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Reporters on Trump’s failing, racist campaign: He’s not doing it right

What do you call it when Donald Trump continuously spouts overtly racist and authoritarian rhetoric while obdurately refusing to take the necessary action to stop a raging pandemic?

If you’re a campaign reporter for the mainstream media, you call it a tactical mistake. You call it political “self-sabotage.” You call it “self-destructive.”

Campaign reporters writing about Trump’s failing campaign are basically saying: He’s not doing it right.

They should be saying: He’s killing people with his stupidity and race-baiting to get his jollies. They should be saying: The only way he can win at this rate is if he steals the election.

But Friday’s campaign procedural in the Washington Post, prompted by Trump’s firing of campaign manager Brad Parscale, was headlined “Republicans fear campaign shake-up can’t counteract Trump’s self-sabotage.”

It was a classic example of obsessing over tactics rather than substance.

Reporters Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Robert Costa described the problem clearly: “a reelection effort cratering under the weight of a deadly pandemic, a stalled economy and a national reckoning on racial injustice.”

But they quickly adopted the view of their sources (“numerous Republicans and Trump allies”) that “the main problem facing the struggling Trump campaign” is “the president himself and his chronically self-destructive behavior.”

They simply can’t acknowledge that this is who he is, this is what he’s done, and this is what his campaign, ineluctably, is all about.

The Post story distinctly echoed the zeitgeist of a June 17 New York Times article by Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni, headlined: “Does Trump Want to Fight for a Second Term? His Self-Sabotage Worries Aides.”

Haberman and Karni described “a recent meeting” Trump held “with his top political advisers,” during which the advisers “warned him that he was on a path to defeat in November if he continued his incendiary behavior in public and on Twitter.”

Trump’s response was: “I have to be myself.”

Sounds pretty definitive, no?

But, channeling the views of “people close to him,” the Times reporters called that “defiance.”

The people close to Trump, the Times reporters wrote, “say his repeated acts of political self-sabotage — a widely denounced photo-op at a church for which peaceful protesters were forcibly removed, a threat to use the American military to quell protests — have significantly damaged his re-election prospects, and yet he appears mostly unable, or unwilling, to curtail them.”

Can you imagine writing off Trump’s triumphant march through Lafayette Park as a tactical mistake rather than a willful act of thuggery? It was an “iconic moment” for the Trump presidency, as Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and — guess who? — Ashley Parker herself wrote at the time: a “created” moment with “outsize symbolism for a nation broken after yet another black man died in the custody of police.”

It was such a dramatic and freighted event that I even thought it had permanently pierced the detachment of the reporters covering it.

But apparently the hoary political-campaign-coverage algorithms snapped back into place.

In the context of campaign reporting, Trump’s epic failing as a president and a human being are just value-neutral challenges for the campaign staff, apparently.

And it’s not just the Post and the Times. Los Angeles Times reporters Eli Stokols and Noah Bierman wrote last week that, according to “numerous” anonymous campaign staffers, “those involved in the reelection effort are increasingly resigned to getting behind their often self-destructive candidate.”

Julie Pace wrote for the Associated Press on Friday that “[t]he issue that needs to be addressed, according to some Republicans, isn’t how Trump’s campaign is run. It’s Trump himself.”

But what exactly is it about Trump himself? Pace’s answer is an anodyne, listless cover-up of Trump’s criminal incompetence and racism:

Trump has often appeared to be out of step with most Americans in recent months. He all but declared victory over the coronavirus pandemic as infections were starting to surge in new pockets across the country, including in states like Florida, Texas and Arizona where he’s enjoyed strong support. He’s shown little concrete interest in police reform following the deaths of Black Americans and has instead focused much of his energy on defending prominent displays of Confederate monuments.

Pace noted that “privately, Trump’s campaign and outsider advisers acknowledge that the president’s situation is dire and showing no signs of improvement.” But then she quoted Scott Reed, a senior political strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, saying the campaign needs a “new and improved level of message discipline that includes the White House staff” — as if that’s the problem.

As I wrote last week, it’s time for reporters to put aside their normal-campaign-reporting habits and recognize that this is something new and different: A campaign aimed only at a distinct minority of voters that can’t win unless it steals the election.

Or maybe, as NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen tweeted, it isn’t really a campaign at all.

As Rosen added in a response: “‘Still effective for his cult’ is not a campaign. It’s internal communications among pre-existing supporters. A campaign tries to convert people.”

New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman chimed in on Friday with a Twitter thread about how we should all be more concerned that Trump will try to steal the election:

New polls show just how profoundly American voters are rejecting Trump. A Washington-Post-ABC News poll shows 38 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the outbreak, down from 51 percent in March, with fully 52 percent disapproving “strongly.”

A survey from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape Project show Trump’s approval rating has dropped by seven percentage points since April.

Meanwhile, in the New York Times, the campaign coverage continues, with Trip Gabriel marveling that Ohio is in play. How could it not be? It’s long been a presidential bellwether. It voted for Obama twice. Trump was a shock, not a trend.

Notably, Gabriel only quoted three Trump supporters: An adviser to the campaign, a Republican strategist and a racist who self-identified with the quote: “I’m not a NASCAR fan anymore.”

How a former right-wing congressman from Florida just became Texas GOP’s new chairman

Allen West, the firebrand former Florida congressman, has defeated Texas GOP Chairman James Dickey to lead the country’s largest state Republican Party.

West claimed victory shortly before 3:30 a.m. Monday, while Dickey conceded about an hour later. The developments came during an early morning round of voting among state Senate district caucuses at the party’s virtual convention.

West ended up carrying a clear majority of the 31 caucuses — 22 — to only four for Dickey, a wide enough margin to negate any desire for a floor fight where individual delegates would be asked to make their choice for chair. Dickey formally withdrew early Monday afternoon, urging party unity ahead of the November election.

“That is my commitment and that is my humble request of all of us — that we stand together, united by our shared commitment to win together in November,” Dickey said.

West briefly joined Dickey on the convention broadcast, saying the two are “united in one single message” of keeping Texas a “strong, red conservative state.” West, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, also told Dickey to “please consider yourself to be a very important counselor and mentor to me — because I know how to jump out of airplanes, but I’m gonna learn how to be a pretty good chairman of the Republican Party of Texas.”

West moved to Texas several years ago and became politically active here. His victory means an abrupt change in party leadership with less than four months until one of the most challenging elections that Texas Republicans are facing in a long time.

West’s campaign said Monday morning he would “immediately resume the responsibilities of the role and begin to implement his strategy to hold Texas.” West got encouragement from President Donald Trump, who tweeted, “Congratulations Allen, great job!”

Dickey’s concession early Monday morning came amid reports that West was easily winning the majority of Senate district caucuses. A candidate needs to carry at least three caucuses to force a floor vote, though West’s strong showing left little uncertainty about how that vote would go and Dickey chose not to go to the floor.

The race’s conclusion capped a tumultuous convention that had unraveled on Dickey’s watch. There was so much dysfunction and delay that delegates voted late Sunday night to take up unfinished business at a second convention — after settling party leadership races.

After Dickey dropped out of the chair race Monday afternoon, he passed the convention gavel to West, who promptly adjourned the gathering until the second convention. The time and place of the second convention have not been determined. Those and other details will be recommended by a 10-person committee that delegates voted to establish late Sunday night but has not named yet.

In addition to Dickey, the party’s vice chair, Alma Perez Jackson, was also defeated. She had faced a challenge from Cat Parks, who chairs the Hamilton County party and had led a candidate recruitment task force created by Dickey. Parks declared victory late Monday morning, shortly before it was announced that she had won 16 Senate district caucuses to 11 for Jackson.

West represented Florida’s 22nd Congressional District from 2011-2013. He built a national profile for his bombast, sparring with his House colleagues and railing against then-President Barack Obama. West came to Texas in 2014 to become the CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas think tank that shuttered three years later.

Responding to West’s win Monday morning, the Texas Democratic Party pointed to his long trail of incendiary rhetoric. Among the comments: He has argued Islam is not a religion but a “totalitarian, theocratic political ideology.” West, who is Black, has also suggested Black communities were “stronger” during segregation.

“We’re disgusted but not surprised that Texas Republicans chose a certified racist conservative hardliner like Allen West as their new chairman,” state Democratic Party spokesman Abhi Rahman said in a statement. “West is everything that is wrong with the Republican Party and brings to light their failures on building an inclusive, welcoming party that is deliberate and thoughtful in handling crisis situations.”

Dickey had campaigned on restoring the party’s finances and positioning it well for the November election through a renewed focus on fundraising, candidate recruitment and voter registration. During his closing statement Saturday morning, Dickey also impressed upon delegates how all-consuming the job is, saying “this is a 24/7 job and I have been a 24/7 chairman.”

“Words matter, but work matters too — and results matter more,” Dickey said, repeatedly saying his “No. 1 priority” is to help ensure success for President Trump and Texas Republicans in November. “This is what I’m focused on, folks — winning.”

In his final pitch to delegates, West promised to make the party better known nationally and adopt a more aggressive strategy against what he described as an increasingly extreme Democratic Party.

“It’s time that our Republican Party once again steps up and leads the way, not just in Texas, but all across the United States of America,” West said. “It’s time to make sure that the Republican Party of Texas is relevant again, that our message is out, that our message is being heard.”

West also appealed to some in the party who have grown frustrated with their own leaders — namely Gov. Greg Abbott — for how they have responded to the coronavirus pandemic. West rallied delegates against what he said was the “tyranny that we see in the great state of Texas, where we have executive orders and mandates, people telling us what we can and cannot do, who is essential, who is not essential.”

The State Republican Executive Committee first elected Dickey to the post in 2017 after the resignation of his predecessor Tom Mechler. Dickey won his first full term a year later at the state convention.

Before chairing the state party, Dickey led the GOP in Travis County, home to Austin.

West brought a high profile to the race and huge financial advantage, vastly out raising and outspending Dickey. While West stumped on building a more ambitious Texas GOP, he also courted support from some in the party who believe Dickey had grown too unwilling to stand up to state leaders when it came to the party’s legislative priorities and the scandal last year that forced House Speaker Dennis Bonnen into retirement.

But no issue overshadowed the closing weeks of the race like the party’s insistence on conducting an in-person convention in Houston despite the coronavirus pandemic. After the convention center operator nixed the party’s contract earlier this month, the party launched a legal battle to continue with an in-person convention. The party lost in the courts shortly before the convention was set to begin, leaving it with a short period to transition to a virtual gathering.

Despite promises that the party had a virtual backup plan all along, the convention opened Thursday with almost immediate technical problems, and the State Republican Executive Committee voted that night to pause the event for a day Friday to resolve the issues. When the convention came back Saturday, things were still rocky — delegates complained they had still not received credentials, committees took much longer than scheduled and live-streaming problems ruined speeches by some of the state’s top elected officials.

West largely stayed out of the convention debate until recent days, when he criticized Dickey for not having an adequate backup plan and questioned the voting technology for the virtual gathering. On Saturday afternoon, he joined calls for Dickey to halt the convention until every delegate could be credentialed.

Dickey acknowledged the pre-convention turbulence in his speech Saturday morning.

“This has been a humbling week and this path to our state convention today has been challenging,” he said, “but I will never give up on the Texas Republican Party.”

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. 

Republicans rush to redirect money from Trump’s campaign to vulnerable Senate Republicans: report

President Donald Trump’s precarious standing among voters has resulted in Republicans wondering if they should assume Joe Biden will win the White House and focus on trying to save the GOP Senate majority.

“President Trump’s weak poll numbers and a surge of Democratic cash flooding key Senate races have jolted top Republicans and intensified talk among party donors and strategists about redirecting money to protect their narrow Senate Republican majority amid growing fear of complete Democratic control of Washington in 2021,” the newspaper reported.

“Almost no one is talking openly about abandoning Mr. Trump at this point. A total collapse at the top of the ticket, Republican strategists and donors agree, would only make holding the Senate harder,” The Times noted. “But maintaining the Senate is an urgent imperative for the G.O.P.: A Democratic Senate could offer a glide path for liberal Supreme Court nominees from a President Biden, or block Mr. Trump’s judges if he won a second term. And right now, Senate Republican incumbents and candidates are losing badly in the money chase not just in the top Senate battlegrounds — states like Maine, Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina — but also in deep red states, such as Montana, where seats are now increasingly up for grabs.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is among the senators facing the voters in November.

“The private discussions about whether to shift resources toward imperiled Republican Senate candidates reflect a mix of factors: a lack of confidence that Mr. Trump will beat Joseph R. Biden Jr.; fear that the president is already a drag on down-ballot candidates; desire to maintain a G.O.P. “firewall” on Capitol Hill if Mr. Biden prevails; and the belief that money is not among Mr. Trump’s myriad problems,” the newspaper explained.

Read the full report.

Trump is trying to rig the election right before our eyes

Donald Trump’s disapproval rate in FiveThirtyEight‘s average has only dropped below 50 percent on a handful of days during his first term, and that was before almost 150,000 mostly avoidable deaths resulted from the pandemic. He can’t win by persuading voters that he deserves another term or by turning out his dwindling base. But everyone knows he won’t go down without a fight. Suppressing the anti-Trump vote is his best hope of clinging to power.

