Mark Meadows is Donald Trump’s worst chief of staff — which is really saying something

The White House chief of staff is one of the most powerful jobs in a presidential administration. According to Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency,” the “responsibilities of the chief of staff are both managerial and advisory and can include the following duties”:

Select key White House staff and supervise them;
Structure the White House staff system;
Control the flow of people into the Oval Office;
Manage the flow of information;
Protect the interests of the president;
Negotiate with Congress, other members of the executive branch and extra-governmental political groups to implement the president’s agenda; and
Advise the president on various issues, including telling the president what they do not want to hear.

One would expect that such a job would require someone with managerial experience and a knowledge of government functions, as well as the trust of the president and other powerful political players. It’s obviously a tough, demanding position.

President Trump has gone through almost as many chiefs of staff in three and a half years as Barack Obama did in two terms. His first was former Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus, who was in so far over his head he didn’t make it past the first six months. He was replaced by retired Gen. John Kelly, who had first been appointed as Trump’s secretary of homeland security. The hope was that a skilled leader with management experience could instill discipline and tame the palace intrigue, but in the end, Kelly found that Trump was uncontrollable and all else flowed from that so he was out as well.

Then came the former Tea Party congressman from South Carolina, Mick Mulvaney, who had been serving simultaneously as head of the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (Multiple appointments, often of people who serve only in an “acting” capacity, are a hallmark of the Trump administration.) This past spring, with the coronavirus pandemic raging in the Northeast, Trump lost faith in Mulvaney too and he was “moved” to the job of special envoy for Northern Ireland. His replacement was another Republican congressman, former Freedom Caucus leader Mark Meadows of North Carolina. As shocking as this may be, it appears he may be the worst one yet.

Meadows entered Congress in 2012, two years after Mulvaney, and both were part of the Tea Party surge. But while Mulvaney has an impressive CV from Georgetown and the University of North Carolina, practiced law for many years and held statewide office in South Carolina before running for Congress, Meadows was pretty much a cipher before he was elected.

In 2018, Meadows was revealed to have exaggerated his college career — he only received an AA degree rather than a BA, as he had claimed. He ran a restaurant in North Carolina for a while and has owned real estate development companies both in Florida and North Carolina. His previous political experience came as a county-level Republican chairman and as a member of North Carolina’s economic development board. That was pretty much it until he ran for Congress eight years ago.

He won that first race in a recently gerrymandered district with little trouble, since he had an R after his name. Meadows roared into Congress carrying the Tea Party banner and started making waves almost immediately. Like the rest of his class, which felt they had a mandate to do everything humanly possible to obstruct the Obama administration’s agenda, he became a leader of the right-wing faction that later branded itself the Freedom Caucus.

After being in office for only eight months, Meadows made a name for himself as the author of a letter demanding that the Republican House majority zero out all funding for Obamacare in the must-pass spending bill, threatening to shut down the government otherwise. He got 79 of his colleagues to sign the letter and it squeezed then-Speaker John Boehner into holding a vote on it, which Boehner did not want to do amid already delicate budget negotiations. Meadows was not a team player:

“This type of vote could potentially hurt our long term goals. I understand that,” he said. But he said that’s not his concern.”My job first is to make sure I represent the people back home,” Meadows said. “I don’t believe that when I get here that people expect me to look at the political implications. That’s for somebody else to focus on.”For him, getting rid of Obamacare is priority No. 1. “[T]o ignore that would be to ignore our duty to represent the people back home,” he said.

He said his constituents wanted him to fight against Obamacare “regardless of consequences.” That gambit was just the first of many more attempts to ditch the Affordable Care Act, shut down the government, wreck the U.S. credit rating and otherwise cause untold damage to the country.

Meadows was 100% a creation of the Tea Party at the height of its power. Activists in the movement interviewed him, vetted him and got him elected. His comments above reflected the movement’s simpleminded arrogance that represented the final, steep decline of what had once been a functioning political party.

By 2015, Meadows was a major power in the House Freedom Caucus — essentially a creation or offshoot of the Tea Party movement — which successfully ousted Boehner for failing to deliver enough of the Tea Party agenda. He soon became a major thorn in the side of Boehner’s successor, Paul Ryan, for exactly the same reason.

So it was somewhat surprising to see Meadows embrace Donald Trump wholeheartedly in 2016, even joining him on stage and leading the crowd in exuberant chants of “Lock her up!” chants. Whatever else Trump may be, he’s not much of a Tea Partier. But Meadows made it clear from the beginning that he sees his job as giving his far-right voters exactly what they want, no matter what, and they wanted Trump. It wasn’t long before he was backing primary challenges to recalcitrant GOP representatives who failed to show sufficient fealty to the president.

By 2019, Meadows was so deeply bound to Trump that he announced he wouldn’t run for re-election and made it known that he would love to be his chief of staff. A few months later the prize was his, and according to this report from the Washington Post he has — unsurprisingly — not only failed to quell the White House chaos but reinforced the president’s worst instincts. Meadows reduces everything to partisan politics, is openly contemptuous of scientists, doctors and other experts and eggs on Trump to play hardball no matter what, in the middle of the pandemic crisis and the ensuing economic disaster.

In other words, just as he blindly did the bidding of the Tea Party without regard to the consequences, Meadows is now channeling their new leader, with the same disastrous results for his party and the country. It’s ironic that the man who founded a group that was often called the “Caucus of No” has turned out to be the perfect yes-man — the last thing America needs in Donald Trump’s White House.

Trump team worries Kamala Harris will “chew” up Pence and “spit him out” in VP debate: report

MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace called into her network while driving with her son and dog during vacation to add her latest reporting on Joe Biden’s pick of Kamala Harris to be his running mate.

“The other piece of reporting I’ve picked up in the past week was from the Trump team, that from their viewpoint, because Donald Trump has no capacity to understand that this is the selection of a person to run the government with the president, he only saw this in terms of casting for the night of primetime coverage that is the vice presidential debate, and this was the pick that scared them the most,” Wallace told MSNBC’s Brian Williams.

“They thought she would more than go toe-to-toe with [Mike] Pence, they thought she could chew him up and spit him out and pointed to her cross-examination of one Bill Barr,” she explained.

“I don’t know that there’s a better debater or questioner on the political field right now,” Wallace said. Her skill-set is unmatched in terms much being able to articulate an argument, to patiently wait to make her point and look at the argument that the democratic ticket has to make.”

Watch:

Watch more TV to understand the backlash against the woman running for vice president

Joe Biden’s promise to name a woman running mate has prompted familiar debates about gender and power.

Are these potential vice presidents supposed to be presidential lackeys or understudies to the leader of the free world? Should they actively seek the position, or be reluctant nominees bound by duty?

After Sen. Kamala Harris’ name emerged as a short-list favorite, CNBC reported that some Biden allies and donors “initiated a campaign against Harris,” arguing that she was “too ambitious” and would be “solely focused on eventually becoming president.”

Claiming that people who want to be president make bad vice presidents might seem ill-conceived if your audience is Vice President Joe Biden. And pundits and journalists quickly pointed out that the argument was racist and sexist – like, really, really sexist.

So why were Democratic Party insiders spouting it?

One clue can be found in the way we tell stories about women politicians. In our book, “Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture,” communication scholar Kristina Horn Sheeler and I examine how fictional and actual women presidential figures are framed in news coverage, political satire, memes, television and film. Our close reading of these diverse texts reveals a persistent backlash that takes many forms: satirical cartoons that deploy sexist stereotypes; the pornification of women candidates in memes; and news framing that includes misogynistic metaphors, to name a few.

But in our chapter on fictional women presidents on screen, we found something particularly relevant to the coverage of the Democratic Party “veepstakes.” Women who are politically ambitious are presented as less trustworthy than those who don’t actively seek the presidency.

There have been seven series on U.S. television that follow a woman president for at least one full season: ABC’s “Commander in Chief“; the Sci-Fi Channel’s “Battlestar Galactica“; Fox’s “24“; CBS’ “Madam Secretary“; Fox 21’s “Homeland“; Netflix’s “House of Cards“; and HBO’s “Veep.”

It may seem like a small point, but when showrunners want to create a “likeable” woman president, they go out of their way to demonstrate that pursuing the presidency isn’t her life’s goal.

The women presidents in “Commander in Chief” and “Battlestar Galactica” didn’t campaign for the office. They ascended to the presidency as a result of tragedy. In the former, the president dies of a brain aneurism; in the latter, a nuclear attack takes out the first 42 people in the presidential line of succession, leaving the secretary of education to fill the role. (To be fair, this did seem like a woman’s likeliest path to presidential power in 2004.) Each character is portrayed as an ethical and effective leader – not perfect, but plausibly presidential.

Conversely, series like “24” and “Homeland” feature women candidates who aggressively seek the presidency. In both cases, the women start out as principled politicians, but their true nature is revealed as weak and duplicitous. Their presidential tenures end up being ruinous for the nation, and order is restored by a white male – “24’s” Jack Bauer and the male vice president in “Homeland.” HBO’s “Veep” takes the premise of a craven woman politician to an absurd extreme, with actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus winning six consecutive Emmy Awards for her burlesque send-up of the familiar female trope.

Interestingly, both “24” and “Homeland” have important connections to real-world presidential politics. Both series portray the first woman U.S. president as a veteran politician and middle-aged white woman. They bear strong resemblances to the only woman who has been a major-party presidential nominee: Hillary Clinton. Appearing in 2008 and 2017, respectively, the storylines were clearly planned to coincide with what could have been Clinton’s first term as U.S. president.

Yet depictions in “24” and Homeland” of fictional women presidents align with communication scholar Shawn J. Parry-Giles’ findings that the media framed Clinton as inauthentic, Machiavellian, and ultimately, dangerous.

That brings us back to our current veepstakes.

Criticisms of women vice presidential prospects echo cultural scripts that insist women who want to be president shouldn’t be trusted. Understanding the resistance to Harris – and Elizabeth Warren, Stacey Abrams and others who announce their eagerness to serve – requires recognizing the diverse forms that backlash against women’s political ambitions can take, which span from calling a congresswoman a “f—— b—-” on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to portraying women presidents as Machiavellian on television dramas.

Did pop culture cause those Biden funders to try to undermine Harris?

No. But the stories we tell ourselves on screen have taught us that women who actually want to be president can’t be trusted. That might be why people like Ambassador Susan Rice, who’s never run for office, and Congresswoman Karen Bass, who said she doesn’t want to run for president, landed on Biden’s short list to favorable coverage.

“At every step in her political career,” The New York Times wrote of Bass, “the California congresswoman had to be coaxed to run for a higher office. Now she’s a top contender to be Joe Biden’s running mate.”

Men who run for president typically have to demonstrate the requisite desire – the so-called “fire in the belly.”

Bizarrely, women are supposed to act like they don’t even want it.

Karrin Vasby Anderson, Professor of Communication Studies, Colorado State University

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

Across the country, public health officials are getting fired in throes of pandemic

Vilified, threatened with violence or in some cases suffering from burnout, dozens of state and local public health officials around the U.S. have resigned or have been fired amid the coronavirus outbreak, a testament to how politically combustible masks, lockdowns and infection data have become.

One of the latest departures came Sunday, when California’s public health director, Dr. Sonia Angell, was ousted following a technical glitch that caused a delay in reporting virus test results — information used to make decisions about reopening businesses and schools.

Last week, New York City’s health commissioner was replaced after months of friction with the police department and City Hall.

A review by KHN and The Associated Press finds at least 49 state and local public health leaders have resigned, retired or been fired since April across 23 states. The list has grown by more than 20 people since the AP and KHN started keeping track in June.

Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called the numbers stunning. He said they reflect burnout, as well as attacks on public health experts and institutions from the highest levels of government, including from President Donald Trump, who has sidelined the CDC during the pandemic.

“The overall tone toward public health in the U.S. is so hostile that it has kind of emboldened people to make these attacks,” Frieden said.

The past few months have been “frustrating and tiring and disheartening” for public health officials, said former West Virginia public health commissioner Dr. Cathy Slemp, who was forced to resign by Republican Gov. Jim Justice in June.

“You care about community, and you’re committed to the work you do and societal role that you’re given. You feel a duty to serve, and yet it’s really hard in the current environment,” Slemp said in an interview Monday.

The departures come at a time when public health expertise is needed more than ever, said Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

“We’re moving at breakneck speed here to stop a pandemic, and you can’t afford to hit the pause button and say, ‘We’re going to change the leadership around here and we’ll get back to you after we hire somebody,'” Freeman said.

As of Monday, confirmed infections in the United States stood at over 5 million, with deaths topping 163,000, the highest in the world, according to the count kept by Johns Hopkins University researchers. The confirmed number of coronavirus cases worldwide topped 20 million.

Many of the firings and resignations have to do with conflicts over mask orders or shutdowns to enforce social distancing, Freeman said. Despite the scientific evidence that such measures help prevent transmission of the coronavirus, many politicians and others have argued they are not needed, no matter what health experts tell them.

“It’s not a health divide; it’s a political divide,” Freeman said.

Some health officials said they were stepping down for family reasons, and some left for jobs at other agencies, such as the CDC. Some, like Angell, were ousted because of what higher-ups said was poor leadership or a failure to do their job.

Others have complained that they were overworked, underpaid, unappreciated or thrust into a pressure-cooker environment.

“To me, a lot of the divisiveness and the stress and the resignations that are happening right and left are the consequence of the lack of a real national response plan,” said Dr. Matt Willis, health officer for Marin County in Northern California. “And we’re all left scrambling at the local and state level to extract resources and improvise solutions.”

Public health leaders from Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, down to officials in small communities have reported death threats and intimidation. Some have seen their home addresses published or been the subject of sexist attacks on social media. Fauci has said his wife and daughters have received threats.

In Ohio, the state’s health director, Dr. Amy Acton, resigned in June after months of pressure during which Republican lawmakers tried to strip her of her authority and armed protesters showed up at her house.

It was on Acton’s advice that GOP Gov. Mike DeWine became the first governor to shut down schools statewide. Acton also called off the state’s presidential primary in March just hours before polls were to open, angering those who saw it as an overreaction.

The executive director of Las Animas-Huerfano Counties District Health Department in Colorado, Kim Gonzales, found her car vandalized twice, and a group called Colorado Counties for Freedom ran a radio ad demanding that her authority be reduced. Gonzales has remained on the job.

