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.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

Trump Is About to Go Full Coronavirus Death Denier

Photo: Doug Mills/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock.

With unemployment soaring, the economy crumbling and consumer confidence in the toilet, Donald Trump is desperate to convince Americans - or at a minimum, his knuckle dragging, Fox News viewing base - that reopening the economy is the correct thing to do since his entire re-election campaign plain had been to boast about the strong economy and stock market.  The Covid-19 pandemic has shredded that plan and Trump seemingly knows he is toast if the economy remains depressed.  To get the economy reopened Trump needs to down play the reliability of the Covid-19 death numbers for two reasons: (i) to downplay  the danger Americans face if they venture out and spend money, and (ii) to be in a position to claim that any resurgence of the virus due to premature reopening is fake news. Yes, it's a mindset and agenda that is totally callous toward those who may become infected and die and which shows that Trump only cares about himself.  The truth and lives of Americans simply do not matter to Trump. . A piece in New York Magazine looks at the growing efforts yo deny the number of Covid-19 deaths.  Here are highlights:

During the initial stages of the coronavirus outbreak, the Trump administration believed the media was exaggerating the virus in order to scare people and hurt Trump’s polling. “The reason they are paying so much attention to it today is that they think this is going to bring down the president,” said then–chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. Later, they insisted the media was exaggerating the economic contraction. Trump has repeatedly floated predictions for the number of deaths from the pandemic that were quickly exceeded by reality.

The next step, reports Axios, will be to begin publicly questioning the listed totals of coronavirus deaths. “Trump has vented that the numbers seem inflated,” it reports, as have several people around him who believe the same.

This is not just a matter of public spin, like Trump’s campaign to pressure the news media into reporting that his tiny inauguration crowd was larger than it was. The news source he trusts, Fox News, has been running hours of programming questioning the death totals.

All of these theories are pure crankery. Indeed, the official recorded death count is lower, not higher, than the actual coronavirus death toll. People who die at home from the virus without receiving medical attention have not been included in the official totals. But the fact that Trump and his allies have developed so many different pseudo-statistical objections shows how desperate they are to cast doubt on the official numbers.

The propaganda campaign has worked. The percentage of frequent Fox News watchers who believe that the official coronavirus death counts are exaggerated has risen from 45 percent last month to 61 percent this month. What’s more, he believes everybody is as dishonest as he is. The deep state would like to defeat Trump, and embarrassing Trump by publishing death tolls higher than Trump predicted would occur will make Trump look bad, so of course they’re cooking the books. Inventing fake statistics to support his goal is exactly what Trump would do, so naturally he believes it is being done against him.

We Are Witnessing Trump Unraveling

Those who have followed Donald Trump even occasionally over the years could have predicted that his presidency would be a dumpster fire - shit show is another term that springs to mind.  What's equally scary is that a comparison of videos of Trump 10-15 years ago versus now show a severe degradation of his verbal and cognitive skills.  A piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican who served in the George W. Bush White House lays out the "steady, uninterrupted intellectual and psychological decomposition of Donald Trump."  Of course, none of this recorded intellectual and psychological deterioration will sway his most loyal supporters who remain blinded by the bigotry and hatred of others and refuse to admit that they made a huge mistake in voting for Trump in 2016.  Rest assured that Trump will heap on more racism and misogyny to maintain their loyalty.  Here are highlights from The Atlantic:

In case there was any doubt, the past dozen days have proved we’re at the point in his presidency where Donald Trump has become his own caricature, a figure impossible to parody, a man whose words and actions are indistinguishable from an Alec Baldwin skit on Saturday Night Live.

President Trump’s pièce de résistance came during a late April coronavirus task-force briefing, when he floated using “just very powerful light” inside the body as a potential treatment for COVID-19 and then, for good measure, contemplated injecting disinfectant as a way to combat the effects of the virus “because you see it gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number on them, so it’d be interesting to check that.”

