America Is In a Downward Spiral. Worse is Still to Come

Like many so-called conservatives and Republicans, George Will - one of the deans of reasoned conservative thought - was an apologist for disastrous GOP policies and Republican shenanigans which harmed the country and laid the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump.  Unlike those in the GOP who continue to prostitute themselves both to Trump and the white supremacist/religious extremists of the GOP base, Will finally opened his eyes and belatedly has come out strong in condemning the moral bankruptcy of Trump and today's Republican Party. In a column in the Washington Post he admits that America is in decline and lays much of the blame at the feet of Trump and the Republican political whores who have enabled him.   Further, he longs for a massive landslide victory by Joe Biden that will be so stark that even Trump's lies and his mindless, soulless followers will not be able to challenge the repudiation of Trump and all he and the GOP which is now a reflection of him stand for.  Here are column highlights:

Never has a U.S. election come at such a moment of national mortification. In April 1970, President Richard M. Nixon told a national television audience that futility in Vietnam would make the United States appear to the world as “a pitiful, helpless giant.” Half a century later, America, for the first time in its history, is pitied.

Not even during the Civil War, when the country was blood-soaked by a conflict involving enormous issues, was it viewed with disdainful condescension as it now is, and not without reason: Last Sunday, Germany (population 80.2 million) had 159 new cases of covid-19; Florida (population 21.5 million) had 15,300.

Under the most frivolous person ever to hold any great nation’s highest office, this nation is in a downward spiral. This spiral has not reached its nadir, but at least it has reached a point where worse is helpful, and worse can be confidently expected.

The nation’s floundering government is now administered by a gangster regime. It is helpful to have this made obvious as voters contemplate renewing the regime’s lease on the executive branch. Roger Stone adopted the argot of B-grade mobster movies when he said he would not “roll on” Donald Trump. By commuting Stone’s sentence, Stone’s beneficiary played his part in this down-market drama, showing gratitude for Stone’s version of omertà (the Mafia code of silence), which involved lots of speaking but much lying. Because the pandemic prevents both presidential candidates from bouncing around the continent like popcorn in a skillet, the electorate can concentrate on other things, including Trump’s selection of friends such as Stone and Paul Manafort, dregs from the bottom of the Republican barrel.

Today, there is a vast longing for respite from the 21st century, which — before the pandemic, two inconclusive wars and the Great Recession — began with a presidential election that turned on 537 Florida votes and was not decided until a Dec. 12, 2000, Supreme Court decision. Given Trump’s reckless lying and the supine nature of most Republican officeholders, it is imperative that the Nov. 3 result be obvious that evening.

[T]he pandemic will be an accelerant of preexisting trends: There will be a surge of early and mail voting. So, an unambiguous decision by midnight Eastern time Nov. 3 will require (in addition to state requirements that mailed ballots be postmarked, say, no later than Oct. 31) a popular-vote tsunami so large against [Trump] the president that there will be a continentwide guffaw when he makes charges, as surely he will, akin to those he made in 2016.

It is scandalous that in many places casting a ballot requires hours of standing in line. Larry Diamond of the conservative-leaning Hoover Institution at Stanford discerns another scandal: “The hard truth is that there has been a rising tide of voter suppression in recent U.S. elections. These actions — such as overeager purging of electoral registers and reducing early voting — have the appearance of enforcing abstract principles of electoral integrity but the clear effect (and apparent intent) of disproportionately disenfranchising racial minorities.

This nation built the Empire State Building, groundbreaking to official opening, in 410 days during the Depression, and the Pentagon in 16 months during wartime. Today’s less serious nation is unable to competently combat a pandemic, or even reliably conduct elections. This is what national decline looks like.

I hate to say it, but Will is 100% on the money.

The Bill is Coming Due for Those Who Sold Their Souls to Trump

 Perhaps it's a result of my Catholic upbringing even though I left the Church years ago in disgust over both the Church's anti-gay virulence and the horrific sex abuse scandal that traced all the way to the Vatican.  The nuns drilled into us the concept that there was good and there was evil and that one did not embrace evil in order to pursue personal power and influence or under some strained concept that the ends justified the means.  This lesson was seemingly lost on countless white evangelicals and the vast majority of Republicans who sold their souls to Trump for varying reasons - most involving person advancement or harming those they deemed "other" and viewed as less than fully human. Sadly, Trump's supporters and his enablers and sycophants have demonstrated that the moral failings and absence for any concern for others that allowed monsters like Hitler to rise to power are alive and well in a significant portion of the American populace (many of whom hypocritically claim to be "Christian") and almost all elected Republicans.  As a column in the Washington Post by a former Republican, hopefully the bill for their moral bankruptcy is fast approaching.  Here are column excerpts:

Between President Trump’s Rose Garden rant on Tuesday (which Mary L. Trump should definitely include in the paperback version of her book delving into her uncle’s erratic behavior) and the White House’s excuse that it never authorized trade representative Peter Navarro to write a screed attacking the world’s leading infectious-disease expert, it has become a wee bit difficult for in-house lackeys, elected Republicans and card-carrying members of the right-wing media to keep up the pretense that Trump and his administration are functioning normally — or even functioning at all.

Increasingly, the White House operates not so much as the head of the executive branch but as a site for Trump’s personal and political breakdowns. It is hard to see that any official business is performed in an administration obsessed with covering Trump’s lies, catering to his ego, attacking his opponents and providing emotional refuge for those whose identity depends on venerating the Confederate flag and excusing systemic racism. There is almost no actual policy happening and no rationale for the administration’s continued existence.

Let’s turn, then, to the Senate Republicans who voted to acquit him (that would be everyone except Utah Sen. Mitt Romney), the House Republicans who mouthed Russian propaganda in his defense and the horde of right-wing pundits and media figures who both financially sustain and humiliate themselves with never-ending rationalizations for a president who struggles to complete a sentence, let alone think through complex policy matters.

The elected Republicans should be confronted at every turn by mainstream media and voters:

• Do you think President Trump is fit even to complete his term?

• Do you regret supporting his exoneration in the Ukraine scandal?

• How can you support a president who clings to the Confederate flag and defends the killing of African Americans by police by saying more white people are killed?

