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USPS admits delivery times are plummeting, says there’s no “constitutional right” to timely delivery

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) argued that there is no “constitutional right” to timely mail delivery after its own data showed that on-time delivery times had plummeted ahead of Election Day.

The Department of Justice, which is defending the USPS in a lawsuit brought by New York and other states over changes ordered by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a top donor to President Donald Trump, argued that the mail slowdown cannot be unlawful because there is no guarantee in the Constitution of timely mail delivery, Bloomberg News reported.

The states’ argument “assumes that because the plaintiff states crafted their election laws with the expectation that USPS will provide a certain level of service, they now have a constitutional right to expect that level of service,” the DOJ said in a court filing, adding that the Elections Clause of the Constitution “does not shield states from any and all external circumstances that may impact state elections.”

The filing came after New York Attorney General Letitia James warned that the USPS slowdown threatened the timely delivery of roughly 7 million ballots.

James argued that the slowdown violated the Elections Clause, because the USPS had taken “actions that are intended to, and do, have the effect of hampering state election administration.”

Numerous federal courts have ordered the USPS to reverse changes ordered by DeJoy over the summer, which the agency’s own inspector general faulted for reduced performance.

“No analysis of the service impacts of these various changes was conducted, and documentation and guidance to the field for these strategies was very limited and almost exclusively oral,” the report said. “The resulting confusion and inconsistency in operations at postal facilities compounded the significant negative service impacts across the country.”

Despite the court orders to restore mail-sorting machines and reverse rules limiting extra delivery trips, mail delivery times have gotten worse — not better. A judge ordered the USPS on Tuesday to inform all employees that DeJoy’s policies had been reversed.

The order came after the agency’s own data showed that mail delivery had plummeted in recent weeks.

The data shows that the USPS delivered less than 70% of first-class mail on time on Wednesday, down from around 91% in the weeks before DeJoy’s policy changes. In Southern Florida, only 63% of first-class mail was on time on Tuesday. In the Philadelphia areas, the USPS delivered only 42% of first-class mail on time. In the Baltimore area, that number fell to only 39%.

Though the USPS has processed election mail at a faster rate, voting rights advocates warned voters against sending ballots by mail in the final days before the election.

“It’s too late to use the mails,” former Attorney General Eric Holder, who now heads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, warned on Twitter. “I urge everyone to now vote in person; early vote or use drop boxes. Protect your health but don’t let the Court and the deliberately crippled Postal Service deprive you of your most precious civil right. Plan your vote.”

The USPS itself has also warned against sending ballots by mail in the final week before the election.

“Our general recommendation is that as a common-sense measure, you mail your completed ballot before Election Day, and at least one week prior to your state’s deadline,” the agency wrote on its website.

Forty-two million out of 92 million mail ballots requested by voters still have not been returned despite the delivery window closing, according to the U.S. Elections Project. Accordingly, elections officials recommended submitting the ballots at drop boxes or voting in person rather than using the mail.

“We are too close to Election Day, and the right to vote is too important to rely on the Postal Service to deliver absentee ballots on time,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in a statement on Tuesday. “Citizens who already have an absentee ballot should sign the back of the envelope and hand-deliver it to their city or township clerk’s office or ballot drop box as soon as possible.”

“Today is the last recommended day to mail back your ballot,” Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said on Twitter. “After today, return your ballot to any election drop box or voting location in your county.”

In the last days of the campaign, Trump wallows in his contempt for his supporters

Sen. Martha McSally, an Arizona Republican, has paid her bootlicking dues. She’s repeatedly gone out of her way to show obeisance to Donald Trump, most famously in January when she yelled “liberal hack” repeatedly at a CNN reporter who asked her if the Senate should consider evidence before rushing to acquit Trump during his impeachment trial. 

But despite years of bowing and scraping and, of course, voting to acquit Trump despite his obvious guilt, McSally has earned no loyalty in return from her orange master. She’s in a tough race against former astronaut Mark Kelly, a Democrat, and has consistently trailed in the polls. At a recent Arizona rally, Trump didn’t  bother to hide his disdain for McSally’s standard political desire to address her own potential voters. 

“Martha, just come up fast. Fast. Fast. Come on. Quick,” Trump barked at her. “You got one minute! One minute, Martha! They don’t want to hear this, Martha. Come on. Let’s go. Quick, quick, quick. Come on. Let’s go.” It was clear that, as always, Trump resents every moment when the spotlight’s not on him, even in the context of helping a sycophant.

That moment went viral, since cringeworthy is the emotional fuel of the internet. It also illustrated of one of the most frustrating aspects of Trumpism: Trump treats his own supporters as a pack of morons, but they don’t seem to mind and keep on adoring him anyway. 

This was most profoundly demonstrated by a bizarre video from a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, last week, when Trump complained to the crowd about the indignity of even having to visit their city. 

“I wasn’t coming to Erie. I have to be honest. There’s no way I was coming. I didn’t have to,” Trump announced. “And then we got hit with the plague, and I had to go back to work.”

(Like most things Trump says, this is not true. Former Vice President Joe Biden’s lead over Trump in the polls — both nationally and in Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state — has been stable since before Biden was officially running.) 

But what’s wild about this video is how the crowd reacts to Trump’s lengthy diatribe about how he doesn’t even want to be there: They laugh and cheer, lapping it up as he insults them right to their faces. 

It’s such a weird reaction that CNN host Don Lemon aired a supercut of Trump complaining at various rallies that he didn’t even want to be there. 

“I may never have to come back here again if I don’t get Iowa,” Trump told a crowd in Des Moines. 

This bit, which he repeats ad nauseam, is Trump’s apparent closing argument: Since he lowered himself to speak directly to the hoi polloi, the least they can do is vote for him. In order for the joke to work, you have to accept Trump’s premise that his supporters are scum and he taints himself by having to speak to them. 

Despite Trump’s insistence that he hates holding his rallies, of course, the truth is that he’s hopelessly addicted to them and their main purpose to feed his ego. They probably aren’t helping his campaign. 

As Susan Milligan at U.S. News and World report pointed out this week, polling suggests that “voters in battleground states do not approve of Trump’s largely maskless, packed rallies.”

Trump sees his own supporters as dupes. He revels in their adoration, but can’t even pretend to return the feeling. Being a sociopathic bully, he revels in rubbing their noses in the fact that he sees them as idiots. 

A recent incident in Omaha, Nebraska, became an almost too-perfect symbol of this relationship between Trump and his supporters. Buses that were supposed to come pick up supporters after a rally failed to materialize, leaving hundreds of people — many of them elderly — stranded in the cold. They had to walk long distances back to their cars, and multiple people were taken to the hospital after exposure to the freezing temperatures. 

That Trump loathes his own fans isn’t a great mystery. As The Atlantic dutifully reported in two articles in September, Trump routinely makes fun of Christian conservatives behind their backs and called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.” All we need is a story about him making fun of dumb cops and we’ve hit the trifecta of Trump mocking the constituent groups that are the most faithfully Republican. 

The irony of this is that the right-wing media has stoked their audience’s hatred for liberal voters, Democratic politicians and mainstream journalists for decades by claiming that such people are a “liberal elite” who look down their noses at “ordinary Americans,” especially conservatives. Night after night, Fox News solemnly declares that its audience is victimized endlessly by this supposed snobbery, even though there’s usually little or no evidence to make the case. This narrative of liberal contempt and conservative victimization permeated Republican talking points during the Amy Coney Barrett hearing, with one GOP politician after another feigning outrage at the imaginary attacks on Barrett for being a devout Catholic and having a big family, without producing a shred of evidence that any such attacks had ever happened. 

While the evidence of liberal contempt for conservatives is thin on the ground, the evidence of Trump’s contempt for his own supporters is delivered to us via firehose. He insults his voters right to their faces. He sneers at Republican politicians who support him. He cares so little for his most fervent supporters that he repeatedly imperils their health with his rallies, not to mention the Barrett nomination party at the White House that led to more than two dozen Republicans getting sick with COVID-19. 

Trump gets away with this because Republicans have treating their own people like a bunch of suckers for years, which is why right wing media is awash in conspiracy theories and snake-oil salesmen. They get away with it because their marks always assume, like good marks should, that they’re in on the con, and that somebody else is the sucker. So when Trump insults his own voters right to their faces, telling them they live in some Podunk burg he hoped he’d never have to visit again, many in the crowd are thinking, “He’s not talking about me, but these other yahoos.”

In truth, those folks are the biggest suckers of all, imagining that they’re the exception to Trump universal contempt. He really does see his supporters as a herd of gullible idiots. By swallowing it and voting for him anyway, they’re only confirming his worst assumptions. 

Kavanaugh corrects controversial opinion after Vermont fact-checks false claim about mail-in voting

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh corrected his controversial opinion in a Wisconsin mail-in voting case after Vermont’s secretary of state sent the hight court a letter fact-checking his “erroneous claim” about the state’s voting by mail rules.

Kavanaugh issued a concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s 5-3 decision to ban Wisconsin from counting mail-in ballots if they are sent by Election Day but arrive after Nov. 3, citing Vermont as an example of a state which had not changed its “ordinary election rules” due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos pointed out that was not true, noting that the state had sent mail-in ballots to every active registered voter for the first time and changed rules to allow those ballots to be counted earlier than in previous elections.

“These two actions factored significantly in our decision to hold to existing law requiring the election day receipt of mailed ballots rather than extending returns beyond election day based on postmark,” Condos wrote in a letter to the court. “Since the state of Wisconsin neither changed its ordinary election rules this year to mail each of its active registered voters a ballot nor authorized its local election officials to process ballots early, Vermont is not an accurate comparison for the assertion Justice Kavanaugh has made. I respectfully ask that the record is corrected to reflect that.”

Condos posted the letter calling out Kavanaugh’s “erroneous claim” on Twitter, arguing that “when it comes to issuing decisions on the voting rights of American citizens, facts matter.”

CNN later reported that Kavanaugh had issued a “rare public correction” after the letter was published, changing the phrase “ordinary election rules” to “ordinary election-deadline rules.”

“Other states such as Vermont, by contrast, have decided not to make changes to their ordinary election-deadline rules, including to the election-day deadline for receipt of absentee ballots,” his opinion now reads. 

Kavanaugh’s opinion, which drew a stark rebuke from liberal Justice Elena Kagan, was “extraordinarily sloppy” and “riddled with errors,” Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern wrote.

Aside from mischaracterizing Vermont’s election rules, Kavanaugh baselessly echoed President Donald Trump’s claim that ballots counted after Election Day could “flip the results” of the vote even though Election Day results are not final or certified in any state.

“These states want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election,” Kavanaugh wrote. “And those states also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter.”

Kagan shot back in her dissent that “there are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted.”

“Nothing could be more ‘suspicio[us]’ or ‘improp[er]’ than refusing to tally votes once the clock strikes 12 on election night,” she wrote. “To suggest otherwise, especially in these fractious times, is to disserve the electoral process.”

“What will undermine the ‘integrity’ of that process is not the counting but instead the discarding of timely cast ballots that, because of pandemic conditions, arrive a bit after Election Day,” Kagan added.

Citing litigation around the 2000 presidential election recount, Kavanaugh also wrongly claimed that a “unanimous” Supreme Court had endorsed the theory that the high court must “police state courts’ interpretation of their own state’s election laws,” Stern wrote, even though “this position never drew support from a majority of the justices, let alone all of them.”

The Trump-appointed justice also cited a law review article by New York University law professor Richard Pildes to warn against the risk that late-arriving ballots “destabilize the election result.” But Pildes actually argued in the article that every state should postpone its deadline for accepting mailed ballots submitted by Election Day.

“States that require absentees to be received by election night or shortly after should move this date back,” Pildes wrote. “Moreover, if a significant number of votes come in after a receipt deadline that has not been changed and that is much tighter than in other states, ex post litigation challenging that deadline is easy to imagine. This is exactly what we do not want to face for a risk that can be mitigated in advance.”

Kavanaugh’s opinion alarmed election law experts, who warned that the conservatives on the Supreme Court appear “poised to allow Republican states to engage in all manner of voter suppression in the name of protecting the rights of state legislatures.”

“Kavanaugh’s opinion advanced a controversial theory about near-absolute power of state legislatures to set rules in federal elections. It also was sloppy in talking about facts and the law, and it echoed Trump’s false talking points about the perils of voting by mail,” Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California Irvine School of Law, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “The overall tenor of Kavanaugh’s opinion was not only dismissive of voting rights, but it also appeared to suggest that decisions to limit counting and enfranchisement are constitutionally mandated.”

Lessons from Trump’s America

Months before a global pandemic rocked our economy and led to millions of lost jobs, these words were spoken to me by Oyawele Dumas, a Detroit child care provider: “A lot of families are stressed out and don’t know how they’re going to make it day to day, and whether they’re going to have shelter.”    

When I met Dumas, the economy was supposedly booming, though for her it was not. In late 2018 the federal government shut down as a result of Donald Trump’s effort to press Congress to pay for a border wall with Mexico, starving Dumas of clients and child care subsidies, and pushing her into debt.

I met Dumas as part of a year-long reporting project for Capital & Main on economic inequality and how it has affected the most consequential presidential campaign in our lifetime. In spite of her difficult circumstance, Dumas was politically engaged, as were many of those we spoke to over the past 12 months. They include Tony Valdovinos, an undocumented student who would not let his inability to vote stop him from getting Arizonans to the polls, as well as Lynn and Nancy Utesch, Wisconsin dairy farmers  who were organizing their neighbors to push back against agribusinesses that have contaminated local wells and forced smaller operators into bankruptcy.

But conversations with poor and working-class people also reveal how difficult it will be to tackle a problem that has only been made more stark by a global pandemic. Why? Americans are beset by skepticism of politics, overwhelmed by the daily demands of life in a pandemic. And they are divided by race, class and party.

