Conflicting polls on economy raise questions over Biden’s chances of beating Trump

It’s a tale of two polls: A Gallup survey taken between Sept. 14 and Sept. 28 found that 56 percent of Americans believe they are better off in 2020 than they were in 2016, while a September survey from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape Project found that 64 percent of Americans believe the economy is worse off now than it was one year ago. Each one suggests a different story, a different possible outcome over whether President Donald Trump will win or lose to his challenger in next month’s election, former Vice President Joe Biden.

To put this in perspective: When a sitting president is up for reelection, the impending contest is widely considered to be a referendum on the economy. Trump’s chances of winning, therefore, are likely to depend heavily on how American voters feel about his administration up to this point. If voters on the one hand feel they are better off now than they were four years ago, but at the same time believe the economy is worse now than it was one year ago, that could simply mean they feel things were better in both 2019 and 2020 than in 2016, but that 2019 was a preferable year to the one that followed. That, in turn, would suggest that Trump has a strong chance of being reelected regardless of the perceived decline over the past 12 months.

But that notion is further complicated by the election polls themselves. When you periodically average all of the polls taken since Sept. 1, 2019, Biden has led Trump in the popular vote in every single one of them, according to RealClearPolitics. The statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight.com has similarly found Biden with a consistent lead over Trump in national polls and, moreover, says that state polls give him an 85 percent chance of winning in the Electoral College on Nov. 3.

So which polls do we trust? Many voters feel burned by the inaccuracy of traditional state-by-state electoral polls from 2016, which generally incorrectly predicted Clinton sailing to victory.

“The problem with public opinion polling nowadays is that because response rates are so low to telephone polls, you start using internet polls [and] you have to use a lot of special techniques to try to come up with a sample on the internet that matches the characteristics of the population,” Dr. Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science and polling expert at Emory University, told Salon last month. “It’s very, very hard to really say how accurate the polls are.”

Still, polling is a careful scientific pursuit, not the result of monkeys throwing darts at a board. While conservatives were gleeful about the inaccuracy of the 2016 presidential election polls, those polls still were not that far off the mark — they did correctly predict that Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump in the popular vote, and were only a point or two off the final result. The problem that year was with state polls: While some were quite accurate, others proved highly unreliable. Major polling agencies made adjustments and, as Abramowitz noted regarding the 2018 midterm elections, “if you went down and looked at the polling average for all the races — like governor, senator — and where they were at polls for House districts, by and large they were pretty accurate.”

Perhaps the best way of understanding this is by realizing that voters choose their president based on several variables, most (but not all) of which deal with the incumbent party’s performance. As American University political scientist Dr. Allan Lichtman details in his book “The Keys to the White House,” voters decide which party will win based on 13 true-or-false statements about the incumbent party. (There is also a key that discusses whether the challenging party’s candidate is unusually charismatic.) If six or more of the statements are false, then the incumbent party will lose.

For the 2020 election, Lichtman found that seven of those statements were false for Trump: A poor economy, his impeachment and other scandals, widespread social unrest, his lack of any major foreign policy successes, his setbacks in the 2018 midterm elections and the fact that he is not popular beyond his own base. Of course, Lichtman also told Salon last month that the election is “stealable” if Trump suppresses enough votes.

South Carolina debate in question as Graham refuses to take COVID-19 test despite possible exposure

Despite recent exposure to at least one colleague on Capitol Hill with COVID-19, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has refused to take a test ahead of Friday’s debate against Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison.

Harrison called on Graham on Thursday to “follow the example of Vice President Mike Pence and follow his own precedent from the last debate” by testing for COVID-19.

In response, the Graham campaign released its own statement calling the request an “11th hour demand” made “without any medical justification.”

But Graham’s recent exposure to Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utath, who recently tested positive for COVID-19, would put him at heightened risk. Another colleague, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who was also at the White House for the unveiling of Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, also tested positive for the disease.

“Mr. Harrison is demanding special treatment,” Graham said. “South Carolinians do not appreciate Mr. Harrison putting himself above others. If Mr. Harrison is not able to interact with South Carolinians on the same terms they live their lives, he should not be their senator.”

In addition to Harrison, the debate’s moderator and two auxiliary panelists all agreed to take a test.

Graham, a three-term incumbent who has found himself locked in a dead heat with the well-funded Harrison, claimed to be following the advice of doctors.

“I will continue to follow the guidance of my doctors — not my political opponent,” he added.

Graham, who self-quarantined in March after he was exposed to the virus during a visit to President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, did not take similar steps in recent days. The Republican senator said he would allow his temperature to be taken ahead of Friday’s scheduled debate, as previously agreed upon.

“Whether Mr. Harrison attends tomorrow’s debate is his decision — not mine,” Graham concluded. “I will be there.”

“Lindsey is so desperate,” Harrison said during a Friday appearance on “The View,” reframing his position as a matter of “treating our brothers and sisters equally.”

“We’ve let 3,500 people die in South Carolina because of the coronavirus,” he said. “One of them was my aunt.”

“The responsibility is not about us as individuals, but the people who are there. Hard-working people at that studio — and every single one of them is taking a test,” Harrison said. “I’m taking a test right after this episode today, so why in the world can Lindsey Graham not just go and take a test?”

“It takes less than 30 minutes to go and get your nose swabbed,” Harrison added. “Lindsey, what are you hiding? Why won’t you take a test?”

After last week’s debate, the Cook Political Report shifted the South Carolina Senate race from “lean Republican” to “toss-up,” a nod in part to Harrison’s continued strong performance in state polls and his national draw. The historically deep-red state had been viewed as a lock for Graham until Harrison’s surge this summer.

The challenger, who last Saturday brought his own plexi-glass partition to the first debate in the wake of an outbreak among members of Trump’s inner circle, threatened to withdraw from Friday’s debate if Graham refused to get tested ahead of time.

“We need to take the threat of this pandemic seriously, and the people of South Carolina understand that,” Harrison said in his Thursday night statement. “With even the president of the United States personally affected, it’s time for every leader to put people before political campaigning.”

While Graham tested negative ahead of last week’s debate, he had attended a hearing with Lee on Oct. 1. Officials recommend a period of 10 to 14 days of quarantine following known exposure, and the debate will mark only eight days since Graham’s possible exposure.

“Of course, the upcoming debates can be held and held safely,” Harrison said. “But, if Sen. Graham will not take a coronavirus test, I cannot responsibly debate in person tomorrow night and allow politics to put my family, my campaign staff, Sen. Graham’s staff and members of the media at unnecessary risk.”

Graham spokesperson TW Arrighi told Salon on Friday that the senator would show up to the debate later in the evening without taking a test. A Harrison campaign spokesperson did not immediately reply when Salon asked if Harrison would abstain.

John Lennon’s brilliant “Gimme Some Truth” is an urgent plea for 2020, too

It may be the latest in a long line of compilation packages devoted to the former Beatle, but John Lennon’s “Gimme Some Truth” picks up where 2018’s impressive “Imagine” box set left off in terms of high-quality mixes and supplemental materials.

In the multi-disc album’s title track, Lennon’s searing indictment of self-serving politicians and all around anti-humanists couldn’t be any more timely as 2020 slouches towards a (hopefully) merciful end. “I’m sick and tired of hearing things,” John sings in “Gimme Some Truth,” “from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics / All I want is the truth / Just give me some truth.” On its face, Lennon’s plea for honesty seems ineluctably simple. But as decade after decade pile up in the years since his senseless murder, Lennon’s dictum seems even more prescient.

As the “Gimme Some Truth” collection demonstrates so emphatically, Lennon’s rage for authenticity typified much of his solo output, ranging from 1970’s “Plastic Ono Band” through “Double Fantasy” (1980) and the posthumous “Milk and Honey” (1984). Curated by Yoko and Sean Lennon, “Gimme Some Truth” offers a wide array of the legendary songwriter’s standout tracks — hits and non-hits alike. As with recent installments in the Beatles and solo Beatles remixes, “Gimme Some Truth” benefits from contemporary technology’s capacity for creating greater separation among the original recordings.

Take “Nobody Told Me,” for instance. Listeners will marvel at the quality of instrumental definition afforded by the edition’s remix. The same can be said for the quasi-rock spiritual “God,” which screeches and pops like never before as Lennon excoriates his Beatles past. From early entries like “Instant Karma” and “Love” through selections from “Double Fantasy,” “Gimme Some Truth” provides a top-flight audio experience, particularly in the age of earbuds and all their attendant ubiquity.

“Gimme Some Truth” deserves special marks for its top-drawer commemorative book and liner notes, which place the 36 tracks in a valuable historical context. Again, as with the “Imagine” deluxe edition, the present compilation takes great pains to elevate Lennon’s life and work—not as staid museum pieces, but rather, as vital cultural artifacts that continue to resonate even decades later as powerfully and refreshingly as they did all those years ago.

White House aides fear Trump’s medications have triggered manic behavior: report

A stunning report in the New York Times Thursday night described President Donald Trump lashing out and demanding his own appointees prosecute his enemies, an egregious breach of norms and real and present danger to American democracy. Most shocking of all was the fact that this largely wasn’t some anonymously sourced bombshell — most of the comments the Times’ report was based on Trump made publicly

But far down in the report was a notable nugget about the White House that wasn’t based on publicly available information. According to the Times reporters, Trump’s own aides are worried that his manic and erratic public behavior this week may be a result of his illness and the medications he’s been taking:

White House aides privately expressed concern about whether the president’s animated mood in recent days stemmed from the dexamethasone. Doctors not involved with the president’s care said it could have a significant effect on a patient’s behavior.

As I’ve reported, the president’s public behavior since taking the steroid dexamethasone has genuinely seemed even more heightened and frantic than is typical for him. I argued that there are multiple explanations for the president’s temperament, none of which are particularly comforting.

Unfortunately, the president’s physician, Dr. Sean Conley, has proven utterly unreliable about Trump’s health. He’s refused to answer many questions and admitted to skirting the truth in order to provide an “upbeat” picture of the president’s condition. But the Times’s report suggested experts and those around the president are highlighting the possibility that the steroids could be significantly altering his mood:

Dr. Negin Hajizadeh, a pulmonary/critical care physician at Northwell Health, noted that the majority of Covid patients receiving dexamethasone are on mechanical ventilation and in a state of induced coma, so they do not exhibit any behavioral side effects. But, she said, large studies show that generally 28 to 30 percent of patients will exhibit mild to moderate psychiatric side effects like anxiety, insomnia, mania or delirium after receiving steroid treatments, and about 6 percent may develop psychosis.