• How can the administration address the pandemic when members of the administration heap scorn on Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases?

• Why are you supporting a president who refused to respond to Russian bounties placed on U.S. servicemen and women?

• Does the self-enrichment and corruption bother you, even a little?

• Is there anything he could do or say that would cause you to renounce him?

The right-wing media cohort — including both those helplessly corrupted by the money and fame that goes with feeding Trump’s frenzied base and those with pretensions of respectability (the “but Gorsuch” crowd, before Gorsuch disappointed them) — have other concerns. . . . . they will likely become the conspiratorialists and rancid critics of the new administration. No accusation will be too far-fetched, no source of gossip turned away.

The spineless sycophants — who attacked Never Trumpers for their show of integrity, who fashioned disingenuous excuses for Trump and who concoct elaborate rationalizations to oppose voting for former vice president Joe Biden (Socialist!) — will swear up and down that Hillary Clinton would have been worse. (Really — denying a pandemic? Inducing supporters not to wear lifesaving masks? Embracing white nationalists? Staffing the White House with a cohort of incompetents? Giving Vladimir Putin a free pass on targeting U.S. troops?)

What “polite society” (if there is such a thing) must not do is forget their role in sustaining an un-American president whose incompetency has resulted in more than 100,000 unnecessary deaths.

The bill is coming due for those who sold their souls to Trump. The voters may boot out a good number of incumbents. The rest of us, however, will have learned how through silence and collaboration a cadre of well-educated comfortable men and women can rationalize and excuse anything. It has been a frightening lesson in human weakness and propensity to accommodate themselves to evil, which should remind us the only thing that really matters in public life is character.

Trump supporters and Hitler's supporters share a common theme: hatred of others and placing short term self-interest above honesty, decency, and basic morality.  Those who continue to stand by Trump truly need to become unwelcome in polite society. 

Republicans Warn Trump's Re-Election is on Shaky Ground

It is still over five months to the November, 2020, elections, but two news stories point to good news for decent, moral Americans - a group that excludes the majority of evangelicals - who are sickened by the Trump/Pence regime.  One in Politico reports on the danger signs in swing states that suggest that Trump is losing to Joe Biden.  The other is at FiveThirtyEight which suggests that older Americans, especially those over 65 are beginning to abandon Trump.  It goes without saying that Trump will shriek and whine about "fake news" even though internal Republican polling confirms the news reports.  One can only hope that the trend continues and that, as Republicans fear, Trump is irrevocably attached to his bungling of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic.  First these highlights from Politico:

Donald Trump has made clear he will attack Joe Biden unmercifully in order to ensure the election is a choice between him and Joe Biden — rather than an up-or-down vote on [Trump's] the president’s handling of the coronavirus.

Scott Walker has a different view, at least when it comes to Trump's chances in the all-important battleground of Wisconsin.

“I think it still boils down to a referendum on [Trump] the president. They’ll beat up on Biden and they’ll raise some concerns,” said the former two-term Republican governor of Wisconsin, who lost his seat in 2018. But in the end, if people felt good about their health and the state of the economy, Trump will probably carry Wisconsin. If not, Walker said, “it’s much more difficult” for [Trump] the president.

Walker is not alone among swing-state Republicans in his assessment of [Trump's] the president’s political prospects. Interviews with nearly a dozen former governors, members of Congress, and other current and former party leaders revealed widespread apprehension about Trump’s standing six months out from the election.

Many fret that Trump’s hopes are now hitched to the pandemic; others point to demographic changes in once-reliably red states and to the challenge of running against a hard-to-define Democratic opponent who appeals to a wide swath of voters. The concerns give voice to an assortment of recent battleground state polling showing Trump struggling against Biden.

[T]hroughout 2016, many Republicans thought he wouldn't win.  But that hasn’t quelled GOP fears, even in some traditionally friendly states.

Georgia hasn’t gone for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1992. But last week, Republicans released two internal surveys showing a neck-and-neck race, one of which had Biden narrowly ahead. “Georgia is absolutely at risk for Republicans in 2020 — up and down the ballot, everything is in play. . . . said Republican State Leadership Committee President Austin Chambers, who has deep experience in Georgia politics and recently released a memo warning the party to take the state seriously.

It's a similar story in Arizona. Public polling over the course of the spring has consistently shown Biden ahead, and a recent private GOP survey had the former vice president with a small lead. Though Democrats haven’t won Arizona in a presidential election since Bill Clinton in 1996, the party flipped four statewide offices in 2018.

Most of the GOP’s attention is focused on a trifecta of Rust Belt states that catapulted Trump to the presidency, but where he now trails.

Republicans, including Trump’s own advisers, are most concerned about Michigan. A Fox News survey taken last month showed Biden leading by 8 percentage points; two recent internal Republican surveys similarly had Trump trailing, but by smaller margins.Democrats are unlikely to repeat their mistake of 2016, when they failed to turn out voters in liberal Wayne County, an area that encompasses the heavily black Detroit metro area.

Recent surveys have also shown Trump behind in Pennsylvania, where Republicans suffered across-the-board losses in 2018. . . . . Former Pennsylvania Rep. Phil English said the state’s Democratic governor would face backlash for his management of the coronavirus but that voters would likely focus any frustrations toward national Republicans in power.

“I think there is too much blame-mongering going on, but that is predictable and I think that is going to complicate the political landscape for Republicans in Pennsylvania because they’re the party with the White House, so all negatives are going to first be set at their direction,” said English.

Former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory said he was confident Trump would win the state, which he carried by less than 4 percentage points in 2016. But with multiple competitive statewide races on the ballot, the former governor was less certain that Trump's popularity would carry over to other Republicans.

Though Florida has drifted toward Republicans in recent statewide elections — Trump carried it in 2016, and the party won races for governor and Senate in 2018 — recent surveys have shown [Trump] the president trailing in his newly adopted home state.

Five ThirtyEight has equally encouraging news about the possible mass defection of older voters from Trump whose policies - as well as the GOP controlled Senate - ought to be setting off alarm bells among the over 65 voters.  Here are story excerpts:

There are different “gaps” in American politics, but one that has consistently shown up in recent presidential elections is the age gap. That is, younger voters tend to vote more Democratic and older voters tend to vote more Republican.