Trump and his allies are trying to rig the election right now. They’re doing it in a fairly obvious way, right before our eyes. The good news is that if enough people see it coming, his scheme can be countered.

Here’s the game. First, he’s encouraging Republicans to cast their ballots in-person this fall. His attacks on voting via absentee ballot, which is how he and many within his inner circle habitually vote, “are driving suspicion among GOP voters toward absentee ballots,” according to The Washington Post. 

In several primaries this spring, Democratic voters have embraced mail ballots in far larger numbers than Republicans during a campaign season defined by the coronavirus pandemic. And when they urge their supporters to vote by mail, GOP campaigns around the country are hearing from more and more Republican voters who say they do not trust absentee ballots, according to multiple strategists.

This, per The Post, is “alarming Republican strategists, who say it could undercut their own candidates, including Trump himself.” This would likely be true if state and local election officials all had the funding and the motivation to prepare now for a massive shift to absentee ballots. But a number of competitive states are not making those preparations, and Republicans are fighting on multiple fronts to prevent election officials from setting up a smooth and safe process for voting during a pandemic.

Meanwhile, the US Postal Service is facing a fiscal crisis created by Republicans, and Trump recently appointed a loyalist, Louis DeJoy, to serve as Postmaster General, causing an exodus of career officials from the agency. Last week, The Washington Post reported that DeJoy “established major operational changes Monday that could slow down mail delivery” by a day or more.

Marc Elias, citing a USPS Inspector General report, writes that “in states where voters can request absentee ballots within seven days of Election Day, it’s highly unlikely that voters will be able to return mail ballots on time. And in states where voters can request absentee ballots within three days of election day, it will be basically impossible for some voters to return mail ballots on time.” This isn’t just a problem in theory; Elias notes that alarming numbers of absentee ballots have already been rejected in primaries across the country this cycle.

At present, all indications suggest that this election won’t be that close, and if Republicans don’t defy Trump’s nonsense and vote by mail in large numbers–which is a distinct possibility–a few hundred thousand rejected ballots probably wouldn’t swing the outcome unless the race tightens considerably.

But that’s where things get a bit scary. We know Trump won’t accept the results if he loses because he didn’t accept them when he won, and he’s already claimed that the election will be plagued by massive fraud. A logjam with absentee ballots could keep the outcome close, but perhaps more importantly, it could lead to him winning on election night on his way to a resounding defeat in the days and weeks that follow as the rest of the ballots are counted. (Days and weeks in which they’d attempt to get as many absentees rejected as possible.)

That would give him and the conservative media a window to delegitimize the results, which could potentially pave the way for a Constitutional crisis that either the Courts or the House of Representatives could resolve in Trump’s favor.

Fortunately, this is all counter-able. Republicans in Florida and elsewhere who are worried about turnout are encouraging their voters to use absentee ballots. The Democrats have several groups spending tens of millions on promoting voting by mail and fighting to protect the results of the election in the courts and potentially in the streets. We can expect Democrats and their allies to educate their voters about the importance of requesting absentee ballots as early as possible and sending them in promptly.

The potential problems outlined above aren’t going to catch anyone by surprise.

 

Suspect in murder of son of judge overseeing Epstein case was a men’s rights lawyer and Trump donor

The man suspected by authorities of shooting the 20-year-old son of a federal judge to death and critically wounding her husband specialized in men’s rights litigation and made multiple campaign donations to President Donald Trump.

Roy Den Hollander had a case pending before U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, in which he was representing a New Jersey woman suing the U.S. Selective Service System so that she could register for the draft. Salas dismissed part of the lawsuit in 2019, though she had not yet ruled on another portion, according to reports. The Daily Beast was the first outlet to report on Hollander’s identity.

A New York attorney and former political producer for local New York WABC-TV News, Hollander allegedly appeared at the family’s North Brunswick, N.J., home Sunday evening dressed as a FedEx delivery driver. He shot Salas’ husband when he answered the door, and shot and killed their son when he came to his father’s aid, according to authorities. 

Salas had been appointed to preside over a lawsuit involving Deutsche Bank and Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire financier who hanged himself last year in a Manhattan detention center while awaiting trial over allegations of sexually assaulting dozens of young women.

In July and October 2016, Hollander made three small-sum donations to then-candidate Trump’s campaign, totaling $47.40, FEC records show.

Four months ago Hollander donated $20 to Winred, the Trump-endorsed GOP super PAC created to compete with Democratic grassroots fundraising machine ActBlue. The donation lists his occupation as “retired.”

After the shooting, Hollander reportedly drove to Liberty, N.Y., two hours away, where his body was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Judge Salas was not harmed. He has a history of filing anti-woman and pro-men’s rights litigation.

In 2010, a federal appeals court tossed a suit he had filed against several Manhattan bars for organizing “ladies’ nights” drink specials.

Hollander also filed two lawsuits to block federal funds from going to Columbia University’s feminist studies program, arguing that feminism was the equivalent of a “modern-day religion.” Both suits were dismissed.

In 2010, he filed an age and gender discrimination lawsuit against a Manhattan nightclub after a bouncer made him buy a $350 bottle of vodka at the door while allowing a younger woman to enter without the same prerequisite. In 2013, a judge ruled that the club had not violated his constitutional rights.

“They all pull the same thing: ‘These guys got gray hair, let’s charge them some money,'” Hollander told the New York Daily News at the time. “They’re doing the same thing they did in the Deep South back in the 1950s. Having to buy a $350 bottle of watered down vodka – that’s the ‘sitting in the back of the bus’ for us.”

“There’s no justice for guys in this day and age,” he added.

Salas’ son, Daniel Anderl, played high school baseball and went on to attend Catholic University in Washington.

“He was very close to his father,” a neighbor said. “They had a basketball thing set up at one time, and he would always be there with his father playing basketball.”

Trump threatens to veto GOP relief bill unless it includes payroll tax cut that favors the rich

President Donald Trump threatened to veto the Republican coronavirus relief proposal unless it includes a payroll tax cut, which would overwhelmingly benefit the rich and potentially cut funding for Social Security and Medicare.

Trump confirmed reports about his push to include a payroll tax holiday in an interview with Fox News that first aired on Sunday.

“I would consider not signing it if we don’t have a payroll tax cut,” Trump said, claiming that “a lot of Republicans like it.”

“It’s been proven to be successful and it’s a big saving for the people. It’s a tremendous saving and an incentive for companies to hire their workers back and to keep their workers,” Trump later said during a Monday appearance in the Oval Office. “The payroll tax to me is very important.”

Though a few Republicans, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, have expressed support for a payroll tax cut, a “number of Republicans oppose” the measure and have pushed back on its inclusion in the bill, according to The Washington Post.

“I have not talked to a single office that has expressed enthusiasm for payroll tax cut,” Brian Riedl, a tax expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute, told The Post.

The payroll tax is a 7.65% tax on employee earnings and a 7.65% tax on employers that funds the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. While President Barack Obama temporarily cut the tax by 2% for workers in 2011, Trump wants a full temporary pause on the tax for both workers and employers, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“Trump’s actions are a war on seniors,” Nancy Altman, the head of the advocacy group Social Security Works, told CNBC. “He is insisting on threatening Social Security on which most seniors rely for their food, medicine and other basic necessities.”

Republicans, who have raised objections over the rising federal deficit, are expected to include the proposal in their bill, according to The Post. A March estimate from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that eliminating the tax for eight months would increase the deficit by $840 billion.

Because the proposal is targeted at those still receiving paychecks, it would do nothing for the tens of millions of Americans laid off amid the pandemic.

“A payroll tax cut is exceptionally ill-suited for the current moment,” Seth Hanlon, a tax expert at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, told Business Insider. “It’s not a second best solution. It’s not even the hundredth best solution. It’s a policy that’s designed to benefit people who are working. It benefits people who are earning more, and it doesn’t do anything for people out of work.”

The policy would largely benefit the richest Americans while providing most American workers with negligible benefits. An analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that 65% of the benefits would flow to the richest 20% of Americans. For most Americans, the “benefits would arrive drip by drip,” according to Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

“That wouldn’t do enough for households affected by the coronavirus, which are likely to need a sizable infusion of cash to meet necessary expenses,” he wrote in a Bloomberg op-ed.

Worse, Republicans plan to add the payroll tax cut to their proposal while pushing for a cut to unemployment benefits for jobless Americans, according to The Post. The Republican plan may also require Americans to pay back the tax cut at a later date.

The legislation could also alter plans to send another round of $1,200 direct payments to Americans. That is expected to be coupled with a reduction to the $600-per-week federal unemployment benefits to $200 or $400 per week.

Republicans are also expected to reject desperate pleas for cities and states facing massive budget shortfalls due to a lack of tax revenue caused by stay-at-home orders. Instead, Republicans plan to offer local leaders flexibility on spending the $150 billion Congress allocated in March. The House had passed a bill which would provide $1 trillion in additional relief to states and cities.

The Republican bill is also expected to tie school funding to classroom reopenings. While the House plan would provide about $3 trillion in relief, the GOP proposal is expected to be valued at around $1 trillion.

“Unfortunately, by all accounts the Senate Republicans are drafting legislation that comes up short in a number of vital areas, such as extending unemployment benefits or funding for rental assistance, hazard premium pay for frontline workers, or investments in communities of color being ravaged by the virus, and many other necessary provisions,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a Monday letter to Democratic colleagues. “Democrats will need to fight hard for these important provisions.”

Is President Trump “demonstrably far poorer” than he claims to be? “Scotland holds the key”

Although President Donald Trump has insisted that he is a friend of the working class and famously told a 2016 audience, “I love the poorly educated,” he is also obsessed with status and brags about his net worth. But financial writer Adam Davidson, in a Twitter thread, stresses that the president greatly exaggerates how wealthy he is and uses some figures to make his case.

Davidson, author of the book “The Passion Economy: The New Rules for Thriving in the 21st Century,” tweets, “Hot take: Trump is demonstrably far poorer than he claims. Again: Scotland holds the key. “Davidson goes on to explain why Trump’s business interests in the U.K. offer some insights on his true net worth. According to Davidson, Trump’s “audited UK financials show money-losing properties with arbitrarily inflated values with no tie to actual market conditions. Those are his ONLY audited financials.”

Davidson goes into specifics, writing, “So, three businesses that lose around 5 million pounds a year and have a collective value of, say, 70M pounds (being generous) are claimed to bring in 150 million pounds a year! And, again, those are his MOST trustworthy numbers.”

Davidson estimates that Trump now has about $50 million less than the amount he inherited from his father, the late Fred Trump, Sr.

“My best guess: he got around $200M from dad and now has $150M or so, because he’s bad at money and takes bad risks,” Davidson writes.

According to Davidson, “There are huge error bars around every number related to Trump. We have no idea how much his businesses make, how many assets he owns, and how much debt he has. There is a good chance he, himself, has no idea. Because he has a small and inept finance team.”

Davidson notes, however, that Trump’s hardcore supporters don’t become any less supportive when he argues that the president isn’t as wealthy as he claims to be.

“When I’ve tried this logic on Trump supporters,” Davidson tweets, “it doesn’t work of course. They are then even MORE impressed with his hustle. A broke guy has a big plane? Cool!”

Trump hints he won’t accept vote if he loses. Pelosi says he’ll be “fumigated” out of White House

President Donald Trump suggested that he may not accept the results of the election if he loses, prompting a strongly-worded rebuke from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace pressed Trump on the possibility of a forthcoming loss in an interview which first aired on Sunday. The current polling average shows Trump trailing by nearly nine points, according to election forecaster FiveThirtyEight.

“I’m not a good loser. I don’t like to lose,” Trump said. “I don’t lose too often. I don’t like to lose.”

Wallace asked if that meant that he would not accept the election results.

“No. I have to see,” Trump replied. “No, I’m not going to just say ‘yes.’ I’m not going to say ‘no,’ and I didn’t last time either.”

Trump then brought up his debunked conspiracy theories about voting by mail, a process which has an incredibly low rate of fraud and numerous built-in protections, to claim that Democrats may “rig” the election.

Pelosi rejected Trump’s remarks in an interview with “Morning Joe.”

“The fact is, whether he knows it yet or not, he will be leaving,” she told the MSNBC morning show on Monday. “Just because he might not want to move out of the White House doesn’t mean we won’t have an inauguration ceremony to inaugurate a duly elected president of the United States.”

Pelosi said simply being present in the White House does not make someone the president.

“There is a process,” she said. “It has nothing to do with the certain occupant of the White House doesn’t feel like moving and has to be fumigated out of there.”

But host Joe Scarborough worried that Trump had already proven that he was capable of doing “whatever he can get away with.”

“I think the best and brightest minds in government and out of government now have to start . . . preparing for something that we haven’t had to prepare for,” he said. “And that is: How does our government, how does our military, how does the Secret Service, how quickly do the courts respond to a sitting president who is defeated at the ballot box and refuses to leave?” 

The progressive grassroots group Stand Up America called Trump’s comments an “existential threat to our democracy” which show he has “no respect for the rule of law.”

“For five years, Trump has sought to undermine our elections again and again — from soliciting foreign interference to making baseless claims about voter fraud to lying about the results of the 2016 election,” Sean Eldridge, the group’s founder and president, said in a statement. “The American people must be prepared to mobilize if Trump refuses to concede — and we will be prepared to meet the moment if he does.”