“When we prescribe steroids we warn our patients: ‘This may cause you to feel jittery, might cause you to feel irritable,'” Dr. Hajizadeh said. “We will tell family members, especially for our older patients, ‘This may cause insomnia, this may cause changes in eating habits and, in extreme cases, mania and impaired decision making.'”

It’s hard to overstate how serious this is. In addition to the usual national security concerns that arise when the stability of the president’s mental state is in question, he currently has the power to impact people’s lives in myriad ways. He’s negotiating future plans for debating his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, trying to set up new campaign events while he may still be infectious, and he’s thrown discussions about a potential second stimulus package into chaos. The president is hardly the picture of stability under normal circumstances, but the prospect that drug-induced mania may be affecting his decision-making at this time is unacceptable.

That’s why many have argued he should have already invoked the 25th Amendment to transfer power to Vice President Mike Pence until it’s clear he’s through his case of COVID-19 and can carry out his duties unimpeded by the infection or its treatment. In light of his behavior and his own aides’ reported concerns, it should be a much bigger deal that the president has refused to relinquish control his office.

Coughing Trump struggles to speak as he dodges Sean Hannity’s questions about his COVID-19 tests

President Donald Trump, who continues to recover from symptoms of COVID-19 in the wake of his recent hospitalization, repeatedly dodged questions about whether he had recently tested positive for the disease during a lengthy Thursday phone interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.

At one point, the president stopped speaking as he attempted to stifle his cough mid-rant about his former Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Trump publicly mocked Clinton for contracting pneumonia on the 2016 campaign trail.

“Have you been tested recently?” Hannity asked the president.

“Yeah, I just saw the doctors today, and they think I’m in great shape,” Trump said. “I am in great shape.”

“Did you test negative?” Hannity pressed.

“I’ll tell you I took this Regeneron. It’s phenomenal. Eli Lilly has something very comparable, and its phenomenal,” Trump responded, referencing the manufacturer of the experimental antibody cocktail he was given at the White House several hours before being flown to Walter Reed Medical Center.

“It’s a whole new day. If you go back a few months, nobody ever thought about this stuff. We came up with it. I’m going to have it delivered to every hospital. We have sick people with COVID — with the China virus, as we call it,” Trump said, invoking a xenophobic term for the virus which causes the COVID-19 disease. “It actually made me better. I went in. I could have left a day later. I’m telling you, Sean, it was incredible.”

But the president, who was one of the first 10 patients to receive the treatment under a special “compassionate use” agreement, cannot actually have it “delivered to every hospital.” Such a feat would currently be impossible when considering supplies, logistics and economics. It would also interfere with the federal process for clinical trials.

“That’s Regeneron,” Trump reminded the Fox News host, with whom he is known to engage in pillow talk. Regeneron is run by a member of one of the president’s private golf clubs — who donated more than $55,000 to groups supporting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign — and its stock went soaring following a viral Twitter video posted by the president on Wednesday.

In that video, Trump falsely hailed the experimental therapeutic from the drug maker as a “cure” and falsely promised to provide it to hospitalized COVID-19 patients “for free.” The president appeared to not remember the day of the week, referencing his release as having happened “yesterday.” In fact, it was actually two days prior.

Trump also appeared to not recall that he had been given the antibody infusion prior to his hospital trip — not while he was in the hospital, as he claimed. The president may also possibly be mistaking it with at least two other experimental treatments received during his hospitalization: the antiviral Remdesivir and the steroid dexamethasone. The effects of the steroid, in particular, would likely have been felt more immediately than the antibody treatment, one expert told Salon.

“Have you had a test since your diagnosis a week ago?” Hannity repeated.

“Probably, the test will be tomorrow — the actual test,” Trump said, again not answering Hannity’s question. “Because there’s no reason to test all the time. They found very little infection or virus, if any. I don’t know if they found any. I didn’t go into it greatly with the doctors.”

The president also withheld information from Hannity in a phone interview conducted one week prior, when he did not disclose his own positive test. During that interview, Trump also blamed soldiers and law enforcement for infecting his top aide Hope Hicks, citing the uniformed men’s desire to “hug” and “kiss.”

The White House and Trump’s physician have repeatedly refused to answer when the president last had a negative test. At least 34 people who work at or for the White House have tested positive for COVID-19 in the last two weeks, according to an internal administration memo. When Salon reached out this week with questions about other top officials, a White House spokesperson declined to answer and indicated they would no longer reveal that information to the public.

Trump went on to praise the care he had received at Walter Reed, telling Hannity that he believed he was “the most analyzed human being in the world right now.” The president also boasted that his doctors “are amazed at how quickly this went, frankly.”

Trump’s personal physician, Dr. Sean Conley, has been criticized for offering an incomplete picture of the president’s health and repeatedly refusing to disclose key medical information, such as the timeline of the president’s diagnosis and whether lung scans showed signs of pneumonia. In his first briefing from Walter Reed on Saturday, Conley lied about whether the president had received supplemental oxygen the previous day; he apologized the following day.

Later in the Hannity interview, Trump, whose voice sounded raspy, stopped speaking to suppress a cough and clear his throat. That was not the only place in the interview where his voice showed signs of struggle. Earlier this week, Conley released a memo claiming that Trump had “reported no symptoms.”

Fox News announced Friday that the network would host Trump’s his first live video interview following his hospitalization on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Dr. Marc Siegel, one of the network’s medical contributors, “will conduct a medical evaluation and interview during the program.”

You can watch a clip below via Twitter:

Trump won't tell Hannity if he's had a negative coronavirus test. He just ignores the question and starts ranting. pic.twitter.com/GOtYbRCDqv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 9, 2020

Fox News host cuts off GOP chair’s virtual debate rant: “Prove” Trump “had multiple negative tests”

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel suggested that her party could withhold participation from all future presidential debates if President Donald Trump is required to participate in a “virtual” event.

During an appearance on Fox News, McDaniel argued that the Commission on Presidential Debate is not following the “science” because she expects Trump to test negative for COVID-19 by the time of the event.

“You’re not shedding live virus 10 days after diagnosis,” McDaniel claimed. “So why are they changing the rules?”

“I will just tell you, I hope no future nominee of our party works with this commission,” she continued. “They are a total joke and they hurting out democracy and they are impacting our election.”

“They are affecting the election right now. People are not going to be able to see these candidates campaign or debate in person because of a commission that is inserting themself,” McDaniel ranted.

Fox News host Sandra Smith interrupted: “The president did get sick with COVID-19 merely days ago. It would be important to know if the president has tested negative yet. Do we know anything on that front? The White House hasn’t released that information.”

“Well, the White House has been transparent,” McDaniel claimed despite a coverup of Trump’s last negative COVID-19 test. “Of course, the president would understand that but Joe Biden didn’t even ask not to have in-person debates.”

The RNC chair went on to suggest that the Commission on Presidential Debates is conspiring to let Biden “debate from home with his prompter and his aide.”

“This needs to be an in-person debate,” McDaniel opined. “If the president tests negative, which he should, based on the science, that this should be an in-person debate.”

“You’re saying you can prove the president has had multiple negative tests,” Smith pressed. “Just tell me what other information you would bring to the negotiating table to get this to be in-person.”

McDaniel refused to “get ahead of the president” and declined to give a direct answer.

“I have real concerns about Joe Biden doing a virtual debate,” she added. “We’ve seen the prompter showing up in his TV screen, you’ve seen him say move the prompter up. We deserve to have a debate between two candidates face to face.”

“It will transform our nation forever,” McDaniel warned.

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

“This man is crazy”: “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski begs Republicans to consider 25th Amendment

MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski called on administration officials to pull the plug on President Donald Trump.

The “Morning Joe” co-host has been forbidden by her husband and co-host Joe Scarborough from talking about the 25th Amendment every day, but the president’s conduct since his COVID-19 diagnosis allowed for a reprieve.

“We’re dealing with a president who, on the same day, did not condemn the plot to kill Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and also perhaps incited the potential attack by tweeting ‘liberate Michigan’ and dog whistles and refused to condemn white supremacy in ‘stand back and stand by,’ and even on this day that this plot was announced and unfolding before us, she talked to the Michiganders and the president is criticizing her,” Brzezinski said. “This man is crazy. He’s not well. He’s cruel, and everything that he appears to be saying and doing is leading to a place where, why wouldn’t anyone and everyone who could be considering the 25th Amendment right now?”

You can watch the clip below via YouTube:

Trump adviser attacks “phony” Gretchen Whitmer on Fox News after alleged plot to kidnap her revealed

Speaking on Fox News this Thursday, Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller took an opportunity to attack Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer after the FBI conducted arrests of a militia group that plotted to kidnap her.

Miller acknowledge that news of the kidnapping plot was “horrendous,” but said that Whitmer squandered a “moment of unity” and used it to attack President Trump for inspiring anti-government groups.

“If we want to talk about hatred, then Governor Whitmer, go look in the mirror,” Miller said. “The fact that she wakes up everyday with such hatred in her heart towards President Trump — I mean, President Trump is the one out there condemning these radical groups whether they be on the right or they be on the left . . . We’re all united standing against anyone who would conspire to cause such hatred and violence, there’s no place for that in American society in any way, shape, or form, but why Governor Whitmer would go attacking President Trump — people can see right through it. They can see Governor Whitmer is a complete phony.”

You can watch the video below via Twitter:

Incredible!