But the burlesque show just keeps rolling on.

Take this past weekend, when former President George W. Bush delivered a three-minute video as part of The Call to Unite, a 24-hour live-stream benefiting COVID-19 relief.

Bush joined other past presidents, spiritual and community leaders, frontline workers, artists, musicians, psychologists, and Academy Award winning actors. They offered advice, stories, and meditations, poetry, prayers, and performances. The purpose of The Call to Unite . . . was to offer practical ways to support others, to provide hope, encouragement, empathy, and unity.

In his video, which went viral, Bush—in whose White House I worked—never mentioned Trump. . . . He emphasized that “empathy and simple kindness are essential, powerful tools of national recovery.” And America’s 43rd president asked us to “remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat.” . . . . Bush concluded, “We rise or fall together, and we are determined to rise.”

That was too much for Trump, who attacked his Republican predecessor on (where else?) Twitter: “[Bush] was nowhere to be found in speaking up against the greatest Hoax in American history!”

But there’s more. On the same weekend that he attacked Bush for making an appeal to national unity, Trump said this about Kim Jong Un, one of the most brutal leaders in the world: “I, for one, am glad to see he is back, and well!”

Then, Sunday night, sitting at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial for a town-hall interview with Fox News, Trump complained that he is “treated worse” than President Abraham Lincoln.

By Monday morning, the president was peddling a cruel and bizarre conspiracy theory aimed at MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, a Trump critic, with Trump suggesting in his tweet that a “cold case” be opened to look into the death of an intern in 2001.

I could have picked a dozen other examples over the past 10 days, but these five will suffice. They illustrate some of the essential traits of Donald Trump: the shocking ignorance, ineptitude, and misinformation; his constant need to divide Americans and attack those who are trying to promote social solidarity; his narcissism, deep insecurity, utter lack of empathy, and desperate need to be loved; his feelings of victimization and grievance; his affinity for ruthless leaders; and his fondness for conspiracy theories.

None of these traits are new in Trump; they are part of the reason why some of us were warning about him long before he won the presidency, even going back to 2011. . . . . We are witnessing the steady, uninterrupted intellectual and psychological decomposition of an American president. It’s something the Trump White House cannot hide—indeed, it doesn’t even try to hide it anymore. There is not even the slightest hint of normalcy.

More than ever, Trump will try to convince Americans that “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” to quote his own words in 2018.

That won’t be easy in a pandemic, as the death toll mounts and the economy collapses and the failures of the president multiply. But that doesn’t mean Trump won’t try. It’s all he has left, so Americans have to prepare for it.

Trump and his apparatchiks will not only step up their propaganda; they will increase their efforts to exhaust our critical thinking and to annihilate truth, in the words of the Russian dissident Garry Kasparov. We will see even more “alternative facts.” We will see even more brazen attempts to rewrite history. We will hear even more crazy conspiracy theories. We will witness even more lashing out at reporters, more rage, and more lies.

We will see more extreme appeals to the fringe base of Trump’s party, including right-wing militias.

Watching formerly serious individuals on the right, including the Christian right, become Trump courtiers has been a painful and dispiriting thing for many of us to witness. In the process, they have reconfigured their own character, intellect, and moral sensibilities to align with the disordered mind and deformed ethical world of Donald Trump.

And we will see, as we have for the entire Trump presidency, the national Republican Party fall in line. Many are speaking out in defense of Trump while other timid souls who know better have gone sotto voce out of fear and cowardice that they have justified to themselves, and tried less successfully to justify to others.

What this means is that Americans are facing not just a conventional presidential election in 2020 but also, and most important, a referendum on reality and epistemology. Donald Trump is asking us to enter even further into his house of mirrors. He is asking us to live within a lie, to live within his lie, for four more years. The duty of citizenship in America today is to refuse to live within that lie.

There are also the daily acts of integrity of common men and women who will not believe the lies or spread the lies, who will not allow the foundation of truth—factual truth, moral truth—to be destroyed, and who, in standing for truth, will help heal this broken land.

