Tag: COVID-19

If I had a nickel for every time I was asked that

There’s a lot of bad news out there these day:

  • Ukraine is being assaulted hour after hour, unprovoked; millions of its citizens are refugees, thousands are dead, Putin’s Russian army commits war crimes against a helpless civilian population,
  • and a former American president, the one that a federal judge publicly says has “more likely than not” committed a federal crime related to his on-going lie to the world at large about the integrity of the 2020 election, chooses just this moment to suggest that the Russian war criminal in chief should supply information on an imaginary crime by the son of the current president
  • that former president is the whining, pouting poster boy for the current wave of a revolting trend of the rich and famous being treated like they’re above the law; they are not, and the sooner that we see signs that Donald Trump and Mark Meadows and Ginni Thomas and the others (and you know who they are) are being investigated for the crimes that they appear to have committed, then the sooner the rest of America will stop believing that justice is for sale
  • (a bit of encouraging news on this front: a judge has held certifiable bad actor Alex Jones in contempt for refusing to comply with court orders to be deposed by the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims who are suing him for defamation for his despicable insistence (since recanted) that the whole thing was staged—step in the right direction!)
  • Bruce Willis is suffering from aphasia, a medical condition impacting his cognitive abilities to the extent that he’s announced he is giving up acting
  • in what should be no surprise to any sentient being anywhere, a medical clinical trial has found no sign—no sign at all—that there is any medical benefit whatever from the use of the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19; woe be to the masking-and-testing deniers who were confident that unconventional therapy was the only kind worth trying

Pick up any newspaper or news app and you’re sure to find more of the same.  It’s discouraging.  It’s depressing.  It’s all real and it’s out there, and it feels like it’s coming in here, where I’m trying to stay safe and warm.  But something else entirely has really got me wondering about the sanity of the world out there, something that’s not in the papers.

Earlier this week I stopped at a local franchise of a national fast food restaurant for lunch, and the total was $9.95; I fished out a five and five ones and handed them to the young man at the cash register.  Yeah, he looked at me sideways a little, I think, probably for having the audacity to pay the tab with folding money instead of my debit card…reminded me of the times I’ve faced a teenager at the till who’s had a helluva time counting out the right change.  But not this guy; he knew precisely what was owed back, and he fished a single coin out of the drawer and held it up to show me, and he said, “Do you want the five cents back?”

Do I want the five cents back?  Do I want MY five cents back?  As my father might have said in such a circumstance, is the pope a Catholic?  Does a bear live in the woods?  Why wouldn’t I want my five cents back?  It is, after all, my five cents.  I can’t get a gumball for a nickel like I used to—it isn’t even made of much nickel any more—but it is still negotiable currency.  He didn’t ask if I wanted to donate the change to a charity, and he didn’t say (in so many words) that he meant to keep it for himself.  He seemed to sincerely just want to know if I wanted to even be bothered dropping the coin in my pocket.

What would you say to a question like that?

Know your enemy

On Friday morning, after a night of insomnia fueled by worries about raising children in a collapsing society, I opened my eyes, started reading about efforts by Wisconsin Republicans to seize control of the state’s elections, then paused to let my tachycardiac heartbeat subside. Marinating in the news is part of my job, but doing so lately is a source of full-body horror. If this were simply my problem, I’d write about it in a journal instead of in The New York Times. But political despair is an issue for the entire Democratic Party.

It’s predictable that, with Donald Trump out of the White House, Democrats would pull back from constant, frenetic political engagement. But there’s a withdrawal happening right now — from news consumption, activism and, in some places, voting — that seems less a product of relief than of avoidance. Part of this is simply burnout and lingering trauma from Covid. But I suspect that part of it is about growing hopelessness born of a sense that dislodging Trump has bought American democracy only a brief reprieve.

One redeeming feature of Trump’s presidency, in retrospect, was that it was possible to look forward to the date when Americans could finish it. Covid, too, once seemed like something we’d be able to largely put behind us when we got vaccinated. Sure, Trumpism, like the virus, would linger, but it was easy to imagine a much better world after the election, the inauguration and the wide availability of shots.

Now we’re past all that, and American life is still comprehensively awful. Dystopia no longer has an expiration date.

Last week in the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg worried about the future of our American democracy.  Like thousands/millions of others, I share her concern, and so should you.

The problem isn’t just that polls show that, at least right now, voters want to hand over Congress to a party that largely treats the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as heroes.

