Bernstein Bombshell: Trump Is A Nincompoop

I'm reproducing here, in full, a fairly long article by Carl Bernstein at CNN.com entitled "From pandering to Putin to abusing allies and ignoring his own advisers, Trump's phone calls alarm US officials." This article is hard to summarize because it's loaded with good stuff that I don't want to leave out:

 In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.

These officials' concerns about the calls, and particularly Trump's deference to Putin, take on new resonance with reports the President may have learned in March that Russia had offered the Taliban bounties to kill US troops in Afghanistan -- and yet took no action. CNN's sources said there were calls between Putin and Trump about Trump's desire to end the American military presence in Afghanistan but they mentioned no discussion of the supposed Taliban bounties. By far the greatest number of Trump's telephone discussions with an individual head of state were with Erdogan, who sometimes phoned the White House at least twice a week and was put through directly to the President on standing orders from Trump, according to the sources. Meanwhile, the President regularly bullied and demeaned the leaders of America's principal allies, especially two women: telling Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom she was weak and lacked courage; and telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel that she was "stupid."

Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state, including Saudi Arabia's autocratic royal heir Mohammed bin Salman and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, "great" accomplishments as President, and the "idiocy" of his Oval Office predecessors, according to the sources.

In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan, Trump took special delight in trashing former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and suggested that dealing directly with him -- Trump -- would be far more fruitful than during previous administrations. "They didn't know BS," he said of Bush and Obama -- one of several derisive tropes the sources said he favored when discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and Russian leaders.

The full, detailed picture drawn by CNN's sources of Trump's phone calls with foreign leaders is consistent with the basic tenor and some substantive elements of a limited number of calls described by former national security adviser John Bolton in his book, "The Room Where It Happened." But the calls described to CNN cover a far longer period than Bolton's tenure, are much more comprehensive — and seemingly more damning -- in their sweep.

Like Bolton, CNN's sources said that the President seemed to continually conflate his own personal interests -- especially for purposes of re-election and revenge against perceived critics and political enemies -- with the national interest. To protect the anonymity of those describing the calls for this report, CNN will not reveal their job titles nor quote them at length directly. More than a dozen officials either listened to the President's phone calls in real time or were provided detailed summaries and rough-text recording printouts of the calls soon after their completion, CNN's sources said. The sources were interviewed by CNN repeatedly over a four-month period extending into June.

The sources did cite some instances in which they said Trump acted responsibly and in the national interest during telephone discussions with some foreign leaders. CNN reached out to Kelly, McMaster and Tillerson for comment and received no response as of Monday afternoon. Mattis did not comment.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment before this story published. After publication, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews said, "President Trump is a world class negotiator who has consistently furthered America's interests on the world stage. From negotiating the phase one China deal and the USMCA to NATO allies contributing more and defeating ISIS, President Trump has shown his ability to advance America's strategic interests." One person familiar with almost all the conversations with the leaders of Russia, Turkey, Canada, Australia and western Europe described the calls cumulatively as 'abominations' so grievous to US national security interests that if members of Congress heard from witnesses to the actual conversations or read the texts and contemporaneous notes, even many senior Republican members would no longer be able to retain confidence in the President.

Attacking key ally leaders -- especially women

The insidious effect of the conversations comes from Trump's tone, his raging outbursts at allies while fawning over authoritarian strongmen, his ignorance of history and lack of preparation as much as it does from the troubling substance, according to the sources. While in office, then- Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats expressed worry to subordinates that Trump's telephone discussions were undermining the coherent conduct of foreign relations and American objectives around the globe, one of CNN's sources said. And in recent weeks, former chief of staff Kelly has mentioned the damaging impact of the President's calls on US national security to several individuals in private.

Two sources compared many of the President's conversations with foreign leaders to Trump's recent press "briefings" on the coronavirus pandemic: free form, fact-deficient stream-of-consciousness ramblings, full of fantasy and off-the-wall pronouncements based on his intuitions, guesswork, the opinions of Fox News TV hosts and social media misinformation. In addition to Merkel and May, the sources said, Trump regularly bullied and disparaged other leaders of the western alliance during his phone conversations -- including French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison -- in the same hostile and aggressive way he discussed the coronavirus with some of America's governors.

Next to Erdogan, no foreign leader initiated more calls with Trump than Macron, the sources said, with the French President often trying to convince Trump to change course on environmental and security policy matters -- including climate change and US withdrawal from the Iranian multilateral nuclear accord.

Macron usually got "nowhere" on substantive matters, while Trump became irritated at the French President's stream of requests and subjected him to self-serving harangues and lectures that were described by one source as personalized verbal "whippings," especially about France and other countries not meeting NATO spending targets, their liberal immigration policies or their trade imbalances with the US.

But his most vicious attacks, said the sources, were aimed at women heads of state. In conversations with both May and Merkel, the President demeaned and denigrated them in diatribes described as "near-sadistic" by one of the sources and confirmed by others. "Some of the things he said to Angela Merkel are just unbelievable: he called her 'stupid,' and accused her of being in the pocket of the Russians ... He's toughest [in the phone calls] with those he looks at as weaklings and weakest with the ones he ought to be tough with."

The calls "are so unusual," confirmed a German official, that special measures were taken in Berlin to ensure that their contents remained secret. The official described Trump's behavior with Merkel in the calls as "very aggressive" and said that the circle of German officials involved in monitoring Merkel's calls with Trump has shrunk: "It's just a small circle of people who are involved and the reason, the main reason, is that they are indeed problematic."

Trump's conversations with May, the UK Prime Minister from 2016 to 2019, were described as "humiliating and bullying," with Trump attacking her as "a fool" and spineless in her approach to Brexit, NATO and immigration matters. "He'd get agitated about something with Theresa May, then he'd get nasty with her on the phone call," One source said. "It's the same interaction in every setting -- coronavirus or Brexit -- with just no filter applied."

Merkel remained calm and outwardly unruffled in the face of Trump's attacks —"like water off a duck's back," in the words of one source -- and she regularly countered his bluster with recitations of fact. The German official quoted above said that during Merkel's visit to the White House two years ago, Trump displayed "very questionable behavior" that "was quite aggressive ... [T]he Chancellor indeed stayed calm, and that's what she does on the phone."

Prime Minister May, in contrast, became "flustered and nervous" in her conversations with the President. "He clearly intimidated her and meant to," said one of CNN's sources. In response to a request for comment about Trump's behavior in calls with May, the UK's Downing Street referred CNN to its website. The site lists brief descriptions of the content of some calls and avoids any mention of tone or tension. The French embassy in Washington declined to comment, while the Russian and Turkish embassies did not respond to requests for comment.

Concerns over calls with Putin and Erdogan

The calls with Putin and Erdogan were particularly egregious in terms of Trump almost never being prepared substantively and thus leaving him susceptible to being taken advantage of in various ways, according to the sources -- in part because those conversations (as with most heads of state), were almost certainly recorded by the security services and other agencies of their countries.

In his phone exchanges with Putin, the sources reported, the President talked mostly about himself, frequently in over-the-top, self-aggrandizing terms: touting his "unprecedented" success in building the US economy; asserting in derisive language how much smarter and "stronger" he is than "the imbeciles" and "weaklings" who came before him in the presidency (especially Obama); reveling in his experience running the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, and obsequiously courting Putin's admiration and approval. Putin "just outplays" him, said a high-level administration official -- comparing the Russian leader to a chess grandmaster and Trump to an occasional player of checkers. While Putin "destabilizes the West," said this source, the President of the United States "sits there and thinks he can build himself up enough as a businessman and tough guy that Putin will respect him." (At times, the Putin-Trump conversations sounded like "two guys in a steam bath," a source added.)

In numerous calls with Putin that were described to CNN, Trump left top national security aides and his chiefs of staff flabbergasted, less because of specific concessions he made than because of his manner -- inordinately solicitous of Putin's admiration and seemingly seeking his approval -- while usually ignoring substantive policy expertise and important matters on the standing bilateral agenda, including human rights; and an arms control agreement, which never got dealt with in a way that advanced shared Russian and American goals that both Putin and Trump professed to favor, CNN's sources said.