Jason Miller attacks Gretchen Whitmer, the target of a kidnapping plot, right after her presser:

"If we want to talk about hatred, then Gov. Whitmer, go look in the mirror! The fact that she wakes up every day with such hatred in her heart towards President Trump" pic.twitter.com/gGqMCVqga3

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) October 8, 2020

White House chief of staff hosted 70-person wedding in Georgia despite COVID-19 restrictions: report

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have publicly downplayed the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and failed to acknowledge the value of social distancing measures. One such Republican is White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who — according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution — hosted a “lavish wedding” in Atlanta in May that violated the city and state’s social distancing guidelines.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, has been an aggressive supporter of social distancing in her city and has had some major disagreements with Georgia’s far-right Republican governor, Brian Kemp, over the coronavirus pandemic — which, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has killed more than 1 million people worldwide and over 212,000 people in the United States. Back in May, under Bottoms’ stay-at-home order, gatherings of more than ten people were prohibited in Atlanta — and Georgia had a statewide social distancing order as well at the time. But according to Atlanta Journal Constitution reporters Patricia Murphy and Greg Bluestein, the wedding that Meadows hosted for his daughter had about seven times as many people.

“The wedding took place May 31 at the Biltmore Ballrooms in Midtown Atlanta,” Murphy and Bluestein report. “The 70 or so guests, including U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, donned tuxedos and ball gowns for the indoor affair, but no masks, as Meadows walked his daughter, Haley, down the aisle through a path of soft white flower petals. With crystal chandeliers, marble floors and a frame of soaring Roman arches, the lush scene could have come from any wedding magazine — were it not taking place at the height of a global pandemic.”

During the summer months, Kemp was criticized by many Democrats, including Bottoms, for being too quick to ease Georgia’s coronavirus restrictions. But according to Murphy and Bluestein, Kemp’s statewide coronavirus restrictions were still in place when Meadows hosted that wedding.

“Although the state of Georgia had loosened some restrictions by the end of May,” Murphy and Bluestein explain, “Gov. Brian Kemp’s orders at the time expressly banned gatherings of more than 10 people. The statewide order in effect — which Kemp signed on May 12 — restricted gatherings of more than 10 people so long as they’re not ‘transitory or incidental,’ or spread out across different locations.”

The reporters note that “pictures of the wedding reviewed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution show groups of people clustered closely together in the same room throughout the evening. Under that emergency order, law enforcement could have potentially written citations to the venue for exceeding the gathering size.”

Five months later, Murphy and Bluestein point out, Meadows is facing “intense criticism” for his leadership during the outbreak of COVID-19 infections plaguing the White House — and for a September 26 ceremony for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which took place in the White House Rose Garden.

“Photographs of the (September 26) event and a private indoor reception show few of the 200 guests wearing face masks or practicing social distancing, which public health experts have long stressed as essential safeguards to contain the illness,” Murphy and Bluestein note.

President Trump is back in the White House after being hospitalized with COVID-19, and other Trump allies who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus range from First Lady Melania Trump to White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany to Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to Senior Adviser Stephen Miller to Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel.

Land deal that got Trump a $21 million tax break being probed by New York attorney general: report

According to a new report from The Washington Post, a promise President Donald Trump made five years ago to preserve the forest around his luxurious mansion in Westchester County, N.Y., got him a $21.1 million tax break. Now, an investigation is underway to determine if he inflated the value of the land.

“The size of Trump’s tax windfall was set by a 2016 appraisal that valued Seven Springs at $56.5 million — more than double the value assessed by the three Westchester County towns that each contained a piece of the property,” The Post reports. “The valuation has now become a focal point of what could be one of the most consequential investigations facing President Trump as he heads into the election.”

Trump’s son Eric sat for a deposition in the case this Monday.

Read the full report over at The Washington Post.

Is Trump actually trying to sabotage his campaign? If so, he’s doing a heckuva job

If you didn’t know that President Trump was ill with COVID-19 and on some very strong drugs, or that even on a good day he tends to be impulsive and scatterbrained, you might think that he is trying to sabotage his re-election campaign. Some of his behavior the last few days has been downright self-destructive, so much so that it’s likely whatever staffers are still ambulatory after the virus swept through the White House wish his doctors had gone a little easier on the steroids and left him in bed, worn out and achy. Trump’s “proof of life” videos, the manic tweeting (even by his standards) and now the call-ins to his favorite Fox shows are downright surreal. But it’s the decisions he’s making that surely have them in despair.

The polling is brutal for Trump right now and he’s beginning to look like an albatross around the necks of Republicans in tough down-ticket races. The averages have Trump losing nationally by nearly 10 points and the battleground states are all going the wrong way. He is naturally “downplaying” these numbers, insisting to his voters that the polls are all fake and he’s actually leading across the board, but you could see the flop-sweat glistening under his makeup even before he developed a COVID fever.

Before Trump got sick, it seemed possible that he could keep the race close enough in certain swing states that Republican lawyers could challenge the vote count and find a way to squeak through with another Electoral College victory. It would be foolish to say that’s impossible, but the way Trump has been behaving ever since his first debate with Joe Biden in Cleveland has made it less likely to succeed. That flamboyantly vulgar performance was just one of a flood of poor decisions by Trump and his campaign.

Most important of those, of course, was the decision to treat the global pandemic like a political problem — or simply an image problem — that could be solved with spin and PR, rather than a serious public health crisis. But however grotesque and mercenary those decisions may have been, you could see a twisted logic at work, indecent as it was. Trump’s behavior in the last few days, on the other hand, has been politically suicidal.

First of all, there’s the fact that Trump caught the coronavirus and saw it spread like wildfire through the White House and the Republican Party. That was a stunning rebuke to the administration’s pandemic response that no amount of bravado can fix. Nothing could better illustrate the folly of his reckless disregard for the public health guidelines that most Americans are living with.

There is a price to pay for that. According to an ABC/Ipsos poll taken last weekend, 72 percent of adults agreed that the president did not take “the appropriate precautions when it came to his personal health” and “did not take the “risk of contracting the virus seriously enough.” As a result, his diagnosis not only didn’t bring him any sympathy, he actually lost support.

Still, one might have expected that he would see contracting the virus as an opportunity to shake up the race and try to woo back some voters who have rejected him. He might have done as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson did: Express some remorse for his previous attitude and exhort people to wear masks and practice social distancing.

It’s absurd to think Trump would ever do such a thing, of course. He’s incapable of anything like that. But I didn’t actually expect him to sally forth with ridiculous pageantry, as in his Mussolini-esque triumphant return to the White House where he mounted the steps, ostentatiously ripped off his mask and saluted.

He could have used the moment to empathize with other victims and their families, and to try to turn the page on that odious debate performance. Instead he has repeatedly filmed bizarre videos in which he once again downplays the virus, plays up his pseudo-miraculous recovery and touts the experimental drug he took, implying that not only did he personally usher it into production but prescribed it for himself. These delirious messages, along with his exhortation that people not allow the virus to “dominate” their lives, have widely been received as unsympathetic to all those who have suffered and died — and also as obtuse about the state of America’s medical care, which is nothing like the VIP treatment he received, and which he is trying to now trying to make dramatically worse.

He didn’t stop there. Indeed, he seems unable to control himself. Apparently realizing that he’s hemorrhaging support among older voters — who now seem to favor Biden by a wide margin — Trump put out another surreal video in which he said this:

Trump speaks to senior citizens about COVID: "You're not vulnerable, but they like to say the vulnerable, but you're the least vulnerable — but for this one thing you are vulnerable." pic.twitter.com/eyZDRwur1p

— The Recount (@therecount) October 8, 2020

Then he promised that all senior citizens would be getting his miracle cure. Now Trump is reportedly working on a “legally dubious” $8 billion plan to give seniors a $200 “gift certificate” for drugs, which is such a harebrained scheme it sounds like something he came up with when his fever was spiking. (He first tried to get drug companies to do it and they balked. Now he’s literally trying to steal money from the Medicare trust fund to benefit his re-election.)

Along with all this, Trump impulsively announced his administration would end negotiations on a new coronavirus relief bill, only to backpedal after someone reminded him that he could once again send out checks to million of people with his name on them. It’s possible some new legislative package can be thrown together before the election, but Trump’s confused meddling has probably erased any possible political benefit for him.

Flying in the face of his own PR campaign to be seen as a Man of Steel who is afraid of nothing, on Thursday he refused to acquiesce to the debate commission’s requirement that next week’s scheduled town-hall debate with Biden be held virtually. Pete Buttigieg handily dispatched his whining:

It's too bad Trump is afraid to debate next week. pic.twitter.com/4juvdgPfE7

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) October 8, 2020

Once again Trump had to reverse course after someone in his campaign, no doubt, gently suggested that he might want to debate since they are behind by 10 points! The Trump campaign suggested rescheduling the event but so far the Biden camp is having none of it. Another opportunity to shift the race, assuming that’s even possible, squandered.

And he’s been calling into Fox shows and sounding very confused, even for him. On Thursday morning he appeared on Fox Business and produced this gibberish:

Later that night he called in to Sean Hannity’s show and it was just as weird:

[blink] https://t.co/gDVH8ib4zP

— David Roberts (@drvolts) October 9, 2020

Trump said in one of his videos this week that getting COVID was a blessing from God. He meant it in some “I am Jesus, here to save the world” sort of way that didn’t make sense, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. He was offered an opportunity to change the trajectory of a campaign that was rapidly going south for him. He could have tried to milk his illness for sympathy and at least fake some compassion for the millions of other people who have suffered. But that’s just not in him. Instead, he’s used it to double down on everything the majority of Americans have come to loathe about him. Of course he did. It’s all he knows how to do.

4 key takeaways from the Harris-Pence VP debate

The Vice Presidential debate didn’t have the fireworks of the first presidential debate but Pence’s lies were just as egregious as Trump’s.

The only honest thing about Pence last night was the fly on his head.

From the moment he was tapped to be Donald Trump’s second-in-command, Mike Pence has served a single purpose: To put a placid, half-way respectable face on the disastrous, cruel policies of his boss. And that’s exactly what he did last night. Pence lied just like his boss, he flouted the debate rules like his boss, he evaded hard questions like his boss.

1. And just like Trump last week, Pence refused to condemn white supremacy.

After Harris highlighted Trump’s 2017 comments characterizing neo-Nazis in Charlottesville as “very fine people”, Pence attacked the media and tried to justify Trump’s despicable remarks. He touted the fact that Trump has Jewish grandchildren, as an apparent excuse for Trump’s repeated refusal to condemn white supremacy and tackle the lethal threat it poses. He concluded his non-answer by omitting any outright condemnation of white supremacy – instead claiming, outrageously, that systemic racism doesn’t exist.

