Trump enters the stage

Sure. This point is correct and well taken. An essential loophole through which any President can crawl through in order to sustain the powers of executive power.

However…

The executive, thereby, can overcome any challenge by the other constitutional parts of governing, to delimit the balances between execution, legislation, and adjudication of programs which cal lawfully curb any one of the constitutional powers.

In this set up, the parts are not exclusively were formed to function, but the variously interact, by associating with each other to degrees of possibility, toward probable integrated levels, whereby , with the objective that use compromise and setting structural frameworks that allow planning to proceed, that do correspond to some measure of cooperation .

The problem here is limits of power which do expedite an easier way that an executive can find crawlspace, through which he can legitimize the essential space that the limits of power between checking and balancing those powers can be manipulated.

Under normal times, yeah5, sure, not much harm can be done to the original principles, however, in these tested times, when those very principles are challenged, the questions of remarking what the limits of power are, defy definitions.

What is the ultimate problem? Is a crisis of foreboding political chaos, that may even abridge the rule of executive rule as it applies to term limits become a qualifiable process, whereupon corruption is ok’d, as long as the party line , is upheld until the leading party is satisfied that status of motive to planning was a hieved, to guarantee the succession of their firm of it?

That is it, and I bet, that if Trump’s agenda still has not achieved Republican politi cal aims, it is not inconceivable for the Republicans to cause any imminent reason to suspend any limits that block them to sustain those won parts of their agenda which stop shirt of those guarantees.

Shumer pointed this out during the impeachment process quite well, and truth is not hidden in a formal declarative process of bully pulpits.

However in these extraordinary times, where the very constitutional framework is being internally challenged, questions like these becoming tweetfully repetitive, the sense if public understanding is being side swiped, and much Madison ave style opinions can interfere and change the process.

It is apropos that a very vested and wealthy man has been elected, as self representation overcomes that of the public.

That ultimately, power here curropts by necessity, is no surprise to anyone, but them what can account for the ideal transition which may undermine itself in the process?

Trump is right in the support of conserving something that which is universal in its scope right now, and so. are those who have to pay for it, the emerging underclass, but does this n it return society to the most foundemental questions facing mankind. that pit self interested moral questions against the ethical ones that need to concern the union as a whole?

Finally the role of intelligence. Colonialism caused the Union (US) to break away from Regal positions of power, and ultimately, a return becomes necessary. Finally to contain the vestiges of self controlled interest, over that of levels of laissez faire equlateral social control

The “free world” becomes burdened by the very firms if de facto economic colonialism that faces the new economic aristicracy. The firms as Ecmandu talks about have set a fixed universal image of power distribution a long time ago.

So You are right of course, but the playing field has changed entirely from the old singularly complex interplay in strategy, even intelligence, as a purveyor of distribution is be coming controlled for political purposes, and even the final ultimate weapons could be used in an ultimate showdown that seemingly every one wants to avoid at all cost.

The return to a singular power struggle can incite a madness if unforeeable proportions,and that is the question that everyone should share equally opportunity for, at the least.

The stage has been set, but the sets have formidable faults lines of demarcation.

<<<>>>>>>>><<<<>>>>>

President Donald Trump on Monday shared a handful of social media posts questioning the expertise of his own public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, and suggesting their scientific counsel was intended to thwart his political standing ahead of November’s general election.

In a burst of early morning online activity, Trump retweeted messages from the politically conservative former game show personality Chuck Woolery — who served stints hosting “Wheel of Fortune” and “Love Connection” — which lamented the “most outrageous lies” being spread about the coronavirus pandemic.

“Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust. I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I’m sick of it,” Woolery wrote in a tweet shared by the president.

In another post Trump retweeted, Woolery claimed there exists “so much evidence, yes scientific evidence, that schools should open this fall. It’s worldwide and it’s overwhelming. BUT NO.”

Trump also retweeted a message from Mark Young, Woolery’s co-host on his “Blunt Force Truth” podcast, which asked: “So based on Dr. Fauci and the Democrats, I will need an ID card to go shopping but not to vote?”

As the United States has posted peak numbers of daily Covid-19 infections in the past few weeks, the president’s relationship with Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, plummeted to a new nadir over the weekend.

The White House reportedly told various news outlets Saturday and Sunday that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things,” and furnished a lengthy list of statements the widely respected immunologist made in the early days of the outbreak.

The type of smear effort directed by the Trump administration against one of its most public-facing, trusted members is traditionally reserved for political rivals, and came after the president expressed public dissatisfaction with Fauci for his dire assessments of the outbreak in congressional testimony and media interviews.

Fauci, who told the Financial Times last Friday that he had not briefed Trump for at least two months, warned at a Senate health committee hearing in late June that the U.S. could register as many as 100,000 additional cases per day if further safeguards were not put in place.

In a livestreamed conversation last Monday with his boss, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, Fauci said the U.S. was still “knee-deep” in its first wave of coronavirus infections, describing the outbreak as “serious situation that we have to address immediately.”

But Trump was dismissive of Fauci in an interview last Tuesday with Gray Television’s Greta Van Susteren, saying: “I think we are in a good place. I disagree with him.” And speaking with Fox News’ Sean Hannity last Thursday, Trump remarked that “Dr. Fauci is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.”

Top administration officials have begun to follow the president’s lead in piling on Fauci, including White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who memorably sparred with the doctor in April over the efficacy of the controversial antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment.

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“Dr. Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public but he has been wrong about everything I have ever interacted with him on,” Navarro told The Washington Post in a story published Saturday, adding: “So when you ask me if I listen to Dr. Fauci’s advice, my answer is only with caution.”

Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Adm. Brett Giroir, the administration’s coronavirus testing czar, said that while “I respect Dr. Facui a lot,” he is “not 100 percent right, and he also doesn’t necessarily … have the whole national interest in mind. He looks at it from a very narrow public health point of view.”

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany addressed the friction between Fauci and his colleagues Monday on “Fox & Friends,” echoing Giroir and arguing that Fauci considers the pandemic response only through the lens of a “public health standpoint.”

“Dr. Fauci’s one member of a team. But rest assured, his viewpoint is represented, and the information gets to the president through” the White House coronavirus task force, McEnany said.

Increasingly ostracized within Trump’s federal government, Fauci did elicit declarations of support Monday from his peers in the medical community, who forcefully defended the veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

David Skorton, president and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges, and Ross McKinney, the association’s chief scientific officer, said in a statement that the AAMC “is extremely concerned and alarmed by efforts to discredit” Fauci, who “has been an independent and outspoken voice for truth as the nation has struggled to fight” the pandemic.

“Taking quotes from Dr. Fauci out of context to discredit his scientific knowledge and judgment will do tremendous harm to our nation’s efforts to get the virus under control, restore our economy, and return us to a more normal way of life,” Skorton and McKinney said. “America should be applauding Dr. Fauci for his service and following his advice, not undermining his credibility at this critical time.”

Fauci is not the administration’s only senior health official to have drawn the president’s ire in recent weeks. Trump similarly targeted CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield in a tweet last week that accused the public health agency’s guidelines for reopening schools of being “very tough & expensive.”

The president’s push to return students to classrooms in the fall represents the latest front in his pressure campaign for a broad-based economic reopening, in spite of surging Covid-19 caseloads.

The U.S. has notched records for new infections in late June and early July, with daily cases reaching 60,000 for the first time. On Sunday, Florida logged 15,000 new cases, surpassing the daily record reported by any single state since the start of the outbreak.

Although Trump ceded to bipartisan calls to wear a mask in public for the first time Saturday, during a visit to Walter Reed National Medical Center, he has remained reluctant to acknowledge the coronavirus’ threat as hot spots continue to emerge across in communities across the South and West.

He claimed in an interview with Fox Business earlier this month that the highly contagious disease is “at some point … going to sort of just disappear,” and asserted during an address at the White House marking Independence Day celebrations that “99 percent” of cases are “totally harmless.”

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Election projections as of 07/13/2020


Forecast: The race between Biden and Trump is within the true margin of error

Analysis by Harry Enten, CNN

Updated 6:29 PM EDT, Mon July 13, 2020



(CNN)There is little doubt that former Vice President Joe Biden is ahead in the polls right now. He regularly posts double-digit advantages nationally and is ahead in the key swing states. If the election were held today, Biden would almost certainly be elected president.

But the election is not being held today. It's being held in a little less than four months. That's a lot of time.

And given the size of Biden's lead (clear, but not a blowout), the race can definitely shift enough to characterize this race to be within the true margin of error.

To be clear, I don't mean that Biden and Trump have similar chances of winning -- far from it. Biden is clearly the favorite.