Throughout his presidency, Trump has touted the theme of "America First" as his north star in foreign policy, advancing the view that America's allies and adversaries have taken economic advantage of US goodwill in trade. And that America's closest allies need to increase their share of collective defense spending. He frequently justifies his seeming deference to Putin by arguing that Russia is a major world player and that it is in the United States' interest to have a constructive and friendly relationship -- requiring a reset with Moscow through his personal dialogue with Putin.

In separate interviews, two high-level administration officials familiar with most of the Trump-Putin calls said the President naively elevated Russia -- a second-rate totalitarian state with less than 4% of the world's GDP -- and its authoritarian leader almost to parity with the United States and its President by undermining the tougher, more realistic view of Russia expressed by the US Congress, American intelligence agencies and the long-standing post-war policy consensus of the US and its European allies. "He [Trump] gives away the advantage that was hard won in the Cold War," said one of the officials -- in part by "giving Putin and Russia a legitimacy they never had," the official said. "He's given Russia a lifeline -- because there is no doubt that they're a declining power ... He's playing with something he doesn't understand and he's giving them power that they would use [aggressively]."

Both officials cited Trump's decision to pull US troops out of Syria -- a move that benefited Turkey as well as Russia -- as perhaps the most grievous example. "He gave away the store," one of them said.

The frequency of the calls with Erdogan -- in which the Turkish president continually pressed Trump for policy concessions and other favors -- was especially worrisome to McMaster, Bolton and Kelly, the more so because of the ease with which Erdogan bypassed normal National Security Council protocols and procedures to reach the President, said two of the sources.

Erdogan became so adept at knowing when to reach the President directly that some White House aides became convinced that Turkey's security services in Washington were using Trump's schedule and whereabouts to provide Erdogan with information about when the President would be available for a call.

On some occasions Erdogan reached him on the golf course and Trump would delay play while the two spoke at length. Two sources described the President as woefully uninformed about the history of the Syrian conflict and the Middle East generally, and said he was often caught off guard, and lacked sufficient knowledge to engage on equal terms in nuanced policy discussion with Erdogan. "Erdogan took him to the cleaners," said one of the sources.

The sources said that deleterious US policy decisions on Syria -- including the President's directive to pull US forces out of the country, which then allowed Turkey to attack Kurds who had helped the US fight ISIS and weakened NATO's role in the conflict -- were directly linked to Erdogan's ability to get his way with Trump on the phone calls.

Trump occasionally became angry at Erdogan -- sometimes because of demands that Turkey be granted preferential trade status, and because the Turkish leader would not release an imprisoned American evangelical pastor, Andrew Brunson, accused of 'aiding terrorism' in the 2016 coup that attempted to overthrow Erdogan. Brunson was eventually released in October 2018.

Despite the lack of advance notice for many of Erdogan's calls, full sets of contemporaneous notes from designated notetakers at the White House exist, as well as rough voice-generated computer texts of the conversations, the sources said.

According to one high-level source, there are also existing summaries and conversation-readouts of the President's discussions with Erdogan that might reinforce Bolton's allegations against Trump in the so-called "Halkbank case," involving a major Turkish bank with suspected ties to Erdogan and his family. That source said the matter was raised in more than one telephone conversation between Erdogan and Trump.

Bolton wrote in his book that in December 2018, at Erdogan's urging, Trump offered to interfere in an investigation by then-US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman into the Turkish bank, which was accused of violating US sanctions on Iran.

"Trump then told Erdogan he would take care of things, explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people," Bolton wrote. Berman's office eventually brought an indictment against the bank in October 2019 for fraud, money laundering and other offenses related to participation in a multibillion-dollar scheme to evade the US sanctions on Iran. On June 20, Trump fired Berman -- whose office is also investigating Rudy Giuliani, the President's personal lawyer -- after the prosecutor refused to resign at Attorney General William Barr's direction.

Unlike Bolton, CNN's sources did not assert or suggest specifically that Trump's calls with Erdogan might have been grounds for impeachment because of possible evidence of unlawful conduct by the President. Rather, they characterized Trump's calls with heads of state in the aggregate as evidence of Trump's general "unfitness" for the presidency on grounds of temperament and incompetence, an assertion Bolton made as well in an interview to promote his book with ABC News last week: "I don't think he's fit for office. I don't think he has the competence to carry out the job," Bolton said.

Family feedback and grievances fuel Trump's approach

CNN spoke to sources familiar with the President's phone calls repeatedly over a four-month period. In their interviews, the sources took great care not to disclose specific national security information and classified details -- but rather described the broad contents of many of the calls, and the overall tenor and methodology of Trump's approach to his telephone discussions with foreign leaders.

In addition to rough, voice-generated software transcription, almost all of Trump's telephone conversations with Putin, Erdogan and leaders of the western alliance were supplemented and documented by extensive contemporaneous note-taking (and, often, summaries) prepared by Fiona Hill, deputy assistant to the President and senior NSC director for Europe and Russia until her resignation last year. Hill listened to most of the President's calls with Putin, Erdogan and the European leaders, according to her closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last November.

Elements of that testimony by Hill, if re-examined by Congressional investigators, might provide a detailed road-map of the President's extensively-documented conversations, the sources said. White House and intelligence officials familiar with the voice-generated transcriptions and underlying documents agreed that their contents could be devastating to the President's standing with members of the Congress of both parties -- and the public -- if revealed in great detail. (There is little doubt that Trump would invoke executive privilege to keep the conversations private. However, some former officials with detailed knowledge of many of the conversations might be willing to testify about them, sources said.) In one of the earliest calls between Putin and Trump, the President's son-in-law Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were in the room to listen — joining McMaster, Tillerson, Hill, and a State Department aide to Tillerson.

"The call was all over the place," said an NSC deputy who read a detailed summary of the conversation -- with Putin speaking substantively and at length, and Trump propping himself up in short autobiographical bursts of bragging, self-congratulation and flattery toward Putin. As described to CNN, Kushner and Ivanka Trump were immediately effusive in their praise of how Trump had handled the call -- while Tillerson (who knew Putin well from his years in Russia as an oil executive), Hill and McMaster were skeptical.

Hill — author of a definitive biography of Putin -- started to explain some of the nuances she perceived from the call, according to CNN's sources — offering insight into Putin's psychology, his typical "smooth-talking" and linear approach and what the Russian leader was trying to achieve in the call. Hill was cut off by Trump, and the President continued discussing the call with Jared and Ivanka, making clear he wanted to hear the congratulatory evaluation of his daughter and her husband, rather than how Hill, Tillerson or McMaster judged the conversation.

McMaster viewed that early phone call with Putin as indicative of the conduct of the whole relationship between Russia and the Trump administration, according to the sources -- a conclusion subsequent national security advisers and chiefs of staff, and numerous high-ranking intelligence officials also reached: unlike in previous administrations, there were relatively few meaningful dealings between military and diplomatic professionals, even at the highest levels, because Trump -- distrustful of the experts and dismissive of their attempts to brief him -- conducted the relationship largely ad hoc with Putin and almost totally by himself. Ultimately, Putin and the Russians learned that "nobody has the authority to do anything" -- and the Russian leader used that insight to his advantage, as one of CNN's sources said.

The Kushners were also present for other important calls with foreign leaders and made their primacy apparent, encouraged by the President even on matters of foreign policy in which his daughter and her husband had no experience. Almost never, according to CNN's sources, would Trump read the briefing materials prepared for him by the CIA and NSC staff in advance of his calls with heads of state.

"He won't consult them, he won't even get their wisdom," said one of the sources, who cited Saudi Arabia's bin Salman as near the top of a list of leaders whom Trump "picks up and calls without anybody being prepared," a scenario that frequently confronted NSC and intelligence aides. The source added that the aides' helpless reaction "would frequently be, 'Oh my God, don't make that phone call.'"

