Dispatches

TRUMP CAN’T CHANGE SUBJECT FROM COVID-19.

Donald Trump has been working hard to change the subject from the coronavirus pandemic, since his failure to control it is a major reason he is on track to lose on Nov. 3. From that point of view, he had a very, very bad weekend Oct. 24-25. So bad, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (10/26).

First, five members of Mike Pence’s staff tested positive, news that got out despite the White House’s efforts to cover it up. Pence announced he would keep to his schedule because, get this, he’s an essential worker. Pence is mostly campaigning these days, so that’s the work being claimed as so essential he can’t follow guidelines and quarantine after close contact with people who have COVID-19.

Then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows went on CNN Sunday morning and told Jake Tapper, “We’re not going to control the pandemic.” Meadows continued, We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas.” Those are in the future though. In the present, the seven-day average of new cases has doubled in the last six weeks, and hospitalizations are up.

Pressed by Tapper on why the US isn’t going to get the pandemic under control, Meadows said: “Because it is a contagious virus just like the flu.” He added that the Trump administration is “making efforts to contain it.”

The US reported its second-highest day of new cases on Oct. 24, with nearly 84,000 Americans contracting the deadly virus. As of Oct. 26, there were more than 8,702,000 cases of coronavirus in the US, and more than 225,000 Americans have died from the virus, according to Johns Hopkins University.

”This wasn’t a slip by Meadows; it was a candid acknowledgment of what President Trump’s strategy has clearly been from the beginning of this crisis: to wave the white flag of defeat and hope that by ignoring it, the virus would simply go away,” Joe Biden said in a statement. “It hasn’t, and it won’t.”

Trump, meanwhile, remained committed to downplaying the threat of the virus:

At an Oct. 24 rally, he whined, “Turn on television: ‘covid, covid, covid, covid, covid.’ A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it—‘covid, covid, covid, covid.’” No, you haven’t missed a plane crash that killed 500 people. The most deadly plane crash during the pandemic killed less than 100 people, in Karachi, Pakistan, in May.

Coronavirus deaths in the US are averaging more than 700 per day. So they admitted that they’re not going to control the pandemic—hell, they’re not even trying, not that it hasn’t been apparent to all of us for months now—while Pence is out on the campaign trail despite five of his aides having tested positive. Reporting shows coronavirus surges in several places where Trump has held rallies. Several of Trump’s boosters at Fox News have been forced to quarantine after they were exposed to COVID-19. And Trump just keeps on pretending if he gets his supporters to clap harder the whole thing will go away. Eight days before the election, it sure doesn’t look like they’re going to succeed at changing the subject.

COVID CASES SURGE AFTER TRUMP ‘SUPERSPREADER’ RALLIES. As Donald Trump jetted across the country holding campaign rallies this fall, he didn’t just defy state orders and federal health guidelines. He left a trail of coronavirus outbreaks in his wake, USA Today reported (10/22).

Trump has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA Today analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minn.; Lackawanna, Pa.; Marathon, Wis.; Dauphin, Pa.; and Beltrami, Minn.

Together, those counties saw 1,500 more new cases in the two weeks following Trump’s rallies than the two weeks before – 9,647 cases, up from 8,069.

Public health officials additionally have linked 16 cases, including two hospitalizations, with the rally in Beltrami County, Minn., and one case with the rally in Marathon County, Wis.

The rallies, taking place almost daily, attract an average crowd of about 6,000 people, standing shoulder-to-shoulder as they wait in long lines, cheering on the president and greeting others as if the global pandemic did not exist, USA Today reported. Some rallies have attracted up to 20,000, according to local news reports. In all, more than 120,000 people have attended his campaign events in the past nine weeks.

Rayla Campbell said she has attended over 100 events to support Trump, including the recent rally in New Hampshire.

Campbell, a 38-year-old from Massachusetts who’s running as a Republican write-in candidate for a seat in Congress, has been a staunch Trump supporter from the beginning, citing his patriotism and business acumen. Even with three small children at home, she has no qualms about COVID-19, shaking hands and hugging other rally goers without any masks or social distancing.

“I haven’t gotten so much as a sniffle,” Campbell said. “Nobody that I’ve come in contact with has gotten sick, and I think this whole thing is blown out of proportion.”

TRUMP PLANS POST-ELECTION PURGE. Donald Trump is planning to clean house if he wins a second term, Axios reported (10/25). He’ll move to immediately fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and also expects to replace CIA Director Gina Haspel and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, two people who’ve discussed these officials’ fates with the president told Axios.

The list of planned replacements is much longer, but the top priorities are Wray and Haspel, who are despised and distrusted almost universally in Trump’s inner circle. He would have fired both already, one official said, if not for the political headaches of acting before Nov. 3.