Wednesday Male Beauty

More Tuesday Male Beauty

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.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

Beware of Those Who Never Admit Having Been Wrong

As America continues to reel socially and economically from the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, we continue to see wrong response after wrong response to the virus and the threat it poses by both Donald Trump - a man who never ever admits error - and his circle off sycophants who represent a who's who of a Republican Party/conservative movement that eschews expertise and basic competence, not to men any ability to admit error. These individuals tell Trump what he wants to hear and frighteningly are listened to over the advice of true experts who find themselves silenced - none of the doctors on Trump's Covid-19 response team are being allowed to testify before Congress for the likely reason that what they have to say will upset Der Trumpenführer.  A column in the New York Times looks at the consequence of never admitting error especially when faced with a pandemic that does not lend itself to spin on Fox News.  Here are column highlights:

“You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero.”

We have contained this, and the economy is “holding up nicely.” It’s not nearly as serious as the common flu. We’re going to have 50,000 or 60,000 deaths, and that’s great. OK, we may have more than 100,000 deaths, but we’re doing a great job and should reopen the economy.

You sometimes hear people say that Donald Trump and his minions minimized the dangers of Covid-19, and that this misjudgment helps explain why their policy response has been so disastrously inadequate. But this statement, while true, misses crucial aspects of what’s going on.

For Trump and company didn’t make a one-time mistake. They grossly minimized the pandemic and its dangers every step of the way, week after week over a period of months. And they’re still doing it.

Now, everyone makes bad predictions; God knows I have. But when you keep getting things wrong, and especially when you keep getting them wrong in the same direction, you’re supposed to engage in some self-reflection — and learn from your mistakes.

To engage in such self-reflection, however, you have to be willing to admit that you were wrong in the first place.

We all know that Trump himself is incapable of making such an admission. At a time of crisis, America is led by a whiny, childlike man whose ego is too fragile to let him concede ever having made any kind of error. And he has surrounded himself with people who share his lack of character.

But where do these people come from? What has struck me, as details of Trump’s coronavirus debacle continue to emerge, is that he wasn’t getting bad advice from obscure, fringe figures whose only claim to fame was their successful sycophancy. On the contrary, the people telling him what he wanted to hear were, by and large, pillars of the conservative establishment with long pre-Trump careers.

On Saturday The Washington Post reported that in late March Trump was unhappy with epidemiological models suggesting a death toll over 100,000 — which, by the way, now seems highly likely. So the White House created its own team led by Kevin Hassett, whom The Post describes as “a former chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers with no background in infectious diseases.” . . . . What The Post didn’t say was that aside from not having any background in epidemiology, Hassett has an, um, interesting record as an economist.

In the mid-2000s Hassett denied that there was a housing bubble, suggesting that only liberals believed that there was.

Finally, Hassett promised that the 2017 Trump tax cut would lead to a big boost in business investment; it didn’t, but he insisted that it did.

You might think that an economist would pay some professional penalty for this kind of track record — not simply one of making bad predictions, which everyone does, but of both being wrong at every important juncture and refusing to admit or learn from mistakes.

The moral of this story, I’d argue, is that observers trying to understand America’s lethally bad response to the coronavirus focus too much on Trump’s personal flaws, and not enough on the character of the party he leads.

Yes, Trump’s insecurity leads him to reject expertise, listen only to people who tell him what makes him feel good and refuse to acknowledge error. But disdain for experts, preference for incompetent loyalists and failure to learn from experience are standard operating procedure for the whole modern G.O.P.

Trump’s narcissism and solipsism are especially blatant, even flamboyant. But he isn’t an outlier; he’s more a culmination of the American right’s long-term trend toward intellectual degradation. And that degradation, more than Trump’s character, is what is leading to vast numbers of unnecessary deaths.

More Monday Male Beauty

Andre Brunelli