(snip)

What’s terrifying is that even if Democrats win back public confidence, they can win more votes than Republicans and still lose. Gerrymandering alone is enough to tip the balance in the House.

(snip)

Meanwhile, Republicans are purging local officials who protected the integrity of the 2020 election, replacing them with apparatchiks. It will be hard for Republicans to steal the 2024 election outright, since they don’t control the current administration, but they can throw it into the sort of chaos that will cause widespread civil unrest. And if they win, it’s hard to imagine them ever consenting to the peaceful transfer of power again.

(snip)

I look at the future and I see rule without recourse by people who either approve of terrorizing liberals or welcome those who do. Such an outcome isn’t inevitable; unforeseen events can reshape political coalitions. Something could happen to forestall the catastrophe bearing down on us.

Here’s a hopeful sign: two long-time contributors to Fox News giving a thorough and public explanation of why they just can’t take it any more.

…there are still responsible conservatives [at Fox News] providing valuable opinion and analysis. But the voices of the responsible are being drowned out by the irresponsible.

A case in point: Patriot Purge, a three-part series hosted by Tucker Carlson.

The special—which ran on Fox’s subscription streaming service earlier this month and was promoted on Fox News—is presented in the style of an exposé, a hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism. In reality, it is a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions. And its message is clear: The U.S. government is targeting patriotic Americans in the same manner —and with the same tools—that it used to target al Qaeda.

(snip)

This is not happening. And we think it’s dangerous to pretend it is. If a person with such a platform shares such misinformation loud enough and long enough, there are Americans who will believe—and act upon—it.

This isn’t theoretical. This is what actually happened on January 6, 2021.

Over the past five years, some of Fox’s top opinion hosts amplified the false claims and bizarre narratives of Donald Trump or offered up their own in his service. In this sense, the release of Patriot Purge wasn’t an isolated incident, it was merely the most egregious example of a longstanding trend. Patriot Purge creates an alternative history of January 6, contradicted not just by common sense, not just by the testimony and on-the-record statements of many participants, but by the reporting of the news division of Fox News itself.

There are still many real conservatives who recognize that the Orange Emperor has no clothes, and who have not drunk the toxic brew that has let so many Republicans (and others) show true feelings they have always keep secret, until now.  Jennifer Rubin is one.

When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, Never Trumpers (now largely ex-Republicans) warned that he would corrupt the party in every way imaginable. His misogyny would morph in the party’s toxic masculinity and degradation of women, they cautioned. His infatuation with brutality and violence (boasting he would kill terrorists’ families, exhorting his supporters to slug protesters) would metastasize to the party as a whole. Boy, did those predictions pan out.

You only have to look at the vicious imagery showing the murder of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) deployed by Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), the verbal attack on her from Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) last year — and Republicans’ defense of both — to understand that their refusal to dump Trump after the “Access Hollywood” tape came to light was merely the prelude to an era of normalizing violence (especially against women), culminating in the Jan. 6 violent insurrection, which many Republicans, including Trump, tried to paint as nonviolent.

Threats and portrayals of violence against women have turned into a badge of honor for a party in which traditional notions about gender (back to the 1950s!) have become a key predictor of Republican support. Casting men (even a Supreme Court nominee) as victims of aggressive, “nasty” or unhinged women accusing them of wrongdoing has become standard fare in the Trump party.

Rubin cites Robert P. Jones, CEO and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, who is willing to lay the blame for the violence we’re seeing now at the core of Republican party voters: White evangelicals.

Today, for an alarming number of white conservative Christians, the mark of Christian faithfulness is not a love that inspires them to lay down their lives for their friends, but a defensiveness that lures them to take the lives of their fellow citizens.

The anti-democratic and white supremacist core of this worldview snaps into focus as soon as we ask just one question: What is the “America” they are saving? This question is at the heart of the MAGA ideology that has now fully overtaken one of our two major political parties.

That second “A,” for “again,” is the hermeneutical key that unlocks the obfuscation.  This nostalgia for a White Christian America has become the weapon of choice in the culture wars. In that vision of the country, white law and order reign, and with refreshments and pats on the back, white vigilantes are informally deputized as partners. And Black people protesting in the streets or even shopping in the local CVS are seen as suspect for not playing their properly deferential roles or staying in their assigned subservient places.