A win, no matter the margin, will embolden Trump to ax anyone he sees as constraining him from enacting desired policies or going after perceived enemies.

Trump signed an executive order that set off alarm bells as a means to politicize the civil service. An administration official said the order “is a really big deal” that would make it easier for presidents to get rid of career government officials.

There could be shake-ups across other departments. The president has never been impressed with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, for example. But that doesn’t carry the urgency of replacing Wray or Haspel.

While Trump has also privately vented about Attorney General Bill Barr, he hasn’t made any formal plans to replace him, an official said.

Trump is furious that Barr isn’t releasing before the election what Trump hoped would be a bombshell report by US Attorney John Durham on the Obama administration’s handling of the Trump-Russia investigation.

Durham’s investigation has yet to produce any high-profile indictments of Obama-era officials as Trump had hoped.

Haspel has kept a fairly low profile and, in some cases, has even bent the intelligence to fit Trump’s delusional view of the world, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (10/26). But that apparently hasn’t been enough for Trump—he’s reportedly frustrated that Haspel has opposed the declassification of certain documents that supposedly could have provided fodder for Trump’s baseless allegations against his Democratic rival Joe Biden. And while Wray hasn’t exactly been a vision of defiance, he has resisted surrendering to Trump’s will on the issue of election security. In particular, he and other intelligence officials have sought to reassure Americans about the security of the upcoming election even as Trump has sought to entirely undermine voter confidence in the outcome.

If Trump wins, his ultimate goal will be to install two loyalists who will serve as willing participants in using the power of the intelligence agencies to go on whichever witch hunt Trump would like. His main goals at first will almost surely be trained on rooting out individuals he either doesn’t like or considers a threat to his power base. In other words, yes, he will turn the full force of the federal government and its intelligence services on the American people. It would be the most classic of dictatorial moves to stamp out opposition, silence critics, and move to consolidate power as quickly as possible, Eleveld noted.

Trump also soured on Defense Secretary Mike Esper over the summer when the Defense secretary rebuffed the idea of sending active-duty military into the streets to deal with racial justice protests and distanced himself from the clearing of Lafayette Square for a photo op at St. John’s church.

TRUMP STILL HAS NO HEALTH CARE PLAN. After Donald Trump abruptly cut off his 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl, while the CBS correspondent waited to see if he would return to finish the interview, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, came in with a hand delivery.

McENANY: Lesley, the president wanted me to deliver his health care plan, it’s a little heavy.

STAHL: Oh my god. This is his health care plan?

McENANY: Yes.

STAHL: Okay. Kayleigh, thank you.

McENANY: You’re welcome and the Vice President will be with you shortly.

STAHL: Okay. And the president’s not coming back?

McENANY: The president’s given you a lot of time.

Stahl noted: “It was heavy. Filled with executive orders, congressional initiatives, but no comprehensive health plan.”

TRUMP TOPS 22,000 LIES AS PREZ, BUT WASHINGTON POST CAN’T KEEP UP. As Donald Trump entered the final stretch of the election season, he began making more than 50 false or misleading claims a day, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported (10/22). It’s gotten so much that the three-member Fact Checker team cannot keep up.

“As of Aug. 27 [the day Trump gave his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination], the tally in our database that tracks every errant claim by the president stood at 22,247 claims in 1,316 days …

“We’ve been able to update the database only to that point as of today — so already we are eight weeks behind. (We maintain this database mostly in our spare time, in addition to our day jobs.)

“Just in the first 27 days of August, the president made 1,506 false or misleading claims, or 56 a day. Some days were extraordinary: 189 claims (a record) on Aug. 11, 147 claims on Aug. 17, 113 claims on Aug. 20. The previous one-day record was 138 claims — on Nov. 5, 2018, the day before the midterm elections.”

At his current pace, Trump will surely exceed 25,000 claims before Election Day, Fact Checker noted. “But who knows when we will be able to confirm that …”

“So far during his presidency, Trump’s most repeated claim — 407 times — is that the US. economy today is the best in history. He began making this claim in June 2018, and it quickly became one of his favorites. He’s been forced to adapt for the tough economic times, and doing so has made it even more fantastic. Whereas he used to say it was the best economy in US history, he now often recalls that he achieved ‘the best economy in the history of the world.’

“That’s not true. The president once could brag about the state of the economy, but he ran into trouble when he made a play for the history books. By just about any important measure, the pre-coronavirus economy was not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson or Bill Clinton — or Ulysses S. Grant. Moreover, the economy was already beginning to hit the head winds caused by Trump’s trade wars, with the manufacturing sector in an apparent recession.”