Trump was met with pushback and skepticism from Wallace throughout Sunday’s interview.

Trump falsely claimed that presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden wanted to “defund the police.”

“Sir, he does not,” Wallace pushed back.

Trump directed an aide to find a copy of a document he claimed showed Biden wanted to “abolish” the police, but Wallace pointed out the document said no such thing. Biden actually supports increasing federal funding for police.

A similar moment occurred when Trump falsely insisted that the U.S. had the lowest coronavirus death rate in the world.

“That’s not true, sir,” Wallace replied.

Trump then directed press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to produce a chart he claimed showed that the U.S. had the “lowest mortality rate anywhere in the world.”

Fox News cut away to fact-check the president, explaining that the White House chart did not show that the U.S. had the lowest death rate in the world. It notably excluded several countries that had a lower death rate.

Elsewhere in the interview, Wallace cited polls showing more Americans believe Biden will be more competent as president than Trump.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, let’s take a test. Let’s take a test right now,” Trump said. “Let’s go down. Joe and I will take a test. Let him take the same test that I took.”

Trump was referring to a cognitive test, which he claims left doctors “very surprised” after he aced it.

“I took the test, too, when I heard you passed it. It’s not the hardest test,” Wallace responded. “They have a picture, and it says: ‘What’s that?’ And it’s an elephant.”

“No, no, no. You see, that’s all misrepresentation,” Trump insisted. “Because, yes, the first few questions are easy, but I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions. I’ll bet you couldn’t. They get very hard, the last five questions.”

Reporter Julia Davis posted an image of the final five questions on the test, noting that they ask things like “What day is it?” and “Where are you?”

Lawsuit accuses former Fox News anchor Ed Henry of rape and current top talent of sexual harassment

Two women filed a lawsuit against Fox News in a New York federal court Monday, alleging rape and sexual harassment at the hands of some of the network’s top talent, including the recently fired Ed Henry and primetime stars Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. 

Jennifer Eckhart, a former associate producer at Fox Business, accuses 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 Hannity, Carlson and the “Media Buzz” host Howard Kurtz. The four men have also been sued in their individual capacities.

Michael J. Willemin, an attorney who represents the women along with veteran sexual misconduct litigator Doug Wigdor, told Salon that Fox News had been informed of Areu’s allegations against Carlson on July 9, four days before the host announced that he would be taking a “pre-planned vacation.”

A Fox News spokesperson confirmed in an email that the network had learned about Areu’s claims against Carlson on July 9 — and “promptly investigated them.”

“Tucker is still employed, and this has zero to do with his vacation, which was legit and pre-planned,” the spokesperson added.

The legal complaint is itself so graphic in nature that it includes a trigger warning: “This document contains contains highly-graphic information of a sexual nature, including sexual assault.” At length, it details Henry’s alleged attempts to groom Eckhart, who claims she was asked to be his “little whore” and “sex slave.” Henry allegedly threatened Eckhart with punishment and retaliation if she did not comply with his demands.

According to the document, Eckhart was ultimately left “violently raped while helpless and restrained in metal handcuffs,” while Henry “performed sadistic acts on her without her consent that left her injured, bruised and battered with bloody wrists.”

The suit claims that Henry had earlier forced Eckhart to perform oral sex on him on network property before raping her at a hotel where Fox often hosted visiting employees, “thereby facilitating, whether knowingly or unknowingly, Mr. Henry’s conduct.”

Henry allegedly sent both Eckhart and Areu lewd text messages. One message to Eckhart referenced “owned & submissive” anal sex, according to the filing. Others said, “F**k you and your safe word. You will know when I am done,” and “When u r owned u don’t get a ‘choice.'”

Yet another text to Eckhart allegedly read, “Good long session last time left you bruised battered dazed sated begging for more.” The hashtag “#perfect” was included. 

Henry allegedly abused Areu with “a slew of wildly inappropriate sexual images and messages” for several months this year, according to the complaint. The texts, which allegedly remain in the possession of Areu, include “a ‘closeup’ photograph of a woman’s vagina being ‘clamped’ closed by four clothespins” and a video titled “Fastest Interview … candidate selected in 3 seconds.”

According to the filing, the video features a woman job candidate exposing her vagina to the interviewer, who then selects her for the job. Immediately after Henry sent the video, he allegedly added: “Are you avail for anchor interview.”

Network executives allegedly knew about Henry’s misconduct as far back as early 2017, when several women accused him of “sexually inappropriate conduct” amid a company-wide probe into sexual harassment at the channel. 

A Fox News spokesperson disputed the suggestion. “There were not sexual harassment claims against Ed Henry at FOX News prior to Jennifer Eckhart’s claim on June 25, 2020,” the spokesperson said in an email.

The executives named in the suit include Fox News Executive Vice President of Human Resources Kevin Lord, Fox News President and Executive Editor Jay Wallace and Fox Business President Lauren Petterson.

The complaint alleges that the network did not take substantive disciplinary action against Henry, instead rewarding him with a promotion to co-anchor on “America’s Newsroom,” as well as a streaming show on Fox Nation. Additionally, the suit claims that HarperCollins, a Fox-affiliated imprint, signed Henry to a lucrative book deal.

Fox News only took action against Henry ahead of the lawsuit, according to the claim. However, the network allegedly did not inform Eckhart, leaving her to learn the news on Twitter and in press reports. 

“It’s heinous to do that to a victim like this — to force her to see him all over the news,” Willemin told Salon.

Two years ago, Wigdor’s firm settled claims brought by more than 20 individuals against Fox News, including its disgraced former star anchor Bill O’Reilly and former CEO Roger Ailes. Willemin confirmed to Salon that the firm told Fox News about Areu’s allegations last week.

“At that point, they had already been aware that we had represented her for two weeks,” Willemin said.

For a period of time, Areu had been a regular featured guest on “Hannity,” “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and “Media Buzz.” She claims that the hosts of all three programs cut her appearances after she pushed back against unwanted advances. 

Areu claims that on March 18, 2018, Hannity, in front of the full studio crew, threw $100 on the desk of his set and repeatedly demanded that one of the men in the room take her out on a date.

“Who wants to take her on a date?” he allegedly yelled. “Take her on a date to Del Friscos.”

Areu claims that she was “stuck” and unable to leave, because she was still “hooked into” studio equipment, which could only be removed by a stagehand. None of the staff took up Hannity’s challenge; he allegedly never invited Areu back thereafter.

Areu describes a similar setup as a guest on Carlson’s show, when an unidentified producer or writer allegedly whispered in her ear to stay put until the program was off air. She claims that no one would undo her equipment on set, making it impossible to leave. Carlson then allegedly invited Areu to his hotel room, where he specified that his wife would not be present. When she refused, her invitations to be on the show allegedly stopped.

Areu documents a similar interaction with Kurtz, after which she accuses him of retaliating by cutting her appearances on his show.

Fox News provided Salon with a lengthy statement, which denied all allegations of wrongdoing and suggested that Eckhart lacks standing to sue the network. The network requested that Salon print the statement in full:

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 and Howard Kurtz and its contributor Gianno Caldwell, are false, patently frivolous and utterly devoid of any merit. 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.”

“We expect Fox News to claim – as it almost always does – that an ‘independent’ investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing,” Wigdor’s office said in a statement. 

Wigdor claimed that the network’s investigation did not include interviews with either woman, who both offered to meet under “reasonable conditions.” He called on Fox News to interview them in the name of public transparency.

A Fox spokesperson told Salon in an email that the investigators had requested a meeting with each plaintiff, with their attorneys present, and asked the women to provide evidence supporting their claims. The Wigdor firm declined, the spokesperson said, saying that the women would not sit for an interview “unless investigators promised that anything either plaintiff said could not be used in any future litigation or proceeding.” The network found those demands unreasonable, the spokesperson said, because “evidence cannot be suppressed or hidden in this manner in litigation.”

The first paragraph of the complaint says, “Fox News would have the public believe that it is a different place from the Fox News that was run by former disgraced Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes. Unfortunately, it is actually worse.”

You can read the full complaint here.

The most promising coronavirus vaccine candidate shows yet more positive results

A new study reveals that a promising coronavirus vaccine being developed by Oxford University researchers is safe and shows promise.

The Oxford vaccine, which goes by the unpronounceable moniker “ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (AZD1222),” is being developed with the assistance of a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company known as AstraZeneca, according to an article recently published in The Lancet. The study involved 1,077 volunteers and in its early-stage human trials was shown to be safe and stimulate a strong immune response. Andrew Pollard, the lead author of the study, said in a statement that the researchers hope “this means the immune system will remember the virus, so that our vaccine will protect people for an extended period.”

He added, “However, we need more research before we can confirm the vaccine effectively protects against SARS-CoV-2 infection, and for how long any protection lasts.”

The authors noted that the most common reported systemic reactions were fatigue and headache, and that other negative side effects included feverishness, muscle ache and malaise.

“Our preliminary findings show that the candidate ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine given as a single dose was safe and tolerated, despite a higher reactogenicity profile than the control vaccine, MenACWY,” the authors wrote. Reactogenicity means the tendency of a shot to produce common adverse reactions, like a sore arm or mild fever. “No serious adverse reactions to ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 occurred,” they add. “The majority of adverse events reported were mild or moderate in severity, and all were self-limiting.”

The World Health Organization reports that there are currently 23 potential vaccines being tested in human trials, with more than 130 others in preclinical studies. In addition to the Oxford study, The Lancet reported that a Chinese vaccine is also showing modest, positive results.

In an editorial, The Lancet pointed out that there are many additional steps beyond the clinical trials, even if they prove fruitful.

“While vaccine development research continues, questions are already arising on the next steps and challenges, concerning the manufacturing, distribution, and widespread accessibility of a possible vaccine,” the editorial warned. “Some strategies are already being considered: Sandy Douglas at the University of Oxford, for example, is leading the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine manufacturing scale-up project. Working immediately on large-scale production could accelerate the availability of a high-quality and safe vaccine when the right candidate is there.”

In addition, as Oxford University notes on its website, “‘Translational medicine’ – taking discoveries from the laboratory right through to treatments for patients — is a significant focus of medical research at Oxford. This ‘bench to bedside’ approach is aided by fruitful links with NHS [National Health Service] organisations.”

One possible threat to the success of any vaccine, at least in the United States, is that a large number of people may not get it and thereby threaten our ability to develop herd immunity. A survey last month by The Washington Post and ABC News found that only 43 percent of Americans would definitely get vaccinated and only 28 percent would probably do so. By contrast, 12 percent said they probably would not and 15 percent said they definitely would not.

“We very clearly know that, if we don’t get 70-something percent of the population covered, we will probably not get to herd immunity,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told Salon in May when discussing the struggle to achieve herd immunity. “There are some people that think that, with this virus, we might be able to achieve it with 50 percent, so that’s not 100 percent. But I’m thinking that 70-something percent is about where we need to be, and it’s because I’ve looked at some of the data. We may achieve it with 50 percent, but the bottom line is we’d run the risk of not getting herd immunity with the vaccine.”

Mutant Salmonella strain sticks to lettuce — no matter how much you wash it

A new study reveals that some strains of Salmonella bacteria have developed methods of not only bypassing botanical immune systems, but of resisting the faucet. The novel strain of bacteria achieves this by squirreling itself deeper within the pores of leafy greens like spinach and lettuce.

The study, which was published in “Frontiers in Microbiology,” found that Salmonella enterica Typhimurium can enter plants like lettuce and spinach through their stomates, or the tiny air holes that plants can open and close to breathe and stay cool. A scientific team from the University of Delaware investigated how E. coli, Salmonella and Listeria interacted with stomates on lettuce and spinach. In the process, they discovered that Salmonella appeared able to enter stomates.

Bacteria that has already found its way into the leaves of plants cannot be washed off with water or chemical treatments, and can easily be spread through water systems and human touch.

“Salmonella remains a critical foodborne pathogen given its ability to persist in various environments and hosts,” co-authors Nicholas Johnson, Pushpinder K. Litt, Kalmia E. Kniel and Harsh Bais explained. “At greatest risk are those aspects of contamination that can occur within the pre-harvest environment, whereby microbial contamination can come in contact with plant foliar tissues from water, soil amendments, wind, birds, insects, animals, and other fomites including food contact surfaces on-farm and at packaging facilities.”

The authors added that direct and indirect mechanisms increase the risk of contamination of plants in the field. “Laboratory studies suggest that bacterial pathogens on plants in the field decrease quickly over the first 3 days, but low numbers continue to persist for several weeks, which may cause human health issues,” they note.

As Bais told Science Daily, “Now we have a human pathogen trying to do what plant pathogens do. That is scary.”

Kniel elaborated on those thoughts, adding that “the food industry works tirelessly to make the product as safe as they can. But even then, we are growing these products outside, so they’re accessible to wildlife, wind, dust, and water that may transmit microorganisms. It’s a tough situation.”

This is not the first study which has found evidence that Salmonella bacteria is becoming more resistant to human preventative measures. In 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that a strain of antibiotic-resistant Salmonella had been found in several brands of raw chicken. Ultimately, “a total of 129 people infected with the outbreak strain of Salmonella Infantis were reported from 32 states,” including 25 hospitalizations and one death.