In 2016, for instance, President Trump performed best among voters 65 years and older. . . . . However, recent public polls — and [Trump's] the president’s own private polling — suggest that Trump may be doing worse among older voters against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

In national head-to-head polls conducted since April 1, Trump is barely breaking even with most older Americans — and in some age groups, he’s even trailing Biden by as much as 1.4 points (see 45- to 64-year-olds).

The most startling shift, though, is among voters age 65 and older. Four years ago, Trump bested Hillary Clinton by 13 points, 55 percent to 42 percent, . . . . But now Biden narrowly leads Trump 48 percent to 47 percent, based on an average of 48 national polls that included that age group.¹ If those figures hold until November, they would represent a seismic shift in the voting behavior of America’s oldest voters.

But it’s not just among voters 65 and older where Trump is slipping. He’s also fallen almost as far among voters 55 and older. Trump is essentially tied with Biden among that age group, even after winning these voters by 10 points in 2016, 53 percent to 43 percent, according to the CCES. Trump’s numbers have also fallen with 45- to 64-year-olds, as well as 50- to 64-year-olds . . . .

We don’t have as much state-level polling to work with, but there’s evidence that Biden is also doing better with older voters in some key swing states. Take two recent surveys from Florida, a state with one of the oldest populations in the country. A Fox News poll from mid-April found Biden with a slim 3-point lead over Trump and running even among voters 45 and older, while a Quinnipiac University survey from the same period found Biden up 4 points overall in Florida and leading Trump 52 percent to 42 percent among voters 65 and older.

Yes, things can change over five months, but the message to decent, moral Americans is that they need to do all they can to convince friends and family members to jettison Trump and ideally vote a straight Democrat ticket - especially if they live in Kentucky or South Carolina.  Moscow Mitch McConnell needs to be sent into retirement as does Lindsey Graham, the Palmetto Queen.

Biden Is Planning an FDR-Size Presidency

Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux.

Driving from work this evening I heard part of an interview with  the director of a manufacturing association who discussed the harsh assessment of manufacturing CEO's who saw little demand - and therefore, hiring increases - through the end of 2020.  The other possible dead weight on the economy is that many pre-pandemic jobs may not come back or, if they do, will come back very slowly.  One of the things these CEO's thought would boost demand and employment was a major infrastructure initiative by the federal government, something Trump has bloviated about but which the Congressional Republicans have done nothing.  Now, with America's economy upended and the political game plan for November, 2020, similarly turned upside down, presumptive Democrat nominee, Joe Biden, has radically altered what he believes his presidency must do if he defeats Der Trumpenführer,  Rather than status quo ante, back to normal, restore the soul of the nation, administration, Biden - correctly, in my view - believes that a FDR style presidency and policies and programs are needed to put America back on a solid economic footing. A very long piece in New York Magazine looks at Biden's evolution on what will need to be done.  Here are highlights:

[S]ometimes looking at the small lake abutting his backyard that bulges out from Little Mill Creek, {Joe Biden} the self-conscious man in the Democratic middle — mocked by the activist left throughout the primary campaign as hopelessly retrograde — considers the present calamity and plots a presidency that, by awful necessity, he believes must be more ambitious than FDR’s.
 The former vice-president carried the Democratic primary by relying on perceptions that he was an older, whiter, less world-historical (and less inspiring) Barack Obama — a steady hand who seemed more electable against a monstrous president than any of his competitors did. The heart of his pitch, when he delivered it clearly, was status quo ante, back to normal, restore the soul of the nation.
 But in the space of just a few months, COVID-19 and the disastrous White House response appeared to have dramatically widened Biden’s pathway to the presidency, making the matter of moderation and electability seem, at least for the time being, almost moot. They also changed his perception of what the country would need from a president in January 2021 — after not just four years of Trump but almost a full year of death and suffering. The pandemic is breaking the country much more deeply than the Great Recession did, Biden believes, and will require a much bigger response. No miraculous rebound is coming in the next six months.  Long before the pandemic, he described a range of actions he’d take on day one, from rejoining the Paris climate agreement to signing executive orders on ethics, and he cited other matters, like passing the Equality Act for LGBTQ protections, as top priorities. Already his recovery ambitions have grown to include plans that would flex the muscles of big government harder than any program in recent history. To date, the federal government has spent more than $2 trillion on the coronavirus stimulus — nearly three times what it approved in 2009. Biden wants more spending. “A hell of a lot bigger,” he’s said, “whatever it takes.” He has argued that, even if you’re inclined to worry about the deficit, massive public investment is the only thing capable of growing the economy enough “so the deficit doesn’t eat you alive.” He has talked about funding immense green enterprises and larger backstop proposals from cities and states and sending more relief checks to families. He has urged immediate increases in virus and serology testing, proposing the implementation of a Pandemic Testing Board in the style of FDR’s War Production Board and has called for investments in an “Apollo-like moonshot” for a vaccine and treatment. This is all only what he believes should be done now before he even ascends to the presidency; by then, he thinks, the country could be in a much darker hole than it is today, presumably requiring even more federal investment and intervention. David Kessler, who led the Food and Drug Administration under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and has been speaking with Biden regularly about the crisis, recently told me the former vice-president “understands that until we have a vaccine or a therapeutic entity that can be used as a preventative, the virus is still going to be with us and that we’re going to constantly be putting out mini-epidemics.” [W]hile 2009 shows that spending unprecedented amounts of money alone doesn’t necessarily make a presidency transformational, the pandemic and the economic collapse it has produced have expanded Biden’s sense of not just how much relief will be required but what will be possible to accomplish as part of that recovery. Trump accomplished one big-ticket priority: tax cuts. Obama managed two: the stimulus, with a filibusterproof 60-vote Senate majority, and, barely, Obama-care. While it’s impossible to tell where the country is headed, Biden’s camp is in the disorienting position of scaling up its laundry list of proposals to match the ambition, and the political appetite, he thinks the American people — desperate for relief — will have in January. Biden’s long platform has grown in recent months as the crisis has deepened. . . . Once he began talking about a coronavirus recovery, he also started signaling more immediate ambitions on climate, including in his multiple conversations with Washington governor Jay Inslee. “He’s totally understood the centrality of a clean-energy plan,” said Inslee. [O]ne morning in late April. . . . he said into the phone, it was time they expanded their thinking. Sure, massive gobs of federal financial help have already been approved — unlike in 2008, he pointed out — but that still won’t be enough. Not while the magnitude of this crisis dwarfs the last one. His advisers agreed: If they were going to talk about lessons from history, their future calls might as well dive into the Great Depression and World War II. Biden is also a lifelong Democrat who likes the view from the center of the party, enough to move rapidly to accommodate when it shifts, as it is doing now very quickly. He may look like a milquetoast moderate to the activist left and maybe even to you, but the party — and world — has changed so fast that even his primary platform puts him well to the left of Obama in 2008 and, in many ways, left of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Those close to him say he sees in the crisis an obvious window for action. “There is no denying that the challenges a President Biden would face in 2021 are different than anyone could have imagined six months ago given the economic and health consequences of the coronavirus,” Feldman, who has worked with Biden for nearly a decade, told me. “What I’ve heard the vice-president say over and over again is this crisis is shining a bright, bright light on so many systemic problems in our country, and so many inequities. It is exacerbating and shining a light on environmental-justice issues, racial inequalities, so many other problems.” Publicly, Biden has made no secret of his displeasure with Trump’s handling of the disaster, from his personal conduct — Biden has said the delay in distributing relief checks in order to print Trump’s name on them “bothered me the most” — to the administration’s failure to ensure small businesses access to relief funds while state unemployment systems were overwhelmed. The crisis, Biden believes, has expanded “the state of what is possible, now that the American people have seen both the role of government and the role of frontline workers,” said Sullivan. “He believes he has a more compelling case to make that this is the agenda that needs to get passed.” Outwardly, at least, Biden appears sensitive to the concerns of progressives. “He has said this is the second time in 12 years that the American taxpayers have bailed out American business,” Sullivan told me. The implication is that Biden has run out of patience. “That’s fine, we should do it and protect our economy — but he believes we have to ask our private sector to take on greater responsibility and accountability.”

