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GOP senator openly hopes Supreme Court battle will distract voters from 200,000 COVID-19 deaths

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) is openly hoping that a big fight over a Supreme Court nominee could distract voters from the 200,000-plus Americans who have died from the novel coronavirus on President Donald Trump’s watch.

In an interview with The New York Times, Alexander said that the Supreme Court battle is the party’s best chance to make the 2020 election about something other than Trump and the coronavirus pandemic.

“Either the election can be about Trump, or about COVID or about the Supreme Court,” Alexander explained. “And, I think, of those three, if it’s about the Supreme Court, that traditionally has helped Republicans more.”

To that end, Republicans are hoping that angry Democrats launch scathing personal attacks against the eventual nominee and will turn the entire hearing into a political circus similar to the one that occurred two years ago during confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

But while the Kavanaugh hearings may have helped GOP base turnout in the 2018 midterm elections, it didn’t stop Republicans from losing 40 seats in the House of Representatives, and Democrats won governorships that year in key swing states, such as Michigan and Wisconsin.

“Insult to every family”: Trump unveils “bogus” health care “plan” that doesn’t actually do anything

When President Donald Trump finally unveiled his long-anticipated health care “plan” on Thursday, it turned out to be comprised of only two toothless executive orders. Journalists and politicians alike were quick to point out that the pair of orders did not actually compromise a “plan” at all, as they were merely “requests for legislation.”

Trump, who repeatedly failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act despite years of promises, claimed on Thursday that “Obamacare is no longer Obamacare” after Republicans tossed the individual mandate penalty. He made the comment while rolling out his “America First Health Plan,” which The Washington Post noted was not actually a “plan.”

“We’ve really become the health-care party — the Republican Party,” Trump claimed during a speech in Charlotte, N.C. “But nobody knows it.”

The first executive order declares protecting patients with pre-existing conditions to be the “policy” of the U.S. But protections for pre-existing conditions were previously enshrined into law through Obamacare, legislation which the Trump administration is currently pushing to overturn in court after failing to do so in Congress.

“The historic action I’m taking today includes the first-ever executive order to affirm it is the official policy of the United States government to protect patients with pre-existing conditions,” Trump claimed on Thursday, despite trying to overturn the law which actually established those protections.

“We’re making that official. We’re putting it down in a stamp,” Trump added, even though it was already “official” in a law which has been on the books for a decade.

Julie Rovner, the chief Washington correspondent at Kaiser Health News, pointed out that Trump’s executive order would do nothing if the Obamacare lawsuit backed by his administration succeeds. 

“This. Requires. Legislation,” she tweeted.

The health care news outlet Stat News described Trump’s speech as “empty rhetoric,” which would neither “improve the quality of Americans’ health care or lower its cost.”

“The speech and executive order stood as a tacit admission that Trump had failed to keep his 2016 promise to replace his predecessor’s signature achievement with a conservative alternative,” Washington Post reporter Toluse Olorunnipa wrote. “Unable to repeal the law, Trump appeared open to simply rebranding it.”

The other executive order directs Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar to explore ways to address surprise medical bills if Congress does not act by Jan. 1.

Stat News reporter Lev Facher noted that the order was merely a “plan to work with Congress” on the issue.

“I am not sure how/why these are executive orders,” New York Times health care reporter Margot Sanger-Katz tweeted. “They are requests for legislation.”

Along with the executive orders, Trump promised millions of seniors would receive $200 coupons toward the cost of prescription drugs. Trump claimed that the coupons would be sent to 33 million Medicare beneficiaries “in the coming weeks,” but the White House has not released any details about the president’s plan. It is unclear how it would actually be funded — or if it is even legal.

A White House official told Bloomberg News that the money would come from a “demonstration program Medicare uses to test new payment systems” and be offset by savings from price cuts Trump ordered for medications bought by the Medicare program. Stat News noted that the order has not been implemented, and the savings “do not currently exist.”

A top pharmaceutical lobby group told Bloomberg that it had already rejected the administration’s request to provide discount cards for Medicare patients, and drug companies are not aware of Trump’s plan for funding the program.

Stat News described the “plan,” which would come with a $6.6 billion price tag, as a “political ploy to curry favor with seniors.” Democratic strategist Adam Parkhomenko argued that it was a straight up “bribe” for seniors, a key Republican voting bloc.

Trump also teased a comprehensive health care reform plan, though he offered no actual details.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Trump’s “bogus executive order” was not “worth the paper it’s signed on.”

“It is an insult to every family with someone with a pre-existing condition that President Trump thinks he can get away with this farce while he races a justice onto the Supreme Court to strike down the life-saving protections enshrined into law by the Affordable Care Act,” she said in a statement. “For his entire administration, President Trump has used every tool and every chance he gets to weaken or rip away protections for people with pre-existing conditions. If President Trump cared at all about people with pre-existing conditions, he would drop his lawsuit to overturn the Affordable Care Act in the middle of a pandemic.”

“President Trump is lying to you about his ‘executive order,'” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. added. “Protections for pre-existing conditions are the law. The threat to these protections is from President Trump and the Republicans suing to end them.”

Trump’s got his Supreme Court coup lined up — and Republicans will back his play

As I’ve watched the Trump era unfold, I have generally assumed that most elected Republicans were just cowards who hoped the Democrats would save them from the unpleasantness of reining Trump in. They could let the Democrats get rid of Trump in 2020 and then, after the smoke had cleared and his followers had licked their wounds and moved on, they could pretend that everything that had happened was all Trump’s fault. They could then return to playing the role of moral arbiters and upright patriots, which they spent years selling to the public, and hope that nobody remembered what sniveling invertebrates they really are.

It turns out they aren’t cowards at all. They are craven opportunists who have observed the way Trump has exposed the weaknesses in our system and showed them how liberating the simple act of blatant shamelessness can be. They see how easily power can be seized, and that if the opponent doesn’t have a countervailing institutional strength, there is nothing to stop them from keeping it.

On some level, many of them know this is dangerous. Just a little over four years ago party leaders were wringing their hands over the possibility that an ignorant brute like Trump could possibly win the Republican nomination.

He hasn’t changed in the ensuing four years. They have. They’ve been seduced by the knowledge that they can get away with anything as long as they have the institutional power to do it. This week we learned that may includes denying the people their choice for the next president by openly manipulating the election.

They know that mail-in votes are perfectly legitimate. And they know that because their leader is so incompetent that the deadly pandemic is still raging in the country, many people would like to use that method to vote. They don’t care. Their actions this week have shown that they are going to go along with Donald Trump’s blatant plan to steal an election he almost certainly cannot win legitimately.

Rushing through a Supreme Court nominee, as I wrote on Wednesday, is simply a ploy to ensure that the lawsuits they already plan to file will end up before a court that has with five justices ready to install Trump for a second term. They probably don’t need the sixth, but they have the opportunity to give themselves a cushion and they’re taking it. That flagrant power play is part of a strategy meant to demonstrate that the millions of Americans who are watching all this unfold with a growing sense horror can’t do anything about it. (Recall Trump’s words to all 50 state governors in the wake of the protests over the George Floyd killing: “You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time….” )

Trump was asked this week if he would agree to a peaceful transition of power if he loses the November election. As nearly everyone on the planet now knows. here’s what he said:

It’s a shocking statement, of course, and Trump was a fool to say that out loud, raising all kinds of fears that he wouldn’t agree to leave if he loses. But despite some mainstream media buying into Republican “assurances” that there will of course be a peaceful transition, they largely missed what’s really happening, as Dan Froomkin of Salon and Press Watch has pointed out.

Trump plans to “win.” As I noted on Wednesday, Trump told his rally audience this last weekend: 

Now we’re counting on the federal court system to make it so that we can actually have an evening where we know who wins — not where the votes are going to be counted a week later, two weeks later.

Later in the week, he said this:

He was even more explicit on Tuesday:

I think this will end up in the Supreme Court. And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices. This scam that the Democrats are pulling — it’s a scam — the scam will be before the United States Supreme Court. And I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation, if you get that. I don’t know that you’d get that. I think it should be 8-0 or 9-0. But just in case it would be more political than it should be, I think it’s very important to have a ninth justice.

He couldn’t be any clearer about what he expects of his latest appointee if he put it in neon lights on the front of Trump Tower. He wants this election to end up before the Supreme Court and wants them to reappoint him on the basis of his bogus allegations of mail-in voting fraud. And his Republican accomplices did not contradict him.

Sure, they said there would be a peaceful transfer of power. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was weirdly specific about the date of the election in his comment, saying “the winner of the Nov. 3 election will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.” Considering that the alleged disputes are going to be all about counting mail-in ballots after Nov. 3, this isn’t the definitive statement many in the press took it for.

Indeed, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., introduced a bill on Thursday that would require all votes to be counted within the 48 hours around Election Day. Any votes not counted by then would be thrown out. Scott certainly knows no such bill will pass, which makes it all the more interesting that he would put that out there in the middle of this contentious campaign.

Many senators said that of course there would be a “peaceful transition,” but none of them questioned the idea that the president was planning in advance on having the Supreme Court decide the election. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., reassuringly said that “Republicans will stand up if he loses and refuses to leave,” as if that were the only question. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, expressed his dismay, but he is either too thick or too cynical to admit that his willingness to install a new justice right before the election is the mechanism by which Trump plans to illegitimately seize another term.

But leave it to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to put the new conventional wisdom about how this election will be decided right out there: “If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Joe Biden, I will accept that result.” He later emphasized that “we need a full court” — and we know what that means.

All these Republicans know they could afford to wait until after the election is decided — in fact, under the normal terms of political self-interest, that would probably be smarter. But they are ready and willing to install a new Supreme Court justice before the election for the express purpose of handing Donald Trump a second term. If they succeed in doing so, they will irreparably destroy the legitimacy of the court, and quite possibly the legitimacy of our democratic system altogether.

But they don’t care about that. After all, “legitimacy” is unnecessary if raw power is the only currency that matters. It’s a shiny new American autocracy, and they’re here for it. 

Students’ mass migration back to college gets a failing grade

Who thought it would be a good idea to move thousands of teenagers and young adults across the country to college campuses, where, unencumbered by parental supervision, many college kids did what college kids do?

Actually, Nigel Goldenfeld and Sergei Maslov, two University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign physics researchers, thought they had it figured out. They created a predictive model for the campus, which showed that with a robust, twice-a-week testing program for students, faculty and staff who are regularly on campus, a mask mandate and an app for contact tracing, COVID-19 cases could be kept below 500 people for the whole semester. They even accounted for close interactions among college students.

But that model failed to take into account that kids who test positive for the virus, whether sick or asymptomatic, might continue to party. From Aug. 16, when campus reopened, to Sept. 14, more than 1,900 new cases of COVID-19 were detected, according to the university’s COVID-19 dashboard. One thousand cases occurred in the first two weeks of the fall semester.

“What is not in the models is that students will actually fail to isolate,” said Goldenfeld during a Sept. 2 press briefing, “that they would go to a party even if they knew they were COVID-positive or that they would host a party while they were COVID-positive. … We didn’t include that behavior in the model.”

Many other colleges across the country also thought through how to bring students back to campus. Several schools looked at computer models to see how COVID-19 would affect students and staff. But, as with the plan developed at Illinois, these models were sometimes based on a set of assumptions that ended up being wrong. In other cases, models that showed what could happen without mitigation strategies were ignored by university administrators, who went forward with plans to bring students back.

Either way, the great student migration has resulted in COVID outbreaks on college campuses nationwide. The University of Central Florida: 378 cases since the week ending Aug. 8. Texas Christian University: 600 cases in August and 220 in September so far. The University of Iowa: 1,804 cases from Aug. 18 to Sept. 11. The University of South Carolina: 2,185 cases since Aug. 1. Making matters worse, some afflicted schools are setting off a second student migration by sending their students back home.

The administration of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign asked students to lock down for two weeks on Sept. 2. And Goldenfeld said during a Sept. 2 news conference that it was too early for him to make a new prediction whether COVID cases could be kept under control for the semester.

