother of Captain Humayun Khan, who died in combat. Trump implied that her Muslim faith made her suspect, although her son’s faith didn’t keep him from fighting under our flag. 

And again, I was horrified when Trump picked a fight with Myeshia Johnson, a Gold Star widow, after her husband was killed during a fight against ISIS-backed forces in Niger, in 2017. 

I thought any of those attacks were proof enough that a man like Trump would go low at every chance, and go lower and lower again. 

 

“It’s just the way he speaks, he can sound like an asshole.” 

Nor am I alone in thinking as I do. Business Insider quoted two sources, supportive of the story in The Atlantic. One former senior White House official said comments attributed to Trump, in that article, clearly resembled his speech patterns, and were “consistent with who he is.” A second source agreed. “I’ve known Donald Trump. It sounds like him. They’re consistent with things that he’s said.” 

The Daily Beast also did some digging, and found eleven individuals willing to defend the president – in a weird sort of way. Had they ever heard him make callous comments about our troops? 

Well, yes. 

But that, they said, was because he hated the wars they had to fight, not the warriors. “The president means no disrespect to our troops; it’s just that the way he speaks, he can sound like an asshole sometimes,” one current senior administration official explained. “That’s how he is [when the cameras are off]… It’s his style.” 

I can agree with that. When I hear Trump speak, I almost always think: His style is to sound like an asshole. 

Three of Trump’s defenders admitted that the story about Trump, at the graveside of Gen. Kelly’s dead son, rang true. Trump could be tactless, even when talking about those who had died since 9/11. “This,” The Daily Beast said sources told them, “included the president mentioning that their service in these war zones [Afghanistan and Iraq] was a ‘waste,’ or that U.S. military personnel in these conflicts had ‘died for nothing,’ or that the fallen ‘should have been doing something else.’” 

Yeah, “something else,” would have been good. 

Not dying comes to mind. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Writing in the British newspaper, The Guardian, Robert McCrum admits his fiery love affair with America – with the promise of what America could be – has been banked, possibly forever. 

 

“An orange monster, half-clown, half-tyrant.” 

It saddens him, he explains, to have to “watch the disintegration of a great society under the leadership of an orange monster, half-clown, half-tyrant.” 

McCrum adds: 

I have always loved America for its language, the snap of Twain or Lincoln and the sonorities of Douglass and Melville. First and last, it’s a society built of words and ideas, those uplifting expressions of reason and the pursuit of happiness, that quest for “a more perfect union”, the new world’s dream.

 

Now the language is reduced to angry, semi-literate tweets, the vocabulary suitable for a sixth grader, the only happiness to be pursued being whatever makes the Narcissist-in-Chief smile.

___

  

9/7/20: Having gone golfing on Saturday, and having golfed avidly on Sunday, and having worked his Twitter thumbs to exhaustion (70 Twitter posts on Sunday, alone), Trump hunkered down at the White House on Labor Day. With nothing better to do, it struck him as a phenomenal idea to hold another press conference. All such conferences now are really lengthy diatribes against political opponents, and anyone else Donald feels like insulting that day.

 

____________________ 

“John McCain liked wars. I will be a better warrior than anybody, but when we fight a war, we’re going to win them.” 

President Trump

____________________ 

 

The president’s overarching problem is that when he opens his mouth and words drip out in random order, an overwhelming majority of America’s assume he’s lying. In a Gallup poll earlier this summer, only 36% of respondents said they believed the president was “honest and trustworthy.” 

That number was elevated by the 72% of Republicans who believed, against all evidence, that the Easter Bunny was real. 

News that the president had called dead Marines, killed during World War I, as “losers,” and referred to men and women who served in Vietnam “losers,” continued to dominate the news. I kept searching for insight. I found several brutal responses aimed at the president, and one defense. The latter was a letter signed by “about 674” veterans – an odd phrase, I thought – and shared with Breitbart on September 4. Signatories included at least three Medal of Honor recipients – and all respect to those brave men. 

That letter, however, seemed to indicate that minds had snapped shut like steel traps, without catching any facts. 

“Recent baseless media attacks against President Trump from anonymous sources,” the letter reads, “are just another example of the depths to which the President’s opponents are willing to descend to divide the nation and meddle in this election.” 

So, was I wrong to believe Trump was capable of stooping so low? I could not help but notice that almost all the “denials” were focused on the visit to France in 2018. A great deal was being made of the president’s decision to skip the visit to the cemetery to pay respects to our fallen soldiers from World War I. The president’s defenders seemed to want to prove that safety concerns related to bad weather were why the president aborted the trip, not narcissism and worry about his hair. Aides insisted they had not heard him call the dead Marines “losers.” 