Biden has talked openly, and seriously, about the notion of rolling out certain Cabinet picks before he is elected as a way of giving voters a sense of what to expect and to hit the ground running when he takes office. And he has already begun early-stage thoughts about not just top appointments but sub-Cabinet posts and the broader shape of his government. [H]e’s spent plenty of his time out of the spotlight weighing his vice-presidential options, conscious that he may effectively be picking his replacement and therefore sending an important signal about his wishes for Democrats’ future. His list of top contenders has long been thought to include Harris, Klobuchar, Whitmer, and Warren, as well as Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. As the lockdown has dragged on, Biden has insisted his pick be ideologically “simpatico” (once thought to be a point against Warren, though less so amid this crisis), and he has hardened his belief that she must be prepared to take over from their first day in office. That point — which Obama has echoed in their conversations — is read by some in Biden’s circles as a potential knock against Abrams, who has never held statewide elected office, and some members of Congress who’ve been floated.

With the pandemic likely lingering through the end of the year, the prospect of four more years of Trump's mismanagement and the GOP effort to restore the Gilded Age ought to terrify most Americans - or at least those not totally blinded by racism and religious extremism. 

How To Respond To Friends Posting False Conspiracy Theories?

Since the 2016 presidential election I have observed many otherwise sensible and decent people - many wealthy Republican women - re-posting and sharing some of the most insane and untrue things on Facebook and other social media platforms.  During the 2016 campaign many of these falsehoods ultimately were traced back to Russian sources working to cause hate and division among Americans and to aid Donald Trump.  For some, no conspiracy seems too far fetched.   In some cases I unfriended individuals since I simply did not have the patience to see the endless parade of batshit crazy stuff they posted and in another recent case I stopped following  the individual.  Now, with the coronavirus pandemic there has been an upsurge in false conspiracy theories being backed by groups ranging to far right billionaires to white supremacy groups to foreign disinformation sources.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at how one should deal with friends who continue to post false materials.  The BBC also has a piece on stopping false "news" some online friends should read. The advice in The Atlantic suggests more patience than I can at times muster perhaps since I work in a profession where facts and logic matter.  Here are article excepts:

[P]olitical scientists Joseph E. Uscinski and Adam M. Enders observed that the coronavirus has created an environment dangerously conducive to conspiracy theories. “We have a global pandemic, a crashing economy, social isolation, and restrictive government policies,” they wrote. “All of these can cause feelings of extreme anxiety, powerlessness, and stress, which in turn encourage conspiracy beliefs.”

This past week, a widely discredited video—a 26-minute clip from a slickly produced documentary called Plandemic—circulated online. It promotes a number of harmful and false ideas, including that wearing a protective mask can make people sick and that the novel coronavirus most likely emerged from a laboratory. (Facebook, YouTube, and other companies are trying to scrub it from their platforms.)

If someone you care about sends you a link to this video—or any piece of media that pushes a conspiracy theory about the pandemic—how should you respond? I put that question to experts on conspiracy thinking, public-health risk communication, and psychology, and their responses converged on some basic guidelines.

Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami and a co-author of American Conspiracy Theories, made an important preliminary distinction: Some people are sharing links to videos like Plandemic because they are curious and uncertain about the claims being made, but others are doing so because they’re already deeply convinced. If you know someone is a “true believer,” to use Uscinski’s term, you probably can’t do much to sway them. You’ll have a better chance of getting through to the curious and the uncertain.

Whatever camp someone falls in, though, the general principles are the same. “It’s always important to respond in a way that doesn’t suggest that the other [person] is foolish, naive, or gullible, as much as you think they may be,” said Joshua Coleman, a psychologist with an expertise in family relationships.

After setting an empathetic tone, Coleman suggested continuing with something like this:
That video might be right, but I've been reading a lot these days that goes counter to that. Do you mind if I send you an article or video about that? It would be good for us to look at both and see what we think.