In West Virginia, the governor forced Slemp’s resignation over what he said were discrepancies in the data. Slemp said the department’s work had been hurt by outdated technology like fax machines and slow computer networks. Tom Inglesby, director of the UPMC Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins, said the issue amounted to a clerical error easily fixed.

Inglesby said it was deeply concerning that public health officials who told “uncomfortable truths” to political leaders had been removed.

“That’s terrible for the national response because what we need for getting through this, first of all, is the truth. We need data, and we need people to interpret the data and help political leaders make good judgments,” Inglesby said.

Since 2010, spending on state public health departments has dropped 16% per capita, and the amount devoted to local health departments has fallen 18%, according to a KHN and AP analysis. At least 38,000 state and local public health jobs have disappeared since the 2008 recession, leaving a skeleton workforce for what was once viewed as one of the world’s top public health systems.

Another sudden departure came Monday along the Texas border. Dr. Jose Vazquez, the Starr County health authority, resigned after a proposal to increase his pay from $500 to $10,000 a month was rejected by county commissioners.

Starr County Judge Eloy Vera, a county commissioner who supported the raise, said Vazquez had been working 60 hours per week in the county, one of the poorest in the U.S. and recently one of those hit hardest by the virus.

“He felt it was an insult,” Vera said.

In Oklahoma, both the state health commissioner and state epidemiologist have been replaced since the outbreak began in March.

In rural Colorado, Emily Brown was fired in late May as director of the Rio Grande County Public Health Department after clashing with county commissioners over reopening recommendations. The person who replaced her resigned July 9.

The months of nonstop and often unappreciated work are prompting many public health workers to leave, said Theresa Anselmo of the Colorado Association of Local Public Health Officials.

“It will certainly slow down the pandemic response and become less coordinated,” she said. “Who’s going to want to take on this career if you’re confronted with the kinds of political issues that are coming up?”

Weber reported from St. Louis. Associated Press writers Paul Weber, Sean Murphy and Janie Har and California Healthline senior correspondent Anna Maria Barry-Jester contributed reporting.

This story is a collaboration between KHN and The Associated Press.

Cutting payroll taxes is the wrong medicine

Donald Trump moved Saturday to drop the payroll tax for the rest of the year to revive our economy, a proposition most economists and even Senate Republicans reject.

Trump initially held back as negotiators for the White House and Democratic leaders ran into an impasse over a new coronavirus pandemic aid package. Then he offered a legally questionable executive order to eliminate the payroll tax to be seen as the last-minute hero.

It is unclear how dropping six months of payroll tax would help, and whether Trump can take the action by himself.

As presented, the payroll tax cut would be part of executive orders that would pay state-paid unemployment benefits through the end of the year, extend eviction and student loan protections — orders short on exactly the detail that has derailed the compromise talks. Where the states get the money was not explained.

Normally, that authority resides in the Congress and its constitutional power over spending. There will be lawsuits and messiness to follow, which seems to be fine by Trump, who already dangled a permanent payroll tax cut if he’s re-elected. Trump believes the law is as Trump wants, and objectors can see him in court.

But let’s set aside the questionable authority here. Cutting the payroll tax feels like the wrong tool for the problem at hand.

What virtually every other leader says is that in a time of pandemic and economic emergency, we need direct aid to individuals and businesses to stay afloat and a quick infusion of lots of cash. Eliminating payroll taxes for six months does neither, amounting to too small a total to be a stimulus, representing a drawn-out approach, and further harming both Medicare and Social Security in a health emergency.

What do we know?

Here’s the conclusion of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities: “A payroll tax cut would constitute poor and inefficient economic stimulus. Other stimulus measures that would be highly effective and for which there is great need — such as aid to help states cover their $650 billion in revenue shortfalls and avoid deep cuts to state services, strengthened nutrition assistance, extended unemployment insurance, and measures to maintain and bolster health coverage and care — should not be held hostage to a poorly conceived payroll tax cut proposal.”

A New York Times analysis said, “Most economists, even conservative ones, do not rank a payroll tax cut anywhere close to the top of their list for best ways to support and stimulate the American economy as it struggles to climb out of the recession.”

Team Trump argues that by reducing the cost of employing someone, and increasing the amount of money workers take home, the cut will make both hiring and job-seeking more attractive. So, how much would that be?

Payroll taxes are on a sliding scale but average 7.6% of weekly pay for workers and the same for employers. That money goes mostly to Social Security up to $137,700 in income, with less for Medicare.

Of course, if you’re out of work, there is no benefit here. Aren’t those out of work the people we want to help? Rather, the perceived benefit is all to incent employers to speed hiring. But for six months in the middle of a pandemic? How does this make sense? Besides, Congress already passed a bill this year that delays —but does not eliminate — the employer side of those taxes, meaning companies will not have to start paying their liabilities for this year until next year.

Overall, eliminating the payroll tax would favor high earners.

Suspending the taxes would cost the government about $400 billion from August through the end of the year, according to estimates from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in Washington.

Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, warned this week that a payroll tax cut would create a “public relations problem,” arguing that direct payments to families would prove more meaningful to individual voters.

A fix missing the problem

Despite Trump’s obsession with cutting the payroll tax, it seems the paper-and-pencil exercises show there is no quick, effective infusion of money in the economy nor substantial direct help for individuals.

Obviously, the pandemic itself remains the biggest disincentive to the economy. Nothing in the executive orders Trump promises helps expand testing or equipping businesses, schools, child-care facilities or anyone else with tools to deal with the effects of the disease.

Business’ main problem is the lack of customers for their products — both because of social distancing measures and because many customers’ incomes have fallen dramatically as unemployment has risen. Businesses will not hire (or retain) more workers or invest in more equipment than they need to produce the goods and services they actually can sell.

At the end of the day, in more normal times, I would want to keep the payroll tax just to make sure we have functioning programs for the health and welfare of seniors, services which otherwise would require a congressional bill to restore if the tax is cut.

In the time of the pandemic, using this payroll tax as a major vehicle for aid seems way off the mark.

Why Trump’s attacks on Biden are missing the mark

Joe Biden, this year’s presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has a long history of taking centrist positions — first during his decades in the U.S. Senate and then as vice president under President Barack Obama. But President Donald Trump has been describing Biden as a puppet of “the radical left.” Journalist Ashley Parker, in an article for the Washington Post, emphasizes that Trump is not describing the Joe Biden that countless people know in Washington, D.C. and explains why his anti-Biden smears have so far failed to resonate.

“President Trump is increasingly trying to run against a Joe Biden of his own making,” Parker explains. “Rather than look for campaign ammunition in the former vice president’s long track record of politically vulnerable votes and policy proposals, Trump has instead chosen to describe Biden as a godless Marxist bent on destroying the country with a radical agenda that would make Che Guevara blanch. The caricature is one that neither Biden’s critics nor supporters recognize, but it’s one Trump continues to promote.”

Trump, Parker notes, has described Biden as “the most extreme left-wing candidate in history” and someone who is determined to “abolish the police” and “abolish the suburbs” — attacks that, according to Parker, promote “a cartoonish depiction so distant from the reality of Biden that the hits don’t always resonate.”

The Post discussed Trump’s anti-Biden smears with Democratic ad maker Pia Carusone, who explained: “Generically, can you successfully paint a caricature of your opponent and be rewarded at the polls? Yes, but you can’t just do that without understanding the greater context that the attack is falling in. And we’re in the middle of a health and economic catastrophe, and people are very pessimistic about what they’re hearing from candidates and elected leaders.”

Similarly, Ken Goldstein, who teaches politics at the University of San Francisco, told the Post, “There is certainly this notion that a bunch of wizards sit around and come up with this caricature and then spend hundreds of millions of dollars to drive the caricature, but it only really works if there is some kernel of truth to it.”

Mary Trump to her Uncle Donald’s supporters: If you care about him, get him out of the Oval Office

Mary Trump’s bestseller, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” has sold more copies in its first week than her Uncle Donald’s “The Art of the Deal” sold in 29 years — and Mary hopes that gets under his skin. (It may sound disrespectful to refer to an accomplished clinical psychologist by her first name, but it’s the only way to avoid massive confusion.) As I learned in my “Salon Talks” conversation with Mary, needling her uncle was not the main reason she wrote this book. It’s a portrait of a troubled American family that created the damaged, sadistic man who is now president of the United States. In Mary’s account, for both Donald Trump and his father, Fred Trump, cruelty can bring them joy.

Mary lost her father, Fred Trump Jr., affectionally called “Freddy,” when she was 16, to health complications caused by alcoholism. Donald used his late brother as a prop on the campaign trial in 2016 and since to feign empathy for those struggling with additions, as Mary explains. But her father was far more than a man defined by his alcoholism. In fact, it was the cruelty of Freddy’s father — and to a lesser degree his brother — that contributed greatly to his losing battle with drinking. Fred Trump demanded that Freddy work in the family real estate business, and when Freddy refused, instead becoming a pilot, Fred and Donald viciously mocked and belittled his career choice until he quit.

In our conversation, Mary offered strong words to mainstream news media outlets for their repeated failure to call her uncle what he is, a liar and a white supremacist. She said she cannot understand the timidity of the press, at a time when the stakes are so high. As for the upcoming election, Mary has a message for Trump supporters: If you really care about this person, the last place you would want him to be is in the Oval Office, because it’s having a serious adverse effect on his mental health. Watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Mary Trump here, or read a transcript of our conversation below.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

First of all, congratulations. Your book has now sold more copies in a week and a half than “The Art of the Deal” sold in three decades, according to reporting. Is there a little joy in that?

Honestly, it’s really going to get under his skin. Anything that gets under his skin, I consider a good for all of us.

If people go into this thinking it’s another book about Donald Trump, they’re mistaken. It’s really about your family, and Donald is one person in that. There’s another important person in the book, person, your late father Freddy, who passed away when you were 16. All America knows about him, frankly, is how Donald has described him— a person with alcoholism who is the reason Trump does not drink. Trump has invoked him to try to show he has empathy to those with opioid addictions. Share a little bit about your father so people know more about him than the one-dimensional person that Donald Trump has painted.

I really appreciate your asking about my dad because it is extraordinary how little Donald has to say about him. Not just in terms of his alcoholism, but other than that, all I’ve ever heard him say is that he was really handsome and he was really kind, but he always says “kind” as if it’s an insult. My dad was much more than that, although he was very handsome. He was probably the only self-made person in my family. He was supposed to take over my grandfather’s business and had every intention of doing so, but when my grandfather essentially made that impossible, my dad, who had gotten his private and professional pilot licenses when he was in college, applied for a job at TWA. He got into their training class in 1964 on his first try, and he was one of maybe 20 percent of pilots who had gotten their training entirely on their own. In other words, the rest of the 80 percent were trained in the military. So that was a huge accomplishment.

He flew the Boston-to-LAX route, which was pretty coveted at the time. He was also a consummate boatman and fishermen, and perhaps more important to me — I’ve spoken to some of his friends from growing up in Jamaica Estates, Queens, and also from college and to this day, they remember him as the sweetest, kindest, most generous person. They still have great feelings of love for him, and also credit him with giving them some of the most amazing experiences of their lives because this was a man who had a little prop plane, and he would fly his friends to Bimini for the weekend or fly them out east to Montauk and take them fishing on his boat. He was pretty extraordinary. Unfortunately, it didn’t last.

You write in the book about how Fred and Donald did not applaud him for having this ambition and initiative to do something outside of the family business. His father ridiculed him. It’s funny for me to call Trump “Trump” when you’re a Trump too. I need to say “Donald.”

Everybody needs to call him Donald.

Donald has even admitted, later in life, that he called Freddy a “chauffeur in the sky.” Why didn’t your grandfather Fred appreciate this ambition and this initiative?

Yeah, because my grandfather was a sociopath and was very driven and narrow-minded and provincial, and the only thing that really mattered to him was his business and making money. He needed one of his sons, and obviously it was supposed to be my dad because he was the oldest and his namesake, to perpetuate the empire. He discovered fairly early on that my dad just didn’t have the right kind of personality. My grandfather wanted him to be a killer, he wanted him to be a tough guy. He wanted to him to be somebody who would win at all costs, and be singularly focused on real estate.

My dad, as I said, had every intention of following in his father’s footsteps, but he had interests outside of the family business. For example, he did ROTC in college and was a second lieutenant in the National Guard, which Donald also never mentions. My grandfather had disdain for what he considered to be a waste of time. I think by the time my dad started working for my grandfather right out of college, it was sort of a done deal. I think my grandfather had already made up his mind about him, and had seen, as Donald got older, that Donald was willing to do anything to win at all costs. He was willing to lie, cheat and steal, and be that so-called tough guy. Although I’ve never quite figured out what that means in the context of Brooklyn real estate in the ’40s and ’50s, but there you go.

You’ve mentioned that Donald talks about your late father’s niceness as almost a weakness. If you’re not cool and mean, and if you’re not going to punch back, then somehow you’re a lesser human being. You write in your book that with Donald Trump, cruelty is the point. Why is cruelty the point to Donald Trump? Did the way his father raised him contribute to that?

As you just said, kindness was considered weakness, and weakness was an unforgivable sin according to my grandfather. My grandfather’s opinion was the only one that mattered, honestly. It wasn’t just kindness, it was illness. Physical illness or alcoholism was certainly considered a weakness. Admitting to your mistakes, apologizing — all of these things were considered weakness. We see the direct line from that to how Donald operates today.

But as far as the way cruelty functions, I think it functions on a couple of different levels. One, it distracts. If he needs to distract from some fiasco he’s created, which happens many times a day at this point, he’s going to do something so outrageous and cruel that it’s going to draw people’s attention away. It’s also a way for him to exercise power over people who are weaker than he is, and I think part of that is also the function that it had for my grandfather, which is that he enjoys it.

There’s something you write about in your book, and I don’t know why others in the media don’t talk about it. With COVID-19, Trump could have been a hero. It’s not like Andrew Cuomo stopped the virus. In fact, New York has the most deaths of any state, yet his approval rating is in the 60s. Trump could have done the right thing. What was it deep down that stopped Donald Trump from being the hero to America?