He said he and Maslov would adjust their model but were waiting to see how students would respond to the lockdown. Cases of COVID-19 on campus declined since the implementation of the lockdown, which was lifted Sept. 16.

The administration of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has collaborated directly with Goldenfeld and Maslov, and has been transparent about the model on which it is basing its decisions. Other universities haven’t been as upfront.

After hearing that Penn State planned to open again for the fall, a concerned faculty group, Coalition for a Just University, created a model predicting what COVID-19 spread would look like at the University Park campus in State College, Pennsylvania. The coalition’s modeling group, composed of engineering and science faculty, chose to remain anonymous, fearing retribution from the university. Its predictive model showed that more than 1,800 students could become sick and two could die of COVID-19 during the semester if only 1% of students were tested each day, which is Penn State’s plan. Since Aug. 28, 1,100 students at the University Park campus (attended by some 47,000 students total) have tested positive for COVID-19.

The team sent the model to university administrators but received no response. A Penn State spokesperson told the Centre Daily Times, a local newspaper, that the methodology of the model was “flawed” and that the group that released it had “advocated against any reopening of campuses.” The coalition is advocating for Penn State to move classes entirely online, at least temporarily until the testing plan is improved, or for the whole semester if the testing procedure isn’t changed, said a spokesperson for the group.

The Penn State spokesperson later said the university had developed its own predictive model but declined to share its results with the paper. Penn State did not respond to a request for comment.

Penn State isn’t alone in its lack of transparency. Edwin Michael, a professor of epidemiology who recently left the University of Notre Dame to work at the University of South Florida, said he created a simulation in April to show how COVID-19 could spread on Notre Dame’s campus in South Bend, Indiana. He said he shared it with university officials but never heard back.

The model showed that on a campus of 20,000 people, if 25 students returned to campus with COVID-19 and there were no mitigation strategies, up to 7,500 students could soon be infected. Roughly 470 would need hospitalization and 365 would need treatment in the intensive care unit.

It was a dire prediction with a purpose. He said it was created “simply to highlight that an outbreak is inevitable if students were to return infected.”

Dennis Brown, a spokesperson for Notre Dame, said that Michael’s predictive model was forwarded to members of the planning committee in May “and subsequently taken into consideration.”

“However, because it made certain assumptions that did not align with the plans being made at Notre Dame, we did not find it relevant to our situation and decided to use other predictive models,” Brown wrote in an email.

Brown declined to give more information on what predictive models Notre Dame did use. Notre Dame has implemented mitigation strategies, such as requiring mask-wearing on campus at all times and limiting gatherings to 10 people, but on Aug. 18 imposed two weeks of remote classes for all students after a spike in cases on campus the first week back. The university has documented 649 cases among students since Aug. 3. In-person classes started phasing in on Sept. 2.

Professors elsewhere have, like Michael, developed models not necessarily to make accurate predictions, but to make a point that without some kind of mitigation strategy there would inevitably be a COVID-19 outbreak on campus — and that part has held true.

On Aug. 15, five days before the University of Georgia started classes for the fall semester, John Drake, director of the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Disease there, predicted that from 210 to 1,618 students could bring COVID-19 back with them to campus. He also predicted that without any type of risk mitigation, reopening campus could result in more than 30,000 infections among the campus population — about 60% of all students and staff.

“Campuses should anticipate explosive localized outbreaks,” Drake wrote when making his model public. (Like most of the university COVID models mentioned here, his was not peer-reviewed or published in a journal.)

There’s no way to know whether Drake’s prediction was right, since the University of Georgia didn’t conduct entry testing for students who returned. Instead, the university is conducting voluntary randomized testing of asymptomatic individuals on campus and asking anyone who has symptoms to get tested.

On Sept. 9, the university reported more than 1,400 cases of COVID-19 among students in a week. University officials did not respond to questions about whether they had used Drake’s model or others when opting to reopen.

About 70 miles away, Joshua Weitz, a professor who studies viral dynamics at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, created his own predictive model, this one with a more dire message: Without any mitigation strategies, 50% of people on Georgia Tech’s campus of about 31,500 would be infected with COVID-19 and 75 would die. The majority of those deaths would be among older faculty and staffers.

He hoped the extreme scenario would show why the school needed to test everyone once a week. Although Georgia Tech has enough tests available and encourages students to be tested once a week, it is not mandatory. Georgia Tech confirmed that Weitz’s model had been taken into consideration when it planned its COVID-19 response. Georgia Tech reported 571 cases of COVID-19 for the month of August.

While some professors created models without mitigation strategies as a cautionary tale to show university administrators what would happen without interventions, others were developed to help campuses adopt a framework to reduce infections once students arrived. Though the limitations of these models run the gamut, their message seems to be the need for constant agility in enforcement policies and awareness about COVID-19’s local spread.

After all, models can’t change one underlying risk that continues regardless of testing plans and other public health strategies: In the end, some college students are still going to be college students, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. (The University of Minnesota delayed the moving of students into university housing by two weeks and started classes online on Sept. 8. The university has had 87 students test positive for COVID-19 through Sept. 10, though students are just this week beginning to move back into residence halls.)

“You don’t need a model to understand that bringing together all the young adult population in college campuses around the country is putting a lit match in a gas can. You don’t need a model to know what’s going to happen next,” Osterholm said.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Alarms are ringing everywhere about Trump’s election plot — except in our top newsrooms

People who know and care about elections and democracy frantically sounded the alarm on Wednesday as Donald Trump’s intention to steal the election became undeniable.

But the leaders of our nation’s top newsroom weren’t listening. The New York Times put its article on Trump refusing to commit to a peaceful transition of power on page A15. The Washington Post story was on A4. Other news organizations underplayed it as well. Despite all the other news, this should have been a screamer headline everywhere.

Consider the magnitude of what they ignored on Wednesday.

Even before Trump’s comments, one of the country’s top election law scholars, Richard Hasen, had written in Slate that “the litigation strategy of the Trump campaign and its allies has become clear: try to block the expansion of mail-in balloting whenever possible and, in a few key states, create enough chaos in the system and legal and political uncertainty in the results that the Supreme Court, Congress, or Republican legislatures can throw the election to Trump if the outcome is at all close or in doubt.”

Hasen’s stark conclusion: “This is a five-alarm fire, folks. It’s time to wake up.”

As NPR media reporter David Folkenflik tweeted:

And the Atlantic had already published Barton Gellman‘s terrifying, detailed article describing scenarios in which Trump “uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him.”

Gellman actually buried — deeply buried — the lede, which was that he had proof that “the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.”

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe tweeted:

Then, during an afternoon appearance ostensibly about ending anti-conservative censorship in social media (ha!), Trump laid out his plan just as plain as day.

After indulging in his typically baseless conspiracy theories about counterfeit mail-in ballots, the president was asked if that’s why he’s in a such a hurry to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

He replied:

Well, it’s a great question. It’s a very fair question. Yes, I think it’s very important. I think this will end up in the Supreme Court. And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices….

I think it’s better if you go before the election because I think this — this scam that the Democrats are pulling — it’s a scam — this scam will be before the United States Supreme Court. And I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation, if you get that. I don’t know that you’d get that. I think it should be 8-nothing or 9-nothing. But just in case it would be more political than it should be, I think it’s very important to have a ninth justice.

You can’t get any clearer than that. As Atlantic writer Edward Isaac-Dovere tweeted:

Trump fully intends the Supreme Court — not the voters — to make the call. And that of course is because his campaign strategy is not to win a majority of the votes, just to win enough to be able to toss things to the lawyers.

As far as I’m concerned, that remains the major revelation of the day — even after Trump’s mind-blowing and somewhat incoherent refusal to agree to a peaceful transition of power.

Here’s the full exchange with Playboy correspondent Brian Karem, at Trump’s early-evening press conference:

Q: Mr. President, real quickly: Win, lose, or draw in this election, will you commit here, today, for a peaceful transferral of power after the election? And there has been rioting in Louisville. There’s been rioting in many cities across this country — red and — your so-called red and blue states. Will you commit to making sure that there is a peaceful transferral of power after the election?

Trump: Well, we’re going to have to see what happens. You know that. I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster. And — and —

Q: I understand that, but people are rioting. Do you commit to making sure that —

Trump: Oh, I know.  I know. Yeah, no, we want —

Q: — there’s a peaceful transferral of power?

Trump: We want to have — get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very trans- — we’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly; there’ll be a continuation.

The ballots are out of control. You know it. And you know who knows it better than —

Q: No, sir. I don’t know that.

Trump: — anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.

There is only one legitimate, decent and normal answer to that question: “Of course.”

Although I think Trump was primarily reacting the way he always does to the suggestion that he might lose — and was also continuing his attempts to delegitimize mail-in ballots — his inability to say “of course” was epic: the stuff of which history is made; the stuff of banner headlines.

To the extent that Trump’s intention to steal the election is undeniable, well, at day’s end, Trump himself didn’t deny it.

There’s some evidence that at least some major newsroom reporters understood the magnitude of what they had witnessed. In the New York Times, Michael Crowley wrote a story full of important context — and stated definitively:

Mr. Trump’s refusal — or inability — to endorse perhaps the most fundamental tenet of American democracy, as any president in memory surely would have, was the latest instance in which he has cast grave uncertainty around the November election and its aftermath.

And he quoted Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of American political history at Princeton University, as saying:

“He’s threatening the election process and saying out loud what everyone has assumed he’s been thinking… The more he makes these arguments, the more he normalizes the fact that this can be part of the conversation.”

In a New York Times “live update” on Thursday, Jonathan Martin explained that “this was no typical Trump provocation: Acceding to the will of the voters is the linchpin of American democracy.”

(Much more lamely, the Washington Post’s Colby Itkowitz noted Trump’s previous threats not to accept election results and concluded that “Refusing to ensure he would support a peaceful transfer of power between administrations if he loses this year’s election seems to escalate that threat amid partisan tensions.”)

But as usual, to capture the real drama of what’s going on, you have to go to the opinion writers — and the editorial cartoonists.

So here is the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, explaining that “what really matters here is that Trump is making an actual declaration of intent — not just to refuse to respect the outcome, but rather to try to cancel and override it, if he is able to get away with it.”

Here is cartoonist Ann Telnaes:

And read this incredible Twitter thread from Crooked media editor in chief Brian Beutler, prompted by the extraordinary spectacle of campaign reporters complaining bitterly about Joe Biden’s tardiness. It killed me.

Why ignore the alarms?

So the big question then is: Why did senior editors decide to bury the story?

I have some theories. (Keep in mind that the entire work product of Press Watch is, in some ways, my attempt to answer that and related questions.)

One overarching problem is that our major newsrooms have simply gotten so corporate and even-keeled that top editors value unflappability as a signal virtue. (OK, I admit I take this one a little personally, being a flappable person. A top Washington Post editor once called me “hysterical.”) Flappable people don’t rise through the ranks. Corporate people do.

Journalism to me is about crusading for the truth. But the notion that a serious, major news organization would pursue a crusade on behalf of its community is considered hippie shit by the people in charge these days. So is consistently standing up to a lawless con man. They’ve gotten used to printing lies. They barely squawk when Trump calls them the “enemy of the people.” They have their algorithms, and they won’t give them up no matter what. They just continue to “do the work.”

So yeah, their news souls are dead. There, I said it.

The more immediate cause, however, is that these newsroom leaders made a considered and intentional decision not to panic after Trump was elected. This was an epic, obvious mistake, and everything that has happened since flowed from tha decision, and was in some sense entirely predictable.

They should have gone on a war footing — and by that I don’t mean a partisan war against Trump. I mean a journalistic war against lies, ignorance and intolerance.

These top editors decided instead that they had made a mistake in underestimating — and not sufficiently heeding — the (non-majority of) people who voted for Trump. So they sent reporters out to diners to talk to Trump supporters instead of trying to educate and redeem them.

They decided their normal methods of covering a president were appropriate — and that even if they weren’t, they were too important to modify for just one. So they got used to writing stories about whatever Trump said, as if that were normal.