What I mean is that people often don't realize what odds actually mean. Something may not have a likely chance of occurring, but it's quite conceivable that it does happen.

Whenever you see a poll published, you'll see the result comes with a margin of error. The margin of error essentially means that for a given population, 95% of the time a poll's result will come within the margin of error of the true value. There's a 2.5% (1 out of 40) chance a result will fall outside the margin of error on the low side, and a 2.5% (1 out of 40) chance a result will fall outside the margin of error on the high side.

It's not shocking at all to receive a poll result back that's outside the margin of error. It's even less surprising when a poll comes in within the margin of error of the other results, though at the high or low end of the polling results published.

Borrowing from this margin-of-error concept, there's literally no reputable forecast I know of that suggests that Biden's advantage is outside that 95% confidence interval when projecting forward to November.

You can see how a race can change from this point forward by looking at history.

Earlier this month, I examined the 13 elections featuring incumbent presidents since 1940. I noted that in two of the 13 presidential contests, the difference between where the national polls were at this point and the eventual margin was greater than 10 points.

That's more than the current margin between Biden and Trump. Two out of 13 times is well more than 2.5%. One of 13 times is plenty more than that.

If you were to expand to contests without incumbents, you will find even more examples of big swings. I wrote about the 1988 election a few weeks ago. The difference between the polls at this point and the election result (Republican George H.W. Bush by 8 points) and the polls in mid-July (Democrat Michael Dukakis by 5 points) was double digits.

This historical study doesn't even take into account that Trump likely has a better shot of winning the Electoral College than the popular vote.

Importantly, you can look at a lot of different odds makers and reach conclusions similar to mine.

The betting markets, which I believe are overestimating Trump's chances, give him about a 2-out-of-5 (40%) chance of winning a second term. (It should be noted that betting markets gave Bob Dole a similar chance of winning in 1996, when he faced a deficit similar to Trump's now. Dole lost.)

Jack Kersting's forecast, which I've cited before, puts Trump's chance of winning at about 1-in-6 (just north of 15%).

There's also the Economist forecast, which gives Trump about a 1-in-10 (around 10%) chance of winning.

There are clearly differences among these odds. The similarity across all of them is that Biden is ahead, though not by enough to have a lead that can be considered anywhere close to being outside the true margin of error.

The worst result for Trump is having about a 1-in-10 chance. His shot would need to be below 1-in-40 to be considered outside the true margin of error.

Indeed, we still have a lot of events and potential game changers ahead of us.

There are the conventions, which sometimes (though not recently) have really shaken things up historically.

We have an economy that seems to be more prone to shocks than usual, which could shift voter opinions.

Additionally, the coronavirus pandemic is bad right now, but there's no real way of knowing how things will be when voters are casting their ballots. Perhaps the case rate will be lower. Maybe there will be better treatments. We just don't know.

Speaking of the coronavirus, it feels like this campaign isn't even really underway. Usually, a presidential campaign is the main news story by this point. But with the pandemic and the protests against police brutality, it's been the number three story over the last month.

The campaign will eventually become the number one story. With a compressed time frame, we may see bigger jumps later in the campaign than we're used to in modern campaigns.

The bottom line is that unless the economy totally falls apart or Biden starts leading by closer to 20 points than 10 points, this election will never be anywhere close to being safely in his corner at this early juncture.



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The plot thickens:




Trump offers denial and delusion as pandemic crisis overtakes his presidency



Updated 10:04 AM EDT, Wed July 15, 2020



(CNN)Rarely has a president shown himself to be so unequal to a tragic national emergency.

Hundreds of Americans are dying daily and tens of thousands are getting infected from a once-in-a-century virus. States and cities are closing down again, threatening to trigger a ruinous new economic slump. Doctors and nurses lack sufficient protective gear as they battle the deadly pathogen. And with testing swamped by waves of disease, one top official is warning of the "the most difficult time" ever for US public health this winter.

Yet this is what is on Donald Trump's mind: Joe Biden didn't fix the country's roads and bridges, crowds of bikers and boaters in MAGA hats prove that election polls are wrong, and the border wall is almost finished (except it isn't). Oh, and by the way, where is Hunter Biden?

Trump struck all the wrong notes on Tuesday, as the US set yet another single day record for new coronavirus infections with 67,417. Florida, now the world's coronavirus epicenter, recorded its highest-ever Covid-19 death toll, and Texas broke its record for new daily cases. Another 900 deaths were reported on Tuesday according to a Johns Hopkins University tally, but the President offered denial and delusion at a White House appearance that even by his standards was a rambling, grievance-fueled mess.



Trump's directionless White House on full display

What is needed from Trump and his administration is a plan to tackle the most relentless national challenge since World War II, consoling words to memorialize the 136,000 Americans who are already dead and the thousands destined to follow, and the rhetoric to summon the will to triumph over this invisible enemy.

All Trump could offer on Tuesday was self-pity, incoherence and indifference. He came across as a leader living in a different dimension from his people and their fear and suffering and uncertainty about what the coming months will bring.

This is a President who has demonstrably failed to beat back the virus and has long since stopped trying to lead the country out of the darkness. He resorts to boasting about inconclusive steps he took months ago -- like limiting travel from China -- that have no relevance to the current moment, and he complains he's not getting enough credit for his performance.

He's also mining divisive political seams he thinks helped him in the past. In a CBS interview on Tuesday, he insisted that more White people than Black people are killed in police violence, dealing an insult to the national soul searching about race following the death of George Floyd.

"We could go on for days," Trump said at one point in his Tuesday tirade, and for a while it seemed that he might in the blasting July heat of the Rose Garden, where journalists sat wearing masks, socially distanced and in bemused silence.

Trump veers off his China script

The ostensible point of Trump's Rose Garden appearance was to unveil a barrage of new measures to punish China for its suppression of freedoms in Hong Kong -- which gave the President a new chance to fulminate against Beijing for sending a "plague" to the US despite his earlier fawning praise for how President Xi Jinping had handled the pandemic.

But it wasn't long before the session turned into the kind of negative, rally-style performance that Trump pines for, with normal campaign events severely curtailed by the pandemic.

He slammed Biden for his record on crime, trade, China, infrastructure, the economy, the military, and at one point suggested that hundreds of thousands could be dead by now had the former vice president been in charge when the coronavirus struck. Bizarrely, Trump also slammed the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for his role in the Obama administration's mobilization against the H1N1 virus, which was far more efficient and cost tens of thousands fewer lives than Trump's missteps over the past few months

At event meant to announce China actions, Trump rambles into political attacks

Trump has been charging that Biden is mentally impaired and is not fit for the Oval Office. But at times, it was the President who appeared to be veering into confusion and incoherence. At one point he appeared to argue that his rival's vow to sign the Paris climate accord would lead to US office buildings being constructed without windows. And he suggested Biden wouldn't even know how to define the word "carbon."

In another extraordinary twist on Tuesday, the White House stepped up what is now a full frontal assault against the government's top infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been telling the truth about the dire turn taken by a pandemic that is now infecting twice as many people per day as it was several months ago. In a USA Today op-ed, Trump's top trade adviser and anti-China polemicist Peter Navarro wrote that the respected scientist "has a good bedside manner with the public, but he has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on."

If nothing else, the President's wild appearance gave a whole new meaning to the notion of incumbent presidents running for a second term on a Rose Garden strategy by staging a highly unusual campaign-style speech to rail against his opponent from the White House.

In recent days, whispers have emerged from inside Trump's camp that aides are worried he is yet to settle on a strong campaign message and that his reelection effort is meandering. If there was a second term manifesto hidden in Trump's digressions and bitterness on Tuesday, it was very well disguised.

The President had an uncanny feel for the resentment at the Washington establishment and the perceived indifference towards political elites and political correctness at a time of sometimes bewildering racial and social change in 2016. Perhaps that mix can carry him to a second term. But after Tuesday's showing, it will be impossible to argue he won a second term based on a reasoned and orderly road map out of the crisis.

The mystery of Trump's missing strategy

Trump's unwillingness to face up to the coronavirus nightmare that is staring the rest of the nation in the face leaves the impression that the man who vowed in his 2016 Republican National Convention speech "I alone can fix it" long ago ran out of ideas on the virus. That speech horrified Trump's critics because of its dystopian vision. But at least Trump looked strong, and was dictating the political winds. In his wandering monologue on Tuesday, he looked lost, a shadow of the man who burned down the Republican Party and the Washington political establishment.

He appeared to be what he is -- a president who is flailing after being cruelly overtaken by events. Such an image -- that beset President Jimmy Carter in the last summer before his reelection bid amid the Iran hostage crisis -- is a perilous one for first-term presidents.