"Trump's view is that he is a better judge of character than anyone else," said one of CNN's sources. The President consistently rejected advice from US defense, intelligence and national security principals that the Russian president be approached more firmly and with less trust. CNN's sources pointed to the most notable public example as "emblematic": Trump, standing next to the Russian President at their meeting in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2018, and saying he "didn't see any reason why" Russia would have interfered in the 2016 presidential election -- despite the findings of the entire US intelligence community that Moscow had. "President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today," Trump said.

The common, overwhelming dynamic that characterizes Trump's conversations with both authoritarian dictators and leaders of the world's greatest democracies is his consistent assertion of himself as the defining subject and subtext of the calls -- almost never the United States and its historic place and leadership in the world, according to sources intimately familiar with the calls.

In numerous calls with the leaders of the UK, France, Germany, Australia and Canada -- America's closest allies of the past 75 years, the whole postwar era -- Trump typically established a grievance almost as a default or leitmotif of the conversation, whatever the supposed agenda, according to those sources.

"Everything was always personalized, with everybody doing terrible things to rip us off — which meant ripping 'me' — Trump — off. He couldn't -- or wouldn't -- see or focus on the larger picture," said one US official.

The source cited a conspicuously demonstrable instance in which Trump resisted asking Angela Merkel (at the UK's urging) to publicly hold Russia accountable for the so-called 'Salisbury' poisonings of a former Russian spy and his daughter with Novichok, a nerve agent developed in what was then the Soviet Union, in which Putin had denied any Russian involvement despite voluminous evidence to the contrary.

"It took a lot of effort" to get Trump to bring up the subject, said one source. Instead of addressing Russia's responsibility for the poisonings and holding it to international account, Trump made the focus of the call -- in personally demeaning terms -- Germany's and Merkel's supposedly deadbeat approach to allied burden-sharing. Eventually, said the sources, as urged by his NSC staff, Trump at last addressed the matter of the poisonings, almost grudgingly. "With almost every problem, all it takes [in his phone calls] is someone asking him to do something as President on behalf of the United States and he doesn't see it that way; he goes to being ripped off; he's not interested in cooperative issues or working on them together; instead he's deflecting things or pushing real issues off into a corner," said a US official.

"There was no sense of 'Team America' in the conversations," or of the United States as an historic force with certain democratic principles and leadership of the free world, said the official. "The opposite. It was like the United States had disappeared. It was always 'Just me'."

Trump-Hannity Interview: A Trump Second Term?

Click here for an article at The Plum Line, a WaPo blog by Paul Waldman, entitled "Here’s what a second term of Trump would look like."

In an interview, Hannity tossed Trump this softball: "What are your top priority items for a second term?” To which our hero, the golden-tongued orator, responded as follows:

Well, one of the things that will be really great: You know, the word “experience” is still good. I always say talent is more important than experience. I’ve always said that. But the word “experience” is a very important word. It’s a very important meaning. I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington, I think, 17 times, all of a sudden I’m president of the United States, you know the story, I’m riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our first lady and I say, “This is great.”

But I didn’t know very many people in Washington. it wasn’t my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York. Now I know everybody. And I have great people in the administration. You make some mistakes, like you know an idiot like Bolton, all he wanted to do is drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.

Okaaaay, thank you for that. Incidentally, I read elsewhere -- Mediate, I think -- that of a one-hour interview, 10 minutes were commercials. Of the remaining 50 minutes, Hannity and Trump spent 3 minutes discussing Covid-19; 47 minutes were spent covering other topics -- confederate monuments, looters and rioters, Sleepy Joe Biden, et cetera.

Lindsey Graham on Donald Trump and Joe Biden

Paste this in your browser address window:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1277238042546319360

Whatever became of this version of Lindsey Graham, and how did he become one of Trump's major lickspittles?

Steve Schmidt v. Matt Gaetz

Matt Gaetz, Republican congresscritter from Florida, directed an insulting tweet to Steve Schmidt, oldtime Republican strategist:

“Decline” could be the story of the various Republican campaigns you’ve led, Steve.

Our ships sail on.

Yours all rest at the bottom of the political ocean.

Big mistake.

In a multi-tweet message, Schmidt responded:

You invited a Holocaust Denier to the State of the Union. You are a conspiracy theorist and a lackey for the most inept, incompetent and illiberal President in American History. In an utterly rancid political moment you have established yourself as a buffoon without peer.

Your drunk driving incident, dozen speeding tickets and gas mask stunt at the beginning of the pandemic mark you as an entitled, reckless and spoiled punk. Your conduct disgraces the United States Congress. One thing is certainly true about democracy, the crazy and the stupid deserve representation also, and with you they have a perfect one.

Trump is falling apart in every way. He is physically decrepit and slovenly. He can barely walk. He is mentally and morally weak and failing at a profound level. He will be repudiated by the American people and by history’s harsh judgement, as will you.

When you are an old man looking back on it all you can be satisfied that you were the political version of Meatloaf or Gary Busey on the Apprentice, a figure of ridicule, a clown 🤡 in Trump’s circus.

The economy is shattered. America is divided and 120,000 are dead from a badly managed pandemic. Trump is going down. @ProjectLincoln @reedgalen @jwgop @TheRickWilson .

All you will have left is the stench. It won’t go away. Ever.

Forthcoming Bombshell: Book By Mary Trump (Niece)

Click here for an article at The Hive, a Vanity Fair blog, by Joe Pompeo, entitled "“She Feels Very Determined”: How Mary Trump’s Coming Bombshell Was Built."

The article is about a forthcoming book by Mary Trump, 55-year-old daughter of Trump's older brother, Fred, who died of ailments related to his alcoholism at the age of 42. She is a clinical psychologist, which gives some weight to her insights into the toxic DNA of the Trump family. The book will be titled "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man."

This quote from the article gives us some idea of what the book will be like:

On the night of her uncle’s election, responding to a tweet from progressive journalist Joan Walsh, Mary wrote, “This is one of the worst nights of my life. What is wrong with this country? I fear the American experiment has failed.”

Paste this into your browser's address window for Stephen Colbert's take on it, a "reading" from the book by Mary Trump herself:

https://twitter.com/colbertlateshow/status/1273057775493550081

Fake News

Here's a segment from Reliable Sources, a CNN blog by Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy, entitled "Twisted incentives." They say that "if one's primary intention is not necessarily to accurately inform or make a good faith argument, but instead to prey on preexisting political narratives to score cheap clicks and engagement on social media, the rules of the game change."

Twisted incentives

Rushing to judgment before all the facts have emerged is never a good idea if one's intention is to provide accurate information to an audience. Too often, preliminary information turns out to be inaccurate or seen in a different light once the full picture is made available. It's usually better to wait until a reasonable amount of information surfaces before weighing in.

But if one's primary intention is not necessarily to accurately inform or make a good faith argument, but instead to prey on preexisting political narratives to score cheap clicks and engagement on social media, the rules of the game change. In the universe of hyper-partisan media, it's actually in one's interest to publish information — regardless of how thin the supporting evidence is — that fits neatly into the narrative.

If you're ahead of your competitors in publishing, you'll see a huge boost in engagement on social media. And if you end up being wrong, so what? Slap an update on the article and move on — the audience will either not notice or care the way they would if an established news org erred.

On Tuesday, we were offered two examples (see below) in which right-wing media pushed a preferred narrative that went viral on social platforms, only later to be undercut by the facts that emerged. (To be clear, this happens across partisan media, and is not unique to right-wing media, though the President consumes the latter camp's messaging which makes it at the moment far more consequential.)

No, Shake Shack didn't poison the NYPD

If you logged online Monday night, you may have seen disturbing reports that indicated a trio of NYPD officers had been poisoned while at a Shake Shack. Those reports, many of which went viral in right-wing media, were based off statements from police unions. But early Tuesday morning, NYPD Detective Chief Rodney Harrison said an investigation had "determined there was no criminality." CNN reported that investigators believe a cleaning agent in the milkshake machine hadn't fully cleared and ended up in the drinks served to the officers.