2. He said he hoped Amy Coney Barrett would get a “fair hearing.”

As Kamala Harris pointed out, 4 million people have already voted in this election and 56 percent of Americans think the winner should fill the Supreme Court vacancy. Meanwhile, Pence’s boss has instructed Senate Republicans to stop negotiations over the stimulus, so Republicans can focus on ramming through Trump’s nominee, after they refused to give Obama’s nominee a vote for 293 days. There’s nothing fair about this process – and Pence knows it.

3. He doubled-down on Trump’s dangerous conspiracy theories.

When asked about Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, he rehashed Trump’s conspiracies about impeachment and the Russia investigation, and pushed Trump’s absurd claim that mail-in voting creates a “massive opportunity for fraud.” Rubbish. The right-wing Heritage Foundation, after examining 36 years of mail-in ballots, found only 1,285 cases of voter fraud out of nearly two billion votes cast — a rate of .0000007 percent.

4. Most importantly, Pence refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if Trump loses. This is a worrisome sign of what may be to come.

Throughout the entire debate, Pence talked over Kamala Harris and moderator Susan Page – who allowed him to go way overtime, avoid her questions, and lie endlessly. He showed utter contempt for the debate process. He even had the gall to demand Harris answer his own questions – in typical misogynistic fashion – even as he repeatedly evaded the moderator’s questions.

Make no mistake: Pence is a slick version of Trump, and just as dangerous as the liar-in-chief.

Wishing Donald Trump well: It’s just another way of normalizing the regime

Inevitably, at some point the bombmaker is hurt by his own creations.

Donald Trump has wielded the coronavirus as his own personal weapon. He does not care about the health and safety of the American people. He refuses to wear a mask to help stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Even though Trump knows how lethal the virus is, he encourages the American people not to wear masks either — and has hosted rallies and other large gatherings where people become infected with his plague. Trumpism is a type of religion, and for true believers refusing to wear a mask is an act of love and faith in the cult leader and godhead. In total, the pandemic has been a way for Trump to inflict pain and suffering on Americans who dare not support his regime.

Last week, Donald Trump tested positive for the coronavirus and was hospitalized.

In a recent interview with Democracy Now, Naomi Klein summarized the resulting moral predicament:

[W]e’re seeing a lot of Democrats sending thoughts and prayers this morning. You know, I really think we should see Trump getting COVID as the epidemiological equivalent of a mass shooting, where the shooter opens fire on the crowd and then turns the gun on himself. This is not a tragic accident. It is a crime scene and should be treated as such.

While Donald Trump was hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center, Americans as a group sent him well wishes and other positive energy for a speedy recovery. Joe Biden, along with Barack and Michelle Obama and other leading Democrats communicated their concerns for Trump’s health and their hope he would quickly recover from the coronavirus. Biden even went so far as to announce that he would stop running “negative ads” against Donald Trump during the time of the latter’s hospitalization.

But these wishes could not disguise or overwrite the fact that Donald Trump has become one of the most despised figures in American history.

For a brief moment when Trump’s illness was made public last Friday night and Saturday morning, there was a moment of raw joy and honesty on social media and elsewhere. Many were eager to celebrate Trump falling ill from a disease that he made so much worse for the American people. Schadenfreude was embraced as virtue.

In the Age of Trump, an interminable interval in history when a country and so many of its people have been bewildered by a surreal fog of lies, when truth itself has been assaulted, empirical reality has been held hostage and malignant reality has taken hold, such authentic emotions were a type of cathartic truth.

Of course, such a moment was not to be permitted. Social media companies did their best to mute the voices of those celebrating Trump’s illness. The editorial pages of some of the country’s leading newspapers chastened those who would celebrate Trump falling ill from a disease he repeatedly claimed had been perpetrated by the Democrats and the “fake news media.” The gatekeepers of public opinion deemed such sentiments to be outside of the approved limits of public discourse.

The right-wing media was of course quick to pounce on what its leading voices deemed to be “double standards” on the left. Writing at Vanity Fair, Tarisai Ngangura elaborates:

In the middle of all the cheerful posturing, however, was rage for the alleged lack of empathy being shown to the man who has made fun of people living with disabilities, who’s mocked Joe Biden’s “memory loss” and who hounded Hillary Clinton when she had pneumonia. Donald Trump Jr. shared a thread of blue-checkmark Twitter accounts that professed gladness at Trump’s diagnosis. Television personality Piers Morgan, a bastion of kindness and goodwill, tweeted, “Shocking and shameful” after Zara Rahim, a former national spokesperson for Hillary Clinton, allegedly tweeted her hope that Trump would die.

Mollie Hemingway, one of Trump’s most oft-quoted Fox News personalities, declared herself “disappointed, genuinely disappointed, to see the glee with which some people responded to this news,” and added that there is a “proper way to respond to this news. For people who pray, it is a good time to pray. You should be praying for your world leaders, your leader of your country, every day, but this is a good time to do it.”

At Slate, Dan Kois publicly struggled with his mixed feelings about Trump’s illness:

The burst of unseemly glee that accompanied the news of the president’s positive test was yet another salvo in this four-year war between my feelings, my intellect, and what I’ve always thought of as my morality. In 2020 the president’s malignancy has expanded. He now directly threatens the lives of every person in America. Over 200,000 of them have died so far, in large part because of his incompetence and cruelty. And so hearing that the virus he has spent months downplaying, lying about, and ignoring has, at long last, stricken him was a moment of such narrative perfection that its power was nearly overwhelming.

I’m not inclined to condemn people for finding the news of the past 36 hours, in addition to alarming and embarrassing, richly comic. To laugh at the shitstorm currently overwhelming the Republican Party, including Trump, is not to disrespect life, as the outraged tone police might insist. To laugh at what the Republicans and Donald Trump have brought upon themselves is to respect life, to understand that to take wanton risks with life was always a fool’s game. It may not reflect well on the state of my soul that I’m watching this entirely predictable panic in two branches of the government with mordant mirth, but we’ve all been damaged by the last four years, haven’t we?

Whatever one thinks are the most appropriate feelings about Trump and the coronavirus, the default expectation that the American people should send the stricken president good wishes is another example of how far Trump and his fascist movement have been normalized in the first place.

This normalization of Trump continues because basic, fundamental realities about him and his regime are still being denied, treated as forbidden thoughts.

First, in the worst ways possible Donald Trump is not a normal human being. His presidency is abnormal and a betrayal of the country’s professed democratic values, beliefs and institutions. Trump and his regime are motivated by cruelty.

Donald Trump has shown himself to be a sociopath, if not a psychopath. He is cruel and malevolent. He is a fascist and an authoritarian. He hates democracy. He only knows how to destroy and not create. He is a white supremacist and misogynist. He has been credibly accused of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment by dozens of women. His willful sabotage and interference with the country’s coronavirus relief efforts are a crime against humanity and an act of de facto genocide, for which — in a better world — he should face criminal prosecution.

Trump is endlessly corrupt. He encourages political violence by his supporters. He does not care about the common good or the general welfare of the American people. He has betrayed his oath of office in many ways and on multiple occasions. He colluded with a hostile foreign country to steal the 2016 presidential election and tried to do it again in 2020.

Moreover, at present Donald Trump is not even trying to convalesce as a normal person might. He has returned to his campaign of chaos with redoubled intensity, sending out more than 120 Twitter messages since Monday. In those tweets, Trump has threatened Biden, Obama, Hillary Clinton and others with prison — or worse — for attempting to stage a “coup” against him. Trump has also attacked the FBI for “betraying” him and also being part of a “plot” to overthrow him. Trump cannot resist his racist impulses, and continues trying to scare white people with tales about Black and brown people rampaging through “the suburbs.”

While purportedly ill with the coronavirus, Donald Trump has also appeared in increasingly peculiar staged videos, in which he has proclaimed himself miraculously healed and more powerful than ever, like some type of super-being.

Donald Trump is a political extortionist. As he did several days ago when he ended negotiations for a pandemic stimulus bill, Trump is again trying to extort the American people into voting for him — this time by promising a free universal “cure” for the coronavirus. (No such thing exists, of course.)

In perhaps the vilest example of his recent behavior, as he was leaving the hospital last Monday Donald Trump proclaimed via Twitter:

I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!

That statement echoes Trump’s reported comments that military service members who are captured or killed in battle are “suckers” and “stupid.” Trump truly believes that people who get sick or die from the coronavirus somehow deserve their fate because of “weakness” and how they lack “good genes” like his.

Ultimately, it’s clear that Donald Trump does not care about other people. Thus he should be treated according to his own version of the golden rule: Do unto him as he has done onto others.

Most people who fall ill from the coronavirus — or who have otherwise been affected by the pandemic —of course deserve our unqualified sympathy, care, and concern. More than 212,000 Americans have died and more than 7.6 million have been infected. Many were older people living in managed-care facilities. Many were poor or working-class people who did not have the option of working their jobs from home. For example, the employees and service staff in the White House and elsewhere who were not given proper protection from Donald Trump and his coronavirus-infected inner circle.

Mary Trump, the president’s niece, agrees with these sentiments. On Twitter she recently expressed her sense of “sympathy, empathy, and despair for those who are sick and for those who have died because they were misled, lied to, or ignored.” Donald Trump would be excluded by those criteria.

Trump’s cultists who refuse to wear masks also do not deserve unqualified sympathy, care and concern when they become infected by the coronavirus.

During the last weeks remaining until Election Day, the mainstream news media should suspend its anthropological expeditions to TrumpLandia where they interview “white working class” people in diners, barbershops, bars and churches in an effort to decode their undying loyalty to Donald Trump. That energy would be better spent (and more revealing of the truth) on interviewing those Americans who are eager to see Trump receive his karmic comeuppance for the cruelty and harm he has inflicted on our nation and a people.

Righteous anger can move worlds. On Election Day and afterward, we will discover if that energy is enough to defeat Trump and drive his movement of hatred and lies back to the periphery of American life.

Vice-Presidential debate: Pence and Harris play “not it” over fracking ban, Green New Deal

When moderator Susan Page brought up climate change during Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate, both Mike Pence and Kamala Harris seemed remarkably prepared.

Maybe that’s because last week, when Chris Wallace broke 12 years of debate question silence on the issue during the painful interruption contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, he forced the candidates to extrapolate on the subject for nearly 10 minutes. The exchange caught the president (and us!) a tad off-guard. So this time, the vice-presidential hopefuls had talking points at the ready.

