Trump Gambled With the Lives of Senior Citizens and Now Wants to Gamble With the Lives of School Children

Part of the reason for Donald Trump's decline in the polls has been due to white senior citizens waking to the reality that Trump puts reopening the economy - and his reelection chances - ahead of the very lives of older voters. Trump truly doesn't give a rat's ass about anyone but himself and being reelected so as not to be remembered by history as a "loser." Now Trump and his anti-public school maven Betsy DeVos - perhaps the worse Secretary of Education ever - want to gamble with the lives of school children and teachers through a push to reopen schools no matter the risk involved.  It is ONLY about Trump and his reelection hopes.  The irony is that the push to reopen schools comes even as Texas' governor - a Trump bootlicker of the highest magnitude - suggests that Texas may need to consider locking down again after is premature reopening to appease Trump's demands.   Sadly, Trump is a narcissistic sociopath who represents a clear and present danger to the lives of A column in the New York Times looks at Trump's efforts to endanger school children and school faculty members alike.  Here are column highlights:

Two weeks ago, I asked Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, what a functioning Department of Education would be doing to prepare the country to reopen schools in the fall.

“A functioning Department of Education would have been getting groups of superintendents and principals and unions and others together from the middle of March,” she told me. It would have created a clearinghouse of best practices for maintaining grab-and-go lunch programs and online education. By mid-April it would have convened experts to figure out how to reopen schools safely, and offered grants to schools trying different models.

“None of that has happened,” said Weingarten. “Zero.”

Instead, Donald Trump has approached the extraordinarily complex challenge of educating children during a pandemic just as he’s approached most other matters of governing: with bullying, bluster and propaganda.

While doing nothing to curb the wildfire spread of the coronavirus, he has demanded that schools reopen and threatened to cut off funding for those that don’t. On Wednesday, he tweeted that the guidelines for reopening schools from his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were “very tough & expensive,” adding, “I will be meeting with them!!!” Mike Pence then suggested that the guidelines would be revised. On Thursday the agency’s director, Dr. Robert Redfield, said they wouldn’t be, but later, seeming to give into pressure, said the guidelines should be seen as recommendations, not requirements.

Also on Thursday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos gestured toward a plan of coronavirus-inspired school choice that would punish public schools that don’t fully reopen. Without offering details, she said families could take the federal money spent at these schools and use it elsewhere. She’s long wanted to give public money to private schools; perhaps she thinks this coronavirus has given her the chance.

When I spoke to Weingarten again on Thursday, she wasn’t worried that Trump and DeVos would be able to follow through on their threats; they can’t redirect the funds without Congress. But with their crude attempts at coercion, they’ve politicized school reopening just as Trump politicized mask-wearing and hydroxychloroquine.

At the end of June, the American Federation of Teachers surveyed its members and found a broad willingness to return to the classroom. Two-thirds of respondents said school buildings should reopen in some capacity, and 76 percent said they’d be comfortable being in school with the proper safeguards. But after Trump began ranting about schools, Weingarten started hearing from teachers who were scared that reopening would be done rashly.

So as Trump tries to turn school reopenings into part of his culture war, Weingarten fears “a huge brain drain of people not willing to be in schools anymore.”

[H]ybrid schedules are being adopted all over the country — and grim as they are, they might turn out to be too optimistic, because they depend on the virus being somewhat contained. Palm Beach, Fla., just announced that schools there won’t open at all. Other districts in hard-hit areas will likely follow suit.

So far, the results of so-called “remote learning” — a term I dislike, since it presumes that learning is happening — have been terrible for students, especially disadvantaged ones. The fallout for many parents’ financial prospects and mental health is catastrophic. And part-time schooling is likely to significantly amplify educational inequalities that are already enormous.

This is almost certainly not why Trump is eager to have school resume. Rather, school closures and staggered schedules are a crushing weight on the economy. To millions of parents, they’re an intimate daily reminder that the president’s incompetence has ruined our lives. But to open schools in a reasonable way, the government needs to do two things: control the pandemic, as most other developed countries have done, and give schools money to adapt. This administration has so far failed to do either.

And now the president’s interference with the C.D.C. has made things worse.

The hybrid model that many large school districts are adopting is meant to limit the number of people whom teachers and students are exposed to. But Elliot Haspel, author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It,” points out that if kids disperse to various kinds of child care when they aren’t in school, they could end up being exposed to more people than they would be in a regular classroom.

“It’s a nightmare,” he told me. “I think we’re going to have significantly more harm to children and to families pursuing a staggered schedule approach, particularly to elementary school students.”

But Trump’s interference means that now no departure from the current C.D.C. guidelines will be seen as credible outside of MAGAland. “The recklessness has made people distrust anything that they say because they have downplayed the virus from the beginning,” said Weingarten.

This [Trump] is a president with negative credibility. The more Trump demands that schools open, the more people who’ve paid close attention to him will fear they all must remain closed. 

Sadly, the current occupant of the White House cares nothing about anyone but himself.  Whites - especially evangelicals - who support him are equally selfish yet fail to grasps that Trump's appeals to their racism and/or religious based hate and extremism masks the reality that Trump doesn't care if they - or their children - live or die. 