First of all, I would suggest that it’s just not in his DNA. That’s never a goal, really. And I’m sure he was worried about alienating his base somehow, but even more fundamental than that, admitting the virus existed would have been admitting that there was something wrong, and that’s not something that you can do in my family. Secondly, when it became unavoidable, when this became something we had to talk about and we had to deal with, he couldn’t handle it. To be honest and straightforward about it would have been admitting he’d made a mistake. Here we are, many months of death and illness later, where he continues not to wear a mask, he continues not to tell other people they should, and he continues to pretend that it’s not a big deal. It’s going to go away, and it’s the “China virus,” because he just can’t help the racism.

Donald Trump, just last week, repeated that children are almost immune. We just learned from the CDC that more than 97,000 children in America contracted COVID-19 in the last two weeks of July alone. We have 300,000-plus children with COVID, and even experts say it’s under-tested so they don’t know. Can you help us understand why he would attack Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci and allow his media minions to smear Dr. Fauci?

I can think of a couple of reasons. One is they’re undermining his message that everything’s just right, and he cannot stand that. Also, and maybe more saliently for him, he knows on a very deep level, probably not consciously, he knows they’re better than he is. I’m not entirely sure about Dr. Birx, quite honestly, but he knows Dr. Fauci is better. He’s smarter, and the fact that we even have to talk about them in the same sentence is an insult to Dr. Fauci, and he’s jealous.

Is he jealous that Dr. Fauci is respected? Trump actually talked about that at a press conference two weeks ago, saying “Dr. Fauci is popular. Nobody likes me.”

Yes, and also, what was interesting about that is he was also trying to co-opt Dr. Fauci’s popularity by saying, “Hey, he works for me, he’s my guy, so therefore anything he does should reflect well on me.” Although I think we’re a little past that point. One of the most confusing things for people outside of this situation is that Donald, at this point, could think that he’s doing a good job. But he probably does. He’s got a lot of people around him lying to him about that on a daily basis as well.

The second part of COVID-19 is the economic impact. We have higher unemployment than the worst point in the Great Recession. We have 60 million Americans out of work right now, we have 8.5 million working part time who want to work full time, and there’s Donald Trump at his country club, which costs $300,000 to join, telling everyone the economy is great, and that we’re coming back. Is it again the same thing as COVID, just lie and deny and hope no one finds out the truth, or at least that no one he’s talking to believes the truth?

I think when it comes to the economy it’s more that he has no idea what he’s talking about. He’s gotten it into his head that the only metric that matters is the stock market. And as we know, the stock market is not the economy. I’m a little mystified. I have some ideas about why the stock market seems to be rallying, and it has something to do with trillions of dollars funneled into the wrong hands in the last couple of months. That’s not the economy, but he’s convinced enough people that that’s the case other than himself. That’s what he keeps pointing to.

What’s so incredibly frustrating about that — there are a lot of things frustrating about it, but to your point, is that as long as the stock market’s doing well he’s not going to pay attention to anything else. He’s so ignorant that for some reason he does not understand that the only way to save the economy is to get rid of COVID-19, to contain this deadly virus.

But again, that would be admitting that he’d done something wrong, and he’d have to course-correct. We can’t have that, so let’s send kids back to school. The cynicism, all of this is breathtaking, and we’re talking about Donald. He’s handling everything very badly, but I continue to believe he’s not the problem. It’s the enablers of who actually know better, and the idea that you’ve got these Republican pundits and elected officials saying, “Oh, well, it’s only going to affect like 1 percent of school children.” OK, that’s a lot of children, and if you’re willing to take that risk with other people’s children’s lives, then you should not be allowed in polite company.

Has the Donald Trump administration been a learning experience for you about how some of our fellow Americans view things? Are you surprised by any of it in terms of the celebration of cruelty, the celebration of white supremacy, the callousness in dealing with COVID-19 where they dismiss it as an acceptable loss to have children die to help Donald Trump get re-elected?

No, unfortunately. The base doesn’t surprise me, there’s always a base. This base was George W. Bush’s base, was Ronald Reagan’s base. They’re going to do what they’re going to do, and I think that’s the only thing Donald tapped into, was their racism, misogyny, anti-immigrant feelings, Islamophobia, we can go on and on, all of that hateful stuff. The only thing that surprised me was how 100 percent of elected Republicans have fallen in line and either overlooked his most egregious behaviors or championed his most egregious behaviors. I thought one of the purposes of liberal democracy was to contain those people, and up until 2018 when thankfully the Democrats took back the House, 100 percent of the United States government represented the worst among us. And now it’s like 80 percent, It’s quite horrifying. And for what, really? For what?

Yet there are polls where some Americans think Donald Trump can handle the economy better than Joe Biden. Trump can’t just file for bankruptcy this time. What do you tell those people who actually think that Donald Trump is a miracle worker with the economy, based on you knowing him?

I don’t think there’s anything anybody could say that would get through to them at this point, since there’s so much evidence that they willfully choose to ignore. I really think the only way to get through to some of them would be to say, “If you really care about this person, the last place you would want him to be is in the Oval Office, because it’s having a serious adverse effect on him, on his mental stability and on his physical health.” Maybe if we could appeal to their self-interest or their alleged concern for this person, but I don’t think anything will work. You can sit them down and show them charts and graphs, and get experts to explain everything, and they don’t care. It’s a cult.

Based on your experience as a clinical psychologist and knowing Donald Trump, is there anything you would recommend to reporters who go to White House briefings on how they can actually get to the truth out of Donald? Or at least reveal to everyone watching what the truth is, and what it isn’t?

First of all, don’t back down. Don’t be deferential. He insults reporters on a daily basis, it’s kind of shocking to me that they keep showing up. The other thing, and this is not my original suggestion, I’ve been hearing this for a while, they need to team up. They need to have each other’s backs. I know we can’t expect that from Fox or OAN, but other mainstream outlets have to pick up where, if Donald shuts down a reporter, the next person has to ask the same question until he either answers it or storms out. That’s it. I’m not entirely sure why they think that there’s any purpose to continuing to do what they’ve been doing. They’re basically showing up at campaign rallies now, and there needs to be pushback on that, otherwise I don’t see the point.

Do you think overall that the media has been too timid? One specific example is last week on Fox News when he called Black Lives Matter a Marxist organization. Weeks before that he called it a symbol of hate. He’s got a horrific track record of demonizing African Americans. “You can’t take a knee in silence, you should be fired for that,” he said to black athletes. “If you march in the street, you’re a Marxist and a symbol of hate.” To me, he’s a white supremacist. I have no problem calling him that. Reporters are restrained, to say the least, in doing it. Is that timidity hurting us?

Of course. It’s awful, and it leads me to believe that no lessons have been learned since the horrific coverage of the 2016 election. It leads me to believe that they’re more interested in access than they are in journalism or journalistic ethics. The fact that he’s continuing to get away with making these broadsides without any follow-up. The follow-up question is: Define Marxism. He needs to be confronted squarely with his racism. He’s a racist. His comments aren’t “racially tinged.” They’re not “racial,” whatever that means. They’re racist. He’s a racist. He’s endangering the lives of Black Americans every single day in this administration. Why are people continuing to tiptoe around this? And I’m sorry, people I guess have to have respect for the office, but nobody has been more disrespectful to the office that Donald has been. So why should he be treated with respect? It’s mind-blowing.

Mary, you know Donald well, despite his tweets saying that he barely knew you. You were there working on his book for him, you spent years with him, as you go through in the book, even after he got elected. What would you share with Americans about your concerns if your uncle were to be re-elected in November?

We’re done. Because again, it’s not just him. He’s got his cronies in place; Mitch McConnell, Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo. They apparently want to turn this country into a theocracy. They want to have some version of apartheid here in which the majority Democrats would be ruled by the minority fascist Republicans. I do believe that the American experiment would be over; we will have failed it; and I don’t see how do we come back from this. I’m not entirely sure we’re going to survive four years because it’s going to require an amount of patience, advocacy and strength of purpose that we have not shown in the past. So: Vote. Everybody vote. We need the largest turnout ever in history.

How has all this been for you as an experience, personally? Do you get questioned all the time, are you related to the president? How do you respond to that?

It’s really interesting. People used to ask me all the time. If I paid with a credit card, I would get that. “Are you related?” It actually stopped after the election, either because people didn’t want to hurt my feelings or they didn’t want to make presumptions. I’m not really sure why, but people don’t really ask anymore. I guess now more people know the answer to the question. I used to say that it came with all the disadvantages and none of the benefits.

Pro-Trump “news” site is run by Trump’s super PAC — and that raises legal questions

A super PAC officially endorsed by President Trump’s campaign has launched a conservative “news” site, and some of its content raises questions about possible violations of regulations that bar coordination between campaigns and political organizations.

The site, first identified as an America First entity by The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay, is called the American Herald, and its pro-Trump content has been packaged and promoted by the official campaign as if it were an independent outlet. The Herald’s domain was registered on July 31, 2019, but the site appears to have launched in late June, and its “about” page self-identifies as “a conservative news platform designed to bring you all the news the liberal media doesn’t want you to know.”

“We commit to cover national issues that impact all Americans, not just what fits the left’s political agenda,” the page says.

On Tuesday, the top stories on the Herald’s home page include: “Democratic cities overrun by left-wing mobs”; “Trump gives aid to jobless, rentless, borrowers”; “Democrats refuse to condemn antifa”; and “President Trump’s executive orders put America first.” One of its Facebook ads promotes a story criticizing Twitter for suspending Donald Trump Jr. after he posted misinformation about the coronavirus.

While the Herald promotes itself as all-embracing (its tagline reads, “Stop being told what to think”) none of the articles have author bylines, including the “opinion” section, making it impossible to tell who is actually creating its content.

A legal disclaimer at the bottom of the website discloses that the page is funded by the America First Action super PAC — and the thousands of dollars in ad purchases on Google and Facebook also have that disclaimer — the Herald’s Facebook page does not possess the same transparency.

The Daily Beast also reported that the Herald’s Twitter page has been suspended, apparently within the last week. A Twitter spokesperson told Salon that the company could not share information about the suspension. It also appears that some of the site’s Facebook and Google ads have been removed for unspecified policy violations.

In fairness, Democratic-affiliated organizations have created a number of partisan sites masked as “news” organizations, including the American Ledger, a site created in 2018 by Democratic super PAC American Bridge that seems to have been a source of inspiration for the Herald. Like the Herald, the Ledger also discloses its connection to its PAC, but describes itself as delivering “reporting” dedicated to “fast, hard-hitting investigations into the pressing issues.”

Unlike the American Herald, however, the American Ledger’s “about” page acknowledges that it’s directly linked to its super PAC parent: “The American Ledger is powered by the fact-based research and nationwide reach of American Bridge 21st Century, which Time calls ‘the dominant player’ in progressive accountability research.” (Disclosure: Salon has published several articles featuring American Bridge research and spokespeople.)

“Since day one, American Bridge has been fully transparent about the American Ledger and its role in our work,” American Bridge spokesperson Kyle Morse told Salon in a statement. “The American Ledger’s content is fully backed up by detailed research and existing reporting, and the digital property will continue to hold Republicans accountable as it has since it was launched in 2018.”

But what truly separates the American Herald from these sites is the direct affiliation with Trump. The PAC has spent tens of millions of dollars on Trump’s re-election efforts over last three years, hosting events at Trump properties and raising money through some of the president’s shadiest supporters — including accepting a $325,000 illegal donation from a shell company co-founded by Rudy Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who are currently under indictment.

The PAC’s chair, former pro-wrestling exec Linda McMahon, served under Trump as head of the Small Business Administration, and its spokesperson, Kelly Sadler, worked for the White House as a special assistant to the president handling surrogate and coalitions outreach.

The American Herald provides another example of the impenetrable murk of campaign finance in the Trump era.

As a super PAC, America First Action can accept unlimited donations from entities and individuals. It cannot legally coordinate its spending with campaigns, which are more financially restricted. Furthermore, the super PAC has published content through the American Herald that promotes the overtly political activities of its dark-money nonprofit affiliate, America First Policies.

America First Policies was co-founded by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale and Nick Ayers, a top adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, but its tax status as a “social welfare organization” bars it from engaging primarily in political activity or coordinating with any political campaign or party.

The Herald’s “reporting” about America First Policies promotes a video advertisement produced by America First Policies, as well as the nationwide “Great American Comeback Tour,” another America First Policies production, which features Pence and promotes not just policies, but Trump’s re-election:

Beginning in June, America First Policies set out on the “Great American Comeback Tour'”featuring Pence, members of Congress, and other special guests.

The policy series follows the group’s tour touting Tax Cuts and historic trade deals like USMCA.

With events in Pennsylvania and Michigan already behind them, the tour will continue into various states throughout the U.S. to educate and mobilize voters around the policies that will lead to an economic resurgence post-coronavirus.

“Through a combination of tax cuts, deregulation, unleashing our energy sector and renegotiating bad trade deals, the Trump administration built the greatest economy in the world,” said America First Policies Communication Director Kelly Sadler. “They did it once, and they can do it again.”

The official Trump campaign website has also promoted the Great American Comeback Tour. Furthermore, the campaign and America First Policies both routinely use the phrase, and the campaign applied it to Trump’s now-infamous rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June, weeks after the ongoing America First Policies tour kicked off.

It is unclear whether this is a series of coincidences, and if so, whether the campaign will ask its official super PAC and affiliated nonprofit to stop.

America First Action and the Trump campaign did not immediately reply to Salon’s request for comment.

Twitter may not like it, but Kamala Harris was probably the right choice

Despite former Sen. Chris Dodd’s relentless war on her in the press, it appears that Sen. Kamala Harris of California is Joe Biden’s pick as a running mate for the former vice president’s contest against Donald Trump this November.

While Harris is the subject of heavy criticism from some corners of the left — the same folks who embraced a phrase seeded by right-wing trolls, “Kamala is a cop” — the reality is that Harris makes a lot of sense as a running mate for Biden.

Even though she bowed out of the Democratic presidential race relatively early, in December of 2019, that was due more to fundraising woes than bad polling. She’s known for her talents at attacking political opponents, which is something Biden experienced directly when Harris famously smoked him over his past comments praising himself as a friend and negotiating partner of segregationist senators in the ’70s. Her performance in various Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, particularly during the questioning of Brett Kavanaugh in his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, has endeared Harris to the organized and engaged female voters — those sometimes derided as “wine moms” — who won the 2018 midterms for Democrats and are absolutely critical to any Biden win in 2020.