Both Pence and Harris rushed to paint themselves as pro-science — not a surprising goal given that in 2020, more acres have burned in the western U.S. than ever before, hurricanes are tearing through the alphabet at record speed, and a global pandemic has killed more than 200,000 Americans. But despite their environmental claims, both candidates seemed most concerned with painting their ticket as sufficiently pro-fracking, bickering repeatedly about Joe Biden’s supposed position on the practice.

Here’s how it all went down: Just 30 minutes into the debate, Harris used a question about the economy as an opportunity to take a stab at the current administration’s failure to pass meaningful legislation rebuilding U.S. roads and bridges. She then touted Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan to create millions of jobs in infrastructure projects and renewable energy.

“There was a time when our country believed in science,” the California senator said, referencing Biden’s planned investment in research and development.

But Pence wasn’t about to let his opponent get away with using the words “jobs,” “science,” and “renewable energy” without a fight. He struck back with one of the two “worst” environmental epithets of the night: Green New Deal supporter.

“They want to bury our economy under a $2 trillion Green New Deal,” he said of his opponents, referencing the price tag on Biden’s climate plan (which is inspired by, but hardly identical to, the so-called Green New Deal resolution introduced by Senator Ed Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). Pence went on to falsely claim that a Biden administration would ban fracking and abolish fossil fuels altogether, costing the country hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Harris did not mince words in response. “Joe Biden will not ban fracking,” she said. “He’s been very clear about that.” (Not only has Biden said he doesn’t want to ban fracking, he does not have the authority to do so, as it would require an act of Congress.) Nevertheless, Pence kept the lie going throughout the evening.

Minutes later, Page officially turned the debate over to climate change, first asking Pence whether he believed that climate change posed an existential threat. Just as he did when asked the same question last year during an excruciating interviewwith CNN, Pence dodged and weaved his way around the matter.

“The climate is changing,” Pence said. “The issue is: What is the cause? And what do we do about it? President Trump has made it clear that we’re going to continue to listen to science.”

Pence recycled claims made previously by various members of the Trump administration: namely, that “our air and land are cleaner than any time ever recorded,” the Paris Agreement was a bad deal for the U.S., and that Biden and Harris want to “abolish” fossil fuels. He also downplayed the role of climate change in 2020’s long list of major disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes. Instead, he called for better forest management and noted that hurricanes are not actually more frequent than they were 100 years ago (both technically true, but incomplete assessments).

From a pro-science standpoint, Pence’s climate statements left much to be desired. And yet Harris, despite her strong record on climate policy, did not seem particularly eager to fill the environmental void. Rather than tout the two environmental justice bills she recently introduced in the Senate, she barely spoke about any of her or Biden’s climate policies (aside from green jobs). Instead, she spent the majority of the climate portion of the debate trying to convince the American public that Biden was NOT GOING TO BAN FRACKING!

Without going into exactly how, Harris offered this dual promise on behalf of her ticket: “We will achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, carbon-neutral by 2035,” she said. “Joe has a plan.”

She just wants to make sure you understand that plan is NOT the Green New Deal.

Self-funding QAnon candidate gave own campaign $450,000 after getting PPP loan

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon conspiracy theorist and Republican candidate who is expected to win her House race in Georgia next month, donated $450,000 to her own campaign after receiving a six-figure Paycheck Protection Program loan from the government for her construction company.

Greene, who has promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory and posted videos attacking Black people, Muslims and Jews, won the Republican primary in Georgia’s 14th congressional district in August despite opposition from Republican leaders. She is almost certain to take over the seat now held by retiring Republican Rep. Tom Graves, especially after her Democratic opponent dropped out of the race last month in a district President Trump carried by 50 points. Trump has since praised Greene as a “future Republican star.”

Greene’s bid was partially funded by a super PAC allied with the House Freedom Caucus, which has opposed additional funding to provide coronavirus relief to Americans. Greene has opposed additional spending as well, declaring in a Facebook video that “the best stimulus for Americans is allowing Americans to go back to work!”

Despite her opposition to the stimulus funding and the PPP, her family’s company, Taylor Commercial, received a six-figure PPP loan worth between $150,000 and $350,000 earlier this year. New York Magazine reported that her name had stopped appearing on the company’s registration forms in 2012 but was added back in 2019.

Greene, who had loaned her campaign $900,000, donated $450,000 to her campaign about two months after the PPP loan, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Her main opponent in the Republican primary, neurosurgeon John Cowan, raised questions about the donation during the campaign.

“Earlier this week, you said that you didn’t want Congress to pass more COVID-related emergency funds for businesses. But your business took as much as $350,000 in PPP loans from the federal government at the same time you were putting $900,000 into your campaign,” Cowan told Greene during a debate in July. “So if you don’t need the money and you have the discretionary funds, will you commit to returning that money to the citizens?”

Greene accused Cowan of being “disconnected” from business owners and “people who have struggled during this government shutdown.”

“I am appalled at the fact that you cannot comprehend that I have a construction company and we can’t do construction remotely at home,” she said, not denying that she opposed the very funds that her company drew from.

“Construction companies were considered essential and they didn’t shut down,” Cowan shot back. “So you were making plenty of money — plus you used $900,000 of your own money during the campaign. Don’t you think you had a little extra to pay your employees? I find it disingenuous that you took money from taxpayers to pay for your employees while you were paying yourself.”

Spencer Hogg, Cowan’s campaign manager, later said in a statement that Greene’s company “wasn’t one of those facing hardships.”

“She says she’s a fiscal conservative, she said last week that she opposed additional emergency funding for businesses forced to close because of COVID, but as we’ve seen on multiple issues, Marjorie doesn’t let principle interfere with self-interest,” he said in a statement. “If she has enough money to spend nearly $1 million to advance her own political ambitions, then she has enough to pay her employees, particularly in an industry that didn’t have to stop working during the lockdown.”

Greene’s campaign did not respond to questions from Salon.

Greene is not the only Republican candidate who has self-funded a campaign while taking PPP loans.

Former Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., received a PPP loan for one of his companies worth between $150,000 and $350,000 in May, weeks before he loaned his campaign $150,000. Issa, who has a net worth of $280 million to $400 million and was the richest member of Congress between 2000 and 2018, is trying to stage a political comeback by running for the Southern California seat recently vacated by convicted former Rep. Duncan Hunter, a Republican.

Issa’s Democratic opponent ,Ammar Campa-Najjar, called for “millionaires like Darrell Issa” to be banned from collecting PPP loans during a debate last week.

Issa said at the debate that he opposed funding the PPP entirely, arguing it would be “foolhardy” and that “paying people not to work has run its course.”

Another California Republican candidate, Michelle Steele, also received a PPP loan worth between $150,000 and $350,000 in April for her family law firm. She donated $500,000 to her campaign in California’s 48th congressional district against Rep. Harley Rouda, a Democratic freshman narrowly elected in the 2018 “blue wave.”

Rep. Vern Buchanan, a Florida Republican, received PPP loans worth up to $7 million for his auto dealerships before donating $250,000 to his campaign.

Accountable.US, a progressive watchdog group that tracks recipients of PPP loans, called on all four candidates to return the money to taxpayers.

“The PPP program was meant to save jobs, not bail out business owners looking for a gig in D.C.,” spokesman Derek Martin said in a statement to Salon. “These candidates should return this money and tell the president to get back to work on a relief bill that will help all Americans during this pandemic.”

Will Republican cultists die for their dear leader?

Donald Trump is covering up just how he and 18 White House aides and supporters got the coronavirus. That’s the latest proof that he doesn’t care about you or anyone else.

Instead of shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, spraying lead bullets out of a gun, Trump sprayed the deadly coronavirus with every word coming out of his unmasked mouth.

Among those whose lives are now at risk – the seven children of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who sat mask-less in the Rose Garden on Sept. 26 when Trump announced their mother was his Supreme Court nominee. As an exercise in atrocious judgment bringing children to a crowded event during a pandemic and not masking them should be enough to establish that Barrett is unfit to sit on any bench.

Then there’s the infected Kellyanne Conway, who said that she quit the White House to be with her troubled teenage daughter.

And what about the 11-month-old baby of Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s press secretary? McEnany has tested positive after again and again showing her fealty to the imaged great leader by going mask-less. Does anyone doubt that if McEnany were a poor black or brown woman—or a Jew or Muslim in a Bible Belt county—that child protective services would be investigating whether to remove the infant Blake for her own safety?

Accepting sickness

This is what happens when a cult arises. The leader is special and believers most demonstrate without even being asked that the messages the leader conveys have been internalized. And if he uses tricks and deceits to fool the public you must go along to remain in his good graces even if it exposes you and your newborn to sickness, lifelong health problems and even death.

The reason, rationality and civil debate envisioned by our Founders and Framers have no place in Trump’s anti-democratic cult. All that matters is loyalty to the leader, a loyalty that runs only one way.

As for lies, it’s hard to top what Trump tweeted Monday before his skillfully timed departure from Walter Reed hospital, a staged event that consumed the entire evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC.

Irresponsible

“Don’t be afraid of COVID,” Trump tweeted before the brilliantly staged pageantry began in what may go down as his single most irresponsible advice during the pandemic that has claimed more American lives in well under a year than combat in World War I, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

That tweet, the flags and dramatic lighting at the White House as the sun set while Trump, his face and hair professionally pampered, posed triumphantly were all part of a propaganda pageant slicker than any event staged by Il Duce, Adolf or Trump’s personal heroes, Putin and Kim.

When it comes to using images to kill rationality and stir cultish emotions, Trump has outdone even Leni Riefenstahl. Hitler, incidentally, at least had the smidgen of decency to not expose his beloved propaganda filmmaker to the risk of death by virus, as Trump did his photographer and videographer, among others, at the White House Monday evening.

Coverup

The Trump virus spreading coverup can be seen in the highly restricted contract tracing being undertaken by the White House medical staff. Trump has coronavirus tracers looking only for who was within death shot of his breath, but only since Thursday, Oct. 1.

That’s after the Tuesday night debate in Cleveland where Trump and his family arrived late, were not tested and sat mask-less. Did they do it because they knew or had reason to suspect that at least one of them was infected? We don’t know because the Trumps aren’t talking about it. Eventually, we will find out.