They decided to keep a level head.

Now they can’t suddenly change their behavior. Partly, that’s inertia. But it’s also because that would mean admitting that maybe they were wrong before. And they’re too proud to admit they’re ever wrong.

So they don’t listen to the people who are warning them, ever more loudly, of the extraordinary danger ahead. They muffle the alarms, hand out earplugs, close the windows and tell everyone to continue business as usual.

Trump’s record in federal courts is the worst of any recent president

Donald Trump is the biggest loser.

While he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may get a chance to ram through another justice on the Supreme Court before the November election, it may not do them much good.

The Trump administration is losing case after case in federal courts. Even judges appointed by Republican presidents are ruling against Trump in most of the cases that have been filed by state attorneys general and other plaintiffs challenging actions taken by Trump agencies.

Administrations usually win 70% of the cases brought against them, but Team Trump has won only about 16% of the 132 decided lawsuits. These figures include 14 of 83 lawsuits about environment, energy and natural resources; seven of 53 lawsuits about deregulation; and 3 of 26 lawsuits about health.

Team Trump lost lawsuits about:

  • Using the pandemic to give polluters a break from regulation
  • Weakening health insurance regulations
  • A pesticide that causes brain damage in children

“Over and over and over the Trump agencies are doing things that are outside the bounds of their statutory authority,” said Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law.

The number of cases Trump agencies are losing is especially astounding because judges usually defer to agencies in court cases. This standard is known as “Chevron deference” after a 1984 case, Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

“Regulatory slop”

This Chevron test has helped administrations typically prevail in about 70% of the cases that are brought against them. But Team Trump is so bad at even the basics of writing law that George Washington University law professors Robert Glicksman and Emily Hammond termed it “regulatory slop.”

Even when the cases were heard by judges appointed by Republicans the Trump administration only won 35% of its cases, Noll found in data she is compiling for a forthcoming paper. They won about 8% of the cases heard by judges appointed by Democrats.

Pandemic break for polluters

Susan Bodine, the EPA enforcement chief, used the coronavirus pandemic that is killing thousands of us to give polluters a break from regulation. Three days after the American Petroleum Institute asked the EPA for help, Bodine gave a reprieve to refineries, operators of public drinking water systems and other industries.

President Harry S Truman signed the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies write new regulations, into law in 1946. One of those provisions requires agencies to let the public know when new rules are being written so they can comment. Bodine failed to do this. New York Attorney General Letitia James and attorneys general from eight other states sued. Bodine ended the policy.

Healthcare rollbacks

Team Trump also relaxed Labor Department regulations for association health plans. The new rule, published by Preston Rutledge, an assistant secretary, let companies evade requirements of the Affordable Care Act that they offer essential benefits such as maternity care, substance abuse treatment and prescription drug coverage.

New York, 10 other states and the District of Columbia sued over the rule that allowed employers to band together on the basis of geography or the type of industry they’re in to offer substandard health insurance to their employees.

“The final rule is clearly an end-run around the ACA,” wrote federal judge John Bates who was appointed by President George W. Bush.

Bates found the rule unlawful under the Employer Retirement Income Security Act, the 1974 law about employee benefit plans. Team Trump appealed the ruling.

States take the lead

Democratic attorneys general like Bob Ferguson of Washington state, and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey have repeatedly sued the Trump administration.

Ferguson filed his state’s first lawsuit against Trump in January 2017, just 10 days after Trump was sworn in, over the travel ban that temporarily barred people from seven mostly Muslim countries.

“I view my role as being on the first line of defense against a Trump administration,” Ferguson said in November 2016.

Every 10 days

Attorneys general — the top legal officers in their state — filed or tried to take part in 130 lawsuits involving more than one state since Trump took office. That’s about a lawsuit every 10 days.

Paul Nolette, an associate professor of political science at Marquette University in Milwaukee, who tracks the lawsuits, said Democratic attorneys general have won about 80% of the 123 lawsuits they have filed that have been decided so far.

More suits brought

Team Trump has been sued by state attorneys general more than President Barack Obama was during his two terms. Seventy-eight multi-state lawsuits were brought against the Obama administration.

President George W. Bush faced 76 such lawsuits; President Bill Clinton, 42.

In 2007, states gained more power to sue the federal government in a Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts v. EPA. The landmark decision ultimately required the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the decision, quoted the reasoning of Oliver Wendell Holmes from a 1907 case about air pollution: The state “has the last word as to whether its mountains shall be stripped of their forests and its inhabitants shall breathe pure air.”

Congressional gridlock

Presidents are governing more by executive action and rulemaking because Congress is gridlocked.  That leaves those decisions more vulnerable to court challenges.

Red states like Texas where Attorney General Ken Paxton has almost 750 attorneys are Trump’s backstop. Paxton and other Republican attorneys general use their offices to defend Trump policies or sue to undo Obama policies.

Texas is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit by 20 states to try to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. A Republican Congress passed a tax bill in December 2017 that eliminated the individual mandate, the penalty for people who go without insurance created by the Affordable Care Act.

Paxton and other red states used that change to challenge the law. In December 2018, federal judge Reed O’Connor ruled that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, making the rest of the law invalid. The Fifth Circuit partially affirmed that decision, and the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.

Texas also is the lead plaintiff in cases involving the Indian Child Welfare Act and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

Picking courts

Attorneys general try to cherry pick which judges they can win with if the case is appealed. Republican attorneys general like the Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, which hears cases from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, is known as our nation’s most conservative.

Democratic attorneys general prefer the Northern District of California and Southern District of New York.

California is second only to New York in number of lawsuits in which it is the lead plaintiff. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has sued Trump even more than Texas sued the Obama administration.

In 2017, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt overruled his own scientists to prevent an agriculture ban of a DowDuPont pesticide that causes brain damage in children.

Dow Chemical, which merged with DuPont in August 2017, contributed $1 million to help underwrite Trump’s inaugural festivities. Corteva, the agricultural unit of DowDuPont, later was spun off as an independent company.

California, New York and six other states intervened in a lawsuit brought by the League of United Latin American Citizens and other groups. Trump’s EPA attorneys argued that the court didn’t have the authority to hear the case under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.

Chlorpyrifos is part of a class of chemicals developed as a nerve gas by Nazi Germany during World War II, but it was approved as a pesticide in the United States in 1965.

Judge Jed Rakoff noted that the EPA had stalled banning the pesticide chlorpyrifos for a decade.

“The time has come to put a stop to this patent evasion,” Rakoff wrote.

Corteva Inc. announced in February that it will stop making the pesticide.

The case of Biden v. Trump: How a judge could decide the presidential election

Imagine the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020. Given the unprecedented number of mail-in votes this election, Americans may wake up and still not know who won the presidential contest between Republican President Donald J. Trump and Democratic challenger Joseph Biden.

The contest could be so close that a result can’t be known until mail-in ballots in several key states, perhaps Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan or Florida, can be fully counted.

It’s conceivable that either candidate will refuse to accept the result, whether before or after the counting of absentee or mail-in ballots. That could lead to several lawsuits to stop the counting, to keep counting or to force a recount.

Amid what will likely be a flood of charges, countercharges and a lot of heated rhetoric from campaigns and supporters, there are prescribed legal processes that will play out in the event of election challenges. Here is how that will likely work.

Where challenges begin — and often end

With only a few exceptions, states run elections. By virtue of Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution, state law governs almost every facet of the electoral process, including most aspects of voter eligibility, the location and hours of polling places, candidate access to the ballot and the members of the state’s Electoral College.

Consequently, electoral challenges must begin — and often will end — in state courts, which will apply that state’s laws.

A candidate who wants to challenge the result in any particular state must first identify what provision of state law the election did not satisfy. In a closely contested national election, where the results in some states are in doubt and may be for many days, this will likely result in several cases being filed simultaneously in several states, and by both major party candidates.

Congress has also provided that each state must have a mechanism for resolving any disputes that arise and that the state’s determination “shall be conclusive.”

In most cases, this means that state law, as interpreted and applied by state courts, will determine which candidate wins that state’s electoral votes.

Ordinarily, a decision by a state’s highest court about how to apply a state law cannot be appealed to a federal court. In such a case, the final decision in an election challenge rests with the state’s supreme court.

How to get to federal court

As seen in the 2000 case of Bush v. Gore, however, there are times when a federal court can hear an election-related case.

For a contested election case to be taken up by a federal court, there must be an allegation that federal constitutional rights, such as 14th Amendment claims to equal protection or due process of law, have been violated.

Similarly, if a person alleges that their right to vote was abridged because of their race or color, that case would be heard in a federal court under the provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is based on the 15th Amendment.

Bush v. Gore was the culmination of numerous lawsuits triggered by the close vote in Florida. After both campaigns filed lawsuits in various state courts, the Florida Supreme Court decided to extend the hand-counting of votes until Nov. 26, 2000, eight days after the state’s statutory deadline for certifying the election results to Congress. The Bush campaign challenged that decision in the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 5-4 opinion, the Supreme Court ruled that the mandated recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court violated the equal protection clause.

The Supreme Court reasoned that the failure of Florida courts to establish a uniform standard for determining legal from illegal votes in a recount created the possibility of different standards being used by different counties. The court concluded that this was a violation of 14th Amendment rights to due process and equal protection of the law.

“The people’s will”

Although the facts of Bush v. Gore were unique and messy, as the court itself noted, it is not difficult to foresee one or even several similar challenges arising in the 2020 election. And where the lawsuits involved in Bush v. Gore all originated in Florida, this time the chaos may reach across several states.

Indeed, many experts foresee the possibility of lawsuits in several key states this November. Depending upon the nature of the claim made by the party bringing the lawsuit, many — if not most — of these cases will originate in state courts, and at pretty much the same time.

But it is also quite likely, as happened in the 2000 election, that some — though not all — of the decisions in these cases will be appealed to the Supreme Court because one party could claim the decision violated the Constitution.

This sets up a situation where the outcome of the election may turn on several court decisions, some of them involving state courts.

And that could lead to a political problem.

In the 2000 election, the Supreme Court’s decision effectively settled the election, but only because both parties and the people chose to accept the decision — or more precisely, chose to accept the court’s authority to make the decision.

Whether the public would accept an electoral result determined by a state supreme court, or some combination of state court and federal court decisions, seems much more doubtful. Moreover, in some states, supreme court judges are elected. A subset of those are partisan elections, where judicial candidates run under a party affiliation, raising the prospect that some of these decisions will appear to be politically motivated.

Indeed, 20 years after Bush v. Gore, in an era of hyperpartisanship, it does not seem obvious that the public would — or even should — accept the Supreme Court’s legitimacy as a neutral adjudicator.

The recent death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg highlights a simple fact: The Supreme Court is itself a critical issue of intense partisan conflict in the 2020 election.

If Ginsburg’s seat is not filled before the election — and, as a constitutional scholar, I believe there are compelling reasons it should not be — then an eight-justice court could split 4-4 in the imaginary case of Biden v. Trump. Such a decision could look to citizens like party politics dressed in black robes rather than an exercise in constitutional reason.

Bush v. Gore triggered a national debate not only about what the Constitution means, but also about the health and well-being of the American polity. As I have written elsewhere, “Political democracies do not choose their leaders by judicial fiat. They elect them, usually by political majorities.”

And as Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer notes, “the people’s will is what elections are about.”

John E. Finn, Professor Emeritus of Government, Wesleyan University

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

Obamacare lawsuit heading to Supreme Court would slash taxes for top 0.1%

The Republican lawsuit that seeks to strike down the Affordable Care Act would save the richest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans an average of $198,000 per year, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The case, which was initiated by 18 state attorneys general and backed by the Trump administration, is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court a week after the November election. A Texas judge ruled in 2018 that the entire Obamacare law was unconstitutional, after the Republican-led Congress eliminated the individual mandate penalty in its 2017 tax bill and an appeals court then sent the case back for the judge to decide whether the entire law needed to be struck down.