In 2018, there were a string of Salmonella infections linked to the consumption of turkeys, caused in part because the United States does not have laws requiring poultry to be free of salmonella. Consumers are encouraged to thoroughly cook poultry before serving it and to avoid washing it in areas like the sink, which can lead to the spread of bacteria.

Want to live longer? Cut the meat, pass the pasta

Food studies are notoriously difficult to do well, mainly because in order to get scientifically meaningful results, you need three elements: careful controls, long time spans, and a huge sample size. That’s why many food studies are done with animals instead of humans: you can feed a rat the same thing for a year, and observe its health, but it would be hard to do the same with a huge number of humans, who like to do normal human things like sneak cookies or binge-eat Ben & Jerry’s.

Remarkably, a sweeping new study checked all three of these research boxes. Researchers followed hundreds of thousands of people over 16 years to observe whether consuming more plant protein made for better health. The broad conclusion was that increasing plant-based protein in one’s diet is associated with lower mortality. But the co-authors’ remarks about what “plant-based protein” actually means are more interesting, both for our diets and for diet culture at large. 

“The association between plant protein intake and overall mortality was similar across the subgroups of smoking status, diabetes, fruit consumption, vitamin supplement use, and self-reported health status,” the study’s many co-authors wrote in the abstract to their article, which was published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). “Replacement of 3 percent energy from animal protein with plant protein was inversely associated with overall mortality (risk decreased 10 percent in both men and women) and cardiovascular disease mortality (11 percent lower risk in men and 12 percent lower risk in women).”

The authors added that the reduction in overall mortality could be mainly attributed to people who substituted egg protein with plant protein, which caused a 24 percent drop in men and a 21 percent drop in women — as well as those who used plant protein as a substitute for red meat protein, which caused a 13 percent drop in men and a 15 percent drop in women.

Because one of the key struggles facing any medical study is finding a sufficiently large group of participants, the sheer scope of the study published in JAMA — both in terms of how many people participated and how long the study itself was conducted — attests to its credibility. 

“The association between dietary protein sources and mortality has been examined in only a few population-based studies,” the authors wrote in the study, citing as some examples the Iowa Women’s Health Study and the Japan Public Health Center-Based Prospective Cohort Study.

They noted that their study included a baseline cohort of 566,398 participants whose diets were observed over a period of 16 years, during which nearly 78,000 of them died. More than 140,000 participants were excluded by the end for various reasons, leaving a final cohort of 416,104 individuals, including 237,036 men and 179,068 women, with median ages of 62.2 and 62.0 respectively. 

The data was culled from the US National Institutes of Health–AARP Diet and Health Study, which was held from 1995 to 2011.

The authors stressed that their findings are consistent with material in other scientific research about the potential benefits of plant-based diets.

“Considerable evidence has accumulated supporting a beneficial role for plant-based diets in the prevention of cardiovascular disease,” they explain. “Dietary plant protein has been associated with reduced cardiovascular disease risk factors.” 

They emphasized the benefits of eating “high-quality plant sources, including legumes, soy, nuts, and other foods” and noted that “higher red and processed meat consumption have been consistently associated with increased premature death.”

The moral seems to be that plant proteins are far better than egg or red meat proteins (in terms of reducing mortality and cardiovascular disease). Plant proteins include those derived from bread, cereal and pasta (all of which derive their protein from flour, which comes from plants like wheat). The conclusions run counter to recent diet trends that have demonized carbohydrate-heavy foods like pasta and bread.

There are non-medical reasons for transitioning from a meat-based diet to a plant-based alternative, too. The meat industry produces carbon emissions that significantly exacerbate the problem of man-made climate change. In addition, even if one is morally comfortable with eating animals, the conditions under which many animals are slaughtered are so cruel that they pose a moral issue in their own right. It is also inefficient to eat meat: Forty percent of the world’s land surface is currently used for food, with most of that going to feed cattle, chicken and pigs. There are also a number of diseases that are transmitted among animals in the meat industry, with companies frequently covering up outbreaks out of concern that publicity will cut into their profits.

“Black women are from the future”: Author says Black girls aren’t magic, but are ahead of their time

Black Girl Magic is a term that gets thrown around a lot when it comes to talking about Black women. As a Black man, I always saw it as a way to acknowledge the way that women like my grandma always found a way. They came through in the clutch and never let us down — even when we thought failure was the only option. For me, the term was the only way to explain how I was always in awe with what Black women had the amazing ability to accomplish, especially in racist, sexist America. I used Black Girl Magic to express endearment. I never thought about the pressure that the phrase puts on Black women, forcing them to go above and beyond in an unrealistic way –– until I read Shayla Lawson.

Lawson, lauded poet and author of “I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean” explains the origin of Black Girl Magic and the problematic expectations it puts on Black people in her new essay collection “This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope.” She summed it up on our recent “Salon Talks” episode, “We either have to be Black people that are in a very specific level of servitude, something that serves whiteness, picking up their packages or picking up their clothes off the floor after they’ve tried them on, or we have to be Oprah, we have to be a basketball player, we have to be Obama.” The book offers a rich, unique take on how Black women in particular have influenced pop culture and Lawson’s quirky, hilarious observations on politics and history through the lens of a young Black woman surviving in America. 

Watch Lawson join me on “Salon Talks” here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below, to hear about this personal, timely collection that she wrote for Black readers specifically. We also talk candidly about the diversity that exists inside of our own race and how movements like Black Lives Matter impact the definition of Blackness. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Congratulations on your new book “This Is Major.” It was fun to connect with your voice in the middle of all this depressing news that we’ve been consuming over the past four months with COVID and the murder of people that look like us being amplified at the highest level. Let me start with how have you been dealing with all this?

I’ve been managing. I’m trying to center as much positive energy around what it means to be Black as I possibly can. My last response to the Black Lives Matter movement was writing the “I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean” book. It was my way of looking at the conversation that we were having about Black people dying and centering our love. Just thinking about the fact that if we’re living in a time in which the archive of what happens to us revolves around what other people are doing, as opposed to the ways that we take care of ourselves with how we love each other, that I personally would be doing a disservice to the time and to the movement. It’s also interesting that this book is written and I wrote a book about Black women and the invisibility of Black women and how much we need to be protected. Now I’m living through a time in which I’m promoting it and those are some of the biggest issues that come up in my news feed every day.

People always ask me about Blackness and what does it mean to be Black or how does it feel? I feel like I’ve never give a satisfying answer because I don’t have anything to judge it against, like I wasn’t white three years ago.

Right.

I’m from Baltimore and I live in Baltimore, which means I literally just started meeting white people three or four years ago. I never have an answer for that, do you?

This is interesting because I actually did a project when I wrote my book “Pantone” and it’s about colors. One of the projects that I did with another artist, she is a Black woman who runs her own apothecary company, was we decided to think about the Black woman’s smell. What is it that Blackness smells like? When you asked me what is being Black like, the first thing that I came up with was the smell. I associate a lot of comfort. I associate a cool touch on the skin, humidity, smoke, a lot of warmth with the idea of being Black. When she and I first started working on a project, we were like, “Oh, what is a Black woman smell?” Cocoa butter and Blue Magic, we were going back into our childhood and going back to some things that were kind of stereotypes of what we are.

But I think what we are really is people who are still connected to the earth in a very particular way that are also struggling to maintain that connection, to maintain that rootedness. In spite of that, we’ve managed to keep ourselves centered in the ground. That’s something that I just feel really proud of. To be uprooted and be transported across the entire world without our will. What other culture can say that they’ve had that experience? Yet in every place that we have been put, we have managed to survive. In a lot of ways, we’ve managed to thrive and build really beautiful culture and build really beautiful ways of taking care of each other. We have a huge struggle and we are definitely under siege, but I’m just so awed by the beauty of how we keep it together.

I going to have to borrow from that. Now I have a more informed answer. Speaking on Blackness in general, I felt like in many ways, your book is a celebration of Blackness.

Yes.

With all of the different social movements happening right now from Me Too, Time’s Up, Black Lives Matter, which are trying to push society forward, do you feel as a writer like things are getting better for Black people and Black women in publishing?

I hope so. We’re going to see if so many of these people put their motivation behind the words that they’ve been putting out over the last few weeks. We’ve been seeing a lot of big companies making statements about their desire to make sure that in the future, they don’t continue to erase us. I’m still a bit skeptical. I’m hopeful.

A couple of years ago when I sold this book I in no way thought that a press like Harper Collins would want a story that I had to write about Black girls. I’m not famous. I wasn’t a super well-known writer, but they really were drawn to the way that I was telling a story. That made a difference to me in that it made me feel that perhaps things are changing, that there’ve been enough people who had paved the way.

I think one of the things that’s nice about what’s going on in my book is I read a lot of books in which what we had to do as Black people is write to someone else, write our stories to someone else. This book I’m really writing towards us. I’m really writing for us as opposed to about us. I wasn’t sure if that was something that was going to catch on, but I think especially in this particular time, we’re seeing a shift in understanding that it’s not the only way to sell a book to an audience is for a Black person to write to an audience that is outside of who we are.

You’re speaking in the language of Toni Morrison. And you actually open your book with a quote from her.

I do.

To quote Morrison, “Racists always try to make you think that they are the majority, but they never are.” Do you feel like these divisive times under this president are inspiring artists to fight this notion, or has it always been this way but now it’s being more amplified?

I think for me, a lot of the conversations that I’ve had with artists about this time and watching 45 get elected, was recognizing that one of the things through which he won was language and the use of language to promote fear. I think as a poet, one of the things that I’ve gotten a little bit lazy about is the economy of language. Being able to use less language to try and say bigger things. I realized that this wasn’t going to be a time for me to write poetry, because this language is being taken away, all this language around protection for the LGBTQ community. If all this language surrounding Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization, all that language is the way that this battle is going to be fought. I needed to be putting more of it out into the world. It made me expand into prose and to think of prose as a political activity, as an artist, a way to make sure that there’s more of the story that’s covered.

Poets write the best prose.

Well, thank you. You will probably make a lot of people angry by saying that.

They’ll be okay. I wish I would’ve sold my last two books after people started caring about us and the industry. I think we might be doing this Zoom interview from a yacht. So people always ask me about the audiences I write for and I normally say I write for people who are from the East side of Baltimore, because I live in this little bubble, but then I also would say you should read it too. Do you feel like you have it? Do you feel like you have an audience as you make this commitment to be able to tell these beautiful stories that you are ready to for Black people? Do you feel like there’s a bigger audience or have you been getting love from this book from a bigger audience?

I always say that I write for the future. I think that Black women are from the future. I’m very big fan of the idea of Afrofuturism and playing around with what time looks like. I think Black women have largely been ignored in the moment of time in which they do things. But then we see quite a bit later, that’s the time when we start talking about the contributions of Harriet Tubman, or I love seeing recently that they’re trying to make a statue to Marsha P. Johnson to honor her commitment to gay rights and Stonewall.

I think we’ve always lived like that as Black women, that we know we might not be appreciated in the moment, but it’s coming. Right now what’s been interesting has always kind of been the case with my writing is that it tends to find a non-Black audience first.

That has been a lot of the conversation that I’ve had about the book thus far. That was surprising to me because it is a very FUBU-type of book, but I’ve gotten a lot of responses, particularly from white women being like, “I really appreciated your take on this conversation because I felt like we were on a road trip and I was driving with you and listening to you tell your stories.” I’m looking forward to when it turns into a big brunch, an Oprah-style brunch, where it’s tons of brown-skin ladies who look a little bit more like me in our chiffon and we get to talk about it. I don’t know if COVID is going to let that happen.

We’ll keep our fingers crossed.

I think when I sat down to write the book, I was thinking a lot about Gen-Z-ers and I was thinking about what they would want to know about millennials, that they’re probably not understanding about who we are and the ways that we’ve had to engage this very particular conversation. I’m really proud of them. As a professor, I teach a lot of them and I wanted to write them in this way, where they had this intermediate step of what our coming into terms with our Blackness look like. Particularly when it comes to Black women and femmes.

In some of your essays in the book you write about, I don’t want to say awkward, but awkwardness, like the Twitter-famous essay is coming to mind. I remember you writing something about being a standout. Do you still feel that way?

Okay, the thing that’s interesting about the way that I wrote the book is that it’s less like a Black card conversation and more just like, “I’m a writer, so I’m weird and I’m always going to be weird.” I don’t always feel like I fit in, but one of the things about writing that’s been awesome is that I’ve met so many Black people who are unlike me. There’s enough of us. We’re our own cookout. Me hanging out with the standard fare family, if I think about going my family cookouts, I always felt a little bit out of place just because of my space as an observer. The fact that I was there watching all of these things and it was just me doing a different thing. What’s lovely about now and the reason why I don’t feel out of place is I can throw my own cookout full of people who are just as strange as me and who are all Black. I love that. I love that there’s so much more space now for us to be who we are.

It’s like we’re evolving as a people because you have things like Issa Rae’s “Insecure” on HBO and “Awkward Black Girl” where you have all of these different cultures evolving in these spaces. We didn’t have that coming up.

No.

Either you were cool or not. There was no space for you to have a community in the middle.