EARLY VOTING ENCOURAGES DEMS. Early voting is reaching record levels, with nearly 60 million casting their ballots as of Oct. 25, suggesting a surge of support for Democrats, as Trump has discouraged the use of absentee ballots. In 19 states that report early voters by party affiliation, 49.1% were Democrats, 27.9% were Republicans, 22.4% were independent and 0.6% were minor parties, the US Elections Project reported. In Florida, where 5.3 million mail-in and in-person votes were recorded, Democrats held an advantage of more than 7 points, or around 400,000 votes, in their quest for the state’s 29 electoral votes, The Guardian reported.

LINCOLN PROJECTS REJECTS THREAT OVER KUSHNER AND IVANKA BILLBOARDS. The Lincoln Project “will not be intimidated by empty bluster,” a lawyer for the renegade Republicans wrote (10/24), in response to a threat from an attorney for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner over two billboards put up in Times Square, The Guardian reported (10/25).

The New York City billboards show the president’s daughter and her husband, both senior White House advisers, displaying apparent indifference to public suffering under COVID-19.

Kushner is shown next to the quote “[New Yorkers] are going to suffer and that’s their problem,” above a line of body bags. Trump is shown gesturing, with a smile, to statistics for how many New Yorkers and Americans as a whole have died.

According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 8.7 million coronavirus cases have been recorded across the US and more than 225,000 have died. Case numbers are at record daily levels and one study has predicted 500,000 deaths by February. New York was hit hard at the pandemic’s outset.

On Oct. 23, Marc Kasowitz, an attorney who has represented the president against allegations of fraud and sexual assault, wrote to the Lincoln Project, demanding the “false, malicious and defamatory” ads be removed, or “we will sue you for what will doubtless be enormous compensatory and punitive damages.”

The Lincoln Project responded that they would not remove the billboards, citing First Amendment rights of free speech and the “reckless mismanagement of COVID-19” by the Trump White House.

“Sue if you must,” Matthew Sanderson, attorney for the Lincoln Project, replied. Sanderson cited Supreme Court precedent and “substantial constitutional protections for those who speak out.” Due to a “gross act of nepotism,” Trump and Kushner have become public officials whom Americans “have the right to discuss and criticize freely.”

Kasowitz claimed Kushner “never said” the words attributed to him on the billboards, and Trump “never made the gesture” she is shown to make. However, Vanity Fair reported the Kushner quote, from a meeting in March, in which Kushner criticized New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Trump tweeted the pose used by the Lincoln Project in July, controversially promoting Goya foods.

The “bruised self-image” of the president’s daughter, Sanderson wrote, “does not change the fact that this billboard accurately depicts her support of a federal response that has utterly failed to prevent an unmitigated tragedy for the United States.”

“May I suggest,” he added, “that if Mr Kushner and Ms Trump are genuinely concerned about salvaging their reputations, they would do well to stop suppressing truthful criticism and instead turn their attention to the COVID-19 crisis that is still unfolding under their inept watch.

“These billboards are not causing [their] standing with the public to plummet. Their incompetence is.”

A footnote to Sanderson’s letter cited “one of the seminal libel-proof plaintiff cases”, that of a well-known mobster whose reputation was “so tarnished … he could claim no damages for defamation”.

TRUMP WOULD REPLACE CIVIL SERVICE WITH CRONYISM. Donald Trump took aim at the existence of a nonpartisan, expert federal government workforce of people working for the good of the US rather than the personal benefit of a president. Trump signed an executive order (10/21) that would strip civil service protections from tens of thousands of federal workers, effectively imposing a political loyalty test on people who have long been outside of politics, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (10/23).

Trump’s order would affect any federal worker whose work involves policymaking. That means public health experts, attorneys, scientists and others with specialized knowledge and long experience of complicated problems facing the US. Such as, for instance, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a career civil servant rather than a political appointee. .

Trump’s order calls for agencies to determine which jobs would be affected by Jan. 19, the day before the inauguration. It’s the latest in a long line of moves against federal workers’ labor rights. Not only would workers lose protections, including the right to be in a union, but hiring for such roles would no longer be conducted under competitive procedures.

“It’s an attempt to redefine the civil service as a political arm of the presidency rather than public servants who work for the American people,” Rep. Don Beyer told The Washington Post, calling the plan “open cronyism that does not benefit the country, but the president.”

“The effect and the apparent intent is that they are moving them into that box” of being like political appointees, said the Partnership for Public Service’s Max Stier. “The discretion for both hiring and firing is so great that the merit principles are undermined and they resemble a political appointee much more than a career civil servant.”

Trump continues to try to make the federal government into his own personal fiefdom, loyal to him and aimed at supporting his political interests rather than the public good. The coronavirus pandemic has shown how dangerous that kind of approach can be. The fact that he’s moving on this now is yet another warning of just how bad a second Trump term would be—more evidence that U.S. democratic institutions absolutely would not survive.

