That wartime *president sh*t came out of The Damn Fool’s own mouth.
So I guess that considering his complete and total ineptitude (with generous helpings of grift) in handling the COVID-19 pandemic, it must follow that all Americans are soldiers in this war...and we know very well what The Damn Fool thinks about soldiers, right?
RIGHT?
But we knew that.
And that would even be true of The Damn Fool’s biggest supporters.
Cohen writes that before winning the presidency, Trump held a meeting at Trump Tower with prominent evangelical leaders, where they laid their hands on him in prayer. Afterward, Trump allegedly said: “Can you believe that bulls--t? Can you believe people believe that bulls--t?”
“The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being,” Cohen writes. “The truth was that he couldn’t care less.”
And...we more or less knew that, as well; anyone could see it. But you can only lead a horse to water (as the cliché says).
Oh, Alex Goldstein, the creator of the Twitter page @FacesofCOVID, was interviewed by Chris Hayes last Friday.
Good morning, everyone! It is pundit time!
John Cassidy of the New Yorker writes that it is time for former Chief of Staff John Kelly to publicly confirm (or deny) The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent reporting describing The Damn Fool’s disparagement of the military; reporting which has been confirmed by the Washington Post, CNN, the Associated Press, and Fox News.
Keeping the military out of politics and following through on a commitment of confidentiality are both commendable goals, and, in normal times, they might be enough to warrant Kelly’s silence. But these aren’t normal times, and this isn’t a normal President. Since entering the White House, Trump has repeatedly flouted the Constitution by defying congressional subpoenas, obstructing special-counsel investigations, and claiming that he has the power to deploy troops in American cities without the approval of governors. Like all members of the military and government officials, Kelly swore to defend the Constitution against all enemies, “foreign and domestic,” when he joined the U.S. Marine Corps, in 1970. In addition to creating virtually unprecedented political strife, Trump, as Commander-in-Chief, now stands accused of scorning the roughly 1.3 million active-duty members of the U.S. military, plus the more than eight hundred thousand people who serve in the reserves, and the roughly eighteen million veterans.
If Kelly can confirm key elements of The Atlantic’s story, he surely owes it to these current and former service members, and to the rest of the country, to stand up and do so. If he can’t confirm some of the allegations, he should still come forward and speak about Trump’s attitude toward the military. He could follow the example of John Bolton, Trump’s former national-security adviser, who was also on the 2018 trip to Paris. Referring to the offensive comments about the American war dead that Trump allegedly made, Bolton told the Times, “I didn’t hear that. I’m not saying he didn’t say them later in the day or another time, but I was there for that discussion.” In an interview with Bloomberg News, Bolton said, “I have not heard anybody say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t sound like the Donald Trump I know.’ ” Bolton also said, “I don’t think he really holds anybody in high regard except his family.”
I don’t care about what John Kelly says or doesn’t say, to be honest about it.
Robert J. Shapiro of Washington Monthly on Trump’s white voter woes.
...The projected vote this year by race and ethnicity also rests on voter registration and turnout data from the 3.5 million households who take part in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, its annual comprehensive measure of the population. Combining data of this breadth is a powerful lens on the electorate. And the electorate is not happy.
Drill down into woes with white voters: They provided about 90 percent of his support in a very close 2016 race. He cannot afford to lose any of them in November. On top of that, the most recent Census Bureau data (2018) show that since 2016, the absolute number of white Americans registered to vote also has fallen substantially. Trump’s law-and-order outbursts and clumsy efforts to demonize Biden may excite his educed base, but those tactics ignore the top concerns of both white and minority voters—the high and rising death toll from the pandemic and the three-fold increase in unemployment.
Trump’s 2016 victory rested on white Americans who dominated the 2016 electorate. Back then, 114.2 million whites were registered to vote, compared to 41.0 million Black, Asian, and Hispanic Americans. But from 2016 to 2018, the universe of registered white voters contracted by 4.1 million votes, while the ranks of registered Black, Asian, and Hispanic voters fell by only 560,000. The registration data also show that the number of registered college graduates, one of Biden’s strongest groups, increased by nearly 2 million to 60.4 million voters, while Trump’s strongest group, registered voters with high school diplomas or less, also contracted by 4.1 million to 46.2 million.
Rosa Brooks writes about some scary post-2020 election scenarios for the Washington Post.