The mystery of Trump's behavior in recent months is that it seems unlikely he can come from behind against Biden unless he can find a way to suppress the virus, or at least give Americans hope that some semblance of normal life can resume soon.



Trump leans into racist rhetoric and downplays police violence against Black Americans

But more and more, it seems like Trump has played his best card -- his demand several months ago for states to open up and revive the economy -- which has been exposed as a backfired gamble as the pandemic races across Southern and Western states. And his go-to strategies of inciting divisions, stirring cultural warfare and sowing confusion with misinformation don't seem to be working -- at least if the polls are right.

The President did his best to talk up his "transition to greatness," but the idea is so divorced from the awful reality of the last few weeks -- with the average daily rate of new infections hitting 60,000 -- that his words only served to display his own considerable remove from reality.

"I think you're going to have some good news very, very quickly having to do with the vaccines," Trump said, at about the same time that Fauci said that it could take a year-to-a-year-and-a-half for the world to get a Covid-19 vaccine, that even then may not be completely effective.

Despite the rolling shutdowns in cities across the country, certain to throw many Americans who work in the service, tourism and transit industries out of work again, the President stuck by his predictions of a riotous return to economic growth.

But absent any credible plans to stem Covid-19's march, all the President has to sell right now is hope.

"I think by Election Day you're going to see some incredible numbers. The third quarter is going to be really good, the fourth quarter is going to be great, but next year is going to be one of the best economic years," he insisted.

"So hopefully I'll be able to be the President where we say, 'Look at the great job I did.'"


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WASHINGTON — One figure continually stands out for President Trump in our new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll: 50 percent.

And not in a good way for him.

Fifty percent of all registered voters in our poll “strongly” disapprove of the president.

Fifty percent say there is no chance at all they will vote for him.

Fifty-two percent — in a separate question — say they’re “very uncomfortable” about his candidacy.

Fifty-one percent are backing Joe Biden in the horserace, versus 40 percent for Trump.

One of the old maxims of American politics used to be that an incumbent (for any office) needs to be at 50 percent to be safe for re-election — otherwise there’s a majority of voters who exist that don’t support him or her.

But Trump has a different problem at hand: He’s got 50 percent (or more) of the national electorate saying they strongly oppose him.

And that’s something that a new campaign manager alone can’t fix.

Of course. The idiot has been sheltered all his life and couldn’t even change a car tire of the nation depended on it. Put a little real life pressure on the asshole and he’ll buckle. Money cant buy your way outta this one, haus.

Of course. The idiot has been sheltered all his life and couldn’t even change a car tire if the nation depended on it. Put a little real life pressure on the asshole and he’ll buckle. Money cant buy your way outta this one, haus.

Hope it doesen’r go hot!

Friday 17 July 2020 14:57

The new Cold War launched by the West against China and Russia is escalating by the day. In a single week, the Kremlin has been unmasked trying to discover the secrets of Britain’s pursuit of a vaccine against coronavirus and revelations are promised about covert Russian interference in British politics. Boris Johnson made a U-turn on Huawei, announcing that it is to be kicked out of participation in the 5G network because it poses a threat to British security, though a curiously slow-burning one since they will only be evicted over seven years.

The US may put the widely-used Chinese video app TikTok on a blacklist that would prevent Americans from using it. The administration is considering using the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act in order to penalise TikTok as “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US security. President Trump says he is considering banning the app in response to the way China handled the coronavirus epidemic.

This is a clue to the prime motive for Trump to ramp up the Cold War against China, which is his determination to win a second term in the White House by diverting voters’ attention from his catastrophic handling of the pandemic. “Don’t defend Trump – attack China,” is the advice of a leaked 57-page memo circulated among Republican Senatorial candidates in April. It suggested that Republican politicians should blame China for starting the epidemic by allowing the virus to escape from a laboratory in Wuhan, lying about it and hoarding medical equipment needed to treat the sick.

A striking feature of the US and British diplomatic offensive against China is how little criticism or even discussion it has provoked in any quarter in the US and Britain, even from those whose normal knee-jerk reaction is to denounce anything said or done by Trump or Johnson. This may be because these critics are genuinely horrified by undoubted Chinese oppression of the Uighurs, proposed imposition of dictatorial rule in Hong Kong, and assertions of military power in the South China Sea and on the Chinese-Indian frontier.

As during the original Cold War in the late 1940s and 1950s, critics can be conveniently dismissed as Communist sympathisers or dupes. Unsurprisingly, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is responding to the confrontation with China by demanding that the US should take an even tougher stance towards Beijing, while the Democratic Party establishment are ever hopeful that their prolonged campaign to portray Trump as the creature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia will take fire and do him serious damage at the polls.

AP

'The State Department has released an internal cable from 2018 detailing the concerns of U.S. Embassy officials in China about a lack of adequately trained personnel at a virology lab in Wuhan, the city that later became the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Leaked contents of the cable sparked unproven speculation from senior U.S. officials beginning in April that the outbreak occurred as a result of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In May, President Trump said he had seen evidence that gave him a “high degree of confidence” that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab. When asked why he was confident, Trump said, “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.” ’

Trump and his enablers will only get worse

By Michael D’Antonio

Updated 11:22 PM EDT, Mon July 20, 2020

Editor’s Note: (Michael D’Antonio is the author of the book “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success.” His forthcoming book, “The Hunting of Hillary: The Forty Year Campaign to Destroy Hillary Clinton” is out later this month. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.)

(CNN)Psychologist Mary L. Trump says her elderly uncle Donald is a “psychologically damaged man” who “without question is going to get worse.”

In another circumstance, someone might intervene to aid the old fellow and protect everyone else (think of family members who lovingly take the keys from a dangerous senior driver). But in this case, Uncle Donald happens to be President of the United States, and the people around him are “enablers,” per his niece, eager to allow him to act out his worst impulses. No one here is going to hide the keys.

“There are too many enablers who are – for whatever reason – continuing to enable him,” says Mary Trump. “Bill Barr has gutted the Justice Department. Mike Pompeo has gutted the State Department. We are in serious danger here.”

The danger was on display last week when video footage surfaced of officers in military gear swooping in to capture a Portland protester on a city sidewalk. They hustled the individual into an unmarked van and drove away. This incident, called “political theater” by Oregon’s governor, represented a new phase in the Trump administration’s heavy-handed response to demonstrations sparked by police killings of Black citizens, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and others.

The President and his administration began setting conditions for a political theater road show many weeks ago. On June 1, federal officers commanded by Attorney General William Barr used tear gas, horses, and batons to clear Lafayette Square, a park across from the White House where protestors had gathered. Barr justified this display of federal force, including officers from the department of Homeland Security, by saying the officers had been deployed to protect federal property. (After Trump signed an executive order late last month to protect federal property, the same justification for an aggressive federal response to protests has been used in other parts of the country like Portland, as recently as last week.) The acting secretary of DHS, Chad Wolf, touched on themes that would likely please the President in his remarks, as he said, “DHS and its partners will not allow anarchists, disrupters and opportunists to exploit the ongoing civil unrest to loot and destroy our communities,”

Mary Trump’s disturbingly credible assessment of her ‘dangerous’ Uncle Donald

As federal forces were deployed in Buffalo, San Diego and Las Vegas, Barr and Wolf helped create images that matched Trump’s obvious desire to be perceived as, “Your President of law and order.” Anyone who didn’t notice that the President seemed bent on recreating the 1960s culture war over civil unrest missed Trump’s use of the phrase, “When the looting starts the shooting starts.” This threat was first used by Miami’s police chief in response to violence in the city in 1967, and was later echoed by Alabama’s racist Governor George Wallace on the campaign trail.

Today’s protests, which involve diverse groups of people rallying behind the Black Lives Matter banner, have been relatively peaceful compared to the sixties, when major cities suffered large scale rioting. However, the facts on the ground haven’t prevented Barr and Wolf from doing what they can to support the President’s fantasy. Why do they do it? They may be acting to please the boss who controls whatever power they wield and can yank it away on a whim. They may actually share Trump’s dystopian views of the country they are supposed to serve. Or they are, indeed, the enablers Mary Trump fears?

As used by Mary Trump’s profession, enablers amplify the dysfunction of a troubled person out of fear or perhaps because they think there’s something to be gained by going along. In Donald Trump’s case, his niece has written, family members and others “consistently normalized” his “aberrant behavior.” In his business he was surrounded by people “who propped him up and lied for him.”

