Trump campaign devolving into ugly in-fighting and finger-pointing as election loss looms: report

In the waning days of the 2020 presidential election, the campaign of Donald Trump is turning into a hotbed of “paranoia and finger-pointing” as aides to the president are resigning themselves to the fact that re-election is out of reach and now everyone is looking for fall-guys to pin the blame on.

According to a report from Politico, former campaign manager Brad Parscale and current White House chief of staff Mark Meadows are popular targets for the failure of the campaign to catch fire the way it did in 2016, as well as the money problems that has tied the campaign’s hands in the last days.

According to Politico’s Alex Isenstadt, “Accusations are flying in all directions and about all manner of topics — from allegedly questionable spending decisions by former campaign manager Brad Parscale, to how White House chief of staff Mark Meadows handled Trump’s hospitalization for Covid-19, to skepticism that TV ads have broken through. Interviews with nearly a dozen Trump aides, campaign advisers and Republican officials also surfaced accusations that the president didn’t take fundraising seriously enough and that the campaign undermined its effort to win over seniors by casting Democrat Joe Biden as senile.”

While high profile Trump officials such as current campaign manager Bill Stepien are putting on a brave face, Politico reports Trump campaign headquarters is riddled with paranoia and internal fighting that is not helping matters as November 3rd looms.

“Senior Republicans say a culture of paranoia has developed in the waning days of the race, with fears mounting that they will be the targets of post-election attacks if Trump loses, which could damage their careers going forward,” the report states before adding, “It’s not just Parscale getting blamed for Trump’s predicament. Some Republican officials are also angry at Meadows for how he managed Trump’s hospitalization. The chief of staff undercut the White House messaging when he told reporters early on that Trump was ‘still not on a clear path to a full recovery.'”

Adding to the problems has been a breakdown in communications between Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, both of which are supposed to be working hand-in-hand to get the president re-elected.

“The dissension has spilled into the final days of the race. In theory, the campaign and RNC are supposed to be working in tandem. But senior Republicans have said the campaign’s coordination with the RNC broke down after Parscale’s departure, with little communication between the two organizations,” the reports states.

Politico is also reporting that some campaign officials are pinning a great part of the blame on the president himself.

“Some people close to the president say he is partly at fault for the fundraising downturn. The president canceled some events during part of the pandemic and, unlike Biden, refused to hold virtual fundraisers,” Isenstadt wrote. “Others expressed frustration over his decision to skip the second debate, which would have been an opportunity for him to gain on Biden, and over his erratic behavior in the closing days of the race. Meanwhile, reelection officials were taken by surprise when on the Monday call when he delivered a 30-minute expletive-filled tirade against myriad targets, including Anthony Fauci.”

He then added, “If Trump goes down, people who know the president say, don’t expect him to take responsibility.”

You can read more here.

WATCH: Trump’s latest attempt to get a foreign leader to attack Biden backfires in his face

In a now-infamous phone call, President Donald Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to insert himself into American politics by announcing an investigation of his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. That call and the scheme surrounding it led to Democrats impeach Trump, alleging that he had corruptly leveraged his office and congressionally approved funds to benefit his own political campaign.

Trump appeared to be taking a shot at similar gambit, if on a much smaller and less elaborate scale, on Friday during a televised call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While discussing a new plan for Israel to normalize relations with Sudan on speakerphone in front of reporters, Trump tried to goad Netanyahu into attacking Biden.

“Do you think Sleepy Joe could have made this deal, Bibi? Sleepy Joe?” Trump asked, smirking. “Do you think he would have made this deal? Somehow, I don’t think so.”

Of course, the ask wasn’t as duplicitous or egregious as the on Trump made of Zelensky. It involved no withholding of military aid, and he was simply asking for Netanyahu to disparage his opponent, not open a criminal investigation of him. Still, it was wildly inappropriate and corrupt, both from the perspective of domestic and international politics.

And despite the fact that Netanyahu has made no secret for his preference for Republicans and his fondness for Trump in particular, the Israeli prime minister refused to bite on the president’s bait. He pointedly avoided disparaging Biden.

“Well, Mr. President, one thing I can tell you is that we appreciate the help for peace from anyone in America,” Netanyahu said. “And we appreciate what you’ve done enormously.”

The smile dramatically fell from Trump’s face, and he gave a deflated: “Yeah.” It was clear he was disappointed that Netanyahu didn’t join him in attacking Biden, which would have given him a de facto campaign ad with the endorsement of one of his favorite foreign leaders.

Many pointed out, though, that despite Netanyahu’s fondness for Trump, he can read polling data as well as anyone. And the polling quite clearly indicates that Biden is heavily favored to win in the 2020 election. Netanyahu is likely to have a more fraught relationship with Biden regardless, but he wisely doesn’t want to intentionally aggravate the Democrat in the last days of an election.

Netanyahu seemed to try to make up for the disappointment his remarks surely caused by adding: “This will be registered in the history books. History registers who did what, I think it does.” But the damage was done.

Watch the clip below:

Trump has Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on speaker phone to discuss a deal normalizing relations between Israel and Sudan. He asks: "Do you think Sleepy Joe could have made this deal?"

Netanyahu: "We appreciate the help for peace from anyone in America" pic.twitter.com/OtCAL37m8e

— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 23, 2020

How the conservative movement and the rise of the hard right created Donald Trump

Signs are increasing that Donald Trump is headed toward the devastating electoral loss that experts expected four years ago. But even if they’re right this time, what does that tell us about what’s ahead? And what if they’re wrong yet again? Either way, Trumpism won’t be going away on its own, nor will any of the other illiberal eruptions across the West and around the world, which have left conservatives as bewildered as anybody else.

With Election Day looming, you probably don’t have time for a 500-page book to help make sense of how we got here. But when it comes to making sense of things afterward, when there’s time for deeper reflection, Edmund Fawcett’s new book, “Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition,” plays a vital, invaluable role. This new book is a follow-up to Fawcett’s 2014 book, “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” and the contrast in the subtitles is telling. Fawcett is a British political journalist who spent 30 years at the Economist, including stints as chief correspondent in Washington, Paris and Berlin and as the magazine’s European and literary editor.

The idea of liberalism he describes as “a search for an ethically acceptable order of human progress among civic equals without recourse to undue power.” But fights, by their very nature, are a much messier matter, and all too often involve “undue power.” Indeed, there’s not just one fight involved within the conservative tradition, but a seemingly endless number. Still, there’s one overarching battle between hardcore resisters of liberal modernity — those Fawcett calls the “hard right” — and those seeking accommodation, whom he calls “liberal conservatives.”

Dealing with both politics and ideas in four countries — the U.S., Britain, Germany and France — Fawcett traces the story through four phases, from an initial period of “frontal resistance to liberal modernity” in the 19th century to the period since 1980 when the success of liberal conservatism, symbolized by the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher opened the door to the rise of the hard right, including the election of a certain American president. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Your book is titled “Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition” But as you lay it out, it’s actually a multitude of fights, both internal and external. Let’s start with the external fights against the modern world itself — the world of market and the Industrial Revolution — and the forces of liberalism and democracy. What was at stake in those fights?

What is it that conservatism is against, as it were? What did it think it was resisting in liberal modernity? That’s a prime question. What conservatives reckon they’re resisting has changed as modern liberal life has changed. So let’s start with history. There’s no conservatism before the early 19th century. It’s essentially a political movement of old, established elites who were used to ruling and are now confronting an utterly new, unimagined condition of society, dominated by modern capitalism and great social fluidity, great social mobility and growing discredit of elites.

At the same time, very soon, pressures arise not just for liberal demands — freedom for citizens, economic liberty and cultural freedom from old kinds of tutorial government and moral interference — not just that, but conservatives very quickly (as do liberals) face demands from democracy that those liberal promises of modern life be extended to everybody, whoever they are. So that’s the 19th-century challenge that conservatives faced. They’re all different in different countries, each has its own particular history, but that is a common thread.

In the 20th century, and now, that contest has changed. Conservatives at the end of the 19th century and early in the 20th century learned how to dominate this new condition of society. They were the defenders of property, defenders of the social order. What did that mean from, say, 1900 to 1950? That meant, above all, defending the capitalist order, putting food in the shops and wages in the pockets. But capitalism is this fantastic engine of great social change, turning everything upside down. So in our lifetime, conservatives have always faced two ways: They’ve been resisters of liberal modernity, of innovation, of moral change, but on the other hand they’ve been the great defenders of its driver, namely capitalist innovation. So this is a tension inside conservatism that runs right through it, and I think explains a great deal of where conservatives are today, fighting against each other.

The internal fights can be divided into three kinds that overlap or interpenetrate: There’s the broadest fight between hard-right resisters and accommodators, narrow fights among specific factions at any one time, and medium-scope fights over how to define what conservatism is, how to order things. The resister/accommodator divide can be symbolized by the twin figures of Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke, each of them anti-modern, anti-Enlightenment and anti-rationalist, but in very different ways. How can we best understand them as illuminating the conservative tradition, at least in its origins and its primordial outlook?

If we could take the third sort first: In talking about all these things I think there is politics first, political decisions. Those always involve the government, voters and parties. To understand conservatism, you need to keep your eye on that. But at the same time, there are what you could call the thinkers of conservatism, people who pore over these rather subtle questions and ask “What is conservatism? Who is the true conservative?” Burke and Maistre were that second kind of person.

Take Burke as a good example. Burke actually was more or less ignored during the 19th century by most people calling themselves political conservatives. He was rediscovered, indeed sort of invented, at the end of the 19th century as a philosopher of conservatism, for a political movement that, successful though it was, didn’t really have a philosophy. Indeed, the best it could do, if asked, was, “Well, we don’t believe in ideas.” One of the reasons conservatives have been able to say that — “We don’t believe in ideas. We don’t need a philosophy” — is that either they were the upper classes or they were the descendants of the upper classes, people whose job was to rule by their nature. They were used to ruling. They weren’t used to having to explain why they should rule, or what they were ruling for.

So it took quite a long time to figure out that they needed political ideas, political philosophy, something called conservatism. And indeed Burke was a very, very late invention. There’s an 1886 “History of Toryism” which barely mentions Burke. As for Maistre, he was much too crazy and outrageous. He was a brilliant writer, but he was much too angry in his opposition to modern life to make him a good intellectual flag-bearer for conservatives in democratic times.

To finish up on the topic of who is and who is not a conservative, it shows itself very strongly in the United States, where you have three strong traditions since the middle of the last century. You have the kind of modern Burkeans, people like Russell Kirk, who dug up his ghost and tried to reinvent him in an American context. That has always been rather a kind of hothouse conservatism that doesn’t really fit into modern American life. And the other two were the economic liberals — the people who want the market and business to do whatever they want, on the theory that would make things work out best — and then there’s a much more sort of moral thread, with the neoconservatives who were interested in the texture of social life, and I suppose you could throw in there the religious right with their moral concerns. So those were three or four very strong threads in American Intellectual conservatism, And they’re still there.

Your book traces the history of conservatism across two centuries, divided into four periods, in the U.K., France, Germany and the U.S. The first you describe as “frontal resistance to liberal modernity,” from 1830 to 1880, with chapters titled “A Right Without Authority,” dealing with politics and “Turning Reason Against Liberalism,” dealing with ideas. How do these two relate to one another?

The first is the political movement as I described it, of old elites, established powers, who suddenly find themselves under challenge from new contestants. You saw it in the United States with Whigs and Democrats, you saw that in Britain with Tories and Liberals, you saw it in Germany and France. The intellectual counterpart of that struggle was, on one side, people like Burke and Maistre, who said, as it were, “Tradition, belief, unreason, these will be the flags with which we will go forward into the future.”

On the other hand, there were conservatives who I mention in the chapter you just described who said, “Not at all. We have to use reason, we have to use the lessons of the Enlightenment in a conservative and orderly cause.” These were people like James Madison, an American example, and Friedrich Gentz, a German. You have here this opening conflict within conservative thought between the traditionalists and the romantics, on the one hand, and the rationalists on the other.

You write: “In the 1830s, the right’s primary choice was either to resist or to compromise with liberal modernity. By the 1880s, it faced the further question of how far to accept democratic modernity.” How did these two choices differ, in terms of what was at stake? What options existed, and how did the right respond?

Good question! Liberalism and democracy need to be distinguished. Liberalism, as it were, lays out the feast. Democracy draws up the guest list. Liberalism promises people — it doesn’t always deliver, but it promises people a number of good things: protections from arbitrary power, social progress, civil rights. It promises many freedoms. Democracy is quite different. Democracy promises those things to everybody, whoever they are. And there’s a big difference. You can have a club of very equal people, where there’s no ranking, where everybody respects everybody else. But the club itself can be extremely exclusive. It sounds almost banal to stress the difference, but that is vital to understanding liberal democracy. Historically, by the end of the 19th century, both conservatives and liberals were facing a demand that the liberal promises of modern life be extended to every last person. When you think about this, that promise wasn’t even delivered on paper until the middle of the 20th century, and in many respects is still not delivered successfully to everybody.

So, the second period you describe as “adaptation, compromise and catastrophe,” that’s from 1880 to 1945. In what sense was there adaptation and compromise? What are some illustrative examples?

If you take the period as a whole, and look at the main conservative parties in Europe and the United States over that period, all of them, broadly speaking, accepted a degree of the welfare state, accepted a degree of big government. They accepted the New Deal in the United States, and in Europe they accepted the welfare state. They accepted, in other words, a very tempered capitalism in which government played a large role in propping up capitalism when it got into trouble and propping up people when they got into trouble, with social safety nets and so on. That broad consensus, hard-fought and very spotty, was by and large the consensus that mainstream conservatives accepted by the middle of the 20th century. That was so with Eisenhower, with Nixon and even to a limited degree with Reagan.

So what do you mean by “catastrophe”?

In any story of the political right, one can’t escape the disaster of the rise of fascism and Nazism. I’m not suggesting that conservatism was directly to blame for these things. That would be wrong. But the conservative classes found themselves in 1945, for a variety of reasons, at a zero point from which they had to reinvent themselves.

That leads right into the third period you describe as “political command and intellectual recovery,” from the end of World War II to 1980. How did conservatism recover during that period?

In the 1945 to 1980 period on the right, in a funny way, politics stopped driving intellectuals and intellectuals came to drive politics. It’s a fascinating period, intellectually, for the right in the United States. There were a number of intriguing thinkers. They were ignored at the time, but they were working away quietly for what became the Reagan revolution, both in terms of economic policy and, to a larger extent, in terms of social and ethical questions. They were broadly derided or ignored, but they came into their own in the 1980s, and they’ve been in the saddle ever since.

How did that compare with what was happening elsewhere?

There was a similar revival elsewhere, but it was slower, and it wasn’t so well paid for. In the United States, there were many big philanthropic donors, right-wing think tanks that supported particular intellectuals like Richard Weaver or Friedrich Hayek. It was a big, very well executed campaign of intellectual renewal. It was less organized in Europe, but it existed there as well.

The fourth period you describe as “the contest for supremacy between liberal conservatism and the hard right,” starting in 1980. Say a bit more about these two terms, both what they mean generally, and specifically in this time period.

It’s difficult when writing about politics, for one has to be given at least five seconds to get the canoe into the water. All these labels are very slippery, particularly the labels “liberal conservatism” — that sounds like a contradiction in terms — and the term “hard right,” which many conservatives particularly dislike because they feel it’s a slander or a slur. But let’s say “liberal conservatism,” with all those provisos, is a good label for the kind of conservatism I was describing earlier, the kind of mainstream conservatism running from Eisenhower to Nixon and even to a certain extent some of the Reagan years.

That’s an OK label for the kind of mainstream conservatism that I was describing, by and large, in government. However much they turned up the gas on the campaign trail, Eisenhower, Nixon and even Reagan were within a recognizable band. It was particularly liberal in economic matters, for the free market, very business-friendly, but also liberal to an extent in the social and ethical sense. Nixon wasn’t a great moral or ethical campaigner. Reagan, I don’t think, believed it himself personally. He threw bones to the moral right, but it wasn’t his thing.

So that’s liberal conservatism. It has a counterpart in Europe. The hard right, I think, is a different thing. It’s what liberal conservatives are in retreat from. If you look at the present Republican Party, I would call that a hard-right party.