We wanted to know: What’s the worst thing that could happen to our country during the presidential election? President Trump has broken countless norms and ignored countless laws during his time in office, and while my colleagues and I at the Transition Integrity Project didn’t want to lie awake at night contemplating the ways the American experiment could fail, we realized that identifying the most serious risks to our democracy might be the best way to avert a November disaster. So we built a series of war games, sought out some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media experts, pollsters and strategists around, and asked them to imagine what they’d do in a range of election and transition scenarios.
A landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power. Every other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.
Jelani Cobb of the New Yorker points out election-related violence is nothing new for America.
The United States is considered one of the most stable democracies in the world, but it has a long, mostly forgotten history of election-related violence. In 1834, during clashes between Whigs and Democrats in Philadelphia, an entire city block was burned to the ground. In 1874, more than five thousand men fought in the streets of New Orleans, in a battle between supporters of Louisiana’s Republican governor, William Kellogg, and of the White League, a group allied with the Democrats. And the nation’s record of overlooking the violent prevention of Black suffrage is much longer than its record of protecting Black voters. The general public tends to view such calamities as a static record of the past, but historians tend to look at them the way that meteorologists look at hurricanes: as a predictable outcome when a number of recognizable variables align in familiar ways. In the aftermath of events in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, we are in hurricane season.
Fabiola Santiago of the Miami Herald writes about Trump’s socialist-scare mongering; an attempt to appeal to Florida’s Hispanics.
Donald Trump is looking for a replay of 2016 — and the only way a president who has chaotically mismanaged a pandemic that has cost almost 200,000 American lives and plunged the economy into a deep dive can win again is to appeal to people’s worst fears.
Republicans — and most stridently among Hispanics, the Cuban Americans — are casting President Trump as a savior from the type of socialism we left behind while painting Democrat Joe Biden, a centrist his entire political career, as a leftist.
“What I learned from communists is that the key to get your followers to forgive your excesses and immorality is to convince them that the alternative is unacceptable,” says Guennady Rodriguez, the 39-year-old Cuban editor of the political blog and podcast 23 y Flagler in Miami. “Everything is forgiven for Trump as long as he devotes his daily prayers to the ‘communism’ that threatens us.”
But Latinos should weigh the facts: Who’s the real dictator?
In Florida, a substantial bloc of voters like me are marked by the experience of fleeing totalitarian regimes. And that’s precisely why I fear, not Biden, but another four years of authoritarian Trump, whose anti-socialist rhetoric is a farce.
Brian Resnick of Vox writes about the future difficulties in distributing and administering a COVID-19 vaccine. In this excerpt from his piece, Mr. Resnick focuses on the so-called “hesitancy problem,’
How do we get ahead of this hesitancy problem? Experts I spoke to say there needs to be widespread, on-the-ground anthropological research in communities to find out what their vaccine concerns are and to test educational campaigns to address those concerns.
“We are, and should be, investing an enormous amount of resources in the research and development of a vaccine,” Crouse Quinn says. “We’ve invested very few, almost no resources, in the social and behavioral science research that will help us understand in real time how the public will respond to a vaccine.”
In August, Brunson headed a working group that published a social science research agenda for a Covid-19 vaccine campaign. “What we’re arguing for is that state and local health departments need to be given the funding,” she says, to go out into communities and figure out what anxieties people have about the vaccine, and the messages and educational materials that might placate those fears.
Research and development into the vaccine technology costs billions. Brunson says the social science component might cost, nationally, around $40 million. But it’s being overlooked. “We’ve been talking with people in the Senate, we’ve been talking with Congress, we’ve been really trying to push this even with nonprofits and nothing has come through yet,” Brunson says. Which is a shame.
More on the probable soon-to-come EUA (Emergency Use Authorization) for a COVID-19 vaccine from H. Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of Science magazine. Mr. Thorp reviews where we have already been with The Damn Fool’s administration with regard to the medical treatments for COVID 10 and concludes: “we’re on our own.”
Before fast forwarding to last week’s debacle on plasma from convalescing COVID-19 patients, here’s a recap of the Trump administration’s prior mishaps on COVID-19 treatments. The harbinger of these sagas is the hydroxychloroquine fiasco. In listing drugs that might help with COVID-19, it was logical to add hydroxychloroquine to the list because of its action against some viruses in vitro. Early studies were vague and shady in various ways, but eventually a picture emerged that it didn’t work. All along the way, President Trump hawked the medicine as a ‘game-changer’ that would end the pandemic. FDA Director Hahn caved and granted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) on March 30, thereby allowing its medical application without the agency’s full approval for use in COVID-19. After millions of dollars were wasted on new studies to prove that the drug was not effective against COVID-19, Hahn finally retracted the EUA on June 15. Trump continued to promote the drug, causing conservative physicians to continue to use it and Trump supporters to demand it. In the meantime, patients who needed hydroxychloroquine for approved indications had trouble getting their normal refills.