The problem with the “I didn’t hear it” defense is that it doesn’t prove Trump didn’t say what sources said he said. If four people say they heard it – and at least four anonymous sources say they did – then, if those sources would come forward, you could be nearly certain the president said what they said he said. 

I kept checking. 

I found one tweet from a veteran, which I think adds great credence to my position, that Trump would be capable of going so low. It came from Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s brother, who had also run afoul of President Trump. 

I would argue that the treatment of the two brothers proves almost beyond doubt that President Trump doesn’t have respect for our servicemen and women, and only cares about himself. 

We know Eugene Vindman’s brother was driven from the service by toadies in the Trump administration (the same enablers who defend him now). Lt. Col. Eugene Vindman has said quite publicly that after he filed his own whistleblower complaint, he was retaliated against by Trump officials. He, too, decided to take off the uniform he had worn with pride for many years. 

I also found a story in The Hill, from September 4, summarizing comments from retired Lt. General Mark Hertling, in a talk with Don Lemon on CNN. Hertling told his host that he had spoken with active duty military as well as veterans. These men and women were “furious” when they heard reports of the president’s comments. “It’s tough to speak out right now if you’re an active-duty serving general officer,” Hertling said in an interview. “By not saying anything, they’re saying a lot.” 

(And if you do cross this president, your career is ruined, and you end up like the Vindman brothers.) 

I kept trying to sort out all the stories I could find. Multiple news outlets had confirmed most of the claims Jeffrey Goldberg made in The Atlantic. At least a dozen people inside the Trump orbit had apparently heard Trump disparage the troops. And on multiple occasions. (I even wondered: If The Atlantic says it had a source, and The New York Times said it had a source, and Jenifer Griffin of Fox News said she had a source, could they all be using the same anonymous source, so that where it looked like three witnesses to conversations had surfaced, there was really one?) 

Like a man possessed, I kept digging, deeper and deeper in the same hole, looking for gold nuggets of proof. 

Let’s just say, I kept finding flakes. I checked Trump’s Twitter feed. If you carry out a word search, you’ll discover he has used the word “loser” to describe critics and enemies dozens of times. Crass, no-class insults are the president’s stock in trade. You know, if any president could ever refer to U.S. war dead as “losers,” and those who served in Vietnam as “suckers,” Trump is the one. 

On Twitter, the president’s habit of going low is always on view. Anthony Scaramucci, who Trump hired briefly to be his press secretary, is suddenly “a loser who begged to come back” after the president canned him. John Kasich, former Republican governor of Ohio, is “another loser.” CNN’s Chris Cuomo, “Fredo,” as Trump likes to call him, is a loser. So are the “lowlifes and losers” protesting in New York City right now. The people who work at CNN, are even worse, “sick losers” as the president calls them, in just one of countless attacks on the free press. Mitt Romney gets the ALL-CAPS treatment from the man with no class: “LOSER!” Chuck Schumer is a “totally overrated loser.” There are “RINO losers” too. Some “losers,” get nicknames: Elizabeth Warren is “Pocahontas,” Michael Bloomberg is “Mini Mike.” John Harwood, a reporter, is a “total loser,” which I assume is the worst kind of all. 

Then again, there are “stone cold losers” working for the Washington Post. 

In fact, as soon as the Goldberg story broke in The Atlantic, Trump went on offense. To prove he would never call dead Marines from 1918 “losers,” he retweeted a post by Matt Schlapp, a soulless enabler if ever there was one. Schlapp had posted simplistically: “The Losers and Suckers work for the Atlantic. They are colluding with the socialists to stop Trump.” 

(Let’s just say one does not go wisely to Trump’s Twitter feed in search of facts, or even cogent analysis of current events. One goes for the lies, the polemics, and the inadvertent comedy.) 

You could even find Trump tweet-denying that he called John McCain a “loser.” Then you could check around a little, as noted yesterday, and easily find the tape and watch when he did.

 

* 

A press conference proves the president will always go low. 

IT’S TUESDAY by the time I complete this post. And I still can’t say with lead pipe certitude, that Trump said what Jeffrey Goldberg says sources said he said. I am not the only person, however, to notice that Gen. Kelly has remained silent, despite Trump’s cheap shot attacks. 