We do know that, so far, Joe Biden and his family have tested negative. Trump’s reckless disregard in exposing Biden to the virus is morally indefensible and verges on the criminal.

And what about Trump’s rally in Duluth on Wednesday where he pumped up a crowd of mask-less fans?

Minnesota Public Health Department officials are telling the 3,000 attendees to self-quarantine if they were near the president. State Sen. Paul Gazelka, the majority leader, State Rep. Kurt Daudt, the House minority leader, are in quarantine. The My Pillow guy, who spoke at the rally, said he was never close to Trump that night.

Careless Trump believers

Three Minnesota Congressmen, Republicans all, flew back to Washington with Trump on Air Force One and then returned to the Gopher state on Delta Airlines in apparent violation of its rules for those exposed to the coronavirus. This is how disregard for the sanctity of human life spreads like waves from a rock dropped in a pond or, worse, that sinks after skipping across the surface like a candidate touching down for campaign rallies.

Oops, not rallies. Trump says his gatherings of fans are better described as protests against mask-wearing.

But he is using his departure from the hospital, no doubt against medical advice, in a crass appeal to raise money while discouraging people from following the well-established science of how to stop spreading the virus, knowledge that dates to the mid-)19th Century.

That letter is the drugs talking. The powerful steroids Trump was given can make you rage with emotions and feel invincible for a time. I know because it happened to me a dozen years ago, a terrible side effect that afflicts some people given steroids for sound medical reasons.

Trump draws crowds because the majority of Americans have real economic grievances, as I’ve written about for decades including these recent DCReport pieces. Indeed, Trump ran for office using many of the phrases he heard me say on television about how Washington policies hurt 90% of Americans.

While he pledged in his inaugural address that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer” his actions documented by DCReport show that he never gave them a thought.

Household staff at risk

Trump also pledged that “at the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens” and “this American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Trump doesn’t care about the health of the nearly 100 White House household staff, many of them men and women of color, who served loyally one president and his family after another. He doesn’t care about the Secret Service agents he made ride in an SUV so he could wave at his fans outside the hospital. When each Secret Service agent pledged to forfeit their own life it was to defend a president under assault, not preening for the television cameras. They are to him what you are, not a human being but an object to be used, abused and then conveniently cast aside or literally buried.

When he took office, Trump expressed a belief that “we are one nation – and their pain is our pain. Their dreams are our dreams; and their success will be our success. We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.”

Trump’s lack of regard, lack of decency and rejection of medical science may give us one destiny, but it will be anything but glorious now that coronavirus cases have moved back up to 43,000 a day and rising.

“From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land,” Trump proclaimed when he took office. “From this moment on, it’s going to be America First.”

And it is now first. It’s America first in coronavirus deaths, in needless pain, in unnecessary economic suffering. Especially, Trump has made America first in unwanted death.

Siding with Big Pharma, Trump overrules FDA on stricter COVID-19 vaccine standards

Taking the advice of profit-driven pharmaceutical corporations over that of his own public health agencies and experts, President Donald Trump is blocking the Food and Drug Administration from imposing tougher safety requirements on the authorization of a coronavirus vaccine after drug company executives privately voiced disapproval with the push for stricter federal standards.

Politico reported late Monday that the White House’s “decision to halt release of new standards for emergency authorization of a Covid-19 vaccine came after officials close to [Trump] told the FDA that the pharmaceutical industry had objected to the tougher requirements.”

“The White House cited the private-sector opposition as a chief reason for blocking the guidelines, which aim to hold companies’ vaccines to a higher bar for safety and effectiveness and would likely push any authorization beyond Election Day,” according to Politico. “The fact that the president was siding with drug makers over his own regulators in shelving the guidance… adds a new dimension to concerns about White House interference in the FDA.”

Trump’s stonewalling of more stringent federal standards comes amid widespread concerns that the president’s politically motivated push for approval of a coronavirus vaccine before November 3 could result in a product that is insufficiently tested and unsafe. Late Monday, shortly after his release from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the president declared that “vaccines are coming momentarily”—a timeline scientists have rejected.

During the presidential debate last week with Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Trump dismissed more cautious vaccine timelines suggested by experts in his own administration as “very political” and said pharmaceutical executives have personally told him that “they can go faster than that by a lot.”

“I’ve spoken to Pfizer, I’ve spoken to all of the people that you have to speak to, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and others,” the president said.

When Biden said he trusts scientists over Trump, the president responded, “You don’t trust Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer?”

As Common Dreams reported last month, the CEO of pharma giant Eli Lilly insisted that the drug industry can police itself as it works to develop an effective coronavirus vaccine—a claim watchdog group Accountable.US dismissed as “like the wolf saying he’ll guard the henhouse.”

“This is an absolutely egregious breach of public trust and clear politicization of what should be a vaccine approval process based on science and public health,” Eli Zupnick, spokesperson for Accountable Pharma, said in a statement Tuesday. “The timeline for vaccine approval should be dictated by what’s in the best interests of patients and the country, not what is best for President Trump’s political future.”

“The White House must retract this interference with the scientists and public health experts at the FDA,” Zupnick added, “and must stop undermining the already eroded public trust in their vaccine approval process.”

Trump just blocked @US_FDA guidance for stricter guidelines around the emergency approval of a #COVID19 vaccine.

This is a major breach of public trust.https://t.co/oe7XgKUgRs

— Accountable.US (@accountable_us) October 6, 2020

As the New York Times reported Monday, “a main sticking point” for the Trump White House has been the FDA’s “recommendation that volunteers who have participated in vaccine clinical trials be followed for a median of two months after the final dose before any authorization is granted.”

“Given where the clinical trials stand, that two-month follow-up period would all but preclude any emergency clearance before Election Day,” noted the Times, which reported that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows—a former Republican congressman with no public health or scientific expertise—has been leading the charge against the stricter FDA standards.

“This administration is a menace to public health,” tweeted Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine and surgery at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Joseph Sakran, a public health expert and trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medicine, said the Trump White House’s blocking of tougher vaccine safety guidelines is further “political manipulation of science—this is exactly what so many of us were worried about.”

Mitch McConnell admits he hasn’t been inside the White House in months for safety reasons

With President Donald Trump and many of his Republican allies in the White House having been infected with COVID-19, many of his critics are warning that setting foot inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue could be a health threat. But one needn’t be a Trump critic to feel that way. None other than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has, in essence, admitted that he hasn’t been inside the White House in two months because of the lack of social distancing precautions.

“I haven’t actually been to the White House since August the 6th,” McConnell said. “Because my impression was that their approach to how to handle this is different from mine and what I suggested that we do in the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing.”

The remarks came at an event in Kentucky, streamed on Facebook.

It was a striking admission, given that President Donald Trump has faced withering criticism for his failure to handle the pandemic in the United States, which has now killed more than 210,000 people. Critics have argued that the recent outbreak of cases at the White House, affecting many top officials including the president himself and which may have centered around the ceremony celebrating the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

Other prominent Republicans who have recently tested positive for COVID-19, in addition to Trump, include long-time adviser Kellyanne Conway, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Senior Adviser Stephen Miller, Bill Stepien (Trump’s campaign director), Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, among others.

Trump’s “miracle” COVID-19 treatment was developed using cells derived from an aborted fetus: report

President Donald Trump has not been shy in his praise for the experimental COVID-19 treatments he received after testing positive last week. In videos posted to Twitter, the president has falsely hailed the therapeutics as “cures” and “miracles coming down from God.”

One of the treatments made available to Trump would have been defeated by his own efforts to thwart the scientific research that made it possible: fetal cell tissue from abortions.

According to Trump’s personal physician, Dr. Sean Conley, the president received a high-dose infusion of monoclonal antibodies last Friday as part of his treatment for COVID-19 infection. Trump was one of the first 10 patients who received the treatment under “compassionate use” emergency access, Salon earlier reported. Several hours after the injection, the president was flown to Walter Reed Medical Center.

The fully-human antibody molecules, made by the pharmaceutical company Regeneron, come from two sources: antibodies identified from humans who have recovered from COVID-19 and the company’s “VelocImmune” mice, which have been genetically modified to have a human immune system, according to a statement provided to Salon by the drug manufacturer.

The lab tests used to evaluate the effectiveness of the antibodies were derived from what the MIT Technology Review pointed out was a standard cell supply known as HEK 293T. It originated as kidney tissue derived from an abortion in the Netherlands in 1973, the same year Roe v. Wade was decided.

Those cells have since been “immortalized” in labs — they keep dividing endlessly, similar to cancerous growth — and have gone through other genetic changes, according to MIT. Over such a length of time, they can become disassociated from their origin.

“It’s how you want to parse it,” a Regeneron spokesperson told MIT. “But the 293T cell lines available today are not considered fetal tissue, and we did not otherwise use fetal tissue.”

But the line connecting the cell lines remains unbroken. The president undeniably benefited medically from cells originating from aborted fetuses.

Regeneron told MIT that other labs also use 293T cells to make what it describes as “pseudoparticles,” or virus-like bodies which have the coronavirus’ “spike” protein. Those particles are necessary in order to test how different antibodies work against the virus. Both antibodies in Regeneron’s treatment would have gone through those tests, MIT reported.

The Trump administration has restricted medical research using fetal tissue from abortions. In 2019, Trump himself overrode top administration scientists, such as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Alex Azar, and tightened the reins on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fund such research. It was an effort pushed by Vice President Mike Pence in an apparent appeal to religious conservative voters.

“This is a major pro-life victory, and we thank President Trump for taking decisive action,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, a lobbying group which opposes abortion, said at the time. “It is outrageous and disgusting that we have been complicit, through our taxpayer dollars, in the experimentation using baby body parts.”

Sometime that year, the Food and Drug Administration website removed a PDF explaining the genesis and use of HEK 293 fetal cells, according to Salon’s search of the Internet Archive.

This August, the Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board — which the HHS established in February, and comprises a number of anti-abortion appointees — recommended that Azar not fund 13 out of 14 research proposals which incorporated fetal cells.

While those rejections keyed in on blocking access to new abortion tissue — as opposed to research involving common cell lines already in use for many years — some scientists want to study abortion tissue precisely so they can create new cell lines.

Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett is an anti-choice religious conservative, and the court will likely soon see a case on burial requirements for fetal tissue.

According to a statement provided by Regeneron to Salon, development and manufacturing of the president’s “miracle” antibody cocktail was accomplished in part with federal funds from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which operates under the HHS and partners with the NIH, whose funding for research has been targeted by Trump and other administration conservatives.

In a video posted Wednesday to social media, Trump said he would make the abortion derived treatment available to COVID-19 patients “for free.”

Trump’s claim to have been “cured” of COVID-19 is “bombastic” and not based in fact, experts say

Although President Donald Trump claimed on Wednesday that the special treatment he had received for COVID-19 had “cure[d]” him, scientists agree that the president has not in fact been cured — and that by claiming so on video, he is spreading dangerous disinformation about how COVID-19 is treated and how the novel coronavirus infects the body.

In his video, Trump claimed that his novel coronavirus infection was “a blessing from God” because his treatment proved “much more important to me than the vaccine.” He claimed that the experimental antibody cocktail given to him by Regeneron, REGN-COV2, “wasn’t just therapeutic, it made me better. I call that a cure.” He also claimed that he was going to arrange it so that people could receive this drug for “free.”

Salon spoke with a number of doctors and public health experts, all of whom agreed that the notion of Trump having been “cured” by his medical treatment is outrageous.

“It would be VERY unusual for him not to still be infected,” Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean emeritus and professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Salon by email. “There is always the possibility that the unlicensed cocktail of monoclonal antibodies he received early in the course of his disease was unusually effective; but that would be very unlikely until real data are seen. More likely, he is being ‘Trump,’ made more bombastic by the heightened sense that the dexamethasone he received commonly causes.”

Sommer’s comment about dexamethasone refers to how the steroid, which is prescribed to COVID-19 patients when doctors are concerned about severely lowered oxygen levels and want to prevent a patient’s immune system from fatally overreacting, can cause side effects; those include severe mood swings, insomnia and nervousness. Less common psychological side effects include confusion, depression, delirium, hallucinations and paranoia.

Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, told Salon that even if the president misspoke and meant to say he is “immune” to the disease, rather than “cured,” even that would not make any sense given what we know about the science of COVID-19.

“What we do know is the president has been infected with COVID-19 and he is currently going through a period in which the disease will run its course,” Medford told Salon. “His statement that he is immune is not based on any obvious facts to the case and a full and complete immune response would not be expected to occur until later, if at all, in the course of this disease.”

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, echoed these thoughts, writing to Salon that “his claim about being cured is wrong. Nothing currently exists that can cure this disease. Your body has to recover from it. The medications he was given helps his body recover a bit faster and reduces his symptoms. But he has to heal naturally which may take weeks.”

Based on known science, the novel coronavirus has an incubation period of roughly 14 days, and the infected who develop symptoms are likely to start doing so within four or five days of contracting the virus. Throughout that two week period, people with COVID-19 remain highly contagious, which is why they are often held under quarantine. While there are ways of treating sufferers, there is no evidence so far that any of them are “cures.”

“COVID-19 has some established and emerging treatments for it and has a variety of clinical manifestations even without treatment, including complete resolution,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, wrote to Salon. “There is not yet evidence that a particular treatment — e.g. the monoclonal antibody that President Trump received — cured him of COVID-19.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Trump’s most prominent adviser in dealing with the pandemic, expressed similar thoughts to The New York Times. As Fauci explained to the publication, “I think it’s a reasonably good chance that the antibody that he received, the Regeneron antibody, made a significant difference in a positive way in his course.” At the same time, when you have only one case study, “you can’t make the determination that that’s a cure. You have to do a clinical trial involving a large number of individuals, compared either to a placebo or another intervention.”

Science aside, Trump’s statements regarding his medical treatments, and their accessibility to the general public, are similarly misinformed. The medical treatments he received are unlikely to be available to the average American. REGN-COV2 has not yet been authorized for production by the Food and Drug Administration, and Trump was only able to access the drug because of a compassionate use permission request made by Trump’s staff. Trump’s elite status as president seems to have played into the decision to authorize use: “When it’s the president of the United States, of course, that gets — obviously — gets our attention,” Regeneron’s CEO told the New York Times.

In addition to dexamethasone and REGN-COV2, Trump also received an antiviral drug called remdesivir, which is thought to possibly hasten recovery time in patients. Although Trump claims he would make this free for Americans, the medication regimen that he received is extremely costly and would likely only be available to all Americans if they had access to the same military health care system that Trump used — which is, in effect, a single-payer health care system specifically for the military and veterans.

“[It’s] way too expensive” for ordinary Americans, as Dr. William Haseltine, the founder and former CEO of Human Genome Sciences, told Salon. “In addition, you have to be in a hospital where they’re going to stick a needle in your arm and infuse it over a long period of time. And the same thing is true for that five day course of remdisivir. You’ve got to infuse that in the hospital over a five day course. So he was getting two drugs that required intrusions, the kind of stuff that makes you feel like a pin cushion.”

There are also ethical concerns about Trump’s repeated touting of Regeneron. Trump’s video caused a 4.7% increase in Regeneron stock. The president used to own stock in the company and he is friendly with its CEO, Leonard Schleifer, who is a member of one of Trump’s golf clubs and whom the president calls “Lenny.”

Is Trump “reaping what he sowed”? Spiritual leaders address views on sinners with conflicted flock

About an hour after President Donald Trump confirmed on Twitter that he and his wife had tested positive for the novel coronavirus, I sent a very early morning text to my friend who is a Presbyterian minister asking her how she planned on contextualizing the news for her largely liberal congregation. “I’m not totally sure yet,” she responded. “But my inbox is already flooded.”

Flooded with notes from church members who were navigating a complex emotional cocktail of schadenfreude — which is understandable considering the president’s egregious mismanagement of the pandemic and his history of abhorrent personal and political stances— and guilt for taking pleasure in the news of Trump’s diagnosis.

“It’s going to be a lot of answering notes that ultimately amount to, ‘Am I bad a person for feeling what I feel?’ and an opportunity to discuss what the Bible says about good and evil,” she texted.

As Salon’s Nicole Karlis wrote on Wednesday, many Americans in general are struggling with similar feelings and, from a therapists’ perspective, it’s completely normal. Karlis spoke with Amalia Miralrío, LCSW, LMSW, M.Ed, who said that that a “reaction of joyful schadenfreude to Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis could be a way for some to reclaim power in an otherwise powerless relationship dynamic.”

“It’s a way of reclaiming that sense of power, a way of feeling like someone who has exerted abuse of power and control over you and when that person suddenly loses some of that, you feel that you are gaining a greater sense of equality in the dynamic,” Miralrío said. “It’s normal to have this emotional response when you are feeling really disempowered in a relationship and feeling that someone is actually trying to harm you.”

With that in mind, religious leaders all across the country are preparing for services this weekend which will be filled, virtually or otherwise, with congregants who have spent days contemplating their spiritual obligations — especially in traditions where forgiveness is a central tenet — in these unprecedented times.

For Rabbi Bryan Mann, who is the Rachlin Director of Jewish Student Life at Vassar College, the first person to call him for spiritual counsel was actually his mother.

“She was like, ‘What does Judaism say about this?’ Mann said. “And it’s interesting because there is a Jewish prayer that we say as part of the weekday Amidah that is all about eradicating the wicked, and praying for wickedness to be removed from the earth, and for wicked people to be removed from the earth.”

Mann continued: “On the flip side, there’s this really well-known story from the Talmud where there’s a rabbi who has some bandits hanging out in his neighborhood. He kind of prays for all of them to die, and his wife, Beruriah, says, ‘Don’t pray for them to die — pray that they will essentially stop sinning. That’s how we eradicate wickedness.'”

Those are, Mann acknowledges, two seemingly divergent teachings (“As the old joke goes, two Jews, three opinions, right?” he says with a laugh), but there’s a lesson to be learned in holding tension between both.

“I feel like Judaism and Jewish teachers are known for asking more questions than providing more answers, if you will,” Mann said. “But I really think, especially with college students, I really want to open up to those bigger questions and do a deep dive of these two very different sources. What do we do when we feel like there’s a person who is very wicked on this earth? And what happens when we’ve seen a pattern of behavior that doesn’t seem to be changing?”

Mann also stressed that he’s not the kind of spiritual leader who shames people for their thoughts, especially when those thoughts may be rooted in some kind of trauma. This is something that Perry Dixon, an associate pastor at Highland Baptist Church in Louisville, says is front of mind as he prepares his sermon for this weekend.

“[Trump] is at the helm of so much suffering,” Dixon said. “We literally have church members in the hospital and on a ventilator from COVID. We’ve had a number that have been diagnosed and tested positive, and they’re now watching the president minimize the suffering for people.”

Speaking to the hardships of his congregants — the LGBTQ members who are concerned over Supreme Court threats to overturn marriage equality, the members who are ill and financially stressed due to the novel coronavirus pandemic — is a way to display truth as a Biblical virtue.

“For me in the pulpit, I need to speak the truth where I can,” Dixon said. “For me, that’s rooting it in our church members’ experiences.”

Rev. Jonah Overton is the lead pastor at Zao MKE, a Milwaukee church they started after seeking out local religious communities where they could both love Jesus and also be embraced “in some of [their] own marginalized identities, including [their] queerness that transness.” As such, Overton understands that their church members may be experiencing some complicated feelings.

“I think we’re all having a mix of emotions right now,” Overton said. “As somebody who leads a congregation full of people who have been directly or indirectly harmed by the abuses of power by the president, it’s a complicated moment to see him suffering from the fallout of the abuses of those powers.”

They continued: “I think that one of the things that any conversation about compassion or prayer towards the president in general, but particularly in light of this illness, has to contend with is that President Trump is right now fundamentally reaping what he’s sowed.”

Overton said that Christians can simultaneously lament the evil that Trump has cultivated in the world, hold him accountable for the actions that he has taken — or failed to take — that have harmed other people, and still have compassion for him as a child of God. They would encourage people who are struggling with their complex feelings about Trump and his illness to recognize that having both a desire for both justice and understanding is not only natural, but right.

“Holding those things in tension is at the heart of the Gospel and the way that Jesus taught and lived,” they said.