In addition, Harris, as a senator from one of the safest blue states in the country, will be replaced — should she become vice president — not just another Democrat, but probably another rising star in the party, just as she was when she ran for Senate. And that matters, if there’s any hope for the Democratic Party going into the future. Keeping power means not pulling popular politicians from swing-state seats, like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. Refilling the party pipeline also means giving opportunities to up-and-coming politicians in bastion of blue like California.

Harris’ abilities as a prosecutor, which she deployed in her criticisms of Biden and in her questioning of witnesses before the Judiciary Committee, are exactly the sort of thing one wants in a running mate. The candidate himself needs to be viewed as someone who can “rise above” the fray. To make that work, it helps to have a running mate who can play the role of the brawler. Biden famously did this for Barack Obama, especially in 2012 when he decimated Rep. Paul Ryan, who was Mitt Romney’s running mate, during the vice presidential debate. Now Harris can play that role for him.

More to the point, there’s not much downside to Harris — and that matters a whole hell of a lot. Despite the heavy media attention to the running-mate selection, the evidence is clear that the vice-presidential nominee does little, if anything, to bolster the candidate’s chances with any particular voting demographic. But a running mate can hurt a campaign by making the candidate look like he has bad judgment, as happened with Sen. John McCain, when he picked laughingstock Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in his 2008 run against Obama.

Dynamic and controversial can work at the top of a ticket, as we saw with both Obama and, sadly, Donald Trump. But the best quality in a running mate is that the person is blandly competent and won’t draw a lot of negative attention.

No doubt the safety factor of Harris will be questioned by many in the media, who spend way too much time on Twitter (I’m guilty of this myself) and are unduly influenced by the chatter of a small group of online loudmouths — one might call them B*rnie Br*s — who absolutely hate Harris.

It’s unfortunate, because these folks, despite their Patreon hauls, are best ignored. They do not represent anything close to a majority of those who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary (who seem to have made their peace with Biden as the nominee, despite his long past of pro-corporate centrism). They don’t have the quiet organizing heft of the door-knocking, phone-calling middle-aged moms who like Harris.

And, most importantly, the people I’m talking about signaled early on that there was no such thing as a female running mate of Biden’s that they would accept. Even Sen. Elizabeth Warren — who is as left-leaning as Sanders, and more so in some ways — was branded a “snake” by that crowd. Since any woman Biden picked was going to encounter nasty, sexist backlash, there really was no reason for Biden not to pick Harris. If you signal to folks that there’s nothing they can do to please you, they’ll stop trying, which is perhaps the first and most brutal lesson of politics.

Of course, the reality here is that Harris — who is not only a woman but biracial, with a Black father and an Indian-American mother — has a whole cascade of identities that marginalize her in American politics and tend to draw out the haters. And a lot of the hate that was coming her way from the more white and male segments of the Democratic Party who chatting up reporters at gossipy outlets like Politico may leave some folks anxious about taking a “risk” in such an important election.

But the same anxieties were in play when it came to nominating Obama, and he was at the top of the ticket. He won in a landslide. Obama helped make it safer for candidates like Harris to win spots in the Senate and now, of course, to run on the presidential ticket. There’s not much reason to worry now that voters are going to panic about a Black candidate, especially in the face of an economic crisis far worse than the one during which Obama was elected in 2008.

Harris is well-liked (that is, outside of Twitter), competent, smart and charismatic. There’s no doubt she would be able to step into the role of president at a moment’s notice, should that be necessary. She’s a safe choice, and that’s the best thing a running mate can be. It really does create a spark of hope for this country’s future that we’re at the point where a Black woman can actually be seen as the safe, boring choice. All by itself, that’s a mark of progress.

Ted Cruz criticized for joking about “magic money tree” for pandemic aid: “It’s not a godd**n joke”

Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., shot back Monday at Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., after he attempted to dismiss a pandemic relief proposal over its alleged dependency on a “magic money tree.”

“It’s not a goddamn joke Ted,” Markey told his Republican colleague. “Millions of families are facing hunger, the threat of eviction, and the loss of their health care during a pandemic that is worsening every day. Get real.”

The battle, which unfolded entirely on Twitter, began after Markey proposed that the next round of coronavirus relief should give all Americans $2,000 a month until three months after the pandemic has passed. Moreover, the progressive senator added that the policy should be retroactively applied to the months of economic shutdowns that the outbreak triggered in March.

It's not a goddamn joke Ted. Millions of families are facing hunger, the threat of eviction, and the loss of their health care during a pandemic that is worsening every day. Get real. https://t.co/z6ygY8lSxc

— Ed Markey (@EdMarkey) August 10, 2020

Markey included a similar proposal in a bill that he introduced in early May, which drew backing from vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. However, the initial bill limited the monthly payments to Americans making $120,000 per year or less — not “every person in our country.”

Cruz, who caught backlash last month after he was caught on camera not wearing a mask on American Airlines flight, mocked Markey’s idea as he invoked foot massages and “soy lattes” — a timeworn conservative putdown for liberals.

“Why be so cheap? Give everyone $1 million a day, every day, forever,” Cruz tweeted in response. “And three soy lattes a day. And a foot massage. We have a magic money tree—we should use it!”

Why be so cheap? Give everyone $1 million a day, every day, forever. And three soy lattes a day. And a foot massage.

We have a magic money tree — we should use it! https://t.co/0ODgPBhc4O

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) August 10, 2020

Negotiations over a new coronavirus relief package unwinded last week, triggering an end to enhanced federal unemployment benefits for American workers. Among the issues that Republicans have not been able to settle within their own ranks are: a payroll tax cut, which Cruz supports in a break with his colleagues, and monthly relief payments to individuals.

As talks flagged, President Donald Trump left Washington for a three-day golf trip, stepping in later that weekend to sign directives that administration officials claim will provide significant relief to struggling Americans. One such order sets up a system intended to provide $400 in extra weekly unemployment benefits, or a 66% cut from the $600 weekly bonus received through the end of July as part of the CARES Act.

However, state and local governments must apply for federal support for those $400 checks, and Trump’s directives still leave them on the hook for 25%. The Republican officials who control Cruz’s state of Texas have not yet weighed in on the policy. Five months into the pandemic, some Texans report that they still have not been able to get in touch with state unemployment offices.

As of Tuesday, there were more than 5 million COVID-19 cases and more than 163,000 deaths from the pandemic in the U.S., according Johns Hopkins University data. Texas, which has seen a dramatic spike in cases over the summer months, has reported at least 9,238 deaths, per Johns Hopkins. Researchers at the University of Texas predict that total will increase to 14,500 by Sept. 1.

Chuck Todd haters, we take your point – but it doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere

Hating on Chuck Todd is easy ’cause he’s terrible.

That’s the general consensus at which Twitter has arrived about the MSNBC host and “Meet the Press” moderator. And at the risk of arousing the rage of the social media mob, it’s not quite fair.

Instead, I think it’s more accurate to say that Todd is the poster model for journalistic ineptitude. His claim to fame may be his inability to push back on fallacious claims and outright lies, but he’s far from alone in that. The White House press corps struggles to push back on a lot of this administration’s unfounded claims, or has given up trying.

It’s just that Todd is the most recognizable face of this industry-wide failure.

This explains the grave dancing in response to the recently announced changes in MSNBC’s schedule, expanding Nicolle Wallace’s 4 p.m. “Deadline White House” program to two hours, bumping Todd’s “Meet the Press” daily show to 1 p.m. on weekdays. The shift also moves Ayman Mohyeldin, who formerly anchored MSNBC’s 5 a.m. slot, to 3 p.m.

Todd’s haters crowed about this demotion even as Variety, which originally reported the news, framed it as an expansion. The host is launching a weekly political program on the network’s live-streaming outlet NBC News Now as well as on Peacock, NBC Universal’s “free as a bird” streaming-video service, in September.

This also signals MSNBC’s intent to make changes beyond Joy Reid’s recent addition to the lineup to make it less white and less male. But to be clear, NBC News isn’t expanding Wallace’s role out of some gesture towards gender equity or to balance out out its late afternoon and prime time lineup’s liberal skew, although the former Bush administration official is MSNBC’s version of a center-right presence.

No, Wallace is taking over the “MTP” 5 p.m. slot because her lead-in telecast was getting higher ratings than Todd’s, giving the cable news network a better shot at competing against Fox News’ dominant program “The Five” and Wolf Blitzer’s “Situation Room” on CNN. And that’s not great!

However, before you start ordering the crates of Champale for that #ChuckToddIsOverParty, you might want to hold off. As if to acknowledge the battering that their anchor’s reputation is taking, NBC sent out a press release on Monday declaring a Sunday victory for “Meet The Press” over CBS’s “Face the Nation,” ABC’s “This Week,” and “Fox News Sunday.” NBC might not be ecstatic about Todd’s daily coverage, but for now, they’re quite fine with the numbers behind the network flagship telecast of “Meet the Press.”

So, is this a demotion? Todd remains the anchor of pre- and post-event programming connected with live event coverage, including the major party conventions later this month, debates, and Election Night. ( A recent New York Times report also mentions that Wallace allegedly was proposed as a replacement for Todd on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” but the network shot that down.)

Political news junkies may not love that fact, but he’s better suited to handle after-the-fact political analysis than, say, handling interviews with Donald Trump or his surrogates . . . or serving as a presidential debate moderator. In those forums he consistently proves to be NBC News’ weakest link.

(Remember when he found a way to make last June’s first Democratic debates about him? This statement isn’t merely a matter of opinion, it’s an impression backed by data: A tally of words spoken during the debate put him in fourth place behind former Democratic presidential contenders Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, and Elizabeth Warren.)

But Todd’s critics are right to view the network’s celebration of his Sunday success with skepticism if not outright disdain, considering how necessary “Meet the Press” was to informing political dialogue in the era of the late Tim Russert.

Under Todd it continues to provide a platform to guests devoted to spreading distrust and cloaking those intentions in supposed good-faith discourse, knowing that the show’s current host will do little to nothing to push back on them. But then, that’s the way these shows have been running across the board. MSNBC, CNN and the Sunday political talk shows welcome White House advisors onto their programs because that is tradition, ignoring that the men and women holding these positions are as far from “traditional” choices as they can get.

There’s a way to handle these surrogates, certainly. Jonathan Swan’s Axios interview shows in the most basic fashion that it’s possible to expose a skilled liar for what he is, even if that liar happens to be America’s most powerful politician.

A person in Todd’s position – which is to say, a network anchor and host who also holds the position of NBC News’ political director, responsible for the network’s political coverage – should have learned enough from his many gargantuan failures in recent years to not be stomped upon by a Trump goon.

And yet that is exactly what happened on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” when White House trade adviser Peter Navarro floated an alarming “theory.” The Democrats, he said, “would prefer to see the economy go into the tank for another 90 days because that harms the president,” adding, “I hope that that Capitol Hill hasn’t become that cynical, but watching this negotiation, it makes me wonder.”

You know – just a musing drawn out of thin air.

How did Todd clap back at that plainly partisan slander? In part with the phrase that sent a crowd of viewers into a fury: “I take your point.”

To the incensed viewer, that line was on par with Trump’s damning, “It is what it is,” line, used to shrug off a question to which he had no answer. In this context, Todd either could not or would not reclaim control from a contentious guest intent upon muddying the conversation when he couldn’t come up with a decent answer to the question of why President Trump was at his golf club all weekend while millions of Americans were kept on tenterhooks to find out the status of their expiring unemployment benefits.

But the exchange was a debacle long before that: when Navarro asserted that “the Lord and the founding fathers created executive orders because of partisan bickering and divided government.” This is risible assertion to anyone with the slightest understanding of what the First Amendment is all about, let alone how the Founding Fathers viewed any concept of involving “the Lord” in government. (The TL;DR version: “Father of the Constitution” James Madison? Not a fan of mixing church and state.)

To this nonsense, Todd uttered nary a peep. And this is why the network’s hailing of that particular “Meet the Press” ratings win should be alarming. In a circumstance in which Todd should have reclaimed the mic from a guest who came prepared to steamroll him, he got flattened. Again.

In the coming weeks, the Sunday “Meet the Press” broadcast and other topical news series known for political analysis can be crucial tools to help the broadest viewership to figure out how policy proposals and future executive orders will affect their lives. Now that Kamala Harris has been announced as presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate, Todd and other network political series hosts have an opportunity to dig in with tough questions and do their part to dispel vicious rumors and fabrications. And yes, Biden has busted out his share of tall tales and incorrect recollections too.

And since I opened by calling Todd’s villainizing by the Twitterati not quite fair, an excerpt NBC’s official transcript places the offending line in context. Here’s what followed Navarro’s stated hope that Capitol Hill wasn’t “that cynical”:

CHUCK TODD:

I think the cynicism is a two-way street.

PETER NAVARRO:

Mark Meadows is a great negotiator.

CHUCK TODD:

I take your point —

PETER NAVARRO:

He is willing to bend.

CHUCK TODD:

Well, I think he has a reputation of killing more deals than he does of solving them —

PETER NAVARRO:

Now, that’s not fair. That man is —

CHUCK TODD:

Let me move to your other job.

Does that make Todd look any better? Of course not. Nor should the audience accept that when it comes to his position as NBC’s arbiter of political coverage, it is what it is.

Todd may have been bumped out of his plum position on the mainstream MSNBC platform, and Peacock launched only recently . . . and has its own usability struggles to overcome before it can be considered a heavy player in this space. But the sobering fact is that for the time being, we’ll be living with him.

He’s not terrible. Instead, he’s something a good deal more depressing in our “it is what it is” age of apathy, corruption and death. Among his kind, he’s typical.

(By the way, I also typed that opening line to tempt any Minnie Riperton karaoke impersonators bored enough to craft a Todd-themed version of “Loving You.” The pandemic has us all trapped in our feelings, go nuts!)

Trump, who told Obama to resign after one Ebola death, calls 160,000 COVID-19 deaths “fantastic job”

President Donald Trump on Monday claimed that he would not have called on former President Barack Obama to resign over the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 160,000 people in the U.S. so far. But Trump previously demanded his predecessor’s resignation for far less.

