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We all know Trump wants to use the USPS to rig the election: Here’s how he’ll do it

Donald Trump is practically daring us to nab him in the act. That’s how obvious and unequivocal his latest conspiracy to cheat in the 2020 election happens to be. We all see it happening, we know what he’s doing and we know exactly why. The crisis is so urgent that it requires us to compile, step-by-step, a complete picture of his plot to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service and, with it, the election. That’s what I’d like to do here today, so let’s get started.

Michael Cohen, in the foreword to his memoir about his time as a fixer for Trump, repeated what he testified under oath to the House Oversight Committee last year: Trump will do anything to win, and possesses “the desire for power at all costs.” Cohen added, “I became even more convinced that Trump will never leave office peacefully.” And the president’s paranoia and rank ignorance when it comes to American government is fully embodied in this sentence: “He thinks everyone is as corrupt and shameless and ruthless as he is.” 

While Trump’s goal is to cheat by making it next to impossible to vote with social distancing in mind, there’s a second layer to Trump’s gambit. He believes — or at least he wants his Red Hat fanboys to believe — that the Democratic Party will illegally exploit the coronavirus pandemic to oust him from power. It’s textbook projection, another Trump character trait described in Cohen’s book. Blind, eager acceptance of Trump’s unproven suspicions is precisely what he requires to make it all work.

I’ve been covering his war against absentee voting since it began. My original thought was that he’d rally his loyalists against voting by mail in preparation for legal challenges to absentee ballots on and after the Nov. 3 election, targeting boards of elections in precincts and districts that could swing entire states, and therebyy invalidating enough ballots to squeak out a narrow Electoral College victory. Indeed, it turns out the Trump campaign has already spent more than $20 million in that nefarious enterprise so far, with, we assume, plans for many more legal challenges through Election Day. 

But now, the walls of the trash compactor are growing narrower by the minute, with Trump making every effort to shrink the options for voting: He wants either in-person voting on the day, despite the pandemic, or nothing. 

So here’s the plot as it currently appears.

Step One: Encourage the Red Hats to blow off the pandemic. It turns out that the coronavirus fits nicely into laying the groundwork for the big cheat. Trump began his herky-jerky movement to reopen at the initial height of the daily infection rate, rather than after the curve had been flattened. That’s why we were still tallying more than a thousand deaths per day well into August, with many more daily infections than most other affluent nations. (We’re ninth in the world in total cases per capita, and 10th in the world for deaths per capita. Oh, and regarding Trump’s favorite excuse: we’re 18th in tests per capita. That’s bad.) For a man who says he understands the stock market, he stupidly bought high, demanding an economic reopening and the so-called liberation of Michigan and other states at absolutely the wrong time.

None of it makes any sense until you see it through the prism of Trump’s desperation to win re-election. 

Not only did his reopening insistence appease the jacked-up white guys in lower Manhattan, resuscitating the stock markets, it set the stage for politicizing how we handle the outbreak. While most normal people continued to stay home, listening to experts, Trump’s fanboys indulged themselves and, maskless, raced out to bars, restaurants, beaches, pools and other frivolous public spaces, deluding themselves into thinking it was safe. 

It’s a suicidal delusion they continue to maintain today. That’s good news for the Trump campaign because it means that his supporters will likely be willing to vote in person, if allowed by their states, while continuing to disregard the risk of exposing themselves and their families (and their co-workers, and their co-workers’ families, and so on), while those of us who are trying to do the right thing amid a massive public health crisis will chiefly vote absentee, either by mailing our ballots or dropping them off.

Step Two: Attacking absentee voting everywhere, including the courts. We’ve been over this step before, but it doesn’t hurt to revisit. Trump’s strategy appears to be not only to use the courts to toss out absentee voting laws, but also to misrepresent what absentee voting actually is through a coordinated disinformation campaign: pure propaganda led by Trump and repeated by Fox News, Breitbart and others. 

Trump began by attacking “mail-in voting” as the enemy, when, in fact, all mail-in voting is absentee voting. It’s the same thing. Incidentally, Trump and his wife have already requested their Florida absentee ballots, another case of Trump’s gaslighting. By the way, they weren’t required under Florida law to provide any excuse to get them, and the ballots will be delivered by the USPS.

At least 33 states, plus the District of Columbia, provide absentee voting without requiring an excuse to receive a ballot. Only seven states — all red states, except New York — require an excuse for voting absentee. Likewise, only nine states automatically send ballots to registered voters. All the remaining states require an application to receive a ballot. Trump wants his people to believe that voters in all states will get ballots automatically, irrespective of whether the voters are dead or alive.

Speaking of which, Donald Trump Jr. and other Red Hats tweeted out a Breitbart article over the weekend featuring the clickbait headline: “Michigan Rejects 846 Mailed Ballots ‘Because the Voter Was Dead.'” Take a guess as to accuracy of this headline. Contrary to what Junior and the goons at Breitbart wanted their loyalists to believe, the actual Michigan secretary of state’s website showed that 846 ballots had been submitted — not by dead people, but by people who were alive when they sent their ballots but died before the election. The site clearly notes: “Refers to voters who died after casting their absentee ballot but before Election Day.” Also, the state caught all 846 of those votes before they were counted toward the election.

Nevertheless, a lie travels around the world before the truth gets its pants on. And that’s what Breitbart, Junior and Trump himself want: to make it seem as if absentee voting is rife with fraud. It’s not. And in the few anecdotal cases, fraudulent ballots are weeded out anyway. That said, mission accomplished for the Red Hats. This will mean more Trump voters turning up to vote in-person (state law permitting), while support is mustered for Trump to dispute the results of the election.

Step Three: Sabotage the U.S. Postal Service. This part of the scam is the very definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy. For months, the president’s been demagoguing about how the USPS can’t possibly handle all those ballots. Then he set about making sure of it by ordering Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who donated $1.2 million to Trump’s re-election campaign, to needlessly slow down the mail. This direct sabotage includes removing sorting machines, ending overtime, removing some outdoor mailboxes while locking others and gouging the states, raising bulk-rate mailing fees to 55 cents per item. 

Last week, 46 states received word that, given the sabotage, ballots mailed late in the process might not arrive in time to be counted. The consequence of this prong is, of course, greatly diminished confidence in the USPS. A new poll shows a significant decline along those lines. Again, Trump did it. He successfully undermined public confidence in one of the most popular government services available.

Lately, Trump’s gaslighting has included his ass-backwards insistence on making the “U.S. Post Office (System)” great again, apparently by bleeding it to death. Maybe instead of killing it by a thousand cuts, he should first learn the actual name of the thing. It’s been called the U.S. Postal Service since 1970, not the “U.S. Post Office (System).” After that, how about giving the USPS the funding it needs to keep up with its pension obligations (the result of a 2006 law passed by a Republican Congress). Trump is also playing into this false notion that the USPS needs to make a profit when exactly zero other government services are held to the same standard, including NASA, the FBI and, yeah, the Space Force. When will the Space Force turn a profit? No one’s asking that question because it’s crazy. Same should be the case for the USPS.

On the bright side, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is reconvening the House Oversight Committee, starting next Monday, when DeJoy will be grilled about why he’s doing what he’s doing. Likewise, state attorneys general need to begin legal proceedings aimed at the sabotage, if they haven’t already. This isn’t over yet and the good guys still have time — but not much.

Step Four: Kill the drop boxes, too. For the past week or so, anti-Trump voters have been discussing, online and off, how best to make sure our ballots are counted. I’m planning on voting early and in-person, mask on. One of the other solutions is to get an absentee ballot, and then drop it off at a designated drop box. The USPS sabotage is avoided and our ballots are counted toward the ousting of the clown dictator.

So the clown dictator has struck back by launching his attack on drop boxes, too, tweeting:

Some states use “drop boxes” for the collection of Universal Mail-In Ballots. So who is going to “collect” the Ballots, and what might be done to them prior to tabulation? A Rigged Election? So bad for our Country. Only Absentee Ballots acceptable!

We can safely assume he’ll be suing to have drop-boxes removed. Count on it. Once again, his paranoia is more about infecting his people with paranoia about all this so they’ll support his cheating. In this case, he’s calling into question the election workers who collect the ballots, as though there aren’t election workers on Election Day doing the exact same thing. What’s next? Suing to ban the use of No. 2 pencils? Where are all these pencils coming from? China! And who does China want to win? Sleepy Joe! 

You may have noticed that he’s saying “only absentee ballots are acceptable.” But it’s absentee ballots that get dropped into the drop boxes. And hasn’t he been screaming about how absentee ballots are loaded with rampant fraud? What the hell? No wonder his Red Hats are going around screaming the n-word and attacking mask-wearers — their messiah’s ballot blurts are neck-snappingly contradictory. 

The ultimate goal here is to disenfranchise his opposition while corralling his supporters into voting booths on Election Day. Any absentee ballots that make it through Trump’s gauntlet will face legal challenges before they’re counted. As long as the options are narrow, he can control the process. Loaded on top of all this is the Republican Party’s useful idiot, Kanye West, plus Bill Barr’s nonsensical “Obamagate” probe and the likelihood of an October surprise that may produce. And all that’s on top of  the voter ID laws, voter purges, voting booth restrictions and all the rest of it. The party of Trump knows its days are numbered, so it’s doing everything it can to rig the process against the growing majority of Americans who are done with Trump and all his insanity and fascism. 

There’s still time to stop him. We have to. Once he’s gone, former U.S. attorney Glenn Kirschner’s concept for a Trump Crimes Commission should be launched, investigating a wide range misdeeds, up to and including the sabotage of the USPS. I hope Trump and his adult children have picked out non-extradition nations and packed their go-bags. They’ll need ’em.

Democratic insider Simon Rosenberg: Trump is “being coached by Putin” to seize power

The Democratic National Convention is taking place this week — but not exactly in Milwaukee, as originally scheduled. For the first time ever, both of this year’s major-party conventions will be almost entirely “virtual,” held online because of the pandemic.

With this event, the 2020 presidential race is now entering its final stretch, with less than three months to go until Election Day. Joe Biden will now be formalized as the 2020 Democratic nominee, with Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his running mate. She is the first black woman to be part of a presidential ticket, and the third woman to be a vice-presidential nominee for a major party. 

Opinion polls show that Biden and Harris enjoy great support among Democratic voters, and hold a significant lead over Donald Trump and Mike Pence at this stage. But these basic facts do not fully channel the malignant reality of America in the Age of Trump, where we have seen a season of death from the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump regime’s criminally negligent response, and now face a presidential election that will be a referendum on the future of the country’s multiracial democracy, respect for human and civil rights, and the rule of law.

As scholars like Mike Davis and Chris Hedges have reflected in recent interviews with Salon, the 2020 election is also a referendum on the future of the planet and the existence of the human race, faced with the global climate disaster and the Republican Party’s support for such ecocide. In sum, the American people’s decision on Election Day 2020 is a world-historical event.

These issues exist in a political environment of escalating right-wing political violence and the possibility of partisan mass violence on Election Day and beyond, all of which is fueled by increasing social inequality, conspiracy theory, an enormous economic crisis, a neofascist and white supremacist counterrevolution in America; and a concerted effort by authoritarians to subvert or destroy empirical reality and replace it with an alternate reality molded in their image.

I recently spoke about all this with Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrats Network and the New Policy Institute, a liberal think tank based in Washington. He has served as a senior adviser to the Democratic Party at the highest levels and has worked in two presidential campaigns, including a senior role in Bill Clinton’s 1992 “war room.” In 2018, Rosenberg was a senior adviser to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and helped to craft the strategy which resulted in the Democrats gaining 41 seats and the House majority. 

In this conversation, Rosenberg shares his thoughts on what issues should be prioritized during the first 100 days of a Joe Biden presidency and explains his theory that Donald Trump isn’t even trying to win the 2020 presidential election, but rather hopes to steal it and then begin a full-on crackdown against any Americans who dare to oppose him.

Rosenberg also suggests that Trump is being mentored by Vladimir Putin and other authoritarians — and then acting on that tutelage as he unleashes his federal secret police and conspires in plain sight to keep the American people from voting by various means, including overt sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service. 

Rosenberg also rejects the views of many progressives, making clear that he’s not part of the “Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders wing” and arguing that the American people do not want radical change but rather a steady, consistent, compromise-oriented leader such as Joe Biden. 

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

As usual, this interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you feeling about America in the Age of Trump and his escalating assault on democracy?

I’m scared. Prior to the 2016 election I wrote articles warning that Donald Trump could be far more destructive than most people understood, particularly focused on questions he was raising about the propriety of the global liberal order and globalization. It was likely that if he were to become president, that he would end Pax Americana. I was an adviser to the DCCC and the DNC during the 2016 cycle, so I was brought in by [interim party chair] Donna Brazile to help deal with some of the cleanup and mitigation after the carnage that happened at the DNC after the Russian WikiLeaks hacking.

I knew the Russian interference campaign was real, because of my background working with the Obama administration on TPP and the European TTIP at the time the United States encountered the problems with [Edward] Snowden. He became a problem because he was pushing the Western alliance apart around questions of privacy and digital issues. Snowden was living in Russia during all this, and there is the question of whether he was a Russian spy.

What we were witnessing at the time was the early stage of this ongoing operation to separate the United States from its allies and to weaken the West. In 2016, the American intelligence community warned this was happening, with their report stating that as part of its ongoing historic efforts to weaken the American-led global order, Russia launched a campaign to help Donald Trump get elected. And then the report went on to call it an insurgency against the West, and that it had to be seen that way. Trump and his campaign were mimicking Russian arguments that America was not a truly virtuous power.

So I was worried, going all the way back to the summer of 2016, that Trump’s relationship with Russia was illicit, and that if he won he would be dependent upon Russia for the victory, which means he was compromised. Putin would be able to exploit him. Putin is part of an ideological movement that is asserting itself in Europe and the United States. This movement’s goal is to weaken and destroy the United States.

I believe that 20 years from now [Mick] Mulvaney and [Mark] Meadows and the other chiefs of staff and senior Trump officials are going to acknowledge that they believe that Putin was Trump’s coach. He has checked every play in the authoritarian playbook — and done it very fast. Donald Trump is not very smart. He is likely being coached by Putin and other authoritarians. They are giving him ideas and pushing him in certain directions. We know that Trump has spoken to Putin seven times in the last few months, in a time when he has ratcheted up his attacks on democracy and started the beginnings of a domestic crackdown here in the United States.