And yet, even the NYPD's own statement didn't stop some partisan media players from pushing the misinformation. Justin Baragona reported that "despite Harrison’s statement, which came at 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning, several Fox News stars ... continued to push the now-debunked claim that the officers were deliberately poisoned by the burger chain’s employees." This B.S. continued into Tuesday night on right-wing websites like The Daily Wire, which blasted out a nightly newsletter with the headline about Shake Shack. All in all, it's a good case study demonstrating that the incentives in hyper-partisan media reward stories that reinforce preexisting political views versus accurate reporting...

Man allegedly linked with "Boogaloo" movement charged

A couple weeks ago, right-wing media personalities and outlets suggested — or outright blamed — the death of federal officer David Patrick Underwood was the result of Antifa or left-wing demonstrators. As Kevin Roose tweeted, "This Oakland police killing was heavily promoted by right-wing publications a few weeks ago as evidence that left-wing protesters were turning violent."

"It was all over Facebook," Roose explained, "shared by right-wing pages with millions of followers. Among the top stories on the platform for days." And it wasn't just limited to online platforms — Underwood's death was used to suggest violence at the demonstrations on talk radio and Fox News too.

Fast forward to Tuesday. US Attorney David Anderson announced at a press conference that a man believed to belong to the anti-government extremist "Boogaloo" group has been charged for the murder. In other words, not a left-wing Black Lives Matter protester or Antifa member. Far from it. But will the outlets and personalties that pushed that narrative correct their previous posts? Will the same amount of attention be given to the new information? Don't hold your breath...

No real consequences

When mainstream news organizations mess up, they correct their errors. If it's a big mistake, disciplinary measures might be taken against the reporter or editor. In severe cases, people could lose their jobs and their careers might be forever tainted.

But, as I alluded to earlier, hyper-partisan media generally isn't governed by the same rules. If these organizations or personalities make a mistake, no matter how egregious it may be, there are no real repercussions. The pundit or outlet often barely corrects or updates the post, before moving on to the next story that will advance the predetermined narrative. In fact, it can be argued that these hyper-partisan entities still benefit from pushing inaccurate information. If their post went viral on social media, for instance, they likely gained followers and added to their reach. The incentives in our current media environment are not aligned with disseminating accurate information.

Chris Cuomo v. Larry Kudlow: Systemic Racism

Click here for a video clip (6:55) of Chris Cuomo replying to Larry Kudlow's repeated assertion that there is no systemic racism in the United States. Cuomo goes on and on and on and ON citing aspects of U.S. life where whites have a systemic advantage over blacks; it's quite a list.

He finishes by giving two possible reasons why Kudlow would express such a belief: one, in his world, he doesn't encounter it so he doesn't realize it's there; or two -- the reason Cuomo believes is the real reason -- he is knuckling under to Trump.

Cops' Participation In Vile Facebook Groups

This is pretty frightening. Click here for Part 1 of a three-part series entitled by Will Carless and Michael Corey, entitled "To protect and slur: Inside hate groups on Facebook, police officers trade racist memes, conspiracy theories and Islamophobia."

William Barr, Explained

Click here for an excellent (long) article in The New York Times Magazine by Mattathias Schwartz, entitled "William Barr's State of Emergency."

It does a good job of explaining Barr's development as a supporter of the theory of the "unitary executive," defined in Wikipedia:

Proponents of a strongly unitary theory argue that the president possesses all of the executive power and can therefore control subordinate officers and agencies of the executive branch. This implies that the power of Congress to remove executive agencies or officers from Presidential control is limited. Thus, under the strongly unitary executive theory, independent agencies and counsels are unconstitutional to the extent that they exercise discretionary executive power not controlled by the president.

The article says:

The presidency, in his [Barr's] view, handled “sovereign functions … which by their very nature cannot be directed by a pre-existing legal regime but rather demand speed, secrecy, unity of purpose and prudent judgment to meet contingent circumstances.” Part of the core function of the presidency was the ability to act swiftly and without constraint, but this capability had been diminished by the other branches since Watergate. Congress had burdened the president with oversight, while the courts were interfering with Trump’s travel ban on certain countries and his termination of President Barack Obama’s DACA program for young immigrants. Barr seemed to suggest that when it comes to foreign policy, the only legitimate check on presidential behavior is the next election. Months later, this argument would become the foundation of Trump’s impeachment defense.

Barr, who had previously been attorney general under Poppy Bush, was appointed Trump's attorney general largely on the strenght of an unsolicited "application" he sent to the White House:

outlining why he believed that Mueller had no legal right to investigate Trump for obstruction of justice. The president, Barr argued, has “complete authority to start or stop” investigations and can “give direction” on individual cases, including those that touch on his political or financial interests. “The Constitution itself places no limit on the president’s authority to act on matters which concern him or his own conduct,” Barr wrote. Law enforcement, he argued, was a power exclusively held by the president, because “he alone is the executive branch.”

Barr had hardly been in his post for a month when he received the Mueller report, when he published a hugely distorted "summary" of the report which seemed to exonerate Trump (which the report itself was far from doing). It's a mistake to consider Barr to be a tool of Donald Trump:

“Those who think he’s a tool of Donald Trump are missing the point,” says Stuart Gerson, who led the Justice Department’s civil division during Barr’s first tour and then succeeded him, serving as acting attorney general during the first three months of Bill Clinton’s presidency. “If anything, it’s the other way around. Barr is vastly more intelligent than Donald Trump. What Trump gives Bill Barr is a canvas upon which to paint. Bill has longstanding views about how society should be organized, which can now be manifested and acted upon to a degree that they never could have before.”

Many believe Barr to be acting not as "the people's lawyer," but as Donald Trump's personal lawyer:

Vanita Gupta, the former head of Obama’s civil rights division at the department, articulated a prevailing view of Barr among Democrats, telling me that the attorney general has “since Day 1 operated as the president’s defense lawyer.” Gupta says Barr’s interventions on behalf of Trump associates have far-reaching consequences. “Barr is overturning decisions made by career prosecutors to placate the president,” she says. “It’s insulting to federal prosecutors who have given their time to build cases with honor and integrity. It has a destructive impact on morale.”

I await with trepidation the forthcoming publishing of the Durham report, which looks as though it will be an effort to pillory the Mueller investigators:

Based on Barr’s public statements, we can see the rough contours of Durham’s findings beginning to take shape. The government’s conduct during the Obama-to-Trump transition, Barr has said, was “abhorrent.” Surveillance of Trump’s campaign amounted to “spying.” Then there was the all-important question of whether the F.B.I. was justified in opening the initial Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia ties.

The Durham investigation has been shrouded in mystery, but it doesn't look good:

Barr has spoken with intelligence officials from Italy, Australia and Britain to reportedly solicit information that could help Durham. In the case of Italy, where Barr and Durham met with political leaders and intelligence chiefs in person, his visit provoked concern among U.S. diplomats, who told The Times that Barr circumvented protocols in setting up the trip. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who is the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee and helped write its five-volume report, said there were “concerns” about Barr’s trips. “There is queasiness among our allies about the kind of activities Barr is engaged in,” he said.

Peggy Noonan v. Trump

Click here for an article by John Harwood at CNN entitled "Trump's evident character flaws leave him unable to meet the historic moment."

Harwood contrasts efforts to unite a divided country by presidents going all the way back to FDR with Trump's constant efforts to divide the country, please his supporters, and antagonize his political opponents. He quotes Peggy Noonan, who predictably praised Ronald Reagan before saying:

"A president doesn't have to be brilliant," Noonan wrote 25 years ago. "He doesn't have to be clever. You can hire clever. But you can't buy courage and decency, and you can't rent a strong moral sense. A president must bring those things with him."

It Can't Happen Here? Oh, Yeah?

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Salman Rushdie, entitled "I’ve seen dictators rise and fall. Beware, America."

Rushdie has lived through and under dictatorships in India and Pakistan, and has used their many misdeeds as the basis for some of his novels. He says he has lived in the U.S. for 20 years and has been a citizen for the last 4, and reminds us that the First Amendment says, in part: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

And yet, the man whose incompetence allowed the pandemic to tighten its deadly grip around our necks, and whose inflammatory language full of racist dog whistles has played a significant role in unleashing white-supremacist bigotry upon us all, stands in the Rose Garden of the White House and announces without an iota of shame that he wants to protect peaceful protesters. At that very time, just down the street, his security forces, some of them on horseback, are attacking a peaceful protest with tear gas and rubber bullets. A moment later, he characterizes the demonstrators as terrorists and characterizes their protests as crimes against God.