If Trump has done anything for us, he has peeled back a thin veneer of patriotic- and Christian-sounding words to reveal the core claim underneath it all: That God intended America to be a white Christian nation. That claim has literally generated—for those among the chosen— a license to kill anyone who threatens that norm and the confidence that those actions will not only be free of negative consequences, but be rewarded both here on earth and in heaven.

“Christian nationalism” is the threat.  Let’s start by defining the terms, thanks to Paul D. Miller at Christianity Today.

There are many definitions of nationalism and an active debate about how best to define it. I reviewed the standard academic literature on nationalism and found several recurring themes. Most scholars agree that nationalism starts with the belief that humanity is divisible into mutually distinct, internally coherent cultural groups defined by shared traits like language, religion, ethnicity, or culture. From there, scholars say, nationalists believe that these groups should each have their own governments; that governments should promote and protect a nation’s cultural identity; and that sovereign national groups provide meaning and purpose for human beings.

What is Christian nationalism?

Christian nationalism is the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a “Christian nation”—not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future. Scholars like Samuel Huntington have made a similar argument: that America is defined by its “Anglo-Protestant” past and that we will lose our identity and our freedom if we do not preserve our cultural inheritance.

Christian nationalists do not reject the First Amendment and do not advocate for theocracy, but they do believe that Christianity should enjoy a privileged position in the public square. The term “Christian nationalism,” is relatively new, and its advocates generally do not use it of themselves, but it accurately describes American nationalists who believe American identity is inextricable from Christianity.

What is the problem with nationalism?

Humanity is not easily divisible into mutually distinct cultural units. Cultures overlap and their borders are fuzzy. Since cultural units are fuzzy, they make a poor fit as the foundation for political order. Cultural identities are fluid and hard to draw boundaries around, but political boundaries are hard and semipermanent. Attempting to found political legitimacy on cultural likeness means political order will constantly be in danger of being felt as illegitimate by some group or other. Cultural pluralism is essentially inevitable in every nation.

Is that really a problem, or just an abstract worry?

It is a serious problem. When nationalists go about constructing their nation, they have to define who is, and who is not, part of the nation. But there are always dissidents and minorities who do not or cannot conform to the nationalists’ preferred cultural template. In the absence of moral authority, nationalists can only establish themselves by force. Scholars are almost unanimous that nationalist governments tend to become authoritarian and oppressive in practice. For example, in past generations, to the extent that the United States had a quasi-established official religion of Protestantism, it did not respect true religious freedom. Worse, the United States and many individual states used Christianity as a prop to support slavery and segregation.

There is much more here you should read.  Know your enemy, while there is still time to win the fight.

This is not about all Christians, or even all Christian evangelicals.  But those who think “freedom of religion” means everyone is free to practice their particular strain of Christian faith in their houses of worship and through the imposition of their religious beliefs in secular law, those who harbor a “nostalgia for White Christian America,” and who have been succeeding politically at achieving their goals since at least the days of the Moral Majority, those are the political enemies we need to get serious about defeating.  Right now, political despair be damned.

Trumpeting their true colors

On Wednesday morning, still working from home most days because of COVID-19, I saw an email from the boss a few steps above me on the food chain warning us all of some new procedures to be followed if we had to physically go into the office.  I emailed my supervisor to ask if this new “help” from management was really something new for us and he said we’d talk about it in our regular meeting that afternoon; I replied “Meeting?  But I planned to watch Congress count the electoral votes this afternoon.”

I didn’t get to bed until 3:00 the next morning.

The election results have been clear: Joe Biden won, fair and square.  Recounts, and recounts of recounts, in many states, all showed that Biden won enough states to give him 306 electoral votes—the same amount Trump got in 2016, when he characterized it as landslide victory.  More than five dozen court cases challenging vote totals and voting laws in several states all sustained that result.  None of the accusations of fraud led to evidence of enough illegality that would change the result.  Many of the legal challenges were comically inept in their composition.  Republican governors and legislatures and secretaries of state did not bow to the siren song of a plea from the president to “find” the outcome he desired—they followed their laws and certified the legal winner.  The Electoral College certified those results.  Now it was up to Congress to add up the totals.  A formality.