Why did it take so long for the American news media and other elites, including senior Democrats, to finally state that Donald Trump is an authoritarian and a threat to democracy?

Why didn’t the elites stop it? Why didn’t the institutions hold? People in the United States study authoritarianism from an academic and distant perspective and thought it could not happen here because of the country’s long history of being a stable democracy.

One of the biggest inhibitors for the Democrats was that a political decision was made in the 2018 elections to not talk about Trump. And I was an adviser to the DCCC in 2018. I was not an advocate of this strategy, although it worked. Democrats won power in the House and it was a successful strategy. But I have been an advocate that we needed to talk to the American people about what Trump was doing to our democracy and the breaking of democratic norms and laws and rules.

In 2017, I was so concerned about Trump’s danger to this country’s democracy that I met with over 30 members of Congress. There were one-on-one meetings with them and their staff to discuss how we as Democrats needed to draw lines with the Republicans and Trump now. There needed to be firm lines, limits created which said that if Donald Trump goes over this line, then we are going to cease all cooperation on other matters of government. The Democrats needed to make it clear that they were not going to allow any part of Trump’s agenda which was a threat to the country’s democracy.

In many of those meetings, members of Congress would say to me, “I don’t think he’s going to be that bad. He’s a businessman, he’s a pragmatist, he’s a dealmaker, and we can work with him.” I would sit in the meeting and say, “In what universe? Have you been paying attention to what Trump is saying about the Russian scandal and election interference? How he is covering up for Putin?”

There is a dark side to American exceptionalism, which is that too many Americans do not believe that authoritarianism can take hold in America. But then again, neither does any other country where authoritarianism takes over. The American people have been naive in that regard.

Joe Biden is leading in the polls. However, there is a long time between today and the vote on Election Day in November. Hillary Clinton led Trump by double digits at times in 2016, and Michael Dukakis had a huge lead over George H.W. Bush in 1988. I am deeply worried that too many Democrats are prematurely celebrating a Biden victory.

Every election is unique. The 2020 election has its own dynamic, and I do not believe that Donald Trump can win this election any longer — which is why we should be worried about all of the anti-democratic activities that he is engaging in.

I’m growing concerned that Trump is not even attempting to look like he’s even trying to win the election anymore. He is now attacking his political opponents, using the government of the United States as a weapon. Trump’s speeches over the Independence Day weekend must be taken seriously and literally.

In those speeches Trump said that he viewed the hunting down and killing of the “radical left” in the United States to be a job equal in importance to getting rid of the Soviet Union and defeating the fascists in Nazi Germany. Trump said that directly. He equated the so-called “radical left” with Nazis and the Soviet Union. That is a direct quotation from Trump. It is not an inference.

Trump’s threats must be taken at face value in that he is going to start a domestic crackdown — and then Portland and his use of federal forces took place a week or so later. Trump and his administration and other allies have concluded that they cannot stay in power through voting and winning the election fairly, and therefore Trump needs to stay in power through other means. I worry that what Barr and Trump have done over the last eight to 10 months is to create an ideological framework for authoritarianism and permanent rule by a tribal minority over a more multi-ethnic, multiracial majority.

Recent polling data shows that Trump’s voters are much more enthusiastic than are Biden’s supporters. How concerned are you about that gap?

Such observations are more important for political insiders than for the general public. Having said that, I would rather have more supporters who are less enthusiastic then fewer supporters who are more enthusiastic.

Donald Trump is losing the election badly and we had very high turnout in the Democratic Party in the 2018 election and primaries since. There is no reason to believe that the Democrats are going to have a turnout problem. Voter intent is very high.

Turnout is going to be high as well, assuming that people have the ability to vote. Joe Biden has a very substantial lead. Only a handful of candidates have been this far ahead. Barring some extraordinary set of events, Biden is in a very strong position. Their challenge is to continue to be on offense and being aggressive. Biden and the Democrats cannot let Donald Trump dominate the news every day. The Democrats are going to have to fight to make sure that what they’re saying is heard and that they’re not getting overwhelmed by the Trump media machine.

I believe that Joe Biden has run a very good campaign. In some ways this is not the hardest election to run in because it’s going to be about COVID and the economy and health care and a handful of other things. This is not an election that’s going to be about eight things. It’s going to be about two things. The Biden campaign has to get those two things right. They can do it.

The American people are not with Donald Trump on any of the major issues right now. Therefore, the Biden campaign must stand up and speak as loud as possible. But they must not take anything for granted. I believe that the Democrats will win the presidency, that the Senate should flip, and that Democrats could extend the number of seats they hold in the House. This is going to be a very good election for the Democratic Party, based on all the underlying trend lines.

Joe Biden and the DNC helped to move the Democratic Party to the right. He and the Clintons were also central to the Democratic Party’s embrace of neoliberalism. That is serious baggage among a large part of the American electorate and the Democratic Party’s base. How would you advise Biden about managing that history and its legacy?

The Biden campaign is obviously listening, growing and maturing. I do not view Biden’s past as baggage. The Democratic Party has been a very successful party over the last 30 years. Biden’s been part of the most successful center-left party in the modern world. We’ve governed very well and left the country far better than we found it both times we’ve been in power. It’s not been perfect — nobody is. But I’d put up our track record of governing over the last generation of American politics against any political party in the developed world. I do not believe that Joe Biden has a lot to run away from. I do believe that the national conversation has changed. Things are different. Every election is about new opportunities and new challenges. The Biden campaign is doing a very good job of adapting itself to the moment.

Joe Biden is who he is, and you cannot run away from the core reality. That is part of what hurt Hillary in 2016. There was a sense that she wasn’t really being honest about her positions and how they had changed. Biden is running very much as Joe. He’s in his 70s, he’s not going to go through some kind of radical change. The important thing is that he’s got to continue to present himself as running as the head of a competent and modern party where diverse voices will be heard. Biden made that very clear in the primaries. That is the opposite type of leadership from Trump.

I think they’re doing a really good job. Biden is running as the top Democrat. I don’t think he’s running a deeply ideological campaign. The Democrats are pragmatists. They are focused on getting things done for everyday people and they’re not a deeply ideological party. I think that that’s important. I’m not in the Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders wing of the party. I do not believe that voters are looking for massive transformation. I think they’re looking for stability and incremental growth and a government that’s on their side fighting for them every day. The voters want government to work.

Biden is willing to work with anybody. He’s willing to work with Elizabeth Warren. He’s going to work with Republicans as well to pursue a winning agenda. Joe Biden is a dealmaker. And I think that, frankly, the country needs that right now. It’s the opposite of Trump’s governing style, which has been so dysfunctional and so hard to get anything meaningful done.

I’m optimistic that Biden is in touch with the moment and his political team has kept him grounded and connected to today’s Democratic Party. And I think Republicans are publicly backing Joe Biden in a way that they never would Hillary because they know that even though they’re not on the same team, if they’re in a room with Joe, he will listen and give them a chance to make their case. Biden’s sense of fair-mindedness and not being deeply ideological or partisan but rather being a leader who wants to do the right things for everyday people is what the American people want right now.

Republicans need to be punished at the polls for their support of Trumpism and its assault on American democracy, civil rights, human rights and the country’s standing in the world. Biden has suggested that he would try to make peace with “good” Republicans and perhaps even put them in his administration. Why not exile the Republican Party from any significant role in American government, society and public life after their cooperation with and loyalty to Trump?

I do not support some type of fusion government. But Democrats have to get better at loving the sinner and hating the sin. Meaning that we have to distinguish between Republicans who are good people and have contributed to the life of the nation versus an ideology that they currently advocate which has done enormous harm to the country. I think we as Democrats are agile enough do that.

I don’t think it’s “a pox on all your houses” for backing Trump. I think what we want is a modern, responsible center-right party in America. We don’t have that. I don’t think that Joe Biden’s going to have the power to create that. I’m of the belief there’s a reasonable chance that the Republican Party goes out of business and some new center-right party is going to be formed. I am unsure if it is possible to reform the Republican Party as it is right now.

On the question about how the crimes of the Trump era are going to be prosecuted, we must let the wheels of justice turn as they will. Claiming that we’re going to look the other way because of misdeeds by anyone in the Trump administration would be a betrayal of justice, much like what Donald Trump is doing. I do not believe that Joe Biden and the Democrats can walk away from Trump’s crimes and other misdeeds, but there are also limits on what can be done.

Many Democrats are going to want to focus on defeating COVID and fixing the economy and dealing with their broader agenda. So how much time are we going to collectively spend on investigating and prosecuting the Trump administration for wrongdoing?

Yes, what has happened in this country with Donald Trump and his time in office is so extreme that there’s going to have to be a long and deep conversation about what happened so that reforms can be passed to prevent such an assault on democracy and the country’s political and social institutions from ever happening again. The United States must strengthen its democracy and recommit to liberal values around the world. There is a lot that has to come from this. I think that part of it is going to be very complicated.

Donald Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy appear to be sabotaging mail delivery by removing mailboxes and sorting machines, canceling overtime and engaging in other machinations with the goal of slowing down the mail such that mail-in ballots will not arrive in time. Trump has made clear that he is interfering with the U.S. mail in order to preventing the American people from voting against him. The crisis is escalating. Will there be free and fair voting on Election Day?

Trump’s sabotaging of the USPS is just one piece of a much broader campaign that Trump is waging to hold onto power, not by winning a free and fair election but through cheating. It’s like a crime spree against democracy, an orgy of anti-democracy behavior we’ve never seen before in America. Nothing could make the authoritarians of the world happier than to see the way Trump is shredding American democracy in real time. Even though we all knew it was coming, it’s clear we weren’t ready for this new assault. We are in a very dangerous moment and folks have to stand up and fight.

What are your thoughts about Sen. Kamala Harris being chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate?

There are many reasons picking Sen. Harris was bold and smart, but perhaps the most important is that it is a very clear embrace by Biden of the emerging America, an America far more tolerant and comfortable with its increasing diversity. Biden is in a very real way in the process of making the handoff of American leadership from one generation to another, and working, as a responsible leader would, to ensure it is a successful transition. 

What should Biden do in his first 100 days in office?

I want him to be restrained and disciplined about staying focused on the things that matter most and not getting drawn in too many separate directions. There are problems right now that matter more than other problems. We have to defeat the pandemic. We have to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and economy better and cleaner. We have to repair our democracy. We have to repair our standing in the world. We have to start to lay out and create a big conversation about how we need to make our society better.

I’m worried that the Democratic House passed hundreds of bills in the last two years, but there has to be demonstrable and clear progress on the things that matter most to voters. Committing to these secondary issues that may matter a lot to constituents or specific groups may have to take a back seat to Joe Biden and the Democrats getting the big stuff right.

We do not have the basic building blocks of a COVID strategy in the United States. We have to do that. And that’s going to be hard and complicated. At the end of the day, what’s Joe Biden going to be evaluated on? It will be whether he defeated the pandemic and how quickly the country was returned to normal.

DeJoy donated big to GOP senators up for re-election; they’re still silent on USPS

Recently appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a top donor to Donald Trump and until earlier this year the head fundraiser for the Republican National Convention, has given tens of thousands of dollars to Republican Senators up for re-election this November, according to Federal Election Commission records reviewed by Salon.

FEC records also show that DeJoy regularly maxed out with tens of thousands of annual contributions to the official GOP committees dedicated to electing Republican lawmakers: the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

DeJoy’s political fundraising and donor records have come under scrutiny since his appointment to the head of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors. He caught fierce backlash last week from Democrats and Postal Service employees after reports broke that USPS warned 46 states that their mail ballots might not be delivered on time for the November election, potentially disenfranchising millions of voters.

The news accompanied other reports that USPS mail sorting machines and drop boxes have been removed, as well as another notice from DeJoy that the agency is engaging in a sweeping overhaul that might delay delivery times.

The House of Representatives has now called on DeJoy to testify about what it sees as a troubling pattern to suppress votes in November’s general election, and has threatened him with arrest if he does not comply.

A number of of DeJoy’s GOP beneficiaries are facing tight races this year: Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona and Michigan Republican candidate John James, who is running against Democratic Sen. Gary Peters. None of these Republicans have spoken publicly about DeJoy or his recent actions as postmaster general.

DeJoy gave a total of $8,100 to McSally — $2,500 for her losing 2018 Senate campaign against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, and $5,600 to her current race. While a recent poll showed McSally pulling slightly closer to Democratic opponent Mark Kelly, husband of former Arizona Rep.. Gabby Giffords, Kelly still leads by about 7.4 percentage points, according to a Real Clear Politics average of polls.

Though McSally says she supports absentee voting, she has expressed the same concerns about mail-in voting as President Trump, despite a warning from Arizona’s top election official that the president appears bent on sabotaging mail-in voting.

“I disagree this close to an election [with] states or at the federal level having some sort of mass mail-in ballots to everyone on the voter roll. I have some real concerns about that,” McSally said last week.

A spokesperson for the McSally campaign declined to comment.

DeJoy, former head of the freight company XPO Logistics, a major player in the supply chain sector and a chief USPS competitor, donated $11,000 to John James, the GOP nominee in Michigan — $5,400 for his failed 2018 run against Sen. Debbie Stabenow and $5,600, the maximum amount, for his current campaign.

James is head of the supply chain company James Group International and its affiliate Renaissance Global Logistics, which received between $1 million and $2 million in federally-backed Paycheck Protection Program loans during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic.

Recent polls in Michigan, a key swing state in November, show James consistently trailing Peters, who is ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, which conducts oversight of the Postal Service. He is currently investigating USPS delays related to mail-in ballots.

James does not appear to have spoken out publicly about DeJoy or voting by mail, and his campaign did not provide comment for this article.

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and his affiliated committees have taken a combined $48,500 from fellow state residents DeJoy and his wife, Aldona Wos, former head of the North Carolina Health and Human Services Department. The couple have contributed to Tillis’ election efforts since his 2014 campaign.

DeJoy also gave to the John Bolton Super PAC, which has spent heavily for Tillis and, like Tillis, has ties to the shadowy data firm Cambridge Analytica, the subject of subpoenas during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into 2016 election interference.