“First validate” the fears people might have about the pandemic “and then pivot,” Rachael Piltch-Loeb, a fellow at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, recommended. Along those lines, she suggested something like “I’m glad you brought this up. Those are some scary claims in that documentary. I am skeptical, though, because a lot of the things mentioned don't jibe with what I have been reading. Here’s an article that I found to be more helpful at explaining these issues, and I feel more comfortable with the science behind it.” John Banas, a communication professor at the University of Oklahoma, advised avoiding the implication that the other person’s faith in the video is “a personal failing.” You could instead point out the flaws in the current information ecosystem, he said, maybe with a reminder like “During this pandemic, there are people who want to take advantage of people's fears and all of the uncertainty surrounding the situation.” You might also try, when having conversations with other friends and family members, to preempt any curiosity they may have about Plandemic or its ilk by warning them about the existence of COVID-19 conspiracy theories. “People need to be prepared to resist harmful persuasion,” Banas said, “just like our bodies need to be prepared to resist harmful viruses.”

Malignant forces are behind these conspiracy theories.  I wish more "conservatives" would stop taking the bait and allowing themselves to be played for fools to further the agenda of others, be they members of the Trump regime or other bad actors.

Will Trump Help Democrats Win the Senate?

If America is to end its national nightmare two things need to happen in November: (i) Trump is defeated, and (ii) the U.S. Senate must flip to Democrat control, removing the toxic influence of Mitch McConnell, a man who along with Trump has done much to destroy the nation's reputation and who has waged a relentless war against working and middle class Americans (I view Trump as mentally ill, whereas McConnell is just plain evil).  As of now, polls are encouraging in terms of Trump's weakness and the improved chances of a Democrat controlled Senate come January, 2021. Better yet, Trump's unpopularity appears to be harming GOP Senators who have prostituted themselves to his cult of personality and the ugliest elements of the GOP base.  A piece in Vanity Fair looks at the current situation.  Here are highlights:

Last month, the National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a 57-page memo that appeared to suggest candidates distance themselves, at least a little, from Donald Trump. “Don’t defend Trump,” the memo read. “Attack China.” Faced with outrage from the president’s team, the NRSC claimed it was all a big misunderstanding—the coronavirus talking point was poorly worded, they said, and there was actually “no daylight between the NRSC and President Trump.” Still, the memo seemed to reflect Republican fears that the president’s catastrophic mishandling of the COVID crisis could not only cost them the White House, but the Senate, as well.

Recent polling suggests those fears are warranted. Democrats need to nab five of eight Republican-held seats in competitive races to gain control of the upper chamber; they hold leads in five of the contests and trail by just a point in another. High-profile Republicans are among those who find themselves in jeopardy; Thom Tillis, a Trump ally, is trailing Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham by nine points in North Carolina, according to a poll released Tuesday, and Maine’s Susan Collins is behind Sara Gideon 2.5 points in an average of polls.

[T]he spate of positive numbers for Democrats in swing races has put the Senate, under Republican control since 2015, in play. “I think it’s become very competitive,” Kyle Kondick, managing editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told the Hill last month.

As Axios reported Wednesday, Democrats have shown momentum in key Senate races as the president’s path to reelection grows increasingly perilous. On Tuesday, polls showed Montana Governor Steve Bullock, who launched his Senate campaign after exiting the 2020 Democratic primary, leading incumbent Steve Daines by seven points in the state Trump carried by more than 20 in 2016, and Cunningham leading Tillis by nine.

In Arizona, Mark Kelly leads Republican Martha McSally by an average of eight points; in Kansas, Barbara Bollier leads possible Republican nominee Kris Kobach, a staunch ally of the president, by two; and in Maine, Gideon narrowly leads Collins.

Even before the coronavirus crisis hit, Trump was a historically unpopular president who made not only himself, but his party vulnerable to defeat—thanks to his corruption, incompetence, and despicable behavior. But his mishandling of the pandemic has accentuated all those shortcomings, perhaps even eroding some support within his previously rock-solid base. “We are starting to see more evidence that suburban voters disapprove of the way Trump is handling the coronavirus pandemic,”

[W]hatever political protection Trump’s cult of personality affords him, personally, may not extend to his allies in down-ballot races.

I hope the anti-GOP trend continues and, better yet, intensifies.

Trump's Damage Is Done and He May Not Be Able to Save Himself

A mass grave on New York’s Hart Island.

Earlier this evening I shared a great Lincoln Project anti-Trump ad - aptly entitled "Mourning in America" - on Facebook and now I am ready an op-ed in the Washington Post by a former Republican and former GOP apologist columnist.  Both the ad and the column take aim at Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, but by extension the Republican Party as represented by nasty trolls like Mitch McConnell and self-prostituting  individuals like Lindsey Graham who have demonstrated that there ids no limit to the self-degradation they will engage in rather than draw the ire of Trump's knuckle dragging, white supremacist/Christian extremist base. One can only hope that the column's premise that Trump's goose is already cooked proves true. Here are column highlights:

In the latest Monmouth poll on Trump’s handling of the pandemic, “42% say he has done a good job and 51% say he has done a bad job. His prior ratings on handling the outbreak were 46% good job to 49% bad job in April and a positive 50% good job to 45% bad job rating in March.” The pollsters found that “the overall trendline suggests that the public is growing less satisfied with Trump’s response to the pandemic.” Not unexpectedly, as the deaths increase and Trump’s lies and crackpot conspiracy theories contradict Americans’ nightmarish experience, they are less and less enamored of him.

The voters are at odds with Trump on the most fundamental question, namely whether to prioritize health or the economy. Among voters, 63 percent are concerned about opening up business too soon (consistent with other recent polls) and 54 percent think the federal government is not doing enough.

To the extent the election becomes a referendum on Trump’s handling of the pandemic, he will find it hard slogging, even in red states. Some stunning polls suggest the race is competitive in places where Trump should be winning easily. . . . . In Texas, the last two polls show Trump and Biden in a statistical dead heat. (Trump won by nine points in 2016.) And in North Carolina, which Trump won by almost four points, one poll shows Biden leading by seven points, and others show a dead heat.

Several points deserve emphasis.