Rushdie says:

If he is allowed to use the actions of a tiny minority of criminals and white extremist infiltrators to invalidate the honorable protest of the vast majority against the murder of Floyd, the violence of the police toward the black community and the entrenched power of American racism, he will be on his way to despotism. He has threatened to use the Army against American citizens, a threat one might have expected from a leader of the former Soviet Union, but not of the United States.

In my most recent novel, “Quichotte,” I characterized the present moment as the “Age of Anything-Can-Happen.” Today I say, beware, America. Don’t believe that it can’t happen here.

"IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE": Shades of Sinclair Lewis.

Statement by General Mattis

Statement made by General James (Mad Dog) Mattis, a former Marine four-star who was Trump's first Secretary of Defense, acting from January 2017 to January 2019:

In Union There Is Strength

I have watched this week's unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words "Equal Justice Under Law" are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.

 When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

We must reject any thinking of our cities as a "battlespace" that our uniformed military is called upon to "dominate." At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict— between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part.

Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that "America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat." We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that "The Nazi slogan for destroying us...was 'Divide and Conquer.' Our American answer is 'In Union there is Strength.'" We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln's "better angels," and listen to them, as we work to unite.

Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.

James Mattis

Ann Coulter v. Trump

Click here for an article by Karoli Kuns at Crooks & Liars entitled "Ann Coulter Tees Off On Trump: 'Another Roy Moore Fiasco.'"

Wow! Coulter doesn't hold back. The following are all tweets from Sunday, May 24:

The most disloyal actual retard that has ever set foot in the Oval Office is trying to lose AND take the Senate with him. Another Roy Moore fiasco so he can blame someone else for his own mess.

Another, same day:

COVID gave Trump a chance to be a decent, compassionate human being (or pretending to be). But he couldn't even do that.

Here's a Coulter tweet in response to a Trump tweet attacking Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation:

Sessions HAD to recuse himself, you complete blithering idiot. YOU did not have to go on Lester Holt's show and announce you fired Comey over the Russian investigation. That's what got you a Special Prosecutor.

Again, same day, apparently criticizing Trump's endorsement of no-hoper Roy Moore for the Alabama Senate race in 2018:

GREAT WORK IN THE LAST ALABAMA SENATE RACE, MR. PRESIDENT! Keep it up and we'll have zero Republican senators. The next Republican president will be elected in the year 4820.

And finally (at least so far; it's still May 24, 2 p.m. Eastern):

I will never apologize for supporting the issues that candidate Trump advocated, but I am deeply sorry for thinking that this shallow and broken man would show even some remote fealty to the promises that got him elected.

Click here for an article by Digby at Hullabaloo entitled "Why Trumpie won’t read."

The New York Times reported today on Trump’s insistence that the Intelligence Community didn’t adequately warn him about the coronavirus pandemic. Even if true, it shouldn’t have made a difference. All you had to do was read the papers. And his own public health experts were running around with their hair on fire. He just didn’t want to hear it.

In fact, he doesn’t want to read anything or hear anything that doesn’t apply directly to what people are saying about him. It is literally all he cares about:

Mr. Trump, who has mounted a yearslong attack on the intelligence agencies, is particularly difficult to brief on critical national security matters, according to interviews with 10 current and former intelligence officials familiar with his intelligence briefings.

The president veers off on tangents and getting him back on topic is difficult, they said. He has a short attention span and rarely, if ever, reads intelligence reports, relying instead on conservative media and his friends for information. He is unashamed to interrupt intelligence officers and riff based on tips or gossip he hears from the former casino magnate Steve Wynn, the retired golfer Gary Player or Christopher Ruddy, the conservative media executive.

Mr. Trump rarely absorbs information that he disagrees with or that runs counter to his worldview, the officials said. Briefing him has been so great a challenge compared with his predecessors that the intelligence agencies have hired outside consultants to study how better to present information to him.

Working to keep Mr. Trump’s interest exhausted and burned out his first briefer, Ted Gistaro, two former officials said. Mr. Gistaro did not always know what to expect and would sometimes have to brief an erratic and angry president upset over news reports, the officials said.

More from the article:

Trump’s non-reading evinces not stupidity so much as incuriosity. Narcissists are easily bored, and Trump is no exception. In his 1990 book, Surviving at the Top, which he didn’t write, Trump says that travel, exercise, and successful people bore him. “I get bored too easily,” he says. “My attention span is short.”

Trump’s former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn allegedly wrote in an email, “Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

The only information that interests Trump is information that affirms his self-image. He’s rich, handsome, and popular — that’s what he wants to hear, which is why he regularly says it himself.

Trump, we are told, processes information orally. If you process information orally, you likely process little information. And if you process little information, you exude even less. Every time Trump comments on a subject, he reveals how little he knows about it. He wondered aloud why the Civil War was fought. He said he’s been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated. He didn’t know what happened at Pearl Harbor. He’s too dumb to know he’s ignorant, and he’s too narcissistic to care.

As John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, observed, oral communication is personal, focuses on emotions, and “reinforces what you know,” whereas the written word “collects information we don’t memorize.” The latter is conducive to prolonged thinking.

And:

Trump, putative author of three books with “think” in the title, doesn’t like to think. He doesn’t even think about himself — his favorite subject — much less about public health. He lives and acts in the moment, chasing instant gratification, which reading does not provide. That’s why he prefers television and Twitter to reading and thinking: they are immediate, visceral, and cognitively undemanding.

Reading doesn’t necessarily make you a good president — James Buchanan, America’s second-worst president, was well-read — but not reading is sure to make you a bad one. In his book Call Sign Chaos, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis writes, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.” Trump’s personal experiences include being on TV a lot and watching a lot of TV.

One of the purposes of reading is to learn, but it’s pointless to learn if you already know everything. Trump is convinced of his own omniscience. Last month, he claimed to “know a lot about helicopters” and to “know South Korea better than anybody,” right before he got the population of Seoul wrong. “I know windmills very much,” he said in December. “I’ve studied it better than anybody.”

The president has claimed to possess superior knowledge about drones, ISIS, courts, lawsuits, America’s system of government, trade, renewable energy, banks, taxes, tax laws, debt, campaign finance, money, infrastructure, construction, technology, the economy, Democrats, polls, steelworkers, the word “apprentice,” environmental impact statements, “the power of Facebook,” “offense and defense,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), COVID-19, and “things.”

None of this is true. Trump is a know-it-all who knows almost nothing and refuses to read anything except his own name. His bibliophobia would be funny if it weren’t so deadly.

Lindsey Graham Nailed

Click here for a post by Digby at Hullabaloo an ad against Lindsey Graham as he runs for re-election in South Carolina.

He's Back! (Ronny Jackson, That Is)

Remember Ronny Jackson? A Navy rear admiral, he was appointed president's physician by W in 2006, and kept on by Obama and then Trump. He was quiet, apolitical, and liked by many in the Obama administration. He first became controversial in January 2018 when he gushed about Trump's extraordinary health (preposterous on its face; the man is sedentary, obese, and a junk food addict), "incredible genes," and said "Based on his cardiac assessment, hands down, there is no question he is in the excellent range," and "I told the President that if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years he might live to be 200 years old." Many people in the Obama administration who had known Jackson defended him at that point because he was well liked.

Controversy boiled over in March 2018, when Trump nominated Jackson, who had no previous managerial experience, to be secretary of Veterans Affairs, a bureaucracy with 375,000 employees. He was assailed for his total lack of experience, and stories came out that he generously doled out prescription drugs left and right, earning the nickname "Candyman," and that he was frequently drunk on duty. Though the allegations were disputed and never really proven, Trump abandoned the nomination.

Jackson retired from the Navy in December 2019 and announced a week later that he was running for a seat in Congress as a Republican (a sitting Republican congressman was retiring). Once seen to be apolitical, he is now an outspoken Trump supporter. Click here for an article by Kevin Liptak at CNN entitled "Former White House physician Ronny Jackson dives headfirst into 'Obamagate' and angers former colleagues."