Following last Friday’s reports of the USPS state warnings, the Tillis campaign told the Raleigh News & Observer that “Senator Tillis is confident in North Carolina’s strong absentee ballot program, is encouraging North Carolinians to vote absentee and believes we will have a fair election.”

Tillis, one of the chief early architects behind North Carolina’s controversial voter ID law — dubbed the “monster” law by critics — played a central role in what a federal judge called the state’s “sordid history” of voter suppression when she struck down a North Carolina voter ID law late last year.

The Tillis campaign did not respond to questions about the donations or the last time Tillis and DeJoy spoke.

DeJoy also gave $5,000 to Graham’s 2014 campaign, per FEC records. Graham, who as Salon recently reported has voted by mail on several occasions, has also made false claims that the practice is prone to fraud.

Graham sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is currently holding hearings to confirm DeJoy’s wife, Aldona Wos, as ambassador to Canada.

In a rare break with the president, Graham has defended the USPS in the face of Trump’s attempts to block funding: “The idea of cutting the Postal Service’s budget is not the right approach,” he said, adding that he believes the president is “trying to stop what he sees as an effort to have mass mail-in voting.”

Graham has apparently not commented on DeJoy specifically. A campaign spokesperson did not reply to Salon’s request for comment.

Manuel Bonder, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Democratic Party’s coordinated campaign, criticized DeJoy’s decisions and Graham’s lack of response. “The current threats to the USPS are not only undermining Americans’ voting rights ahead of this election; they endanger the health and well-being of communities and small businesses across South Carolina,” Bonder said. “The fact that Sen. Graham has not taken any action to protect this essential service is yet another failure in leadership, and it is hurting South Carolinians.”

DeJoy has routinely made maximum donations to NRSC, the official GOP committee dedicated to electing Republican senators. During the 2018 election cycle, the NRSC was chaired by Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, now the focus of one of the most consequential 2020 Senate contests, which is currently listed as a “toss-up” by Cook Political Report. (Cook also considers Tillis’ seat a toss-up; McSally’s race is “lean Democratic” and Graham’s “lean Republican.”)

Gardner, recently asked whether he thought DeJoy was doing a good job, dodged, saying, “First we have to understand what the postmaster is trying to do.”

DeJoy’s donor questions extend well beyond the Senate, however.

The Greensboro-based businessman once used a nearly untraceable North Carolina shell company, LMD Properties LLC, to give $50,000 to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super PAC in 2014. That year, DeJoy merged New Breed, Inc., his former contracting logistics company, with freight delivery company XPO Logistics, serving on the board of directors until May 2018, according to his bio on the DeJoy-Wos Family Foundation website.

DeJoy, along with Wos, was a Jeb Bush donor in 2016, but has since given the Trump campaign more than a million dollars. He also made a $100,000 contribution to the Trump inaugural committee, according to financial records accessible through Open Secrets. He cited New Breed, Inc., as his company.

“I take my ethical obligations seriously, and I have done what is necessary to ensure that I am and will remain in compliance with those obligations,” DeJoy said in a statement provided to Salon by a USPS spokesperson.

The spokesperson declined to comment specifically on DeJoy’s political donations.

Over the years, XPO has been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in federal government contracts, primarily through the Pentagon, according to government spending data — including more than $14 million in Defense Department contracts the month DeJoy stepped down. Since his departure, XPO’s government contracting appears to have all but stopped.

Another former Pentagon freight contractor, Bill Zollars, was confirmed to the USPS board of governors by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Oversight in June. Weeks later, Zollars’ former company, YRC Worldwide, received a $700 million federal bailout, despite being worth only $70 million at the time.

Salon reported last month that YRC is currently being sued by the Department of Justice for allegedly defrauding Pentagon delivery contracts to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of those allegedly fraudulent contracts occurred during Zollars’ tenure as CEO.

FEC records show that DeJoy also donated $5,200 to the 2018 campaign of Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who sits on the committee that confirms Postal Service governors.

DeJoy tried to give Hawley an additional $2,500, but it was returned because he had exceeded the limit for the election cycle. It’s a common trait in DeJoy’s FEC history, suggesting that he gives so much money so frequently, to so many Republican candidates, that occasionally he loses track.

COVID victim’s daughter at DNC: Dad’s “only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump”

President Donald Trump was ripped by the daughter of a coronavirus pandemic victim during the opening night of the Democratic National Committee Convention on Monday.

Kristin Urquiza said her father contracted the virus after listening to Trump dismiss the severity of the crisis. He went to a karaoke bar with friends and subsequently died.

“I’m one of the many who has lost a loved one to COVID. My dad, Mark Anthony Urquiza, should be here today, but he isn’t … My dad was a healthy 65-year-old. His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump, and for that, he paid with his life,” she said.

“The coronavirus has made it clear that there are two Americas: the America that Donald Trump lives in, and the America that my father died in,” she argued. “Enough is enough.”

“One of the last things that my father said to me was that he felt betrayed by the likes of Donald Trump. And so, when I cast my vote for Joe Biden, I will do it for my dad,” she explained.

911 call transcript shows the results of Tucker Carlson’s threats to reporters

Fox News’s Tucker Carlson openly threatened New York Times reporters on air in July, unleashing a torrent of his apparent fans torment and harass them over a lie. A new 911 phone call transcript, first published by the Washington Post on Monday, revealed more details about the consequences of the host’s actions.

Carlson claimed that reporters for the Times were working on a story that would identify the location of his family’s home. However, the Times denied that it planned to reveal the location, and the story that was in the works has yet to be published.

But it seems that didn’t matter to Carlson. He openly threatened the reporters working on the story.

“So how would Murray Carpenter and his photographer, Tristan Spinski, feel if we told you where they live?” he said on air. “If we put pictures of their homes on the air?”

He didn’t identify their homes — but, as he must have known, he didn’t need to. Online sleuths were likely to find their addresses in revenge for a wrong against Carlson that never even took place.

And it appears that’s exactly what happened. Erik Wemple of the Post reported that the two freelancers faced a wave of threats over various media.

And on Monday, Wemple shared a 911 transcript related to the incident. He explained:

The 911 transcript adds contour to the story, as it depicts the victims of Carlson’s dangerous speculation trying to make sense of a sudden spurt of hostility at their doorstep on an otherwise quiet summer night. The call arrived at the Lincoln County facility at 9:57 p.m., just about an hour after Carlson’s blast. “It’s been some loud banging noise downstairs and some threats coming to the house recently just in the past hour,” says Spinski’s brother-in-law on the call transcript, which you can read in full here. “I mean there’s the call and the voicemail saying we know where you live, beware and things of that nature.”

After the dispatcher asks about the threats, Spinski’s brother-in-law responds, “Yeah just recently, it’s my brother-in-law is a journalist and a news source posted his name on uh Tucker Carlson show and his address and things of that nature so he has um been getting threats all night long.” Spinski himself jumps in on the call with the dispatcher, explaining, “There is definitely people (muffled voices) on our property,” he tells the dispatcher (parentheses in original transcript). “Yeah there was a definite, we can feel our house when someone is trying to get into it downstairs. It was significant,” Spinski says.

The occupants of the house — Spinski, his wife and his brother-in-law — were “locked” in an upstairs room during the ordeal, Spinski tells the dispatcher. “I am not going to poke my head out you know,” he says.

It’s a frightening episode. And it’s entirely predictable that something like this would happen, especially as Carlson has been cultivating a devoted and paranoid fanbase that perceives enemies all around them.

In fact, what happened to Spinski is exactly what Carlson was supposedly outraged could happen to him — that a media report could spark real-world danger toward him and his family. Except in Carlson’s case, this threat was imaginary and never came to pass. The Times didn’t, intentionally or otherwise, spur harassment toward someone’s family. The only one guilty of that in this case is Carlson himself.

Pandemic alters political conventions — which have always changed with the times

Politics, like everything else in American life, is being reshaped by the pandemic and by technology. Democrats will hold almost all of their 2020 nominating convention virtually. Republicans have not moved their convention online — delegates will still attend the event in Charlotte, North Carolina — but it will be significantly scaled back.

Most notably, President Donald Trump will give his renomination acceptance speech at another location — first planned to be in Jacksonville, Florida, but which now might be at the White House, or possibly the Gettysburg battlefield, but which could theoretically happen anywhere.

These technological adaptations signal a permanent shift in the way nominating conventions meet and the way voters watch them — but it’s not the first time such radical changes have come to politics.

Technology has driven change in the presidential nominating process since the earliest days of American parties. This is a lesson I learned while researching 19th-century party politics for my book, “The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880-1896.” America’s current party organizations were built as party leaders used new technologies to make their proceedings more attractive to voters and their candidates more appealing.

The caucus system

The first nominating process was not a convention at all. In an age of horse-drawn carriages on muddy dirt roads it could take more than a week — in good weather — just to cross large states like New York. Travel was expensive and unreliable, making large gatherings of people separated by great distances unworkable. So the earliest party nominations in 1796 and 1800 happened when members of Congress started consulting in informal meetings called caucuses to select nominees before returning home for fall campaigns. It was an efficient means of achieving party unity under the circumstances. There was, however, little room for voter involvement.

Between 1800 and 1830, states built better roads and canals. Travel times were shortened, and the cost of travel shrunk. The Post Office, established in 1792, delivered printed material cheaply, subsidizing a booming national press. Americans were able to gather across vast distances, had better information and depended less on word of mouth from political leaders.

The rise of conventions

With better informed citizens, the caucus system was in disarray by the 1820s. It was fully discredited in the eyes of many voters and political elites in 1824 when less than half of the members of the Republican party caucus attended the meeting. Multiple nominees were instead selected by state legislatures, creating a crisis of legitimacy for the dominant Republican party, which historians now refer to as the Democratic-Republican party.

In 1828, Andrew Jackson won the presidency, based in part on a nomination from the Tennessee state legislature. After his victory, he engineered the first national convention of a major party in 1832, at which the Jackson faction of the Republican party called itself the Democratic party.

The convention did not officially re-nominate Jackson, but it did choose his running mate, Martin Van Buren. In the process it demonstrated that a national convention could in fact gather larger numbers of delegates, who themselves represented a larger number of voters, and could therefore be more democratic.

This convention model dominated American politics for the next hundred years.

Convention sites followed the progress of American transportation networks westward. The first six Democratic national conventions were held in Baltimore due to its convenient location and its position on the border of slave and free states. But as railroads made travel less expensive, the parties moved west. In 1856 Democrats convened in Cincinnati, in 1864 in Chicago, and in 1900 in Kansas City, Missouri.

Republicans met in Chicago as early as 1860 and as far west as Minneapolis by 1892. To appeal to different regions, both parties moved their conventions every four years — a tradition maintained to this day.

Conventions in the 20th century

Another technological shift came in 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt became the first major party nominee to address a convention in person.

Until then, custom dictated that the nominee stayed home under the pretense of not being too ambitious for office. Some months later, a committee of delegates would visit the nominee to “inform” him of his candidacy. Only then did the nominee give brief prepared remarks and start actively campaigning.

Roosevelt blew through that custom by catching a plane from New York to the Democratic convention site in Chicago and addressing the delegates the day after his nomination. “Let it be from now on the task of our party to break foolish traditions,” Roosevelt intoned, before calling for a “new deal.”

Traveling to Chicago was not just a metaphor for Roosevelt. By dominating the attention of the convention at precisely the time voters were paying attention to it, FDR signaled his intention to not only be a nominee of the party, but the leader of the party. And it made his transformative political message part of the news.

Television further changed the conventions. For much of the 19th century, presidential nominations were contested by multiple candidates, causing difficult convention battles; the 1924 Democratic convention went through 103 rounds of balloting before settling on John W. Davis.

Starting in 1948, conventions permitted television cameras, which reduced the incentives for endless ballots. Instead, conventions became visible celebrations of party unity.

In 1972, the parties started using primary elections to select delegates pledged to vote for specific candidates, so the delegate count was publicly known before the conventions were gaveled to order. Conventions became days-long infomercials for the nominee.

Unconventional conventions

The pandemic has struck at just the right moment for another technological shift. Network television news — the medium through which most 20th century conventions were viewed — commands less voter attention.

Moving the convention spectacle online allows the party to control their message more effectively — as Republican efforts to exclude journalists from the proceedings highlight.

Democrats have announced that some speeches will be recorded in advance, allowing the party to release focused content compatible with the pace and packaging of social media. As voters share and comment on that content, using official party social media graphics and Zoom screens, it could nurture a sense of party identification, and of virtual participation.

What comes next?

The GOP’s wavering between different locations, and the Democrats’ plan to rely on remote speakers, will lead some to ask whether a centralized convention is even necessary. In the future, why not have multiple convention sites across the country, with multiple political figures speaking to smaller physical audiences?

Events like that could enable the party to target narrow groups of voters more effectively. As parties experiment with the potential of digital technologies, it seems likely that they will find some of them more attractive than cavernous convention halls and outdated swarms of straw hats.

But that approach would have disadvantages. Social media spectacles would eliminate spontaneous reactions from delegates that give home viewers a sense of the mood — whether dissension from the party line, contagious enthusiasm or even the striking power of a memorable speech line. Democrats have acknowledged that the online format in 2020 will deprive supporters of Bernie Sanders the stage they had in 2016. As much as specialized events might draw in some voters by targeting narrow groups, they might also allow parties to create more divisive appeals in ways that evade broader scrutiny. And virtual conventions can make it easier for party leaders to obscure proceedings from journalists and the public.

It’s not yet clear how this moment will reshape nominating conventions. But party leaders will adapt to the technological opportunities it presents, and find new ways to make conventions work.

Daniel Klinghard, Professor of Political Science, College of the Holy Cross

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

“Disturbing milestone”: Just 12 U.S. billionaires now own more than $1 trillion in combined wealth

New research published Monday by the Institute for Policy Studies shows that the dozen richest American billionaires now collectively own more than $1 trillion in wealth, a finding one analyst described as “a disturbing milestone in the U.S. history of concentrated wealth and power.”

According to IPS, a progressive think tank, the 12 top U.S. billionaires have seen their combined wealth soar by 40%—or $283 billion—since the coronavirus began spreading rapidly across the U.S. in mid-March, sparking widespread economic shutdowns and mass job loss.