Mary Trump's Tell All Book

While the public may not know the details of Donald Trump's tax returns until after the November, 2020, election, the Supreme Court rulings yesterday mean that eventually the New York prosecutors will have access to them and they could well help lay a basis for prosecutions against Trump and/or his businesses. Meanwhile, Trump's niece's  book will hit the shelves a week ahead of schedule and will give a further look into the soulless man who currently occupies the White House.  Some of what is revealed is already known, but the family details and the malignant picture of Trump are telling and come just as Trump is already sinking in the polls - largely do to his own incompetence and dishonesty. A column in the Washington Post by Trump's nemesis, George Conway looks at the convergence of the book's details and the Supreme Court ruling.  Here are highlights:

What do a gripping family tell-all book and a momentous Supreme Court decision have in common? Quite a lot, it turns out.

The book, to be published next week, comes from Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist who happens also to be niece of Donald Trump, the president of the United States. It describes how Donald Trump has been protected by institutions his entire life.

Trump v. Vance, the Supreme Court case decided Thursday, illustrates how the president has pushed those protections to the limit — and how they’re about to end.

Mary Trump’s ”Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” tells a remarkable story, the broad strokes of which many already knew. Mary Trump offers a tale of what she calls “malignant” family dysfunction, and how it produced a malignantly dysfunctional president.

It’s an unsparing and relentlessly detailed account. Her professional judgments about the president’s indisputable narcissism and, perhaps, sociopathy dovetail with those that other experts have reached before. Yet it’s not the possible diagnoses that give Mary Trump’s book its punch. It’s the factual detail — detail that only a family member could provide.

According to the book, Donald Trump paid someone to take the SAT for him. He also tried to trick his mentally declining father into signing a codicil that would have stripped his siblings of their inheritances. Her specifics all lead to the same brutal conclusions: “the sum total of who my uncle is,” she says, consists of “lies, misrepresentations, and fabrications.” He’s “incapable of growing, learning, or evolving.” He lacks true competence, his “real skills” being “self-aggrandizement, lying, and sleight of hand.” His own sister, a former federal appellate judge, thinks of her brother as a “clown,” unsuited for office. (Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, called ”Too Much and Never Enough” “a book of falsehoods.”)

Above all, Mary Trump’s point is that her uncle has spent his life being protected from the consequences of his actions and shortcomings. It’s as though “Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life,” she writes, “so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.” Far from being the virtually self-made man he has always pretended to be, Donald Trump was the “vanity project” of his father, whose money he used “to prop up an illusion” of success. When sales of assets of his father’s estate weren’t enough to clean up his finances, a television producer, through artful editing and image-making, “presented him as a legitimately successful tycoon” — something he never managed to be.

[Trump] has sought the ultimate institutional protection by invoking the presidency to serve his ends. For Donald Trump, the office has served as a bully pulpit from which he could lie and self-promote, with aides to solve, deflect or cover up his self-inflicted problems. In Vance, Trump tried to leverage the presidency for his personal benefit to an unprecedented extreme: His lawyers argued that the presidency should protect not just him from the legal consequences of his conduct — but his businesses, too.

The case, ironically, came about partly because of Mary Trump. As her book explains, she became a principal confidential source for a New York Times exposé that described how the Trump Organization, over many years, may have dodged taxes. Those allegations became part of the predicate for a New York state criminal investigation that the president sued to curtail. Trump argued that, because he’s president, not even his accountants had to respond to the district attorney’s subpoena.

The Supreme Court would have none of it. Its decision rejected Trump’s narcissistic vision of the presidency. “In our judicial system,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the court, “the public has a right to every man’s evidence.” And that includes a president’s evidence. Just as other presidents have “uniformly” given evidence when required of them, the court held, so, too will Donald Trump and his businesses and accountants. . . . . As Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion aptly put, “no one is above the law.”

[F]or Donald Trump personally, his niece’s book and the Supreme Court’s decision may someday be remembered as the beginning of the end of his institutional protections. And not just in a legal sense. Much of the power of the presidency comes from the perception of it, and that perception is now waning as the president bleeds out in the polls. As that power ebbs, more Mary Trumps and John Boltons will tell their stories, or give their evidence to investigators, with ever less fear.

As Mary Trump puts it in her book, “the walls” of her uncle’s “very expensive and well-guarded padded cell are starting to disintegrate.” Come January, they should be gone for good.

Trump’s Only Campaign Promise: Make Bigotry Safe Again

Recently Donald Trump gave a rambling comment about his agenda for a second term if, god help us all, he were reelected to a second term.  What was striking was that he had no agenda other than being reelected and continuing his vanity show from the White House.  Meanwhile, Sunbelt states that foolishly reopened at his bidding are reeling from huge rises in Covid-19 cases and we have learned that Trump's BFF, Vladimir Putin was paying bounties for the murder of American soldiers in Afghanistan. So what is Trump response?  Pandering to white racism - something he has harbored himself for years going all the way back to racial discrimination in housing the Norfolk, Virginia area almost 50 years ago and his demands for a judicial lynching of innocent young blacks falsely accused of crime in Central Park.  Along with his narcissism, racism appears to be the one constant with Trump.  A column in the Washington Post looks at his apparent decision to use racism and fear to gain reelection.  Here are highlights:

“White power!” shouted the elderly man, raising his fist as he drove his golf cart past a group of demonstrators advocating racial justice. On Sunday, President Trump offered an “amen.”

A white couple stood outside their St. Louis mansion aiming deadly firearms — the man wielding a semiautomatic rifle, the woman waving a handgun — at Black Lives Matter protesters who were peacefully marching past. On Monday, Trump joined that hallelujah chorus, too.