There were stories online about a rally near the White House that morning where the president was reportedly repeating his regular grievances and his lies about the theft of his re-election, and I ignored that as just so much more of the same old same old, the blah blah blah that I and so many others have become so tired of, and so inured to, that I was so looking forward to, so very soon, not having to hear any more.  I was oblivious to the news that Trump supporters had a plan for the day:

The advance publicity for the “March for America” had been robust. Beyond the repeated promotions in tweets by the president and his allies, the upcoming event was cheered on social media, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

But woven through many of the messages to stand up for Mr. Trump — and, if possible, block the congressional certification of the election he claimed he had won — was language that flirted with aggression, even violence.

For example, the term “Storm the Capitol” was mentioned 100,000 times in the 30 days preceding Jan. 6, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company. Many of these mentions appeared in viral tweet threads that discussed the possible storming of the Capitol and included details on how to enter the building.

To followers of QAnon, the convoluted collection of conspiracy theories that falsely claims the country is dominated by deep-state bureaucrats and Democrats who worship Satan, the word “storm” had particular resonance. Adherents have often referred to a coming storm, after which Mr. Trump would preside over a new government order.

I’d seen the news that Vice President Pence had announced he would not/could not/had no authority to overrule the states and decide which electoral votes could be counted and which tossed aside.  After four years of his incredible obsequiousness to Trump I was surprised that he was acting like his own man but grateful to see it—I assumed now it would just be a matter of waiting through the speeches challenging the votes in a few states, and then the curtain would fall on the last scene of a dreadful play.

In blissful ignorance of what was to come, I tuned in for the start of the joint session of Congress but instead saw video of hundreds of people at the doors around the Capitol—no wait, it’s thousands, in fun colorful hats and shirts and carrying flags and such.  They looked to me like they were having more or less friendly exchanges with the police and security officers while they demonstrated their insistence that Trump had not lost the election.  Inside, Pence started the roll call of states to tabulate the electoral votes…and outside, the crowd was slowly moving up the steps of the Capitol.  And when some of them seemed to have made it inside, I assumed that police had let them in…there was no sign of any confrontation, and no reporting that there had been any.  But that changed.

A bloodied officer was crushed in a doorway screaming in Wednesday’s siege, which forced lawmakers to go into hiding for hours and halt their voting to affirm President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Another officer tumbled over a railing into the crowd below after being body-slammed from behind. Members of the media were cursed, shoved and punched.

A vast number of photos and videos captured the riot, which left five people dead. Many of the images were taken by the rioters themselves, few of whom wore masks that would have lowered not only their chances of contracting the coronavirus, but their chances of being identified. Some took pains to stand out.

My favorite amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees, among other things, “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  (Emphasis added.)  When those people forced their way into the building, a peaceful protest turned into a criminal act.  And what I remember thinking as I watched on Wednesday, and knowing as little as I did then about the details, was that the Capitol police—clearly outmanned, and maybe outgunned—were smart to be taking a patient approach.  Rather than open fire, causing more casualties and who knows what kind of potential escalation, they were letting the baby cry itself out.  They even escorted some of the protesters out of the building.  There were no reports of large numbers of people being arrested, or of being injured.  The vote counting concluded.

While the U.S. Capitol was under attack by thousands of people intending to subvert the outcome of our election, some of them meaning to capture and possibly execute representatives of our government, President Sentence Fragment watched from a catered party tent at the White House before moving inside and staying glued to the TV.  He didn’t call out the National Guard, or any law enforcement agencies to assist; until pressed by his advisers he didn’t make any effort to get the protesters to stop, and when he did he told them he loved them; he didn’t make a phone call to find out if his vice president was safe and unharmed; and while the invasion was still going on he continued calling members of Congress trying to convince them to change the outcome of the election.  He is still insisting the election was stolen from him, and said he will not be attending Biden’s inauguration.  Good.

Since the events of Wednesday there are Trump supporters who are calling for him to resign, or to be impeached (again), or for Pence and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.  Inasmuch as he has proved, yet again, that he cannot be trusted to obey the law or even to control his own impulses, I’d support any effort within the law to remove him from office.  The voters have done what they can, and he will be gone soon.  Others argue that the nation needs to heal, and any effort to remove Trump now will damage that effort.  That’s bullshit.

If we do nothing, if we turn away from this shameful event—this terroristic attack on our nation’s capital, nothing less than that—we will be tacitly encouraging it to happen again.  If we do not hold lawbreakers accountable for their actions, they won’t have any reason not to do it again.  We punish our children so they learn to behave, the same reasoning applies to entitled adults.