President Donald Trump has fired or driven away many members of his administration who were known for expressing their honest opinions. Long gone are Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Chief of Staff John Kelly, economic advisor Gary Cohn, Secretary of State James Mattis, National Security Advisor John Bolton and many others who had the courage and character to speak truth to power. Their replacements have been notably more compliant. Many remain acting officials who don’t enjoy the respect that comes with Senate confirmation. The President seems to see value in keeping members of his team insecure. “I like acting,” he once said, “because I can move so quickly. It gives me more flexibility.”

Trump is facing the thing he dreads most

One top official who enjoys permanent status, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, happens to be among the more obsequious officials in the administration. Once a stern Trump critic who believed Russia attacked the 2016 election, he has become a staunch defender of the President who downplayed Russia’s election meddling. As Secretary of State, he has served the President’s cause with his conservative Evangelical base by neglecting the cause of equal rights for the LGBTQ community – a recent report he released spoke of same sex marriage rights as “divisive social and political controversies.”

Pompeo downgraded LGBTQ rights presumably because a good enabler knows what to do without being told. Count economic advisor Peter Navarro in this category too. When he penned an article in USA Today attacking the President’s top pandemic advisor Anthony Fauci, Navarro likely thought it would win him points with Trump. When Navarro’s attack failed, Trump disavowed it, but in meek terms that did no real damage.

Navarro is safe on the Trump team, thanks to his enabling of the President in his outbursts against China, even suggesting that a Chinese lab created the coronavirus now raging across the country. The pandemic, of course, is a leading cause for the President’s struggle in polls, which show his bid for reelection to be in trouble.

Faced with the prospect of defeat, Trump has suggested the upcoming election could be rigged and recently refused to say he would accept the outcome. Expect to see this position, which casts doubt on the validity of the American system for transferring power, to be echoed by his enablers. And when the president says or does the next outrageous thing, they’ll support that too. To do otherwise would require courage and character they just don’t seem to have.

© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

"Trump pushes mask wearing, says he’ll resume COVID briefings

OPINION

As America tops 4 million COVID cases, the cult of Donald Trump has become a death cult

People who refuse to wear a mask are bolstering their sore egos. Their national motto is not ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ it’s ‘You’re not the boss of me.’

America has now passed the milestone of 4 million COVID cases, and we’re still arguing with doctors and epidemiologists about masks and school closures. I expected some of this, because I literally wrote the book over three years ago on why so many Americans think they’re smarter than experts. What I did not expect is that this resolute and childish opposition to expertise would be hijacked by the president of the United States and an entire American political party, and then turned into a suicide cult.

It did not take a lot of foresight to know, even before the coronavirus arrived, that the United States was leaving itself vulnerable to a crisis that would require the public to trust experts. We long ago became a narcissistic nation whose citizens believe they can become competent in almost any subject by watching enough television and spending enough time on the internet. But I was certain that a true national crisis — a war, a depression, or yes, a pandemic — would snap people back to reality.

I was wrong to be so optimistic.

Endangering others as empowerment

Some states (including Rhode Island, where I live) have had great success in asking their citizens to cooperate for the common good. Other communities, unfortunately, have had to endure shouting matches with bellowing ignoramuses who think it is intolerable that they be asked to wear a mask while shopping or ordering food — two things people in other countries would gladly do wrapped in aluminum foil and with prayers of thanks on their lips if they got to do it in the United States of America.

There is no one more responsible for this particular moment than President Donald Trump, but all he has done is play to a gallery whose seats were already full by the time he ran for office. Trump appealed to a powerful sense of narcissistic grievance among millions of Americans, nurturing it and feeding it. An entire claque of enablers joined in, knowing there was plenty of money to be made feeding this self-centered, anti-social nihilism.

When the pandemic arrived, these enablers in the conservative media and among the cowardly Republican political class took their cues — masks, no masks, closing, opening — from Trump, whose statements for months were a fusillade of nonsense that reflected only his own pouty anger that Mother Nature had the sheer brass to mess up his presidential grift.

Not all of those who have been reckless and irresponsible are Trump supporters. There are, as always, young people who believe they are invincible. And some experts inflicted a huge wound on themselves right in the middle of this crisis by blessing the Black Lives Matter protests rather than repeating stern warnings they gave to other Americans that such events are dangerous.

But the Americans who are now driving the pandemic are not sudden skeptics about masks or distancing or expert opinion because of street protests. Some of them reject expertise because of the previous “failures” of experts. This is always one of the reflexive explanations for the refusal to listen to the educated and experienced. Expert failures are real and happen every day, but the people who sullenly refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic are not doing so because the United States failed to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or because the housing market crashed in 2008.

Rather, they are doing so because they see endangering others as empowerment, a way of telling people whom they believe look down on them that no one, no matter how smart or accomplished, can tell them what to do. For these people, our national motto is not “In God We Trust” or “E Pluribus Unum,” but rather: “You’re Not the Boss of Me.”

Reject expertise and trust Trump

So committed are these Americans to assuaging their sore egos over their imagined lack of status that they are literally willing to die for it. Unfortunately, they seem all too willing to take many of us with them. This is not Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate, whose cult members fled society to go and die together. This is worse. This is an attempt to create a Jonestown in every American city and town and then invite the rest of us over for a cool drink.

The irony here is that the same people who reject expertise because they believe they are smart and clued in to the mistakes of experts will accept the word of Donald Trump — a man who has obliterated most of the projects he’s ever been involved with and who stands as the uncontested champion of American public liars — as the gospel truth.

A resolution: After appalling Roger Stone commutation, don’t let Donald Trump break us, America.

But that is how cults work, and woe to anyone who crosses them. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for over 35 years, has endured attacks from the White House and some members of Congress because some Republicans believe that he is somehow trying to use the pandemic against the president. Worse, Fauci now has to travel with security, as Americans treat the rest of the world to the shameful sight of one of the most accomplished scientists in one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world having to be guarded against unhinged cultists in his own country.

On the same day that America hit a grisly new record, President Trump went on television to explain both that he must cancel his cherished plans for a political convention while insisting that children be sent back to school in the coming weeks. Millions of Americans nodded along with him, secure in the knowledge that scientists are quacks and that no one understands viruses like Donald Trump. They will likely still believe that even as they lie in a hospital bed and are given last rites with a ventilator down their throats.

If only the rest of us did not have to risk being in the bed next to them."

© Copyright Gannett 2020

The double faceted political arena has never been more brazen and offensive, with political, and psychological reality
struggling for dominance in a field of thorns wrought with pain and mortality.
Where is truth found Nowedays, where claims and counterclaims clamor for attention and seeks relevance from every nook and cranny?

Jas all rationality been usurped for the sake of the loaded and expedient brazen call for for the lowest common denominator that intelligence could glean?

The sad fact is, that such utterly paradoxical absurd logic does speak out of two tongues,l.

The geopolitical certainty of capital splits national capitalism and national socialism , ( oops here goes that word again) - and so I am realism can not as yet support an internationally equivocal vale system, as yet.

The idea of extending marketability to the advantage either of particular national interests, OR toward the furtherance of a classless universal population-with equitable market and labor interchange, is truly, and literally a trumped up (forgive the slip) reason for it’s primal cause.

It would like that impression, but at least in the foreseeable future, it means to sustain and leverage international differences , that favor conglomerate economic behemoths , to the disadvantage of labor.

Further , labor in the advanced societies have to sustain in some measure the traditional socially adapted levels of accustomed standards, and this parallels somewhat the way international models need to be sustained.

Which model will attain superior models down the line, I believe has already been decided, regardless of the clever inter-party clamor for an attention that could signify substantial undertones with dynamic latencythat could actually turn things this way or that, toward national or international objectives.

The party unity or it’s negative is mostly rhetoric to advance the jobs of two camps of lawyers, who need such division to propel faux objectives, to fuel the political process.

The pipette masters hold Biden and Teump dangling in a show that need to describe a complex ground foreground interplay, that really has no depth, that Main Street can really understand.

And social unrest in the U.S. escalating:

youtu.be/iY9vP48oXIY

youtu.be/sLnjxXE0G24

Donald Trump has refused to back down from his controversial suggestion that November’s election be postponed, insisting “I don’t want to see a crooked election”, as he continues to claim mail-in voting - a likely necessity given the coronavirus outbreak - is vulnerable to fraud.

“I want an election and a result, much, much more than you,” he said at the White House on Thursday.

“I don’t want to delay. I want to have the election. But I also don’t want to have to wait three months and then find out that the ballots are all missing, and the election doesn’t mean anything.”

The president cited recent media reports about potential problems with postal ballots arriving late and said it could take weeks, months or even years to sort it out.

“Do I want to see a date change? No, but I don’t want to see a crooked election,” he said.