Legal experts have called the idea that the individual mandate rendered the entire law unconstitutional “ridiculous” and a “mockery of the rule of law.” But conservatives currently hold a 5-3 majority on the Supreme Court, which could soon swell to a 6-3 majority if President Trump successfully replaces the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, putting the fate of the law and health coverage and protections for tens of millions of Americans in doubt.

Repealing Obamacare would be a boon for the richest Americans, however, because of the taxes imposed by the law. Obamacare imposed a 0.9% tax on earnings over $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples, along with an additional 3.8% tax on unearned income like capital gains and royalties. The analysis also includes other Obamacare revenue streams, like a $2.8 billion annual fee on pharmaceutical companies and the law’s employer mandate. These taxes were used to cover the cost of the Medicaid expansion and subsidies for those buying health care on the exchanges created by the law.

The top 0.1% of earners, who make more than $3 million per year, would see a tax savings of about $198,000 per year, according to the CBPP analysis. Households earning more than $1 million per year would get tax cuts of about $42,000 per year.

Households in the bottom 80% would see average tax cuts of less than $80 a year. The top 0.1% would receive 42% of the tax benefits from the law’s repeal.

Tax cuts for households with incomes above $200,000 per year would cost the government about $30 billion per year, enough to cover the cost of the Medicaid expansion for more than 4 million people, according to the analysis.

“In effect, the Administration and the state attorneys general are seeking a massive transfer of resources from low- and moderate-income people to those at the top of the income scale,” the CBPP researchers wrote. “The lawsuit would also widen racial gaps, with Black and Hispanic people disproportionately likely to lose health coverage and the overwhelming share of the tax cuts flowing to white people.”

Based on estimates from the Urban Institute, the analysis found that nearly 10% of non-elderly Black people and 10% of Hispanic people would lose health coverage if the law were repealed. About one of every 16 white people would also lose coverage.

“Meanwhile, the tax cuts that would result from striking down the law would flow disproportionately to white households, which are three times likelier than Black or Hispanic households to be in the top 1 percent of the income scale,” the researchers wrote.

The lawsuit was filed after Senate Republicans unsuccessfully tried to repeal Obamacare despite campaigning on the issue for years.

“Repealing ObamaCare has always been about tax cuts for the rich,” Steve Wamhoff, the director of federal tax policy at the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, wrote in an op-ed during the repeal push.

An ITEP analysis also found that if Congress had repealed the law’s 3.8% tax on unearned income in 2016, about 90% of the benefits would have gone to the richest 1% of households.

“Opposition to the ACA has always been about opposition to the taxes that were included to finance the expansion of health insurance,” Wamhoff wrote. “No one should be gullible enough to believe that this has changed.”

“I need some help”: Graham touts Kavanaugh defense as he pleads for campaign donations on Fox News

While he pleaded for campaign donations on “Fox & Friends,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., trumpeted his defense of Brett Kavanaugh during the Supreme Court justice’s controversial 2018 confirmation hearings.

“I stood up for Kavanaugh at a time when they wanted to destroy his life, and I dared to help President Trump — the unpardonable sin of a Republican,” Graham told the co-hosts of Trump’s favorite morning show. “So the wrath of the left is coming down on me, but it’s all of us — all of us are getting outraised.”

Graham, who has held his Senate seat since 2003, has been outraised and outspent by Democratic rival Jaime Harrison. During Thursday’s Fox News appearance, the Republican incumbent admitted that he was “being killed financially” after donations supposedly flooded the Harris campaign in the wake of former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. 

“This money is because they hate my guts,” Graham said. “I stood up for Kavanaugh.”

Though Graham claimed that Harrison would raise about $100 million, it was not clear to what figures the senator was referring. Harrison had a record week prior to the death of Ginsburg, raising $2 million in the days after a poll showed him tied with Graham.

The $28 million Harrison had raised as of his last federal filings in June was less than Graham’s $29 million. But Graham claimed on Fox News that Harrison had raised $6 million since Ginsburg’s death. 

“Act Blue raised $150 million right after the death of Justice Ginsburg within three days. My opponent raised $6 million. I’m being outspent four-to-one, outraised five-to-one,” he continued. “. . . If you want to help me close the gap. I need some help.”

Graham, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, will play a central role in the confirmation hearings of Ginsburg’s replacement on the bench. President Donald Trump has announced plans to reveal his nominee on Saturday afternoon. The process, Graham said on Fox, will “be the Super Bowl of politics.”

“They are going to try to destroy the nominee,” he said. “The liberal media with the Democratic radical left tried to destroy Kavanaugh.” 

Graham famously delivered an impassioned defense of Kavanaugh, who had been accused of sexual assault, during the 2018 confirmation hearings. The senator claimed that a “no” vote would legitimize “the most despicable thing that I have seen in my time in politics.” 

Now, the senator is setting himself up to defend Trump’s nominee once again. Despite opposing former President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland 11 months ahead of the 2016 election, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has already announced that the upper chamber will vote on Trump’s nominee to replace Ginsburg despite her “fervent wish” to “not be replaced until a new president is installed.” 

“The double-standard is stunning,” Graham said of Democrats on Fox News. “Look and see how this nominee will be treated compared to what liberal nominees — how they get treated with the kid gloves.” 

Graham’s South Carolina Senate race has tightened. Election forecaster Larry Sabato shifted Graham’s seat from “likely Republican” to “leans Republican” at the beginning of the week. A Morning Consult poll released Tuesday found Graham and Harrison in a statistical tie, with Graham struggling to gain the same level of support from South Carolina Republicans enjoyed by Trump. 

Trump Tower Hicksville: Why is the Trump campaign sending rent checks to a Long Island P.O. box?

President Donald Trump has charged his own campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent for offices in Trump Tower for more than five years. But the campaign doesn’t always send its rent to Trump Tower. In fact, most of the checks have gone to a post office box in Hicksville, New York, a suburban community on Long Island. It’s not clear why, or who is receiving those checks. But experts say that the address may be of interest to Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, who in a court filing earlier this week made his clearest statements yet about the scope and focus of his criminal investigation into President Trump’s finances.

The Trump campaign has rented office space at Trump Tower, off and on, since Donald Trump first announced his candidacy in June 2015. Exactly how much space the campaign actually uses in the landmark Fifth Avenue building is unclear. FEC filings show that the rent started around $35,000 a month, then jumped over the $100,000 mark after Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination, before settling at its current rate of $37,541.67 a month, or about $450,500 a year. Sometimes the rent spikes, for reasons that are difficult to understand.

But while the campaign’s payments go to Trump Tower Commercial LLC, the business operation behind Trump Tower  — and ultimately to Trump himself — they don’t always go to Trump Tower. Federal Election Commission records show that most of those checks have been sent to P.O. Box 1926 in Hicksville, which is a suburban town in central Nassau County, just south of Oyster Bay on the affluent North Shore of Long Island.

The Hicksville post office box has been described by Trump money watchers as the “white whale” of Trump’s financial dealings. It is, in a word, bizarre — even by Trump standards. (The campaign did not reply to multiple specific requests for comment.) It’s unclear whether other Trump Tower commercial tenants, such as the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, for instance, send their rent checks to Hicksville, or if they pay at the building itself — as the campaign itself did, for a while.

In the early days of the campaign, however, it wasn’t just rent — some of the Trump campaign’s payroll also went through Trump Tower Commercial LLC, but apparently to a certain type of employee.

But even given that confusing history, FEC filings show that 2020 is turning out to be an exceptional year in terms of the destination of the Trump campaign’s rent checks to Trump Tower Commercial LLC.

In 2015, 2016 and 2017, all rent checks all went to the Hicksville address. The rent payments stopped after September 2017, but resumed in 2018, the year after the Trump tax bill passed, and the same year that the campaign also took up offices in Rosslyn, Virginia. All rent checks in that year, 2018, went upstairs to the accountants in Trump Tower. But in the first half of 2019, the checks went back to Hicksville. Then, in the second half of that year, they once again went to Trump Tower.

The pattern grew even more erratic in 2020. This year, public filings show, the campaign has so far sent six of its eight rent checks to Hicksville — the two outliers being April and May, when the coronavirus ravaged the city and the checks went to Trump Tower, in Manhattan. 

Interviews with state income tax and commercial property tax experts familiar with the workings of New York city and state yielded bafflement: Comments included, “Totally bizarre,” “No idea,” “I’ve never seen something like that” and “Holy shit, that’s absolutely weird.”

Vance’s announcement this week that his office is investigating Trump for criminal tax fraud and misrepresenting business records might throw the Hicksville mystery in a new light.

Vance is the district attorney of New York County, which is the same thing as the borough of Manhattan. He has no jurisdiction anywhere else. So if Vance is investigating Trump for tax fraud, he must believe that Trump defrauded Manhattan authorities in a unique way — through either school, income or property taxes. While New York state Attorney General Letitia James is also interested in Trump’s taxes, she has not announced a similar criminal tax fraud investigation. And there is, as far as public records show, no federal investigation into Trump’s taxes.

Hicksville is in Nassau County, about 30 miles east of Manhattan. If Trump attached the Nassau County address to Trump Tower payments that should otherwise have qualified for income, payroll or occupancy taxes in Manhattan, and did not make that clear — or actively concealed it, possibly with a second bank account — that, experts say, could amount to fraud.

Another possibility is that Trump is using the Hicksville address to hide portions of rent income, which could give him a property tax advantage in the city, where appraisers tie income to property value and tax.

“Given the jurisdiction of the Manhattan D.A., a tax fraud charge makes total sense if manipulated rental income results in a lower real property tax assessment,” a New York City tax attorney told Salon.

A corporate accountant told Salon that if Trump has expenses “that should be allocated to the Trump Organization, but are paid outside to another entity, like Trump Tower Commercial, less expenses means more income — so he could inflate the value to make himself look much wealthier than he is.”

It turns out that the campaign didn’t only expense its rent there. It also spent payroll.

In the 2016 election cycle, federal filings show, the Trump campaign paid then-candidate Trump’s personal bodyguard Keith Schiller $2,574 a week, occasionally a little more. Trump would make those payments himself, routed through payroll at Trump Tower Commercial LLC in Hicksville, and the campaign would reimburse him.

Schiller, however, was unique. Trump had a number of Trump Organization employees on the campaign payroll at one time or another. Hope Hicks, for instance, or the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, Allen Garten. None of those people, however, were ever on the Trump Tower Commercial LLC payroll. Trump routed their campaign salary through Trump Payroll Corp., which he also owned.

When Schiller went to work at the White House, he told the U.S. government in his financial disclosures that he had been paid $160,000 a year by the Trump Organization. He also said the campaign had paid him $70,000, when campaign filings indicate he made much more than that. What’s more, those filings also indicate that Schiller was not on the Trump Organization payroll, but specifically on the payroll at Trump Tower Commercial LLC.

This makes a difference. At the time, Trump Tower Commercial was owned by Donald Trump personally, according to his 2015 and 2016 financial disclosures. This is a unique thing in TrumpWorld: Trump Tower Manhattan (or Hicksville) was all his.

(Well, along with any “silent partners” in the four Trump-owned entities between which Trump Tower was split. One of those was an obscure entity called Tipperary Realty Corp., which is owned by Donald Trump but lists his son, Eric, as CEO. Nothing in TrumpWorld is ever simple, an insider told Salon, but if anything is strange, it’s intentional.)

Schiller wasn’t the only person the Trump campaign paid through Trump Tower Commercial payroll. FEC records show that Trump’s longtime personal driver Noel Cintron — who sued Trump for years of unpaid overtime shortly after he took office in 2017 — also at one point took campaign money routed through Hicksville. So did Trump Tower security chief Bert Mentor. Notably, both Cintron and former Trump Tower porter Rakhim Urazov sued Trump Tower Commercial — not the Trump Organization — for their lost overtime, eventually settling out of court.