“During the first stage of the pandemic, between January 1 and March 18, the collective wealth of the Oligarchic Dozen declined by $96 billion,” wrote IPS researchers Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo. “But their wealth quickly rebounded and surpassed their September 2019 Forbes 400 wealth level. The only exception is Warren Buffett, who is still $2 billion below his September 2019 wealth, but is currently worth $80 billion.”

Last Thursday, the billionaires’ combined wealth reached $1.015 trillion—the first time in U.S. history that the collective net worth of the top 12 American billionaires has topped the trillion-dollar mark. According to IPS, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has seen his wealth jump by $48.5 billion since mid-March, making him the “biggest pandemic profiteer” of the group.

 

“This is simply too much economic and political power in the hands of twelve people,” Collins, director of IPS’ Program on Inequality and the Common Good, said in a statement.

The dozen wealthiest U.S. billionaires and their respective net worth as of August 13 are listed below:

  • Jeff Bezos—$189.5 billion
  • Bill Gates—$114.1 billion
  • Mark Zuckerberg—$95.5 billion
  • Warren Buffett—$80.6 billion
  • Elon Musk—$73.1 billion
  • Steve Ballmer—$71.5 billion
  • Larry Ellison—$70.9 billion
  • Larry Page—$67.4 billion
  • Sergey Brin—$65.6 billion
  • Alice Walton—$62.6 billion
  • Jim Walton—$62.3 billion
  • Rob Walton—$62.03 billion

“The total wealth of the Oligarchic Dozen is greater than the GDP of Belgium and Austria combined,” said Ocampo. “Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans are unemployed or living paycheck to paycheck, and 170,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the United States.”

“The Ellen DeGeneres Show” ousts three top producers

“The Ellen DeGeneres Show” has overhauled its senior production team in the wake of accusations of racial insensitivity, sexual misconduct and other problems in the work environment at the long-running daytime talk show.

Three senior producers — executive producers Ed Glavin and Kevin Leman, and co-executive producer Jonathan Norman — have been ousted from the Warner Bros.-distributed syndicated strip following damning allegations raised in recent reports by Buzzfeed and Variety. “Ellen” veterans Mary Connelly, Andy Lassner and Derek Westervelt will remain at the show as executive producers alongside host DeGeneres. Connelly, Lassner and Westervelt have been with the show since its inception in 2003.

Read more from Variety: “Ellen DeGeneres Show” elevates DJ “tWitch” to co-executive producer

A Warner Bros. spokeswoman confirmed that Glavin, Leman and Norman have “parted ways” with the show.

The news was delivered to “Ellen” staffers Monday afternoon during a staff meeting in which DeGeneres spoke via a videoconference call. DeGeneres was emotional to the point of tears, and apologetic as she addressed more than 200 staffers. According to multiple sources, DeGeneres told the staff she was “not perfect” and realized that in the effort for the show to run as a “well-oiled machine,” sometimes leaders were not as sensitive to “human beings” as they should have been. She added that reading disturbing allegations about the atmosphere on the show was “heartbreaking.”

DeGeneres even went so far as to note that the show has at times alienated staffers and even guests by shifting shooting timetables on short notice. She vowed to stick to agreed-upon timetables to make the production process smoother for all.

At the same time, during the meeting Connelly and Lassner addressed the results of the studio’s internal investigation that was sparked by the flurry of reports. After interviewing more than 100 people connected to the show, the probe found that there was no evidence of “systemic” racism on the show, although there was an acknowledgment that more needed to be done in terms of diversity and inclusion. DeGeneres and others vowed that everyone on staff — including DeGeneres — will participate in diversity and inclusion workshops. The host also announced that the show’s resident DJ, Stephen “tWitch” Boss, was promoted to co-executive producer.

Read more from Variety: “America’s Got Talent” enlists Kenan Thompson as latest Simon Cowell replacement

Warner Bros. declined to comment on the specifics of the investigation. Sources said DeGeneres and other other producers did not take questions from staffers, who are still working remotely. DeGeneres is said to have vowed to meet in small groups with staffers once the health threat of the pandemic has passed. The show has faced criticism for a lack of diversity on its staff, something the studio has promised to address.

The departures had been expected ever since Glavin, Leman and Norman were cited in a July 30 story published by BuzzFeed about allegations of misconduct, harassment and questionable behavior on the set of the show. The trio was suspended in the wake of the BuzzFeed story and have since been terminated, multiple sources said.

Sources close to the situation said Leman and Glavin are also out as EPs on other DeGeneres-produced shows, including NBC’s “Ellen’s Game of Games.” Staffers were also told that the show has pushed back its 18th season debut by a few days, to Sept. 14.

Read more from Variety: Inside the Democratic National Convention’s star-studded music lineup

In response to the complaints that found their way into media reports, Warner Bros. has established a dedicated HR representative for the show and a hotline for complaints. DeGeneres told staffers she had hoped to address them sooner, but was told not to while the investigation was in process.

DeGeneres responded to the persistent rumor that staffers and guests were told not to address her or even look her in the eye if they encountered the host on the set or in the offices on the Warner Bros. lot. She called that “crazy” and “not true,” although she also described herself as an “introvert.” She apologized to anyone who felt “disregarded,” according to multiple sources.

DeGeneres repeatedly emphasized that she was “proud” of the show’s success and its ability to spin off additional programs such as “Ellen’s Game of Games.” She also expressed gratitude to staffers, many of whom have been with her for the entire run. She insisted the show would “come back strong” next month.

“This will be the best season we’ve ever had,” DeGeneres said.

Trump pushing unproven plant extract as coronavirus “cure” after meeting with MyPillow CEO: report

President Donald Trump wants the Food and Drug Administration to approve an unproven plant extract as a coronavirus “cure,” MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell told Axios after an Oval Office meeting.

Trump has embraced the experimental plant extract oleandrin, which comes from the oleander plant, to “the alarm of some government health officials” after it drew support for Lindell and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, according to the report.

The plant itself is considered highly toxic and “ingestion of any part of the oleander plant can lead to serious illness and possibly death,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Lindell, a longtime Trump supporter who has a financial stake in a company that manufactures the product, told the outlet that the president “basically said” that the “[Food and Drug Administration] should be approving it.”

Trump confirmed on Monday that he has “heard about” oleandrin.

“We’ll look at it. We’ll look at it, we’re looking at a lot of different things,” he said. “I will say the FDA has been great. They are very close. We’re very close to a vaccine — very close to a therapeutic. I have heard that name mentioned. We’ll find out.”

A senior administration official expressed concerns over the discussions.

“The involvement of the secretary of HUD and MyPillow.com in pushing a dubious product at the highest levels should give Americans no comfort at night about their health and safety during a raging pandemic,” the official told Axios.

Lindell told the outlet that he has been taking oleandrin, which he has shared with family and friends. He claimed to believe that it prevented him from getting the coronavirus. He also dismissed the alarm sparked by his lobbying from inside the administration.

“I think it’s being suppressed,” he said. “Because somebody doesn’t want this out there, because it works.”

The reported lobbying effort by Lindell, a top Fox News advertiser, follows a similar one over hydroxychloroquine. Fox News host Laura Ingraham and several of the network’s pundits met with Trump at the White House, where they pushed for the president to press the FDA to issue an emergency authorization for the anti-malarial drug before multiple studies showed it was not effective in treating the coronavirus and could case harmful side effects. Trump pressed the FDA to authorize the drug, which it did in March, before pulling the authorization in June following extensive research.

Oleandrin showed some evidence of reducing the severity of coronavirus symptoms in a non-peer-reviewed study but “there is no public data showing oleandrin has ever been tested in animals or humans for its efficacy against COVID-19,” Axios reported.

Andrew Whitney, an executive at the biotech company Phoenix Biotechnology, told the outlet that the study was in the process of being peer reviewed. Lindell helped Whitney set up an Oval Office meeting with Trump in July to discuss the extract as a potential coronavirus “cure,” according to the report.

Carson, another booster of the unproven extract, also attended the meeting.

“Secretary Carson is a member of the coronavirus task force. He has been directly involved with the administration’s response to this disease from the very beginning,” a spokesperson told Axios. “The task force is looking at a plethora of therapeutics to fight COVID-19. To suggest that Secretary Carson, who is a world-renowned expert in the medical field, shouldn’t be involved is not only absurd but unhelpful in our collective fight to eradicate the pandemic.”

But a senior administration official told the outlet that while Carson may be a renowned neurosurgeon, he is not an expert on infectious diseases or antiviral treatments.

Whitney told the outlet that while he hoped to start clinical trials on the extract, he was also pushing the FDA to allow it to immediately be sold as a dietary supplement. Administration officials said Whitney claimed that the extract cures the coronavirus within 48 hours, though the company would not be allowed to make that claim if it is approved as a dietary supplement.

Whitney said he stands by his claim that oleandrin is a “cure” for the coronavirus “100%.”

“Now, there are all sorts of lawyers who would tell me I can’t say things like that, because you know you need to have years of studies, and you need to have this, that, and the other and so forth,” Whitney said. “But as an American with a right of free expression, I’m telling you, I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

A source told the outlet that Whitney had not actually provided the administration with any proof of his claim. Whitney said he did but did not provide any evidence.

“At this stage, it’s probably best left at that. The data is compelling,” he told Axios. “We have something that we believe will address the problem, and we want to make it available. We believe we should be given the opportunity to demonstrate that in a hospital clinical trial setting, and we believe that must happen now and not a month from now.”

FDA chief Steven Hahn “appears to be resisting” the efforts, according to the report.

“If people were left to their own devices,” one administration official told The Washington Post, “this would be the next hydroxychloroquine.”

Can you get coronavirus twice? Promising new studies say probably not

Whenever a new virus enters the human population, one of immunologists’ first questions is how the body’s immune system reacts to it once the immune system clears it from the body. For certain viruses, getting them once (or being vaccinated once) means that you now have life-long immunity; in other cases, the immune system appears to forget how to defend against them after a short period of time.

Now, for the good news: While previously some experts feared that a coronavirus vaccine might only confer short-term immunity, that may not be true. Recently, there has been a flurry of promising research signaling that those who recover from a coronavirus infection will have lasting immunity. Understanding the human body’s immune response is key to returning to any sense of normalcy in our world, and has repercussions for public health behaviors and vaccine development.

According to one of the new studies, which has yet to be peer-reviewed and was posted on MedRxiv over the weekend, researchers at the University of Arizona conclude that “immunity is durable for at least several months after SARS-CoV-2 infection.” Specifically, the research says a previously-infected person is immune to the coronavirus for at least three months, even after a mild infection; though researchers say that’s a conservative prediction, based on lack of long-term human health data for the nascent virus.

The conclusion conflicts with earlier reports that suggested immunity was transient, meaning that it only lasted for a short period of time.

Deepta Bhattacharya, associate professor of immunobiology at the University of Arizona and co-author of the paper, told Salon in an interview that he and his colleagues came to their conclusion after they measured antibodies and examined how long they were being produced in COVID-19 patients.

“In most viral infections that are clear, we call these acute viral infections, early antibodies that are made and then they settle down, and usually what happens is that they hit a flat and stable point after that initial infection phase,” Bhattacharya said. “We were trying to see if that’s happening in COVID-19 survivors or not.”

It turns out, there is a similar antibody build-up to other acute viral infections. The study looked at 5,882 volunteers, including asymptomatic individuals. Bhattacharya told Salon that the researchers noted in the study that the antibodies are present up to at least three months because that’s the longest time frame they have measured, but it could be longer. 

“It’s not that the immunities are going to vanish all of a sudden after three months, we can say that it’s at least three months,” he said. “Now if I had to make a prediction based upon the first SARS-CoV-1 coronavirus, I think it would likely last for years.”

Bhattacharya said that this research is encouraging in terms of vaccine development.

“I think from a vaccine standpoint, it basically sets the parameters of what we know is possible,” Bhattacharya added. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that a vaccine will work perfectly and it doesn’t necessarily mean that every single vaccine that’s out there is going to be very effective, but at least it tells us that this is a very much achievable goal, that this virus can be cleared and that you can generate immunity against it,” he said.

According to another study, currently under review at the journal Nature, researchers concluded that mild COVID-19 infections display traditional “hallmarks associated with antiviral protective immunity.”

“We found that recovered individuals developed SARS-CoV-2-specific IgG antibody and neutralizing plasma, as well as virus-specific memory B and T cells that not only persisted, but in some cases increased numerically over three months following symptom onset,” the researchers wrote.

However, researchers won’t know for certain if reinfection is possible for a longer period of time until there is more evidence of people being exposed to the virus a second time, to observe if they are able to keep it at bay.

After being infected with a virus, the human body creates proteins called antibodies that can detect and attack that virus if it reappears in the body. This is how the body develops immunity to an infection. How long that immunity lasts ranges on the type of infection: for example, once a person is infected with measles they are immune throughout their entire lives. But when it comes to seasonal coronaviruses, it’s a bit more complicated. For SARS and MERS, this line of defense is present in survivors, according to separate studies, around two years. Antibodies, which were studied in both papers, don’t last forever since they aren’t living cells. They’re unable to replenish themselves and they eventually disappear from the blood.

Dean Blumberg, chief of pediatric infectious diseases and associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, Davis, told Salon a long-term follow-up is needed to really understand immunity and how long it lasts due to antibodies.

“You can measure the immune response but you don’t know for certain that that protects against infection until you do the studies,” Blumberg said. “We don’t know how long people who have been infected, how long they will be protected against future infection whether it’s a matter of months, similar to the other coronaviruses or maybe it’s longer.”

Because the immune system appears to react differently to this coronavirus compared to others, and because the most severe cases occur when the immune system overreacts, Blumberg said it’s possible that there could be a stronger immune response in those who have recovered.

“If you look at what happens with other coronaviruses, less pathogenic ones, it looks like immunity after infections lasts for a few months and then you can get reinfected again, so that’s depressing,” Blumberg said. “But this isn’t exactly the same — we know it’s different.”

Being undocumented during the pandemic: “I feel we have no voice”

Anastasia, 42, is originally from Ayutla, a small town in Puebla, Mexico, and has lived in Mott Haven, a bustling neighborhood in the South Bronx, since 1995. A single mom of two teenagers, she was working as a housecleaner, mostly in homes in downtown Manhattan, before the COVID-19 outbreak brought her work to an abrupt halt. We talked in May to hear about how the pandemic has affected her and her family. Anastasia’s name was changed to protect her identity.