I don’t want to leave without touching on another important aspect of what we saw Wednesday.  It is fair to ask why it appears that these protesters—these white protesters—were treated so gently by law enforcement.

Can you imagine a scenario where an African-American mob storms the Capitol and the lawn is not littered with bodies and blood? That happens to Black people when they ask for equal justice, much less if they tried to overthrow the government. Yet this mostly white mob had the run of the building. What a shameful and wretched spectacle. What an embarrassment.

It’s another important aspect of the things we learned last week, thanks to Donald Trump.

For four years, Trump has made war on the constitutional order, on the institutions of American democracy, and on anyone who stood in his way. Almost all of the Republicans on Capitol Hill let him do it. They aided and abetted him. They voted to acquit him of impeachment charges. They endorsed him for reëlection and even acceded to his request not to bother with a Republican Party platform. The Party’s ideology, henceforth, would be whatever Trump wanted it to be. When Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, bragged about Trump’s successful “hostile takeover” of the Republican Party, he was, in a toxically untruthful Administration, for once telling the truth.

We’re not done yet

Donald Trump lost the election, bigly.  There is no honest, reasonable question about that any more, not even among judges with a conservative philosophy, or ones who were nominated by Republican presidents.  Even those nominated by this Republican president.

Last month more than 84.1 million Americans voted for someone other than Trump; another 80.8 million eligible voters voted for no one at all.  That’s 165 million Americans who, given the opportunity to sign up for another four years of Trump as president, said, no thanks.  Almost 70% of Americans of voting age.  A landslide.

But 74.2 million of our fellow Americans did vote for him.  That’s more than voted for him in 2016, more than voted for any candidate for president in any year other than Joe Biden this year.  Almost 47% of the people who voted in this election, almost one-third (31%) of all eligible voters, took the time to stand up and say “Thank you sir, may I have another?”.

(The Electoral College totals—306 for Biden, 232 for Trump—reflect a larger percentage for Biden than do the popular vote totals, but that’s the nature of the Electoral College.)

It’s wishful thinking to assume that those 74.2 million people will now just shrug, say “oh well, you win some and you lose some,” and try to resume their normal lives, or whatever passes for normal in the age of COVID-19.  Some will, but we’ve seen evidence of thousands who’ve turned their backs on demonstrable truth and maintain what I’d describe as an irrational belief in Trump as their hero, as the guy who’s fighting for the little man.  Irrational in that there is not only no evidence that Trump has tried to help the average American but ample evidence that he doesn’t give a damn about the little guy and is only ever in it for himself.

Yet, they persist.  Rather than reassess the field for 2024, MAGA Nation is far more likely to (1) want Trump to run again, or (2) support one of his children, or worst of all, (3) support another fascist and authoritarian candidate, one who is smarter than Trump and who would do more and lasting damage to our democracy if he becomes president.

It is fear of those voters—the base—that has prevented leaders of the Republican Party from more than a low-key, tacit admission that Trump lost and Biden won.  Those people have demonstrated that Trump is who and what they support and that they will punish any variance from full-throated support of Trump.  As long as Trump keeps up a public face of contesting the election results—even though he probably understands that he cannot win and stay in power—no Republican sane enough to recognize that reality can publicly acknowledge real reality.

There is no shortage of people and groups now distancing themselves from the party of Lincoln, from the party of Reagan.  They make a persuasive argument that an organization that maintains loyalty to someone as off his rocker as Donald Trump has abandoned the tenets of principled Republicanism and principled conservatism.  One is The Lincoln Project, founded by longtime Republican officials and operatives and which was not shy about its support of Biden: “President Donald Trump and those who sign onto Trumpism are a clear and present danger to the Constitution and our Republic. Only defeating so polarizing a character as Trump will allow the country to heal its political and psychological wounds and allow for a new, better path forward for all Americans.”

Another, which I just discovered in a story in The New Yorker, is Veterans for Responsible Leadership.  Organized by Naval Academy graduate and former Navy SEAL Dr. Dan Barkhuff, this group is giving military veterans who can’t stomach the treachery of Trump a place to go to fight back.