“It appears that Trump had only certain employees on the Trump Tower Commercial payroll, rather than the Trump Organization’s,” campaign finance and government ethics law expert Brett Kappel told Salon. “Employees like Keith Schiller, his personal driver, the night security guard at Trump Tower — employees in a position to know embarrassing and possibly incriminating information about Trump.”

It could also be that the story of the wandering rent checks is no big deal. One corporate accountant told Salon that the location of the payments did not raise any flags for him, and that outside of misrepresenting income, the arrangement appears benign.

Trump could be actively trying to keep this one entity — his flagship building — clear of any dirt. If so, that would seem to require a lot of legwork.

“Regular businesses don’t run like Trump businesses,” Jordan Libowtiz, of the government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told Salon. “If he’s hiding something, he’s doing a pretty good job of hiding it. And if he’s not hiding something, he’s doing a good job of making it look like he is.”

New York City tax assessors consider income when they calculate the taxable value of commercial properties, making New York property tax filings resemble those of income taxes more than property tax filings typically do in other parts of the country. Trump Tower tax filings reviewed by ProPublica showed small discrepancies in terms of income.

In other words, a New York City tax attorney told Salon, the Hicksville setup might not be about falsifying tax records, but falsifying business records — also a subject of Vance’s subpoenas.

“The whole thing is a lie perpetrated by Trump and [Trump Organization CFO] Allen Weisselberg, who concocted a method to defray the salary costs of the Trump Organization and shift them to the campaign, on the backs of donations from unsuspecting supporters,” said a source with knowledge of the payment arrangements. 

It may be worth noting that the first of Trump’s infamous checks to former personal attorney and “fixer” Michael Cohen — reimbursing the $131,000 in hush money paid out to adult film star Stormy Daniels — weren’t signed by Trump himself, but by Weisselberg and Donald Trump Jr. The president began writing those checks from his personal account only a few months into his term. Before doing that, however, he quietly gained access to the trust into which he had put all his assets, as a symbolic promise to the American people that he could be trusted.

Sarah Sanders says Trump won’t need a transfer of power: “He’s going to win”

Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said on Thursday that President Donald Trump is not planning for a peaceful transfer of power because he expects to win.

During a press conference on Wednesday, Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses in November.

“We’re going to have to see what happens. You know that I have been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster,” he remarked. “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer frankly. There’ll be a continuation.”

Sanders appeared on Fox News and was asked about the president’s comments.

“I think the president feels like many American, that it’s not going to matter because he’s going to win on election day and he’ll be serving another four years,” Sanders opined. “So, I don’t think he expects to need to have any type of transfer of power.”

According to Sanders, many Americans “will question that final result” because of the increased use of mail-in ballots.

When the conversation turned to the upcoming debate, the former White House press secretary attacked the media.

“I think if Joe Biden doesn’t fall asleep on stage, the media will declare him the winner regardless of how well the president does,” Sanders insisted.

Watch the video below from Fox News.

Facebook could let Trump prematurely declare victory

One of the many ways in which President Donald Trump’s critics fear he could try to steal the election on November 3 is by claiming victory prematurely before all the votes are counted in key swing states. And journalist Mark Sullivan, in an article for Fast Company, explains why he fears that Trump will use Facebook to claim victory even when the presidential election’s outcome remains uncertain.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that during the week prior to the election, it will not accept any new political ads because there won’t be enough time left to check them for accuracy. But beginning at 12:01 a.m. eastern time on Election Night — that is, right after November 3 turns to November 4 in major East Coast cities like Washington, D.C., New York City, Miami, Philadelphia and Boston — it will allow new political ads again, Sullivan notes. And in some of those new ads, the journalist warns, Trump could make a premature claim of victory.

For example, let’s say that the race is close in Pennsylvania and Florida — two key swing states — and Trump is ahead in the vote count in those states. Trump might prematurely declare victory in Pennsylvania even though many votes in Democrat-dominated Philadelphia and its suburbs have yet to be counted. Or in Florida, Trump might prematurely declare victory before all of the votes in Miami-Dade County have been counted.

Sullivan explains, “12:01 a.m. on November 4 could mark the outset of an extremely sensitive and crucial period when election officials take a week or longer to process and tabulate the mail-in ballots used by millions of voters this year. Election integrity experts have said that the in-person votes will be counted first in many jurisdictions, and that because higher numbers of his base will likely vote in-person, Trump may appear to hold a lead on Election Night. That could change over the coming weeks as mail-in ballots are tabulated.”

If Trump prematurely declared victory in Pennsylvania or Florida and it turned out that former Vice President Joe Biden won those states, it’s hard to imagine Trump and his MAGA base admitting the president was wrong.

“If the Trump campaign uses a mass media channel like Facebook to declare victory in the early hours of November 4,” Sullivan notes, “it could send the GOP base into a frenzy of euphoria — and it may go on believing Trump won even after the official ballot count later reveals Biden to be the president-elect. Trump might then declare the election ‘rigged’ — like he did in 2016, even after winning! — and refuse to leave the White House. The nation would find itself in the teeth of a constitutional crisis.”

Florida attorney general asks FBI to investigate Bloomberg’s efforts to restore felon voting rights

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, a Republican, has asked the FBI and the state’s Department of Law Enforcement to investigate former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s efforts to help felons in the state regain their voting rights by paying their court fees, citing “potential violations of election laws.”

Bloomberg has over the last week raised more than $16 million from individuals and private organizations, which he said would go towards paying down fines and fees for nearly 32,000 Black and Latinx Florida voters with felony records. A controversial Florida law forbids former felons from voting unless and until they pay off all money they owe the courts or other legal parties. Critics have called it a “modern day poll tax.”

Florida attorney general Ashley Moody said in the letter that the office of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis had asked her to look into the issue, CNN reported Wednesday.

“After preliminarily reviewing this limited public information and law, it appears further investigation is warranted,” Moody wrote in a letter to the agencies.

Bloomberg aides told CNN that the fundraising drive would benefit the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, a group run by former inmates focused on making it easier for ex-felons to vote.

“This transparent political ploy is just the latest example of Republicans attempting to keep Floridians disenfranchised,” Bloomberg spokesperson Jason Schechter told CNN.

In 2018, Florida voters approved an amendment restoring voting rights to more than a million former felons, with exceptions for murder or sexual offenses. 

State Republicans in turn enacted a law requiring all previously convicted felons to pay off any outstanding fines, fees and restitution costs before they could vote. The U.S. Supreme Court later upheld the law.

Florida Democrats have argued that the law is a form of voter suppression. Judge Barbara Lagoa, a far-right Cuban-American Republican currently on President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee short list, disagreed. She recently voted to uphold the law from her seat on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

During her nine-month stint on Florida’s Supreme Court, Lagoa also ruled in favor of the law. Though Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee asked her to recuse from the federal case, she did not. She argued that it was different from the state-level case, a point which some view as a gray area when it comes to recusal.

The Trump campaign views Florida as a must-win on its path to electoral victory Nov. 3.

Polls show a tight presidential race in the Sunshine State. Biden has been ahead in many polls this month — but not by much. Recent polls have shown Trump trailing Democratic nominee Joe Biden by only 2% (CBS News/YouGov), 3% (Redfield & Wilton), 1% (Kaiser Foundation Foundation), 2% (Benenson/GS Strategy), 5% (Monmouth University) or 3% (CNBC/Change Research). An ABC/Washington Post poll released Wednesday showed Trump with a four-point lead, or within the margin of error.

FBI spokesperson Andrea Aprea told CNN that while the bureau’s Tampa field office had “not officially received the letter” from the attorney general, the agency’s “standard policy is not to confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.”

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement confirmed that it had received the letter, telling CNN that it “will review the information.”

Texas Republicans sue Gov. Greg Abbott to stop extended early voting amid the coronavirus pandemic

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas was sued on Wednesday by a group of prominent members of his own party over his one-week early voting extension amid the coronavirus pandemic.

In July, Abbott moved the start date for early voting up to Oct. 13 from Oct. 19, increasing the window by six days. The extension also applied to the option to return mail-in ballots in person, which was previously limited to Election Day. 

The lawsuit, filed this week with the Texas Supreme Court, claimed that those orders had violated existing state laws governing voting dates. Abbott acted like a “king” by unilaterally changing the date without consulting the legislature, the plaintiffs alleged.

“The Texas Constitution is not a document of convenient consultation,” the lawsuit, filed by Texas GOP Chairman Allen West, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller and a number of members of the Texas Legislature, read. “It is a steadfast, uninterrupted charter of governmental structure.”

The plaintiffs argued that the Texas Constitution required Abbott to obtain legislative approval for such a directive, pointing out that the governor had refused to call special sessions during the pandemic.

“If ever a special session was justified, now is the time,” the filing said. 

It was not the first time that Abbott’s own Republican Party targeted him for actions he had taken to mitigate the pandemic.

In April, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick caught national criticism when he told Fox News that “there are more important things than living.” Two right-wing state lawmakers got illegal haircuts at a Houston salon, daring the governor to enforce his own rules.

A Dallas salon owner was jailed in May for defying orders to close her business. After she received airtime on Fox News and hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, Abbott revised his own stay-at-home orders. His office asked the salon owner for advice on how salons in the state could reopen quickly and safely. Abbott ultimately reopened salons more than a week before his initial target date.

Abbott was caught on tape acknowledging that reopening businesses in the state would “lead to an increase” in COVID-19 cases after he began to ease social distancing restrictions. Ten weeks later, morgues in the state were at capacity.

One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, the Houston-area conservative activist Steve Hotze, has filed several lawsuits already this year targeting Abbott’s response to the coronavirus. This time, he has the added firepower of a number of the state’s most powerful GOP leaders: West and Miller, plus three state senators and four state representatives, the chairman of the Harris County Republican Party and the Texas envoy to the Republican National Committee.

However, one of those state senators, Donna Campbell of New Braunfels, later asked the group to remove her name from the lawsuit in a letter. Campbell said she had not consented to join the legal challenge and disagreed with the “basic construct of the matter.”

The Texas Democratic Party, which has lobbied for expanded voting by mail this fall, released a statement in response to the lawsuit. It said state officials “should be expanding early voting and vote-by-mail options — not cutting them.”

Though Abbott moved the start of early voting, the final day remains the same: Oct. 30, or the last Friday before Election Day. 

Mary Trump sues family for fraud: “Fraud was not just the family business — it was a way of life”

President Donald Trump is facing a new legal battle with his niece Mary Trump who insists she was deluded into forfeiting her inheritance following the death of her grandfather, Fred Trump, Sr., and her father, Fred Trump, Jr.

In the New York State Supreme Court lawsuit, filed in Manhattan on Thursday morning, Mary Trump named the president, her aunt, Maryanne Barry Trump, and her late uncle, Robert Trump — who passed away in August of this year. She outlined claims of fraudulent representation, fraudulent inducement, negligent representation, civil conspiracy, and fraudulent misrepresentation and concealment dating back to the “beginning of the 1980s.”

“For Donald J. Trump, his sister Maryanne, and their late brother Robert, fraud was not just the family business — it was a way of life,” the suit says. “Beginning in the 1980s, these siblings took control of the New York City real estate empire that their father Fred Sr. had built, and exploited it to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone around them.”

According to the lawsuit, Mary Trump claims that she inherited “valuable minority interests in the family business.” However, she insists her two uncles and aunt conspired to chip away at her inheritance over time, ultimately conspiring to withhold the actual value of what she should have inherited.

“Rather than protect Mary’s interests, they designed and carried out a complex scheme to siphon funds away from her interests, conceal their grift, and deceive her about the true value of what she had inherited,” the suit read.

Mary Trump also alleges her uncles and aunt colluded with multiple other parties, including a trustee, who was appointed as a representative allegedly acting on Mary’s behalf, to present “a stack of fraudulent valuations” in an effort to coerce her into signing a settlement agreement that “fleeced her of tens of millions of dollars or more.”

“Through each of these schemes,” the lawsuit says, “Defendants not only deliberately defrauded Mary out of what was rightfully hers, they also kept her in the dark about it — until now.”