What is the hard right? Well, it combines two elements. It’s a strange combination, on the one hand, of ultra-marketeers, who would let business do what it chooses and will do what business wants, but on the other hand of politicians speaking loudly for the forgotten man, for disaffected voters in the name of the people. The hard right is curiously for global free markets and at the same time one-nation populist. You see this odd combination across Europe and in the United States. Although there are local differences, that’s the hard right.

Conservatives get quite upset when you say, “You conservatives have a fight on your hand between the liberal strain of conservatism and the hard right.” Why? Because, particularly in Europe, in France and Germany, the hard right is associated with old neofascist parties but it is by no means any longer limited to those. Indeed, it’s gone way beyond them. The National Rally, as it’s now called in France, and the Alternative for Germany have both the elements I’ve mentioned: rowdy popular elements and a free-market elite element. One of the leaders of the German hard right worked, I think, for Goldman Sachs. That gives you an idea of the hard right as an elite and popular combination.

You see the same in the United States with the Republican Party. Partly because of his outsized personality, people have over-focused on Trump as if somehow he invented the hard right. He didn’t at all. The hard right invented him. You could say the same thing about Boris Johnson, the Brexiteer in Britain. He didn’t invent Brexit or UKIP [the anti-EU U.K. Independence Party] or the new Tory party. It chose him.

Here in America, Trump is presented as a figure who came out of nowhere. You show that he’s part of a hard right that’s been growing for decades, before gaining ground with his election and Brexit happening close together. How specifically would you explain him as a part of the hard right? What characteristics does he share that would make him a part of it? If you’d like, perhaps say something about how today’s hard right echoes characteristics that have been there in the past.

In a way, he’s a kind of gifted improviser. I don’t think he has or has ever had a lot of aims or principles. In that, he rather resembles Boris Johnson in our country — gifted campaigners with a fantastic sort of canny popular touch. If you look for a consistency of aim or opinion, it’s very hard to find. If you wanted a word for Trump, I think it would be opportunist. He saw a moment to move into politics, and he succeeded very well. But, the party he took over had been moving to the hard right for a long time without him.

One of the figures to whom the American hard right at the moment owes an enormous amount is Pat Buchanan. He was writing the kind of lines that Trump delivers back in the 1970s. If “Trump” were a movie, Trump would be the star, but Pat Buchanan would get the screenwriting credit.

To answer the other part of your question, the hard right does have historical precedent. There has always been in conservatism, as it has adapted, as it has become more liberal and mainstream, as it has appealed to more and more democratic voters — democratic with a small D — there’s always been a resistant fringe of those who say, “We’re compromising too much.”

There’s a quick caution needed here in that when talking about the hard right, it’s very easy to be misheard and have people say, “Ah! Fawcett’s out of his mind, the hard right isn’t fascist.” I’m not saying for a moment that the hard right is fascist. There are many, many ways in which a conservative can become less liberal or less democratic without becoming fascist. Fascism in the 1920s and ’30s was something specific. It came out of a particular historical context in Europe, after a disastrous war in which Germany was defeated. History doesn’t repeat in that way. Fascism is not the right parallel.

Nor indeed is populism quite the right label for the hard right. Populism in the American context meant something quite specific, it was a movement flanking progressivism at the end of the 19th century. It had wide working-class and farm support. Populism as it’s kicked around nowadays is a very loose idea. In fact, populism in connection with the hard right is an elite phenomenon. The hard right is not the people fighting the elite. The hard right in the United States and Europe is one elite, namely the hard right, a very conservative elite, fighting another, a more liberal elite. Hence the subtitle of my book: “The Fight for a Tradition.”

I guess you would say that’s true in other countries as well?

Yes. As for early hard-right politicians, you have Pat Buchanan. In Britain, there was a politician who may not be known to Americans, but is very well-known in Britain, Enoch Powell. He was a Tory politician, a ferociously clever person who ran himself out of politics in the 1960s by racialist outbursts which discredited him. His contribution to Tory politics is a bit like Pat Buchanan’s contribution to Republicanism in the United States. Powell’s contribution was, first, anti-European — get Britain out of the European Union — and nationalistic, to go it alone and not count on foreign friends, not even on the United States. Secondly, it was hyper-liberal in the economic sense. This strange cocktail, you see, was present in Enoch Powell — that same cocktail that I earlier described as hard right.

In opposition to that, you talk several times about successful conservative leaders. In one place you say “Like [Benjamin] Disraeli, or Margaret Thatcher, Churchill seemed to resolve in one capacious personality the [Conservative] party’s inner conflicts.” There are several other places where you make comments like that about how successful political leaders of conservatism resolved tensions that, once they passed from the scene, seemed to spill out all over the place. Could you say something about the importance of such figures? I’d also like to ask about Reagan as one such figure, because after him came the unraveling, as you mentioned before.

Reagan belongs in that category of conservative politician. It includes Thatcher and Angela Merkel today, the chancellor of Germany. They managed to keep their parties together, although like every successful party, each has a tremendous internal dynamic and conflict. In order to keep your party together, you have to give something to each side, and arguably both Reagan and Thatcher gave much too much to the market liberals, those who say “Markets will solve everything; government is always the problem.” We’re still living, I think, both in Europe and the United States, with the limitations of that policy. You can say that they gave too much in terms of the cost to society. However, in party terms, they were quite successful in keeping their parties together. The split in conservatism, the rise of the hard right and the rout of the old liberal Republicans, didn’t begin until after Reagan and Thatcher were gone.

So what problems opened the door to the hard right after Reagan and Thatcher?

There were three levels. There was a historic internal change in society and economy, connected with the collapse of old industries, the collapse of unions. If you look back to our society and economy in the 1960s and ’70s, out of which Reagan and Thatcher came, it’s almost unrecognizable. So that’s one thing, a huge, huge change. Second, the end of the Cold War, in 1989 and 1990. That was a convenient, if dangerous, framework for thinking about the world and other countries. That’s now gone. Those two changes together — huge social and economic change inside, great global change outside — have meant that an old framework of ideas in which conservative politicians argued with each other is gone, and needs replacing. Good as they were at keeping their parties together, neither Thatcher nor Reagan handed on any kind of replacement.

Into that vacuum has come the hard right. It’s not a program, it’s not a long-term solution to anything. It’s actually intellectually incoherent. It promises global free markets on the one hand, and a kind of self-reliant, protective nation on the other. It doesn’t add up. However, it’s politically extremely appealing.

In your coda you discuss the choices facing conservatives. But in your preface, you write that your book “is written in comradely spirit with a question for the left: if we’re so smart, how come we’re not in charge?”

I hope we will die on the left, but I sometimes think also we will die of the left.

I don’t expect a quick answer, because then why write the book? But I wonder if you might have a tentative answer to offer, that points to a direction for further discussion and inquiry?

What is the answer to the question, if the left is honest with itself? The answer is that we may have the answers, we may be the virtuous ones, but we have never, in 200 years, persuaded a majority of our fellow citizens that we are the way to go. That seems to me too deep a pattern for there not to be lessons drawn from that. What is the lesson? In essence, a boring, dull and unpopular lesson on the left: That is that we have to cooperate with liberal-minded right-wing people at the center of politics if we want to get into government and govern, as opposed to being the party of criticism or a movement of protest, however necessary and legitimate.

To throw in a further thought, the condition of the left is part of a larger explanation of the political hole that we’re in. It’s not just that on the right, a hard right is dominant at present, and liberal conservatives are dispirited and in retreat. On the left, there isn’t a really persuasive, strong and responsible alternative.

That said, contingency plays a part of the mess we’re in politically. Think of the three times the 21st century arrived: First 9/11, a horrendous event for which it would take decades for the consequences to work themselves out. Then the 2003 Iraq war, necessary or not, which broke the liberal Republicans and broke the center-minded Labour Party in Britain. And third, the crash of 2008, which more or less finished the idea that markets look after themselves. You had these three hammer-blows which were, in their way, contingencies. Neither party, neither the left or the right, has really digested any of that.

Finally, what’s most important question I didn’t ask? And what’s the answer?

“Is the fight on the right going to go on after Nov. 3?” And do you know what the answer is?

From reading your book?

Not only. We are thinking in parallel here. I liked the piece you wrote, “It’s not just about Trump.” I completely agree. Of the fight on the right, you could say, “It’s not even about Trump.” So my answer to the question you didn’t ask is, yes, the fight on the right will go on.

CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of the introduction to this interview conflated some ideas within liberalism with conservatism. This story has been corrected.

Did Trump confuse the public option with “Medicare for All”?

During the final presidential debate, President Donald Trump claimed that 180 million people would lose their private health insurance to socialized medicine if the Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, is elected president.

“They have 180 million people, families under what he wants to do, which will basically be socialized medicine — you won’t even have a choice — they want to terminate 180 million plans,” said Trump.

Trump has repeated this claim throughout the week, and we thought the linkage of Biden’s proposed health care plan with socialism was something we needed to check out. Especially since Biden opposed “Medicare for All,” the proposal by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would have created a single-payer health system run completely by the federal government, and has long been attacked by Republicans as “socialist.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to our request asking where the evidence for this claim came from. Experts called it a distortion of Biden’s plan.

Where the number comes from

Experts agreed the number of people who have private health insurance either through an employer-sponsored plan or purchased on the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplace is around 180 million people.

KFF, a nonpartisan health policy organization, estimated in 2018 that about 157 million Americans had health insurance through their employer, while almost 20 million had insurance they purchased for themselves. Together, that adds up to about 177 million with private health insurance. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.)

What does Biden support?

Biden supports expanding the ACA through several measures, including a public option. Under his plan, this public option would be a health insurance plan run by the federal government that would be offered alongside other private health insurance plans on the insurance marketplace.

“The marketplace is made up of multiple insurers in areas,” said Linda Blumberg, a health policy fellow at the Urban Institute. “Sometimes there are five or more [plans]; sometimes there is only one. Biden is talking about adding a public option in the marketplace. You could pick between these private insurers or you could pick the public option.”

Getting rid of the so-called employer firewall is also part of Biden’s proposal.

This firewall was implemented during the rollout of the ACA. It was designed to maintain balance in the insurance risk pools by preventing too many healthy people who have work-based coverage from opting instead to move to a marketplace plan. And it all came down to who qualified for the subsidies that made these plans more affordable.

Currently, those who are offered a health insurance plan through their employer that meets certain minimum federal standards aren’t eligible to receive these subsidies, which come in the form of tax credits. But that leaves many low-income workers with health care plans that aren’t as affordable or comprehensive as marketplace plans.

Biden’s plan would eliminate that firewall, meaning anyone could choose to get health insurance either through their employer or through the marketplace. That’s where many Republicans argue that we could start to see leakage from private health insurance plans to the public option.

“The problem is healthy people leaving employer plans,” said Joseph Antos, a scholar in health care at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. That could mean the entire workplace plan’s premiums would go up. “You could easily imagine a plan where it spirals, the premiums go up, and then even more people start leaving the plans to go to the public option.”

Blumberg, though, said that because the marketplace would still include private health insurance plans alongside the public option, it doesn’t mean everyone who chooses to leave their employer plan would go straight to the public option.

She has done estimates based on a plan similar to the one Biden is proposing. She estimates that only about 10% to 12% of Americans would choose to leave their employer-sponsored plans, which translates to about 15 million to 18 million Americans.

KFF also did an estimate and found that 12.3 million people with employer coverage could save money by buying on the exchange under the Biden plan.

But “it’s not clear all of those people would choose to leave their employer coverage, though, as there are other reasons besides costs that people might want to have job-based insurance,” Cynthia Cox, vice president and director of the program on the ACA at KFF, wrote in an email.

Either way, none of the estimates are anywhere close to the 180 million that Trump claimed.

Is this type of public option socialism?

Overall, experts said no, what Biden supports isn’t socialized medicine.

“Socialized medicine means that the government runs hospitals and employs doctors, and that is not part of Biden’s plan,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, wrote in an email. “Under Biden’s plans, doctors and hospitals would remain in the private sector just like they are today.”

However, Antos said that, in his view, the definition of socialism can really vary when it comes to health care.

“I would argue in one sense, we would already have socialized medicine. We have massive federal subsidies for everybody, so in that sense, we’re already there,” said Antos. “But, if socialized medicine means the government is going to dictate how doctors practice or how health care is delivered, we are obviously not in that situation. I don’t think the Biden plan would lead you that way.”

And in the end, Antos said, invoking socialism is a scare tactic that politicians have been using for years.

“It’s just a political slur,” said Antos. “It’s meant to inflame the emotions of those who will vote for Trump and meant to annoy the people who will vote for Biden.”

Our ruling

Trump said 180 million people would lose their private health insurance plans to socialized medicine under Biden.

While about 180 million people do have private health insurance, there is no evidence that all of them would lose their private plans if Biden were elected president.

Biden supports implementing a public option on the health insurance marketplace. It would exist alongside private health insurance plans, and Americans would have the option to buy either the private plan or the public plan. While estimates show that a number of Americans would likely leave their employer-sponsored coverage for the public plan, they would be doing that by choice and the estimates are nowhere near Trump’s 180 million figure.

Experts also agree that the public option is not socialized medicine, and it’s ridiculous to conflate Biden’s plan with Medicare for All.

We rate this claim Pants on Fire.

The dark ending of the “The Witches” remake is actually the one that we need right now

For much of the film, Robert Zemeckis’ new adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book “The Witches,” now streaming on HBO Max, feels far safer than its 1990 predecessor.

In it, a young orphaned boy and his loving grandmother (Jahzir Bruno and Octavia Spencer here) end up at a resort at the same time that an international coven of witches are holding a convention. The witches want to see “every child in the world rubbed out, squashed,” and they cook up a simple solution: turn all the earth’s children into mice.

As you may have guessed, the boy — nameless in the original book, called Charlie in this version — is swept up in their scheme. He’s turned into a mouse and is forced to fight back against the witches in his new, diminutive state.

Many of the more violent scenes in the original adaptation directed by Nicolas Roeg are now played for CGI-bolstered laughs, while Anne Hathaway‘s High Witch is decidedly more campy than Anjelica Houston’s truly creepy turn in the role.

But then there’s the ending (if you’ve not seen the film, and don’t want the ending spoiled, here’s your final warning to stop reading here).

While the 1990 rendition of “The Witches” has a classic, if predictable, “happy ending” — the boy is changed back into human by a good witch after thwarting the High Witch’s schemes — in this version, Zemeckis opts to stay true to the final pages of Dahl’s book where it’s revealed that the boy is destined to live the rest of his life as a mouse.

This leads to a brief conversation with his grandmother that packs an emotional wallop, wherein he asks about a mouse’s typical lifespan. His grandmother takes a moment to consider the question, then responds that since he is a “mouse-person” hybrid, he could live about nine years. The boy is thrilled. “That’s great! It’s the best news I’ve ever had!” he replies.

He doesn’t want to outlive his grandmother, who is nearly 90 — he’s already lost both his parents, if you recall — and given his reduced lifespan, the two could die around the same time.

It’s an undeniably dark conclusion, but Dahl, who died in 1990, was always keenly aware that childhood isn’t all everlasting gobstoppers and golden tickets — something that many adults seem to forget with time. That’s one of the reasons that Dahl’s books continue to incite controversy (that along with the author’s racism, transphobia, and vocal antisemitism which, until recently, had largely been overlooked by the literary community).

For what it’s worth, Dahl wasn’t ultimately thrilled with the 1990 adaptation of his book. His widow, Felicity, told “The Telegraph” that after watching the ending, “Roald said: ‘Take my name off this thing. You’ve missed the whole point of the book.’ I’d never seen him so upset.”

So, Zemeckis’ adaptation is not only truer to the author’s original intent and message, it also comes at a time where audiences have been primed — especially within the last decade or so — to appreciate child-friendly media that deals with the complex emotions associated with loss and death, like “Adventure Time,” “Series of Unfortunate Events,” and “Steven Universe” do.

This version of “The Witches” also feels undeniably more poignant than it might have had it debuted before the pandemic. Now, the associated loss of life is inescapable, even for children, and finding media that opens up the conversation of mortality — and not just in the context of a villainous character’s demise — is perhaps more necessary now than ever.