In both cases, Trump offered his encouragement to white tribal fear and anger in the form of retweets on his Twitter feed. There’s plenty of bad news the president might want to overshadow: the explosion in covid-19 cases in Sun Belt states he pushed to reopen prematurely, for example, or the reports that Russia offered bounties for killing U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. But why choose “white power” as the bright, shiny object he wants everyone to focus on? Why not some other, less incendiary bit of nonsense?

The logical conclusion is that, in his desperate campaign to win reelection, Trump has decided to position himself even more explicitly as the defender of whiteness and all its privileges. Certainly, in his ideologically flexible career, maintaining the primacy of whiteness is a rare constant.

The “white power” incident took place earlier this month at The Villages, a sprawling retirement community near Orlando. . . . . Trump retweeted a video of the incident, appending the comment, “Thank you to the great people of The Villages.” The tweet was deleted a couple of hours later, with the White House claiming that Trump hadn’t heard the “white power” rallying cry. That is likely a lie, since the shouted slogan comes right at the beginning of the two-minute video clip. You can’t miss it — unless you’re just retweeting things you haven’t bothered to watch.

And if Trump didn’t mean to amplify the “white power” message, then why — one day later — would he retweet a video of the St. Louis incident? You don’t have to be a semiotician to understand the message of that video, which reinforces a message Trump has repeated over and over again: White people, when you see a diverse crowd of protesters coming down your street, be afraid. Go get your guns. Be ready to shoot.

With Trump’s hope of reelection fading, I fear this is the gambit he has chosen: using this moment to exacerbate racial animus — rather than lessen it, as any responsible leader would try to do — by heightening white fear and loathing of the nation’s growing diversity.

“Black lives matter” does not imply some sort of zero-sum game. The whole nation will benefit if we can curb the kind of police violence that led to the deaths of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Elijah McClain and so many others. The whole nation will benefit if we finally acknowledge and then address systemic racism. What makes this moment of upheaval and protest different is that so many white Americans see how racism is a ball and chain that holds all of us back — and see what a braver, fairer, stronger nation we can be if we confront our original sin with honesty and determination.

As a political strategy, this can work only if Trump motivates enough older, white, non-college-educated voters in the Sun Belt and rural Midwest to see the coming election as a matter of us vs. them — while the Republican Party simultaneously uses various techniques of voter suppression to limit Democratic turnout. Polls suggest that all of this is unlikely to work, and that Trump may be dragging the GOP’s Senate majority down with him.

As presidential leadership, Trump’s “white power” strategy is tragically irresponsible. His narcissism leads him unerringly to adopt any course of action he sees as beneficial to himself, no matter what the potential impact on the nation might be.

His focus is on a despicable effort to make white people angry and frightened enough to give him a second term. If he sincerely wants anything beyond his own glorification, it is to make America safe again for bigotry.

As for Republican "friends" who continue to support Trump, perhaps they need to be honest and join the KKK since they are supporting the Klan's de facto leader.

John Bolton's Scathing Indictment of Trump

From the excerpts of John Bolton's new book that have been released by the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal, the worse views of Donald Trump by myself and many others have been confirmed.  Indeed, it is even more crystal clear that Trump is unfit to occupy the White House and constitutes a danger to both Americans and the rest of the world.  He is every bit the self-centered malignant narcissist that many in the mental health field said he was back before the 2016 election and afterwards.  Worse yet, he is utterly ignorant on a host of issues and has little interest in educating himself. While all of this has been known for years now, Bolton failed his duty to America by refusing to testify during the impeachment proceedings and put a lucrative book deal ahead of the interests of the nation.  For that he needs to be repeatedly condemned. A column in the Washington Post looks at the horrors Bolton reveals and also excoriates Bolton for his failure to expose Trump far earlier. Here are highlights:

Welcome to the “Never Trump” camp, John Bolton. It took you a long time to get there. In 2016, you gave this vapid celebrity TV host credibility on the right by praising him for having a “serious” foreign policy vision. You did not join the “War on the Rocks” letter signed by 122 Republican national security professionals, including me, warning that Donald Trump would “make America less safe, and … diminish our standing in the world.” You chose to ignore those warnings. Was it perhaps because you wanted to preserve your lucrative career as a right-wing lecturer and talking head — and your ambitions for higher office?

But better late than never. Reading the excerpt from your new book in the Wall Street Journal, along with summaries of it in The Post and the New York Times, makes clear that you are confirming in every particular — and then some — the indictment of Trump by his critics. The president is every bit as ignorant, incompetent, capricious and heedless of the public interest as many of us have been saying while you stayed silent or supported him.

You write: “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” and you provide ample documentation for that grave charge. Indeed, you quote Trump asking Chinese President Xi Jinping to help his reelection campaign.

You then demonstrate Trump’s contempt for human rights when you quote him urging Xi to build concentration camps for China’s Uighurs — “which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.” His hostility for human rights abroad was matched by his hostility for human rights at home: You quote him saying that reporters were “scumbags” who should be jailed or even executed for failing to reveal their sources. This makes clear that the private Trump is every bit as odious as the public one.