Trailing badly in the polls to presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden, Trump posted a tweet yesterday that said voting by mail, which many states are likely to use because of the pandemic, would result in a “fraudulent” vote.

“It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???,” he added, his tweet following hot on the heels of the news that US GDP fell 9.5 per cent in the second quarter, wiping out five years of growth and therefore not fooling anyone, given that his re-election case is centered on prosperity…"

The machines are well oiled, but can’t stop now.
Let’s not jump to any conclusions, gentlemen. At least not now, not yet.

Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue:

The Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue

Trump is the kind of boss who can’t do the job — and won’t go away.

July 30, 2020

President Trump’s response to the coronavirus has been a disaster both epidemiological and economic.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

Every worker’s nightmare is the horrible boss — everyone knows at least one — who is utterly incompetent yet refuses to step aside. Such bosses have the reverse Midas touch — everything they handle turns to crud — but they’ll pull out every stop, violate every norm, to stay in that corner office. And they damage, sometimes destroy, the institutions they’re supposed to lead.

Donald Trump is, of course, one of those bosses. Unfortunately, he’s not just a bad business executive. He is, God help us, the president. And the institution he may destroy is the United States of America.

Has any previous president failed his big test as thoroughly as Trump has these past few months? He rejected the advice of health experts and pushed for a rapid economic reopening, hoping for a boom leading into the election. He ridiculed and belittled measures that would have helped slow the spread of the coronavirus, including wearing face masks and practicing social distancing, turning what should have been common sense into a front in the culture war.

The result has been disaster both epidemiological and economic.

Over the past week the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 averaged more than 1,000 people a day, compared with just four — four! — per day in Germany. Vice President Mike Pence’s mid-June declaration that “There isn’t a coronavirus ‘second wave’” felt like whistling in the dark even at the time; now it feels like a sick joke.

Paul Krugman’s Newsletter:

"Nobody likes me,’ Trump complains, as even his allies fade

By Kevin Liptak, CNN

(CNN)Lamenting his plunging popularity this week, a self-pitying President Donald Trump wondered how it all went wrong.

'Nobody likes me," he said, confounded at how his administration’s health experts could be receiving accolades while he is accused of ignoring and denying the raging public health crisis.

“It can only be my personality,” Trump said, “that’s all.”

That’s one answer.

In a week that saw a devastating global pandemic worsen, a record economic meltdown confirmed and an all-out bid to stoke racial tensions for political gain deepen, Trump is finding himself more and more the odd man out: absent and detached from the leadership of either party, locked in antique cultural battles and increasingly unpopular among voters.

By Friday, the President’s blunt assessment of his own popularity seemed to have manifested in a litany of other ways:

Even his staunchest Republican allies flatly rejected his suggestion that November’s voting be delayed, some actually laughing at what, by most accounts, was a serious (if toothless) proposal from the President to undermine the election.

The nation’s civic leadership, including three of Trump’s four living predecessors, gathered without him in Atlanta to honor the late Rep. John Lewis, making the sitting president’s absence conspicuous if unsurprising.

Stimulus talks on Capitol Hill have proceeded almost entirely without his participation, and have been notable mainly for the disarray they have exposed among Republicans, many of whom were unpleasantly surprised to learn the President’s demand for a new FBI building was included in the final proposal.

In a closed door hearing on Friday, intelligence officials working in Trump’s own administration discounted the possibility of foreign countries mass-producing fake ballots to interfere in the November elections – a claim Trump seemed to be making simultaneously from the Cabinet Room.

And the concerted push by Trump to delegitimize mail-in ballots is raising alarm bells among Republican operatives, who are worried the President’s demand for in-person voting will mainly serve to dampen turnout among his own supporters.

Trump’s attempts to regain standing have only exacerbated the divorce and led to worries he is weighing down his party’s ability to move forward. Long dismissive of the Washington establishment, Trump has shown little concern at how his moves are forcing allies into awkward positions or alienating himself from longstanding norms.

Far from a mere difference of “personality,” the examples of “nobody liking” Trump this week suggested a President actively isolating himself in his own bubble of conspiracy theories and questionable science, with fewer and fewer people willing to step inside to join him.

In an attempt to boost his mood, Trump’s advisers scrambled to assemble a scaled-down political event on a baking Florida tarmac on Friday, where Trump addressed a mostly mask-less crowd standing inches from one another. Other events in the state that Trump had scheduled for Saturday were canceled as a storm approached.

The event illustrated what White House officials describe as an ad-hoc effort to schedule appearances for Trump that allow him to bask in at least some adulation as his campaign rallies remain on hold and after an in-person convention acceptance speech was scuttled.

White House officials are still weighing their options for how Trump will formally accept the nomination, one person familiar with the planning said, including assessing sites around the country where he might deliver a prime-time address. Yet the task has proven difficult as Trump insists upon something dramatic while aides work to temper some of his expectations about the scale of the potential venues.

Aides say Trump has grown to recognize the extreme political peril he’s created for himself less than 100 days until the election. When he speaks with friends, his grievances are long and his complaints are ample but his willingness or ability to alter course seems minimal, according to people who have spoken to him.

Trump has voiced versions of “nobody likes me” for the past several months, those people said, describing an in-the-dumps president brought low by a pandemic he feels he has little ability to control.

Speaking Thursday, Trump appeared resigned to the fact that coronavirus case counts will continue spiking, and said it’s probably not anyone’s fault, least of all his.

“That’s just the way it is,” he said.

Top Republicans, many of whom have given up hope that Trump will offer anything resembling a coherent national plan to contain the virus, have long decided to promote mask-wearing and social distancing without taking a lead from Trump. One of those who didn’t, Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, found out he had coronavirus from a test administrated at the White House.

Instead of avoiding the question or denying knowledge about Trump’s tweet on Thursday suggesting an election delay – a tactic they’ve fallen back on before when the President dispatches something inconvenient or embarrassing – nearly every Republican this week rejected the idea out of hand.

“I don’t think that’s a particularly good idea,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, an informal adviser to the President.

“I read it. I laughed. I thought my gosh this is going to consume a lot of people,” said GOP Sen. Kevin Cramer. “I long ago stopped being surprised by the things he does that other presidents wouldn’t have done, but I also understand why he does it and why his base enjoys it so much.”

On Capitol Hill, the ill-fated election day float went over about as well as the administration’s proposal to include $1.75 billion for a new FBI building in a coronavirus relief package – a longstanding fixation for the President that his opponents decry as ethically questionable.

Republicans simply decried it as non-sensical in a bill meant to extend unemployment to the millions of newly unemployed Americans whose lives have been crushed by an out-of-control pandemic.

“There’s a number of unrelated things in there,” said Republican Sen. John Cornyn of the provision, which he said caught him by surprise.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who also appeared to be caught off guard by the item, understatedly called it “non-germane.” Absent any support, the White House eventually said the new money wouldn’t be a dealbreaker.

Yet by Wednesday, Trump’s isolation from the leaders of his own party – who are hoping to salvage what is shaping up to be a tough November – seemed cemented. Aboard Air Force One, Trump indicated to associates that he would not intervene in the Kansas Republican primary, even after hearing appeals from both his political team and senior Republicans that the seat – and control of the Senate – was at risk if conservative firebrand Kris Kobach wins.

The move appeared to some another break from a President whose interests in politics generally don’t extend beyond his own self-interest. While his absence from the Lewis funeral on Thursday was not a surprise given the animosity between the two men, it also reflected Trump’s general impatience for the rituals of politics that do not revolve around him.

Aides never expected Trump to join his three most recent predecessors – Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton – at the funeral. But even some White House officials were surprised when Trump, on Monday, flatly rejected the prospect of traveling to the US Capitol where Lewis lay in state. Some had quietly been considering a quick trip to pay respects.

As it stood, all three former presidents offered remarks that could be read as oblique rebukes of how Trump has approached the job they all held.

“In the America John Lewis fought for, and the America I believe in, differences of opinion are inevitable elements and evidence of democracy in action,” said Bush, the most recent Republican president.

Denied traditional routes of affirmation, Trump has begun looking elsewhere. Frustrated that his once-favorite television channel Fox News is willing to interview Democrats, Trump has adopted the hard-right OAN as his preferred venue and spoke to the outlet’s CEO this week about hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial that he insists works to prevent coronavirus.

Even amid attempts by his aides to shift his focus back to the pandemic, Trump continues to hear from a wide range of associates who are undermining the administration’s health experts and questioning their approach to the pandemic, people familiar with the conversations say.

A group of doctors who have promoted hydroxychloroquine and cast doubt on the decision to enforce lockdowns to contain the virus were invited to the White House for a meeting with Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday, even though a video of a press conference they delivered was removed from social media for violating rules against misinformation.’

© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Congressman Jim Clyburn: Trump has no plans to leave White House
House majority whip Jim Clyburn has compared the president to Mussolini during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union.

After Trump’s suggestion earlier this week that he would consider delaying the election, Democrat congressman Clyburn compared Trump to the Italian dictator who was in power for 20 years.

“I don’t think [Trump] plans to leave the White House,” Clyburn said. “He doesn’t plan to have fair and unfettered elections. I believe that he plans to install himself in some kind of emergency way to continue to hold on to office.”

‘RECORD HIGH NASDAQ! It would all come crashing down, including your Jobs, Stocks, and 401k’s, if Sleepy Joe ever became President. China and others would own us!!!’

A typical Trump tweet. Truth or fiction :

The nasdaq is at an all time high because of trumps deregulation (regulation being one of the things that makes America greater than other countries)

What he’s saying though is not altogether untrue. The question is whether trump is helping Asia more than the US. All these fucking debts (20 trillion) are with Asia. If we actually paid back all those debts today, Asia would kick our ass economically! Trump didn’t start the problem, but he’s exaserbated it substantially.

If china had the means, they’d not have to rely on the U.S. for the exports china needs, and then they wouldnt have to tolerate that outrageous debt. As it stands, american capitalism knows china has to tolerate that debt… or lose a major supplier of resources.

Everywhere capitalism crawls its thievery and manipulation follows.

And every single empire followed that playbook, Britain, the previous hedgehog was eclipsed by America.

Sad, but true.

Incidentally, this:

'goldman Sachs says “markets are underpricing the prospect that at least one coronavirus vaccine will be developed and ready to use by the end of 2020.” ’

Which verifies my prediction of a Republican win if the above turns out to be true…In addition, the haggling over the stimulus package may be intentional, so as to get closest possible to the election.

Even if its portrayed as a unilateral partisan effort to gain votes. Hmmm.

May Be.

Ecmondu said,:

"The question is whether trump is helping Asia more than the US. All these fucking debts (20 trillion) are with Asia. If we actually paid back all those debts today, Asia would kick our ass economically! Trump didn’t start the problem, but he’s exaserbated it substantially.,

And the denial of that led to the projected idea that the Democrats sleeping with the Chinese, led to the imbroglio of international interference into US elections, creating the impeachment scenario.

The most revealing answer from Donald Trump’s interview with Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace came in response not to the toughest question posed by Wallace, but to the easiest.

At the conclusion of the interview, Wallace asked Trump how he will regard his years as president.

“I think I was very unfairly treated,” Trump responded. “From before I even won, I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation.”

Peter Wehner: The president is unraveling

When Wallace interrupted, trying to get Trump to focus on the positive achievements of his presidency—“What about the good parts, sir?”—Trump brushed the question aside, responding, “Russia, Russia, Russia.” The president then complained about the Flynn investigation, the “Russia hoax,” the “Mueller scam,” and the recusal by his then–attorney general, Jeff Sessions. (“Now I feel good because he lost overwhelmingly in the great state of Alabama,” Trump said about the first senator to endorse him in the 2016 Republican primary.)

Donald Trump is a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man. He is so gripped by his grievances, such a prisoner of his resentments, that even the most benevolent question from an interviewer—what good parts of your presidency would you like to be remembered for?—triggered a gusher of discontent.

But the president still wasn’t done. “Here’s the bottom line,” he said. “I’ve been very unfairly treated, and I don’t say that as paranoid. I’ve been very—everybody says it. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. But there was tremendous evidence right now as to how unfairly treated I was. President Obama and Biden spied on my campaign. It’s never happened in history. If it were the other way around, the people would be in jail for 50 years right now.”

David Frum: This is Trump’s plague now

Just in case his bitterness wasn’t coming through clearly enough, the president added this: “That would be Comey, that would be Brennan, that would be all of this—the two lovers, Strzok and Page, they would be in jail now for many, many years. They would be in jail; it would’ve started two years ago, and they’d be there for 50 years. The fact is, they illegally spied on my campaign. Let’s see what happens. Despite that, I did more than any president in history in the first three and a half years.”

With that, the interview ended.

Such a disposition in almost anyone else—a teacher, a tax accountant, a CEO, a cab driver, a reality-television star—would be unfortunate enough. After all, people who obsess about being wronged are just plain unpleasant to be around: perpetually ungrateful, short-tempered, self-absorbed, never at peace, never at rest.

But Donald Trump isn’t a teacher, a tax accountant, or (any longer) a reality-television star; he is, by virtue of the office he holds, in possession of unmatched power. The fact that he is devoid of any moral sensibilities or admirable human qualities—self-discipline, compassion, empathy, responsibility, courage, honesty, loyalty, prudence, temperance, a desire for justice—means he has no internal moral check; the question Is this the right thing to do? never enters his mind. As a result, he not only nurses his grievances; he acts on them. He lives to exact revenge, to watch his opponents suffer, to inflict pain on those who don’t bend before him. Even former war heroes who have died can’t escape his wrath.

Read: Trump’s America is slipping away

So Donald Trump is a vindictive man who also happens to be commander in chief and head of the executive branch, which includes the Justice Department, and there is no one around the president who will stand up to him. He has surrounded himself with lapdogs.

But the problem doesn’t end there. In a single term, Trump has reshaped the Republican Party through and through, and his dispositional imprint on the GOP is as great as any in modern history, including Ronald Reagan’s.

I say that as a person who was deeply shaped by Reagan and his presidency. My first job in government was working for the Reagan administration, when I was in my 20s. The conservative movement in the 1980s, although hardly flawless, was intellectually serious and politically optimistic. And Reagan himself was a man of personal decency, grace, and class. While often the target of nasty attacks, he maintained a remarkably charitable view of his political adversaries. “Remember, we have no enemies, only opponents,” the former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who worked for Reagan, quotes him as admonishing his staff.

In his farewell address to the nation, Reagan offered an evocative description of America. “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it,” he said. “But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”

A city tall and proud, its people living in harmony and peace, surrounded by walls with open doors; that was Ronald Reagan’s image of America, and Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party.

When Reagan died in 2004, the conservative columnist George Will wrote a moving tribute to his friend, saying of America’s 40th president, “He traveled far, had a grand time all the way, and his cheerfulness was contagious.” Reagan had a “talent for happiness,” according to Will. And he added this: “Reagan in his presidential role made vivid the values, particularly hopefulness and friendliness, that give cohesion and dynamism to this continental nation.”

There were certainly ugly elements on the American right during the Reagan presidency, and Reagan himself was not without flaws. But as president, he set the tone, and the tone was optimism, courtliness and elegance, joie de vivre.

He has since been replaced by the crudest and cruelest man ever to be president. But not just that. One senses in Donald Trump no joy, no delight, no laughter. All the emotions that drive him are negative. There is something repugnant about Trump, yes, but there is also something quite sad about the man. He is a damaged soul.

Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point

In another time, in a different circumstance, there would perhaps be room to pity such a person. But for now, it is best for the pity to wait. There are other things to which to attend. The American public faces one great and morally urgent task above all others between now and November: to do everything in its power to remove from the presidency a self-pitying man who is shattering the nation and doesn’t even care.

The Ticket: Politics from The Atlantic
Crazy/Genius

TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

And:

"Democracy Dies in Darkness
The Plum Line
Opinion

If Biden wins, the post-Trump corruption purge will have to be epic
(Source: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
(Source: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
Image without a caption
Opinion by Greg Sargent
Columnist
August 5, 2020 at 4:45 PM EDT
It’s widely understood that if Joe Biden wins the White House, he’ll face monumental tasks in digging us out of our spiraling public health crisis and the economic catastrophe it has unleashed, which could get far worse if Congress’ next rescue package falls short, as it likely will.

But an incoming Biden administration will also face another mission: undertaking a full accounting of the Trump administration’s corruption and the damage it has done to our government and institutions.

That is, if the new administration chooses to accept that mission.

A new report from the Democratic-allied Center for American Progress both lays out an argument for why Biden should indeed take on that mission and offers a suggested road map on how to do that.

The core argument for acting ambitiously to fumigate the Trump administration’s corruption is a straightforward moral hazard one:

A constant of the Trump administration has been escalation in the absence of accountability. If a free pass is provided to those that broke the law and subverted democracy, it will embolden them and any illiberal politicians or administrations in the future to show even greater disregard for the rule of law.
One question that will be tough to answer is: Where to start?

The CAP report suggests beginning with the Justice Department, with a full review of special treatment accorded to Trump allies, such as Roger Stone and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, both of whom Trump championed.