“I kind of figured [Trump] was going to win anyways,” Robert Glover, a father of five, told me, explaining why he did not bother to register to vote in 2016. He was moving his family from Erie, Pennsylvania to Cleveland because of a lack of job opportunities. And that was during an economy with record-low unemployment. Voter turnout in the U.S. is worse than in most other developed countries, and many people simply don’t register to vote.

Meanwhile, Erie truck driver Jim Boehm, who suffered from a bad back from long hours behind the wheel, was inspired by Trump’s pledge to build a border wall with Mexico. Pressed about tax cuts that favored the wealthy, he pushed back. “It’s like Congress. They give themselves raises all the time, and they’re not doing anything.”

Glover is African American and Boehm is white, and for those hoping to see transformative change, each man’s approach to politics – Glover’s disengagement and Boehm’s anti-immigrant stance – could provoke a sense of hopelessness. But focusing solely on the skepticism and division of voters at the bottom of the economic ladder misses the point by a long shot.

Ample research suggests that we have a political system – and political leaders – who have been increasingly unresponsive to the needs of the poor and working class. And economic mobility has been declining as well. More than 90% of children who were born in 1940 grew up to earn more than their parents. Only 50% of children born 40 years later will go on to earn more than their parents, according to a Harvard University team of researchers led by Raj Chetty.

We launched the series with a timeline that highlighted some of the major decisions that have contributed to the growth of economic inequality over the last 40 years, from efforts to quash labor reform to giant tax breaks to free trade agreements that have encouraged the outsourcing of jobs. Those decisions – all attacks on an already fragile social contract between workers, government and business – have been made under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. The U.S. is unusual. It has a level of economic inequality that is higher than its peer nations, and wealth inequality has been on the rise, with the top 0.1% of Americans holding about as much wealth as the bottom 90%.

In 2016, Trump did particularly well in regions of the country – from Dayton to Erie to Battle Creek – that had seen a decades-long loss of manufacturing jobs and the decline of industrial unions, institutions that checked corporate power, built the middle-class jobs and also fostered solidarity across racial lines. Trump exploited the declining fortunes of the white working class with his promise to bring back manufacturing jobs to the industrial Midwest, to “make America great again.”

In spite of his promise to represent working people, Trump’s policies have largely not delivered. His infrastructure plan never materialized. More than half of all states saw slower median household income growth during Trump’s first three years when compared to the three years leading up to his presidency. Corporations and the wealthy have seen their taxes slashed, while attacks on the Affordable Care Act have swelled the ranks of the uninsured. In the last month, Trump has prioritized his Supreme Court pick over an economic relief package for working people.

This hard-right approach to policy is not popular, making it all the more important to exploit racial divisions and incite xenophobia; fear of looters has replaced immigrant caravans in this campaign cycle. And it has led to Republicans’ reliance on creaky and undemocratic institutions like the Senate and the electoral college, which give outsized weight to people in low population states, along with gerrymandering and outright attacks on the voting process. 

“The spectacle of right-wing populism gets all the press,” argue Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. They suggest we pay attention to the Koch Network, the chamber of commerce, the “plutocrats” who are driving the Republican economic agenda. The populist support for Trump is genuine, but one wing of the Republican party can’t maintain control of the country without the other.

This election cycle began with progressive candidates putting forward dueling plans to address rising economic inequality, and it is ending in the midst of a deadly pandemic that has only accelerated its cruel march. What will follow?

Will the Black Lives Matter movement help lead to a narrowing of a racial wealth gap that leaves the median white family with nearly ten times more to fall back on than the median Black family? Will white working-class voters who support Trump turn their ire on corporate executives whose pay is now more than 300 times that of the average worker, up from 20 times in 1965? Or will legislation to shore up the health care system and strengthen labor unions be stymied by Republican-led Senate filibusters, corporate lobbyists and a lack of Democratic ambition? It will take hard work to address this crisis from the grassroots on up. And we still need to beat COVID-19.

“Sometimes it takes a disaster for big policy changes to actually be made.” Those words were spoken to me by West Virginia University political science professor William Franko last fall, at the start of this project.

We got our disaster. Now let’s hope we get some change.

Psychologist Dan McAdams on the case of Trump: “Much stranger than any diagnostic category”

Many of the United States and the world’s leading mental health experts have concluded that Donald Trump is mentally unwell, pathological, dangerous and perhaps even a sociopath or a psychopath.

This conclusion has been reached after more than four years of observing Trump’s public behavior. Other mental health professionals, most notably the president’s niece, Mary Trump, who is a psychologist, as well as Dr. Justin Frank (author of “Trump on the Couch“) have reached the same conclusion after expertly observing Trump’s behavior for years or decades.

After being hospitalized several weeks ago for COVID treatment, during which he was administered an experimental cocktail of drugs, Trump has behaved in an even more erratic and aberrant manner.

Donald Trump’s mind and mental health are like the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. These last days before Election Day are a countdown for a man who, if he is defeated, will experience a meltdown that spreads his poison all over the world.

As documented by the Washington Post, Trump has lied more than 20,000 times while president. In these last few weeks, his lies are becoming more frequent and outrageous.

Trump is now claiming that he somehow defeated the coronavirus pandemic. In reality, the United States is falling deeper into a season of death. The virus is spreading largely unchecked, with more than 227,000 people dead in total and upwards of 70,000 new cases a day.

During his second and final presidential debate with Joe Biden, Trump sounded remarkably callous and cruel in his discussions of the death and suffering caused by his negligence and incompetence during the pandemic.

Because fueling his ego, grandiosity and malignant narcissism are more important than the lives of others, Trump continues to host rallies where his followers gather unmasked by the thousands. Public health experts have now directly tied Trump’s events to the spread of the virus and resulting illnesses and deaths. Trumpism literally is a death cult; his followers are human biological weapons.

On Tuesday, in Omaha, Nebraska, Trump again showed that he does not care about the health and safety of his followers. After a rally at an airfield, many of Trump’s supporters were left behind in freezing temperatures when the buses they were promised did not appear. Many people were forced to walk several miles from the rally site back to their vehicles, and dozens of them required medical attention.

As president, Donald Trump has significant influence over the behavior of the American people. His mental pathologies have infected tens of millions of his followers, and have caused PTSD and other forms of stress and trauma for those Americans who oppose his regime. 

But for all of Donald Trump’s evident mental pathologies, could it be that he is even more dangerous than previously understood? That’s the contention of Dan McAdams, who is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and a professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University. He is the author of almost 300 articles and chapters as well as seven books, including “The Art and Science of Personality Development“ and “The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By.”

McAdams’ work has been featured in leading media outlets such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN and elsewhere. His most recent book is “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning.”

In this conversation McAdams warns that Donald Trump’s greatest threat is caused by the fact that he exists only in the present moment, a man without a future or a past who lacks any sense of a life narrative, story or ethics beyond winning at all costs. This aspect of Donald Trump is the greatest threat to the country and the world.

McAdams also cautions that Donald Trump is a unique and strange person who defies any singular category of mental diagnosis, and shares his concern that leaders like Donald Trump inevitably bring ruin and destruction to the countries they lead.

But all may not be lost. At the end of this conversation, McAdams offers hope that Trump’s followers will be dejected and broken once he is removed from office, and that America’s political and cultural institutions will be strong enough for healing to begin.

You can also listen to my conversation with Dan McAdams on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How have you made sense of the Age of Trump?

For the first time here in America we have a full-blooded authoritarian leader. This has happened in other countries at other times, most notably the 1930s in Italy and Germany, of course. But for Americans this was all news. I’ve spent several years trying to understand Donald Trump using the standard vocabulary, nomenclature, ideas and theories from psychological science to make sense of him and his life. But they have only proved somewhat helpful in that quest.

I end up just being flummoxed by the strangeness of the man. I believe that he does not neatly fit the categories. He’s not the typical malignant narcissist. He’s unbelievably disagreeable, but in ways that nobody would ever fathom. There are so many things about Donald Trump that are peculiar. My book is entitled “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump.” I cannot help but to emphasize the strangeness of Donald Trump — it is as if he is a type of one-off when it comes to human nature.

Even at this point, there are many millions of Americans who are still in shock that Trump even became president.

The 50% or so of the American populace who are strongly opposed to Donald Trump never got over election night 2016. It was a traumatic experience. It was an event that people have flashbacks over. People are in therapy about what happened that night.

Many people keep hoping against hope that somehow it is all going to go away — that Trump’s time in office is this weird anomaly that happened to American culture and somehow we are going to go back to some type of pre-Trump normal. I do not believe things will be the same again in this country. What many Americans will never get over is the feeling that this is not the country they thought they lived in before Trump was elected.

There is this repeated cycle of hope and despair with America and the Age of Trump. People are hopeful that some scandal, or his crimes against democracy and the country, will stop him. But that never happens. If anything, impeachment and every revelation of his wrongdoing has made him stronger. What does that cycle of ups and downs, hope and disappointment, do to people?

Going back to the 1970s, Donald Trump wins when he wears people out. Trump’s modus operandi has always been to be more persistent, to hang in there and to run out the clock. As president he tried to win by outlasting everyone else. He did this in the real estate market. He did this to his creditors in the 1990s.

Trump has shown unlimited energy to promote himself. I do not believe that there is anyone else on the planet with that much self-promoting energy.

Every day, Donald Trump he is fighting what he considers to be a battle of survival, and then he either wins or loses. Trump has been like that his whole life. Trump wakes up the next day and starts all over again with that behavior. Trump does not even remember what happened yesterday. Other human beings remember what happened on Monday when it is Tuesday. As human beings we develop long-term narratives about how our lives work. But not Mr. Trump. For him it is new every day.

It is not a cognitive deficit. Trump has always behaved that way. He’s always had this tremendous ability to just forget about the past and to deal with the present moment. That is part of what makes Trump so powerful in the minds of his supporters. He’s not hiding anything. He’s not thinking about yesterday. He’s not worried about two weeks from now. He looks at the crowd, and he’s 100% all there in the moment.  

Outside observers often think, “Oh my God, there is something behind all of that performance and behavior!” The answer is no. Trump is always what we see. He is Donald Trump playing “Donald Trump” all the time.

Donald Trump is totally authentic as he fakes his way through the role. Trump is a perfectly authentic fake. There is nothing behind the mask. Trump has boundless energy because he does not have to worry about yesterday or tomorrow.

What does Trump’s living in the “forever present” with no thought for the future or the past do to a country in terms of truth, reality and decision-making more generally?

It dooms a democracy. It dooms a culture and the broader development and health of a culture. Democracy and society depend on people taking some sort of long-term view. If there is no long-term vision or understanding of reality, then what works for such a person like Donald Trump is whatever he or she needs at that moment to win the fight.

For example, on a given Monday Trump will say, “Nancy Pelosi is the worst person on the planet.” On Wednesday, it is a totally different fight. He does not have any memory of Monday and thus he will then say, “Well, you know what, Nancy and I were getting along today.” And on Friday, Donald Trump is in another place. It is all moment to moment.

Other people do not live that way. It is not sustainable. To survive long-term a people, a nation, cannot have leaders who behave like Donald Trump.

Many mental health professionals would respond that such behavior shows that Donald Trump is mentally pathological.

People can label said behavior however they would like to. But here is what we must take into account in these discussions about mental illness and Donald Trump.  Any of the diagnostic categories are supposed to describe a compromise in one’s functioning such that a person cannot get along in life and be successful.

Donald Trump is the president of the United States. He clearly has been successful. He has clearly gotten along in life. Moreover, I do not think that Donald Trump suffers from a mental illness. His behavior does not make him upset. His behavior motivates and drives him.

So yes, a person can throw those diagnostic categories about, but they are not helpful in this case. They do not help to explain how Donald Trump came to be. Donald Trump is much stranger than any diagnostic category.

Moreover, let us assume that we label Donald Trump as having narcissistic personality disorder or being a sociopath. Who cares? The labels are interesting to the clinicians, but are we going to say in this country that people who have mental illnesses should not be president?

If that is the conclusion, then Abraham Lincoln should not have been president because he clearly suffered from clinical depression. However, Lincoln used that mental illness in way that was powerful and productive. I do not consider mental illness as a deal-breaker when it comes to public office. But in my mind, Donald Trump is way more strange than any mental illness category that one can apply or create.

We must also grapple with the fact that many “successful” people such as CEOs and other “high-achieving” people are sociopaths. Moreover, sometimes that personality type may be of benefit to them.

That is true. But I am not comfortable with the term “mental illness.” Let us discuss instead personality disorders such as narcissistic personality disorder. Steve Jobs met all nine criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. Only five are sufficient for the diagnosis. But Steve Jobs had other characteristics as well. He was a genius, for one, which helped him negotiate life.

Donald Trump is not a genius. Trump is also not as competent as other high-functioning narcissists we see in the world. And yet Trump has been extraordinarily successful through the use of brute-force leadership. That type of leadership is useful in certain contexts such as the military or sports. But there should also be leadership by expertise. Trump is almost 100% brute-force leadership. I do not believe that the United States has ever had such a president.

Donald Trump, again, is not like other human beings.

I have spent my entire career, some 30 years, studying how people create stories about their lives. This is part of human nature. Each of us is walking around with a story in our minds about how we came to be who we are. The story helps to ground us. It gives us a moral framework and help us make sense of who we are, who we were, who we will be in the future. This a called a “narrative identity.”

Trump is the exception. He does not have a story in his mind about how he came to be. This is not a small thing. It is why Trump is able to live in the moment. He is able to play “Donald Trump” the character repeatedly, because there is no animating narrative in his mind about who he is and where his life is going. None.

But again, not having a strong narrative identity — or not having one at all — is not a sign of any particular mental illness. In the DSM there are mentions of “emptiness” and so forth, but that is not necessarily a criterion for mental illness.

It’s just something we all assume that just about everybody has, and now we run into an individual who’s remarkably strange in that regard. And a lot of people still don’t really believe it. They keep thinking there’s something else to him. He’s strategic. He’s playing the long game and so forth. But no. There is no strategic or long game with Donald Trump. Trump is like the alpha chimp who is always playing the short game, a brute-force game, to win at all costs.