Americans aren’t great at discussing death. In her Washington Post essay about the Pixar film “Coco,” writer Michelle Boorstein said that was one of the reasons the film appealed to her and her 8-year-old daughter.

“I have blurry ideas of what happens after death,” she said. “That attribute makes me extremely common in a country where people are rapidly ditching institutional religion, with its paradigms, rules and stories, but remain mostly uncomfortable or unwilling to think deeply or talk with others about what they do believe and imagine, if anything, about the afterlife.”

“The Witches” is honestly nowhere as near as nuanced as “Coco” was in its discussion of death — nor does it attempt any insight into what the afterlife will be like — but it does understand that darkness and death don’t have to be taboo topics in family films.

After all, children’s stories and fairy tales weren’t always the upbeat sing-a-longs that dominate streaming services today — but, as Scott Meslow wrote for “The Atlantic” in 2012, Walt Disney “set the template for the contemporary concept of the fairy tale: a whimsical, animated story appropriate enough for the entire family.”

Dahl’s children’s literature, in contrast, understandably feels subversive. In his book “The Twits,” Mrs. Twit feeds her equally vindictive husband worms instead of spaghetti; “Matilda” features a double-whammy of disdainful parents and a cruel headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, who essentially hammer-throws students by their pigtails; while “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is a parade of badly behaved children and jaw-dropping punishments.

Laid out back-to-back-to-back, the content seems harsh, but even beloved author Maurice Sendak once wrote, “In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There’s a cruelty to childhood, there’s an anger.” Dahl recognized that to be true, and where many children’s books build a world with an obvious good versus evil dichotomy, his stories inhabit a middle ground where moral ambiguity is on full display; he seems to trust that children will discern what (and who) is right and wrong for themselves. Similarly, through dealing with “adult” topics like mortality, Dahl offers his readers more emotional nuance than what the standard “happy ending” can provide.

Macabre content provides a certain level of catharsis for young readers. In 2016, writer Hephzibah Anderson connected Dahl’s work with child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim’s study “The Uses of Enchantment.”

“Without such fantasies, the child fails to get to know his monster better, nor is he given suggestions as to how he may gain mastery over it,” Bettelheim wrote in the study. “As a result, the child remains helpless with his worst anxieties – much more so than if he had been told fairy tales which give these anxieties form and body and also show ways to overcome these monsters.”

And this year is one that has been absolutely packed with anxiety — and we’re kidding ourselves if we think children are immune or oblivious to it. Their lives have upended for reasons they may not totally be able to comprehend. But as Jerry Bubrick, PhD, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute, wrote in earlier this year, “The treatment for anxiety isn’t to make the fear go away, it’s to manage the fear and tolerate uncertainty.”

Family films, even imperfect ones like “The Witches,” that introduce topics that could cause anxiety — death being the most obvious — offer an essential opportunity to give fear a name and and address it. While Dahl’s books and Zemeckis’ adaptation may feel a touch too dark for some, consider that it’s actually shining a light into the shadows.

COVID-19 death rates have drastically fallen among all age groups — even as cases spike

The chances of dying from COVID-19 have fallen precipitously since the pandemic began, according to two new peer-reviewed studies.

One study, from researchers at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, found that the death rate has gone down substantially among all age groups.

Patients treated by NYU’s health system had a 25.6% chance of dying when the pandemic began but that number has fallen to 7.6% in recent weeks, according to the study, which will be published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine next week.

The researchers identified multiple reasons for the drop, including increased experience with the virus among health workers, lower hospital capacity, the availability of new treatments, earlier intervention, higher community awareness, and “lower viral load exposure from increasing mask wearing and social distancing.” The researchers added that it is also possible that “earlier periods had a more virulent circulating strain.”

“Our findings suggest that while COVID-19 remains a terrible disease, our efforts to improve treatment are probably working,” co-author Leora Horwitz said in a statement. “Even in the absence of a silver-bullet treatment or vaccine, we are protecting more of our patients through a host of small changes.”

While the NYU study only looked at about 5,000 cases in a single health system in New York, another analysis by Bilal Mateen, a researcher at the Alan Turing Institute in the United Kingdom similarly found that the death rate has fallen about 20 percentage points since the pandemic began.

The study, which was released as a preprint before it is set to appear in the journal Critical Care Medicine, looked at data from more than 20,000 hospitalizations in the UK.

“This trend remains after adjustment for patient demographics and comorbidities suggesting this improvement is not due to changing patient characteristics,” the analysis said. “Possible causes include the introduction of effective treatments as part of clinical trials and a falling critical care burden.”

To be clear, the death rate is “still higher than many infectious diseases, including the flu,” Horwitz told NPR. And many patients still have severe symptoms months after first testing positive. “It still has the potential to be very harmful in terms of long-term consequences for many people,” she said.

Horwitz acknowledged that “people who are getting hospitalized now tend to be younger” and have fewer health conditions but even when adjusted for age and other diseases, the study found that the death rate among older patients has dropped by about 18 percentage points.

“Clearly, there’s been something [that’s] gone on that’s improved the risk of individuals who go into these settings with COVID-19,” Mateen told the outlet.

Doctors who were not involved in the studies agreed that there were numerous reasons for the drop.

Khalilah Gates, a critical care pulmonologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, told NPR that patients in the early days of the pandemic were put on ventilators and breathing machines and perhaps offered enrollment into critical trials but “six-plus months into this, we kind of have a rhythm, and so it has become an everyday standard patient for us at this point in time.”

Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert and emergency medicine physician at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, added that doctors have also learned to quickly identify patients at risk of blood clots or “cytokine storms,” when the body’s immune system attacks itself.

“We know that when people are getting standardized treatment, it makes it much easier to deal with the complications that occur because you already have protocols in place,” he said. “And that’s definitely what’s happened in many hospitals around the country.”

Mateen stressed that hospital capacity has been key in reducing the death rate in the UK because when “staff are stretched, mistakes are made.”

“It’s night and day to take care of someone with a disease you’ve never seen before, than taking care of someone where you’ve seen hundreds,” Horwitz told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s also probably that the hospitals are not overwhelmed, but that can change.”

Indeed, the number of new cases in the United States hit a record high of more than 77,000 on Thursday and hospitalizations hit record highs in numerous states like Ohio, Iowa, Utah, and Oklahoma. Hospitals in Utah, Wisconsin, Idaho, and others are already nearing full capacity.

As hospitals in hot spots are stretched thin, Horwitz stressed that wearing a mask could mean the difference between life and death.

A study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that masks may reduce the amount of the virus the wearer is exposed to, “leading to higher rates of mild or asymptomatic infection.”

“Masks, depending on the material and design, filter out a majority of viral particles, but not all,” the study said. The researchers found that in some cases, “if 80% of the population wears a moderately effective mask, nearly half of the projected deaths over the next two months could be prevented.”

Countries that had high levels of mask-wearing before the pandemic have fared better than other nations and subsequent resurgences have been less deadly.

“The more virus you get into your body, the more sick you are likely to get,” said study co-author Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at UCSF.

“Masks can prevent many infections altogether, as was seen in health care workers when we moved to universal masking. We’re also saying that masks, which filter out a majority of viral particles, can lead to a less severe infection if you do get one,” said Gandhi. “If you get infected, but have no symptoms – that’s the best way you can ever get a virus.”

The study compared outbreaks on two cruise ships in the winter. In February, 18% of 634 people who tested positive aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan were asymptomatic. But a cruise ship in Argentina, where workers handed out surgical masks to all passengers and N95 masks to all staff after the first passenger tested positive, had an 81% asymptomatic rate among 128 people who tested positive.

Likewise, as hundreds of food processing plant workers died from the coronavirus, plants that distributed masks to workers saw high asymptomatic rates. A seafood processing plant in Oregon and a Tyson chicken processing plant in Arkansas had 95% asymptomatic rates among hundreds of infections after giving workers masks.

Gandhi said that public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should stress these findings along with the current messaging that wearing a mask prevents asymptomatic people from spreading the virus to others.

“We messaged that mask wearing will protect other people, and that did not seem to convince our country as much as we would have hoped,” she said. “If you think something’s going to help you or your family, you are going to do it more than if you think you’re helping others.”

Trump goads Biden into saying he’ll “phase out” fossil fuels at final debate

“You both have very different visions on climate change,” NBC’s Kristen Welker said in the last 20 minutes of the second and final presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday, setting up a tête-à-tête on climate policy between the two candidates. “For each of you, how would you both combat climate change and support job growth at the same time?”

President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden don’t see eye to eye on a great number of things, but you’d need a microscope to see the common ground between them on the issue of climate change. On Thursday night, the pair mostly rehashed the particulars of that great divide, hitting notes they’ve been hammering for months now, including during the first debate.

Trump alleged that the United States has the cleanest air and water in the world, when in fact his administration has spent the better part of his term rolling back regulations that protect those resources. Biden leaned hard on his $2 trillion plan to reinvigorate the U.S. economy and combat rising emissions in the process (though his proposal suggests eliminating emissions from the electricity sector by 2035, not 2025, as the candidate said on stage). Trump accused Biden of letting “AOC plus three” — Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the three other members of the “Squad” — ghostwrite his climate plan. (“It’s actually AOC plus 115 because that’s how many House and Senate members have cosponsored the most ambitious climate legislation in American history,” Ocasio-Cortez shot back on Twitter; also she was one of many advising Biden on climate.)

Though there was plenty of inanity from Trump, the portion of the debate that focused on climate change wasn’t all “tiny windows” (Trump seems convinced environmentalists want to do away with windows in the name of energy efficiency) and dead birds (don’t ask). The night held one big surprise: Biden said that he aims to transition the U.S. off of fossil fuels.

On its face, that doesn’t sound like a big deal. Scientists agree that keeping the world’s remaining fossil fuel resources in the ground is essential if we’re going to slow planetary warming. And many politicians, including Biden, have said that oil and gas development needs to be seriously reined in and, eventually, phased out. Biden’s whole green stimulus plan focuses on transitioning fossil fuel workers to jobs in renewable energy.

Still, saying you want to phase out oil and gas hits differently on a debate stage than in a whitepaper. Here’s how it went down. And it was the first time a major candidate for U.S. president has said anything of the sort on a national debate stage.

As Biden was responding to a question from Welker about what he would do to help communities of color affected by industrial pollution, Trump interjected with a question of his own. “Would you close down the oil industry?” Trump demanded, hoping Biden would say yes. He got his wish. “I would transition the oil industry, yes,” Biden said. “That’s a big statement,” Trump said. “It is a big statement,” Biden replied.

Welker, sounding resigned, gave in to Trump’s effort to redirect the conversation. “Why would you do that?” she asked Biden. “Because the oil industry pollutes, significantly. It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time,” he said, powering through Trump’s interruptions.

“Basically what he said is he’s going to destroy the oil industry,” Trump said, looking like a kid on Christmas morning.

Trump had good reason to look pleased. Biden may have just handed the Trump campaign a golden sound bite. For decades now, the fossil fuel industry has played a massive role in American politics. Oil and gas companies and lobbying groups donate millions of dollars to politicians every major election cycle. And the oil, gas, and coal industries collectively employ millions of Americans.

But did Biden drop a bombshell on Thursday, or was he just leveling with the American people? In the past couple of years, the conversation around climate change in America has shifted dramatically. That’s due to a perfect storm of factors: The effects of climate change have become more visceral, a vast majority of young Americans (the biggest generation of voters in the country now) want their elected representatives to combat rising temperatures, and the Green New Deal — co-introduced by Ocasio-Cortez — prompted the left (and even a few folks on the right) to take a more aggressive approach to reducing emissions. Polls show that Americans are in favor of climate action across the board.

Trump may think that Biden took a huge political risk tonight, but it’s also possible that the president is out of touch with how far the nation has come on this issue. Biden was just reiterating what his plan, and what many other climate plansreleased by his fellow candidates in the Democratic primary — and, more recently, by committees in the House and Senate — have been spelling out for months and months now: a government that gives fossil fuel companies federal subsidies instead of transitioning fossil fuel workers to jobs in renewable energy is not one that’s committed to fighting climate change. (At a press pool after the debate, Biden amended his stance on phasing out fossil fuels, saying: “We’re not getting rid of fossil fuels. We’re getting rid of the subsidies for fossil fuels, but we’re not getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time.”)

But on stage, he was forceful and clear about his goals. “Look, we have to move toward a net-zero emissions. The first place to do that by the year 2035 is in energy production,” Biden said, closing out the section on climate change — and sounding as though he were simply stating a fact.

Will Trump blame McConnell for blocking a new stimulus?

In Thursday night’s debate, President Trump skirted Joe Biden’s observation that it’s Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republican Senators — not House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who are blocking the “go big” stimulus package that Trump recently decided to promote before the election.

Trump kept on blaming Pelosi. But suppose that, with Nov. 3 in sight but unable to see beyond his immediate self-interest, he shoots himself in the foot by lambasting the Republican senators for blocking the stimulus he wants, thereby prompting some of his base to “punish” them at the polls, very possibly helping to hand the Senate to Democrats.

Although that would be a self-defeating strategy for Trump, it might not be bad for hundreds of thousands of his followers who are small businesspeople or self-employed in other ways and who, along with their customers and clients, need the stimulus as desperately as Trump does, albeit for “gut” economic reasons, not his narrow political ones. A Democratic Senate would probably join with the House (and a President Biden) to pass a stimulus package even more ambitious than whatever Pelosi and Mnuchin find possible.

Trump’s self-absorption and opportunism have spotlighted not only philosophical divisions between Senate Republican hawks who can’t stomach a $2 trillion stimulus and the office-holders who want only to hold on to their offices; Trump’s pro-stimulus move also spotlights the economic canyon that yawns between our high-rolling con man of a president and millions of hard-working people whom his Republican Party has betrayed.

McConnell, currently in his own re-election fight, assumes that enough Kentucky voters are anti-government ideologues who will keep on shooting themselves in the foot by backing him and other Senate Republicans in blocking a stimulus. (Recent polling has him leading his challenger Amy McGrath statewide across income brackets and education levels.) He may be right to believe he can count on the support of the slice of Kentucky voters who believe “a wildly misleading image of recipients of public aid as thieves bleeding taxpayers dry,” as New York Times economics columnist Eduardo Porter put it in his book “American Poison : How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise“:

“‘Welfare queens’ and other racial stereotypes peddled over the years by the political foes of redistribution… convinced white Americans that people of color are undeserving moochers from the public purse,” Porter writes. “White voters marginalized by the same economic forces … could not figure out that they were shooting themselves in the foot” by cutting programs they imagined were serving only non-whites.

Thus many of McConnell’s supporters have embraced “welfare reform” and Medicaid rules that culled 100,000 people from the rolls in recent years, even as the state, Porter writes, has “the most cancer deaths in the nation, and the most preventable hospitalizations” and is near the top in its death rate from diabetes. (Kentucky’s Medicaid program has been a rollercoaster over the last several years; one of Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s first orders of business last December was to roll back the work requirements his Republican predecessor Matt Bevin put on Medicaid recipients in an effort to derail the expansion enacted under the Affordable Care Act.)

A Kentucky friend of mine shared with me the phrase “shame-natured” to describe the mixture of “low self-esteem and fierce pride, independence, and a sense of honor,” as she puts it, which some conservative white working-class Southern voters have long carried with them into the booth. But the pandemic has up-ended much in their lives, and a parsimonious response could put McConnell on thinner ice with GOP reliables whose incomes have shriveled due to the virus. Perhaps McConnell hasn’t yet heard the concerns of Republican voters like the Corbin truck driver who told the Washington Post back in August that he’s “scared to death of losing everything” and angry at GOP leaders for failing to authorize another round of stimulus payments.

Or perhaps McConnell is hoping that party-line voters who are hurting economically will give him a pass, especially in the rural parts of his state, or at least let him ride Trump’s coattails as the President rails against “Democrat-led cities” and other dog whistles in his rallies and tweets. McConnell knows that whites’ anger and resentment can shift easily, with a little prompting from the right, into blaming minorities for the many little increments of humiliation and loss that have accumulated in their own lives. The more obvious it becomes that their racism is hurting not only Black people but also themselves, the more furiously some people deny it, like philosopher George Santayana’s fanatic, who redoubles his energy when he has forgotten his aim. Trump’s demagoguery channels their hurts into cravings for scapegoats — not only Black people, but also the “elites” — and for revenge.