That’s why the internet has been so important. Social media has been so important for Black people, but one of the things that I find as somebody who used to work in social media, is the inherent tendency for whiteness to want to co-opt that and turn it into something that they can sell and to commodify and manufacturer. It’s an ongoing struggle when it comes to Blackness, the idea that my Blackness was sold back to me in the form of the way that I was told I needed to operate on social media.

That felt a lot like when I was trying to fit into an HBCU crowd, as somebody who went to a regular a** state college. It’s a struggle that has been put in front of us, where there’s always a way that we need to achieve at being better at being Black people. I love the fact that we’re taking that back and we’re saying we are doing the fine a** job of being the Black people that we are. This is who we are, if I’m Black and this is what you see and all my friends are like me, that’s because what we are. We cosplay, we ate kale, we do yoga. We love our comic books. We love all the things. We love our bicycles. We love our pets. For so long, I just felt like what was sold to me is the idea of you can be a cool Black person or you can do this stuff that you’re into. Now they’re the same, it’s the same thing. I love it.

No group of Black people have a monopoly on Blackness, but the internet would kind of have you fooled. Like I said, I’m from Baltimore and I’m from public housing. When the whole Black Lives Matter conversation, when it first started happening after Trayvon died and then blowing up even more after Mike Brown died, people was in my neighborhood were talking about Black Lives Matter. I was in the middle of a group of guys and I had never heard of that. At that particular time, if you wasn’t tapped into that portion of Black Twitter, you had no access to that movement. A lot of people around that time didn’t have smart phones or Twitter accounts. It’s good that these stories are being out there so we can see the diversity that exists inside of our own race.

I think what’s so cool about what you just said, that’s neat, is just thinking about what we manage, what we as Black people, what the Black Lives Matter movement managed to do in a matter of years with technology. The Black Lives Matter movement made the progress that it did largely by becoming more visible in the technological space, in a social media space, than just on the ground. Now we’re seeing in this new iteration, we see protests all over the world that are happening. That’s something that I’m really proud of too. Because growing up, I just remember the ways that people were like, “Black people can’t use computers, Black people don’t know how to use computers,” and we had so much less access to these tools, but we’re using them for revolutionary purposes in addition to being able to find each other. It’s just, it’s really dope. I’m really, really proud and really excited.

Mistaken identity has been a part of your journey. You look nothing like Whoopi Goldberg, but you got Whoopi Goldberg. At least she’s a millionaire.

It’s true. It’s funny because I love having this conversation with Black people because I definitely run into people who think I’m the maid or people think I work there. “Excuse me, Miss, could you get this in my size?” Then the other side of that is the people – I talked to some other friends about it as well and how they end up in these situation, we’re just doing something normal, like going to the CVS or whatever and some white people becomes convinced, “Oh my God, I just had a celebrity sighting,” and then get mad at you when they realized I’m not famous but I’m still a person, “But you’re not famous. I said, hi to you. It was not worth it.” But you need to do all that? We need to go through all that when you make a mistake?

I think that it’s a really important thing for us to look at on both ends that we can’t just be normal Black people. We either have to be Black people that are in a very specific level of servitude, something that serves whiteness, picking up their packages or picking up their clothes off the floor after they’ve tried them on or we have to be Oprah, we have to be a basketball player. We have to be Obama. Those are the only two ways that white people think that they encounter us as opposed to us just being the same as them in which we have a diaspora, a strata in which we are everywhere.

That gets so dangerous because at the end of the day, I use that story in the book to talk about artificial intelligence and how we’re coding those same expectations in artificial intelligence. When they’re using AI software, for instance, to filter through job applications. How they started filtering out dark-skinned people and women for lower caste jobs, because that was the only place that they were showing up in the system that was entered into. Then when they start using these identification systems to find criminals, we know how well America has done with mistaken identity just on its own accord when it comes to Black men. Now to have these AI systems in which they have encoded the same prejudices, they are now saying that this computer is more accurate because a computer, it can’t be biased.

Without actually looking at what machine learning is, machines learn from us. If we are biased, we encode that bias on the machines. Machines have a much harder time seeing a dark-skinned women than anybody else. Comparatively for dark-skinned men, there’s a 98% accuracy, 99% for light-skinned women, 100% for light-skinned men but then there’s an 86%. We got a 14%margin of error when it comes to identifying dark-skinned women. A lot of times we get identified as being male, which just goes back to this ongoing stigma of the strong Black women and Black women not really being women. In these machines Michelle Obama gets listed as a man wearing a toupee. You can see how it’s an encoding of our inherent, this ongoing conversation we have as Black people to fight the idea that we’re people, now showing up in machines.

In that same chapter, you talk about someone mistaking your mom for Oprah and then touching her, which is extremely problematic. Why do people have a problem with their hands? What does that come from?

That’s where we get that whole conversation with Black women and “Don’t touch my hair,” is because people still treat our bodies like they own us. I’ve had all sorts of strangers grab me in public places and then get upset with me when I have a problem with that. To think about that man grabbing my mom’s wrist because he thought she was Oprah. When would you be in a position to grab Oprah’s wrist? When are you going to be close enough to Oprah where you can just grab her, so that she can take a picture of you? It’s a very different way of thinking about personhood. You have to not think about me as the same status of person that you think about yourself if you think it’s okay to touch my body. I think particularly when it comes to Black women and femmes, there’s this level of ownership that people think that they have. Because we’re dealing with the racism and the misogyny and it’s really dangerous. I can talk of the book, how we need to start looking at that as assault.

We get really touchy about how we can use the word assault in common language. If somebody feels comfortable touching you and you don’t want it, and it puts you in danger or a threat, it puts you in a situation in which you are worried, because at the time in the story, my mom was holding the hand of my 4-year-old sister. Then a grown man puts his arm on my mom’s wrist. What is that other than assault? “Oh, I just made a mistake.” Well, what was a mistake? Was the mistake that my mom wasn’t Oprah or was the mistake that you should never put your hands on somebody you don’t know?

One of my favorite chapters was “Black Girl Magic.” Explain it to our viewers and Black Girl Magic as society sees it and then the reality of what it creates.

I start the chapter of Black Girl Magic by saying, “Uh-uh no, not a thing.” The reason why is because I wanted to explore another side of what the idea of Black Girl Magic is, CaShawn Thompson, the woman who started Black Girl Magic, she started it with the #Blackgirlsaremagic. It was about Black women being out and being praised for the things that they do. One of the things that concerns me about the distillation of that into Black Girl Magic is how much that fits into the magical Negro archetype. That in order for Black girls to be paid attention to, they need to be superhuman. They need to be special. They need to be magical. We’ve seen how much that has been a problem throughout history, when it comes to the Black body and the experience. We have the magical Negro archetype as something that affects both Black men and women.

I just looked at it from the particular standpoint of Black Girl Magic and thought about the Hottentot Venus and the ways that they exploited her was to tell her that her body was magic. I thought about Marie Laveau and how Marie Laveau was this insanely smart entrepreneurial business woman, but she’s recorded in history as being the voodoo queen. She never even professed to practicing voodoo, but this is the ways that they looked at her and her spirituality, as a Black woman, who became a really famous pastor during the time. I looked at Tituba who wasn’t necessarily even on record as a Black person. If we go back into the historical record, she was both Caribbean and Indigenous. But then when we take the Salem Witch trials and we turn it into this commodified image, all of a sudden she comes a Black woman, she becomes the Black witch of Salem. She was neither a practicer of voodoo of any kind of divination or necessarily somebody who thought of herself as Black. Yet in order to save herself, she had to look at the two things that white people saw her as and say, “Yes, you know what? I am a Black woman, because I’m a Black woman, I know how to do voodoo. If you don’t save me, then Satan has told me to destroy the whole town.” Because of that, she had saved her life.

That’s something that I find interesting too, how often that Black Girl Magic is a vehicle for self-preservation. That sometimes we have to make ourselves look magic to people so that they won’t hurt us. That’s why I want us to explore it a little bit deeper. I’m really proud of how magic Black girls are and the things that we managed to accomplish that just seemed like it would be impossible for me to be done. There’s an optimism in Black Girl Magic, but I also think it’s good for us to look at historically what it’s meant when white people want to tell us that we’re magic with the things that we do.

“Passion and anger without a strategy is called frustration”: Bill Duke on positive systemic change

Do actors and other artists have a special obligation to society as truth-tellers and activists?

Moreover, do successful Black and brown actors and other members of marginalized groups have an even greater obligation to speak truth to power and by doing so to help empower their communities?

These questions are made even more important during the Age of Trump, which is a moment when the United States is besieged by a white neo-fascist movement, a counter-revolution against the civil rights movement, a pandemic made worse by a willfully negligent regime, economic collapse and growing social inequality, militarized police, global climate disaster, and many other crises.

In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with actor, screenwriter, producer, and director Bill Duke. During his five-decade career he has appeared in many films including “Menace II Society,” the 1980s action film classic “Predator,” and as “Agent Percy Odell” in the ongoing TV series “Black Lightning.” Duke’s directing credits include “Deep Cover,” “A Rage in Harlem,” and “Hoodlum.”

He is also the founder of the Duke Media Foundation, an organization that prepares young people for careers in television, film, and video production.

Duke spoke to Salon in conjunction with the release of the 4K restored version of his acclaimed 1984 film “The Killing Floor.” In the conversation, he reflects on the personal and professional choice – and the cost that comes with it – of his being a truth-teller about race, Hollywood and society. He also shares his thoughts on the George Floyd protests and this moment of social activism and what should come next in terms of creating substantive positive social change in America. Duke also explains why “The Killing Floor” and its story about the Red Summer of 1919, the labor movement, and white on black racial pogroms and other terrorism still resonates today in the Age of Trump.

Moreover, Duke offers insights about the allure of fame and how he has maintained his dignity, humility, and self-respect as a Black man in Hollywood.

Given all that is happening in the Age of Trump with the pandemic, economic collapse, and his presidency and what it has wrought more generally, could you have made this up? It is unbelievable, like a horrible story sitting in the reject pile at a movie studio or book publisher. 

No, it would be a horror film, and nobody would believe it.  

One of the reasons I have such great respect for you and your work is that as an actor who happens to be Black you could have easily chosen to be quiet, not told inconvenient truths, and just played it safe – and made lots more money doing so. Telling the truth about society is a great risk in Hollywood – especially for a Black person.

It’s not easy because you do pay a price for it. I don’t work as much as I’d like sometimes because people take my candor and telling the truth as being some type of intimidation. But I choose to share how I feel. If you keep that energy in it hurts your health because you are not being true to yourself.

As a country and a people we are in the midst of a perilous and challenging time – but one with great potential for positive change. Watching the George Floyd protests I saw something beautiful. There were Black, white, brown, old and young folks standing up for what is right and risking their lives.

God bless them for it. To do what they did took courage. But now what must happen with the protests is that there must be a strategy. Passion and anger without a strategy is called frustration. We cannot play checkers in a chess game. What are you going to replace the existing system with? How are you going to come up with a comprehensive solution?

What of actors and others in Hollywood – especially Black and brown folks – who are able to use their money and resources to help create positive social change? What is involved in deciding to be public with one’s politics versus working in private and behind the scenes to create positive change in society? There are merits to both approaches.

It is a matter of individual choice because there are consequences either way. If a person is not vociferous and outgoing or inclined towards those traits, speaking out may not be something they do well or desire. So, if you want to help with a cause then you support organizations, you give money, you give advice, you give whatever you can. Other people are the spokespersons. They are leaders in the sense that they want to have a public presence, they’re eloquent, they’re clear, they’re decisive. They have not only ideas but strategies, so they choose to speak out about a given political or social cause. Both approaches, both the more overt and the behind the scenes, have validity and utility.

Given the state of the world, how are you managing your emotions on the day-to-day?

One of the things I had to do is to get past my anger and frustration. The deaths of these young people and even older people are horrible. Of course, not all police officers are bad, but there are some narcissistic sociopaths who do bad things against the public. I am very angry and upset with those police. But again, my question is, what are we going to do as a society in terms of solutions? What are we as a country going to do to make positive systemic change and not just superficial improvements?

You always possess such dignity and presence in your performances. 

There are a lot of roles that I’ve turned down because the images presented by those roles do not present Black people in a good light. The roles were negative and stereotypical. I am not interested in playing such characters. I prefer to continue to present our full humanity as Black people. Black men are not these unconscious beasts that just commit crimes, and are bad to women, and are hostile and angry, and uneducated.

You have played very memorable characters in such films as “Menace II Society,” “Predator,” and others. Why do some characters endure over time and others are forgettable?

When you read a script, you understand not only what it’s about but who you are as a character in it. What can you bring to the role as talent? What part of your humanity can you bring to that human being? Let’s say you play a bad guy. In that role as an actor you should not think of yourself as playing the villain. For example, my character Agent Percy Odell in the “Black Lightning” television series does not think of himself as a villain. What does Odell think about himself? Odell does not care that about your feelings. Odell works for the government. He loves his country. He is hired to protect it against people who might in any way be subversive. In his mind, as long as Odell does his job, he does not care what anyone else thinks. If a subversive person has to be dealt with then they have to go. Those subversives are dangerous and a threat to the public.