Trump insisted that he would not have called on Obama to step down when a reporter questioned what his response would have been if “160,000 people had died on President Obama’s watch.”

Given that Trump repeatedly harangued Obama over his Ebola response, the remark drew skepticism. Trump demanded that Obama “apologize to the American people & resign” in the fall of 2014 for allowing an individual who tested positive for Ebola to enter the country.

“If Obama resigns from office NOW, thereby doing a great service to the country– I will give him free lifetime golf,” Trump tweeted weeks later. (Trump falsely claimed that he had golfed less than Obama during his 276th golf course outing as president last month.)

The West Africa Ebola epidemic, which lasted from 2014 to 2016, was the largest outbreak of the virus in history, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only two individuals, who contracted Ebola in Africa, died of the virus in the U.S.

Trump defended his response to the new coronavirus pandemic as the U.S. faces the worst outbreak in the world.

“I think it’s been amazing what we’ve been able to do,” Trump added on Monday. “If we didn’t close up our country, we would have had 1.5 or 2 million people already dead. We’ve called it right. Now, we don’t have to close it. We understand the disease.”

REPORTER: If 160,000 people had died on Obama's watch, would you have called for his resignation?

TRUMP: No

[Trump called for Obama to resign over ebola, which didn't kill anyone in the US!] pic.twitter.com/mkJ3T4r1vr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 10, 2020

Trump’s claim that 2 million people would have died was based on early projections formed from an “unlikely” scenario with no mitigation factors. The president, of course, did not “close up our country.” Instead, he let states make their own decisions about restrictions.

“Nobody understood it, because nobody has ever seen anything like this,” Trump continued at Monday’s news briefing. “The closest thing is in 1917, they say. Right? The great — the great pandemic certainly was a terrible thing, where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people, probably ended the Second World War. All the soldiers were sick.”

This is false on more than one count. The so-called Spanish Flu pandemic, which actually began in 1918, most certainly did not end World War II, which began in 1939. It did not even end World War I.

“Our people have done a fantastic job — our consultants and our doctors,” Trump further said. “They’ve done a — really, an extraordinary job. They’ll never be given the credit — and I’m not talking about me. The people that have worked on this so hard will never be given the credit.”

Despite Trump’s attempts to downplay the devastation the pandemic has wrought in the U.S. — which is singular among wealthy nations — his “doctors” have increasingly sounded the alarm over the current situation.

“What we are seeing today is different from March and April,” Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, told CNN earlier this month. “It is extraordinarily widespread.”

The comment drew a public rebuke from Trump, who accused Birx of trying to hurt his administration. Additionally, he called her remarks “pathetic.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country who has had to hire security for his family amid numerous public attacks from the Trump administration, agreed during a recent interview that the country’s outbreak was the “worst” in the world.

“Quantitatively, if you look at it, it is. I mean, the numbers don’t lie,” Fauci said. “I mean, when you look at the number of infections and the number of deaths, it really is quite concerning.”

Trump threatens Social Security and Medicare — and the D.C. press yawns

I get it. They’re tired. And it’s hard to summon outrage anymore.

But still, there’s no excuse for the lackluster reporting from major news organizations about Donald Trump’s announcement on Saturday evening that he wants to permanently eliminate the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare.

Decoupling Social Security’s funding from the payroll tax would either drain it of money or, at best, make it subject to the year-to-year political whims and gamesmanship of Congress and the president.

To defenders of the social safety net, Trump’s call was clearly an act of war.

And you might think that political reporters would take notice when a president seizes with both hands what has historically been called the “third rail of American politics.”

But to our major news organizations, it was just another day in Trumpland.

Among several other actions, Trump on Saturday released a memo (not an executive order) calling for the deferral of four months of payroll taxes starting in September. He also declared: “If I’m victorious on Nov. 3, I plan to forgive these taxes and make permanent cuts to the payroll tax. So I’m going to make them all permanent.”

In Monday’s Washington Post, Tony Romm, Erica Werner and Jeff Stein understated Trump’s vow, writing that his goal was only “to make the deferred payments into a permanent tax cut.”

It wasn’t until the end of their article that they indicated more might be at stake:

Retirement benefits historically are sacrosanct in American politics, and Trump’s mere suggestion that he may seek permanent reforms to the way they are financed raised immediate concerns that it could lead to lasting changes to the monthly checks paid out to seniors.

The Associated Press airily noted that Trump “raised the possibility of making [the payroll tax deferral] permanent, though experts said he lacked that authority.”

And there was nothing on the New York Times’ front page on Sunday or Monday to suggest any cause for alarm.

Where’s the outrage?

You know what all the reporters covering Trump for major news organizations have in common? They’re unflappable.

Like that’s a good thing.

Trump says something, they write it down. Maybe in a few weeks, it will become conventional wisdom that Trump’s vow to cut the payroll tax was an outrage, an act of impetuousness and malice and lunacy, a gift for his grifter friends. But for now, the news reports won’t tell you what you need to know.

For that, as is so often the case these days, you have to turn elsewhere: Specifically, to the opinion writers.

Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik sputtered with rage on Monday: “Make no mistake: He’s talking about bankrupting Social Security.”

Hiltzik continued:

This order, along with comments Trump made at the signing ceremony, poses a mortal threat to the 64 million Americans who currently receive Social Security benefits and the hundreds of millions more who will receive benefits in coming decades.

William J. Arnone, CEO of the National Academy of Social Insurance, told Hiltzik: “This is all a very well thought-out campaign to undermine Social Security and Medicare.”

And Hiltzik pointed out the trap Trump set when he announced that Democrats “will have the option of raising everybody’s taxes and taking this away”:

In other words, he’s offering voters a bribe — in effect, “elect them and you’ll have to pay what you owe; elect me and you’ll get a pass.”

Washington Post business columnist Allan Sloan wrote that Trump’s proposal only makes sense “if it is to undermine Social Security and stir up class and generational warfare”:

Step back and look at the big picture — and listen to Trump say that he’ll eliminate Social Security tax next year should he be reelected — and you realize that if Trump prevails, it would likely mean the end of Social Security as we’ve known it.

The net effect, Sloan wrote, is “to undermine Social Security by turning it into just another federal spending program rather than a program funded by a dedicated payroll tax and a $3 trillion trust fund.” He explained that “having Social Security funded out of general tax revenue would make it immensely vulnerable to political and financial pressures.”

New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman hasn’t written a column on the topic, but he posted what may be the most memorable, salient tweet about the whole idea:

I don't know if anyone else has said this, but payroll tax cuts are the hydroxychloroquine of economic policy. They won't do anything to solve the employment crisis, but will have dangerous side effects. Yet Trump remains obsessed with them as a cure 1/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) August 9, 2020

Democratic leaders seized on what Trump said, with no misunderstanding. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said in a statement on Saturday. “He is putting Social Security at grave risk at a time when seniors are suffering the overwhelming impact of a pandemic he has failed to get under control. And make no mistake: Donald Trump said today that if he is re-elected, he will defund Social Security.”

A one-man war

Trump’s payroll tax proposal had gotten exactly nowhere in Congress, where neither Democrats nor Republicans expressed any support for the idea.

Despite Trump’s delusional claim Saturday that “everybody wants it,” its only champions appear to be — surprise — the same people who have been trying to destroy Social Security for decades, either because they think it’s too expensive and will lead to higher taxes over time, or because they would rather have Wall Street get a cut, or both.

It also has nothing to do with responding to the COVID-19 crisis. Trump has been talking about a payroll tax cut since 2017. He told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in early April of this year: “I’d like to have the payroll tax cut regardless of this problem that we just — that just arose recently.”

And as Hiltzik (and others) have noted time and time again, cutting the payroll tax does nothing for those out of work, because they’re not on the payroll.

But Trump’s plot is still insidious. In the short run, it’s a bribe to the middle class, for which his Democratic successor will have to take the political hit for taking away again.

In the longer run, even if funding were miraculously restored – “we’re going to, through the general funds, reimburse” the Medicare and Social Security programs, Trump said breezily on Sunday — such a move would change the essential nature of Social Security.

The fact that workers “pay into” the system has always been key, giving them a sense of ownership. At the same time, those dollars fund a program that is way more humane and progressive than I could imagine any modern Congress reliably supporting on a year-to-year basis.

Today, Social Security provides benefits to about 63 million Americans, not only to retired workers but also to the spouses and dependents of workers who die prematurely and to disabled workers and their dependents.

And it involves massive subsidies — not only from the next generation of retirees to this one, but from single workers to married couples, from two-earner couples to one-earner couples, from high-income earners to low, from the able-bodied to the disabled, and from those who die early to those who die late. (I’m cribbing here from the 1999 Social Security special report that I wrote for the Washington Post.)

It’s a magnificent, beloved program that is central to the modern American experience. The fact that Trump is trying to undermine it should arouse massive indignation in even the most unflappable of us.

Kamala Harris becomes first Black woman on major party ticket after Joe Biden taps her for VP role

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has named Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., as his running mate, marking the first time a woman of color has appeared on a major-party ticket.

“I’ve decided that Kamala Harris is the best person to help me take this fight to Donald Trump and Mike Pence and then to lead this nation starting in January 2021,” Biden said in a Tuesday email announcing the decision.

I have the great honor to announce that I’ve picked @KamalaHarris — a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants — as my running mate.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 11, 2020

Harris, the former attorney general of California, challenged Biden for the top of the ticket last year. She was widely considered a front-runner for the vice presidential slot, which Biden previously said would go to a woman.

Harris’ experience as California’s top prosecutor, combined with four years in the Senate, made her among the most experienced potential picks. Indeed, former President Barack Obama, who served two terms in the White House alongside Biden, touted the senator’s credentials shortly after her nomination was announced.

“I’ve known Senator Harris for a long time. She is more than prepared for the job,” Obama said. “She’s spent her career defending our Constitution and fighting for folks who need a fair shake.”

I’ve known Senator @KamalaHarris for a long time. She is more than prepared for the job. She’s spent her career defending our Constitution and fighting for folks who need a fair shake. This is a good day for our country. Now let’s go win this thing. pic.twitter.com/duJhFhWp6g

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 11, 2020

Harris will be the first Black woman and first woman of South Asian descent to appear on a major-party presidential ticket. Her nomination carries added weight amid a national reckoning on race sparked by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Harris herself challenged Biden’s history on the racially-charged issue of busing during a primary debate last summer.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” she said onstage as she turned to speak directly to Biden. “And that little girl was me.”

The attack caught Biden off-guard after Harris worked closely with his late son, Beau. While the face-off made a big splash, Harris failed to ride the momentum. She suspended her presidential campaign in December, weeks before the first nominating contest was held in Iowa.

Though Harris styled herself a “progressive prosecutor” who fought for criminal justice reform, her presidential bid was plagued by criticism from the party’s left wing. Those criticisms may return, though Harris emerged as a key force behind racial justice legislation in late May.

Still, Harris’ record on race and criminal justice will be pitted against that of President Donald Trump. Though he signed a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill in 2018 — which Harris supported — Trump was considered “a racist” by a majority of American voters in a 2019 Quinnipiac poll.

Harris drew upwards of 20,000 people to her presidential campaign launch last January in Oakland, Calif. Though she struggled to translate that excitement into strong poll numbers, Harris’ presidential ambitions remain bright. Biden, who if elected would become the oldest American sworn in as president at 78 years old, has said his pick would have to be ready to assume the Oval Office on “a moment’s notice.”

“It’s overdue. It’s tremendous,” Angela Rye, a Democratic political strategist and former executive director for the Congressional Black Caucus, told the Los Angeles Times of the nomination. “Kamala is not a stranger to making history, so it’s poetic justice that she’d be making history here.”

“Hopefully, it signifies a tremendous shift in the Democratic Party by finally recognizing how important Black people, and most specifically Black women, are to the base,” she added. “We don’t just mobilize the Black community, but we mobilize the party overall.”

Harris, 55, is the daughter of two immigrants: Her mother was an Indian-born oncologist, and her Jamaican father was a prominent economist at Stanford University. She attended a historically Black college, Howard University.

Why defunding the police means investing in mental health

Body camera footage from two of the Minneapolis police officers who arrested George Floyd reveals that Floyd — who was killed by one of those cops’ colleagues, Derek Chauvin — pleaded with law enforcement officers to explain that he has mental health issues.

The footage, which was retrieved from body cameras worn by former officers Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Keung and leaked to the Daily Mail, is striking for the number of times that Floyd and his companions attempt to calm the officers by bringing up Floyd’s mental health. It shows Floyd explaining to the officer that he had been shot before, implying that he may suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) from previous interactions with law enforcement; he also mentions that his mother recently passed away, indicating possible mental health issues related to stress and grief; his ex-girlfriend, when asked by Lane why Floyd is being “squirrelly,” gesticulates that Floyd has mental health problems because of “a thing going on about the police”; and Floyd himself tells the officers that he has “claustrophobia” and “anxiety.”

Despite the obvious plausible signs that Floyd may have suffered from mental illnesses, and even though he was being accused of a non-violent offense (he allegedly used a counterfeit $20 bill at a nearby grocery store), Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes. Floyd died soon thereafter.

Floyd’s horrific and unjust death has prompted a national re-evaluation of the function and nature of the US police force, including calls to defund the police. Many activists have rightly pointed out that a vast number of calls to police are mental health calls, which police are generally not well-trained to handle (as is evident in Chauvin’s case). According to the National Library of Medicine from the National Institutes of Health, an estimated “six to 10 percent of all police contacts with the public in the U.S. involve persons with serious mental illnesses.” The reported added that the evidence regarding whether mental illnesses increase the likelihood of arrest is “equivocal.”

“I believe [police] training and their protocol should include asking… if they have any health conditions that we need to know about,” Dr. Jameca Woody-Cooper, a psychologist in St. Louis, told Salon, pointing out that there are non-psychological health conditions like epilepsy that could influence a citizen’s encounter with police officers. “Then he volunteered that information — about his prior history with police, and being shot, and one thing that he mentioned was trauma. Then I think his friends said that as well, that he’d been shot before. Then he told them he was afraid. Then he said he was claustrophobic. Then he said he has anxiety, as he’s crying.”

“You don’t have to be a trained mental health professional to know that he’s volunteering his health information and they ignored each and every piece of it,” Woody-Cooper added.