While obsequious to our enemies, you note, Trump is hostile to our friends. You reveal that during a NATO summit in July 2018, Trump said he had decided to withdraw from NATO if the allies did not commit to massively increase their defense spending within six months. According to your book, he dictated a message to you: “We will walk out, and not defend those who have not [paid].”  He did not carry out that threat because — mercifully — he has the attention span of a hyperactive 6-year-old.

You confirm that Trump’s ignorance is as vast as his ego, writing that he did not realize that the United Kingdom was a nuclear power and that he wondered if Finland was part of Russia. You also suggest that Trump is simply unhinged: You quote him saying it would be “cool” to invade Venezuela and that that nation is “really part of the United States.”

In sum, your book presents an ironclad case that Trump is utterly unfit for the office you thought he should win in 2016. As you write: “He second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government.”

But here’s the thing you may not realize. The stronger you build the case against Trump — and you have constructed a titanium-strength case — the more you indict yourself for not speaking out sooner. You could have helped stop Trump in 2016 — when all of his deficiencies were evident — by endorsing his opponent. More recently, you could have aided the impeachment managers by testifying under oath. But you refused to do that.

And yet you have the gall to write: “Had Democratic impeachment advocates not been so obsessed with their Ukraine blitzkrieg in 2019, had they taken the time to inquire more systematically about Trump’s behavior across his entire foreign policy, the impeachment outcome might well have been different.” There is no one who could have done more to aid a wider impeachment inquiry than you — but you failed us when the nation needed you most. You are, as Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D.-Calif.) says, an author but not a patriot.

I hope you will at least now have the decency to campaign against Trump as he seeks a second term to continue the calamitous foreign policy you now decry.

Trump Lashes Out as His Re-Election Prospects Darken

Donald Trump's lashing out in a desperate efforts to "change the discussion" may be working with some of his Kool-Aid drinking supporters - I just had a Facebook set to with one - but the polls, both nationally and in key swing states, show that more and more Americans are growing fed up with Trump gross malfeasance in handling the Covid-19 pandemic and the cratering economy.  Down ballot Republicans are worrying that Trump may drag them down with him.  Though Trump fails to see, it, many are belatedly tiring of his incessant lies. Nonetheless, expect more and more lashing out and more and more lies as Trump seeks distract and deflect from his horrific failures and continues his efforts to gaslight voters in general.  Trump seemingly cannot recognize that his crime boss-like ways in his shady real estate business do not translate to holding high elected office.  A piece in Time looks at the behavior of the psychotic occupant of the White House. Here are highlight:

President Trump wanted to see a rocket launch. On the day the U.S. topped 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, Trump was at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center to watch two astronauts blast off inside a capsule built by billionaire Elon Musk. The President may have been hoping for an escape—maybe not from the Earth, but from the drumbeat of devastating headlines. The stormy skies above Cape Canaveral seemed to echo Trump’s temper.

A tragic time for the country has become a dire moment for the President’s re-election prospects. The toll of the coronavirus pandemic is mounting, nearly 40 million Americans are out of work, and Trump is trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden among key sectors of the population and in crucial swing states. His ability to communicate directly to his voters has been undercut by Twitter’s decision to begin fact-checking misinformation in his feed, and he still cannot hold the large rallies that are crucial to his campaign strategy.

The circumstances have left Trump fuming behind the scenes. . . . . Trump has lashed out repeatedly at his critics, to a degree that is rare even for him. He has been stoking unfounded conspiracies about a decades-old accidental death in the former congressional office of Joe Scarborough, now his cable news nemesis, prompting the family of the deceased woman to ask Trump to stop.

He has continued to undermine public-health efforts by refusing to wear a mask in public. He’s further frayed the country’s democratic institutions by conducting a purge of the inspectors general tasked with ferreting out government waste. And he’s sought to undermine faith in November’s election, attacking states’ use of mail-in ballots, which are legal, have a track record of expanding voter access and have not been linked to wide-spread fraud.

It’s the instinct to punch back which sometimes plays out in ways like this,” the White House official says, warning against trying to ascribe “too much grand strategy” to the outbursts. Aides close to Trump have come to see his Twitter feed as a release valve for the President, and have given up on trying to rein in his impulses on the platform.

Some observers see in Trump’s outbursts an attempt to change the subject. . . . . This isn’t the first time Trump has lobbed incendiary tweets to try to deflect. But a “look over there” strategy has rarely been tested during a public health crisis in a time of national grief, with American lives on the line and a presidential election just months away. As the pandemic continues, Trump’s electoral prospects are worsening. The Real Clear Politics polling average finds Trump trailing Biden by an average of more than 5 points nationally, and losing to the former Vice President in most key swing states, including Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—the troika that delivered him the White House in 2016.

Some prominent Republicans say the President has crossed the line with the attacks he’s lobbed in recent days. “We’re in the middle of a pandemic, he’s the Commander-in-Chief of this nation, and it’s causing great pain to the family of the young woman who died, so I would urge him to stop it,” Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the chair of the House Republican Conference, said May 27, referencing Trump’s repeated implication that Scarborough had been involved in the death of staff member Lori Klausutis in 2001.

For its part, Trump’s 2020 campaign is attempting to reframe his tantrums as part of his blunt personality that gets results. . . . . But as Trump continues grasping for distractions, even the rocket launch couldn’t provide the outlet he craved. Just 16 minutes before liftoff, the launch was scrubbed because of bad weather.