First, if the draft government memo obtained by The Post forecasting 200,000 new coronavirus cases per day by June 1 is accurate, Trump’s numbers certainly will not improve.

Second, as the coronavirus invades rural America and red states, the definition of a “safe” seat may change. The New York Times reports: “Rural towns that one month ago were unscathed are suddenly hot spots for the virus. It is rampaging through nursing homes, meatpacking plants and prisons, killing the medically vulnerable and the poor, and new outbreaks keep emerging in grocery stores, Walmarts or factories, an ominous harbinger of what a full reopening of the economy will bring.” And it’s not just big cities in red states.

Third, Trump’s increasingly negative tone toward “blue-state bailouts” means not only plenty of negative ads for Biden in places such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, but also a federal government failure of epic proportions. New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) took this head-on during a news conference Tuesday. “First of all, this is not a blue-state issue. Every state has coronavirus cases.” He warned, “You need a bipartisan bill to pass. You go down this path of partisanship and politics, you will never pass a bill. If you never pass legislation, you’ll never get this economy back on its feet. So you go down this path of division, you will defeat all of us, because we’re all in the same boat.”

He might have added: If Trump keeps going down this path, he will face a brutal defeat in November. Then again, the damage is already done, and whatever Trump does may not save him or the Republicans who have lashed themselves to his mast.

Trump Attacks George W. Bush's Call for National Unity

If there has been one beneficiary of the Trump presidency it is George W. Bush who no longer needs to fear the label "worse president ever."  Indeed, Trump has made Bush look like a better president despite his many terribly wrong decisions, the Iraq War being perhaps the most tragic.  Similarly, Bush was never always focused on himself, something Trump is utterly incapable of doing.  With Trump, it is all about him 24/7 and he truly has no empathy for anyone else.  Absolutely none - something his idiot supporters still have not figured out as he plays them for fools by appealing to their bigotry and misplaced grievances. The Hill looks at Trump's tantrum over Bush's call for national unity in this time of crisis.  Here are excerpts:

President Trump on Sunday took aim at George W. Bush after the former Republican president issued a call to push partisanship aside amid the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. 

In a three-minute video shared on Twitter on Saturday, Bush urged Americans to remember "how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat."

"In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants. We are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God," Bush said. "We rise or fall together, and we are determined to rise."

In an early morning tweet on Sunday, Trump called out Bush for his failure to support him as he faced an impeachment trial earlier this year over his alleged dealings with Ukraine.

While Bush never commented publicly on the allegations and the trial, he and other members of his family have voiced criticism of the president and his policies. 

The former president released the video as confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, continued to rise in parts of the U.S. The country has confirmed more than 1.1 million COVID-19 cases and more than 66,000 deaths from it.

Bush invoked the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in his message, noting that the U.S. has faced "times of testing before." 

"Let's remember that the suffering we experience as a nation does not fall evenly. In the days to come, it will be especially important to care in practical ways for the elderly, the ill and the unemployed," he [Bush] said. 

Trump has faced continued scrutiny for his early response to the outbreak. The president in February suggested the virus would suddenly "disappear" and later predicted that everyone who needed a test would have access to one. He's repeatedly pushed back against concerns from governors about testing and medical equipment shortages. 

Are You Rich Enough to Survive the Pandemic?

In a past post, the case was made that the coronavirus pandemic has revealed that America is a failed state when the measurement is serving the vast majority of its citizens.  Unlike western European nations, America has a very poor social safety net and how well one survives the pandemic crisis could ultimately come down to how much money one has if not working in an industry deemed essential and still providing an income.  Before the pandemic, upward social mobility in America had fallen precipitously and now one has been chances of upward mobility in "Old Europe" - a Republicans term of derision.  Blinding too many is the continued myth of American exceptionalism - a term bandied about by politicians of both political parties - that ignores and seeks to gloss over America's many systemic economic and social problems. As the pandemic grinds on, the wealthy know they will survive while the least fortunate wonder where their next meal will come from.  A long piece in New York Magazine looks at this reality and makes one wonder if Americans will ever demand the system be improved.  Here are highlights:

There was the pandemic, then there was the storm. Of all the natural disasters, tornadoes lend themselves the most to being read as Providence. Like hurricanes and wildfires, they can level everything in their path, but those paths can also be narrow enough, forgiving enough, to grind one house into debris while leaving the neighboring structure untouched. Metaphors become redundant in the face of such calamity; the thing to which you’d otherwise be comparing it is, too often, what it already is.

But when disaster looms, we grasp for deeper meaning. When the disaster is unfamiliar, our imaginations retreat to more familiar terms, even primordial ones, as with the notion that celestial forces control our fate. The need to ascribe our misfortunes to some grand plan makes it hard not to look for cosmic significance in the tornadoes that ripped through the American South on Easter Sunday, months after the novel coronavirus made itself known on U.S. shores and several weeks after any of us had left the house.

But if recent months have proved anything, it’s that most disasters we otherwise understand as “natural” have an uncanny way of reflecting human design. Randomness isn’t justice, even a perverse form, distributed equitably. It is a test of vulnerability — of your wherewithal to prepare, escape, recover.

The wrong lesson, of impartial vulnerability, will always be there, tempting. As, understandably, will be metaphysical rationales for physical phenomena — faith, myth. These have been instrumental in helping people navigate the otherwise unspeakable. But alongside them an insidious form of self-deception can take root: the lies we tell to reconcile our behavior, good and bad, with our idealized conceptions of who we are as individuals and as Americans. Faced with horrors so vast they make us feel impotent, we tell ourselves that crises invariably bring out our best; there’s no shortage of heroic anecdotes to reinforce this narrative, encompassing emergency response, provision of health care, neighborliness. But more often, these displays are too diffuse, too renegade, to overcome the scale of the disaster itself. The long list of crises that have taken America’s most brutal inequalities and enhanced them suggests the opposite conclusion, that a motivating shame should be our main takeaway from hurricanes Katrina and Maria, the 2008 economic crisis, the forever wars in which we’re now ensnared. For elected officials, in particular, pressure is high to sell a more flattering vision of U.S. culture — one defined by an unshakable belief that America, as a project, is singularly good, noble, and ripe with opportunity even in the toughest of times.