Dr. David Reiss, a professor at Yale Child Study Center, was troubled that the officers reacted with such aggression toward Floyd even though he and the other people in his car clearly communicated that he had mental health problems.

“It’s really the officer’s — or whoever is approaching the person — responsibility to identify the situation they’re dealing with. And the person who is in it, the only thing they can do is communicate,” Reiss explained. “This is the best they can do. ‘This is what I’m experiencing, or this is what I’m dealing with. Help me beyond that.’ It’s really up to the responding person to do something. There’s not much else the person could do other than to inform, ‘I have an issue, help me with this.’ And sometimes they’re not capable of doing that, but there’s not much else they can really do.”

As Woody-Cooper explained to Salon, this is where the issue of discrimination against people with mental illnesses intersects with racism.

“If you’re a black person in America, you don’t have the luxury of saying that you have a mental issue that would preclude you from reacting a certain way,” Woody-Cooper pointed out. “That’s a luxury that’s not afforded to black people in America.”

Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity (CPE) and an African-American Studies and Psychology Professor at Yale University, elaborated on the officers’ various missed chances to recognize Floyd’s vulnerable state and interact with him in a way that would have been beneficial to all parties. Like Woody-Cooper and Reiss, Goff pointed to how Floyd attempted to communicate that he had mental health issues in order to protect himself. Goff added that this goes a long way toward explaining why America needs to have mental health professionals in situations like this, as well as law enforcement officers, so that they can people with psychological conditions can be treated fairly.

“It’s not just Mr. Floyd who indicated that he is claustrophobic, he’s been shot before, he’s exhibiting symptoms of trauma,” Goff told Salon. “His ex-partner is also there saying that he’s got mental health issues, and in those situations, there’s an opportunity without endangering the officers to de-escalate.”

As any social worker or ER nurse can attest, there are different protocols for dealing with deliberate violent criminality and those suffering from mental illness. Yet most police, at least as they exist today, seem to flatten the distinction.

As Goff pointed out, an officer “pointed a gun as soon as [Floyd] opens the door” — a vast and unwarranted provocation for someone accused of a minor petty crime. “There is nothing in the video that I saw that would justify that to have escalated.”

Goff said that proning Floyd was the wrong move for someone who is reporting trauma and difficulty breathing, that it “is not something that you do for someone who is going to be hyperventilating. All of those things would be a violation if this person was considered to be concerning being dangerous or concerning being violent in a mental health facility. And that’s part of the reason why it’s important that, when you have someone who is presenting with mental health symptoms, you have someone who is trained to deal with someone presenting a mental health symptoms present.”

Activists’ calls to defund the police have often gone hand-in-hand with calls to reallocate policing funds to mental health and social services. Indeed, the experts Salon spoke with said it would be a social boon to have mental health professionals, social workers or others from non-law enforcement backgrounds present in handling certain criminal situations.

“A lot of departments, if they get a call and they know it’s going to be a mental health issue, they’ll send a social worker or a mental health professional with the team as part of the police team to help with that,” Reiss explained. “Now obviously you can’t do that if it’s something that just happens suddenly, but the officers should be trained and should use that training to know when to de-escalate as opposed when they should assume it’s going to be a violent, hostile situation.”

Dr. Laurence Miller, a clinical, forensic and police psychologist based in Palm Beach County, Florida, disagrees, arguing that it would not be a good idea to have mental health professionals accompany every police call.

“I think it would be a misuse of resources to insist that a mental health practitioner accompany of police officers to every call, not to mention the liability issue, because many of these calls can turn extremely dangerous . . . most mental health professionals are the ones that I know are not going to just walk into a scene without knowing what the consequences might be,” Miller told Salon.

The incident with Floyd is hardly the first time the nature of police interaction with the mentally ill has been thrust into the public eye. Social justice advocates have drawn attention to the case of Matthew Rushin, an African American autistic man who is serving a 50-year prison sentence (a judge ordered that he had to serve 10 of them) for severely wounding a 72-year-old man in an automobile accident. Although no one disputes Rushin’s guilt, mental health advocates have argued that he was pressured into signing a plea deal he does not understand because of his autism, attention deficit disorder and traumatic brain injury, and that his sentence was out of proportion to his offense.

There is also the case of Neli Latson, a Virginian special-education student who is also black and on the autism spectrum, who was accused of “suspicious” activity while sitting outside of a library (he did not have a gun, as the anonymous caller claimed). After the officer grabbed him several times during their interaction, Latson lashed out and injured the officer, resulting in a jail sentence where he was often held in solitary confinement for over 100 days. At one point Latson was Tasered and strapped to a restraint chair.

“People equate mental illness with violence,” Reiss told Salon when asked about how biases against mentally ill individuals may have factored into what happened with Floyd. “The reality is that people with mental illnesses are much, much more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrator. Yes, some of the violence is because of mental illness, but that’s a small percentage. Yet we tend to act as if that’s inherent to mental illness when the reverse is true.”

Woody-Cooper opened up about how she felt watching the latest Floyd footage as an African-American mother who helps mentally ill people.

“As a mental health professional, just watching that was heartbreaking,” Woody-Cooper explained. “I’m a parent. I have two sons, African American sons that are teenagers, and watching this was traumatic for me. So I can only imagine what it’s going to be for the masses.” Her conclusion was the same one reached by many people: “It tells me as an African American person in this country that truly my life doesn’t matter.”

Goff, by contrast, firmly contextualized Floyd’s mistreatment in terms of racism.

“One of the prejudices that folks have against African Americans is it’s harder to see when they are in mental distress, Instead they get upgraded as angry, violent, scary, but not that there is something going on inside of them, which is painful,” Goff explained. “Our pain is reinterpreted as a danger to other people.”

Jerry Falwell Jr. is the true face of white evangelicals — and dumping him changes nothing

One has to imagine that for Jerry Falwell Jr., things feel very unfair right about now. For more than four years, the world of right-wing American Christianity has not only lined up behind Donald Trump — a thrice-married chronic adulterer who bragged on tape how he likes to “grab ’em by the pussy” — but has embraced him as if he were the second coming. White evangelicals’ devotion to Trump didn’t wane after he became president, even in the face of stories about Trump paying off a porn actress and a centerfold model to stay quiet about his compulsive cheating on his third wife. Nor was there any angst on the Christian right over Trump’s relentless grifting or his efforts to blackmail the Ukrainian president into bolstering lies about former Vice President Joe Biden.

On the contrary, the Christian right’s worshipful attitude toward Trump has only increased over the years, with pastors comparing Trump to Jesus himself and calling Trump “God’s chosen one.” The president’s approval with white evangelicals remains strong, at 72%, and 82% say they plan to vote for him.

With all this Christian love for a president who makes all ordinary sinners look like amateurs, it’s no wonder that Falwell — the president of Liberty University, which was founded by his dad, the legendary Southern Baptist pastor and televangelist — thought it was no big deal to unbutton his pants a little. But when Falwell posted a photo on social media of himself partying on a yacht with those literally unbuttoned pants, holding something that resembled an alcoholic beverage and with his arm around the waist of a pregnant female acquaintance with her shirt rolled up, he did not get the Trump treatment.

Instead, Falwell was asked to take an indefinite leave of absence from his job at Liberty University, the right-wing evangelical institution in Lynchburg, Virginia, that his father, Jerry Falwell Sr., founded in 1971. On Tuesday, the school announced that Jerry Prevo, chairman of its board of trustees, would replace Falwell as acting president.

The photo itself, if we’re being honest, was hardly “racy,” as some outlets called it. It looked no different from any other photo of people at a social gathering acting goofy after a few drinks. Still, this was apparently the last straw, after a year of reports that Falwell was getting up to precisely the kind of antics for which Trump apparently gets a permanent pass.

Last summer, a series of titillating stories about the Liberty president, including a report that Falwell and his wife had lavished financial favors on a “pool boy” half their age they met while partying in Florida. Falwell also reportedly emailed photos of his wife in a French maid costume to an employee, later claiming that was an accident and he’d meant to send the photos to her personal trainer. This raised more eyebrows, however, since the personal trainer is another good-looking younger man whom the Falwells have helped financially. Other photos of the Falwells partying in a Miami nightclub in 2014 were published last year.

Giving Falwell the boot only after he embarrassed the evangelical community in public only reinforces the main takeaway from this story: The supposed morality of white evangelicals is largely a facade, propped up in order to justify the Christian right’s real purpose, which is to defend white supremacy and male dominance. It’s worth asking why anyone would bother to keep up the facade, now that Trump has proved right-wing America doesn’t need to hide behind the Bible and the cross to defend its true agenda.

Before Trump, it was actually a pretty good racket that white evangelicals had going. As Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute writes in “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” his book on the racist history of much of American Christianity, “most white Christian churches have protected white supremacy by dressing it in theological garb, giving it a home in a respected institution, and calibrating it to local cultural sensibilities.”

Piety can give cover to racism by positioning white evangelicals as morally superior. By policing sex and prohibiting the pleasures of gambling, partying, drinking or even dancing, white evangelicals can craft a narrative where they are upright guardians of virtue, rather than mean-spirited racists who organize — in distinctly un-Christ-like fashion — to preserve their privileges at the expense of people of color. Indeed, the more white evangelicals defended a racist social order, the more effort they put into portraying themselves as “virtuous” by the way of strict rules governing individual behavior.

It’s the same story with white evangelicals and sexism. The prohibitions on premarital sex, contraception, abortion and divorce mainly serve to control girls and women, channeling them away from living independent lives and keeping them under the thumb of one man or another, first a father and then a husband, for their entire lives. Whenever feminists criticized evangelical misogyny, the Christian right defended itself by claiming that its sexist ideology flowed from “faith,” when in reality, it was the other way around: Male supremacy was the core belief, and religious faith was used to rationalize and justify it.

One of the remarkable developments in the age of Trump has the collapse of any meaningful need for all this Bible-hugging to defend bigotry against people of color, women and LGBTQ people.

Oh, Trump sometimes loves to wave a Bible around, though always with an awkwardness that suggests he’s afraid it may burn his fingers. But it’s unclear that anyone is fooled. With his ham-fisted and sloppy fake piety — and his obvious ignorance about all religious or theological questions — Trump illuminates a fundamental truth about right-wing Christianity, which is that it’s largely a cover story used to defend the otherwise indefensible.

As I argue in my book, “Troll Nation,” the true innovation of Trumpism is a kind of asshole pride, the collective conservative realization that there’s no longer any need to pretend to be moral or virtuous or even to care about other people. It’s become a time to embrace playing the role of the villain.

For the modern conservative, “triggering the liberals” by being a jerk is the highest calling, and “political correctness” is the slur directed at anyone who tries to harsh their vibe by suggesting that overt racism and sexism is uncool. Their president is a witless wannabe insult comic, and the more that Trump resorts to flinging childish insults, the more his supporters love him. Ours is an era where conservatives deliberately go to the grocery store without masks and film themselves harassing minimum-wage workers who are trying to enforce basic public health rules, so they can glory in what massive jerks they are. Their entertainment comes from crude right-wing shock jocks in the Rush Limbaugh tradition. Trolling liberals — for example, by awarding the odious Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom — has replaced pious posturing as the lingua franca of American conservatives.

In other words, the American right no longer feels any need to justify their will to power with over-the-top moralizing. Dominance has become its own justification.

So it’s not surprising that Falwell got a little lackadaisical about pretending to believe all that crap he’s been preaching about the virtues of sobriety and chastity. And more than a little dopey that the board of Liberty University is trying to act offended and going through the ritual of asking him to step aside. The notion that the religious right is motivated by “morality” and “faith” was blown to bits the second they bet their future on Donald Trump. Their massive hypocrisy has been permanently exposed, and dumping one prominent figure to save face won’t change that.

California judge orders Uber and Lyft to reclassify drivers as employees

In a preliminary injunction issued on Monday, a California judge ruled that Uber and Lyft must classify their drivers as employees rather than contractors. The injunction signals a massive change in the gig economy, which has traditionally relied upon a contingent labor force with little or no employer-provided benefits.

“The Court is under no illusion that implementation of its injunction will be costless or easy,” California Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman wrote in the order. “There can be no question that in order for Defendants to comply with A.B. 5, they will have to change the nature of their business practices in significant ways, such as by hiring human resources staff to hire and manage their driver workforces.”

The order is set to go into effect in 10 days, though rideshare giant Uber is filing an emergency appeal to block the ruling from going into effect.

The ruling comes after California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and city attorneys of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, sued Uber and Lyft for not complying with California’s Assembly Bill 5 (AB5). The law, AB5, went into effect on January 1, 2020 and looks to the “ABC test” for determining whether someone is a contractor or employee. Becerra and city attorneys also filed a motion for a preliminary injunction.

“The court has weighed in and agreed: Uber and Lyft need to put a stop to unlawful misclassification of their drivers while our litigation continues,” Becerra said in a statement. “While this fight still has a long way to go, we’re pushing ahead to make sure the people of California get the workplace protections they deserve.”

Becerra added: “Our state and workers shouldn’t have to foot the bill when big businesses try to skip out on their responsibilities.”

Since Uber and Lyft have never classified their drivers as full-time employees, the companies have never paid an unemployment insurance tax for each of their workers. According to an analysis by the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center, Uber and Lyft collectively would have paid $413 million into the California Unemployment Insurance fund from 2014 to 2019 if their drivers were classified as employees. Uber and Lyft drivers have lost significant income as ridership has dropped during the pandemic, pushing many to seek relief from unemployment insurance that Uber and Lyft have yet to contribute to.

Drivers who have been advocating for this see the ruling as a step in the right direction.

“Today’s ruling affirms what California drivers have long known to be true: workers like me have rights and Uber and Lyft must respect those rights,” Mike Robinson, a Lyft driver and member of the Mobile Workers Alliance, a group of Southern California drivers, said in a statement.

“These companies will do and spend whatever it takes to avoid protecting drivers or following the law — even if it means pouring tens of millions of dollars into a ballot initiative to buy themselves special treatment. We hope that today’s ruling will serve as a potent reminder to California voters that Uber and Lyft are not above the law — and that they vote No on Prop 22.”