Also worth examining might be the attorney general’s efforts to discredit his own agency’s conclusions about a massive foreign attack on our democracy, as Trump implicitly but relentlessly demanded.

But, crucially, CAP suggests that such a review must not involve the White House at all. It would instead involve career Justice Department officials or the inspector general, and Congress (if it’s controlled by Democrats) would potentially have a major role.

Sign up for The Odds newsletter for election updates from data columnist David Byler

Which immediately highlights an interesting conundrum: to what degree members of a Biden administration could undertake such an internal examination without involving Biden in any way, since that would risk straying into the sort of politicization that is the problem under Trump.

Another area for such fumigation might be the president’s constant attacks on inspectors general and whistleblowers. This is one of the clearest areas in which Trump has sought to wreck one of the most important anti-corruption and pro-accountability innovations of the post-Watergate era.

One answer to this, suggested by CAP, would be to try to reinvigorate the role of IGs. This could of course be done through the act of respecting their independence but also explicitly and actively reaffirming that independence.

CAP also suggests that major agencies should conduct their own internal reviews of corruption that took place under Trump — the Environmental Protection Agency is an obvious candidate — which could theoretically involve inspectors general, revitalizing their role in that way.

Yet another area — not discussed in the CAP report — would entail new legislative safeguards against the sort of relentless financial self-dealing that Trump engaged in. A model is Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) blueprint requiring the IRS to release presidential candidates’ tax returns.

Such an effort would be led out of Congress. But Biden would surely be pressed to bless (and then sign) it.

This is of course a very partial list of what might need to be done. But the very fact that a mainstream outfit such as CAP is already pushing Biden in this way suggests he — and/or members of his administration — may feel great pressure to act along these lines.

Many other stakeholders in Washington who have been glaring at Trump’s contempt for the rule of law from the sidelines for so long will also surely offer their own blueprints, adding to the chatter around what will be a huge national debate, should Biden win.

And yet, having campaigned on a vow of post-Trump reconciliation — and facing the daunting task of unifying a battered country around national solutions to the coronavirus pandemic and a potential economic depression — Biden might feel disinclined from sinking too much political capital into an effort along these lines, which might feel akin to diving right back into Trump’s black hole.

The CAP report tries to address this, arguing that ultimately, it’s more divisive and risky to allow all this corruption to slide, and that in the end, reaffirming the rule of law should itself constitute a unifying act.

Of course, Trump himself will make this as hard as possible. As the report notes, Richard Nixon “resigned from office in disgrace, providing some measure of accountability for his actions.”

By contrast, Trump will steadily rage about any such efforts at an accounting from private life, his Twitter thumbs as active as ever. And GOP opportunists in the Senate who see advocating for the Lost Cause of Trumpism as their path to glory in 2024 will add to the bellowing.

All of which is a reminder of the vast scale of the garbage field we’ll all be digging out from under, should Biden win. And that’s if we’re lucky."

'Trump advisers hesitated to give military options and warned adversaries over fears he might start a war

By Jim Sciutto, Chief National Security Correspondent
Updated 11:10 PM EDT, Thu August 06, 2020

Washington(CNN)Amid escalating tensions with both North Korea and Iran, President Donald Trump’s advisers hesitated to give him military options fearing the President might accidentally take the US to war and deliberately informed their counterparts in both countries that they did not know what the President would do next, multiple former administration officials tell me.

These accounts are contained in my upcoming book, “The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World,” which will be published August 11 by Harper Collins.

Trump’s relationship with Kim Jong Un has blown hot and cold throughout his presidency but in 2017 as the President dubbed Kim “little rocket man” and the North Korean dictator responded by calling Trump a “dotard,” there was a very real fear amongst senior members of the administration that the war of words might culminate in the President launching military action against Pyongyang.

“We used to only think of Kim Jong Un as unpredictable. Now we had Trump as unpredictable,” Joseph Yun, who served as President Trump’s special representative for North Korea policy until 2018, told me. “And I would communicate that.”

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Yun recalled that during the worsening standoff with North Korea in 2017, the Pentagon hesitated to give the President a broad range of military options, concerned that he might indeed order a major military attack on the North.

“You had to be careful what options you gave him,” he said. “We were being very cautious, because any options you put out there, he could use them.”

That frustrated the White House. “The White House viewed it as ‘Goddamnit! The President is looking for all options!’” Yun recalled. But the Pentagon, under Defense Secretary James Mattis at least, didn’t budge.

Later Trump decided diplomacy was the way forward and met for two historic summits with Kim, even telling a 2018 rally in West Virginia that the “two fell in love.”

A senior White House official told CNN that on North Korea “it was the President who at every turn has encouraged diplomacy over escalation. He took the historic step of meeting with KJU in person to encourage de-escalation.”

‘Is this a joke?’ Pentagon dumbfounded by Iran military options request
Again in 2019, as the President and his team were considering military options against Iran in response to escalating attacks in the Persian Gulf, senior Pentagon officials made clear both to US partners in the region and to Tehran that they could not predict how and where Trump would respond, or if he would respond at all.

“We told allies that we did not know what the President would be willing to do against Iran,” Mick Mulroy, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East until 2019, recalled. “It was possible he could make a decision that would lead to an escalation of the conflict, and that escalation could lead to war, so they needed to relay that to Iran so they realized not even his staff knew what would happen if they attacked another oil facility, for instance.”

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These warnings were part of a longer-term effort to contain some of the President’s worst impulses when confronted with military action abroad. Earlier, in September 2018, when a handful of mortar shells struck near the US Embassy in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone causing no casualties or serious damage, Pentagon officials were surprised when they received a call from a senior official on the National Security Council demanding military options for the President to retaliate against Iran. That NSC official said the President wanted to know immediately how and when the United States could respond.

“The NSC called us in on a Sunday,” a former senior US official told me. “[The NSC official] was basically telling us we had to have military options against Iran, today, on that day.”

Pentagon officials were dumbfounded. On a conference call with the White House, which included the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Paul Selva, and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood, Selva muted the line on the Pentagon’s end and turned to his colleagues in disbelief.

“He said, ‘Is this a joke? They really want us to propose direct military action into Iran, against Iran, based on this?’” the same former senior US official told me." And I said, ‘No, we’ve been dealing with this all morning. Have they spent any time in Iraq?’ This is a constant thing."

When they got off the call, General Selva and Secretary Rood made it clear to their colleagues they would not be providing the White House with any military options unless directed explicitly by the President himself.

“There’s no way we’re going to provide the NSC military options for this,” the former senior US official recalled their saying. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

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That “urgent” request from the White House did not last. “It just died after that,” the official remembered.

A handful of mortars. One forceful demand for military options. Then silence. It was just the first of many times the NSC would reach out to the Pentagon for military options against Iran, without warning and without the normal interagency process to determine if a military response was warranted or wise.

The aftermath of those wayward mortars in September 2018 began a months-long policy-making seesaw with Trump and Iran, alternating between urgency and inaction, threat and retreat. On which side would Trump emerge? And did he have a strategy?

In June 2019, President Trump would balk at retaliation for Iran’s shootdown of a US drone over international airspace, calling off military action with US warplanes already in the air. That September, he also decided against retaliation after an Iranian attack on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia which temporarily shut down half of Saudi oil production.

“‘Well, [the President] didn’t want to do it, so we’re done,’” Mulroy recalled. “The first time that happened, I think there was kind of a sigh of relief. The second time, I think there was shock. So it’s like ‘What do you mean, we’re not doing anything? I mean, we’ve got to do something.’”

Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator who served as Defense Secretary under President Barack Obama said the situation was unprecedented.

“In all my years dealing with national security and intelligence and foreign policy I’ve never heard any senior military leaders express concern about a president’s decision-making,” Hagel said.

“When I was Secretary of Defense my Pentagon colleagues and I always knew that President Obama had studied the issues, was well informed and wanted our opinions and recommendations. He listened to those charged with national security experience,” he added.

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“The President’s foreign policy – particularly in the Middle East, has been defined by taking strong action when necessary (see strikes in Syria in 2018), deescalating to avoid protracted conflicts (draw down in Afghanistan, taking a lesser response to Iran.) However, make no mistake – the President will take decisive action when it warrants to protect US interests,” the senior White House official said.

Trump did eventually take military action against Iran, ordering the killing of the country’s most senior General Qasem Solemaini in a drone strike on Baghdad airport in January of this year. Iran retaliated by striking a US base in Iraq, injuring dozens of US service members, but at least up until now tensions have alleviated. Had the US launched an attack on Iranian soil, many feared an all-out war was possible.