* * *

I’m Anastasia. I live with my two children. My son is going to be 19 years old. He’s graduating high school. My daughter is going to be 17 years old. She’s in the 11th grade. Both kids are very good students, really good kids.

I’m from Mexico. We live in the Bronx, in an apartment building. In my neighborhood, there are many Mexican, many Central American, immigrants who don’t have documents. There are millions of us who contribute to this country without having any status here. But we work extremely hard. We do any kind of work we can find. We clean homes, we babysit, we work in restaurants, in delis. We do any work we’re able to do because we don’t want to be a burden. We want to contribute to this country. I want people to know that we’re human beings, that we might have very little, but we contribute to the well-being of this country.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, my normal day was to go work on the subway. I was cleaning homes downtown. At the end of the day, I’d come back, be with my children, help them do homework, prepare dinner, go to sleep, and get ready for the next day. I worked for different people each day, in total, five homes. And I’d go to each house every two weeks. I also worked cleaning a small independent school in East Harlem on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

I started hearing about coronavirus in early March. Then people started to die, and the school my kids go to closed. And that’s when I stopped working. It was March 13. The people I was working for, they told me, “The virus has become very dangerous.” They had to protect their families, and I had to protect mine. At the beginning, they told me that it would only be for two weeks, that the virus was spreading. But then, as you know, the time just went on. With two of my employers, I haven’t had any contact. The other three have expressed concern about what’s happening to my family. They asked, “How can we help?” They told me not to worry, that they would help me during those two weeks. They’ve continued to support me and I’m very grateful.

I haven’t been able to get everything we need, but I’ve been able to get the basics. I’ve managed to keep a roof over my head and my children’s heads, and I’ve been able to provide them and myself with food. During a typical day now, I’m at home with my kids. We cook together. In the morning, we’ll either have a sandwich or eggs with toast, you know, a light meal. And then later on in the afternoon, we make a lunch that’s more of a meal, a real meal. We do chores together at home. They do their homework too because they have school also. So I’ve been spending more time with them and that’s the one nice aspect of what’s been happening. I truly cherish that I’m able to spend full days with my kids. I’m very grateful that the three of us are in good health, that we are taking care of each other, staying here at home together.

But I’m concerned about what’s going to happen, when I’ll be able to go back to work. I might be able to go back to work cleaning the homes of those three people who’ve been helping me, but I haven’t heard anything from the other two. And I don’t know when or if the school that I was cleaning will open again. So I really don’t know.

We have a friend of the family who died. He was sick for three weeks in the hospital. That had a tremendous impact on us, it really made us realize how serious this was, how dangerous this virus was. That’s when we decided to stay at home and only go out to the store to buy the necessities. And to be protected with everything we could get a hold of — face masks, gloves, whatever else.

In the neighborhood, the silence is now so noticeable. The streets are empty. I go to the window along with some of my neighbors to applaud the medical workers at seven o’clock each evening. I shake my maracas to thank all those people who’ve been working so hard to keep people alive. Only five or six of my neighbors are willing to go to their windows. The fact that so few people are willing even to risk that means that there has really been an enormous change.

The neighbors, we used to talk with each other. Now we cannot do that. Before I’d walk on the street, find someone I know, and hug and chat with them. We’d laugh with each other, shake hands with each other. Now no hugs. No handshaking. Not even a minimum of conversation. Everyone is just rushing home. Everything has become about disinfecting, disinfecting yourself.

I miss my routine, going out to work. I miss the feeling of being able to do something for myself, for my children, to be able to support them. I miss meeting my neighbors and friends on the train and talking to them about their children, my children, whether they’re leaving work early or not. I miss the contact, the day-to-day conversation. It’s like I’m all alone. That I have to be alone. The door has to stay closed. I’m afraid.

Sometimes I wish my extended family was nearby. I really feel the need to see my mother because all of this. It’s so terrible. I’m so afraid. I need a hug, my mother’s hug. But she’s far away. She’s in Mexico and it’s been many years since I last saw her. Thankfully, our town is far away from the city so she’s pretty safe. It’s not that I’m pessimistic, but I keep thinking that if I end up dying of this, I’m going to die without having gotten a hug from my mother.

I feel we have no voice, undocumented people. I didn’t come here to take anything away from anybody else. We just want to be able to live. I want to have the opportunity to be accepted here, to have status. People want us to go back to our country, but they don’t understand that it’s very difficult for us to just take our stuff and go back. Our children grew up here, they speak this language here. We have roots here now. They don’t even know the family that I left behind. It’s very difficult. I can’t just bring them back to an unknown place.

We work and we pay taxes based on the money that we earn. But we don’t receive any economic aid from the government. We’re not able to qualify for anything. I need economic aid from the government during this time. Many people like myself depend on charity, on the goodness of people. But basically we’re at their mercy—it’s the only way in which we’ve been able to survive.

Judiciary Democrats call on FBI to launch criminal probe into Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

Two Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee on Monday called for the FBI to launch a criminal inquiry into Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Board of Governors over operational changes which have slowed mail delivery.

Reps. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who serve on the Judiciary subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, which has oversight over the FBI, called for the bureau to look into whether DeJoy and USPS leaders “committed any crimes” related to recent moves at the agency which led to a mail slowdown.

“Multiple media investigations show that Postmaster DeJoy and the Board of Governors have retarded the passage of mail,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray. “If their intent in doing so was to affect mail-in balloting or was motivated by personal financial reasons, then they likely committed crimes.”

The lawmakers cited two laws: one which imposes fines and prison time for anyone who “knowingly and willfully obstructs or retards the passage of mail” and another which imposes criminal penalties on government employees using their official authority “for the purpose of interfering with, or affecting” an election.

“There is overwhelming evidence that Postmaster General DeJoy and the Board of Governors have hindered the passage of mail,” they wrote, noting that mail sorting equipment had been removed from post offices. The USPS has also informed 46 states that “voters could be disenfranchised by delayed mail-in ballots.”

“There is evidence that making mail-in balloting more difficult may be one of the motivations for the changes,” they wrote, citing President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on mail voting.

Trump last week vowed to block funding to help the cash-strapped agency, citing concerns over universal mail-in voting. DeJoy, a top fundraiser for the Republican Party, donated more than $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Fund before he was appointed to the USPS despite having no experience at the agency.

“It is not unreasonable to conclude that Postmaster General DeJoy and the Board of Governors may be executing Donald Trump’s desire to affect mail-in balloting,” Lieu and Jeffries said.

DeJoy continues to own $30 million in stock for USPS contractor XPO Logistics, and in June, he purchased up to $100,000 of Amazon stock, they added.

“If the changes instituted at the Post Office by the postmaster general affect positively the value of Amazon or XPO Logistics, then DeJoy would receive a financial benefit,” they wrote, noting that it would also be a violation of federal law.

DeJoy, who has denied intentionally slowing down mail delivery, acknowledged the changes have led to “unintended consequences.”

Democrats have repeatedly warned that the slowdown could impact the expected surge of mail-in voting in the upcoming election, as well as deliveries of government assistance and vital medications.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the House of Representatives back early from its summer recess to vote on legislation that would reverse DeJoy’s changes, though it would also have to be approved by the Republican-led Senate.

“Lives, livelihoods and the life of our American democracy are under threat from the president,” Pelosi said in a letter to House Democrats. “That is why I am calling upon the House to return to session later this week.”

House Democrats also called on DeJoy to testify this month over policies that pose “a grave threat to the integrity of the election.”

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs called on her state’s attorney general to investigate the changes. Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., made a criminal referral to his state’s attorney general, calling for an investigation into the “subversion of election laws by Donald Trump, Louis DeJoy and other Trump officials in their accelerating arson of the Post Office.”

At least seven state attorneys general are mulling legal action against the Trump administration over the changes.

“We are going to make sure that every American’s vote counts this fall, whether cast by mail or in person,” Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring told The New York Times. “My colleagues and I are working as we speak to determine what Trump and DeJoy are doing, whether they have already violated or are likely to violate any laws and what tools we have at our disposal to put a stop to President Trump’s ongoing attack on our Postal Service and our democracy.”

While Democrats have lead the calls for the USPS to roll back changes made after DeJoy’s installment, several Republicans have recently sounded the alarm over the slowdown, too.

Rep. John Katko, R-N.Y., called on the USPS to reverse the changes and for Congress to provide billions to save the agency, noting that his constituents “are more dependent than ever on the USPS to deliver life-saving medications, economic impact payments, unemployment benefits and many other important deliveries.”

Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana, also expressed concerns in a letter to DeJoy about reports that mail collection boxes had been removed throughout the state. Daines said it was “unacceptable” that these moves “could result in delayed mail delivery and reduced mail options.”

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, also expressed concerns to DeJoy that “Mainers are experiencing delays in delivery of needed prescriptions, personal protective equipment, such as masks and payments sent through the mail.”

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, slammed Trump’s false claims that mail voting is rife with fraud, noting that his heavily Republican state has had all-mail elections for years. Romney alleged that Trump’s focus on undermining the USPS was based on his belief that mail voting would cause him to lose.

“I’ve heard some people say they think that the reason the president doesn’t want people to vote by mail is that polls show that people who want to vote by mail tend to vote for Vice President Biden. People who tend to want to vote in-person tend to want to vote for President Trump,” Romney said on Friday. “So this is a political calculation. But my own view is we want people to vote.”

How should fans react to Kanye’s perceived betrayals? It’s complicated

“Bro, Kanye West is a f**king clown!” my mentee breathed angrily into a voice memo to our group chat of artists. “The biggest Uncle Tom in the world with this Harriet Tubman is not a hero, Ben Carson, praise Trump bulls**t!”  

His voice echoed through the house. I had to listen to his rant in another room so I wouldn’t wake my wife and baby. He continued on, listing Kanye’s antics over the last few years: the time he wore a Confederate flag on his green Yeezus Tour flight jacket, when he called Trump his father, that episode in the TMZ office when he said slavery was a choice. The list continues. 

What set him off? Reports that Republicans were actively helping Kanye get on the presidential ballot in several states. CNN reported that some Democrats believe Republicans see West as a possible spoiler who could take African-American votes away from Donald Trump’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.

“Democrats in Wisconsin and beyond called it a blatant attempt to appeal to young black voters who may be unenthused about the Biden campaign,” CNN’s Dan Merica and Jeff Zeleny reported. “Any downturn in turnout for Biden among young black voters, a group the Trump campaign has tried to target in the race against the former vice president, could impact the outcome in states with traditionally narrow margins, like Wisconsin.'”

Working against Biden, who obviously cares more about the wellbeing of Black voters than Trump, was the last straw for my mentee. I have critiqued Kanye West‘s ideas and views multiple times; but this time, I paused before I responded to my mentee’s rant. I did so for a number of reasons. First of all, In my younger years, I was just like my mentee — brash when necessary, angry always, and hungry to prove my points. That approach, easily justified as it is when dealing with racism and tokenism, has closed more doors to potential change than created opportunities for me to introduce those with opposing views to my side. And second, Kanye and his wife Kim Kardashian West have both publicly talked about the rapper’s struggles with mental illness. 

“As many of you know, Kanye has bi-polar disorder. Anyone who has this or has a loved one in their life who does, knows how incredibly complicated and painful it is to understand,” Kardashian West wrote in an Instagram stories post. “I’ve never spoken publicly about how this has affected us at home because I am very protective of our children and Kanye’s right to privacy when it comes to his health. But today, I feel like I should comment on it because of the stigma and misconceptions about mental health.”

Now I’m no expert on mental health, nor do I try to be. But the Mayo Clinic offers a list of symptoms that characterize manic episodes in bipolar disorder. And while his diagnosis has only recently become public knowledge, Kanye appears to have been displaying manic behavior to some extent since the beginning of his career. 

Never forget the time Kanye swooped on stage during the VMAs in the middle of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech to tell the viewers that Beyoncé had a better video. Never forget that he proudly flashed a bottle of Hennessy that he took big swigs out of on the red carpet that night. Never forget the infamous line, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” he shocked the world with during a Hurricane Katrina benefit. It’s not any stranger’s place to diagnose Kanye’s behavior from afar. But in light of his openness now about his bipolar disorder, it’s hard to look back at some of Kanye’s more notorious events and not see hints of it in the past. Mr. “HOW SWAY! YOU DON’T GOT THE ANSWERS SWAY!” has been doing this for a long time. 

The difference is that as fans, we cheered for Kanye’s seemingly manic behavior when we agreed with him. I did think Beyoncé had a way better video than Swift’s and that MTV got that award wrong. I did think George Bush didn’t care about Black people after the way he handled Katrina’s displacement of New Orleans residents, the high number of Black deaths and his FEMA debacle. I’m still a Sway fan, but I did think that he didn’t have the answers or experience to talk fashion with Kanye. Kanye spoke out for the people in those episodes — for the oppressed, for those of us who feel underrepresented and marginalized — so his erratic and impulsive behavior was cool with us. He was our voice. We held him up and were excited to give him his flowers every chance we got.

Now he’s doing the same thing, but for racist white people and Black Uncle Toms. The difference is that now we know he is sick. I can’t ride with my mentee or anyone else who refuses to acknowledge the reality of mental illness because of the level of celebrity or privilege a person has. Society did the same thing to Whitney Houston as she battled addiction, and Britney Spears after she shaved her head, we laughed it off and turned their pain into jokes, leaving them no space to heal. 

The final reason I chose to wait before responding is the respect I have for Kanye’s late mom. I try to see these periods of public scrutiny through Donda West’s eyes. As his mother, I imagine she’d accept him, hold him close, protect him, and work hard to get him the help he needs. And yet to a revolutionary like Dr. West, seeing your son wear Confederate flags and praise one of the most powerful racists in recent history would have to hurt. According to Kanye, Donda was only six years old when she was arrested at a sit-in demonstration to acquire better public accommodations for people of color. He even rapped about it on his song “Never Let Me Down“: “I get down for my grandfather/ Who took my mama/ Made her sit in that seat where white folks ain’t want us to eat/ At the tender age of 6/ She was arrested for the sit-ins/ And with that in my blood I was born to be different”.