To the consternation of his former Obama administration friends, he said last week on Twitter, without offering any proof, "President Obama weaponized the highest levels of our government to spy on President Trump. Every Deep State traitor deserves to be brought to justice for their heinous actions." The following day, he doubled down:

On Wednesday, Jackson released a new statement "regarding recent false accusations from former Obama officials and the mainstream media."

"I stand by my comments calling out President Obama's administration for weaponizing our government to spy on President Trump and his supporters," Jackson wrote. "I will never apologize for standing up to protect America's national security interests and constitutional freedoms, even if that means triggering liberals and the 'mainstream media.'"

In his statement, Jackson says he's "proud to call President Trump a close friend."

Former acquaintances feel blindsided: "During my time in the White House Ronny Jackson was my colleague, my friend and my doctor. I thanked him in my book for his good care," tweeted Alyssa Mastromonaco, a former deputy chief of staff. "His comments yesterday and today leave me confused, angry, and heartbroken. I don't recognize this version of Ronny at all."

An Explanation Of The Flynn Mess

Click here for an article in The New York Times by Adam Goldman and Mark Mazzetti entitled "Trump White House Changes Its Story on Michael Flynn."

Don't lose sight of the fact that Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about telephone conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak. The view expressed by the White House three years ago was that "Mr. Flynn ... had lied to Vice President Mike Pence and other aides about the nature of his calls to the ambassador, had lied repeatedly to F.B.I. agents about the calls, and might have made himself vulnerable to Russian blackmail."

Marshall L. Miller, a former top prosecutor in Brooklyn and the principal deputy of the Justice Department’s criminal division, says “Mr. Flynn admitted twice under oath that he lied to the F.B.I. Political appointees at D.O.J. are now trying to rewrite the law to erase the crime.”

Mr. Flynn’s troubles began with a phone call.

It was Dec. 29, 2016, the day the outgoing Obama administration announced sanctions against Russia for the country’s widespread effort to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Flynn, who was Mr. Trump’s incoming national security adviser, urged Mr. Kislyak in a phone call not to escalate tensions with a retaliatory move against the United States — perhaps by kicking American diplomats and spies out of Russia.

Given the circumstances, the call was remarkable. The United States government had just determined that its longtime adversary had launched a concerted effort to sabotage a presidential election, and the incoming national security adviser was having a back-channel discussion with a top Russian official that might lead to the new Trump administration gutting the sanctions its predecessor put in place to punish the Russians.

As time went by, "The matter took on greater urgency when Mr. Flynn’s discussions with Mr. Kislyak were revealed publicly by David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist."

Top Trump transition officials — including Mr. Pence as well as Reince Priebus, who was to be White House chief of staff, and Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary — questioned Mr. Flynn about the Washington Post column. Mr. Flynn denied that he spoke about sanctions with Mr. Kislyak, and Mr. Spicer repeated those claims to members of the news media. "Days later, on Face the Nation, Pence stated what Flynn had told him: "'They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia,' the vice president said."

Mr. Pence’s interview set off alarms at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. If Mr. Flynn had lied to the vice president, the Russians knew that and could use it as leverage over Mr. Flynn. Newly disclosed documents made public in Mr. Flynn’s criminal case show officials were also concerned that Mr. Pence might have been lying, as well.

“The implications of that were that the Russians believed one of two things — either that the vice president was in on it with Flynn, or that Flynn was clearly willing to lie to the vice president,” Mary B. McCord, a former top national security at the time, said in an interview with the special counsel’s office.

That was when the FBI decided to find out what was going on. Comey sent a pair of FBI agents to interview Flynn, who by then was a few days into his job as national security adviser. That was when Flynn lied repeatedly, denying that he had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador [how could he not have known that Kislyak's phone calls were tapped, and the FBI knew he was lying?]

“McGahn [White House counsel] and Priebus [White House chief of staff] concluded that Flynn could not have forgotten the details of the discussions of sanctions and had instead been lying about what he discussed with Kislyak.”

Mr. McGahn and Mr. Priebus decided that Mr. Flynn needed to go and made that recommendation to Mr. Trump.

So it was Trump and his White House staff who made the decision to fire Flynn for what they believed was good cause, although they are now maintaining that Flynn is a victim of bullying by the Obama administration as part of a "silent coup" to take Trump down. In June of 2019 Flynn got a new lawyer, a woman named Sidney Powell, who stated that “it is increasingly apparent that General Flynn was targeted and taken out of the Trump administration for concocted and political purposes.”

Why People Support Trump (It's Frightening)

Click here for an excellent article at The New York Times by Thomas B. Edsall entitled "Trump Is Staking Out His Own Universe of ‘Alternative Facts,'" subtitled "The president’s re-election strategy isn’t based on reality. How could it be?"

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

In less than a year, from May 2019 to March 2020, the share of weekly church-attending white Protestants convinced that Donald Trump was anointed by God to be president grew from 29.6 percent to 49.5 percent.

Good lord. "Anointed by God"? What's wrong with these people?

The Trump campaign’s digital sites serve a dual purpose. His supporters are able to enter a self-contained, self-reinforcing arena where Trump reigns supreme, and the campaign gets detailed marketing information about those who go through the elaborate sign-up process — information subsequently used for voter mobilization, fund-raising and volunteer recruitment.

The article says that Stefan Smith, a Democratic tech strategist, says the Trump campaign is "trapping people inside an ecosystem of dangerous misinformation, conspiracy theories, and grievance politics. And it’s doing so while making the experience as fun and exciting as possible."

“The new Trump campaign app uses gamification to drive voter outreach and valuable data collection,” CNN reported on April 23. “Share the campaign app with a friend, win 100 points. Earn 5,000 points and you can redeem a campaign store discount. Earn 100,000 points, and you can get a picture with President Donald Trump.”

Those who download the Trump app can “watch live ‘shows’ hosted by senior campaign aides and surrogates,” according to CNN, and receive tutorial videos from top campaign aides and surrogates like Lara Trump, who explains how to become a “digital activist” on social media and host a “MAGA meet up.” Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr, explains how to become a fund-raising “bundler” and political director Chris Carr discusses how to be a grass roots “team leader.”

Parscale himself [Brad Parscale, Trump's campaign manager] told viewers that his favorite item at his Florida home is Hillary Clinton toilet paper: “I have boxes of it,” he said, “and I take it into the bathroom and it’s just enjoyable since she said so many mean things about me and our campaign and our president.”

A scholarly article about the phenomenon, “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy,” published in 2018 in the American Sociological Review by Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim and Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan, of the business schools at Yale, Northwestern and M.I.T., pose the question: “How can a constituency of voters find a candidate authentically appealing (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a ‘lying demagogue’ (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to nonnormative private prejudices)?”

How does a lying demagogue attract and keep supporters? Well, “the lying demagogue claims to be an authentic champion of those who are subject to social control by the established political leadership.” The target audience is those who believe that their interests are not represented by the political establishment. The established political leadership is repelled by the actions of "the lying demagogue," and this just reinforces the followers' belief that the demagogue is on their side, fighting their fight, enraging the right people.

People may feel anxious or angry about the political landscape they see around them -- and the demagogue tries to keep them angry.

When people are anxious they tend to seek out new information. Anxiety rouses people from a sort of ‘autopilot’ mode and causes them to re-evaluate their beliefs.

Anger, in contrast, has the opposite effect. When people are angry they tend to mentally retreat and dig in on the things that they know and believe to be true.

The result?

The psychological nature of anger essentially precludes any sort of attitudinal change against Trump. Anger causes Trump’s supporters to become more reliant on information they receive from him, the RNC, Fox News, etc.

Here's some scary stuff: Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, warned in an April 9 appearance on David Plouffe’s podcast, that

the numbers are pretty stark. Joe Biden has 4.6 million Twitter followers. Donald Trump has 75 million. Joe Biden has 1.7 million Facebook fans. Donald Trump has 28 million.