‘It wasn’t a ploy’
Trump’s unpredictability is something that permeated official US interactions with the leaders of countries across the globe—from Iran to Syria to North Korea to Canada and Mexico to NATO allies.

“The general concept was discussed, not as a strategy we deliberately adopted, but rather as something we pointed out as a matter of fact,” said Mulroy. “The thing is, it wasn’t a ploy,” he explained. “I think both allies and enemies realize that his decision process was unpredictable even to those advising him up to and including the secretary of defense and national security adviser.”

Trump’s capriciousness left the advisers responsible for virtually every corner of the globe guessing.

“I had many meetings where my counterparts would ask, ‘Can we really believe what you’re saying? On whose behalf are you speaking?’” said Fiona Hill, President Trump’s former senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council and key witness during the impeachment investigation of the President in November 2019. “This makes the US a capricious partner for anyone who is interacting with us as a collective.”

Trump’s unpredictability was not a national secret. US adversaries were keenly aware that his own advisers and the institutions and agencies they lead were often in the dark about the President’s intentions and therefore sought to take advantage, said Susan Gordon, who served as the United States’ second-highest-ranking intelligence official as principal deputy director of national intelligence.

“Our partners, adversaries, and competitors know we don’t know the next play,” Gordon said.

With any other president or any other administration, such deliberate unpredictability might be seen as a flaw, identifying it as a criticism. But in the view of Trump and his most devout supporters, his unpredictability is a keen negotiator’s strength to be lauded.

“For him, the unpredictability is a card that he liked having,” said Yun.

© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.’

Trump’s new pre-election threat: A gusher of stimulus turning into a trickle

Lawmakers have left town and Trump aides don’t expect new stimulus talks anytime soon. That leaves the U.S. economy without much of the government aid that had been propping it up.

After a spring and summer bolstered by cash infusions from the federal government of more than $3 trillion, the U.S. economy may have to sink or swim this fall with a relative trickle of support — presenting a significant threat to President Donald Trump’s standing as he heads into a compressed reelection campaign already trailing in the polls.

Negotiations on another large fiscal aid package remained stalled on Monday, and people close to the talks held no hope of any movement this week — perhaps even for the rest of the month. And economists mostly say Trump’s executive actions announced on Saturday would have limited impact, even if they manage to survive potential legal and operational challenges.

For the moment, struggling small businesses are running out of their initial aid with no replenishment in sight. State and local governments face mounting budget shortages that could spur significant layoffs this fall. And schools are waiting on much-needed funding to open safely.

Struggling households bolstered by previous direct federal payments may get no more cash anytime soon. And expanded unemployment benefits may drop substantially — even if Trump’s move survives in court — while millions remain out of work. Trump’s payroll tax deferral could also prove difficult to implement and is, at least for now, only a temporary reprieve rather than a permanent cut.

All of this means that absent a fresh breakthrough on another stimulus bill, an economy that cratered by historic proportions in the first half of the year amid the Covid-19 epidemic will have to continue to snap back without much federal help, at least beyond the easy-money policies put in place by the Federal Reserve.

“We are increasingly concerned that this best-they-can do stimulus from the White House will never make it fully to the execution stage and the economy will be left to sink or swim on its own,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at financial group MUFG. “Washington is either unable or unwilling to provide a lifeline to those who can’t swim like the bankrupt state and local governments and the millions of unemployed who have no jobs to return to.”

With latest executive orders, Trump gets approval from his golf club crowd

White House officials reject this idea and say the executive actions will do a lot to boost the recovery while also putting Democrats on defense politically.

“Besides adding some much needed assistance, I think this moves the ball toward recovery,” National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said in an interview. “I’m the first to admit there is way too much unemployment out there and we really do need to help people and we came up with a good compromise way to do that.”

Kudlow is framing the payroll tax deferral as a $1,200 wage increase “for the heroes who are working through this whole pandemic. And if after-tax wages go up, that’s an incentive to go back to work. And politically, it may well move us toward negotiations.”

Trump on Saturday moved to circumvent Congress with four executive actions that would attempt to provide $400 per month in extra jobless benefits by redirecting existing federal disaster aid money.

The order says states would have to come up with 25 percent of the money, but Trump later said the federal government would cover the whole payment if struggling states could not. Kudlow said the extra benefit could be even higher — as much as $800 — because the administration would work to repurpose more funds and add to whatever states are able to provide.

But it’s unclear when the benefit would kick in or how long it would last; states were still seeking guidance Monday, and some worried they’d need to build a new system for delivering benefits under this program.

The payroll tax deferral for those making under $104,000 a year would require employers to comply, but would only be a deferral of taxes that would later amount to a giant tax bill. And the eviction moratorium would actually do nothing for the vast majority of the country’s tenants.

“The direct economic effects are likely to be limited in scope, scale and duration,” said Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz. “And this is before you consider the considerable legal uncertainties. The indirect effects are uncertain, depending on whether the orders facilitate or retard congressional compromises.”

Trump’s own senior aides over the weekend acknowledged the shortcomings and potential legal challenges. “Maybe we’re going to go to court on them. We’re going to go ahead with our actions anyways,” Kudlow said on ABC’s “This Week.”

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows conceded that major issues would remain unaddressed. “The downside of executive orders is you can’t address some of the small business incidents that are there,” he said on Sunday on “Full Court Press With Greta Van Susteren.”

“You can’t necessarily get direct payments, because it has to do with appropriations,” he said. “That’s something that the president doesn’t have the ability to do. So, you miss on those two key areas. You miss on money for schools. You miss on any funding for state and local revenue needs that may be out there.”

On CNBC Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin reiterated what Trump himself suggested Sunday night and on Twitter on Monday: The White House still wants a larger deal, despite major differences with Democrats on the price tag and what new legislation would include.

“The president is determined to spend what we need to spend,” Mnuchin said. “We’re prepared to put more money on the table.” But he did not say when he might restart talks with Democratic leaders on the Hill, only that “if we can get a fair deal we’re willing to do it this week.”

Meadows is out of Washington this week so talks could prove difficult to restart right away. And many Republicans have expressed concern about spending much more federal money and have an ideological preference to simply let the economy fend for itself.

If no deal is reached and with questions looming over Trump’s executive actions, the economy may wind up without more fiscal support just as the recovery from the depths of the Covid-19 collapse appears to be flagging.

Job creation slowed from 4.8 million in June to 1.8 million in July as fresh virus breakouts spread in multiple states and reopening plans had to be curtailed. So far, the U.S. has added back only around 9 million of the 22 million jobs lost since the crisis began.

Consumer spending began recovering in April, likely bolstered by stimulus checks, but has since leveled off, according to credit card spending data maintained by JPMorgan Chase. Federal data showed a strong 5.6 percent increase in consumer spending in June, but that was down from 8.5 percent in May. Personal income dropped 1.1 percent in June and 4.4 percent in May as federal payments slowed down.

To many analysts, this all suggests that the economy could struggle in the fall if the federal government stops pumping money into the system through stimulus checks, enhanced jobless benefits and other channels.

“It’s unclear where we go from here. The recovery may be ongoing but downside risks absent further stimulus are significant,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics. “Expiring support is coming against a backdrop of virus containment that is already slowing down activity. Without additional help, incomes and spending will surely retrench. That in turn will have implications for business profitability and jobs.”

There has been little external pressure to force a deal, partly because the stock market has continued its sharp recovery, despite the lack of action of further stimulus. The Dow Jones Industrial Average remains around 1,600 points below where it was before Covid-19 slammed the U.S. But it’s up roughly 9,000 points since hitting its pandemic low in March.

Market analysts say this is part because second-quarter earnings — though dramatically lower than 2019 — have mostly not come in as badly as feared. And the Fed’s commitment to keep interest rates low and pumping vast sums of money into markets to boost growth is driving investors into stocks.

But part of the market resilience is also an assumption — perhaps an incorrect one — that Republicans and Democrats will ultimately have to make a deal for something around $2 trillion in further stimulus rather than face the election risk of a freshly declining economy. That amount would be halfway between the Democrats’ package of more than $3 trillion and Republicans’ goal of $1 trillion or less.

“The markets perceive this to be a weird political dance in preparation for the election,” said Richard Bernstein, founder of investment firm Richard Bernstein Advisors. “And ultimately there will be a halfway or something close to halfway deal.”

It’s virtually impossible to find analysts who believe a deal won’t ultimately get made.

“Trump’s executive orders will likely force Democrats to come back to the negotiating table with Republicans,” said Edward Moya, senior market analyst at foreign exchange trading firm OANDA. “Democrats will likely make some big concessions and a deal around the $1.5 trillion level should be reached. The economic recovery will continue and still be fueled by stimulus before and after the election.”

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