As Salon has previously reported, Uber and Lyft funded the ballot measure Proposition 22, which will appear on the November ballot in California. If passed, it will exempt these companies from Assembly Bill 5. The astroturf campaign has been said to cost the rideshare giants $110 million. Drivers are incensed by the 9-figure expenditure by their employer to further their exploitation, as many of them struggle to receive even basic support, like personal protective equipment and hand sanitizer, from their employers.

On Monday, Yes on 22 campaign sent out the following statement from Jan Krueger, who is retired and drives with Lyft in Sacramento:

“We need to pass Prop 22 more than ever. Sacramento politicians and special interests keep pushing these disastrous laws and lawsuits that would take away the ability of app-based drivers to choose when and how they work, even though by a 4:1 margin drivers want and need to work independently. We’ll take our case to the voters to protect the ability of app-based drivers to work as independent contractors, while providing historic new benefits like an earnings guarantee, health benefits and more.”

In an op-ed in The New York Times published on Monday, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi denied that Uber workers were mistreated. Khosrowshahi, whose compensation package as CEO is $45 million, wrote that treating drivers as employees and thus compensating them appropriately would result in drivers losing their “freedom.”

Businesses and workers “furious” with McConnell over response to Kentucky’s economic crisis: report

On Thursday, August 6, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was the target of an angry protest in Louisville, Kentucky — where members of labor unions (including the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters) railed against him for blocking coronavirus aid. And that protest was not an anomaly: journalist Tony Romm, in a Washington Post article published on August 11, reports that the August 6 protest was only one of many expressions of dissatisfaction with McConnell over economic conditions in the Bluegrass State.

“In more than two dozen interviews, out-of-work residents, struggling restaurant owners and other business leaders — as well as a cadre of annoyed food, housing and labor rights groups — all said they are in dire need of more support from Congress, the likes of which McConnell has not been able to provide,” Romm reports. “About five months after Kentucky reported its first loss of life from COVID-19, its economy continues to sputter amid the coronavirus pandemic.”

According to Romm, “Many unemployed workers say their benefit checks aren’t enough to afford their bills, and some here simply have stopped looking for jobs. Businesses say they’re also hemorrhaging cash, and local governments fear they’re on the precipice of financial ruin too.”

One of the disgruntled Kentucky residents the Post interviewed was truck driver Kenny Saylor, who told the publication that in April, “Everything went south for me . . . I’m scared to death of losing everything.”

Jason Bailey, executive director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, told The Post that Kentucky’s economic situation is dire — explaining, “We’re seeing huge numbers of people needing help . . . I can’t imagine a state that needs additional relief more than Kentucky does.”

Michael Holland, a resident of Lexington, Kentucky and industrial engineer who has been out of work since February, was relying on unemployment benefits of $600 per week. But those benefits have expired.

Holland, who is angry with McConnell, told The Post, “There are some people, I’m sure, that are bringing home more than they were making before the pandemic. But there’s also those of us who’s making a lot less . . . What about those of us who need a job and can’t get a job, because the coronavirus is coming back?”

Michael Halligan, who is seeing a heavy demand at the food banks he runs in Kentucky, told the Post, “You can speculate on the impact on the various programs and how that influenced the economy. Based on our historical knowledge, if economics tighten, food insecurity will increase.”

This year, McConnell — who was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984 — is up for reelection, and his challenger is centrist Democrat Amy McGrath. Democratic strategists would love to unseat the Senate majority leader, but a Morning Consult poll released in early August found McConnell leading McGrath by 17%. Other polls, however, have shown him ahead by only 5% (Quinnipiac) or only 3% (Bluegrass Data Analytics).

Judge rejects Trump’s claim that Ukraine emails enjoy “executive privilege”: “Simply doesn’t cut it”

President Donald Trump and others in his administration have been claiming that a batch of 2019 emails discussing his hold on military aid to Ukraine are protected by “executive privilege.” But U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson — the Barack Obama appointee who sentenced Trump ally Roger Stone to 40 months in prison — rejected that argument on Monday, Aug. 10, ruling that the 21 emails in question enjoy no such protection.

Jackson, journalist Josh Gerstein reports in Politico, ruled that the Trump administration failed to show that email exchanges between White House aide Robert Blair and Michael Duffey, an official in the Office of Management and Budget, were eligible for executive privilege protections.

“During a teleconference Monday in which she announced her decision,” Gerstein reports, “Jackson did not rule out the possibility that she might, at some point, uphold the government’s bid for secrecy for the e-mails, but she said a pair of declarations OMB Deputy General Counsel Heather Walsh filed to back up the executive privilege claims were too vague.”

Jackson stressed, “The declarations are based on inadmissible hearsay and not personal knowledge . . . The declarations don’t come close here. In sum, the declaration appears to be based largely on Mr. Blair’s job title, the location of his office and what assistants to the president in general ‘often’ do . . . That simply doesn’t cut it.”

In 2019, the Ukraine scandal led to Trump’s impeachment. Trump, during a July 25, 2019 phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, asked the Ukrainian leader to investigate a political rival — former Vice President Joe Biden, now the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee — and his son, Hunter Biden. And prominent Democrats, from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, argued that Trump committed an impeachable offense by making an investigation of the Bidens a condition of military aid to Ukraine. House Democrats indicted Trump on two articles of impeachment, but he was later acquitted during a trial in the GOP-controlled U.S. Senate.

According to Gerstein, “It remains unclear whether the disputed messages will emerge before the November election. Jackson gave Justice Department lawyers until Thursday to suggest how much time they’ll need to prepare a more detailed justification for the privilege claims or decide to simply release the e-mails. One government attorney said she was likely to propose a date in late September for a further submission to the court.”

Jackson is also the judge who, in March 2019, sentenced Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, to three and one-half years in prison for conspiracy charges.

Conway reacts to shooting near White House: People “starting to lose it” over Trump’s re-election

White House adviser Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday suggested that a shooting at the White House occurred because people are “starting to lose it” over the possibility of Donald Trump being president for four more years.

During an appearance on “Fox & Friends, Conway commented on a Monday shooting that caused Trump to abruptly end his press conference.

“You saw the president resumed his duties,” Conway said. “That’s very Donald Trump also. The show must go on, the briefing went on.”

According to the White House adviser, “the violence that’s erupting all over the country is really the bigger story here.”

Conway then pointed out that over 400 people have been murdered in Chicago in 2020.

“What’s really regrettable is that I see these mayors in their press conferences and are really shameless but not blameless and not nameless,” she continued. “What is the most common word they say in their press conferences? Not police, no sympathy. ‘Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump! We will not have the president and the feds here!'”

“It means people are shoveling hate at police officers, shoveling hate at people who work here,” Conway opined. “I think that people are also worried that Donald Trump is going to get four more years and they’re starting to lose it.”

“And you see that here and elsewhere yesterday,” she insisted.

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Ghislaine Maxwell, alleged Epstein accomplice, complains of “uniquely onerous conditions” in jail

Ghislaine Maxwell, the alleged accomplice of the late accused billionaire child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, has filed a formal complaint about her treatment in jail.

NBC News reports that Maxwell’s attorneys this week made a court filing in which they said she has faced “uniquely onerous conditions” in New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center ever since she was arrested last month and charged with conspiracy to entice minors to travel and engage in illegal sex acts.

Maxwell’s attorneys say that their client is being subjected to these conditions because authorities don’t want a repeat of what happened last year, when Epstein died by apparent suicide while in custody.

“It has become apparent that the BOP’s treatment of Ms. Maxwell is a reaction to the circumstances surrounding the pretrial detention and death of Mr. Epstein,” they write.

Maxwell is demanding to be removed from solitary confinement, and her attorneys also complain that she is being monitored 24 hours a day “by security cameras and by multiple prison guards.”

Billionaire Trump donor finalizing deal to bring back Bill O’Reilly at station where accuser works

Bill O’Reilly is “in the final stages” of a deal to host a new program at a New York radio station owned by a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, who also employs a woman who accused the disgraced former Fox News host of sexual harassment.

O’Reilly is wrapping up a contract negotiation with 77 WABC, his attorney told CNBC.

The conservative station — which already features hosts like Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro and Fox News hosts Brian Kilmeade and Mark Levin — is owned by billionaire John Catsimatidis, a longtime booster of the president.

The station also features host Juliet Huddy, a former Fox News anchor who accused O’Reilly of trying to derail her career after she rebuffed his sexual advances.

Company Christmas party should be a real zinger this year. https://t.co/Dl3neTpTlG

— Juliet Huddy (@JetSetJuliet) August 11, 2020

“We are in the final stages of a contract,” O’Reilly’s attorney told CNBC, “and a program should be on in the fall.”

Catsimitidis confirmed the report, praising O’Reilly as “one common-sense American.”

The billionaire, who also owns the Gristedes grocery store chain, bought the station last year and is exploring a campaign for New York City mayor after vowing to spend $100 million of his own money on a potential run. He previously ran for mayor in 2013 but lost his Republican primary race.

Catsimitidis has been a major Trump supporter, donating to his campaign and praising his efforts to build a border wall.

The show would mark O’Reilly’s most prominent attempt at a comeback after he was fired from Fox News in 2017 following a New York Times report revealing that he and the company paid five women $13 million to settle sexual harassment allegations against him. The Times later reported that O’Reilly also settled a sixth allegation of harassment and a “nonconsensual sexual relationship” for $32 million, bringing the total to around $45 million in settlements.

Huddy, who appears on one of WABC’s afternoon shows, alleged that O’Reilly called her repeatedly “and that it sometimes sounded as if he was masturbating,” The Times reported. She also alleged that O’Reilly tried to kiss her and asked her to return a key to his hotel room, where he appeared at the door in his underwear. Huddy was paid in the “high six figures” after agreeing not to sue, according to the report. The company and O’Reilly denied the allegations.

“Company Christmas party should be a real zinger this year,” Huddy wrote on Twitter after the news that the pair would be reunited at the same station broke.

The Times also reported that Fox was aware of the allegations when it re-signed O’Reilly to a $25-million-a-year contract. O’Reilly was consistently the highest-rated host in cable news and generated nearly half a billion in ad revenue for the network between 2014 and 2016.

O’Reilly called The Times report “inaccurate,” claiming that it had “maliciously smeared” him in order to “keep him from competing in the marketplace.”

Since his ouster, O’Reilly has hosted “No Spin News” on a recently-launched conservative digital network called “The First.” He has also made frequent appearances on 77 WABC and other conservative networks, including Newsmax.

O’Reilly’s firing came shortly after Fox News fired its longtime CEO Roger Ailes over a litany of sexual harassment allegations, which many accusers claimed were covered up by the network.

“We were just women doing our jobs, who veered straight into the path of predatory men who wanted us to do more. And when we didn’t, they took our jobs away,” Huddy wrote in an NBC News op-ed in 2017. “But I’m proud that I, and others, found the confidence to speak out now. This is a movement, and we will keep it going. Today, I’m working as a guest talk show host on 77WABC Radio in New York City. I’m grateful the execs there have given me a platform.”

Two women filed a new lawsuit against Fox News in a New York federal court last month, alleging rape and sexual harassment at the hands of some of the network’s top talent.

Jennifer Eckhart, a former associate producer at Fox Business, accused Ed Henry, the former co-anchor of “America’s Newsroom,” of rape and other forms of sexual violence. Her co-plaintiff, Cathy Areu, a regular guest on the network, filed sexual harassment claims against Henry, as well as Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and the “Media Buzz” host Howard Kurtz.

Fox called the allegations false.

“Based on the findings of a comprehensive independent investigation conducted by an outside law firm, including interviews with numerous eyewitnesses, we have determined that all of Cathy Areu’s claims against FOX News, including its management as well as its hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity & Howard Kurtz and its contributor Gianno Caldwell, are false, patently frivolous and utterly devoid of any merit,” the network said in a statement. “We take all claims of harassment, misconduct and retaliation seriously, promptly investigating them and taking immediate action as needed — in this case, the appropriate action based on our investigation is to defend vigorously against these baseless allegations. Ms. Areu and Jennifer Eckhart can pursue their claims against Ed Henry directly with him, as FOX News already took swift action as soon as it learned of Ms. Eckhart’s claims on June 25 and Mr. Henry is no longer employed by the network.”

White House paid up to $500 million too much for ventilators: Congressional investigators

Citing “evidence of fraud, waste, and abuse,” a congressional subcommittee investigating the federal government’s purchase of $646.7 million worth of Philips ventilators has asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General to launch its own investigation of the deal.

The House subcommittee launched its review after ProPublica stories in March and April showed how a U.S. subsidiary of Royal Philips N.V. received millions in federal tax dollars years ago to develop a low-cost ventilator for pandemics but didn’t deliver it. Instead, as the coronavirus began spreading around the globe and U.S. hospitals were desperate for more, Philips was selling commercial versions of the government-funded ventilator overseas from its Pennsylvania factory. Then in April, despite having not fulfilled the initial contract, the Dutch company struck a much more lucrative deal to sell the government 43,000 ventilators for four times the price.

Under this new deal, ventilators that the Obama administration had agreed to buy for $3,280 each suddenly cost $15,000. When the deal was announced in April, neither HHS nor Philips would say how the more expensive ventilators differed from the cheaper ones.

It turns out that they were “functionally identical,” according to investigators with the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, and the “waste of taxpayer funds” may have reached $500 million.

The investigators reviewed thousands of pages of emails and other records obtained from Philips and concluded that “inept contract management and incompetent negotiating by the Trump Administration denied the country the ventilators it needed.” And the subcommittee’s report, which it shared with the inspector general’s office, named names: Peter Navarro, President Donald Trump’s director of trade and manufacturing policy, was the administration’s point man on the deal. In addition, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and HHS Secretary Alex Azar participated in calls with Philips’ executives.

In a letter to the inspector general, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the Illinois Democrat who chairs the subcommittee, wrote: “The Subcommittee requests that you immediately open an investigation into this apparent waste of taxpayer funds, how it was able to happen unchecked, and how to prevent it in the future. Moreover, the Subcommittee requests that your office’s review include an assessment of the reasonableness of the price of the contract and the amount of excess profits received.”

He attached the subcommittee’s 49-page report of its investigative findings.