We have to hope that COVID is bringing a different set of priorities and calculations home to Trump’s and McConnell’s bases. The state’s recent election of Beshear may signal the beginning of a slow shift in that direction (though recent polls suggest that approval of Beshear isn’t necessarily boosting McGrath’s chances in her race against McConnell, and Trump is projected to win Kentucky handily, if by a slimmer margin than 2016).

Opportunist that Trump is, he seems poised to seize on a shift in the wind if he deems it advantageous. McConnell may not sense it, or he might have too much invested in his own image as the power-broker and conservator of right-wing ideals to switch lanes now. With or without a big pre-election stimulus announcement, we’ll see soon enough how much of the national Republican base is shifting and fragmenting as COVID cases rise and economic destitution sets in, and how much of it still resembles Santayana’s fanatics after this election.

The year of constant sorrow: Defeating Donald Trump won’t heal the damage of 2020

How many times can you say “I’m so sorry” without the words losing their meaning? How many times can you answer a text or an instant message or an email by typing “I’m so sorry” without becoming inured to the feeling of sorrow? Even if you manage to pause your constant grief, you’re hit between the eyes with another statistic, another story. The day the coronavirus death total hit 220,000, we learned that the parents of 545 children who were separated at the border cannot be found. Can you even imagine? Can you imagine being a three-year-old child and not knowing where your mommy and daddy are? Can you imagine being a father or a mother and having no idea if you’ll ever see your daughter or your son again?

We are spending so much time simply coping that we don’t have the time to express to ourselves the deep sense of loss and sorrow that has been with us every day. Do you remember how you actually felt the day you saw the cell phone footage of George Floyd murdered on a street in Minneapolis by a policeman kneeling on his neck? I’m sure the image is still with you, but do you remember how you actually felt? Anger? Sadness that it had happened again, yet another unarmed Black man killed by police on a street in an American city.

You lose track of the names. Who was the guy who was shot in Kenosha, Wisconsin? Was it Rayshard Brooks? No, he was the guy who fell asleep in his car blocking the drive-through lane at a fast food restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia, and was shot twice in the back as he tried to get away. It was Jacob Blake who was shot seven times in the back as he got into the driver’s seat of his car in Kenosha.

You lose track of the spread of the COVID virus. Which states are the ones with the highest incidence of new infections this week? Is it Georgia and North Carolina? No, it’s South Dakota, with 35 percent testing positive this week, and Idaho, with 33 percent positive. What about Montana and Wisconsin? There was something about both states being really bad, wasn’t there? Well, yes, Montana is up 48 percent in new cases from two weeks ago, and Wisconsin is up 43 percent.

But the numbers just keep going up, don’t they?

Yes. That’s the answer, every single day. The numbers keep going up. We’ve now got 21 states in what they call the “red zone,” which according to NPR indicates “unchecked community spread” of the disease. We’ve got 21 states in the “orange zone,” with “escalating community spread.” And we’ve got 8 states in the “yellow zone,” where there is “potential community spread.” We have zero states where the disease is “close to containment,” which is how they classify the so-called “green zone.” There were 81,010 new coronavirus cases on Friday, the highest number since the disease hit. Think of it. This disease has been with us for nine months, and we haven’t learned a thing.

But it’s not all just statistics, is it? It’s sadness, deep, deep sadness at the tragedy of it all, and sadness at the individual losses, one by one as they happen. Every single one of the 223,845 deaths from coronavirus, which is the total tracked as this article was edited on Friday evening, was an unknowably tragic loss to someone, or in most cases, many someones. Mothers. Fathers. Sisters. Brothers. Husbands. Wives. Co-workers. College or high school classmates. Teachers. Neighbors. Friends. Acquaintances from the local supermarket or gas station or hardware store or school. Maybe somebody you regularly sit next to at your son’s Friday night football games, or your daughter’s cheer competitions. Or somebody you see a couple of times a week waiting for the subway or picking up your mail at the mailroom in the lobby.

Then there are the fires in the West, and the hurricanes along the Gulf, one, two, three of them, Hannah in Texas and Laura in Louisiana and Sally in Alabama. Laura alone caused $14 billion in damage and 77 deaths. Houses incinerated, whole neighborhoods flooded and blown away, people wandering around in the ashes and the soggy remains of fires and winds and rain, people who lost loved ones, homes, cars, businesses, everything. And still they rage, the fires now in Colorado with another month of hurricane season to come, all the destruction and death doubly tragic in the time of COVID.

You turn on the TV and you see the faces of family members of the people shot by the police, the mothers and sisters and brothers of Breonna Taylor or George Floyd or Daniel Prude, who died of asphyxiation, naked in the street, as police restrained him in a “spit hood” with a knee on his neck in the midst of a mental breakdown. You see the faces of the dead men and women in photographs taken during happy times in their lives, and you realize they weren’t just statistics, another Black person dead at the hands of the police. They were real people, with real lives, and hopes and dreams and brothers and sisters and wives and lovers who cared for them and loved them deeply, and now they are gone. They won’t be there on Saturday to drink beer and watch the game with the guys, they won’t be a phone call away when you can’t find that recipe for sausage biscuits they gave you, and you can’t remember how much baking soda it calls for, or how much salt.

And then there is time, the hours and days and weeks and months we are losing to the coronavirus. Our children are losing a year out of their lives, a year they spent as an eighth-grader or a sophomore in college, a year when they didn’t get the chance to stand around with their friends in the hallway of their school gossiping about who’s dating who, or who got caught by their parents smoking pot in their bedroom with the window open, or whose exhaust pipes on their beater Camaro are loudest, or who’s got the coolest North Face fleece jacket or hottest Lululemon yoga pants with that new cresting wave design up the sides.

We’re so busy staying safe ourselves, and wearing our masks and figuring out when the Target has the fewest customers so we can safely pick up more toilet paper and shampoo and see if they’ve got the spray cleaner with bleach in stock that we’re almost unaware of what we’ve lost.

And then you remember your college classmate who died from the virus, his lungs filled with fluid, struggling on a respirator in an ICU, and you remember hearing how his wife couldn’t be there with him because it was too dangerous and the hospital was overrun with cases, and she couldn’t see him at the morgue, they just sealed him up and put him in a coffin, and they couldn’t even have a real funeral for him. His classmates couldn’t come, all the guys he went to college with, and all their friends from the neighborhood, and the people he worked with, none of them could be there to say goodbye. They posted a few pictures online of the family’s service at the graveside, and that was it. No celebration of his life. No remembrance of the good times we all had, those nights hanging out at the neighborhood bar, the afternoons playing pick-up touch football in the park, how he could quote Philip Larkin and Anne Sexton, whole poems from memory, how much he meant to us, how much he is missed by everyone.

Can you even imagine what it must be like for his family, for all the families out there, the hundreds of thousands of them, their grief and loss and sadness? And yet as vivid as his loss is, as profoundly as he will be missed, he is just one more death in a year of constant sorrow that is still with us and will be with us for many more months to come, so many tears, so many times you write the words, say the words, dive evermore deeply into the abyss of “I’m so sorry.”

We can’t be mournful enough in this plague. All we can do is go on and try to make their lives count by remembering them. We will vote and make a better world, because that is our duty, but the world will never be the same after this.

Amy Coney Barrett failed to disclose leadership role in anti-LGBTQ church

There’s an important omission from Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Senate questionnaire about her fitness to serve on our Supreme Court.

She failed to disclose she served as Council Chair for St. Joseph Catholic Church in South Bend, Ind., for two one-year appointments, between 2013 and June 2015. Her responsibilities included providing counsel and advice to the pastor and assisting in all church duties, according to the church’s documents on its Council Bylaws.

The parish runs a grammar school that, according to its website, teaches that “homosexual behavior” is an offense against the Sixth and Ninth Commandment. Neither commandment makes any reference to homosexuality. Both commandments address heterosexual behavior, however.

Various religions cite the commandments slightly differently, but widely published versions of the Sixth Commandment say, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” The Ninth says, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy
neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.”

Barrett did disclose that she served on the board of the Trinity School in South Bend from 2015 to 2017, which is affiliated with community faith group, People of Praise, an extremely tight-knit and conservative Catholic religious organization. During that time, the school enforced a policy to not accept children of unmarried couples. The admissions policy clearly states that it excluded students with gay parents.

In addition, the pastor of her congregation in South Bend runs an organization that aims to keep people “who struggle with same-sex attraction” to live celibate lives instead.

While Barrett did list her role on the board of Trinity School in the exhaustive 69-page document submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, St. Joseph’s Catholic Church cannot be found once in the filing. It raises questions of what kind of bigotry might be practiced there that she would not mention her ties to the church.

On the very first page of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Supreme Court nominee questionnaire, nominees are asked to include an employment record dating back to their college graduation. This would include any affiliation as an officer, director, partner or employee or non-profit organization, with or without pay.

This new information should cause the Senate Judiciary to pump the brakes on her confirmation. The Senate is expected to vote on her nomination on Oct. 26.

It may have been a calculated omission because Barrett provided details on her work history otherwise, going back to a job she held as a summer administrative assistant to Phelps Dunbar LLP, in New Orleans, in 1994.

Her position as parish council chair was unpaid. Barrett and her husband, Jesse M. Barrett, were also generous donors to St. Joseph’s Church. An annual report for 2012-2013 shows a donation for that year between $10,000 and $25,000.

While it’s no secret the Trump administration wants to fill every possible bench with a conservative judge, Barrett was hand picked by former White House counsel Don McGahn. He put Barrett forth for consideration noting her “unbending conviction on social issues.”

Calls to Barrett’s office and various senators on the Judiciary Committee were not returned. A call to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church was redirected to the Bishop’s office of the Diocese in Fort Wayne, Ind.

Kamala Harris’ chief of staff on how Joe Biden can “change the direction of this country”

It’s history squared. Karine Jean-Pierre, Senator Kamala Harris’ chief of staff, is making history while working on a campaign that is also making history. Jean-Pierre, a former Obama administration member, made history as the first Black woman to ever be named as chief of staff for a vice presidential campaign when she was tapped by Harris to serve in the position. And of course, Harris herself is the first Black woman to be the running mate on a major party’s presidential ticket.

Jean-Pierre’s job as chief of staff is to manage Harris’ staff and help the senator navigate her campaign. But when I talked to Pierre on “Salon Talks” this week, one other part of her job comes through clearly: Getting people to vote for the Biden/Harris ticket. And for someone working non-stop on the campaign, she has a lot of energy, especially as she pushes back on Donald Trump’s recent smear of Joe Biden, noting Trump has chosen this tactic because he is “desperate.”

Jean-Pierre gleefully added that if Trump and his BFF Rudy Giuliani “want a conversation on corruption, then they need to talk about Donald Trump who is the most corrupt, lawless and unstable president in American history,” pointing out that six of people in Trump’s inner circle went to jail or were convicted of a crime.

However, as Jean-Pierre, who served as an MSNBC political analyst and chief public affairs officer at MoveOn.org before she took the position with Harris’ campaign, explained this election will not be won or lost with discussions on “corruption,” but rather on issues affecting Americans on a daily basis: COVID-19 and the economy. As she laid out, Americans want leadership on these issues, not Trump’s buffet of lies. Watch my conversation with Jean-Pierre here or read a Q&A of our chat below.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity

Today I’m very happy to welcome Karine Jean-Pierre. She was an MSNBC contributor. We interviewed her on Salon for her book. But right now she’s serving as chief of staff for Senator Kamala Harris’ campaign for vice president of the United States of America. Karine, welcome back to Salon.

Hey, Dean. So good to see you. Last time we did this, we were in person and so much has changed, but it’s good to see you, my friend. Virtually.

But can you imagine, we’re just a few days away from the most crucial, consequential election of our lifetime.

I agree. And so, first of all, though, it’s not often I get to speak to the chief of staff for the vice presidential candidate for the presidency of the United States. People probably have an idea what the chief of staff in our White House does, but what does the chief of staff for a candidate to vice president do?

I want to start for a moment to acknowledge the historical nature of a Kamala Harris on this ticket. Right? If you think about it, Joe Biden selected her to be his running mate, helping her make history. And so that, to me, that was just so amazing. A Black woman with Indian heritage, and it plays into [how] representation matters. It plays into having someone like her at the table who will have the ear of the president and be part of the decision making once they get into the administration. So you have that historic nature of her being announced. And then you have the other historical component where she accepts the nomination at the convention — amazing night, amazing moment. And then the debate, it’s like the trifecta, right? Then the debate happens and she wins that debate against Mike Pence, and seeing her on the debate stage and speaking directly to the American people, making the case for a Joe Biden/Kamala Harris administration, I think for me, and for so many women, was so inspiring.

I always want to start with that because it is such an historical moment, and an historical ticket, even though this is the most consequential election of our lifetime. Look, in my work for Senator Harris, I’m helping her speak directly to the American people. We’re traveling both virtually and in person, earning every vote. Election day is actually every day, right? Because people are voting right now — tens of millions of people have voted. And so that is my job: make sure she’s out there, make sure she’s on the trail, making sure that it’s being done in a strategic way and a smart way, alongside with the broader campaign, and managing her staff.

Senator Harris is out on the campaign trail, connecting with diverse voters from around the country in key states that we’re going to need to win. And so that’s my job, and I have been proud and honored to be given this responsibility. And we’re going to win because folks who are watching are going to go out there and they’re going to vote, and they’re going to get their communities to vote, they’re going to get their household to vote, and we’re going to win this thing.

It’s like you’re willing it through the screen there. I can tell it’s just in your mind: Karine Jean-Pierre says you will vote. Come vote by November third.

And if you don’t know how to vote, make a plan. I haven’t done it yet, or don’t know how it works in your state. Go to IWillVote.com. Please, please make a plan, make a plan to vote. It’s so critical. Vote early if you can, in your state.

And nobody can plan for the issues that are going to come up that are unexpected in a campaign for president and VP. Right now, though, we’re seeing what is not unexpected, just worse than I had hoped: this spike in COVID. You know, Donald Trump began his rallies on September 8th after taking the summer off, which was actually responsible. He took the summer off from rallies. We were averaging 36,000 new cases a day. Today, as we sit here and chat, we’re averaging over 60,000 new cases. Is it more irresponsible than ever that Donald Trump is out there doing these rallies where we’ve seen — he actually got people sick who have attended it — but also he’s signaling to his base that there’s no need for social distancing. There’s no need for masks. Live your life. And now we’re seeing an explosion across much of the Midwest in COVID, and the death toll is now creeping up as well.

You know, Dean, it’s so incredibly irresponsible. He’s literally going around the country holding super-spreader events. I mean, this is the president of the United States, and the American people are watching at home. They know it, they know it.

And so, if President Trump hasn’t taken necessary precautions to protect himself, how can we trust him to protect us, to protect others? It’s really sad and disturbing because this is real. More than 210,000 people … have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. alone. More than eight million people have cases of COVID, and it could become a preexisting condition. And what is happening, this administration right now is in the courts trying to take away [the Affordable Care Act], which means taking away health care from 20 million people. You should be expanding health care right now. You should be making sure it’s affordable, making sure that there’s options, which is what Joe Biden wants to do when he’s president. And this president wants to take away your health care. This is what he’s doing.

Our campaign is getting out to meet people where it matters. I talked to you about what Kamala Harris is doing. And so, our campaign — Joe Biden, Dr. Biden, Doug Emhoff — they are out there, they’re doing it in a very safe way. They’re meeting people where they are, but they’re wearing masks, we’re socially distancing, we’re making sure we’re washing our hands. And we’re having really safe, as safe as we can make it, interaction with voters. And it’s irresponsible [to hold] rallies staged for TV to boost egos. That’s what he’s doing; he’s boosting his ego. And these are real communities. These are local businesses, and these are their lives. And, like I said, people are dying.