And: “Biden’s first virtual online chat got 5,000 people. Just one with Lara Trump gets 945,000.”

Fintan O'Toole On Trump

I'm attaching a copy of an article by Fintan O'Toole (a noted journalist with The Irish Times who spends a good part of every year in the U.S.), entitled "THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT":

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into corona virus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted … like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party, and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV. If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety. Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3 that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities.”Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic.

It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the virus draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providential-ism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralyzed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St. Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder. And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics. Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

News Flash: Trump Lies!

Click here for an article in The New York Times by Michael D. Shear, Maggie Haberman, and Linda Qiu, entitled "White House Orders Staff to Wear Masks as Trump Misrepresents Testing Record."

Declaring once again that “if somebody wants to be tested right now, they’ll be able to be tested,” Mr. Trump said that his administration was working with states to allow them to conduct 12.9 million tests in May, insisting that the testing ability in the United States compares favorably with other countries.

“We are testing more people per capita than South Korea, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Sweden, Finland and many other countries,” he said, ignoring countries where testing on a per capita basis is higher, including Germany, Russia, Spain, Canada, Switzerland and at least 20 others, according to statistics compiled by Our World in Data.

Shades of W's "Mission Accomplished":

Flanked by large posters that proclaimed “America leads the world in testing,” Mr. Trump also declared victory over the pandemic, saying that “we have met the moment and we have prevailed.” Later, under questioning, he revised his comments, saying he only meant to say the country had prevailed on increasing access to testing.

Trump v. Scarborough

There's a Twitter feud going on between Trump and Scarborough. Trump tweeted:

“‘Concast’ [I guess he means Comcast?] should open up a long overdue Florida Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough ... I know him and Crazy Mika well, used them beautifully in the last Election, dumped them nicely, and will state on the record that he is “nuts”. Besides, bad ratings! #OPENJOECOLDCASE.”

In 2001, while Scarborough was serving as a Republican congressman from Florida, a 28-year-old intern, Lori Klausutis, was found dead in his Florida constituency office. The death was ruled to be unsuspicious; she had a heart condition and suffered an attack which caused her to fall, and she struck her head.

Scarborough responded on the MSNBC show, "Morning Joe," that Scarborough co-hosts with his wife, Mika Brzezinski (who Trump has also viciously attacked in the past):

I know you meant to be extraordinarily cruel to me by attacking me, by bringing up a conspiracy theory that has lived in the gutters of the Internet for some time now. But just like the Seth Rich conspiracy murder that was pushed by your allies, you don’t understand the pain you cause.”

He said that the president’s accusations dredge up pain for “the families who’ve already lost a loved one. Not me. Not my children. Not anybody that knows me. They know the truth. You once again drag a family through this and make them relive it again, just like Seth Rich’s parents, as if losing a loved one the first time isn’t enough.”

Biden Ad Highlights Trump's Incompetence

Click here for a Biden ad retweeted by Joe Scarborough.

Do We Really Want "Freedom," American Style?

Click here for an article in The New York Times' "Opinion Today," by editorial page editor James Bennet.

It's all worth the read, but here's the section I like, on Finland -- and check out the bolded paragraph at the end:

Before our office shut down and we all dispersed, one of the last editorial board meetings we held in person was with the prime minister of Finland, Sanna Marin. At 34, she’s the youngest female prime minister in the world.

She spoke about Finland’s challenges in coping with climate change, immigration and a movement of people to cities that is hollowing out rural communities. Again and again, as she talked about sustaining political consensus to confront these challenges, she returned to the importance of the sense of security Finns feel because of their strong social safety net, including free health care and university.

“It gives people freedom when you have a very strong welfare state,” she told us.

That formulation stands the American politics of freedom on its head. Franklin Roosevelt may have envisioned freedom from want, but in recent decades freedom here has come to mean freedom from taxes, freedom from regulation, freedom from having to wear a mask in public. The American left has largely conceded the rhetoric and even the idea of freedom to the right.

Told that some Americans look at Finland and fear socialism, the prime minister smiled. As neighbors of the Soviet Union, Finns had seen a socialist experiment up close and wanted no part of it. “We are an open-market society,” she said proudly.

Our columnist Nicholas Kristof, in a deeply reported exploration of the Nordic model, had the brilliant idea to look at what it’s like to work for McDonald’s in Denmark. The answer is that, even though Denmark has no minimum wage, you make about $22 an hour and get “six weeks of paid vacation a year, life insurance, a year’s paid maternity leave and a pension plan.” All that plus the Danish guarantees of medical insurance and paid sick leave.

Trump, High School Hero? Not So Much

Click here for an article at the Daily Beast by Jamie Ross, entitled "Box Scores Show Trump Lied His Ass Off About Being a High School Baseball Legend."

Here’s a shock—President Trump, who has repeatedly boasted about how great he was at baseball in high school and how he could totally have gone pro if he’d wanted to, actually pretty much sucked at it. Slate has managed to unearth nine box scores from Trump’s time at New York Military Academy, which showed a four-for-29 batting record in his sophomore, junior, and senior seasons, with three runs batted in and a single run scored. Trump’s batting average in the nine games Slate found box scores for stood at a disappointing .138. Slate asked The Athletic’s Keith Law, a senior baseball writer, if Trump’s numbers sounded like those of someone who could have gone pro. “You don’t hit .138 for some podunk, cold-weather high school playing the worst competition you could possibly imagine,” Law said. “It’s absolutely laughable. He hit .138—he couldn’t fucking hit, that’s pretty clear.”

Trump, The Showman

Click here for an article at The Plum Line, a WaPo blog by Paul Waldman, entitled "Trump knows exactly how to save his reelection: With a show."

Trump knows how to do it: He's done it before.

"In the early 2000s, after a couple of casino bankruptcies and other business failures, Trump’s fortune had collapsed, almost no bank would lend to him, and he was hugely in debt. How did he bring himself back? He got an offer to star in a reality TV show.

“The Apprentice” saved him, not only providing him a stream of direct income but giving him incalculably valuable PR. What’s relevant for our current moment is the way it covered Trump’s shabby reality in a layer of gold leaf, and in doing so revived him. Here’s how the New Yorker described it:

“The Apprentice” portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth — a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” [editor Jonathan] Braun told me. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.” Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, “We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.”

The TV producers used all their skills, and it worked, reinforcing for Trump a principle on which he had built his career: If you’re relentless enough, you can create a false image that eventually turns into reality, or at least something close. Tell everyone you’re the very embodiment of wealth and success, and you can con people into giving you so much money that you actually become wealthy and successful.

What is Trump going to do?

So Trump is now saying that before the pandemic he delivered the greatest economy the world had ever seen (itself a ridiculous lie), and he’ll do it again. How is he going to do that?

It’s not going to be with a repeat of his prior economic policies, which basically came down to cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, slashing regulations on things such as environmental protection and worker safety, and launching a destructive trade war with China. In fact, don’t be surprised if there are little or no significant policy moves at all on the administration’s part.

What Trump does is PR. So that’s what he’ll do.

He’ll visit factories carefully chosen with MAGA hat-wearing CEOs who will play their part and thank him profusely for getting America back on its feet. He’ll hold events at the White House where he can sit inside a truck and honk the horn like a real big boy. He’ll tout the progress of the stock market. He’ll have rallies again — so many rallies — where he’ll say that no one has ever seen such an amazing comeback, it’s fantastic, it’s incredible, world leaders are calling me to say how impressed they are. He’ll remind us that the pandemic was the fault of China and Democratic governors and Barack Obama, but he brought prosperity back.

Every Republican will repeat the message: America suffered a blow, but Trump has saved us and now everything is great again.

The fact that by November the economy will almost certainly not be great will not be part of the show. Just as today Trump is utterly incapable of feeling or communicating empathy for those who have lost family and friends to the coronavirus, he will have no time for the unemployed, the bankrupt, the fearful or the uncertain. Only Trump-haters could dwell on that, he’ll say. The truth is that we’re in paradise, thanks to me.

Can this show actually persuade people to ignore the reality of their own lives and communities? One would hope not, but you never know. Given his own experience, Trump is probably sure that it will. And it’s about all he has left.