SECRET CHINESE BANK ACCOUNT REMAINS PROBLEM FOR TRUMP. It came as a bit of a surprise this week when the New York Times reported on the existence of Donald Trump’s previously undisclosed bank account in China, Steve Benen noted at MaddowBlog (10/23). Not surprisingly, Democrats wasted little time seizing on the revelation.

Former President Barack Obama spoke in Philadelphia and wondered aloud how it’s even possible for Trump to have a secret Chinese bank account. “Can you imagine if I had a secret Chinese bank account?” Obama asked, adding that Fox News “would’ve called me Beijing Barry.”

A day later, Pete Buttigieg appeared on Fox News and pressed the same point: “If Republicans want to talk about the business dealings of a government official, let’s talk about this: Why does Donald Trump have a secret bank account in China? ... I’m pretty sure it bothers Americans a lot more than what they’re trying to whip up.”

During the final presidential debate of the year, Joe Biden also brought it up, and for the first time, Trump addressed the issue publicly. “I was a businessman doing business, the bank account you’re referring to, which is — everybody knows about it — it’s listed, the bank account was in 2013,” Trump said. “That’s what it was. It was open and it was closed in 2015, I believe.”

Is that true? Let’s take the claims one at a time. First, the idea that “everybody” knows about the account because “it’s listed” is wrong. As the Times report explained, the account was never disclosed before now:

“The foreign accounts do not show up on Mr. Trump’s public financial disclosures, where he must list personal assets, because they are held under corporate names. The identities of the financial institutions are not clear.”

Second, the president’s belief that the account was “closed in 2015” is also wrong. The Times added in a debate fact-check:

“An attorney for the Trump Organization told The Times that the bank account Mr. Trump’s company owned in China is still open.”

In 2017, the Times reported, Trump International Hotels Management — the one with a Chinese bank account — reported an unusually large spike in revenue — some $17.5 million, more than the previous five years’ combined. It was accompanied by a $15.1 million withdrawal by Trump from the company’s capital account.

So where does that leave us? With a scandal-plagued American president defending a previously undisclosed bank account in China with two claims, both of which are wrong.

POLL: PENNSYLVANIANS SUPPORT CLEAN ENERGY. Many pundits judged that Joe Biden made a gaffe in the second presidential debate when he said we should transition from oil to renewable energy. Dems feared he would lose votes in Pennsylvania, where “fracking,” or hydraulic fracturing, is used to extract natural gas from rock formations.

During an exchange about climate change (which Trump has long dismissed as a hoax), this happened:

Biden: “(Oil) has to be replaced by renewable energy over time. Over time. And I’d stop giving to the oil industry, I’d stop giving them federal subsidies.”

Trump: “Basically, what he is saying is he’s going to destroy the oil industry.”

Biden: “He takes everything out of context. But the point is, we have to move toward a net zero emissions. The first place to do that, by the year 2035, is in energy production. By 2050, totally.”

Columnist Dick Polman of Philadelphia observed: “Trump and his desperate enablers may think that Biden has handed them a game-changer (‘This is really devastating,’ said gleeful flak Jason Miller), but, as always, they’re not living in the real world. Biden didn’t say anything controversial. At a time when the reality of climate change is self-evident (intensifying wildfires, floods, hurricanes, derechos), what Biden said is now conventional wisdom.

“Even Big Oil knows what needs to happen. BP has announced a plan to cut carbon emissions to zero by 2050. We’ve already been trending away from oil; according to the federal government’s own stats, domestic oil consumption has been falling for the past 15 years. And most Americans are fine with the idea of ending all federal subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, just as Biden suggests; a national poll four years ago found that 62% of registered voters – including 54% of Republicans – want to cut off that money.”

In the aftermath of Biden’s remarks on debate night, the Morning Consult/Politico poll reported that phasing out oil in the long run is now the solid centrist position; among independent voters, 52% said yes, only 28% said no. Among suburban voters, the yes share was 57%. Even among Republican voters, 41% said yes. And when all voters were asked which candidate is trusted to tackle climate change, Biden beat Trump by 30 points (59-29).

Pennsylvania residents also realize that a transition to clean energy is needed. A recent poll by Climate Nexus, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication (9/17) finds 72% of Pennsylvania voters support the state’s participation in a multi-state, market-based initiative to reduce carbon dioxide pollution from power plants.

Even more Pennsylvania voters – 76% — consider climate change to be a serious problem, with nearly half (45%) seeing it as “very serious.” And 78% want the state to provide job training, guaranteed wages or other assistance to coal and natural gas workers who lose their jobs as a result of the market transition to renewable energy sources.

As for fracking, the biggest threat to the industry has been the low price of natural gas. From 2016 to 2018, there were about 26,000 jobs in oil and natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania but since 2018, the gas industry has struggled and hundreds of jobs have been lost as large fracking companies are divesting form the area, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported (9/5).

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2020

Populist.com