And another thing — Biden, throughout this crisis, he’s demonstrated leadership. And that’s what voters at home are looking for. They want leadership. This campaign has taken COVID extremely seriously from the beginning, back in March, when we started seeing cities and states shutting down. And since the start of COVID-19, the campaign’s top priority has been the health of voters first. That’s what we do. Listening to experts, and listening to health experts. Yes, Joe Biden believes in science, and listens to health experts. And that’s what we’re going to continue to do on our campaign, and definitely, when Joe Biden is president and Kamala Harris is vice president.

You know, I think the fact is that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have empathy and compassion, bucketloads of that. And Donald Trump is just a celebration of selfishness, and cruelty often as well. But if you are very selfish, you don’t even care if your own supporters get sick from a virus, and might even die from it. That just typifies Trumpism to me. Trumpism, so much, as Donald Trump has shown us, is his abject selfishness that I’ve never seen in any person. I’ve never seen someone this selfish. So again, to your point, he’s having rallies for his own ego, and for optics. He thinks it helps. And he will literally sacrifice the lives of his own supporters, and anyone else, to do that. This is where we are. Are you stunned by that? This is where we are in 2020 in the United States of America.

This is where we are. And the thing is, we knew it in 2016. We did, we knew it in 2016. And now, after four years of terrible policies, and him in the White House, right? Debasing the White House and showing his lack of leadership. Now it’s hurting us. Now it’s killing us. And that’s the fear. I mean, this is the president. Again, the president of the United States has mismanaged COVID-19 so poorly that now we are in an economic crisis and he does not care. We know that. We know that from Bob Woodward’s book, where we heard the tapes ourselves, we heard his voice, and he understood how deadly this virus was. He understood that this was worse than the flu. He understood that this was airborne. He understood everything that you needed to know, a leader needed to know, to stop this, to manage this.

And he didn’t care. He didn’t care. And that’s what’s so scary. You know, Joe Biden in his speech, he tends to say look at the table and see that missing person who was supposed to be sitting at the chair at your dinner table. That’s what real people are going through, everyday people are going through. They have lost someone in their family because there has been no care. No care by the leader at the top.

When I started off talking to you, I talked about how this is the most consequential election of our lifetime. It is, because so much is on the ballot, right? Our lives are on the ballot, justices on the ballot. Our health care is on the ballot. The economy is on the ballot. You know, everything that we care about is on the ballot. And so that’s what matters. That’s what matters in the last few days, as people are voting right now,

I agree with you. And for people who have known someone who died from COVID, I knew three people. One was a childhood friend, who leaves behind two teenage sons, now without a dad. It is very real and it’s very painful, this virus. For some Trump supporters, I guess they are fortunate enough, they don’t know anyone who was impacted by this virus or died, but I wish they would have an orbit of compassion and empathy that would go beyond who they know, and understand there are people in pain in this country.

Donald Trump’s closing arguments talk about Joe Biden’s family. Joe Biden’s closing arguments tell about how to help your family. And is that because…

And everything Hunter Biden, which even Mike Huckabee and Frank Luntz stopped talking about Hunter Biden. No poll shows anyone cares about that. They care about a deadly virus, and they care about the economics of it.

Trump is talking about Hunter Biden — a story that’s not just alleged, it’s fabricated in my view — because he’s got nothing else. He literally has, he didn’t even get Mexico to pay for the wall. I mean, COVID was bad. The economy — we have 11 million people out of work that had a job in March. I’ve not seen a jobs plan. Is this because he really literally has nothing else to talk about for the last week and a half of the campaign?

Yes. He’s desperate, right? This is a thoroughly discredited attack that Trump and Rudy Giuliani had been trying to pin on Joe Biden for over a year, right? This is not old. This is something that they’ve been trying to do over here. And it’s false. It’s misinformation. It’s lies. And he’s doing it because he is desperate. They are so desperate right now because they want a conversation on corruption. But here’s the thing. If they want a conversation with corruption, Dean, they need to talk about Donald Trump, who is the most corrupt, lawless and unstable president in American history. Six of his campaign managers and senior staff have been charged with major crimes. Let’s not forget, Donald Trump, himself, was impeached by the House because he was so afraid of Joe Biden, because he wanted to stop Joe Biden, because he did not want to take on Joe Biden in the general election.

And so, now we have a person, Donald Trump, who is trying to distract, who is trying to just put anything that he can on Joe Biden. And it hasn’t stopped, if you think about it. It’s been a year and a half. All of these lies do not stick on Joe Biden because, I think because the American people are aware of what is truly going on. And the American people want change. They want leadership, going back to our last conversation about leadership, about people dying. Enough is enough. And so now you have an incredibly desperate man who is lying, and just continues to debase the office that he holds.

I know that Vice President Biden will not speak about Ivanka Trump. And I know why, because the real issue that Americans want to hear about is how to keep your family safe and how to put food on their table and get a job. I understand that. But from a campaign strategy point of view, does it make sense for surrogates? I mean, I just wrote about it for The Daily Beast, and you’ve got Ivanka Trump, who literally got trademarks approved from China the day her father lifted sanctions on ZTE, the Chinese telecommunications company. They’re not even trying to hide the comp, and there’s so many crude, nonpartisan ethics have been documented. They even filed a complaint with the DOJ in January 2019, asking for an investigation where her and Jared were profiting over tax shelters they were working on for the federal government.

But I get that Joe Biden will not talk about that, and nor do I actually think he should. But should there be a place for surrogates on the campaign to talk about this? Or is that taking you off message?

I think, sure. I think there’ll be surrogates talking about this. So I’ve been out there. I have traveled, I’ve been to North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania. I’ve been to many of the battleground states in the past couple of weeks, and traveling either with the senator or with the vice president for their respective trips.

And that’s not what people want to hear. It really isn’t. That’s not what people want to hear. They want to hear about, hey, how are they going to get a job? What are we doing about the economy? How are you going to protect us from COVID-19? How about what are you going to do to keep us safe? What are you going to do to help us gain wealth?

You hear about education. You know, there are kids who cannot go back to school. That’s affecting parents and everyday people. We have a six-year-old. We have to deal with that, but thank goodness we have the resources to deal with that in a way that we can help our child. She has peers, or kids her age, whose parents can’t stay home. They’ve got to go to work. And sometimes they got to bring their kid to work. And how their kids learn? They learn in the car.

This is what everyday people are talking about and need to deal with. And that’s what we’re talking about. We’re putting out plans: Talking about here, this is how we’re going to deal with this issue. This is how we’re going to move the country forward. And honestly, when Biden launched his campaign back in April of 2019, the thing I think that really resonated when he put out his launch ad, I should say, was we need to save the soul of our nation. And you saw that image of Charlottesville, and you saw neo-Nazis marching down those streets. And Dean, I know you wrote about it. You’ve talked about it. We’ve talked about it.

And it was disturbing, right? This was the direction of our country. And then he talks about we have 400 years to talk about too, right? There’s a whole history of this country that we need to talk about, that’s real systemic racism. But part of the problem is something that we can handle in just a few days on November 3, and what I mean by that is voting Donald Trump out, and sending a loud resounding message to Republicans that this is not OK, and this shouldn’t be who we are and we have to change the direction of this country. And so those are the things that Joe Biden is talking about.

Interesting poll from Pennsylvania — and the top line was good to the Biden campaign, up by six — but I looked at the issues of concern for people. And there’s one that jumped out that surprised me, but I think it speaks to Joe Biden. The top three almost tied: COVID, the economy, understood, expected. The third one was about uniting the country. There are voters in Pennsylvania, that tied with COVID and the economy about uniting the country. There are people desperate for this cold war to end between the left and the right, but can we honestly be hopeful that can change, or are we being naive that if Joe Biden wins, gets elected, that we can build some common ground and go beyond the idea of owning the libs and owning the conservatives, and actually find some common ground with the people we can? Because we’re not going to meet people halfway on white supremacy. That’s not happening. We understand that, but there’s others out there that think maybe we can. What do you think?

I’m hopeful. We have to be hopeful. How can we move on if we’re not hopeful? And here’s the thing. I have known Joe Biden for more than a decade. I got to know him when I worked in the Obama/Biden campaign, and I know him and I got to travel with him when I was in the White House. I know him personally to be a decent, honest, true person. And I believe in him, or else I wouldn’t be on this campaign, honestly. There’s so many things that I can be doing. I believe that he will unite the country — at the least, try to, make an honest, true effort to try to make that happen. And we need this. We’ve been divided, at least for this current moment, for four years.

And we just can’t go on like this. There’s too much on the line, and I believe in him, I trust him. And I think that’s why you see that in the polling, Dean, right? You see that over and over and over again. You see him as being a comfort, right? Someone who can comfort people, someone who can unite the country, someone you can trust, someone who has the leadership to get us out of this.

And it’s not just domestically, right? It’s internationally. How we’re seen now as a country with our allies, just our allies, right? Who we have just kind of turned our backs to because of Donald Trump, who is doing this, as you know, Dean, all in our name, he’s doing this on our behalf.

We have to be hopeful. We have to be hopeful.

[Trump] paid more money to China in taxes than he paid in the United States of America, we just learned from New York Times reporting. Flash forward: Joe Biden wins. It takes a lot of work, but he wins. And a lot of progressives are going to say, look, we want Medicare for All now. We want the Green New Deal or parts of it. What can you tell them about Joe Biden listening and being someone who will be responsive to those within his base who are pushing from the left?

As you know, Dean, I come from a progressive organization. I took a leave from Move On to do this work, to do this, I think, incredibly important job that myself and so many of my colleagues are doing, and it’s trying to win this election in the next last several days. Look, as Joe Biden has said, there’s more that unites us as a party than separates us. And he believes in addressing climate change, making health care a right, not a privilege, which is so important. Rewarding work, not wealth, which he talks about all the time. And I think it is right to say that we might disagree on tactics, but we share the same goals. He would say that, right? These are his words. We would share the same goals, and I think that’s what makes the Democratic Party so unique.

And I think about this all the time. We all want the same thing. The tactics are different. And I think we will get there to a place where all the things I just laid out — rewarding work, not wealth; health care is a right, not a privilege — I think we will all get there. And so the thing that I was thinking about is Donald Trump does not share any of those same goals. He’s reversing climate change. He’s in the court, as I mentioned before, trying to repeal Obamacare. His tax cut rewarded the super wealthy and corporations. And I think Joe has been incredibly deliberate in how he is reaching out to the progressive wing of the party and Bernie supporters. I mean, Bernie has been on board with Joe Biden from practically day one, when the primary was done.

Elizabeth Warren has been amazing. She was just in Wisconsin for us a couple of days ago, over the weekend. So throughout this campaign, he’s made clear he wants to build the broadest coalition to defeat Donald Trump. And we’re going to need that coalition as well as we try to govern. We just have to all come together and achieve that common goal.

I’m confident about that. But Joe is running on the most progressive agenda of any president since Medicare was created, and I think we just have to continue to work together and push each other. I mean, right? That’s the beauty of the Democratic Party.

Most U.S. farmers remain loyal to Trump despite pain from trade wars and COVID-19

U.S. farmers have suffered a lot in the past few years: The trade war with China, natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic have all resulted in substantial losses for many producers.

Farmers overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in 2016 and remain critical to his reelection in many swing states such as Iowa and Minnesota. But given the impact of all that’s happened, will they stick with the president in the November elections?

We’ve conducted extensive research on American farmers in recent years through surveys and one-on-one interviews. We’ve also examined the impact of the U.S.-China trade war.

While the economic costs have been steep, Trump has found a way to make it up to them: record subsidies. And that’s why we believe most U.S. farmers will stay loyal to Trump.

Falling exports

The trade war with China, which began in 2018, has dealt a major blow to U.S. agricultural exports.

After over a year of escalation, by the fall of 2019 retaliatory tariffs by China had covered virtually all U.S. agricultural products. As a result, exports of key goods such as soybeans experienced steep declines, resulting in losses to U.S. soybean farmers of over US$10 billion, according to our calculations.

The pain was spread across the U.S., if unevenly. California’s state economy, for example, has suffered the most, losing over $6 billion. Still, most states saw hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, and 11 experienced losses of more than $1 billion.

Federal subsidies to the rescue

In 2018, the Trump administration created a subsidy program intended to mitigate farmers’ losses related to the trade war. Breaking from tradition, the administration let the U.S. Department of Agriculture spend the money without first getting approval from Congress.

Under the program, farmers and ranchers received $8.5 billion for 2018 losses and $14.3 billion for 2019. No trade-related subsidies have been distributed for 2020 except for the remaining third tranche of the 2019 payments.

But just as some states were hurt more by the trade war than others, not all states benefited equally from the payments. The subsidies heavily targeted the Midwest, reflecting the political influence of rural constituents in these states. Most of the states that came out ahead — such as Iowa and Nebraska — tend to vote Republican and have relatively large agricultural sectors.

As Trump put it during a recent rally in Iowa, “Some of the farmers were making more money the way I was doing it than working their asses off, all right? They were very, very happy.”

Since the costs of the program are financed by all taxpayers, states with large urban populations such as California, Texas and New York are footing the bill — and spending more money than they are getting in support. California farmers, for example, received just $106 million in payments — despite the $6 billion in losses — even as the state’s taxpayers contributed $2 billion to the program.

Coronavirus adds to losses

Unfortunately for farmers, just as the U.S. and China were reaching a truce in their trade war, the coronavirus recession saddled them with another source of deep economic pain.

While the economic toll from the virus remains unknown, the closures of schools, restaurants and other businesses cut into food sales and further depressed markets for crop and livestock farmers across the United States. In 2020, even with federal aid, Midwest corn and soybean farmers are expected to lose money.

Working with Congress this time, the Trump administration created another program to help farmers hurt by the coronavirus pandemic and has so far disbursed almost $30 billion. Again, a large chunk of the payments have gone to red Midwestern states such as Iowa, which alone received almost $1 billion of the first $10.2 billion disbursed.

Payments have been accelerating as Election Day approaches. Combined with trade-related and pre-Trump subsidies, total payments this year are expected to reach a record $46 billion.

While the payments are meant to provide short-term relief, the trade war may already have done long-term damage to American farmers. The tariffs on U.S. agricultural products led Chinese companies to seek out cheaper sources for food and feed. Brazilian farmers sold record amounts of soybeans to China in May and June and are now enjoying their highest profits from the crop in history.

Support holds strong

So what does this all mean for how Trump will fare with farmers in November?

Two recent studies show that Republican candidates lost support in the 2018 congressional elections in counties more exposed to trade retaliation, as well as in counties with more soybean production. And certainly, not all farmers are happy with Trump. One Ohio farmer who voted for Trump in 2016 lamented in a news article that the president “always does the same. He hurts you and then he gives you money to keep you quiet.”

[Get our best science, health and technology stories. Sign up for The Conversation’s science newsletter.]

Yet the generous farmer subsidies are one reason farmers have said they support Trump’s trade war. Last fall, our survey of Midwest crop farmers found that 56% said they somewhat or strongly support Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, despite retaliation on their own exports. Farmers also said they share concerns held by many Americans of the broader perceived threat of China over issues like the trade deficit and cyber espionage.

And several recent polls show that farmers’ overall support for the president remains strong. Eighty-two percent of farmers polled by the Farm Journal in August said they planned to vote for Trump. A survey of large-scale farmers in July found that 75% would back the president, about the same as in 2016.

While the trade war’s impact on the election remains unclear, there is no reason to expect a substantial portion of farmers to defect from the president.

Wendong Zhang, Assistant Professor of Economics, Iowa State University and Minghao Li, Assistant Professor of Economics, New Mexico State University

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

Trump Organization renewed the TrumpTowerMoscow.com domain name — this year

The Trump Organization reregistered the domain name TrumpTowerMoscow.com this June, internet records show, suggesting that contrary to President Trump’s claims, the company has not necessarily abandoned its pursuit of the lucrative real estate deal that figured prominently in multiple investigations into his connections with Russia.

The Trump Organization has re-upped the domain every year of his presidency. This year it renewed its ownership on June 9, under a company called DTTM Operations, which Trump’s financial disclosures show manages more than 100 company trademarks. DTTM Operations appears now to have registered a total of more than 3,000 domains, according to a whois search, including renewals for TrumpRussia.com, TrumpTowerLondon.com and DonaldTrumpSucks.com — 2,000 more than reported in 2017.