What would Donald Trump say if you were to ask him, “Who are you in your own life story?”

People have tried to do that very thing. Going back to the 1980s, journalists and biographers have asked Mr. Trump such questions. He refuses to answer.

Trump scoffs. He changes the subject. He can’t answer such questions. Trump will summon a memory from here or there, but the memory does not really reveal anything substantive because in his mind he has just always existed. Trump cannot offer a narrative about how he has become who he is today. Such a narrative makes no sense to him. Such a question also does not make sense to children either.

I have repeatedly argued that Donald Trump the human being does not really exist. He is a character, a symbol without substance, one on which people impose meaning. Is that analysis correct? What would it feel like to be such a person?

Your characterization of Donald Trump is a good one. Of course, Trump is a human being. He’s flesh and blood. He’s not an apparition. There is a substance and a reality to him there as a human. But when we think of how persons operate in the world, it is not clear to me that Donald Trump would say to you, assuming he knew what the criteria even are, that he is in fact a person.

It is hard to say if Donald Trump is miserable. It is hard to say that he has not done well in life. He is always Donald Trump playing “Donald Trump.” There is not a person behind that behavior, or a narrative, or complexity. Donald Trump is a force of sorts, and that is how he sees himself.

Does Donald Trump believe in right and wrong? Is there some type of ethical governor on his behavior?

Donald Trump has a philosophy of life. It is: “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.” That’s it. That is what he believes. Right from wrong has to be understood in that context. It is Hobbesian. What is right is what wins, what is strong. You either win or you lose. It’s victory or defeat.

When Trump says, “Life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat,” he does not just mean that life ends in victory or defeat. What Trump really means is that every battle ends in victory or defeat. Life is a series of battles, one after another. Monday, there’s a battle, Tuesday, there’s a battle, Wednesday, there’s a battle. There’s victory or defeat in the battle and then you start all over. For Donald Trump there really is no moral framework beyond his version of survival of the strongest.

I don’t think he has a moral framework. It’s very interesting: How does somebody grow up without one of those things? If he’s going to win, everybody else has to lose, so he has to reverse everything that Barack Obama did. Everything. He didn’t care about these things, he doesn’t even know what they are. He didn’t even know what NAFTA was. He just didn’t like it because it was something that was around when Obama was around, so he did away with it. Trump does not know what these things are. He just wants to turn it around and go the other way, and that gives him a victory because somebody always has to lose. Alliances like NATO and trade pacts, they make no sense to him. They are ideally win-win propositions. We help you, you help us.

That is not how the world works in Donald Trump’s mind. If you’re the strongest and the smartest and the most stable genius on the planet, you do not need such relationships. You just win. You have to keep winning.

Trump is version 1.0 of a 21st-century American fascism. What comes next?

I’m not sure there’ll be a version two. I am not saying that everything is going to be fine. Democracy in the United States can go into a tailspin. It is very fragile and there is nothing natural about it. If American democracy is failing, then Donald Trump certainly is playing a role in it. But ultimately, I have more faith in the country’s political and social American institutions than that. I actually believe that the country will recover from this moment.

In a sense, Donald Trump is part of a much bigger phenomenon. I also do not believe that Donald Trump can be duplicated. I do not imagine a Trump 2.0. But I do imagine that Trump’s core base, about 30 million people, who want a Trump 2.0, that will become very frustrated because they will have missed their moment. When Donald Trump is gone, it is going to be very hard for his supporters to recreate the magic that they had with him.

How would Donald Trump respond to being defeated in the 2020 presidential election?

It is very difficult to imagine Donald Trump admitting defeat. He’s never done it. In any domain of his life, be it personal life or business life, Trump has never for a moment admitted to any kind of misstep or defeat. Will Trump even leave the Oval Office? Will he step off the White House grounds? Will he show up to the inauguration? Here in America we have never had to ask these kinds of questions before.

2020 and the company U.S. voters keep

Guilt by association is a troublesome notion. As a matter of law, Americans learned just how troublesome in both the Mitchell Palmer raids of 1919-20, and the McCarthy era commotions over fears of communist infiltration. 

The question is arising once more in Michigan and elsewhere with extremist threats to attack or overthrow established governments. 

The challenge is not only to law enforcement officials forced to assess whether extremist plans cross legal lines. 

Keeping good company?

It also requires answers from those associating with militias or other groups whose tendencies threaten the good order of the nation: Is that the company they wish to keep? Are they satisfied by an ambiguous message to those who offer arms instead of arguments merely to “stand back and stand by”? 

In society more generally, and especially in families, the issue is crucial. Parents worry over their children’s choice of friends. Will a family’s efforts to mold a healthy character be frustrated by peer influences — bad language, bad habits, bad behaviors? 

Inevitably, raising a child demands wholesome examples, praying that a child will emulate admirable conduct and forswear the corrupt temptations that life presents. 

A healthy community reflects those familial concerns. Thus, it is not surprising that the issue becomes acute in politics. 

In choosing a public officer, voters cannot escape the need to judge a candidate’s character, as well as his or her policy positions. 

The power of example

The power of example in the public square can never be ignored. Will a leader’s expressions or conduct shape a constructive or destructive social environment? 

A forgiving community may overlook past misdeeds, for a tolerant society cannot expect perfection in the lives of public figures. 

However tolerant it may be, it cannot ignore conduct in office that betrays commonly held norms of truthfulness and integrity. 

There are, to be sure, tricky aspects to any discussion of guilt by association. Collective guilt appears repugnant on its face. 

Collective responsibility

Yet collective responsibility is the essence of democratic politics. When people elect leaders, they assume a degree of responsibility for the overall character — wise or foolish, effective or incompetent, moral or immoral — of the side they choose. 

The common assertion that elections have consequences is true, and at bottom voters are responsible for those consequences. 

America’s current political campaign presents this challenge to a degree that exceeds historical experience. That helps explain the recent call to civic responsibility by prominent evangelical leaders. 

For the health of the nation

Their full-page advertisement (“For the health of the nation”) urges a moral appraisal of the options offered to the country. Without specifying a choice in the election, those ads are an implicit, yet devastating, critique of the current administration. 

The difficulty runs very deep in the American polity. The 72 million citizens who voted for other candidates in 2016 cannot justly accuse all 63 million who favored the incumbent of sharing his turpitude. 

The constitution respected that minority’s choice and their votes installed a president for four years. But the majority who opposed that choice can fairly expect the minority to consider the consequences of their votes. 

Most emphatically, a nation aspiring to tolerance is entitled to expect that minority to meet the civic obligation to judge rationally the example set by the individual in whom it invested executive power. 

A litany of dubious behaviour

No need to rehearse here the litany of dubious behaviors displayed by Mr. Trump. In the rawest and simplest sense of the terms, do Americans wish to associate with a man who has brought the nation into domestic turmoil and international disrepute? 

Those in Congress and beyond who enable Trump’s behavior will face parallel questions of accountability. 

The point here is that every voter, in judging whether to associate with Trump or his minions, will decide to bless or condemn the conduct shown to the nation. 

What is the alternative? One thing we know for sure: Joe Biden is a big “D” Democrat with a small “d” democrat’s respect for those who are not big “D” Democrats. 

Republicans and independents who have worked with him testify to his trustworthiness as a coalition builder. 

As good a man as god ever created

Long before today’s campaign intensities, even his current adversary Lindsay Graham called Biden “as good a man as God ever created.” 

Every voter is right to ask whether Mr. Trump’s defiance of customary civility demonstrates genuine concern for anyone other than himself. 

And they should be mindful that the ballot they cast will signal their own small “r” republican — or big “A” authoritarian sympathies. 

This article is republished from The Globalist: On a daily basis, we rethink globalization and how the world really hangs together.  Thought-provoking cross-country comparisons and insights from contributors from all continents. Exploring what unites and what divides us in politics and culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  And sign up for our highlights email here.

Why is Michael Bloomberg pouring millions into Texas?

Oil and gas companies burn off billions of cubic feet of natural gas into the atmosphere every year in Texas alone. It’s both wasteful — the gas could be used to power the state’s populous cities many times over — and a major source of climate-warming pollution. Nevertheless, the Texas Railroad Commission, the state agency that regulates the industry, has largely sanctioned the practice, rubber-stamping applications from companies that want to engage in unlimited flaring.

An under-the-radar election for one of the commission’s three seats could change all that. On November 3, Democrat Chrysta Castañeda will face off against Republican Jim Wright, a South Texas businessman who runs an oilfield waste and recycling company. The odds are stacked against Castañeda: She’s running for a position that a Democrat hasn’t won in three decades. But with Democrats suddenly polling competitively up and down the ballot in Texas — not to mention a recent $2.6 million donation Castañeda’s campaign received from former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg — the oil and gas attorney from Dallas may have a fighting chance.

If she wins, she may be in a position to get the commission to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions in some of the largest oilfields in the country. For this reason, she calls the race “the most important climate election in the nation.”

Political analysts agree that the contest may be getting less attention than it deserves.

“This is a sleeper race,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “If there’s a statewide race [in Texas] that Democrats might win that is not on people’s radar, then it’s this one.”

For one, Castañeda is not facing an incumbent. Wright, her opponent, pulled off a stunning upset against an incumbent commissioner in the Republican primary, causing some to speculate that his name may have reminded voters of the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Jim Wright, who died in 2015.

The Republican nominee has also been found in violation of state environmental and permitting rules more than 250 times by the very agency that he hopes to join. The Railroad Commission also fined him more than $180,000 in 2017, and he is battling a series of lawsuits that accuse him of fraud. (Wright’s campaign declined to provide Grist any comments for publication.)

Despite its yawn-inducing name, the Railroad Commission is a powerful state agency that regulates the coal, oil, and gas industries. It approves permits for fracking, signs off on pipeline routes, grants companies the power of eminent domain, and oversees coal mining and cleanup. In a state that’s heavily dependent on oil and gas extraction to power state and local budgets, it has tremendous influence on the economy. The agency is governed by three commissioners who are elected to six-year terms. A Democrat has not served on the commission since 1994.

Over the last few years, the agency has faced increasing scrutiny of its regulation of flaring — an industry term for burning off excess natural gas when pipelines are already at capacity, or when that gas is deemed unworthy of the cost it takes to send it to refineries. The commission sets limits on flaring, but it also routinely grants long-term exemptions to operators who request one. The agency has granted more than 12,000 such exemptions over the past two years, allowing oil and gas companies to burn hundreds of millions of cubic feet of natural gas. That’s up from around 300 in 2010.

Even major oil and gas companies have called flaring a “black eye” for the industry’s image. Most people don’t want to live near flares, which are both unsightly and an obvious source of pollution. For oil behemoths like ExxonMobil and BP, which have pledged to cut down their carbon emissions, flaring is low-hanging fruit.

Under pressure from major oil and gas companies as well as environmental groups, the Railroad Commission took up changes to flaring regulations earlier this year. It proposed requiring companies to provide additional data about the volume of gas to be flared and the exact location of flares. It also requires companies to detail plans for flaring reductions, but it doesn’t set hard limits on how much companies can burn.

Castañeda said that these rules are meager and “would have been a great information-gathering exercise five years ago.” Instead, she says, the commission should use the authority it already has to reject applications for exemptions, and it should push the industry to deploy alternative technologies that reduce flaring.

“It has become routine practice to flare rather than to capture the energy — and that violates the bedrock principle of the Railroad Commission, which is to preserve our natural resources,” she said.

Industry players have primarily lined up behind her Republican opponent. Wright has secured the endorsement of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, as well as current railroad commissioners Christi Craddick and Wayne Christian. When it comes to flaring, Wright acknowledges the problems the practice poses but posits that the solution is to build additional pipeline capacity to move natural gas to refineries.

“Flaring is just that – waste,” he says in a position paper on his website. “The need for more transport capacity is apparent and any barriers to building out that capacity should be removed.”

The contrast between the candidates on the issue of climate change more broadly is stark. Wright has said that he’s not sure “we have good facts on what’s causing our climate change,” while Castañeda says that climate change is real and human-caused. Still, the Democrat says it’s possible to balance “responsible” oil and gas extraction and reduce greenhouse gas emissions “all at the same time.” (Scientists say that most fossil fuels need to be left in the ground in order to avoid catastrophic climate change.)

Rottitnghaus said that Castañeda’s positioning is strategic and “probably wise.” She is running in Texas, after all. “It’s a safer political choice,” he said. “If you start talking about fracking and bans on fracking, that opens you up to all kinds of different political problems that other Democrats have faced from Republican challengers.”

Castañeda has represented oil and gas companies in her work as an attorney, and she made headlines when she secured $146 million in damages for T. Boone Pickens, the Dallas oil tycoon, in 2016. She told Grist that she is not currently working with any operators involved in oil and gas extraction, and that she is rejecting new case work at least until election results are in.

If elected, Castañeda may be able to push the commission to approve stricter flaring regulations. The commission requires a majority vote for proposals to pass. Companies’ requests for flaring exemptions are also put to a vote. Given that the other two commissioners have expressed interest in strengthening flaring regulations, Castañeda may find allies. The chair of the commission, Wayne Christian, set up a “Blue Ribbon Taskforce” to tackle flaring earlier this year. The practice, he said, is “tarnish[ing] the reputation of our state.” Many of the task force’s recommendations have found their way into the proposal the agency is now considering passing.

As for consensus-building on the commission, Castañeda believes that there is widespread buy-in for finding solutions that address rampant flaring.

“What’s missing is the political will to help the people who follow the law to follow the law — and not benefit those who are disregarding the law by giving them an unfair economic advantage,” she said.

Castañeda hopes to bring that political will if she wins next week.

No, President Trump, suburbia is no longer all white

President Donald Trump has tweeted up a storm about how his Democratic challenger Joe Biden wants to “abolish suburbs” and institute programs that would bring impoverished criminals into the suburbs, where they will destroy the “suburban lifestyle dream.”