But I read through the transcripts of the president’s Monday “press conference,” looking for new insight. And I would argue they provide all the evidence we need to decide what kind of man Donald Trump is. Is he capable of going to lows even those of us who don’t like him could never imagine? 

Absolutely. 

This was vintage Trump on display, wine soured to vinegar, with a spritz of arsenic. Here, on public display, the president went just as low as any of the anonymous sources in The Atlantic had said. At one point, Trump explained his dislike for Sen. McCain. The man is dead. You’d think he could let it go; but that’s not who Donald J. Trump is. “John McCain liked wars,” he claimed. “I will be a better warrior than anybody, but when we fight a war, we’re going to win them.” 

McCain, imprisoned and tortured for five years, “liked wars?” And Cadet Bone Spurs was a “better warrior than anybody?” 

Even I was a better warrior than Trump – and I was a supply clerk in the Marines, about as unheroic a job as there can possibly be.

George H.W. Bush served in combat.

 

This is a fake hero.

The blogger defends the nation (1969).

General Kelly.

Names on the Vietnam Memorial Wall.

 

___

 9/8/20: They say a leopard can’t change its spots. But if a leopard is like Donald J. Trump, he can always deny he has spots. 

With the election fast approaching, the leopard in the Oval Office decides to pretend he’s a great environmentalist.

 

____________________

 

“Trump is the worst president for the environment in history.”

 

The Sierra Club

____________________

 

 

Apparently, most people who care about the environment, including scientists who know that climate change is a threat to the planet’s future, would disagree. The League of Conservation Voters, for example, graded Trump on his first year in office, as is their practice. “If there was anything worse than an ‘F,’” they wrote, “Trump would get it.”

The Sierra Club recently offered pungent assessment: “Trump is the worst president for the environment in history.”

 

It was only two months ago, when a coalition of 20 environmental groups sued Trump for wrecking bedrock environmental laws.

 

So, let’s get real. You have a Science-Moron-in-Chief, who wants you to believe he’s Albert Einstein. He can’t even differentiate between weather and climate. (See: 5/17/18.)

 

Meanwhile, an increasingly hotter, drier climate means fire season in the West is longer than ever. When fires do break out, they burn ever larger chunks of real estate, including whole towns. This past weekend, Los Angeles County recorded its highest temperature ever, 121°, creating “kiln-like” conditions for fires. The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reports:

 

Firefighters across the western states are seeing extreme fire behavior on many large fires. Seventeen new large fires were reported, bringing the national total to 96 large fires [which] have burned more than 3.4 million acres. Fires in California, Oregon and Washington burned tens of thousands of acres yesterday, causing evacuation orders for many nearby residents.

 

Trump likes to blame state officials in California for their growing problems. Someone should spray him with fire retardant. Currently, there are fires burning in:

 

Alaska: 4

Arizona: 7

California: 24

Colorado: 6

Idaho: 10

Montana: 9

Nevada: 1

New Mexico: 1

Oregon: 14

Utah: 4

Washington: 12

Wyoming: 3

 

According to my calculations, based on NIFC figures, in the last ten years just under 90,000 square miles have burned in this country.

 

For sake of comparison, that would be the same as burning up every inch of Minnesota and then burning down Delaware for good measure.

 

Trump’s grade from environmentalists (and people who actually followed the news): 

F. 

FUN WITH STRAWS: Trump did focus on the “main issue,” environmentally, during a recent campaign rally. Climate change? No. Oil spills? Nah. Plastic straws! 

He told his fans he had to save them. Democrats wanted to ban those beauties. “They want to ban straws,” he warned. “Has anybody ever tried those paper straws? They’re not working too good. I’ve had a couple of meals at McDonalds, et cetera, over the years. Wendy’s, a friend of mine owns Wendy’s, I’ll give it a plug,” he added. 

The guy’s a moron. (See: 7/27/18 for the dangers of plastic waste in the world’s oceans. Trump doesn’t know about it, because he’s an incurious oaf.)

Devastation in Oregon.

___

 

 

9/9/20: Team Trump, to use a sports metaphor, finds itself trailing after an errant pass from quarterback D. J. “Bone Spurs” Trump is intercepted by journalist Bob Woodward, and run back 105 yards for a pick-six.

 

____________________

“We’re in crazytown.”

 

White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly

____________________

 

Or to put in political terms, for some inexplicable reason, President Trump decided to begin talking to Woodward, the man who helped bring Nixon down, sitting with or talking by phone – on the record – a total of eighteen times. Considering Woodward’s first book on the Trump years was titled Fear, and the next, out Tuesday will bear the title Rage, you wonder what Trump was thinking.