How hard it is to make a living as a working actor? How does one work through – especially as a non-white person in Hollywood – the dilemma of, “I may have to take this role to eat and keep a roof over my head, even though it lacks any dignity.” What’s that thought process like?

If your passion is acting, and you have three children that you must feed and then send off to college then you have a lot of concerns to weigh. You have your self-respect and your integrity – but you are also a father and a husband. How do you weigh that? How do you balance it? And sometimes you make sacrifices on both sides. Such a balancing act and burden are not easy.

You have managed to remain grounded and humble. How do folks get seduced by stardom?

If a person has no understanding of who they are as a human being then all they have is the superficial. The more accolades you get, and the more money you make, and the more famous you are, that becomes your identity because you are not dealing with the core issue of who you are as a human being. Outside of your fame, what makes you happy? And some people are afraid of love, commitment, family, and relationships. Because of that fear they rely more on their fame and their public recognition.

Fame is okay, but when you’re sick in your bed, and you need somebody to help you, you can’t call on fans, you know? What kind of relationship did you build with other people who would care enough about you to help you when you are sick? In a crisis? Vulnerable? Everyone’s sick day is coming. We will all need help at some point in our lives.

As Faulkner observed, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” Your 1984 film “The Killing Floor” resonates today. It is about the Red Summer and white riots against Black people in 1919. But with Donald Trump and his movement and the racism and violence he has spawned and channeled – and of course the recent rally in Tulsa – the film speaks to the present in a very ominous way.

Unfortunately, you’re right. One of the major things about the movie that I love is how in the beginning the movie was about inequality and race along the lines of who was in the labor union and who was not. At the end, people came together across the color line in pursuit of a common cause for justice and human rights as workers. That reflects my core belief that we are all human beings and once we get past racism and other forms of ignorance and bad behavior, we are all, whatever our color, human beings.

Of course, we should always recognize our heroes as Black people – they brought us through Jim Crow segregation and slavery. Such people are the heroes of my life.

There are so many great performances in “The Killing Floor” where you see the humanity of Black people in our struggle and the ups and downs of our lives. There was so much dignity in the film and those little moments where the Black Freedom Struggle and day-to-day resistance and life is presented with such verisimilitude and sincerity. How did you get those performances?

I was very fortunate to have great actors working on a low budget PBS project. But when folks read the script for “The Killing Floor” they could really relate to the project. The great Moses Gunn, he was one of my favorite people and favorite actors. Gunn really was one of the best ever. Alfre Woodard was also in the film. We were so very fortunate to have amazingly talented people who were committed to the cause of the script.

Thinking about the white on Black pogroms and other terrorism in Tulsa and Chicago and other parts of America during the early 20th century, there is little public discussion of how Black people fought back. In Tulsa, Chicago, and other parts of the country Black World War One combat veterans took a leading role in Black self-defense. In “The Killing Floor” those moments were so powerful. Those Black World War One vets were truly men of bronze.

Having those Black men stand up for their communities was one of my favorite scenes in the movie.

How do you get that quiet dignity and pride in being Black men who are protecting their families and communities out of the performers? None if was overly dramatic and hyper-masculine. Those brothers were not caricatures.

I asked them a question. I said to them, “How many of you have children? Raise your hands. How many of you love your wife, your children? Raise your hands.” Then I said, “Okay, gentlemen, what would you do if someone was threatening to take the lives of your wife and your children?” And that emotion is easy to get to because each one of them didn’t say a thing in response. They just looked at me like, “You know what I would do.” You see, when you come to the understanding that someone is threatening the people that you love, and you’re a man, and your manhood is determined by how you respond to that situation then something happens. Those questions helped to channel the energy in those scenes.

Your career has spanned some five decades as both an actor and a director. What advice would you give to a young director?

If you are going to be a director you must really understand the craft of directing. Directing has two components. One is the aesthetic, where you sit down with the writer, you come up with a vision of the script that you have to translate to sometimes a hundred people or more. The second part is management. This involves three things: time, people, and money. You can be a very creative person. But if you cannot manage time, people, and money, then you may not work as a director very much because you are not making the investors their money back with a profit.

And I used to think very badly of that because I thought, “Wow, I’m an artist.” So I went to my agent one day and talked about it. I said, “I go into these meetings. They tell me how much they like the project, but I never hear from them again.” My agent then said to me, “Hey, Bill, did you answer the essential question that was on their minds in the first five minutes of your pitch?” And I said, “What question is that?” He said, “Bill, here’s what they want to know. Outside of your passion, how in the hell you going to make them their money back? I know you may not agree with it, but if somebody asks you for $5 million, wouldn’t you want to know that, too?”

It isn’t charity.

No, it’s not charity my brother. It’s not charity at all.

Being a child of the 1980s, “Predator” is one of my favorite films. Why do you think “Predator” endures as a film all these years later?  

We had a great director and great actors who came together as a collaborative team. John McTiernan, is an amazing filmmaker. His mastery of visual storytelling is something that most directors do not possess. The storyline of these brothers on a mission is compelling. Arnold Schwarzenegger was great. He was humble and every day he came to work with 100% focus and energy. No ego. Just doing the best he could. There were so many elements which made “Predator” a success and a true classic.

“The Killing Floor” in 4K is now available and is being screened online and in select theaters.

Trump administration poised to deploy feds to more US cities as tensions in Portland boil over

The Trump administration is poised to expand the deployment of federal authorities to more U.S. cities, even though elected officials have blamed their presence for inflaming confrontations with protesters in Portland.

Federal officers have been recorded snatching protesters off the streets into unmarked vans in Portland, severely injuring protesters with non-lethal munitions, firing tear gas in defiance of a state ban, unleashing a flashbang on a group of mothers that formed a human wall to protect protesters and beating a Navy veteran who tried to remind the officers of their oath.

The officers, who were ostensibly deployed to protect federal property, are not trained to deal with mass demonstrations, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times. They have been filmed confronting protesters who are not on federal property. City and state leaders have condemned the violence and demanded that the administration withdraw its forces.

But White House chief of staff Mark Meadows announced Sunday that the administration was instead preparing to expand its deployment to even more cities headed by Democrats.

“You’ll see something rolled out this week as we start to go in and make sure that the communities — whether it’s Chicago, or Portland, or Milwaukee or someplace across the heartland — we need to make sure their communities are safe,” he told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.

Meadows did not elaborate on what he meant by his comment, but CBS News reported that the Trump administration planned to send 175 federal officers to cities run by Democratic mayors to “assist local police with what they call unrest.”

The Trump administration has cited the president’s June 26 executive order to protect federal property and statues to justify the situation in Portland. But Meadows suggested that the administration may try to expand its legal authority to grow the federal presence in cities.

“The statues are one thing, but it’s really about keeping out communities safe,” Meadows said, “and the president is committed to do that.”

Top Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli told CNN that the officers were deployed to Portland after July 4 upon receiving “locally generated” intelligence on “planned attacks” on federal buildings.

“If we get the same kind of intelligence” in other cities, Cuccinelli said, “we would respond the same way.”

“This is a posture we intend to continue not just in Portland, but in any of the facilities that we’re responsible for around the country,” he said in another interview with NPR.

But Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat, said the protests were losing steam before the federal deployment blew up tensions “like a powder keg.”

“The president has a complete misunderstanding of cause and effect,” Wheeler told NBC News. “What’s happening here is we have dozens, if not hundreds of federal troops, descending upon our city. And what they’re doing is they are sharply escalating the situation. Their presence here is actually leading to more violence and more vandalism, and it’s not helping the situation at all. They’re not wanted here. We haven’t asked them here. In fact, we want them to leave.”

The officers were reportedly part of Customer and Border Protection and the U.S. Marshals Service. Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum sued both agencies on Friday, seeking a temporary restraining order to “immediately stop federal authorities from unlawfully detaining Oregonians.”

“The current escalation of fear and violence in downtown Portland is being driven by federal law enforcement tactics that are entirely unnecessary,” Rosenblum said in a statement.

The American Civil Liberties Union also sued the Trump administration to “block federal law enforcement from dispersing, arresting, threatening to arrest or using physical force against journalists or legal observers.”

“Under the direction of the Trump administration, federal agents are terrorizing the community, risking lives and brutally attacking protesters demonstrating against police brutality,” Kelly Simon of the Oregon ACLU said. “This is police escalation on top of police escalation.”

Three House committees also called on the inspector generals at the Justice and Homeland Security departments to investigate whether the authorities had abused their power.

“The legal basis for this use of force has never been explained — and, frankly, it is not at all clear that the attorney general and the acting secretary are authorized to deploy federal law enforcement officers in this manner,” the letter said. “The attorney general of the United States does not have unfettered authority to direct thousands of federal law enforcement personnel to arrest and detain American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Trump argued on Twitter that he was “trying to help Portland, not hurt it.”

“Their leadership has, for months, lost control of the anarchists and agitators. They are missing in action. We must protect Federal property, AND OUR PEOPLE,” he tweeted.

In another tweet, he hinted at expanding the deployment.

“Look at Portland, where the pols are just fine with 50 days of anarchy. We sent in help. Look at New York, Chicago, Philadelphia. NO!” he wrote.

“They’re Democrat-run cities, they are liberally run,” he added in an interview with Fox News. “They are stupidly run.”

But Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, said the federal presence was only “adding gasoline to the fire.”

“The Trump administration needs to stop playing politics with people’s lives,” she said Sunday. “We don’t have a secret police in this country. This is not a dictatorship. And Trump needs to get his officers off the streets.”

“Unidentified stormtroopers. Unmarked cars. Kidnapping protesters and causing severe injuries in response to graffiti. These are not the actions of a democratic republic,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said. DHS “actions in Portland undermine its mission. Trump & his stormtroopers must be stopped.”

Maxine Waters intervenes after seeing a Black driver pulled over by LAPD: “They stopped a brother”

Rep. Maxine Waters of California has been speaking out about criminal justice for decades, going back to her years in the California State Assembly. Waters, now 81, has continued to speak out following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 — and the congresswoman made her presence felt over the weekend when she stopped her SUV and got out after seeing a Black man who had been pulled over by Los Angeles Police Department officers.

Another observer was using a cell phone to film the incident, and a video shows Waters saying, “They stopped a brother. So, I stopped to see what they (the LAPD) were doing.”

Waters said of the LAPD officers, “They say I’m in the wrong place . . . They’re going to give me a ticket, but that’s OK, as long as I watch them.”

In the video, an observer told Waters, “You gotta do what you gotta do. Make sure” — and she responded, “I will.”

Waters, originally from St. Louis, served in the California State Assembly from 1976-1990 and was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990. Following the blue wave in the House in the 2018 midterms, Waters was appointed chair of the House Financial Services Committee.

Trump working with Bush torture lawyer to cut Congress out of lawmaking: report

President Donald Trump suggested in a Fox News Sunday interview that he planned to act beyond his legal authority to implement sweeping changes to immigration and health care policies based on an interpretation of a recent Supreme Court ruling granting him “powers that nobody thought the president had.”

Axios reported that the legally precarious strategy, which cuts Congress out of the lawmaking process, relies on a theory of executive power floated in June by John Yoo, the George W. Bush administration lawyer who drafted the memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation technique.

The first of the controversial orders will cover immigration, per Axios. Trump told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace that he would also invoke the authority to create “a full and complete health care plan.”

You heard me yesterday. We’re signing a health care plan within two weeks — a full and complete health care plan that the Supreme Court decision on DACA gave me the right to do. So we’re going to solve — we’re going to sign an immigration plan, a health care plan and various other plans. And nobody will have done what I’m doing in the next four weeks.

The Supreme Court gave the president of the United States powers that nobody thought the president had by approving, by doing what they did — their decision on DACA. And DACA’s going to be taken care of also. But we’re getting rid of it, because we’re going to replace it with something much better. What we got rid of already, which was most of Obamacare —  the individual mandate. And that I’ve already won on. And we won also on the Supreme Court. But the decision by the Supreme Court on DACA allows me to do things on immigration, on health care, on other things that we’ve never done before. And you’re going to find it to be a very exciting two weeks.

Yoo argued in a National Review article that a recent Supreme Court decision upholding the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program empowered the president to bypass Congress through prosecutorial discretion: choosing not to enforce federal laws.

While the orders may be illegal, Trump would likely be able to run out the clock in the courts until Election Day, according to Yoo. It would also create legacy headaches for any successor, who would have to enforce the laws unless and until the courts overturn them, Yoo claimed.

“Suppose President Donald Trump decided to create a nationwide right to carry guns openly,” Yoo wrote. “He could declare that he would not enforce federal firearms laws, and that a new ‘Trump permit’ would free any holder of state and local gun-control restrictions.”

“Even if Trump knew that his scheme lacked legal authority, he could get away with it for the length of his presidency,” he added. “And, moreover, even if courts declared the permit illegal, his successor would have to keep enforcing the program for another year or two.”

“According to Chief Justice Roberts, the Constitution makes it easy for presidents to violate the law, but reversing such violations difficult — especially for their successors,” he concluded.

Yoo is most famous for what has become known as the “torture memo,” which justified the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding via a constitutional reading called “the unitary executive theory.”