More McConnell Iniquity

In October 2019, Justin Walker -- a protégé of Mitch McConnell -- was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. District Court in Kentucky. He's 37 years old. Upon graduation from law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who was then sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. (He gave 119 media interviews during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings for SCOTUS.) He was appointed despite the fact that the ABA (the American Bar Association) rated Walker "not qualified," saying that Walker “has a very substantial gap, namely the absence of any significant trial experience.”

According to The New York Times, "The District of Columbia appeals court is considered a steppingstone to the Supreme Court and is also viewed as a highly influential arbiter of many of Washington’s disputes over federal policy and separation of powers."

The Walker appointment, first to the federal bench in Kentucky and then to the second-highest court in the U.S., is typical of McConnell's drive to cement his legacy: appointment of extreme right-wing Trump appointments to U.S. federal courts (and young ones at that, who may continue to infect the country's judicial findings for the next 40 years).

But here's a new wrinkle to the poisonous McConnell legacy. Click here for an article in The New York Times by Carl Hulse, entitled "Appeals Court Vacancy Is Under Scrutiny Ahead of Contested Confirmation Hearing."

The chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit publicly advanced a call by a progressive group for an ethics investigation into the circumstances of a plum vacancy.

There's an allegation that McConnell may have contacted Judge Thomas B. Griffiths to get him to retire, opening a vacancy for Walker.

With the number of federal judicial vacancies to fill nearly exhausted, Mr. McConnell has been urging those contemplating retirement to step aside this year if they want to assure that their successors will be nominated by a Republican president and confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate.

Also:

"The coordinated manner of Majority Leader McConnell’s involvement in the judges’ decision-making is quite unprecedented and raises significant ethical questions for the judges who heed his advice,” the group said in its letter requesting an investigation. It said a “thorough inquiry into the judge’s announcement and scheduled retirement, including when and how the decision to retire was made, and with whose input, is crucial.”

Covid-19 Peaks in New York, not in U.S.

Incidence of the virus is on a downward path in New York, but no peak is yet apparent in the U.S. as a whole. Click here for an article at The New York Times by Julie Bosman, Mitch Smith and Amy Harmon, entitled "With New Hot Spots Emerging, No Sign of a Respite."

While cities like New York have seen a hopeful drop in cases, upticks in other major cities and smaller communities have offset those decreases.

Kevin Hassett's Record Of Being Wrong

Click here for an article at The New York Times by Paul Krugman, entitled "Trump and His Infallible Advisers," subtitled "Beware men who never admit having been wrong." (Like Trump, for example.)

Kevin Hasset, a "former chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers," has emerged as Trump's champion for reopening the economy (at a cost of tens of thousands of lives).

He first attracted widespread attention as co-author of a 1999 book claiming that stocks were greatly undervalued, and that the Dow should be 36,000 (which would be around 55,000 today, adjusting for inflation). It quickly became clear that there were major conceptual errors in that book; but Hassett never admitted error.

In the mid-2000s Hassett denied that there was a housing bubble, suggesting that only liberals believed that there was.

In 2010 Hassett was part of a group of conservative economists and pundits who warned in an open letter that the Federal Reserve’s efforts to rescue the economy would lead to currency debasement and inflation. Four years later Bloomberg News tried to reach signatories to ask why that inflation never materialized; not one was willing to admit having been wrong.

Finally, Hassett promised that the 2017 Trump tax cut would lead to a big boost in business investment; it didn’t, but he insisted that it did.

But Hassett is far from being alone among Trump's misguided economic advisers:

And Hassett isn’t even uniquely bad. Unlike, say, Stephen Moore, who Trump tried to put on the Federal Reserve Board, he does not, as far as I know, have a history of simply getting basic numbers and facts wrong.

And, as for Trump:

Yes, Trump’s insecurity leads him to reject expertise, listen only to people who tell him what makes him feel good and refuse to acknowledge error. But disdain for experts, preference for incompetent loyalists and failure to learn from experience are standard operating procedure for the whole modern G.O.P.

Trump’s narcissism and solipsism are especially blatant, even flamboyant. But he isn’t an outlier; he’s more a culmination of the American right’s long-term trend toward intellectual degradation. And that degradation, more than Trump’s character, is what is leading to vast numbers of unnecessary deaths.

Covid-19 Response: Canada v. U.S. (Part 2)

Click here for an article at Hullabaloo by Tom Sullivan entitled "Read 'em and weep."

Canada is doing a measurably better job responding to the pandemic. Orders of magnitude better, writes Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

“We have a federal government that is supporting provinces’ responses,” says David Fisman, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto. “You have a chief executive who is directly undermining the public health response.”

Another quote from the article:

Unlike polarized state governors to the south, leaders in Canada’s provinces — Liberals and Conservatives — agreed on implementing extreme measures to halt the virus’ advance. The dysfunctional U.S. response is illustrated in the graph above that compares U.S. and Canadian COVID-19 cases per capita since the outbreak began. “The comparison is a case study in how a dysfunctional political system can quite literally cost lives,” Beauchamp explains.

But at this point in the crisis, the worst you can say about the Canadian response is that it has been basically competent — what you would expect from a country with a functioning political and health care system. The United States, by contrast, hasn’t cleared this lowest of bars. Our lack of attention to public health, poorly designed national health care system, and deep political dysfunction have contributed to the greatest public health crisis of our lifetimes.

How Sad It Must Be

I saw this on Twitter but was unable to figure out where to attribute it:

How sad it must be -- believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality TV star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.

Trump Battles Congressional Oversight

Click here for an article at The Daily 202 (a WaPo blog) by James Hohmann entitled "The Daily 202: White House moves to shield Trump from oversight of his coronavirus response."

The White House revealed on Monday that members of its coronavirus task force – and their deputies – are barred from testifying before Congress unless they get special permission from chief of staff Mark Meadows. The reason being given for blocking public health officials is that they’re busy trying to get control of a contagion that has now killed at least 68,172 and infected 1,175,000 Americans.

But this is just the latest in a growing list of power plays by President Trump to thwart congressional oversight and independent watchdogs from scrutinizing his administration’s response to the novel coronavirus and the way trillions of dollars are being distributed by the government.

A memo to congressional staff directors said this restriction on testimony also applies to the departments of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and State. It decrees that committees are limited to no more than four virus-related hearings this month. “Given these competing demands in these unprecedented times, it is reasonable to expect that agencies will have to decline invitations to hearings to remain focused on implementing of COVID-19 response, including declining to participate in multiple hearings on the same or overlapping topics,” the memo states.

Last week, the White House blocked Tony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases official, from testifying before a House committee, which is controlled by Democrats. But Fauci received permission from Meadows to testify next week before the Senate’s health committee, which is controlled by Republicans.

Trump hinted at a more partisan motivation than the memo let on as he boarded Marine One on Tuesday morning, telling reporters that Fauci is not being allowed to testify before the House because its members are “Trump haters.” During his Fox News interview on Sunday night, the president grumbled that House Democrats are trying to embarrass him. “When you see all these committees, seven or eight committees, we haven’t even started, and they have all these committees looking for trouble, just looking for trouble,” Trump said at the Lincoln Memorial. “Every enemy I have is put on a Democrat committee.”

Democrats are outraged. “President Trump should learn that by muzzling science and the truth, it will only prolong this health and economic crisis,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). “The president’s failure to accept the truth, and then his desire to hide it, is one of the chief reasons we are lagging behind so many other countries in beating this scourge.”

There's much more about Trump's efforts to escape congressional oversight.

Covid-19 Response: Canada v. U.S.

Click here for an article at Vox by Zack Beauchamp entitled "Canada succeeded on coronavirus where America failed. Why?" Lots of reasons -- not just Donald Trump's profound incompetence.

CoronaLola: A Parody

Trump's Multiple Lies On A Fox News Interview, May 3

Click here for an article at CNN by Daniel Dale, Marshall Cohen and Tara Subramaniam, entitled "Fact check: Trump peppers Fox News town hall with false claims on coronavirus and other topics."