This vision regularly finds itself at odds with reality. Governor Cuomo knows as well as any that the coronavirus isn’t really “the great equalizer,” that generations of inequality cannot be erased simply by giving two people of differing economic backgrounds the same disease. You’d have to bury your head in the sand to ignore the obvious: By almost every metric, those getting the sickest and dying most frequently and being plunged into dire financial straits at disproportionate rates are the same people who were vulnerable and marginalized before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic.

A brief accounting: Hungry people have been stuck in traffic jams at the Forum in Inglewood, California, as thousands of motorists wend their way through the parking lot to pick up free groceries. Twenty-six million Americans have filed for unemployment since the middle of March, and a nationwide strain on food-bank capacity has resulted, with demand increasing by an average of 40 percent. “Lower-income workers, minority communities, communities of color, folks working in service jobs, folks living in public housing, folks with kids who are on the free, reduced lunch programs” . . . . “those are the folks who are really feeling the pain on this. And they were already in pain before.”

One could drive just off the Las Vegas Strip and see dozens of homeless people asleep in a taped-off parking lot while empty but still gaudily lit luxury hotels loomed above them. County officials have been unable to reach a deal with casino owners to house the houseless in their unused hotel rooms, where they might enjoy a modicum of safety and hygiene. Recent actions by the Vegas city council had already criminalized resting on sidewalks for even brief stretches of time; pressed for lodging options, many people were forced into cramped shelters that have since become hotbeds of infection.

Older people have been especially imperiled: for instance, the outbreak at the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, which killed 43 people and vivified COVID’s lopsided threat to the elderly. In nursing homes across the country, 11,000 have already died.

But the suffering is larger still than the dying. Recent polls indicate that as many as two-thirds of Latino adults have lost their jobs or seen their incomes reduced as a result of the economic downturn. Much of this is attributable to Latino workers’ high representation among wage laborers in service and hospitality industries, which have been decimated. Even as American life retreats indoors, ICE raids continue, bringing armed agents into people’s homes and risking the spread of infection, then transporting those they capture to detention facilities known for incubating diseases. In a cruel twist of irony, many undocumented agricultural workers, demonized for years by nativists, have been deemed “essential” for their role in maintaining the food-supply chain. Grocery employees, home health aides, social workers — the essential economy under the coronavirus is rife with traditionally undercompensated professions staffed largely by people of color, especially women . . .

Preliminary data points to some of the bleakest outcomes for black Americans, as anyone might have predicted even before that data began rolling in. Homeless, imprisoned, and impoverished people in the U.S. have and continue to be disproportionately black, with the accompanying health risks: higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, all reliable indicators of whether an otherwise manageable case of COVID could turn fatal. Black victims compose 40 percent of Michigan’s infected dead but 14 percent of the state’s population, for instance. They’re 70 percent of the dead in Louisiana, one of the country’s biggest epicenters outside New York, but just 33 percent of the population.

These are the people whose suffering is neglected when terms like equalizer are reduced to platitudes. But neglecting it in practice, as many officials have, also shapes our expectations of what returning to normal looks like. Social conditions that seemed intolerable six months ago have since acquired the sheen of an idyllic recovery. Getting back to work, earning wages again — these are broad improvements over what we have now that, nevertheless, won’t repair the long-standing circumstances of millions whose bigger problems were always structural. That many of us can’t even begin to expect or even conceptualize this — in a moment so desperate, so damning to the notion that America’s best feature is its ability to manufacture prosperity, a reopening where black doesn’t mean sicker, Latino doesn’t mean lower wages, and poor doesn’t mean unreliable food or housing — reaffirms that for millions, normality is cruel enough.

This is where the history that produced America’s undercastes is hardest to escape, where the flattering delusions that neglect suffering look less like personal coping mechanisms than a national inheritance. When Trump’s surrogates urge people to sacrifice their lives to resuscitate the economy, they aren’t just protecting his reelection prospects; they’re advancing a culture war fueled by resentment toward people who’ve long been understood as unworthy. It’s why Trumpist protesters brandishing the Confederate flag can storm the Michigan capitol calling on the governor to rescind her stay-at-home orders and have the emblem not seem incongruous.

Deception that obscures inequality isn’t just expedient. It infuses tragedy with a tacit moral dimension, where the worst suffering is presumed to be reserved for those who deserve it — whether by being too poor, too black, too proximate to either.

What happens when this magnitude of crisis befalls the entire country? There’s a liberal impulse to treat these disasters as emancipatory, freeing us from the illusion of an equitable status quo, the better to pursue the real thing with our vision unclouded. This might be true for some, though whether their awakening produces the requisite policy response is less clear. I’d say, in fact, it’s doubtful. The reality thus far, rather than solidarity, has overwhelmingly been individuals left to manage the fallout alone, in many cases owing to the absence of infrastructure whereby they might help one another. Dairy farmers in Wisconsin dump thousands of gallons of milk a day, citing less need from schools and restaurants, while food-pantry lines in San Antonio and Dallas stretch for blocks, and there’s no public entity to connect the two.

How societies mitigate the pain they cause at the margins is far more revealing — how much we invest, as Americans, in catching the vulnerable when the floor is ripped from beneath them. We may tell ourselves the pandemic is asking this question of us, but if we had the courage to look clearly, the answer was evident long before this crisis: in how our society distributes suffering, the stories we tell to make it compatible with our national self-regard; how aggressively so many insist on overlooking the foreseeable. The depth of havoc that the coronavirus wreaks on its inevitable victims was, and is, within America’s capacity to determine. We have few insights into the path it’s cutting today that we haven’t had for years and that we weren’t already ignoring.

Hopefully Trump Is Self-Destructing Before Our Eyes

The lies and insanity coming from Donald Trump's daily coronavirus briefings is so overwhelming that a number of Republican elected officials are whispering that the briefings need to stop.  Daily, Trump provides Joe Biden and other Democrats with material for future political ads that underscore his utter incompetence.  Trump's latest off the charts batshitery was to suggest that injecting humans with disinfectants would be a cure for Covid-19.  Yes, it would be a cure alright, the patient would be dead and the virus thus defeated. As the New York Times reports, both manufacturers of disinfectants and health officials have rushed to urge people to NOT follow Trump's suggestions: 

[Maryland's] Emergency Management Agency had to issue a warning that “under no circumstances” should any disinfectant be taken to treat the coronavirus. In Washington State, officials urged people not to consume laundry detergent capsules. Across the country on Friday, health professionals sounded the alarm.