The domain was first registered in 2008, according to internet “whois” lookups, but the Trump Organization was not the first buyer. Longtime Trump associate Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman whose efforts to build the Moscow tower date back to the early 2000s, told Salon that he turned ownership of the domain over to the Trump Organization in 2015, when Trump signed a letter of intent to develop the project.

The domain was first reported in early July 2017, about two months before the Washington Post’s bombshell report that during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Trump Organization had tried to strike a deal with Russian developers to build the luxury hotel and condo tower. A series of BuzzFeed News reports starting the next year illustrated the significant progress the project had made and the extent of Donald Trump’s involvement.

Initially envisioned as the tallest building in Europe, Trump Tower Moscow was spearheaded on the Trump side by Sater and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, and included the personal involvement of Ivanka Trump. But even with a Russian developer on board, the project needed the blessing of government officials to get off the ground, a responsibility that fell to Cohen.

At one point the company proposed awarding Russian President Vladimir Putin the $50 million penthouse suite for free, a quid pro quo for the green light to break ground, and which had Trump’s approval.

While Trump repeatedly denied having any “deals” with Russia, documents show that tower plans progressed well into the design phase. That proposal became a focal point of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which eventually charged Cohen with lying to Congress, largely to minimize the extent of Trump’s involvement in the deal. (Cohen says he was encouraged in this by one of Trump’s attorneys, and Ivanka Trump reportedly reviewed his testimony in advance.)

Trump has insisted throughout his term that the Russia probe was a “witch hunt,” but the continuing annual domain purchases indicate that his company has put money into the idea each year of his presidency.

“He’s as bad a liar as he is a president,” Cohen told Salon. “How stupid can someone be who refutes over and over again the continuation of a real estate project, while simultaneously paying to keep the domain name active? What’s more, they’re not even bothering to anonymize it, but slapping the Trump brand on it. Hence why I use the term stupid: His arrogance translates into idiocy. Does Trump really believe that the people of this country are ignorant?”

“It would be comical,” Cohen said, “if it weren’t really happening.”

The annual domain registries, and especially the 2015 handoff to the Trump Organization with Trump’s commitment to the project, are new dots in a constellation of redemption for Cohen, who, after pleading guilty to lying, has since launched a campaign to tell the truth about his former boss — claims that to date have led directly to at least two government investigations into the president’s business dealings.

Cohen’s confessions, moored by corroborating documents, have even pulled Trump a few steps closer to the truth.

“We were thinking about building a building,” Trump admitted to White House reporters in November 2018, after years of denials and months after Cohen’s perjurious testimony to protect him.

“I decided ultimately not to do it. There would have been nothing wrong if I did do it,” Trump said. He repeated three times something he had denied throughout his campaign: “Everybody knew about it.”

“Everybody knew about it. It was written about in newspapers. It was a well-known project,” Trump said, none of which is true. “It was during the early part of ’16 and, I guess, even before that. It lasted a short period of time.”

According to Cohen, Trump wanted to visit Russia during the 2016 campaign in order to personally meet Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations — a plan Sater confirmed to Salon in a phone call.

“Make it happen,” Cohen said Trump told him.

However, Trump and his associates in the U.S. and Russia kept a lid on the story through the election and beyond. (Russia granted Trump six trademarks in 2016, including four on Election Day.)

“I have no dealings with Russia,” Trump said shortly before his inauguration in 2017. “I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away.”

This week the New York Times reported that Trump’s tax returns show that the president maintains a previously unknown bank account in China, which according to a company spokesperson was opened “to explore the potential for hotel deals in Asia” and which has incurred nearly $200,000 in local taxes.

“Though the bank account remains open, it has never been used for any other purpose,” the spokesperson claimed.

Asked whether the domain renewals, amid years of fending off allegations of improper ties with Russia, suggest that Trump was keeping his post-presidency options open, Cohen dismissed the idea.

“The business does not survive” after Trump leaves office, he said. “There’s too much scrutiny, and too much knowledge.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez corrects Trump on popularity of Green New Deal

After President Donald Trump erroneously claimed during Thursday night’s debate against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden that congressional support for the Green New Deal is limited to “AOC plus three,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fired back on social media: “It’s actually AOC plus 115.”

“That’s how many House and Senate members have cosponsored the most ambitious climate legislation in American history,” Ocasio-Cortez noted.

Although the New York Democrat has had to contend with dismissiveness of the popular resolution—which seeks to transform the U.S. into a more equitable and sustainable society by simultaneously creating millions of green jobs and reducing carbon emissions—from conservative members of her own party, she tweeted: “I am so deeply proud and grateful for each and every one of my House and Senate colleagues who stand for our future and champion the Green New Deal.”

I am so deeply proud of & grateful for each + every one of my House and Senate colleagues who stand for our future & champion the #GreenNewDeal, the boldest climate plan in US history.

Here they are below. If you can, tweet them a thank you tonight:https://t.co/1pYcjeCzDt

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 23, 2020

U.S. House candidates Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri chimed in to note that in addition to the dozens of cosponsors of what Ocasio-Cortez called “the boldest climate plan in U.S. history,” there is a growing number of progressives aspiring to join Congress who would lend additional support to the resolution.

“There’s more than three,” Bowman said on social media. Bush tweeted that “our progressive movement is here to stay, and we’re only getting stronger.”

“No matter who occupies the White House,” she added, “we need progressive champions in the People’s House.”

Our progressive movement is here to stay, and we’re only getting stronger.

No matter who occupies the White House, we need progressive champions in the People’s House. Join us today: https://t.co/rxB7APxiT3

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) October 23, 2020

The Green New Deal, which Ocasio-Cortez earlier this month described as “a massive job-creation and infrastructure plan to decarbonize and increase quality of work and life,” is not just endorsed by 116 lawmakers.

Despite being “lied about nonstop,” the congresswoman noted, the resolution remains popular among the electorate as well.

A 2019 survey conducted on behalf of 350 Action and Data for Progress found that the Green New Deal, summarized as “policies that would transition the U.S. economy from fossil fuels to clean energy sources and drive job-creating investments in infrastructure and communities,” was supported by 59% of the nation’s voters while only 28% opposed it.

More recent polling done last month by The Guardian and VICE News revealed that a growing share of the U.S. population favors stronger climate policies. Seventy percent of voters back government action to address the climate crisis, three-quarters want the U.S. to generate all of its electricity from renewable sources by 2035, and almost two-thirds reported being more likely to pick a candidate who favors a complete shift from dirty to clean energy.

While Biden has distanced himself from the Green New Deal label, a majority of voters support his proposal to invest $2 trillion over four years in energy efficiency, solar, wind, and related projects, according to Data for Progress.

Rising young right-wing House candidate publishes explicitly racist website hitting Sen. Cory Booker

Liberals and progressives often attack far-right MAGA and Trumpian Republicans for “racist dog whistles.” But sometimes, racism from the far right isn’t subliminal, but rather, overt and in-your-face — for example, the congressional campaign of 25-year-old North Carolina Republican Madison Cawthorn saying, in essence, that Cawthorn’s 62-year-old Democratic opponent, Moe Davis, is a self-hating White male for being too pro-Black.

Tim Miller, a Never Trump conservative and ex-communications director for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, slams Cawthorn’s campaign in an October 22 article for The Bulwark. Miller notes that Cawthorn’s campaign, on the anti-Davis website MoeTaxes.com, “takes aim at Davis over his purported association with a local journalist, Tom Fiedler. It says that Fiedler ‘quit his academia job in Boston to work for non-white males, like (Sen.) Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males.'”

Miller writes, “Putting the atrocious syntax aside: quitting one’s job to work for someone who isn’t White is a problem now? Booker’s blackness is the issue that offends you? In Donald Trump’s white grievance party, apparently so.”

The Bulwark points out that after Miller’s article was initially published, the overtly racist rhetoric at MoeTaxes.com was changed. The “non-white males” and “ruin white males” references were replaced with claims that Davis supports “left-wing identity politics.”

Miller, in his article, explains that “Trump has made a feature of his stump speech a line about how Joe Biden plans to send Cory Booker, of all people, into the suburbs to somehow ruin everything for reasons that are a total mystery. Wink. But Cawthorn is happy to say the loud part even louder: Cory Booker, you shouldn’t work for him because he’s ‘non-white’ and ‘ruining white males.’ Horrific.”

In North Carolina’s 11^th Congressional District, Cawthorn is running for the U.S. House of Representatives seat that was vacated by former Rep. Mark Meadows when he left Congress to become White House chief of staff in the Trump Administration.

Miller stresses that Cawthorn has been “claiming to represent a new generation of Republicans,” adding that “like the rest of the young Generation Trump, Cawthorn has learned that Republican voters are less interested in the regulatory regime than in uncut white identity politics. In addition to targeting Davis for associating with someone who worked for a Black man, the microsite, (MoeTaxes.com) also smeared him as a ‘terrorist defender’ who commits ‘perversion.’ But, like the rest of Generation Trump, Cawthorn is also learning that while it’s easy to dominate a Republican primary with this stuff, winning a general election is harder.”

Miller notes that an internal Democratic poll found Davis leading Cawthorn by 3%. And considering that the district in question was conservative enough to send far-right Tea Party favorite Meadows to Congress, that is saying a lot.

Slamming Cawthorn’s campaign with biting sarcasm, Miller writes, “If Cawthorn goes down in defeat, at least we know he won’t go work for anyone who is Black, since his closing message against Moe Davis is Make America 1950 Again.”

Eric Trump’s latest anti-Biden attack line just completely blew up in his face

Eric Trump, the second-eldest son of President Donald Trump, has spent the past several days falsely claiming that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden owns a massive 10,000-square-foot mansion currently valued at an estimated $1.6 million.

What Trump fails to tell his fans, however, is that the house in question is not currently owned by Biden. Rather, as several fact-checking outlets have noted, Biden bought the house for just $185,000 back in 1974, when it was run down and in need of repairs.

The Democratic presidential nominee would subsequently sell the house in 1996 for $1.2 million after having owned and invested in it for more than 20 years.

Despite all this, reports CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, Eric Trump has been going on media appearances and telling audiences to “Google Joe Biden’s house.”

Unbeknownst to Trump, running a Google search of Joe Biden’s house at the moment actually returns multiple articles that fact check his false claim about Biden owning the house.

In fact, four of the first six results from the search are fact-checking articles from outlets including Snopes, USA Today, and Reuters.

“Borat 2” makes an America slathered in misogyny and disinformation reckon with itself

On Wednesday multiple news outlets revealed the purported headliner of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” to be none other than Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s trusted lawyer and cable news’s favorite nutcase.

Compared with the mock attempted kidnapping Pamela Anderson, Borat’s ultimate get in 2006’s “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the pranking of America’s mayor does not make for a grand climax or even an affectionate one. Instead, it more or less confirms what we already know about Rudy Giuliani: his corruptibility makes him shockingly easy to dupe.

All it took for the producers of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” to succeed in their mission was a simple honeytrap, presented in the form of Baron Cohen’s exceptional co-star Maria Bakalova dressed as a right-wing fake news Barbie. By the time we get to that scene the Bulgarian actor has solidly established that she is the reason this feminist-themed sequel works as well as it does.

Performance-wise, Bakalova fully commits and never breaks, keeping pace with Baron Cohen in every shared sequence and commanding every scene she pilots solo. If Baron Cohen were to ever greenlight an inheritor to his Borat franchise, she would more than do it justice.

And this illustrates the subtextual call to action throughout in “Subsequent Movefilm” for women of good conscience to reclaim their power, not only at the polls but in the realm of social equity. Baron Cohen and his writers cloak this in slapstick from the moment we’re introduced to Bakalova’s Tutar, the 15-year-old daughter Borat never realized he had.

Tutar is filthy and coarse, raised in a pen and guided by a book given to her by the Kazakh government that insists that women cannot drive, own businesses or even touch their privates without causing great disaster on par with the sinking of the Titanic. Her highest aspiration is to live in a golden cage like Queen Melania, “the happiest wife in the world,” emboldening her to join Borat’s latest trip as a stowaway.

Similarly life, and Borat’s government, have not been kind to him since “Cultural Learnings” conquered America with great success – high five! – 14 years ago.

America may have loved Borat but his countrymen, neighbors and family in his home village of Kuzcek felt great shame at how his documentary portrayed them (a nod, perhaps, at the Romanian villagers angered at being misrepresented in the 2006 film, who unsuccessfully sued its producers). In reaction he was sentenced to a life of hard labor in a gulag.

When Kazakhstan’s current Premier Nazarbayev (Dani Popescu) realizes the regime has a use for Borat, he’s hauled out of prison, shaved into a familiar form – ill-fitting grey suit, walrus mustache, puffy hairstyle and all – and given a new mission to smooth glorious leader’s entry into the world’s strongman club. How? By presenting to”Vice Premier Mikhail Pence” valuable offering: Johnny the Monkey, “Kazakhstan’s Minister of Culture and No.1 porno star.”

This is why the Giuliani spoiler leaking before the film’s releasae fails to ruin “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” because, like old Johnny would do in a room full of bananas, plunking Giuliani into a situation like the one announced in the film’s full title: “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” merely yields the expected results. Giuliani was hoodwinked not by a monkey but old-fashioned monkey business. Wa-wa-wee-wa!

In the main, the humor driving “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” is a continuation of what Baron Cohen does in his 2018 Showtime series “Who Is America?” – which his to say that he functions more as a prodding force these days than a hard crowbar. Long ago the Borat character functioned as a truth serum, the kind of amiable ignoramus people were inclined to countenance or forgive either out of politeness or a sense of superiority. Bigots would meet his bigotry with their own, perhaps, in a gesture of finding common ground, while others put up with him out of kindness.

Now, as father and daughter embark travel through the good old U.S. & A 2020 edition, they encounter a place where the rampant racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia Borat unearthed in 2006 is now on proud display across the land and slathered in misogyny.

The sexism, though, is the road by which Borat and Tutar find their way in to the psyche of the ugly American – enabling them to infiltrate a debutante ball where Borat gets a father to admit he’d pay $500 for Tutar within earshot of his own child, and another man, hopelessly drunk, slurs out unbidden that men love pretty girls in South. “They’re fun!”

Following a span of time in which Borat keeps Tutar in a cage while he sleeps in the relative luxury of a horse trailer he drags behind a jalopy, “Subsequent Moviefilm” makes Tutar’s empowerment the centerpiece of the movie’s second half. Baron Cohen’s signature obviousness and a style reminiscent of director Jason Woliner’s past TV work (which includes series such as “Nathan for You”) shapes how this transpires, and the audience either accepts this for what it is or may cringe at its clunkiness.

Either way, the fact that “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” and Baron Cohen need Bakalova is indisputable.

There’s the practical matter that the character of Borat is famous, for one. Back in 2007 Baron Cohen announced that he was retiring two of his alter egos, Borat and Ali G, acknowledging to The Daily Telegraph that “the problem with success, although it’s fantastic, is that every new person who sees the Borat movie is one less person I ‘get’ with Borat again, so it’s a kind of self-defeating form, really.”

What he could not have predicted back then was how thoroughly the fabric of reality would be torn by the disinformation flood plaguing us today. However, he’s right about the problem of Borat’s fame. “Subsequent Moviefilm” confronts this early in the film when Borat sets down in America once again, only to be instantly recognized and pursued by crowds of thrilled Texans. This necessitates a trip to a local costume shop to purchase prosthetics and disguises.

Nonetheless, Borat’s relevance in 2020 is debatable. Since the anti-Semitism and sexism at his heart are defining traits in a nation seized by white nationalism, that either makes him redundant or highly relevant — except for the fact he reveals of his subjects’ prejudices.

But then, they never were. The laugh-until-you-cry parts of the original “Borat” don’t involve, say, the Islamophobic, homophobic rodeo organizer mouthing off or those Southern frat boys wishing aloud that slavery was still legal. The best antics involve Borat’s stupidity crashing against the patience and politeness of typical Americans, or ludicrous moments like the nude wrestling match between him and his producer Azamat (Ken Davilian) that spills out of their hotel room and well into public spaces.