The issue is tht Trump is Trump and ignores advice and counsel.  He is a self-centered narcissist incapable of telling the truth and who ignores anything and anyone who doesn't tell him what he wants to hear. Nothing would be more sweet than to see him suffer a landslide defeat which might be more than his fragile mental state can handle. That said, the worse the polling, the more dangerous Trump will become.  Nothing and no one matters to the man except his ego and sense of self-importance. .  

Der Trumpenführer to Sign Executive Order on Social Media Companies,

The day after Twitter felt compelled to attach a warning to some of Donald Trump's tweets containing gross falsehoods (to thereby prompt readers to fact-check Trump's claims), much like a (i) petulant self-absorbed child or (ii) banana  republic dictator, Donald Trump claims he will sign an executive order likely punishing social media companies that resist giving a platform for his lies and deliberately false propaganda.  Spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany (who is severely challenged herself when it comes to truth and veracity) confirmed Trump's intentions to reporters aboard Air Force One, traveling with Trump to Washington from Florida. Trump's threatened action confirms that he sees himself as a monarch accountable to no one.  In reality, questions remain as to what Trump can realistically do to get revenge on those who will not disseminate his lies.   CNN Business looks at the controversy:

Donald Trump threatened to "regulate" or even "close" down social media platforms in a series of tweets over the last day after Twitter added a fact-check label to some of his posts. But Trump's options for cracking down on Twitter and other platforms over how they moderate their platforms are somewhat limited, legal experts say.

The options at Trump's disposal could range from pushing for new legislation to pressuring US regulators to sue the companies, none of which are guaranteed to accomplish what the president is threatening to do. The most "obvious" course of action would be for Trump to seek changes to the Communications Decency Act, which shields tech platforms from legal liability for a wide range of online content, according to Andrew Schwartzman, senior counselor at the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society.
 There has been an ongoing push, led by the Justice Department and Republicans in Congress, to do just that. But changing the law would require building broad consensus in a deadlocked Congress. The Trump administration could not go it alone. And a new law that specifies how tech companies must police their platforms could raise questions about the law's constitutionality. 

Trump could pressure agencies such as the FTC and the Federal Communications Commission to take action against social media companies. But the agencies have previously resisted efforts by the White House to transform them into arbiters of political speech, with officials privately voicing opposition to a draft executive order that experts at the time said tested the limits of agency jurisdiction. The FCC regulates phone and broadband infrastructure, said Schwartzman, and lacks much jurisdiction over Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB) in the first place. Schwartzman said one way Trump could seek to "harass" social media companies would be to pressure the FCC to deny those companies licenses for unrelated experiments involving satellite internet or wireless spectrum. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has considered establishing a White House commission to study allegations of conservative bias. But that only underscores the limits of Trump's direct influence on the matter.
 Despite the limitations, growing tensions with the White House could still be perceived as a threat to the companies. Twitter and Facebook saw their shares dip on Wednesday on a day when the overall market was up.

Others argue that Trump should be allowed to lie and show his true self, but that argument forgets that a wide swath of the public lacks the knowledge - dare I say, intelligence - recognize the level of the untruthfulness.  A column in the Washington Post makes the case of allowing Trump to hang himself.  Here are excerpts:

Timothy Klausutis is right: His late wife deserves better than a president who has cynically seized on the tragic circumstances of her death at 28 and “perverted it for perceived political gain.”

Basic human decency, a quality manifestly lacking in Trump, argues in favor of granting Klausutis’s request. Yet, while my heart aches for him and his family, I think that, on balance, deleting the tweets would be a mistake.

Twitter is both a private company and a powerful public platform. Once it assumes the role of deciding what speech by public officials is to be allowed and what is to be taken down, it has ventured onto the slipperiest of slopes. I’m not sure I want Dorsey or his team deciding what the public should and shouldn’t see from the elected president of the United States. Even this one.

[U]nder Twitter’s ordinary terms of service, the platform would not only remove the tweets but also perhaps even Trump himself; some people have advocated for just that. But the president, like any world leader — except more so, with his 80 million followers — is no ordinary tweeter. The argument over what to do about Trump on Twitter is a subset of the larger debate about how to treat his outbursts and falsehoods, in particular whether the media becomes complicit simply by presenting them to a wider public. Thus, stretching back to the 2016 campaign, there has been vigorous debate over whether and how to cover Trump’s misinformation- and venom-filled campaign rallies. [B]ut I would argue that shining sunlight on Trump’s idiocy is the best disinfectant. Let the public witness him in his full glory and make its own judgment about whether he deserves a second term. Combine that with real-time chyrons and commentary calling out his falsehoods.

That is what Twitter usefully and appropriately did Tuesday when it appended a fact check to another set of Trump tweets about the supposed dangers of voting by mail. Twitter should do the same with Trump’s tweets about Scarborough

The fundamental problem isn’t Twitter — it’s Trump. He shouldn’t be de-platformed, but he must be defeated.