In the final stages of his campaign, Trump has made an explicit appeal to suburban women: “So can I ask you to do me a favor? Suburban women, will you please like me? I saved your damn neighborhood,” the president said at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in mid-October.

I am a political scientist who studies race in America’s suburbs; my book “African Americans in White Suburbia: Social Networks and Political Behavior” was published in 2017. I contend that Trump’s tweets are not about the actual suburbs.

Instead, they are meant to evoke an archetypal identity for a place historically rooted in the maintenance of racial segregation and white supremacy.

Trump’s image of the suburbs is filled with white people; his tweets are aimed at getting them to vote for him. But there is another contingent of suburban residents — African Americans — who may experience his tweets as provocation to participate in the election in a different direction.

My research indicates that Trump’s appeals may spark an unintended countermobilization. Half of African Americans in the U.S. live in the suburbs. These voters, typically of higher socioeconomic status when compared with their white neighbors, are more likely to mobilize others who — in the face of Trump’s unsubtle racist signals — may now be motivated to vote for Democrats, particularly in races lower down on the ballot.

What is a suburb?

Ask an American to describe the suburbs and they will likely paint a picture of single-family houses, manicured lawns and minivans. They may also speak of the suburbs as a symbol of socioeconomic achievement.

Those things constitute the mythology of the suburbs. They’re not the empirical measurements that social scientists use to measure life in the suburbs. Those include income levels, crime rates and racial makeup.

In practice, the federal government’s definition of a suburb is any place surrounding an urban area that is neither urban nor rural. For instance, the Census Bureau’s Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington Metropolitan Statistical Area includes the urban centers of those cities and a suburban area between them that crosses three states — Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.

Trump’s tweets speak to an imagined and well-to-do stereotypical suburban resident who fears the bogeymen of poverty and crime. That combination of threats has historically had a Black or Latino face.

Who really is a suburbanite?

Trump is likely not referring to the actual suburbs in his tweets. According to data from Pew, while suburban residents are still predominantly white, their share declined between 2000 and 2016, from 76% to 68% of all suburban residents.

Poverty is increasing in the suburbs because of job sprawl. Trump has charged that low-income people are moving to the suburbs because they’re attracting to its low-income housing. But he’s wrong: The suburbs are in flux because of the new geography of jobs.

In a 2010 study whose revealing title was “Job Sprawl and the Suburbanization of Poverty,” Brookings Institution researchers attributed the rise in the number of poor suburbanites to the availability of low-skilled jobs, like service or manufacturing, that have moved to the suburbs. In findings using data from 1999 to 2015, urban planning scholar Andrew Schouten notes that the number of suburban residents in poverty is increasing at double the rate of the central cities.

The suburbs’ racial history

During the period between 1932 and 1964, the suburbs served as a government-subsidized path to the middle class that was designed to exclude Blacks and other “minority” groups such as Irish and Jewish Americans.

At the beginning of suburban development, buyers and sellers had to sign restrictive housing covenants stating that they would not sell their house to a person of color.

At the same time, the federal government would not extend housing loans to citizens who lived in nonwhite neighborhoods and would lower the assessment of a home’s value (the most valuable asset) if Black people lived nearby.

So Trump’s invocation of “suburbs” as an achievement of the American dream is rooted in the fact that the dream was realized through the explicit racialization of home ownership and opportunity.

Suburban African American countermobilization

My research suggests that Trump’s racially coded tweets may produce a countermobilization from suburban African Americans.

In 2008 and 2016 these voters, who are often of higher socioeconomic status than their white neighbors, were statistically more likely than white suburbanites to get involved in politics, even outside their home communities. This includes distributing political or interest group information, sharing information on social media, signing petitions and attending protests. For example, 11% of suburban African Americans are likely to attend a protest as opposed to 0.07% of their white neighbors.

Suburban Blacks are in a unique position compared to their neighbors, co-workers, and even the majority of their coethnics. Following my book’s publication, I analyzed the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, focusing on Americans in ZIP codes that are less than 20% Black, encompassing the very areas that Trump and residents may consider suburbs.

A familiar story emerges. Most Americans believe political participation is primarily designed to affect their immediate community.

But suburban African Americans do not believe their neighbors share their political views. Politically, this means these African American voters are in a position where they are surrounded by people with similar incomes, education and occupations. Yet on their primary identity, race, they are very different.

Political interests not in their backyard

Evidence from 2008 and 2016 shows that suburban African Americans are less likely to vote in their local congressional races, but are more likely to engage in alternative forms of political participation such as donating to minority candidates, writing letters to newspapers and attending protests.

Unlike voting, these behaviors are not tied to a geographic jurisdiction. They include donating to legal challenges to statue removal in a state where they do not live or to a PTA in another community that conducts voter registration drives. Their opinions suggest that they devote their political resources to particular racial interests.

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The data show that these mostly suburban African Americans are in fact more likely to participate in behaviors like distributing political or interest group information, sharing information on social media, signing petitions and attending protests when compared with their white neighbors.

Trump’s pleas to suburbanites may spur these African American residents to work in swing states and competitive races lower down on the ballot.

So while Trump’s racialized pleas toward “suburban” voters could have the desired effect — gaining the support of white women in those communities — they could also spur other suburbanites to mobilize the very people he vilifies.

Ernest B. McGowen III, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Analysis shows spike in Covid-19 cases after numerous Trump rallies

Half of the 22 campaign rallies held by President Donald Trump between June and September were followed by county-level increases in Covid-19 cases, suggesting that these frequent in-person events attracting thousands of people may be unnecessarily intensifying the spread of coronavirus and “endangering host communities” throughout the United States.

That’s according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress (CAP), based on an examination of county-level data on Covid-19 from the New York Times.

By comparing the number of daily new cases and the seven-day moving average of new cases during the 21 days before and after each rally, researchers were able to discern the extent to which Trump’s rallies “were associated with heightened cases.”

While the authors stress that “multiple factors prevent a definitive, causal connection,” CAP found “unambiguous increases” in county-level cases after rallies in the following cities:

  • Mankato, Minnesota
  • Bemidji, Minnesota
  • Henderson, Nevada
  • Londonderry, New Hampshire
  • Swanton, Ohio
  • Middletown, Pennsylvania
  • Old Forge, Pennsylvania; and
  • Newport News, Virginia

CAP also detected a more “subtle” increase in the county-level case count trend after Trump’s rallies in Vandalia, Ohio; Latrobe, Pennslyvania; and Oshkosh, Wisconsin. 

According to the analysis, “counties that had a lower Covid-19 incidence — a measure of new cases per capita — prior to the rally were more likely to have a visible increase in cases after the rally, perhaps because any uptick in cases was more likely to stand out against the pre-event level.”

“By virtually any standard, Trump’s rallies ignore every public health recommendation to mitigate the spread of Covid-19,” said Thomas Waldrop, policy analyst at CAP and co-author of the report, in a statement released Tuesday.

“They involve thousands of people, packed closely together, with few people wearing masks and no attempts at social distancing,” he added. 

Emily Gee, a health economist at CAP and co-author of the analysis, noted that “eight months into the pandemic, we know the factors that can stop the spread of the coronavirus.”

“The president and his team have flouted the rules at every turn,” Gee said. “These rallies offer a boost to the president’s ego but risk leaving behind a trail of sickness and increased strain on local public health departments and medical systems.”

Trump announced Tuesday morning via Twitter that he has “three BIG rallies today” in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. In response, Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., pointed out that Wisconsin on Monday passed 200,000 Covid-19 cases, with half occurring in “just the last 36 days.”

According to CAP’s report, the majority of Trump’s rallies — where attendees typically do not wear masks or spread out — “have been in violation of local or state restrictions on gatherings to limit the spread of Covid-19.”

Calling Trump “nothing but a thug,” The Daily Beast’s Michael Daly on Monday described the president’s insistence on holding dangerous rallies with closely-packed audiences in spite of public health precautions prohibiting large gatherings as a criminal act that flies in the face of Trump’s professed respect for authority and law enforcement. 

“The self-declared law-and-order president,” Daly wrote, “proved to be a flat-out gangster by declaring himself willing to place the lives of who knows how many [people] in jeopardy.”

Eric Feigl-Ding recently commented that “the biggest difference between public health and astrophysics is that rocket scientists don’t have to convince a science denialist for mission success.” 

“But we epidemiologists have to fight . . . denialism” about the risks of coronavirus exposure and the efficacy of masks in minimizing it, he added. “And if we fail, people die.”

A recent report (pdf) by researchers at Columbia University estimated that of the more than 217,000 lives lost to Covid-19 in the U.S. as of October 16, “at least 130,000 deaths and perhaps as many as 210,000 could have been avoided with earlier policy interventions and more robust federal coordination and leadership.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Monday registered his disgust with Trump’s “pathetic” mishandling of the public health disaster relative to other countries:

Compared to many other countries, the U.S. pandemic response has been hobbled by a lack of universal healthcare, paid sick leave, and additional structural disadvantages.

But, as CAP’s new analysis shows, the country has also been hampered by the Trump administration, which has consistently eschewed the guidance of public health officials throughout the crisis and has “fostered a culture that discourages common-sense mask-wearing and social distancing.”

“It’s unbelievable,” said Waldrop, “that the president has continued to hold these events, which present a risk to public health, despite contracting Covid-19 and being hospitalized himself.”

Trump and Biden on the biggest climate question: What kind of energy transition lies ahead?

Last week’s final presidential debate ended with a revealing split between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on climate policy. But most of the media coverage is missing the real story, because the media ignores what is already happening in the economics of the energy sector.

Biden was clear that he isn’t going to ban fracking or shut down the oil industry. He mentioned ending new drilling on public lands and shutting down subsidies for coal, oil and gas. And he said we would transition away from oil —that it would take decades, but that we need to replace fossil fuels with renewables because of the climate threat. He mentioned some of the tools he’d use to speed the transition: funding 50,000 EV charging stations and beginning the retrofitting of leaky, polluting buildings. 

Trump, as he did in 2016, offered himself as a successful King Canute, and implied he had stopped the tide and effectively shut down the transition away from coal and oil. (Canute knew better — one wonders if Trump has a clue.) He pointed to his withdrawal from the Paris agreement as having saved tens of trillions of dollars. (Fact check: We haven’t actually withdrawn ,and won’t until Nov. 4.)  Trump said Biden’s plan would cost $100 trillion, an entirely made up statistic. He proclaimed that he had “saved” the oil industry, and that as a result, “They’re making a tremendous amount of money.”

In reality, Biden and Trump’s policies would take the U.S. energy sector in very different places — but not in the ways the debate, or media coverage of the debate, might imply.

Trump has not saved the oil industry, any more than he saved the coal jobs he promised in 2016. The U.S. shale sector is unlikely ever again to pump as much crude as it did in 2019. After all, even with high oil prices, it lost hundreds of billions of dollars sustaining those levels during the Trump years. The iconic symbol of Trump’s U.S. “energy dominance,” ExxonMobil, has lost two-thirds of its market value since Trump took office. Oil companies have shed 100,000 jobs and their rig count continues to fall. If the “very inexpensive gasoline” Trump boasted of during the debate continues, those jobs will never return, and the U.S. oil industry will be headed down the pathway coal took during the past decade, even if Trump is elected to a second term. Investors are already fleeing the sector.

The reason is quite simple. Renewables are getting cheaper than oil, as they already are cheaper than coal. As a result, global demand for oil either has peaked, or shortly will, a reality recognized by voices as diverse as BP, Shell and the International Energy Administration. As consumption flattens and then declines, oil prices will remain stubbornly below the $60-per-barrel range required for profitable expansion of U.S. oil production. Exxon, the most bullish of the major oil companies on future demand and prices, concedes that 20% of the oil currently carried on the industry’s books is never going to be profitably pumped.

What will be needed — indeed, for decades, as Biden said, although in diminishing quantities — is cheap oil, the kind owned by the Saudis, the Iraqis, the Iranians and Russia, oil that can be profitably pumped at today’s $40-$50 prices. Major oil companies own huge legacy reserves of such affordable oil, but have no prospect of replacing those reserves as they sell them off. They are either going to shrink and follow many of the independent companies into bankruptcy, or they will have to transition, as BP and Shell have begun exploring, into companies that sell energy — mostly renewable energy — rather than just oil. 

Demand for oil will shrink faster as electric cars and trucks replace internal combustion pollution. Europe, China and half of the U.S. vehicle market are already committed to such a transition. It will happen globally, even if Trump is re-elected, just as his first election did not prevent renewables from replacing coal in states as friendly to Trump’s policies as Oklahoma.

We will transition off oil. That’s not a debating point to be decided next week. It’s a market reality already well underway.

So does it matter who wins? Hugely. Because there are two ways to transition off oil. One is a planned transition, with strategic investments aimed at making sure that as renewables replace fossil fuel, the U.S., not China or Europe, does indeed develop green energy leadership. These investments in clean energy need to be matched with investments in fossil fuel-dependent regions and communities, so that North Dakota, after the end of the Bakken oil boom, isn’t devastated as West Virginia has been by the collapse of coal under Trump’s stewardship.

That’s the pathway Biden has been figuring out and would prefer. We know Trump’s pathway — we’ve seen it in action in the coal fields already. Lots of subsidies for the owners and shareholders in these companies, no planning for a transition or economic diversification, and no attention whatsoever to workers, families and communities. 

Given the economic realities — fossil fuels have no economically competitive future, and clean energy is cheaper almost everywhere — it is Biden’s approach which constitutes, to paraphrase Politico, attractive “climate dessert,” whereas Trump’s is “climate spinach” — or, more realistically, cod liver oil, particularly for the regions and stakeholders who currently depend on coal, oil and gas.  

But commentators would rather tell yesterday’s story, in which we are debating whether to make a shift from fossil fuel to clean energy, rather than today’s reality: How do we manage our way through it, and ensure that we come out far more prosperous than we went in?