Barkhuff is a conservative. He voted Republican until 2016, when he saw insurmountable character deficiencies in Donald Trump. He noted that, as [James] Stockdale endured torture as a P.O.W., Trump, who dodged the draft, was “enjoying the comforts” of the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. As troops risked their lives in Afghanistan after 9/11, Trump was bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” The thought of Trump becoming President disgraced the friends that Barkhuff had lost to combat and the peers he had watched make “countless small choices: to be truthful, to stay committed to a code of honor and duty, and to choose a harder right over the easier wrong.” Barkhuff thought it reasonable to expect any leader to respect courage, self-sacrifice, and service. He did not vote for Trump.

When Trump took office, Barkhuff decided to give him a chance, hoping that the President “would rise to the level of the office.” But, Barkhuff told me, Trump was “worse than I thought he would be—and I thought he was going to be terrible.” Barkhuff often expressed his dismay on Facebook, where his posts were seen only by his relatives and Navy pals. When he discovered that other veterans shared his concerns, he created a page—Veterans for Responsible Leadership—where like-minded members could vent.

Service members are trained to remain apolitical when in uniform, but veterans are free to espouse their views. The V.F.R.L. members chatted online about diversity in the military (“transgender people should obviously be allowed to serve”), athletes kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice (kneeling “is NOT disrespectful to our troops”), and the President’s divisiveness (“Trump wins only by creating controversy and firing up people. . . . It’s dictatorship 101”). Most of the members were Navy vets, yet V.F.R.L. hoped to recruit from all branches and ranks. Glenn Schatz, one of the V.F.R.L. leaders and a former nuclear-submarine officer, told me that the Trump Administration’s assault on established norms called veterans back to service. “Once you’re out of uniform it’s your obligation to speak up when you see the Constitution being violated,” he said.

(snip)

In the 2018 midterms, V.F.R.L. backed one candidate, Dan McCready, a Democrat and former Marine Corps captain, in North Carolina, who ultimately lost his congressional race. By 2020, “there were no Republicans left to support,” Barkhuff told me. “They had all gone all in on Trump.” V.F.R.L. did not endorse the high-profile veterans Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, or Dan Crenshaw, of Texas, because, the organization argued, by aligning themselves with Trump, they had “sacrificed foundational principles for political expediency.”

(snip)

On July 3rd, Barkhuff, in a post on V.F.R.L.’s Facebook page, tried to capture the scope of the criticism surrounding Trump’s handling of military issues: “Since his inauguration Donald Trump has, in no particular order: lost active duty troops on missions he personally approved and blamed it on ‘his’ generals . . . , refused to believe the intelligence reports given to him by the Central Intelligence Agency . . . , minimized the TBI’s (traumatic brain injuries) sustained by troops in Iraq during an Iranian missile attack as ‘headaches’, deployed active duty troops to our southern border to stop a ‘caravan’ of migrants immediately before the midterm elections, called a collection of his generals including General Mattis a bunch of ‘dopes and babies.’ ”

Barkhuff asked if he had forgotten anything. Dozens of replies piled up, highlighting other affronts: Trump had disparaged Gold Star families; publicly ridiculed Senator John McCain, a former P.O.W., for being captured in Vietnam; appeared to make unilateral policy decisions by tweet; asked for a military parade; and inappropriately involved Army General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a photo op. Later discussions would mention Trump retweeting a post from an account linked to QAnon conspiracy theories, alleging that the seals never killed Osama bin Laden. (Robert O’Neill, the former seal who said he fired the kill shot, had to tweet assurances that the bin Laden operation had happened, and that the target was dead.)

Please read the article, very much worth the time.  You can get the short course in this pre-election spot that Barkhuff recorded for The Lincoln Project.

I take comfort in knowing that there are people all across the political spectrum in this country who really do see Trump for what he is, who haven’t and won’t fall for the charlatan with the easy answers to the very real and serious problems our country faces.  Our next step is to realize that the problem hasn’t been solved just because we voted him out of office.  There are still 4+ weeks before Biden is sworn in, and Trump’s not done yet…even his enablers in the White House are starting to be concerned.

2020 vision

If we were to treat this like a “regular” election between “regular” candidates, it would be sensible to compare the candidates’ core beliefs and positions on important issues.  The problem with that, in this case, is not only that Donald Trump is not a regular candidate, he has no core beliefs or strong positions on any issues.