 

Ego and narcissism likely blinded the fool.

 

So, far, what we’re hearing is even worse than what we read in Fear, if we were the reading type.

 

For today, let’s stick to revisiting some of the quotes Woodward provided in Fear:

 

On page 47, Steve Bannon described Trump, after his surprise election victory: “This is a guy totally unprepared….Trump hasn’t spent a second [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] getting ready for this moment.”

 

Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief White House economic advisor, told Woodward what he was most proud about having done before he resigned: “It’s not what we did for this country,” he explained. “It’s what we saved [Trump] from doing.” (xix)

 

Cohn eventually came to see Trump in a stark light. “He’s a professional liar,” he told people. (209; 338)

 

Former White House aide Rob Porter seconded Cohn in his thinking: “A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.” (xix)

 

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson famously described the president this way: “He’s a fucking moron.” (On page 225, Woodward explained why.)

 

Trump’s first White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, offered a clear-eyed view of his former boss. “The president,” he said, “has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.” (235)

 

Nor was Priebus impressed with Trump’s management style. When “you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls,” he said, “things start getting nasty and bloody.” (237)

 

Gen. John Kelly, who replaced Priebus, was no more a fan. “The president’s unhinged,”  he warned at one point. “He’s an idiot,” he told other top aides after one more disastrous meeting. “It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown.” (263; 286)

 

John Dowd, the lawyer charged with building a defense during the Mueller investigation, despaired at times. During a prep session, in case Trump had to testify under oath, he realized that if Trump didn’t know an answer, “He just made something up. That’s his nature.” Eventually, Dowd reached a startling conclusion. “Don’t testify,” he told the president. “It’s either that or an orange jump suit.” (353; 354)

 

In fact, I think we can assume the president was too lazy to read the book, before deciding to give Woodward access this time.

 

Fear ends on page 357, with this:

 

But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.” 

___

 

9/10/20: The president and his band of enablers spend a hectic day trying to explain away the damaging revelations included in Bob Woodward’s latest book. Several news agencies have advanced copies and begin quoting select passages from a work titled simply, Rage.

 

(This blogger is definitely buying one Tuesday, when the book goes on sale.)

 

If the quoted passages and stories are indicative of the full portrait Woodward paints, it may stand as the most damning work ever written about a U.S. president. It certainly should be enough to give even ardent Trump supporters pause on November 3.

 

(Okay, we know it won’t.)

 

____________________

 

Mattis would pray for the country every Sunday.

____________________

 

 

First, remember, President Trump agreed to go on record in talking to Woodward. So, we often get Trump unfiltered. That is: Trump at his manic, lying, bragging, ill-informed best. Or: his worst.

 

Woodward sums up the man in full, writing that Trump has “enshrined personal impulse as a governing principle of his presidency.”

 

At one point, Trump makes clear to the journalist (he called Woodward a “whack job” on Thursday, after hearing some of what he wrote) that one of his main goals as president has been to undo Obama’s accomplishments: “Ninety percent of the things he’s done, I’ve taken apart,” Trump boasts. Policy differences from one administration to another are to be expected. For Trump this is more than policy or the give-and-take of partisan politics. It’s personal. It’s an obsession. He hates his predecessor. He can’t help himself. And if that means he must stand on a pile of wreckage that will represent his presidential monument in the end, he gladly will. Smash Obamacare. Bulldoze DACA. Withdraw from the Iran deal, all of these with nothing to show for the effort. Quit the Paris Climate Accord.

 

Watch the world burn, like Nero writ large. Like Nero, take pride in your fiddle-playing expertise.

 

Woodward also has many who worked in Trump’s administration on record, including several who have not spoken out before. Secretary of Defense James Mattis would go to church every Sunday and pray for the country, Woodward writes, not just in the normal way, but knowing the danger his boss represented.

 

True to an unspoken code in this country, Mattis said when he resigned his cabinet post in 2018, that he owed his commander-in-chief a period of silence. It is tradition, in this country, that generals and admirals do not undermine civilian leadership, as in your typical banana republic.

 

Mattis had warned that his silence would not be permanent. Woodward puts him on record, describing Trump as both “dangerous” and “unfit.”

*

 

THESE AREN’T ANONYMOUS SOURCES, as Trump’s lackies said just days ago, in trying to blunt the damage done by stark revelations in The Atlantic (see: 9/5/20 and 9/6/20). These are men who worked for Trump, who were chosen by Trump.