Injecting bleach or highly concentrated rubbing alcohol “causes massive organ damage and the blood cells in the body to basically burst,” Dr. Diane P. Calello, the medical director of the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System, said in an interview. “It can definitely be a fatal event.”

Even the makers of Clorox and Lysol pleaded with Americans not to inject or ingest their products.

The frantic reaction was prompted by President Trump’s suggestion on Thursday at a White House briefing that an “injection inside” the human body with a disinfectant like bleach or isopropyl alcohol could help combat the virus.

One has to wonder when my Republican friends will finally admit that the elected a lunatic to the Oval Office.  Not a day goes by without numerous lies and falsehoods being disseminated by Trump.  It's so bad that CNN now has a daily piece that reviews the prior evening's falsehoods.  A column also in the Times speculates that Trump is self-destructing before our eyes (although probably not in the eyes of his knuckle dragging, racist base, some of whom may try Trump's suggested "cure").  Here are column highlights:

Tens of thousands of Americans die; what does the president do? Spreads bad information. Seeds false hope. Reinvents history, reimagines science, prattles on about his supposed heroism, bellyaches about his self-proclaimed martyrdom and savages anyone who questions his infallibility. In lieu of leadership, grandstanding. In place of empathy, a snit. And he’s going to get re-elected.

With that refrain we perform a spiritual prophylaxis. We prepare for despair. . . . We began to treat a verbal tic as inevitable truth.

It isn’t. While Trump may indeed be careening toward four more years, it’s at least as possible that he’s self-destructing before our eyes.

Maybe a toasty beam of sunlight is all that we need to wipe out the coronavirus? What if we just injected disinfectant into our veins? He floated both of those fantasies on Thursday, when he might as well have stepped up to the lectern in a tin foil hat. They’re the ramblings of a dejected, disoriented and increasingly desperate man.

As Katie Rogers and Annie Karni reported in The Times, [Trump] the president feels isolated and embattled and is panicked that he’ll lose to Joe Biden in November. That state of mind, they wrote, prompted his executive order to halt the issuing of green cards, which is precisely the kind of base-coddling measure that he resorts to “when things feel out of control.”

He can read the polls as well as the rest of us can, and they show that while he stands there nightly in the White House briefing room and blows kisses at himself, Americans aren’t blowing kisses back. A month ago there was much ado about a slight uptick in Trump’s job-approval numbers. But the real story was the slightness: Past presidents had experienced greater bumps during crises, when Americans tend to rally around their leader. For Trump there was no such rallying — just a grudging, incremental benefit of the doubt. A fleeting one, too. His uptick quickly took a downturn, reuniting him with his anemic norm. According to the polling average at FiveThirtyEight as of late Friday afternoon, 52.5 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance. Only 43.4 percent approve. Other numbers tell an even scarier story for Trump. In all three of the battleground states that enabled his Electoral College victory three and a half years ago, he’s currently behind Biden — by 6.7 percentage points in Pennsylvania, 5.5 in Michigan and 2.7 in Wisconsin, according to the averaging of recent polls by RealClearPolitics. That website also puts him behind by 3.2 points in Florida, a state he won in 2016 and must win again. According to monthly polling by Gallup, the percentage of Americans who indicated satisfaction with the way things were going in the country plummeted to 30 percent in mid-April from 42 percent in mid-March. Only twice before in the past two decades has there been a one-month decline that precipitous.

Maybe this drop was less a referendum on Trump’s stewardship than a recognition of the coronavirus’s devastation. But maybe not: Surveys reveal that a significant majority of Americans believe that he acted too late to stem the virus’s spread. He’s also out of step with most Americans’ appraisal of what will and won’t be safe in the immediate future.

In a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, 65 percent of Americans said it could take until June or later for gatherings of 10 people or more to be safe. And in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll, only 22 percent of Americans supported the protesters who have been demanding an end to their states’ restrictions, while 60 percent opposed them. President Trump has egged those protesters on.

Is he following some gut instinct or just flailing? I vote for the latter. Lately he has contradicted himself at a whole new pace and to a whole new degree, and he has undercut his own party’s talking points.

Republicans have developed a strategy to evade any responsibility for Trump’s response to the pandemic by blaming and demonizing China. “But there is a potential impediment to the G.O.P. plan — the leader of the party himself,” Martin and Haberman wrote, noting that Trump has “muddied Republican efforts to fault China” by continuing to curry favor with President Xi Jinping. Also, Trump’s most optimistic pronouncements about imminent deliverance from the current misery represent a bigger gamble than the many others he has taken. If he’s wrong, there’s not going to be any hiding it. If he’s reckless, the toll is Americans’ very lives. There’s incessant talk of how fervent his base is, but the many Americans appalled by him have a commensurate zeal. For every Sean Hannity, there’s a Rachel Maddow. For every Kellyanne Conway, a George Conway. She and her ilk may be wily in their defense of the president. He and his tribe are even better in their evisceration of him.

And what of the diaspora of refugees from the Trump administration: people like Rick Bright, the government scientist who says he was just stripped of his leading role in the search for a coronavirus vaccine because he wouldn’t parrot Trump’s cockamamie talking points? I predict that as November nears, more and more exiles will speak out, sharing alarming accounts of life inside the president’s hall of mirrors. Trump in turn will mutter about the “deep state,” but the phrase won’t fly when he’s left with such a shallow pool of charlatans around him — and when he’s making such a repellent fool of himself.

Don’t tell me that his nightly briefings are just a new version of the old stadium rallies; their backdrop of profound suffering makes them exponentially harder to stomach. Americans who take any comfort from them were Trump-drunk long ago. The unbesotted see and hear the president for what he is: a tone-deaf showman who regards everything, even a mountain of corpses, as a stage.

I sincerely hope the author is correct.