The lawsuit draws out how the alleged elaborate schemes were orchestrated and managed over time. Among the schemes outlined, the lawsuit alleges that the siblings also charged “exorbitant management fees, consulting fees, and salaries” from questionable companies connected to her aunt’s financial holding companies.

“Each scheme was a fraud in itself, but they also built on one another. First, Defendants fraudulently siphoned value from Mary’s interests to entities Defendants owned and controlled, while disguising those transfers as legitimate business transactions (the ‘Grift’),” the suit said.

“Second, Defendants fraudulently depressed the value of Mary’s interests, and the net income they generated, in part through fraudulent appraisals and financial statements (the ‘Devaluing’),” the suit claims.

“Third, following Fred Sr.’s death, Defendants forced Mary to the negotiating table by threatening to bankrupt Mary’s interests and by canceling the healthcare policy that was keeping [Mary’s brother] Fred III’s infant son alive, and once at the table Defendants presented Mary with a stack of fraudulent valuations and financial statements, and a written agreement that itself memorialized their fraud, and obtained her signature (the ‘Squeeze-Out’).”

“Through each of these schemes, Defendants not only deliberately defrauded Mary out of what was rightfully hers, they also kept her in the dark about it — until now,” the suit says.

Mary Trump’s lawsuit comes just months after the release of her book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” The incriminating narrative chronicled Trump’s upbringing with a number of “harrowing and salacious” stories about the president’s life and how it contributed to who has become today.

Hillary Clinton is launching a new interview podcast ahead of election

Hillary Clinton wants to get in front of listeners with her new podcast covering topics ranging from politics to the pandemic and from food to friendship, which is set to debut five weeks before the November U.S. election.

The 24-episode “You and Me Both with Hillary Clinton,” produced by iHeartMedia, will premiere Sept. 29, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts and other podcast platforms.

The series will feature Clinton — former First Lady, Secretary of State, senator and presidential candidate — interviewing guests including Sarah Cooper, Gloria Steinem, Stacey Abrams, Samin Nosrat, Patton Oswalt, Tan France, and Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman (co-hosts of podcast “Call Your Girlfriend”).

“I’m excited to bring these eye-opening, powerful, sometimes hilarious conversations to the forefront and open up new avenues of discussion with some of the people I find most fascinating,” Clinton said in a statement. “This podcast is a chance to talk about subjects that are too often overlooked and share the inspiration and education I’ve gotten from my guests.”

News of Clinton’s plans for a podcast with iHeart came out earlier this year. She said she was inspired to launch her own interview podcast after guesting on Howard Stern’s radio show and Conan O’Brien’s “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” last year.

Clinton was the subject of recent Hulu docuseries “Hillary,” directed by Nanette Burstein, an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at her life and career, culminating in her 2016 presidential campaign. The docuseries earned a 2020 Emmy nomination in the documentary/nonfiction series category.

“Hillary, being the first woman on the ballot in a general election for president, is one of the great political leaders of our time, and we are delighted to partner with her on this project,” said Conal Byrne, president of the iHeartPodcast Network. “‘You and Me Both’ will provide listeners with an astute, nuanced look at what’s happening in the world right now — and Hillary is the perfect moderator for those discussions.”

Meanwhile, Spotify this summer debuted “The Michelle Obama Podcast,” with that former First Lady hosting Barack Obama as her first guest.

Hillary Clinton’s podcast will join the lineup of originals on the iHeartPodcast Network, which includes “Stuff You Should Know,” “Next Question with Katie Couric,” “The Ron Burgundy Podcast” and “Atlanta Monster.” The company also has inked co-production audio and TV/film partnerships with Shonda Rhimes, Will Ferrell, Charlamagne tha God, Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions and others.

Listen to the trailer for “You and Me Both with Hillary Clinton”:

Tilda Swinton mesmerizes as a woman possessed in Pedro Almodóvar striking take on “The Human Voice”

Since its first production in the 1930s, there have been dozens of stage and screen adaptations of Jean Cocteau’s one-woman play, “The Human Voice.” A well-regarded 2014 version that screened at the Tribeca Film Festival featured a terrific performance by Sophia Loren. In 2018 Rosamund Pike appeared in a version, while that same year, Roger Avary, who co-wrote “Pulp Fiction,” directed a short starring Elsa Zylberstein. 

Now Pedro Almodóvar has put his patented spin on this classic work, which also marks his first English-language production. For this film, which screened at the New York Film Festival Sept. 24, the director collaborated with the fiery Tilda Swinton and shot this half-hour short in 12 days over the summer, during quarantine. 

Despite its origins as a play, “The Human Voice” is well suited to being filmed. Swinton’s expressions, from a silent sigh in the opening moments, to her look of shock enhanced by her unkempt, flame-red hair, provide key moments that require a camera to capture in close-up. But Almodóvar also knows when to pull back and give Swinton some breathing room, especially during some of the film’s more dramatic moments.

The story — “freely adapted” from the Cocteau play, a credit indicates — is simple. An unnamed woman (Swinton) is bitter about the end of her four-year relationship. She has waited three days for her lover’s packed bags to be picked up, and his dog (Dash) to leave. The woman is seen early on in a hardware store purchasing an axe, and Swinton, in a bold blue suit and sporting big dark sunglasses (probably to hide her puffy, cried-out eyes), exhibits a confidence that shows she is not to be messed with. 

But she is also masking her vulnerability. Her subsequent voiceover fills in the details of her state of mind as she fusses with some books, including a copy of Alice Munro‘s “Too Much Happiness,” as well as some DVDs, including “Kill Bill,” and “Jackie.” These props (along with a copy of “A Little Life” placed prominently on her bookshelf) suggest her state of mind perhaps. But so too does a shot of Swinton looking in the mirror and checking her lipstick. When she later takes the axe to her lover’s clothing laid out on the bed, it is hard not to flash on “Mommie Dearest,” but Swinton (and Almodóvar) do not play this scene for camp. She is a woman enraged and her pain is palpable.

“The Human Voice” shows that Swinton’s character is also contemplating suicide, from her looking over her balcony to her ingesting a handful of brightly colored pills. (Under Almodóvar’s lens the pills look more like candy than poison). And just as she is lying in bed, trying to end it, the phone rings. It is him, her lover. 

The second half of this short has Swinton talking to her ex, and this monologue provides the actress with a real showcase for her singular talents. She appears haunted, ghostlike (especially with her alabaster skin set up by her red hair and dark clothes). When she talks about “madness and melancholy,” Swinton exudes it. 

But when the woman acknowledges having to resist the impulse of sticking a knife in her lover’s chest, it reveals her mercurial nature. How angry and depressed is she? As “The Human Voice” continues, Swinton becomes increasingly more desperate (and more impassioned). The film remains mesmerizing, thanks to Almodóvar’s striking production design and Dash’s actions.

The woman talks about the risk of the relationship and her suffering, “like an animal,” and Almodóvar spins his camera around the actress. When she talks about how the words he said to her are “engraved on her heart,” it is an indelible moment and Swinton spews that phrase so it becomes a sucker punch. And when she loses control and gets angry, Swinton’s performance really crackles. She is best as a woman possessed.

Almodóvar milks this melodrama for all it is worth, using music and his camerawork to emphasize the heightened emotions. He shoots on a soundstage and features an overhead shot and other scenes to remind viewers of the theatricality of it all. The effect does not dilute the power of the production or Swinton’s performance. She is playing along, especially in the last scene when she does something that captures her ex’s attention. 

It is clear what attracted both Almodóvar and Swinton to collaborate on “The Human Voice.” He gravitates to stories of “women on the verge,” and Swinton has this ethereal quality to her that makes her fragile and headstrong simultaneously. Both are working at the height of their powers here. Viewers lucky enough to see this short film will have a memorable experience.

Republican senators push back against Netflix over “Game of Thrones” creators’ new series

Republican senators have sent a letter to Netflix chief content officer and co-CEO Ted Sarandos pushing back against the streaming service’s upcoming series “The Three-Body Problem.” Netflix announced September 1 that “Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are adapting Liu Cixin’s science-fiction trilogy “The Three-Body Problem” for the streamer with the help of “The Terror: Infamy” writer Alexander Woo and executive producers Rian Johnson and Rosamund Pike. The letter claims that by producing the series Netflix is “normalizing” the imprisonment of Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province.

Read more from IndieWire: Damon Lindelof’s big “Lost” regret is acknowledging the fans who hated the series finale

The senators point to an interview “Three-Body Problem” author Liu Cixin gave in 2019 to The New Yorker in which he expressed approval over the imprisonment of Uighur Muslims. Human right abuses are reportedly taking place in Xinjiang province, including the detainment of over one million Uighur Muslims.

When asked in 2019 about imprisoning Muslims in Xinjiang, Liu Cixin responded, “Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty.”

Read more from IndieWire: “The Chef Show” and the comfort of a cooking show’s tiny imperfections

The letter to Netflix is signed by Martha McSally (R., Ariz.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), Rick Scott (Fla.), Kevin Cramer (R., N.D.), and Thom Tillis (R., N.C.). The Republican members ask Netflix to rethink its working relationship with Liu Cixin considering his comments, while adding, “Does Netflix agree that the Chinese Communist Party’s interment of 1.8 to 3 million Uyghurs in internment or labor camps based on their ethnicity is unacceptable?”

“Netflix’s company culture statement asserts that ‘Entertainment, like friendship, is a fundamental human need; it changes how we feel and gives us common ground,'” the letter concludes. “This statement is a beautiful summary of the value of the American entertainment industry, which possesses innovation largely unmatched in the global market. We ask Netflix to seriously reconsider the implications of providing a platform to Mr. Liu in producing this project.”

Disney came under fire earlier this month for filming its live-action “Mulan” adaptation in parts of the Xinjiang province. The end credits of “Mulan” also include a “special thanks” to the “publicity department of CPC Xinjiang Uighur Autonomy Region Committee” and to the public security bureau in the city of Turpan, which is where detainment centers are reportedly in operation.

Read more from IndieWire: “The Queen’s Gambit” trailer: Anya Taylor-Joy slays at chess in Netflix limited series

With the first installment of the “Three-Body Problem” series, Liu Cixin became the first writer in Asia to win the prestigious Hugo Award. The book is set during the Cultural Revolution when humans establish contact with an alien civilization on the edge of extinction. After the aliens invade earth, humans split off into two camps: one in favor of takeover by the superior aliens and the other determined to resist.

IndieWire has reached out to Netflix for further comment.

Text messages are the new door-knocking — but voters are paranoid about political outreach via text

When news broke that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away, political organizers and advocacy groups jumped on the sad news as a chance to try to stop Trump from appointing a right-wing nominee prior to the election, against Ginsburg’s dying wish. One prominent message began to circulate on social media, advising readers to text “RBG” to the number 50409. The message said that, by sending this text, citizens would add their signatures to a petition asking their local senators to delay a new Supreme Court Justice nomination until after the 2021 election.

If you want the Senate to delay a new Supreme Court nomination until after the election, text RBG to 50409. It’s a bot that will send a signed letter to your Senator. I was 414,446. It takes 2 minutes!

— Betty Buckley (@BettyBuckley) September 21, 2020

The problem? Many people didn’t trust it. Scam Detector said it received inquiries questioning its legitimacy. 
And as the message gained traction, more people on Twitter took a second to clarify that this wasn’t a “scam” and it was “actually legit.”

Text “RGB” to 50409. It will send a letter on your behalf to your senators and sign a petition to not allow a new Justice until after the inauguration. It was a very easy process. If you are worried that this is a scam, it’s actually legit.
After you text RBG, reply yes! #Resist pic.twitter.com/S6OduMLrAg

— klopas (@klopas18) September 21, 2020

They were right. It wasn’t a scam. As verified by Snopes, texting “RBG” to 50409 is part of an automated service run by Resistbot, which is a product of a non-profit organization called the Resistbot Action Fund.

Jason Putorti, the executive director of Resistbot, shared data with Salon that as of September 24, 2020, a little over 1.5 million people signed letters that went to their senators across the country asking for the SCOTUS nomination to take place after the election. Putorti added that as the co-creator of the app, and a former volunteer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, he believes texting is an important medium in organizing.