Very important to remember (and I’ve been harping on this, I know): Trump lies.  About everything.  Virtually every word out of his mouth.  There is no good reason to believe anything he says.  The Washington Post Fact Checker documented 20,000 lies by Trump as president, and that was back in July.  (As they say, the hits just keep on coming.)   If in any moment Trump needs his audience to think that he believes A, because he thinks the audience members believe A, he will say he believes A.  If in another moment he needs another audience to think he believes not-A, he will say he believes not-A.  It doesn’t matter to him whether he really does like A or actually prefers not-A, or if he’s even given the whole A/not-A dichotomy any real consideration: he will say anything if he wants it to be true in that moment.  What’s more, he thinks we are too stupid to realize that he has taken both the position of A and not-A at one time or another.

Also important to remember is that Trump has demonstrated he is not good at presidenting.  I mean being president of the USA—don’t even talk about his record of business bankruptcies.  He touts his handling of the economy, but he denies that he took office with an economy that was in pretty good shape and managed not to screw it up.  (By the way, the stock market is not “the economy.”)  He quickly reminds you about passing a tax cut bill…one that primarily benefitted the already-wealthy, AND which he doesn’t want you to remember is only temporary, AND WHICH was contributing to a big increase in government debt even before pandemic relief.

Oh yeah, the pandemic.  Any government effort to protect Americans from an insidious virus that was spreading across the country and killing thousands of people a week would have started by asking people to isolate themselves, and that was what forced so many businesses to temporarily close and shocked the U.S. economy back in the spring.  Once medical researchers identified the transmission path AND a simple and efficient way to block it—yes, the mask—a good president (and governors and mayors) would have been working like hell to get people to voluntarily help themselves and their neighbors by wearing the damn mask.  Other countries did, and they did not suffer the rates of infection and death that America has; they have not suffered the economic hardships that we have.  Trump’s willful mismanagement of the government’s response to COVID-19 is likely to be his legacy: his public denial of the problem, which contributed to the expansion of the problem, which led to more than 9 million infections and the deaths of more than 213,000 Americans (so far) along with the prolonged weakening of the economy.  You’ve probably heard: a third wave is already underway.

(Recently I read a woman’s complaint about wearing the mask; she feels she should not have to do that because “they have already taken so much away from us.”  Honest to god, lady: no one set out to take anything away from you.  There is an attack against our country underway right now, and our best response to the threat—which will help protect you, your children, your neighbors—calls for you to make a tiny sacrifice.  Why is this a problem?  It almost couldn’t be any easier.  Also: who is “they?”)

Very important to keep in mind—maybe most important—is that Trump does not believe in America, or its Constitution, or the rule of law, or our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or in racial or gender equality, or supporting the sacrifices of our fellow citizens in the armed forces, or in any type of service to country.  He doesn’t believe in Truth, or Justice, or the American Way.  He says he does, but he doesn’t.  (Remember, Trump lies.)

He ran for president as a publicity stunt, and was as surprised as anyone when he (barely) won.  He has used the office to enrich himself and his businesses, he’s alienated our allies, and he’s used the government itself to attack protesters and political enemies—he was impeached for doing that!  He wasn’t removed from office for it because he has also, somehow, managed to drag the Republican Party and a lot/many/most (?) of its leaders down to his level.  They talked themselves into believing that protecting Trump is what “real Americans” want them to do, because…why again?  Because with Trump as president they will get judges who will incorporate their political and religious beliefs into American law?

There was an ad on television the other day (please, Jesus, end the TV ads!) in which the candidate looked sincerely into the camera and told me “this election is about getting our economy moving again.”  No; no, it’s not.  I understand why you say that, and that would be a very good thing to get the economy back up to speed…also, to be able to go to a restaurant or a ballgame again, or even back to the office.  But no, that’s not what this election is about.

This election is about saving the United States of America from the chaos and fascism and authoritarianism that is undoubtedly right around the corner if Donald Trump wins re-election.  Even if Joe Biden is not everything you want in a president, he is one thing you need in a president: he is not Donald Trump.  He is a patriot, and he will govern with the best interests of this country at heart.  Just ask these Republicans:

You could also ask yourself, when was the last time I remember a president promising me that the next election was going to be rigged…unless he wins?  The last time a president running for re-election, and his political party, spent so much time making it harder for people to vote, and laying the groundwork to overturn the results?

He’s a clown…a cartoon.

Vote him out of office next week.  Do it for America.  A landslide may not be enough—let’s make it an avalanche that will also defeat whatever nonsense he pulls to try to ignore our votes and hold onto office (and stay out of jail).  That will make America great again.