We are in the middle of a historic energy transition. Do we want national leadership to make it as smooth and fair as possible? Or do we want a repeat of the collapse of coal — or, for that matter, the coming of the coronavirus?

Trump wants the Supreme Court to help him win the election. It’s unlikely — but still possible

President Trump has repeatedly tried to cast doubt on the results of the presidential election and signaled that he hopes the Supreme Court’s conservative majority can deliver him a win — but election law experts say that scenario is increasingly implausible because Trump has fallen so far behind in the polls.

“It is unlikely the Supreme Court will decide the 2020 elections because it would have to be so close in a state pivotal to the Electoral College that litigating could make a difference,” Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California Irvine School of Law, told Salon. “That’s what happened in 2000 and it could happen again, but odds are against it. If cases do get to the court, we have seen the court divide along ideological and party lines in some key election cases. I hope that would not be the case in 2020.”

Trump has said that his campaign’s litigation over mail voting expansions in key swing states could “end up in the Supreme Court” and the court’s recent decisions have raised fears that it would side with the president in a dispute over ballot rules. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation is likely to further stack the deck in Trump’s favor unless she recuses herself from election-related cases.

Even before Barrett’s confirmation, the court voted 5-3 to block a district court from extending Wisconsin’s mail-in ballot deadline. The court split 4-4 on a decision that allowed Pennsylvania to extend its mail-in ballot deadline, but the state’s Republicans have already filed another request for the court to hear the case after Barrett’s confirmation. Republicans asked a court to separate ballots sent in after Election Day to make it easier to reject them if the court decides to block Pennsylvania’s deadline extension after all.

These rulings could certainly affect the outcome of certain states’ elections, if a large enough percentage of ballots are affected.

“Focusing just on how [the Supreme Court] might rule after Nov. 3, when the initial tallies have already come in, misses something important: It could be that the critical ruling that will decide the 2020 race has already, today, been made by a court or elections official somewhere,” said Michael Geruso, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the Electoral College. “Judges and elections administrators have already made dozens of decisions in Pennsylvania and elsewhere about how and where ballots will be accepted. These decisions have already affected voters’ behaviors. Almost certainly, they have affected whether some voters have voted at all.”

Geruso said that rulings made before Election Day can be just as important as a post-election ruling like the 2000 Bush v. Gore case.

“Regardless of whether SCOTUS rules on an election case after Nov. 3, it could still be the case that earlier, lower rulings — as well as judgment calls by local or state election officials in Pennsylvania and elsewhere — are affecting which ballots are cast and which ballots are counted,” he said. “If these decisions could affect a few thousand votes, then the courts and officials, not the voters, could be deciding the presidency in 2020.”

Conservatives on the court like Justice Brett Kavanaugh have “advanced a controversial theory about near-absolute power of state legislatures to set rules in federal elections,” Hasen wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “If Barrett does not recuse herself from election disputes next month, there’s every reason to worry that a 5-4 court could interfere in the election to help Trump if a case that might swing the outcome gets before the court.”

Hasen said there was a “small chance” that the court would take up the Pennsylvania case a second time, but said it is “extremely unlikely” that the court would intervene in a case that affects the outcome of the election.

But even a small chance and a small number of votes could impact hundreds of millions of people. A study by Geruso and fellow UT Austin economist Dean Spears found that there is greater than a 10% chance that just “20,000 votes or fewer could decide the Electoral College winner in a typical election year.”

A “one-in-10 chance of something happening that could precipitate a legitimacy crisis is something to be concerned about,” Geruso said. “If you thought there was a one-in-10 chance of your plane crashing, you wouldn’t want to get on that plane!”

But a lot of things would have to happen for the election to come down to 20,000 votes. First, Trump, who trails nationally by about 8.5 percentage points, would have to make up enough ground in other states for the election to come down to a single state like Pennsylvania, where the president trails by about five points. Any litigation would have to make its way through the federal court system and the Supreme Court would have to agree to hear the case.

“I have to think that at least one of the [conservative] justices would have real qualms about upsetting the apple cart this late,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told the Washington Post. “The court would be doing this literally on the eve of the election … past the point where at least some Pennsylvania voters would be able to cast a lawful ballot.”

But conservatives on the court have made eyebrow-raising decisions in election cases already, making a break from longstanding tradition more likely.

“It is conceivable that if it all comes down to the counting of late-received ballot in Pennsylvania, the court could be dispositive,” Richard Briffault, a professor at the Columbia School of Law, told Salon.

Trump has repeatedly argued in court that “courts or administrators have changed the rules beyond what the state legislature has authorized, and that those changes should not be allowed to take effect,” he said. “They have had some success with this argument when the change was due to the decision of a lower federal court.”

Briffault said it is also possible that “millions of ballots will be disqualified” based on the “normal 1-2% disqualification” rate of mail-in ballots for issues like missed deadlines and signature issues.

“It might be the case that a lower court or state elections system might accept ballots that arguably ‘should have been’ rejected, either for lateness or a signature problem, and that could be challenged to the Supreme Court,” he said. “Of course, in a close election, rejecting thousands of ballots would be enough.”

But Hasen stressed that “it is far from likely that the election would come down to Pennsylvania — or, even if it did, that Pennsylvania will be within the margin that litigation of the election could swing.”

Beyond the 2020 election, however, “it is hard to escape the fact that the Supreme Court is poised to allow Republican states to engage in all manner of voter suppression in the name of protecting the rights of state legislatures,” he said.

Geruso, who with Spears authored an earlier paper showing that the Electoral College heavily favors Republicans in close elections, noted that concerns about whether courts will determine the election winner could be alleviated in the future by switching to a national popular vote system.

“It is very, very unlikely that a small number of votes would separate the candidates nationally,” he said. “Even in the closest races, hundreds of thousands or millions of votes typically separate the candidates. For 2020, there’s uncertainty about the Electoral College outcome, but very little uncertainty that the popular vote spread will be enormous. Projections today suggest that Biden will win the popular vote by millions. A Biden popular vote win in the millions is likely to occur regardless of whether judicial decisions about mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania ultimately decide who becomes president.”

Kayleigh McEnany’s new volunteer role with the Trump campaign raises ethics questions

President Donald Trump‘s White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany appears to have supplemented her government work with a new role as a senior adviser to the president’s re-election campaign.

McEnany, who left her job as Trump campaign spokesperson to join the administration, was introduced in a Tuesday segment on Fox Business as “Trump 2020 senior adviser and White House press secretary.” During a second appearance on the same day, Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney said the press secretary was “serving now as adviser for the Trump campaign” as he introduced her with an image of both the White House and the Trump campaign logo behind her.

A Trump campaign spokesperson told Salon that the campaign had instructed the cable news shows not to refer to McEnany with her White House title in advance.

The new shadow role, which the Daily Beast first reported on Tuesday, triggered criticism among government ethics watchdogs, who pinned it as a continuation of the history of the intercourse between Trump’s government administration and his ostensibly separate political arm.

“People will probably be surprised to learn that both the Federal Election Commission [FEC] and the Hatch Act allow White House employees to campaign for federal candidates as long as they do it on their own time and don’t use any White House resources,” Brett Kappel, a top government ethics expert and attorney at Harmon Curran, told Salon in reference to the federal rule that bars government employees from politicking on the clock.

However, Kappel added that the nature of McEnany’s duties at the White House — including on-demand rapid-response to urgent news and regular media interviews — made it difficult to draw the line.

“Given that working in the White House is a 24/7 proposition,” he said, “it is hard to see how it would be possible to maintain the separation required by the Hatch Act.”

Jordan Libowitz, spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), echoed Kappel’s point.

“People like Kayleigh McEnany can volunteer for the campaign, but obviously cannot appear for the campaign in their official government capacity or using their government authority,” Libowitz told Salon. “Since she’s essentially providing the same role for each, it raises questions about what efforts she is taking to prevent government resources from being used for her campaign activity.”

“Ultimately, I think we need a little more information about what’s going on here,” he added. “But I’ve never seen something like this before.”

A Trump campaign spokesperson confirmed to Salon that McEnany “appears in her personal capacity on a volunteer basis,” and she speaks only “as a private citizen” unrelated to her White House role.

But on Varney’s show, McEnany discussed official administration policy, including offering insight to elements that “we’re providing” in the ongoing negotiations for a new coronavirus relief bill.

“The chances are slim when you have someone like Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House,” she said. “If we’re providing stimulus relief for the American people, it should be just that — for American people, for United States citizens — not a wish-list from the liberal left.”

The White House has caught relentless flak from ethics advocates for repeated violations of the Hatch Act, most recently for hosting the extravagant Republican National Convention in August, in which numerous administration officials stumped for the president, who himself accepted the party’s nomination from the White House lawn.

Former senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway had been accused of violating the rule 50 times on Twitter alone — before 2019 — a pattern so brazen that the Office of Special Counsel recommended her removal. The White House, which appears to bask in the controversy stirred by Hatch-related controversies, declined to act.

While the White House waived McEnany’s ethics pledge ahead of her Republican National Committee appearance, Kedric Payne, the general counsel and senior ethics director at the Campaign Legal Center, told Salon that her role as former campaign spokesperson complicated that rationale — and smacked of desperation.

“White House officials are generally permitted to volunteer for the campaign, but McEnany’s ethics pledge was intended to bar her from working with the campaign because it is her former employer,” Payne said. “The overlooked legal rationale the White House gave for waiving the pledge is that it doesn’t matter that this raises ethics questions, because her services are desperately needed. Ethics does not appear to be the priority this close to an election.”

In July, Salon reported that the campaign had continued to pay McEnany for two paycheck cycles after she went to work for the White House. McEnany and the campaign insisted that the funds had been restored and properly accounted for, in spite of Salon’s joint review of the campaign’s filings with campaign finance experts.

“The campaign overpaid me, and I immediately paid them back,” McEnany said, claiming that “every penny has been paid back in the overlap.” Neither McEnany nor the campaign provided documentation that the campaign had received the money.

“Campaign funds are meant for bona fide campaign expenditures,” Ciarra Torres-Spelliscy, campaign finance law expert at Stetson University and former fellow at Brennan Center for Justice, told Salon at the time.

But Torres-Spelliscy,pointed out exceptions. For instance, 18 U.S.C. § 209 — “Salary of Government officials and employees payable only by United States” — prohibits officials and employees of the U.S. government from being paid “by someone other than the United States for doing their official Government duties,” but it includes a carveout for “special government employees” and “employees serving without compensation.”

Such examples include former Ambassador Kurt Volker, who served the administration as an unpaid “special envoy” to Ukraine while keeping his full salary as an executive at the lobbying firm BGR. McEnany’s dual roles reverse that arrangement: serving the administration in a paid capacity while volunteering outside of it.

Weeks after Salon published its July 27 report, a refund from McEnany dated mid-July appeared in the Trump campaign’s financial statements filed with Federal Election Commission at the end of that month. Salon asked the campaign to explain the 10-week lag between McEnany’s alleged repayment and the campaign’s documentation but received no response.

Two campaign finance experts told Salon that given data included with the filing itself, the entry might have been backdated, but allowed that a set of unusual but still-unknown circumstances could explain it.

The campaign has still not provided documentation to Salon.

You can watch McEnany’s appearance on Fox Business below via YouTube: 

All eyes are on Pennsylvania — but does Joe Biden really need it to win?

If former Vice President Joe Biden wins every state that 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won four years ago and flips Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — all of which Trump won four years ago — that would get him over the 270 electoral votes he needs in order to win the election. But what if Trump wins Pennsylvania a second time? Polling expert Nate Silver examines that possibility on his FiveThirtyEight website.

Silver notes that although polls are showing Biden with an advantage in Michigan and Wisconsin, “The polls have been tighter in Pennsylvania.” Citing FiveThirtyEight’s polling analysis, Silver explains, “Biden’s current lead is just 5.1 points, and in 2016, polls were off by 4.4 points in the Keystone State — Trump won it by 0.7 points after trailing in our final polling average by 3.7 points there. So, with a 2016-style polling error in Pennsylvania, Biden would be cutting it awfully close — perhaps even so close that court rulings on factors like ‘naked ballots’ could swing the outcome.”

Silver poses the question: “Is Pennsylvania a must-win for Biden?,” and his answer is, “No, not quite.”

“(Pennsylvania) is close to being a must-win for Trump, who has only a 2% chance of winning the Electoral College if he loses Pennsylvania,” Silver argues. “Biden, however, has a bit more margin for error. He’d have a 30% chance if he lost Pennsylvania, which isn’t great but is also higher than, say, Trump’s overall chances on Election Day 2016.”

If Biden loses Pennsylvania, according to Silver, he still has some paths to victory, but minus Pennsylvania, the Sun Belt becomes even more important for him. Sun Belt states in which Biden is competitive include Florida, Arizona and Georgia, among others.

Outside of the Sun Belt, Biden is competitive in Ohio. But Ohio, Silver notes, is a Rust Belt state that is even closer than Pennsylvania. Democrats struggle more in Ohio than they do in Pennsylvania.

“Here’s the thing: yes, Biden and Democrats should be nervous that he has only about a 5-point lead in Pennsylvania, the most likely tipping point state,” Silver writes. “Five points is more than a normal-sized polling error, but not that much more. And Biden does have some backup plans. A regional polling error in the Midwest or the Northeast wouldn’t necessarily doom his chances in states like Arizona, for instance. It wouldn’t be the blowout that Democrats hope for, but Biden would still retain an edge in the Electoral College even without winning his birth state.”

Former Supreme Court justice’s son helped Trump get Deutsche Bank loans: report

During Justice Anthony Kennedy’s 31 years on the U.S. Supreme Court, liberals and progressives had a love-hate relationship with the Reagan appointee — praising him for his rulings on gay rights and abortion rights while slamming his economic rulings as beneficial to unchecked corporate power. And those who viewed Kennedy as being too quick to side with big business are likely to have similar views on his son, Justin Kennedy, who according to the New York Times, has been very close to Trumpworld and helped Donald Trump secure almost $700 million in loans for a real estate project in Chicago.