As the theory goes, in wartime a president can exercise virtually unlimited authority, which can only be checked by Congress’ spending power. Because the “war on terror” might not have a definitive end, the president would have nearly dictatorial power in this realm for the foreseeable future, including deploying federal troops for police actions and suspending the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

Axios reported that Yoo’s article has been spotted on Trump’s desk, and the president had brought it up in meetings with aides. Yoo told the outlet that he had discussed the theory with White House aides in recent virtual meetings.

When Trump first mentioned the plan, in a recent Telemundo interview, he drew fire from within the Republican tent. Not only would the order include DACA, which the administration just spent years fighting to overturn, Trump claimed it would also create a path to citizenship, as well.

“I’m going to make DACA a part of it,” said the president. “We’re going to have a road to citizenship.”

The White House immediately walked back that claim, which runs the risk of alienating GOP immigration hawks, as well as the anti-immigrant base which carried Trump through the 2016 primaries and general election.

“This does not include amnesty,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement.

Fellow Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas quickly tweeted that “it would be a HUGE mistake if Trump tries to illegally expand amnesty.”

“There is ZERO constitutional authority for a President to create a ‘road to citizenship” by executive fiat,” he wrote.

At the same time, Trump said he would change over to a merit-based immigration system, as opposed to one based on family connections, something which anti-immigration hardliners like senior White House adviser Stephen Miller have wanted for years.

Under Trump’s earlier “merit-based” proposal, immigrants would be selected through a point-based system, which scores for “extraordinary talent, professional and specialized vocations and exceptional academic track records.” However, the Republican-led Senate was not on board.

In 2018, Trump offered a path to citizenship as a concession to get Congress to authorize $25 billion for his wall along the Mexican border, but lawmakers balked. In 2019, the Democratic-led House passed a bill which would allow Dreamers to apply for citizenship, but the Senate still has not voted on it. The White House said at the time that Trump would veto such a bill.

It was not immediately clear how Trump would craft such an executive order to create a health care plan. He made the “repeal and replace” of Obamacare a cornerstone of his 2016 campaign, but all efforts to secure enough Republican votes in Congress failed.

FBI says private equity, hedge funds pose huge risk for money laundering

A leaked document reveals that the Federal Bureau of Investigation fears that the investment funds industry is a ripe target for money launderers, and could be a ticking time bomb in the private equity and the hedge fund sector. 

The leaked intelligence bulletin from Blue Leaks, according to a story broken by Reuters, was published in May under the title “Threat Actors Likely Use Private Investment Funds To Launder Money, Circumventing Regulatory Tripwires,” the FBI wrote that it has “high confidence” that “threat actors” could use “the private placement of funds, including investments offered by hedge funds and private equity firms, to launder money, circumventing traditional anti-money laundering programs.” The term “threat actors” refers to both hostile foreign powers and criminals attempting to make money.

The FBI notes that government law enforcement and watchdog agencies aren’t up to the task to suss out money laundering through the finance system in this way. “AML [anti-money laundering] programs are not adequately designed to monitor and detect threat actors’ use of private investment funds to launder money,” the report notes.

A hedge fund is a type of investment fund in which the managers trade in relatively liquid assets (or assets that can be bought and sold without a drastic change in their price) using various complicated techniques. Hedge fund management tends to be lucrative, regardless of whether an individual manager is actually successful, because the standard fee arrangement in the hedge fund industry is something known as “2 and 20.” Under that system, hedge fund managers take two percent of the money put up by an individual wealthy client, regardless of whether they successfully turn a profit off of those investments. When the investments are profitable, they then reap an additional 20 percent of those profits.

Private equities are another type of investment fund. Whereas hedge funds trade in relatively liquid assets, however, private equities purchase and restructure companies which are not being publicly traded through methods such as leveraged buyouts, mezzanine capital, growth capital, venture capital and distressed investments. Private equities are controversial because they often inflate fees and expenses charged to companies in which they hold stakes, which means private equities can hurt individuals whose pension plans are invested in them or whose jobs depend on them through fee arrangements that allow the managers to make billions at the investees’ expense.

Hedge funds and private equity firms operate in a regulatory gray area, which makes them vulnerable to criminality, the FBI claimed: “Hedge funds and private equity firms receive funds from entities registered in nations that maintain laws conducive to masking underlying beneficial owners, thereby making it harder for US financial institutions and regulators to determine the source of funding.”

The report added that “hedge funds and private equity firms have been used to facilitate transactions in support of fraud, transnational organized crime, and sanctions evasion.” It cited as specific alleged examples a former partner at a major American law firm who “assisted others in laundering more than $400 million from a fraudulent cryptocurrency investment scheme,” a representative from a hedge fund based in London and New York who “proposed investing in private placement funds and using a series of shell corporations to purchase and sell prohibited items from sanctioned countries to the United States,” a Mexican cartel operating in southern California which “recruited and paid individuals to open hedge fund accounts at private banking institutions” and “a New York-based private equity firm [which] received more than $100 million in wire transfers from an identified Russia-based company allegedly associated with Russian organized crime.”

Hedge funds and private equities have been associated with a wide range of criminal behavior. Bernie Madoff, who was responsible for a $64.8 billion financial fraud that was exposed in 2008, ran a scam that involved feeder funds, which sends money to hedge funds that make investment decisions. Hedge funds have been previously criticized for not being required to fight money laundering. As Clark Gascoigne, deputy director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, told ProPublica last year: “You’ve got several trillion dollars, the management of which nobody is required to ask any questions about where that money is coming from. This is very problematic.”

There are also occasions when hedge funds profit from a company’s failure: Empty creditors, or people who can be made whole through or even profit from credit default swaps, frequently have a financial incentive to let companies like the global tour operator Thomas Cook crash and burn, rather than try to save them.

Private equities are also rife with controversy. Last month President Donald Trump’s administration allowed large managers of 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts (IRAs) to put workers’ retirement savings into private equity investments. Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), warned that American workers have “socked away $6.2 trillion in 401(k) accounts and another $2.5 trillion in IRA accounts,” meaning that “if just 5 percent of the money in these retirement funds were available to private equity, it would be a windfall of $435 billion — real money even to private equity millionaires and billionaires.” Private equity firms have also been connected with the downfall of companies like Toys R’ Us, RadioShack, Deadspin, Shopko and Payless Shoes.

Desperate to hide the numbers, Trump declares all-out war on testing

In her tell-all book about being Donald Trump’s niece, “Too Much and Never Enough“, psychologist Mary Trump tells a story of how her grandfather and the president’s father, Fred Trump, would handle it when his tenants wanted the basic landlord services they were entitled to. 

When one tenant repeatedly called the office to report a lack of heat, Fred paid him a visit. After knocking on the door, he removed his suit jacket, something he usually did only right before getting into bed. Once inside the apartment, which was indeed cold, he rolled up his shirtsleeves (again, something he rarely did) and told his tenant that he didn’t know what they were complaining about. “It’s like the tropics in here,” he told them. 

Donald Trump clearly learned the art of gaslighting from his dear ol’ dad, a man so mean-spirited and racist that Woody Guthrie wrote a diss track about him. This belief, that any inconvenient or unflattering fact should be dealt with by pretending it doesn’t exist, is the closest thing Trump has to a guiding philosophy. So it’s no surprise that as coronavirus cases are rising around the country, due primarily to Trump’s own incompetence and malice, his strategy is to simply deny that the virus is a serious threat and do whatever he can to hide the evidence contradicting his lies. 

This weekend, what was long suspected became undeniable: Trump believes he can make this coronavirus problem go away by hiding the evidence. 

Fox News aired Chris Wallace’s interview with Trump on Sunday that was yet another Trumpian train wreck, despite being conducted for a network that primarily serves these days as a spin factory for the Trump administration. Trump tried to brag about passing a cognitive test, implying it was a difficult task, even though, as Wallace noted, it’s mostly consisted of tasks like correctly identifying a picture of an elephant and subtracting 7 from 100. Trump also indicated pretty clearly that he has no intention of accepting defeat in the November election, having already set up the conspiracy theory about mail-in voting that he intends to use as justification for refusing to leave office. 

But the most immediate point of concern was that Trump demonstrated once again that he is fully committed to hiding the extent of the coronavirus pandemic by juking the stats. 

After being shown a chart by Wallace that indicates the rapid rise of viral contagion — a direct result of Trump not simply mismanaging the response but actively interfering with efforts by other officials to slow the spread — the president got defensive. 

“If we didn’t test, you wouldn’t be able to show that chart. If we tested half as much, those numbers would be down,” Trump argued. 

This is both an echo and an escalation of the argument Trump has made since the beginning of the pandemic, which is that no one would even know about coronavirus if we didn’t test for it, and that testing is not an urgent matter of public health, but a conspiracy to tank his chances of re-election.

The problem with this argument, of course, is that even without testing, people are still getting visibly sick and requiring hospitalization at rates so high that ICUs in some areas are being overwhelmed. Furthermore, the death rates are once again rising sharply, as all sensible people knew they would, some weeks after the case load started rising again. Even China, the authoritarian state where the virus started, found that their notoriously effective methods of censorship and controlling information were not enough to conceal the masses of bodies piling up and the overflowing hospitals. 

But Trump is nothing if not famously certain that he’s the best at everything, no matter how little he knows about any given topic. So after months of Trump telling us that he feels the best way to deal with the coronavirus epidemic is by staging a massive cover-up, his administration is making moves to turn those wishes into reality. 

On Saturday, reports emerged that the White House is trying to force Congress to remove provisions from the next coronavirus relief bill that would provide funding to states to continue virus testing. The administration is also trying to block funding for CDC and Pentagon efforts to research and contain the virus. 

This report comes on the heels of other reports suggesting that the Trump administration is trying to force hospitals to stop reporting cases to the CDC, and instead wants them to report directly to a program at the Department of Health and Human Services, which will not make the data publicly available in the same way that the CDC does. Reporting about this focused on health officials reeling “concerned” that this was about Trump trying to hide the extent of the pandemic. In light of his public comments and other efforts to prevent testing and data collection, it’s safe to say that’s by far the likeliest explanation. 

Trump’s gaslighting strategy, learned from his father and employed throughout his life, has largely worked for him. It worked to cover up his extensive collusion with a Russian conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election on his behalf. It worked when Trump was impeached for trying to blackmail the Ukrainian president into helping him cheat in the 2020 election, giving Senate Republicans just enough cover to justify voting not to remove him from office. Trump’s gaslighting has worked when it comes to his blatant embezzlement of both taxpayer funds and campaign donations. 

This strategy works not by actually convincing people to believe Trump’s lies, which now average about 12 a day. Rather, it works the same way Fred Trump’s gaslighting about the heating worked — by inducing a sense of helplessness in the victim, and by making clear there’s nothing the victim can say or do to persuade the gaslighter to recognize reality. Trump yelled “no collusion” like a parrot for months until the public essentially gave in to the lie, in a “Have it your way, just stop screaming at me” reaction. 

Trump clearly hopes he can pull the same trick off one more time with the coronavirus, insisting that everything is fine — in the face of all evidence to the contrary — at such length and with such stubbornness that his opponents eventually just give up. It’s genuinely surprising he hasn’t reworked his “no collusion” catchphrase into some version of “no coronavirus,” although we still have three and a half months until the election, so don’t rule it out.

The purpose of this repetition is to exhaust the opposition. It gets tiresome insisting that, yes, the coronavirus is a real threat in the face of someone who will never admit that. Hiding the evidence helps, by making those who continue to believe in reality work that much harder and longer to prove their point. Trump wants to wear us down the way his father wore down his tenants, who realized that nothing they could say would compel him to admit that the heat was broken. 

The good news, however, is that reality-based folks who believe the coronavirus is a real threat don’t have to convince Donald Trump. They just have to convince their fellow Americans. On that front, things are looking good so far. Polling shows that 60% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, and only 38% — roughly the percentage who will never abandon Trump, even if he starts curb-stomping puppies on live TV — approve of his performance. People can see that coronavirus is sweeping through their communities and filling up their hospitals, even if the administration succeeds in making actual case numbers harder to track. The media, especially at a local level, won’t stop covering the issue, especially if conditions on the ground keep getting worse. Trump has won numerous victories through his expertise at gaslighting, but he can’t trick the virus and his luck may finally be running out. 

Organizer of moms who built wall to protect Portland protesters says group was tear-gassed by feds

A group of mothers joined the demonstrations against police brutality in Portland after videos showed federal officers tear-gassing and snatching protesters off the street, only to be met with gas and flashbangs themselves.

Portland has become a flashpoint of President Donald Trump’s deployment of federal authorities in response to protests over systemic racism across the country. Local and state leaders have demanded that Trump withdraw the federal officers, who are from the Department of Homeland Security, Custom and Protection’s Border Patrol Tactical Unit and the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group, after protesters were filmed being detained in unmarked vans.

The weekend’s protests drew dozens of women, who said they were mothers seeking to protect demonstrators.

“Feds stay clear! Moms are here!” the group was heard chanting in a viral video.

The women interlinked arms to build a human wall around protesters.

“We are about protecting peaceful citizens’ right to protest,” organizer Bev Barnum told BuzzFeed News.

The women stood outside a federal courthouse on Sunday. Federal law enforcement deployed “CS gas,” or tear gas, at protesters in the area, according to the Portland Police Department.