Trump and McConnell’s mostly white male judges buck 30-year trend of increasing bench diversity

In nominating Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, President Donald Trump fulfilled his pledge to put another woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.

But most of the 218 judges Trump has so far appointed to the federal judiciary — with the steadfast collaboration of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — are not women or judges of color.

Our study on judicial diversity, which ended in July 2020, shows that Trump-appointed judges are 85% white and 76% men — the least diverse group of federal judges seen since Ronald Reagan.

This bucks a 30-year historical trend of increasing diversity on the bench, our research shows. Using data from the Federal Judicial Center, we collected demographic information on all lower court judges and their predecessors dating back to the Carter administration.

Trump’s appointments have made the federal judiciary less diverse. And our research as scholars of judicial politics suggests that could erode the legitimacy of the judicial system.

Trends in judicial appointments

For our study, we created a simple tool that measures how American presidents from Jimmy Carter through Donald Trump have affected judicial diversity — that is, the presence of women and people of color on the federal bench. Our measure does not reflect the partisanship or ideology of these judges, just their self-identified gender, racial and/or ethnic background.

White, male judges — the historic baseline — are assigned a value of zero. Judges who are white women or men of color get a value of 1, because they increase either gender or racial diversity. Women of color get a value of 2.

We then compared each new judge to their predecessor. If a white man who retired or died was replaced by either a white female or a man of color, diversity was increased by one. If a white man was replaced by a woman of color — as when Trump appointed Neomi Rao, an Asian American woman, to Brett Kavanaugh’s seat on the D.C. circuit — diversity was increased by two.

The math works the same way in reverse to measure decreasing judicial diversity.

Our data show that all six presidents before Trump made the federal judiciary more diverse, beginning with President Carter. The federal judiciary was almost entirely male and white when Carter came into office, with just 10 women judges and 30 men of color. Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton both made the courts markedly more diverse by replacing white male judges with women of color.

Just 18% of Trump’s judges increased diversity in the federal judiciary, and just 3% of the total appointments increased it by two points. Meanwhile, 20% of Trump-appointed judges reduced the diversity of the courts in gender, race or both.

Why does the court’s makeup matter?

Trump’s judicial appointments make up about a quarter of the country’s federally appointed judges, visibly reducing the diversity of many courts across the nation. That could damage the court’s ability to serve its function as a neutral arbiter of the law in American politics and society.

The courts arbitrate when conflicts erupt between the government and its citizens, between different institutions of the government or between the citizens themselves. But they have no power to enforce their judgment. As Hamilton aptly noted in 1788, the judiciary has “neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment.”

Court rulings matter only if the government enforces them and the people comply. To remain consequential, then, the judiciary must be legitimate in the eyes of the public and of elected officials.

Yet because federal judges are presidential appointees and not elected officials — a setup that’s supposed to insulate them from partisan politics — legitimacy is an ongoing challenge. They have no direct connection with or accountability to the people. So how do they earn their legitimacy?

Diversity and legitimacy

One way that public institutions gain and maintain legitimacy is by mirroring the diversity of society.

As political theorist Hanna Pitkin wrote in 1967, women and people of color are more likely to support institutions where they are represented because that suggests the institution is open to them. They also tend to believe that an institution is fairer when it is composed of a diverse set of decision-makers, according to several studies.

Trump’s judicial appointees do not mirror the diversity of society.

In 2020, the United States population is 13% Black, 18.5% Latino, almost 6% Asian American and 60% white, according to the census. Trump’s judges are 85% white and 76% male; less than 5% are Black. In comparison, 19% of Barack Obama’s appointees were Black and 42% were women.

Research on the relationship between the diversity of institutions and their legitimacy suggests that if the composition of the courts gets too out of step with society, it could eventually erode trust in and respect for the courts. As expectations regarding diversity in government increase, judicial diversity will matter ever more.

Trust in the courts

Overall, public support for both state and federal courts remains high, at 65%. The courts are more trusted than Congress or the president. Among government institutions, only the military has higher approval.

The courts have maintained this legitimacy for much of their history without significant diversity on the bench in large part because they are closely associated with the Constitution, a venerated document. In recent years the Supreme Court has also shored up waning public approval by eschewing partisanship in its decisions.

But the United States’ deep political polarization is starting to hurt the courts, which are increasingly viewed as a partisan institution — not, as Hamilton intended, “the citadel of the public justice and the public security.”

Many of Trump’s judges will sit on the bench for decades to come. By 2050 according to the Pew Research Center, white people will no longer be the majority in the U.S. Whether the courts will still have legitimacy in that society is an open question.

Rorie Solberg, Associate Professor of Political Science, Oregon State University and Eric N. Waltenburg, Professor of Political Science, Purdue University

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

Nancy Pelosi hints at possibility of push to invoke 25th Amendment amid concerns over Trump’s health

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) hinted at the possibility of a push for the invocation of the 25th Amendment in the wake of President Donald Trump’s illness.

At her weekly press conference, the California lawmaker revealed she and her Democratic colleagues will be discussing the 25th Amendment on Friday amid growing concerns about the president’s condition.

“Tomorrow, by the way, tomorrow, come here tomorrow. We’re going to be talking about the 25th Amendment. But not to take attention away from the subject we have now,” she said.

The top-ranking Democrat also discussed another key question she and other Democratic lawmakers have raised. Although Trump tested positive more than a week ago, the White House has yet to reveal when the president’s last negative COVID test was — a critical piece of information needed for contact tracing. Pelosi also expressed concern about the Trump administration’s lack of transparency regarding the president’s illness and the coronavirus outbreak at the White House.

“I’m not talking about it today except to tell you, if you want to talk about that, we’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. “But you take me back to my point, Mr. President, when was the last time you had a negative test before you tested positive? Why is the White House not telling the country that important fact about how this made a hotspot of the White House?”

Although Pelosi was asked for more details about Democrats’ forthcoming discussions, she indicated that more information would be announced tomorrow. Pelosi’s remarks come amid Trump’s questionable behavior and impulsive actions which have greatly impacted multiple areas of government.

On Tuesday afternoon, the stock market crashed due to Trump abruptly ending stimulus negotiations. More than 30 White House officials have also tested positive for COVID-19 this week. But despite the outbreak, Trump continues to push for business as usual. Still positive, the president has returned to the White House.

While hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center for what is believed to have been a severe case of coronavirus, Trump made it clear there would be no transfer of power to Vice President Mike Pence. Even now, the president is reportedly still making decisions while taking medications. After Trump’s announcement to end negotiations, Pelosi also expressed concern about his ability to make sound decisions while medicated.

Trump insists he feels “great” now but he is still confined to the White House.

Six men accused in plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer after Trump called to “liberate Michigan”

The FBI has thwarted an alleged plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., and stage a violent coup against the state government, according to a federal criminal complaint published by The Detroit News.

In total, 12 people were arrested on Wednesday on state and federal charges. One day later, six men were charged in the alleged kidnapping plot. The FBI complaint alleged that the following individuals were involved in the plot: Daniel Harris, Ty Garbin, Kaleb Franks, Adam Fox, Barry Croft and Brandon Caserta.

The complaint was filed after the FBI raided Garbin’s home in Hartland Township amid an investigation into a Detroit man killed in a shootout with FBI agents last week.

The FBI said the alleged plot involved a Michigan militia. Suspects allegedly surveilled Whitmer’s vacation home twice and discussed bringing her to a remote area in Wisconsin to face trial for “treason.”

“Several members talked about murdering ‘tyrants’ or ‘taking’ a sitting governor,” FBI agent Richard Trask said in the complaint. “The group decided they needed to increase their numbers and encouraged each other to talk to their neighbors and spread their message.”

The timeline of the plot was unclear, but the investigation dates back to early this year, when the FBI found social media messages discussing a violent coup against state governments.

In June, Croft and Fox met with 13 other individuals in Ohio, including a confidential FBI source who recorded the meeting.

“The group talked about creating a society that followed the U.S. Bill of Rights and where they could be self-sufficient,” Trask said in the complaint. “They discussed different ways of achieving this goal from peaceful endeavors to violent actions. At one point, several members talked about state governments they believed were violating the U.S. Constitution, including the government of Michigan and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. As part of that recruitment effort, Fox reached out to a Michigan-based militia group.”

The group was not identified in the document, but Trask noted that its members met to hold firearm training and drills. The FBI was monitoring the group in March after police learned of alleged plans to attack officers.

“At the time, the FBI interviewed a member of the militia group who was concerned about the group’s plans to target and kill police officers, and that person agreed to become a (confidential source),” Trask wrote.

In June, Fox recorded a Facebook video criticizing the state’s lockdown.

“Fox referred to Governor Whitmer as ‘this tyrant b*tch,’ and stated, ‘I don’t know, boys, we gotta do something,'” the complaint said. “‘You guys link with me on our other location system. Give me some ideas of what we can do.'”

The video was posted in June, after Trump repeatedly attacked Whitmer over her coronavirus restrictions. In April, the president called to “liberate Michigan.” At least one of the members of the militia group was involved in a Second Amendment rally at the Michigan statehouse in June, according to the complaint.

“The lockdown has been a lightning rod for anti-government extremists in this country, and Gov. Whitmer has been on the forefront of their targeting,” Seamus Hughes, deputy director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, told The Detroit News.

In July, the members “discussed attacking a Michigan State Police facility, and in a separate conversation after the meeting, Garbin suggested shooting up the Governor’s vacation home,” the complaint said.

Later that month, Fox and an informant discussed the kidnapping plot.

“Snatch and grab, man. Grab the f*cking governor. Just grab the b*tch. Because at that point, we do that, dude — it’s over,” Fox allegedly said, according to the FBI.

The complaint said four of the six men charged in the plot planned to meet on Wednesday to “make a payment on explosives and exchange tactical gear.”

Some observers linked Trump’s comments to the alleged plot.

“It’s almost like ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN’ was a dangerously indefensible message for the President of the United States to send,” Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Texas University School of Law, wrot.

“If the president read his intel briefings and understood the dogma of white nationalist groups,” wrote Politico’s chief political correspondent Tim Alberta, “he’d realize that language like ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN!’ is read as tacit permission — if not explicit encouragement — for militias to take action.”