In an article published this week, Times journalists David Enrich, Russ Buettner, Mike McIntire and Susanne Craig report that the financial crash of September 2008 “was in full swing” when Trump visited Chicago “to mark the near-completion of his 92-floor skyscraper.” But the project did not go smoothly.

“How Mr. Trump found trouble in Chicago and maneuvered his way out of it is a case study in doing business the Trump way,” the Times reporters explain. “When the project encountered problems, he tried to walk away from his huge debts. For most individuals or businesses, that would have been a recipe for ruin. But tax-return data, other records and interviews show that rather than warring with a notoriously litigious and headline-seeking client, lenders cut Mr. Trump slack — exactly what he seemed to have been counting on.”

According to the Times, Trump went to Deutsche Bank to borrow “the bulk of the money” he would need for the skyscraper project — and he “assured Deutsche Bank officials, including Justin Kennedy, the son of the now-retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, that the Chicago development was a guaranteed moneymaker. In a sign of the Trump family’s commitment to the project, Mr. Trump told his bankers that his daughter Ivanka would be in charge.” 

In an article published in Law & Crime following the Times’ article, reporter Jerry Lambe examines the relationship between Justin Kennedy and Trumpworld. Lambe points out that Justin Kennedy was close to Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner — both of whom are now White House senior advisers in Trump’s administration — and “was willing to overlook Trump’s shoddy history as a debtor.”

Lambe notes, “Justin Kennedy’s role in helping to breathe life into Trump’s business empire before he was president has continued to breed rumors and conspiracies about the alleged ‘White House charm offensive’ carried out by the Trump family to help convince Justice Kennedy to retire and make way for Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the bench.”

David Enrich, finance editor for the New York Times, discussed the relationship between Trumpworld and the Kennedy family in his book “Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction.” Enrich wrote that Justin Kennedy was “drawn to Trump’s risk-taking and glamour” and said, “Trump’s flattery was part of a coordinated White House charm offensive designed to persuade the ageing justice — for years, the Court’s pivotal swing vote — that it was safe to retire, even with an unpredictable man in the Oval Office.”

Lambe explains, “Justin Kennedy was apparently not the only member of the Kennedy family with the White House’s ear. Washington Post deputy editorial page editor and columnist Ruth Marcus wrote, in her 2019 book ‘Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover,’ about a suspicious scene in which Kennedy’s other son, Gregory Kennedy, allegedly met with White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway during a dinner just days after the president’s inauguration. No one was happier about the outcome of the election than his father, Gregory Kennedy said, according to the book.”

Anthony Kennedy, now 84, was most definitely a swing vote during his 31 years on the Supreme Court. Before his retirement in 2018, the fiscally conservative but socially liberal justice was the closest thing the High Court had to a libertarian — and he ruled with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on abortion and gay rights decisions but often ruled with Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Antonin Scalia on economic matters. Far-right culture warriors hated Kennedy for his rulings in Lawrence v. Texas (which struck down a Texas sodomy law as unconstitutional) and Obergefell v. Hodges (which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide), while liberals and progressives generally liked him on social issues but were furious over his ruling in the Citizens United case. And when Trump nominated Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, he obviously wanted to replace Justice Kennedy with a social conservative who would appeal to the president’s far-right white evangelical allies such as Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson.

Ralph Nader: Mitch McConnell is the most “brazen evil” and “cruel” legislator in the last 50 years

Even if November 3 brings a major blue wave, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, according to recent polls, is likely to be reelected. McConnell is seeking a seventh term, but veteran progressive activist Ralph Nader, in an op-ed for the Louisville Courier, argues that the last thing the Kentucky senator deserves is to be reelected.

“I have studied and interacted with many members of Congress,” Nader writes. “McConnell is the most brazen evil, cruel and powerful legislator in the last 50 years. His lack of empathy for the vulnerable and disadvantaged is stunning.”

McConnell’s record, Nader stresses, has been characterized by a total lack of compassion for those less fortunate than him. And he hasn’t grown any more compassionate under Donald Trump’s presidency.

“McConnell, comfortably embraced by the Congress’ socialized medicine, loses no sleep saying yes to a corporate-profit-glutted, wasteful corporatized health care industry whose denials, co-payments and exemptions are costing thousands of uninsured and insured American lives a year. He fought but failed to end Obamacare, pleased to consign another 22 million people to the dreaded, uninsured hell,” Nader writes, adding that he has vigorously fought against relief for Americans who are hurting financially because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Nader, “McConnell’s back-of-the-hand to coal mine workers’ safety, survivors’ pensions and continuing black lung payments, mainly harms Kentucky, but his other aggressions against people in favor of big business affect the entire country. He bragged at an event in Owensboro that he and he alone decides what issues this Senate votes on.”

McConnell was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984. This year, his latest Democratic challenger, Amy McGrath, was hoping to unseat him. But McConnell appears heading for reelection. 

“McConnell has the gall to campaign on ‘Kentucky Values,'” Nader writes. “Voters in Kentucky, with a little homework, or a factual memory of this senatorial oligarch, shouldn’t have difficulty in rejecting those claims. McConnell has gotten away with ferociously shredding Kentucky values for 36 years. He smugly expects six more years.”

Jared Kushner bragged about ignoring medical experts: “Trump’s in charge — not the doctors”

Newly released audio recordings reveal that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner bragged to reporter Bob Woodward that President Donald Trump was blowing off advice from medical experts about doing more to contain the novel coronavirus pandemic back in April.

CNN reports that Kushner told Woodward on April 18th that the administration was moving away from a containment strategy for the virus and was instead pushing toward reopening the economy as soon as possible.

“There were three phases [of the pandemic],” Kushner told Woodward. “There’s the panic phase, the pain phase and then the comeback phase. I do believe that last night symbolized kind of the beginning of the comeback phase.”

Roughly 40,000 Americans had died from COVID-19 at the time of Kushner’s statement about being in the “comeback phase.” Since that time, an additional 187,000 Americans have died from the disease.

Kushner then bragged to Woodward about wresting control of the pandemic response away from the medical experts.

“Trump’s now back in charge,” he said. “It’s not the doctors. They’ve kind of — we have, like, a negotiated settlement.”

 

Supreme Court denies Republican attempt to shorten mail-in ballot deadline in North Carolina

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court rejected GOP efforts to reduce the ballot receipt deadline for mail-in voters in North Carolina from nine days to three.

The decision came shortly after the justices also declined to grant a stay blocking the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s order extending the deadline in that state.

As in the Pennsylvania ruling, newly minted Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not participate, and Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh crossed over to deny the GOP’s request — although, as legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern noted, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas made clear they wanted the court to intervene against voting rights.

“Stardust” trailer: David Bowie biopic tells the origin story of a music icon

It was only a matter of time before David Bowie got the biopic treatment. Enter “Stardust,” British filmmaker Gabriel Range’s biographical drama about the life of the music sensation before he became a worldwide cultural icon. Tracking Bowie as he sets out on his first music tour across the U.S. and creates his legendary alter ego Ziggy Stardust, the film could be a breakthrough moment for singer-turned-actor Johnny Flynn, whose previous credits include “Beast” and “Emma.”

Read more from IndieWire: “Bly Manor’s” lesbian love story is no cause to celebrate

The official “Stardust” synopsis from IFC Films reads: “Meet David before Bowie. One of the greatest icons in music history. But who was the young man behind the many faces? In 1971, a 24-year-old David Bowie (Flynn) embarks on his first road trip to America with Mercury Records publicist Ron Oberman (Marc Maron), only to be met with a world not yet ready for him. ‘Stardust’ offers a glimpse behind the curtain of the moments that inspired the creation of Bowie’s first and most memorable alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, capturing the turning point that cemented his career as one of the world’s greatest cultural icons.”

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While IndieWire’s Kate Erbland was a bit mixed on the overall film in her review out of the Tribeca Film Festival, she had nothing but raves to share about the leading performance. As Erbland writes, “Johnny Flynn bursts off the screen in Gabriel Range’s look at Bowie before he hit it big, but the film is never as original as its star or subject…It’s a graceful, winning performance at its best when Flynn is allowed to go really wild.”

Joining Flynn in the “Stardust” cast is Marc Maron as Mercury Records publicist Ron Oberman and Jena Malone, who most recently popped up in the horror film “Antebellum.” “Stardust” world premiered virtually during the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival. Range co-wrote the script with Christopher Bell. The director is best known for his fictional political-documentary “Death of a President” and “The Day Britain Stopped,” which won a Royal Television Society Craft and Design Award.

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IFC Films is set to release “Stardust” in theaters and on VOD platforms Nov. 25. Watch the official trailer for the movie in the video below.

“Bly Manor’s” lesbian love story is no cause to celebrate

In the final episode of “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” a stylish serialized riff on Henry James’ horror novella “The Turn of the Screw,” the show’s central philosophy is revealed during an exchange between two women. “You said it was a ghost story,” the bride from the opening scene tells her mysterious silver-haired guest, the benevolent narrator (Carla Gugino) who’s been regaling the wedding party with the story of Bly Manor. “It isn’t. It’s a love story.” To which the narrator replies, her eyes loaded with meaning: “Same thing, really.”

[Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” including the ending.]

Taken at face value, this comment implies that “The Haunting of Bly Manor” is a love story, which tracks with the grief-stricken backstories of the various characters. It’s a poignant view of ghost stories; transforming the idea of the haunting ghoul into a lingering spirit watching over loved ones. But if ghost stories are love stories, the reverse is also true. Heartache can render you a shell of your former self, haunted by the shadow of lost love. To cling to the memory of a person, whether dead or simply no longer there, is a kind of madness that can lead only to misery. At least, that seems to be what happens to the poor souls of “Bly Manor.”

The show takes liberties with James’ original story, often to creative and thrilling heights, and contemporizes it by making the central ingenue queer. Unfortunately, it’s no longer enough simply to represent a queer love story. This being a horror/melodrama, things don’t exactly work out for the two lovebirds. With its tragic romantic ending, “Bly Manor” trades in the same tired and harmful “kill your gays” trope that has plagued Hollywood for years — ever since Shirley MacLaine was last seen hanging by a rope in “The Children’s Hour.”

“The Haunting of Bly Manor” begins with the arrival of a plucky young American, Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti) to a grand, definitely haunted-looking manor house in the British countryside, where she’s accepted a position as governess to two orphans, Flora (Amelie Bea Smith) and Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth). Since their parents died in a terrible accident and their drunk uncle is nowhere to be found, the only other people on the grounds are the help. There’s the absent-minded housekeeper Mrs. Grose (the excellent T’Nia Miller), kindly cook Owen (Rahul Kohli), and the earthy gardener Jamie (Amelia Eve), a rough-and-tumble sort intent on keeping to her rose bushes — until she meets Dani, that is.

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The first three episodes follow “The Turn of the Screw” quite religiously, introducing the disturbed children as not-so-harmless charges. Miles is a spoiled rich kid with creepy old man tendencies, and Flora talks to dolls. In addition to the ghosts of Bly Manor, Dani has her own personal demon, a bright-eyed spectacled man she sees behind her in the mirror. It’s later revealed that he is the ghost of her fiancée, who was killed just seconds after she broke off their engagement. (Presumably because she realized she was queer, though that’s only implied with the lightest of touches from a rather bold seamstress.)

As Dani and Jamie’s flirtation progresses, Dani cannot escape this ghost of her past. He appears in a blinding flash every time she gets close to Jamie, including their first timid kiss in the garden house. Jamie bristles at Dani’s reluctance, not wanting to get played by a wishy-washy straight girl, though again she says none of that. The series ends with Dani and Jamie, framing its entire existence around their story, but sadly their romance requires a lot of filling in between the lines. The show seems to want a pat on the back for making them queer, without making anything about them very queer.

Though she ends up being a crucial figure in the series, Jamie’s tragic backstory is delivered via one emotional monologue, which is shoehorned into a fireside chat and devoid of any mention of her sexuality. Owen and Mrs. Grose, the other secondary characters who have their own moving love story, both get more meaningful screen time and backstories that continue throughout multiple episodes. Even the original ghosts of Bly Manor get the entire penultimate episode devoted to their family saga, though they barely appear before then.

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In a recent interview with IndieWire, “Bly Manor” actress Kate Siegel said: “There are no rules, this is all make believe….these people could be anything, Black, white, they could be furries! There’s nobody who passed a law on art. It’s make believe and you can cast anybody.” This is wildly reminiscent of Scarlett Johansson’s now infamous comment defending her controversial attempt to play a trans man in “Rub and Tug,” when she said an actress should be allowed to play “any person, or any tree, or any animal.”

This kind of self-congratulatory approach to inclusive storytelling — all too rampant in Hollywood — never works; it assumes one can simply write a queer or non-white character without doing any of the work to contextualize them or flesh out their differences. What remains is a hollow nod at “diversity” that leaves its characters floating weightlessly in an otherwise straight white universe. It’s hard to make an impact without being grounded in anything.

While Siegel does not speak for the show, she is married to creator Mike Flanagan and played a major queer role in “The Haunting of Hill House.” That character, Theo Craine, was a hard-partying lothario who would have fit right in on “The L Word.” Though she also struggled to find love, at least Theo had a gay swagger and a hot sex life. In contrast, Dani and Jamie’s tepid romance and conventional domestic bliss feels like a major step backwards.

Read more from IndieWire: “Stardust” trailer: David Bowie biopic tells the origin story of a music icon

This being a horror series, there’s no such thing as a happy ending, at least not one without complications. The final reveal, in which Dani unknowingly sacrifices her soul to the Lady in the Lake in order to save Flora, is a wrenching and moving twist. (OK, it’s pretty queer that she takes a woman inside her, but that’s another extremely close read between the lines.) The show’s final image settles on the aging Jamie awaiting Dani’s ghost as a hand rests on her shoulder. Is this meant to be romantic, a nod to the power of everlasting love, this lone lesbian and her dead lover?