Another video showed a group of moms rocked by a flashbang grenade thrown by one of the officers.

Barnum told BuzzFeed News that some of the moms were treated for exposure to chemical irritants after the confrontation. None of the women were arrested.

Barnum said the women organized online after sharing a video showing federal officers silently placing a protester into an unmarked van.

“Protestors are being stripped of their rights by being placed in unmarked cars by unidentifiable law enforcement,” Barnum wrote on Facebook. “We moms are often underestimated. But we’re stronger than we’re given credit for. So what do you say, will you stand with me? Will you help me create a wall of moms?”

“We’ll be out until no protester needs protecting,” Barnum told BuzzFeed on Sunday night.

Another viral video showed authorities beating and pepper-spraying 53-year-old Navy veteran Chris David after he confronted them.

“Enraged” by seeing federal officers policing protests, David told CNN that he went to talk to a group of them.

“I was going to ask why they weren’t living up to their oath of office, the Constitution,” he said. “All I wanted to do was ask them, ‘Why?'”

David said the officers responded by repeatedly hitting him with their batons.

“I was hoping they wouldn’t shoot me, because one had a weapon pointing it right at my chest. I’m relieved that I only got hit by batons and pepper spray,” he told CNN. “The baton hits weren’t the issue, but when they used pepper spray it was over. It felt like they dumped a gallon of burning gasoline on my head.”

David said he broke his hand in the confrontation and plans to have surgery next week.

Local leaders have condemned the presence of federal officers at the protests. A memo obtained by The New York Times showed that the officers were deployed, even though they do not have “training in riot control or mass demonstrations.”

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum filed a federal lawsuit aiming to stop the Department of Homeland Security from participating in the “kidnap and false arrest” of citizens.

Trump declared last week that the federal officers were there to “quell” the vandalism of federal property. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat, said their presence has had the opposite effect.

“Their presence here is actually leading to more violence and more vandalism,” he told CNN on Sunday. “And it’s not helping the situation at all. They’re not wanted here.”

Trump-loving Missouri governor: Children who get COVID-19 at school will “go home” and “get over it”

Trump-loving Missouri Gov. Mike Parson late last week caused a stir when he blew off parents’ concerns about sending their children back to school during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Parson on Friday conducted an interview with talk-radio host Marc Cox in which he insisted children in the state would go back to school no matter what.

“These kids have got to get back to school,” Parson said. “They’re at the lowest risk possible. And if they do get COVID-19, which they will — and they will when they go to school — they’re not going to the hospitals. They’re not going to have to sit in doctor’s offices. They’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it.”

While it’s true that children have significantly lower risk of suffering severe reactions to the novel coronavirus, the odds are nonetheless greater than zero. Additionally, there are concerns about teachers and other school staffers getting the disease, as well as about parents and grandparents getting it when the children return home.

“We worry about those in school who are not children — teachers, support staff and volunteers,” Dr. Alex Garza, incident commander of the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force, told the Post-Dispatch. “Many of those people will have a much more serious response to the virus and that is what we want to avoid. These children could also come home and spread the virus to others in their household who could also be at a greater risk of a serious outcome.”

Son of federal judge assigned Deutsche Bank-Jeffrey Epstein case killed by gunman at home

Federal Judge Esther Salas was at her home with her family in New Jersey when someone appeared at the door. When Judge Salas’ husband opened the door multiple shots were fired by someone dressed as a FedEx driver.

According to sources who spoke to NBC New York, Solas’ husband is in very critical condition. It was announced that her son died late Sunday night.

“Salas, a judge of the U.S. District Court for New Jersey in Newark, has been in her seat for nine years. Before that she spent five years as a magistrate judge, and nine years prior to that as a federal public defender,” the report said.

It’s unknown who the target was as the judge’s husband also is a well-regarded criminal defense attorney.

“Salas has presided over a number of high-profile trials in her tenure, including the trial of former ‘Real Housewife’ [star] Teresa Giudice,” said the report.

At the scene are FBI agents, U.S. Marshals, New Jersey State Police and the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General.

Judge Esther Salas is presiding over the Deutsche Bank-Jeffrey Epstein civil case after it was assigned to her four days ago.

Donald Trump’s virus-whisperer: The tragic downfall of Dr. Deborah Birx

Over the past week or so, there’s been a major attempt by the Trump administration to demean the reputation of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, with anonymous “oppo-research” and open insults from Peter Navarro, a trade adviser close to President Trump. Fauci is widely acknowledged to be one of the world’s foremost experts on pandemics so there was a furious pushback to this crude character assassination. Despite the fact that Trump had made similar remarks about Fauci being “wrong” about the coronavirus, the president was forced to throw Navarro under the bus despite the fact that it’s obvious they’ve been on the same page.

Trump is obviously jealous of the public’s trust in Fauci, compared to the increasing public skepticism of anything he personally says about the crisis. But this attack on Fauci is really just a symbol of the administration’s rejection of the reality we can see with our own eyes: a new explosion of COVID-19 all over the country.

It was an ugly kerfuffle but certainly not something that should have surprised us. Trump has been insulting and purging any government employee he deems disloyal, and since Fauci isn’t blowing smoke about the virus, that’s how Trump sees him.

Over the weekend Trump gave an interview to Fox News’ Chris Wallace and made a fool of himself trying to deny this reality. He insisted, as he always does, that the virus is not spreading and the rising number of cases is entirely due to expanded testing, which is complete nonsense.

According to the New York Times fact check:

The United States has the eighth-worst fatality rate among reported coronavirus cases in the world, and the death rate per 100,000 people — 42.83 — ranks it third-worst, according to data on the countries most affected by the coronavirus compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

That was far from the only false information Trump shared on the pandemic. And it raises the question: where does he get this stuff? As you can see by that clip above, he had White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany standing by with papers that had headings on them saying things like “The United States has the lowest mortality rate in the world” but that doesn’t mean anything. While it’s possible that Trump just heard this from one of the voices in his head, we don’t need to go there right now.

Well, the Times did another one of those deep dives into how the White House handled the pandemic, which offers up some new information about that question. This time the reporting team looked specifically at the month of April, when the administration made a dramatic shift in strategy to shovel all responsibility for the pandemic response onto the states. That article suggests that if you want to point the finger at one member of the White House coronavirus task force who has consistently fed optimistic projections and questionable data points to the president, it’s Dr. Deborah Birx.

It turns out that many of the most important decisions that were made during that period weren’t done by the official task force headed by Vice President Mike Pence, but by another shadowy group that met every weekday morning in White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ office. (Remember, Jared Kushner was also running his own task force on a secret, separate track.)

This one was single-mindedly dedicated to producing evidence to back up the White House decision to open up the economy, come what may. Dr. Birx was their validator, the only public health official among the group of political hands, and the Times describes her as “the chief evangelist in the West Wing for the idea that infections had peaked and the virus was fading quickly.”

During the morning meetings in Mr. Meadows’s office, Dr. Birx almost always delivered what the new team was hoping for: “All metros are stabilizing,” she would tell them, describing the virus as having hit its “peak” around mid-April. The New York area accounted for half of the total cases in the country, she said. The slope was heading in the right direction. “We’re behind the worst of it.”

During much of mid-April, Dr. Birx focused intensely on the experience that Italy had fighting the virus. In her view, it was a particularly positive comparison, telling colleagues that the United States was on the same trajectory as Italy, where there were huge spikes before infections and deaths flattened to close to zero.

Dr. Birx would roam the halls of the White House, sometimes passing out diagrams to bolster her case. “We’ve hit our peak,” she would say, and that message would find its way back to Mr. Trump.

Unlike Fauci, she had an office in the West Wing and fully embraced “her role as a member of the president’s team.” I think we know what that means.

Birx relied on an optimistic model that depended on everyone doing everything exactly right, while Fauci had a more realistic view of probable human behavior and listened to reports on the ground as well as the statistical data. As things got worse, Birx’s rosy scenarios were chosen over Fauci’s darker predictions. Trump didn’t want to hear bad news and Birx was there to give him what he needed.

She still is. Apparently, she remains the go-to for the White House communications team whenever they need some damage control. McEnany was asked the other day how she could claim that everything was well in hand when hospitalizations were going up rapidly. She replied, “I spoke with Dr. Birx this morning — about 10 to 40 percent in the hospitals reaching high capacity are COVID, so a lot of hospitalizations aren’t pertaining to COVID.” (The word on Sunday was that some hospitals in Florida’s Miami-Dade County had run out of available ICU beds. That was not the result of elective surgeries. )

Fauci describes Birx, whom he considers a friend for decades, as more political than him, a “different species.” Indeed she is. In fact she often sounds like Kellyanne Conway or McEnany:

When Birx first came on the scene at the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote about the fact that she was part of a Christian right public health subculture (yes, that actually exists) that surrounds Mike Pence’s office. I don’t think I expected that she’d be willing to sacrifice her reputation as a serious infectious disease expert for the thrill of being on Trump’s “team.” Apparently she has.

Whether Birx’s upbeat scenarios were passed on to the president and his enablers because she truly believed them or because she wanted to be a team player is an interesting question. It doesn’t much matter in reality, because the result has been a disaster. Like so many others who came into Trump’s orbit, she threw her respectable career on the fire to please a president who is so far over his head that he’s pretty much buried himself and taken her down with him. Tragically, they’ve both overseen policies that have buried more than 140,000 Americans in the last five months as well.

Betsy Devos wants to turn millions of children into Trump’s pandemic lab rats

The trouble with actually listening to Education Sec. Betsy DeVos and other Trump cabinet members is that their words lead nowhere.

They are circular arguments: Schools should open despite coronavirus because, well, schools should be open.

Clearly DeVos is backing Trump’s demand for schools across the country to be fully open with in-person classes in September. But under the fairly predictable questions of talk show appearances, she was tongue-tied about exactly that is supposed to happen. Instead, she turned to the old reliable – that local districts need to figure it out on their own. All of which makes it more curious as to why the Trump campaign would send her around the country with her mealy-mouthed speech about re-opening schools as part of re-electioneering.

Fine. But, if “no one-size solution fits all cases” is the mantra, why are Trump and DeVos saying the federal guidance – under threat of loss of federal funds — is exactly that: Open up or else.

That this advice ignores a singularly difficult pandemic spread is obvious. Return to “normalcy,” as we hear endlessly, means making it appear that conditions are the best for a Trump reelection. But the contagion isn’t going away, nor is the popular unwillingness to take even basic precautions.

In states like Florida where Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to step as lightly as possible despite record numbers of new outbreaks of coronavirus, there is criticism because he is ignoring the disease. In states like California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom is re-imposing many but not all stay-at-home orders, there is criticism from those who find the orders will kill their businesses.

In the midst of chaos, the Trump White House is busy attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading immunologist, rather than taking more aggressive, direct steps to enable exactly what it really wants – some semblance of normal. It’s wacky.

It is baffling how attacking Fauci helps keep contagion at bay. It is equally baffling how opening schools fully helps to allay the contagion that is keeping schools closed altogether, or how threats to cut budgets that cannot afford safety investments work exactly.

Do you believe in magic?

We may as well bring on the magic dust.

Lists of obvious questions for safe operation of schools around the country are circulating widely on social media. They range from the safety of students, to ways to ensure physical distance, to children as asymptomatic transmitters of disease to families, to pay issues for teachers, administrators, custodians and cafeteria workers who also are in these schools.

There are no answers forthcoming. The Centers for Disease Control offers guidance to local school districts, which say they cannot afford to implement them. The White House criticizes the CDC for issuing guidelines altogether, and then says it will issue its own; the CDC leaders say the guidelines were never meant to keep schools closed and doesn’t want to change them to meet a political need at the White House. Worse, the White House now wants to grab all the data and control what is shared publicly. Do you think this will help reduce the disease – or just the bad numbers?

Meanwhile, parents, grandparents, teachers and families watch both nervously and angrily that such inane tail-chasing does nothing to address the key questions here.

Many schools are scheduled to open next month, leaving little time for physical rearrangements even if districts have money available. That most do not because coronavirus lockdowns have created so many state and city tax revenue shortfalls—none of which seems to register with DeVos, who may not have been in a classroom more than a half-dozen times in nearly four years in the job.

It takes no special genius to recognize that either keeping schools closed or opening them under such conditions will have a heavier impact on schools in low-income, urban neighborhoods. Yet in all her remarks to date, that is a reality that seems not to matter to DeVos.

Where’s the plan?

If schools were closed in March and April because of the disease, where’s the plan for why opening in September is safer?

You’d think that the Department of Education instead would be working on detailed ways to boost on-line teaching resources, including trainings for teachers on how to be most effective in on-line teaching. Or that the department would be working with tech companies to ensure that students all over the nation could have access to laptops and internet connection without regard to social status, income or residence.

You might think that DeVos would be out talking with teachers and visiting enough local schools to make some kind of assessment of what exactly the challenge is. Or she might be reconciling the CDC guidelines with the realities of compliance in districts large and small, to get a sense of whether emergency grants might help achieve the goal she and Trump want.

Or given that she is such an advocate for private and parochial schools, she might be consulting with them.

Instead, we fall back on the silliness of partisan politics. We should open schools, risking further spread of contagion among adults as well as children, because Trump wants it.

Magic will make it so.