“Texting is a really powerful way to get in touch with people and there’s an immediacy, people see it,” Putorti said. “Email was pretty good a long time ago, but now so much is filtered out, or people don’t open it, texting could go that way eventually. . . . but for right now, I think especially where there’s no door knocking and there’s no ability to do the normal types of campaign activities, the one-on-one texting is pretty critical.”

Digital organizing, and outreach to voters via text, has become more popular over the past few years. During the 2018 midterm elections, Democratic campaigns and similar organizations sent texts to 350 million people through the apps Hustle and GetThru, which are left-leaning political texting companies, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But as Putorti said, in 2020, it’s become even more vital, particularly given how the pandemic has limited traditional, face-to-face outreach. Yet as the Wall Street Journal reported, some people don’t respond to political texts out of fear of getting scammed. A local news station in Orlando, Florida, even warned against them.

Do citizens have a lack of trust in this medium? A simple search on Twitter for “political text scam” shows hundreds of people venting about being annoyed by the outreach or decrying it as fraud. Currently, there’s no official way to quantify the trust or distrust in this medium, but there are voters who expressed their skepticism to Salon.

“A lot of times I’m kind of suspicious of them just because I don’t know how they’re getting my number,” Stephanie Trzaskowski, who lives in Arizona, told Salon. 

Trzaskowski said sometimes she receives text messages from Republicans who are trying to get her to vote a certain way, which doesn’t align with how she’s previously voted.

“I’m always kind of suspicious of that,” Trzaskowski said.

Campaigns and organizers get people’s phone numbers either from scraping data or from publicly available voter files. Democrats work with political text messaging platforms like GetThru or Hustle, which is what volunteers use to send the messages.

However, the aggregated lists compiled by campaigns aren’t available for volunteers to see. In other words, they don’t type your number into their phones directly. It’s all done through the computer. Volunteer texters also get fake numbers, for the sake of privacy.

Being suspicious of this kind of outreach is perhaps understandable given that texts are a ripe medium for scammers. Indeed, in 2018, there was a text-based phishing scam reported in Michigan, in which victims received text messages stating that their absentee ballots were incomplete. They were then asked to fill out personal information to complete them.

According to Scam Detector, there are a handful of phishing scams in which scammers have disguised themselves as government officials. There are similar scams, too, on short-form text media like Twitter. In July 2020, hackers hijacked the Twitter accounts of former President Barack Obama, presidential hopeful Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian and Apple, posting a similar fake message to encourage users to send them Bitcoin.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) states directly on its website to be suspicious of messages that ask for one’s personal information.

“The messages might ask you to give some personal information — like how much money you make, how much you owe, or your bank account, credit card, or Social Security number — to claim your gift or pursue the offer. Or they may tell you to click on a link to learn more about the issue,” the FTC states. “Some links may take you to a spoofed website that looks real but isn’t.”

The FTC advises consumers not to click on links that arrive via text from an unknown source.

Still, text message outreach seems poised to become an even more common means of political outreach in the coming years. Samantha Sherman, who is the president of Women to the Front, said texting has been a crucial medium for organizing for various Democrat campaigns.

“I think it’s absolutely key and crucial, it is also really great at recruitment and it’s the most effective way to reach the most amount of people, and share information,” Sherman said. “Especially in a pandemic.”

Sherman said she usually sees a handful of people question the legitimacy of the outreach. Once, she had a person ask for a photo to prove she’s a real human (which she didn’t send); instead, she replied with a robot emoji, which established trust with the recipient whom she managed to recruit for phone banking.

“It’s not the majority, it’s definitely the minority” who are innately mistrustful, Sherman said.

Unpacking Trump’s beef with canned tuna, which he claims protesters are using as weapons

The day after President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Moon Township, Pa., I spent a portion of the afternoon calling a dozen grocery stores around the country and inquiring about their tuna sales. Most of those conversations revealed that those sales had spiked at the beginning of the pandemic — likely a consumer exercise in frugality and due to the product’s shelf stability — but slowed to a trickle over the summer as production struggled to keep up with initial demand. 

We talked about the tuna market, in general. Sales have dipped 42% over the past three decades after a peak in the late 1980s. We reminiscenced about the 2018 Wall Street Journal article in which StarKist’s Vice President of Marketing and Innovation Andy Mecs blamed the struggles of the tuna market, in part, on millennials and their lack of can opener ownership. 

Then came the final, absurd question, “Have you heard of any protesters in your community using tuna cans as weapons?”

A Minneapolis bodega owner probably gave the most reasonable response. 

“I . . . no — not at all. Why would you ask me that?”

Starting in June, Trump began asserting that protesters across the United States — many of whom are calling for police reform and increased awareness of systemic racism following the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor — were throwing canned food items at police officers during demonstrations. 

In a July 31 meeting with the National Association of Police Organizations Leadership, Trump said that protesters’ weapon of choice was canned soup because it’s “better than a brick because you can’t throw a brick.” During his Tuesday rally in Pennsylvania, he said they had scaled down to cans of tuna fish. 

“They throw it,” he said. “It’s the perfect weight, tuna fish; they can really rip it, right? And that hits you. No, it’s true. Bumble Bee brand tuna. And you can throw that, you can put a curve on it, you can do whatever the hell you want.”

It should be noted that there have been no media reports of protesters attacking police officers with cans of tuna. It’s just another lie from a president from whom untruths are completely unsurprising, and in the realm of topics about which he has been willfully dishonest, this is definitely one of the more inane. 

But these comments — which became an overnight meme on Twitter — only serve to further show Trump as someone who actively peddles to conspiracy theorists, plays into heightened tensions across the nation and publicly lashes out against people (and, uh, canned tuna brands) who have previously criticized him. 

The whole situation is reminiscent of what I’ve since termed the “Great Dairy Scare of 2020,” when there were swirling rumors of police officers being targeted with poisoned Shake Shack milkshakes, hardened concrete made to look like “chocolate chip ice cream,” and a blended coffee drink concealing a tampon. 

Some of these stories’ origins were more reasonable. In the case of the Shake Shack milkshakes, the drinks tasted “off” because of residual milkstone remover, an acidic solution used to combat buildup in dairy equipment. The machine had just been cleaned before the officers placed their orders. 

The officers were sent to Bellevue Hospital to be examined, but never actually became sick. 

However, as I reported in June, an email was sent out in the meantime to the city’s police unions, stating six officers had “started throwing up after drinking beverages they got from shake shack on 200 Broadway,” which was followed up with by a post by The Detectives Endowment Association saying that several officers had become ill after being “intentionally poisoned by one or more workers at the Shake Shack.” 

That’s the version of the story that spread rapidly, and only served to widen the divide between protesters and officers, and their respective supporters. The “chocolate chip concrete” and tampon-in-Frappuccino rumors are other examples of senseless fearmongering, no different than the “buses full of antifa” hoaxes that spread panic through a number of small towns across the country — or the current tuna can discourse. 

And Trump has no interest in assuaging unfounded fears or promoting unity. During his meeting in July with the National Association of Police Organizations Leadership, he called into question the motives and character of all protesters. 

“When they get caught, they say, ‘No, this is just soup for my family,’ and then the media says, ‘This is just soup. These people are very, very innocent. They’re innocent people. These are just protesters. Isn’t it wonderful to allow protesting?'” 

He continued: “No, there’s — and, by the way, the media knows it better than we do. They know what’s going on. I don’t know what’s wrong with them. They’re doing our country a tremendous disservice — I’ll say that.” 

It’s interesting, too, that in his comments about tuna can projectiles, Trump name-checked a specific brand: Bumble Bee Seafoods. The San Diego-based company was vocally opposed to Trump administration tariffs against imports of Chinese tuna, stating that the action would be “devastating” for the company. 

As Neil Ramsden reported for Undercurrent News, a seafood industry trade publication in 2018, Bumble Bee CEO Jan Tharp wrote a letter to the U.S. Trade Representative about the potential implications of the tariffs. 

“We are very concerned with the proposed tariff on tuna loins and the impact that these tariffs will have on our supply chain, global competitiveness, and U.S. operations,” Tharp said. “The proposed tariff on tuna loins will have a devastating effect on Bumble Bee given that our business model is to import tuna loins for further processing and canning in the U.S. by American workers.” 

Bumble Bee did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether they felt Trump’s comments regarding their products being used as projectiles by protesters were retaliatory, but it wouldn’t be the first time the president has publicly disparaged a company for perceived slights against him. 

For example, in August, he blasted Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company when it was revealed that company dress code banned MAGA hats. It’s happened often enough that marketing consultant Rohit Bhargava wrote a guide for companies called “How to React if Trump Mentions Your Company on Twitter.” 

The canned seafood company did, however, issue a short quip of a response on Twitter. 

“Eat em. Don’t throw em,” the brand tweeted. 

Trump’s own FBI director shoots down his bogus conspiracy theories about mass voter fraud

While Democrats are encouraging voting by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump continues to attack the process and vehemently insists, without evidence, that mail-in voting encourages voter fraud. FBI Director Christopher Wray answered questions about the security of mail-in voting during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee meeting on Thursday, and he didn’t see it as any less secure than voting in person.

During his testimony, Wray told Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, “We take all election-related threats seriously, whether it’s voter fraud, voter suppression — whether it’s in person, whether it’s by mail. And our role is to investigate the threat actors. Now, we have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.”

Wray pointed out that that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has seen local election fraud “from time to time” but that there was no evidence to suggest that mail-in voting is less secure than voting in person.

“Certainly, to change a federal election outcome by mounting that kind of fraud at scale would be a major challenge for an adversary,” Wray told Peters. “But people should make no mistake: We’re vigilant.”

Attorney General Bill Barr, on the other hand — who happens to be Wray’s boss — has echoed Trump’s dubious concerns about voter fraud. He has even claimed the federal government uncovered a case of one person turning in 1,700 fraudulent ballots — but this story turned out to be entirely false.

You can watch the clip below via Twitter:

How William Barr could help Trump steal the election — and take the US to “a very dark place”

Between the coronavirus pandemic, civil unrest in major U.S. cities, huge anti-racism protests, bitter political divisions, a heated Supreme Court battle and President Donald Trump’s ruthless voter suppression efforts, the United States’ 2020 presidential election is turning out to be even more chaotic than the elections of 2000 and 1968. Trump has a devoted loyalist in U.S. Attorney General William Barr, and former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade discusses the effect he could have on the 2020 election in a disturbing op-ed published in the Washington Post on Sept. 22.

“William P. Barr sounds more like a far-right-wing news pundit lately than the nation’s attorney general when he’s discussing politics and the coming election,” McQuade warns. “The difference is that unlike talk show panelists, Barr has the power to do something about it.”

McQuade gets into specific comments from Barr, noting, “He said, ‘These so-called Black Lives Matter people’ are ‘not interested in black lives. They’re interested in props: a small number of blacks who were killed by police during conflict with police, usually less than a dozen a year, who they can use as props to achieve a much broader political agenda.’ He told a journalist that if President Trump is not reelected, then the nation would be ‘irrevocably committed to the socialist path.’ He called coronavirus lockdowns ‘the greatest intrusion on civil liberties other than slavery.’ Later, he lauded the role of politics in prosecution, saying, ‘The most basic check on prosecution is politics.'”

The former U.S. attorney adds that Barr has joined Trump in making the baseless claim that mail-in ballots encourage voter fraud on a grand scale, and she fears that if the presidential election is close, Barr won’t hesitate to intervene or to give Trump an unfair advantage over his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

“Barr has demonstrated a determination to use his position — and the legal powers of the federal government — to advance the president’s political interests,” McQuade explains. “So, what damage could Barr do in the days and weeks after the election to help Trump stay in office no matter what voters might prefer? First, Barr has the power to file criminal charges of voter fraud. The presidential election is really state elections, but that doesn’t mean the federal government can’t step in.”