Trump’s goal was not to deliver a miracle cure, but to paint science into the same corner with his other enemies – academia, the media, coastal elites. When the medical science community said “No” to hydroxychloroquine, politicians retaliated by accusing scientists of taking away hope for people. More importantly, this allowed politicians to use their digital misinformation machine to sow confusion. Confusion is the fuel of Trump’s political strategy machine, and it was further enhanced by Hahn’s EUA, which he then reversed.
Which brings me to convalescent plasma. This is a measure that many scientists think has promise and may likely meet reasonable standards. Nevertheless, when FDA’s EUA for convalescent plasma suddenly showed up on the treatment radar, NIH scientists Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins strongly objected and tried to slow things down. Then Fauci went in for surgery on his vocal cords, and the White House Coronavirus Task Force rushed to resurrect the EUA, announcing it in a breathless press conference as a major breakthrough. This is hardly the case, and in the press conference, Hahn completely botched the statistics. He tried to walk back his statements after scientists cried out from outside the FDA, and probably from inside the agency as well. Hahn also fired chief spokesperson Emily Miller only 11 days after she was hired. But the damage was done. Trump got what he wanted–more confusion, chaos, and scientists debating details that the public doesn’t understand.
Lauren Victor, the diner that was confronted and surrounded by Black Lives Matter protestors in Washington D.C., writes about her experience for the Washington Post.
Second, it is never okay to coerce people’s participation; that is just bullying. To be clear, this is not an argument against anger, expressed loudly, about terrible things that are allowed to happen. My desire is simply to see the vital energy that anger gives rise to be effectively directed to bring about important, lasting change.
As the marchers closed in on our table, I could not see any protest signs. I asked who they were and why they were marching. No one would answer me. Why march and hold back your message? This was not your usual Black Lives Matter protest, or really, any other protest I have attended. Marchers are usually delighted to tell you about their mission.
Erin B. Logan writes for the Los Angeles Times on what has become known as the “gentrification” of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Some white supporters bolstered the original Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in response to the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014. And in this second big wave of BLM protests that began in May after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, an unprecedented number of white people flooded the streets.
Young people like me (I’m 25) were the largest age cohort among the protesters. One reason young people protested is that they had been cooped up in their homes due to the global pandemic, said Douglas McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford who studies social movements. He told me that the dire economy, coupled with disdain for the current president, is also a factor in a large number of young people in the streets.
In other words, it can be hard to disaggregate young people’s rage about the loss of life, hope, jobs and opportunities from their righteous solidarity with Black protesters.
But Jeffries told me that, in broad terms, there is a distinction between the motivations of white and Black protesters.
Historically, when Black people protest, they are responding to intolerable and immediate injustice — say, the water crisis in Flint. In contrast, Jeffries said, white Americans tend to protest over more abstract goals — like the Occupy Wall Street protests against economic inequality or the melting of Arctic glaciers — and are driven by the “fierce urgency of the future.”
Alasdair Lane writes for Deutsche Welle that support for Scotland’s independence from the United Kingdom is rising.
Since the start of 2020, opinion polls have given "Yes" campaigners a consistent lead over their unionist rivals, with one recent survey predicting a total reversal of the 2014 referendum result — 55% in favor of separation, versus 45% against.
Much of this swing is tied to Brexit. Scots voted against leaving Europe by almost two-to-one in 2016, and the ascendancy of Prime Minister Boris Johnson — who's prepared to take Britain out of the EU without a deal — has proved anathema to many north of the border.
With the emergence of coronavirus, these divisions have sharpened. Though neither Scotland nor England has weathered the storm particularly well (the UK collectively has suffered one of the world's highest COVID-19 death tolls), Nicola Sturgeon — Scotland's pro-independence first minister — has "played the politics" of the pandemic more adeptly than her London counterpart, says political analyst Sir John Curtice.
"The public think that Nicola Sturgeon has handled the coronavirus crisis brilliantly, and they think Boris Johnson has done badly. That is not unique to those who voted No in 2014, or those who voted Leave in 2016. In all groups, Sturgeon is well ahead of Johnson," said Curtice.
Everyone have a good morning!