Behind Trump’s Demand to Reopen Churches: Slipping Poll Numbers

This post is a follow up on one from yesterday but is important because it reveals that Donald Trump doesn't give a rat's ass about churches, the free exercise of religion, or the safety of congregants at church services.  Rather, it is ALL about him and alarm withing his campaign that his polling with white evangelicals and white Catholics has taken a major hit thanks to his bungling of the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic.  His demand the church services be deemed "essential services" is a desperate attempt to restore slipping support among the falsely named Christian Right - which is neither Christian nor right on almost any issue. Trump knows that without the support of this demographic he will likely be toast in November, and hence his call to allow church services even if it means infecting congregants.  Anyone who believes Trump gives a damn about them is delusional.  With Trump, it is all about him 27/7 and nothing and no one else matters except in the context of how it helps him.  A piece Politico looks at what is really motivating Trump and it has NOTHING to do with religious freedom (A piece in Business Insider notes that church services are "super spreaders" of covid-19).  Here are article highlights:

A sudden shift in support for Donald Trump among religious conservatives is triggering alarm bells inside his reelection campaign, where top aides have long banked on expanding the president’s evangelical base as a key part of their strategy for victory this November.

The anxiety over Trump’s standing with the Christian right surfaced after a pair of surveys by reputable outfits earlier this month found waning confidence in the administration’s coronavirus response among key religious groups, with a staggering decline in the president’s favorability among white evangelicals and white Catholics. Both are crucial constituencies that supported Trump by wide margins in 2016 and could sink his reelection prospects if their turnout shrinks this fall.

The polls paint a bleak picture for Trump, who has counted on broadening his religious support by at least a few percentage points to compensate for weakened appeal with women and suburban populations. . . . . Another person close to the campaign described an April survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, which showed a double-digit decline in Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals (-11), white Catholics (-12) and white mainline protestants (-18) from the previous month, as “pretty concerning.”

To safeguard his relationship with religious conservatives, Trump on Friday demanded that America‘s governors permit houses of worship to immediately reopen, and threatened to “override“ state leaders who decline to obey his directive. The announcement . . . . featured clear appeals to white evangelicals, many of whom have long supported Trump's socially conservative agenda.

Following the PRRI survey, which was conducted while Trump was a dominant presence at televised daily briefings by his administration's coronavirus task force, Pew Research Center released new data last week that showed a 7-point increase from April to May in white Catholics who disapprove of Trump’s response to the Covid-19 crisis and a 6-point decline among white evangelicals who previously gave him positive marks.

Trump campaign aides, White House officials and outside allies are responding to the threat by boosting their outreach to religious voters and promising to prioritize religious gatherings as they push to reopen the U.S. economy.

It was not immediately clear whether the president's order on Friday — that state and local officials must take immediate action to reopen religious institutions — was legally permissible, nor was it clear how administration officials planned to enforce the guidance.

Guidelines released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about reopening certain establishments — including schools, public transit systems and child care facilities — did not mention how religious institutions should go about returning to in-person worship services and ministry opportunities. One senior administration official said the guidance was omitted due to concerns that the prescriptions CDC staffers planned to provide were too restrictive.

It’s unlikely that critics of church closings alone are responsible for the decline in Trump’s favorability among critical religious demographics. According to the Pew survey, 43 percent of white evangelicals and 52 percent of white Catholics think the current restrictions on public activity in their areas are appropriate versus 42 percent and 31 percent, respectively, who think fewer restrictions would be better. Greater shares of white evangelicals and white Catholics also said they are more afraid about their state governments lifting restrictions on public activity too soon than they are about leaving the restrictions in place for too long.

Laura Gifford, a historian of politics and religion at George Fox University, said it’s likely become harder for the president’s supporters to embrace his plans for an accelerated reopening of the country. The more Trump contradicts health officials who have warned against reopening schools and nonessential businesses, she suggested, the less accepting his usual supporters might become of his overall response. . . . . “This is something where that is harder to ignore than previous controversies or crises because it has life-and-death consequences for congregations and religious populations.”

Part of the strategy Trump allies have adopted to protect his relationship with conservative Christians is to frame the novel coronavirus — and church closures in response to social distancing restrictions — as a threat to religious freedom. . . . . But the religious freedom framing might not matter if the economy remains in free fall through the November election, even after churches are permitted to reopen and conservative outside groups ramp up their outreach to religious voters.

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. 

Why Trump Failed America

If one is honest, looks at the facts, all of Trump's lies, and considers all the ways that the Trump/Pence regime weakened America's ability to meet the Covid-19 crisis  - e.g, disbanding the National Security Council pandemic directorate, slashing funding for the CDC, and rescinding Obama era regulations for nursing homes that might has slowed the spread of the virus among the  nursing home residents - the only conclusion is that Trump has spectacularly failed America. But even beyond all of this, there is an added reason for Trump's failure: he is a malignant narcissist who lies incessantly and cares only about himself and satiating his unquenchable ego.  All the warning signs were on open display ranging from his boasts about "grabbing p*ssy" without consequence to being able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue without consequence.  Sadly, Trump's calls to racism and religious extremism were followed by many who should have known better even as Democrats in a funk stayed home and by default voted for Trump.  A column at CNN looks at all of this and Trump's very nature that guaranteed his huge failure to safeguard America.  Americans should never again put someone with Trump's mental and psychological illness in the Oval Office - or any high office.  Here are column excerpts:

Watching President Donald Trump wrestle with this epic crisis reminds me of the old fable about the Scorpion and the Frog.

You'll remember that the scorpion asks the frog for a ride across a river, only to sting the frog when they are midway across. When the startled frog asks why the scorpion would repay his kindness so cruelly and kill them both, the scorpion shrugs. "It's my nature." Trump could have made this unparalleled and agonizing trial for our country an occasion for personal triumph — if he were only able to take the personal out of it. But that is not his nature.