A “determined Barr,” McQuade goes on to say, “could use the fraud statute to charge voters, the Democratic Party or even state election officials with a crime” and “could also involve the Justice Department in civil suits challenging election results.”

McQuade notes, “If a candidate or party filed a lawsuit challenging the election results in one or more states, a statement of interest would allow the Justice Department to make arguments that favor Trump’s campaign. Think Bush v. Gore, but with the U.S. government taking sides. That tactic could bring the powerful voice of the Justice Department to the case, potentially influencing the court of law as well as the court of public opinion.”

“The Justice Department has long taken pride in being independent of politics,” McQuade writes. “Barr’s erosion of this tradition could take our country to a very dark place — sooner than we think.”

Exclusive: GOP Sen. Thom Tillis embraced QAnon conspiracy about COVID-19 death count in town hall

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., on Thursday told a virtual town hall audience that he believed the 200,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the U.S. had been inflated in order to “encourage people to use social distancing.”

“When the final accounting is done,” the actual COVID-19 death count will be lower, Tillis claimed.

The response echoes a false conspiracy theory pushed by adherents of the baseless QAnon movement: that public health officials are allegedly lying to the public about the true death count because of ulterior or possibly sinister motives. Only 6% of the reported deaths are attributable solely to COVID-19, conspiracy theorists claim. 

Tillis also embraced an extreme anti-vaccine position and appeared to welcome herd immunity as part of a strategy to get 60% of the country immune. (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said last month that a herd immunity strategy would lead to an “enormous” death rate that would be “totally unacceptable.”)

The Republican incumbent told the caller that she was “absolutely right” in saying “the CDC has made clear” that deaths related to COVID-19 cover “things like heart attacks, and slip-and-falls and things like that” when people “have COVID in their system.” The caller told Tillis she wanted “a more definitive, clear number.”

“How many people has COVID actually killed?” the caller asked. “Because I think the numbers are skewed, and as citizens, we’re having a hard time of getting a real grasp of what that number actually is.”

“You are absolutely right,” Tillis replied. “I want to make sure I get a chance to answer your question, but you’re making a very, very important point.”

He continued:

In fact, we understand that 95% of the deaths were comorbidities. Sounds like you’re studied in this, so you know what that means. But for the other people in the telephone town hall: Comorbidity means that that person had some other underlying health condition.

So you’re absolutely right. We’re not at a granular level yet. They’re using conservative numbers to encourage people to use social distancing and try and end the spread of the virus. But I think when the final accounting is done you are going to see, sadly, that the number of people who died may have died from an underlying condition at the same time that they had COVID.

Now the question is — and what will be difficult to prove out is — but for COVID, would they have had that heart attack? The complication with diabetes? Would their COPD have been enough to have caused the death except for the additional strain on their body from having COVID? 

And so there’s no question that when all this is done — and we’re not managing a crisis — the same people right now that are just trying to figure out how to end the spread of the virus are going to have to go back into that data so that we can tease through it and learn from it. Now, I know you have a question. But I thought you made a great point, and I wanted to expound on it.

The caller went on to ask her intended question, which was about her concerns over the government implementing a vaccine mandate.

“I don’t want the government telling me that I have to vaccinate my child — for anything, honestly — for whatever effect. Because, as a parent, it is my job before God, honestly, to make sure my children are healthy,” she said. “I’m not a fan of this vaccine — or any vaccine being mandated.”

“You ought to save your phone call for somebody who thinks a mandate would be good,” Tillis responded. “I don’t think you’ll see a mandate, number one. And number two, you’re absolutely right.”

Tillis repeated that vaccine decisions should be left to parents before appearing to embrace herd immunity.

“I for one hope that 60% of the country either develops an immune response after having gotten COVID or having the vaccine, because once we’ve gotten up to 60% this will be a manageable illness in the United States,” he said. (Scientists estimate that a little more than 2% of the U.S. population has acquired the virus, at the cost of more than 200,000 lives.)

The caller sounded like a “great mom,” Tillis concluded.

The comorbidity theory reflects a viral QAnon meme, which misrepresents a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicating that COVID-19 was the sole factor in only 6% of reported U.S. deaths from the coronavirus.

The theory concludes incorrectly that only 6% of those reported deaths should count, a claim which has been repeatedly debunked by medical professionals. If anything, the true number of deaths related to COVID-19 is likely undercounted, according to experts. Victims with at least one other contributing factor, such as pneumonia — itself often brought about by the virus — are still part of the total number of deaths.

Tillis’ Republican colleague Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa also drew fire for making similar remarks during a campaign Q&A earlier this month, which fell on the same week in which the White House coronavirus task force notified her state it had become the nation’s leading hotspot.

“I heard the same thing on the news, you know, traveling across the state today — that they’re thinking there may be 10,000 or less deaths that were actually singularly COVID-19,” Ernst said.

“Now, no doubt that there are deaths, and it complicates with those that have other illnesses, certainly, but those are just attributable to COVID-19,” she said. “I’m just really curious. It would be interesting to know that.”

Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, called Ernst’s remarks “JAW DROPPING” in a series of tweets.

“Senator Ernst is from Iowa, where currently is having one of the WORST #COVID19 OUTBREAKS hotspot in the entire nation as a region, and some say maybe the world,” Feigl-Ding said. “To deny that is to deny the suffering of Iowans.”

President Donald Trump retweeted a tweet pushing the false theory from a QAnon follower named “Mel Q” earlier this week. Twitter removed the tweet for violating its rules against spreading misinformation about the pandemic.

Salon first reported that in another virtual town hall in July, Tillis, long a proponent of responsible masking, had blamed a surge of the virus in North Carolina on the Latinx community for not wearing face coverings.

“And I will tell you, I’m not a scientist, and I’m not a statistician, but one of the concerns that we’ve had more recently is that the Hispanic population now constitutes about 44% of the cases — the positive cases,” the Republican senator said. “And we do have concerns that, in the Hispanic population, we’ve seen less consistent adherence to social distancing and wearing a mask.”

Last month, Tillis apologized for not wearing a mask at the Republican National Convention after he had posted a picture of himself with one on at the beginning of the night.

“I fell short of my own standard,” he said.

Salon has reached out to Tillis’ re-election campaign for comment.

Trump just can’t keep a secret — especially when it comes to his plans to stage a coup

Donald Trump is escalating. Wednesday afternoon, under questioning by Brian Karem of Playboy, Trump offered what the mainstream news outlets are calling a “failure to commit” to a “peaceful transfer of power.” One might also call it “threatening a coup”. 

The first time Karem asked Trump whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election, Trump pulled his usual move, pretending that the fate of our democracy is like a reality-show cliffhanger: “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens.”

But Karem was dogged and asked him again: “Do you commit to making sure that there’s a peaceful transferral of power?”

That’s when Trump let the cat out of the bag: “Get rid of the ballots, and you’ll have a very — we’ll have a very peaceful, there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.”

“The ballots are out of control,” Trump continued, making crystal clear that he resents those gosh-darn ballots and the way they allow American citizens the (theoretical) right to choose their own leaders.

All this moaning over “ballots” is an extension of the conspiracy theory Trump has been hyping for a long time. With assistance from other Republicans — most notably Attorney General Bill Barr — Trump has been falsely claiming for months that mail-in ballots are fraudulent.

The purposes of this false claim are crystal-clear. First, it creates a pretext to prevent people from voting in the first place, through legal challenges against efforts to make mail-in voting more accessible during the pandemic. Second, it’s the excuse Trump and Barr intend to rely on when they try to get those votes thrown out before they can be counted. 

It’s no secret that Trump plans to do whatever he can to steal the election. But by openly demanding that ballots be thrown out, Trump confirmed publicly what many activists, historians and legal experts have been warning may be coming: An actual attempted coup against democracy.

Trump has created a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose proposition: Either he wins the election, or the election was fraudulent. He refuses to accept the third (and likeliest) option, which is that his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, wins outright, which is the outcome the polls are currently pointing toward. 

Trump is going to attempt to stage a coup if he loses. (And right now, FiveThirtyEight gives him a 77% chance of losing a fair election.) There is no use dancing around this or using euphemisms.

Trump has lined up his legal team to fight this in the courts. He’s indicated that he expects his nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat left by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to join a conservative majority to rule in his favor. He’s also been stoking the paranoia of well-armed angry white men, encouraging them to join up with militias that can be leveraged in the upcoming fight over whether all the ballots will be counted. 

This is all very scary, but it’s no time to give into despair and hopelessness. Those of us determined to resist Trump’s coup have one big advantage that resistance movements around the world often don’t have against authoritarian leaders: Trump just keeps giving the game away. 

“Typically power grabs are organized in secret and launched suddenly,” explains the website Choose Democracy. “It’s rare for any country leader to publicly admit they might not respect the results of an election.”

“[P]eople who stop coups rarely have the chance to get training, warning, or preparation,” they continue.

Trump’s motormouth, however, means that the upcoming coup is being advertised and his strategy is being outlined, bit by bit, in the public eye. He’s given up the advantage of surprise.

As anyone who has ever played a war game can tell you, that’s an enormous advantage to give up. And no, Trump didn’t do this for strategic reasons. He did it because he’s a narcissist and an idiot who can’t help running his mouth. 

Because Trump keeps talking, he’s making it very hard for anyone to ignore the fact that an attempted coup is nearly inevitable — and is already underway, through the Postal Service slowdown and the efforts to keep people from getting mail-in ballots. Despite that, the New York Times initially reverted to its ingrained instinct to minimize Trump’s behavior by burying the story about his comments towards the bottom of their front page. (Times editors eventually moved it up to the No. 2 position, below stories about the protests in Louisville over a grand jury’s failure to indict police in the killing of Breonna Taylor, after social media shaming.)

Trump’s big mouth has made it possible for typically cautious but prestigious publications to run articles about the attempted election theft. The Atlantic recently published a piece by Barton Gellman that details concrete and terrifying evidence that Trump is amassing an army of lawyers and activists who plan to pull every political and legal lever available to them to vacate the results of the election and install Trump for a second term. (Ahem: Salon got there first.) Slate also published a piece on Wednesday by political scientist Richard L. Hasen that didn’t pull punches in alerting leaders that an attempted coup is coming. 

Still, it’s hard to dislodge the instinct among much of the punditry to tell fairy tales about how our institutions will protect us and that a coup is un-possible in America.

One example is Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, who sneered on Twitter Thursday afternoon, “It seems like the mood among some of the blue-checkmarks here has drifted a bit too liberally from ‘there’s a plausible chance of some very bad outcomes’ (true) to ‘Trump is fersure going to steal the election and you’re all sheeple for thinking otherwise’.”

This was, of course, a straw man. People are scared, but talking about Trump’s inevitable and ongoing attempts to steal the election is not defeatist at all. By highlighting Trump’s likely tactics and strategies, journalists and activists are trying to stir the public to the actions that will be required to stop him.

It isn’t surprising that this makes Nate Silver uneasy. Silver’s space in the punditry is about the statistical modeling of election outcomes. But as in sports, statistical models only really work within the rules of the system. Whether we’re talking about a basketball game or a presidential election, if one side is flagrantly cheating, the predictive value of the models falls apart. Silver doesn’t want to look too hard outside the neat little word of rules and statistics he has built. 

But Trump’s loquaciousness got in the way of Silver’s valiant attempts to sound savvy and not like those “hysterical” #Resistance people. Trump’s comments about getting rid of ballots occurred just a few hours after Silver’s efforts to shame people who take the attempted coup seriously, and he was forced to tweet, “OK this is real bad tho” in response. 

Getting over the wishful thinking that holds that such things can’t happen in the United States is the first step in preventing them from happening. In this, we have a major advantage, since Trump won’t shut up about it. He doesn’t just talk in the abstract about rejecting the election results — he goes ahead and outlines the steps he and his minions will take to try to pull this off. Trump has handed his opponents the blueprint for his intended coup, with the leverage points that might be most effective at stopping him helpfully highlighted. The only question is whether people have the clarity to take him at his word, and the will to do what it takes to save democracy.