Fewer of those sight gags exist in “Subsequent Moviefilm.” Save for an extended segment in which he quarantines with a pair of right-wing QAnon adherents, such have been replaced instead by situational humor, such as the turn where Tutar swallows a plastic baby cake decoration and Borat rushes her to what he believes to be a doctor’s office. Naturally they land in crisis pregnancy center where father and daughter are counseled, not by a doctor but by Pastor Jonathan Bright. This evolves precisely as one expects it would.

Then there are the bits that have already made the news: Baron Cohen’s infiltrating the Conservative Political Action Conference in February dressed as Trump? They work their way to that, and a scene from a right-wing militia gathering in Washington state where enable Borat performed as Country Steve, where he got the audience to sing along to a racist ditty, staring with lyrics about injecting Obama “with the Wuhan flu.”

Gotcha moments like this and the Giuliani business don’t tell us anything we don’t already know. Instead, it’s what the context implies about America’s psychological state. The cringe comedy in the crisis center isn’t merely in the misunderstanding about the nature of the baby inside Tutar’s stomach, it is his calm insistence in her keeping it there even after Tutar’s father tells him that he put it there. (He bought the cupcake, OK?)

But this is part of an escalating series of moments that show us who America is: a nation of very fine people who live and let prejudice flourish so long as it doesn’t disturb the status quo.

There’s the Texas baker who uses icing to pipe the words “Jews Will Not Replace Us” on a chocolate cake without batting an eyelash. There’s the shop owner who guffaws along with Borat when he asks that Tutar be directed to the “no means yes” dress section. There’s the spray tanning salon technician who, in response to Borat asking, “What color is best for racist family?” says without pause or reaction, “I wouldn’t go any darker than a six or a seven.”

All of these are women, by the way.

This leads up to savior in this narrative: Jeanise Jones, a Black woman Borat hires to look after Tutar and who ends up talking some sense in to her, starting with waking her up to the fact that her father has been lying to her. (And how.) Jones is the level-headed figure in a vast land of fools; she’s also playing to the trope of the Black woman savior utilized in the first “Borat” and touted in this election cycle. Placed in the context of everyone else Borat and Tutar encounter, though, she’s a cool clarifying drink in a desert of dumb and therefore welcome.

Evaluating the comedy value of “Subsequent Moviefilm” relative to the first “Borat” sets it up to lose, sad to say. It is enormously entertaining and for the reasons listed above a healthy treatment to whatever anxieties plaguing us a little more than a week leading up to the election. Whatever faults it has aren’t deadly, although it’s plain to see that the pandemic forced a shift upon the film’s plans and likely shifted its ending in ways that don’t feel fully baked.

The most prominent difference between the “Borat” of 2006 and the 2020 “Subsequent Moviefilm” is in who America is now. Our inability to agree on basic facts has only worsened since Trump’s election in 2016, to say nothing of how decline and fall of basic critical thought has left us vulnerable to benevolent pranksters like Baron Cohen and outside forces who would mean us harm.

At the same time there’s simply no getting around the fact that Kazakhstan receives little in the way of an image acquittal in this follow-up, an unavoidable and miserable result of alloying a problematic character to a place. However, if there’s a salvageable component to this it is in how differently the sequel leaves us. When we first met Borat we comforted ourselves with the first-world notion that somehow we are better than people of so-called “lesser” nations.

Now it doesn’t allow the audience to be so sure of itself, implying in the final scene that we aren’t merely ugly Americans. We’re a once glorious nation being led by goons who are sliding us backward into diminishment, and dangerously so. That is nothing to laugh about.

“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” is currently streaming on Amazon.

Trump appears to have pocketed $123,000 from Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi: report

The information contained within President Donald Trump’s tax returns continues to result in blockbuster stories by The New York Times.

On Friday, the newspaper focused on Trump’s claims of philanthropy — which don’t always add up.

“In 2009, for example, he agreed to rent his Seven Springs estate in Westchester County, N.Y., to the Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who hoped to stay in a tent on the grounds during a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly,” the newspaper reported.

“Though the plans fell apart when local residents objected, Colonel Qaddafi made a payment of $150,000, which Mr. Trump told CNN in 2011 that he had given to charity. His 2009 tax returns, however, reported only $22,796 in business and personal cash gifts,” the newspaper explained.

New Tax Story: Donald Trump’s taxes show he didn't reach for his wallet for most of his charitable giving. The bulk of it came from donating land. His taxes also cast doubt on a number of charitable commitments he has boasted about. https://t.co/J6pWBIKZEE

— Susanne Craig (@susannecraig) October 23, 2020

New York Times nailed for publishing Republican propaganda — yet again

The New York Times has been caught, once again, passing off Republican operatives as “regular” Republican voters in an article intended to show how effectively Donald Trump is maintaining his support.

It raises serious questions about whether Times editors and reporters, rather than actually trying to determine how voters feel, are setting out to find people to mouth the words they need for predetermined story lines that, not coincidentally, echo the Trump campaign’s propaganda.

In the latest case, an article posted on Wednesday headlined “Around Atlanta, Many White Suburbanites Are Sticking With Trump” by Times national reporter Elaina Plott initially misidentified two of the four allegedly run-of-the-mill voters who supported the article’s thesis: That Trump’s unfounded fear-mongering along the lines that “ANTIFA THUGS WILL RUIN THE SUBURBS!” is working.

The lead anecdote came courtesy of Natalie Pontius, who was simply identified as “an interior decorator, married with two children and a University of Georgia alumna.”

“The riots, the push to defund the police — that’s not the direction our country needs to go,” Plott quoted Pontius as saying. “I feel like the Democratic Party is continually trying to come up with ways to divide us.”

Pontius, it turns out, was a paid political consultant for a Republican candidate for Georgia’s House of Representatives in 2018.

Plott also quoted Jake Evans, initially identified simply as “an attorney in Atlanta.”

Evans insisted that the polls showing Joe Biden and Trump in a dead heat in Georgia are deceptive, because “you’ll go to dinner with moderate or right-leaning voters who would never say in their workplace that they’re voting for Trump, but when you’re in private, it’s all day, every day.”

Evans, it turns out, chairs the state’s branch of the Republican National Lawyers Association, is the immediate past president of the Atlanta Young Republicans, is a member of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s election-security task force — and is the son of Randy Evans, a Republican heavy hitter rewarded by Trump with a cushy gig as ambassador to Luxembourg.

This isn’t the first Times story of this kind to feature ringers. In a notorious June 2018 story by political reporter Jeremy Peters, headlined “As Critics Assail Trump, His Supporters Dig In Deeper,” the supposedly ordinary Republican woman in the lead anecdote turned out to be a board member of an ultra-conservative PAC.

A whole host of questions

Among a legion of questions raised by this latest incident, my first has to be: Who assigned this story? What were they thinking?

The fact that Plott couldn’t find real people to support its thesis suggests that she was assigned to produce precisely the story she did. (So does the URL, which I suspect reflects the editor’s original “slug” for the story: “atlanta-trump-voters-women.”)

Who looked at the latest poll data showing that a solid majority of white college-educated folks in Georgia are still backing Donald Trump and concluded that Trump’s inflammatory post-George Floyd rhetoric was working?

Because, guess what? Given that the polls also show that support has been pretty steady over the last six months or longer, I’m pretty sure that isn’t the real reason.

(Or to the extent that Trump’s transparently dishonest “law and order” rhetoric is essentially one big dog-whistle for racism, maybe it actually is.)

And why is the Times continuing to buy into the framing of Trump’s racist language and lawbreaking actions as a “law-and-order” message? The article used the term three times — including once in its subhead — without caveats. As I’ve noted before, the Times is making a mistake in failing to heed Washington Post opinion columnist Greg Sargent‘s warning that “any news organization that uncritically describes President Trump’s reelection campaign as premised on ‘law and order’ appeals, without placing his concerted efforts to destroy the rule of law in America front and center alongside them, is helping to drain those words of all meaning.”

Who at the Times requested a story that doesn’t seem to be supported by the facts, that essentially provides cover for Trump’s overt appeals to racism and lawbreaking, and that suggests it was good politics?

This, I’m afraid, is Dean Baquet’s newsroom in a nutshell, where the anachronistic notion of “objectivity” is horribly misapplied to produce both-sides stenography instead of calling out liars and racists.

There are specific questions about how this article was produced.

Did Plott know the people she quoted weren’t ordinary voters? Did she want to know? Did she ask? Did she hide it from her editors as well as her readers? How did she get their contact information?

To be clear: Reporters should take great care to find actually “average” voters before identifying them as such, should carefully question those voters to make sure they aren’t ringers and should verify that by checking around — and their editors should do likewise.

Then there’s the broader question of how the Times and other national news organizations find “regular people” to interview — especially in the age of COVID.

At this point, I think news organizations need to be a lot more transparent about how they go about this, at the risk of losing readers’ trust entirely.

(As a counterpoint to the Times’ story, consider this one by Time magazine’s Charlotte Alter, the result of a three-week road trip through the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, in which she describes finding a powerful strain of “unlogic”: “reason distorted by suspicion and misinformation.”)

Going forward, readers deserve to know exactly how the reporters found their way to the “average” people they quote, to judge for themselves how typical or atypical they may be. How many people did the reporters talk to before they found the person they needed for their story? What questions did they ask?

And finally, I need to bring up a point I’ve made repeatedly before: Simply quoting Trump supporters who mouth crazy talking points (whether they’re ringers or not) is a terrible disservice to the reader.

Why are they saying these things? How can they possibly believe they are true? Consider Pontius’ quote: “I feel like the Democratic Party is continually trying to come up with ways to divide us.” What does she even mean by that? What leads her to that conclusion?

I think voter interviews are important. I’d like to see more interviews with Biden voters, for instance. But when it comes to Trump supporters, simply quoting them without trying to actually understand where they’re coming from isn’t good journalism. The key is for reporters to explore not just voters’ political opinions, but their core values — especially those related to pluralism and authoritarianism — and their news sources.

The sleuth

The hero in this story is Charles Bethea, a New Yorker staff writer — and Twitter.

Bethea quickly recognized Jake Evans:

That’s because Bethea had actually written a short profile of Evans for the New Yorker in 2018, when Evans was president of the Atlanta Young Republicans.

Eventually, after sleuthing by Zach Kopplin, an investigator for the Government Accountability Project, and Georgia attorney Eric Teusink, Bethea also announced:

As Vice writer Laura Wagner pointed out, archly:

Evans would have been pretty easy to spot.

New Yorker staff writer Isaac Chotiner recapped the mess, leading University of Michigan law professor Sam Bagenstos to cry foul:

This is worse than journalistic malpractice. This is the NYT aiding and abetting misinformation. https://t.co/pfHvllRTdo

— Sam Bagenstos (@sbagen) October 23, 2020

The tweets eventually resulted in corrections being appended to the original story on Friday:

An earlier version of this article referred incompletely to Jake Evans, an attorney and voter in Atlanta. Mr. Evans chairs the state’s branch of the Republican National Lawyers Association and has been appointed to Gov. Brian Kemp’s election-security task force. The article also misstated Mr. Evans’s age. He is 33, not 31.

An earlier version of this article referred incompletely to Natalie Pontius, an interior decorator near Atlanta. In 2018 she served as a consultant for a Republican candidate for a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives.

For some inscrutable reason, the Times also published a second, vastly truncated version of Plott’s story on the web on Thursday. Evans is gone from this version entirely. Pontius is moved from the lede to the kicker, but still not identified as a Republican operative.

This is a New York Times management failure, more than a reporting failure, though it is that, too.

UPDATE: The reporter on the story, Elaina Plott, and the Times’s political editor, Patrick Healy, have tweeted explanations, as of Friday evening.

Plott wrote that she simply failed to do her “due diligence”:

Healy, in a five-tweet thread, wrote that the premise of the story was to “understand factors” that were leading white college-educated white voters to back Trump. “We believe the premise and the story are sound,” he wrote.

We have corrected a Times story about white college-educated voters in the Atlanta suburbs who are supporting President Trump. Here’s an explanation of what happened. https://t.co/fT8egFG8uu

— Patrick Healy (@patrickhealynyt) October 23, 2020

He wrote that the shorter version was simply a “Live Briefing” item. He did not explain why that item still misidentifies Pontius.

“The omission of information was an honest mistake; we were not trying to hide details,” he wrote.

But Plott’s excuse is almost too stupid to be believed. Did she not ask about these people’s background? Did they mislead her? A simple Google search would have turned up Evans’ obvious conflict. Did she not want to know?

Healy did not address how Plott came to contact the people she quoted, what her orders or preconceptions were, where those orders originated, who edited the story or how. All in all, an entirely unsatisfactory explanation.

Kellyanne Conway is being paid $15,000 a month by the GOP following her White House exit: filings

Citing a need to devote time to her family, Kellyanne Conway announced her departure from the Trump administration only one month ago. Nonetheless, the Republican National Committee is paying the former White House counselor $15,000 a month, according to new federal filings.

Conway left the White House in late August amid a publicly unfolding family drama after her daughter declared her intention to seek emancipation over alleged “trauma and abuse” in multiple social media posts. In an exit statement, Conway said she would be stepping down “gratefully” and “humbly.”

Her husband, the attorney George Conway, simultaneously announced that he would withdraw from his role as chief agitator at The Lincoln Project, a big-money group of conservative Trump critics, to “devote more time to family matters.”

“We disagree about plenty, but we are united on what matters most: the kids,” Kellyanne Conway said of her husband in her statement, adding: “For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama.”

Kellyanne Conway, who carried Trump’s 2016 campaign over the finish line before assuming a role as the administration’s most facile TV sophist, would bring a range of experience and insight in national politics. But the scope of her Republican National Committee responsibilities is unclear. The veteran pollster was paid for “political strategy services,” according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings released on Friday.

The monthly amount — $15,000 — is the equivalent of a top White House salary. Indeed, Kellyanne Conway previously earned almost the same amount during her time at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. It’s also a common monthly salary handed out by the GOP to former officials who exit through the Trump administration’s revolving door.

Filings show the RNC still pays $15,000 a month to former presidential security chief and Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller — originally for “security services” connected to the 2020 Republican National Convention, which has since come and gone. The new records also show a $20,000 Oct. 13 expenditure to Pinkerton, the famed private investigation and protection agency, also for “security services.”

The GOP paid that same $15,000 monthly stipend to Ric Grennell after he left the Trump administration, but the latest round of filings reveal the chief Republican LGBTQ+ adviser got an unexplained October bump to nearly $22,000.

Former White House adviser Omarosa Manigault-Newman was reportedly offered $15,000 for RNC work when she left the administration. ABC News also reported that the committee paid former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale in monthly installments of the same amount for strategic development.

The Conways own a New Jersey beach home, as well as an $8 million mansion in the posh Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, which their teenage daughter, Claudia, often features in social media videos.

Claudia Conway, an outspoken critic of the president and her mother’s work with the administration, said she was “devastated” that her mom was speaking at the Republican National Convention. She claimed in August that she was “officially pushing for emancipation” from her family “because of years of childhood trauma and abuse.” She celebrated her mother’s resignation from a job which allegedly “ruined” her life.

“Look what I did!” she said in a TikTok video at the time. “Look at what I did, ladies and gentlemen.”

The Conways, who are former Trump Tower residents, have long been the subject of media fascination ever since George Conway, who interviewed for a top job at the Department of Justice early in Trump’s presidency, became a leading critic of his wife’s boss. Kellyanne Conway told The Washington Post in 2018 that she found her husband’s criticisms to be beyond “disrespectful.”

“It’s a violation of basic decency, certainly, if not marital vows,” she told the outlet, before trying to strike the conversation from the record.

In August, Kellyanne Conway said that she anticipated taking on a “significant role” in Trump’s 2020 campaign, according to The Washington Post.

The Republican National Committee awarded Kellyanne Conway a top speaking slot this August at its convention in Washington, which stirred controversy for numerous likely violations of the Hatch Act, a law prohibiting federal employees from engaging in political activity. Conway was accused of violating the Hatch Act more than 50 times before 2019 — on Twitter alone. In 2018, the Office of Special Counsel ruled that she had violated the law on two occasions, but the White House let her off the hook.