Like the ghosts of “Bly Manor,” “kill your gays” haunts us to this day. It’s time to lay the “sad dead lesbians” trope at the bottom of the lake for good. Less “Children’s Hour” and more “The L Word,” please.

“The Haunting of Bly Manor” is streaming now on Netflix.

Gaseous signs of life on Venus aren’t seen in follow-up observations

Last month, the science world was stunned and excited when Nature Astronomy published a paper indicating that the atmosphere of Venus appeared to contain trace amounts of phosphine, a gas associated with anaerobic bacteria on Earth that would be near-impossible to produce in any other fashion on Venus. If other scientific studies continued to confirm the report’s findings, that could mean that there is life in Venus’ clouds.

Now, two subsequent scientific investigations question the evidence on whether phosphine — and perhaps life — resides in the Venusian atmosphere. 

Scientists study the Venusian atmosphere by analyzing spectra, or plots of light emanating from the planet, and analyzing the wavelengths. Because different molecules produce different wavelengths when light shines through them, scientists can ascertain chemical compositions of various substances using this method. Whenever looking at spectral data, there is the risk that “noise” — meaning, any variable that could alter the wavelengths for reasons unrelated to the composition of the chemical compounds studied — can cause inaccurate results. Notably, the phosphine spectrum from Venus was faint to begin with. 

According to one paper in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, written by Thérèse Encrenaz of the Paris Observatory and her colleagues, archived data from an infrared spectrograph in Hawaii called TEXES did not find any indication of phosphine in their data collected between 2012 and 2015. However, the TEXES spectrographic data looked at the cloud tops of Venus, while the original paper claiming phosphine appears in the upper atmosphere analyzed a lower part of the atmosphere, below the cloud tops. 

While this does not automatically disprove that phosphine exists in the atmosphere, it opens up logistical questions about how it would move around Venus’ atmosphere.

Another paper submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics that calls into question the evidence for Venusian phosphine was posted online just last week. Authored by astrophysicist Ignas Snellen from Leiden University in the Netherlands and his colleagues, the paper analyzed the same data from the ALMA telescope array in Chile that scientists initially used to find evidence of phosphine on Venus. After reducing the noise, they too concluded that “the presented analysis does not provide a solid basis to infer the presence of PH3 in the Venus atmosphere.”

Though the phosphine discovery is not disproven, these findings certainly put a damper on the exciting prospect of life on the second planet from the sun. Likewise, such scientific call-and-responses epitomize how good research is done. 

“It’s exactly how science should work,” Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, told Science News. “It’s too early to say one way or the other what this detection means for Venus.”

Clara Sousa-Silva, an astrochemist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, expressed a similar view to Science News, telling the publication that having the findings challenged “is completely normal and what I expected (nay, hoped) would happen. This is usually a phase of a project that I enjoy, and I am hoping people will realize this is just what science looks like.”

When Salon spoke last month with a planetary scientist who studies Venus, he also observed that the news about possible phosphine was auspicious regardless of whether it would be later verified.

“Personally I find it exciting,” Noam Izenberg, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and deputy chair of NASA’s Venus Exploration Analysis Group, wrote to Salon. “The Venus science community is about as energized as I’ve seen it in well over a decade. Whether or not this specific finding is verified or falsified by follow up investigations, it drives us to learn and know more. It highlights how much we don’t know about Venus, and that fundamental new discoveries, possibly relevant to and reflective of the history of our own planet, await us next door.”

What happens when a narcissist loses? Expect “rage” and “terror,” psychologists warn

There is agreement among psychologists — and, for that matter, anyone who has been abused by narcissistic personalities — that President Donald Trump fits the psychological profile of a narcissist. What does that mean for the upcoming election, particularly if Trump loses, as polls suggest? Psychologists tell Salon that pathological narcissists who do not get their way tend to react abusively — which could lead to one of several devastating political scenarios for the nation in the election’s aftermath. 

“One does not have to diagnose to recognize pathological or toxic narcissism,” Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist who has taught at Yale and authored the new book “Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul,” told Salon by email. “This is behavior, not a diagnosis — and the media need not fixate so much on ‘the Goldwater rule,’ which applies to only 6% of practicing mental health professionals (that is, members of the American Psychiatric Association, the only association in the world with this rule).”

The so-called Goldwater Rule holds that “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.” However, the rule does not apply to describing obvious narcissistic behavior in a public figure, any more than it would disqualify someone from describing celebrities who spend most of their days drinking liquor as having an alcohol problem.

“Those with pathological narcissism are abusive and dangerous because of their catastrophic neediness,” Lee explained. “Think of a drowning person gasping for air: a survival instinct just may push you down in order to save one’s own life. In the manner that the body needs oxygen, the soul needs love, and self-love is what a toxic narcissist is desperately lacking. This is why he must overcompensate, creating for himself a self-image where he is the best at everything, never wrong, better than all the experts, and a ‘stable genius.'”

Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a licensed clinical psychologist and professor of psychology who is noted as an expert on narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic abuse, agrees that Trump is narcissistic and believes this makes him very dangerous.

As Durvasula explained, many of Trump’s seemingly inexplicable actions as president make sense when viewed through the lens of a “narcissistic or antagonist personality style.” These include “validation and admiration seeking,” as manifested by his “endless campaign rallies despite the associated danger, needing to be taken on a ride around the hospital when he had COVID-19 so people could wave to him, repeatedly requiring validation on the number of people present at his inauguration.” Trump also displays denial, as seen by his response to the pandemic, and vindictiveness, as demonstrated by his obsession with reversing Barack Obama’s legacy “seemingly just to punish him” as well as by his threat to “withhold federal funds from California for wildfire destruction because he perceives the state is against him.”

In addition, Durvasula pointed out that Trump shows extreme sensitivity to criticism through the erratic and malicious content he frequently posts on Twitter, but at the same time reveals a lack of empathy through “his discourse about the diverse citizenry of this country – racial and ethnic minorities, specific religious groups (e.g. Muslims), women, and separating families at the border.” Trump, Durvasula said, is also manipulative, as he panders to a constituency that he appears to “have contempt for.” Durvasula cited his gaslighting, too— meaning trying to alter or deny memories of basic facts — is revealed in how “he has often been caught by fact-checkers in his lies, and denies things he actually said.”

Perhaps the most ominous of the symptoms that Durvasula identified, though, is “triangulation.” As she explained, “this is the infliction of chaos created by turning groups against each other. Doing this centralizes the power in the narcissist and creates a blind alliance between some of the polarized groups and him; the country is terribly polarized on numerous dimensions, to the point where families are bearing a toll of divisiveness based on the antagonistic rhetoric.”

Now, experts and pollsters seem to agree that Trump is likely to lose this election. So what happens when a narcissist doesn’t get their way?

Lee explained that narcissists who cannot get the love they crave will frequently seek adulation as a substitute. Because no amount of adulation will ever satisfy them, though, “the usual course of an unconstrained pathological narcissist is to seek positions of ever greater power and celebrity.” Yet, as Lee explains, because “reality never matches one’s fantasy, dissatisfaction grows at greater pace.”

Therefore, if Trump loses to Biden, as seems likely, the outcome could be be “frightening.”

“Just as one once settled for adulation in lieu of love, one may settle for fear when adulation no longer seems attainable,” Dr. Lee told Salon. “Rage attacks are common, for people are bound to fall short of expectation for such a needy personality—and eventually everyone falls into this category. But when there is an all-encompassing loss, such as the loss of an election, it can trigger a rampage of destruction and reign of terror in revenge against an entire nation that has failed him.”

She added, “It is far easier for the pathological narcissist to consider destroying oneself and the world, especially its ‘laughing eyes,’ than to retreat into becoming a ‘loser’ and a ‘sucker’ — which to someone suffering from this condition will feel like psychic death.”

In a sense, the best analogy is that of a narcissistic family member abusing other family members. Metaphorically, Trump has already abused America. “This personality pattern has taken a toll on this country, and been quite abusive,” Durvasula says. “It has eroded trust, left a nation confused and unsupported, and deeply divided and insecure. These same adjectives can be used to describe a marriage or a family which is suffering the challenges of a difficult narcissistic personality in its midst.”

If Trump loses, Durvasula says it will be like watching a three-year-old refuse to go to bed.

“They will just stand there, poignantly in their Superman pajamas and say NO, I am NOT going to bed, and drop to the ground and scream,” she explained. “Plan on an adult version of that. As is often the case when a difficult personality style like this faces disappointment we tend to see a cascade of reactions – oppositionality, denial, rage, despair, paranoia, more rage, entitlement, victimhood, and vindictiveness.”

The next question, then, is what Trump could actually do in his vindictive rage to punish an America which he may believe has consigned him to “loser” status. (Indeed, one-term presidents are usually regarded as failures — and Trump would be the first one-termer in 28 years). As political activist and former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader wrote in August, Trump could pressure the Justice Department to issue bogus subpoenas in order to punish his critics and opponents, pull out of contracts with businesses and individuals who he feels wronged him, refuse to work with Biden’s transition team in handing over power and (of course) “intensify the use of the Justice Department and his personal lawyers to challenge in every frivolous, obstructive way the results of the election in selected states, no matter what the margin of his defeat.”

Trump could also pick winners and losers in terms of who receives federal help during the pandemic and recession, helping those who sided with him and exacting vengeance against those who did not. He could egg on his supporters into committing acts of violence or, at the very least, do everything in his power to make sure they do not accept the legitimacy of a Biden presidency. He could pressure the Federal Reserve to try to drive up interest rates and stop supporting the stock and corporate bond markets, actions that would tank the American economy (and which Trump would most likely attempt to blame on Biden).

Most ominous of all, a narcissist like Trump could simply refuse to leave office when his term ends on January 20, 2021. America has never had an incumbent president flat-out defy the results of an election — John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush all overcame their disappointment and accepted that they had lost.

If Trump refuses to leave because of his narcissism, it will be unprecedented. It will be abnormal. And it will all have been very, very predictable.

Why horror movies may be good for your health

October is “spooky season” — the time of the year when fake blood, giant Home Depot skeletons, ghost-shaped chocolates and horror movies suddenly become ubiquitous. Yet given that this year’s Halloween season is complicated by the real-life horror of a fractious election and a deadly pandemic, those of us who find horror movies stressful might wonder whether it’s really a sane idea to watch a scary movie. Does it not seem counterintuitive, amid all this misery, to watch something anxiety-inducing? 

As it turns out, the opposite may be true: Watching horror movies can be a boon to one’s mental health. Researchers say there are some eerie reasons that’s the case.

“It does feel counterintuitive; there’s plenty of fear and anxiety in the world, right?” Mathias Clasen, a scholar of horror fiction at Aarhus University, told Salon via email. “My answer would be that some people, at least, seem to use horror to manage their fear and anxiety; they expose themselves to limited and controllable doses, and they may even get to practice coping strategies and push their own limits for how much fear and anxiety they can tolerate.”

This is similar to the idea of exposure therapy, which is a technique used to treat anxiety disorders. In exposure therapy, a professional therapist might expose a patient to the context of the threat without any real danger to help them overcome their anxiety and distress.

Clasen says while there isn’t a lot of research on the positive effects of watching horror movies, the research available shows how watching horror movies can help us “tackle fear and develop resilience.” Clasen added that scary movies also bring people together.

“There’s reason to believe that horror films may have a bonding effect,” Clasen added. “Most people seem to seek out horror as a social activity, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that many people experience strengthened bonds to their co-viewers after watching a scary movie together.”

Indeed, while scary movies can totally frighten people, there’s research to suggest that people simultaneously enjoy them—whether they’re aware of that joy in the moment or not. (That makes sense economically — why would they be so popular otherwise?)

In 2009, researchers at the Institute of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany, were curious how this kind of “movie-induced” anxiety affects the brain. They scanned participants’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, as they showed them threatening clips from scary movies (like “The Shining” and “The Silence of the Lambs”) and less scary scenes; they also asked participants if they liked to seek out scary scenarios or not. They found that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that’s associated with various anxiety disorders, was the only area that experienced hyperactivity for all participants while watching the scary scenes. Interestingly, the researchers found that there were patterns in brain activity that suggested the participants enjoyed the scary situations to which they were exposed to, too.

“The fear is transient for most people,” Clasen said. “We feel fear during the movie, and most people also feel some heightened vigilance in the hours or, in some cases, days after the movie; It’s a price most people are willing to pay.”

“The greatest benefit, for most people, is the pleasure that accompanies the fear—the pleasure that’s a function of the fear elicited by the movie,” he added.

Neil Martin, who has studied the psychological responses to horror movies and is a professor at Regent’s University London, told Salon via email that watching a scary movie can indirectly help people cope with negative emotions because it can be an “extreme distraction.”

“The reason for not having a direct effect is that few horror films mirror exactly the negative experiences we do in real life,” Martin said. “This is part of why we watch, to see the thrill of the impossible or implausible or something we would never experience (and which we would be unwise to experience because it would kill us or put us in jail).”

On the flip side, Martin noted, there’s something called  “cinematic neurosis” which is “where individuals report extreme behavioral reactions to watching horror.”

“But these are usually case studies, with sample bias and participants who had other issues, outside those involving horror films,” Martin said.

If many or most people get scared of horror movies, why do we seek them out?

Clasen explained that evolutionarily speaking, we are “designed” to find pleasure in threatening situations. This is a result of the “evolved fear system,” which Clasen says is “is a defense mechanism that helps us stay clear of danger, and we share its basic components with other animals.”

Clasen mentioned, as an example, when you’re walking through the woods alone at night and you start to feel afraid.

“The fear system kicks into gear, focusing your attention on that sound, redirecting resources away from the digestive system (hence the feeling of butterflies and dry mouth) and toward the big muscles in anticipation of attack,” Clasen said, which a good horror movie simulates. “A good horror movie immerses you in a threat simulation and presents you with cues of danger. . .  but the thing is, you know it’s just a movie, and that’s why it isn’t just frightening, but fun too.”