 

These voices tell us what should be obvious to all by now. Trump is a liar. Even worse, he’s the kind of liar who falls for his own lies.

 

Woodward includes a telling anecdote involving Dan Coats’s wife. At a dinner one evening, Marsha Coats sits next to Vice President Mike Pence. Appalled by what she has seen of the president, and what she has heard about him behind the scenes, “I just looked at him, like, how are you stomaching this?” she tells Woodward. “I just looked at him like, this is horrible. I mean, we made eye contact. I think he understood. And he just whispered in my ear, ‘Stay the course.’”

 

Vice President Pence might have the capacity to hold his nose and back the president in the name of policy or personal gain.

 

It’s hard for others to ignore the stench wafting from the Offal Office.

 

 

“Truth is no longer governing the White House.”

 

A reporter for Business Insider picked out some of Mattis’s other comments from the Woodward book. It has long been known that Mattis and the president disagreed about policy. Normal in any administration. But Mattis came to see Trump as a danger to the nation. Like many of us, watching from the sidelines, watching up close, he found it impossible to understand why Trump kept picking fights with allies, while sucking up to some of the world’s worst dictators.

 

“What we’re doing is we’re actually showing [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] how to destroy America,” he says of his old boss. “That’s what we’re showing [our enemies]. How to isolate us from all of our allies. How to take us down.”

 

Mattis is not the first survivor of this administration to describe the president as ill-informed. He is one of the most potent. Trump “doesn’t understand,” Mattis tells Woodward. The president “has no mental framework for these things. He hasn’t read.” In one brutal passage, Mattis vents to Dan Coats, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. “The president,” he says, “has no moral compass.” Coats doesn’t disagree. He doesn’t try to calm his colleague.

 

“True,” he replies. “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.” 

Coats is as true a conservative as ever lived, a Republican, heart and soul. Yet during his entire tenure as Director of National Intelligence, he finds it impossible to shake the feeling that Vladimir Putin “had something” on Trump. There seemed no other way to explain the president’s reluctance to confront one of America’s most dangerous rivals. “He suspected the worst but found nothing that would show Trump was indeed in Putin’s pocket,” Woodward writes. “There was no proof, period. But Coats’s doubts continued, never fully dissipating.” 

Trump’s own words, in this regard, are deeply troubling. He may not be able to get along with Merkel of Germany, or Macron of France, two of our top allies. Yet he fits in well with the authoritarian crowd. “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,” the president tells Woodward. “You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?” 

I would argue that Gen. Mattis already has. Trump is a man with no moral compass. He has no overarching goals or principles, except to do and say whatever he has to do and say to make himself look good.

 

In eighteen separate interviews – all on tape – the president reveals who he is. The picture is ugly. After the Saudis murder the Washington Post writer, Jamal Khashoggi, and cut his corpse up with a bone saw, Trump does not stand up for the free press in a contest with killers. He does not seem to know that Khashoggi’s children are U.S. citizens and deserve support. When U.S. intelligence agencies make clear there could be no murder without the approval of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Trump refuses to face the fact. He brags to Woodward, saying of the Prince, “I saved his ass.”

 

“I was able to get Congress to leave him alone,” Trump said. “I was able to get them to stop.” 

Trump stopped lawmakers from slapping Saudi Arabia with stiff sanctions, arguing in part that the Saudis bought billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. weapons. So what if they cut up a reporter? 

No moral compass. 

None. 

 

Quoting a mass murder to denigrate a former U.S. president? 

Even weirder, if possible, is Trump’s love affair with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. While Trump may rage about our relationship with South Korea, and insist we’re “suckers” for defending our allies, he tells Woodward that he and Kim, a bloody killer, have some kind of chemistry. “You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it’s going to happen.” 

(Just be glad Trump didn’t try to grab Kim’s pussy.)

 

“I don’t think Obama’s smart,” Trump tells Woodward at one point. “I think he’s highly overrated. And I don’t think he’s a great speaker.” Trump adds, as if in validation, that Kim Jong-un thought Obama was “an asshole.” 

Quoting a mass murder to denigrate a former U.S. president? Something is fundamentally wrong, at his core, with Donald J. Trump. 

Trump tells Woodward that he was awestruck meeting the North Korean dictator for the first time in 2018, thinking to himself, “Holy shit,” and finding Kim to be “far beyond smart.” Trump bragged that Kim “tells me everything.” That included a graphic account of Kim having his uncle killed. 