Donda West was a respected scholar and longtime chair of the Department of English at Chicago State University — where she also taught, served as Foreign Expert to the People’s Republic of China and helped establish the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing during her decades-long tenure — before retiring in 2004 to manage Kanye’s carrier. She is an icon, a legend, and died too soon. Her activism from a young age and her dedication to education means she contributed to making our country a better place, leaving an example for people like me to follow. So why should I be excited to tear her son apart? Tearing a rich person apart is easy because they live a life that most people can only dream about. It’s easy to see them as people who don’t have the capacity to suffer, to call them spoiled attention seekers. But why would a famous person go to such lengths to receive negative attention when they can already command public and media attention any time they want? 

When these famous people die, we lionize them instantly, talk about great they were and how we wished we would have taken their pain seriously instead of calling them washed up, using them as a punching bag or a laughingstock during their final years. Whitney Houston’s music cranked out of speakers everywhere that first year after she passed. Amy Winehouse, too. The list continues. 

I explained all of this to my mentee, adding more about why we shouldn’t rush to judgment on anybody’s suffering. “Yeah, that’s cool,” he replied, but then reiterated that Kanye is still a clown, still the biggest Uncle Tom. To me, he’s also Donda West’s son, and the man who spoke our truth to George W. Bush and the world on live TV. The Republican operatives trying to leverage his latest erratic episode for their political gain aren’t likely to stick around for the aftermath. And Kanye is likely to fall further before he’s able to get on a healing path. What do his fans owe him, as he deals with a debilitating illness and residual trauma, and vice versa? Like everything with Kanye, it’s complicated. We should slow the conversation down, and ask who and what we’re really angry with here. 

Rose McGowan on why she revealed sexual misconduct allegations against Alexander Payne: It was time

Rose McGowan has accused director Alexander Payne of sexual misconduct.

McGowan, the actor and whistleblower, made allegations on Twitter on Monday about an incident with Payne that occurred when she was 15. At the time, Payne would have been in his late 20s.

Based on McGowan’s age, the incident would have occurred in the late ’80s.

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“Alexander Payne,” McGowan tweeted. “You sat me down & played a soft-core porn movie you directed for Showtime under a different name. I still remember your apartment in Silverlake. You are very well-endowed. You left me on a street corner afterwards. I was 15.”

In another tweet, McGowan shared a photo of herself at 15 years old, writing, “I just want an acknowledgement and an apology. I do not want to destroy.”

In a WhatsApp conversation with Variety, McGowan expanded on her tweet:

“I feel very badly for my 15 year-old self. I had auditioned for him. He took me home afterwards. I quit acting after that and then was discovered by Ilene Staple (a friend of Gregg Araki) 6 years later. It wasn’t until after the HW [Harvey Weinstein] stories came out that I reframed the Payne of it all. I had for years looked at it as a sexual encounter, not understanding what it really was. It was a grooming situation. The first time I’d been shown a straight porn.’

“He left me on the corner in front of Café Tropical in Silverlake to find my own way home. 

“I feel extreme emotional exhaustion today.”

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Payne, the director of “Election,” “Sideways” and “The Descendants,”  won two Oscars for best adapted screenplay: for “Sideways” in 2005 and “The Descendants” in 2012. Currently, Payne has a series in the works with HBO and Sky, “Landscapers,” which is set to star Olivia Colman.

Monday’s allegations are the first time McGowan has named Payne, but in the past, she has referred to an incident of alleged misconduct when she was 15.

In a conversation with investigative journalist Ronan Farrow in early 2018 at the 92nd Y, McGowan spoke about a sexual encounter with a “very famous” man when she was 15, and said she recently learned it was statutory rape and that she would eventually come forward with the man’s name when she was ready. “He took me home, after he met me, and showed me a soft-porn movie he’d made for Showtime, under a different name, of course,” McGowan said during the conversation with Farrow. “And then he had sex with me. And then he left me next to Tropical in Silver Lake, standing on a street corner.”

When asked why she was ready to make the allegation against Payne now, McGowan said: “It just came over me. It was time.”

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As one of the most prominent voices of the #MeToo movement, McGowan was one of the first women to come forward with allegations against Weinstein in October 2017, sharing that Weinstein raped her at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 in his hotel suite. Weinstein is now serving a 23-year sentence in upstate New York, convicted on the charges of third-degree rape and first-degree sexual assault.

Ramy Youssef on highlighting anti-Blackness: “The conversation about race in America is very binary”

Ramy Youssef is not trying to get you to convert to Islam with his critically acclaimed Hulu show, “Ramy.” He’s simply trying to make you laugh while sharing a glimpse into a Muslim American family living in New Jersey. In fact, as I discussed with the 2020 double Emmy Award nominee (Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series and Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series) on “Salon Talks,” his show, by design, often makes references to Islam and the customs of American Muslims without explaining it in detail. Ramy, who won a Golden Globe in 2019 for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for Television, noted that’s why we have this thing called Google.

The sophomore season of “Ramy” not only recently won a prestigious Peabody Award, but also (excitingly) features double Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, who plays Ramy’s imam on the show as he attempts to navigate practicing his faith while being a millennial in 2020 America. What makes the show so vitally important is that it does not seek to present an idealized version of the Muslim American community; in fact, Yossef notes that the show is more focused on the struggle of faith.

“Faith isn’t really on our series brought into question,” Youssef told me on “Salon Talks.” “It’s not even so much instructed or even really explained. It’s more, we’re watching people. We’re kind of watching people live in this gap between who they want to be and they actually are. It’s all about struggle.”

For decades Hollywood has demonized and depicted Muslims irresponsibly as terrorists with no concern for the real-world consequences. Rather, Ramy shares a brutally honest — while often funny— depiction of the Muslim community. In this season alone, the show featured numerous intra-Muslim community issues from anti-Black racism by some Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims to the way the LGBTQ community is viewed inside the community. As a Muslim myself, I’m keenly aware of the challenges these issues pose to our community and perhaps by Ramy holding a mirror up to these issues it will hasten change for the better.

To hear more about Ramy Season 2 and where the creator, actor and director plans to take the next season, watch my “Salon Talks” with Ramy Youssef here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below.

We’ve known each other for a long time from your early days of comedy. When you were dreaming of doing something bigger than just live performing. You were doing videos while I was doing stand-up during the Arab Comedy Festival, and then you started doing stand-up and acting. Was your dream to do a show like “Ramy” and sharing a slice of the Muslim-American experience in modern-day America?

I don’t think I could honestly say I ever thought it would look like this in this form, but the intention was there, right? We met doing Arab Comedy Festival, which you started. And I remember being so inspired about that environment and being able to talk about who I was in a way that I didn’t feel like anyone was talking about. We were living in this era of people talking about Arabs, talking about Muslims, but no one talking with us and no one was having a conversation that felt real. I remember feeling really liberated, getting to do the fest, getting to eventually do stand-up and step into talking about these things. In terms of the desire to figure out how it would scale into something, I remember thinking I was making these videos and I was like, “Will I make a movie or make a TV show?” It was kind of up in the air. But the spiritual intention of “Ramy” has always been there from the beginning.

Your faith is important to you. My faith is important to me. I’m not going to speak for you, but both of our faiths are important, in different ways. When you’re creating the show how much of an obligation do you feel to express Islam in a way that’s accurate, like not showing this idealized version of what the real version of being Muslim in America.

I think you kind of hit it there where it’s like, it’s more about being an Arab Muslim than it is about Islam, right? So the faith isn’t really on our series brought into question. It’s not even so much instructed or even really explained. It’s more, we’re watching people. We’re kind of watching people live in this gap between who they want to be and they actually are. It’s all about struggle. And so because of that, I don’t feel any pressure because I’m talking about people struggling. And so that’s just gonna look messy. That’s the design of the thing. So we’re not here to really teach Islam or anything, that I would be very worried about and I would also be very unqualified to do.

Look, you made a great point. It’s not about Islam 101, you don’t even explain things about Islam. You just talk about it. I’m wondering if people are going to get some of the details on hajj, they might get a broad stoke, but with Mo[hammed Amer] and Dave [Merheje], two of the cast members who I know, talking about hajj and stuff. My fiancée Hend, she’s from the Middle East, she’s Arab and Muslim, and even when I watch your show I’m like, “What’s that?” And she’ll have to explain it to me. So I’m thinking, “What are white people thinking?” But you don’t care, you’re not going to explain everything. You’re just sharing these lives of these characters. Is that accurate?

Yeah, totally. And people love to Google, man. People look it up, they’ll find it. And I think people like watching something that they don’t know. I think not knowing is exciting. Everyone’s kind of sick of seeing the same thing all the time, so it’s a nice opportunity to be able to present something new.

For me, as someone who knows you, during Season 1 of “Ramy,” Ramy felt like it was Ramy the character, not you. The second season though, he was more or less like you. I know’s that unfair because this Ramy is getting to be more self-destructive — not in a horrible way, but he’s doing a bunch of crap. Do you struggle with being more self-destructive than I know of you?

Definitely and I think on a level, you met me when I was 19, you know, and I already knew what I wanted to do. And so, so much of this character is what if I didn’t know what I wanted to do? You know, what would that look like? What if my family wasn’t as communicative as mine is? ‘Cause I think we can all kind of see a version of our life where we’re like, “Oh man, if I went left instead of going, right, oof you know, I could be there, I could be doing that.” I definitely deal with battling some of this stuff in the show, just not to the extent of it, because I feel like I’ve been able to have perspective, but so much of the fun of making this show is getting to daydream about what if I didn’t, you know?

I think sometimes people make a show where they’re like, oh cool, I’m going to make a show that’s like a fantasy of what my life would be. And mine’s almost like, a little bit of kind of a nightmare of what my life could be like. Like what, what if it went this way? You know? And what if this is how it felt? And it’s almost scarier because it’s not that far off, you know. Like you said, he’s messing up. It’s kind of this lane of, oof, that’s a little too close for comfort, and we really liked that pocket on the show.

And you do hit that well. I’m not trying to do spoilers, but I have to ask you, at the end of the second season, you’re talking about taking a second wife, of course it’s the day after the wedding. Have you heard from Muslims and Muslim Americans and their reactions to that?

Of course I have. I think a lot of the reactions have been like, “I’ve heard a guy try to make this argument,” you know? I think it’s less about the principle. I think if you look into the principle of how this occurs in Islam and in the right way, you kind of understand the context. I think the historical context is immediately clear. And I think the context in how it is, is also immediately clear. It’s not so much of an issue within the principle, as much as it is the way this character is trying to use it. In the way this character is trying to do what he’s doing. I’ve definitely heard people being like, “Oh my God, I’ve had a dude try to have this convo with me.”

Not only did you get two Emmy nominations for the show, but Mahershala Ali, who people know well — the Oscar winner, Emmy winner, remarkable, co-star in most of the episodes — gets nominated as well. What I really loved is you brought up something that’s uncomfortable inside our community and that’s anti-Black racism. Arab, South Asian and Black Muslims, they might all be Muslims to an outsider, but from the inside it’s often different. Why did you feel important to approach this topic, in your series?

Because I think the conversation about race in America is very binary. It’s almost like it’s white versus people of color, you know, and everyone’s on the same team. And I think when you frame a conversation that way you get so much further from being able to have any sort of real healing. And I think it’s really important for us to look at anti-Blackness within our communities.

Even within the point you just made, I don’t even know that Arabs and South Asians are so much on the same team. I think they’ll talk about each other too. But I think very clearly, the bigger issue and the bigger target is the rampant anti-Blackness. And I think that to ignore it would be dangerous. You can’t not talk about it when it’s obviously going to be an organic thing that we know that our characters are going to come up against and are going to face. We’re never trying to protect our characters. We’re trying to really actually show their flaws because we feel like that is the most humanizing path that there is. But yeah, when you’re showing closets yeah, you got to show them off.

I think what makes the show so neat because being of Muslim Arab heritage and even just talking about the film I made years ago “The Muslims Are Coming,” but we got a lot of flack for people in the Muslim community going, “Why did you have so much cursing? Why did women do this? Why wasn’t she wearing hijab and why was this?” And you’re like, we weren’t making this for our internal consumption of our community. We were trying to show a spectrum of our community from very devout to not devout at all. We’re just culturally Muslim. Do you have any of the same issues within the Muslim community where you find yourself going, “Here’s what we’re trying to portray. It’s not a Muslim, it’s not a show made for the intra Muslim community; it’s made for the broader American community”?

Yeah, I mean, I think that the audience is at a disadvantage because we’ve seen so little representation that’s even trying to speak to anyone under the banner of Muslim. Basically any other imagery that we’ve seen that has Arabic that has prayer, let alone, even Black Muslims are barely depicted. It’s all really under the guise of something really extreme and violent and kind of crazy. And so now we have this show, probably the first intimate look with an Arab-Muslim family in this format. And I think the expectations are very high.

I think the scarcity is very high as to types of content. And also, I think there’s something about the marketing that feels like, “Hey, here’s your show, like this is you.” And so I think that there’s kind of an immediate, recoil to that. You know, this show is not a show about Muslims. It’s about an Arab-Muslim guy in New Jersey who jerks off too much. That’s like a really specific lane. Like you can’t convince an uncle and an aunt at the mosque, like, “Hey, you know, pop this on during Ramadan.” This isn’t for everybody. And I think that’s good. I think that’s what the show should be because it, it creates a lane for other things to exist. I never want to feel like, hey, I checked all the boxes.

You also approach another topic, which is an issue in every community, not just ours, and that’s homophobia. I’m talking about your uncle in the show played by Laith Nakli, who I have known for a long time. He is so great in this.

I met him at the Arab festival.

Oh, did you? In Season 1, at least I didn’t see signs that he was gay or not, but he comes out this season. He was closeted. Why was it important for you to address it?

I think so much of what we really are excited about exploring is places that people hide and that people feel lonely. And we do that with all our characters. We’re trying to find them in these intimate places because that’s kind of the goal of the show is to make people feel less alone. There are certain things that are hard to talk about in real life. What’s really dope about art or comedy or anything like that is it can get expressed in the arena of fiction. And then people can talk about it as a reference point and people in everyday life don’t have to be as bearing of where they’re at if there is a reference point to talk about where they’re at. It can open doors to some conversations. We really felt like, yeah, this is an important conversation.