There may be other physical health benefits to controlled fear like that which arises from watching a horror movie or show. A separate study from 2003 suggests that watching a scary move might boost your immune system. Specifically, researchers from Coventry University published a study in the journal Stress which found that watching a fictitious stressful event significantly increased people’s circulating levels of white blood cells.

More recently, a study which Clasen co-authored that was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found that horror-movie fans have been more resilient during the pandemic, as opposed to fans of other genres.

“We did a study early in the pandemic to see whether horror fans experienced greater resilience during the corona[virus] pandemic (on the hypothesis that horror movies teach people coping strategies), and it turns out that yes, horror fans do exhibit fewer symptoms of psychological distress,” Clasen said. “They’re still frightened by the movies, but in the long run, they may have a real advantage in a scary and sometimes threatening world.”

So, does this mean it’s time to binge-watch some horror movies this weekend? Perhaps — as it turns out, what might seem nightmare-inducing in the short run could be beneficial in the long run.

Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne: We’re the only band “used to playing in space bubbles”

Wayne Coyne long ago mastered the art of social distancing — at Flaming Lips shows, he’s known for climbing into a transparent “space bubble” and heading into the crowd — so it makes sense that his band would be at the forefront of pandemic-era concerts. Not only did the group record an NPR Tiny Desk performance with band members encased in the orbs, but in mid-October, Flaming Lips played a show with audience members also inside bubbles. 

Such innovation is par for the course with the Oklahoma City band, who are known for unorthodox music delivery mechanisms (a USB drive inside a giant gummy skull) and experimental sounds. This year’s “American Head” LP is no exception: Coyne and bandmate/collaborator Steven Drozd used a small incident — Tom Petty’s first band Mudcrutch making a pit stop in Oklahoma to record — as a jumping-off point to create an album dealing with serious topics, including the deaths of friends and relatives, people they’ve known who’ve dealt with drug abuse. 

A week before the bubble-heavy show, Coyne spoke to Salon about “American Head” and gave an update on his unexpected 2020 activities, including being at home for the whole summer for the first time since the late ’90s and filming a test-run video with bubbles in advance of the concert. However, the frontman also expressed gratitude for his health and ability to spend more time with his young son, who’s already into music.

“My wife Katy, though she’s not outwardly a musician, has a very musical kind of mind,” Coyne says. “[Our son] has the same sort of thing, but he also has my love of things that make noise. We feed the dogs a couple of times a day, and they have these really loud, big tin dog bowls. And in our house, there’s a bunch of concrete floors, and we regularly bang around with them for a couple minutes. And I can tell it drives Katy and one of the dogs crazy — but a little boy and the dogs and myself, we love it.”

What put you in the backward-looking mindset and explore the themes that you did?

It comes down to, you write songs. And though some songwriters have an agenda of what you’re going to write a song about, for Steven [Drozd] and I, it’s never that clear. We start writing a song, and it just is what it is. We feel like we’re just a slave to the moment and the motion that is happening, only because that’s the way our best songs have happened. I’m not saying that’s the way everybody’s best songs happen — but for Steven and I, that’s a pretty true formula. 

And we started to come up with a couple of songs that had this thing — I guess we’d call it a longing. And then we wanted to attach real events to it. I think we liked the way that Bruce Springsteen would write about being in New Jersey, and I think we liked the way Tom Petty would always infuse his girlfriends and his friends and experiences into his songs. And we’ve done that on accident before, and we had a couple of songs that went that way. And those were really, really good. That inspired Steven to do more songwriting that is just deeply, painfully emotional. He would play these things for me. It’s melodic, it doesn’t have lyrics, but it’s melodic, and it’s storytelling, and it has a pace. And it’s really just a fully envisioned piece of music, and we both know we’re going to turn it into a song, and then I will give into whatever it’s evoking in me. And then we kind of say, “Well, that’s where we’re going.” Once we got five or six of these types of songs, we felt very confident, and just it felt easier to sing songs about our mothers, our brothers, suicides and stuff like that. 

Not everybody in the group’s as old as me, but we’re old enough for a lot of the people that we’re singing about to be gone. There was always a little bit of, you know, when my mother was alive, she would have been very embarrassed if I had written a song about her. 

Writing songs is just, I mean, the word I use, it’s just a motherf***er. You think the more you do it, the better you get at it, but it’s not true. It’s a mystery as to why these words in this motion with these melodies, why they will affect you. And the minute you think you’ve figured it out, it’s boring. It’s like you think you know, but you don’t know. 

There’s some really serious topics on “American Head,” and you’re being asked about them time and time again. I wondered if that was difficult for you.

I think because we’ve just done it for so long, it’s such a great relief that people actually listen and are interested. [Laughs.] I mean, if I got the chance to talk to, you know, John Lennon or Tom Petty, I would ask them, “Who are these people in your songs?” It would be the exact things that I would want to know. And I don’t think it’s painful once you’ve put it into a song. I think the song helps you get it out of the depths, depths, depths of your mind, and it can stand out there and be an experience for you instead of this internal stew that you can never quite understand. I think that’s part of why so many songwriters will put these horrible, painful things into a song. 

It makes sense, and it’s one of those things you need to get out, and it comes out at the right time too. You mentioned that your mom might have been embarrassed — that’s a song you could only have written at a particular point in your life.

Steven and I have been doing this podcast for the past couple of years. And even though we always think it’s only gonna take us a day or two, it inevitably takes us a couple of months to do just one episode together, because we sit in a room and we talk and we try to remember, “Why did we think of this song?” and all the things that led to the making of whatever song it is that we’re talking about in the podcast. 

[It’s] a lot of time spent with just Steven and I sitting in a room being each other’s therapist. I would be asking him questions, and then we go deeper and deeper and deeper, and then he’d turn around, ask me questions, and then we’d go deeper and deeper and deeper. And so we just felt like, “Oh, man, we got some good stories here,” that we could have never pried out of each other just by working together. 

And that’s probably a little bit of the magic, too, because I would start to harken back to stories that he’s told me two years ago or so and be like, “Let’s talk about that. That’s cool,” or “That’s weird that that’s happened,” or “What do you think of that?” I think that helped too. 

But it is intense. And I think we wouldn’t want to make albums like this all the time. These are the kind of albums that if you’re lucky, you get to make them every five or six years, not every six months. We make a lot of music and we wouldn’t want it all to be us crying about our brothers that have been in car accidents and stuff all the time. You kind of are glad to be like, “Oh, I’m glad we talked about that. Now let’s have some more fun.”

I love the Mudcrutch anecdote that also really inspired the album, because  I’m a big Petty fan, and I think that era of his career is so fascinating. 

He really is such an inspiring, purely American kind of dude. He’s not really like, the man — the alpha male man — but he’s put in the position of like, “I’m kind of the kind of the leader of this group, and I’m the singer.” And I like how he looks at them as a group, and they’re called Mudcrutch. But then the record company’s like, “We don’t care about your group, we just want you,” so he says, “Okay, it’ll be Tom Petty, and a group.” I mean, no one can come up with that on their own. It usually is a guy that’s in flux does feel slightly insecure about doing it all, but you still have to do it. 

And so I think Steve and I, we really do relate to that sort of thing. We’re not really a singer-songwriter group. We really just make records; we’re not really set in any certain way. But sometimes we do think about like, “What kind of group are we?” And we like this vibe of being a singer-songwriter group, even though I don’t really think we are, but it’s the way we seem like we are. We like that, kind of like Tom Petty or like the Eagles or something — or even like the Grateful Dead. I’m not quite sure if all those groups are similar, but the way that they’re similar would be the way that the Flaming Lips are like them. [Laughs.]

When you look across the Flaming Lips catalog, there’s a diversity of sound. There’s the core — like, here’s what we do — but individual albums go in different directions. And I think Petty did that, too. You look at his career, and he had all these little detours. I can see the similarities.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think the worst thing that artists can do is feel like, “Okay, I’ve got my thing. Now I just need to repeat that.” That type of boredom I think would just destroy us. I mean, we’ve tried to make records where we thought, “Okay, we know what our formula is. Let’s try it.” We’re just not good like that. I think we’re either insanely inspired — or it’s nothing. Inspired means we’re going where it takes us.

We’ve been very, very lucky that our audience and our record label and everybody around us, really does say, you know, “Go where you got to go, fellas. We’re here with you. We can’t wait to see what comes of it.” And I think often enough, you know, it does make songs that are relatable to people and all that, but I don’t think it always does. We probably always think it’s the greatest thing ever. And then sometimes you’re like, “Maybe that’s just too weird.” 

You know, we spent a good half-year making a song that was 24 hours long. When I step back from some of the things that we’ve done, I’m like, “We are f***ing insane. What the f***? How the f*** do we get away with all this stuff?” [Laughs.] But at the time when we’re doing it, we really aren’t…you know, it’s not a gimmick, it’s the kind of thing we want to get immersed in and figure out and have the freedom to experience it.

You’re shooting a video on Monday. What else do you have planned in the coming months?

The [“Assassins of Youth”] video shoot is letting us do a little bit of a dry run with our friends for free. And so we can tell them what to do and where to go and all that. And it gives us an idea of like, “What is this mechanism to get a big group of people into a building and get them into these bubbles?” And then at the end of the show, get them out of the bubbles and get them out of the building, and using the bathroom and getting drinks and all these boring things that you don’t really ever have to think about. 

And the video I think will look great. And we can we can do two or three takes, get the lighting right and all that. But it really is to help us decide, “How are we really going to do the show?” The place where we’re doing it is where we’re going to do the show, and it’s letting us sit in there for a long time because there’s nothing else going on in this giant venue, you know, because of this pandemic stuff. 

It’s a bizarre situation that we can be in this giant room doing this thing that really isn’t about music. The music part of it hasn’t really changed. I mean, we’re in space bubbles. Of all the groups in the world we’re like the only band that would be used to playing in space bubbles, as ridiculous as that sounds. That part of it is not new or difficult for us. It’s really just getting that many people into the space bubbles, and then taking care of them and then getting them out at the end of the show. 

So it’s a strange quagmire. And, you know, it’s always the detail. The big picture is always, “Oh, yeah, we know what to do.” But it’s the details of, “How do we do this? How we do that?” that will drive you crazy. This lets us do it without people spending their own money and giving us their entire night and all this sort of stuff. It can be a little bit of a calamity — but it’s all in good fun, because we’re just making a music video. And at the most, you know, people are there for maybe an hour or something. It’s not a giant commitment of three or four hours, like a show would be.

What a bizarre thing — when you start a band, these are things you never would have foretold you would have to navigate.

I say this all the time. I mean, you know, it starts off, you just want to be a rock star up there playing guitar and singing. And then it’s not that. But I have to say, I’m very relieved. For us, we’re glad that there is some earthquake movement that’s always happening, and every five or six years, whatever you were doing now is shifted into something different. 

And so I’m not in any way glad that this happened. But I’m glad to sort of do my part to say, “Well, if we can do this, then maybe this would inspire someone else to do their version of how we play shows during the pandemic,” or whatever. In that way, it’s great because it’s like, “Well, this this is really happening.” I think that’s what creative people like: They like there to be a purpose too. Entertainment is great, but the purpose too gives you a lot of motivation.

When you have something where you can be like, there’s a goalpost ending — absolutely.

Yeah. And it’s working, and I think it will make people happy, and it will be different. I mean, there’s no other time in the history of the world ever that you’d have to be in a bubble at a concert. I mean, it’s something out of a science fiction novel, you know — and now it’s really happening. Even when I talk about it, I really can’t quite believe it’s happening. Like, “We’re really going to do this.” I think it’s really going to work. You know, I don’t think it’ll be like a normal concert. But I do think it’ll keep everybody safe, and it’ll let everybody have a crazy time.

“American Head” is available now, and the video for “Assassins of Youth,” featuring the space balls, will be released Oct. 30.

Guitarist Steve Lukather on surprising Paul McCartney and why “it all begins with the Beatles”

Grammy-Award winner Steve Lukather, best known as the lead guitarist for Toto, recently joined host Kenneth Womack to talk about the Beatles on “Everything Fab Four,” a new podcast co-produced by me and Womack, a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon, and distributed by Salon.

Lukather, who has played on over 2,000 rock and pop tracks, talks about how he went from being “shitty at sports” and “bullied as a kid” to finding his soul in music when the Beatles hit “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964.

“Life went from black-and-white to color,” says Lukather. “I was like, I gotta learn how to do that. I [joined] a band when I was nine. I mean, what are the odds of a little kid from West Hollywood seeing the Beatles on ‘Ed Sullivan,’ then playing on the 50th anniversary of that show?”

Nowadays, having been a member of Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band for years, he counts Ringo as one of his closest friends. “I cherish that relationship probably more than anything at this point,” Lukather says. “Ringo’s the coolest guy I’ve ever been friends with — and I have a lot of cool friends.”

He also got to know George Harrison after playing onstage with him at a 1992 tribute to the late Jeff Porcaro, Toto’s original drummer. And he ended up working with Paul McCartney — not only on Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album in 1982, but later as a session player in McCartney’s 1984 film, “Give My Regards to Broad Street.”

On set, Lukather says, “We were told when we got there that we shouldn’t talk about the Beatles with Paul.… After about two days [working] with Linda, she said ‘Who told you that? That’s ridiculous, Paul loves talking about the Beatles.’ So me, being a young ballsy kid in my 20s, I started playing ‘Please Please Me.’ And Paul looked up at us, surprised, and then he started singing and everybody jumped in!”

As Lukather explains, “I respect what came before me — I’m a big fan of all sorts of music  — but it all begins with the Beatles.”

Listen to the entire conversation with Steve Lukather on “Everything Fab Four,” and subscribe via Spotify, Apple, Google or wherever you get your podcasts:

“Everything Fab Four” is distributed by Salon. Host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin, the bestselling book “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles,” and most recently “John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.” Read more of his work at Salon here.