This moment of extraordinary pain and crisis calls for steadiness and sobriety; empathy for the widespread pain and suffering of others; absolute transparency; a willingness to listen and learn; and rigorous, disciplined attention to detail. None of these qualities are within his nature.

Many governors across America have enhanced their popularity simply by doing their jobs during this deadly outbreak of the coronavirus. Even in a polarized nation, it might have been the same for Trump if, from the start, he had leveled with the country about the nature of the threat, followed expert advice and made the case for the painful and decisive steps required to save lives.   But that's not his nature. Instead, the [Trump] President spent six weeks dismissing the threat and offering false assurances as public health experts frantically warned what was to come.
 Trump ostensibly feared that an acknowledgment of the severity of the virus and the draconian steps required to protect Americans would tank the stock market and the economy, which he had hoped to make the springboard to his re-election. So he insisted on an alternative storyline. US cases would not surpass 15, he said in February, even as some public health experts warned of a potential pandemic. "Miraculously," he suggested with a flourish, the virus could just fade away with a change in the weather.
 As Covid-19 had begun its deadly march across the nation, Trump was accusing Democrats and the media of politicizing the disease in what amounted to a Coronavirus "hoax" to damage him.

While some governors were mobilizing against the threat, [Trump] the President sent the nation and federal bureaucracy the opposite signal, delaying the necessary steps, which cost the nation valuable time to gird for the battle and deepened the crisis.
 Since the day he finally recalibrated, appearing at the podium in the White House briefing room in March to declare war on Covid-19, [Trump] the President has spent most of his briefing time spinning his administration's uneven and tardy response (which he rated a 10 out of 10) rather than giving the American people the sober and accurate assessment they need. Truth and accountability are not his nature. Americans of all stripes are bound together by a common calamity, hungry for a unifying leader who will rise above partisanship. But that is not Trump's nature. He has suggested that governors, desperately asking the federal government for more testing supplies, were acting out of political motivation.
 Trump is who Trump has been from the beginning of his long career in the public eye: a super narcissist and shameless self-promoter, unwilling to accept responsibility or the truth and unable to think about anyone but himself. If he had been more in this historic moment, it would have done so much to strengthen his brand and his prospects of reelection -- not to mention comfort his wounded country. But it is no surprise that he could not. It's just not his nature.

Trump Is Asking Americans to Play Russian Roulette With Their Lives

Since Donald Trump cares for no one but himself - and his re-election chances in particular - it should come as no surprise that he is in a rush to reopen the economy to (i) get things back to what passes for normal, and (ii) most importantly, in the hope Americans will forget how badly he bungled the nation's response to the pandemic in the critical first six weeks of its initial arrival in the USA.  To achieve his goals, he is asking Americans to play Russian roulette with their lives and the lives of loved ones. Medical experts rightly fear a premature reopening of the economy could bring a second wave of infections and more deaths - especially given America's continued horrendous shortage of testing capacity.  Sure, I want things back to "normal" - with my husband's salon closed, we have lost half our income (yes, we are luckier than many) while the expenses of our properties, the husband's health insurance and other costs continue.  I'd like to not have to meet clients armed with a mask and virus killing wipes - wondering all the time if one of them is infected and doesn't yet know it - and feeling some fear during what used to be a routine business exercise for me.  Without wide scale testing, we cannot know who might pose a danger, yet Der Trumpenführer doesn't care.  I'm smart enough to know that my life (and that of my family members) means absolutely zero to him.  Sadly, his base is too stupid to grasp this reality. It's all about him and no one else.  A column in the New York Times looks at Trump's selfish and dangerous agenda.  Here are highlights:

“LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.”

With these three short tweets last week, President Trump attempted to kick off the post-lockdown phase of America’s coronavirus crisis. It should be called: “American Russian roulette: The Covid-19 version.’’

What Trump was saying with those tweets was: Everybody just go back to work. From now on, each of us individually, and our society collectively, is going to play Russian roulette. We’re going to bet that we can spin through our daily lives — work, shopping, school, travel — without the coronavirus landing on us. And if it does, we’ll also bet that it won’t kill us.

More specifically: As a society, we will be betting that as large numbers of people stop sheltering in place, the number of people who will still get infected with Covid-19 and require hospitalization will be less than the number of hospital beds, intensive care units, respirators, doctors, nurses and protective gear needed to take care of them.

Because it is clear that millions of Americans are going to stop sheltering in place — their own President is now urging them to liberate themselves — before we have a proper testing, tracking and tracing system set up.

[A]s individuals, every person will be playing Russian roulette every minute of every day: Do I get on this crowded bus to go to work or not? What if I get on the subway and the person next to me is not wearing gloves and a mask? What if they sneeze? Do I get in the elevator at the office if there is another person on it? Do I go into the office lunchroom or not? Do I stop for a drink at this bar, where the stools are six feet apart, or that crowded one my friends chose?

What will be so cruel about this American version of Russian roulette is how unfair it will be. Some people will have no choice but to take the subway or the bus to work. Some people will have to send their kids back to school because they can’t afford to stay home from work. Some bosses will demand that their employees show up to reopen their workplace, but some of those employees may be afraid to come back. Do you fire them? Do they bring a lawsuit against you if you do, or do they go on Twitter and post a picture of how closely together you forced them to work — six inches apart, not six feet?

“Liberate”? Think about the use of that word. We were not in jail! We were not doing something wrong! We were doing what our president, governor, mayor, and national epidemic experts told us to do: behave responsibly and shelter in place to break the transmission of this virus.