It’s about understanding the humanity of people, right? We have people who feel not only that they can’t be themselves, that’s almost a different thing. They almost feel like because of how they feel they shouldn’t exist. I mean, suicide is just a huge problem in modern civilization, just in general, the way that we are, the way that we live, the way that we are socially, but then you also have a group of people that just feels so alone that they really feel like they have no way to talk about what’s going on in their lives. We take that seriously and we wanted to look at that and we wanted to create a reference point for that.

In another episode you touched on transgender issues and you talk about suicide. It’s heartbreaking to learn that transgender teens are about 50% more likely — even sometimes higher than that — to attempt suicide on their lives because of our society. I do think things are moving forward and I mean, that’s what gives me hope all the time. So a couple more, before I let you go, my friend. Look, you won a Golden Globe, you get these two Emmy nominations. The obvious question is, do you feel more pressure? On the other hand, does it inspire you more to know that your stuff is being recognized and there’s an appetite for it, and it’s respected and celebrated?

It feels like fuel to keep going. It’s really inspiring because we’re still a small show. We’re still trying to get people to watch. It’s like the Golden Globe win, the Emmy nominations – these feel like it’s like, oh cool, we got some good ad space. People, go watch. I’m not a celebrity. Yes, we have Mahershala in the second season, but this is not a celebrity-driven experience or show. This show, it’s small. And for it to be recognized on this level is, it’s massive. It means so much to what we’re trying to do. And I think on an industry level, it means so much to kind of inspire networks to pick up things that they might’ve thought were too small.

When you accepted your Peabody Award this year, you talked about what it meant to you, that the show was recognized, that people like yourself and other smaller stories. And the idea that smaller stories could be told in a bigger way. Why is representation so fundamentally important to you, to actually be seen onscreen telling your story?

I think it’s important to see reference points for your existence, you know, to see your humanity presented, you can’t put a price on that. You can’t put a price on feeling seen. And I think everyone deserves that. What’s also really cool is audiences are sick of seeing the same thing. So it’s kind of like you get to have volt. You get to have something that I think is really necessary for a society to have cool conversations that they need to have. And you also get variety.

With your Emmy nomination for Best Actor in a Comedy series you’re up against Ted Danson and Michael Douglas, Don Cheadle and others. My advice is go Trump, go negative. Go right at them. No one’s done that!

Everyone says that’s it’s just an honor to be nominated. I need to start taking digs. I need to be like, “You gotta vote for me because I’ll be the only one who can serve four years.”

Before the show got picked up for a third season you said you would do it on TikTok if you had to, but now you’ve got a third season. You don’t have to. Any sense of where this might go?

Yeah, a bunch. I think so much of what we have fun looking at is the secrets that people keep. And it’s interesting too, when you have a family that’s living in the same house, but the kids are a little older. Everyone’s really living their own life, but they’re still under the same roof. And I think with what happened with the family and Season 2. Season 3, I think a lot of the things people have been hiding are going to come out in a bigger way. And I think we’re going to kind of really feel the ensemble of the family even more and really feel everyone talk about some things that they’ve been needing to talk about for a while. I’m really excited for a lot of these things to come to the surface.

Any idea when you will actually go film with COVID?

It’s going to be a bit. My feeling in terms of how we’re approaching and running our set is that we want to lean towards being slow to come back because we certainly want to be the leaders. I think we want to feel like things are safe.  I anticipate that maybe we get back into it late spring or something.

Late Spring. Wow.

To shoot, yeah.

Last thing, I saw you were not just working on your own pocket, you’re developing something for Steve Way, who was on the show. You did fundraisers in New Jersey for this guy. You love this guy. And it shows.

I know it’s my guy. It’s my guy.

What are you trying to develop from there?

We’re developing a show, a scripted show with Apple right now that is a deep dive and look at the disabled community. Even Steve’s role on my show, playing my disabled best friend, he’s still just the best friend. There’s an entire universe that could revolve around Steve and you know, the show will, and we’ll really be able to view what someone like him goes through and what his community looks like in a real way.

Scientists studied five different types of seafood. 100 percent were contaminated with plastics

A new study that examined five different types of seafood found that traces of plastic contaminants were present in every single sample — suggesting that humans ingest a large amount of plastic pollution from eating seafood both wild and farmed.

The study, which was conducted by a group of scientists led by doctoral candidate Francisca Ribeiro from the University of Queensland’s Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences, investigated 10 raw samples of wild sardines, 10 raw samples of farmed tiger prawns, 10 wild squid, 10 oysters and five wild blue crab. The authors’ goal was to develop a simple quantitative means to improve plastic contamination detection methods.

The researchers found that every single one of the samples had plastic in them, although the extent varied quite a bit. The researchers measured the amount of plastic pollution per gram of seafood tissue, and found that sardines had the highest percentage: about 0.3 milligrams of plastic per gram of tissue, meaning that one would ingest 30 milligrams of plastic after consuming an average serving of sardines. 

Squid, oysters and prawns all had about 0.01 milligrams of plastic per gram of tissue, while crabs has 0.03 milligrams of plastic per gram of tissue weight. An average 100-gram serving of crab would cause one to ingest about 3 milligrams of plastic. 

For comparison, a sesame seed weighs about 3.64 milligrams, and a grain of rice weighs about 29 milligrams. That means that a small crab serving may contain about a grain of rice’s worth of plastic. 

“Microplastic contamination of the marine environment is widespread, but the extent to which the marine food web is contaminated is not yet known,” the authors explained. Their findings, as they note, illustrate the vastly different degrees of plastic contamination in different seafood animals. 

The study also went into the different kinds of plastic found in different seafood. Sardines, for instance, were largely contaminated with polyethylene, which is used in packaging and bottles; whereas oysters’ contamination was largely comprised of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. PVC is the kind of plastic used in pipes, phonograph records and credit cards.

The authors said they could not be certain of the exact origin of the plastics in the different types of seafood. They speculated that the sardines may have been contaminated during food processing and handling, although not enough research has been done on plastic contamination during those processes to be able to say for sure. Other possible sources of contamination include the immediate environment where the seafood was caught, “airborne particles, machinery, equipment, and textiles, handling, and/or from fish transport.”

Salon reached out to Ribeiro about the larger implications of the study, and its limitations.

“The purpose of our research was to simply develop a method to quantify plastics in seafood and understand the extent of microplastic contamination in seafood,” Ribeiro told Salon by email when asked about whether the results for Australian seafood carry over to American seafood. “This method has been applied to Australian seafood, and although it can be applied to any kind of seafood, I really can’t answer if there are implications for seafood consumed by Americans.”

She also said that scientists are unsure about the health risks associated with the widespread consumption of microplastics.

“At this point we are not sure about the potential risk of ingesting seafood to human health because we didn’t test it ourselves and, as far as I’m aware, there are no studies on the topic yet,” Ribeiro explained.

Ribeiro also cautioned against assuming that the plastic comes from the ocean, telling Salon that “we do not know the source of the plastic (i.e. it may not come from the ocean) but our guess is that the values found in sardines can be from other sources, such as packaging and processing. Further research will focus on tracing the sources of plastic.”

In terms of what steps should be taken going forward to address the problem of seafood plastic, Ribeiro said that “we should take a precautionary approach and make sure we stop the use of single use plastic, reduce the use of plastic in our everyday life and manage our plastic waste in a correct way.”

While the origin of plastic in the wild samples of studied seafood is unclear, it is indisputable that there is too much plastic in our ocean, and plastic contamination in ocean fish and mammals is well-documented. The Pacific Ocean contains a vast morass of plastic and other trash waste known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which has an area of 618,000 square miles. A February 2019 report found that over 690 marine species had been observed having ingested various kinds of microplastics.

John Hocevar, Oceans Campaign Director of Greenpeace, told Salon last year that plastic has become ubiquitous in human life, to an extent that most people do not even realize.

“We have put so much plastic into the environment at this point that it has gotten into everything around us,” Hocevar said in an email. “Plastic is in the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. Everywhere scientists have looked, they have found plastic, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and from the tops of remote mountains to the bottom of the deepest trench in the Pacific.”

He added, “It is difficult to say for sure how many people’s reproductive health problems or cancer diagnoses stem from our widespread use of plastic. We know that these chemicals are dangerous, and we know they are entering our bodies through plastic packaging.”

The surprising economic consequences of the coin shortage

As America continues to suffer an economic crash spurred by the pandemic, one of the unexpected economic side effects is a shortage in coin circulation. While a coin shortage might seem inconsequential, economists say that those most affected are likely to be the poorest Americans. 

The cause of the coin shortage relates, indirectly, to the pandemic: As brick-and-mortar businesses closed due to quarantine, there was an inevitable decline in coin circulation, as fewer people were spending money. The coin shortage was exacerbated by the U.S. Mint decreasing its staff, which led to a further drop in available coins.

Now that businesses are starting to reopen, the demand for coins has drastically increased — but the supply of coins is simply not there to meet it.

“The most likely impact of it, I think is, is an increase in businesses going to the ‘we only accept credit cards’ cashless model, which is what you have in a country where everybody has access to a credit card or can pay by phone as Sweden does — or as, in fact, Kenya and even Somalia have everybody pay by phone,” Karl Widerquist, an American political philosopher and economist at Georgetown University in their Qatar campus, told Salon. “If you have that, that’s no problem, but it’s a problem in the United States because in the United States, poor people very often can’t afford pay by phone. It’s actually very expensive.”

He added, “We make it hard to get a bank account, hard to get a credit card, hard to pay by phone. So what these businesses end up saying is, when they say ‘we’re going to only sell without cash,’ is that ‘we don’t want any poor people coming into the shop.'”

The Federal Reserve has implemented several measures to counteract the coin shortage, including announcing a Strategic Allocation of Coin Inventories in June and creating a temporary U.S. Coin Task Force in July that aims to identify the variables from the pandemic that have affected coin circulation and attempt to remedy them. In a statement last month, the task force argued that “many have referred to this as a shortage; however it is not. There is approximately $48 billion in coin already in circulation, most of which is sitting dormant inside America’s 128 million households.”

In other words, there are plenty of coins to go around — they’re just stuck in jars and on dressers. The task force said as much: “As people have changed their spending habits, and coin-intensive businesses and financial institution lobbies have been less accessible, the nation’s coin is pooling in change jars, in car cup holders and in shuttered businesses, making it difficult for the businesses of this country to get the coin that they need to support cash transactions.” Hence, the coin shortage is a result of poor coin circulation, not production.

The U.S. Coin Task Force’s proposals included encouraging consumers to spend coins that they have at home, deposit their coins at appropriate financial institutions, use retail coin kiosks and promote the hashtag “#getcoinmoving.”

This is not the first time that the US has faced a coin shortage. There were periodic coin shortages from the late-1950s through the mid-1960s, which the federal government remedied with the Coinage Act of 1965. That bill got rid of silver in circulating dimes and quarter dollars and reduced the amount of silver in the half dollar from 90 percent to 40 percent. (It was eventually eliminated entirely.)

“There have been coin shortages historically,” Gabriel Mathy, a macroeconomist from American University, told Salon by email. “Ben Franklin talked about how gold and silver coins (specie) were in short supply in colonial America as the coins were used to pay for imports, and so tended to be insufficient for the needs of domestic commerce.  The colonies often printed their own paper money to try to alleviate this shortage and pay for government spending (wars mostly).”

The Civil War also led to a number of coin shortages, Mathy noted, because the gold standard was suspended and coins were often hoarded or sent abroad. Government-issued stamps were used instead of coins in many cases.  

“Reprehensible”: Seven states mull legal action over “Trump’s ongoing attack on our Postal Service”

More than a half-dozen states are mulling lawsuits against the Trump administration in an attempt to stop it from slowing mail delivery before Election Day. 

The attorneys general of Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington are participating in discussions over how to challenge the administration in court amid concerns that a slowdown would disenfranchise voters in an election that is expected to see a surge in voting by mail as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, according to The Washington Post.

“Washington State is expected to be the first to file this week, and Pennsylvania and New York are likely to follow,” The New York Times reported.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who now heads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, is also weighing action, a spokesperson told The Post.

The report comes as Democrats increasingly sound the alarm over changes made by recently-installed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a top Trump and Republican Party donor, which have led to a slowdown of mail delivery in an effort ostensibly aimed at cutting costs at the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service (USPS).

The USPS told 46 states last week that it was unable to guarantee that all ballots sent by the election would arrive in time to be counted. The USPS has removed mail sorting equipment from post offices, removed mail boxes in certain states and is considering service cuts. Democrats have also expressed concerns over the delivery of medications to seniors and government aid to Americans impacted by the economic crisis.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Sunday announced that she would call the lower chamber back early from its summer break in order to vote on legislation to block changes at the USPS. Any bill would also need to be approved by the Republican-led Senate and signed by President Donald Trump to take effect. House Democrats are also planning emergency hearings on service delays.

“He is undermining the safest voting method during a pandemic and forcing people to cast a ballot in person,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, told The Post. “It is reprehensible.”

The attorneys general discussing a legal challenge are expected to announce the lawsuits early this week.

“This is not just terrible policy, but it may be illegal under federal law and other state laws, as well,” Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, a fellow Democrat, told The Post. “A lot of work is being done literally as we speak over the weekend and at nights to try to figure out what Trump and DeJoy are doing, whether they have already violated or are likely to violate any laws and how we can take swift action to try to stop this assault on our democracy.”

Though most of the states considering challenges to the administration’s moves are Democratic, Massachusetts has a Republican governor. North Carolina and Pennsylvania both backed Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

“We are exploring all available options, but we also want to make clear that people should continue to make use of mail options and not be deterred by the president’s effort to undermine the election,” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, a Democrat, told the outlet.

Even though Republican officials and the Trump campaign have urged voters to cast ballots by mail, the president has repeatedly sought to sow doubt about voting by mail as he trails in the polls. Trump has repeatedly — and falsely — claimed that the practice of voting by mail is rife with fraud, even though many states have had all-mail elections or no-excuse absentee voting for years in which fraud has been virtually nonexistent.

However, Trump has himself praised Florida’s mail voting system, which allows anyone to vote by mail for any reason. Mail-in ballots for the president and the first lady were reportedly delivered to their Mar-a-Lago address in the state last week. 

