Ron Brownstein/CNN:
Changing Southwest may bring Democrats a milestone win
Democrats today are strongly positioned to oust Republican Sens. Martha McSally in Arizona and Cory Gardner in Colorado and hold their own open seat in New Mexico. If the party wins those three races, as most analysts today agree they are favored but not assured to do, it will control all eight Senate seats from Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada for the first time since 1941, according to Senate records.
But there’s more, if you’ll just follow us over here …
Jill Lawrence/USA Today:
As coronavirus deaths near 100,000, Trump makes America exceptional in all the wrong ways
Trump has transformed America well beyond COVID-19 and the economy. He's eviscerated transparency, accountability, accuracy and competence, for a start.
Nearly half of Trump’s statements fact-checked by PolitiFact fall into the “false” or “pants on fire” categories. Compare that with 12% for former President Barack Obama.
The Washington Post Fact Checker calculates that as of mid April, President Trump had made 18,000 “false or misleading claims.” The Fact Checker marked Obama's 2017 departure with a 10 "biggest whoppers" story. Author Glenn Kessler told me the team never had reason to do a cumulative tally because "Obama spoke very carefully and had his speeches carefully vetted."
The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed 131 complaints and 61 lawsuits during the Trump administration, a much higher number than in previous administrations, says CREW communications director Jordan Libowitz. The group, which began operating in 2003 during the George W. Bush administration, filed 41 lawsuits before Bush left in early 2009, and nearly the same number in the first few years of Obama's two terms.
That number will only grow.
Tom Nichols/Atlantic:
Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President
Why don’t the president’s supporters hold him to their own standard of masculinity?
I am a son of the working class, and I know these cultural standards. The men I grew up with think of themselves as pretty tough guys, and most of them are. They are not the products of elite universities and cosmopolitan living. These are men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage. (My father’s best friend got the Silver Star for wiping out a German machine-gun nest in Europe, and I never heard a word about it until after the man’s funeral.) They admire and value the understated swagger, the rock-solid confidence, and the quiet reserve of such cultural heroes as John Wayne’s Green Beret Colonel Mike Kirby and Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo (also, as it turns out, a former Green Beret.)
They are, as an American Psychological Association feature describes them, men who adhere to norms such as “toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors.” But I didn’t need an expert study to tell me this; they are men like my late father and his friends, who understood that a man’s word is his bond and that a handshake means something. They are men who still believe in a day’s work for a day’s wages. They feel that you should never thank another man when he hands you a paycheck that you earned. They shoulder most burdens in silence—perhaps to an unhealthy degree—and know that there is honor in making an honest living and raising a family.
Not every working-class male voted for Trump, and not all of them have these traits, of course. And I do not present these beliefs and attitudes as uniformly virtuous in themselves. Some of these traditional masculine virtues have a dark side: Toughness and dominance become bullying and abuse; self-reliance becomes isolation; silence becomes internalized rage. Rather, I am noting that courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.
And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard. Put another way, as a question I have asked many of the men I know: Is Trump a man your father and grandfather would have respected?
Francis Wilkinson/Bloomberg:
American Politics Is Now Democrats Versus Authoritarians
When one party respects the rule of law but the other doesn’t, political discourse can’t be normal.
The Democratic Party now confronts a predicament familiar to democratic political parties in authoritarian states such as Hungary and Russia. As those parties have learned, there is no good answer to the problem.
The proximate cause of the difficulty for Democrats is that Republicans are suddenly fond of subpoenas again. They plan to issue them to “a wide variety of Obama administration officials” in connection with the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week: “The American people deserve answers about how such abuses could happen.”
This is a lie, of course. Not the part about subpoenas. The untruth is the notion that imagined past abuses by Obama officials, rather than present abuses by Republican senators, will drive these investigations.
Rachel Bitecofer/NY Times:
Why a Biden Victory Hinges on Picking the Right Running Mate
The Democratic nominee needs someone to energize the party's coalition and balance the ticket.
So Joe Biden’s electoral fate may well hinge on this decision. In our polarized era, where turnout determines election victors and each party’s coalition has become more locked in, ticket-balancing picks for vice president can be helpful in mending primary wounds and generating excitement for the coalition in the general election.
That is why Mr. Biden should select for his running mate a ticket balancer.
Now, the temptation for Mr. Biden to pick a ticket “complementer” will be high. All the conventional wisdom suggests that ticket complementers “do no harm” because they are, essentially, prototypes of the presidential nominee.
By contrast, ticket balancers offer voters something the main nominee lacks and often are meant to motivate a group within the coalition with which the nominee has struggled to gain traction. Balancers are perceived to be riskier, especially since John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin in 2008.
Cindy Ermus/STATNews:
When bubonic plague hit France in 1720, officials dithered. Sound familiar?
The city’s primary municipal magistrate, Jean-Baptiste Estelle, owned part of the ship as well as a large portion of its lucrative cargo. He used his influence to arrange for the premature unloading of the cargo into the city’s warehouses so the goods could be sold soon thereafter at the trade fair.
The number of infections and deaths began to climb within days, and the threat to the economy of this major commercial port became all too real. Instead of undertaking emergency measures to try to contain the infection, officials launched an elaborate campaign of misinformation, going as far as hiring doctors to diagnose the disease as only a malignant fever instead of the plague.
It wasn’t until two months after the first cases of bubonic plague appeared in Marseille that appropriate measures were undertaken. These included trade embargoes, quarantines, the prompt burial of corpses, the distribution of food and aid, and disinfection campaigns using fire, smoke, vinegar, or herbs. And the Grand Saint-Antoine was burned and sunk off the coast of Marseille.
But by then it was too late. The epidemic went on to spread from town to town, and over the next two years took as many as 126,000 lives in Provence.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
Can we stop pretending Trump is fit to be president?
At various times over the past three and a half years, many of us have asked what would happen if President Trump truly went over the edge or if his behavior became so frightening that his unfitness for the most powerful position on Earth could no longer be denied.
But the human capacity for denial is apparently almost infinite. Let’s review what our president has been up to in the past few days:
- With the death toll from covid-19 about to top 100,000, Trump has offered almost nothing in the way of tributes to the dead, sympathy for their families, or acknowledgement of our national mourning. By all accounts he is barely bothering to manage his administration’s response to the pandemic, preferring to focus on cheerleading for an economic recovery he says is on its way, even as he feeds conspiracy theories about the death toll being inflated. This weekend, he went golfing.
- In a Twitter spasm on Saturday and Sunday, Trump retweeted mockery of former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s weight and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) looks, along with a tweet calling Hillary Clinton a “skank.”
- Eager to start a new culture war flare-up, he urged churches to open and gather parishioners in a room to breathe the same air, threatening that he would “override” governors whose shutdown orders still forbade such gatherings. The president has no such power.
If you have a moment for some op art, this is a QAnon conspiracy chart (.pdf) that’s lovely in its complexity.
Two months ago! Biden is not ahead because of the pandemic. And it’s still ‘lean’ and not yet ‘likely’ but the pandemic may get him there in the end.