Trump was cynically trying to curry favor with his base by implying that the Democratic governors, following his own national guidelines, were unfairly locking people up, depriving them of their livelihoods. Is there anything more irresponsible that this president could do, after weeks of complimenting the American people for how they pulled together and sacrificed to shelter in place — patriotically doing their part to bend the curve of this virus?

So, folks, forget about all those White House briefings. You don’t have to tune in another day. When the president is calling on governors to “let their people go” before comprehensive testing facilities are in place, he is basically saying that, until there is a vaccine, we are betting on herd immunity. Achieving herd immunity requires that more than two-thirds of a community be immune, a process that could involve many more deaths, if proper preparations are not in place. I just know three things:

First, this is the bet Trump is urging you to make in his “liberate” tweets — when he should be ordering out the National Guard and mobilizing American industry to get testing everywhere.

Second, this bet will fall very unfairly and unevenly in our society, when so little testing and tracing is in place.

And third, if this is the future, every business, restaurant, hotel, theater, sporting facility, factory, nonprofit and government office needs to ask itself: What does my business look like when, on the best days, the responsible people coming to my door will be wearing a mask, gloves, distancing six feet apart and volunteering to have their temperature taken before they enter, and the irresponsible ones won’t be? How do I handle that? . . . .Because that will be our economy until we have a vaccine or have established herd immunity.

Bottom line, my fellow Americans: Your president is telling you that you’re on your own to make these decisions. And if this strategy works, you can be sure that he will take credit. And if it doesn’t, you can be sure that he will tweet that it was all Anthony Fauci’s idea.

Trump’s Desperate and Deadly Search for a Scapegoat

One thing that can be depended upon when dealing with a malignant narcissist such as Donald Trump is that they will NEVER admit that anything is their fault. Any misfortune or calamity MUST be the fault of someone else because their narcissistic personality disorder prevents them from ever admitting a mistake or miscalculation - no matter what the objective evidence indicates otherwise. Today, in a further morally bankrupt attempt to shift blame from his own and his administrations failures and incompetence in handling the coronavirus threat, Trump has targeted the World Health Organization and cut US funding to the international organization - a move criticized even by a number of otherwise self-prostituting Republicans.  A column in the New York Times looks at this dangerous move by a tyrant who seemingly increasingly sees himself as a monarch rather than a elected official who serves at the bidding of the public.  Here are column highlights:

Thousands of Americans would be alive today if President Trump had spent more time listening to the World Health Organization instead of trying to destroy it.

Trump’s announcement that he is halting American funding for the W.H.O. just as the world is facing a raging pandemic is a dangerous attempt to find a scapegoat for his own failings.

Yes, some of the complaints about the W.H.O.are valid,  . . . . But it has still managed the coronavirus crisis far better than the Trump administration has.

The W.H.O. tweeted its first warning about the coronavirus on Jan. 4 and then rang alarm bells, culminating at the end of that month when it declared a “public health emergency of international concern.” It developed an effective diagnostic test that is used in dozens of countries, while the United States still cannot manage adequate testing.

In late January and in February, the W.H.O. issued increasingly urgent warnings about the coronavirus. Trump ignored them, instead insisting that it was “totally under control,” predicted the number of infections would drop, declared that “it’s going to disappear” and consistently downplayed the virus while talking up the stock market.

Trump’s passivity — even as the W.H.O. and his own advisers warned him of the risks — squandered the chance to acquire more personal protective equipment for doctors and nurses. His likening of Covid-19 to the flu led people to join public gatherings like Mardi Gras and Florida spring break, and that is one reason the United States has had 80 deaths per million inhabitants from Covid-19, compared with four per million in South Korea and fewer than one per million in Taiwan.

The W.H.O. is bureaucratic, frustrating, timid — and indispensable. No other organization can fill its international role overseeing the fight against disease. It has battled an outbreak of Ebola since last year in Congo, and that’s one reason we haven’t had Ebola cases in the United States.

Every day, the W.H.O. saves lives. It has promoted safe childbirth, and the number of women dying in childbirth has been cut almost in half over 25 years. It fights female genital mutilation and helps women with obstetric fistula. It is struggling to eliminate cervical cancer. It is part of the campaign against polio.

Normally, an American president is a leader in global health, and Democrats and Republicans have often cooperated on a humanitarian agenda. President George W. Bush started a program against H.I.V./AIDS called Pepfar that has saved 17 million lives. President Barack Obama helped lead the global effort to end the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014-16.

In contrast, Trump has provided zero global leadership against the coronavirus, and he is now trying to crush the one organization providing such leadership.

Trump’s main complaint about the W.H.O. is that it is too close to China, and there’s some truth to that — but Trump himself fawned over China’s response to the pandemic. “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump tweeted on Jan. 24. “I want to thank President Xi.”

Gutting the W.H.O. would mean more kids dying of malnutrition, more moms dying of cervical cancer, and the coronavirus infecting more people in more countries — impairing the pandemic response, which may well cost even more American lives. And all because an American president is seeking a scapegoat for his own ineptitude.

Yes, Americans have died unnecessarily from Covid-19, and I’ve been seared by my own reporting in “hot zones” of New York hospitals. But if Trump insists on holding people accountable, he needn’t denounce the W.H.O. He can gaze in the mirror.