Trump also declared last week that he would block funding to emergency funds to aid the USPS.

“They need that money in order to have the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions of ballots,” the president told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Thursday. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting. Because they’re not equipped.”

Administration officials attempted to walk that claim back over the weekend. Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh told The Post that Trump was open to more funding if Democrats agreed to his terms for the next phase of coronavirus relief.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows also told CNN that Trump was open to funding for the USPS — and vowed that the agency would stop removing mail sorting machines until the election. The USPS also said it would stop removing mail boxes in certain states.

“The president of the United States is not going to interfere with anybody casting their vote in a legitimate way,” Meadows said, “whether it’s the post office or anything else.”

But Meadows also doubled down on Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud after CNN host Jake Tapper noted there was no evidence of widespread fraud.

“There’s no evidence that there’s not,” Meadows claimed.

In fact, there is “evidence that there’s not.” With more than 250 million ballots cast by mail over the past two decades, there have been a recorded 143 criminal prosecutions for fraud, or a rate of about 0.00006%.

Congressional Democrats have launched multiple investigations into service changes at the USPS, and several Republicans have joined the calls for the USPS to reverse its operational changes. Rep. John Katko, R-N.Y., called for a reversal of policies enacted since DeJoy took over, while Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., wrote a letter to DeJoy urging him to do the same.

“The reason the president doesn’t want people to vote by mail is that polls show that people who want to vote by mail tend to vote for Vice President Biden,” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said over the weekend. “People who tend to want to vote in-person tend to want to vote for President Trump, so this is a political calculation.”

Lauren Groh-Wargo, the head of the voting rights group Fair Fight, echoed Romney’s criticism.

“Donald Trump is scared,” she told The Post. “He’s a coward. He doesn’t think he can win an election when everybody is allowed to vote. Our vote is our power.”

Trump, without evidence, warns “Fox & Friends” viewers that “dogs are getting” mail-in ballots

President Donald Trump on Monday defended his attempt to make changes at the U.S. Postal Service after Democrats said that he is trying to undermine mail-in voting.

During an interview on “Fox & Friends,” host Steve Doocy asked Trump to explain why he is “sabotaging” the Postal Service.

“No, I’m just making it good,” the president insisted. “This has been one of the disasters of the world, the way it’s been run. It’s been run horribly. And we’re going to make it good.”

Trump tied his effort to “fix” the USPS to his distaste for mail-in voting. He went on to say that Amazon is the “biggest problem with the post office.”

“They come and they drop all their mail to a post office — not all of it, but a big percentage of it — and they say, ‘Here, you deliver it, you stupid people,'” the president ranted. “We’re losing a fortune. And I said, you’ve got to raise the rates.”

The president was also asked about concerns that he will not leave the White House if he loses the 2020 election.

“The first thing I think of is crooked Hillary Clinton,” he replied. “The problem is she didn’t accept it. She went crazy. She’s still going crazy. I mean, she’s gone nuts.”

“I go by the election,” Trump added. “Now with that being said, I have to tell you that if you go with this universal mail-in where you send millions of votes — in California, tens of millions of ballots being sent to everybody and their dogs. Dogs are getting them, OK? People that have been dead for 25 years are getting them.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

 

Dairy farmer who voted for “con man” Trump in 2016 to speak at Democratic National Convention

The first all-digital Democratic National Convention is taking place this week, and one of the speakers will be Rick Telesz — a 62-year-old dairy and soybean farmer in Western Pennsylvania who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016 but is supporting former Vice President Joe Biden in 2020.

Telesz’ appearance is important for a number of reasons. First, Pennsylvania is a crucial swing state. Second, Telesz is among the registered Democrats who crossed party lines in 2016 and did not support that year’s Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. 2016 had its “Trump Democrats” just as 1980 and 1984 had their “Reagan Democrats” — although the Reagan Democrats were much more plentiful. Trump, unlike Reagan, lost the popular vote by almost 3 million.

In 2016, Telesz bought into Trump’s pseudo-populism. The Pennsylvania farmer recently told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that four years ago, he believed Trump would “drain the swamp” and “look after the working man,” but he now feels betrayed.

“He’s a hell of a salesman — and a tremendous con man,” Telesz said of Trump. “He conned me.”

According to Telesz, Trump’s trade war with China has been terrible for business.

“Is farming going to disappear tomorrow?,” Telesz told the Gazette. “No, but if these trends continue, I could very possibly be the last generation on this family farm . . . It will disappear. It cannot sustain.”

Telesz, in 2019, told an ABC affiliate, “When you start taking a 20% cut, it can be very stressful. It is stressful.”

Pennsylvania — like Michigan and Wisconsin — was among the Rust Belt states that went to President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but went to Trump in 2016. Trump’s narrow victory in the Keystone State was a shocker, as it marked the first time a Republican presidential candidate had won that state since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Telesz is also critical of Trump for his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has killed more than 170,000 people in the United States and over 775,900 people worldwide. The farmer recently told the New Castle News that although “you can’t blame anyone for the virus,” Trump was “totally incompetent in not informing the public earlier of what was coming.”

Fox News host fact-checks Trump surrogate: Obama presided over “significant drop” in unemployment

Fox News anchor Sandra Smith reminded Trump campaign spokesperson Hogan Gidley that there was a “significant drop in the unemployment rate” during former President Barack Obama’s administration.

As the Democratic National Convention was set to begin on Monday, Smith asked Gidley to explain the “biggest differences” between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.

“The beauty about this campaign is you don’t have to guess how things would look under either person,” Gidley opined. “Joe Biden has a 47-year failed record in elected office with nothing to show for it, quite frankly.”

“When he was at the helm, you don’t have to guess how the economy would look, it was absolutely horrible,” he continued. “People did not have jobs. The jobs that were being created were being created overseas.”

“You’re talking about during the Obama administration?” Smith sought to clarify.

“Absolutely,” Gidley replied. “And during this time of rioting and COVID and looting in our streets, you don’t have to guess how unsafe would be because Joe Biden has come out and said he wants to defund the police.”

Gidley went on to falsely claim that Biden “had a chance to fix a pandemic” and “he just closed testing.”

Smith interrupted: “There’s a lot to dig into there, the economy and other things.”

“Obviously, during the Obama administration, you have to reference the fact that you did have significant drop in the unemployment rate coming out of the financial crisis,” she pointed out.

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Jeffrey Epstein showed off 14-year-old victim to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago: lawsuit

A new lawsuit claims that late alleged child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein brought one of his victims to see President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort when she was just 14 years old.

The Daily Beast reports that a woman identified only as Jane Doe filed a lawsuit earlier this year detailing sexual abuse she allegedly endured at the hands of Epstein and longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who earlier this year was arrested on sex trafficking charges.

Part of the lawsuit details a trip taken to Mar-a-Lago in 1995, which Trump had bought a decade earlier.

“Doe also claims Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago when she was only 14 years old,” reports The Daily Beast. “‘This is a good one, right?’ Epstein asked the future president, who allegedly smiled and nodded before sharing a chuckle with the depraved hedge funder.”

The lawsuit does not accuse Trump of any sexual misconduct, although it does raise questions about what Trump knew of Epstein’s nefarious activities.

In 2002, Trump heaped praise upon Epstein in an interview with New York Magazine and hinted that he had an interest in younger women.

“Terrific guy,” he told the magazine. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

People are taking Trump’s USPS cheating seriously — and we have impeachment to thank

One could have been forgiven, for a hot minute there, for worrying that Donald Trump would be successful at keeping his scheme to steal the 2020 election by destroying the U.S. Postal Service under the radar. There was a real chance this scandal would be drowned out by the dozens of other Trump scandals that fight for headline space at any given moment. Considering that voter suppression has been a longstanding GOP habit, one that’s never been sexy enough to garner much interest outside political junkie circles, the campaign against the post office might not even have rate as a medium-level Trump conspiracy. 

Even the fact that Trump confessed on live TV to the conspiracy was no guarantee that the story wouldn’t sink beneath the waves. On the contrary, Trump often uses confessions to make scandals disappear, relying on people’s assumption that his criminality and corruption can’t be that big a deal if he’s so open about it. 

Over the weekend, however, there were strong signs that the USPS scandal was not, in fact, going to just go away. News that the Postal Service warned the majority of states about serious delays in service was broadly reported. Speaker Nancy Pelosi pulled back House members back from their summer recess to vote on legislation to protect the USPS, and the House scheduled a hearing for Aug. 24 featuring Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and Postal Service Board of Governors chairman Robert M. Duncan, although it’s entirely likely they’ll follow the lead of other Trump appointees in the past and simply ignore a summons from Congress. 

Perhaps more importantly, the story of post-office sabotage has penetrated public consciousness. Photos of trucks hauling away mailboxes went viral. Stories about mail sorting machines being decommissioned were shared widely, and when White House chief of staff Mark Meadows went on CNN to issue denials — which have no weight, since the Trump White House lies about everything — Jake Tapper pushed back, hard. 

So yes, it seems that both the media and the public are aware of Trump’s attempts to steal the election, and have so far avoided that trap of imagining that it can’t be that bad or that liberals are just being hysterical. 

For that, we can thank the House impeachment of Trump back in December. Remember, that was about his abuses of presidential power in his scheme to cheat in the election by extorting the Ukrainian president into publicly lending support to a ridiculous conspiracy theory about Trump’s Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. 

Yes, he was technically acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate, but it’s unlikely there’s a single soul in this country that actually mistakes that vote for an assertion that Trump is innocent. On the contrary, the evidence of Trump’s guilt that was brought to bear was overwhelming, and the acquittal was really more a demonstration of the widespread Republican embrace of cheating in service of winning elections. 

In other words, the sustained attention to the Ukraine scandal made one thing absolutely clear: Trump has no compunction about cheating to win in 2020. Because of that, the media no longer operates under any compulsion to give this president the benefit of the doubt. His critics no longer need to prove that Trump is both eager to cheat and willing to bend or break the law to do it. That is now indisputable. 

So when stories started to emerge that Trump was slowing down the mail to keep ballots from being counted, it wasn’t bogged down by hand-wringing debate over whether Trump is capable of such devious and authoritarian behavior. And when Trump confessed on Fox Business to slow-walking post office funding so that he could steal the election, there wasn’t the usual parsing over whether or not he actually said the thing he clearly said.

That Trump is a cheater is indisputable, and that has emboldened both journalists and leading Democrats to speak bluntly about this latest scandal without fear of being accused of overreacting. The Biden campaign, for instance, appears to be taking Trump’s effort to steal the election very seriously and is moving to educate voters on their need to vote early, to prevent ballots from getting “lost” in the mail. 

Even former President Barack Obama, who generally tries to stay out of the fray of day-to-day politics, spoke out about Trump’s war on voting, denouncing Trump for trying to “to actively kneecap the Postal Service” and otherwise discourage voting at all. 

Trump was able to coast for years on this implicit assumption that the office of the presidency somehow ennobles the occupant, and that it was therefore unfair to assume the president is a liar and a cheat just because his entire career before he became president was based on lying, cheating and defrauding people. Impeachment ended that presumption of good faith, by making abundantly clear that not only was Trump willing to “accept” cheating on his behalf, as he did with Russian election interference in 2016, but he actively sought out opportunities to cheat and actively participated in them.

So it’s simply wrong to say the impeachment of Trump failed because the Senate acquitted him. The whole ordeal completely changed the national discussion around Trump’s corruption. The question is no longer about whether Trump is corrupt, but more about whether or not voters care about that. Now that his corruption is threatening their ability not just to vote but to receive all the things ordinary people get by mail, there’s good reason to believe it will finally come back to bite him. 

Trump complains that Fox News is “not watchable,” urges viewers to switch to “fair & balanced” OANN

President Donald Trump complained about Fox News’ weekend coverage on Sunday before urging viewers to switch over to the even more adamantly pro-Trump outlet One America News Network (OANN).

Though Fox News’ opinion lineup has been compared to North Korean state TV for heaping dubious praise on Trump and echoing his talking points for years, the president has repeatedly groused about the network’s “news” side for presenting a less rosy view of his administration, seemingly as a way to pressure the network into more favorable coverage.

“Fox News is not watchable during weekend afternoons. It is worse than Fake News @CNN,” Trump tweeted on Sunday. “I strongly suggest turning your dial to @OANN. They do a really ‘Fair & Balanced’ job!” he added, quoting Fox News’ retired motto.

OANN is the low-rated, blatantly pro-Trump outlet which Mother Jones recently described as filled with “propagandists and conspiracy theorists” with a “willingness to do stories without a factual basis.”

“OAN has been around since 2013, but it didn’t truly find its reason for being until the channel’s lord and master Donald Trump took office in 2016,” Salon’s Melanie McFarland wrote last year. “Since then, OAN has been the main outlet for the Trump congregants who are refusing to buy the fake news the rest of the lamestream media is peddling.”

Though Trump has touted OANN in the past, his criticism of Fox News drew skepticism given that the rest of his Twitter feed is also filled with clips from Fox News.

“‘Fox News is not watchable during weekend afternoon,’ says president who watches and live tweets Fox News every single weekend afternoon,” Mother Jones’ Ben Dreyfuss quipped.

Hours after the tweet, Trump appeared on “Fox & Friends” to push debunked conspiracy theories about mail voting.

“I have to tell you that if you go with this universal mail-in . . . tens of millions of ballots being sent to everybody and their dogs. Dogs are getting them, OK? People that have been dead for 25 years are getting them. You have to see what’s happening,” Trump falsely claimed without any pushback from the panel of Fox News hosts.

Though most states require voters to request a ballot, a few states have opted to send ballots to every registered voter. These ballots have extensive fraud prevention safeguards in place, including signature verification, in order to prevent individuals from casting ballots which do not belong to them. 

When asked how he was preparing for the upcoming debates against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Trump also falsely claimed that he won every debate poll in 2016.

“By working very hard . . . not on debates but on running the country,” Trump said. “Honestly, what I’m doing is — I’m doing my job. My job . . . that’s the best debate prep . . . I guess I’ll do some preparation, but I didn’t so much last time because I understand what’s happening.”

As CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale pointed out, Trump only won “non-scientific polls on media websites that allow supporters to flood them with clicks.”

“He lost the scientific polls” on all three debates with Clinton, he added.