Uber drivers sue Uber, claiming app is coercing them into voting yes on anti-labor proposition

A group of Uber drivers is suing the company, with the lawsuit filed on Thursday accusing the ridesharing service of politically coercing them into supporting a California ballot measure that would exempt the company from a law requiring them to be treated like employees. The lawsuit was filed at the same time that a California court ruled that Uber and other ridesharing companies must classify their gig workers as employees, thus entitling them to the normal benefits of waged work.

“I can’t rule out that employers have engaged in coercive tactics like this in the past, but I have never heard of an employer engaging in this sort of barrage of coercive communications on such a broad level, ever,” an attorney for the drivers, David Lowe, a partner at Rudy, Exelrod, Zieff & Lowe, told The New York Times, which broke the story about the lawsuit. “It is such an extraordinary thing, from my perspective, for Uber to exploit this captive audience of workers.”

A spokesman for Uber responded to the litigation, writing to Salon that “this is an absurd lawsuit, without merit, filed solely for press attention and without regard for the facts.” He added that a survey from May and June found that the “vast majority” of its drivers support Proposition 22.

Proposition 22, if passed, would allow ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft and food delivery services like DoorDash and Instacart to continue not treating their gig workers as employees. This would exempt them from a recent California labor law that would otherwise require them to do so. If Proposition 22 passes, few if any drivers will qualify for health insurance benefits, drivers won’t be guaranteed paid leave, won’t be allowed to unionize, and won’t be entitled to workers’ compensation if they get in an accident on the job. The way the proposition is written is such that it is almost impossible to undo in the state legislature, as it would require an unprecedented 7/8ths super-duper-majority of legislators.

As contractors, many gig workers of these companies make less than minimum wage, particularly after accounting for other expenses like insurance and gas costs, which drivers must pay themselves. A study from January found that DoorDash delivery drivers make, on average, $1.45 per hour after accounting for expenses.

Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates have led the drive behind Proposition 22, which has now received $180 million in financial backing from these Silicon Valley companies. That makes it the most expensive ballot initiative in California history. Despite this massive warchest, a September poll by the University of California, Berkeley found that only 39 percent of California voters support the initiative, compared to 36 percent who oppose it and one-fourth who were undecided.

This is not the first time that Uber and Lyft have resorted to controversial tactics in order to avoid having to classify their contractors as employees. Earlier this year the two companies engaged in a “capital strike,” a practice in which corporations threaten to stop doing business in a given area and take away people’s jobs unless policies that they oppose are not implemented. The ridesharing companies threatened to cease operations in California over the summer unless they were exempt from a 2019 state law that says all workers have to be considered employees unless a boss can prove they are independent contractors (the very state law that prompted these companies to later create the aforementioned astroturfed ballot measure, Proposition 22). Their promise of a capital strike may have been effective: In August a California appeals court issued a temporary stay on a preliminary injunction order that would have forced the companies to immediately reclassify their drivers.

That decision was reversed on Thursday, however, when a California appeals court ordered the companies to once again classify their workers as employees rather than independent contractors. As California Attorney General Xavier Becerra explained in a statement after the ruling, “Uber and Lyft have used their muscle and clout to resist treating their drivers as workers entitled to those paycheck and benefit protections. It’s time for Uber and Lyft to play by the rules.”

That said, it is unlikely that this ruling will directly impact the companies prior to the referendum on Proposition 22. As CNN Business put it, “Uber and Lyft still have 30 days to comply with California’s law once the appeals process finishes. That clock typically starts 61 days after the appellate court transfers jurisdiction back to the trial court, assuming the opinion is not challenged.”

“Today’s ruling means that if the voters don’t say Yes on Proposition 22, rideshare drivers will be prevented from continuing to work as independent contractors, putting hundreds of thousands of Californians out of work and likely shutting down ridesharing throughout much of the state,” the Uber spokesman told Salon. “We’re considering our appeal options, but the stakes couldn’t be higher for drivers—72% of whom support Prop 22—and for the California economy, where millions of people are jobless and another 158,000 just sought unemployment support this week.”

Amid their Proposition 22 campaigning blitz, Uber has also been criticized by social justice activists for co-opting pro-Black Lives Matter rhetoric, with some of them arguing that it is hypocritical for a company to fight to underpay its workers — many of whom are people of color — while at the same time claiming to support black lives. Indeed, the company has recently peppered major cities with billboards urging racists to “delete Uber.”

“Racial justice is economic justice,” Shona Clarkson, an organizer with Gig Workers Rising, told Salon last month. “The fact of the matter is that the majority of gig workers are people of color and the conditions that make police killings of black people possible and inevitable are the same conditions that make the exploitation of Black and brown workers possible and inevitable. We reject attempts by Uber and other gig companies to separate racial justice from economic justice and we see it as an attempt to dodge their responsibility for the exploitation of your Black and brown workers everyday.”

Trump said that he is “cured” of COVID-19. Scientists say that’s not how it works

In a night full of many bold claims made by President Trump, one stood out to immunologists: Trump’s statement, during the Thursday night debate with Joe Biden, that he had been “cured” of COVID-19.

“I can tell you from personal experience that I was in the hospital, I had it,” Trump claimed. “And I got better and I will tell you that I had something that they gave me — a therapeutic, I guess they would call it. Some people could say it was a cure. But I was in for a short period of time and I got better very fast or I wouldn’t be here tonight. And now they say I’m immune. Whether it’s four months or a lifetime, nobody’s been able to say that, but I’m immune.”

The only problem? Immunity doesn’t work that way, experts say. And there are other reasons to take Trump’s comments with a grain of salt, too.

“There is no cure for this disease,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA) and former secretary of health in Maryland, wrote to Salon. “The treatments are very limited and reduce the severity of the disease in a subset of patients. So this is inaccurate.”

He added, “He may be immune but we don’t know for sure. More importantly, if he is, we don’t know for how long he will have protections. [The] current thinking is a few months, but studies are ongoing to find out how long. Reinfections are very rare so far which argues for immunity. Remember the disease is less than a year old so we don’t yet know it’s long term course.”

Benjamin was referring to a host of new research that indicates that immunity is only temporary for the virus — in scientific speak, immunity is not “durable.” A Nature Medicine article suggested that those who contract the novel coronavirus and recover may be immune to it for about twelve months. There are reported cases around the world of some becoming re-infected after three months.

Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, reacted to Trump’s claim of having been cured by writing to Salon that “the President’s clinical course with COVID-19 is a single case study. None of the therapies the President received have been demonstrated to be ‘cures’ in clinical trials that test hundreds or thousands of patients infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Indeed, only a handful of patients outside of clinical trials have received Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody.”

Regarding Trump’s claim of being immune, he was skeptical that he could even know that. “As a new disease, our understanding of the body’s immune response to Covid-19 is limited,” Medford said. “We do not yet know how long a person will be protected after they’ve recovered from an infection. We also don’t know yet the full significance of laboratory tests that measure the immune response to Covid-19 as indicators of immunity against the SARS-Cov-2 virus. While rare, there are now a growing number of reports of people getting Covid-19 a second time.”

Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean emeritus and professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Salon that while he does not believe there was anything inaccurate about Trump’s aforementioned statement, “he was very lucky, and received superb treatment. He probably is immune; there are only a handful of cases that have contracted the virus a second time (we know from their genetic signatures that they are new infections) but very rare. We don’t have any idea how long that acquired immunity lasts.”

It is also worth noting that Trump received a bespoke medical regimen that would be unavailable to the vast majority of Americans. This included an 8 gram dose of an experimental drug called REGN-COV2 from the biotechnology company Regeneron, a monoclonal antibody treatment that the company’s website claims leads to “greatest improvements in patients who had not mounted their own effective immune response prior to treatment.” In addition, the president took the steroid dexamethasone, which helps patients with lowered oxygen levels by making sure their immune systems do not accidentally kill them with an immune overreaction. He also received a five-day course of the antiviral drug remdesivir, which is meant to improve recovery time in patients.

“The drugs the President got are not given to ordinary Americans, especially the antibody cocktail which has not been approved and is still under study,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, told Salon earlier this month by email. “Similarly, a patient of his description would not be given medications for severe disease (Remdesivir, dexamethasone) since the steroids can be harmful and the anti-viral is of uncertain efficacy in that situation.”

The president has made many medically and scientifically inaccurate statements regarding COVID-19 in the past. He has frequently downplayed the importance of wearing a mask, even criticizing Biden during last month’s presidential debate by saying “every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from him and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.” Experts agree that the administration’s mishandling of the pandemic has exacerbated it greatly and led to thousands of needless deaths.

“The Queen’s Gambit” is the sexiest and most thrilling TV show about chess you’ll ever watch

“You really are something, you know that?”

In Netflix’s limited series “The Queen’s Gambit,” troubled chess prodigy Beth Harmon — played by “Emma” star Anya Taylor-Joy — receives this compliment from her good-looking opponent Townes (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) during her first tournament. Even though she’s somewhat distracted by his charming demeanor, that doesn’t stop her from trouncing him after chasing his pieces around the board.

It’s one of numerous suspenseful matches throughout the series, where the dynamic can shift from playful to desperate or lackadaisical to cutthroat in just a few moves. In this scene, Beth handles the pieces reluctantly — unwilling to be the author of Townes’ doom — which brings a sweet, flirtatious tone to the game.

“Whatever the energy is of the person that you’re playing with, it is a bit of a dance,” Taylor-Joy tells Salon. “I love that sequence with Townes because it’s the first time that Beth is genuinely conflicted about winning. Like, ‘I want to win the more than anything, but you’re also so cute. This is making me sad, and I’m confused by it.'”

Chances are “The Queen’s Gambit” is the sexiest, most addictive TV show about chess you’ll ever watch. Granted, it’s probably the only TV show about chess you’ll ever watch (sorry, “Endgame”), occupying a space in entertainment where only films occasionally dare to venture.

Written and directed by Scott Frank, and based on Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel of the same name, “The Queen’s Gambit” begins with nine-year-old Beth in a Kentucky orphanage, where she is raised after her mother’s tragic death. There, a taciturn janitor (Bill Camp) introduces her to chess, for which she has an astounding aptitude. After her adoption, Beth’s unique Bildungsroman begins in earnest as she travels the country and then the world to earn prize money at chess tourneys and seek the respect from mostly male peers.

Tevis, who also wrote “The Hustler,” goes beyond the usual underdog sports narrative for “Queen’s Gambit.” He draws a line between genius and mental health, giving Beth a host of personal issues that begin in childhood. Not only is she alone in the world, which plays out in her uncertain relationships with men later in life, but in the orphanage she’s introduced to tranquilizers. They soon become an addiction that continues into adulthood when she also adds alcohol to the mix. It’s your classic tale of sex, drugs, and . . . well, chess.

In the trailer, we see Beth literally falling down drunk, and throughout the series she goes on various benders that interfere with her success in the game and in life. Despite Beth turning to some rather self-destructive coping mechanisms, however, the series never ventures too deep into the darkness.

“[Creator Scott Frank] really gets in a primal way that tragedy has to make you laugh,” says executive producer William Horberg. “He doesn’t ever want things to get too earnest. I love the sense of humor in this, even when it’s pretty dark. Even when there’s some heavy stuff going on with these kids [in the orphanage] being dosed with tranquilizers, the way he intercuts that with clips from the movie ‘The Robe’ where the characters are entering the kingdom of God with the scene of [young Beth] stuffing pills in her mouth — that’s pure Scott.”

Substance abuse and testing the waters with various men — including characters played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster (“Game of Thrones”) and “Harry Potter” alum Harry Melling — are just distractions, however, from Beth’s one true love: chess. And the series sets up the matches and shoots the scenes cleverly so that even an audience without a deep understanding of the rules or nuances of chess will find it as enthralling as Beth does.

Part of the series’ success in translating chess for viewers comes from Tevis. He was a devoted C-class player who constructed the novel’s realistic games with the help of U.S. chess master Bruce Pandolfini, who also consulted on this series and the film “Searching for Bobby Fischer.” Much of the dialogue and gameplay has been lifted straight from the page to the screen.

Pandolfini also coached the actors on how to play convincingly. It’s not just about moving the pieces but how one uses the hands, the posture, the psych-out body language. Beth plays against grandmasters, former child prodigies like herself, and world champions. Each of these actors had to look as if they’d been playing their whole lives.

“And then even further, Bruce introduced Scott and I to Garry Kasparov, who’s maybe the greatest chess player of all time. Garry had lived the life of our protagonist because he was a child chess prodigy, who was growing up in the Cold War and was roughly the same age as Beth Harmon’s character in the book,” said Horberg.

“He had a whole other dimension of really interesting stuff to share with us outside of the book, just in terms of what was it like when you were seven or eight in the Soviet Union? Your relationship with your family and your peers and the adults and the KGB? How did it work when you were going to play tournaments?”

The lynchpin of the series of course is Taylor-Joy, who’s often been acclaimed for the non-verbal aspects of her performances, from her creepy debut in “The Witch” to the surprisingly visceral adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma.” Much is made of her large, expressive eyes, but never before have they been as essential to the storytelling as when she plays chess, drawing the viewers into the gameplay with every stare or flicker. For Beth, these matches are life or death, and those stakes had to be communicated.

“It was important for me to understand the serious chess because I know the people that really love this sport,” said Taylor-Joy, who was a novice going into filming. “Knowing the theory was important. However, knowing the theory and then executing it are two very different things.”

Memorizing moves for a filmed match is just the first step of the challenge. As a genius, Beth is often asked to play simultaneous matches against multiple people, shifting from board to board, one move after another. Even more difficult is a scene where she plays simultaneously against three different opponents, but this time, it’s speed chess.

“That’s actually some of my favorite sequences in the entirety of the show, because they were so much fun,” said Taylor-Joy. “With the amount of games that I had to play, the only way that it was feasible without me literally driving myself insane, because I am in every scene essentially of this whole thing, I would learn the sequences five minutes prior. And I just have to thank my short term memory for that, like, dance choreography for my fingers.

“It just became a competitive thing within myself. ‘OK, how quickly can I learn how many moves to play over three different boards? And then how fast can I do that?’ One of my favorite photographs ever taken is me on set, Scott just snapped a picture of me the second that the first take of speed chess is done, and it’s like pure joy. But I was so happy and proud of myself.”

“The Queen’s Gambit” is currently streaming on Netflix.

“Dark money” PACs dumping last-minute millions into Senate races to save Republican majority: report

According to a report from Politico, conservative donors — some using so-called “dark money” political action committees (PACs) — are coming to the rescue of incumbent Republican Senators who are facing ouster because of their close ties to Donald Trump in the hope Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) can hold onto power.

With Republican Senate seats in Maine, Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina and Iowa in danger of flipping, Politico is reporting that GOP donors are riding to the rescue in states where the Republican incumbents are being badly outraised by their Democratic opponent.

“The GOP’s top super PAC raised nearly $50 million in the first two weeks of October, a huge sum that can help the party defend itself across a broad Senate map with close to a dozen senators in peril. But the total didn’t fix the party’s fundraising problems,” Politico’s James Arkin wrote.

Noting the Democrats still have a huge cash advantage with the election only 11 days away, the report states that a “dark money” PAC affiliated with allies of McConnell, called the Senate Leadership Fund, brought in $49.6 million in the first two weeks of October to bolster the candidates’ last-minute advertising.

“The funding mostly came almost entirely from big donors, or from unknown sources. One Nation, the dark money group aligned with SLF, added $27.5 million, more than half the total fundraising; $16 million of the rest came from six people or groups giving 7-figure checks. SLF had $69 million in the bank as of Oct. 14,” the report states.

This is not to say that Democratic candidates are going to be outspent.

“Democrats held an enormous advantage in candidate fundraising and spending in the third quarter of this year, and they continued to steamroll Republicans in the first two weeks of October,” Arking reported. “In the 14 most competitive races on the map, Democratic candidates raised more than $84 million in the two-week period, more than double the $41 million combined from Republican senators and challengers. Democrats put the money to good use: Their campaigns spent $128 million in that time frame, compared to $69 million for the GOP.”

You can read more here.