In a written statement, Philips said that it has been transparent about its ramp-up plans, pricing and allocation policies, and that it cooperated with the subcommittee. “We do not recognize the conclusions in the subcommittee’s report, and we believe that not all the information that we provided has been reflected in the report,” Philips CEO Frans van Houten said. “I would like to make clear that at no occasion has Philips raised prices to benefit from the crisis situation.”

White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere called the House investigators’ report “a stunt that is only meant to politicize the coronavirus.”

“Because of the president’s leadership, the United States leads the world in the production and acquisition of ventilators,” Deere said. “No American who needed a ventilator was denied one, and no American who needs a ventilator in the future will be denied one. Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for this misleading and inaccurate report.”

An HHS spokesperson said the department moved with “deliberate and determined speed” and followed federal contracting rules in reaching the deal. She noted that some of the Philips ventilators are already being used to treat patients with COVID-19.

The federal government’s quest for a cheap, durable ventilator that could be stockpiled for emergencies began a decade ago during the Obama administration. The first deal fell apart after a small California ventilator manufacturer was bought by a much larger competitor, which dropped the project. Philips in 2014 struck a $13.8 million deal with HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to develop a low-cost, portable ventilator that would be easy to use by people with limited medical training. (In their report, the congressional investigators wrote that Philips later was granted an additional $547,000 to develop the ventilator.) The original deal included an option to purchase 10,000 of the ventilators for $3,280 each with delivery by June 2019.

HHS under the Obama administration granted one extension, and then the Trump administration allowed several more. When Philips finally won Food and Drug Administration clearance for the stockpile ventilator in July 2019, it also got the green light to sell a commercial version, which the company sold at far higher prices. The government didn’t exercise the option to buy the stockpile ventilators until September 2019. Under the timeline in the original contract, there would have been four waves of deliveries starting in June 2020 and ending in June 2021 and the government would have the power to increase its order in times of need, the House investigators wrote in their report.

Among the most surprising findings of the investigation was an email communication between the company and the government on the day the U.S. reported its first coronavirus case. On Jan. 21, a Philips manager sent a news story about that case to an HHS contracting officer and asked “how we could help out or if you may expect a need to accelerate any shipments.” Yet nobody from the federal government responded to Philips for six weeks, the investigators found.

On March 4, the HHS contracting officer told Philips managers in an email that Azar’s office had directed him to “expedite production of the ventilators.” Philips responded the same day suggesting a contract modification “to allow for the earlier shipments.”

Rather than speed up delivery, though, the modification Philips suggested gave the company until September 2022 to deliver any of the stockpile ventilators. Still, HHS signed off on the deal, the investigators found.

“Philips appears to have duped the Administration into thinking that this amendment, which permits a lengthy delay, was necessary for it to expedite production,” the congressional investigators wrote.

That same month, as the administration sought to cut a new deal, a Philips executive shared with Azar the slide deck he planned to present to Navarro. In the presentation, Philips described the government-funded stockpile ventilator design as “the best solution to confront exactly the pandemic we are facing.”

However, Philips soon steered Navarro and his colleagues to a more expensive option, the $15,000 Trilogy EV300, saying in one email to an associate director in Navarro’s office that this hospital ventilator had “more clinician friendly screens.”

Yet, the House investigators found the screens of the pricier model were identical to the less-expensive stockpile version. “The Administration’s willingness to spend hundreds of millions of extra dollars for non-existent ‘more clinician-friendly screens’ constitutes waste,” they wrote.

The White House negotiators were “gullible,” the investigators wrote, “and conceded to Philips on all significant matters, including price.” The contract called for Philips to make monthly deliveries between April and December 2020 with more than half arriving in the final three months.

Philips spokesman Steve Klink on March 28 told ProPublica that the company had only made the stockpile version of the ventilator in small batches and didn’t want to ramp up production on a model it had never mass produced. Rather, he said, the company wanted to “stick with what we have and ramp up and not lose time because we cannot afford to lose time.” HHS echoed that sentiment in a written statement at that time, saying the agency was purchasing “what was immediately available.”

But the congressional investigators wrote that the records Philips turned over showed that was false. Philips did not have a long track record making the $15,000 Trilogy EV300; the company did not start making that version until March, the month the federal negotiators agreed to buy them. And the White House knew this, the investigators wrote.

“In a March 18, 2020 email to the White House, Philips explained that the Trilogy EV300 was a new product being introduced and that it would take time to build up inventory,” they wrote. “By selecting the $15,000 model, the Administration demonstrated that it either failed the most basic duty of reading what Philips sent it or that it was not concerned about overpaying.”

Navarro and his colleagues never tried to lower the $645 million price and agreed to pay an additional $1.7 million for circuits and filters, the investigators found.

In its statement, Philips said the list price of the EV300 ventilator, stand and accessories that HHS selected is “over $21,000,” so the final price does reflect a discount “while taking into account part of the higher costs for the expedited delivery schedule.”

The records Philips turned over to the congressional subcommittee showed that before May 27, Philips sold 5,339 other Trilogy EV300 ventilators in the U.S. No buyer paid more than HHS did. One Missouri purchaser bought a single ventilator for $9,327, records show.

“It would stand to reason that a purchaser of 43,000 units would be able to negotiate a better deal than a purchaser of a single unit,” the House investigators wrote.

The ranking Republicans on the House committee and subcommittee said they disagreed with the findings of the investigation. In a prepared statement, James Comer of Kentucky, who sits on the House committee, and Michael Cloud of Texas, who sits on the subcommittee, accused the congressional investigators of failing to take “the most basic investigative steps to ensure they get the facts right.”

“Democrats read a few documents produced by the cooperating company and made a bundle of assumptions,” they wrote. “They received no briefings, conducted no transcribed interviews or depositions, and did not try to engage with the Administration to understand their side of the story.”

Krishnamoorthi, the subcommittee chairman, sent his letter and the investigators’ report to Christi Grimm, who remains in charge of the HHS Office of Inspector General, though President Donald Trump has sought to replace her after her office in April wrote about shortages of testing supplies and protective equipment at hospitals.

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Is Trump destroying Social Security and Medicare by accident — or on purpose?

It’s quite likely that Donald Trump was unaware that payroll taxes are how the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are bankrolled. He might also be unaware that current Social Security checks to seniors are derived from payroll taxes — not those paid into the system when today’s recipients were working, but the ones being paid in, right now, by today’s workers.

Either Trump doesn’t know how the programs work or he’s deliberately attempting to use executive orders to kill both programs, in accordance with the decades-long conservative crusade to drown them in the bathtub, leaving current and pending retirees without the benefits they’re expecting.

One way or another, Trump may have just committed political suicide with around 80 days to go before Election Day — wrapping his stubby, sweaty paws around the electrified third rail of electoral reality. To be clear: I’m not complaining about the political suicide part. Fine by me. After all, my rule remains: Trump always makes things worse for Trump, but the awful reality is that too often the rest of us are caught in the relentless undertow from his bungling incompetence, dragged further away from the democratic republic we once knew.

Let’s rewind and start from the beginning.

At his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, this past weekend, Trump signed an executive order deferring payroll taxes for working Americans for four months, from September through December. It’s crucial to note that the so-called “holiday” is actually just a delay of the taxes due, meaning workers will have to pay back the full amount after the four-month holiday ends. However, Trump claims that if he wins re-election, he’ll not only eliminate the payback provision, but will consider eliminating the payroll taxes entirely.

As our president explained to an assembly of wealthy club members who resembled the cast of “Caddyshack” on Saturday, “If victorious on Nov. 3, I plan to forgive these taxes and make permanent cuts to the payroll tax.” He added, “I’m going to make them all permanent.”

A senior adviser on the Trump campaign, Jenna Ellis, tweeted that Trump will “look into terminating the payroll tax permanently.”

Trump claimed on Monday that his hypothetical payroll tax cuts would have “no effect on Social Security and Medicare,” and that those trust funds would be reimbursed from the “general fund,” meaning the money would come from federal revenues without congressional approval, which I’m pretty sure is illegal.

It’s also germane to add that Trump thinks that the Supreme Court’s DACA decision gives him the authority to create and sign his own laws, without bothering to go through Congress. It’s quite likely that Attorney General Bill Barr, who’s the loudest voice in support of the “unitary executive” theory since Dick Cheney retired to Wyoming, has told Trump he can do this, even though he can’t. In fact, the Supreme Court will likely strike down Trump’s executive order, since it spins off into the territory of appropriations and taxation, which are the exclusive constitutional purview of Congress. Of course Trump is also ignoring the rest of the court’s decision on DACA, having refused to accept a single new Dreamer application since the court ordered him to, which of course means he’s capable of doing it again and again.

With all that out of the way, let’s talk about specifically why this is such a terrible idea.

1. The forthcoming personal debt crisis. Again, the payroll tax holiday isn’t actually a holiday. Deferring the payments to January will only sucker-punch taxpayers just when things should be ramping up again economically. Combine this deferral with pandemic-related deferrals on rent, mortgage payments and other debt, plus unsustainable credit card debt that out-of-work Americans are rapidly accumulating, and we’re talking about the potential for a colossal glut of bankruptcies and worsened household debt starting in 2021.

Unless there’s no other way, workers need to ask their bosses to continue charging the existing payroll tax rates. Don’t let Trump’s irresponsibility, recklessness and penchant for bankruptcies force you into insolvency, too. If you can afford to ignore the holiday, ignore it and keep paying the old rates. Plus, you’ll be contributing to the common good, preserving Social Security and Medicare so that it might be around when you retire, too.

2. Trump is extorting you for your vote. Did you hear? If and only if Trump is re-elected, you won’t have to pay back the money from the payroll tax holiday! So you’d better vote for him or else, right? Wrong.

Think about how this works: Trump is linking payroll tax forgiveness to the outcome of the election. If he wins, you might not have to repay the deferred taxes, he says. But if he loses … who knows? Will he forgive the taxes owed in January even if he lost the election? We should assume he won’t.

He’s counting on voters taking the bait, so by the time they realize what they’ve done it’ll be after the election and too late. The smart move is to ignore his offer. Assume it’s a scam like everything else he does. (See also Trump University, the Trump Foundation and the countless Atlantic City contractors he screwed out of payment.)

In the end, either Trump or the courts will make taxpayers pay back the money. It might happen because he’ll simply forget to forgive the taxes or because he won’t care or because his executive order will be struck down by the courts after workers have already enjoyed all or part of the holiday. In other words, if the courts strike down the payroll tax holiday, which they probably will, you’ll almost certainly have to pay back the taxes for however long the holiday lasted, irrespective of Trump’s empty promises.

3. Social Security and Medicare will die. We covered this already, but it bears repeating: If Trump wins and makes good on his promise to forgive the payroll taxes owed during the holiday, and then if he signs another executive order (thinking it’s a law) making the holiday permanent, Social Security and Medicare will quickly dry up. Not only does that mean the programs won’t be around when current workers retire, it will rapidly be stripped away from current retirees, creating a debt and homelessness crisis of epic proportions, chiefly affecting elderly, sick and disabled Americans.

If I were Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or Sen. Todd Young of Indiana, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, I’d be sprinting up to the White House for a come-to-Jesus meeting with Trump for launching all this nonsense with just a few weeks to go before early voting begins.

4. This is all part of the plan to “starve the beast.” Republicans know they can’t get away with killing Social Security and Medicare outright. The political repercussions would be catastrophic. Instead, they’ve been practicing the “starve the beast” strategy, in which they manufacture budget shortfalls in order to pitch various cuts to the programs, including partial privatization. They pretend to feel bad about it, but they really don’t. They want voters to believe they have no choice but to cut the programs, even though they have plenty of options for maintaining solvency. The best method, by the way, to preserve the programs for all time would be to eliminate the income cap. Currently, taxpayers who make more than $137,700 don’t have to pay into the system on the remainder of their income above the cap. But Republicans won’t support lifting it because that would amount to a tax increase on upper-income earners. Who are, you know, their people.

Trump’s payroll tax holiday is the most brutal and obvious of any “starve the beast” gambits so far. Only this time, he’s potentially defunding both of these immensely popular programs in one go, hoping it’s all too complicated for voters to understand — especially as it whizzes past our heads with the rest of the ceaseless Trump madness.

If he makes the tax holiday permanent, the deaths of Social Security and Medicare will be inevitable. When the money dries up, that’s it. That’s the end. If you’re retired now, or if you’re about to, you’d better make contingency plans because this is the real deal.

To repeat: When confronted by questions about keeping the programs solvent, Trump told reporters on Monday that he intends to reimburse the Social Security and Medicare funds from the “general fund.” On the surface, that might sound like he’s planning to cover the shortfall. But he’s not. Appropriations from the general fund will balloon to staggering proportions, further inflating the budget deficit and national debt. As of right now, Trump has already spiked the deficit from around $500 billion in Barack Obama’s final year to a record $3.7 trillion by the end of 2020, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Now add to the deficit literally all the mandated payouts to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. According to the Social Security Administration, “In 2020, about 65 million Americans will receive over one trillion dollars in Social Security benefits.” If Trump has his way, that’s $1 trillion pulled from the general fund every year, with no reimbursement of those revenues from tax collection, meaning that at least an additional trillion will be added to the annual deficit. And that doesn’t even take a defunded Medicare trust fund into consideration.

Take a guess what’ll happen when congressional Republicans see the shortfall manifesting: This will mean significant cuts to benefits or the elimination of cost-of-living adjustments or whatever other sabotage they propose.

So there are several possibilities here, and none of them carry good news for taxpayers. Either we’ll slam face-first into a brick wall — a deferred tax bill to pay next year — or, in the worst-case scenario, Social Security and Medicare will be crushed beneath Trump’s ponderous bulk, a consequence of his hyperkinetic desperation to be re-elected after presiding over and indeed precipitating the deaths of more than 160,000 Americans.

Through his knee-jerk malevolence, Trump is steamrolling Americans with unnecessary debt, along with all of its accompanying financial hardships. And, honestly, it’s no wonder. More than 62 million suckers decided to vote for a game-show host whose TV catchphrase was literally firing people from their jobs, the portend of a 11 percent unemployment rate. They elected a failed real estate developer who’s carrying hundreds of millions in debt, and who couldn’t make money by operating casinos, which are usually geysers of cash. Remarkably, Trump’s suckers might vote yet again to have their Social Security and Medicare taken away, along with everybody else’s. They can wise up now, or pay up later.