CNN plucked another bizarre episode from the pages of Rage: 

A week later, on December 13, 2019, when Woodward returned to interview the President again, Trump was still fixated on the photos [he had of his meeting with Kim] and insisted on giving Woodward a poster-sized print of Trump and Kim.

 

“Do you have a round thing for this so he can take it? Or even a rubber band or something. Because you can’t fold it, you’ll ruin it. I don’t even know why I’m giving it to you. That’s my only one,” Trump said.

 

Some people – teenage boys – want posters of super models and sports icons to grace their walls. 

Trump? 

How would you like a poster of him and the guy who has starved millions of his people, and slaughtered critics with anti-aircraft guns? 

 

“Like a minus number.” 

Woodward manages to get the normally discreet Dr. Anthony Fauci on record, though until I see the book, I suspect he has been quoted second hand. In one meeting with top health officials, including people like Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the CDC, Dr. Fauci says that in dealing with the coronavirus, the president’s attention span “is like a minus number.” He warns the others that Trump “is on a separate channel.” The president, he says, is “rudderless.” According to Woodward, Dr. Fauci came to believe that Trump’s “sole purpose was to get reelected.”

 

Perhaps most telling, and most damaging, are Trump’s own words on his handling (or mishandling) of the coronavirus crisis. In a recorded conversation on February 7, Trump makes it clear he knows the virus is deadly. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” he says. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” 

“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeats for emphasis. 

Trump’s defenders will try to blame Dr. Fauci and others for giving the president bad advice in those early days of crisis. Here we have Trump explaining that the disease is easily spread through the air. It’s far more dangerous than flu. Yet when Trump speaks in public, he will discount wearing masks for months. He will tell the nation that COVID-19 is in fact no worse than flu. His supporters will hear his words – will repeat them and spread them like a second kind of virus. Rush Limbaugh and the fools who pose as pundits at Fox News will pick up the story and spread it as surely as a sick patient spreads disease by coughing on a nurse. Hundreds of healthcare workers will be infected and die. Millions of Americans will be infected. Nearly 200,000 will die. Other nations will face the threat with clear eyes and honest leadership and handle it with greater success. 

In fact, Trump admits in a March 19 call to Woodward that he has deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” he tells the reporter. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” 

The danger Americans face is acute. In April, at the same time he is calling on states to reopen, he warns Woodward about the virus. “It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it.” 

Thursday, with all these damaging revelations dominating the news, Trump picks that one word, “panic” from his conversations with the author. He claims that even though he knew how the disease spread, how easily, how dangerous it was, he was discounting the danger because he wanted the American people to remain calm. 

By the way, let’s show up for big rallies and celebrations, and wear our red MAGA hats, but not masks. 

As Mattis and Coats and many others who have seen Trump up close, could tell us, the president was going to lie. 

And, once again, he had. 

It didn’t matter to Trump if tens of thousands of Americans died. His only purpose was to win a second term.

 

* 

FINALLY, a minor matter to discuss, but a telling one, nevertheless. Woodward himself learned how ill-informed Trump could be, or perhaps how happy he was to lie. “I’m number one on Twitter,” he boasted during one conversation. “When you’re number one and when you have hundreds of millions of people, whether they’re against you or not they still read what you say,” Trump continued. On Twitter, actually, he has 88.5 million “followers” and that includes people like me, who only go to his threads to find out how insane he sounds. 

It would no doubt pain the president to know that his nemesis, Barack Obama, has 122.4 million followers on Twitter. 

(Trump also trails a number of celebrities, including Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, and Taylor Swift.) 

Often, in their conversations, Trump is suspicious about what Woodward will do with what he says. “You’re probably going to screw me,” the president predicts. “You know, because that’s the way it goes.” 

On the contrary, from what we know of the book so far, the president screws himself. He reveals himself. 

“When his performance as president is taken in its entirety,” Woodward finally writes, “I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.”

 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Even the Taliban have the brains to wear masks in a time of COVID-19, and their only profession is murder.  

Trump crowd from September 10.

Above, a Trump crowd, from a September 10 tweet by the bombastic liar, President Donald J. Trump. 

 

A reporter for The New York Times tweets another picture of this rally, noting that not one in ten in the audience is wearing a mask. Security tracks her down, using her picture, and has her thrown out.

 

Putin and Kim and their ilk would understand the president’s impulse to stifle the free press.

 

Give Trump a second term. Maybe we’ll have anti-aircraft guns and bone saws in the next four years.

___